NPR’s Andy Carvin, tweeting the Middle East

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By Paul Farhi, Tuesday, April 12, 7:24 PM

Hold on a second, says Andy Carvin mid-conversation, swiveling to his laptop. He taps away for a few seconds, as quiet as a squirrel. And then he’s back.

Carvin does this 20, 25, 30 times — it’s easy to lose count — an hour. It’s practically second nature now. Often, he doesn’t even interrupt what he’s saying; the typing and the talking happen simultaneously.

Carvin is tweeting, relentlessly. Seven days a week, often up to 16 hours a day. He once went 20 hours straight, pumping out more than 1,400 brief messages on his Twitter account, @acarvin. That’s his guess, at least. It’s easy to lose count.

Since December, Carvin, a social-media strategist at NPR in Washington, has become a one-man Twitter news bureau, chronicling fast-moving developments throughout the Middle East. By grabbing bits and pieces from Facebook, YouTube and the wider Internet and mixing them with a stunning array of eyewitness sources, Carvin has constructed a vivid and constantly evolving mosaic of the region’s convulsions.

At a given moment, Carvin may be tweeting links to fresh video from Libyan rebels, photos of street protests in Bahrain or the highlights of a NATO news conference. His followers, in turn, point him to more material — on-the-ground accounts of the government crackdown in Yemen, breaking reports from Tahrir Square, the latest from Jordan or Syria.

The result is a dizzying, nonstop ride across the geopolitical landscape, 140 characters at a time:

• March 31: “Extremely graphic video of a Libyan man with half his jaw blown off, giving a V for victory sign & trying to talk” [link to video].

• April 11: “Video appears to show victims of shootings in Baniyas, Syria. More cameras than there are corpses” [link to video].

• April 9: “At least 10 casualties from tonight’s assault in Sanaa. Can’t really tell who’s alive and who’s dead” [link to Yemeni photo on Facebook].

And so on, into the thousands. “Is this the world’s best Twitter account?” asked the Columbia Journalism Review about @acarvin last week.

Carvin’s high-beam focus on the region has attracted more than 43,000 followers, essentially the readership of a small newspaper. His flock has more than doubled since he started tweeting about the Middle East in December during the first stirrings of rebellion in Tunisia.

Among those following his prodigious output: Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, actress Morgan Fairchild and Chad Ochocinco, the Cincinnati Bengals’ oddball wide receiver.

“It was very clear to me in December that Tunisia would be a big deal,” says Carvin, a stocky 39-year-old who seems to be constantly clicking, tapping or typing, “but it never occurred to me that this could kick off something much, much bigger. My tweeting kind of revved up with it.”

There isn’t really a name for what Carvin does — tweet curator? social-media news aggregator? interactive digital journalist? — but that may be because this form of reporting is still being invented. By Carvin, among others.

“I see it as another flavor of journalism,” he says. “So I guess I’m another flavor of journalist.”

Carvin likens himself to a radio or TV anchor, introducing the experts, the pundits and reporters. The difference, he hastens to add, is that Anderson Cooper has to go to the scene of his stories — and eventually has to go to sleep.

Not Carvin, whose anchor chair goes where he does and whose metabolism seems permanently set on “Go!” Carvin spends his workdays at a bland cubicle at NPR’s headquarters, but his tweets come from wherever he is (his wife, Susanne, says his iPhone is “pretty much an extension of his palm at this point”). He live-tweeted the first attack on protesters in Bahrain while he waited in line at the men’s room in Zaytinya, the downtown D.C. restaurant. He sent updates while at a Duran Duran concert at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and at a pirate-themed birthday party in Baltimore with his 4-year-old daughter in tow. He regularly tweets on the Metro during his commute to and from his home in Silver Spring.

It doesn’t seem at all surprising that he suffers from repetitive stress in his hands and wrists and wears a special pair of corrective gloves when he’s planted at his desk at work.

Oddly enough, the one place Carvin hasn’t tweeted about the Middle East is . . . the Middle East. Carvin has been to Tunisia, Egypt, Israel and several other countries in the region, but has not been back since 2005, a time before Twitter.

Even more oddly: Before the tweet gig came along, the closest Carvin came to professional journalism was co-producing a documentary with his wife about Thai kickboxing. He spent more than a decade after college as a Washington policy wonk, specializing in technology and educational issues for such outfits as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the nonprofit Benton Foundation, for whom Carvin headed a project exploring ways to close the “digital divide” affecting poor communities. In 2006, NPR hired him to help the organization’s journalists make use of new media such as Facebook and Twitter. Carvin started tweeting soon after Twitter launched in 2006, mostly as a way to stay abreast of the news and to keep in touch with friends.

Susanne Carvin, a former National Geographic researcher who raises the couple’s two young children, says she understands her husband’s dedication to the story and the nonstop nature of it. “A few years ago, he would have been glued to a desktop,” she says. “Now, since he can do it all on his [iPhone], he can go to the garden with us, be walking along, check in with his contacts overseas. . . . It has become so commonplace, and he does it so regularly that half the time I don’t even realize he’s online.”

The Carvins’ children, meanwhile, take daddy’s wired habits for granted; his daughter and son, who is 2 1 / 2, have accidentally tweeted when he’s left his laptop unattended. So have the family’s two cats.

Part of the attraction of social media, Carvin says, is how it can be used for crowd-sourcing, or tapping a group’s collective knowledge and experience. During the 2008 election, for example, Carvin marshaled his followers to fact-check the presidential debates and provide tips about polling-place irregularities.

The same technique helped Carvin get to the bottom of a story last month. When he heard from a follower that Arab news sources were reporting that Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi had attacked rebels with Israeli-made mortar rounds, Carvin thought the story sounded fishy. He found the reports had a superficial basis: The Facebook page of Al Manara, a Libyan expatriate news service based in the United Kingdom, showed a photo of a munition stamped with what appeared to be a Star of David topped with an odd multi-crescent shape.

“They ID it as Israeli,” Carvin tweeted. “Maybe, maybe not. Need help to ID it. Anyone?”

Within minutes, Carvin’s “tweeps” — his Twitter people — began piecing it together:

“81mm calibre — it’s not eastern. Probably British,” responded one follower.

Another found a photo of a British-made 81mm shell with the same markings. Still another noted that the star logo indicated that it was an illumination round and the crescent signified a parachute, which deploy on such rounds to slow their descent.

This was soon followed by links to photos of similar rounds manufactured in India and France. Another follower posted a page from a NATO weapons manual that instructed member countries to identify their shells with the star-and-crescent markings.

Carvin declared the story “debunked,” even as other news outlets, including Al Jazeera’s Arabic TV channel, continued to report the bogus link to Israel.

“In a lot of ways, this is traditional journalism,” says Mark Stencel, NPR’s managing editor for digital news. Except that Carvin “has just turned the newsgathering process inside out and made it public. He’s reporting in real time and you can see him do it. You can watch him work his sources and tell people what he’s following up on.”

Another benefit is the “social” part of social media — Carvin has developed hundreds of sources through the give-and-take of Twitter. One of his best sources about opposition activities in Yemen is a former Miss Universe Canada contestant, Maria Al-Masani, a member of a well-connected Yemeni family.

Carvin also befriended a Libyan named Mohammed Nabbous, a tech buff who had created a 24-hour live video stream to report on events there. While witnessing fighting near Benghazi last month, Nabbous was killed in the crossfire. Carvin lauded him on NPR as “a pioneer” of an independent Libyan press.

