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In an era of global protest, France and Israel stand out for use of dangerous ammunition

Please see the original article here.

With the world gripped in a historic wave of unrest, journalists in no fewer than 65 countries – about a third of the world – have been attacked covering protests since 2015, according to a report I authored for a U.N. agency that was published today.

One thing that stood out during my research for the report Safety of Journalists Covering Protests: Preserving Freedom of the Press During Times of Turmoil, published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO – was the use of dangerous munitions to suppress demonstrations.

Security forces in France and Israel, in particular, have deployed specific tools to devastating effect on the safety of the press covering protests.

French-invented “flash balls” have been used by riot police in the country since before the “yellow vest” protests began in 2018 over rising fuel prices and other economic grievances. They are made of rubber or condensed foam. While the original flash balls emitted a flash, the ones in use today do not. They travel at a higher velocity than other non-lethal projectiles like rubber bullets or pepper balls. A recent model of flash ball gun, known as the LBD40, fires 40mm projectiles traveling at speeds of up to 100 meters (328 feet) per second.

In December 2018, French authorities fired flash balls at reporters covering “yellow vest” protests, as CPJ documented at the time, citing news reports. According to CPJ’s research, several journalists were injured, including Boris Kharlamoff, a journalist for the audio press agency A2PRL, who said he was hit in the side even though he showed a press badge, and Liberation reporter Nicolas Descottes, who was struck in the face.

Multiple phone calls for comment to the French embassy in Washington, D.C. were not returned.

In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, another harsh weapon, the “butterfly bullet” was used by the Israel Defense Forces in response to Palestinian protests in 2018-2019, according to Al Jazeera, which cited testimony from medics. During those protests, known as the Great March of Return, Palestinians demanded to return to their historic homelands inside Israel, and for Israel to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip.

An Israeli military vehicle keeps position at the border fence with Gaza during the Great March of Return protest on March 30, 2019. Medics in Gaza said the Israeli army shot “butterfly bullets” at protesters; reporters were injured and killed by Israeli fire during the protests. (AFP/Jack Guez)

While butterfly bullets come in different forms and calibers, the most damaging are live ammunition or rounds with metal casings designed to expand and fan out upon impact, causing maximum injury to flesh and bone. Marie-Elisabeth Ingres, the former head of Doctors Without Borders in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, described seeing injuries among Gaza protesters “where the bullet has literally destroyed tissue after having pulverized the bone.”

In August 2018, at least four Palestinian journalists were injured by gunfire and shrapnel, including from live “butterfly” rounds covering protests in Gaza, as CPJ documented at the time, citing news reports. During the same series of protests, photojournalist Yaser Murtaja with the Gaza-based Ain Media agency and journalist Ahmad Abu Hussein who was reporting for Voice of the People radio, were shot by Israeli forces in separate incidents and both died from their wounds, as CPJ documented. In both cases, the journalists were clearly identified as members of the press. It’s unclear what kind of munition the IDF used in those two shootings.

In a statement on its website, the IDF denied that it used expanding bullets against Gaza protesters. Such munitions, also known as “dumdum” rounds, have been outlawed in war since the Hague Declaration concerning Expanding Bullets of 1899. However, the treaty does not apply to situations where no war has been declared. A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. did not return a request for comment sent via email.

According to my review of attacks against the press, Israel is unusual in its use of live ammunition on protesters. Flash balls have shown up in countries outside of France; in Spain, riot police under the regional government in Basque Country used the ammunition to quell protests as late as at least 2012, before their use was discontinued, the BBC reported.

Caveat utilitor: Satellite phones can always be tracked

The original blog is posted here.

Caveat utilitor: Satellite phones can always be tracked

The Telegraph in London was the first to report that Syrian government forces could have “locked on” to satellite phone signals to launch the rocket attacks that killed journalists Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik, as well as many Syrian civilians, besides wounding dozens more including two more international journalists. Working out of a makeshift press center in Homs, foreign correspondents and local citizen journalists alike have been using satellite phones to send images of attacks on civilians around the world.

Without evidence, it is impossible to know whether Syrian forces tracked the journalists’ satellite signals to target the attack. And one should keep in mind that the building being used as a makeshift press center in Homs may have been known to many people in the city.

Yet the consensus among technologists devoted to Internet freedom is clear.

“Satellite phone tracking is not only possible, it’s widely used by military and security services,” one human rights-oriented technologist with experience training citizen activists in Syria told CPJ.

Jacob Appelbaum, a technologist associated with the Internet circumvention tool popular among human rights activists known as Tor, was among the first to warn journalists via @ioerror on Twitter: “No matter what – unless you ‘know’ otherwise, your Satellite phone almost certainly discloses your exact GPS location in an insecure manner.”

There are at least three ways to track a satellite phone. Tracking radio frequency emissions is one. “It is relatively simple to receive this signal for a trained technician, ” reports SaferMobile, a U.S.-based nonprofit group dedicated to helping activists, human rights defenders and journalists share information, in a blog this week pegged to the above attack.

