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  • The Imperialists’ and Proxies’ War against Syria

    On 30 August 2021, the United States’ 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan came to an end when the removal of American forces was completed. Although the withdrawal was botched, it was the correct move. The withdrawal is ignominious because it turns out that the much ballyhooed US fighting forces were, in the end, defeated by Afghan peasants. Has the US learned anything from its debacle in Afghanistan? One might gain an insight into that question by observing the debacle still ongoing in Syria.

    Author A.B. Abrams provides an in-depth analysis on the US-led war in Syria in his excellent book World War in Syria: Global Conflict on Middle Eastern Battlefields (Clarity Press, 2021). WW in Syria documents the lead up to war in Syria, the precursors, the ideologies, the tactics, who the combatants are and who is aligned with who at different stages of the war, the battles fought, the impact of sophisticated weaponry, adherence to international law, the media narratives, and the cost of winning and losing the war in Syria for the warring parties. Unequivocally, every side loses in war. People are killed on all sides, and each death is a loss. But a victor is usually declared, and Syria with its allies has been declared as having won this war, albeit at a great price. However, the finality and clarity of the victory is muddled because Turkey and the US are still occupying and pillaging northern areas of Syria where they provide protection for Islamist remnants (or recklessly guard Islamist prisoners; as I write, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and US are fighting to defeat an Islamic State (IS) assault on a prison in northeastern Syria). In addition, apartheid Israel continues to periodically attack war-ravaged Syria.

    Abrams asks why the West and Israel were bent on “regime change” in Syria. As Abrams explains, with several examples, nations that do not put themselves in thrall to the US will be targeted for overthrow of their governments. (chapter 1) “Syria was increasingly portrayed as being under some kind of malign communist influence — the only possible explanation in the minds of the U.S. and its allies for any party to reject what the West perceived as its own benevolence.” (p 10)

    What is happening in Syria must be understood in a historical perspective. (p 55) Abrams details how imperialist information warfare brought about violent overthrows of socialistic governments in Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya. That tested template has now been applied to Syria. (chapter 2)

    Abrams identifies four casus belli for attacking Syria: (1) being outside the Western sphere of influence, (2) to isolate Syria from Hezbollah and Iran, which would appease Israel and the Gulf states, (3) to remove Iran and Russia as suppliers of natural gas to Europe, (4) to isolate Syria geo-politically from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, and (5) a new base for foisting Islamist (“Islamist” is used to refer to a political ideology rather than the faith of Muslims) groups against Western-designated enemies.

    So Syria found itself beset by a multitude of aggressive foreign actors: key NATO actors Britain, France, the US, and Turkey. Jordan, Cyprus, Turkey, and Israel were staging grounds for attacks. (p 99) The Sunni regimes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were also arrayed against Syria. At first, the mass protests — given fuel by Bashar Al Assad’s neoliberalism schemes (p 35) — served as a shield for covertly supported military operations. (p 107)

    These state actors supported several Islamist entities. Abrams, who is proficient in Arabic, adroitly elucidates the complex and realigning web of Islamist proxies. Among these groups are Al Qaeda, Fatah Al Asram, Absay Al Ansar, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and IS.

    Syria would not be completely alone as fellow Axis of Resistance members Iran and Hezbollah would come to the aid of Syria. Hezbollah directly joined in the spring of 2013 and it played an important role in the pivotal capture of Al Qusayr. (p 132) Thereafter, Iran would step up its involvement in defense of Syria. (p 134)

    What will be a surprise to most people is the solidarity shown by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) toward its longtime partner Syria. (Albeit this is no surprise to readers of another of A.B. Abram’s excellent books, Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power. Review.) Gains made by the invading forces would be substantially rolled back with the entry of Russia, an event deplored by some leftists. Among the reasons for a Russian entry was fear of Islamist terrorism approaching its frontier.

    With the advancing tide of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies, Westerners reacted by pressing for the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria. However, having learned from Western manipulation of such a United Nations Security Council resolution during the war on Libya, in which Russia and China had abstained, Russia and China would veto any such attempt this time.

    The enemies of Syria would engage in manufactured gas attacks abetted by disinformation. This pretext led the US and allied attackers to grant themselves the right to bomb Syria. Abrams responds, “It is hard to find a similar sense of self-righteousness and open willingness to commit illegal acts of aggression anywhere else in the world.” Abrams connected this extremism to “the ideology of western supremacism.” (p 174) Syria would relinquish the deterrence of its chemical weapons in a futile effort to forestall any future opposition-contrived chemical attacks attributed to it.

    Although Hezbollah, Iran, the DPRK, and Russia were invited by the government of Syria, the western nations (without UN approval) were illegally attacking Syria. Among them were Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands, and Middle Eastern actors which included Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. (p 197) Israel was abetting Al Nusra. (p 199) The Syrian borders with Jordan and Turkey were supply conduits for the Islamists. (p 203)

    The US planned to create safe zones in Syria with an eye to dismemberment of Syria. (p 204-207) Russia would up the ante, killing 150 CIA-backed Islamists in airstrikes, which the US criticized. (p 221) In apparent reprisal, an IS terrorist attack would down a civilian airliner over Egypt killing 219 Russian civilians. War is a dirty endeavor. Among their other crimes, Islamists used civilians as shields, poisoned water supplies, and carried out beheadings. American war crimes included using depleted uranium and white phosphorus (p 301).

    With the US and Turkey competing to occupy land from the collapsing IS, the SAA was pressured to advance as quickly as possible in its lands.

    Aside from internecine fighting among the Islamists, there were puzzling complexities described between different combatants. Turkey and the US were sometimes aligned and sometimes at loggerheads; the same complexities existed between Russia and Turkey (“a highly peculiar situation reflecting [Turkey’s] pursuit of both war and rapprochement separately but simultaneously.” p 348), and between Russia and Israel. Of course, given past and current history, any enemy-of-my-enemy alliance between Israeli Jews and Arabs against a fellow Arab country will certainly cause much head shaking.

    Despairingly, the UN was also condemned for bias and being complicit in the western attempt to overthrow the Syrian government. (p 334)

    Abrams criticized the American arrogation of the right to attack. He warned, “This had potentially highly destabilizing consequences for the global order, and by discarding the post-Second World War legal prohibition against crimes of aggression the West was returning the world to a chaotic order that resembled that of the colonial era.” (p 383)

    In toto, Abrams finds, “Even though Syria prevailed, the West was able to achieve its destruction at very little cost to itself … meaning the final outcome of the war still represents a strengthening of the Western position at Dasmascus’ expense.” (p 384)

    Israel’s War

    A book review can only cover so much, and there is much ground covered in WW in Syria. Particularly conspicuous is the annex at the end of the book entitled “Israel’s War.” (p 389-413) This annex leads one to ask why there are no annexes on America’s War, Turkey’s War, Qatar’s War, Saudi Arabia’s War, UAE’s War, NATO’s War, or even the terrorists’ War. Why does Israel stand out? Prior to the recent invasion of Syria, it was only Israel that was occupying Syrian territory: the Golan Heights, annexed following the 1967 War, and recognized as a part of Israel by president Donald Trump in 2019 (quite hypocritical given US denunciations of Crimea’s incorporation into Russia). Syria does not recognize Israel, and it has not reached a peace agreement with Israel. Of Syria’s Middle Eastern allies, Iran does not recognize Israel; Lebanon signed a peace treaty with Israel under Israeli and American pressure, but Lebanon never ratified it. Hezbollah regards Israel as an illegitimate entity. Hezbollah is noted for the first “successful armed resistance on a significant scale to the Western-led order after the Cold War’s end” in 2006. (p 39) Thus, Israel views the arc from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon as a security threat. Since Israel is regarded by some foreign policy wonks in the US as its aircraft carrier in the region, that reason among others secures US “aid” and military support. That Syria will not bend its knees to US Empire is also a source of consternation to imperialists. After Egyptian president Anwar Sadat treacherously broke Arab solidarity, (p 21-26) Syria would find itself increasingly isolated. Given the rapacious nature of imperialism, Israel and its lobby have faced no serious opposition from within the imperialist alliance, allowing the Jewish State to pursue its plan for a greater Israel to which Syria, a country that does not threaten any western nation, is an impediment. Israel, writes Abrams, will continually seek to degrade the military capabilities of countries it designates as enemies. (p 406)

    Closing

    The situation in Syria still simmers. Those who scrupulously read the dispassionate account of WW in Syria will gain a wide-ranging insight into what underlies the simmering. It will also be clear why any attempt by western imperialists and their terrorist or Islamist proxies will not succeed in a coup against the elected Syrian government. Syrians will put up a staunch defense. Hezbollah and Iran will stand in solidarity, as will the DPRK. Having Russia, a first-rate military power, presents a powerful deterrence. In addition, China, no pushover itself, stands steadfast in support of its Russian partner. Thus the western imperialists’/proxies’ main goal has been thwarted; they have been shamelessly reduced to pillagers of oil and wheat and occupiers of small pockets of a sovereign country.

    The post The Imperialists’ and Proxies’ War against Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Another Saudi Coalition Massacre In Yemen

    A Saudi coalition airstrike on a prison killed at least 60 people and wounded at least 100 more in northern Yemen as part of the coalition’s reprisal attacks after the Houthis claimed drone and missile attacks that hit targets in Abu Dhabi earlier this week:

    At least three children are among the dozens of people killed Friday, the humanitarian organization Save the Children said in a statement on Twitter. It noted that “the true number is feared to be higher.”

    This follows coalition airstrikes in Sanaa that killed at least 20 civilians. The coalition response to the Abu Dhabi attacks has been consistent with the way they have waged the war from the beginning: reckless and indiscriminate bombing that slaughters civilians. The AP reports on the aftermath of the bombing:

    “The initial casualties report from Saada is horrifying,” said Gillian Moyes, Save the Children’s country director in Yemen. “Migrants seeking better lives for themselves and their families, Yemeni civilians injured by the dozens, is a picture we never hoped to wake up to in Yemen.”

    The post Another Saudi Coalition Massacre In Yemen appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • This latest slaughter highlights Britain’s shameful role in the Yemen war

    On 21 January, air strikes from the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition were blamed for killing over 200 people in the “U.S.-backed conflict” in Yemen. One report said the bombings targeted a prison “holding mostly migrants”. The report says they also bombed and killed children as they played football. Following these attacks, the medical humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders said one hospital was:

    so overwhelmed that they can’t take any more patients

    As extensively reported by The Canary, the UK arms industry has a vested interest in this conflict. And this latest slaughter highlights Britain’s role in Yemen, as Labour MP Kate Osamor tweeted:

    The travesty unfolds

    The AFP News Agency reported on the attack and the extensive loss of human life:

    Meanwhile this human rights activist posted this video claiming to be of a bombing on a civilian home:

    British complicity

    Moreover, this image analyst service posted shocking “before” and “after” images. It claims these are images of a football field hit during the strike. And it listed the countries, including the UK, it felt were responsible:

    This protest in Huddersfield, which took place on Saturday 22 January, also pointed a finger at the UK and called on it to stop arming Saudi Arabia:

    And rapper and Mint Press News podcast host Lowkey drew attention to the UK’s overall responsibility in this war:

    Meanwhile, this twitter user called for the International Criminal Court to hold the UK responsible:

    How is the UK getting away with this?

    This war in Yemen has been raging for over seven years, with the death toll approaching 400,000 people. Yet it appears as if little pressure is being brought against the UK for its complicity. If the international community is actually serious about planning “a brighter future in Yemen”, then the UK’s role in supplying and benefiting from the war needs to be front and centre. And the UK needs to be held accountable.

    Featured image via Flickr – Alisdare Hickson cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under CY BB 3.0.

    By Peadar O'Cearnaigh

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • After a Year of Biden, Why Do We Still Have Trump’s Foreign Policy?

    Getty Images

    President Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of President Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve long-standing foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis on diplomacy that Biden was promising.

    Tragically for America and the world, Biden has failed to restore Obama’s progressive initiatives, and has instead doubled down on many of Trump’s most dangerous and destabilizing policies. It is especially ironic and sad that a president who ran so stridently on being different from Trump has been so reluctant to reverse his regressive policies. Now the Democrats’ failure to deliver on their promises with respect to both domestic and foreign policy is undermining their prospects in November’s midterm election.

    Here is our assessment of Biden’s handling of ten critical foreign policy issues:

    1. Prolonging the agony of the people of Afghanistan. It is perhaps symptomatic of Biden’s foreign policy problems that the signal achievement of his first year in office was an initiative launched by Trump, to withdraw the United States from its 20-year war in Afghanistan. But Biden’s implementation of this policy was tainted by the same failure to understand Afghanistan that doomed and dogged at least three prior administrations and the U.S.’s hostile military occupation for 20 years, leading to the speedy restoration of the Taliban government and the televised chaos of the U.S. withdrawal.

    Now, instead of helping the Afghan people recover from two decades of U.S.-inflicted destruction, Biden has seized $9.4 billion in Afghan foreign currency reserves, while the people of Afghanistan suffer through a desperate humanitarian crisis. It is hard to imagine how even Donald Trump could be more cruel or vindictive.

    1. Provoking a crisis with Russia over Ukraine. Biden’s first year in office is ending with a dangerous escalation of tensions at the Russia/Ukraine border, a situation that threatens to devolve into a military conflict between the world’s two most heavily armed nuclear states–the United States and Russia. The United States bears much responsibility for this crisis by supporting the violent overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, backing NATO expansion right up to Russia’s border, and arming and training Ukrainian forces.

    Biden’s failure to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate security concerns has led to the present impasse, and Cold Warriors within his administration are threatening Russia instead of proposing concrete measures to de-escalate the situation.

    1. Escalating Cold War tensions and a dangerous arms race with China. President Trump launched a tariff war with China that economically damaged both countries, and reignited a dangerous Cold War and arms race with China and Russia to justify an ever-increasing U.S. military budget.

    After a decade of unprecedented U.S. military spending and aggressive military expansion under Bush II and Obama, the U.S. “pivot to Asia” militarily encircled China, forcing it to invest in more robust defense forces and advanced weapons. Trump, in turn, used China’s strengthened defenses as a pretext for further increases in U.S. military spending, launching a new arms race that has raised the existential risk of nuclear war to a new level.

