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Reason Writers Around Town: Matt Welch Talks Foreign Policy and the 2008 Election with Eli Lake

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Over at Bloggingheads.tv, Editor in Chief Matt Welch discusses Pakistan, terrorism, the fear of a Palin presidency, and more with The New York Sun's Eli Lake. Click on the image below to watch.

Breitbart on Hollywood Censorship

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:55:00 EDT

Andrew Breitbart, long associated with The Drudge Report, prop. of the excellent newsfeed site Breitbart.com, author of The Washington Times col "Big Hollywood," and maker of lists for reason, finds it larfable that Matt Damon is worried about GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin banning books. Breitbart writes:

The sad fact is that actual artistic oppression—book banning in its many modern forms—is a matter of course in the entertainment industry, especially when the underlying product is declared politically incorrect or runs contrary to the interests of Hollywood's political altar, the Democratic Party.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations runs rings around Hollywood's pious First Amendment absolutists.
"I hope you will be reassured that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs," director Phil Alden Robinson wrote after changing the script from Muslim terrorists to Austrian neo-Nazis in the Tom Clancy thriller, "The Sum of all Fears." "And I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination."
While Mr. Clancy put up an admirable fight, actor Ben Affleck acquiesced, cashed his multimillion-dollar check and fought the dreaded Austrians, whose flagging Teutonic self-confidence again took a hit. Thanks to Hollywood artistic appeasement, Arab youth in totalitarian Muslim countries indoctrinated in anti-Western thought dodged another esteem bullet....
The silence of the celebrity political class was heartbreaking when Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic radical in retaliation for making "Submission," a critically acclaimed film that portrayed horrific female oppression within the practice of Islam.
Yet Hollywood—quick to find martyrs near to its heart (Valerie Plame, et al)—ignored its fallen Dutch comrade and refused to celebrate the film and its maker, fulfilling his murderer's greatest desire.

More here.

Very Animated Anti-Arab Animus

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:34:00 EDT

Alan Vanneman sends along this dispatch from The Wash Post, in which an ex-diplomat has been sent to jail for being, well, not very diplomatic:

A retired Foreign Service officer was sentenced yesterday to one year in prison for making threats against Arab American Institute President James Zogby and other employees there.
W. Patrick Syring, 50, who served two tours in Beirut during his 25-year State Department career, pleaded guilty to violating civil rights laws. The charges stem from messages he left at AAI in the midst of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
"The only good Arab is a dead Arab," Syring said in a profanity-laden July 2006 voice-mail message delivered to AAI, which promotes Arab American participation in elections and policy issues.
After federal prosecutors in the District accused him of intimidating the workers based on their national origin, Syring sent an incendiary message to a television station where Zogby had been interviewed. In the March 2008 e-mail, Syring repeated some of the language from his phone call and accused Zogby of "promoting the interest of Hezbollah, Hamas and Arab terror."

Whole thing here.

While it's easy to see why the guy washed out of the diplomatic corps, it's not fully clear to me that he should be doing jail time for his out-of-bounds comments (at least as reported in the press). I like the idea of holding government officials to higher standards than the rest of us, but it's not clear to me that's in play here. He should (and I'm assuming he will) have a tough time finding work. What say you, Hit & Runners?

Alan Vanneman site here; always worth reading.

"Drop Dead Gorgeous—and Military Trained!"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:45:00 EDT

Via the overheated commentary of Extreme Mortman comes this bizarre slow-news-day CNN Situation Room bit on how Israel (that 60-year-old!) is overhauling its image by having former military gals pose for Maxim magazine. "Israel is hip, sexy, and fun," says CNN:

Not sure if Fox News will counterblast with the girls of the PLO.

Gentle reader, does this news change your views on foreign aid?

Or does it merely convince you further that we're living in the Rapture and we don't even know it?

Also, No One Likes the Popup Ads

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:10:00 EDT

Al Qaeda's Internet problems:

One Bin Laden tape in four months has a tremendous impact, a dozen Zawahiri tapes in two months has considerably less. In Zawahiri's Q+A, he repeatedly answered questions with an irritated "I already answered that in last month's speech" or "bin Laden already answered that in his speech." That suggests that too many messages dilutes the impact. It also reduces the likelihood of massive media coverage, since the messages become routine. The same applies for the Iraqi insurgency videos: the first exploding hummer might be thrilling, but the 76th not so much.

That's the always-interesting Marc Lynch writing about the limits of the jihadists' online efforts. They bear a striking resemblance to the limits of everyone else's online efforts. Here's some more:

I come across quite a bit of posturing and bravado in these forums, hating on 'enemies' and back-patting of 'allies'. The recent initiation of an 'al-Jazeera watch' feature on one of the forums tracking perceived slights and misrepresentation by the now maligned station reminds me of nothing so much as the partisan media criticism found on so many political blogs. There's a lot of posting of articles or news reports clipped from the media, with long comment threads of cheering or jeering. I remember seeing a bitter post on one of the main forums a few weeks ago (al-Boraq? I forget) complaining that the "internet jihad" had failed since the forum had degenerated into personal attacks and what we would call flame-wars.

Whole thing here.

Soft on Terrorism? No Way!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:53:00 EDT

reason contributor John Mueller, the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and professor of political science at Ohio State University, writes in The National Interest:

Terrorism and the attendant "war" thereon have become fully embedded in the public consciousness, with the effect that politicians and bureaucrats have become as wary of appearing soft on terrorism as they are about appearing soft on drugs, or as they once were about appearing soft on Communism.
Key to this dynamic is that the public apparently continues to remain unimpressed by several inconvenient facts. One such fact is that there have been no al-Qaeda attacks whatsoever in the United States since 2001. A second is that no true al-Qaeda cell (or scarcely anybody who might even be deemed to have a "connection" to the diabolical group) has been unearthed in this country. A third is that the homegrown "plotters" who have been apprehended, while perhaps potentially somewhat dangerous at least in a few cases, have mostly been either flaky or almost absurdly incompetent.

Read the whole article here.

Hat tips: Alan Vanneman, Arts & Letters Daily.

Updates: Here's Jacob Sullum on "The Forever War," from the October 2002 issue. And me on "The New Cold War," from the December 2001 issue.

Little Brother Is Watching

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Same As It Ever Was

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On March 28, the United Nations Human Rights Council elected, by unanimous vote, a special rapporteur on the "situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967." The nominee, Richard Falk, a veteran political activist and emeritus professor of law at Princeton University, was opposed by Israel for, among other statements, equating the situation in the Palestinian territories with the Nazi Holocaust. According to a spokesman for Israeli's foreign ministry, Falk will not be allowed through passport control in Tel Aviv.

"This is a very outrageous statement to us and a personal insult to every Israeli," said spokesman Arye Mekel. "How could he then come up with an objective conclusion about what Israel does or doesn't do in Gaza?"

To the Israelis, Falk's appointment is but another indication that the Human Rights Council (UN-HRC), which replaced the corrupt United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in 2006, amounts to little more than a new acronym obscuring old anti-Israel bias. When the UNCHR was disbanded, The New York Times called the organization a "disgrace," conceding that, on this one point, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton was undeniably "right." In assembling the replacement body, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the new council would provide the "United Nations the chance—a much-needed chance—to make a new beginning in its work for human rights around the world." The UN-HRC, he claimed, "will breathe new life into all our work for human rights."

So has the UN-HRC purged itself of its political biases? Has it, at long last, expelled human rights violators from its ranks? Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Human Rights Watch's Peggy Hicks surveyed the recent record of the revamped council with dismay: "In its first year, the council shied away from taking action on most human rights crises, dropped its scrutiny of Iran and Uzbekistan, and managed to condemn Israel's human rights record without addressing violations by Hezbollah and Palestinian armed groups."

The nomination of Richard Falk is further evidence of UN backsliding in its commitment to fairly scrutinizing human rights. Not only has Falk served in a similar role in the past—he was on a 2001 special panel investigating Israeli human rights violations, suggesting that UN-HRC is recruiting from the old UNCHR pool—but his record is considerably worse than the recent news reports would suggest.

For instance, in 1979, not long after the inauguration of Iran's totalitarian and theocratic "revolution," Falk, then chairman of something called U.S. Citizens Concerned about Freedom in Iran, was granted space on The New York Times opinion page to shill for the incoming government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A month prior, Falk had flown to Paris with his comrade Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general and inveterate friend of dictators, to discuss "social justice" (Clark's phrase) with the then-exiled religious leader. Upon returning, Clark told The Washington Post that he was "deeply impressed by the nature and depth and purpose of the movement in Iran that has established the opportunity for a new freedom."

By the time Falk published his impressions of the Paris pilgrimage, the Ayatollah's gang of fundamentalist squadristi—officially known as "secret revolutionary tribunals"—was already meting out executions with little concern for due process. Nevertheless, in his Times opinion piece, Falk upbraided President Jimmy Carter for "associating [Khomeini] with religious fanaticism," and declared that "the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude religious prejudices seems certainly and happily false." Indeed, "his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals."