Using commercially available tracking devices is another. “There is ample technology already on the market for doing so,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, another, San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, wrote in a blog yesterday. Companies including the Polish firm TS2 sell monitoring equipment to track different models of satellite phones. The Italian firm Area SpA sold surveillance equipment to Syria last year in advance of the current crackdown, according to Bloomberg News and EFF.

Finally, satellite phones can be tracked through their own built-in GPS devices or weak encryption protocols. “It is very likely that the GPS location data is transmitted by the sat phone in the clear,” reports Safer Mobile. “Additionally and important as a side note — aside from revealing your location with a sat phone — the encryption used by commercial satellite telephone systems has been recently cracked.”

So what are journalists and citizen journalists to do? In an environment where normal Internet access is either shut down or severely restricted, satellite phones remain a key way to transmit and report information. For now, alternatives such as amateur radio links or — as this report from Syria suggests, using carrier pigeons — are largely infeasible replacements.

Technologists with experience operating in hostile environments tell CPJ that one should use a satellite phone in such situations only with strict radio discipline:

-Avoid using a satellite phone (or any radio frequency based device) from the same position more than once.

-Avoid using a satellite phone or similar device from a location that cannot be easily evacuated in case of attack.

-Keep the maximum length of any transmission to 10 minutes at most, then cease transmitting and change location as soon as possible.

-Avoid having multiple parties transmit from the same location, i.e. a central media center may be too dangerous to operate in a place like Homs, Syria.

Murdering with Impunity: The Rise in Terror Tactics Against News Reporters

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Murdering with Impunity

The Rise in Terror Tactics Against News Reporters

November 14, 2010 by

Frank Smyth is the Washington representative and Journalist Security Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. He serves as board member of the International News Safety Institute and was a former investigator for Human Rights Watch.

More journalists were killed last year than ever before. No doubt the world has become a more dangerous place for journalists, but not necessarily in ways that people might expect. The risks to foreign journalists, especially for (but hardly limited to) Western correspondents, have risen dramatically. Some of us are old enough to recall a time back in the 1980s when raising a white flag and writing TV in masking tape on a vehicle might help keep one safe. But in recent years reporters for outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Al-Arabiya have been attacked in ways which demonstrate that being a journalist may only make one more of a target.

The untold story, however, is the following: the risks to local journalists, or journalists who report within the borders of their own nation, have never been greater. In fact, the risks that local journalists face have long been severe. The difference is that, now, perhaps more Western-based international observers and groups are taking notice.

Nearly three out of four journalists killed around the world did not step on a landmine, or get shot in crossfire, or even die in a suicide bombing attack. Instead, no less than 72 percent of all 831 journalists killed on the job since 1992, according to data compiled with other figures cited below by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), were murdered outright, such as killed by a gunman escaping on the back of a motorcycle, shot or stabbed to death near their home or office, or found dead after having been abducted and tortured.

The pattern of most journalists murdered in reprisal for their work, as opposed to being killed by the hazards of combat reporting, holds true even in war zones. In Somalia, more than half (53 percent) of journalists killed did not die in anything like a firefight or bombing attack; instead, they were individually murdered. Similarly, in Afghanistan, outright homicides account for 59 percent of journalists killed. In Iraq, which by any measure has been the most dangerous nation for journalists on record, 63 percent of journalists killed since the US-led invasion in 2003 were murdered.

Atwar Bahjat was an Iraqi journalist and contract correspondent in Iraq for Al-Arabiya, a television network based in the United Arab Emirates and partly owned by the Saudi broadcaster Middle East Broadcasting Center. Bahjat had previously reported from Iraq for Al-Jazeera, the satellite television network based in Qatar and partly financed by the nation’s Emir-led government. In 2006, Bahjat and her TV crew were reporting at the site of the Shi’ite Askariya shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, in Samarra immediately after it had been bombed. A surviving crewmember said that armed men driving a white car attacked the crew and demanded to know the whereabouts of the on-air correspondent. Her remains and those of two crewmembers were found the following day. Bahjat’s corpse in particular, according to a mutual friend interviewed by this author, bore unmistakable signs of torture.

The killing of local journalists is most common. Nearly nine out of ten journalists killed on the job, or 87 percent, were murdered or otherwise killed within their own nation. Many people have heard of the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who, after her repeated exposés on human rights abuses in the Russian province of Chechnya, was shot to death in October 2006 in the elevator of her apartment building.

But how many people beyond the northern Mexican town of Saltillo have heard of Valentín Valdés Espinosa, a young general assignment reporter for Zócolo de Saltillo, whose tortured corpse was found in January 2010 after he reported the arrest of an alleged local drug lord? Or how many people outside of the Sindhi-speaking area of Pakistan have heard of Ghulam Rasool Birhamani, a middle-aged reporter for the Daily Sindhu Hyderabad, who was abducted, tortured and left for dead in May 2010 after reporting on an arranged, tribal marriage involving a 12-year-old girl? Or how many people outside of Indonesia have heard of Ridwan Salamun, a young correspondent and cameraman for Sun TV, who was stabbed to death in August 2010 while filming violent clashes between two villages?

