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Love During The siege/ حب في الحصار

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People and Power Syria ; Russian bombings

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Private Prisons Are Cashing In on Refugees’ Desperation

By ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN  FEB. 25, 2016

The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

Berlin — IMMIGRATION and Customs Enforcement calls the detention site in Dilley, Tex., a “family residential center.” But to the 2,000 migrant children and mothers who live there, it’s something else: “People who say this is not a prison are lying,” Yancy Maricela Mejia Guerra, a detainee from Central America, told Fusion last year. “It’s a prison for us and a prison for our children, but none of us are criminals.”

The Dilley center holds people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a government agency, but it is run by the Corrections Corporation of America, America’s largest private prison and detention company. It is one part of a worrisome global trend of warehousing immigrants and asylum seekers at remote sites maintained by for-profit corporations. The United Nations estimates that one in every 122 people on the planet is displaced. This is a crisis that requires a humanitarian solution; unfortunately, some people view it as a business opportunity.

In recent decades, many Western governments have increasingly outsourced prisons to private companies, claiming that doing so saves money. As the number of migrants and asylum seekers has grown, governments have found a new use for the private-prison model.

It has become a multimillion-dollar industry. The company Hero Norway runs 90 refugee centers in Norway and 10 in Sweden, charging governments $31 to $75 per refugee per night. Australia’s government has contracted the company Broadspectrum to manage two detention camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea for asylum seekers. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government awarded the security firm Serco a seven-year contract in 2014 worth over $100 million for running the Yarl’s Wood immigrant detention center.

These private companies are too often plagued by scandal and accused of abuse. The Corrections Corporation of America has a long history of ignoring detainee safety and federal laws. Serco has been accused of inadequately training its guards and overcharging the British governmentfor substandard work. One doctor who worked at a site run by Broadspectrum in Nauru told The Guardian that the detention center was “reminiscent of Guantánamo Bay.”

The global flows of refugees are unlikely to abate anytime soon. Wars in the Middle East continue, as does the epidemic of gang violence in Central America. Climate change will send millions more people fleeing their homes in the years to come. Governments must accept that for-profit detention centers are not the way to deal with this issue.

State-run detention centers don’t necessarily guarantee more respect for human rights, but there is evidence that government control brings improvements: A 2014 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, found that private immigration detention centers in the United States were more crowded than state-run ones, and detainees in them had less access to educational programs and quality medical care. And public centers, while still flawed, are more transparent

Opacity is a common denominator in the privatized detention system around the world. In Australia, Europe and the United States, journalists have less access to private prisons than they do to public ones; governments maintain less oversight. That’s not a coincidence. As Matthew J. Gibney, a political scientist at Oxford University, told The New York Times: “When something goes wrong — a death, an escape — the government can blame it on a kind of market failure instead of an accountability failure.”

Advocates of private immigration detention claim they are saving taxpayers money. But that seems unlikely. The American government spends more on immigrant detention today than it did 10 years ago, when the number of border crossings was higher. The Corrections Corporation of America and other companies have lobbied politicians to keep more people behind bars rather than deporting them. Congress requires that at least 34,000 people be housed daily in detention centers — a so-called detention bed mandate.

Making a profit doesn’t just require keeping beds filled, it can often lead companies to skimp on services. This means mental health care, outdoor activities and healthy food are far less available in private detention centers than at those run by the government. Last year, the United Nations described a camp for refugees in Traiskirchen, Austria, that is run by the Swiss firm ORS Service, as “inhumane” because of overcrowding. Similar reports are common not just on Europe’s frontiers but across the world.

Governments that receive migrants and asylum seekers must reverse their reliance on private companies. The current practice is a short-term fix that in the long run will cost governments more and subject refugees to worse conditions. In the meantime, governments from Canberra to Vienna to Washington should institute independent cost analyses to ensure that private centers give taxpayers the best value for their money. They should encourage more oversight of these sites, from government agencies and from the news media. And the 34,000-bed quota must also be done away with immediately.