    Biden has only exacerbated these dangerous international tensions. Alongside the risk of war, his aggressive policies toward China have led to an ominous rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, and created obstacles to much-needed cooperation with China to address climate change, the pandemic and other global problems.

    1. Abandoning Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. After President Obama’s sanctions against Iran utterly failed to force it to halt its civilian nuclear program, he finally took a progressive, diplomatic approach, which led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement in 2015. Iran scrupulously met all its obligations under the treaty, but Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018. Trump’s withdrawal was vigorously condemned by Democrats, including candidate Biden, and Senator Sanders promised to rejoin the JCPOA on his first day in office if he became president.

    Instead of immediately rejoining an agreement that worked for all parties, the Biden administration thought it could pressure Iran to negotiate a “better deal.” Exasperated Iranians instead elected a more conservative government and Iran moved forward on enhancing its nuclear program.

    A year later, and after eight rounds of shuttle diplomacy in Vienna, Biden has still not rejoined the agreement. Ending his first year in the White House with the threat of another Middle East war is enough to give Biden an “F” in diplomacy.

    1. Backing Big Pharma over a People’s Vaccine. Biden took office as the first Covid vaccines were being approved and rolled out across the United States and the world. Severe inequities in global vaccine distribution between rich and poor countries were immediately apparent and became known as “vaccine apartheid.”

    Instead of manufacturing and distributing vaccines on a non-profit basis to tackle the pandemic as the global public health crisis that it is, the United States and other Western countries chose to maintain the neoliberal regime of patents and corporate monopolies on vaccine manufacture and distribution. The failure to open up the manufacture and distribution of vaccines to poorer countries gave the Covid virus free rein to spread and mutate, leading to new global waves of infection and death from the Delta and Omicron variants

    Biden belatedly agreed to support a patent waiver for Covid vaccines under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, but with no real plan for a “People’s Vaccine,” Biden’s concession has made no impact on millions of preventable deaths.

    1. Ensuring catastrophic global warming at COP26 in Glasgow. After Trump stubbornly ignored the climate crisis for four years, environmentalists were encouraged when Biden used his first days in office to rejoin the Paris climate accord and cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline.

    But by the time Biden got to Glasgow, he had let the centerpiece of his own climate plan, the Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP), be stripped out of the Build Back Better bill in Congress at the behest of fossil-fuel industry sock-puppet Joe Manchin, turning the U.S. pledge of a 50% cut from 2005 emissions by 2030 into an empty promise.

    Biden’s speech in Glasgow highlighted China and Russia’s failures, neglecting to mention that the United States has higher emissions per capita than either of them. Even as COP26 was taking place, the Biden administration infuriated activists by putting oil and gas leases up for auction for 730,000 acres of the American West and 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. At the one-year mark, Biden has talked the talk, but when it comes to confronting Big Oil, he is not walking the walk, and the whole world is paying the price.

    1. Political prosecutions of Julian Assange, Daniel Hale and Guantanamo torture victims. Under President Biden, the United States remains a country where the systematic killing of civilians and other war crimes go unpunished, while whistleblowers who muster the courage to expose these horrific crimes to the public are prosecuted and jailed as political prisoners.

    In July 2021, former drone pilot Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison for exposing the killing of civilians in America’s drone wars. WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange still languishes in Belmarsh Prison in England, after 11 years fighting extradition to the United States for exposing U.S. war crimes.

    Twenty years after it set up an illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to imprison 779 mostly innocent people kidnapped around the world, 39 prisoners remain there in illegal, extrajudicial detention. Despite promises to close this sordid chapter of U.S. history, the prison is still functioning and Biden is allowing the Pentagon to actually build a new, closed courtroom at Guantanamo to more easily keep the workings of this gulag hidden from public scrutiny.

    1. Economic siege warfare against the people of Cuba, Venezuela and other countries. Trump unilaterally rolled back Obama’s reforms on Cuba and recognized unelected Juan Guaidó as the “president” of Venezuela, as the United States tightened the screws on its economy with “maximum pressure” sanctions.

    Biden has continued Trump’s failed economic siege warfare against countries that resist U.S. imperial dictates, inflicting endless pain on their people without seriously imperiling, let alone bringing down, their governments. Brutal U.S. sanctions and efforts at regime change have universally failed for decades, serving mainly to undermine the United States’s own democratic and human rights credentials.

    Juan Guaidó is now the least popular opposition figure in Venezuela, and genuine grassroots movements opposed to U.S. intervention are bringing popular democratic and socialist governments to power across Latin America, in Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Honduras – and maybe Brazil in 2022.

    1. Still supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and its repressive ruler. Under Trump, Democrats and a minority of Republicans in Congress gradually built a bipartisan majority that voted to withdraw from the Saudi-led coalition attacking Yemen and stop sending arms to Saudi Arabia. Trump vetoed their efforts, but the Democratic election victory in 2020 should have led to an end to the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

    Instead, Biden only issued an order to stop selling “offensive” weapons to Saudi Arabia, without clearly defining that term, and went on to okay a $650 million weapons sale. The United States still supports the Saudi war, even as the resulting humanitarian crisis kills thousands of Yemeni children. And despite Biden’s pledge to treat the Saudis’ cruel leader, MBS, as a pariah, Biden refused to even sanction MBS for his barbaric murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

    1. Still complicit in illegal Israeli occupation, settlements and war crimes. The United States is Israel’s largest arms supplier, and Israel is the world’s largest recipient of U.S. military aid (approximately $4 billion annually), despite its illegal occupation of Palestine, widely condemned war crimes in Gaza and illegal settlement building. U.S. military aid and arms sales to Israel clearly violate the U.S. Leahy Laws and Arms Export Control Act.

    Donald Trump was flagrant in his disdain for Palestinian rights, including tranferring the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to a property in Jerusalem that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized border, a move that infuriated Palestinians and drew international condemnation.

    But nothing has changed under Biden. The U.S. position on Israel and Palestine is as illegitimate and contradictory as ever, and the U.S. Embassy to Israel remains on illegally occupied land. In May, Biden supported the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, which killed 256 Palestinians, half of them civilians, including 66 children.

    Conclusion

    Each part of this foreign policy fiasco costs human lives and creates regional–even global–instability. In every case, progressive alternative policies are readily available. The only thing lacking is political will and independence from corrupt vested interests.

    The United States has squandered unprecedented wealth, global goodwill and a historic position of international leadership to pursue unattainable imperial ambitions, using military force and other forms of violence and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international law.

    Candidate Biden promised to restore America’s position of global leadership, but has instead doubled down on the policies through which the United States lost that position in the first place, under a succession of Republican and Democratic administrations. Trump was only the latest iteration in America’s race to the bottom.

    Biden has wasted a vital year doubling down on Trump’s failed policies. In the coming year, we hope that the public will remind Biden of its deep-seated aversion to war and that he will respond—albeit reluctantly—by adopting more dovish and rational ways.

    The post After a Year of Biden, Why Do We Still Have Trump’s Foreign Policy? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Whither the Weasel?

    The real threat from ground based surface-to-air missiles means that there is still a need to keep the Vietnam ‘Wild Weasel’ capability current. The US Navy’s (USN) announcement that the Northrop Grumman AGM-88E Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile – Extended Range (AARGM-ER) had received Milestone C programme approval on 23 August 2021 focused attention on the […]

    The post Whither the Weasel? appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Outspoken Saudi princess returns home after nearly three years in jail

    Human rights advocate Princess Basmah, a critic of the crown prince’s crackdown on dissent, was imprisoned without charge in 2019

    A Saudi princess and human rights advocate has returned to her home in Jeddah after three years in a state prison without charge, her supporters and lawyer have confirmed.

    Princess Basmah bint Saud bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, 57, a staunch critic of her cousin and Saudi Arabia’s effective leader, Mohammed bin Salman, was released on Saturday, along with her daughter, Souhoud al-Sharif, who was arrested with her in March 2019.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • It is not just NSO – Loujain Al-Hathloul sues Spyware Maker DarkMatter

    Laptop with broken screen

    As announced on 9 December 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit to on behalf of Saudi human rights defender Loujain Al Hathloul against spying software maker DarkMatter and three of its former executives for illegally hacking her iPhone to secretly track her communications and whereabouts.

    AlHathloul is among the victims of an illegal spying program created and run by former U.S. intelligence operatives, including the three defendants named in the lawsuit, who worked for a U.S. company hired by United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the wake of the Arab Spring protests to identify and monitor activists, journalists, rival foreign leaders, and perceived political enemies.

    Reuters broke the news about the hacking program called Project Raven in 2019, reporting that when UAE transferred the surveillance work to Emirati firm DarkMatter, the U.S. operatives, who learned spycraft working for the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies, went along and ran DarkMatter’s hacking program, which targeted human rights activists like AlHathloul, political dissenters, and even Americans residing in the U.S.

    DarkMatter executives Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke, working for their client UAE—which was acting on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA)—oversaw the hacking project, which exploited a vulnerability in the iMessage app to locate and monitor targets. Baier, Adams, Gericke, all former members of U.S. intelligence or military agencies, designed and operated the UAE cybersurveillance program, also known as Project DREAD (Development Research Exploitation and Analysis Department), using malicious code purchased from a U.S. company.

    Baier, who resides in UAE, Adams, a resident of Oregon, and Gericke, who lives in Singapore, admitted in September to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and prohibitions on selling sensitive military technology under a non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Justice Department.

    “Companies that peddle their surveillance software and services to oppressive governments must be held accountable for the resulting human rights abuses,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene. “The harm to Loujain AlHathloul can never be undone. But this lawsuit is a step toward accountability.”

    AlHathloul is a leader in the movement to advance the rights of women in Saudi Arabia [see also: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/1a6d84c0-b494-11ea-b00d-9db077762c6c].


    DarkMatter intentionally directed the code to Apple servers in the U.S. to reach and place malicious software on AlHathloul’s iPhone, a violation of the CFAA, EFF says in a complaint filed in federal court in Oregon. The phone was initially hacked in 2017, gaining access to her texts, email messages, and real-time location data. Later, AlHathloul was driving on the highway in Abu Dhabi when she was arrested by UAE security services, and forcibly taken by plane to the KSA, where she was imprisoned twice, including at a secret prison where she was subject to electric shocks, flogging, and threats of rape and death.

    “Project Raven went beyond even the behavior that we have seen from NSO Group, which has been caught repeatedly having sold software to authoritarian governments who use their tools to spy on journalists, activists, and dissidents,” said EFF Cybersecurity Director Eva Galperin. “Dark Matter didn’t merely provide the tools; they oversaw the surveillance program themselves.“

    While EFF has long pressed for the need to reform the CFAA, this case represents a straightforward application of the CFAA to the sort of egregious violation of users’ security that everyone agrees the law was intended to address.

    “This is a clear-cut case of device hacking, where DarkMatter operatives broke into AlHathloul’s iPhone without her knowledge to insert malware, with horrific consequences,” said Mukund Rathi, EFF attorney and Stanton Fellow. “This kind of crime is what the CFAA was meant to punish.” In addition to CFAA violations, the complaint alleges that Baier, Adams, and Gericke aided and abetted in crimes against humanity because the hacking of AlHathloul’s phone was part of the UAE’s widespread and systematic attack against human rights defenders, activists, and other perceived critics of the UAE and KSA.

    The law firms of Foley Hoag LLP and Boise Matthews LLP are co-counsel with EFF in this matter.

    EFF also welcomed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ recent ruling that spyware vendor NSO Group, as a private company, did not have foreign sovereign immunity from WhatsApp’s lawsuit alleging hacking of the app’s users. Courts should similarly deny immunity to DarkMatter and other surveillance and hacking companies who directly harm Internet users around the world.

    For the complaint:
    https://www.eff.org/document/alhathloul-v-darkmatter

    For more on state-sponsored malware:
    https://www.eff.org/issues/state-sponsored-malware Contact: Karen Gullo

    https://www.eff.org/press/releases/saudi-human-rights-activist-represented-eff-sues-spyware-maker-darkmatter-violating

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/eff-court-deny-foreign-sovereign-immunity-darkmatter-hacking-journalist

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Let’s Abandon False Dichotomy of “Offensive vs. Defensive” Support for Yemen War

    A Yemeni man inspects a house that was destroyed in an air strike carried out by the Saudi-led coalition, on February 5, 2021, in Sana'a, Yemen.

    On the evening of December 7, 2021, the Senate shot down a resolution to block the sale of a package of air-to-air missiles and missile rail launchers to Saudi Arabia. In the weeks leading up to the vote, bombs rained down on the city of Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. This November, civilian casualties in Yemen were at a 16-month high. Bombing rates from the Saudi coalition were 41 percent higher than the monthly average during this year. Ten months have passed since President Biden ended “offensive” support to the Saudi coalition that has been waging war on Yemen since 2015. Biden pledged to find a political solution to the conflict, but the situation on the ground has only gotten worse.

    The sale of the package of weapons was announced by the White House in November for $650 million in air-to-air missiles — primarily produced by Raytheon Technologies. The administration insisted that these weapons were not to be used inside Yemen but to protect the Saudi people from retaliatory attacks in Saudi territory by its adversaries in Yemen, i.e., the Houthis. Congress then had 30 days to contest the sale. The biggest debate in the Senate centered on whether the weapons were “offensive” or “defensive” in nature.

    The Biden administration, in a statement released hours before the Senate vote on the resolution to stop the sale, argued that the sale was for “defensive” support to Saudi Arabia and the weapons being sold could not be used offensively. Senators who voted in support of the sale echoed the same rhetoric. However, that characterization is ridiculous when discussing the Saudi-led war on Yemen because Saudi Arabia is aggressively violating another nation’s sovereignty by waging war on Yemen in the first place.

    The nature of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Yemen is entirely offensive. Support of any kind for the war by the United States sends a signal of impunity to the Saudi government. It says that even if Saudi Arabia is bombing, blockading and starving another independent country, the U.S. will be there to lend a hand.