This was too much for the Times' preeminent liberal columnist, Anthony Lewis, who ripped Falk's column as "outstandingly silly." It was clear to those not blinded by ideology, Lewis wrote, that the "Ayatollah has set out, without equivocation or disguise, to turn the clock back and give Iran a theocratic regime." With hindsight, it is perhaps tempting to see Lewis's column as prescient, and Falk as merely a naïve, anti-Shah activist duped by the regime's unsophisticated propaganda apparatus. But as contemporaneous news accounts make clear, the theocratic and dictatorial character of the Khomeini clique was widely acknowledged by Middle East observers well before the hostage crisis.

Falk's conception of human rights—remember, this is what he is tasked to monitor for the UN—is also colored by his warm feelings toward Tehran. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, an associate professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, noted in 2000 that "The international law scholar Richard Falk, who sympathizes with the Islamic Republic and who opines that ‘Islam' is entitled to have its own 'civilizational approach' to human rights, embodies the tendency to imagine that Iranians need more Islamic culture, not the human rights protections valued by people in the West."

But this is small beer compared to Falk's latest intellectual pursuit. In 2004, Falk wrote the introduction to The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, a book arguing that the American government was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of the vast trove of 9/11 "truth" material available in print and online, it was Griffin, Falk wrote in his foreword, who "has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account." For Griffin's latest book, Debunking the 9/11 Debunkers, Falk provided a dust jacket endorsement: "David Ray Griffin has established himself—alongside Seymour Hersh—as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths."

As media coverage of Falk's nomination has metastasized, it has unfortunately obscured news of UN-HRC's nomination of the Swiss socialist Jean Ziegler to the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. A brief recapitulation of Ziegler's qualifications: In 1996, he defended Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy not only on free speech grounds—an admirable position, after all—but further celebrated his supposed scholarship. "All your work as a writer and philosopher," Ziegler wrote, "attests to the rigor of your analysis and the unwavering honesty of your intentions. It makes you one of the leading thinkers of our time." He lauded the Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, a leader who "has history and morality with him." He offered his "total support for the Cuban revolution." He recently told a Lebanese newspaper the he "refuse[d] to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It is a national movement of resistance."

Then there's Ziegler's friendship with Libyan dictator Moammar Kaddafi. In 1989, according to a report in Neue Zurcher Zeitung (one that confirms research done by UN Watch), Ziegler helped establish the Kaddafi Prize for Human Rights. In 2002, Ziegler himself received the prize, which he shared with, among others, Roger Garaudy. Previous recipients include Fidel Castro, Louis Farrakhan, and Hugo Chavez.

Outside Turtle Bay, it is obvious that those who believe the 9/11 attacks were a government sponsored "false flag" operation and who believe in the moral probity of Kaddafi bequeathing cash prizes to serial human rights abusers have no business adjudicating human rights violations at the United Nations. In 2006, the current administration was widely criticized for opposing the establishment of the UN-HRC; the United States was the only industrialized country, besides Israel, to oppose its creation. In light of the appointment of Richard Falk and Jean Ziegler, it is similarly obvious that this was the correct decision.

While it is gratifying that the commission that long provided political cover for vile and undemocratic regimes such as Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Libya was publicly disgraced and dismantled, it is a disheartening, though utterly predictable, that its replacement is following in its footsteps.

Michael C. Moynihan is a reason associate editor.

They Want to Buy Our Crappy Assets. Run For Your Lives!!!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:12:00 EDT

Sovereign wealth funds, this year's Dubai Ports World-style ooga-booga man of international finance, are the subject of an interesting Washington Post feature today.

The star of the piece is Bader al-Saad, a former Chase Manhattan and First National Bank of Chicago man who came to the Kuwait Investment Authority in 2003 and started remodeling the state-owned, oil-fed investment fund on the endowments of Harvard and Yale, which meant getting out of the Persian Gulf and looking for diversified opportunities abroad. And it turns out, with the U.S. dollar and American asset prices deflating, those opportunities began presenting themselves in these United States. Excerpt:

It was not Bader al-Saad's idea to buy huge chunks of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch.
It was early January and Saad ... was in his office as usual, reviewing potential deals in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region, when the banks asked him to invest, he recalled.
"They called us.... We receive calls on most transactions," said Saad, whose fund bought stakes of $3 billion in Citigroup and $2 billion in Merrill Lynch. [...]
He said the next big purchases of assets in the United States may be in the real estate sector, which he expects will peak as an investment target -- in other words, hit rock bottom -- in the next few months. Saad said he also thinks U.S. telecommunications companies and more financial firms would make good investments.
"There are certain opportunities which do not come every day," he said. "We consider the recent crisis as creating some opportunities in certain sectors. I look at history, such as the savings-and-loan problem. It created golden opportunities."

But fear not -- legislators are busy looking for ways to discourage global liquidity from washing in to cash-starved Washington. The EU and U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund are drawing up targeted regulations and extracting you-will-only-come-seeking-profit pledges from the scary foreigners. Future president Barack Obama vows to stop "transferring wealth to these countries." The Council of Foreign Relations has issued a jeremiad against the "New Financial Superpower" [PDF] who will bring us to our knees by, uh, selling the U.S. assets they have already bought? It's all very confusing.

Some thoughts from Marginal Revolutionary Tyler Cowen here. Science Correspondent Ron Bailey explained how foreign ownership is not a threat, but stupid legislation is back in March 2006. And Kenton E. Kelly explained how a bogus security panic is alienating an ally and endangering our country in February 2006.

Bin Laden Denounces "Pope of the Vatican," Has No Comment on Pope of Greenwich Village

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:10:00 EDT

There's a new tape out (or maybe it's old) from Osama bin Laden (or maybe it's someone else). Transcript here. The big news, if there is any news, is that bin Laden believes those Muhammad cartoons -- remember them? they were a big deal in 2005 -- "came in the framework of a new Crusade in which the Pope of the Vatican has played a large, lengthy role." This is presumably a reference to Benedict XVI's controversial remarks about Islam, which were a big deal in 2006. CIA experts say this new evidence will help them determine when exactly bin Laden's tape recorder ran out of batteries.

Diary of an Israel Junketeer, Part Two

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

(Editor's Note: reason Associate Editor Michael C. Moynihan is traveling though Israel on a program sponsored by the American Israel Education Fund, a travel program for journalists sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He'll be filing observations throughout the week.)

Tel Aviv—"It's amazing," the owner of Jerusalem restaurant says, flicking his cigarette. "The police fined us for smoking out here. I mean, it's technically part of the building, but it's open air." The country banned smoking in bars and restaurants last year.

"Right over there, behind the security fence," he gestures wildly, "is the West Bank. And they are fucking with me for smoking. This restaurant used to be in the Old City and it was attacked four times. Guns, bombs, and hand grenades." But please refrain from lighting up.

In Tel Aviv, not a single bar or nightclub seems to obey the rules; all are thick with smoke. It is, roughly, a mix of 20 percent hash and 80 percent tobacco. According to a prominent investigative journalist here, it isn't just Israelis who indulge in drugging. The reporter, who works for a major Tel Aviv daily, is a fluent Arabic speaker who spends the majority of his time pounding the pavement in the Palestinian Territories.

He relates a bizarre story: Last year, while interviewing a house full of Hamas members, he entered into a rather ordinary conversation on the banalities of soldiering (the journalist, like most Israelis, is an Israel Defense Forces veteran). "So how do you pull these long shifts?" he wondered. "Well, we take pills smuggled in from Tel Aviv," said the Hamas apparatchik. "What pills?" He didn't know, but graciously placed a call to a Hamas comrade, who, apparently, doubles as his pharmacist. "He says they are called the EK-STAZY." The raver-jihadists explained that these mystery pills induce a mild euphoria, and allow them to shoot at members of the Israel Defense Forces for long, happy stretches.

The Hamas-embedded journalist relates another woe-is-me-story of life as a terrorist. "I'm the Oprah of the Palestinians. They are always telling me things about their private lives." One leader of Islamic Jihad recently confessed that his manifold sexual problems were driving him to depression. It is tough, he moaned, to find a good woman, a woman willing to spend time with you, when you marked for death by Israeli intelligence. Amongst the extremists, they even manage to blame not getting laid on Zionism.

According to a report in this morning's Jerusalem Post, Israelis are overwhelmingly opposed to further privatization of health services. It's initially surprising that such poll questions are even being asked, that such issues are deemed important, when Kassam rockets are being lobbed at Sderot everyday, when the very real possibility of a third intifada is discussed and debated with a mixture of exhaustion and terror. But life trudges forward. Visitors (and visiting journalists, especially) are the ones that steer conversation towards the maudlin. I have consistently asked Israelis, both politicians and ordinary citizens, their opinions on a variety of economic issues. There is, from this admittedly small sample, no real enthusiasm for such debates.