In its 2014 annual report, the Corrections Corporation of America worried that changes to American immigration policy could cut into the company’s bottom line. Many other such contractors might have similar fears. Let’s hope they do. Unless governments make drastic changes now, these corporations look likely to get richer and richer as more people around the world flee their homes, desperately seeking safety.

Antony Loewenstein is a journalist and the author of “Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe.”

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 25, 2016, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Private Prisons Cash In on Refugees. Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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jesus

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Obama Signs Executive Order Relocating Congress to Guantánamo

 

BY ANDY BOROWITZ

CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY PETE SOUZA / THE WHITE HOUSE
CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY PETE SOUZA / THE WHITE HOUSE

 

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Making good on one of his key campaign promises, President Obama signed an executive order on Tuesday relocating the United States Congress to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The President seemed to relish signing the order, calling the relocation a “win-win for America,” and indicating that Congress could be moved to its new headquarters “immediately.”

“We don’t envision doing any renovations to the facility down there,” he said. “It is ready to house Congress right now.”

The President did not specify what the current U.S. Capitol building would be used for in the future, but he hinted that it could be the setting for historic reënactments in the manner of Colonial Williamsburg.

“I think it could be fascinating to school groups,” he said. “It could really take them back to the olden days when it was a real, functioning place.”

Minutes after the President signed the order, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) called it “an outrage” and “grounds for impeachment,” but Obama appeared to take such howls of protest in stride.

“If Congress believes that this executive order is illegal, they can take it up with the Supreme Court,” he said. “Oh wait—we don’t have a Supreme Court.”

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The American Who Quit Money To Live In A Cave

………

Meet Daniel Suelo. He’s been living without money since 2000. When our paths crossed synchronistically in Moab, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to learn from this wise man. I interviewed him and found his philosophy and way of living inspiring and visionary.

For more about Daniel and his experiment of living without money, check out
zerocurrency.blogspot.com/
sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/

There is also a book about Daniel’s life by the same title “The Man Who Quit Money” by Mark Sundeen. 
facebook.com/themanwhoquitmoney/

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Voices from the road

jano

 

 

She likes it when her friends call her Jano.
Aged 53, Jano comes from Aleppo, one of Syria’s most war-ravaged cities. She is now waiting for her asylum request to be processed at a refugee camp in Nijmegen, in the east of the Netherlands.
She spends her days knitting woolly scarves and hats, and gives them out as gifts to the children in the camp. There is no warmth without love, she says. And whenever she sees a child cry, she walks up to him to hug him, and says: “Don’t cry, we’ve cried enough.” 
Jano talks a lot about what happened to her on the way to the Netherlands, along the migrant trail. 
“In Serbia, I had to get through a forest. It was after midnight, and there, in the dark, I fell into a muddy swamp. I was stuck there for three whole hours. I was travelling alone, so there was no one with me to help me out,” she said.
One of the things that Jano remembers most about being on the journey to the Netherlands is the silence. “Any sound can give you away, and create problems for the others travelling the route,” she says.
“I got stuck in the swamp, and I was sinking deeper and deeper, until I saw the shadows of two men. ‘Help me,’ I whispered. And they pulled me out, but I lost my boots in the mud. I walked in the forest for several more hours, barefoot, all night long. When I reached a town, I managed to buy shoes and treat the wounds on my feet,” she recalls.
Jano also thinks back to another moment on her journey. “I was climbing a steep hill one night. I was very scared. The smuggler told us that we might slip and die if we weren’t careful. And I realised that if any of us fell, he wouldn’t just die, he would also cause trouble for the others, because the police might notice us. At one point I was about to fall, and a man helped me. He said in a deep voice: ‘I’ll hold you, I won’t let you fall.’” 
For the rest of that climb, she kept on relying on him. And he relied on her too: at one point he was about to slip, and she helped him up. He held her hand and thanked her. They were then separated, just before dawn. “I never knew his name, or found out what he looked like,” she says.
Jano talks about Aleppo like a sorrowful husband who has lost his widow, or a mother grieving her children, or a bride who has become separated from a groom on the eve of their wedding day. She also remembers how people had to live without electricity and running water for many months before she finally decided to flee.
She also tries to think of the future. She wants to learn to ride a bike, she is learning how to use a smartphone, and is picking up some words in Dutch. She doesn’t want to rely on others to get around. 
Jano wants a new life.Story and photo by
Ola Shams
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Covertly, Israel prepares to fight boycott activists online