    The Senate largely failed to examine this particular sale in the broader context of Saudi Arabia imposing a land, air and sea blockade on the entire country of Yemen. Since 2015, Yemenis have not had full and proper access to their land crossings, their sea ports or their airports. The blockade has been a consistent strategy of the Saudi coalition since the beginning. This act of collective punishment has starved thousands of Yemenis and will have impacts on the population for generations to come. The blockade has also exacerbated the pandemic. Hospitals treating COVID19 patients risk losing power due to fuel shortages caused by the blockade and patients who need to leave the country for treatment are not able to. It is an act of war. Why would the United States be lending any support to a country starving millions of people, no matter how the support is labeled?

    Saudi Arabia has tried to beat the Houthis for six years and has failed, despite being backed and armed by the United States, the most militarized nation on Earth. Now the Saudi government is using its blockade of Yemen as a bargaining chip in peace talks. The weapons that are a part of this new sale give Saudi Arabia the ability to prolong and enforce their air blockade — a crucial part of Saudi Arabia’s war strategy. The White House can say Saudi Arabia will only be able to use the weapons in defense of its population, but the United States is handing over weapons capable of shooting down other aircraft when Saudi Arabia maintains that it will control the airspace in Yemen.

    It has been almost a year since President Biden ended “offensive” support for the war in Yemen and promised to find a lasting political solution. After the announcement, Yemen advocates in the United States and around the world were wondering what ending “offensive support” really means. Ten months after the announcement, the situation on the ground has only gotten worse. Worst-case estimates say that a Yemeni child is starving to death every 75 seconds. The Saudi government and the Houthis are nowhere close to a peace agreement because the blockade continues to be used as a political tool by Saudi leaders and because the U.S. continues to support Saudi Arabia, simply now calling the support “defensive.” It is clear that President Biden’s strategy of ending “offensive” support for the war is disingenuous. Creating this false dichotomy between offensive and defensive has only left wiggle room for the Saudi military to continue its brutal assault on the people of Yemen. It’s time that members of Congress and activists who are serious about ending U.S. support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen abandon that rhetoric completely.

    Across political parties, 64 percent of likely voters oppose the newest sale, even though it has been defined as “defensive.” Members of Congress across party lines opposed the deal. The dichotomy is breaking down, and peace activists should welcome it. If the “defensive vs. offensive” rhetoric continues to be embraced, the Biden administration and Congress will only continue to postpone the day when Saudi Arabia realizes the futility of its intervention and leaves the Yemeni people to determine their own future.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Saudi Arabia Arms Sale Is One of Biden’s Many Militaristic Actions in First Year

    President Joe Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room on the continuing situation in Afghanistan and the developments of Hurricane Henri at the White House on August 22, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Given the brutish approach of his predecessor, many expected President Joe Biden to shift away from the worst practices in U.S. foreign policy and at the border in the previous four years. Indeed, in the first weeks of his presidency, the Biden administration signaled changes. In Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s first press briefing, the State Department announced that it was reviewing weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — which have led the catastrophic war on Yemen with essential U.S. partnership.

    A week later, Biden declared in his first foreign policy address as president that “We are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.”

    Regarding its practices at the border, Biden administration officials promised a shift away from Trump’s practices of separating families and caging children, calling them a “moral failing.” He said that the new White House would “deal with immigration comprehensively, fairly, and humanely.”

    As 2021 comes to a close, however, we are seeing the latter part of a trajectory that settles into familiar, disastrous militarism.

    The U.S. is selling Saudi Arabia $650 million worth of missiles and providing $500 million worth of maintenance for U.S.-made aircraft, training and other support for its military operations.

    These arrangements come as Saudi Arabia is escalating its devastating bombing in Yemen. In November, Saudi forces carried out the largest number of air strikes since Trump’s last year in office.

    These bookends — Biden’s early announcement of an end to U.S. support for the war in Yemen and his subsequent robust material support of that war — capture the set of practices that the Biden White House is settling into, not only in Yemen, but also in the realm of war and imperialism more broadly.

    Consider the White House’s approval of a $23 billion weapons sale to the U.A.E., which provides the Emirates with attack drones and F-35 fighter jets. The arrangement was negotiated under the Trump administration as the prize for the U.A.E.’s role in leading the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and itself, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, despite Israel’s deepening violence against Palestinians.

    The Biden administration embraced the normalization agreements, along with Trump’s other actions meant to consolidate U.S. support and extend legitimacy to Israel in a time when Palestinian protest presents a steady challenge to Israeli apartheid, and global Palestine solidarity campaigns have gained more traction than ever.

    Trump fulfilled longstanding wishes of the Israeli right wing, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, declaring the legality of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank — which are considered unambiguously illegal according to international law — and endorsing the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights. The crudeness with which Trump performed these acts — framing them nakedly as pandering to right-wing evangelical Christian voters, and declaring himself the “King of Israel” — may contrast with Biden’s rhetoric. Yet when it comes to concrete action, Biden has accepted and continued along his predecessor’s path.

    This continuity is also painfully evident regarding Biden’s actions toward migrants — many of whom have been displaced due to U.S. imperialist policies. For example, in the face of severe social, political and economic crises in Central America — which are driven by decades of Washington-directed economic policies and brutal repression carried out by U.S.-armed regimes in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — Kamala Harris, in Guatemala City on her first overseas tour as vice president, presented the U.S.’s policy in succinct cruelty: “Do not come.”

    Once they approach or enter the country, migrants face a complex of forces that remains in place to detain, incarcerate, and deport migrants and prevent their entry into the United States.

    Biden has maintained the use of Title 42 — a statute that allows the federal government special powers in public health emergencies — to deny migrants, including asylum seekers, access at the U.S.-Mexico border, in violation of international law. Biden is thus continuing Trump’s use of the measure, which was invoked when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Public health professionals and scholars have argued that the measure cannot be justified in the name of public health and have called upon the administration to end it.

    Biden has also reopened some of the most notorious detention sites highlighted in the Trump era, including Florida’s Homestead Shelter for Unaccompanied Children. The numbers of people in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have swelled to 22,000 under Biden — marking a 56 percent increase since the day the new president took office.

    Biden’s most dramatic and revealing act at the border this year was his handling of the arrival of thousands of primarily Haitian asylum seekers at Del Rio, Texas, in September. From Border Patrol agents on horseback whipping the Black migrants, to their confinement in squalid conditions on riverbanks and under a bridge, the U.S. government and its police forces engaged in racist violence, treating the Haitians as a criminal threat to be contained, rather than vulnerable people with the right to seek refuge and asylum. Biden deported the group of thousands to Haiti in an operation that revealed the logistical capacity at his disposal — which could, of course, instead be used to welcome people and support their survival.

    Finally, the Biden administration has resumed Trump’s infamous “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forces people seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border to apply in Mexico and wait there while their applications are processed. The policy goes against U.S. law, which guarantees people the right to apply for asylum inside the U.S. — regardless of how they entered. Biden initially opposed the program, suspending it in February. In the face of rulings by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, however, the White House negotiated a new version of the policy with the Mexican government, and has begun to administer it. The program — which made tens of thousands of asylum seekers vulnerable to kidnapping, assault and other hazards in Mexico under Trump — is now Biden’s.

    Biden did follow through on his promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But even that long overdue and necessary move for a war that was unjust from its first day was done with such careless disregard for the lives of Afghans that it sparked a new and escalating humanitarian crisis. U.S. forces even killed several Afghans — including seven children in a single family — in the chaotic withdrawal of ground troops. While State Department officials failed Afghans made suddenly vulnerable by the haphazard withdrawal — with no plan to evacuate the many who sought exit — the Pentagon secured its ability to continue carrying out air missions in Afghanistan through its bases in the region and by positioning an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea weeks in advance.

    At the moment, Afghanistan faces mass hunger and an economic catastrophe as billions of dollars belonging to the Afghan Central Bank sit in the United States, frozen by order of the Biden administration.

    Yet, amid these blatant continuations of state violence, grassroots pressure has clearly made an impact on U.S. policy.

    Biden’s rhetorical vows to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, for example, empty as they were, were responses in significant part to a years-long, consistent and vocal challenge of U.S. support for the war. This has been led by Yemeni activists in the U.S., journalists, and UN and other aid workers in Yemen calling attention to the catastrophic humanitarian crisis there and the U.S.’s central role. Activism has continued with Biden in the White House, including a hunger strike earlier this year led by activists in the Yemeni Liberation Movement.

    Similarly, 2021 saw an increasingly critical and widespread challenge to U.S. support for Israel, especially during its horrific attack on Gaza and repression of Palestinians in Jerusalem during Ramadan this May. The ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s could no longer reconcile its progressive brand with doing business in Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied territories, and announced the end of its operations there. And though it ultimately passed, congressional approval for an additional $1 billion to Israel to replenish its missiles after the attack was more controversial and faced more direct opposition than any funding proposal for Israel in U.S. history.

    These formidable challenges to U.S. support for Israeli apartheid stemmed from many years of Palestine-solidarity organizing, as well as a more widespread anti-racist consciousness in the U.S. driven by years of Black-led resistance to police violence and other forms of racism.

    On the subject of popular resistance, it is important to remember that the greatest moments of setback for Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda came when people mobilized en masse. This happened in response to the anti-Muslim travel ban, when thousands took to airports to express solidarity with those targeted — and then again in rallies across the country in response to the separation of families and cruel detention of children at the border. These moments of protest disrupted those policies, albeit temporarily.

    As we enter a new year, we are challenged to build movements with capacity expansive enough to build and sustain solidarity with those targeted and displaced by U.S. policies. Mass mobilization is necessary to stop the violence that the U.S. carries out and supports around the world and at its borders.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Saudi film festival is a ‘whitewash’ by authorities, say critics

    Gulf regime accused of using glamour of show business to to distract attention from rights abuses within the country and beyond

    Saudi Arabia has opened its first international film festival amid accusations that the government is using culture to whitewash its poor human rights record, just days after similar controversy shadowed its first time hosting a Formula One race.

    The Red Sea festival attracted international stars including Hilary Swank, Clive Owen and Vincent Cassel. Saudi Arabia presented it as a moment of change for a country that only lifted a ban on cinemas four years ago, a position embraced by some of those walking the red carpet.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Saudi women’s rights activist sues three ex-US intel operatives over hacking for UAE

    Loujain al-Hathloul says actions of men on behalf of the UAE led to her iPhone being hacked and to her imprisonment and torture

    Loujain al-Hathloul, the prominent Saudi women’s rights activist, has filed a lawsuit against three former US intelligence and military officers who have admitted in a US court to helping carry out hacking operations on behalf of the United Arab Emirates.

    In her lawsuit, which was filed in a US district court in Oregon in conjunction with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Hathloul alleged that the actions of three men – Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke – led to her iPhone being hacked and communication being exfiltrated by UAE security officials.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Senate Rejects Sanders’s Resolution to Block $650M Weapons Sale to Saudi Arabia

    Sen. Bernie Sanders looks at reporters while stepping into a car

    The Senate voted against a bipartisan resolution to block a $650 million weapons sale to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, rejecting a bid by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and progressive and Republican lawmakers to stop the sale.

    The resolution was voted down 67 to 30. Most Republicans voted against the resolution, except for Senators Rand Paul (Kentucky) and Mike Lee (Utah), who had teamed up with Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) and others in the Democratic caucus to introduce the measure. Seven Democrats joined Republicans in voting no.

    Advocates of the resolution say the weapons sale will help Saudi Arabia advance its brutal blockade of Yemen, which is at the center of one of the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crises as a result of the war between Houthi rebels and the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition. Although aid groups are attempting to assist the roughly 20.7 million Yemenis — nearly 80 percent of the country’s population — who urgently need humanitarian assistance, the Saudi aerial blockade of the Sanaa airport has been preventing aid from reaching citizens. Meanwhile, Yemen’s economy is on the verge of collapse.

    Human rights groups and Yemeni-led advocacy organizations have condemned the weapons sale, and recently sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to pass the resolution. Hassan El-Tayyab, the director of Middle East policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, told Truthout that approving the arms sale “sends a message of impunity” to Saudi Arabia and removes key leverage that the U.S. could use to end the war.

    If Saudi Arabia were to end its blockade on the Sanaa airport, El-Tayyab said, Houthi forces would likely have little motivation to continue cross-border attacks. “For the U.S. to continue the support of Saudi Arabia for their defensive concerns, while not fully embracing the diplomacy needed to lift the blockade and end the aerial bombardment, we are essentially not addressing the root cause of the problem,” El-Tayyab said, adding that so-called “defensive” equipment in the sale could also be used to enforce the blockade.

    In a joint statement released by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Ilhan Omar and caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Washington) said the blockade has almost completely blocked medical supplies from entering the war-torn country. The blockade has also “amounted to a death sentence” for Yemenis seeking care abroad, they said.

    “The world’s largest humanitarian crisis is escalating. Last month, Saudi Arabia tightened its blockade on Yemen, permitting just 3 percent of the fuel the country needs into Yemen’s major port,” the lawmakers wrote. “Saudi warplanes enforce a blockade on Yemen’s airspace, threatening to shoot down commercial and humanitarian flights.”

    Ahead of the vote, the White House released a Statement of Administration Policy — a more forceful version of a regular statement — saying that the administration “strongly opposes” the resolution. This goes against promises Biden made during his presidential campaign, when he vowed to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” in response to the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident killed by a team of Saudi agents in 2018.

    “I would end the subsidies that we have, end the sale of material to the Saudis, who are going in and they’re murdering children and they’re murdering innocent people, and so they have to be held accountable,” Biden said at the time.

    In the statement, the White House claimed that the arms sale will only go toward defensive actions for Saudi Arabia, therefore, it won’t contradict Biden’s previous pledge to help end the war. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), a longtime critic of Saudi Arabia’s role in the war, also voted against blocking the sale, citing the same reasons as the White House.

    The arms sale divided the Democratic caucus, with only a handful of lawmakers siding with Biden and voting against the resolution.

    “The United States must do everything in our power to bring this brutal and horrific war to an end,” Sanders said on the Senate floor before the vote on Tuesday. “Exporting more missiles to Saudi Arabia does nothing but further this conflict and pour more gasoline on an already raging fire.”