Despite the speed of delivery and breadth of material that Carvin musters every day, the form has its weaknesses. Carvin acknowledges that it’s difficult to know the full context of some of the information he transmits, such as the harrowing footage he linked to last week of a father encountering his dead and disfigured son in a hospital room. The video apparently was from Yemen, but much else — who shot it, under what circumstances and when — was hard to substantiate.

What’s more, Carvin doesn’t speak Arabic or Farsi, which means he must rely on his followers for translations. He’s also never met about two-thirds of the hundreds of sources he uses for tips and tweets.

Carvin candidly notes another potential pitfall: He’s far more likely to get information from rebels than from the regimes. “The majority of people online [in the Middle East] are young, better-educated and skew toward reform,” he notes.

All this makes some observers raise an eyebrow about Carvin’s work. “To have NPR appoint a senior strategist with full knowledge that they are publishing news or information based on tweets of unknown or unvetted sources is troubling,” says Adam Curry, a media critic and vet­eran technology blogger (and long-ago MTV veejay). “Who knows where some of this is coming from? I’m not saying Andy’s a bad guy or has an agenda. But I do think it’s worth asking what NPR thinks it’s doing.”

Actually, NPR thinks Carvin is creating something new. “What you’re witnessing is Andy’s effort to determine the veracity of what’s emerging,” says Kinsey Wilson, the head of NPR’s digital-media division. “It’s not positioned as the definitive sort of piece that you might hear on NPR. It’s a different form.”

In his defense, Carvin says he relies on sources who’ve proven to be reliable and drops those with dubious track records. He’s open about unconfirmed material, flagging some claims with a single skeptical word, such as “Source?” or “Evidence?”

Carvin’s followers also are quick to point out his misfires. When Carvin tweeted a link to what he thought was video of nurses ministering to a wounded girl, his followers jumped in. The girl wasn’t wounded, they told him, she was dead; the women were washing the girl’s body for burial according to Muslim custom. Carvin quickly corrected his tweet.

The key, he says, is disclosing what he doesn’t know and asking others to fill in the blanks.

“It’s a self-correcting mechanism,” he says. “I don’t want to think of myself as a wire service. It’s an open newsgathering operation.”

He pauses, just before plunging back into the Twittersphere once more. “A lot of the time,” he adds, “I’m raising more questions than I’m answering.”


farhip@washpost.com

Top White House aide delivers Obama letter to Saudi king

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By Karen DeYoung, Tuesday, April 12, 9:35 PM

A top White House aide delivered a personal letter from President Obama to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Tuesday, as the administration moved to calm tensions between the two countries over how to respond to upheaval in the Arab world and deal with their mutual adversary in Iran.

The hastily arranged visit to the kingdom by national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon came less than a week after Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made the same trip. While administration officials confirmed the delivery of Obama’s missive, they declined to specify its contents.

Neither government denies that there has been a divergence of views between the entrenched, conservative monarchy and the administration, which is struggling to balance its substantial interests and alliances in the region with its desire to see democratic reforms.

The stakes are high for both sides, perhaps higher for Obama.

Saudi Arabia, in addition to being the world’s largest oil exporter and the site of the Muslim world’s holiest sites, is the leading U.S. regional partner on counterterrorism matters. An extensive bilateral intelligence and law enforcement infrastructure has been established over the past decade. A pending $60 billion arms deal with the Saudis is the largest in U.S. history.

A senior Saudi official said the back-to-back U.S. trips were less “fence-mending” than consultations on “how do we move forward . . . given all the things that are happening, in ways that best protect our interests.”

While the administration sees democratic potential in the Arab spring, the Saudis are feeling an ominous chill from all points of the compass — Bahrain to the east, Yemen to the south, Egypt to the west and Iraq to the north. They have also seen signs of internal unrest, with minor Shiite demonstrations in the eastern part of the kingdom in recent weeks.

Saudi leaders were furious last month when the administration criticized their deployment of troops to Bahrain, the small island nation in the Persian Gulf whose Shiite majority has taken to the streets to demand more political representation from Sunni rulers. U.S. calls for political dialogue were interpreted as a naive response to what the Saudis see as a clear case of interference by Iran’s Shiite theocracy.

Bahrain is the “reddest of red lines” for the Saudis, said a member of the Majlis al-Shura, the consultative council that advises Abdullah on a range of foreign and domestic issues.

Beyond Bahrain, the Saudis were stunned at Obama’s rapid abandonment of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a decades-long ally. They have been dismayed by what they see as Obama’s failure to seize the initiative in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. They also consider Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki little more than a stooge for Iranian interests, and were disappointed in the administration’s support for his second term in office against Saudi advice.

“I don’t want to pretend we haven’t had some differences,” said a senior U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the situation on the record. “There are some things we need to work on.”

While the administration shares the Saudi concern about Iranian expansionism, it also believes that the Saudis have developed a dangerous fixation on Iran’s role.

“It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” the administration official said. “If you see every Shiite as an Iranian agent, that could very well turn out eventually to be the case.”

Underlying the current tensions is Saudi Arabia’s long-standing concern that it “has been taken for granted by the United States,” said another member of the Shura, part of a group that visited Washington last week.

The Saudis consider themselves “the voice for moderation and stabilization in the Middle East,” he said, and resent the U.S. implication that the administration is more attuned to threats such as Iran, or that the Saudi monarchy needs to move toward its own reforms at a faster pace than it believes is wise or necessary.

Some foreign policy experts in this country agree that Obama needs to pay more attention to the relationship. The Saudi king needs to know “that the president will provide a secure safety net of support, rather than undermine him” in the event of trouble in the kingdom, Martin Indyk, the director of the Brookings Institution’s foreign policy program, wrote in The Washington Post early this week.

Saudi uncertainty was reflected in a visit to Pakistan last month by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the head of the Saudi National Security Council.

Until the mid-1990s, Pakistan maintained a division of troops in Saudi Arabia, and it has long been a recruiting ground for Persian Gulf security forces. Although Bandar made no official request, he was assured of help if needed, a senior Pakistani official said. “We hold the Saudis so close,” the official said, “we have to really help them if there is a need.”

But others are more dismissive of Saudi concerns. “Our friends are mad at us because we said Mubarak had to go,” Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said Tuesday at the U.S.-Islamic Forum, a conference in Washington jointly sponsored by Brookings and the government of Qatar. “We didn’t say that . . . the Egyptian people did,” Kerry said. “We acknowledged a reality.”

“For leaders worried about their regimes, royal families and governments,” Kerry said, “this is an opportunity to adjust to how they stay in power.”

deyoungk@washpost.com

Chinese editors, and a Web site, detail censors’ hidden hand

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By Keith B. Richburg, Tuesday, April 12, 6:13 PM

BEIJING — When fears of radiation spreading from Japan prompted a rush on iodized salt in China, a weekly business newspaper posted the story on its Web site under the headline: “Panic buying in Guangdong, Shenzhen and Dongguan; iodized salt out of stock, nuclear panic in Japan spreads.”

Within minutes, government censors called the Economic Observer’s vice chief editor, Zhang Hong, “and asked us to delete that post immediately,” he said.

In a small act of defiance, Zhang left the story on the site, but he changed the second part of the headline to read: “Salt bureau said the stock is sufficient.”

That March 17 incident is just one example of the daily, even hourly, tussle between editors of China’s state-controlled media and the Communist government’s army of propaganda officials and censors who want to shape every aspect of what Chinese citizens read, see and think.

