Syria warns: "Whole region" could burn

An anti-Syrian regime protester burns a poster of Syrian President Bashar Assad, during a protest following Friday prayers in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, Oct. 28, 2011. Arabic reads: "The silence of lambs."

Πηγή: cbsnews

By AP
Oct 30 2011

BEIRUT - Syrian President Bashar Assad warned against Western intervention in his country's 7-month-old uprising, saying such action would trigger an "earthquake" that "would burn the whole region."

Assad comments, published in an interview with Britain's Sunday Telegraph, were made against a backdrop of growing calls from anti-regime protesters for a no-fly zone over Syria and increasingly frequent clashes between government troops and army defectors, the latest of which left at least 30 troops dead Saturday.

"Syria is the hub now in this region. It is the fault line, and if you play with the ground you will cause an earthquake," Assad said. "Do you want to see another Afghanistan, or tens of Afghanistans?"

Assad's remarks appeared to reflect his regime's increasing concern about foreign intervention in the country's crisis after the recent death of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who was toppled by a popular uprising backed by NATO airstrikes.

Syrian opposition leaders have not called for an armed uprising like the one in Libya and have for the most part opposed foreign intervention, and the U.S. and its allies have shown little appetite for intervening in another Arab nation in turmoil. But with the 7-month-old revolt against Assad stalemated, some Syrian protesters have begun calling for a no-fly zone over the country because of fears the regime might use its air force now that army defectors are becoming more active in fighting the security forces.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a clash Saturday night in the restive central city of Homs between soldiers and gunmen believed to be army defectors left at least 20 soldiers dead and 53 wounded. It also said gunmen ambushed a bus carrying security officers late Saturday in the northwestern province of Idlib, killing at least 10 security agents. One attacker was also killed.

The Associated Press could not verify the activists' accounts. Syria has banned most foreign media and restricted local coverage, making it impossible to get independent confirmation of the events on the ground. Syria's state-run news agency SANA, said seven members of the military and police, who were killed in Homs and the suburbs of Damascus were buried Sunday.

The Local Coordination Committees, another activist group, said Sunday that 343 people, including 20 children, have been killed in Syria since Oct. 16, when the Cairo-based Arab League gave Damascus a 15-day deadline to enact a cease-fire. A meeting was scheduled for later Sunday in Qatar between an Arab committee set up by the 22-member Arab League and a Syrian delegation expected to be headed by Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem.

The unrest in Syria could send unsettling ripples through the region, as Damascus' web of alliances extends to Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah movement, the militant Palestinian Hamas and Iran's Shiite theocracy.

Unlike Gadhafi, Assad enjoys a number of powerful allies that give him the means to push back against the outside pressure. A conflict in Syria risks touching off a wider Middle East conflict with arch foes Israel and Iran in the mix. Syria wouldn't have to look far for prime targets to strike, sharing a border with U.S.-backed Israel and NATO-member Turkey.

In case of an international intervention, Assad and his main Mideast backer, Iran, could launch retaliatory attacks on Israel or -- more likely -- unleash Hezbollah fighters or Palestinian militant allies for the job. To the north, Turkey has opened its doors to anti-Assad activists and breakaway military rebels, which also could bring Syrian reprisals.
Assad alluded to those concerns at home and abroad, saying "any problem in Syria will burn the whole region. If the plan is to divide Syria, that is to divide the whole region."

A Yemeni female protestor shows her hand with Arabic that reads "we will prevail" and the colors of pre-Gadhafi Libya, Syria, Yemen, Tunisia ,and Egypt during a demonstration demanding the resignation of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa, Yemen, Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2011. (Credit: AP Photo)

The uprising against the Syrian regime began during a wave of anti-government protests in the Arab world that toppled autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The U.N. says that Assad's crackdown has left more than 3,000 people dead since the uprising began in mid-March.

Facing an unprecedented threat to his rule, Assad is desperate to show that only he can guarantee security in a troubled region where failed states abound.

In a show of support to Assad's regime, thousands of Syrians carrying the nation's flag and Assad posters rallied Sunday in a major square in the southern city of Sweida, some 70 miles (110 kilometers) south of Damascus, near the Jordanian border. There have been two similar massive pro-Assad demonstrations in recent days in the capital Damascus and the coastal city of Latakia.

Assad said that Western countries "are going to ratchet up the pressure, definitely." He was apparently referring to a wave of sanctions that were imposed by the European Union and the U.S.

"But Syria is different in every respect from Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen. The history is different. The politics is different," Assad said.

The Syrian president described the uprising as a "struggle between Islamism and pan-Arabism." He was referring to his ruling Baath party's secular ideology and the Muslim Brotherhood that was crushed by his regime in 1982.

"We've been fighting the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1950s and we are still fighting with them," Assad said.

Assad also spoke to Russia's state Channel One television, and in an interview broadcast Sunday hailed Moscow's veto of a European-backed U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria that aimed to impose sanctions on Damascus.

"We are relying on Russia as a country with which we have strong historic ties," Assad said.

The measure vetoed by Russia and China earlier this month would have been the first legally binding resolution against Syria since Assad's forces began attacking civilian protesters.

Clinton credited with key role in success of NATO airstrikes, Libyan rebels

Clinton’s role: U.S. officials and key allies are offering a detailed new defense of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s pivotal role in the approach that led to Moammar Gaddafi’s fall — both within a divided Cabinet and a fragile, assembled-on-the-fly international alliance.

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Joby Warrick

Oct 31 2011

TRIPOLI, Libya — At 5:45 p.m. on March 19, three hours before the official start of the air campaign over Libya, four French Rafale jet fighters streaked across the Mediterranean coastline to attack a column of tanks heading toward the rebel city of Benghazi. The jets quickly obliterated their targets — and in doing so nearly upended the international alliance coming to Benghazi’s rescue.

France’s head start on the air war infuriated Italy’s prime minister, who accused Paris of upstaging NATO. Silvio Berlusconi warned darkly of cutting access to Italian air bases vital to the alliance’s warplanes.

“It nearly broke up the coalition,” said a European diplomat who had a front-row seat to the events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters between allies. Yet the rift was quickly patched, thanks to a frenzied but largely unseen lobbying effort that kept the coalition from unraveling in its opening hours.

“That,” the diplomat said, “was Hillary.”

Seven months later, with longtime U.S. nemesis Moammar Gaddafi dead and Libya’s onetime rebels now in charge, the coalition air campaign has emerged as a foreign policy success for the Obama administration and its most famous Cabinet member, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Some Republicans derided the effort as “leading from behind,” while many others questioned why President Obama was entangling the nation in another overseas military campaign that had little strategic urgency and scant public support. But with NATO operations likely to end this week, U.S. officials and key allies are offering a detailed new defense of the approach and Clinton’s pivotal role — both within a divided Cabinet and a fragile, assembled-on-the-fly international alliance.

What emerges from these accounts is a picture of Clinton using her mixture of political pragmatism and tenacity to referee spats among NATO partners, secure crucial backing from Arab countries and tutor rebels on the fine points of message management.

Clinton, in an interview, acknowledged “periods of anguish and buyer’s remorse” during the seven months of the campaign. But, she said, “we set into motion a policy that was on the right side of history, on the right side of our values, on the right side of our strategic interests in the region.”

From skeptic to advocate

During the initial weeks of unrest in Libya, Clinton was among the White House officials clinging to fading hopes that Gaddafi might fall without any help from the West.

From the first armed resistance on Feb. 18 until March 9, the disorganized opposition movement appeared to be on a roll, taking control of Libyan cities from Benghazi to Brega and Misurata on the Mediterranean coast. But in a single, bloody week, Gaddafi loyalists turned rebel gains into a rout, crushing resistance in towns across Libya before marshaling forces for a final drive against Benghazi, the last opposition stronghold.

Libya: Militias Terrorizing Residents of ‘Loyalist' Town

Πηγή: trust
Oct 30 2011

(New York) - Militias from the city of Misrata are terrorizing the displaced residents of the nearby town of Tawergha, accusing them of having committed atrocities with Gaddafi forces in Misrata, Human Rights Watch said today. The entire town of 30,000 people is abandoned - some of it ransacked and burned - and Misrata brigade commanders say the residents of Tawergha should never return.

Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of Tawerghans across the country, including 26 people in detention in and around Misrata and 35 displaced people staying in Tripoli, Heisha, and Hun. They gave credible accounts of some Misrata militias shooting unarmed Tawerghans, and of arbitrary arrests and beatings of Tawerghan detainees, in a few cases leading to death.

"Revenge against the people from Tawergha, whatever the accusations against them, undermines the goal of the Libyan revolution," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "In the new Libya, Tawerghans accused of wrongdoing should be prosecuted based on the law, not subject to vigilante justice."

The National Transitional Council (NTC) should bring central command and control, as well as accountability, to the more than 100armed groups from Misrata, Human Rights Watch said. Anyone abusing Tawerghans, or preventing their return, is committing a criminal offense.

The people of Tawergha mostly fled in August to the Jufra region, south of Misrata, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which put the number of displaced Tawerghans there at 15,000. Local officials in Hun, a town in Jufra, said 4,000 Tawerghans had sought shelter in three camps there as of early October, and an unknown number are in the town of Sokna and nearby agricultural settlements. Since then, at least 5,000 Tawerghans have moved from Jufra to Benghazi and Tripoli, and other groups are in Tarhuna, Khoms, and the far south.

When Human Rights Watch visited Tawergha at the start of October, it appeared emptied of its residents and most of the buildings had been ransacked. Over three days between October 3 and 5, 2011, Human Rights Watch saw militias and individuals from Misrata set 12 houses aflame in the town.




On October 25, Human Rights Watch spoke with a Misrata brigade that claimed to be "guarding" Tawergha. The deputy commander said his forces were "protecting the place from arson and looting." At the same time, trucks full of furniture and carpets, apparently looted from homes, drove past with men on the trucks honking and waving. Brigade members failed to intervene, arguing passionately that Tawreghans should never return after "what they did in Misrata."

On October 26, Human Rights Watch saw four more homes burning in the town, and a freshly lit fire in an apartment block next the brigade's base.

Most of the Tawerghans interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they had fled between August 10 and 12, as Libyan opposition forces led by fighters from Misrata approached and entered the town. More than 100 civilians stayed in Tawergha after that date but said that militias quickly forced them out.

"They came outside my house, and told us we had to leave our homes," said 80-year-old Muhammad Grayra Tawergi, a retired date farmer. "We were unarmed."

The local authorities and residents of Misrata widely accuse Tawerghans, the majority of whom say they are descendants of African slaves, of having committed serious crimes in Misrata with Gaddafi forces, including murders and rapes.

Gaddafi forces used Tawergha as a base for attacks on Misrata and the surrounding area from March until they fled in August. Many Tawerghans supported Gaddafi, whose government claimed that Libyan opposition fighters would enslave Tawerghans if they took power. Hundreds of Tawerghans joined the army, both Misrata and Tawergha residents said, during the heaviest attacks on Misrata between March and May, when the city was besieged and repeatedly subjected to indiscriminate rocket and mortar attacks. Misratan fighters successfully defended the city and began to defeat Gaddafi forces in the area, with help from NATO airstrikes.

Since the defeat of Gaddafi's forces, the Tawerghans have reported serious abuses, including arbitrary arrests, beatings, and some killings. Two cousins who fled the town told Human Rights Watch that they were gathering firewood in mid-September near where they were taking refuge in Lode, in the Jufra district, when they were captured by six armed men from a Misrata brigade. The brigade members handcuffed the two men, beat them, shot them, and left them abandoned on the side of the road.

"The first bullet hit my leg," one of the men said. "Then they started shooting all over, and two bullets hit my side and one in my cousin's leg. They were telling us to extend our hands to take off the handcuffs. I could see the bone in my leg so I fainted." The other cousin, interviewed separately, gave the same account (see below), stressing that both men were unarmed and in custody when they were shot.

In some cases, arrested Tawerghans have been subjected to torture and severe beatings, sometimes leading to death. Two witnesses told Human Rights Watch that on August 20, they saw guards in a Misrata detention facility on Baladia Street beat to death Emhamid Muhammad Shtaywey, commonly known as Faraj, a 42 year-old garbage truck driver from Tawergha, who they said had been tortured to confess to rape.

"They hit him with everything, all over his body: a hose, a leather belt, a stick; they even kicked him on the chest," one witness to the beating said. "He was lying on his back and they hit him hard."

On August 20 or 21, guards at the Zaroug School detention facility in Misrata beat to death a mentally ill man from Tawergha named Ashraf Salah Muhammad because they wanted the pass code to a walkie-talkie, two witnesses said.

"They started whipping him at 10 a.m. with a horse whip," one said. "It lasted forty-five minutes. He was dead by noon."

On September 25, Human Rights Watch witnessed the abuse of detainees at the Wahda detention facility in Misrata. Around midnight, a group of guards forced four injured detainees to run in the courtyard and to walk on their knees with their hands behind their heads.

"We do this every day," one of the guards said. "It is sport before they go to bed. They committed rape."

Sulaiman Fortia, one of three Misrata representatives on the NTC, denounced the deaths in custody and the mistreatment of Tawerghans in Misrata prisons.

"This is wrong, and it shouldn't happen," he told Human Rights Watch.

Fortia said the problem stems from the lack of civilian control over the hundreds of Misrata brigades and militias operating in Misrata, Tripoli, and until recently in Sirte.

Ibrahim Yusuf bin Ghashir, another member of the NTC from Misrata, said that the passions aroused by alleged atrocities, especially rape, make the return of Tawerghans to their town unlikely.

"We think it would be better to relocate them somewhere else - Tripoli, Benghazi, the south - give them housing and compensation for their losses in Tawergha," he said. "These cases cannot be forgiven, and it would be better to resettle them far away."

Gaddafi forces subjected the civilian population of Misrata to serious abuses during the war, Human Rights Watch said, especially during the siege between March and May. Gaddafi forces repeatedly launched indiscriminate mortar and Grad rocket attacks into the town, killing civilians. In April, Human Rights Watch documented the government's use of cluster munitions in the city.

But forcing all residents of Tawergha to resettle permanently in another part of Libya would amount to collective punishment and would constitute a crime against humanity for deportation or forced transfer, Human Rights Watch said.The NTC and Misrata Council should instead ensure the investigation and prosecution of Tawerghans accused of crimes and allow others to return to their homes and live in safety.

The NTC should also hold detained Tawerghans outside of Misrata, due to the abuse many of them are experiencing in the city, Human Rights Watch said.

"The entire town of Tawergha should not be punished for the crimes of some individuals," Whitson said. "Prosecutions of people who committed serious crimes are the way forward, with respect for victims' privacy, not the forced expulsion of the entire town."

Deaths in Custody

Two witnesses, interviewed separately, reported the death in custody of Emhamid Muhammad Shtaywey, known as Faraj, a 42 year-old garbage truck driver from Tawergha, at the Misrata security committee detention facility on Baladia Street at about 8 p.m. on August 20. They said that guards beat him to death. One of the witnesses said that guards and visitors badly beat Faraj throughout most of the day in the Baladia Street facility:

They hit him with everything all over his body: a hose, a leather belt, a stick; they even kicked him on the chest. He was lying on his back, and they hit him hard. Three or four people entered every half an hour and started beating him… He had confessed to rape. I asked him, "Why did you say that?" He said, "They made me." I said, "C'mon, thirty girls, the youngest eight-years-old?" [He said,] "I had to say that so they would stop beating me…" They were cursing and swearing at him: "You rapist, you are with Gaddafi." He wasn't answering, and he wasn't moving. They said, "Wake up, wake up." I saw his chest; it wasn't moving.

The second witness said he saw Shtaywey badly beaten but still alive, and then later saw his dead body.

"They put him out in the hallway," the man said. "He was dead... The guards were touching and feeling him, and they said he had died."

Two witnesses, interviewed separately, described another death in custody of a Tawerghan resident in the basement of the Zaroug School, a makeshift detention facility in Misrata, on August 20 or 21. The facility has since been closed, the witnesses said. One witness said he saw the guards beat the man, and then saw the dead body. The other said he overheard the beating and then saw the dead body. Both witnesses said that the victim, Ashraf Salah Muhammad, in his early thirties, was mentally ill. He was beaten repeatedly in his cell to divulge a pass code to a walkie-talkie, both of the witnesses said. One of the witnesses said:

They started whipping him at 10 a.m. with a horse whip. It lasted forty-five minutes. He was dead by noon… They whipped him on his back and neck… Two guards put thick brown tape around his wrists and mouth. They asked him for the code of his walkie-talkie. That was their only question. He only said, "Have mercy on me. I will kiss your hands so you will leave me be." Over and over again. I don't know why they were asking him this. After they finished torturing him… we went to sleep because of the fasting in Ramadan. After an hour-and-a-half, we woke up and found that he had died. We touched his pulse and didn't feel anything. We knocked on the door and said that someone here had died. The guards covered him with a blanket and took him away. The guards didn't say anything to us about what happened. They just pulled him out and that was that.

