http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/opinion/africas-trauma-epidemic.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 9:11 AM
Subject: re: Africa’s Trauma Epidemic
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  In all of healthcare, there are only three bargains: potable water, sanitary sewers and vaccines. That's as true today as it was half a century ago when I learned it on my mother's knee.  Everything else (including CAT scans and burn units) is vastly more expensive per life saved.  Where resources are finite (and they're always finite) we must choose to spend dollars where they do the most to save lives, to restore autonomy and to decrease suffering. It's not that Dr. Orekunrin's trauma work isn't critical and valuable. But it's certainly not a rational place to start spending more resources.

Barry Haskell Levine

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Africa’s Trauma Epidemic

By OLA OREKUNRIN

Published: October 17, 2013

LAGOS — It was dusk and I was on my way home from Abeokuta, a vibrant city in southwest Nigeria. My driver had switched off the car’s air-conditioning so I could open the windows and feel the breeze. He was weaving between potholes in the road when suddenly, the scene ahead changed.

A large truck had pulled out carelessly onto the road, knocking a car straight into the median.

That stretch of road is notoriously dangerous, not just because of traffic accidents but also because of armed robbers. It’s for that reason that I suppressed my natural instinct to stop and help.

I was filled with guilt as we passed the wrecked car, because I knew that if the young man at the wheel had been badly injured, there was only a small chance that he would get the emergency treatment he needed.

I knew this because I am a trauma doctor and the founder of West Africa’s first indigenous air ambulance service. Nigeria, a country of more than 170 million people, has no organized trauma response system and no formal training for paramedics. Injured people are often taken to the hospital in a car or minibus or draped across the motorcycle of a good Samaritan, sometimes several hours after the accident has occurred.

Even if the patient does reach a local hospital, it may not have the skilled staff or equipment needed. (There are only a few that do, and there are huge distances between them.) Most of those who are seriously injured probably bleed to death.

So I couldn’t help it when, a few moments later, I said “Stop the car, please.”

I grabbed one of our emergency response bags from my trunk and walked back. I tried to concentrate on the types of injuries the driver might have rather than how unsafe it was walking on that stretch of road, particularly in the evening. Was he bleeding? Was he conscious?

The crash scene had quickly attracted some of the people who typically gather around accidents in Nigeria. Bystanders were pulling the driver out of the car. Before long they were joined by a barefoot “prophet” in a white robe. No Nigerian accident scene is complete without a prophet who commands everyone to stand by while he loudly predicts that the patient will stop bleeding. The patient is often drained of blood by the time the prophecy is complete.

Sadly, these prophets are the best hope that many Nigerians have. Trauma has become a silent epidemic in Africa, an epidemic that will only spread as the economy grows. More and more Africans are buying cars and working in heavy and dangerous industries. At the same time, infrastructure is poor, safety laws lax, and cars badly maintained.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s smallest number of motorized vehicles but the highest rate of road traffic fatalities, with Nigeria and South Africa leading the pack.

The World Bank predicts that in the next two years, road accidents could be the biggest killer of African children between 5 and 15. By 2030, according to the Global Burden of Disease study, road accidents will be the fifth leading cause of death in the developing world, ahead of malaria, tuberculosis and H.I.V.

If you add to these numbers the injuries caused by violent crime and communal conflict, then you have all the ingredients for a public health emergency.

And yet, trauma receives only a tiny fraction of the attention and money given to these three infectious diseases. Every health care conference I attend focuses on vaccines, treatment and training to combat the infamous “triple epidemic.”

Over the last decade, billions of dollars have poured into Africa with the laudable aim of defeating these killer diseases. But that most basic killer, injury, remains neglected.

Part of the problem is that the solutions are so complex. It’s easy to quantify interventions like the number of AIDS-fighting anti-retrovirals or mosquito nets distributed. Pills can be counted, flown in on cargo planes and delivered to large numbers of people in a short time period. But a pill would do very little for someone on a rural road in Nigeria with a head injury and a collapsed lung.

We need to put in place systems to provide lifesaving care for accident victims. They need to be moved to a fully equipped hospital — one with X-ray machines, CT scanners, a burn unit — within the space of 45 minutes. We need at least 10 of these proper hospitals. We need to improve our roads, and we need a high-quality ambulance system to drive on them. And we need paramedic schools — like the one my company is helping to open, the first of its kind in Nigeria.

Some countries in other parts of the world have come up with proactive solutions. In Israel, a group called United Hatzalah helps volunteer emergency workers get quickly to accident sites, by “ambucycle” or on foot, if necessary. But Africa’s challenge will require an African response — and international support.

On the road that night, I quickly assessed that the young man needed urgent medical attention. I gave him oxygen and inserted a makeshift airway. I noted that he probably had internal bleeding and did my best to stem whatever external bleeding I could detect.

A passing taxi then transported him to the nearest hospital. He had a fighting chance. But too many injured Nigerians, forgotten on the side of the road, do not. It’s time the global public-health community paid attention to Africa’s urgent need for emergency medical care.

