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/2013/09/26/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
.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/close-the-nsas-back-doors.html?_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 7:56 AM
Subject: re: Close the N.S.A.’s Back Doors
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   America can't afford its NSA. This is not just a matter of the NSA's $10.8 budget; that money's mostly merely wasted. By systematically compromising companies' security here, the NSA makes sure that anyone who values their Intellectual Property or their clients' data will incorporate and operate somewhere else.

   In the 21st century, that's a competitive disadvantage that no economy can accept.

Barry Haskell Levine

EDITORIAL

Close the N.S.A.’s Back Doors

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: September 21, 2013

Today's EditorialsIn 2006, a federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, helped build an international encryption system to help countries and industries fend off computer hacking and theft. Unbeknown to the many users of the system, a different government arm, the National Security Agency, secretly inserted a “back door” into the system that allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using its technology.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, make clear that the agency has never met an encryption system that it has not tried to penetrate. And it frequently tries to take the easy way out. Because modern cryptography can be so hard to break, even using the brute force of the agency’s powerful supercomputers, the agency prefers to collaborate with big software companies and cipher authors, getting hidden access built right into their systems.

The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica recently reported that the agency now has access to the codes that protect commerce and banking systems, trade secrets and medical records, and everyone’s e-mail and Internet chat messages, including virtual private networks. In some cases, the agency pressured companies to give it access; as The Guardian reported earlier this year, Microsoft provided access to Hotmail, Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Skype. According to some of the Snowden documents given to Der Spiegel, the N.S.A. also has access to the encryption protecting data on iPhones, Android and BlackBerry phones.

These back doors and special access routes are a terrible idea, another example of the intelligence community’s overreach. Companies and individuals are increasingly putting their most confidential data on cloud storage services, and need to rely on assurances their data will be secure. Knowing that encryption has been deliberately weakened will undermine confidence in these systems and interfere with commerce.

The back doors also strip away the expectations of privacy that individuals, businesses and governments have in ordinary communications. If back doors are built into systems by the N.S.A., who is to say that other countries’ spy agencies — or hackers, pirates and terrorists — won’t discover and exploit them?

The government can get a warrant and break into the communications or data of any individual or company suspected of breaking the law. But crippling everyone’s ability to use encryption is going too far, just as the N.S.A. has exceeded its boundaries in collecting everyone’s phone records rather than limiting its focus to actual suspects.

Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, has introduced a bill that would, among other provisions, bar the government from requiring software makers to insert built-in ways to bypass encryption. It deserves full Congressional support. In the meantime, several Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, are building encryption systems that will be much more difficult for the N.S.A. to penetrate, forced to assure their customers that they are not a secret partner with the dark side of their own government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/world/middleeast/extremists-take-syrian-town-on-turkeys-border.html?_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 11:49 AM
Subject: re: Extremists Take Syrian Town Near Turkey Border
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Americans want desperately to believe that there are two sides to every story. Anyone paying attention to the war in Syria knows that in fact there are many more. To oppose al-Assad is not to back al-Nusra, to oppose al-Qaeda one need not endorse the use of chemical weapons.

   Millions of Syrians engaged in a year of carefully non-violent protests against al-Assad during the Arab Spring. We ignored them. Now that they're being exterminated by their own government they deserve our help no less. if we are too pure to save them from starvation and bombardment, we have little right to complain that they accept help from other quarters.

Barry Haskell Levine

Extremists Take Syrian Town Near Turkey Border

Muzaffar Salman/Reuters

Rebel fighters in Aleppo, Syria. Islamic extremists seized a town hear the Turkish border that is on the road to Aleppo.

By BEN HUBBARD and KARAM SHOUMALI

Published: September 18, 2013

BEIRUT, Lebanon — An extremist group linked to Al Qaeda routed Syrian rebel fighters and seized control of a gateway town near Syria’s northern border with Turkey on Wednesday, posting snipers on rooftops, erecting checkpoints and imposing a curfew on the local population.