Shootings

The harassment by Misrata brigades of Tawerghans includes shootings of unarmed men, sometimes in custody. In one case armed men from Misrata killed a displaced Tawerghan in the camp where he was taking shelter. In two other cases, Misrata brigade members shot Tawerghans in their custody and left them by the side of a deserted road.

Three witnesses told Human Rights Watch that a member of a Misrata brigade killed an unarmed man from Tawergha named Ihsam Omar Sa'ad in late September. They said that Sa'ad, a nurse at the Tawergha hospital, was shot once in the back and once in the leg at the military rest house in Hun, a facility being used as a camp for nearly 1,800 displaced Tawerghans.

One of the witnesses said he entered the camp with Ihsam as members of the al-Adiyat Brigades were separating the young male Tawerghans from the old men, women, and children:

[A Misrata fighter] came with his gun and told me to go back [into the courtyard where the other camp residents had been collected]. He was hitting us with the back of the Kalashnikov. He hit me in my chest. As we were going, one of the Misrata fighters fired two bullets - one hit Ihsam in the back and one in the leg. There were more shots. I looked back. He fell.

A cousin of Ihsam said he was also walking with Ihsam into the compound and saw the shooting. One of the bullets that hit Ihsam went through the jacket that the cousin had draped over his arm, he said. He showed Human Rights Watch the bullet hole in the jacket and the place in the compound where he said Ihsam was shot. The cousin said he attended Ihsam's burial the following day.

In mid-September a Misrata brigade apparently shot and wounded two unarmed cousins from Tawergha, who said they were in the hills gathering firewood a few kilometers from where they were staying in Lode. The men, interviewed separately, said that when they approached the road, six armed men stopped them and handcuffed them to each other. The fighters beat the cousins and asked whether they had fought as members of the Gaddafi forces, as soldiers or volunteers, and whether they had weapons. One of the cousins described how the fighters shot them and abandoned them by the side of the road:

They put us in the car and then changed their mind. They put us on our knees. One of the rebels kicked my cousin on his nose with his boot. One of them tried to point the gun at me, so I was running toward him so he wouldn't shoot at me. One of the guys said they should put us under the car and run us over. We were standing in a corner, and one of them had a 14.5mm pointed at us and the others with their Kalashnikovs pointed… My cousin was crying because his nose was broken, and I just surrendered. When I looked the other way, the first bullet hit my leg. Then they started shooting all over, and two bullets hit my side and one in my cousin's leg. They were telling us to extend our hands to take off the handcuffs. I could see the bone in my leg so I fainted... My cousin was awake, and they pulled me by my neck and pulled us to the edge of the road. I was wearing a gray t-shirt and shorts. My cousin had a red vest and a pair of trousers. They tore his shirt off.

They left us at the edge of the road, put a blanket over us and then started swearing, "You are dogs, hope you die." There was a farm nearby, so my cousin started pulling me so we could hide at the farm... My cousin said to hold on to his shoulders... But my wound was very bad, unlike him. I fell again. I said, "Just leave me, I am going to die." Everything went white. I couldn't see anything. I could just hear his voice but I couldn't understand what he was saying.

The cousin with the lighter bullet wounds said he was able to crawl to safety within 10 days, surviving off irrigation water from nearby farms. The other cousin said he was rescued after about two weeks, also surviving on farm water, at which point one of his wounds had been badly infected. Human Rights Watch interviewed this man while he was still in the hospital, as well as the doctor who was treating him. The bullet marks in the bodies of both men were consistent with their statements, and the medical records for the hospitalized man said he had been admitted to the hospital on October 3 for gunshot wounds.

In another case, Human Rights Watch interviewed a Tawerghan man who said that Misrata fighters opened fire on him and his friend, Abdel Majid Faraj Ali, while they were searching for firewood, hitting Ali in the back. The man said that he and Ali had fled Tawergha and taken refuge on a farm near Lode. On August 22 they went searching for firewood in the area. Near a highway, five unidentified men from Misrata in two pickup trucks stopped and ordered them to approach, the man said. Ali ran and the group of men fired AK-47 rifles in the air, forcing Ali to stop, the man said. The armed men then pulled a Tawerghan detainee who had been badly beaten from one of the trucks. The detainee said he knew Ali.

"Ali got afraid, and so did I," the man said. "We started to run among the date trees. They started yelling ‘slaves, slaves' and fired at us. They hit Abdel in the back and he fell." The man said he managed to get away despite the shooting and hid in a family farm. He did not know Ali's fate.

Prisoner Abuse

Human Rights Watch documented the abuse of Tawerghans and other detainees in the custody of militia fighters, both in Tripoli and in Misrata. Abuse included the use of electric shock and beatings, including beatings on the soles of the feet (falaga).

Misrata brigades single out Tawerghans to extract confessions, many victims and witnesses said. One Tawerghan detainee told Human Rights Watch that the first question Misratan captors ask is, "‘Where are you from?' When they say they are from Tawergha, the Misratan immediately asks, ‘Did you rape? Did you kill? Did you steal?'"

According to head counts that Human Rights Watch conducted during visits to four detention facilities in September and October in Misrata, civilian and military authorities in the city are holding well over 1,300 detainees. Tawerghans held in custody by brigades from other cities did not appear to be singled out for mistreatment.

In late September Human Rights Watch interviewed 50 prisoners in four Misrata prisons, including 22 Tawerghans and 10 non-Libyans. Human Rights Watch also interviewed three Tawerghans who had been released from detention. Human Rights Watch found evidence of mistreatment in three of the four facilities. None of the detainees alleged mistreatment in the Sadoun School facility since May, when the director of the facility, Sheikh Abdulhafith Abu Ghrain, fired those who had committed abuses, according to one detainee who said he had been subjected to electric shock there.

Human Rights Watch found Tawerghan detainees in all four of the detention facilities it visited. In two, Tawerghans constituted the majority of detainees. Most of the Tawerghan detainees reported beatings at the time of their capture, both in Tripoli and Misrata. Most reported beatings at both transitional detention facilities and the de facto prisons. Because of the possibility of reprisals against the detainees, Human Rights Watch is not providing their names.

One Tawerghan man said that in the Sikt detention facility near Misrata in August, members of the Murdaz Brigade from Misrata tried to force confessions of rape:

They wanted me to say I had raped. They ask most people from Tawergha to say that they had raped. They beat me. They used an electric stick on my back and my stomach… they did it over and over. And some of them beat us on our feet twice… They put me in a room by myself and asked me if I raped; I said no. They asked me where the orders came from in Tawergha. "Where were the weapons?" I said, "I am a civilian... I know nothing about the military." They told me to confess that I raped five people. I don't know why five people. They hung me with a pole between my legs and my arms. They beat me up. They used a whip for horses and told me to confess… That lasted five hours. They whipped me on my feet, my legs, my hands. There were lots of different people in civilian clothes. They were taking turns. The investigator was giving orders. After I was beaten, I passed out for five minutes. When I woke up they were standing over me, spitting and cursing at me, and saying, "We will send you back to Africa."

The man showed Human Rights Watch pronounced scars all over his body consistent with his account.

Another Tawerghan detainee described the nightly routine he said he endured at Sikt:

They beat me on my feet every night for 15 minutes, and some people hit my backside and my back. For four days I couldn't sit. They poured cold water on top of me, then took an electric stick and put it on my shoulders, back, and arms each night for ten minutes. It shook me. I can't describe it… They used an engine belt, a plastic hose, a wooden stick, a horse whip…. I had blood in my urine for four or five days.

The man showed Human Rights Watch scars on his body that were still red and protruding one month after the abuse.

Two Tawerghan detainees captured together on August 11, both with visible injuries two months later, said Misrata fighters broke their bones in Misrata. They said that their captors repeatedly hit them with heavy rubber cables and forced them to admit to rapes. A third man said interrogators applied electric shocks to his thighs during an interrogation on August 11, after he was found with weapons in his home in Tawergha.