Normally, the government’s relentless effort to control information plays out behind the scenes. But an aggressive news Web site called China Digital Times, based out of Berkeley, Calif., and run by Xiao Qiang, a longtime human rights activist, has begun publicly exposing the practice by publishing the official weekly directives and guidelines to the print media from the government’s main censorship organs.

Moreover, several editors and journalists have begun pushing back. Spurred by the growing popular demand for more openness, and with the Internet and microblogs offering more unfettered information, they are testing the boundaries of what is permissible. Some editors and reporters, in interviews, spoke candidly, albeit cautiously, about how censorship works in practice, and the growing competing pressures they face between a public that wants the truth and the censors who want to manipulate it.

The main censorship organs are the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department and the State Council Information Office, among others. Together, the various agencies involved in censorship are known derisively among Chinese journalists as the “Ministry of Truth,” a reference to George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” about a fictitious totalitarian state that controls the population by falsifying history.

Several editors and journalists who were contacted said that they had not seen the specific directives but that the guidelines described by the China Digital Times Web site closely followed what they have been told.

The list of do’s and don’ts opens a window on how the party and government pay close attention to even the most seemingly routine news stories and how they might affect Chinese opinion.

For example, when the Japanese earthquake struck last month, during China’s annual meeting of its two legislative bodies, the news media were instructed to give prominent coverage to the disaster and the role of the Chinese rescuers, but not to neglect the annual legislative forum.

“We must fully propagandize the state of the rescue work that our teams have initiated in Japan. We must closely follow the circumstances of Chinese people and overseas Chinese in Japan,” the March 13 directive read.

“Do not deliberately criticize or champion the actions of the Japanese government, and do not make any comparisons with anti-seismic and rescue efforts in our country,” the directive continued.

On March 4, a directive read: “Do not report on the incident of an exchange student in Norway injuring himself after parachuting from a tower at the Chinese Academy of Science.”

And on March 3 came the intriguing item: “All media are not to hype the salary increase given to the People’s Liberation Army.”

The case of China’s railways minister, Liu Zhijun, who was fired for corruption, has received widespread coverage here. But on March 4, the Propaganda Department sent the instruction: “All media are not to report or hype the news that Liu Zhijun had 18 mistresses.” (Several outlets had reported on the mistresses before the order).

A March 28 directive stated, “Do not report, repost stories, or comment on the execution of a drug trafficker from the Philippines.” And on March 29, when a story circulated online about a plan by Peking University to screen students for “radical thoughts,” the censors wrote, “All Web site authorities are requested to stop these discussions, and quickly water down this topic.”

Several editors and reporters in Beijing and Shanghai said the latest censorship instructions appear more detailed than usual, reflecting, they said, an official nervousness among the ruling elite that uprisings sweeping North Africa and the Middle East might reach China.

Another senior editor for a Beijing-based newspaper, who asked that he and his paper not be identified, agreed. “Overall, compared with last year, it is true the situation this year is very tight,” he said. “Part of the reason is the general international environment. And also next year is an important year for China, too.” Next year, China is due for a leadership change, with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao set to step down from their posts.

Most journalists said they had never actually seen the written directives from the censors. Those are normally passed on only to a newspaper or television station’s top editor, and the rest of the staff receives spoken instructions.

For newspapers, the top editors are routinely asked to attend meetings at the Propaganda Office, where they are given the latest guidelines. If they cannot attend the meeting, a propaganda official will call the editor.

For Web sites, with their faster-moving pace, the censors prefer to use a Chinese instant messaging system called RTX. And some editors said they might receive a simple e-mail with up-to-date instructions.

In both cases, one editor said, the message typically ends with the request: “Please delete.”

Some editors said they see their jobs as a tricky balancing act, between the demands of a public hungry for real news in a competitive market and the aggressive censors who want to control the flow of news.

Hu Xijin is chief editor of the Global Times, a tabloid-size daily in English and Chinese owned by the Communist Party. “I’ve been appointed by them — they can remove me. So they have influence on me,” he said of the paper’s owners. “And the market has some influence on me. I live between them. But the market has a bigger and bigger influence.”

“We’re not as free as the American media,” Hu said. “But we are becoming freer and freer every day.”


richburgk@washpost.com

Researchers Wang Juan in Shanghai and Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.

U.N. report: Palestinian Authority ready for statehood

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By Joel Greenberg, Tuesday, April 12, 7:05 PM

JERUSALEM — The Palestinian Authority is ready for statehood, according to six key criteria, although urgent action is needed to bolster its progress in state-building, the United Nations said Tuesday.

The declaration, contained in a report prepared for a meeting Wednesday in Brussels of donors to the authority, is an important boost to Palestinian efforts to obtain international recognition of a Palestinian state in September.

The U.N. study echoed findings by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who in separate reports prepared for the donors conference said last week that the authority was well-positioned to run an independent state.

“In six areas where the U.N. is most engaged, governmental functions are now sufficient for a functioning government of a state,” said the report from the Office of the U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. It defined those areas as: governance, rule of law and human rights; livelihoods and productive sectors; education and culture; health; social protection; and infrastructure and water.

The Palestinian Authority has improved its ability to plan and budget effectively and has upheld transparency, media freedom and mitigation of corruption, while drafting laws to ensure compliance with international human rights norms, the report said.

The report noted improvements in security and the economy in the West Bank, with an estimated 8 percent growth in gross domestic product in 2010. It said that the area’s health-care system was well-developed and that government spending on social services had created a “comprehensive social safety net.”

But the report cautioned that the continuing Israeli occupation, the unresolved conflict with Israel and the persistent divide between the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and the West Bank means that “the institutional achievements of the Palestinian state-building agenda are approaching their limits within the political and physical space currently available.”

Robert Serry, the U.N. special coordinator for Mideast peace, said that “further steps on the ground” are urgently needed. Israel has to “roll back measures of occupation” to match Palestinian progress in state-building, he said, and stalled peace negotiations should resume “if the state-building and political tracks are to come together by September.”

Israeli-Palestinian talks were relaunched last September with the aim of reaching a framework agreement for a Palestinian state within a year. The talks later broke off in a dispute over continued Israeli settlement building in the West Bank.

In a government plan initiated in August 2009, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad set a two-year target date for Palestinian institutional readiness for statehood. In his report for Wednesday’s donors meeting, Fayyad asserts that the Palestinian Authority is now prepared “to assume all the responsibilities that will come with full sovereignty on the entire Palestinian occupied territory.”

Palestinian leaders say that if there is no progress in peace efforts, they will ask the U.N. General Assembly in September to grant membership to a Palestinian state whose territory would include all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has argued that unilateral moves cannot be a substitute for peace talks. “Palestinians seek to go to an international forum and avoid peace negotiations,” he told European Union diplomats Monday. “It pushes peace farther back.”


greenbergj@washpost.com

Adapting to campaign-finance rulings, Democrats build big-spending network

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By Dan Eggen, Tuesday, April 12, 5:46 PM

The first sign that the ground had shifted in political fundraising came last year, when conservative groups quickly took advantage of new court rulings to dramatically outspend their liberal rivals.

Now comes the next tremor, as Democratic activists finalize plans for an entirely new political infrastructure in 2012. A network of liberal groups formed in recent weeks is poised to spend $200 million or more in support of President Obama and other Democrats, in large part by raising unlimited donations from wealthy donors.