 

Feb. 17, 2016 8:21 AM EST

FILE – In this April 20, 2015, file photo, an Egyptian man shouts anti-Israeli slogans in front of… Read more

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel is using its world-leading expertise in cyber security to take on the growing threat of the global pro-Palestinian movement to boycott Israel.

The Israeli government recently allotted nearly $26 million in this year’s budget to combat what it sees as worldwide efforts to “delegitimize” the Jewish state’s right to exist. Some of the funds are earmarked for Israeli tech companies, many of them headed by former military intelligence officers, for digital initiatives aimed at gathering intelligence on activist groups and countering their efforts.

“I want to create a community of fighters,” said Sima Vaknin-Gil, the director general of Israel’s Ministry for Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, to Israeli tech developers at a forum last month dedicated to the topic.

Initiatives are largely being kept covert. Participants at the invite-only forum, held on the sidelines of a cyber technology conference, repeatedly stood up to remind people that journalists were in the room.

Among the government officials involved in the efforts are some of Israel’s top secret-keepers, including Sima Shine, a former top official in the Mossad spy agency, and Vaknin-Gil, who recently retired as the chief military censor responsible for gag orders on state secrets.

Israel has established itself as a world leader in cyber technology innovation, fueled by graduates of prestigious and secretive military and security intelligence units. These units are widely thought to be behind some of the world’s most advanced cyber-attacks, including the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iran’s nuclear energy equipment last decade.

Each year, these units churn out a talent pool of Israelis who translate their skills to the corporate world. Now Israel is looking to harness their technological prowess for the fight to protect Israel’s international image.

Vaknin-Gil said her ministry is encouraging initiatives to expose the funding and curb the activities of anti-Israel activists, as well as campaigns to “flood the Internet” with content that puts a positive face on Israel. She said some of these actions will not be publicly identified with the government, but that the ministry will not fund unethical or illegal digital initiatives.

Established about 10 years ago, the pro-Palestinian “BDS” campaign is a coalition of organizations that advocate boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Inspired by the anti-apartheid movement, BDS organizers say they are using nonviolent means to promote the Palestinian struggle for independence.

The movement has grown into a global network of thousands of volunteers, from campus activists to church groups to liberal Jews disillusioned by Israeli policies. They lobby corporations, artists and academic institutions to sever ties with Israel.

The movement has made inroads. U.S. and British academic unions have endorsed boycotts, student governments at universities have made divestment proposals, and some famous musicians have refused to perform in Israel. The BDS movement also claims responsibility for pressuring some large companies to stop or modify operations in Israel. In its latest push, it has urged top Hollywood actors to reject a government-paid trip to Israel being offered to leading Oscar nominees.

Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS movement, said “quite a few web pages” that BDS websites linked to have mysteriously disappeared from the Internet.

“We assume Israel’s cyber sabotage is ongoing, but we are quite pleased that its detrimental impact on the global BDS movement has been dismal so far,” he said.

Israel says the movement is rooted in anti-Semitism and seeks not to change Israeli policies, but ultimately to put an end to the Jewish state.

Many online activists driving anti-Israeli campaigns on social media are tech-savvy, second- and third-generation Muslims in Europe and the U.S. who have grievances against the West and also lead online campaigns against European and U.S. governments, said Elad Ratson, who tracks the issue for Israel’s Foreign Ministry and spoke at last month’s cybersecurity forum.

He said they often create code that allows activists to blast thousands of messages from social media accounts — creating the illusion that many protesters are sharing the same anti-Israel or anti-West message online.

Israeli officials lobby Facebook to remove pages it says incite violence against Israelis, and there has been talk of advancing legislation to restrict Facebook in Israel. A Facebook representative met with Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan in Israel last week about the matter.