Another Tawerghan detainee said his Misratan captors repeatedly beat him on the head until he passed out after he had been transferred from Tawergha on August 12 to an unknown location in Misrata. He said the men accused the people of Tawergha of rape, although they did not specifically charge him with wrongdoing. Interviewed in October, he showed Human Rights Watch welts on the top of his head that he said came from the beating.

Another Tawerghan detainee said Misrata fighters captured him in Zawiya, west of Tripoli, on September 20 and took him to a farm where his captors twice put him against the wall and fired bullets near his body as they told him to confess to killing three people in Misrata. He said his captors took him overnight by truck through Tripoli, where he was displayed briefly in Martyrs' Square while chained to the bed of the truck.

Several witnesses at one Misrata facility told Human Rights Watch that they saw guards whip one dark-skinned Tawerghan detainee while forcing him to run around a courtyard and then telling him to climb a pole while shouting, "Monkey needs a banana."

One Tawerghan detainee said that the Misrata fighters who captured him in Tripoli took him to a private building there and beat him with whips and rifle butts.

"I confessed to raping women because I thought that would get me released," he said. "But the beatings continued [in Misrata]." The man's captors said they would take him to "Hotel Jenat," [Hotel Hell] the man said, which is Misrata slang for the local cemetery. The man displayed fresh gashes on his face and arms, and blood was visible inside his mouth. During the interview, the man lost consciousness for about one minute.

While Human Rights Watch was interviewing detainees at the Wahda detention facility in Misrata around midnight on September 25, a group of guards forced four detainees, all of whom were injured, to run in the courtyard and to walk on their knees with their hands behind their heads. When the researcher confronted the guards about the mistreatment as it happened, one guard said: "We do this every day. It is sport before they go to bed. They committed rape."

Human Rights Watch spoke to witnesses who said that the guards had previously beaten other detainees. The supervisor of the prison, Ali Garman, claimed not to be aware that this abuse was taking place there every night, although he was present at the time the witnesses were forced to run and walk on their knees.

Sedik Bashir Bady, deputy head of the Misrata Council, told Human Rights Watch that the council has ordered prison guards and fighters to halt the mistreatment of prisoners, but that guards and fighters had ignored the demand.

"We have made it clear that there must be no abuses," he said. "They don't respect orders. They do what they want."

Omar el-Qayed, a member of the Misrata Military Council, told Human Rights Watch that top officers "do not give license" to abuse prisoners or other Tawerghan people. "But even on the battlefield, the revolutionaries are hard to control," he said.

Forced Displacement

The population of Tawergha, roughly 30,000 people, has fled to other parts of Libya. Most left as anti-Gaddafi forces approached the town in mid-August; at least 140 people who remained were forcibly expelled by members of a militia.

The largest known group took refuge in Jufra, a region 200 miles south of Sirte. In Hun, a town in Jufra, as of early October units of the Al Jazeera Brigade from eastern Libya were guarding about 4,000 displaced persons in three compounds, where the Tawerghans were free to come and go. The brigade had begun transferring some Tawerghan families voluntarily to Benghazi for their protection. On October 5, Human Rights Watch visited the three refugee compounds in Hun and spoke unimpeded with 22 displaced Tawerghans. By October 27, 2011, at least 5,000 Tawerghans had gone to Benghazi.

Al Jazeera Brigade officers told Human Rights Watch that members of brigades from Misrata have tried to enter the camps in Jufra with the intention of rounding up male Tawerghans.

"A few days ago, a Misrata group came to this gate and demanded to go in," one officer said on October 5. "I said no, and one of them shot at the ground at my feet. Everyone loaded up and the confrontation ended. But they might come back." The Misratans have come four times in two weeks demanding to come in, the officer added.

"Mainly they are looking for stray Tawerghans in the street," he said. "They're on a hunt." A committee of Tawerghans in one of the three facilities gave Human Rights Watch a list of more than 50 youths missing from the area over the previous month.

Displaced families in the Hun camps were in crowded, unsanitary conditions. Tawerghan authorities in the camp said that sewage water was leaking into the courtyard and that many of the children had diarrhea. Human Rights Watch noticed a putrid smell in the courtyard area. Men apparently did not have access to indoor toilets.

Tawerghan families told Human Rights Watch that they were running out of money. Although the local community helped them with food, they were buying many of their supplies at the local stores and cooking outside on fires. There were shortages of blankets, children's shoes, and clothes for the fall and winter. Tawerghan authorities in the camp said that a civilian truck from Misrata recently stocked the camp clinic with medications.

In other areas near Hun, Tawerghans had taken refuge in agricultural settlements and had refused invitations from the Al Jazeera Brigade to gather in Hun. Elsewhere they also had moved in with relatives or were living in makeshift camps, especially in Tripoli.

Many Tawerghans said they were reluctant to go outside in many parts of Libya for fear of capture and abuse by Misrata brigades. Misrata units in Tripoli and elsewhere have been rounding up Tawerghan men, frequently transferring them to Misrata.

On September 22, fighters from a Misrata brigade detained at least five members of the Tawergha Local Council, a body of 10 members that the NTC had recognized as representatives from Tawergha. They were released on October 2 or 3.

On September 30, Human Rights Watch visited Heisha, a cluster of rural settlements about 60 miles south of Misrata. Two groups of displaced Tawerghan families had taken refuge in an unfinished housing development and some abandoned farm houses. The first group of about 700 people said they had fled their homes on August 12, when the Misrata forces arrived. They took no part in the fighting, they said, and in fact had opposed Gaddafi. They said that pro-Gaddafi Tawerghans threatened to assault them when the war was over.

In interviews in Heisha, a group of six men said they moved first to Jufra, about 200 miles south of Sirte, on August 11, and then to Heisha, closer to their hometown, on September 26. Rebels at a nearby checkpoint have refused to let them pass either to Tawergha or beyond to Tripoli, they said.

Mohammed Idriss, a physician, said that on October 2, guards denied a woman soon to give birth passage for four hours until they relented and permitted her to continue to Misrata hospital.

"The rebels call us rats and say we will never go back," he told Human Rights Watch.

Three medical workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that the de facto director of the makeshift hospital between Sirte and Heisha, at a place known as Kilometer 50, told the staff to treat Misrata fighters ahead of everyone else, including ahead of "Tawerghans, people who are black, civilians from Sirte, Gaddafi soldiers, and women. Basically anyone not from Misrata."

In the nearby town of Heisha, three Tawerghan families of about 32 women and children had taken refuge in an abandoned farmhouse. They too said they had fled Tawergha on August 12 as forces from Misrata approached, but got no further than Heisha, where rebels arrested five of their men. The women did not know the men's whereabouts, and they have not been able to go back to Tawergha. They are being fed by a nearby family from the southern town of Sebha, they said.

Harassment in Misrata

The collective blame that militias are applying to the people of Tawergha includes Tawerghan residents of Misrata. These people say they dislike Gaddafi and supported the anti-Gaddafi revolt. Human Rights Watch interviewed four such Tawerghans. One said he had been fired from his state job, another that a teller forbade him from withdrawing money at a bank, and another said nurses denied her medical care at the hospital. In all cases the people were told this was because they were Tawerghans. The fourth said a band of armed men from Misrata ransacked his home and stole a camera. All of the men asked that their names not be used. They all said that Misratans had repeatedly told them that Tawerghans would not only be forbidden from returning to Tawergha, but also from staying in Misrata.

One of the Tawerghans, who said he has lived in Misrata for 20 years, said he supported the rebels as a volunteer by giving out food during the siege. On July 11, he arrived on payday at his place of work, which he did not want to identify, and a guard at the facility told him to "forget about it."

"We are going to eradicate Tawergha," he said the guard told him.

"I don't know who these people are and they don't know I was with the revolution," the man told Human Rights Watch. "They don't care. It is enough that I am Tawergha."

The man said he complained to the Misrata Security Committee, which instead of helping told him to surrender his government-provided car. The man said he returned home to find his car stolen.

Another Tawerghan resident of Misrata said she was rejected for treatment at Misrata's government-run hospital, where she went in August for a pregnancy checkup. Nurses told her: "We don't treat Tawarghans here." The woman approached a Libyan doctor friend who conducted an examination in her home. She said that when she has gone to a local market, Misrata people have insulted her and told her to leave town.

