Under Israeli pressure, Facebook and Twitter delete large amounts of Palestinian content
MEMO | June 9, 2016
Facebook and Twitter have recently deleted thousands of posts, pages and accounts in response to demands from the Israeli ministry of justice, Quds Press reported on Wednesday.
“We succeeded to achieve our goals as around 70 per cent of our demands [to delete Facebook and Twitter content] were fulfilled,” Israeli Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked said, according to Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
She also added: “We succeeded to delete incitement contents calling for death and violence across the internet.”
During a meeting she held to discuss “fighting incitement and shameful content on social media” three-days ago, Shaked reiterated Israel’s “cooperation with Facebook, Twitter and google regarding the violent electronic Palestinian incitement”.
Shaked claimed that when internet incitement decreased, the attacks on Israelis decreased.
“This proves that there is a direct relationship between internet incitement and violence in Israel,” she said.
Gov. Cuomo’s Anti-BDS Bill is a First Amendment Nightmare
By Eoin Higgins | CounterPunch | June 8, 2016
On June 5 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law an executive order aimed at the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. BDS is a non-violent economic and political protest against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
In Cuomo’s order, which Salon reporter Ben Norton called “McCarthyite,” there is a provision that requires the state to create a list of companies that participate in the BDS movement. The list aims to publicly shame and financially harm those who exercise their First Amendment right of political protest.
And though Cuomo’s order will not stand up to a challenge in court, the list itself will cause extreme harm and damage- and that’s the plan.
Within the next 180 days, the Commissioner of General Services of the state of New York will deliver the initial list of BDS- participating companies to the governor. The list will be placed online for the public’s viewing. Companies are allowed to appeal their placement for 90 days in advance of their placement.
As Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman described it in The Intercept :
Cuomo’s Executive Order requires that one of his Commissioners compile “a list of institutions and companies” which – “either directly or through a parent or subsidiary” – support a boycott. That government list is then posted publicly, and the burden falls on them to prove to the state that they do not, in fact, support such a boycott.
Note- the language Greenwald and Fishman cite in the accompanying image to this paragraph appears to indicate companies have time to appeal their placement prior to public posting, not after
Once a company is on the list, they can appeal for removal from the list. The list will be updated every 180 days.
Draconian stuff.
Even if the legislation doesn’t survive the inevitable legal challenges on its merits, the creation of such a list will have irreversible consequences.
One of the lingering after-effects of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era of the 1950s was the difficulty of the wrongly accused to find work, decades after the list had been closed. Despite the efforts of the Hollywood Ten, the breaking of the list did not result in the immediate reinstatement to work of those on the list.
Some would go without work for years due to their association with the blacklist and, by proxy, Communism. Even after the country by and large had rejected the blacklist and McCarthyite scaremongering, the ostracization of those associated with the list remained in place.
It’s for this reason that Cuomo’s legislation is so dangerous.
First Amendment rights of association and political protest are designed specifically to combat government interference. Cuomo’s anti- BDS law is an obvious and blatant violation of those rights. It will be struck down in court.
But if it is not struck down in time, if the courts do not manage to issue a stay on its implementation, or if the NY state bureaucracy can tie up the legal system while putting the order into effect, the list will exist. And once it exists, the damage will have been done.
Even when the law is struck down, the stigma of being associated with this draconian law will linger. Just as those who were on the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s found it hard to find work for years after the list was broken, so too will businesses that are tied to BDS in NY state find it difficult to survive in the American economy.
Which is exactly the point. Cuomo wants the fear of that stigma to do the work of the law, no matter the outcome in the courts.
UK training Saudi police in CSI techniques that risk torture
Reprieve – June 7, 2016
Britain’s College of Policing is teaching the Saudi Arabian interior ministry high-tech forensic skills that risk being “used to identify individuals who later go on to be tortured”, an internal police report obtained by human rights charity Reprieve reveals.
According to the document, released under Freedom of Information, the controversial training program began in 2009 and continued even after juvenile protesters were rounded up, tortured and sentenced to death following the Arab Spring uprisings.
British police now want to step up their training package to include advanced cyber-crime courses, which could be misused to target pro-democracy activists in Saudi Arabia.
Although the UK Foreign Office opposes the death penalty, the College of Policing wants to teach Saudi officers how to analyse mobile phone records, which could lead to activists being arrested and executed.
Ali al-Nimr was just 17 years old when he was sentenced to death for attending non-violent protests in 2012 and allegedly using his blackberry phone to invite friends to join demonstrations. At trial the prosecution requested execution by “crucifixion”.
Many more juvenile protesters were swept up and tortured in the 2012 crackdown, including Dawood al Marhoon and Abdullah Hasan al-Zaher, who now face beheading at any time. Another teenage activist, Ali al Ribh, who was arrested at school, was among 47 people executed on a single day in January 2016.
