One Big Unhappy Family - The New York Review of Books

Image via Wikipedia

Volume 56, Number 4 · March 12, 2009

One Big Unhappy Family

By Fred Halliday

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century

by Steve Coll

Penguin, 671 pp., $35.00; $18.00 (paper; to be published March 31)

About a decade ago I had a curious visitor to my office at the London School of Economics. An American in his mid-fifties, he explained that he had been a student in the 1960s and had come by to see who was in the office of a former professor. I asked him what he was now doing. "I am the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia," he replied. Previously, Wyche Fowler had been a Democratic senator from Georgia, losing his seat in 1992; he had then been appointed US ambassador in Riyadh by President Clinton, a position he held from 1996 to 2001. So, I asked him, how would he evaluate the situation in this notoriously opaque country? Ambassador Fowler explained that indeed it was difficult to monitor the country; he and his colleagues were largely confined to the embassy, and access to Saudis was extremely difficult. As ambassador, he said, the only person he could really talk to was the King—an experience he compared, with a little irony, to talking to Ronald Reagan.

He was not alone in finding it difficult to get a handle on Saudi Arabia. Until the past decade or so, there was almost no reliable academic or journalistic writing on the country.^[1] US intelligence and diplomatic analysis did little better. As The Bin Ladens, Steve Coll's fascinating recent book, demonstrates, precise knowledge about the workings of power, members of the ruling elite, security, and money was intrinsically impossible to find.

Along with several other American ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, Wyche Fowler has a walk-on part in Coll's book. Following the bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998, Fowler was told to put pressure on the Saudis to reveal details of the bin Laden family finances and links to Osama, who took credit for the bombings. He found himself caught up in conflicts between different branches of the US government, each insisting that it had the best means of getting the desired information. It is easy to claim that one or another approach would have made a decisive difference, that the September 11 attacks could have been avoided, or that the Saudis could really have closed down the al-Qaeda operation. Looked at from the outside, however, such assumptions appear less certain. In a world where public statistics, and accounts, are largely inventions, in which even basic figures of national income and expenditure are worthless, conventional forms of investigation, based on experience in the United States or elsewhere, are of little use.

---

---

To read Coll's book is to enter a universe of perpetual movement and deal-making, but one in which little, if anything, is recorded or written down, where power and money are distributed by means of kin networks, informal gatherings of influential Saudi males, and the mobile phone. The Bin Ladens is not so much a book about Osama bin Laden himself, or his terrorist network and political aspirations, as about the power structures of modern Saudi Arabia. And in this it is most informative. Against much contemporary writing about the Arab world, which tends to explain political and social behavior by analysis of culture and religion, Coll's book is about more secular matters—about sibling rivalry; fascination with modern technology, particularly planes and means of communication; about the attraction of women; and above all, for all the talk of piety, about money.

Drawing on extensive oral testimony from friends and business partners, The Bin Ladens gives persuasive explanations not just of Osama bin Laden, of where he came from and how he was radicalized, but of his gifted and restless family and, perhaps more than anything, of the modern Saudi elite itself. The success of the bin Ladens was tied to their connections and access to the King and his close associates, and the ability to anticipate and carry out, whether in building, engineering, or accounting, the wishes of the House of Saud.

Coll describes the rise of Mohamed bin Laden, a poor immigrant from the Hadhramawt region of Yemen who arrived in Arabia in the 1920s and became one of the country's leading construction magnates. Beyond ingenuity and hard work, he had a remarkable capacity for understanding and manipulating the shifting and internecine worlds of the Saudi royal family. The Saudis came to power in the 1920s without the experts or trained personnel to run a state, and they relied heavily on enterprising immigrants, like Mohamed bin Laden, together with the more cosmopolitan business elite of western Arabia, the Hijaz. This reliance persisted well into the second and third generations, so that by the time Mohamed bin Laden was killed in a plane crash in 1967, his elder son Salem—educated in Britain and in Lebanon, and with a taste for the life-style of Texas and California—came to occupy the same position, coaxing contracts and payment out of the Saudi court and, in a loose but effective way, managing the family construction business on behalf of Mohamed's fifty-four children, among them twenty-four sons, of whom Osama was one of the youngest and, initially, less prominent.

Salem bin Laden built up contacts with Americans that would have been unimaginable to his father. These included oil engineers, fixers, financiers, and pilots, as well as a string of lovers whom he met in his ceaseless traveling, flying, purchasing, and negotiating. He died in a plane crash at a small airfield in Texas in 1988. There is something at once elusive and intoxicating about the world of the oil elite of Arabia. Many of its members spend their lives talking, charming, making deals, managing to receive payments, moving from one city and continent to another, accompanied by hangers-on, cronies, sycophants, and friends. The first question that always arises in such circles is " Mata wasalt? ": "When did you arrive?"

This is a world awash with money, the precise origins of which are hardly clear. In all the pages of The Bin Ladens, and the detailed account of the family's business, personal, and political activities, three words rarely if ever appear: "book," "idea," "read"—although we soon gather that the initially reserved and pensive younger brother Osama must have read extensively. It is small wonder that, exposed to both Saudi puritanism and the Western lifestyle, the members of the bin Laden family should have chosen a variety of paths, from assimilation into the Western elite, such as Yeslam, now in the perfume business in Geneva, to outright rejection, as in the case of Osama. As Coll puts it, perhaps with a little simplification, the bin Laden family divided into the "Hard Rock" and " jihadi " factions.