Ola Orekunrin is a trauma doctor and the managing director of Flying Doctors Nigeria, an air ambulance service.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/us/politics/us-legal-shift-may-open-door-for-challenge-to-secret-wiretaps.html?hp&_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 7:43 AM
Subject: re: Door May Open for Challenge to Secret Wiretapsq
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  President George W. Bush should have been impeached in 2004 for warrantless wiretaps in violation of the FISA statute and of our Fourth Amendment guarantees of freedom from unreasonable search. But the editor of this newspaper was intimidated, and our Congress proved craven and it  was papered over by changing the statute ex post facto. 
   Where our "leaders" don't leader, the People have to step up. So it becomes a matter for the courts, each victim left to sue for damages inflicted by our own government. Where our Executive has assaulted us and our Legislature has abandoned us, at least we have recourse to the Court.  In this context, mr. Verilli's assertion that targets of these illegal wiretaps must be notified of that fact gleams like the tentative promise of dawn.
Barry Haskell Levine

Door May Open for Challenge to Secret Wiretaps

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: October 16, 2013 6 Comments

WASHINGTON — Five years after Congress authorized a sweeping warrantless surveillance program, the Justice Department is setting up a potential Supreme Court test of whether it is constitutional by notifying a criminal defendant — for the first time — that evidence against him derived from the eavesdropping, according to officials.

Prosecutors plan to inform the defendant about the monitoring in the next two weeks, a law enforcement official said. The move comes after an internal Justice Department debate in which Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. argued that there was no legal basis for a previous practice of not disclosing links to such surveillance, several Obama administration officials familiar with the deliberations said.

Meanwhile, the department’s National Security Division is combing active and closed case files to identify other defendants who faced evidence resulting from the 2008 wiretapping law. It permits eavesdropping without warrants on Americans’ cross-border phone calls and e-mails so long as the surveillance is “targeted” at foreigners abroad.

It is not yet clear how many other such cases there are, nor whether prosecutors will notify convicts whose cases are already over. Such a decision could set off attempts to reopen those cases.

“It’s of real legal importance that components of the Justice Department disagreed about when they had a duty to tell a defendant that the surveillance program was used,” said Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor. “It’s a big deal because one view covers so many more cases than the other, and this is an issue that should have come up repeatedly over the years.”

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose internal discussions. The Wall Street Journal  previously reported on a recent court filing in which the department, reversing an earlier stance, said it was obliged to disclose to defendants if evidence used in court was linked to warrantless surveillance, but it remained unclear if there were any such cases.

The debate was part of the fallout about National Security Agency surveillance set off by leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. They have drawn attention to the 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, which legalized a form of the Bush administration’s once-secret warrantless surveillance program.

In February, the Supreme Court dismissed a case challenging its constitutionality because the plaintiffs, led by Amnesty International, could not prove they had been wiretapped. Mr. Verrilli had told the justices that someone else would have legal standing to trigger review of the program because prosecutors would notify people facing evidence derived from surveillance under the 2008 law.

But it turned out that Mr. Verrilli’s assurances clashed with the practices of national security prosecutors, who had not been alerting such defendants that evidence in their cases had stemmed from wiretapping their conversations without a warrant.

Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued in the Supreme Court on behalf of the plaintiffs challenging the 2008 law, said that someone in the Justice Department should have flagged the issue earlier and that the department must do more than change its practice going forward.

“The government has an obligation to tell the Supreme Court, in some formal way, that a claim it made repeatedly, and that the court relied on in its decision, was simply not true,” he said. “And it has an obligation to notify the criminal defendants whose communications were monitored under the statute that their communications were monitored.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. The department’s practices came under scrutiny after a December 2012 speech by Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee. During debate over extending the 2008 law, she warned that terrorism remained a threat. Listing several terrorism-related arrests, she added, “so this has worked.”

Lawyers in two of the cases Ms. Feinstein mentioned — one in Fort Lauderdale and one in Chicago — asked prosecutors this spring to confirm that surveillance under the 2008 law had played a role in the investigations of their clients so they could challenge it.

But prosecutors said they did not have to make such a disclosure. On June 7, The New York Times published an article citing Ms. Feinstein’s speech and the stance the prosecutors had taken.

As a result, Mr. Verrilli sought an explanation from national security lawyers about why they had not flagged the issue when vetting his Supreme Court briefs and helping him practice for the arguments, according to officials.

The national security lawyers explained that it was a misunderstanding, the officials said. Because the rules on wiretapping warrants in foreign intelligence cases are different from the rules in ordinary criminal investigations, they said, the division has long used a narrow understanding of what “derived from” means in terms of when it must disclose specifics to defendants.

In national security cases involving orders issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, prosecutors alert defendants only that some evidence derives from a FISA wiretap, but not details like whether there had just been one order or a chain of several. Only judges see those details.

After the 2008 law, that generic approach meant that prosecutors did not disclose when some traditional FISA wiretap orders had been obtained using information gathered through the warrantless wiretapping program. Division officials believed it would have to disclose the use of that program only if it introduced a recorded phone call or intercepted e-mail gathered directly from the program — and for five years, they avoided doing so.

For Mr. Verrilli, that raised a more fundamental question: was there any persuasive legal basis for failing to clearly notify defendants that they faced evidence linked to the 2008 warrantless surveillance law, thereby preventing them from knowing that they had an opportunity to argue that it derived from an unconstitutional search?

