A delegation of US tech companies and policymakers are visiting Syria today and holding a meeting with President Bashar Al Assad and high-ranking officials. The tech delegation (#techdel on Twitter, and “techdel” hereafter) came after coordination on high diplomatic levels and as a part of the Obama administration’s policy of engaging with Syria, according to William Burns, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

A tweet by Alec Ross, the techdel’s leader, summed up the United States’ attitude towards the visit:

This trip to #Syria will test Syria’s willingness to engage more responsibly on issues of #netfreedom

Of course Net freedom is craved by Syrian users; Censorship is strict and many popular websites are blocked by the Syrian government (Facebook and YouTube to name a couple), and perceived cyber-dissidents have many a time received prison sentences ranging between 3-5 years in most cases. What the techdel seems oblivious to is how much the U.S. sanctions on Syria are complicit in further limiting internet freedoms for Syrian users. Jared Cohen, Member of Secretary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff and a member of the delegation, tweeted:

Big gap between older & younger Syrians on challenges to business. Youth blame lack of education, not sanctions

Just to show how misguided that statement is, I’ll draw up a few comparisons between Syrian governmental censorship and U.S. imposed IT sanctions:

According to Jared Cohen, the techdel also addressed issues of intellectual property:

Strong words from US techdel to Syria on intellectual property & emphasis on enacting laws to address this in short & long-terms

Again, US policymakers are requesting that Syrian authorities help them enforce measures against software piracy, of software that’s originally banned from Syria under the US sanctions. I don’t know what message they are trying to send here, but again it shows that the techdel came with a pre-prepared speech that’s hardly based on the facts on the ground, and shows little desire to have a proactive discussion with Syrian counterparts. It’s ludicrous that Syrian officials are asked to help effectively enforce sanctions against their country; The fine people from techdel seem to disagree. The fact of the matter remains, pirated software is the only choice for Syrians now, and in the absence of the ability to purchase original copies; all U.S. demands for measures against piracy are painfully misguided.

I personally have little hope for any positive outcome to come out of this initiative. Both sides are hardly affected by the current situation and the real victim here is the Syrian youth and entrepreneurs who are having to spend their time and energy to come up with ways to go around limitations and hurdles from local and U.S. policies. Those wasted talents would have been better invested in an [infant], yet promising, Syrian IT sector.

I hereby start a campaign to call on policymakers from Syria and the US to end unjust policies and practices that are adversely affecting Syrian IT infrastructure, and users.

How you can help

Start by contacting US policymakers, especially if you’re based in the United States.  If you’re a Syrian blogger, blogging in Arabic is a good way to attract attention and garner support internally.

- Important contacts:

You can call or write to Sec. Clinton’s office:
Phone: +1 202-647-5291
Address:
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520

You can also contact advisers and members of Sec. Clinton’s team:
Alec Ross (@AlecJRoss on Twitter), Adviser for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Jared Cohen (@JaredCohen on Twitter), Member of Secretary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff.

Use hash tag #freenetsy on Twitter to make it easier to organize and track tweets, and make sure to join the Facebook group page and invite your friends to join.

WikiLeaks

Have you watched the video? Now here’s the official U.S. army statement in 2007 as it was reported by the New York Times:

The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.

“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.

Nice cover up, No? Weddady explains on twitter how this could happen: “NYT is only as good as their sources when reporting on unseen events. US military sources –> US military official line.” I wouldn’t expect the army to behave any differently; Armies protect their own no matter what. Disgusting, but not uncommon. Defendants of the soldier’s actions are saying that the Iraqis had guns and what appears to be RPGs. Jacob Appelbaum clears things out a bit saying “When I was on northern Iraq in 2005: I had a camera over my shoulder, and a guard with an AK-47. This is very common in Iraq.” I also have to add that RPGs used by the insurgents are anti-tank weapons and not a ground-to-air weapon. Trying to hit an Apache with these is similar to trying to kill a flying wasp with a slingshot. Suspecting the journalist’s camera to be an RPG which is quite an outrageous mistake to make and still does not hold as an excuse for the trigger-happy soldier operating that 30mm machine gun. Read more about how they’re actually used in Iraq here.

There’s more to the story. US army officials lie trying to pretend that they don’t know how two children were injured in the incident. The children were in fact in the van trying to rescue the wounded and the on the full length video we hear the one of the soldiers saying: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” Except the so-called battle happened in a suburb; you know, where families with children usually live. Iraqis are not bringing their kids to battle. The battle is happening in their back yards, streets, and homes. With over a million Iraqis killed since the war began and over 4 million became refugees, isn’t it clear as the sun that Iraqis have pretty much done everything within their power to spare their kids the battle.

The climax of disregard to human life, and a textbook breach of the Geneva Conventions and their three additional protocols, happens near the end of the video. A van draws near the wounded and an unarmed man rushes out of it trying to evacuate the wounded. The soldier requests permission to “Engage” — gotta love the euphemisms — and once he’s granted permission he opens fire killing everyone on the scene. I’ve seen a few apologists argue that these are insurgents and that the Geneva conventions and International Humanitarian Law (IHL) don’t apply for some reason they fail to mention. Article 41 of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I) says the following:

Safeguard of an enemy hors de combat

1. A person who is recognized or who, in the circumstances, should be recognized to be hors de combat shall not be made the object of attack.