The evidence in 2009 continues to bolster the same point. CPJ recorded a record 72 journalist deaths last year. The unprecedented toll stemmed largely from the November massacre of 30 journalists out of 57 people killed in one incident during election unrest in the Philippines’s Maguindano province. Keep in mind that CPJ figures are by and large consistent with those provided by other global monitors, including the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders and the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists, except for two possible cases. When it comes to journalist murders, CPJ only includes those cases where researchers have investigated the motive to determine that a journalist was murdered in retaliation for his or her work, as opposed to, say, a business arrangement gone bad, a land dispute, or even a love triangle. In 2009, for example, no fewer than 24 journalists were murdered that year whom CPJ excluded from the record total of 72 journalists killed because a motive in each of these outstanding cases has yet to be determined. Each year, on average, CPJ records dozens of outstanding cases with motives under investigation. CPJ’s annual figure of journalists killed worldwide also excludes murders of media workers such as drivers and translators, which in 2009, for example, numbered three.

The resulting figures still stand up under scrutiny, and they are staggering. At least 599 journalists have been murdered since 1992, according to CPJ statistics. To put it another way, a journalist is murdered somewhere around the world at least once every 11 days. Most of them were not even investigative journalists, but simply beat reporters trying to get the story. More than nine out of ten of the murdered journalists, or 93 percent, were local newsmen and women.

Unsolved Crimes

There is another trend that is even more disturbing. When it comes to journalists, the killers get away with the murders in nearly nine out of ten cases. In no less than 89 percent of journalist murders worldwide, there has been little or no prosecution whatsoever. Moreover, only in four percent of journalist murder cases has full prosecution occurred, which in most cases means that both the assassins and the masterminds who ordered or hired them, have been brought to justice.

In 2005, a judge in Nicaragua found a local politician guilty of the murder of journalist Maria José Bravo, a correspondent for the Managua daily La Prensa. Bravo had been killed in the previous year upon leaving a voting booth during claims of election irregularities. In 2004, a military court in the Ivory Coast found a police officer guilty of the murder of journalist Jean Hélène, a French correspondent with Radio France Internationale, who was shot in the head outside the national police headquarters while waiting to interview an opposition activist. But such convictions remain rare, especially when they involve local correspondents.

To help illustrate the problem, CPJ developed an Impunity Index. The methodology is simple: The index calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of a nation’s population. The size of the population is used as the base of the calculus since it is a discernible figure, unlike attempts to guess at the number of journalists in any one nation at any given time. Determining who is a journalist has long been problematic. In a digital age, it becomes nearly impossible. The percentage of journalists belonging to a trade union or professional association varies from nation to nation, and local journalists such as community radio reporters often belong to no formal group. Moreover, defining who is a journalist in the blogosphere can be done only on a case-by-case basis. (Most observers would seem to agree that journalists, noted in The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel, as opposed to other disseminators of information, engage in some process of verification.)

The number of unsolved journalist murders is a figure which hits as hard as a bullet, however, in all too many nations. The latest Impunity Index covers the years 2000 through 2009, and includes nations with at least five unsolved journalist murders over the same period. Iraq tops the list with no fewer than 88 journalist murders out of a population of over 31 million, followed by the much smaller nation of Somalia with nine unsolved journalist murders in a nation of nine million people.

Few are surprised to see either nation top the list. But the countries that follow may not be expected. Three democratic nations (nations with a reasonably long history of competitive national elections) come next: the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Colombia. The Philippines has had 55 unsolved journalist murders so far in the past decade out of a population of 90.3 million. The smaller nation of Sri Lanka has seen 10 unsolved journalist murders out of a population of 20 million; Colombia, 13 out of over 44 million.

All the remaining nations on the list are also all at least nominal democracies, although a few if not more for different reasons may not be arguably worthy of even that term: Afghanistan, Nepal, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. The ongoing problem of such impunity in murdering journalists cuts across geographic and political boundaries, perhaps the single greatest threat to press freedom worldwide. But it also raises questions that go beyond the traditional bounds of press freedom monitors. One thing, however, is clear: in the post-Cold War era, civilian government institutions, which include judicial and law enforcement capabilities, remain woefully weak in many nations, while military or intelligence agencies continue to dominate many of the same nations.

Who is behind all these journalist murders? The answer is also not what many might expect. Government officials of one kind or another have killed nearly as many journalists as terrorists or other political movements and groups. In fact, if one adds government-backed paramilitary groups to the list, government officials along with their paramilitary allies have murdered more journalists than terrorists and other anti-government groups.