The debate stretched through June and July, officials said, including multiple meetings and dueling memorandums by lawyers in the solicitor general office and in the national security division, which has been led since March by acting Assistant Attorney General John Carlin. The deliberations were overseen by James Cole, the deputy attorney general.

National security lawyers and a policy advisory committee of senior United States attorneys focused on operational worries: Disclosure risked alerting foreign targets that their communications were being monitored, so intelligence agencies might become reluctant to share information with law enforcement officials that could become a problem in a later trial.

But Mr. Verrilli argued that withholding disclosure from defendants could not be justified legally, officials said. Lawyers with several agencies — including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the N.S.A. and the office of the director of national intelligence — concurred, officials said, and the division changed the practice going forward.

National Security Division lawyers began looking at other cases, eventually identifying the one that will be publicly identified soon and are still looking through closed cases and deciding what to do about them.

But in a twist, in the Chicago and Fort Lauderdale cases that Ms. Feinstein had mentioned, prosecutors made new court filings saying they did not intend to use any evidence derived from surveillance of the defendants under the 2008 law.

When defense lawyers asked about Ms. Feinstein’s remarks, a Senate lawyer responded in a letter that she “did not state, and did not mean to state” that those cases were linked to the warrantless surveillance program. Rather, the lawyer wrote, her point was that terrorism remained a problem.

In a recent court filing, the lawyers wrote that it is “hard to believe” Ms. Feinstein would cite “random” cases when pressing to reauthorize the 2008 law, suggesting either that the government is still concealing something or that she had employed the “politics of fear” to influence the debate. A spokesman for Ms. Feinstein said she preferred to let the letter speak for itself.

On a New Jersey Islet, Twilight of the Landline

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/technology/on-a-new-jersey-islet-twilight-of-the-landline.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 10:31 AM
Subject: re: On a New Jersey Islet, Twilight of the Landline
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    In 2013, U.S. law still treats communications by landline differently from those by cellphone, although users do not.  My communications by landline enjoy a presumption of privacy; to tap the contents legally requires a court warrant or a National Security Letter. My communications by cellphone enjoy no such legal protection. As soon as the message is transmitted by radio from my cellphone to a relay tower I have "shared" it with a third party. From that point onwards, I enjoy no presumption of privacy and no court warrant is needed to tap the contents of my conversation.

   Of course, this law needs to be fixed to give teeth to Americans' Fourth Amendment guarantees of freedom from unreasonable search. But until the law is fixed, for Verizon to replace landline service with a wireless link is to deprive residents of a basic civil right, as guaranteed in our bill or rights.

Barry Haskell Levine

 

MANTOLOKING, N.J. — Hurricane Sandy devastated this barrier island community of multimillion-dollar homes, but in Peter Flihan’s view, Verizon Communications has delivered a second blow: the telecommunications giant did not rebuild the landlines destroyed in the storm, and traditional telephone service here has now gone the way of the telegraph.

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“Verizon decides then and there to step on us,” said Mr. Flihan, 75, a retired toy designer and marketer.

Verizon said it was too expensive to replace Mantoloking’s traditional copper-line phone network — the kind that has connected America for more than a century — and instead installed Voice Link, a wireless service it insisted was better.

Verizon’s move on this sliver of land is a look into the not-too-distant future, a foreshadowing of nearly all telephone service across the United States. The traditional landline is not expected to last the decade in a country where nearly 40 percent of households use only wireless phones. Even now, less than 10 percent of households have only a landline phone, according to government data that counts cable-based phone service in that category.

The changing landscape has Verizon, AT&T and other phone companies itching to rid themselves of the cost of maintaining their vast copper-wire networks and instead offer wireless and fiber-optic lines like FiOS and U-verse, even though the new services often fail during a blackout.

“The vision I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chairman and chief executive, said last year. Robert W. Quinn Jr., AT&T’s senior vice president for federal regulatory issues, said the death of the old network was inevitable. “We’re scavenging for replacement parts to be able to fix the stuff when it breaks,” he said at an industry conference in Maryland last week. “That’s why it’s going to happen.”

The Federal Communications Commission has long agreed. In its National Broadband Plan, published in 2010, the F.C.C. said that requiring certain carriers to maintain plain old telephone service “is not sustainable” and could siphon investments away from new networks.

“The challenge for the country,” the F.C.C. said, is to ensure “a smooth transition for Americans who use traditional phone service and for the businesses that provide it.”

But as far as Mr. Flihan and others in New Jersey are concerned, that transition from a reliable service — one that has given them a sense of security all their lives — is not smooth at all. An array of state-sanctioned consumer advocacy groups, as well as AARP, have petitioned regulators to disallow the replacement of Mantoloking’s copper lines with Voice Link.

Not only will Voice Link not work if the power fails — a backup battery provides two hours of talking time, hardly reassuring to people battered by Sandy — but Verizon warns Voice Link users that calls to 911 under normal conditions might not go through because of network congestion. Medical devices that require periodic tests over phone lines, like many pacemakers, cannot transmit over Voice Link. Fax machines do not work over most wireless phone networks, including Voice Link. Neither do many home security systems, which depend on a copper phone line to connect to a response center.