    “Why in the world would the United States reward such a regime which has caused such pain in Yemen with more weapons?” Sanders asked. “My friends, the answer is we should not.”

    Paul also condemned the sale before the vote. “We could stop this war if we really had the will to do it,” Paul said. “All of America should be appalled at the humanitarian disaster caused by the Saudi blockade of Yemen.” When the resolution was introduced, Paul said the sale, if allowed to advance, would send a message to Saudi Arabia that their “reprehensible behavior” should be rewarded.

    The U.S. has provided the Saudi-led coalition with billions of dollars in weapons, training and military support, playing an instrumental role in the destruction of Yemen for nearly seven years. Donald Trump in particular was determined to support Saudi Arabia, going so far as to veto several bipartisan measures to stop weapons sales to the country during his tenure. In 2018, Sanders and allied Republicans led the Senate in passing a historic war powers resolution to end the U.S. role in the war, which was not authorized by Congress. The resolution died in the GOP-controlled House.

    The $650 million sale will go on despite the wishes of the American public, which largely disapproves of the sale. A Data for Progress poll found that 64 percent of likely voters oppose the sale, with opposition nearly even across political affiliations.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • F1 under pressure to speak out against Saudi human right abuses

    • F1 accused of being complicit in sportswashing for the regime
    • Reprieve group has written to world champion Lewis Hamilton

    Human rights organisations have demanded Formula One act to mitigate human rights abuse in Saudi Arabia as the sport prepares to race there for the first time this weekend. F1 is accused of being complicit in sportswashing for the regime and has been presented with a large amount of criticism of the state, much of which appears to be in direct contradiction to F1’s commitment to equality and diversity.

    On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch and the Reprieve group both wrote separately to F1 outlining their concerns. Amnesty International were unequivocal in their criticism and the Codepink group has sent a letter to world champion Lewis Hamilton, signed by 41 organisations, requesting he speak to Saudi leaders to highlight human rights issues.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Anti-arms trade group condemns UK support for Saudi regime as Yemen death toll approaches 377,000

    Anti-arms trade campaigners had strong words for the British government over Yemen. Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) blasted UK arms sales and cuts to aid as the UN announced deaths would hit 377,000 by the end of 2021.

    But the report also says that recovery is possible within a generation if the war is stopped now. As it stands, many of the deaths are a result of disease and hunger. While others are from air raids and combat. The war has raged since 2014 and, during this time, UK ally Saudi Arabia has constantly bombed its poorer neighbour.

    Horrifying

    In a press release, CAAT’s parliamentary officer Katie Fallon said:

    This horrifying report is a reminder that while the war in Yemen may have fallen off the news agenda, its devastating impact on the people of Yemen is as bad as ever.

    Fallon also directly criticised US President Joe Biden and the UK arms trade:

    Promises by President Biden to end support for the Saudi coalition’s role in the war have not been fulfilled, despite a welcome halt to a few arms sales. Meanwhile, the UK government continues to supply arms to Saudi Arabia without restraint.

    Blockade

    Fallon called for a halt to sales of military equipment to the Saudi regime:

    The UK, the US and other leading powers must immediately halt the arms sales that are prolonging and exacerbating the war, press hard for an end to the Saudi blockade that is one of the main contributors to the humanitarian catastrophe, and engage in sustained and meaningful diplomatic efforts to bring the war to an end.

    Finally, Fallon said the UK’s cuts to humanitarian aid had compounded Yemen’s problems:

    The UK must also reverse its cruel cuts to humanitarian aid to Yemen, which have only
    increased the war’s appalling toll.

    UK-backed

    As well as providing material support, the UK has had troops embedded with Saudi forces throughout the conflict. In July 2021 it emerged that up to 30 military personnel were training Saudi troops inside Yemen. In 2019 it was reported that 11 UK military personnel were embedded in Saudi headquarters. CAAT has estimated that the UK has licensed £20bn in arms sales to the Saudis since 2015.

    Featured image – Wikimedia Commons/Fahd Sadi.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The US Has As Much Moral Authority As Saudi Arabia On The Legitimacy Of Elections

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    “Let there be no mistake – Sunday’s regional and municipal elections in Venezuela are nothing more than a sham,” reads a recent statement authored by Republican US Senators Jim Risch and Michael McCaul. “The illegitimate Maduro regime has taken drastic measures to dismantle or control every independent institution in the country, including hijacking political parties and the National Electoral Council to ensure state-sponsored electoral fraud.”

    “Today’s elections in Venezuela are as illegitimate as Maduro’s tyrannical regime,” reads a tweet by Republican Senator Rick Scott. “The Venezuelan people deserve free and democratic elections NOW. The U.S. and all freedom-loving nations must stand up, condemn these sham elections and support the people in their fight for freedom.”

    The imperial media are lining up behind the official US government line on Venezuela’s gubernatorial and mayoral elections, with The New York Times assuring us that conditions “are far from freely democratic” and The Washington Post reporting that opposition parties “say the elections have been stacked against them by the socialist government of President Nicolás Maduro,” who sees the elections as “a chance to reassert strength while projecting a veneer of legitimacy.”

    This level of intrusiveness into Venezuela’s heavily internationally monitored democratic process is typical of what we’ve been seeing from the US political/media class with regard to electoral contests in empire-targeted Latin American nations like Bolivia and Nicaragua. Which is really silly, because the US has no more moral authority over the legitimacy of democratic processes than a totalitarian monarchy like Saudi Arabia.

    US elections are of course corrupt and fraudulent, entirely dominated at the federal level by legalized oligarchic bribery in the form of campaign contributions, manipulated primaries, gerrymandering, voter suppression, shutting out third parties, and the worst voting system in the western world.

    More than this, though, the United States is also the world’s single most egregious offender when it comes to interfering in foreign elections. As Claire Bernish has observed in The Free Thought Project, the US government’s own data shows that it interfered in no fewer than 81 foreign elections just between the years 1946 and 2000. You’d never know it from the shrieking of the political/media class post-2016, but this would also include brazenly interfering in Russia’s elections in the nineties to ensure the presidency of Washington lackey Boris Yeltsin.

    And that’s just election interferences. It doesn’t include more brazen interferences in who governs foreign nations like direct military invasions, staged coups, color revolutions and proxy wars.

    https://twitter.com/GramsciFag/status/1462542388094590981?s=20

    As a completely undemocratic country whose government is also far and away the world’s single most aggressive saboteur of democracy, it is fair to say that US institutions are the absolute least qualified to comment on the validity of any nation’s elections on the entire planet.

    Everyone would laugh if Saudi Arabia’s psychopathic crown prince Mohammed bin Salman began opining on the quality of various nations’ democratic processes, especially if those criticisms were directed at the so-called liberal democracies of the west. But this same scrutiny of a power structure who has no business commenting on electoral integrity never gets directed at the United States, whose institutions issue such criticisms on a daily basis despite being no more morally qualified to do so than the House of Saud.

    If you think about it, Saudi Arabia is nothing other than a more honest version of the United States. Its oligarchs and its official government are the same people, it doesn’t pretend that its warmongering is humanitarian, when it wants to kill a journalist it just dismembers him with a bone saw rather than trying to squeeze him to death with lawfare in a maximum security prison, and it makes no pretense about being a democracy.

    The more I observe its behavior on the world stage the more hilarious it gets to see US political and media figures criticizing the democratic processes of foreign nations. It’s like McDonald’s evaluating whether mom and pop restaurants are sufficiently eco-friendly and vegan.

    Very silly stuff, mate.

    _______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • How Britain Aids Saudi Massacres In Yemen

    A small English village is hardly the first place that comes to mind when mentioning the war in Yemen. Yet Warton in the northwest of England is playing an oversized role in what the United Nations has repeatedly called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” The Lancashire village is home to an airfield and a manufacturing site where weapons dealer BAE Systems maintains, repairs and rearms Saudi jets responsible for much of the worst destruction in Yemen.

    The post How Britain Aids Saudi Massacres In Yemen appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Justin Bieber urged to cancel performance in Saudi Arabia

    On December 5, 2021, Canadian pop star Justin Bieber is scheduled to perform at the Formula 1 STC Saudi Arabian Grand Prix 2021, a state-sponsored music festival funded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has contacted Mr. Bieber and his team, urging him to cancel his performance and refuse the Kingdom’s efforts to whitewash its appalling human rights record. Instead, HRF has asked him to use his global influence to issue a statement in support of human rights in Saudi Arabia, just as his colleague Nicki Minaj did when she cancelled her 2019 performance in Saudi Arabia, following a letter from HRF.

    “It would be disastrous for Justin Bieber, an artist with a vast global following, and who is idolized by millions, to be used as a pawn by MBS’ murderous regime,” said HRF President Céline Assaf-Boustani. “Instead of giving into MBS’ plot to launder his image, as other artists have done since MBS’ ascent to power, Mr. Bieber should follow the lead of his fellow artist Nicki Minaj, who boldly shut down MBS and refused to perform for him.”

    Saudi Arabia is not a democracy. It is an absolute monarchy whose de facto dictator, MBS, brutally silences anyone who dares to criticize his policies or calls for reform. Since the beginning of his rule in 2017, MBS has spearheaded a brutal crackdown on dissidents, many of whom have been harassed, arbitrarily detained, sentenced, and tortured to death. Among the groups that his crackdown has targeted are women, who are treated like second-class citizens, the LGBTQ+ community, and other minority groups.

    Should he follow through with the performance, Mr. Bieber, who has shown support for the LGBTQ+ community throughout his career, will be profiting off a regime that executes LGBTQ+ individuals for the “crime” of being who they are. In April 2019, for example, five gay men were beheaded after they confessed to crimes under torture. Mr. Bieber has also supported the Black Lives Matter movement and the advancement of civil rights and social justice in the United States, indicating that he wants to use his artistic gifts to “serve this planet and each other,” and to help those who feel helpless in the face of “suffering, injustice, and pain.” 

    “As someone who has articulated a commitment to civil rights and social justice, Mr. Bieber should stay true to his words and use his platform to raise awareness about the atrocities being perpetrated every day in Saudi Arabia, especially against members of the LGBTQ+ community,” added Assaf-Boustani. “This performance would stand in stark contrast to the core values he claims to subscribe to. Music is not just a business, but also an influential art form that should not be purchased by a brutal dictatorship.”

    The Formula 1 event at which Justin Bieber is scheduled to perform, is one of many events that is integral to the Saudi regime’s “Vision 2030” plan. Vision 2030 is a massive undertaking designed to project an image of modernism and prosperity to the rest of the world, and a critical component of it includes the funding of sporting and entertainment industries. This plan, along with a major public relations campaign abroad, has the clear intention of whitewashing the crimes of MBS’ dictatorship, and preventing any form of democratic reforms from taking hold in the country. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/01/25/cristiano-ronaldo-and-lionel-messi-resist-big-money-to-advertise-for-saudi-arabia/ and https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/05/12/more-sports-washing-with-anthony-joshua-and-tyson-fury-clash-set-for-saudi-arabia-in-august/

    HRF also sent letters to A$AP Rocky, David Guetta, Tiësto, Jason Derulo, and Mohamed Hamaki regarding their participation in the event.

    Read HRF’s letter to Justin Bieber

    https://mailchi.mp/hrf.org/hrf-to-justin-bieber-cancel-performance-in-saudi-arabia?e=f80cec329e

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • “A Crime Against Humanity”: The “Greenwash Festival” Of COP26

    One of the most damning assessments of COP26, the UN climate conference being held in Glasgow, came from Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist:

    ‘#COP26  has been named the must excluding COP ever.
    This is no longer a climate conference.
    This is a Global North greenwash festival.
    A two week celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah.’

    And, indeed, if you scour news reports from COP26 they yield a familiar litany of political rhetoric and weasel words: vows, pledges, promises, commitments, sign up, phase out, green investment, innovation, transition, progress, scaling up, carbon credits, bending the emissions curve, net zero, 2050, 2070.

    To quote from King Crimson’s  ‘Elephant Talk‘:

    ‘Arguments, agreements… articulate announcements…Brouhaha, balderdash, ballyhoo…It’s only talk…cheap talk…double talk.’

    Juice Media, the campaign group who ‘make honest Government ads’, exposed the dangerous and misleading nonsense behind ‘Net Zero by 2050’:

    ‘There’s a huge gap between our promises and where we need to be. We don’t talk about that gap coz that would entail a complex process called “Being Honest”. Being Honest would mean admitting that we’re failing. And we can’t do that coz then we’d have to stop failing. That would mean ending fossil-fuel subsidies and banning all new gas, coal and oil projects.’

    The satirical government ad continued:

    ‘So being honest isn’t an option for us. Which is why we’ve come up with the next best alternative: Net Zero by 2050…which risks setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond our control.’

    Nature, the leading science journal, reported last week that top climate scientists – co-authors of a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – are sceptical that nations will rein in global warming. Moreover:

    ‘Six in ten of the respondents [climate scientists] said that they expect the world to warm by at least 3 °C by the end of the century, compared with what conditions were like before the Industrial Revolution. That is far beyond the Paris agreement’s goal to limit warming to 1.5-2 °C.’

    The news report added:

    ‘Most of the survey’s respondents – 88% – said they think global warming constitutes a “crisis”, and nearly as many said they expect to see catastrophic impacts of climate change in their lifetimes. Just under half said that global warming has caused them to reconsider major life decisions, such as where to live and whether to have children. More than 60% said that they experience anxiety, grief or other distress because of concerns over climate change.’

    ‘An Orchestrated PR Scam’

    A powerful thread on Twitter by conservationist Stephen Barlow echoed our own experiences and insights from observing climate conferences over three decades:

    ‘I’m starting to get the impression of COP26 as a contrived stitch up. Where world leaders get to present their inadequate action as fixing the problem. This really is dangerous stuff. You see I remember the 1992 Rio Earth Summit well.’

    Barlow expanded:

    ‘After the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, political leaders, fossil fuel companies and general vested interest gave the impression the problem was fixed, that there was no need for people to turn to green politics, because mainstream politics had fixed the problem.

    ‘In the following years, in the 1990s, we had oil companies taking out big full page adverts in BBC Wildlife Magazine, National Geographic, etc, saying how they were switching their business model to renewables.