Individual CPJ case capsules — which, along with all other data cited here, are available online—have identified anti-government political groups and movements, including terrorist organizations, as being the most likely perpetrators of at least 30 percent, or 180 cases, out of a worldwide total of 599 murders since 1992. Civilian government officials are considered the probable perpetrators of 24 percent of journalist murders. Military government officials are responsible for another five percent, and pro-government paramilitary groups are responsible for seven percent, or of about 41 murders over the same period.

The repercussions of the murder also stretch beyond the incidents themselves. The murder of any one journalist sends a signal to countless others that they or members of their family could well be next. Many journalists have been threatened, sometimes repeatedly, before being murdered. But countless more journalists have been warned not to travel the same path. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the perpetrators or those who wish to keep the press from reporting on their own wrongdoings, murdering a journalist makes cold-blooded sense. In the 1980s, many journalists were murdered while covering human rights abuses. In the past two decades, more journalists have been killed while reporting on corruption, such as collusion between government actors and organized crime.

Murdering some journalists, while threatening to target even more, generates fear that is hard to measure. Self-censorship has become routine in nations from Colombia to Mexico. After the tortured remains of previously mentioned Mexican reporter Espinosa were discovered, no other reporter in the city of Saltillo attempted to report on why Espinosa had been killed. In fact, his newspaper, Zócolo de Saltillo, went in the other direction entirely and stopped reporting on organized crime, according to a senior editor who asked to remain anonymous.

The unchecked proliferation of journalist murders also challenges some of the precepts behind global press freedom indices produced by groups like the Washington, D.C.-based Freedom House as well as Reporters Without Borders. Based on a multiplicity of factors, their global indices, when evaluating another democratic nation like the Philippines, must somehow weigh the value of a relatively open environment for the press to criticize the government and report on a wide range of other topics against the disvalue of journalist murders.

Multilateral institutions like the World Bank are only beginning to come to grips with this ongoing problem, and how to factor it into decisions concerning loans and other economic support to nations. In fact, while economic and health indicators like gross national product and infant mortality per capita have long been used to determine levels of economic development, another way to measure development would be to examine the rate of prosecutions for murders. Hard, comparative data on the topic is not readily available. But one factor that clearly separates the world’s most developed nations from most other nations is that in most G-8 nations, for example, most murders are solved. In contrast, throughout much of the world, the global rate of impunity for unsolved journalist murders approaches 90 percent and largely appears to be replicated for the murders of other citizens as well.

Danger at the Front Lines

At the same time, combat journalists and other reporters who cover dangerous situations still face great risks. No less than 18 percent of the journalists killed on the job in all circumstances since 1992 died covering combat or some other form of military engagement. Another ten percent were killed during reporting on matters like violent demonstrations.

Among field reporting incidents, disputed shootings have received the most attention. What’s the difference between a murder and a disputed shooting? In a murder, no one doubts that a homicide occurred; the question is who did it. In most disputed shootings, everyone knows who fired the ordinance that killed the journalist; the question is whether the firing was justified.

Few cases have received more scrutiny than the August 2003 shooting of Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana outside the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He was in a car with members of his crew after filming outside the walls of the jail when a US Army tank approached their position in the street. Dana got out of the car, put his camera on his shoulder, and began walking in the direction of the tank as he was filming it. A gunner atop the tank opened fire, hitting Dana fatally in the chest.

The soldier who fired later said that he had seen a dark-skinned, dark-haired man in black clothing, and mistook Dana’s camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, according to a US military investigation of the shooting that was later declassified and released to the public. The US military exonerated the soldiers involved. But the same report also included a recommendation that commanders should review the military’s own rules-of-engagement for potential modifications to try and avoid such incidents in the future. Human Rights Watch and CPJ would later make a similar recommendation in a 2005 letter to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In fact, since 2003, at least 16 journalists have died and others seriously wounded by US forces’ fire in Iraq. US military authorities have conducted investigations in less than a handful of cases, but the investigations exonerated the soldiers involved in each case. It remains unclear whether, or to what degree, the US military may have reviewed its procedures in response to the recommendations by its own investigators and others.

Another well-known disputed shooting involved Israeli Defense Forces and British freelance cameraman and film director James Miller, who was working on a documentary for the TV channel HBO in Gaza in May 2003. Miller and his crew were working out of the home of a Palestinian family as they filmed the army’s demolition of houses in an area that the Israeli army alleged contained tunnels used to smuggle arms. Near midnight, the television crew decided to leave the home and walked toward a fixed position of Israeli troops and armored personnel carriers 300 feet away.

The journalists were wearing jackets and helmets marked “TV,” as was later shown in the HBO documentary. One crewmember waved a white flag, while Miller used a flashlight to illuminate the flag and also shouted a greeting as they approached. A shot was fired. The group yelled that they were British journalists, and a second shot was fired immediately after. The video shows the second shot hitting Miller, who was struck in the neck. Several more shots followed. An Israeli army spokesman first said that troops in the area returned fire after being fired on by rocket-propelled grenades. Later, the army said that Miller was struck by a bullet from behind, claiming that he may have been hit by Palestinian fire. Israeli authorities exonerated the soldiers involved; exhortations by CPJ and others for the Israeli army to conduct a transparent investigation into the shooting were not heeded.