The effort — spearheaded by a small group of longtime congressional and White House aides — represents Democrats’ response to the electoral drubbing of 2010, when a coterie of conservative and business groups did a far better job than their opponents of adapting to a new campaign finance landscape.

“Our mission is to ensure that when Democrats are attacked by these third-party groups, we are there to respond,” said former Al Gore aide Monica Dixon, the executive director of Majority PAC, a new group that will focus on helping Senate Democrats. “We did not do enough last year to support our candidates. . . . Nobody can sit on the sidelines this year. There’s too much at stake.”

The plans underscore the rapidly growing importance of political groups outside the party system, many of which are free to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money because of a landmark Supreme Court decision and other court rulings last year.

The rulings led to a new kind of political action committee, dubbed “super PACs,” which must disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission but are not bound by the financial limits that apply to political campaigns. House and Senate candidates are also free to solicit donations on behalf of such groups as long as they do not coordinate with those groups on how the money is spent.

The new Democratic strategy centers on building a network of such groups focused separately on the presidential race, Senate contests and opposition research. Another piece of the puzzle is expected to fall into place this week with the formation of a group to aid Democratic candidates in the House.

The strategy poses a political problem for Obama and other Democrats, who railed against unfettered spending by outside interest groups last year but didn’t pass legislation to curb them. At least two of the new Democratic groups — Majority PAC and American Bridge 21st Century — will include a nonprofit arm that will not have to disclose donors to the public; another group that’s focused on the presidential race could follow the same path.

Chris Harris, a spokesman for American Bridge — which is building a “war room” concentrating on opposition research — compared the situation to a college football coach who still participates in bowl games despite favoring a playoff system.

“In 2010, we sort of sat on our hands in protest and got stomped,” Harris said. “We’ve got to get off the mat and fight back. We may not like the way the system is set up, but we have to work with the system we have.”

Last year, Democrats were particularly critical of American Crossroads, a conservative super PAC, and a nonprofit sister group called Crossroads GPS, which does not have to reveal its donors. The two organizations together raised $71 million from wealthy donors in 2010, and they plan to raise more than $120 million for the 2012 cycle.

“What we’re seeing is a brazen hypocrisy among the center-left and good-government types, who spent enormous amounts of time and resources criticizing” the fundraising tactics of conservative groups in 2010, said American Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio.

In many ways, the emerging Democratic strategy marks a reprise of the 2004 presidential contest, in which several big-money groups helped Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

In 2008, Obama and his team shunned outside groups to consolidate control within the campaign, which raised a record $750 million. For 2012, however, adviser David Axelrod, campaign manager Jim Messina and others have signaled encouragement to independent groups while also setting their own aggressive fundraising benchmarks.

Democratic strategists say they are particularly worried about groups such as American Crossroads — which was formed with the help of GOP political guru Karl Rove — as well as spending by billionaires Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, who reportedly plan to raise more than $80 million for various conservative projects.

The Democratic-leaning groups announced so far have an assortment of anodyne names: House Majority PAC; Majority PAC, which will focus on the Senate; and American Bridge 21st Century, which had to lengthen its initial title to avoid being confused with a construction firm.

American Bridge was founded by David Brock, a conservative-turned-liberal activist who heads the Media Matters advocacy group. The group will concentrate on gathering and disseminating information about Republican opponents, with a “phase one” budget of about $10 million and room to grow much larger later on, sources said.

Majority PAC — which includes former aides to Gore, Kerry and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) — is aimed at closing the gap with conservative groups, which spent almost $50 million more on Senate races in 2010 than their liberal rivals did, according to FEC records.

A fourth major group, not yet named, is likely to be the most influential. Headed by former White House aides Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, the organization will focus on aiding Obama in the presidential race and could include both a super PAC and a nonprofit akin to the American Crossroads model, strategists said. The group hopes to spend at least $100 million — and probably much more than that — in an attempt to keep up with conservative organizations, sources said.

Unlike in 2004, when outside groups ran most get-out-the-vote operations, Democrats say the Obama campaign will spend much of its money trying to reestablish the “ground game” that helped inspire historic turnouts among blacks and voters younger than 30 last time. Pro-Democratic labor unions are also expected to mount aggressive organizing efforts in states such as Wisconsin, where GOP governors have taken on public employees.

“The negative results in November were a pretty significant wake-up call,” said one top Democratic adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the effort. “Sometimes people respond better to a crisis than they do to an early warning system.”

eggend@washpost.com

Staff writers Perry Bacon Jr. and T.W. Farnam contributed to this report.

$4-a-gallon gas fueling fears for US economic recovery

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By Michael A. Fletcher and Ylan Q. Mui, Tuesday, April 12, 9:12 PM

Gasoline prices are soaring toward $4 a gallon, a threshold that some analysts say will damage the fragile economic recovery and crimp consumer spending just as families are planning their summer vacations.

Higher prices saddle businesses with higher transportation costs, causing them to either swallow them or pass them along to already strapped customers. As gasoline costs go up, consumers are left with less money to spend elsewhere. And there is evidence that the hike at the pump is beginning to push drivers off the road.

Gasoline prices, which are approaching record levels, “are going to have a very profound effect on the economy,” said Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland.

D.C. resident Amber Sutton, who drives 25 miles each way to her job in Woodbridge, said rising gasoline prices have caused her to cut back on restaurants and other entertainment.

“I already was spending a ton on gas,” she said. “But now it’s absolutely ridiculous.”

The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline Monday was $3.79 — up more than a dime from the previous week and 93 cents from a year earlier, according the Energy Information Administration. In California, the average is now $4.16, and prices are above $4 a gallon at some stations in the District and elsewhere.

Prices have risen so high, so fast that some market analysts predicted a sell-off in the short term. That sentiment sent crude oil prices tumbling Tuesday for the second consecutive day, dragging stock markets down about 1 percent, as evidence grew that escalating prices are beginning to threaten the global economic recovery.

But Morici and other economists say the pullback may only provide temporary relief at the pump and that higher prices could be here to stay.

Gasoline prices peaked in July 2008, when a gallon of regular sold for an average of $4.11 nationally. Some analysts fear prices could again approach that level in the near future, since demand for gasoline generally rises in the warm-weather months.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans says higher prices could slow their spending in other areas in the months ahead, according to a Deloitte survey of consumers’ spending intentions.

“We have an au pair from France, and she recently filled up our minivan and gave me a bill for $70,” said Melanie Janin, a mother of three from Bethesda. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”

Already, motorists are cutting back on driving because of the increasing prices. “We are seeing some deterioration in U.S. motor gasoline demand . . . as pump prices near $3.75 a gallon,” which is when demand got soft in 2008, said David Greely, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “As the market moves to higher prices, the likelihood that you’re going to weaken demand increases.”

Bill Simon, chief executive of Wal-Mart U.S., said recently that the retailer sees fewer customers when gas prices begin to rise, because its mammoth stores are typically farther away than local grocery and convenience stores.

But as the spike continues, customers begin consolidating shopping trips and are more likely to visit just Wal-Mart instead of a handful of smaller retailers, Simon said. “We know that gas prices are going to continue to challenge people.”

New reports from Goldman Sachs and the International Energy Agency were the triggers for Tuesday’s $3.67-a-barrel drop in the price on the New York Mercantile Exchange, where a barrel of the U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate closed at $106.25.

Oil prices above $100 will hurt the recovery, the IEA report said. “Economic impacts from high prices are never instantaneous, and often take months to materialize, but preliminary data for early 2011 already show signs of oil demand slowdown,” the IEA report said. “Unfortunately, the surest remedy for high prices may ultimately prove to be high prices themselves.”