    ‘Politicians presented all these rosy views of green growth, all sorts of carbon trading schemes and generally giving off the impression that the problem was fixed, and the future was green.’

    He rightly concluded:

    ‘The problem is, unlike the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, where it took nearly 30 years to find out everything we were promised was a scam and it just kept on getting worse – in 30 years time (in fact far less) we are going to be in serious trouble.

    ‘This is as evil as it gets. This is an orchestrated PR scam to carry on with business as usual. Where various elements like politicians, the mainstream media, billionaires, royalty and vested interests, combine to maintain business as usual, with fraudulent presentation.’

    Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, who has repeatedly exposed the reality of UK foreign policy, recently reported that the British government is seeking trade deals with carbon-lobbying countries who have attempted to weaken a scientific assessment report being prepared by the IPCC. The countries include Saudi Arabia and the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, along with Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Norway and India. Indeed, the UK is actively seeking to promote increased fossil fuel production in nearly all those countries, including Saudi Arabia – the world’s second largest oil producer.

    Ahmed noted that last month, on the eve of COP26, foreign secretary Liz Truss flew to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to explore a potential trade deal with the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

    He added:

    ‘According to the UK Department for International Trade’s Exporting Guide to Saudi Arabia, some of the biggest opportunities for UK investment are in expanding the kingdom’s fossil fuel sector.’

    The export guide proudly states:

    ‘There are significant opportunities in Saudi Arabia’s energy market for UK businesses, especially in oil and natural gas.’

    Ahmed continued:

    ‘Increasing the kingdom’s natural gas production is a particularly lucrative area for UK industry. The DIT notes that Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s giant oil producer, is exploiting natural gas reserves off the Red Sea coast to support increased domestic demand, which will involve using deep water technologies for drilling below 1,000 metres.’

    He summed up:

    ‘Britain’s intent to ramp up fossil fuel production in partnership with some of the world’s biggest obstructers of climate action raises urgent questions about its role at COP26.’

    That is an understatement. Then again, who believes that a corrupt Tory government – led by a shambling, elitist, racist, serial twister of the truth – would ever actually take the serious actions required to tackle the climate emergency?

    ‘Systematically Corrupted By Vested Interests’

    The climate campaign group Insulate Britain, who have blockaded several roads in multiple actions in recent weeks, said:

    ‘As will become clear after COP26, our government has no intention of taking the necessary action to protect its people. It has broken the social contract – the unwritten agreement in which we agree to obey the government’s laws and in return it will protect us.’

    In particular, Insulate Britain:

    ‘have exposed the government’s refusal to act on home insulation as cowardly and vindictive and their refusal to protect our country and our children from the climate crisis as genocidal and treasonous.’

    Those are strong words. But climate campaigners from Extinction Rebellion (XR) also made clear that:

    ‘Nothing on the table in the run up to COP26 has resembled a compassionate and functional response to the crisis. The Climate and Ecological Emergency is a Crime Against Humanity perpetrated by the rich and powerful, and the COP process is systematically corrupted by vested interests – national, corporate and financial.’

    The environmentalist group Global Witness assessed that there are more fossil fuel lobbyists present at COP26 than even the largest delegation from any country. They reported:

    ‘At least 503 fossil fuel lobbyists, affiliated with some of the world’s biggest polluting oil and gas giants, have been granted access to COP26, flooding the Glasgow conference with corporate influence.’

    Moreover, reported Global Witness:

    • If the fossil fuel lobby were a country delegation at COP it would be the largest with 503 delegates – two dozen more than the largest country delegation [Brazil].
    • Over 100 fossil fuel companies are represented at COP with 30 trade associations and membership organisations also present.
    • Fossil fuel lobbyists dwarf the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s official indigenous constituency by around two to one.
    • The fossil fuel lobby at COP is larger than the combined total of the eight delegations from the countries worst affected by climate change in the last two decades – Puerto Rico, Myanmar, Haiti, Philippines, Mozambique, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Pakistan.
    • 27 official country delegations registered fossil fuel lobbyists, including Canada, Russia and Brazil.

    On day 1 of the conference, XR had already declared that COP26 was a ‘failure’ and the conference itself ‘a crime against humanity’. XR spokesperson Jon Fuller pointed out the responsibility of the media to:

    ‘form an analysis of the situation, delving beyond presenting the views of different parties to the reality of what has been achieved and what the consequences are for ordinary people. If they fail to do so they continue to be guilty of the same crimes against humanity as the world leaders who have gathered at 25 previous COPs, claiming progress in spite of a complete failure to stop emissions rising.’

    Of course, as Media Lens has demonstrated over the past two decades, the state-corporate media, including BBC News, are indeed complicit in crimes against humanity.

    Last year, the BBC took £300,000 in advertising revenue from Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramco. The BBC does not carry advertising in the UK, but it does so abroad where much of its output is supported by commercials.

    Jim Waterson, the Guardian’s media editor, reported that:

    ‘Big fossil fuel companies have spent approximately $660,000 (£483,000) with the BBC on US-focused digital adverts since 2018, according to projections produced by the advertising data firm MediaRadar. Most of this came from the national Saudi oil company – although BP, Exelon and Phillips 66 are among the other fossil fuel business[es] estimated to have spent five-figure sums advertising on the BBC’s digital outlets.’

    He added:

    ‘The real figure for how much the BBC is making from large fossil fuel companies could be much higher when other forms of advertising are taken into account.’

    Meanwhile, BBC News programmes and high-profile BBC journalists continue to channel government propaganda on climate, with minimal scrutiny or genuinely countervailing voices. An extended appearance by Greta Thunberg on the Sunday morning Andrew Marr show on 31 October was a rare exception.

    More typical was Laura Kuenssberg’s relentless tweeting of government talking points:

    ‘PM says score in the match btw humanity and climate change is now, 5-2, or 5-3, not 5-1 at half time, which was his assessment a few days ago – if you hate the metaphor, let’s say, progress, but not yet enough’

    This tweet from the BBC political editor managed to capture both:

    1. the pathetic state of the ‘democracy‘ that ‘elected’ Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.

    2. the crass, subservient nature of much of BBC News.

    As US journalist Glenn Greenwald once observed:

    ‘The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.

    ‘I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.’

    The pathetic state of much of what passes for ‘journalism’ in the UK was summed up by investigative journalist Matt Kennard’s recent observation:

    ‘The British Journalism Awards [are] sponsored by Starling Bank, Gilead pharma, Google, Ovo Energy. The capture of our political, media and cultural systems by corporations is absolute and the root of problem. Rejecting + replacing corporate media is prerequisite to real democracy.’

    And real democracy is a prerequisite for tackling the climate emergency before it threatens to engulf humanity, driving us towards extinction.

    The post “A Crime Against Humanity”: The “Greenwash Festival” Of COP26 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Blacklisting the Merchants of Spyware

    In a modest effort to disrupt the global spyware market, the United States announced last week that four entities had been added to its blacklist.  On November 3, the US Department of Commerce revealed that it would be adding Israel-based companies NSO Group and Candiru to its entity list “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”

    Russian company Positive Technologies and the Singapore-based Computer Security Initiative Consultancy also made the list “based on a determination that they traffic in cyber tools used to gain unauthorized access to information systems, threatening the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide.”

    The move had a measure of approval in Congress. “The entity listing signals that the US government is ready to take strong action to stop US exports and investors from engaging with such companies,” came the approving remarks in a joint statement from Democrat House Representatives Tom Malinowski, Anna Eshoo and Joaquin Castro.

    This offers mild comfort to students of the private surveillance industry, who have shown it to be governed by traditional capitalist incentive rather than firm political ideology.  Steven Feldstein of the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program observes how such entities have actually thrived in liberal democratic states.  “Relevant companies, such as Cellebrite, FinFisher, Blue Coat, Hacking Team, Cyberpoint, L3 Technologies, Verint, and NSO group, are headquartered in the most democratic countries in the world, including the United States, Italy, France, Germany, and Israel.”

    The relationship between Digital China and Austin-based Oracle shows how talk about democracy and such ideals are fairly meaningless in such transactions.  Digital China is credited with aiding the PRC develop a surveillance state; software and data analytics company Oracle, despite pledging to “uphold and respect human rights for all people” was still happy to count Digital China a global “partner of the year” in 2018.  Its software products have been used to aid police in Liaoning province to do, among other things, gather details on financial records, travel information, social media and surveillance camera footage.  What’s bad for human rights is very good for business.

    In its indignant response to the Commerce Department’s blacklisting, NSO wished to point out to US authorities how its own “technologies support US national security interests and policies by preventing terrorism and crime, and thus we will advocate for this decision to be reversed.”  Portraying itself as a card-carrying member of the human rights fraternity, the company claimed to have “the world’s most rigorous compliance and human rights programs that are based [on] the American values we deeply share”.  Previous contracts with governments had been terminated because they had “misused our products.”

    As NSO has shown on numerous previous occasions, such strident assertions rarely match the record.  In July, an investigation known as the Pegasus Project, an initiative of 17 media organisations and groups, reported how 50,000 phone numbers had appeared on a list of hackable targets that had interested a number of governments.  The spyware used in question was Pegasus, that most disturbingly appealing of creations by NSO designed to infect the phone in question and turn it into a surveillance tool for the relevant user.

    The range of targets was skin crawlingly impressive: human rights activists, business executives, journalists, politicians and government officials.  None of this was new to those who have kept an eye on the exploits of the Israeli concern. Its sale of Pegasus has seen it feature in lawsuits from private citizens and companies such as WhatsApp keen to rein in its insidious practices.

    Despite denying any connection, the company will be forever associated with providing the tools to one of its clients, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to monitor calls made by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a fellow dissident scribbler, Omar Abdulaziz.  In October 2018, Khashoggi was carved to oblivion on the premises of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a hit squad with prints stretching back to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.  In a legal suit against NSO, lawyers for Abdulaziz argue that the hacking of his phone “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr Khashoggi.”  To date, the vicious, petulant modernist royal remains at large, feted by governments the world over as a reformer.

    While NSO has hogged the rude limelight on the international spyware market, that other Israeli-based concern, Candiru, has been a rolling hit with government clients.  Their products are also tailored to infecting and monitoring iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, and, discomfortingly enough, cloud accounts.

    Those behind this company evidently have a distasteful sense of humour; the original candiru of Amazon River fame is, goes one account in the Journal of Travel Medicine, “known as a little fish keen on entering the nether regions of people urinating in the Amazon River.”  Equipped with spikes, the fish invades and fastens itself within penis, vagina or rectum, making it a gruesome challenge to remove.  However colourful the imaginative accounts of the Candiru’s exploits are – William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is merely one – the Israeli version is far more sinister and deserves consternated worry.

    In July this year, the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto identified over 750 websites that had been influenced by the use of Candiru spyware.  “We found many domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as media companies, and other civil-society themed entities.”  The company, founded in 2014, maintains an opaque operations and recruitment structure, reputedly drawing expertise from the Israeli Defence Forces Unit 8200, responsible for code encryption and gathering signals intelligence.

    Within two years of its founding, the company had raked in $30 million in sales, establishing a slew of clients across Europe, states across the former Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf, Asia and Latin America.  A labour dispute between a former senior employee and the company shed some light on the company’s activities, with one document, signed by an unnamed vice president, noting the offering of a “high-end cyber intelligence platform dedicated to infiltrate PC computers, networks, mobile handsets, by using explosions and disseminations operations.”

    NSO Group’s reputation, and credentials, are now impossible to ignore.  The Israeli government, which grants the export licenses that enable the likes of NSO and Candiru to operate, is splitting hairs.  “NSO is a private company,” insists Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, “it is not a governmental project and therefore even if it is designated, it has nothing to do with the policies of the Israeli government.”  In his view, no other country had “such strict rules according to cyber warfare” and “imposing those rules more than Israel and we will continue to do so.”

    No Israeli government is likely to entirely abandon companies that make annual sales of $1 billion in the business of offensive cyber.  The efforts by governments the world over to attack encrypted communications while trampling human rights on route have become unrelenting.  In that quest, it matters little whether you are a citizen journalist, a master criminal, or a terrorist.  Those deploying the spyware rarely make such distinctions.

    The post Blacklisting the Merchants of Spyware first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Blacklisting the Merchants of Spyware

    In a modest effort to disrupt the global spyware market, the United States announced last week that four entities had been added to its blacklist.  On November 3, the US Department of Commerce revealed that it would be adding Israel-based companies NSO Group and Candiru to its entity list “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”

    Russian company Positive Technologies and the Singapore-based Computer Security Initiative Consultancy also made the list “based on a determination that they traffic in cyber tools used to gain unauthorized access to information systems, threatening the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide.”

    The move had a measure of approval in Congress. “The entity listing signals that the US government is ready to take strong action to stop US exports and investors from engaging with such companies,” came the approving remarks in a joint statement from Democrat House Representatives Tom Malinowski, Anna Eshoo and Joaquin Castro.

    This offers mild comfort to students of the private surveillance industry, who have shown it to be governed by traditional capitalist incentive rather than firm political ideology.  Steven Feldstein of the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program observes how such entities have actually thrived in liberal democratic states.  “Relevant companies, such as Cellebrite, FinFisher, Blue Coat, Hacking Team, Cyberpoint, L3 Technologies, Verint, and NSO group, are headquartered in the most democratic countries in the world, including the United States, Italy, France, Germany, and Israel.”

    The relationship between Digital China and Austin-based Oracle shows how talk about democracy and such ideals are fairly meaningless in such transactions.  Digital China is credited with aiding the PRC develop a surveillance state; software and data analytics company Oracle, despite pledging to “uphold and respect human rights for all people” was still happy to count Digital China a global “partner of the year” in 2018.  Its software products have been used to aid police in Liaoning province to do, among other things, gather details on financial records, travel information, social media and surveillance camera footage.  What’s bad for human rights is very good for business.

    In its indignant response to the Commerce Department’s blacklisting, NSO wished to point out to US authorities how its own “technologies support US national security interests and policies by preventing terrorism and crime, and thus we will advocate for this decision to be reversed.”  Portraying itself as a card-carrying member of the human rights fraternity, the company claimed to have “the world’s most rigorous compliance and human rights programs that are based [on] the American values we deeply share”.  Previous contracts with governments had been terminated because they had “misused our products.”