These incidents and others helped compel a group of journalists based in Geneva, Switzerland, who cover the United Nations and other multilateral agencies, to form a group with two goals: to establish a universal press emblem and to work to modify the Geneva conventions, making it an explicit war crime to target journalists. Most global press freedom groups including CPJ, Reporters Without Borders, the International Federation of Journalists, as well as a consortium of groups based in Europe known as the International News Safety Institute opposed the changes.

Global press freedom groups argued, first, that establishing a universal press emblem would require the formation of a regime to determine who would be eligible to don the emblem and that this would be tantamount to establishing a licensing regime which would determine who is and who is not a journalist. Such a step would only feed efforts by repressive regimes, the global press freedom groups went on, which already sought to restrict journalists by licensing them according to political criteria.

Second, it is already a war crime to target civilians, a category which includes journalists (journalists who are embedded with military forces may be legitimately targeted, as they legally become a part of the military unit to which they are embedded). Thus, to make the targeting of journalists an explicit war crime would not only be redundant and unnecessary; it would also send the message to the public that journalists saw themselves as special and somehow more important than other civilians.

Moreover, the entire debate over the changes proposed by the Geneva-based group, now known as Press Emblem Campaign, does not address the facts underscored here that nearly three out of four journalists killed are murdered outright in non-military situations in direct reprisal for their work. But the discussion has managed to generate more dialogue over the issue than ever before, starting largely with the International News Safety Institute and its watershed 2006 report, “Killing the Messenger: Report of the Global Inquiry by the International News Safety Institute into the Protection of Journalists.”

Reporting, Past and Future

Violence, of course, is only one way to silence the press. In many so-called closed or restrictive nations, especially those controlled or dominated by a single political party or monarchy, outright censorship of the press and imprisonment for individual journalists who persist in crossing the line is the most common reprisal. For 11 consecutive years, China was the world’s leading jailer of journalists. But Iran usurped China to hold that dishonor after jailing dozens of journalists in the wake of election unrest in 2009. Cuba is next on the list, followed, unfortunately, by sub-Saharan Africa’s newest nation, Eritrea.

Two trends also stand out. In 2008, online journalists of one form or another surpassed print and broadcast journalists as the largest single category of journalists imprisoned around the world, comprising nearly half of those incarcerated. In the following year, the number of jailed freelance journalists nearly doubled from the previous three years to similarly make up almost half of incarcerated journalists. Both trends are likely to grow: Further digital advances will empower more freelance journalists to venture out on their own, while newsroom cutbacks, especially in newspapers in most developed nations, will lead to more freelancers on the market.

One should also not forget that many methods to restrict the press fall somewhere in between the more obvious means of violence or imprisonment. For instance, ruling party thugs have intimidated and attacked journalists in the streets from Zimbabwe to Venezuela; government officials and other public figures have brought criminal libel suits against journalists from Thailand to Morocco; national agencies have ordered impromptu tax audits against news outlets from the Ukraine to South Korea. In nations such as Hong Kong and Argentina, governments have manipulated private or public advertising to punish media outlets’ critical reporting, as was recently documented by the Center for International Media of the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy.

Serious challenges lie ahead. The Committee to Protect Journalists has launched a Global Campaign Against Impunity, which aspires both to raise awareness among the public in nations like the Philippines about the value of journalism to society, and to pressure law enforcement authorities to bring the murderers of journalists to justice. Some progress has already been made in Latin America to resolve a number of journalist-murder cases, due to efforts by the Inter-American Press Association. There is no doubt, however, that progress will take time.

But the first step toward solving any issue is to acknowledge it. One should also keep in mind that behind every figure is a face, and most likely also a family, friends, and colleagues, all of whom suffer from a journalist’s persecution or death.

Think Daniel Pearl, Atwar Bahjat, or Valentín Valdés Espinosa. Clearly, there is much more to say.

Tunisia Caucus Co-Chair Calls Despot Moderate and Wise

Betty McCollum told her constituents she was going to honor the dead. “Congresswoman Betty McCollum (D-MN) will spend the Fourth of July holiday visiting the North African Cemetery and Memorial in Tunisia to pay tribute to American troops, including 138 Minnesotans, who lost their lives in World War II,” reads a July 1 statement on her website. “It is an honor for me to have the opportunity to pay tribute to these courageous men on behalf of Minnesotans and the nation.”

But the state-run Tunisian press agency reported something else. The next day, on July 2, Rep. McCollum met with the Tunisian Foreign Minister, Abdelwaheb Abdallah, in Tunis. “The Foreign Minister briefed his guest about the comprehensive development work carried out in Tunisia, under the impulse of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and stressed Tunisia’s will to further reinforce its relations with the United States, highlighting the role [of the] ‘Tunisia Caucus’ in strengthening these relations,” reads a Tunis-Afrique Presse news agency report.