When I asked Likud parliamentarian Mickey Eitan to explain the difference in the economic policies of Kadima and his party, he was, as appears to be his nature, blunt. "None. We are both [classical] liberals. Our differences were almost only over the disengagement of Gaza."

Coming next: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the peace process that isn't...

Diary of an Israel Junketeer, Part One

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

(Editor's Note: reason Associate Editor Michael C. Moynihan is traveling though Israel on a program sponsored by the American Israel Education Fund, a travel program for journalists sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He'll be filing observations throughout the week.)

Jerusalem—Walking toward Jerusalem's Old City, a journalist colleague in my tour group relates, apropos of nothing, that Tucker Carlson's MSNBC show is being cancelled. A brief argument follows over who is the best cable talk show host on American television—I nominate the peerless Robin Byrd—only to be interrupted by two elderly and ornery American tourists: "We came here to get away from politics." The Yanks seem unaware that, in Israel—and we're within spitting distance of the Dome of the Rock—there is no escaping politics.

The constant political discussions in this city quickly annex most of your brain. It's a shopworn observation, but the simple act of entering a coffee shop requires a quick bit of profiling and a wave of the metal detector wand. No one, from what I can make out, seems irritated by this.

Politics and the icons of war are all around. Reading an essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, trying to beat suffocating jetlag, I repeatedly misread a doped-up character named "Sharon" as Sha-rone.

Within the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, plus-sized American tourists are everywhere, waddling through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with their panama hats and chunky white sneakers, oohing and ahhing at various reconstructed tombs and crucifixion crosses. Deeply holy, with a whiff of Six Flags.

Like everything else in the region, the church is subdivided into four quarters. The Eastern Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, and Greek Orthodox have their own little Bantustans for which they are responsible. Take away these invisible boundaries and, I suppose, fistfights would break out.

Just outside the church, in the narrow alleyways of the Arab quarter, it is possible to buy all manner of junk: rugs, cheap knives, and, depending on your degree of bravery, either an IDF or Yasser Arafat t-shirt.

Over breakfast, an Israeli political analyst inspires little confidence that a peaceful resolution to this baffling, maddening, intractable conflict is at hand. The three pillars of Israeli politics, she says—the right, left, and center—have all collapsed, all producing similar results.

The latest: Kadima, the centrist party formed by Ariel Sharon in 2005 that took power the next year, presided over Hezbollah's 12,000-missile buildup and an inconclusive war. Sharon's total disengagement from Gaza has, almost everyone reminds you, resulted in a Hamas government and, as we have seen in recent weeks, a huge spike in the number of Qassam rockets fired at civilian population centers in Israeli border towns. As could be expected, recent opinion polling shows that the Likud party, which currently has just 12 seats in the 120-member Knesset (to Kadima's 29), would more than double that number if elections were held today.

Over lunch, an Israeli academic praises the innumerable benefits of the Israeli parliamentary system—no candidates, only party lists—and bemoans "the boring" American election. I wonder, though don't ask, if the parliamentary system in Italy, with its 50 governments in as many years, is an appropriate counter-example to the supposed brilliance of coalition governments and proportional representation. Israel, says the professor, was once a welfare state in the Scandinavian mold and, so I hear, was equally bungling and bureaucratic. But in recent years, he points out, the country "has privatized faster than Russia." It is difficult to determine if this is said with contempt or pride.

In the evening we drive into Arab East Jerusalem for a meeting with a senior Palestinian Authority official close to Mahmoud Abbas (all Israelis call him Abu Mazen). The consensus among our small group of journalists, regardless of their own political hang-ups, is that this guy, like many P.A. officials, eloquently delivers an hour of sophistry and evasion.

It's a pitiful performance. One questioner asks why, if the Palestinian Authority renounces terror, it recently celebrated the life and achievements of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist George Habash. The official becomes agitated and recommends that such issues must be left "in the past." Calling people "terrorists" or calling them "freedom fighters," he grumbles, is an impediment to peace.

For the remaining hour, it is clear that the Palestinian Authority wants to bury the past-except when it doesn't. The rest of the conversation is an argument about the past, with periodic nods to "the peace process." When I ask the official about the massive and well-documented thievery of Yasser Arafat, his eyes narrow. "Arafat never stole money," he hisses. "The people around him did, but not Arafat."

Besides, any corruption in the P.A. was "done with the full knowledge of Israel." If this guy pulls a muscle playing racquetball, he probably blames Israel. While the moderate Likud member of parliament Mickey Eitan told me that his former party boss Ariel Sharon "was the most corrupt man in the history of Israel," and that Sharon's extended family was like "something you would find in South America," the P.A. dare not speak ill of its former leader.

Coming Next: Raver-jihadists, privatizing health care, and the Oprah of the Palestinians.

Qaddafi Abolishes Libyan State -- Again!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:08:00 EST

The Economist reports:

The Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, has taken the traditional conservative quest for smaller government to a new plane by calling for the dissolution of the country's existing administrative structure and the disbursement of oil revenue directly to the people. Colonel Qaddafi's tirade against what he described as the "octopus" of government, which has sucked up Libya's massive oil wealth and provided little of value in return, came during his opening address to the General People's Congress (GPC), an annual gathering of the popular committees that notionally hold power in his "jamahiriyya" (entity of the masses)....

His premiss was that the GPC every year considers the annual budget, on this occasion US$37bn, based on estimated oil export revenue. The funds are paid into the central bank and disbursed to various government departments, or committees, and public sector companies in the hope that the capital spending targets are achieved. However, Colonel Qaddafi said that it doesn't happen like that: "It is like the cloud that fills the desert, and you think it is water, but when you reach it you find that it is nothing." He said that the people had lost confidence in the government and the public administration, and had grown to believe that the country's wealth was being systematically plundered for personal gain.

He proposed that from now on oil revenue would be paid directly to every Libyan family every month. They would then decide on their spending priorities, individually or in the form of ad hoc committees interested in investing in a new agricultural or industrial project, or in education, health or housing. These committees would also decide how much tax to pay to the remaining centralised institutions.

Don't get excited; we've been through this before. As reason reported a few years back:

On at least three occasions, the colonel has made a big show of abolishing the Libyan state. His most recent display began in March 2000, when he eliminated 12 ministries and declared that the remaining five would soon follow. "You have no government to complain against," Qaddafi declared to the masses. "Now everything is in your hands and in the future you can complain to yourselves."

Nonetheless, the state stuck around. (Just ask Amnesty International.) It'll stick around this time, too. The Economist notes: "The Libyan leader, having let off steam, can be expected to acquiesce in a somewhat less dramatic change in the system of government than that suggested in his speech -- indeed, he said at the end of his oration that the current system could be maintained on a temporary basis." I assume "temporary" means "until the next faux-anarchist outburst."

The Impossible Dream of Energy Independence

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

In his forthcoming book Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence” (PublicAffairs) Robert Bryce, managing editor of Energy Tribune and author of Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego and the Death of Enron, grapples with what he detects as a growing belief, both among policy elites and the public, in “energy independence.”

That’s the notion that America should disengage from world energy markets and seek self-sufficiency in energy production. To Bryce, this is not only impossible, but dangerous to even attempt. As he writes in the book’s introduction, the quest for energy independence “means protectionism and isolationism, both of which are in opposition to America’s long-term interests.”

Some of the myths of energy independence Bryce takes aim at are summed up in this January Washington Post op-ed. They include the false belief that U.S. energy autarky can curb terrorism; that government investment in “alternative fuels” can end our use of foreign oil; that we can starve evil petro-regimes of money by refusing to buy their oil; and that less reliance on foreign energy sources can make our energy supply more secure.

Like any decision to isolate ourselves from the free international market, the search for energy independence would, Bryce demonstrates, lead us to waste our money and, yes, our energy doing things more expensively than they can be done by taking advantage of the international division of labor and flow of capital.

reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, author of This is Burning Man and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (PublicAffairs), interviewed Bryce by phone last week.

reason: While “energy independence” has soared to fresh public prominence in this era of soaring gas prices and Mideast wars, it’s not a new idea, is it?

Robert Bryce: The first president to promote the idea was [Richard] Nixon in the wake of the oil embargo in 1973. In his State of the Union address in 1974, Nixon said that he was aiming for energy independence by the end of the decade. He hoped that by 1980 the U.S. would not be importing any oil. And every president since Nixon, in one way or another, has espoused a similar idea. But if you look back at the data, the U.S. was a net crude oil importer [as early as] 1913 and ever since we’ve been a net crude importer with a handful of years [as exceptions]. It’s remarkable how much the rhetoric about “energy independence” has had no connection with reality.

reason: What do its proponents think we can get out of energy independence?

Bryce: The main talking points for those who promote energy independence are, one, that if we were just more tech-savvy we can develop lots of new jobs, and that would be great—we can build windmills, solar panels, whatever nifty new whizbang tech is going to replace oil, and that will stimulate the economy.