    As NSO has shown on numerous previous occasions, such strident assertions rarely match the record.  In July, an investigation known as the Pegasus Project, an initiative of 17 media organisations and groups, reported how 50,000 phone numbers had appeared on a list of hackable targets that had interested a number of governments.  The spyware used in question was Pegasus, that most disturbingly appealing of creations by NSO designed to infect the phone in question and turn it into a surveillance tool for the relevant user.

    The range of targets was skin crawlingly impressive: human rights activists, business executives, journalists, politicians and government officials.  None of this was new to those who have kept an eye on the exploits of the Israeli concern. Its sale of Pegasus has seen it feature in lawsuits from private citizens and companies such as WhatsApp keen to rein in its insidious practices.

    Despite denying any connection, the company will be forever associated with providing the tools to one of its clients, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to monitor calls made by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a fellow dissident scribbler, Omar Abdulaziz.  In October 2018, Khashoggi was carved to oblivion on the premises of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a hit squad with prints stretching back to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.  In a legal suit against NSO, lawyers for Abdulaziz argue that the hacking of his phone “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr Khashoggi.”  To date, the vicious, petulant modernist royal remains at large, feted by governments the world over as a reformer.

    While NSO has hogged the rude limelight on the international spyware market, that other Israeli-based concern, Candiru, has been a rolling hit with government clients.  Their products are also tailored to infecting and monitoring iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, and, discomfortingly enough, cloud accounts.

    Those behind this company evidently have a distasteful sense of humour; the original candiru of Amazon River fame is, goes one account in the Journal of Travel Medicine, “known as a little fish keen on entering the nether regions of people urinating in the Amazon River.”  Equipped with spikes, the fish invades and fastens itself within penis, vagina or rectum, making it a gruesome challenge to remove.  However colourful the imaginative accounts of the Candiru’s exploits are – William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is merely one – the Israeli version is far more sinister and deserves consternated worry.

    In July this year, the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto identified over 750 websites that had been influenced by the use of Candiru spyware.  “We found many domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as media companies, and other civil-society themed entities.”  The company, founded in 2014, maintains an opaque operations and recruitment structure, reputedly drawing expertise from the Israeli Defence Forces Unit 8200, responsible for code encryption and gathering signals intelligence.

    Within two years of its founding, the company had raked in $30 million in sales, establishing a slew of clients across Europe, states across the former Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf, Asia and Latin America.  A labour dispute between a former senior employee and the company shed some light on the company’s activities, with one document, signed by an unnamed vice president, noting the offering of a “high-end cyber intelligence platform dedicated to infiltrate PC computers, networks, mobile handsets, by using explosions and disseminations operations.”

    NSO Group’s reputation, and credentials, are now impossible to ignore.  The Israeli government, which grants the export licenses that enable the likes of NSO and Candiru to operate, is splitting hairs.  “NSO is a private company,” insists Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, “it is not a governmental project and therefore even if it is designated, it has nothing to do with the policies of the Israeli government.”  In his view, no other country had “such strict rules according to cyber warfare” and “imposing those rules more than Israel and we will continue to do so.”

    No Israeli government is likely to entirely abandon companies that make annual sales of $1 billion in the business of offensive cyber.  The efforts by governments the world over to attack encrypted communications while trampling human rights on route have become unrelenting.  In that quest, it matters little whether you are a citizen journalist, a master criminal, or a terrorist.  Those deploying the spyware rarely make such distinctions.

    The post Blacklisting the Merchants of Spyware first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Takes A U-Turn, Approves $650 Million Weapons Sales To Saudi Arabia

    In an about-turn from its stated policy, the Joe Biden administration on Thursday, November 4, approved USD 650 million worth of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. The deal marks the first major arms sales deal with Saudi Arabia since Biden announced the end of US involvement in the war in Yemen and the sale of “offensive” weapons to Riyadh in February.

    The post US Takes A U-Turn, Approves $650 Million Weapons Sales To Saudi Arabia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Being A Child In Yemen Is The Stuff Of Nightmares

    In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – along with other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – began to bomb Yemen. These countries entered a conflict that had been ongoing for at least a year as a civil war escalated between the government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, the Ansar Allah movement of the Zaidi Shia, and al-Qaeda. The GCC – led by the Saudi monarchy – wanted to prevent any Shia political project, whether aligned with Iran or not, from taking power along Saudi Arabia’s border. The attack on Yemen can be described, therefore, as an attack by the Sunni monarchs against the possibility of what they feared would be a Shia political project coming to power on the Arabian Peninsula.

    The post Being A Child In Yemen Is The Stuff Of Nightmares appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Manufacturing Ignorance: Keeping The Public Away From Power

    In their classic book on the news media, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky presented a ‘propaganda model’ of how the major broadcasters and newspapers operate. Whereas the ‘mainstream’ media declare that their aim is to educate, inform and entertain the public, their actual societal purpose ‘on matters that are of significance for established power’ is to avert any ‘danger’ that the public can ‘assert meaningful control over the political process’. 1

    As media analyst Lance Bennett wrote:

    ‘The public is exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media in response to these messages…. Leaders have usurped enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular control over the political system by using the media to generate support, compliance, and just plain confusion among the public.’ (Ibid., p. 303)

    Thus, rather than manufacturing public consent for elite policies and priorities, manufacturing public ignorance is the more desirable and effective goal. After all, explicit public ‘consent’ is typically not required for the UK government, for example, to attack the welfare system, underfund and carve-up the NHS for commercial purposes, sell arms to Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemeni civilians, sabre-rattle in the Indo-Pacific to ‘counter’ China, or increase its nuclear weapons arsenal by 40 per cent.

    Significant public activism and opposition to state-corporate power needs to be rooted in widespread shared public knowledge. But, in the absence of adequate public knowledge, and thus the reduced ‘threat’ of an informed populace participating in a real democracy, power is more or less free to do as it pleases.

    Take a recent Reuters news report following the death of Colin Powell, one of the perpetrators of the supreme international crime of invading and occupying Iraq. Like a parody from the satirical website The Onion, the article was titled: ‘Powell remembered as “one of the finest Americans never to be President”’.

    As Matt Kennard of Declassified UK noted:

    ‘The wildest thing about Western establishment media is its journalists aren’t even working under threat of prison or violence.

    ‘They do state propaganda – and sanitise our worst war criminals – totally off their own back. Incredible discipline and dedication to serving power.’

    Recall that, in February 2003, as the US and allies were preparing to invade Iraq, US Secretary of State Colin Powell had addressed the United Nations Security Council, dramatically holding up a small glass vial he said could contain anthrax, a biological weapon.

    ‘Saddam Hussein and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him,’ stated Powell, arguing that Iraq was deceiving UN weapons inspectors. He claimed that he was providing ‘facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence’. Powell’s presentation was seemingly watertight, based on supposedly undeniable evidence, and it was reported as such by an obedient ‘mainstream’ news media across the globe.

    But it was all lies, and it is ‘irrefutable’ that Powell ‘consciously deceived the world’, as US political analyst Jon Schwarz noted. Around one million Iraqis died as a result of the invasion-occupation, while many more millions became refugees, the country’s infrastructure devastated.

    With her customary sardonic wit, the Australian political writer Caitlin Johnstone described the infamous image of Powell holding a vial while addressing the UN Security Council as a ‘viral anti-war meme’:

    ‘Over the years Powell’s meme has been an invaluable asset for opponents of western military interventionism and critics of US propaganda narratives about empire-targeted nations, serving as a single-image debunk of any assertion that it is sensible to trust the claims US officials make about any government that Washington doesn’t like.’

    For the benefit of credulous, power-friendly journalists and anyone else who believed that Powell had made just one mistake that he bitterly regretted for the rest of his life, she added:

    ‘Powell’s other contributions to the world include covering up and participating in war crimes in Vietnam, facilitating atrocities in Central America, and destroying Iraqi civilian infrastructure in the Gulf War. But it’s hard to dispute that his greatest lasting legacy will be his immortal reminder to future generations that there is never, ever a valid reason to trust anything US officials tell us about a government they wish to bring down.’

    She added:

    ‘Be sure to remind everyone of Powell’s sociopathic facilitation of human slaughter often and loudly in the coming hours. Public opinion is the only thing keeping western war criminals from The Hague, after all, and those war criminals are keenly aware of this fact. At times like these, they suddenly become highly invested in making sure that regular people “respect the dead,” not because they respect any human alive or dead, but because they cannot allow the death to become an opportunity to amplify and change public opinion about their egregious murderous crimes.’

    The Persecution Of Julian Assange

    As we have recently observed in media alerts (here and here), the state-corporate media, including and especially BBC News, have been complicit in keeping the public largely ignorant about the case of Julian Assange. Likewise, the case’s likely terrifying implications for further limiting public knowledge about what governments and big business actually get up to. As founder of WikiLeaks, Assange has probably done more than anyone in at least a generation to expose the war crimes of the US and its allies.

    The revelations that the CIA had plans to kidnap or even kill Assange, almost entirely ignored by BBC News, has prompted concerned calls from advocates of ‘press freedom’ (such as it is in the West). The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Knight First Amendment Institute, Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders are among the signatories of a letter demanding that the case against Assange be dropped.

    Next Wednesday, a substantive U.S. appeal hearing will be heard at the High Court in London. Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde, the High Court judge who reversed an earlier court order to bar the U.S. from appealing Assange’s medical issues, will preside over the hearing. According to Consortium News legal analyst Alexander Mercouris:

    ‘It is highly unusual for a judge who has already ruled in favour of one party to continue on the bench. In most cases, fresh judges would be brought in who have had no part in earlier rulings for either side.’

    Mercouris called the decision ‘extremely disturbing news’ and ‘very worrying. Nothing in this case is proceeding as it should do.’

    Nina Cross has examined the insidious role of the BBC in the state-sponsored persecution of Assange. First, in an overview of BBC history, she showed that:

    ‘Britain’s most powerful “national asset” helps keep the British people in check while serving imperialism.’

    In the case of Assange, the BBC has helped ‘to control the narratives around the stripping of Assange’s asylum’, typically presenting him as someone who is attempting to evade the law.

    Cross added that the BBC is serving:

    ‘the interests of the British state apparatus, enabling a culture of impunity by spoon feeding its audience government narratives, manipulating perception, and promoting ridicule and disdain. The persecution of Assange that increasingly looks like a slow assassination by the UK and US authorities could not be so conceivable without a servile media.’

    She continued:

    ‘The impunity to persecute Assange has been enabled by the BBC through omission and silence. Instead of practising journalism it has turned a blind eye to abuses of the British authorities and those of its allies. The BBC’s behaviour is contrary: anti-journalism, anti-truth.’

    This is not new. As Noam Chomsky has observed:

    ‘Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy – their own population.’

    In this sense, BBC News is a form of technology that the UK government deploys to keep the British population away from the levers of power.

    The ‘Illusion Of A Democratic System’

    Take the case of UK arms sales. A new film and report by Matt Kennard and Phil Miller of Declassified UK investigated the largely-hidden role of a factory owned by arms exporter BAE Systems in the Lancashire village of Warton. The factory supplies military equipment to the Saudi Arabian regime, enabling it to continue its devastating attacks on Yemen which, for years, has been suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

    Kennard and Miller noted that:

    ‘Boris Johnson recently visited Warton and claimed the BAE site was part of his “levelling up agenda”. No journalist covering the visit seems to have reported the factory’s role in a war.’

    Back in London, Declassified UK interviewed Molly Mulready, who was a lawyer at the Foreign Office from 2014-19. She was responsible for giving legal advice in relation to exporting arms to the Middle East. She said:

    ‘Boris Johnson was very casual and jokey when we would go in to talk to him about arms to Saudi Arabia. We would go in to brief him about Yemen and he would joke around and waste everybody’s time and it was a bit mind blowing because you know, you’re discussing civilian casualties, you’re discussing the fact that innocent people have died and that British supplied bombs have played a part in that.’

    In 2017, Campaign Against Arms Trade took the UK government to court over the export of weaponry from places like Warton to Saudi Arabia. Mulready was tasked with trying to defend the government: ‘something she now bitterly regrets.’ Clearly upset, she told Kennard and Miller:

    ‘I’m so ashamed that I had anything to do with it. There have been tens of thousands of civilians killed in the bombing and there are millions of people who are food insecure. There are children in Yemen who are starving to death. The Saudis seem to have absolutely no compassion whatsoever.’

    The arms sales violate the UK government’s own licencing laws, Mulready believes, and contribute to Saudi war crimes.

    As Kennard and Miller concluded:

    ‘Yet they [UK arms sales] continue, along with the weekly cargo flight we filmed.’

    The Morning Star reported Mulready’s important testimony. But, according to our search of the ProQuest newspaper database, no other British newspapers have done so.

    In a recent interview with Lowkey, the British rapper and political activist, Kennard said that in his work as a journalist he wants to ‘pierce the propaganda bubble’. He emphasised the ‘illusion of a democratic system’ in the UK:

    ‘We do not live in a democracy. That’s what people need to understand. This is not a democratic state. Britain is an oligarchy.’

    On the tragicomic notion that ‘Britain is a force for good in the world’, he commented:

    ‘It’s an amazing mythology. It’s mirrored by the US. They have this thing called “American exceptionalism” which is how America operates very differently along principled lines; very differently to all superpowers. They don’t deal with [their own] interests, etc. It’s literally the intellectual level of about a five-year-old.’

    Kennard continued:

    ‘But the interesting thing about our society is you cannot work in any elite part of the intellectual industries unless you believe it…I’m looking every day at the reality of what Britain does in the world. And they are a force for reaction. They are a force for repression. They’re a force for militarism. They’re a force for destroying hope wherever it appears. They’re a junior partner to the US, but they’re actually an integral player. And the imperial operations of both are quite similar.’

    What is the way ahead then? Rather than looking for a ‘saviour’, such as Labour centrists Sir Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham, Kennard suggested:

    ‘Let’s focus on different strategies, i.e. building extra-parliamentary movements and understanding what Labour’s role in the British polity is, which is to support the British establishment, and absorb the radical left and neutralise it.’