The takeover of the town, Azaz, by fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, reflected the rising strength of extremist fighters in northern and eastern Syria and their rapidly deteriorating relations with more mainline rebels.

By early Thursday, Islamist rebel leaders had intervened to stop the fighting, although most of the town appeared firmly in the hands of the extremists, opposition activists said. The extremists had not seized the nearby Bab al-Salameh border crossing with Turkey. Azaz sits just south of the border crossing on the road to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and has served as an important artery for the rebellion in northern Syria, allowing arms, fighters and supplies to move in and refugees fleeing the violence to leave the country.

Its seizure is likely to alarm Syria’s neighbors. Turkey, which has vocally supported the fight against forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and allowed fighters and arms to flow freely across its southern border, now faces a bold Qaeda affiliate.

Lebanon has sought information for more than a year about nine Lebanese Shiites held captive by rebels in Azaz. The town’s seizure by a group that considers Shiites heretics who deserve execution is sure to increase worries about their fate.

The takeover also signals a new low in relations between the rebels fighting a civil war against Mr. Assad’s forces and international jihadists who have flocked to rebel-controlled areas to lay the groundwork for an Islamic state.

For much of the 30-month-old conflict, the rebels welcomed jihadist fighters for the know-how and battlefield prowess they brought to the anti-Assad struggle. In recent months, however, jihadist groups have isolated local populations by imposing strict Islamic codes, carrying out public executions and clashing with rebel groups.

In the eastern city of Deir al-Zour on Wednesday, extremist fighters took dozens of rebels captive after a gunfight near a rebel base, activists said.

Reached by telephone, a rebel commander who gave only his first name, Khattab, said that Wednesday’s violence in Azaz began when ISIS fighters stormed the town and tried to detain German doctors who were visiting a hospital.

As local doctors tried to keep out the fighters, rebel brigades arrived and clashes erupted, Khattab said. At least three rebel fighters were killed, he said, as well as an opposition media activist, who was shot dead in the street by a sniper.

“He was left bleeding, and the ISIS fighters did not allow anyone to take his body,” he said.

Dr. Moayyad Qieto, also reached by phone, said the German doctors worked for a group that financed the Azaz hospital. They were evacuated, unharmed, to the nearby border with Turkey.

“The situation is so tense, like a volcano that might erupt at any time,” Dr. Qieto said.

Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, and Karam Shoumali from Istanbul. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut
.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/two-state-illusion.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 8:43 AM
Subject: re: Two-State Illusion
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  Among apologists for the status quo, Ian Lustick deserve pride of place.  No one 'til now had managed to cite the breakup of Yugoslavia and the expulsion of the British from Ireland to argue that Israelis should remain in the West Bank. He then concludes by swallowing his rhetorical tail, arguing that the future may yet bring us a two-state solution, if only we would quit working towards it.

   If some future generation of Palestinians will deserve self-determination, then their parents do now. The charter of the United Nations is not some vague sketch of eschatology. It is a treaty ratified by the congress of the United States. As such, it is the supreme law of the land, which our Executive is charged to see "faithfully executed".

Barry Haskell Levine

OPINION

Two-State Illusion

By IAN S. LUSTICK

Published: September 14, 2013 102 Comments

Enlarge This ImageTHE last three decades are littered with the carcasses of failed negotiating projects billed as the last chance for peace in Israel. All sides have been wedded to the notion that there must be two states, one Palestinian and one Israeli. For more than 30 years, experts and politicians have warned of a “point of no return.” Secretary of State John Kerry is merely the latest in a long line of well-meaning American diplomats wedded to an idea whose time is now past.

Josh Cochran

Enlarge This Image

Oded Balilty/Associated Press

A barrier in the West Bank city of Hebron. With barbed-wire coils, hills scarred by patrol roads and weather-beaten guard posts, Israel has been shaped like few other countries by its borders.