“Mrs. McCollum affirmed, in turn, that ‘Tunisia holds a strategic position between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and it represents the voice of moderation and wisdom in the world, a voice we must listen to,’” according to the Tunisian state news report.

McCollum’s chief of staff Bill Harper later clarified to the Committee to Protect Journalists (www.cpj.org) that she made this remark in the context of foreign policy, and, in particular, Tunisia’s advice more than five years ago to the United States. While long cooperating with Washington in the war on terror, Tunisia earlier in this decade (quietly) opposed the Bush administration’s intervention in Iraq. “The premise of her visit was security,” he explained.

But Iraq was not mentioned in the Tunisian government news report about McCollum’s visit. Instead, the Tunis-Afrique Presse agency went on, “The meeting allowed as well to highlight the role of [the] ‘Tunisia Caucus,’ a group within the U.S. House of Representatives including congressmen who want to learn more about Tunisia, its culture, traditions, history, and people and to further strengthen bilateral relations.”

Apparently the bipartisan Tunisia Caucus has little or no interest in learning about, or even acknowledging, Tunisia’s abysmal record on press freedom and human rights. The so-called moderate and wise leader, President Ben Ali, is a dictator who has monopolized power for no less than 21 years. He runs Tunisia as a police state, where the country’s large, Soviet-style press does little more than laud the despot and his tight-fisted regime.

Only a handful of Internet publications and small-circulation opposition papers have attempted to seriously criticize the government or hold it accountable. But journalists writing for these outlets have been placed under surveillance, assaulted by plainclothes police, had their phone and Internet lines cut, and been prevented from leaving the country. Enough have been imprisoned since 2001 to make Tunisia the Arab world’s worst nation for jailing journalists.

Of course, Tunisia’s admirers are right to point out that it is a highly secular as well as modern nation. Not only does it have a literate population, but one in which women largely enjoy the same rights as men. The sunny Mediterranean state is also one that has little or no history of ethnic or sectarian strife. No wonder the nation seems like a natural “friend,” as U.S. diplomats prefer to call it, if not ally of the United States.

But members of Congress seeking to strengthen such ties should neither sidestep nor dismiss Tunisia’s utter lack of democratic rights and norms. Unfortunately, McCollum is hardly the first to do so. Earlier this year, the other Tunisia Caucus co-chair, Rep. Bud Cramer, Jr. (D-AL), went to Tunis where he also pledged to strengthen bilateral relations without mentioning either press freedom or human rights. The Tunis-Afrique Presse agency quoted Cramer saying, “He voiced his readiness to exert more influence…to better publicize the opportunities offered by Tunisia so as to hoist bilateral co-operation to higher levels.”

Cramer’s press officer Jennie Gibson did not return calls asking for comment.

Nor should members of Congress allow their statements to be used for propaganda by a police state. On Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Middle East Program Coordinator Joel Campagna wrote an op-ed (http://www.twincities.com/opinion/ci_9962056) about McCollum’s recent visit to Tunis in The St. Paul Pioneer Press, her hometown paper. McCollum has yet to respond to the op-ed. Her press officer, Cleve Mesidor, also did not return calls asking for comment for this blog.

Other members of the Tunisia Caucus include Rep. Mark S. Kirk (R-IL), Ben Chandler (D-KY), Henry E. Brown, Jr. (R-SC), and Rep. Solomon P. Ortiz (D-TX).

Note: CPJ is a worldwide watchdog that accepts no government funds as it defends the rights of journalists everywhere to report the news without fear of reprisal.

By Committee to Protect Journalists Washington Rep. Frank Smyth

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Politics .

Israel’s future could be on the line in Iraq

Original story found here.

For all the talk about Iraq and whether we should send more troops, one subject seems almost too delicate to bring up: Israel. What happens to America’s closest ally in the Middle East if the Bush administration loses Iraq to a wider war marked by more anarchy and violence?

The Administration aspired to remake Iraq in a Jeffersonian image that would have left the nation more friendly to us and Israel. But the effort has failed.

Not only is Iraq the site of spreading sectarian violence, but the U.S.-led invasion has made the country a magnet for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups hostile to the United States and Israel. By helping bring Iraq’s long-oppressed Shia majority to power, the administration has, however unwittingly, helped expand the influence of Iran at a time when Iran’s nuclear activities pose a long-term threat to Israel.

President George W. Bush seems convinced his short-term “surge” will help stem Iraq’s rising tide of bloodletting. But neither he nor his advisers have articulated what might come next. Bush has already rejected the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s recommendations to pursue several diplomatic initiatives at once, including sustained peace-building efforts between Israelis and Palestinians.

Arab leaders have been making it clear to U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on her latest trip to the region, they will not back U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq without seeing progress toward a Palestinian state. So if the administration’s one big last military push fails, the United States will have few options left in the region. Pushing again on Israeli-Palestinian tensions would be conceivable but would most likely be seen as too little, too late.