“They told us this was the greatest thing in the world,” Mr. Flihan said. But he estimates that roughly 25 percent of the calls he makes through the Verizon Voice Link service do not go through the first time he dials, or sometimes the second or third. Occasionally, the call is interrupted by clicking sounds, and sometimes a third party’s voice can be heard on the line, Mr. Flihan said.

Verizon responded that it had offered to visit Mr. Flihan’s house to address the problems. Mr. Flihan said he had refused if Verizon would not bring back his landline. Overall, the company said that a vast majority of Voice Link customers in Mantoloking and elsewhere liked Voice Link, and if not, they could get phone service over cable television lines through Comcast or another provider.

The difference between wired and wireless, however, is a big one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/world/middleeast/egypt-violence.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 9:52 AM
Subject: re: Egyptian Attacks Are Escalating Amid Stalemate
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    The Arab Spring replaced a corrupt, repressive unrepresentative government in Egypt with an imperfect democracy. Three months ago, that experiment was ended by a military coup d'etat. The American people are unlikely to ever know how deeply we were involved in this coup. At minimum, someone assured al-Sisi that we wouldn't cut off $billions in  U.S. aid as our statutes require in case of a coup.

   So what have we bought? The al-Sisi junta continues to abide by the Peace Treaty with Israel as Morsi did and as Mubarak did. And it goes on beating and jailing and killing anyone who questions its legitimacy. But the Egyptian people now know that we stand by the military, and that our rhetoric of democracy and liberty and rights is a tissue of lies. Americans ask "why do they hate us?". The answer's not that obscure.

Barry Haskell Levine

Egyptian Attacks Are Escalating Amid Stalemate

Mostafa Darwish/Associated Press

Egyptian security forces at the site of a car bombing on a security headquarters in the Sinai town of El Tur on Monday.

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: October 7, 2013 

• 
  
• BACKED GOVERNMENT AND ITS ISLAMIST OPPONENTS ESCALATED ON MONDAY, WITH AN EXPANSION OF ATTACKS AGAINST GOVERNMENT TARGETS, SIGNS THAT THE AUTHORITIES HAVE FAILED TO SECURE THE STREETS AND THAT BOTH SIDES REFUSE TO BACK DOWN.

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Timeline of Turmoil in Egypt After Mubarak and Morsi

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• Dozens Are Killed in Street Violence Across Egypt (October 7, 2013)

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A state security building after a car bombing on Monday in the Sinai town of El Tur that killed two police officers and injured nearly 50 other people.

Three brazen attacks across the country included a drive-by shooting near the Suez Canal that killed six soldiers, a car bomb that killed three police officers and wounded dozens near the Red Sea resorts area, and the first rocket-propelled grenade launched in the struggle, exploding near an elite enclave of the capital and damaging a satellite transmitter.

The attacks came a day after security forces killed 53 protesters, many shot in the head and chest, in the worst outbreak of street mayhem in Cairo since mid-August.

Three months after the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, the violence was the latest evidence that the new government installed on July 3 by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi had failed to neutralize the Islamist opposition even after arresting its leadership and demonstrating its willingness to use lethal force.

To many in the government, the protests and attacks seemed only to underscore the need to redouble its fight against the Brotherhood, which officials quickly blamed for Monday’s attacks.

To the Islamist opposition, however, a heavy turnout for a day of protests on Sunday despite the deadly reprisals only proved the resilience of their “anti coup” movement — even with no obvious leadership. Faced with a return to decades of repression, Islamists said, they had no choice but to continue their protests even if they risked death and stood little chance of reversing the takeover.

The seemingly random attacks on Monday, many analysts said, indicated that the violent backlash against the new government had taken on a momentum that the leaders of the Brotherhood could no longer restrain even if they wanted to.

While neither side could fully triumph, neither could see room to pull back, setting the stage for further bloodshed, said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo who has tried without success to broker steps toward compromise. “We have reached a bloody stalemate,” he said.

Since Mr. Morsi was deposed, the killing of security officers has become an almost daily occurrence in the industrial canal zone of the lawless northern Sinai. But the car bomb on Monday morning in the south Sinai town of El Tur, in the same region as the biblical Mount Sinai and the Sharm el Sheik resort, was the first sign that such attacks might be spreading to what had been a pillar of the Egyptian economy, its Red Sea resorts.

And the rocket-propelled grenade attack was the first time in years that such a heavy weapon had been used in the vicinity of the capital. The grenade tore a foot-wide hole in a satellite-transmission dish, and its explosion an hour before dawn sent shivers through the affluent neighborhood of Maadi, a heavily guarded precinct that is home to many embassies and diplomats.

No one claimed responsibility for the attacks, nor did they need to. The attacks were universally assumed to be the work of Islamists angry at Mr. Morsi’s ouster, and, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized as spokesmen, two senior government officials blamed the Brotherhood despite its repeated public disavowals of such tactics.

“Blackmail by terrorism,” said one of the officials, a senior military officer.

Suggesting the Brotherhood was almost predisposed to violence, he argued that the violence might have been worse if not for the crackdown, in which security forces have killed more than 1,000 protesters and jailed hundreds of Islamist leaders. If the violence was this severe with the leaders behind bars, the officer asked, how much worse might it be if leaders were released?