True believers in the two-state solution see absolutely no hope elsewhere. With no alternative in mind, and unwilling or unable to rethink their basic assumptions, they are forced to defend a notion whose success they can no longer sincerely portray as plausible or even possible.

It’s like 1975 all over again, when the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco fell into a coma. The news media began a long death watch, announcing each night that Generalissimo Franco was still not dead. This desperate allegiance to the departed echoes in every speech, policy brief and op-ed about the two-state solution today.

True, some comas miraculously end. Great surprises sometimes happen. The problem is that the changes required to achieve the vision of robust Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side are now considerably less likely than other less familiar but more plausible outcomes that demand high-level attention but aren’t receiving it.

Strong Islamist trends make a fundamentalist Palestine more likely than a small state under a secular government. The disappearance of Israel as a Zionist project, through war, cultural exhaustion or demographic momentum, is at least as plausible as the evacuation of enough of the half-million Israelis living across the 1967 border, or Green Line, to allow a real Palestinian state to exist. While the vision of thriving Israeli and Palestinian states has slipped from the plausible to the barely possible, one mixed state emerging from prolonged and violent struggles over democratic rights is no longer inconceivable. Yet the fantasy that there is a two-state solution keeps everyone from taking action toward something that might work.

All sides have reasons to cling to this illusion. The Palestinian Authority needs its people to believe that progress is being made toward a two-state solution so it can continue to get the economic aid and diplomatic support that subsidize the lifestyles of its leaders, the jobs of tens of thousands of soldiers, spies, police officers and civil servants, and the authority’s prominence in a Palestinian society that views it as corrupt and incompetent.

Israeli governments cling to the two-state notion because it seems to reflect the sentiments of the Jewish Israeli majority and it shields the country from international opprobrium, even as it camouflages relentless efforts to expand Israel’s territory into the West Bank.

American politicians need the two-state slogan to show they are working toward a diplomatic solution, to keep the pro-Israel lobby from turning against them and to disguise their humiliating inability to allow any daylight between Washington and the Israeli government.

Finally, the “peace process” industry — with its legions of consultants, pundits, academics and journalists — needs a steady supply of readers, listeners and funders who are either desperately worried that this latest round of talks will lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state, or that it will not.

Conceived as early as the 1930s, the idea of two states between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea all but disappeared from public consciousness between 1948 and 1967. Between 1967 and 1973 it re-emerged, advanced by a minority of “moderates” in each community. By the 1990s it was embraced by majorities on both sides as not only possible but, during the height of the Oslo peace process, probable. But failures of leadership in the face of tremendous pressures brought Oslo crashing down. These days no one suggests that a negotiated two-state “solution” is probable. The most optimistic insist that, for some brief period, it may still be conceivable.

But many Israelis see the demise of the country as not just possible, but probable. The State of Israel has been established, not its permanence. The most common phrase in Israeli political discourse is some variation of “If X happens (or doesn’t), the state will not survive!” Those who assume that Israel will always exist as a Zionist project should consider how quickly the Soviet, Pahlavi Iranian, apartheid South African, Baathist Iraqi and Yugoslavian states unraveled, and how little warning even sharp-eyed observers had that such transformations were imminent.

In all these cases, presumptions about what was “impossible” helped protect brittle institutions by limiting political imagination. And when objective realities began to diverge dramatically from official common sense, immense pressures accumulated.

JUST as a balloon filled gradually with air bursts when the limit of its tensile strength is passed, there are thresholds of radical, disruptive change in politics. When those thresholds are crossed, the impossible suddenly becomes probable, with revolutionary implications for governments and nations. As we see vividly across the Middle East, when forces for change and new ideas are stifled as completely and for as long as they have been in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, sudden and jagged change becomes increasingly likely.

History offers many such lessons. Britain ruled Ireland for centuries, annexing it in 1801. By the mid-19th century the entire British political class treated Ireland’s permanent incorporation as a fact of life. But bottled-up Irish fury produced repeated revolts. By the 1880s, the Irish question was the greatest issue facing the country; it led to mutiny in the army and near civil war before World War I. Once the war ended, it took only a few years until the establishment of an independent Ireland. What was inconceivable became a fact.