Second, they love biofuels. We can just grow the fuels we need to replace imported oil and it will be great for farmers and the rural economy. Third, [energy independence proponents] conflate oil and terrorism. Those arguments really came to the fore since the 9/11 attacks. We buy imported oil, some of our suppliers are Islamic petro-states, some Islamic petro-states send some dollars to support radical Islam, therefore oil equals terrorism and “energy independence” is anti-terror.

The idea is that if we could isolate the oil-exporting countries that in theory support terror we’d cut off its lifeline. The connections of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 terror attacks are real, I’m not denying that. But you cannot, given the complexity and enormous size and interconnectedness of the global crude oil market, separate one actor from another.

S. Fred Singer [of the Science and Environmental Policy Project] came up with the best analogy. He described the global oil market like a big bathtub. All the oil production is dumped into one bathtub and all consumers have straws sucking oil out. [For all economic purposes] it’s like we’re all sucking from the same common pool. To say you are not gonna buy Saudi oil, or Algerian oil—it’s crazy. For example, the U.S. hasn’t purchased a dime of Iranian oil—except for a small amount in the early ‘90s, but for the most part no Iranian oil since 1979. And that hasn’t stopped Iran from supporting Hezbollah.

reason: Can increased energy efficiency help us achieve the goal of “energy independence”?

Bryce: To answer that, you need to understand the “Jevons paradox.” In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons published a book, The Coal Question, which projected that Britain was on the precipice of disaster because it was running out of coal. Sound familiar? But it still hasn’t happened. Jevons’ discovery was that energy efficiency doesn’t decrease demand—it increases it.

We’re told that if we just push more efficient technologies like fluorescent light bulbs and drive Priuses that energy use will decline. It’s just not true. There’s a graphic in my book that shows the decline in the number of BTUs consumed per dollar of GDP [from 19,000 BTUs consumed per dollar of GDP in 1950, to a projected 9,000 BTUs in 2010], but energy consumption continued to grow.

Efficiency can be a great thing for its own sake. It can mean good things for the economy and for people, but it doesn’t mean we’ll use less energy overall. We’ll use more. And not just the U.S., but the Chinese, Vietnamese, Pakistanis.

One anecdote that illustrates the principle: I had a friend who bought a Prius tell me the other day how he used to take the train to New York to see the opera. But now they have a car that gets 40 miles per gallon, so they just drive. It becomes more efficient on a mile per gallon basis, but on a total BTUs consumed basis, no.

reason: How about domestic renewables as a solution to dependence on foreign oil?

Bryce: I’m not opposed to renewables. I have 3,000 watts of solar panels on the roof of my home. I understand the economics of renewables. But an incurable problem for both solar and wind is intermittency. The sun doesn’t shine at night. I like to have lights and TV at night. Unless we come up with some incredibly efficient method of storing large amounts of electricity, it’s not a viable source because we can’t store it.

It’s the same problem with wind. I consider wind the electric-sector equivalent of the ethanol hype. At a conference recently I asked a wind guy, “Without subsidies, how many projects now under way [regarding wind] would make economic sense?” He said maybe 30 percent.

reason: You sound skeptical about ethanol as well.

Bryce: The ethanol scam is the longest running robbery of taxpayers in American history. Some recent news reports, which I don’t discuss in the book, include a report showing [that] corn-based ethanol releases [more] greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. That’s just one indictment of the inefficiency of the whole process. It’s also fiscal insanity—providing 51 cent per gallon subsides for making fuel from what’s already the most subsidized crop.

In 2005 federal corn subsidies approached $9.4 billion, which is around the entire budget of the Department of Commerce, with 39,000 employees. It also takes orders of magnitude more water to make corn ethanol than [is used for] gasoline production. Given the problems in the West and Southwest with water, it’s insane to think we’re going to be able to produce sufficient ethanol to make a dent in gasoline use when the amount of water needed is so high.

reason: What about the promise of changes in foreign policy in the Mideast if we could wean ourselves off their oil?

Bryce: People like to think that if only we bought less oil we wouldn’t need to be in the Persian Gulf. It sounds appealing. The reality is the U.S. gets 11 percent [of its oil] from the Persian Gulf. From a strategic point of view it was a big mistake assuming militarism is better than markets. The key adjustment is to make markets trump militarism when it comes to the Persian Gulf. We’re not the most reliant [on Persian Gulf oil]—it’s the Japanese, the French, the rest of Europe, China. If we want to have stability in the Persian Gulf, it’s not just for the U.S. It’s good for the whole world, so the U.S. needs to understand that it shouldn’t be its burden alone.

reason: I thought what you had to say about Saudi Arabian energy independence was interesting.

Bryce: The Saudis in 2005 imported 83,000 barrels of gasoline per day. Here is a country with the single largest oil deposits on the planet and they are importing gasoline. Iran too is importing 40 percent of its gasoline, because it doesn’t have enough refining capacity. Iran has the second largest reserves of natural gas and is importing natural gas to northern Iran because its gas reserves are in the south. Do we need better examples of energy interdependence? If even Saudi Arabia and Iran are energy interdependent, why wouldn’t we be?

It isn’t like energy is the only vital thing we aren’t “independent” in. I have a chart in the book which shows, using data from the U.S. Geologic Survey, some mineral commodities. We import 100 percent of more than a dozen—fluorspar, yttrium, strontium, vanadium, arsenic among others. These are industrial commodities we need to power our economy—yttrium in televisions, microwaves, ceramics; strontium for nuclear fuel; manganese in steel and iron. These are things we have to have, and we import 100 percent of them.

The only energy source with zero carbon emissions in electric power is nuclear. And that’s another example of interdependence. We import 83 percent of our uranium. There are other countries like Kazakhstan with much larger reserves of uranium than the U.S. which can mine it more cheaply.

“Energy independence” would dictate that if we use nuclear power we must produce our own uranium to fire those reactors. Why would we wanna do that if someone else is a lower-cost producer? If we get to [obtain a resource] for less, why wouldn’t we do that? We do it with shoes, iPods, cell phones, watches, fresh flowers, you name it. We rely on global commercial markets for all kinds of things—what’s wrong with relying on it for uranium?

reason: What did you think of the recent energy bill in the context of your book’s concerns?

Bryce: If I could tell Congress one thing, I’d tell them to forget about doing anything for the energy business. They’ve done enough damage, don’t do any more. The bill is unfortunately named the “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.” It’s got 300 pages of blather about ethanol and biofuels that does nothing for energy independence or security. They mandate 36 billion gallons of biofuels for every year by 2022. It’s pure fantasy, the idea that we can hit that target.

Every presidential candidate has talked about energy independence and every one conflated oil and terrorism, except for Ron Paul. Paul as far as I can tell was the only presidential candidate who dared to say something to the effect of, when it comes to energy, we need to let the market work, that supply and demand and prices should make decisions about [how and from where we get energy].

reason: Do you think the current fears about “peak oil” feed into the craze for energy independence?

Bryce: Some time the world will reach a limit in the amount of oil [produced] per day and a decline will start. But the decline is likely to be shallow, not skiing down a steep decline. As we get closer [to peak oil], prices will rise, and as prices rise a pool [of oil] that’s previously unecononomical gets worth drilling.

I consider myself a liberal mugged by the laws of thermodynamics, but all [interest in my thesis] has so far come from the [free-market] right. The left doesn’t seem to care. They just hate fossil fuels. To me, I see we had huge government support for ethanol mandates, and how has that turned out? Modern leftists [who question the value of freer markets in energy] don’t seem to know, for example, the history of the Synfuel Corporation or how the prohibition on using natural gas for electricity worked, or how price controls made for gas lines. With all those government interventions, if the market had been allowed to work, the outcomes would have been a lot better.

Rodney King's Children

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Over the last few years, a brave group of Arab activists has circulated footage of Egyptian cops striking, lashing, and even raping detainees. The torture videos, which had been filmed by the policemen themselves, prompted protests both inside and outside the country. They also prompted censorship: YouTube temporarily shut down the dissident blogger Wael Abbas' digital video channel after the company received complaints about the violent clips.

The channel can now be viewed on YouTube again. Much of its footage can also be seen on a website called The Hub, which is what YouTube would look like if it had been designed by Mohandas Gandhi. The site first appeared in pilot form in 2006, and a beta version launched in December 2007; over 500 pieces of media—videos, audio clips, photo slideshows—have been uploaded to it since its debut. The offerings range from raw footage of a massacre in Guinea to a detailed documentary about forced labor in rural Brazil. Most are accompanied by further information on the issues examined and on ways to take action against the abuses.

The site was created by Witness, a Brooklyn-based group founded by the pop star Peter Gabriel in 1992. Conceived in the wake of the Rodney King beating, the group first focused on getting cameras into the hands of human rights groups around the world and then on training them in the most effective ways to use those tools—creating, in Gabriel's phrase, a network of "Little Brothers and Little Sisters" to keep an eye on Big Brother's agents. Now Witness wants to move that community of camera-wielding activists online.