Ratson said social media giants are beginning to close inciting users’ accounts. Twitter said in a statement this month that since mid-2015, it has closed more than 125,000 accounts that were “threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS,” the Islamic State group. But he said Islamist activists are simply moving to “Darknet” sites not visible on the open internet.

Some Israeli tech companies are starting to build sly algorithms to restrict these online activists’ circle of influence on the “Darknet,” so activists think their message is reaching others when in fact it is being contained, Ratson said.

Other Israeli companies work on forensic intelligence gathering, such as detecting digital or semantic signatures buried in activists’ coding so they are able to track and restrict their online activity.

Firewall Israel, a non-profit initiative sponsored by the Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, is building an online platform to help pro-Israel activists around the world communicate about anti-Israel activism in their communities. At a recent event the initiative held at Campus Tel Aviv, a Google-sponsored event space for entrepreneurs, an Israeli web expert taught young activists how to mine the internet for BDS activities.

“Delegitimizers are engaged in a Disneyland of hate,” Igal Ram of Firewall Israel told seminar participants. “We want to act against the people who run the Disneyland … and the useful idiots who help.”

Inspiration, an Israeli intelligence analysis company founded by Ronen Cohen and Haim Pinto, former military intelligence officers, launched a technological initiative some months ago to collect intelligence on BDS organizations in Europe, particularly Scandinavian countries, the U.S., and South America, Cohen said. He said the initiative aims to dismantle the infrastructure of groups he said were responsible for incitement and anti-Semitism against Israel. He declined to give specifics.

“It’s no different than an operation, which you sometimes read about in the newspaper, in Syria or Lebanon,” Cohen said. “It’s the kind of thing that, if you want to do it in the future … you can’t work in the open.”

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Follow Daniel Estrin on Twitter at www.twitter.com/danielestrin

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“Iran the Protector”

Qunfuz

Robin Yassin-Kassab

iran

Iran executes more people than any country except China. Many victims are Ahwazi Arabs or from other minorities. Many are political dissidents. And many, of course, are Shia Muslims.

This was published at al-Araby al-Jadeed/ the New Arab.

I recently gave a talk in a radical bookshop in Scotland. The talk was about my and Leila al-Shami’s “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War”, a book which aims to amplify grassroots Syrian revolutionary voices and perspectives. My talk was of course critical of the Iranian and Russian interventions to rescue the Assad regime.

During the question and answer session afterwards, a young man declared: “You’ve spoken against Iran. You’ve made a good case. But the fact remains, Iran is the protector of Shia Muslims throughout the region.”

In reply I asked him to consider the Syrian town of al-Qusayr at two different moments: summer 2006 and summer 2013.

During the July 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese fled south Lebanon and south Beirut – the Hizbullah heartlands where Israeli strikes were fiercest – and sought refuge inside Syria. Syrians welcomed them into their homes, schools and mosques. Several thousand were sheltered in Qusayr, a Sunni agricultural town between Homs and the Lebanese border.

It made no difference that most of these refugees were Shia Muslims. They were just Muslims, and Arabs, and they were paying the price of a resistance war against Israeli occupation and assault. That’s how they were seen.

Their political leadership was also widely admired. The kind of people who would resist the pressure to pin up posters of Hafez or Bashaar al-Assad might still raise Hassan Nasrallah’s picture. During the 2006 war, very many Syrians of all backgrounds donated money to the refugees and to Hizbullah itself. The famous actress Mai Skaf was one such benefactor.

How quickly things changed. By 2012 Mai Skaf was embroiled in an online war with Hizbullah. “I collected 100,000 liras for our Lebanese brethren who fled the July 2006 war to Syria,” she posted on Facebook, “bought them TV sets and satellite dishes to follow what was happening in their countries, and bought their children shoes and pajamas. Now I am telling Hassan Nasrallah that I regret doing that and I want him to either withdraw his thugs from Syria or give me back my money.”