That same month, the College of Policing proposed further courses for Saudi personnel despite noting that there was a risk “the skills being trained are used to identify individuals who later go on to be tortured or subjected to other human rights abuses”.
Other techniques on sale to Saudi detectives include decrypting hard drives, retrieving deleted files, voice recognition and trawling CCTV systems. The project is described as an “income generating business opportunity” for the College of Policing.
Some of the training has taken place at the College of Policing’s forensics centre outside Durham, and “over 120 fingerprint personnel are in the process of being trained”.
The document says that the Saudi officers are drawn from the gulf kingdom’s 300,000 strong interior ministry, which includes policemen, prison guards and national security staff.
The college claims to have developed a “trusted and professional partnership” with the ministry, which carries out beheadings, stoning and lashings. David Cameron faced outcry in Parliament last year over a Ministry of Justice project with Saudi prison guards.
Commenting, Maya Foa, Director of the death penalty team at Reprieve said: “It is scandalous that British police are training Saudi Arabian officers in techniques which they privately admit could lead to people being arrested, tortured and sentenced to death.”
“The training Britain delivered included hi-tech skills that could easily have been used to target pro-democracy activists in Saudi Arabia. Let’s not forget that while this was going on, teenage protestors like Ali al-Ribh, Abdullah al-Zaher, Ali al-Nimr, and Dawood al-Marhoon were rounded up and sentenced to death.”
“The FCO has to explain how on earth helping execute juvenile protesters makes anyone safer in Saudi Arabia or the UK.”
FBI in new push to probe web browser history – report
RT | June 7, 2016
The FBI hopes to amend surveillance laws as early as this year, giving the agency explicit authority to access a personal Internet browser history by simply issuing an administrative “national security letter,” the Washington Post reports.
The new legislation being readied would empower the FBI to obtain “electronic communication transactional records” bypassing judges’ approval with the help of a “national security letter” (NSL) which could be issued by the special agent in charge of a bureau field office, the paper says.
The FBI chief made a specific point that gaining this access through changing legislation is topping agency’s priorities for the year 2016, since the inability to get the necessary data “affects our work in a very, very big and practical way,” James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in February.
The Obama administration already tried to adopt a similar amendment some six years ago, but had to retreat after fierce opposition from the IT industry and privacy advocates.
Incidentally, Comey believes the current state of things is thanks to a “scrivener’s error” in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, enabling internet providers and other technical companies to refuse providing certain personal information to the agency, citing infringement of American citizens’ privacy.
The ECPA is “needlessly hamstringing our counterintelligence and counterterrorism efforts,” Comey stressed.
The FBI also insists that a broader update of the ECPA should set electronic communication transactional records equal to telephone billing records.
The personal web ‘transactional records’ in question will allegedly include protocol addresses and the exact time a person spends on a web resource, but not content like search queries and email texts.
A coalition of privacy and civil society groups united with internet industry organizations to oppose the legal initiative, warning that the amendment would “dramatically expand the ability of the FBI to get sensitive information about users’ online activities without oversight.”
Security letters requesting data usually come with a gag order forbidding the internet providers from making the fact of the FBI request public.
The FBI has issued over 300,000 such requests within the past 10 years and in most cases they were accompanied by gag orders, estimated American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) legislative counsel Neema Singh Guliani.
“That’s the perfect storm of more information gathered, less transparency and no accountability,” Guliani said.
Will Hillary Clinton Get Favored Treatment?
By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | June 6, 2016
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in a legal pickle over her careless email practices – in that she appears to have endangered national security secrets including the identity of covert CIA officers and done so for selfish reasons (personal convenience or keeping her documents out of reach of transparency laws).
The facts of the case would seem to merit criminal charges against her, since Clinton’s situation is analogous to problems faced by other senior officials, including former CIA directors John Deutch and David Petraeus who were accused of mishandling classified information, Deutch by having secret material on his home computer and Petraeus for giving notebooks with highly sensitive information to his lover/biographer.
Deutch agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor but was preemptively pardoned by President Bill Clinton; Petraeus pled guilty to a misdemeanor in a plea deal that spared him from jail time and was widely criticized as excessively lenient, especially since the Obama administration had jailed lower-level officials, such as former CIA officer John Kiriakou, for similar violations.
In 2012, faced with a multiple count indictment, Kiriakou agreed to plead guilty to one count of violating the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act for giving a reporter the phone number of a former CIA officer whose work for the spy agency was still classified. Though the reporter did not publish the ex-officer’s name, Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act was also a factor in the “Plame-gate affair” in 2003 when officials of George W. Bush’s administration disclosed the CIA identity of Valerie Plame as part of a campaign to discredit her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had challenged Bush’s claims about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium for a nuclear program, one of the falsehoods that was used to justify invading Iraq.