Fears of continued Middle East unrest and the possibility that supply disruptions could spread beyond Libya have driven up the price of Brent crude, another key oil benchmark that is used by about two-thirds of the world, from $100 a barrel in mid-February to $125 a barrel last Friday, a level not seen since May of the record-setting 2008. Yet inventories and spare production capacity are bigger this year than they were then, Goldman noted.

Goldman Sachs analysts did not change their target prices, which are $105 a barrel for Brent much of this year with a rise to $120 a barrel by the end of 2012. Brent prices closed at $120.66 a barrel Tuesday, down $3.32, after reaching 21 / 2-year highs Monday.

Recent oil price hikes increasingly look like the result of speculation. Saudi oil ministry officials, worried that prices are so high that they might lower consumption, have contacted major oil companies offering additional supplies. But the firms responded that they have ample supplies.

“I think you are starting to see that the market might have overextended on prices,” said Frank A. Verrastro, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But even though crude prices are retreating, there is no telling how low they will go, or when the price decreases will show up at the pump, he said.


fletcherm@washpost.com


muiy@washpost.com

Obama risks losing liberals with talk of cutting budget

Image via WikipediaBy Zachary A. Goldfarb and Peter Wallsten, Wednesday, April 13, 11:00 AM

President Obama faces a growing rebellion on the left as he courts independent voters and Republicans with his vision for reducing the nation’s debt by cutting government spending and restraining the costs of federal health insurance programs.

Key liberal groups, which helped elect Obama in 2008, are raising concerns that he has given up political ground to Republicans, allowing the message of reducing government to trump that of creating jobs and lowering the unemployment rate.

Seizing on Friday’s deal, which would cut $38.5 billion from the fiscal 2011 budget, activists on Tuesday threatened to sit out the 2012 presidential campaign if Obama goes too far with further cuts.

“The fundamental problem in our country right now is unemployment and a jobs crisis, not a deficit crisis,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, an advocacy group for the poor. “It appears the president is fighting on the wrong terrain and is conceding that the only thing we should be talking about is how to bring down the deficit.”

The clash over government spending — coming as Obama prepares to make a major speech on fiscal discipline Wednesday — is the latest example of the frayed relations between the president and a broad coalition of union and activist groups.

The dispute also underscores a key question about what will define the coming year for Obama: an attempt to defend longtime Democratic priorities over Republican objections or an effort to seek compromise and control the national debt.

The White House is responding to concerns about spending cuts by saying that the president is working to preserve important programs that help the economy grow — such as investments in education — while taking seriously the need to reduce the debt. The White House also has said that any reductions in government entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid must be accompanied by tax increases on the rich and cuts in defense spending.

“We can take a balanced approach toward reducing our deficit in the long term while protecting the investments which will enable us to grow in the 21st century,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday.

The White House on Tuesday dispatched David Plouffe, one of Obama’s senior advisers, to meet with progressive groups at their routine coordinating meeting at the Capital Hilton, according to people knowledgeable about the meeting.

In the past, Obama has expressed exasperation with left-leaning groups because they had not credited him with achieving some of their goals, such as making affordable health care more widely available, under difficult political circumstances.

Since the budget deal was reached Friday, the White House has sounded two competing themes. It has trumpeted the cuts as being among the largest annual spending reductions in history, while arguing that they wouldn’t undermine economic activity.

“[W]hile the level of cuts was high . . . it does not have a negative impact on our economy,” Carney said. “The highest principle the president took into this negotiation was that we must not do anything that harms our recovery.”

But many liberals said Tuesday that they feared Obama had taken steps that would damage the economy. Leading liberal columnists joined with activists to pounce on the White House, questioning why the president is apparently embracing the image of deficit cutter rather than job creator.

Those frustrations have followed dismay on the left over Obama’s health-care law and the tax deal he negotiated with Republicans in December — not to mention elements of the administration’s foreign and trade policies.

The liberal activist group MoveOn.org, whose vast membership mobilized for Obama’s election in 2008, issued an e-mail blast to members Tuesday decrying the president’s deal with the GOP last week and the prospect that he might embrace some of his deficit commission’s ideas on deficit reduction.

Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn, said many of its 5 million members “worked their guts out” to help elect Obama. But, after the recent string of dealmaking with the GOP and the president’s apparent willingness to compromise on entitlements, he said the base could well stay home in 2012.

“If the president and the Democrats don’t stand up to Republicans, I don’t see people coming out and doing the work that it would take to get them elected,” Ruben said. “If they came out to vote, these die-hards might vote for the president, but whether they open their wallets and their hearts and their address books and hit the pavement, that’s a totally different thing.”

A liberal group called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee said Tuesday that more than 60,000 liberals responded to an e-mail by committing not to donate to Obama’s reelection campaign if he cuts Medicare or Medicaid spending.

Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, said Obama has apparently “abandoned” his earlier view that increased spending was needed to stimulate the economy. And that suggests he may look for a bargain on entitlements.

“If he feels like the path of least resistance is to cut a deal, even if that means unwinding Medicare and substantial cuts to Social Security, I think he might do that,” Baker said.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)--an avowed liberal who nevertheless is part of a bipartisan group of senators working on deficit reduction--said he understood the frustration of liberal advocates, but believes strongly that Obama has no better choice.

“We’re going through the stages of grief when it comes to our national debt, certainly on the left,” Durbin said at a breakfast with reporters Wednesday morning sponsored by Bloomberg News. “. . .At the end of the day, this is going to be a painful process.”

The near-budget shutdown of last week, Durbin said, and the need to dramatically cut domestic spending, “has been a wake up call to the left: that if you don’t move in a new direction to deal with this, then there’s going to be a re-run of this season opener with regularity.”

Some liberal activists say they recognize that Obama faces difficulties.

“I don’t think the president can be an inactive observer to a debate that is clearly going to be front and center in Washington — and that’s the deficit,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA.

He said the speech on Wednesday will offer the perfect opportunity for Obama to rebut Republicans’ claims that the best way to cut the deficit is simply by drastically slashing government programs.

goldfarbz@washpost.com

wallstenp@washpost.com

CIA’s brain drain: Since 9/11, some top officials have moved to private sector

Image via Wikipedia

Entrance to CIA HQ

By Julie Tate, Tuesday, April 12, 11:05 PM

In the decade since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, private intelligence firms and security consultants have peeled away veterans from the top reaches of the CIA, hiring scores of longtime officers in large part to gain access to the burgeoning world of intelligence contracting.

At least 91 of the agency’s upper-level managers have left for the private sector in the past 10 years, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. Several of the top positions have turned over multiple times in that period: In addition to three directors, the CIA has lost four of its deputy directors for operations, three directors of its counterterrorism center and all five of the division chiefs who were in place the day of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In many quarters in Washington, government officials decamp for the private sector as a matter of course. Defense consultancies routinely hire generals retiring from the Pentagon; the city’s lobbying firms are stacked with former members of Congress and administration officials.

But the wave of departures from the CIA has marked an end to a decades-old culture of discretion and restraint in which retired officers, by and large, did not join contractors that perform intelligence work for the government. It has also raised questions about the impact of the losses incurred by the agency. Veteran officers leave with a wealth of institutional knowledge, extensive personal contacts and an understanding of world affairs afforded only to those working at the nation’s preeminent repository of intelligence.