Which brings us to the second moment for comparison: summer 2013. Throughout May, hundreds of Hizbullah fighters led a devastating assault on Qusayr. Because they were local men defending their homes, the Free Syrian Army were able to resist the onslaught for weeks, but were finally defeated. A Shia flag was then hung over the town’s main Sunni mosque, a signal of sectarian conquest. Shortly afterwards the regime burnt the Homs Land Registry, and Alawi and Shia families were invited to occupy homes abandoned by the families of Qusayr.

So a militia designed to resist foreign occupation became an occupier itself. The supposed assistant of the oppressed became the fighting arm of the oppressor. In Shia symbology, Hizbullah, rather than defending Hussain, was serving Yazeed.

The backlash hit fast. Qusayr fell on June 5th. On June 11th 60 Shia, most civilians, were massacred at Hatla in Deir al-Zor.

Why did Hizbullah intervene against the Syrian revolution? Various excuses were offered up: to protect the Lebanese borders, or to protect the shrine of the Prophet’s grandaughter Zainab outside Damascus. None of them explained Hizbullah’s participation in battles as far afield as Hama or Aleppo. Why would Nasrallah choose to infuriate Lebanese Sunnis, to make Lebanese Shia targets of sectarian revenge attacks, to deplete and downgrade his anti-Zionist fighting force?

From a Lebanese perspective, it makes no sense. And as a community, the Lebanese Shia could have taken a very different line. In 2012, for instance, the respected Shia leader Sayyed Hani Fahs called on Lebanese Shia to “support the Arab uprisings… particularly the Syrian [one] which will triumph, God willing… Among the [factors] that guarantee a [good] future for us in Lebanon is for Syria to be stable, free, and ruled by a democratic, pluralist and modern state.”

But still Hizbullah steered its constituency away from revolutionary solidarity and into a deadly embrace with the Assad regime. Sheikh Subhi al-Tufayli, who led Hizbullah between 1989 and 1991, blamed Iran: “I was secretary general of the party,” he said, “and I know that the decision is Iranian, and the alternative would have been a confrontation with the Iranians. I know that the Lebanese in Hizbullah, and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah more than anyone, are not convinced about this war. … Iran and Hizbullah bear responsibility for every Syrian killed, every tree felled, and every house destroyed.”

Iranian counter-revolutionary policy not only uses Arab Shia as cannon fodder, but bears huge responsibilty too for the anti-Shia backlash on the Syrian battlefield and in regional public opinion. The Iranian state, therefore, is not a protector of Arab Shia but a threat to their security and wellbeing.

Likewise in Iraq, where before the 2003 invasion and occupation a third of marriages were cross-sect Sunni Shia. Today, after the civil war’s ethnic cleansing, and with ISIS facing not a unified Iraqi army but a collection of Iran-backed Shia militias, it’s hard to see how the country’s sectarian relations can ever be healed. The Iranian state’s undue influence on Iraq’s military and political life has helped strangle both communal coexistence and the possibility of democracy. And Iranian officials openly boast their imperialism. “Three Arab capitals have today ended up in the hands of Iran and belong to the Islamic Iranian revolution,” Ali Reza Zakani, an MP close to Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei, said last year (he was referring to Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad).

Of course, more players than just Iran are responsible for Iraq’s dysfunction. The United States must be blamed for the occupation, and the Saddam Hussain regime which fanned sectarianism to divide and rule, specifically to put down the 1991 southern uprising. Sectarian TV channels from the Gulf don’t help. And historically, the British and French states did their fair share of damage (and sectarian engineering) during the post-Ottoman carve-up.

None of these states protected people. And this is because they are states.

The young man who spoke up for Iran wasn’t a Shia Muslim. He was a Catholic, he said, who’d grown up in the Gulf. And he was also a leftist.

But this is something that leftists, when they were internationalists, once understood: states are designed to protect the property, position and privilege of the various elites which run them, not to safeguard the interests of ordinary people. This means Iran is not the protector of the Shia, Saudi Arabia is not the protector of the Sunnis, and Israel is not the protector of the Jews. Need it be said that the Assad regime is the deadliest enemy of Alawis?

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