The Brotherhood’s “anti coup” alliance, meanwhile, saluted what it called the courage and sacrifice of “unprecedented numbers” who had turned out the day before. In a statement on Monday, the alliance called for student protests at schools and universities on Tuesday “to denounce the continuation of the massacres.”

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Mostafa Darwish/E.P.A.

Egyptian soldiers at the site of a car bombing on Monday.

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Timeline of Turmoil in Egypt After Mubarak and Morsi

And it all but dared the government to continue the violence against protesters by calling for new marches on Friday to Tahrir Square, the symbolic center of the 2011 revolt against President Hosni Mubarak and more recently the staging ground for rallies in support of General Sisi. It was the attempt by pro-Morsi marchers to reach Tahrir Square on Sunday, when it was the site of a pro-military celebration, that set in motion the day of deadly violence, and the opposition alliance’s plans to try again this Friday appeared to set the stage for more.

“Nobody will keep us from the square no matter what the sacrifices,” the alliance said in its statement.

Leaders and supporters of the Brotherhood have said repeatedly for weeks that they have no choice but to continue their street protests regardless of the odds, because the new government has so far shown every intention of suppressing Egyptian democracy as well as their movement.

“This is a final ultimate battle with the military,” Ahmed el-Erainy, 42, a business consultant and Brotherhood member recently released from prison after his arrest at an antigovernment sit-in, said on Monday. “It is the ultimate battle between us and them, and by us I don’t just mean the Brothers — I mean the civil state versus the military state.”

Like others in the Brotherhood, he dismissed the idea that its members could ever hope for fairness under the military-led government, and after his turn through Egypt’s capricious and politicized judicial system he laughed with particular relish at the idea that instead of street protests they might put their trust in the law and the courts. “What judiciary?” he asked. “There is no judiciary in Egypt.”

H. A. Hellyer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who is based in Egypt, argued that the Brotherhood’s approach was tragically shortsighted. Egypt’s security forces were likely to meet almost any mass demonstration with force, and the Islamists end up taking the blame for the loss of life, the chaos and any subsequent retaliation like the attacks on Monday.

“Who do you think will be blamed for that R.P.G. attack?” Mr. Hellyer said. “More people will die, you will have violence in other parts of the country, and all that will be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“It is only a question of whether the Brotherhood are pummeled out of the political arena, or if they withdraw on their own terms,” he added.

But Professor Shahin of the American University in Cairo argued that by harassing the government the protests gave the Islamists some leverage, and that the current government was also in a battle it could never fully win. “You can’t just say, ‘I have half the population on my side and with it I can crush the other half,’ and go on like that indefinitely,” he said. “This military-backed government cannot consolidate on the basis of repression and the authoritarian measures of the ‘50s and ‘60s. That is a bygone era.
”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/world/middleeast/syria-crisis.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:02 AM
Subject: re: Key Syrian Rebel Groups Abandon Exile Leaders
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Until now it had been confusing for Americans; the fighting in Syria didn't conform to our template in which there can be only two sides to a conflict.  Now however, the forces opposed to al-Assad's unconscionable  rule have sorted themselves out.  We owe support to the suffering Syrian people and to Free Syrian Army and not to those who align with al-Qaeda. 

   It is president Obama's delaying tactic--going to our do-nothing Congress--that has bought this clarification.Thanks, guys!

Barry Haskell Levine

Key Syrian Rebel Groups Abandon Exile Leaders

Associated Press

Smoke rose after an airstrike in a village in Hama Province on Wednesday.

By BEN HUBBARD and MICHAEL R. GORDON

Published: September 25, 2013NATIONS PUSH FOR A PEACE CONFERENCE TO END SYRIA’S CIVIL WAR, A COLLECTION OF SOME OF THE COUNTRY’S MOST POWERFUL REBEL GROUPS HAVE PUBLICLY ABANDONED THE OPPOSITION’S POLITICAL LEADERS, CASTING THEIR LOT WITH AN AFFILIATE OF AL QAEDA.

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backed leadership has dwindled, a second, more extreme Al Qaeda group has carved out footholds across parts of Syria, frequently clashing with mainline rebels who accuse it of making the establishment of an Islamic state a priority over the fight to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

The fractured nature of the opposition, the rising radical Islamist character of some rebel fighters, and the increasing complexity of Syria’s battle lines have left the exile leadership with diminished clout inside the country and have raised the question of whether it could hold up its end of any agreement reached to end the war.

The deep differences between many of those fighting in Syria and the political leaders who have represented the opposition abroad spilled into the open late Tuesday, when 11 rebel groups issued a statement declaring that the opposition could be represented only by people who have “lived their troubles and shared in what they have sacrificed.”

Distancing themselves from the exile opposition’s call for a democratic, civil government to replace Mr. Assad, they called on all military and civilian groups in Syria to “unify in a clear Islamic frame.” Those that signed the statement included three groups aligned with the Western-backed opposition’s Supreme Military Council.

Mohannad al-Najjar, an activist close to the leadership of one of the statement’s most powerful signers, Al Tawhid Brigade, said the group intended to send a message of disapproval to an exile leadership it believes has accomplished little.