Gabriel serves as the group's celebrity face and as chairman of the board, but he stays out of the organization's day-to-day operations. Those decisions are made by people like program manager Sam Gregory. A human rights activist since he first joined Amnesty International in his teens, the U.K.-born Gregory became a student filmmaker at college, where he "was always trying to find a way to combine" his two interests. In addition to his managerial work, Gregory, 33, has co-produced videos about human rights issues in Burma, the Philippines, Argentina, Indonesia, and the United States.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker met Gregory at the DIY Video Summit at the University of Southern California, where Gregory gave a presentation about The Hub; Walker interviewed him via phone in mid-February.

reason: How did Witness get started?

Sam Gregory: Peter Gabriel had been traveling the world with the Amnesty human rights tour in the late '80s. He repeatedly encountered activists who were saying, "We've experienced this abuse, we've heard these stories of abuses, and we have no ways of responding." He had been carrying a Hi-8 camera with him, and it struck him that if those activists had access to cameras they would be able to document what was happening around them and share it in a way that would be totally different from the typical text-based approach.

The Rodney King incident brought that idea home. You had this example of an amateur, George Holliday, on the balcony of his apartment filming a graphic instance of abuse and receiving massive news coverage. That gave the impetus to start the organization. What we learned over the first four or five years was that the promise that Rodney King represented couldn't be realized just by providing cameras to human rights groups. In the absence of technical training, they couldn't produce video that would be used by news organizations and they couldn't craft the stories that would engage audiences.

We also found it was challenging to reach the right audiences. For example, it's very hard for most human rights activists to get mass media coverage. Their issues are either censored by their governments or not considered newsworthy or are hard to represent in just a single snapshot—they're more structural or deeper than just a single image of, say, police brutality. Similarly, trying to use the video as evidence did not work. It's challenging to get it into court, and the Rodney King experience taught us that video evidence can be turned either way—in the Rodney King case, used in the defense as well as the prosecution of LAPD officers.

reason: Were there any notable successes in that first period?

Gregory: There was footage that got into the news media, but it wasn't a successful period in terms of creating real change. I'm trying to think of what was especially effective in those first few years. I'm actually hard pressed to put my finger on an example.

So we learned to think more strategically about what kind of training you provided to groups, how you helped them tell stories, and, most importantly, where you tried to place that material. We train them to develop something called a video action plan, which is essentially a strategic communications plan around video. They'll say, for example, "We're trying to persuade this UN committee to recognize that the government is not reporting the whole story on this issue." And we'll say, "This is how you might think about crafting videos so you'll be able to persuade that committee of the truth of your side of the story." Or they might be doing community organizing—to give a concrete example—around child soldiers in eastern Congo. They faced a problem in terms of persuading parents not to let their children be voluntarily recruited. They needed to find a way to show the impact on the children and present a range of voices explaining the damage without pointing the finger at the parents so they just feel guilty, but instead giving them an option to find alternatives for their children.

reason: How do you get the video in front of those parents? I assume this stuff isn't aired on Congolese TV.

Gregory: The idea at the root of our work is that the voices that need to be heard are the ones closest to the violations. It's not a centralized vision, and all our work derives from the agency of those locally based human rights groups. At any given time we're working with around 13 groups around the world—our core partners—on a range of issues. They'll come to us with a campaign and a strategy that they already have in place.

The group in the Congo, a group called Ajedi-ka, was already doing village meetings all around this area affected by voluntary recruitment. What they were doing with the video is bringing it into that setting: They're bringing a TV, they're bringing a generator, literally just carrying it there.

In other settings you take a different approach. In a high-tech setting, you might carry a video around on an iPod. On Capitol Hill we'll get a screen up and do a much more traditional showing. But the root of it is always the human rights groups themselves thinking about how to use it as a tool to complement what they've done before, and not assuming that video is a magic bullet that will get people to react. It has to be within this context of options for people to take action.

reason: How do you train the people?

Gregory: We train them initially around how to film. We're not trying to make human rights workers into filmmakers, but we give them the tools to be mediamakers within their work. It's media literacy: Just as they can write a written report, they should be able to pull out a camera and film. Alongside that we develop this video action plan.

Usually there's a process after that where we receive footage from them and we provide feedback. We'll say everything from "Maybe you should put that person a little bit to the right in the frame" to "Have you thought about whether you're getting the right testimonies in order to persuade the audience you want to reach?" Typically, at least in the first instance, groups will come to Witness to edit. We do that partly so they can tap into a range of experiences here. In a lot of the relationships, as time moves on, we train them how to edit on their own. So, for example, a group we've work ed with on the Thai-Burma border that secretly travels into Burma to document atrocities there—they produce all their videos in the villages on the border. At this point we're really just a strategic consultant to them.

reason: Did you have any notable successes during that period after you rethought your approach and before you launched The Hub?

Gregory: I would highlight Ajedi-ka. We worked with them first on that campaign around child soldiers, and they've seen a decline in voluntary recruitment in communities where they've been doing work. They then identified a need to reach a completely different audience, to communicate with people at the International Criminal Court, which was making a decision about what to investigate in the Congo. We worked with them to develop a video that spoke to the impact on children of being involved in conflict. The organization did private screenings with senior members of the International Criminal Court, and that helped push the court to prioritize that issue. The first arrest warrant they issued in their investigation was for a warlord, and it was specifically on the child soldier issue.

Another example is in Mexico, where a group called Comisión Mexicana has been looking at murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez. You've had this pattern of murders of young women, failures by the local police to investigate, and choices to arrest and torture scapegoats. We worked on a video that found a very powerful individual story that spoke to the broader pattern. It was the story of a young woman who disappeared shortly before she was due to go to university. She's never been found, but the police two weeks later arrested her uncle, accused him of the murder, and tortured him into confessing. So this one story wrapped together both the murders and the abuse of power.

They used this video to lobby Congress here in the U.S. but also showed it to the attorney general's office in Mexico and to local politicians there, and as a result of that the young man who had been arrested was released.

reason: What were they lobbying for in Congress?

Gregory: They were lobbying for a House statement that Mexico should do more to investigate these murders. I wouldn't place much emphasis on that, but you can use it in human rights advocacy. For example, recently we've done a lot of screenings around Burma with the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in D.C.—again, trying to bring those voices of people driven from their villages directly into a committee room in Washington. You can sometimes see the boomerang effect of that.

reason: What did you think of the way the Burmese atrocity footage was used at the beginning of the new Rambo movie?

Gregory: The people we work with inside Burma are tremendously excited that the Rambo movie came out, because it's another way of focusing attention on the crisis. I think it was effective. I have some concerns about how you then go into, essentially, a Hollywood revenge fantasy. But I think it was important that people knew that this was a real situation, and I think it is important to think about how this accesses other audiences that might not know about Burma.

reason: Most of the examples that you've given so far have involved one form or another of narrowcasting. Do you still make an effort to get something out to a mass audience like that?

Gregory: We absolutely do think about how you reach out to a broader audience. In fact, some of our footage appeared in the opening credits of Rambo.

We try to build media attention when we think it's complementary to the advocacy goals. We don't assume that media attention will work. The experience of many of the groups that we've worked with is that the way they're represented in the media doesn't represent either them or their communities well and can be counterproductive. So we try to find opportunities where we can help navigate how it's covered and retain the advocates' point of view. Certainly with The Hub we're thinking about how the media gets access to a broader range of grassroots footage.

reason: How do you police the clips on The Hub for accuracy?

Gregory: We don't police heavily. We made a decision early on that we cannot guarantee the accuracy of every clip. But when we look at clips, we look for red flags, such as someone being exposed to a risk by being seen, or graphic sexual violence that's not in a human rights context. If it's something we're not sure about, we'll try to contact the user who uploaded it and ask more questions. If there's a big question mark in our minds we won't upload it.

We're trying to move to a more community-based model of assessing human rights footage. We've seen success in a number of instances. There was a case from the Ivory Coast where collective intelligence helped identify falsification of footage around a shooting of civilians there.

reason: But nothing goes up until you've approved it. It's not like YouTube.

Gregory: At the moment, nothing goes up until we've approved it. In the long run, I think we'd like to move to a situation where more material can go directly up. We'd like to trust more to the community to assess that material, but right now we've got to build that community.

reason: What are some of the other differences between what you do and YouTube?

Gregory: One key area is the issue of security. We are very aware that people may be uploading from situations where the government is watching the Internet and there may be potential repression. So when someone tries to upload to the site they're given an indication of the security risks. We provide ways to upload safely and securely. Once they upload, we don't hold onto their IP address, so if someone tries to obtain that information either legally or illegally we are unable to identify where users are based.

Another element is editorial control. We're trying to tap into a participatory community of human rights activists rather than leave it in the hands of a corporation. That's an important difference.