    ‘There Are No Climate Leaders’

    As we have often emphasised in our work, in this era of worsening climate instability, time is rapidly running out. Climate activist Ben See observes:

    ‘Very few people seem aware that we only have about three or four years left before Earth’s species start being smashed by catastrophic 1.5°C of global warming in the context of toxic pollution, deforestation, etc. Perhaps our media and education systems are…utterly inadequate?’

    The forthcoming United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, starting on 31 October, will doubtless generate yet more ‘blah, blah, blah’, as Greta Thunberg so memorably summed up all the decades-long, political hot air on climate. She rightly observed that:

    ‘no one treats the crisis like a crisis, the existential warnings keep on drowning in a steady tide of greenwash and everyday media news flow.’

    She added:

    ‘The truth is there are no climate leaders. Not yet. At least not among high-income nations. The level of public awareness and the unprecedented pressure from the media that would be required for any real leadership to appear is still basically nonexistent.’

    During COP26, we can expect plenty of coverage of tense negotiations and exhausted delegates finally delivering an ‘agreed’ outcome. But there will be zero or negligible attention given to the unjust system of global economics that is driving humans into oblivion.

    The endless corporate drive to privatise the planet was highlighted in a recent article by journalist and researcher Whitney Webb titled, ‘Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class’. She reported:

    ‘Last month, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced it had developed a new asset class and accompanying listing vehicle meant “to preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.” Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water.” These NACs will then maintain, manage and grow the natural assets they commodify, with the end of goal of maximizing the aspects of that natural asset that are deemed by the company to be profitable.’

    Simply put, capitalists are seeking to control, not just ecosystems as ‘financial assets’, but the rights that people around the world have to ‘ecosystems services’, including the benefits that humans receive from Nature:

    ‘These include food production, tourism, clean water, biodiversity, pollination, carbon sequestration and much more.’

    The estimated ‘monetary value’ of Nature’s ‘assets’ have been priced at $4,000 trillion. Webb concluded:

    ‘Thus, NACs open up a new feeding ground for predatory Wall Street banks and financial institutions that will allow them to not just dominate the human economy, but the entire natural world.’

    The obscenity of this is almost beyond belief. Randall Wray, a professor of economics in New York, warned:

    ‘From the get-go, capitalism has been all about exploitation. Marx’s followers will point to exploitation of workers, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. Capitalism originated in the large plantations of the New World, exploiting the slaves, and Africa itself — which bore the burden of producing the humans that would be kidnapped and shipped across the seas to create the Old World’s wealth. It exploited the environment of America’s seemingly infinite natural resources, abandoning the land it exhausted, moving ever westward in its genocidal conquest of the continent. It spewed its waste into the water, the air, and the bodies of creatures great and small. It put a money price on the formerly free communal resources so that it could exploit them to extinction.’

    He added:

    ‘Capitalism has always been celebrated for its presumed efficiency. In fact, it is supremely inefficient. It survives only because it is the greatest system ever developed for exploitation of man and nature. It pushes costs off to the environment, “other” people, families, governments, and our “future.” It is ever on the lookout for new frontiers of exploitation. And in that quest, human survival is at risk.’

    Do not expect to be hearing much, if any, about all this from the state-corporate media in the weeks, months and years ahead; or however much time homo sapiens has left.

    1. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, Vintage, 1988/1994, p. 303.
    The post Manufacturing Ignorance: Keeping The Public Away From Power first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Lawyers to submit Yemen war crimes dossier to UK police

    Key figures in Saudi Arabia and UAE accused of crimes against humanity include investors in Britain

    A group of human rights lawyers will on Wednesday file a legal complaint in the UK accusing key figures in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates of being involved in war crimes relating to the war in Yemen.

    They plan to submit a dossier to British police and prosecutors alleging that about 20 members of the political and military elite of the two Gulf nations are guilty of crimes against humanity, and call for their immediate arrest should they enter the UK.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Abandoning Yemen?

    Monday, October 11, marked the official closure of the U.N. Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen (also known as the Group of Experts or GEE). For nearly four years, this investigative group examined alleged human rights abuses suffered by Yemenis whose basic rights to food, shelter, safety, health care and education were horribly violated, all while they were bludgeoned by Saudi and U.S. air strikes, drone attacks, and constant warfare since 2014.

    “This is a major setback for all victims who have suffered serious violations during the armed conflict,” the GEE wrote in a statement the day after the U.N. Human Rights Council refused to extend a mandate for continuation of the group’s work.  “The Council appears to be abandoning the people of Yemen,” the statement says, adding that “Victims of this tragic armed conflict should not be silenced by the decision of a few States.”

    Prior to the vote, there were indications that Saudi Arabia and its allies, such as Bahrain (which sits on the U.N. Human Rights Council), had increased lobbying efforts worldwide in a bid to do away with the Group of Experts. Actions of the Saudi-led coalition waging war against Yemen had been examined and reported on by the Group of Experts. Last year, the Saudi bid for a seat on the Human Rights Council was rejected, but Bahrain serves as its proxy.

    Bahrain is a notorious human rights violator and a staunch member of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia-led coalition which buys billions of dollars worth of weaponry from the United States and other countries to bomb Yemen’s infrastructure, kill civilians, and displace millions of people.

    The Group of Experts was mandated to investigate violations committed by all warring parties. So it’s possible that the Ansar Allah leadership, often known as the Houthis, also wished to avoid the group’s scrutiny. The Group of Experts’ mission has come to an end, but the fear and intimidation faced by Yemeni victims and witnesses continues.

    Mwatana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni organization established in 2007, advocates for human rights by reporting on issues such as the torture of detainees, grossly unfair trials, patterns of injustice, and starvation by warfare through the destruction of farms and water sources. Mwatana had hoped the U.N. Human Rights Council would grant the Group of Experts a multi-year extension. Members of Mwatana fear their voice will be silenced within the United Nations if the Human Rights Council’s decision is an indicator of how much the council cares about Yemenis.

    “The GEE is the only independent and impartial mechanism working to deter war crimes and other violations by all parties to the conflict,” said Radhya Almutawakel, Chairperson of Mwatana for Human Rights. She believes that doing away with this body will give a green light to continue violations that condemn millions in Yemen to “‘unremitting violence, death and constant fear.’”

    The Yemen Data Project, founded in 2016, is an independent entity aiming to collect data on the conduct of the war in Yemen. Their most recent monthly report tallied the number of air raids in September, which had risen to the highest monthly rate since March.

    Sirwah, a district in the Marib province, was—for the ninth consecutive month—the most heavily targeted district in Yemen, with twenty-nine air raids recorded throughout September. To get a sense of scale, imagine a district the size of three city neighborhoods being bombed twenty-nine times in one month.

    Intensified fighting has led to large waves of displacement within the governorate, and sites populated by soaring numbers of refugees are routinely impacted by shelling and airstrikes. Pressing humanitarian needs include shelter, food, water, sanitation, hygiene, and medical care. Without reports from the Yemen Data Project, the causes of the dire conditions in Sirwah could be shrouded in secrecy. This is a time to increase, not abandon, attention to Yemenis trapped in war zones.

    In early 1995, I was among a group of activists who formed a campaign called Voices in the Wilderness to publicly defy economic sanctions against Iraq. Some of us had been in Iraq during the 1991 U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm invasion. The United Nations reported that hundreds of thousands of children under age five had already died and that the economic sanctions contributed to these deaths. We felt compelled to at least try to break the economic sanctions against Iraq by declaring our intent to bring medicines and medical relief supplies to Iraqi hospitals and families.

    But to whom would we deliver these supplies?

    Voices in the Wilderness founders agreed that we would start by contacting Iraqis in our neighborhoods and also try to connect with groups concerned with peace and justice in the Middle East. So I began asking Iraqi shopkeepers in my Chicago neighborhood for advice; they were understandably quite wary.

    One day, as I walked away from a shopkeeper who had actually given me an extremely helpful phone number for a parish priest in Baghdad, I overheard another customer ask what that was all about. The shopkeeper replied: “Oh, they’re just a group of people trying to make a name for themselves.”

    I felt crestfallen. Now, twenty-six years later, it’s easy for me to understand his reaction. Why should anyone trust people as strange as we must have seemed?

    No wonder I’ve felt high regard for the U.N. Group of Experts who went to bat for human rights groups struggling for “street cred” regarding Yemen.

    When Yemeni human rights advocates try to sound the alarm about terrible abuses, they don’t just face hurt feelings when met with antagonism. Yemeni human rights activists have been jailed, tortured, and disappeared. Yemen’s civil society activists do need to make a name for themselves.

    On October 7, the day the U.N. Human Rights Council voted not to continue the role of the Group of Experts with regard to Yemen, the United Nations agreed to set up an investigative group to monitor the Taliban. However, the agreement assured the United States and NATO that abuses committed under their command would not be subject to investigation.

    Politicizing U.N. agencies and procedures makes it all the more difficult for people making inquiries to establish trusting relationships with people whose rights should be upheld by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights.

    When I was approaching shopkeepers for ideas about people we might contact in Iraq, I was just beginning to grapple with Professor Noam Chomsky’s essays about “worthy victims” and “unworthy victims.”

    That second phrase seemed to me a terrible oxymoron. How could a victim of torture, bereavement, hunger, displacement, or disappearance be an “unworthy victim?” Over the next thirty years, I grew to understand the cruel distinction between worthy and unworthy victims.

    A powerful country or group can use the plight of “worthy victims” to build support for war or military intervention. The “unworthy victims” also suffer, but because their stories could lead people to question the wisdom of a powerful country’s attacks on civilians, stories about those victims are likely to fade away.

    Consider, in Afghanistan, the plight of those who survived an August 29 U.S. drone attack against the family of Zamari Ahmadi.  Ten members of the family were killed. Seven were children. As of October 13, the family had not yet heard anything from the United States.

    I greatly hope Mwatana, The Yemen Data Project, The Yemen Foundation, and all of the journalists and human rights activists passionately involved in opposing the war that rages in Yemen are recognized and become names that occasion respect, gratitude, and support. I hope they’ll continue documenting violations and abuse. But I know their work on the ground in Yemen will now be even more dangerous.

    Meanwhile, the lobbyists who’ve served the Saudi government so well have certainly made a name for themselves in Washington, D.C., and beyond.

    Grassroots activists committed to ending human rights abuses must uphold solidarity with civil society groups defending human rights in Yemen and Afghanistan. Governments waging war and protecting human rights abusers must immediately end their pernicious practices.

    In the United States, peace activists must tell the military contractors, lobbyists, and elected representatives: “Not in our name!” With no strings attached, the U.S. government should be proactive and end war forever.

    This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine

    Tower houses in Sanaa, August 15, 2013 (Rod Waddington)

    The post Abandoning Yemen? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sportswashing at Tyneside: Saudi Arabia moves into English Football

    The recent acquisition of the Newcastle United football club by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, along with financier Amanda Staveley and the billionaire Reuben brothers, was a source of much excitement for some former players.  Old boy Alan Shearer did little to conceal it.  “We can dare to hope again,” he rejoiced.

    In The Guardian, Barney Ronay was less enthusiastic, notably at the appearance of the House of Saud in English football.  “Welcome, Mohammed bin Salman, to the billionaire boys club.  No need to wipe your feet.  Although maybe, on reflection, do wash your hands.  Those damned spots, eh?”

    Hatice Cengiz, fiancée of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi so brutally carved up in his country’s Istanbul consulate in October 2018, spoke of her heartbreak.  It was “a real shame for Newcastle and for English football” that the club was now in the hands of “the person responsible for the murder of Jamal.”

    The CEO of Amnesty International UK, Sacha Desmukh, described the deal as “an extremely bitter blow for human rights”.  Great football clubs, she claimed, were “being used to sportswash human rights abuse.”  Saudi Arabia had undertaken this move as part of an “aggressive move into sport as a vehicle for image-management and PR plain for all to see.”

    The deal had been reached in April last year but stalled after Qatar-based beIN Sports voiced opposition. The broadcaster, holding broadcasting rights to the EPL for audiences in the Middle East and North Africa, was banned by Saudi Arabia in 2017 as part of the Kingdom’s effort to blockade Qatar.

    Relations between the states have since thawed.  “Following completion of the Premier League’s Owners’ and Directors’ Test, the club has been sold to the consortium with immediate effect,” the EPL confirmed in its October 7 statement.  The body had also been given “legally binding assurances that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will not control Newcastle United Football Club.”  This is much wishful thinking, given that the PIF is personally chaired by the crown prince and governed by a board stacked by Saudi government ministers and royal favourites.  And just to make matters that much darker, the fund was behind the purchase of a company which owned the two private jets used by the death squad responsible for Khashoggi’s killing.

    The fanbase had other priorities: the celebrated departure of the detested Sports Direct billionaire Mike Ashley; the closing of a dark chapter lasting 14 years; a shell of a club that could be revived.  Under Ashley, the club went into decay, suffering two relegations and the estrangement of its supporters.

    They gathered in number, cheering the announcement, sporting Saudi flags and, rather disconcertingly, donning masks of bin Salman.  One fan, Paul Loraine, claimed that there was “not a lot we can do about the human rights stuff”.  He reflected upon the clothing “borne out of sweatshops in countries with human rights issues.  The moral compass is always a strange one in times like this.”  Strange, and relativised to such a point that Ben Machell of The Times could suggest an off-colour joke regarding the unpopular manager, Steve Bruce.  “Hope Newcastle United’s new owners don’t have Steve Bruce strangled and dismembered”.

    While topflight football has a habit of drawing out bleeding heart sentimentalism, the Saudi role provided suitable distraction from a competition that long ago ceased being concerned with human rights or the moral compass.  The acquisition was merely another move that has become common in the English Premier League, a form of soft power at play, a place to park dirty money and forum for blood-soaked finances.

    Even Shearer had to admit that the sport had faced a number of sketchily drawn lines in the sand, making any claims to moral fibre weak.  “Maybe it was Russian involvement in the Premier League, China or Abu Dhabi.  Maybe it was Americans using the club’s own money to help complete their purchase of it.” Qatar was set to host the World Cup while Saudi Arabia had invested “in all kinds of businesses in this country and a variety of sports worldwide.  It was only a matter of time before it turned to football.”