“We found it was time to announce publicly and clearly what we are after, which is Shariah law for the country and to convey a message to the opposition coalition that it has been three years and they have never done any good for the Syrian uprising and the people suffering inside,” he said.

The statement was issued just as Western nations are striving to raise the profile of the “moderate” Syrian political opposition, which is led by Ahmad al-Jarba. The United States and its allies have been reluctant to fully align with and arm the rebels because their ranks are heavily populated by Islamists.

France has scheduled an event on Thursday on the sidelines of the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly at which Mr. Jarba is to speak along with foreign ministers who have backed him, including Secretary of State John Kerry.

There was no immediate comment from Mr. Jarba, whose coalition is formally known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. Mr. Jarba canceled a news conference that had also been scheduled for Thursday.

A senior State Department official who accompanied Mr. Kerry to the United Nations meetings this week said the United States was still trying to strengthen Mr. Jarba’s coalition and suggested that some of the factions that had broken with him included extremists.

“We, of course, have seen the reports of an announcement by some Islamist opposition groups of their formation of a new political alliance,” the State Department official said.

“As we’ve already said clearly before, we’ve been long working toward unity among the opposition,” the official added. “But we also have had extreme concerns about extremists.”

Another American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing internal deliberations, said the coalition had recently made “real progress” in broadening its base by including an array of Kurdish parties as well as members of local councils in “liberated” areas of northern and eastern Syria.

But the official acknowledged that the coalition had more to do to build up its credibility inside the country, since its headquarters are in Turkey and not Syria.

The latest split in the opposition emerged as the United States, Russia and other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council were making progress on another front: drafting a Council resolution that would enforce an agreement on eliminating Syria’s vast chemical weapons arsenal.

A Western diplomat said Wednesday that about 80 percent of the resolution had been agreed to and that he was “cautiously optimistic” that it would be settled this week.

The rifts between the exile opposition and those fighting Mr. Assad’s forces inside Syria have raised questions about whether the opposition’s political leadership has sufficient influence in the country to hold up its end if an agreement is ever reached to end the civil war.

“At this stage, the political opposition does not have the credibility with or the leverage over the armed groups on the ground to enforce an agreement that the armed groups reject,” said Noah Bonsey, who studies the Syrian opposition for the International Crisis Group.

“You need two parties for an agreement, and there is no viable political alternative to the coalition,” he said, defining a disconnect between the diplomatic efforts taking shape in New York and the reality across Syria.

Inside Syria, rebel groups that originally formed to respond to crackdowns by Mr. Assad’s forces on political protests have gradually merged into larger groupings, some commanded and staffed by Islamists. But differences in ideology and competition for scarce foreign support have made it hard for them to unite under an effective, single command.

Seeking to build a moderate front against Mr. Assad, Western nations encouraged the formation of the opposition political coalition. Even though some of its leading members, like Mr. Jarba, have been imprisoned by the Assad government, the coalition has loose links to many of the rebel fighters on the ground.

The rebel groups that assailed the political opposition are themselves diverse and include a number that are linked to the coalition’s Supreme Military Council. More troubling to the West, they also include the Nusra Front, a group linked to Al Qaeda. At the same time they include groups that remain opposed to another group linked to Al Qaeda: the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

“The brigades that signed have political differences with Nusra, but we agree with them militarily since they want to topple the regime,” said a rebel who gave his name as Abu Bashir.

A coalition member and aide to Mr. Jarba said the opposition was still studying the development but was surprised by some of the groups that had signed on with the Nusra Front.

“The Islamic project is clear and it is not our project,” said the coalition member, Monzer Akbik. “We don’t have a religious project; we have a civil democratic project, and that needs to be clear.”

Further complicating the picture is the rise of the new Qaeda franchise, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has established footholds across northern and eastern Syria with the intention to lay the foundations of an Islamic state.

In recent months, it has supplanted the Nusra Front as the primary destination for foreign jihadis streaming into Syria, according to rebels and activists who have had contact with the group.

Its fighters, who hail from across the Arab world, Chechnya, Europe and elsewhere, have a reputation for being well armed and strong in battle. Its suicide bombers are often sent to strike the first blow against government bases.

But its application of strict Islamic law has isolated rebels and civilians. Its members have executed and beheaded captives in town squares and imposed strict codes, forcing residents to wear modest dress and banning smoking in entire villages.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/world/middleeast/syria-crisis.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:02 AM
Subject: re: Key Syrian Rebel Groups Abandon Exile Leaders
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Until now it had been confusing for Americans; the fighting in Syria didn't conform to our template in which there can be only two sides to a conflict.  Now however, the forces opposed to al-Assad's unconscionable  rule have sorted themselves out.  We owe support to the suffering Syrian people and to Free Syrian Army and not to those who align with al-Qaeda. 

   It is president Obama's delaying tactic--going to our do-nothing Congress--that has bought this clarification.Thanks, guys!

Barry Haskell Levine

Key Syrian Rebel Groups Abandon Exile Leaders

Associated Press

Smoke rose after an airstrike in a village in Hama Province on Wednesday.