One elderly Tawerghan man who said he has lived in Misrata for 10 years, including during the fighting, said a teller denied him service at a bank unless he erased Tawergha from his identity card. He said the teller told him that Tawerghans were "traitors" who should not stay in Misrata.

Another Tawerghan from Misrata, a clothing store owner, said during the anti-Gaddafi revolt, he took part in street protests and helped carry ammunition for the rebels. In mid-July, a group of men in sedans and pickup trucks mounted with recoilless rifles pulled up to his home, he said, knocked on the door and demanded to conduct a search. He said as he opened the door, men leaped over a courtyard wall and entered the house, saying "No more Tawerghans." They overturned shelves and drawers and stole a camera and mobile phone, he said. The man complained to the Misrata Security Committee, but they have not investigated, he said.

Recommendations

Misrata's civil and military leaders should help promote justice for serious violations during the conflict and support the rule of law by:
Publicly condemning revenge attacks against Tawerghans and punishing those who harass or attack Tawerghans, or detain them without grounds;
Issuing strong and unambiguous orders to all military commanders and detention facility officials that physical or mental abuse at the time of arrest or during detention is strictly forbidden and will be punished appropriately, and that commanders will be held responsible;
Expediting efforts to bring the many military brigades and local militias in Misrata under a unified civilian command;
Clarifying who has the lawful authority to detain people and treating detentions by anyone else as a crime;
Transferring Tawerghan detainees out of Misrata to NTC-run facilities in Tripoli or Benghazi, where they are less vulnerable to abuse; and
Working to reestablish the criminal justice system, so those accused of having committed serious crimes can be lawfully investigated, prosecuted, and given in a fair trial.

Exports to Greece, Syria 'risky': ECGC

Πηγή: Business Standard
By Namrata Acharya / Kolkata

Oct 31 2011

Troubled economies of Europe and West Asia are set to drag down India’s rising export graph. For, here is the latest setback: the move by the Export Credit Guarantee Corporation (ECGC) to impose stringent rules for insurance cover for exports to Syria and Greece.

This month, ECGC — the government organisation that provides insurance cover to exporters — reclassified exports to Greece as “risky” by withdrawing open cover insurance scheme for them.

In August, it had issued similar notices for exports to Syria — and in February for Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. Exporters say the situation is worrying, with clouds of another recession in the US adding to their woes.

ECGC provides two types of insurance — open and restricted covers to exporter, with the latter given only after the evaluation of the risk profile of exports.

“The risk element is very high in countries like Greece, Syria, Egypt and some other Middle East countries,” said a senior ECGC official. “So exporters will need specific approval after we examine underwriting risks. It is a preventive measure. We are closely watching the situation,” he told Business Standard.

In consequence, exporters might need to shell out hefty premium for business with countries reclassified by the ECGC.

The Engineering Export Promotion Council (EEPC) calls it a worrying situation. “We are going to see a considerable drop in exports this year,” says its director Suranjan Gupa. “However, since exports in the first six months have seen a growth of 52 per cent, even with slower growth in the next six month, we will be able to achieve at least 20 per cent growth.”

In fact, political turmoil in Egypt may impact Indian exports more, than in any other economy, as the African nation had emerged as one of the important trading partners for India in the recent past.

“Egypt had emerged as an important market for us over the last few years. Engineering exports itself grew by 18 per cent last fiscal,” said Gupta.

India’s trade balance used to be Egypt’s favour earlier, but recently it had balanced out. India’s export to Egypt increased to $1.46 billion in 2009-10, against $1.29 billion in 2008-09.

In fact, Indian companies are no longer participating in government projects in countries like Greece and Syria.

Recently, Syria had invited tenders for railway projects, but most Indian companies refrained from bidding, says exporter Rakesh Shah, who is a former chairman of the EEPC. India’s total exports to Syria in 2009-10 was about $345 million, with major export items being textiles and yarn, petroleum products, transport equipment, machinery, drugs, pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals.

India has already been witnessing a declining trend in exports to Europe due to the economic slowdown and China’s domination in the export market. For example, India’s exports to Greece halved to $452 million in 2009-10, against $878 million in 2008-09.

Banks too are being cautious in giving fresh line of credit to exporters in Europe and West Asia.

Says an official from United Bank of India: “We will be cautious in lending in countries like Italy, where we have considerable leather exports.”

However, in spite of troubled shores of Indian export destinations, exports for April- September 2011 increased by 52 per cent, at $160 billion. Much of the rise in export was due to the apprehension that the duty entitlement pass book, a tax refund scheme, would be withdrawn this year, adds Gupta.

State Bank of India saw export credit growth of about 15 per cent last quarter. “Much of the export credit depends on the US economy,” points ouf an official from SBI. “As of now, though, things are comfortable.”

US Congress for black ops against Iran

New York Congressman Peter King: "Kick out Iranian officials at the UN in New York and in Washington"

Πηγή: ramallahonline
Dr. Ismail Salami

Oct 31 2011

The US secret agenda for tightening its vice-like grip on the Islamic Republic of Iran has taken on an apparently new form after the anti-Iran alleged assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, raised many eyebrows among experts and analysts around the world.

With a strong penchant for pushing for tougher action on Iran, the Obama administration has already imposed a series of sanctions against the Islamic Republic. However, a Republican-controlled congressional committee has recently heard testimony demanding an extensive range of covert operations against the country.

The operations, which range from cyber attacks to political assassinations, are speculated to be conducted under the feeble excuse that Iran was the alleged architect of an assassination plot against the Saudi envoy to the United States. By political assassination, the US congressmen unconsciously mean the liquidation of the Iranian nuclear scientists, an act they actually started long ago.

Retired Army Gen. John Keane told a hearing of two key subcommittees of the House Committee on Homeland Security on Wednesday, “We’ve got to put our hand around their throat now. Why don’t we kill them? We kill other people who kill others.”

Also, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) poured some pearls of wisdom over others and called for “sober, reasoned discussion.”

“Iran’s leaders must be held accountable for their action,” she said, “but we cannot take any reckless actions which may lead to opening another front in the ‘War on Terror,’ which the American people do not want and cannot afford.”

Naturally, the US government, in essence, cannot afford to wage another war at least in view of the economic woes it has wrought upon the American citizens, regardless of other influencing factors.

The stone that started rolling fell into the hands of New York Congressman Peter King who made an extremely bizarre comment. He suggested that the US should kick out Iranian officials at the UN in New York and in Washington and accused them of being spies, ignorant of the fact that the UN is considered an independent international body and that the US has no authority to ‘kick out’ diplomats accredited there en masse.

Overwhelmed with a sense of false eagerness, he renewed the anti-Iran alleged assassination ploy and said excitedly, “So you have the assassination of a foreign ambassador, you have the willingness to kill hundreds of Americans — this is an act of war,” King said, “I don’t think we can just do business as usual or even carry out sanctions as usual.”

The volley of vitriolic words against Iran which issued from Mr. King reeks of blind enmity long egged on by other hawks in Washington.

In point of fact, the anti-Iran moves practically started in 2007 when US Congress agreed to George W. Bush, the then US president, to fund a major increase in covert operations against Iran. According to the intelligence officials who spoke to the Blotter on ABCNews.com, the CIA was then given a presidential approval to commence its covert ‘black’ operations inside Iran. To that effect, over four hundred million dollars were allocated in a Presidential Finding signed by George W. Bush. The ultimate goal of the finding was to cripple Iran’s religious government and the operations involved throwing support behind minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchis and other opposition groups as well as amassing intelligence about Iran’s nuclear sites.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, the intelligence officials confirmed that Bush had signed a “nonlethal presidential finding”, giving the CIA carte blanche to engage in any sabotaging activities including a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions in order to destabilize and eventually achieve regime change in Iran.

“I can’t confirm or deny whether such a program exists or whether the president signed it, but it would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime,” said Bruce Riedel, a retired CIA senior official, an expert on Iran and the Middle East (ABCNEWS.com May 22, 2007).

In June 2007, The New Yorker magazine also ran a similar story by Seymour Hersh, confirming that the finding had been signed by Bush and intended to destabilize the Islamic government.

“The Finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” the article cited a person familiar with its contents as saying, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.”

From an intelligence point of view, the fact that the US government is resorting to covert black operations against Iran rules out the possibility of a military strike against the country.