Right-wing columnist Robert Novak blew Plame’s undercover identity but a special prosecutor chose not to indict anyone, including Bush’s aides, under the 1982 law. He did, however, convict Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, of obstructing justice. However, Bush commuted Libby’s sentence so he avoided jail time.
The recent State Department Inspector General report makes clear that Clinton blithely disregarded safeguards designed to protect the most highly classified national security information and that she included on her unprotected email server the names of U.S. intelligence agents under cover.
In other words, there is legal precedent for Hillary Clinton to be charged in connection with her decision to handle her State Department emails through a personal server in her home in Chappaqua, New York, rather than through official government servers. But there’s political precedent as well for the well-connected to be either slapped on the wrist or let off the hook.
A Biblical Warning
Beyond Clinton’s legal predicament over secrets, there is also the question of how she manipulates information on small matters as well as big. There’s a pertinent Bible quotation: “If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won’t be honest with greater responsibilities.” (Luke 16:10)
Ray McGovern standing in protest.
And I happen to have personal experience with how Clinton has been dishonest in the little matter of my brutal arrest on Feb. 15, 2011, after I stood with my back turned toward her while she delivered a speech at George Washington University about the importance of respecting dissent (in other countries, that is).
I have looked closely at her relevant email exchanges from late February 2011 after Secretary Clinton didn’t miss a syllable as I was roughly dragged away by security personnel right in front of her. From my review of those emails, I had two take-aways: (1) Secretary Clinton is not truthful about the smallest of things; and (2) she had a much more important issue to worry about at the time; namely, rallying support for a “no-fly zone” as a gateway to a “regime change” war on Libya.
Could that be why she never took up her confidant Sidney Blumenthal’s suggestion that an apology to me might be in order? Since the emails speak so eloquently to both issues, I will cite them below:
On my standing silently at George Washington U. on Feb. 15, 2011:
From: sbwhoeop [Sidney Blumenthal]
To: H (Hillary Clinton)
Sent: Fri Feb 18, 09:27:25, 2011
Subject: H: FYI, an unfortunate incident. Sid
“Don’t know if you are aware of this unfortunate incident described below on Larry Johnson’s website. Ray McGovern, a former CIA officer who gave the daily brief for President George H.W. Bush, is pretty well known in the intelligence community. He’s become a Christian antiwar leftist who goes around bearing witness. Whatever his views, he’s harmless. Something bad happened at your speech at GW. And it’s become a minor cause celebre on the Internet among lefties. You might have someone check this out and also have someone apologize to Ray McGovern. Sid”
From Sidney Blumenthal (continued)
“Larry C. Johnson is a former analyst at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, who moved subsequently in 1989 to the U.S. Department of State, where he served four years as the deputy director for transportation security, antiterrorism assistance training, and special operations in the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism. He left government … in October 1993 … and is an expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, and crisis and risk management, and money laundering investigations. Johnson is the founder and main author of No Quarter, a weblog that addresses issues of terrorism and intelligence and politics.)”
Blumenthal then quoted from a blog piece that Johnson wrote after hearing what happened during Secretary Clinton’s speech at GWU on Feb. 15:
“During a speech by Hillary earlier this week at George Washington University retired CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, was physically accosted and arrested for disorderly conduct for the simple act of standing up and turning his back to Hillary. Ray ended his career at the CIA as one of the senior officers who provided George H.W. Bush his daily intelligence brief. Since then Ray has emerged as an anti-war activist. Ray is a fearless but he also is a kind, gentle soul. …
“Unfortunately Hillary is getting blamed for what happened to Ray, but it is not her fault. Hillary is not in charge of her security detail. … He had every right to stand and silently protest. He posed no threat to Hillary and made no threatening move. The security folks grossly over-reacted. … Since the folks inside the auditorium had gone thru a metal detector there was no reason to assume that Ray represented a threat to do harm. It is the ultimate irony that the Obama Administration is calling on foreign leaders to tolerate protest and dissent but when it comes to an old man standing silently there was no tolerance at all.”
[end of shortened text of email from Larry Johnson, quoted by Sidney Blumenthal]
Clever Wording
Secretary Clinton then replied:
To: Sidney Blumenthal Subject: “H: FYI, AN UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT. SID”
From: H hrod17@clintonemail.com [one of two email accounts that Clinton used]
To: sbwhoeop
Sent: Friday, February 18, 2011 10:14 AM [replying to Blumenthal less than an hour later]
Subject: Re: “H: FYI, an unfortunate incident.”
“Sid I appreciate your sending thgis (sic) to me. Neither State nor my staff had anything to do w this. The man stood up just as I was starting and GW–which claims their quick actions were part of their standard operating procedures to remove anyone who stands up and starts speaking while an invited guest is talking–moved to remove him. GW claims he was not in any way injured. We have no other info but I will see what else can be done.”