France ruled Algeria for 130 years and never questioned the future of Algeria as an integral part of France. But enormous pressures accumulated, exploding into a revolution that left hundreds of thousands dead. Despite France’s military victory over the rebels in 1959, Algeria soon became independent, and Europeans were evacuated from the country.

And when Mikhail S. Gorbachev sought to save Soviet Communism by reforming it with the policies of glasnost and perestroika, he relied on the people’s continuing belief in the permanence of the Soviet structure. But the forces for change that had already accumulated were overwhelming. Unable to separate freedom of expression and market reforms from the rest of the Soviet state project, Mr. Gorbachev’s policies pushed the system beyond its breaking point. Within a few years, both the Soviet Union and the Communist regime were gone.

Obsessive focus on preserving the theoretical possibility of a two-state solution is as irrational as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic rather than steering clear of icebergs. But neither ships in the night nor the State of Israel can avoid icebergs unless they are seen.

The two-state slogan now serves as a comforting blindfold of entirely contradictory fantasies. The current Israeli version of two states envisions Palestinian refugees abandoning their sacred “right of return,” an Israeli-controlled Jerusalem and an archipelago of huge Jewish settlements, crisscrossed by Jewish-only access roads. The Palestinian version imagines the return of refugees, evacuation of almost all settlements and East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.

DIPLOMACY under the two-state banner is no longer a path to a solution but an obstacle itself. We are engaged in negotiations to nowhere. And this isn’t the first time that American diplomats have obstructed political progress in the name of hopeless talks.

In 1980, I was a 30-year-old assistant professor, on leave from Dartmouth at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. I was responsible for analyzing Israeli settlement and land expropriation policies in the West Bank and their implications for the “autonomy negotiations” under way at that time between Israel, Egypt and the United States. It was clear to me that Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government was systematically using tangled talks over how to conduct negotiations as camouflage for de facto annexation of the West Bank via intensive settlement construction, land expropriation and encouragement of “voluntary” Arab emigration.

To protect the peace process, the United States strictly limited its public criticism of Israeli government policies, making Washington an enabler for the very processes of de facto annexation that were destroying prospects for the full autonomy and realization of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people that were the official purpose of the negotiations. This view was endorsed and promoted by some leading voices within the administration. Unsurprisingly, it angered others. One day I was summoned to the office of a high-ranking diplomat, who was then one of the State Department’s most powerful advocates for the negotiations. He was a man I had always respected and admired. “Are you,” he asked me, “personally so sure of your analysis that you are willing to destroy the only available chance for peace between Israelis and Palestinians?” His question gave me pause, but only briefly. “Yes, sir,” I answered, “I am.”

I still am. Had America blown the whistle on destructive Israeli policies back then it might have greatly enhanced prospects for peace under a different leader. It could have prevented Mr. Begin’s narrow electoral victory in 1981 and brought a government to power that was ready to negotiate seriously with the Palestinians before the first or second intifada and before the construction of massive settlement complexes in the West Bank. We could have had an Oslo process a crucial decade earlier.

Now, as then, negotiations are phony; they suppress information that Israelis, Palestinians and Americans need to find noncatastrophic paths into the future. The issue is no longer where to draw political boundaries between Jews and Arabs on a map but how equality of political rights is to be achieved. The end of the 1967 Green Line as a demarcation of potential Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty means that Israeli occupation of the West Bank will stigmatize all of Israel.

For some, abandoning the two-state mirage may feel like the end of the world. But it is not. Israel may no longer exist as the Jewish and democratic vision of its Zionist founders. The Palestine Liberation Organization stalwarts in Ramallah may not strut on the stage of a real Palestinian state. But these lost futures can make others more likely.