According to reports, US ambassadors in Islamabad have repeatedly asked for opening a consulate in the province of Baluchistan, a suspicious demand from the US. In 2011, the call was renewed by US ambassador Cameron Munter to Islamabad. Persistence in this demand is to be taken seriously. Baluchistan is strategically important as it is a harbor for the anti-Iran terrorist group, Jundullah, in the first place and a separatist Pakistani province in the second place.

In fact, Washington greatly favors the establishment of a ‘Greater Baluchistan’ which would integrate the Baluch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran. Military expert Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters suggests that Pakistan should be broken up, leading to the formation of a separate country: ‘Greater Baluchistan’ or ‘Free Baluchistan’ (June 2006, The Armed Forces Journal). As a result, this would incorporate the Baluch provinces of Pakistan and Iran into a single political entity which can be tailored to suit the interests of Washington.

So it seems that the US harbors two main ulterior motives if this demand is answered. First, it can fulfill its dream of establishing the Greater Baluchistan, consolidate firm presence in this separatist part of Pakistan and secondly, it will be in a position to avail itself of this influence to carry out its sabotaging activities within Iran.

Earlier in 2007, the Blotter on ABCNews.com revealed the role of the US government in backing the terrorist Iranian group , which is responsible for a number of gruesome assassinations of the Iranian civilians on the Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The terrorist group spares no efforts in sowing the seed of terror in the southern Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan and their lust for murder and cruelty knows no remission. The victims the group has so far claimed include many women and children who have become the direct target of their killing. In July 2010, the group mounted a pair of suicide attacks on a major Shi’ite mosque in the city of Zahedan, the capital of Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan Province, killing dozens of worshippers and wounding over 100 people.

Although US officials deny any ‘direct funding’ of the terrorist group, they acknowledge that they are in contact with the leader of the group on a regular basis. A similar terroristic attack was launched by the same group on a mosque in Zahedan in May 2009, which led to the martyrdom of many worshippers.

Sadly enough, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) implicitly supports the group and reportedly shelters some of its high-profile members in coordination with the CIA.

Isn’t it paradoxical that Jundullah, a terrorist group and an offshoot of al-Qaeda, is directly funded by the US government which keeps bandying about its so-called ‘war on terror’ in the world?

This is enough to cause the US to hang its head low in shame and humility.

– Ismail Salami is an Iranian author and political analyst. A prolific writer, he has written numerous books and articles on the Middle East. His articles have been translated into a number of languages.

Wall Street reform law bogged down

Republicans are blocking the nomination of Richard Cordray

Πηγή: Politico
By JOSH BOAK

Oct 30 2011

President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill into law 15 months ago, saying he was anxious to put new rules of the road in place for Wall Street.

But federal agencies have blown about 77 percent of the rule-making deadlines for the massive overhaul, according to a recent progress report by the law firm Davis Polk — meaning key parts of the bill are far from implementation.

Some Democratic officials see a Republican plot afoot to run out the clock, in hopes that a GOP-controlled Senate and White House can overturn the reforms. But one top Treasury official said the missed deadlines are less of a concern to the administration than the possibility that a rushed process would result in poor regulations.

“We want quality and speed, but we’re not going to sacrifice quality for speed,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin told POLITICO. “We want to make sure that we do these rules in a thorough way.”

In some cases, Wolin said, politics are slowing down the process. Senate Republicans are blocking the nomination of Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless changes in governance are made to the agency. GOP lawmakers also have introduced bills to repeal all or part of the 848-page Dodd-Frank law.

“There are certainly some who’ve sought to delay or roll back provisions of Dodd-Frank or slow things down,” Wolin said. “We don’t think that’s helpful. What’s important now is we go about the business of putting in place a stronger financial system that will better protect our country.”

Republicans push back against the charge, saying that regulators are simply unable to write regulations from the law in a timely or effective way.

Obama has tried to spark more movement on the reforms by taking his case directly to the public in speeches and news conferences.

“What we’ve seen over the last year,” he said at a news conference this month, “is not only did the financial sector — with the Republican Party in Congress — fight us every inch of the way, but now, you’ve got these same folks suggesting that we should roll back all those reforms and go back to the way it was before the crisis.”

But a strategy that largely depends on standing behind a podium and shaming his opponents is unlikely to save the reforms from being killed or delayed, said Arthur Levitt, who was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Clinton administration.

“A president that wants something as complex as this to take place has to devote an incredible amount of his resources and political capital to getting it done,” he said. “Left to the legislators and regulators, it will sink and rot in the miasma of dialogue and debate.”

In putting together the rules, regulators are sorting through thousands of comment letters and answering questions at congressional hearings and meetings with executives and lobbyists from the financial services industry. The sheer volume of activity makes it hard to act quickly or decisively, lending credence to worries that Republicans are obstructing progress.

“They hate it; they’re afraid to take it head on, so they’re trying to slow it down in hopes they take over the White House,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), one of the architects of the 2010 law.

Bart Chilton, who as a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is among the regulators approving the new rules, said getting input from investment firms is critical, but some have less than helpful intentions.

“There are some people who all they want to do is run the clock out,” said Chilton, one of three Democratic commissioners. “Their goal isn’t thoughtful regulation, it’s no regulation.”

Republican staffers said there is no grand strategy for holding up regulations, emphasizing that their goal is to dismantle the law.

“If that is one of the side consequences, that’s not a terrible thing from our perspective,” a GOP Senate aide said. “We would rather most of these not happen in the first place. … Some people might be looking at it with 2012 in mind, but I don’t think that’s the primary thing.”

Much of the blame for the delay, Republicans said, rests squarely with federal agencies that lack the ability to meet the schedule set up by the law.

“The bad thing is that the deadlines are not reasonable or realistic,” said a Republican congressional aide. “The delay is from the regulators. We’re not controlling them.”

One financial industry executive said the law touches on so many parts of the economy that both sides have a fair point. Reasons for the delay can range from the intricacies of a regulation to partisan disputes to the roadblocks put up by investment firms to insufficient funding for regulators.

“There’s a whole mosaic of why the deadlines are being missed,” the executive said.

For example, the proposed Volcker rule introduced by agencies this month contributed to a sense of confusion. It came decked out with a 215-page preamble, 384 footnotes and requests for comment on 394 specific issues, the American Bankers Association said.

Named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, it limits banks to proprietary trading that isn’t on behalf of their clients. The dense proposal failed to clarify the difference between proprietary trading and legitimate trading by banks to hedge risk or keep markets liquid.

Ken Bentsen, executive vice president for public policy at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, fears that without sharp guidelines, the government could penalize banks for trading they believe was legal.

“What you think was allowed, you find out in the rearview mirror that it was not allowed,” he said.

Public Citizen, a watchdog group calling for greater Wall Street oversight, shared similar concerns about the vagueness of the proposal, but called it an “invitation for evasion” by banks.

According to the administration, the questions in the proposals show that agencies are being inclusive and responsive.

Republican lawmakers claim that regulators have not been exhaustive enough in assessing the potential economic impact of the rules.

After an investigation by inspectors general at the SEC and the CFTC, among other agencies, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) expressed concern in June “that there are no uniform cost-benefit requirements for our financial regulators that focus on economic growth, job creation or competitiveness.”

Former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins said the fundamental problem lies with Dodd-Frank itself, which he said forces regulators to climb “unscalable mountains” and issue rulings that are certain to face challenges in court.

The newly created Financial Stability Oversight Council, he said, faces the nearly impossible task of monitoring and quarantining “too big to fail” institutions. Atkins is skeptical that new entities such as the council can provide the kinds of safeguards being promised by the administration.

“Dodd-Frank,” he said, “is infused with this philosophy that a cabal of people like the oversight council can peer into the future at where a bubble is growing and prick it.”


Republican staffers said there is no grand strategy for holding up regulations, emphasizing that their goal is to dismantle the law.

“If that is one of the side consequences, that’s not a terrible thing from our perspective,” a GOP Senate aide said. “We would rather most of these not happen in the first place. … Some people might be looking at it with 2012 in mind, but I don’t think that’s the primary thing.”

Much of the blame for the delay, Republicans said, rests squarely with federal agencies that lack the ability to meet the schedule set up by the law.

“The bad thing is that the deadlines are not reasonable or realistic,” said a Republican congressional aide. “The delay is from the regulators. We’re not controlling them.”