In this brief email, Secretary Clinton takes two misleading tacks. Though she had first-hand knowledge that I had not been “speaking” — since she was there — she suggests otherwise while not actually saying so. She just strongly implies that I was “speaking.”
Not only was she an eyewitness, numerous videos on the Internet in the days prior showed that I did not say a word until the security people had me in a headlock and almost out the door and into the street. Lawyers like Hillary Clinton apparently parse words – even on minor matters, and even in emails that they hope will never see the light of day. (And what, by the way, is the meaning of “is?”)
Ray McGovern on Feb. 15, 2011.
Similarly, Secretary Clinton attributes to GWU the claim that I “was not in any way injured.” Case closed. … except for the photos sent around on the Web a few days earlier.
So, as you might guess, there was no apology from the Secretary of State or a statement that perhaps the “unfortunate incident” with McGovern had unfortunately stepped on her passionate and surely heartfelt denunciation of Iran for not respecting the right of dissidents to protest their government’s policies.
Targeting Gaddafi
But the incident with me was minor compared to what Secretary Clinton was then cooking up for Libya, where she was outraged that Col. Muammar Gaddafi was citing the need to root out Islamic terrorists operating around Benghazi. Dismissing Gaddafi’s claims, Clinton and her State Department preferred to denounce Gaddafi’s domestic “war on terror” as a “genocidal” attack on innocent dissenters in eastern Libya.
Again, Clinton was communicating with her outside adviser Blumenthal about how to rile the world up enough against Gaddafi to push a “no-fly zone” through the United Nations Security Council.
Secretary Clinton’s private emails also contradict her testimony before the House Benghazi Committee that Blumenthal “was not at all my adviser on Libya,” although I guess it depends on what your definition of “adviser” is. The emails show that she actually took immediate proactive steps to follow up on his advice, as can be seen in the following:
From: sbwhoeop [Sidney Blumenthal]
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2011 10:32 PM
To: H Subject: H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes. S
“UK former Foreign Secretary David Owen has called for a no-fly zone over Libya, imposed by the United Nations and/or Nato … US might consider advancing tomorrow. Libyan helicopters and planes are raining terror on cities.”
[Article from Aljazeera as quoted by Blumenthal]: “In the wake of reported aiattacks (sic) on civilian crowds by the Libyan airforce, former Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen has called on the UN Security Council to immediately meet in emergency session and authorise a `No Fly Zone’ over Libya. Speaking on al Jazeera, Lord Owen called for a UN Charter Chapter 7 intervention (meaning the authorisation of both military and non-military means to ‘restore international peace and security’) to be enforced by NATO air forces with Egyptian military support to demonstrate regional backing.”
From: H <HDR22@clintonemail.com> [the other Clinton email, using her maiden name initials, Hillary Diane Rodham]
To: Sullivan, Jacob 3 [deputy chief of staff]
Sent: Mon Feb 21 22:42:21 2011
Subject: Fw: “H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes. Sid”
“What do you think of this idea?”
From: Sullivan, Jacob J [mailto:Sullivan33@state.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 04:59 AM [early the next morning]
To: H
Subject: Re: “H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes. Sid”
“Several have proposed it but honestly, we actually don’t know what is happening from the air right now. As we gain more facts, we can consider.”
From: H hrod17@clintonemail.com [back to the other email address]
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 6:09 AM
To: sbwhoeop
Subject: Re: “H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes.”
“Sid, We are looking at that for Security Council, which remains reluctant to ‘interfere’ in the internal affairs of a country. Stay tuned!”
From: H <HDR22@clintonemall.com>
To: Sullivan, Jacob J
Sent: Tue Feb 22 06:34:15 2011
Subject: Re: “H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes. Sid”
“I’ve heard contradictory reports as to whether or not there are planes flying and firing on crowds. What is the evidence that they are?”
From: Sullivan, Jacob J <SullivanJJ@state.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 7:21 AM
To: H
Subject: Re: “H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes. Sid”
“Not much – unconfirmed reports. Though helos firing seems more plausible.”
On to War
It took three more weeks, but on March 17, 2011, Secretary Clinton got her wish for a “no-fly zone” approved by the UN Security Council, acting under the military authority of Chapter Seven of the UN Charter. The vote was ten in favor, zero against, and five abstentions.
The five abstentions were: Brazil, Russia, India, China and Germany; Russian and China, which as permanent members could have vetoed the motion, complained later that they were deceived as to the real purpose of the “no-fly zone,” not realizing that it was a pretext for another “regime change,” which involved slaughtering much of the Libyan army before driving Gaddafi from power.
When Gaddafi was captured in his home town of Sirte on Oct. 20, 2011, he was tortured with a knife, which was used to sodomize him. Then he was murdered. When Clinton was notified of Gaddafi’s demise, she declared, “we came, we saw, he died” — and clapped her hands in undisguised glee.