THE assumptions necessary to preserve the two-state slogan have blinded us to more likely scenarios. With a status but no role, what remains of the Palestinian Authority will disappear. Israel will face the stark challenge of controlling economic and political activity and all land and water resources from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The stage will be set for ruthless oppression, mass mobilization, riots, brutality, terror, Jewish and Arab emigration and rising tides of international condemnation of Israel. And faced with growing outrage, America will no longer be able to offer unconditional support for Israel. Once the illusion of a neat and palatable solution to the conflict disappears, Israeli leaders may then begin to see, as South Africa’s white leaders saw in the late 1980s, that their behavior is producing isolation, emigration and hopelessness.

Fresh thinking could then begin about Israel’s place in a rapidly changing region. There could be generous compensation for lost property. Negotiating with Arabs and Palestinians based on satisfying their key political requirements, rather than on maximizing Israeli prerogatives, might yield more security and legitimacy. Perhaps publicly acknowledging Israeli mistakes and responsibility for the suffering of Palestinians would enable the Arab side to accept less than what it imagines as full justice. And perhaps Israel’s potent but essentially unusable nuclear weapons arsenal could be sacrificed for a verified and strictly enforced W.M.D.-free zone in the Middle East.

Such ideas cannot even be entertained as long as the chimera of a negotiated two-state solution monopolizes all attention. But once the two-state-fantasy blindfolds are off, politics could make strange bedfellows.

In such a radically new environment, secular Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank could ally with Tel Aviv’s post-Zionists, non-Jewish Russian-speaking immigrants, foreign workers and global-village Israeli entrepreneurs. Anti-nationalist ultra-Orthodox Jews might find common cause with Muslim traditionalists. Untethered to statist Zionism in a rapidly changing Middle East, Israelis whose families came from Arab countries might find new reasons to think of themselves not as “Eastern,” but as Arab. Masses of downtrodden and exploited Muslim and Arab refugees, in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel itself could see democracy, not Islam, as the solution for translating what they have (numbers) into what they want (rights and resources). Israeli Jews committed above all to settling throughout the greater Land of Israel may find arrangements based on a confederation, or a regional formula more attractive than narrow Israeli nationalism.

It remains possible that someday two real states may arise. But the pretense that negotiations under the slogan of “two states for two peoples” could lead to such a solution must be abandoned. Time can do things that politicians cannot.

Just as an independent Ireland emerged by seceding 120 years after it was formally incorporated into the United Kingdom, so, too, a single state might be the route to eventual Palestinian independence. But such outcomes develop organically; they are not implemented by diplomats overnight and they do not arise without the painful stalemates that lead each party to conclude that time is not on their side.

Peacemaking and democratic state building require blood and magic. The question is not whether the future has conflict in store for Israel-Palestine. It does. Nor is the question whether conflict can be prevented. It cannot. But avoiding truly catastrophic change means ending the stifling reign of an outdated idea and allowing both sides to see and then adapt to the world as it is.

Ian S. Lustick is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza” and “Trapped in the War on Terror.
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Making Administration’s Case, Kerry Finds Six Words That Spell Trouble

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/world/middleeast/making-administrations-case-kerry-finds-six-words-that-spell-trouble.html?_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 9:04 AM
Subject: re: Making Administration’s Case, Kerry Finds Six Words That Spell Trouble
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
   Anyone who promotes a Secretary of State from the U.S. Senate should expect a torrent of sometimes contradictory words. But the voice that should guide us in Syria was formed not in the Senate, but in the wars of the Middle East. As Secretary of State Colin Powell taught us, military action should be used only as a last resort and only if there is a clear risk to national security by the intended target; the force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy.
   There is no place for Kerry's "limited" or "unbelievably small" strikes. The U.S. should resort to military force only when we're willing to mobilize the nation to war. That means committing our sons and daughters to bleed and die, not just dispatching a few cruise missiles.
Barry Haskell Levine

-----------

CRISIS IN SYRIA
LISTENING POST
Making Administration’s Case, Kerry Finds Six Words That Spell Trouble
By MARK LANDLER
Published: September 12, 2013

LIVE WASHINGTON — In the last three weeks, Secretary of State John Kerry has uttered tens of thousands of words about Syria — in Congressional hearings, on Sunday news programs, from the State Department and the British Foreign Office, and now in a Geneva hotel, where he and the Russians are hashing out a plan that could avert a military strike.
Six of those words have gotten him into trouble.