By BEN HUBBARD and MICHAEL R. GORDON

Published: September 25, 2013NATIONS PUSH FOR A PEACE CONFERENCE TO END SYRIA’S CIVIL WAR, A COLLECTION OF SOME OF THE COUNTRY’S MOST POWERFUL REBEL GROUPS HAVE PUBLICLY ABANDONED THE OPPOSITION’S POLITICAL LEADERS, CASTING THEIR LOT WITH AN AFFILIATE OF AL QAEDA.

Multimedia

backed leadership has dwindled, a second, more extreme Al Qaeda group has carved out footholds across parts of Syria, frequently clashing with mainline rebels who accuse it of making the establishment of an Islamic state a priority over the fight to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

The fractured nature of the opposition, the rising radical Islamist character of some rebel fighters, and the increasing complexity of Syria’s battle lines have left the exile leadership with diminished clout inside the country and have raised the question of whether it could hold up its end of any agreement reached to end the war.

The deep differences between many of those fighting in Syria and the political leaders who have represented the opposition abroad spilled into the open late Tuesday, when 11 rebel groups issued a statement declaring that the opposition could be represented only by people who have “lived their troubles and shared in what they have sacrificed.”

Distancing themselves from the exile opposition’s call for a democratic, civil government to replace Mr. Assad, they called on all military and civilian groups in Syria to “unify in a clear Islamic frame.” Those that signed the statement included three groups aligned with the Western-backed opposition’s Supreme Military Council.

Mohannad al-Najjar, an activist close to the leadership of one of the statement’s most powerful signers, Al Tawhid Brigade, said the group intended to send a message of disapproval to an exile leadership it believes has accomplished little.

“We found it was time to announce publicly and clearly what we are after, which is Shariah law for the country and to convey a message to the opposition coalition that it has been three years and they have never done any good for the Syrian uprising and the people suffering inside,” he said.

The statement was issued just as Western nations are striving to raise the profile of the “moderate” Syrian political opposition, which is led by Ahmad al-Jarba. The United States and its allies have been reluctant to fully align with and arm the rebels because their ranks are heavily populated by Islamists.

France has scheduled an event on Thursday on the sidelines of the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly at which Mr. Jarba is to speak along with foreign ministers who have backed him, including Secretary of State John Kerry.

There was no immediate comment from Mr. Jarba, whose coalition is formally known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. Mr. Jarba canceled a news conference that had also been scheduled for Thursday.

A senior State Department official who accompanied Mr. Kerry to the United Nations meetings this week said the United States was still trying to strengthen Mr. Jarba’s coalition and suggested that some of the factions that had broken with him included extremists.

“We, of course, have seen the reports of an announcement by some Islamist opposition groups of their formation of a new political alliance,” the State Department official said.

“As we’ve already said clearly before, we’ve been long working toward unity among the opposition,” the official added. “But we also have had extreme concerns about extremists.”

Another American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing internal deliberations, said the coalition had recently made “real progress” in broadening its base by including an array of Kurdish parties as well as members of local councils in “liberated” areas of northern and eastern Syria.

But the official acknowledged that the coalition had more to do to build up its credibility inside the country, since its headquarters are in Turkey and not Syria.

The latest split in the opposition emerged as the United States, Russia and other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council were making progress on another front: drafting a Council resolution that would enforce an agreement on eliminating Syria’s vast chemical weapons arsenal.

A Western diplomat said Wednesday that about 80 percent of the resolution had been agreed to and that he was “cautiously optimistic” that it would be settled this week.

The rifts between the exile opposition and those fighting Mr. Assad’s forces inside Syria have raised questions about whether the opposition’s political leadership has sufficient influence in the country to hold up its end if an agreement is ever reached to end the civil war.

“At this stage, the political opposition does not have the credibility with or the leverage over the armed groups on the ground to enforce an agreement that the armed groups reject,” said Noah Bonsey, who studies the Syrian opposition for the International Crisis Group.

“You need two parties for an agreement, and there is no viable political alternative to the coalition,” he said, defining a disconnect between the diplomatic efforts taking shape in New York and the reality across Syria.

Inside Syria, rebel groups that originally formed to respond to crackdowns by Mr. Assad’s forces on political protests have gradually merged into larger groupings, some commanded and staffed by Islamists. But differences in ideology and competition for scarce foreign support have made it hard for them to unite under an effective, single command.

Seeking to build a moderate front against Mr. Assad, Western nations encouraged the formation of the opposition political coalition. Even though some of its leading members, like Mr. Jarba, have been imprisoned by the Assad government, the coalition has loose links to many of the rebel fighters on the ground.

The rebel groups that assailed the political opposition are themselves diverse and include a number that are linked to the coalition’s Supreme Military Council. More troubling to the West, they also include the Nusra Front, a group linked to Al Qaeda. At the same time they include groups that remain opposed to another group linked to Al Qaeda: the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

“The brigades that signed have political differences with Nusra, but we agree with them militarily since they want to topple the regime,” said a rebel who gave his name as Abu Bashir.

A coalition member and aide to Mr. Jarba said the opposition was still studying the development but was surprised by some of the groups that had signed on with the Nusra Front.

“The Islamic project is clear and it is not our project,” said the coalition member, Monzer Akbik. “We don’t have a religious project; we have a civil democratic project, and that needs to be clear.”