It turned out, however, that Gaddafi was right that many of his adversaries in the east were radical jihadists and terrorists, a truth that Clinton learned when U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel were slain by attackers in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.
Clinton’s deception around the Libyan “no-fly zone” – as a gateway to yet another brutal U.S.-backed “regime change” – also helped poison U.S. relations with Russia and China, which balked at similar U.S. demands for a “safe zone” inside Syria, an idea that Clinton has advocated both as Secretary of State and as a presidential candidate.
In other words, Clinton is no more honest about big things than small, just as the Bible passage foretold, except now the fate of the world may hang in the balance.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, and used to brief every other morning one of Secretary Clinton’s predecessors, George P. Shultz, with the President’s Daily Brief.
European Commission’s Hate Speech Deal With Companies Will Chill Speech
By Jillian York | EFF | June 3, 2016
A new agreement between the European Commission and four major U.S. companies—Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft—went into effect yesterday. The agreement will require companies to “review the majority of valid notifications for removal of hate speech in less than 24 hours and remove or disable access to such content,” as well as “educate and raise awareness” with their users about the companies’ guidelines.
The deal was made under the Commission’s “EU Internet Forum,” launched last year as a means to counter what EDRi calls “vaguely-defined ‘terrorist activity and hate speech online.’” While some members of civil society were able to participate in discussions, they were excluded from the negotiations that led to the agreement, says EDRi.
The agreement has been met with opposition by a number of groups, including EDRi (of which we’re a member), Access Now, and Index on Censorship, all of which have expressed concerns that the deal with stifle freedom of expression. The decision has also sparked debate on social media, with a wide variety of individuals and groups opposing the decision under the hashtag #IStandWithHateSpeech.
But you don’t have to stand with hate speech to stand against this decision. There are several reasons to oppose this Orwellian agreement. First, while Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights allows states to limit freedom of expression under select circumstances, such limitations are intended to be the exception, and are permitted only to protect the following:
-
The rights or reputations of others,
-
national security,
-
public order,
-
public health, or
-
morals.
These limits must also meet a three-part test as defined by the ICCPR: be defined by law; have legitimate aim; and be truly necessary. While some of the speech that concerns the Commission may very well qualify as illegal under some countries’ laws, the method by which they’ve sought to limit it will surely have a chilling effect on free speech.
In addition, as EDRi points out, despite a lengthy negotiation between companies and the Commission, “hate speech” remains vaguely-defined. Companies have been tasked with taking the lead on determining what constitutes hate speech, with potentially disastrous results.
In fact, social media companies have an abysmal track record when it comes to regulating any kind of speech. As Onlinecensorship.org’s research shows, speech that is permitted by companies’ terms of service is often removed, with users given few paths to recourse. Users report experiencing bans from Facebook for 24 hours to up to 30 days if the company determines they’ve violated the Community Standards—which, in many cases, the user has not. Requiring companies to review complaints within 24 hours will almost surely result in the removal of speech that would be legal in Europe.
By taking decision-making outside of the democratic system and into backrooms, and granting corporations even greater control, the European Commission is ensuring a chill on online speech.
Dismantling Civil Society in Bahrain
By Rannie Amiri | CounterPunch | June 3, 2016
Like a vise which first grips its object and then slowly, deliberately and inexorably crushes it, the al-Khalifa regime has done similarly to civil society in Bahrain. It did not stop when peaceful, pro-democracy, reform protests erupted in 2011 and were violently put down by government forces aided by an invasion of Saudi troops in March of that year. Indeed, the vise continues to close and relentlessly so.
Nationalities have been revoked, mosques razed, citizens deported, human rights activists imprisoned on flimsy charges of insulting the monarchy at the least or plotting its overthrow at worst, and the most perfunctory of dialogues with the opposition abandoned. By smothering the figures and institutions who dare challenge the authority of the ruling dynasty in the most benign of fashions – a tweet, waving the country’s flag, tearing up a photo or merely questioning the tenure of the world’s longest serving prime minister – the Bahraini regime and its Gulf allies would like to believe monarchal rule has been preserved. Such desperate measures however, only speak to its precarity.
The stalwart activist Zainab al-Khawaja was given a sentence of three years and one month in Dec. 2014 for (again) tearing up a picture of King Hamad. She refused to be separated from her infant son whom she took with her to prison. Al-Khawaja has just been released on “humanitarian” grounds after serving 15 months in jail.
Her father though, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, remains imprisoned serving a life sentence on trumped-up charges of attempting to topple the government. While authorities may have set Zainab al-Khawaja free, they simultaneously doubled the sentence of Sheikh Ali Salman, head of al-Wefaq, an opposition political party. Initially given a term of four years incarceration for alleged incitement against the regime, it was increased to nine years on appeal. The unflinching President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) and founding Director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights Nabeel Rajab, remains banned from leaving the country despite the need to secure medical treatment for his wife.