Another element is that the pages are designed to provide space to contextualize and act around the footage. We're building a number of advocacy options into the site, so people can find ways to generate online or offline action. If you look at the Shoot on Sight clip from Burma, for example, the video itself is quite self-contained, but the underlining material gives more information, gives the statistics, gives more background about what's been happening, and gives ways to act.

One of the functionalities that will launch shortly is an ability to download the clips, so people can use them in the kind of offline settings that are particularly common outside the global North. Perhaps there's only one connection to the Internet, so what you want to do is download it and take it into a communal setting.

We're definitely encouraging people to port the media out. We want them to share it, to embed it in their blogs, and to take it offline, in a community setting or on a mobile phone.

reason: Are there projects outside of Witness that have influenced what you're doing?

Gregory: I think the Amnesty International Unsubscribe Me campaign, which shows six minutes of someone going through a stress position, is an interesting one to look at, in terms of how you use the vaudevillian characteristics of something like YouTube and turn it around for human rights purposes.

reason: The definition of human rights activism gets kind of hazy around the edges sometimes, and you'll often see groups with very broad political agendas. There are also times when people in different parts of the community have had very different ideas about, say, whether to call for military intervention. Do you accept clips from groups with different analyses? How do you deal with those tensions?

Gregory: We don't have any particular focus in terms of human rights issues. We define human rights very inclusively, so we include economic, social, cultural, political, and civil rights. We wouldn't typically take two core partners that have dueling perspectives, but we're open to groups that are on the edge and leading. We worked, for example, with the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan under the Taliban when they were definitely not the mainstream of human rights activism there. We don't necessarily go for the middle-of-the-road groups.

In the context of The Hub, there's a clear set of community guidelines in terms of how people should act on the site. So advocating violence or posting hate speech or slurs will violate the terms. But we don't legislate a particular point of view, and in fact we encourage different points of view on how to address human rights violations.

We also, in some cases, will contextualize clips that have a public service value, even though they may be a piece of hate speech. If we were to receive footage similar to, say, the incitement to violence by the Rwandan government during the Rwandan genocide, I think there would be a strong reason to feature that on The Hub, but then to put a comment around it. So there is a place where we might editorialize, to explain why something is there.

reason: How does the site deal with informed consent?

Gregory: The overall framework we've set is to think about informed consent in a victim- and survivor-focused model. That means making sure that someone who is filmed is doing it voluntarily, that they understand the risks, that they understand how it's going to be used, and that they're competent to agree, so it's not someone who for reasons of mental disability or age or trauma is incapable of making an appropriate decision. Often oppressive governments will hunt down people who are featured in human rights material. People should be aware of the risks, and they should be aware that any piece of media, once it's out there, can be seen by their worst enemy.

We recognize that we can't impose that standard on people uploading to The Hub. So we emphasize that people shouldn't just think about consent as something legalistic. It's not a legal question whether someone in Burma is filmed and faces risk. They're never going to sue you. You should think about it in a much deeper way that centers on the safety and security of the person filmed as much as the person filming.

reason: The site includes clips of beatings in Egypt that were filmed by Egyptian police officers themselves. How often does that kind of footage appear on the site?

Gregory: There's quite a lot of it. One piece of footage that surfaced in the pilot project was something that became known as squatgate. Police officers in Malaysia used a cell phone to film the humiliation of a young woman who had been arrested. They forced her to strip and to squat in a jail cell. Similar to the Egyptian footage, that escaped from the closed circle of police officers sharing it among themselves and sparked a national outcry in Malaysia around police misconduct.

reason: Do you worry about consent issues in that context?

Gregory: We do. In fact, with the Egypt videos, we made a decision not to show the most grotesque of them, which included the sodomization of one of the detainees. And in the squatgate example we decided not to post that video because it had been seen so widely, and the woman involved specifically requested to me, "Please don't circulate this anymore."

In the case of the Egyptian footage, the people involved said they really wanted people to know about what was happening. When we can get that kind of cue from the people in the material, that helps.

reason: What other approaches have the clips taken?

Gregory: One of the primary modes is witness journalism. Clips filmed by the right people in the wrong place. We have a clip, for example, from a group in Cambodia that is recording forced evictions in Phnom Penh.

Another genre is advocacy videos—videos that speak to a particular audience and push for a particular change in policy, behavior, or practice. Most of the videos from Witness are in that mode, including the videos I talked about from the Congo.

And I think there's a third kind of video: more traditional documentaries that follow a story in a human rights context but don't necessarily have an explicit call for action. It sort of splits into two. For example, we have footage from Al Jazeera on The Hub. So that's a news story. And there's a video that explains the history of West Papua under Indonesian control. That's more of a documentary.

The important elements for us are to go beyond a space where footage is viewed to think about how you create a human rights community around it and how you turn that visual media into action. It's not OK just to see scenes of misery. In fact it can be deeply draining and frustrating both for the people creating it and the people watching it. You have to think about ways to contextualize and ways to act.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.

Under Suspicion

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:07:00 EST

In February 2005, the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, was assassinated, along with 21 others, in a massive truck bomb explosion in Beirut. Most observers blamed Syria for the crime, and in the aftermath hundreds of thousands of Lebanese took to the streets in what was later dubbed the "Cedar Revolution," demanding a Syrian military withdrawal from their country. The United Nations Security Council set up a special independent commission to investigate the murder and identify the guilty. Last year, the U.N. took the additional step of establishing, under Chapter VII of its charter, a special tribunal, currently being set up near The Hague, to try the suspects.

The first commissioner of the U.N. investigation team was, Detlev Mehlis, a Berlin native who is now a senior prosecutor at the city's Superior Prosecutor's Office. His successor was the Belgian Serge Brammertz, who recently left the Hariri investigation to take up duties as prosecutor of the special tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. A Canadian, Daniel Bellemare, has replaced Brammertz, and once the investigation is completed he is expected to become the first prosecutor of the Hariri tribunal. After two years of virtual silence, Mehlis agreed to go on the record for a Wall Street Journal interview I conducted with him, in which he criticized the slow progress in the investigation. This is an expanded version of that interview, which took place in Berlin.

reason: For a long time after you left your post as commissioner of the United Nations-mandated Hariri inquiry in December 2005, you refused to go on the record to talk about the case. Why do so now?

Detlev Mehlis: My successor, Serge Brammertz, has just left after two years on the job, and a new commissioner, Daniel Bellemare, has been installed. So it's a good time for a summing up on my part. To have spoken up earlier would have created an impression of interfering in the investigation. I also feel I owe it to the people I worked with during my eight months as commissioner. This is my final statement, except for one exception when I will be interviewed by a German newspaper.

reason: Recently, however, you did go on the record to tell a Frankfurt daily that you "regretted" having left the investigation in December 2005. Why did you say this?

Detlev Mehlis: From what I am hearing, the investigation has lost all the momentum it had [when Brammertz took over] in January 2006. Had I stayed on, I would have handled things differently. But I couldn't stay because the U.N. told me that for security reasons I could no longer remain in Lebanon after January 2006. They offered to relocate me outside the country, but this was impossible for me. The permanent representative of Germany at the U.N. told the organization that it would be unacceptable for a German prosecutor to stay away from his team in Beirut. I fully agreed with this. I also left for professional and family reasons.

reason: What would you have done differently than Brammertz?

Detlev Mehlis: Above all I would have continued informing the U.N. Security Council and the Lebanese on progress in the investigation. When I arrived in Beirut, I said that participation of the media was central for democracy. The Lebanese public has to be informed, even if there are setbacks in the investigation. In a democracy people have the right to know, particularly when a prime minister was murdered and people don't trust the authorities. This was an opportunity to restore credibility to the justice system.

There is also a practical rationale: To have the support of the public, to encourage witnesses to come forward with information, and for governments to send specialized investigators, you need to give them an idea of what you are doing.

reason: What makes you think that Brammertz has not moved forward? After all, he wrote in his reports that he had identified "persons of interest"?

Detlev Mehlis: Unfortunately, I haven't seen a word in his reports during the past two years confirming that he has moved forward. When I left we were ready to name suspects, but [the investigation] seems not to have progressed from that stage. There is no judicial term that I have ever heard of called a "person of interest." You have suspects, and a "person of interest" is definitely not a suspect. If you have identified suspects in a case like this one, you don't allow them to roam free for years to tamper with evidence, flee the country, or commit similar crimes.

reason: But what if Brammertz did not reveal his information for tactical reasons? He has defended preserving the "secrecy of the investigation."

Detlev Mehlis: I don't accept the concept of the "secrecy of the investigation," nor is it a judicial principle that I know. For me, as a German, the notion of a secret investigation sounds ominous. For the reasons I outlined earlier, the public has the right to know and the U.N. commission has to inform without endangering its investigation.

reason: Brammertz reopened the crime scene after he took over from you. What was your reaction to that move?