Further complicating the picture is the rise of the new Qaeda franchise, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has established footholds across northern and eastern Syria with the intention to lay the foundations of an Islamic state.

In recent months, it has supplanted the Nusra Front as the primary destination for foreign jihadis streaming into Syria, according to rebels and activists who have had contact with the group.

Its fighters, who hail from across the Arab world, Chechnya, Europe and elsewhere, have a reputation for being well armed and strong in battle. Its suicide bombers are often sent to strike the first blow against government bases.

But its application of strict Islamic law has isolated rebels and civilians. Its members have executed and beheaded captives in town squares and imposed strict codes, forcing residents to wear modest dress and banning smoking in entire villages.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/world/middleeast/egyptian-court-bans-muslim-brotherhood.html?_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 9:28 AM
Subject: re: Egyptian Court Shuts Down the Muslim Brotherhood and Seizes Its Assets
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Decades after the facts, U.S. citizens are still learning the role our government played in the coups that toppled Mossadegh in Iran and Allende in Chile. We pray that Egypt's new government proves less murderous thatn those of he Shah or Pinochet. But his much we know already. The junta we've endorsed in Egypt is the most repressive government there in human memory.

   Americans should consider with open eyes our own role in creating the horrors of the last century before embarking on any more experiments in regime change around the world.

Barry Haskell Levine

Egyptian Court Shuts Down the Muslim Brotherhood and Seizes Its Assets

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

Anti-Muslim Brotherhood graffiti depicting former President Mohamed Morsi in Cairo.

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: September 23, 2013 

CAIRO — An Egyptian court on Monday issued an injunction dissolving the Muslim Brotherhood and confiscating its assets, escalating a broad crackdown on the group less than three months since the military ousted its ally, President Mohamed Morsi.

The ruling, by the Cairo Court for Urgent Matters, amounts to a preliminary injunction shutting down the Brotherhood until a higher court renders a more permanent verdict. The leftist party Tagammu had sought the immediate action, accusing the Brotherhood of “terrorism” and of exploiting religion for political gain. The court ordered the Brotherhood’s assets to be held in trust until a final decision.Related

If confirmed, the ban on the Brotherhood — Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group — would further diminish hopes of the new government’s fulfilling its promise to restart a democratic political process that would include Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters. For now, though, it effectively formalizes the suppression of the Brotherhood that is already well under way.

Since Mr. Morsi’s ouster, the new government appointed by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi has killed more than 1,000 Brotherhood members in mass shootings at protests against the takeover and arrested thousands more, including almost all of the group’s leaders. Security services have closed offices of the group and its political party in cities around the country. Members are now sometimes afraid to speak publicly by name for fear of reprisals.

And even before Mr. Morsi was overthrown, the police watched idly as a crowd of anti-Brotherhood protesters methodically burned down the group’s gleaming Cairo headquarters — a symbol of its emergence after the 2011 revolution from decades underground. The destruction capped weeks of attacks on its offices around the country.

Some Islamist lawyers said Monday that they would appeal the injunction, but the Brotherhood’s legal status is likely to remain uncertain for some time. Amid the anti-Islamist fervor after Mr. Morsi’s ouster, the group now faces several similar legal claims seeking to rescind its license or prohibit its work, and it is unclear how long it might take to resolve them.

In a statement issued from an office in London — out of reach of the Egyptian police — the Brotherhood called the verdict “an attack on democracy,” arguing that the court overstepped its jurisdiction and failed to allow the group to present its side of the case. “It is clearly an attempt to ban the Muslim Brotherhood from political participation,” statement said, accusing the military leaders of “throwing Egypt back into its darkest days of dictatorship and tyranny.”

“We have existed for 85 years, and will continue to do so,” it continued. “We are part and parcel of the Egyptian society, and a corrupt and illegitimate judicial decision cannot change that.”

Laying out its reasoning, the court reached back to the Brotherhood’s founding as a religious revival group in 1928, when Egypt was in the last tumultuous decades under a British-backed monarchy. From its beginning, the court argued, the Brotherhood has always used Islam as a tool to achieve its political goals and adopted violence as its tactic.

The state newspaper Al Ahram elaborated further, declaring on its Web site that the court found the Brotherhood had “violated the rights of the citizens, who found only oppression and arrogance during their reign” — until fatigued citizens had risen up this summer “under the protection of the armed forces, the sword of the homeland inseparable from their people in the confrontation with an unjust regime.”

Despite the tone of the official news media, it was hard to discern whether the court’s ruling was part of a plan by the generals now leading Egypt or a more ad hoc judicial decision, said Michael Hanna, a researcher who studies Egypt at the Century Foundation in New York. “It could be part of a broader strategy with respect to the Muslim Brotherhood, or it could be that people in the military were as surprised as anyone,” he said.

In a sweeping injunction, the court banned both the Brotherhood itself and “all activities” it organized, sponsored or financed. It immediately returned the Brotherhood to the outlawed, underground status it occupied for most of its 85 years, including the long decades from President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1954 crackdown on the group until the 2011 revolt that ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

If enforced, the ruling could take a toll on communities across Egypt where the Brotherhood has often played a philanthropic role. For decades, the Brotherhood has also played an open role in political life by sponsoring candidates who formed a minority bloc of the Parliament.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting
.