Israelis will continue to live in an area where the forces on the rise in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere are not stable, pro-Western governments but sectarian militias and other irregular armed groups – many of whom hate each other and their own states, but nearly all of whom oppose Israel.

Of course, Israel can defend itself, with the best-trained, best-armed military in the region, no doubt armed with nuclear weapons. The country’s willingness to use its strength for rapid strikes inside enemy territory has been an effective deterrent against even the most hostile states such as Syria, which have easily identifiable targets like military bases and electrical plants.

But nonstate movements are far less vulnerable to retaliatory attacks, as Israel learned last year after its air strikes in Lebanon failed to do much discernable damage to Hezbollah while Hezbollah militia forces were firing rockets into Israel.

Such irregular armed forces breed in a climate of resistance. Thriving on perceptions of their own victimization, they often gain politically, as Hezbollah did from its military defeats in Lebanon following Israel’s bombing. Well-armed powers have discovered, most recently in Iraq and Lebanon, that neutralizing the appeal of such militias requires at least as much savvy as arms.

In the past, Israel has quietly gained as its enemies fought each other, notably during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. But what applies to states does not necessarily apply to irregular armed movements. Take the clashes today in the West Bank and Gaza between Fatah and Hamas Palestinians. Instead of weakening Israel’s enemies, the fighting may end up undermining moderates such as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

In a broader struggle between Sunnis and Shia in the Persian Gulf region, the two warring Muslim sects may each find opportunities to attack Israel, to bolster their jihadist credentials. Though Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders are ultra-conservative Sunnis who have long derided Shia for deviating from the Muslim faith, some al-Qaida figures came to Hezbollah’s defense as it attacked Israel, calling the Shia fighters Muslim allies in a common struggle.

The same kind of cynical logic may help explain the repugnant language of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His conference in Tehran promoting Holocaust denial helped show other anti-Israeli Muslims the Middle East’s largest Shia-led state is no less hostile to Israel than are many Sunni Muslims.

This means avoiding further destabilization of the Middle East is in the interest not only of the United States, but of Israel. This is a fact the Bush administration would do well to address. It is betting against the odds its one-track military policy will work. If it fails, Israel could be in greater danger than ever.

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This article originally appeared at:
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opsmy21b5060248jan21,0,1972949.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

Time for Hard Choices on Leaving Iraq

While the unexpected crisis involving Israel and Lebanon rages on with no end in sight, the United States needs to stay focused on the Iraqi crisis of its own making. Lately, even the most articulate supporters of that war have finally declared that our efforts there are not working. But navigating our own safe passage out of Iraq at this stage will require more than simply throwing up our hands.

The time has come to make some hard choices. So far, the highly partisan debate here has been about whether to set up a timetable for U.S. forces to leave Iraq and, if so, when. But this is little more than political posturing unless we first pave the way for our forces to leave without the nation imploding while drawing in other states in the region.

It might help if we could try to understand Iraqis on their own terms. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently announced his outrage over elected Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s refusal to criticize the Lebanese group Hezbollah for its ongoing, indiscriminate attacks against Israel. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) expressed her affront over the same Iraqi government’s plan to offer amnesty to Iraqi insurgents who have attacked American forces.

These Democrats are making the same mistake many Republicans did in presuming that Iraqis would not only be grateful for our help in bringing democracy to their nation, but that they would show it by electing leaders with whom we would get along. We seem to forget that most Iraqis are poor Shias who long lived under the boot of Saddam Hussein, while Shia groups elsewhere, namely with Hezbollah and in Iran, each supported Iraqi Shias against Hussein far more consistently than we did.

Now, if we are going to find our way out of Iraq, we must scale down our expectations. Iraq will never be the pro-American beacon of Western values that architects in the Bush administration naively promised. Nor is the ongoing Iraqi insurgency, or the nation’s even faster rising tide of sectarian violence, likely to end until after Iraq’s elected, Shia-led government negotiates a settlement with the nation’s own entrenched Sunni insurgents.

This may well require granting insurgents an amnesty for attacking not only U.S. forces but armed Iraqi forces. After all, Great Britain was forced to accept even tougher terms to negotiate a settlement in Northern Ireland with the Irish Republican Army. One difference in Iraq might be that an amnesty would not extend to those responsible for attacks on Iraqi civilians, most of which have been carried out by foreign fighters loosely associated with al-Qaida.

Another concession we may well need to make is to give up any permanent U.S. military bases on Iraqi soil. Only the Kurds in the north really want us to stay there, anyway, to keep them from being overrun by Turkey. Of course, none of these steps would change anything overnight. But renouncing our own claims to retain any long-term military presence in Iraq could help change the political climate inside the country.