2. A person is hors de combat if:
(a) he is in the power of an adverse Party;
(b) he clearly expresses an intention to surrender; or
(c) he has been rendered unconscious or is otherwise incapacitated by wounds or sickness, and therefore is incapable of defending himself.

Several other articles reiterate the corner-stone of IHL: the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants. Once a fighter is wounded and no longer able to partake in the battle, he is no longer a target. I’ve read so many attempts at justifying what the soldier’s did from people who claim to be military exerts or serving in the US occupation forces in Iraq. I’m ever so convinced that every soldier should be taught Humanitarian Law before being taught how to survive in the wild or how to shoot a rifle. That incident is a disgrace, and it’s unlikely that it’s one of a kind. Defending it is inexcusable, no it’s unimaginable.

have you donated to Wikileaks today?

Being the skeptic that I am, I had to see for myself before I could make a final judgment.

I arrived in Boston on June 20th, 2009, knowing that I would have to go through “Secondary Screening” at the airport. The waiting room had a weird mix of people:  a Lebanese kid (he looked 16); a Russian young man with missing papers that was trying to weasel his way in; a bunch of disgruntled Spaniards, including a plane crew, that were irked by the fact that they would have to go through the humiliation of secondary screening. My experience was not so bad, I waited for a little over three hours before my turn came up and I was asked a couple of trivial questions about my parents before being allowed out. That was anticlimactic. It was an inconvenience, but it was still easier for a Syrian national to be granted entry to the U.S. than to some Arab countries.

Up until last week, my stay in the U.S. had been one smooth ride. I had been pleasantly surprised to have no incidents, no one with nasty prejudices. I had been treated as any other human being. Then came a trip to Washington D.C. where I opted to take the train because flying for a Syrian in the U.S. does not go without hassle. To my surprise the train  had no WiFi so I unfortunately chose to watch an episode of Al Jazeera documentary in Arabic called The Story of a Revolution ( حكاية ثورة Hikayat Thawra) on the Palestinian struggle against Israeli oppression and occupation, and yes, the oppression of the various  Arab regimes that were trying to use Palestinian suffering for domestic political gains.

حكاية ثورة - Copyright Al Jazeera

Halfway through the episode I noticed a hawk-eyed middle aged man ogling my screen with a death stare. I did not pay much attention to him and I went back to my documentary. Minutes later I hear him  on the phone talking about me to what I assumed to be 911. He was on a rant about a terrorist watching a video in Arabic, at one point he said something about Jihad as well. He was soon yelling profanity making sure I could hear it though he wasn’t saying it directly to my face, things like: “What the fuck is this shit,” “I’m not putting up with this shit.” He soon proceeded to leave the cart, I assumed he was also going to report me to the train’s staff as well. I took advantage of his absence and called 911 myself and told them that there was a guy acting in a threatening manner because he saw me watching a documentary in Arabic on my laptop. They advised me not to confront him and just move to another cart for my own safety.

Needless to say my train ride was ruined because I was paranoid that at any given stop the police might want take me away or that highly disturbed old man would decide to do a preemptive strike and attack me himself. I wanted so bad to confront him myself, call him out for the ignorant racist that he is, but he looked crazy enough that any exchange of words with him would make him physically violent immediately. Even though I believe I did that right thing by not confronting him, every time I think about it I regret not giving him a piece of my mind.

You might have heard about the college senior that’s suing after he was held for over five hours after an airport screener found  his Arabic flash cards and a book critical of us foreign policy, and you might know that U.S. airports make passengers that carry certain passports go through heightened security measures (the list of countries is politically loaded and has nothing to do with national security any way you look at it.) There was also the case of the Iraqi immigrant that was denied access to a JetBlue flight until he covered a T shirt that said “We will not be silent” in Arabic and in English.  The U.S. has gone a long way since Rosa Parks defiantly declared that she had the right to sit anywhere she wanted on the bus, but it still has a long way before allowing tokens of Arab culture and language onto their trains and airplanes.

I was especially interested in the particular use of words in the article. I quote:

It has been a quarter-century since Israel and Syria fought directly, but Syria backs anti-Israel forces like the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic organization Hamas. Israel’s sworn enemy Iran backs Hamas and Hezbollah.

In this article, Hamas and Hezbollah were not referred to as.. *gasp* “terrorist organizations.” Now I was not able to determine if this was an AP policy not to refer to them as such outside of a direct quote, or whether there’s more to the matter. I’m going to layout a few happenings, and let the readers come out with their own conspiracy theories.

Syria’s main beef with the U.S./Israel can be summed up to the following points and accusations: Supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, Interfering in Lebanon and Iraq, and strong ties with Iran. So what’s changed?