One financial industry executive said the law touches on so many parts of the economy that both sides have a fair point. Reasons for the delay can range from the intricacies of a regulation to partisan disputes to the roadblocks put up by investment firms to insufficient funding for regulators.

“There’s a whole mosaic of why the deadlines are being missed,” the executive said.

For example, the proposed Volcker rule introduced by agencies this month contributed to a sense of confusion. It came decked out with a 215-page preamble, 384 footnotes and requests for comment on 394 specific issues, the American Bankers Association said.

Named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, it limits banks to proprietary trading that isn’t on behalf of their clients. The dense proposal failed to clarify the difference between proprietary trading and legitimate trading by banks to hedge risk or keep markets liquid.

Ken Bentsen, executive vice president for public policy at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, fears that without sharp guidelines, the government could penalize banks for trading they believe was legal.

“What you think was allowed, you find out in the rearview mirror that it was not allowed,” he said.

Public Citizen, a watchdog group calling for greater Wall Street oversight, shared similar concerns about the vagueness of the proposal, but called it an “invitation for evasion” by banks.

According to the administration, the questions in the proposals show that agencies are being inclusive and responsive.

Republican lawmakers claim that regulators have not been exhaustive enough in assessing the potential economic impact of the rules.

After an investigation by inspectors general at the SEC and the CFTC, among other agencies, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) expressed concern in June “that there are no uniform cost-benefit requirements for our financial regulators that focus on economic growth, job creation or competitiveness.”

Former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins said the fundamental problem lies with Dodd-Frank itself, which he said forces regulators to climb “unscalable mountains” and issue rulings that are certain to face challenges in court.

The newly created Financial Stability Oversight Council, he said, faces the nearly impossible task of monitoring and quarantining “too big to fail” institutions. Atkins is skeptical that new entities such as the council can provide the kinds of safeguards being promised by the administration.

“Dodd-Frank,” he said, “is infused with this philosophy that a cabal of people like the oversight council can peer into the future at where a bubble is growing and prick it.”

Sham US colleges expose student visa scams

Susan Su, president of Tri-Valley University. 

Πηγή: channelnewsasia

By AFP
Oct 31 2011

WASHINGTON: A case working its way through a federal court in California has exposed huge student visa scams by "sham" universities cashing in on Indians and other foreigners looking for a quick path to jobs in the United States.

Enrollment at Tri-Valley University, an unaccredited self-styled Christian graduate school, surged from a handful of students to 1,500, almost all from India, in a two-year period before federal authorities shut it down in January.

The university's president, Susan Su, was arrested in May and charged with fraud, money laundering, harboring aliens and making false statements. Four others also have been charged in the case.

She is accused of submitting false documentation to get federal approval to sponsor students to the university on foreign visas, and then using it to sell visas to all comers for the price of tuition, $2,700 a semester.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Wednesday called it "a pretty horrible visa scam, where a fake university petitioned and got visas for a bunch of students to come over and then actually turned out not to be a real educational institution."

The case, which has yet to go to trial, has strained relations with India, whose press has portrayed the students as innocent victims suddenly at loose ends and under threat of deportation, their dreams dashed by the scam.

India's ambassador to the United States, Nirupama Rao, this week wrote US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the case, citing the hardships faced by the students and urging that their cases "be viewed in their totality with understanding and in a fair and reasonable manner," the embassy said.

Nuland said 435 of the students have been approved to be allowed to transfer to other universities, but the status of more than 900 others is still in doubt.

"Some students we're not going to be able place, but we're continuing to work on this issue," she said.

The TVU case comes at a time when many American colleges are eager to recruit students from India, where a burgeoning middle class and growing population is powering demand for higher education.

In 2009-2010, there were 105,000 Indian students in the United States, about 15 percent of the total international students here, according to a report by the Institute of International Education. Only China, with 128,000, had more.

But even with the rush for foreign students, TVU was unusual in that it had only foreign students, 95 percent of them from India.

It operated from a building in Pleasanton, California that had capacity for only 30 students when it opened in 2008, and yet the university grew by hundreds of students in its second year, according to court filings.

As the school's enrollment surged, Su bought a new Mercedes-Benz and a 1.8 million dollar home in Silicon Valley with the estimated 3.2 million dollars that flooded in, the government said.

There were other signs that something was amiss -- a university website rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, sketchy course listings, many of them taught by none other than the school's president and CEO, Susan Su.

When DHS agents finally raided the school they found that most of its students were dispersed around the country, holding jobs under the visa program's work-study provisions.

The residence where the university said more than half its students were living turned out to be a single apartment, according to the filings.

Prosecutors allege that Su gained certification to sponsor foreign student visas with a tissue of false information.

When DHS agents visited the school, she gave false information about "TVU's classes, instructors, DSO's, official staff and school policies," according to the April 28 indictment.

A database that DHS created after the September 11, 2001 attacks to keep track of foreign students was allegedly plied with false information. False letters of good standing, transcripts and attendance records filled out the picture, prosecutors allege.

"It is certainly a wake-up call," said Ronald Cushing, director of international services at the University of Cincinnati, an accredited university.

"I would be very surprised if anybody who has gone through the certification process since Tri-Valley has not been looked at more closely," he told AFP.

And indeed, other cases have surfaced since TVU.

A Miami woman who ran a language school in a strip mall was sentenced August 30 to 15 months in prison for sponsoring visas for foreign students who did not attend classes. In that case, 116 students were ordered deported.

On July 28, DHS agents raided the University of Northern Virginia, an unaccredited, little known, for-profit undergraduate and graduate school in the Washington suburbs with 2,400 students from India.

In reality, he told AFP, there was a disconnect between giving students work to do, which the school could tout, and "a true curriculum that involves some practical experience to round out the education.

"That's where the abuse came in," he added.

But Cushing said the key failing is the process by which DHS certifies schools, calling it "minimal at best" with inspections conducted by retired law enforcement officers, rather than academics knowledgeable enough to detect fraud.

DHS may have made some changes since TVU, he said. "But what I know has not changed is the length, the duration and the types of individuals they are sending out to do these certifications."

Mind-goggling: 'Reading the brain'

Πηγή: The Economist
Oct 29 2011

If you think the art of mind-reading is a conjuring trick, think again. Over the past few years, the ability to connect first monkeys and then men to machines in ways that allow brain signals to tell those machines what to do has improved by leaps and bounds. In the latest demonstration of this, just published in the Public Library of Science, Bin He and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota report that their volunteers can successfully fly a helicopter (admittedly a virtual one, on a computer screen) through a three-dimensional digital sky, merely by thinking about it. Signals from electrodes taped to the scalp of such pilots provide enough information for a computer to work out exactly what the pilot wants to do.

That is interesting and useful. Mind-reading of this sort will allow the disabled to lead more normal lives, and the able-bodied to extend their range of possibilities still further. But there is another kind of mind-reading, too: determining, by scanning the brain, what someone is actually thinking about. This sort of mind-reading is less advanced than the machine-controlling type, but it is coming, as three recently published papers make clear. One is an attempt to study dreaming. A second can reconstruct a moving image of what an observer is looking at. And a third can tell what someone is thinking about.

First, dreams. To study them, Martin Dresler, of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, in Munich, and his colleagues recruited a group of what are known as lucid dreamers. They report their results in this week’s Current Biology.

A lucid dream is one in which the person doing the dreaming is aware that he is dreaming, and can control his actions almost as if he were awake. Most people have lucid dreams occasionally. A few, though, have them often—and some have become good at manipulating the process. Dr Dresler co-opted six self-professed practitioners of the art for his experiment. He asked them to perform, in their dreams, a simple action whose neurological traces in a brain scan are well understood. This action was to clench either their right or their left hand into a fist. The test would be to see if Dr Dresler’s brain scanner could reliably tell the difference.

Once a volunteer had dozed off and begun dreaming, he was to shift his eyes from left to right twice, to show he was ready to begin the experiment. (Unlike other parts of the body, which become limp in the phase of sleep during which dreams occur, the eyes continue to twitch. Indeed, this phase is known as rapid-eye-movement sleep.) After this signal, he clenched his left hand in his dream ten times, and then his right hand. (His real hands, of course, remained motionless.) He indicated the end of each set of clenches by turning his eyes as before. A trial was deemed a success if at least four sets of alternate clenches were performed in this way.