    Fans of a club such as Manchester City, having tasted the sort of success in recent years Newcastle United has only dreamed of, would also have to face these lines.  In June 2007, Thailand’s former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra purchased it for £81.6 million.  Affectionately known to fans as Frank, he promised much, delivering a coach in the form of Sven-Göran Eriksson and a number of top shelf players.  But during his time in office, the human rights record of the country was severely blotted.  Between January 2001 and January 2005, eighteen human rights defenders were assassinated; one was disappeared.  In February 2002, the Thaksin government commenced its own version of the “War on Drugs”, which saw over 2,700 extrajudicial killings.

    With Sheikh Mansour of the United Arab Emirates taking the reins at Manchester City through the Abu Dhabi United Group just over a year later, a corrupt, sanguinary owner had been replaced by a member of an absolute ruling family.  “City fans knew that the UAE had a dodgy human rights record. But many of us preferred to turn a blind eye,” recalls Manchester City follower and writer Simon Hattenstone.

    In 2020, Amnesty International noted the continuing UAE practice of banning political opposition and imprisoning those seeking a change of government.  To this could be added the conduct of trials marked by forced confessions and the incommunicado detention of accused parties.  In terms of labour conditions, the UAE’s kafala sponsorship program for migrant workers remains famed for its brutal conditions and lack of protections.  The Gulf state has also been a co-leading member of the coalition with Saudi Arabia in the brutal conflict in Yemen and supplier of arms and drones to the rebel Libyan National Army.

    In a singular mark of cognitive dissonance, the Sheik’s ownership of the club could somehow sit alongside the wearing of a yellow ribbon by club manager Pep Guardiola, worn in solidarity for political prisoners jailed for campaigning for Catalan independence.

    In turning over a new leaf, Newcastle United has placed its faith in a theocracy that does away with its dissidents using bone-sawing death squads.  A support base long starved of success is already looking the other way, while the city will be looking for Saudi money to fuel investment.  The ghosts of Khashoggi and other victims will be, at least for a time, passed over as needless distractions.

    The post Sportswashing at Tyneside: Saudi Arabia moves into English Football first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Amanda Staveley: ‘Newcastle is a fantastic gem that needs buffing up’

    The director who will run the club said she understands the questions on human rights and takes them seriously

    Amanda Staveley has spent sufficient time in Middle Eastern souks to be able to spot a precious stone hiding, unpolished, amid a sea of replicas.

    No jewel, though, has ever quite captured her heart the way Newcastle United did when, almost exactly four years ago, she arrived at St James’ Park to watch Rafael Benítez’s then team draw 1-1 with Liverpool. “I fell madly in love,” she says. “Newcastle’s unique; it’s like a fantastic gem which needs buffing up at every level.”

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Repression, Brutality, Impunity: An Overview of Human Rights Defenders in Saudi Arabia

    For years, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been increasing its repression of human rights defenders (HRDs). In order to silence dissidents, government authorities arbitrarily interrogate, detain and imprison HRDs under the Anti-Terrorism Law and the Anti-Cybercrime Law for their peaceful activities and human rights work. In a country where the freedom of expression, assembly, and opinion is not tolerated, the Saudi government systematically subjects HRDs to harassment and reprisals, whether they are in Saudi Arabia or abroad. Considered enemies of the State by the regime, by the end of 2020, all Saudi HRDs were either in detention without charge, on trial, or serving their prison terms.

    Widespread and Systematic Pattern of Repression

    The repression against HRDs is widespread and follows a similar pattern. HRDs are repressed through detentions, arrests and imprisonments, and their basic human rights are violated in all stages of the judicial process. Often held incommunicado, they are tortured during interrogation or in detention. For instance, women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathoul was held incommunicado for three months and was subjected to physical and psychological torture such as beatings and electric shocks. She was also sexually assaulted and threatened with rape. Additionally, Dawood al-Marhoon and Abdullah al-Zaher were held incommunicado without having access to a lawyer. Both were arrested in 2012 without a warrant––while they were still minors––for their participation in a protest. They were tortured in detention and forced to sign a confession without knowing its content. Coerced confessions are common practice in Saudi Arabia, and the courts mostly rely on confessions obtained under torture to issue sentences. Beyond torture and mistreatment, the Saudi judicial system does not respect the rights to a fair trial and due process, two fundamental rights provided by the international human rights framework.

    The sentences issued by the courts to HRDs are excessive, violent (e.g. death penalty, life imprisonment or lashes) and unfair. The government uses the Specialized Criminal Court to prosecute and silence the dissidents. It abuses the Anti-Terror Law and the Anti-Cybercrime Law to prosecute HRDs in unfair and illegal trials. For instance, the HRDs Raif Badawi, Waleed Abu Al-Khair, and Mohammad Al-Qahtani were arrested, detained, and then prosecuted under the Anti-Terrorism Law, whereas Loujain Al-Hathloul and Samar Badawi were arrested, detained, and then prosecuted under the Anti-Cybercrime Law. The government resorts to systematic and massive detention and prosecution of HRDs.

    In June 2020, 14 supporters of the women’s rights movement detained since 2019 were charged under the Anti-Cybercrime Law and/or the Anti-Terrorism Law. Moreover, the founding members (Essa Al-Hamid, Abdulrahman Al-Hamid, Abdullah al-Hamid) of the Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights (ACPRA) had all been prosecuted by 2016. On April 14, 2020, one of the founding members, Abdullah al-Hamid, died in prison. It is reported that he died because of medical negligence and a delay in his heart operation. Additionally, he was prohibited from discussing his health conditions with his family.

    Detention Conditions in Saudi Prisons

    The detention conditions in Saudi prisons, especially pertaining to the treatment of HRDs, are unhygienic and unsanitary; medical care and treatments are often lacking, which puts the lives of the prisoners at risk. Many prisoners have reported being ill-treated and tortured by prison officials. For instance, Raif Badawi, an activist sentenced to ten years and 1000 lashes in 2014 for using an online platform to call for freedom of religion and belief, has been subjected to solitary confinement and denied medical treatment and contact with his family. On September 17, 2019, he carried out a hunger strike to contest the ill-treatment, horrendous detention conditions, and confiscation of his books. He ended his hunger strike on September 21, 2019 following a visit of the Saudi Human Rights Commission.

    Raif Badawi was not the only one to perform a hunger strike to protest the conditions in the prison. On March 6, 2021, the HRDs Mohammad Al-Qahtani, Fawzan Al-Harbi, and Issa Al-Nukhaifi, along with 27 others prisoners, started a hunger strike to contest the humiliating conditions and the ill-treatment they endured in the Al-Ha’ir prison. Specifically, they protested the lack of provision of books, the denial of contact with their families, and being held with mentally ill people who allegedly threatened them with death. Al-Qahtani and Al-Harbi were respectively sentenced in March 2013 and in November 2014 to 10 years of prison, followed by a 10 year travel ban upon their release. Al-Nukhaifi was sentenced in February 2018 to six years in prison and banned from travelling for six years as well. The US Department of State argues that holding HRDs in the same cells as persons with mental disabilities is a form of punishment. They finally ended their hunger strike on March 13, 2021 when the Saudi authorities promised they would meet their demands.

    COVID-19 in Prisons

    Recently, Mohammad al-Qahtani, founding member of ACPRA, has also been held incommunicado after testing positive for COVID-19 when he was serving his sentence in the Al Ha’ir prison. Once he tested positive, he was unable to contact his family to tell them about his health condition and he was taken to an isolation center. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the prison authorities have denied medical care to prisoners infected with the virus and violated even more of their basic human rights, such as not being able to contact their relatives or being placed in isolation. Regarding the spread of COVID-19 in prison, government authorities have neglected medical care and treatment. Indeed, they have not put in place any proper medical procedure to stop the spread of the virus, and they have not implemented a treatment protocol to properly take care of the infected prisoners.

    Targeting of Families

    Furthermore, in order to silence HRDs, the government of Saudi Arabia does not hesitate to target their families and/or relatives as an act of reprisal against them. For instance, on May 12, 2020, security officers raided the home of Saad Al Jabri’s brother and detained him without cause. Moreover, on August 24, 2020, Saad Al Jabri’s son-in-law was not only arrested in retaliation against him, but also to intimidate Saad Al Jabri for filing a lawsuit against the Saudi government.

    Another example is the case of Ali Al-Nimr, the nephew of the prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, who was executed by the Saudi government in 2016. Ali Al-Nimr was arrested without a warrant in February 2012 for his participation in a peaceful protest but also as reprisal against his uncle, Sheikh al-Nimr. Moreover, he was held incommunicado for three months, tortured, and forced to sign a confession which was later used in court to prosecute him. On May 27, 2014, Ali was sentenced to death in an unfair and illegal trial.

    Eternally Enemies of the State

    Even after being released from prison, HRDs continue to be considered by the regime as enemies of the State. Upon their release, their freedoms of movement and expression are strongly limited in order to hamper the resumption of their human rights work and activism. After being released, a travel ban (most often with the same duration as their sentence) is imposed on them with the aim of preventing them from engaging with international human rights institutions, such as the United Nations.

    For instance, lawyer Waleed Abu Al-Khair received a 15 year travel ban after being sentenced by the Specialized Criminal Court to 15 years in prison for peacefully denouncing human rights abuses on social media. Moreover, when Loujain al-Hathloul was released on  February 10, 2021, she was also banned from travelling abroad for four years and at the same time received a media ban.

    The government imposes travel and media bans to keep control of HRDs, who are further subjected to online surveillance. Each of their movements is monitored by the State Security Presidency and they are not allowed to express their opinions freely on or off the internet. For instance, Loujain al-Hathloul was released on three years’ probation, meaning she could be arrested for any action that the Saudi government deems illegal. Thus, HRDs are released conditionally and cannot be called free. These government strategies of surveillance and restrictions enable the government to keep an eye on HRDs in order to silence them.

    Conclusion: A Kingdom of Repression, Abuse, and Impunity

    In conclusion, the repression of HRDs by the Saudi government is widespread and systematic. It fails to comply with international human rights law, as the Saudi government supports and even encourages the torture of HRDs. Indeed, impunity prevails and HRDs continue to be mistreated and tortured during interrogation and detention. Their rights to a fair trial, legal representation, and due process are denied by the government. Consequently, HRDs serve long and excessive sentences from several years’ imprisonment to the death penalty. Once their sentence is finished, HRDs are conditionally released and can face immediate re-imprisonment if they dare to defy the conditions imposed by the Saudi authorities.

    The post Repression, Brutality, Impunity: An Overview of Human Rights Defenders in Saudi Arabia appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • Abdul Rahman Al-Shamiri, after 15 years, released in Saudi Arabia

    Abdul Rahman Al-Shamiri [m3takl/Twitter]Abdul Rahman Al-Shamiri

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    On 24 September 2021 the Middle East Monitor reported that the ALQST and the Prisoners of Conscience Twitter account quoted sources as saying that Al-Shamiri was released “following the expiry of his sentence.”

    Al-Shamiri is a retired Saudi academic who worked at Umm Al-Qura University, he was also a consultant in the kingdom’s Shura Council for years.

    He was arrested in 2007, and sentenced to a 15-year prison term on charges including “disobeying the ruler”.

    In December 2003, Al-Shamiri was one of the signatories of a reform document sent to the Saudi monarch at the time, King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, demanding Saudis be allowed to participate in the political system. The document was followed by others, including one which demanded the release of three rights defenders, including the late Abdullah Al-Hamid.

    Saudi Arabia releases prominent rights advocate after 15 years in prison

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Johnson blasted for joking Patel is making UK ‘the Saudi Arabia of penal policy’

    Boris Johnson has been criticised for making a “disgusting” joke that the UK could become the “the Saudi Arabia of penal policy” under home secretary Priti Patel.

    “New low”

    Opposition politicians said that the prime minister had reached a “new low” after footage emerged of the comments made at a Conservative Party fundraiser last week. Critics argued that the joke was in bad taste because Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s most extreme punitive regimes, including capital punishment by beheading:

    Homosexuality is illegal in the Gulf state and can be punished by the death penalty and inhumane sentences such as whippings and chemical castration. Business Insider, which obtained the video, said Johnson made the ‘gag’ in front of some 300 attendees at the InterContinental London Park Lane hotel in Mayfair.

    Kicking off his speech, Johnson said:

    In the immortal words of Priti Patel or Michael Howard or some other hardline home secretary, addressing the inmates of one of our larger prisons: it’s fantastic to see so many of you here.

    Johnson went on to tee up the offending joke by discussing the UK’s work on renewable energy. To laughter from the audience, he said:

    I said last year we’re the Saudi Arabia of wind. Probably the Saudi Arabia of penal policy, too, under our wonderful Home Secretary

    In 2011, Patel told BBC’s Question Time programme that she would “support the reintroduction of capital punishment to serve as a deterrent” to “murderers and rapists”.

    The front entrance of the British Ambassador’s residence, at Riyadh in Saudi Arabia (John Stillwell/PA)
    The front entrance of the British Ambassador’s residence, at Riyadh in Saudi Arabia (John Stillwell/PA)

    But she later insisted she no longer supports the death penalty after first entering the Cabinet.

    “Kills homosexuals”

    Attacking the prime minister’s comments, Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said:

    Saudi Arabia beheads its own citizens, tortures activists exercising their democratic rights and kills homosexuals. This is disgusting.

    As ever with Boris Johnson behind closed doors the masks slips and we see what he really thinks.

    The Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman Alistair Carmichael said the comment “marks a new low even for” Johnson. Carmichael added:

    He may admire his pals in the Saudi dictatorship but with this kind of humour the joke is on all of us

    In July, a journalist at Politico reported Johnson making a similar joke about Saudi Arabia during a call with business leaders, but was told by Downing Street the suggestion was “total bollocks”.

    Following a string of controversies, Patel is widely tipped to be sacked as Home Secretary in the next reshuffle, which has been announced for Wednesday 15 September.

    The UK currently makes billions selling arms to Saudi Arabia despite allegations it’s committing war crimes in Yemen.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.