Among the CIA’s losses to the private sector have been top subject-matter experts including Stephen Kappes, who served as the agency’s top spy in Moscow and who helped negotiate Libya’s disarmament in 2003; Henry Crumpton, who was one of the CIA’s first officers in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks; and Cofer Black, the director of the agency’s counterterrorism center on Sept. 11.

The exodus into the private sector has been driven by an explosion in intelligence contracting. As part of its Top Secret America investigation, The Post estimated that of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. Thirty percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies is made up of contractors.

Those contractors perform a wide range of tasks, among them assessing security risks, analyzing intelligence and providing “risk mitigation” services in foreign countries.

“Since 9/11, the demographics of the agency have been out of whack. A number of people left the agency earlier than you would think, and you had a large influx of younger people,” said Robert Grenier, a 27-year agency veteran who is now chairman of ERG Partners, a boutique investment bank specializing in the intelligence industry. “The average experience of an officer now is much lower than it has been traditionally, and that has its effects on the agency.”

For private firms seeking to tap into the lucrative industry of intelligence contracting, the value of having agency officers on the payroll is hard to overstate. And although the agency pays its top managers large salaries — the most senior officers make nearly $180,000 a year — private firms are generally able to offer more.

This report is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former CIA officials. The Post compiled its list of more than 90 upper-level managers
by identifying agency personnel who left for the private sector after serving as directors, deputy directors or chiefs of the CIA’s various divisions, as well as other members of the leadership of the Directorate of Operations, now known as the National Clandestine Service.

CIA spokesman George Little said that “any suggestion that there isn’t world-class, senior expertise at the CIA is flat wrong.”

“Retirement is a fact of professional life,” Little said, “and the CIA has created strong mechanisms to assist our officers as they explore opportunities after retirement and to retain their knowledge before they go.”

The bulk of the agency’s losses to the private sector came roughly from 2002 through 2007, as business with intelligence contractors spiked. In fiscal 2010, a senior U.S. official said, attrition rates at the CIA were at an all-time low.

Some of the officials quoted for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities involved in discussing the agency’s inner workings.

Few of them cited problems at the agency as their reason for leaving. Rather, they said, the choice was often financially driven.

One former senior official who had worked in government service for more than 25 years said he looked at the opportunities for advancement at the agency on the one hand and at the looming costs of college tuition for his children on the other. He chose the private sector.

“It was a practical matter,” he said.

Contractors calling

Years of intelligence reforms found the CIA unprepared for the events that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. From 1990 through 1996, Congress had slashed the intelligence community’s budget every year, and from 1996 through 2000, it effectively left the budget flat.

Suddenly, with a demand for better intelligence, the agency needed more bodies. It needed people to deploy to Afghanistan. It needed top-level linguists. It needed interrogators. Insiders and outsiders quickly concluded that the CIA needed contractors.

Richard “Hollis” Helms, a longtime overseas officer and former head of the agency’s European division, founded Abraxas Corp. in the days after the attacks. Helms identified the areas in which the agency needed the most help and began aggressively recruiting current and former intelligence professionals.

Those professionals included mid-level analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence. But they also included top brass such as Rod Smith, a former chief of the agency’s Special Activities Division, and Fred Turco, one of the original architects of the CIA’s counterterrorism center and the former chief of external operations. Meredith Woodruff, one of the agency’s most senior female operatives, signed on to Abraxas in 2006.

“Hollis is brilliant; he realized there was a huge market out there to exploit. He printed money for a while — hired tons of CIA staffers and doubled their salary. He was the first agency guy to figure it all out,” said one former chief of station, the term for the top CIA officer at a U.S. embassy. “You would see people leave the CIA on a Friday and come back on Monday in the same job but working for Abraxas.”

Barry McManus, an agency veteran, was among those who saw the promise of Abraxas.

McManus had worked for the CIA his entire career, with the exception of a few years on the D.C. police force. He started out as a bodyguard for CIA Director William J. Casey, then climbed through the ranks, eventually doing work in more than 130 countries. By 1993, he had become the CIA’s chief operations polygraph examiner and interrogator, responsible for interviewing high-level terrorism suspects and others in the process of interrogation.

But when he turned 50 in 2003 and found himself eligible for retirement, McManus said, he realized he wanted to do something else.

Now, as vice president of training and education at Abraxas, he spends much of his time training others in the law enforcement and intelligence world. Among his contracts is one with the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which hired him to lead a four-day class that covers an introduction to terrorism.

According to government contracting documents, in a separate four-day period in 2006, McManus made nearly $40,000 for leading a seminar for immigration officers in “detecting deception and eliciting responses.” A year later, he secured a $238,000 contract to perform guest lectures. Pretty soon, more contracts began rolling in.

McManus said he is well compensated for his work at Abraxas. One of his first big purchases in post-agency life: a black Maserati GranTurismo, which retails for $160,000.

Helms, Abraxas’s founder, declined to be interviewed. In 2009, the privately held firm had an estimated 470 employees and annual revenue of $90 million. Late last year, Cubic, another defense contractor, acquired Abraxas for $124 million.

Growing demand

Many former CIA officers say they are surprised at their worth in the private sector. Some are surprised the private sector wants them at all.

At a 2009 conference hosted by the Digital Government Institute, John Sano, former deputy director of the National Clandestine Service and now a director of business development at Cisco, cracked a joke about his background.

“Let me tell you about my technological expertise: I have none,” Sano told conference attendees at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington. “I just figured out how the spring on this pen works. That is the limit to my expertise.”

If he didn’t bring technical expertise to Cisco, Sano, a 28-year vet­eran of the agency, did bring something else: the ability to help the firm navigate the sometimes mystifying layers of bureaucracy in Washington.

The same can be said of countless other CIA veterans. A top-level official with experience at the agency might know the right people on the right committees or be able to help identify federal employees who play a key role in awarding a lucrative intelligence contract. They also know how the intelligence world works.

“If you worked on the seventh floor of the agency, you have a view of everything that’s going on in the world from Marrakesh to Bangladesh,” one former operations officer said. “That knowledge is invaluable to companies working internationally.”

Outside the intelligence world, corporations have found reasons to turn to CIA vet­erans in the post-9/11 era. Many former officers now head security for multinational firms. Among others, Robert Dannenberg, a former Central Eurasia division chief, left the CIA to run BP’s international security affairs division and now is the director for global security at Goldman Sachs.

When Mel Gamble, a 40-year veteran of the agency, retired in 2008, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He was retiring as the chief of recruitment for the National Clandestine Service, after serving in jobs that included being operations officer and eventually a chief of station in Africa.

In the old days, through the 1990s, there had been an “unwritten rule,” Gamble recalled: “You would retire and go away. Go raise tulips or dogs.”

But some officials with the agency now have concluded that their retirement income is not enough, and they don’t want to stay at the agency working as “instructors or doing task-specific duties,” Gamble said.

“I didn’t just want to go back to the agency [as a contractor] as so many people do,” said Gamble, who ultimately settled on a position at Electronic Warfare Associates, a defense contractor based in Herndon that advertises services including network penetration testing and computer forensics analysis.

“They knew the ins and outs of how to deal with [the Defense Department], but they didn’t understand other agencies at all and how they were structured,” said Gamble, who has since left EWA for another company. “I tell them, you need to talk to people at this level, or it’s actually this person at the National Security Council who would make a decision on this project.”

A loss of experience

At the agency, some say the wave of departures has led to a sense of unease.