As long as Iraqis of all kinds can blame their daily problems on occupying U.S.-led troops, the nation’s various groups – including insurgents, sectarian militias and government authorities – can put off facing one another to try to resolve their differences. Already Shia militias are demanding greater autonomy in the south. Great Britain recently announced its plans to turn over the southernmost city of Basra to the local Shia militia by early next year.

The United States is sure to feel more pressure to follow suit, even though doing so could easily help lead to the bloody breakup of Iraq. Anyone advocating an immediate or otherwise premature U.S. withdrawal should keep in mind that no matter what one chooses to call it so far, Iraq’s ethnic cleansing could still get much worse.

But there is at least one silver lining hanging over today’s stormy region. Hezbollah’s status throughout the Arab world has only risen from its ongoing rocket attacks against Israel, and this has notably helped defuse tensions between Shias and Sunnis in much of the Arab world. Many radical Sunnis who previously denounced Shias for practicing their own interpretation of Islam now accept Hezbollah as a partner in a broader anti-Western struggle. This could help strengthen the hand of Prime Minister Maliki both inside and outside of Iraq to try to find a settlement to both the insurgency and sectarian strife inside his own nation.

The same storm drops at least one flash retort, too, on those who still claim the Bush administration only went into Iraq to set up a puppet government and steal Iraqi oil. Even if that were the original intent, no doubt the elected Iraqi government is speaking with its own voice today, though it remains dependent on U.S. troops for its survival.

Not the democracy we wanted? It’s the one we got, so we’d better get used to it if we want to bring our troops home anytime in the foreseeable future.

A war ‘shock and awe’ didn’t win

Original story found here.

Remember when the Bush administration launched its “shock and awe” campaign across Iraq?

Even hardened critics were left starstruck watching the bombs rain down on Baghdad and other targets three years ago this week. It was as if the United States were flaunting its firepower while saying to hostile states and forces around the world: This is what happens to you when you mess with us.

The Pentagon was testing a theory developed seven years earlier by a small team of U.S. National Defense University authors. “The aims of this doctrine are to apply massive or overwhelming force as quickly as possible,” the authors wrote. “While there are surely humanitarian considerations that cannot or should not be ignored, the ability to shock and awe ultimately rests in the ability to frighten, scare, intimidate, and disarm” the enemy’s will.

It seemed to work at first, as supporters boldly proclaimed we had both won a war and taught the Mideast a lesson. And we did so, or so we thought, by beating the Saddam out of Iraq. “[T]he comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great bombardments of World War I,” wrote the authors, was exactly the kind of effect on the adversary they proposed.

But the doctrine was even more ambitious. Much the way a schoolyard bully might pummel one smaller kid to send a message to the rest, its proponents wrote that the impressive display of force would compel not only the targeted nation but other states as well to fall into line. This helps explain why the administration thought that the messy politics of Iraq along with the entangled mosaic of the region were not much to worry about, as the other states would all end up coming at least a little more our way once they got wind of shock and awe.

But the doctrine failed its first field test, while the arrogance it dropped on Iraq has since given rise to contingencies its proponents never saw. Far from making Iraqis more pliant, shock and awe helped foment an insurgency that shows no sign of going away, besides helping to uncork sectarian strife that the administration also grossly underestimated. The same hubris has further increased sympathy for al-Qaida in many nations while it has helped Saddam Hussein turn his murder trial into a stage to rally insurgents against the U.S.-led occupation.

Instead of learning to fear us, as the Bush administration’s war planners had hoped, the world now understands that even the tallest of giants can end up bogged down, if not crippled, no matter how fierce it starts out. In a world as complex as ours, military strength is only a part of even our nation’s overall power. Instead of the kind of decisive, demonstrative victory the administration expected, the legacy of shock and awe may be that being mean and dumb doesn’t work.

One lesson we could yet learn is as simple as: The politics matter, stupid. Trying to bully a whole nation along with a region into submission could end up backfiring on us. Showing off our high-tech muscle on even the most despised despotic regime may only result in turning countless people there and elsewhere against us.

Of course, it is never too late to change. But we have to start with our attitude. Arguably, such a transformation is already under way, although the administration would be the last to admit it. Last week, both the United States and Iran announced that, despite their many disagreements, it is finally time after decades of no diplomatic contact to open talks. Now that we know that shock and awe didn’t scare the Ayatollahs, either, we’ve learned the hard way that we have to treat them, like other people, with respect whether we like them or not.

The same goes for Iraq. Having failed to subdue seemingly any sizable part of the population in the long run, we now know that we need to reach out to not only those Iraqis more or less on our side but also to the leaders of the insurgency whom we still hope to bring into the political process. One might call it bunker diplomacy. Instead of walking tall across the battlefield in the wake of shock and awe, we are the ones looking besieged and desperate for a way out.

Despite the grandiosity America sported when we invaded Iraq, the giant that the administration tried to project there sure looks weaker now. It all comes back to basics. The bully may well beat up one kid after another – only to find himself alone, surrounded by ever more people who hate him and hope, if not plot, for his demise.