Making the case on Sept. 3 for military action before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry acknowledged a worst case that would entail American “boots on the ground” in Syria. Six days later, at a news conference in London, he promised that any military strike againstSyria ordered by President Obama would be “unbelievably small.”

Critics on the left and right seized on Mr. Kerry’s comments as proof of two contradictory theories about the president’s threatened strike: that it would be a slippery slope to another American war in the Middle East; or that it was a token gesture that would do nothing to alter the deadly stalemate between the Syrian government and the rebels.

In Mr. Kerry’s zeal to persuade different audiences, administration officials concede, he leaned too far in both directions. But these slips of the tongue laid bare a more basic contradiction in the Obama administration’s Syria policy: it is a call for military action by a president who has desperately wanted to avoid being drawn into military action.

Given his boss’s ambivalence, it was fitting that what many initially saw as Mr. Kerry’s third major gaffe — suggesting in London that President Bashar al-Assadcould avert a military strike by immediately turning over his chemical weapons — instead set in motion a diplomatic process that might end up being Mr. Obama’s salvation.

With Russia taking up Mr. Kerry on his seemingly offhand suggestion, it now falls to the secretary of state to try to work out an international plan to take over and ultimately destroy Mr. Assad’s chemical weapons. With such a central role, his public statements will continue to receive a level of scrutiny unusual even for a secretary of state.

Mr. Kerry’s early missteps are hardly unusual, but they have gotten more attention than those of his two immediate predecessors, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, former diplomats say, because of the intensity of the Syria crisis and Mr. Kerry’s own intensity in responding to it.

“Every secretary I’ve worked with has said things that were impolitic,” said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East diplomat who has worked for Republican and Democratic administrations. But Mr. Kerry, he said, has done so on a bigger stage than many of his predecessors.

“It’s the combination of Kerry’s supreme self-confidence, his desire to be out there, and his own forceful style, which has led him to an imprecision of language,” said Mr. Miller, who is now a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Despite the missteps, Mr. Kerry has kept the backing of the White House, where officials said they appreciated that he had gone “all in” on advocating a difficult policy.

“It’s a complicated balancing act to persuade people of the necessity to act, while also having the necessity to prove that it will be limited,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser.

As a former senator who spent nearly three decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry is used to speaking at length and with authority on world affairs. At the committee hearing last week, he was speaking to former colleagues with whom he had shared a dais for years.

So when the committee’s current chairman, Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, asked him whether a Senate resolution authorizing force should contain an absolute prohibition on deploying American soldiers to Syria, Mr. Kerry responded candidly that he could think of scenarios that would require “boots on the ground.”

“In the event Syria imploded, for instance, or in the event there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of Al Nusra or someone else,” Mr. Kerry said. When that upset the ranking Republican, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, Mr. Kerry replied that he had been “thinking out loud about how to protect America’s interests” and hastened to add, “There will not be American boots on the ground with respect to the civil war.”

A week later, after a meeting with the British foreign secretary, William Hague, Mr. Kerry faced a different question. Why, a reporter asked him, had the Obama administration’s arguments for a strike fallen flat with voters in the United States, Britain and France?

Mr. Kerry answered that people were understandably wary of another Iraq or Afghanistan. Compared with those wars, he said, the operation Mr. Obama had in mind was a “very limited, very targeted, very short-term effort that degrades his capacity to deliver chemical weapons.” It would, he added, be an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.”