Busy highlighting the nation’s cordial relations with the United Kingdom and United States, the latter of which headquarters its Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the capital Manama, the Western media has largely ignored the plight of Bahrain’s ordinary citizens. The arrest and torture of disabled youth has now been documented by the BCHR. Indeed, for more than a decade, the Center has meticulously chronicled the dismantling of Bahrain’s civil society in all its forms by the al-Khalifa regime.
Most recently, with the passage of a law preventing any religious figure from joining political societies or engaging in political activities, the BCHR issued a statement condemning, “… the Bahraini parliament and Shura Council’s passage of amendments to the Political Societies Law, which places a ban on participation in political decision-making based on discriminatory religious grounds. In defense of this draft amendment, lawmakers supporting this motion argued it would prevent religious acts from being politicized. This decision restricts people’s ability to freely engage in religious practices, as those members willing to join political activities pertinent to the legislative process in Bahrain would now need to refrain from any activities carrying religious connotations.”
In the face of widespread and open abuses in civil society, lack of proportional parliamentary representation, curfews, detentions, and imprisonment and torture of those who dissent, these practices have nonetheless failed to adversely impact the ties enjoyed between Bahrain and the United States. But when a regime becomes alienated from those whom it rules and for example, gives lengthy jail sentences for tweets it finds offensive, it speaks to a tenuous reign.
The pillars of civil advocacy in Bahrain – Nabeel Rajab, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, Maryam and Zainab al-Khawaja, Abduljalil al-Singace (sentenced to life in prison for participating in pro-democracy protests), Naji Fateel, Hussain Jawad and countless others both named and unnamed – have consistently engaged in purely secular, non-sectarian activism. Unlike the practice of the regime, the designations Sunni and Shia need not be applied when discussing the ongoing struggle for legal, political and socioeconomic rights in Bahrain. The people have waited too long for the West to recognize their demands are not based on sect, but on equity.
Despite an oppressive regime and the long shadow cast by the U.S. Fifth Fleet, resilient Bahrainis remain unintimidated.
Rannie Amiri is an independent commentator on Middle East affairs.
Dreams of Control: Israel, Global Censorship and the Internet
By Binoy Kampmark | CounterPunch | June 3, 2016
“Under the cover of darkness, there is no limit to the expansion of Big Brother.”
Ilan Gilon, Meretz Party (Israel), Times of Israel, Feb 4, 2016
While Israel’s central justification for its often reactionary policies is couched in hyper-exceptionalist rhetoric, nourished by the ashes of Holocaust remembrance, current interest in censoring the Internet is far from exceptional.
Like a machine of justification against its critics and its enemies, Israel enlists various projects under the banner of the remarkable and precious, when it is simply accomplishing what other states have done before or since: the banal and ordinary. All states want to limit expression, control criticism and marginalise the sceptics. Some do it more savagely, and roughly, than others.
Israel’s military censor, Col. Ariella Ben Avraham, who is part of the IDF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, gave a good example of this in February by insisting that social media activists and bloggers submit material relevant to security matters for approval prior to posting. The move also revealed an increasing interest to police the digital realm, previously considered an anarchic jungle incapable of effective policing.
Up to 32 Israeli bloggers and social media activists were informed about the directive, one of the first being Yossi Gurvitz, a left-wing activist running the “Friends of George” Facebook page. In rather unceremonious fashion, he was informed via Ben Avraham’s private Facebook account that he was obligated to run future submissions by her office. To his credit, he promises to defy the order.
Internal censorship is but one aspect of this policy. Israel Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan has dipped into the discourse of censorship to convince others that limiting various social media platforms on a global scale is the way to go. In January, he revealed the inner ambition of Israel’s security establishment to internationalise the censorship effort.
To achieve that goal, Erdan speaks of an “international coalition” that would make limiting criticism of Israel its primary objective. The central aim is hardly imaginative: making such providers as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook face up to responsibility as to what they host on their sites.
The Erdan plan suggests that various countries would form a “loose coalition that would keep an eye on content and where it is being posted, and members of the coalition would work to demand that the platforms remove the content that was posted in any of their countries at the request of members.” The simple idea behind this collusion is extra-territorial cooperation, effectively circumventing the global nature of such platforms.
As for the scurrilous subject matter itself, the issues are universal fare for states keen to control matters that supposedly stimulate the darker side of human nature. (Read: contrary to state interests.) Erdan’s office gives the example of material from a Palestinian (of course) disclosing the best locations on the body to inflict fatal stab wounds.
This begs that grand question about how far such an effort goes: control the more sordidly violent sides of the Old Testament because it encourages various unsavoury practices? Limit suggestive literature being discussed in the whirl of social media, buzzing away with malicious promise? The mind is an untidy place filled with remarkable things, and not all of them necessarily make it to actual perpetration. This is a point that continues to elude the mighty warriors of the security state.