In 2009, after a double agent blew himself up at a CIA base in Afghanistan, killing seven of the agency’s officers, many former officials suggested that the tragedy might have been prevented had the CIA retained more senior personnel at the outpost.

Some officials questioned why the agency had given one of the top assignments there to an officer who had never served in a war zone. Other former officials raised concerns about how intelligence assets were being handled in the field.

“The tradecraft that was developed over many years is passe,” a recently retired senior intelligence official said at the time. “Now it’s a military tempo, where you don’t have time for validating and vetting sources. . . . All that seems to have gone by the board. It shows there are not a lot of people with a great deal of experience in this field.”

Only a year before the bombing, the agency had instituted a new program to mitigate the loss of institutional memory. The program required officers heading out the door to train their successors or participate in oral histories about their own careers. Some officers even make manuals describing specialized work.

At times, though, a transfer of knowledge has not been enough.

In 2010, after the CIA lost Michael Sulick, the head of its clandestine service, to retirement, it chose not to replace him from within its current ranks. Rather, the agency tapped John D. Bennett, a CIA veteran who had served as station chief in Pakistan and who had retired only two months before.

Back from retirement

As far back as 1989, the agency established a retirement program to help former employees adjust to life outside the bubble of the agency. The program, now three months long, teaches agency officials about their benefits and financial management skills.

But these days, it also functions as a recruitment space.

When the retirement program was conceived, fewer than 20 firms came to speak to the retiring classes about opportunities in the workforce outside the agency. Today, 40 to 50 companies vie to attend an agency-sponsored job fair held 10 times a year at the CIA’s retirement center in Reston. Major contractors — including SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton and CACI — are regular participants.

One agency participant who interviewed with top defense contractors described the conversations as an exercise in figuring out whom he knew in the intelligence world.

“With a couple of firms, it was sort of a blatant, how-can-we-
exploit-your-Rolodex conversation,” said one former intelligence officer. The chief executive of the company he ended up working for told him: “We want to know how the intelligence world works and how we can provide services to them.”

At the agency, Director Leon Panetta has helped slow the exit of talent. But this year he has seen his top three leaders leave the agency. Collectively, they represented more than 75 years of institutional knowledge and operations talent.

One former official said the loss of so many insiders has taken a toll on those connected to the agency.

“Honestly, it’s painful to see, and it’s not in the national interest to see so many men and women at the peak of their experience walk out of the agency at the age of 52 or 53,” the former official said. “The agency would be well served to implement stronger incentives to encourage people to stay.”

Bob Wallace, a 32-year agency veteran who now runs Artemus Consulting Group in Herndon, suggested that the departures from the agency reflect more than the draw of a big salary outside government. Rather, he said, some veterans who have risen to the management level are leaving for a much more mundane reason: bureaucracy.

“People tire of meetings,” Wallace said. “Eventually, they decide they want to jump to the private sector so they can be back on the street again — doing what they love.”

tatej@washpost.com

Chinese Troops Surround Tibetan Monastery

VOA News April 12, 2011

Photo: AP

Tibet flag

Exiled Tibetan groups say Chinese security forces have surrounded a Buddhist monastery in Sichuan province, following the self-immolation of a young Tibetan monk last month.

Phuntsok died March 16 after setting himself on fire to protest Chinese rule in Tibet.

His self-immolation coincided with the third anniversary of violent protests against Chinese rule in Tibet.

The Indian-based Tibet Post newspaper says Chinese security forces have cordoned the monastery in Ngaba prefecture, restricting the movement of the monks and visits to the monastery.

The report says the monks are now facing food shortages because they depend on offerings by local residents through the monastery administration.

Exiled Tibetan sources say a group of people tried to approach the monastery around noon Monday, but were blocked by Chinese troops.

Reports say that in the aftermath of Phuntsok's protest and the subsequent show of solidarity by the monks at Kirti monastery, authorities have taken drastic measures to bring them under control.

More than 2,500 monks reportedly live in the monastery.

Tibetan groups are calling on the international community and human rights groups to intervene and stop China's security clampdown.

Daughter of Prominent Bahraini Activist Challenges Obama

Cecily Hilleary April 12, 2011

Photo: Photo: courtesy - Zainab Alkhawaja

A screen shot of Zainab Alkhawaja's Twitter feed the night of her father's and other relatives' arrests. On Twitter and in the blogosphere Zainab is known as AngryArabiya.

Zainab Alkhawaja, the daughter of a prominent Bahraini human rights activist, has written a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama calling upon him to stand up for freedom and speak up on behalf of her father, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja. He, along with other relatives, was arrested Saturday by security forces.

Zainab, who has been sharing her story on her blog and via Twitter, where she is known as “AngryArabiya,” has also started a hunger strike to draw attention to her cause.

Contacted by phone, Zainab read for us some passages from her letter to Obama.
“Mr. President,… when you were sworn in as President of the United States, I had high hopes.  I thought, ‘Here is a person who would never have become president if it were not for the African-American fight for civil liberties. He will understand our fight for freedom.’

courtesy - Zainab Alkhawaja

Zainab Alkhawaja

What was it you meant, Mr. President? YES WE CAN…support dictators? YES WE CAN…help oppress pro-democracy protesters? YES WE CAN…turn a blind eye to a people suffering?”

Zinaib also recounted for us in her own words the events surrounding the arrest of her father and other relatives Saturday.

“I have a one-year-old daughter. When I heard that they were going to come for my father, I took her out and left her with some friends. Just in case something would happen, I didn’t want her to be part of this, I didn’t want her to get scared.

At about 2 a.m., they did arrive. The first thing that we heard, knowing that they had arrived, was the banging with a sledgehammer on the building door. They were breaking it. Then we heard them running up to the apartment, and in about 30 seconds, they broke the door to the apartment as well.

Five minutes before they had arrived, my father was telling all of us to be calm and to be patient, and if they do come, he did not want to see anyone crying or shouting. He said he would go with them voluntarily, and he said, “Let’s keep our dignity and respect.”  And just as he was going to speak with them, and I expected he was going to say, “Calm down, I will come with you, please don’t hurt my family,” just as he opened his mouth to speak, the man started saying, “Down on the ground” in very broken Arabic - he was not an Arab - and then he held my father from his neck, from his throat. And he started pulling him away. He pulled him on the stairs, he was dragging him on the stairs while other security forces were hitting him and kicking him and punching him.

courtesy - Zainab Alkhawaja

Abdulhadi Alkhawaja

They were all wearing black uniforms and they were all masked and they were all armed. And they were beating him. And I heard him gasping for air and saying, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”

And that’s when I decided that was enough. I wasn’t just going to stand and watch this happen. I ran down the stairs and I was telling them, “Please don’t hurt him, don’t beat him, he’s willing to go with you voluntarily, why are you hitting him?”

One of them started saying, “Beat her up too and arrest her, we’ll take her as well.”

But instead of that, one of the masked men, he grabbed me from my shirt and he started dragging me up the stairs… I saw my father fallen on the stairs as they were dragging him, but he wasn’t moving at all.

And then I saw them take my husband and my two brothers-in-law. They were taking them away like they were two prisoners of war, with their heads forced down. And I saw drops of blood on the stairs. And I knew that my father had been really hurt. Even though my father was unconscious, they were still beating him and kicking him and cursing him and saying that they were going to kill him.

We have no idea where they are. We haven’t even gotten a phone call from them saying that they’re okay.