Hamas is being locked in Gaza with walls courtesy of the Israeli and Egyptian governments; They will be are being starved into irrelevancy. Hezbollah is no longer an upset in Lebanese politics since they failed to establish a majority in the last election and eventually all the creases were straightened out. Also, the 2006 war was a PR disaster for Israel and gave Hezbollah a stronghold in Lebanon, even though they weren’t able to translate it into votes a couple of years after that. To Israel, Hezbollah is a wasp hive best left alone. Also, the U.S. has been very successful in slyly translating the tensions in regards to Iraq into tensions between the Iraqi and Syrian governments as Washington works a slow withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

On the other hand,  Syria and the U.S. seem to be achieving progress, be it painfully slow: A promise of a gradual lift of sanctions that is yet to materialize. Robert Ford, former deputy ambassador to Iraq, is a candidate for the vacant-for-five-years job of U.S. ambassador to Damascus. He is currently awaiting Syrian approval. Iran is now occupied with internal turmoil, and sanctions keep piling up. I would not be surprised if Syria starts to noticeably drift away from its current closest ally. Politics in essence is more interest than ideology.

Does all of the above mean that Syria is working its way out of the gutter? Are Hezbollah and Hamas going to be removed from US terrorist organization lists at some point in the near future?

I do not think that the correlation of these events implies causation. Maybe I’m reading too much into the choice of words in that AP report. Still, It’s certainly interesting to see how things are shaping up. Could we be witnessing the “birth pangs of a new Middle East?”

P.S. The following Time article also uses the term “militant groups” to refer to Hezbollah and Hamas: Why the U.S. is Back on the Road to Damascus.

P.P.S. It’s important to mention Twitter in anything you write to show that you are relevant and hip — sarcasm.

Image via Wikipedia

Gregory Levey suggested in the Newsweek today that President Obama should appoint George W. Bush as his Mideast envoy to gain the trust of Israelis in order achieve the American “wish list” with the Israeli Government. The “full-court press” wishes are the following:

They want Israel to stop expanding settlements; to stop building Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem; and for hawks in the government to chill out while the U.S. is negotiating with Iran.

So Mr. Levey suggests that the U.S. needs to acquire Israeli trust in order to stop the illegal settlements, illegal Judaization of Jerusalem, and to have Israeli permission to have talks with Iran. The absurdity of his suggestion is only matched by a fact he mentions to justify his outrageous suggestion:

In the history of U.S.-Israel relations, probably no president has earned adoration and unequivocal trust from Israel like Bush.

It strikes me that the U.S. President that was considered by the rest of the world as the worst (and most stupid) U.S president in history was the most popular among the Israelis. His achievements were: dragging the U.S. into two pointless wars and promoting anti-American sentiment in the world like never before, and right before his second term was over he practically destroyed the American economy to the extent they had to borrow astronomical sums of money from CHINA to keep the economy going. Of course he was rewarded by a flood of jokes on his expense by late night comedy shows and a sewage plant that was honorably named after him.

Yet of course:, Levey continues with another gem:

During the Bush years, Israelis were consistently among the few foreign populations that gave the American president high approval marks—often in far greater proportion than Americans themselves.

It appears, according to Levey, that the measure of a good American president is how much the Israelis love him, regardless of the catastrophes he brings onto the very people who elected him. After all, voters are dismissible once the elections are won. A better alternative would be that Bush becomes the  honorary Israeli president since he has unprecedented approval rates there and they’re practically fawning over him, although I’m sure the trend would be reversed if this were really to happen . This alternative suggestion, though absurd, is a much superior solution to the Middle East problems than Mr. Levey’s well-thought-well-written plan.

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"This is your kiss goodbye you dog!!"

I’m reposting this picture from Yaman Salahi‘s blog, one of my favorite Syrian Bloggers.

Nothing more to say really..

بدون تعليق

من جريدة الوطن الصادرة صباح اليوم

The text reads: “A New Dawn For Humanity, 70 Days Till Bush Leaves the White House”

This was taken from the top of the front page of Al Watan Daily Newspaper.

I won’t comment on the fact that both regimes are democracies and people can hold their governments accountable. You can’t argue with that since both “repeatedly introduced themselves to the world as being democratic.”

The last outburst of American Wrath has cost the Iraqis 2 million lives and turned about 4 million of them into refugees scattered around the world. Iraqi young women – even minors – resorting/forced into prostitution just to keep there families from starving to death (I’ve personally came across families that can’t afford a daily meal of more than a couple of loaves of bread a day for the entire lot of 6-8 people!) Iraq’s infrastructure is devastated beyond repair, and new explosions are shedding Iraqi blood into the Euphrates so often that even news agencies lost interest in covering the daily hell on earth Iraqis are forced to live through as a consequence of American Wrath. But hey, they had it coming.

Saying that is worse than saying that rape victims brought it upon themselves by wearing revealing clothes, might as well advise them to lay back and try to enjoy it! Despite the “NO it’s not” answer I got when I asked, I still hope the whole idea was nothing more than a sick joke.