Detlev Mehlis: I wondered what he was doing. We already had Swiss, French, and German expert opinion indicating that the explosion that killed Hariri was beyond doubt an above-ground explosion. By reopening the crime scene he cast doubt on the credibility of the investigation that I had led. He also wasted valuable time and manpower. All this only to end up confirming our initial findings. But this is typical of a broader problem, namely that in the past two years the U.N. investigation has told us little we didn't already know before Brammertz became commissioner. We are now told that Hariri was killed for political reasons and that there were several layers of participation in the conspiracy. We needed two years of investigative endeavor to discover this?

But let me hasten to add that my criticism is not personal. I'm the one who recommended Brammertz, among others, for the post of commissioner, so I must bear some responsibility for what happened afterward.

reason: Do you feel Brammertz's silence may have been due to his fear that being more open about the inquiry might have led to political conflict inside Lebanon?

Detlev Mehlis: I don't buy the argument. The assassination was always going to have political repercussions. It was a political crime. We had to accept this and it came with the territory. For many Lebanese we did too little; for the United Nations we did too much. Many at the U.N. would have preferred a softer approach. I understood this. The U.N. didn't want another problem.

reason: So, was there interference by the Secretary General's office in your work, particularly from then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan?

Detlev Mehlis: Annan made it clear to me that he did not want another trouble spot. I respected this but he also respected my point of view. Traditionally, there is tension between politics and justice, and I accepted that Annan did not want more problems because of the Hariri case. Relations are helped little when a prosecutor [like Brammertz] uses terms such as the "secrecy of the investigation." Yet Annan was always very supportive of my work and well-being. The U.N. did not interfere in my efforts and had no leverage over me, as I was not after a position in the organization. Even had the U.N. tried, there were investigators from 17 countries who might have thought differently, making this impossible.

reason: There was the famous case where, in your first report, one could access through the track changes command the edits in the initial draft of the document. It was clear that you had edited out the names of two very senior members of the Syrian leadership mentioned by a Syrian witness. Was leaving the track changes in intentional, so people could see which officials might have been implicated?

Detlev Mehlis: Not at all. When I prepared the original report, it was my impression that it would be confidential; that we would release to the public a version containing fewer details. However, in New York I learned that Annan wanted to make the report public. I intervened to say that, therefore, we needed to remove the names in question, because the persons mentioned were not suspects, but had merely been mentioned by a witness. Only the names of suspects and certain prominent witnesses were in the report. The U.N. press office made an unfortunate mistake in releasing the document with the track changes. It was definitely not intentional.

reason: Your reports, the fact that you asked the Lebanese authorities to arrest four pro-Syrian Lebanese intelligence chiefs, and your requests to interview Syrian officials and intelligence officers all showed whom you suspected of being involved in the crime. What was it like dealing with the Syrians, and how many times did you travel to Syria?

Detlev Mehlis: My interlocutors always treated me courteously and professionally, even in a friendly way. But they also made it clear to me that there were limits to their cooperation. I twice went to Syria: once for preliminary talks and once to interview witnesses.

reason: Before leaving, you had put in a request to interview Syrian President Bashar Assad as a witness. The Syrians were quite bothered by this. In the end you never spoke to President Assad. What happened?

Detlev Mehlis: I left before the process could go through and don't know what later happened. There were reports that Brammertz held a meeting with President Assad, but that is legally quite different than taking down a witness statement. In fact I took down the statements of many Lebanese politicians, who did not seem especially keen to put their signature on a document having legal repercussions. I also interviewed the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, who seemed to have no problem with this.

reason: Two of your key Syrian witnesses did not seem particularly reliable. One told a press conference in Damascus that his testimony was fraudulent; the other, a former intelligence officer, later became a suspect in Hariri's murder, and has made contradictory statements.

Detlev Mehlis: In such crimes you cannot be choosy about whom you are dealing with. What do you expect, white angels, coming out from the blue? Those two gave us a lot of information, which we could sometimes corroborate with information received elsewhere. In the end, the tribunal will determine their credibility, and ask why they agreed to sign their statements. Maybe the witnesses were there to discredit the investigation, but that can help us determine who wants to discredit the investigation.

reason: The four intelligence chiefs you asked the Lebanese authorities to arrest are still in jail. Their lawyers are saying that they are entitled to be set free, pending a trial. What are your thoughts about this?

Detlev Mehlis: That is one reason why it's important to accelerate the trial process, to protect the rights of the accused. At the same time, we did find sufficient evidence that all four generals were involved in the Hariri case. This was not my assessment alone, but also that of my commission's investigators and the Lebanese judiciary. Recently, I was accused in press reports in Beirut of having interviewed one of the suspects--Jamil al-Sayyed--without his lawyer. That is nonsense. But there has been a lot of media misinformation on my participation in the Hariri case in order to derail the investigation.

reason: Last week there were reports that judges had been appointed to the Hariri tribunal, which will try suspects identified in the ongoing investigation. The tribunal was established last year under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter and will be based near The Hague. This suggests that there is progress.

Detlev Mehlis: Perhaps, but because I haven't seen a word on new suspects in the past two years, I have my doubts. I think people should not expect a trial within the next two to three years, unless the investigation regains momentum. I fear that the suspects will end up in a judicial no-man's land, with Lebanon claiming they are under the U.N.'s jurisdiction, and the U.N. saying that they must remain under Lebanese jurisdiction.

reason: You seem to believe that the problem with the Hariri tribunal is not so much the likelihood of a cover-up, but that the process will stall. Do you think a cover up, like Lockerbie bombing, is possible?

Detlev Mehlis: The Hariri case is an unusual one. Usually in investigations you start at the bottom and work your way up. In the Hariri case we started pretty much at the top and worked down. We had an accurate view of how the assassination took place from above, but less clear a view of what happened on the ground. That is why the investigation was supposed to continue [when I left].Therefore I think that it would be very difficult to have a Lockerbie II.

reason: There is palpable international reluctance to carry the Hariri case to its conclusion, and you alluded to this earlier. Few at the U.N., for example, are particularly eager to destabilize Syria's regime, assuming its involvement in the Hariri murder is proven. Do you think this might derail the case?

Detlev Mehlis: You can't prosecute governments and countries; you prosecute individuals. When I headed [the U.N. investigation], there was a will to get to the bottom of the crime—shown in all the Security Council resolutions on the matter. Why not now? One of the most helpful [member nations] was Russia, which persuaded Syria to comply with the resolutions. Even with states having different interests, common understandings can be reached.

reason: What do you know of Daniel Bellemare, the new commissioner?

Detlev Mehlis: I have never met him, heard of him, or been contacted by him.

reason: What advice would you give to Bellemare?

Detlev Mehlis: Concentrate on the Hariri case itself; don't try to write a history book. Focus on the whos, hows and whys of the crime. Analysis can never replace solid investigative police work. As my top Swedish investigator once put it, "A case like this cannot be solved through a PowerPoint presentation."

reason: What does the Hariri case mean for the U.N.?

Detlev Mehlis: This can either be an example of efficient U.N. involvement or a one-time experiment. The U.N.'s image is at stake, particularly in Lebanon, where people put high hopes—perhaps too high—in the Hariri investigation.

reason: It took you nine years to bring convictions for the 1986 bombing of the LaBelle discotheque in Berlin, in which you accused Libyan officials of being behind the attack. What did that experience teach you?

Detlev Mehlis: That justice prevails, but you have to have patience. I also recall that for years the LaBelle case dragged on with small successes and failures, but it was always kept alive on the prosecution's side by my working to inform the media; and on the victims' side because their families created pressure groups. I feel that in the [Hariri] case, the families of the deceased can certainly play a much more active role. It's important to keep such cases in the public eye.

reason: In conclusion, do you feel the Hariri tribunal will go forward?

Detlev Mehlis: Someone committed a terrible crime and someone is responsible. Definitely, no one can abolish this tribunal. I may not be happy about the time frame, but am deeply convinced the case can be solved and will be solved.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

For the Love of Allah

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:49:00 EST

Here's one way to disguise your contraband sex flicks:

Algerian police have uncovered a criminal group that made pornographic DVDs and put well-known Islamic preachers on the covers to disguise the films, the Al Shuruk al Yawmi daily reported on Monday.

Police said tens of thousands of copies of the erotic films were sold in the capital, Algiers, and that many customers bought the discs in good faith, innocently unaware of their contents.

"Many" customers, eh?

Elsewhere in Reason: Porn as psychological warfare.

Was it Pakistan All Along?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:35:00 EST

In a somewhat unnerving speculation, Jim Henley wonders whether Osama Bin Laden's plan all along might have had little to do with the United States--and everything to do with Pakistan's nukes.

Benazir Bhutto's Political Future

info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:08:00 EST

Shakespeare famously wrote in connection with the assassination of the great Roman emperor Julius Caesar: "The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones." The exact opposite might turn out to be the case with Benazir Bhutto. She was an exceedingly flawed figure whose death, ironically, might contribute more toward her goal of turning Pakistan into a secular democracy than her life.