Within minutes, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been pushing the White House for a more robust response to Syria, posted a scathing Tweet: “Kerry says #Syria strike would be ‘unbelievably small’ — that is unbelievably unhelpful.”

Fortunately for Mr. Kerry, that turned out to be a footnote. Minutes earlier, when he was asked whether Mr. Assad could do anything to head off a strike, he said: “Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”

Sensing another gaffe, Mr. Kerry’s aides insisted he had been speaking rhetorically. But Mr. Kerry had been told by the national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, that Mr. Obama had discussed this issue with President Vladimir V. Putin in St. Petersburg days earlier. As soon as Mr. Kerry opened the door, the Russians walked through it.

The State Department’s deputy spokeswoman, Marie E. Harf, said of the situation, “We’re in Geneva today talking about a possible peaceful path to eliminate the regime’s chemical weapons precisely because John Kerry issued a hypothetical challenge that smoked out our private conversations with the Russians.
”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/more-mistakes-at-the-nsa.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 9:51 AM
Subject: re: More Mistakes at the N.S.A.
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  James Clapper's  and Keith Alexander's pattern of lying to Congress and to the public is tiresomely familiar. In Saddam Hussein's mouth, this was called  a campaign of"cheat and retreat". But it needn't  take NATO and airstrikes to pry them out of their  palaces. President Obama just needs to fire them. Or--alternatively--concede that the Directors of National Intelligence and of the NSA are above the law.

Barry Haskell Levine

More Mistakes at the N.S.A.

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: September 11, 2013

RelatedA fresh trove of previously classified documents released on Tuesdayprovides further evidence — as if any more were needed — that the National Security Agency has frequently been unable to comprehend, let alone manage, its vast and continuing collection of Americans’ telephone and Internet records. The documents, made available by the agency in response to lawsuits by two advocacy groups, revealed that in 2009 a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court severely reprimanded the agency for violating its own procedures for gathering and analyzing phone records, and then misrepresented those violations to the court.

• 
  

The agency gathers data on billions of telephone calls. But to examine a specific phone number it must have “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the number is connected to terrorism. The agency keeps an “alert list” with about 18,000 phone numbers it suspects may be linked to terrorism, and it compares new call data to numbers on the list. But while agency lawyers told the court that all the numbers on the list met the required legal standard of suspicion, only about 10 percent of the numbers on the list actually did so.

The judge in the case, Reggie B. Walton, sharply rebuked the agency not only for violating its own rules but for failing to fix the problem. Although the agency said it had retrained its analysts, he pointed out that many of them continued to repeat the error, some because they had not installed proper software and others, apparently, without even realizing it.

The violations were both so frequent and so systemic, Judge Walton found, that the privacy safeguards the court ordered “never functioned effectively.” Alarmingly, the agency itself acknowledged that “there was no single person who had a complete technical understanding” of the system its analysts were using.

Intelligence officials insist that “technologically complex” surveillance activities will always be prone to human error. But that is precisely the problem — indeed a problem greatly multiplied — when the government collects personal information on such a vast scale.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said that while he welcomed the release of the documents, they showed “systemic problems” and that the bulk collection program should be stopped.

Senator Leahy is right, particularly given that the intelligence court has no adversarial process and is at the mercy of the government’s competence at ferreting out its own incompetence. As Judge Walton told The Washington Post in August, the court “is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided” to it. President Obama has said he welcomes an open debate on the balance between protecting national security and preserving civil liberties, but how can that debate ever be truly open when the government insists on policing itself and hiding the results?

While the recent declassifications are a step toward greater openness, it is still hard to accept the claim made on Tuesday by James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, that the “handful of compliance incidents” that have happened each year since 2009 are “the result of human error or provider error” and not because of “systemic misunderstandings.”

In a statement released Tuesday, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall said “significant information” regarding violations of the bulk e-mail collection program still remains classified. Judge Walton anticipated as much when he wrote in his 2009 ruling that he saw “little reason to believe that the most recent discovery of a systemic, ongoing violation ... will be the last.”