And that’s why the last thing that I could think of doing is to just go on hunger strike. I don’t like the feeling of being helpless, of sitting here wondering how they are torturing my father, my husband, my brother-in-law and my uncle. This is my way of trying to do something, of trying to help them, of trying to get the world to realize what’s happening here and what’s happening to my people, what’s happening to my family.”

After sharing her story, Zinaib ended with another passage to her letter to President Obama.

“I ask of you to look into your beautiful daughters' eyes tonight and think to yourself what you are personally willing to sacrifice in order to make sure they can sleep safe at night, that they can grow up with hope rather than fear and heartache, that they can have their father and grandfather's embrace to run to when they are hurt or in need of support. Last night my one-year-old daughter went knocking on our bedroom door calling for her father, the first word she ever learnt. It tore my heart to pieces. How do you explain to a one-year-old that her father is imprisoned? I need to look into my daughter's eyes tomorrow, next week, in the years to come, and tell her I did all that I could to protect her family and future.

For my daughter's sake, for her future, for my father's life, for the life of my husband, to unite my family again, I will begin my hunger strike," writes Zinaib.

Bahraini officials have rejected claims of a targeted campaign against opposition activists, insisting authorities are only doing what was necessary to ensure law and order.

Critics suspect many countries have been reluctant to take a firm stance on Bahrain because of the emirate’s strategic importance as a Western ally in the oil-producing Persian Gulf region. Bahrain is also home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet.

More Horn of Africa immigrants in Yemen despite unrest

Photo: Contributor/IRIN

Ethiopian immigrants sitting outside the offices of the Charitable Society for Social Welfare in Haradh, Yemen

SANAA, 13 April 2011 (IRIN) - The number of immigrants arriving in Yemen from the Horn of Africa since the beginning of 2011 has increased despite the current political turmoil, raising fears that the government may find it hard to provide for them.

Some 21,577 arrivals were recorded by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in the first quarter of 2011, compared to 9,439 during the same period in 2010, and 16,932 in 2009. This year's figures are the highest since 2008.

Yemen has, since February, been in the grip of nationwide protests against long-serving President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and more than 100 people have been killed.

"I don't know how the government can provide protection for this increasing number of illegal immigrants and refugees coming from the Horn of Africa while it is struggling to protect its own citizens," said Mohammed al-Fuqmi, rapporteur for the government-run National Committee for Refugee Affairs.

The data shows that while the number of Somalis has decreased, the number of Ethiopians has increased.

Unlike the Somalis, who tend to take the perilous 35-hour voyage from the northern Somali port of Bosasso to Yemen's southern coast, most Ethiopians reach Yemen via Djibouti - a much shorter journey of up to 10 hours, according to Ahmad Akam, a Yemeni coastguard official at the port city of Mukha.

"Their sea voyages are less risky, compared to the more adventurous voyages made by those coming from Bosasso," he told IRIN said.

Why the influx?

Ame Abdu Shabo, chairman of the Oromo Refugee Community in Yemen, attributed the increasing influx of Ethiopians to conflict in the Oromo region. Some of the new arrivals, he added, had been harassed by armed Yemenis demanding money in Dabab village near the southwestern coast in Taiz Governorate.

“We found out that four Oromo women and a man [were] being held captive for more than one week by armed men in Dabab,” he said. “Each one of them was asked to pay a ransom of US$300. The four complained of being tortured and beaten by their captors daily because they couldn’t pay.”

Jamal al-Najjar, an information assistant with UNHCR, said the agency was following up the matter with the authorities in Taiz.

Official Yemeni government estimates put the total number of African refugees and illegal immigrants in the country at more than 700,000.

ay/cb

Timeline of key events in Syria since mid-March

Photo: Hugh Macleod/IRIN

Syrians at a previous protest. About 200 people have died in recent clashes between security forces and protestors (file photo)

DUBAI, 13 April 2011 (IRIN) - Syria has been under emergency law since the Ba’ath Party seized power in 1963 and banned all opposition parties. Since early March 2011, there have been regular protests in a number of towns and cities, with the southern town of Dera’a a focal point. About 200 people have died in recent clashes. Below is a timeline of some key developments since 16 March:

16 March - “Silent” protest in Damascus by 150 members of imprisoned families and friends. Four protesters killed and dozens wounded by security forces in Dera’a, near the border with Jordan.

18 March - Demonstrations in Dera’a demanding political freedom and an end to corruption in Syria.

20 March - People continue to demand an end to Syria’s long-running emergency law banning political opposition. Crowds set fire to headquarters of the Ba’ath Party in Dera’a.

21 March - Hundreds of security forces line the streets of Dera’a, but do not confront thousands of mourners marching at the funeral of a protester killed in the town.

22 March - In a fifth consecutive day of demonstrations against the government, hundreds of people march in the southern cities of Dera’a and Nawa.

23 March - Reports of Syrian forces killing six people in an attack on protesters in Dera’a, and later the same day opening fire on hundreds of youths marching in solidarity. Faysal Kalthum, regional governor of Dera’a, sacked by President Assad.

24 March - President Assad’s advisers say the president has ordered the formation of a committee to raise living standards and study scrapping the emergency law.

25 March - At least 200 people march in Damascus and hundreds also on the streets of Hama. Amnesty International says at least 55 people have been killed in Dera’a in the last week and there are reports of at least 23 dead around the country, including for the first time in Damascus. Thousands march in funerals for some of the dead; witnesses say protesters in Dera’a toppled a statue of Assad's father, former President Hafez al-Assad. Security forces open fire from buildings. According to Syrian human rights organizations, there are indications that almost all of those who had been arrested in and around Dera'a since 18 March have been released.

26 March - Clashes between security forces and protesters in the coastal city of Latakia kill another 12, according to Syria's state news agency. President Assad deploys the army there the next day. In an attempt to placate protesters, Assad frees 260 prisoners, and 16 more the next day.

27 March - Army increases its presence in Dera’a.

28 March - Security forces fire into the air to disperse hundreds of protesters in Dera’a. Reports of pro-government rallies taking place across the country. Amnesty International cites unconfirmed reports saying 37 more people had been killed since 25 March in protests in Damascus, Latakia, Dera’a and elsewhere.

29 March - Resignation of government following weeks of protests. President Assad appoints former government head Naji al-Otari as the new caretaker prime minister.

30 March - President Assad delivers a speech for the first time since the protests began, but does not announce any major reforms.

31 March - Assad orders an investigation into protest deaths in Dera’a and Latakia. The Syrian state news agency says a panel will study and prepare "legislation, including protecting the nation's security and the citizen's dignity… paving the way for lifting the emergency law" by 25 April.

1 April - Up to eight people are killed after government forces use live ammunition against protesters in the Damascus suburb of Douma.

3 April - President Assad appoints Adel Safar, minister of agriculture in the last cabinet, to form a new government.

4 April - Mohammad Khaled al-Hannus appointed governor of Dera’a.

8 April - Security forces open fire on protesters across Syria killing as many as 26 people, mostly in Dera’a.

10 April - Reports of shooting, many injuries and 200 arrests in the coastal town of Baniyas, 300km northwest of Damascus, following clashes in the area.

11 April - Some 500 Damascus university students call for more political freedom. According to the Syrian Human Rights League, opposition figure, writer and journalist Fayez Sara, was arrested, as well as bloggers, activists and young opposition supporters. According to Human Rights Watch, there are reports of beatings and torture inside prisons.

Sources: Alertnet, Al-Jazeera, Amnesty International, BBC, Montreal Gazette, Reuters, Syrian news agency SANA