There is little doubt that under President Pervez Musharraf, the military general who assumed power in a bloodless coup in 1999, Pakistan has become both less secular and less democratic. His support for the U.S. in its battle against Islamic terrorism has become a huge obstacle to secularism in Pakistan. It has antagonized Islamic fundamentalists and he largely acquiesced to their demands—even ceding territory to them in the northwest frontier provinces—to prevent them from destabilizing his regime. At the same time, he has resorted to ever more draconian tactics to suppress dissidents—such as the chief justice of Pakistan and lawyers' groups—who have questioned his political legitimacy. All while cashing in mountains of U.S. dollars in post-9/11 aid. These moves have deeply antagonized Pakistan's moderate and urban intelligentsia and fuelled widespread anti-American sentiment. More to the point, it has made it more difficult for Pakistan to reverse course and move toward democracy.

The great hope both in Pakistan and the U.S. was that Bhutto, as the leader of the closest thing to a genuinely liberal party in the country, the Pakistani People's Party (PPP), would unify Pakistan's secular forces ahead of the January elections and then win a voter mandate to beat back religious fundamentalists not just in mosques but in the nation's intelligence and armed services.

This was not a baseless hope. A former prime minister, Bhutto was a charismatic and courageous figure who, despite having spent the last eight years in exile in England, retained a strong following in Pakistan. Educated in the West, she was the only candidate in the upcoming elections who was making the case for fighting radical Islam—not in the name of a more moderate religion, but of the rule of law. Her pledge to respect the country's constitution, restore the separation of powers, and protect the political rights of ordinary citizens was a central part of her platform.

But articulating the case for a secular democracy is not sufficient for actually producing one. It requires political leaders of the right timber. And, it is doubtful that, in the end, Bhutto had what it takes. Indeed, the biggest obstacles to the creation of functioning democratic institutions in Pakistan, as in other emerging nations, are corruption and ambition. Bhutto had both, in abundance.

Her two stints as prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to 1996 were corrupt even by Pakistani standards. She made her husband a cabinet minister and gave him free rein to use his position to bequeath favors on businesses for kick-backs, a practice that earned him the sobriquet of "Mr. 10 percent." Both times her administration collapsed amidst corruption scandals, which did much to pave the way for a takeover by Musharraf, who justified his dictatorial rule as necessary to clean house.

But Bhutto's overweening ambition was potentially even more of an obstacle to democracy than her corruption. She belonged to the political equivalent of the Rockefeller family. As the oldest and most brilliant of the four children of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a flamboyant and populist prime minister who was hanged by his successor, she sincerely believed that she was the only legitimate heir to her father's political legacy. She bickered bitterly with her brothers and her mother over the leadership of the PPP, the party founded by her father. One of her brothers, who challenged her role in the party, was gunned down by the police outside his home while she occupied the prime minister's office. Soon after, she summarily deposed her mother as the president of the PPP and gave herself the position for life. "I had no idea I had nourished a viper in my breast," her mother wailed at the time. If Bhutto could not set aside her ambition for the well-being of her family, it is doubtful that she would have done so for the sake of democracy in Pakistan.

Yet her death might contribute more to that end than if she had actually won a third term. The perception that she martyred herself to rid the country of its jihadist reactionaries will force moderately religious opponents to at least pay lip service to her secularist convictions. Al Qaeda's possible involvement in her assassination will discredit Islamist parties that are already viewed as little more than fronts for extremist groups.

Equally important, her assassination will produce some unique and powerful benefits for her party that will greatly help the democratic process in Pakistan. The PPP will get a huge sympathy vote in the next election (even as it moved to contest their timing this weekend). More crucially, however, her murder allows the PPP to move beyond being an extension of the Bhutto family. The party has chosen Bhutto's teenage son—a student at Oxford who has had only minimal contact with his country growing up—as its president (and her husband as its co-chair). But given that her son's political talents are untested and his experience non-existent, the party has also declared that, if it wins the elections, it will name Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the current party vice president, to be the next prime minister of Pakistan. This is a very encouraging development.

Fahim is widely regarded as a decent, progressive, and measured man who is every bit as secular as Bhutto. He had hitherto eschewed the job of prime minister because he did not want to cross swords with her. He lacks Bhutto's charisma and dynamism, but that won't be a problem for him this time because of the sympathy vote his party will draw. Bhutto's death, over time, will allow the PPP to shed her family's domination, while at the same time use its name to maintain continuity and coherence.

This is precisely what happened in neighboring India. After the assassinations of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 and of her son Rajiv seven years later, many feared that their party, Congress (I), would never recover. Much like the PPP, for nearly 40 years, Congress (I) had been synonymous with the Gandhi name. Without a viable and visible Gandhi left to represent it, it seemed likely that the party would enter the political wilderness, never to return. Instead, over the years, Congress (I) forged a new arrangement with the Gandhi family that has allowed it to harness the clan's political capital while casting a much wider net for political talent. This has allowed Congress (I) to offer India two stellar prime ministers, including the current one, who became the architects of the country's economic liberalization.

The same thing might happen in Pakistan. Bhutto's assassination could well liberate her party from her flaws and give her country the push it needs to realize her vision. If that happens, Bhutto's most important legacy might still be ahead of her.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation.

The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 09:57:00 EST

Pakistan's opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, has been killed in a suicide attack. Current press accounts say at least 20 others died in the bombing.

Technorati's roundup of reactions is here. Balloon Juice may have the most apt response:

There will be chaos in Pakistan because of this. F**king crazy. Holy shit.

Post your own apocalyptic scenario in the comments.

Six More Weeks of Winter

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:09:00 EST

Last month I linked to a Marc Lynch article about the rise of blogging within the Muslim Brotherhood. Now Lynch reports that this Islamist corner of the blogosphere may be collapsing:

In a controversial article published on al-Jazeera Talk (and, notably, not on his own blog or on an official MB website), Abd al-Monem Mahmoud ("Ana Ikhwan"), one of the leaders of the Brotherhood blogging movement, declared a mournful end to the Brotherhood blogging opening. The great mistake of the MB bloggers, Mahmoud concluded, was that they became identified with a specific ideological and political trend - which made it too easy for them to be portrayed by internal and external critics as a "faction." Blogging was supposed to be a personal thing, not a political trend, and its growth into a movement doomed the experiment. Leaders were particularly concerned about the trend since it came a time when the Brotherhood faced a harsh regime crackdown; the airing of internal disagreements helped the organization's enemies and weakened its public image. A number of senior leaders rebuked the blogging Brothers, both publicly and privately, urging them to come to their elders to discuss their concerns rather than just posting them online for all to see. Finally, argues Mahmoud, the recklessness of a few of the youth (especially the "Islam Offline" episode, where some young bloggers posted a parody site of the official Brotherhood website in protest over its editorial decisions) triggered a harsh backlash throughout the senior ranks. The organization's leaders, he hints, decided that the time had come for discipline to replace openness - while the greatest pressure, I hear, actually came from the more radical and salafi youth who vehemently opposed the relatively liberal trend embodied in the blogging experiment.

Brotherhood of Bloggers

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:03:00 EST

The Muslim Brotherhood has discovered blogging. Writing in MERIP, Marc Lynch observes that there were about 150 Egyptian bloggers in the Islamist organization as of this past spring—"an impressive number given that less than a year before there had been virtually none." These diarists, Lynch argues, "have more in common with other young Egyptian activists, whether leftist or nationalist, than they do with their less wired peers":

Muhammad Hamza, a Muslim Brother and a blogger, identifies his as a "generation of the 2004 movement," shaped by the information revolution—satellite TV, cellular phones and the Internet—and the appearance of human rights organizations. Armed with handheld technology, this "2004 generation" obtains and analyzes information, and communicates with fellow Brothers and activists with other leanings, with rapidity and ease....Hamza acknowledges that the blogger-activists face significant internal criticism: They are too influenced by liberal ideas, other Brothers say, they want for clear political thought and defined goals, and they pay insufficient attention to the Brothers' imperative to proselytize (da'wa). Empowered by the new technology, fed up with the status quo and—for now—encouraged by at least some of Brotherhood leaders, the bloggers and activists have thus far shown little inclination to stand down....

Not all Brothers' blogs are part of a coordinated campaign, however. Over the last year, a growing number of youth have started the sort of individual online journals that would be familiar to youth anywhere. These Muslim Brothers often simply live online—whiling away the hours not just reading blogs, but participating in forums and posting to YouTube and the ubiquitous Facebook. While they engage in their share of political activism, many of their blogs are intensely personal. Like the youth of any country, they spend as much time writing about family and friends as about world affairs—as well as, of course, their religious faith. Like most Egyptians in their age group, they are viscerally concerned with the persistent unemployment, under-employment, inflation and affordable housing shortage that have made it exceedingly difficult for the last two generations of young Egyptians to marry and settle down according to social expectations. Lastly, these bloggers clearly do not share the salafi aversion to popular culture: Their blogs are full of disquisitions on their favorite songs and books and movies.