At first, only one participant managed to meet these exacting criteria, though he did so on two occasions. Dr Dresler speculated that the reason was his chosen brain scanner. He was using a functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. This is the best sort of scanner, but it makes a terrible racket and so is not conducive to dreamy slumber. Replacing fMRI with a slightly less accurate technique called near-infra-red spectroscopy produced two further successful trials involving a different volunteer.

Both techniques were able to see the brain acting to clench a volunteer’s fist in his dream in exactly the way that it does when ordering fist-clenching in reality. This might not seem a big deal, but it is the first time science has proved what was hitherto mere speculation: that the brain, when dreaming, behaves like the brain when awake. In principle, then, it might be possible to “read” dreams as they are happening, and thus perhaps solve one of the great mysteries of biology: what, exactly, is dreaming for?

Though it may seem a stretch to suggest that the mind of a dreamer could be read in this way, it is not. For the second paper of the trio, published in Current Biology in September, shows that it is now possible to make a surprisingly accurate reconstruction, in full motion and glorious Technicolor, of exactly what is passing through an awake person’s mind.

This study was done by Jack Gallant of the University of California, Berkeley. In the name of science, three members of Dr Gallant’s team each endured two sessions of fMRI while watching assorted film trailers. The researchers chose to experiment on themselves, rather than calling for volunteers, because the experiment required them to sit perfectly still in an fMRI machine for long periods. Two hours of being bombarded with excerpts from such treats as the remake of “The Pink Panther”, they decided, would be too brutal a procedure to visit on innocent outsiders.

Which will be the critics’ choice?

Psychodrama

Unlike Dr Dresler, who focused on the sensorimotor cortex, which controls movement, Dr Gallant and his team looked at the visual cortex. Their method depended on the brute power of modern computing. They compared the film trailers frame by frame with fMRI images recorded as those trailers were being watched, and looked for correlations between the two. They then fed their computer 5,000 hours of clips from YouTube, a video-sharing website, and asked it to predict, based on the correlations they had discovered, what the matching fMRI pattern would look like.

Having done that, they each endured a further two hours in the machine, watching a new set of trailers. The computer looked at the reactions of their visual cortices and picked, for each clip, the 100 bits of YouTube footage whose corresponding hypothetical fMRI pattern best matched the real one. It then melded these clips together to produce an estimate of what the real clip looked like. As the pictures above show, the result was often a recognisable simulacrum of the original. It also moved (watch at gallantlab.org) in the same way as the clip it was based on.

The third study, published in August in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience by Francisco Pereira and his colleagues at Princeton university, used a technique similar to Dr Gallant’s to perform an equally impressive trick. Rather than recreating images, Dr Pereira was able to determine what topics people were pondering. To do this, he re-examined data collected during an experiment conducted in 2008, in which nine volunteers had been shown labelled pictures of 60 objects, and then had their brains scanned as they were asked to imagine those same objects.

Dr Pereira divided the data in two. He used half to generate his hypothesis and half to test it. Though his pattern-detection algorithms could not distinguish exactly which objects the volunteers had seen, they managed a task that was only slightly less demanding. They could work out what type of object something was. In other words, they could not distinguish a carrot from a stick of celery, but could say that it was a vegetable.

The similarity to Dr Gallant’s study came from the way the categories were established. This was done by pillaging another huge website, Wikipedia, to find out how the names of objects tend to cluster together in the online encyclopedia’s articles. Dr Pereira found that they appear to cluster in similar ways in the brain, and to produce enough shared neural characteristics there for the clustering to be detectable.

Mind-reading, then, has become a reality. It is crude. The results would not stand up in court—yet. But, as the Franck report said of America’s first atom bomb, the thing does work.

Turkey’s Third Wave — And the Coming Quest for Strategic Reassurance

Πηγή: GMF
By Ian O. Lesser

Oct 26 2011

Summary: Turkey may beentering a “third wave” in the evolution of its modern foreign policy, with continued regional activism played out in a strategic environment that is increasingly insecure and crisis prone. The prevailing mix of self confidence, assertiveness, and coolness toward Western partners may not be sustainable as Ankara once again requires greater reassurance against conflict and chaos on its borders. The return to brinkmanship in the eastern Mediterranean is a further complicating factor, and one that may play a growing role in Turkish-Western dynamics. After a decade of commercial engagement and soft power, hard security issues are returning to center stage. The deepening Kurdistan Workers Party challenge from Northern Iraq, and potentially from Syria, is just one facet of an increasingly troubled security picture across Turkey’s neighborhood.

Analysis Turkey’s Third Wave — And the Coming Quest for Strategic Reassurance by Dr. Ian O. Lesser October 26, 2011 Washington, DC • Berlin • Paris • Brussels Belgrade • Ankara • Bucharest

Lesser Turkeys Third Wave Oct11

U.S. had advance warning of abuse at Afghan prisons, officials say

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Joshua Partlow and Julie Tate

Oct 30 2011

KABUL — Across the street from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, shrouded from view by concrete walls, the Afghan intelligence agency runs a detention facility for up to 40 terrorism suspects that is known as Department 124. So much torture took place inside, one detainee told the United Nations, that it has earned a different name: “People call it Hell.”

But long before the world body publicly revealed “systematic torture” in Afghan intelligence agency detention centers, top officials from the State Department, CIA and U.S. military received multiple warnings about abuses at Department 124 and other Afghan facilities, according to Afghan and Western officials with knowledge of the situation.

Despite the warnings, the United States continued to transfer detainees to Afghan intelligence service custody, the officials said. Even as other countries stopped handing over detainees to problematic facilities, the U.S. government did not.

U.S. Special Operations troops delivered detainees to Department 124, and CIA officials regularly visited the facility, which was rebuilt last year with American money to interrogate high-level Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects, according to Afghan and Western officials familiar with the site. Afghan intelligence officials said Americans never participated in the torture but should have known about it.

When the United Nations brought allegations of widespread detainee abuse on Aug. 30 to Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. military commander here, he took swift action ahead of the public release of the findings. Coalition troops stopped transferring detainees to Department 124 and 15 other police and intelligence agency prisons. They also hastily began a program to monitor those facilities and conduct human rights classes for interrogators.

But the prospect that U.S. officials failed to act on prior warnings raises questions about their compliance with a law, known as the Leahy Amendment, that prohibits the United States from funding units of foreign security forces when there is credible evidence they have committed human rights abuses. The State Department is now investigating whether the law applies and what funding might be affected, according to U.S. officials.

American officials denied that they had ignored credible warnings of detainee abuse and said that whenever such an allegation was raised, they took action. For instance, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former top commander, ordered a halt to detainee transfers to Afghan intelligence and police custody in Kandahar in July.

“Any place that we’ve had a concern in the past, we’ve taken the appropriate steps, I’m confident of that, and we’re taking the appropriate steps now,” Lt. Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said in an interview. “I don’t see it as a systemic problem, as some have said it might be.”

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the United States has a “long-standing policy against transferring individuals to torture” and that “whenever allegations of human rights violations are raised with us, we move quickly to work with the host government to investigate and resolve them.”

The “CIA adheres to those same rules,” another U.S. official said. “The reality is that the system in place works.”

Confidential warnings

Even by the standards of Afghanistan’s deeply troubled justice system, Department 124 stood out. With chilling detail, the United Nations recounted detainees’ stories of interrogators hanging them by their hands for hours, beating them with metal pipes, shocking them with electricity and twisting their genitals until they passed out. Of the 28 detainees interviewed who had spent time at the facility, 26 told the United Nations that they had been tortured, according to a report released this month.

Before the U.N. investigation began in October 2010, the International Committee of the Red Cross told Afghan and U.S. officials about their concerns over detainee abuse at Department 124 and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the confidential discussions.

The conversations intensified this year, with the ICRC warning top-level officials from the U.S. Embassy, CIA and Joint Special Operations Command, among others. One person familiar with the conversations said the concerns involved the “prevalence and pervasiveness” of detainee abuse by the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, as Afghanistan’s primary intelligence service is known. When the discussions failed to produce improved treatment and conditions, the ICRC issued confidential written findings to the Afghan government outlining the extent of the problems.

One former senior U.S. Embassy official disputed these characterizations of the briefings. If there had been “serious substantive allegations of systemic institutional torture of detainees, the embassy would have acted on these,” the official said.