Another justification is being thrown in: they, the social media giants, rake in the proceeds, and should therefore man the barricades. “We are planning to put a stop to this irresponsibility,” claimed Erdan’s office, “and we are going to do it as part of an international coalition that has had enough of this behaviour as well.”
Other governments have also done their bit to limit the internet and content available to their citizens. Most famously, Beijing runs its own “Great Firewall of China”, overseen by the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), while the State Council Information Office and the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department examine content.
In recent times, countries of a supposedly democratic character have taken to the blinds and endeavoured to do what Erdan dreams about. Dangerous thoughts are seen as the reason for dangerous actions. To that end, the country that gave Europe the Enlightenment has been busy forging its own vision of global internet censorship, using a mixture of security and privacy concerns.
The latter has proven to have potentially pernicious consequences, framed largely as an effort to protect the privacy of the French citizen. From that vantage point, a vision of global control has been built on a premise forged in European law: the right to be forgotten. The Court of Justice of the European ruling of May 13, 2014 (Google Spain v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González) has supplied the subject matter for the latest enlargement of censorship powers.
The French response has been intrusively enthusiastic, with the privacy regulator, CNIL, fining Google 100,000 Euros in March for not applying the right to be forgotten across the global network. In the chilling words of the regulator, “For people residing in France to effectively exercise their right to be delisted, it must be applied to the entire processing operation.” Erdan may well be irritated he did not come up with that one.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
The US and the EU Support a Savage Dictator
By Brian CLOUGHLEY | Strategic Culture Foundation | 31.05.2016
On May 6 a court in Istanbul, acting on the orders of Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan, sentenced the editor of the Cumhuriyet newspaper to five years and ten months in prison for publishing a report about illegal provision of weapons to Islamist terrorists in Syria by Turkey’s secret service. His bureau chief got five years.
Two weeks later Istanbul was host to the World Humanitarian Summit, which was held «to stand up for our common humanity and take action to prevent and reduce human suffering». Attendance included 65 heads of state. It was the usual total waste of time (Oxfam called it «an expensive talking shop» and those who refused to be there included President Putin and the global medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières), but the point is that a humanitarian conference should never have been held in Turkey, which is being transformed into a dictatorship by a president who is well-described by Professor Alan Sked of the London School of Economics as «a volatile, unstable, highly authoritarian personality».
The professor went on to observe that Erdogan «has pursued a civil war in his own country and has clamped down on the opposition and social media at will. Thousands have been imprisoned for merely criticising him. He has ordered the shooting down of a Russian warplane, and his country has been accused by Russia of trafficking secretly in oil with Isis. He cannot be trusted…»
Erdogan is a bigoted thug, yet the international community rushed to his country to hold a humanitarian conference and foreign heads of state flock to press his hand in friendship. He is treated with deference around the world and there can be no public criticism of him in the many countries that have laws prohibiting disparagement of heads of state and holding defamation and insult of their leaders to be a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment.
In January over 1,100 Turkish academics signed a letter asking Erdogan to cease his merciless blitz on Kurdish centres in the south east of the country. Thousands of Kurds had been (and continue to be) killed and crippled by ground and air assaults of merciless savagery. Erdogan’s response to the petition was to declare that these compassionate scholars «spit out hatred of our nation’s values and history on every occasion. The petition has made this clearer… In a state of law like Turkey, so-called academics who target the unity of our nation have no right to commit crimes. They don’t have immunity for this».
Some thirty of the humanitarian signatories were arrested and fifteen were dismissed from their university posts. They live under constant threat, as do all who attempt to disagree with the imperial president.
Yet Erdogan’s Turkey is strongly supported by the United States and by the European Union, albeit for very different reasons.
The US backs him because he supports Washington’s efforts to destroy President Assad of Syria and is a strident and aggressive opponent of Russia, while the EU is behind him because if he chose he could control the influx of Syrian refugees to Europe. So Erdogan can persecute and jail as many journalists and academics as he likes, while continuing to slaughter Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and although there may be a few murmurs of disapproval in Brussels and Washington there will be no action whatever taken by either the US or the EU to stop the President of Turkey wielding absolute power over his people.
In March, while Erdogan was attending the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington (yet another total waste of time and money, except for the travel industry) he met separately with the US president and vice-president, neither of whom had the moral courage to take him to task for his blatant oppression of those of his citizens who dare to have ideas and opinions contrary to his own.
As the Voice of America reported on March 31, «President Barack Obama assured his Turkish counterpart of American commitment to the security of Turkey, a critical ally in the fight against the Islamic State group», while the White House “readout” of the Erdogan-Biden meeting recorded that «the Vice President reiterated the United States’ unwavering commitment to Turkey’s national security as a NATO Ally». They discussed «ways to further deepen our military cooperation» which was no doubt heartening to a bellicose thug whose aim is to persecute and preferably kill Kurds wherever they may be.
In spite of all the evidence, the United States refuses to acknowledge that Erdogan’s Turkey has sent massive quantities of weaponry to Islamic terrorist groups who are prepared to kill Kurds. It does not appear to matter to Washington that «Not only has Erdoğan done almost everything he can to cripple the forces actually fighting ISIS; there is considerable evidence that his government has been at least tacitly aiding ISIS itself».
The countries of the European Union, in similar blinkered mode, ignore Erdogan’s transformation of Turkey from democracy to dictatorship because they are prepared to make almost any sacrifice to reduce the flood of refugees now threatening their countries. Their leaders are terrified that behaving in a humanitarian manner will damage their domestic electoral chances and have set up an extraordinary deal with Erdogan who has agreed to «do more to prevent refugees from traveling to Europe via its territory and take back all migrants and refugees who manage to cross into Europe from Turkey … In return, the European Union has doubled the financial aid it promised Turkey from 3 billion to 6 billion euros, has agreed to take in more Syrian refugees from Turkey, and will move to provide visa-free travel to Turks and reopen EU accession talks».
Little wonder that Erdogan is on the crest of a wave and can persecute dissenters and slaughter Kurds with hardly a word of international criticism. In March, when he took over Turkey’s largest newspaper, the independent Zaman, and replaced the entire staff with his supporters, US State Department spokesman John Kirby called the seizure «troubling». And it was reported on 25 May that, «the EU wants Ankara to narrow its definition of terror to stop prosecuting academics and journalists for publishing ‘terror propaganda’, but Turkey has refused to do so».
Unless the US and the EU bring pressure to bear on Erdogan to restore democracy in his country, he will continue to suppress and persecute his critics and continue his killing spree. But he is too valuable to them for that to happen. All they will do is hold more humanitarian conferences.
New Survey: Over Two-Thirds of California Voters Oppose Asset Forfeiture
By TJ Martinell | The Tenth Amendment Center | May 27, 2016
One thing Californians agree on is their opposition to laws that allow law enforcement to seize and keep people’s cash and property merely for being suspects of a crime, also known as asset forfeiture (learn more here).
That’s according to a two new surveys by the Public Policy Polling. The surveys found “overwhelming statewide and local opposition” to asset forfeiture laws. Over two-thirds of voters surveyed (82 percent) opposed these laws compared to 14 percent in favor of them.
Opposition to asset forfeiture also transcended party lines. Rough the same amount of Democrats, Republicans and independents expressed aversion to the idea that our property rights don’t apply when someone is suspected of crime – even if they’re never convicted.
Their support is not due to voter ignorance, as PPP also found that “opposition to civil asset forfeiture laws strengthens as voters learn more about them” and very few changed their minds after hearing law enforcement arguments justifying these laws. Maybe that’s because 17 percent of those surveyed knew someone who had lost property to police without a conviction.
Although California has asset forfeiture restrictions a loophole allows local police to pass off cases to the federal government, while still getting up to 80 percent of the proceeds obtained through civil forfeiture.
A bill introduced last year in the California state Senate would rein in these practices by law enforcement agencies. After passing the Senate by a wide margin, SB 443 was hit by massive opposition and delays in the Assembly. It was pulled from the “inactive file” this week and a final Assembly vote is expected in coming days.
California residents should contact their Assemblymember and insist the loophole be closed once and for all.
There’s also a Facebook group to support SB443 – HERE.
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Neocons confess: “We did 9/11-anthrax”
By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | September 6, 2014
As the 13th anniversary of the crimes of September, 2001 approaches, the neoconservatives are shrieking from the rooftops – and effectively confessing that they were the real perpetrators of the 9/11-Anthrax false flag operation. (The neocons, you may recall, openly called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in September, 2000 – and got one exactly one year later.)
Every year at this time, the neocons orchestrate and hype a series of public relations stunts designed to magnify fears of “radical Islam” and reinforce their crumbling 9/11-Anthrax cover story. But this year’s propaganda campaign is so extreme that it represents a tacit confession: The neocons know that the truth about the 9/11-Anthrax operation is slowly closing in on them; so they are over-reacting by desperately trying to stoke the dying embers of the so-called War on Terror, in order to maintain the myth that Muslims (rather than neoconservative Zionists) attacked America in the autumn of 2001.
When a hysterical person exhibits guilty demeanor by trying too hard to blame a crime on someone else, that person is almost certainly the real perpetrator. As the neocons try much too hard to blame Islam for 9/11 and “terrorism” in general, their hysteria inadvertently reveals their own culpability. Like Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, the neoconservative movement has blood on its hands and “doth protest too much.” … continue
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