Coll is careful not to bring Salem's younger brother Osama into the picture too early. This is in part because he wants to show from what kind of world Osama, who was born in the mid-1950s, emerged. He received an elite education in a private school in Jeddah, al-Thaghr, modeled on a British "public" school; it featured English and Scottish teachers, and a school magazine which was edited in Osama's time by a Saudi who later became a student at the London School of Economics. For many years, until his estrangement from the family in the late 1990s, Osama received his share, estimated by Coll at between $2 and $3 million per year, of the bin Laden business income.

His entire career and life opportunities had been framed by his ties to the Saudi elite; but whereas his brothers concentrated on financial and commercial links, Osama's links were political. Radicalized by Muslim Brotherhood teachers who were in exile from Egypt in the 1980s, and increasingly drawn to an austere, reserved lifestyle, Osama went to Pakistan in 1984 to help organize the recruitment and deployment of Arab volunteers who had come to fight the Russian and Afghan Communist forces over the border. At first, his primary function was to help funnel money from the Saudi intelligence services to the Mujahideen, and also to use skills, contacts, and, it seems, even construction equipment provided by the family business to build bases and facilities for the anti-Communist forces inside Afghanistan.

Coll is keen to maintain a sense of proportion in describing Osama bin Laden's role in the Afghan jihad. He was not a major military leader, but had a part in at least two bloody episodes in the latter stages of the war: a battle in 1987 in the border region of Jaji, where he had built a network of caves and fortifications for the Islamist fighters; and the unsuccessful siege of the eastern Afghan town of Jalalabad in 1989. Coll goes on to develop one of his major themes—the degree to which Osama bin Laden, increasingly involved in fighting and an apparently heroic military campaign, came, more and more, to believe in his own rhetoric about his leadership of a global Islamic movement. He quarreled first with his Palestinian mentor, the militant Islamist cleric Abdullah Azzam, who died in mysterious circumstances in 1989, and then with his Saudi sponsors, following the Iraqi attack on Kuwait in 1990. Saudi Arabia supported the US in the Gulf War, while bin Laden saw the presence of infidel US forces in Arabia as violating the sacred land of Islam. It was when King Fahd rejected bin Laden's offer to fight the Iraqis using Islamist forces instead of relying on the US that the latter's real falling-out with the Saudi ruling family began.

Coll questions the conventional story about bin Laden's links to the CIA. As the author of a previous book on the CIA's role in Afghanistan, Ghost Wars,^[2] he is well placed to investigate the issue. He finds that there is no evidence of bin Laden ever being paid by, or meeting directly with, American intelligence representatives during the Afghan war. However, as Coll also makes clear, this does not mean too much. Bin Laden was well connected with the Pakistani and Saudi security services, and made at least one trip to London, in 1986, when he stayed in the Dorchester Hotel for six to eight weeks, negotiating for the supply of portable antiaircraft missiles to the Afghan guerrillas with his brother Salem and a representative of the German arms firm Heckler & Koch. Plausible deniability is, in the world of covert operations and intelligence, very much part of the game.

Coll draws on information found by the Bosnian authorities during a raid in 2002 to provide an account of the founding of al-Qaeda as a loose transnational coalition at meetings in Peshawar, Pakistan, in August 1988. The story of Osama's gradual estrangement from the Saudi state and from his own family is also well told. For Coll, key turning points are Osama's involvement, however indirect, in the 1993 attempt to bomb the World Trade Center in New York and his open denunciation, beginning in 1994, of the Saudi ruling family for allowing the military bases of American infidels on Arabian soil.

On other questions, such as why the date of September 11, 2001, was chosen, we remain in the dark. Remarkably for a subject on which so little that is reliable has been written to date, The Bin Ladens contains very few erroneous or contestable judgements.^[3] The main weaknesses occur in Coll's account of events that have little to do with America or Saudi Arabia as such. He makes rather too little of Osama's time in Sudan, from 1991 to 1996, a period following the takeover of Sudan by Islamists in 1989, when he was involved in major attempts to overthrow the government of Egypt and other states, including Algeria and Libya. In 1993, al-Jihad, the Egyptian organization run by bin Laden's close associate Ayman al-Zawahiri, failed in its attempt to assassinate Egypt's interior minister and prime minister. This was not an interlude: it was the blocking—by the government of Egypt, among others—of the export of the Sudanese Islamic revolution to neighboring states that pushed Osama to his later "global" attacks in East Africa and Manhattan. In this very important sense, September 11, spectacular as it was, was also a sign of failure, not of escalating battle, and it was carried out on behalf not only of bin Laden but of his radical Egyptian allies.

Coll's account of al-Qaeda's role in Saudi Arabia's neighbor, Yemen, in the late 1980s and early 1990s greatly understates the extent to which Islamist militias such as the Abyan Army, led by Tariq al-Fadli, a former sultan, and the armed groups in northern Yemen led by Abd al-Majid al-Zindani supported the pro-Western North against the formerly socialist South. The undermining and ultimate destruction of the Communist regime in South Yemen, the only case other than Afghanistan in which a Soviet-style system was established in the Muslim world, was a major priority for bin Laden and his associates. Coll's account implies that this was something that occurred only in the late 1980s, whereas the involvement of bin Laden's allies and kin, in what for them was a struggle against a Communist regime similar to that of Afghanistan, lasted through to the 1994 war between North Yemen and the socialist republic of South Yemen, which the North won.^[4]

On three broader matters relevant to the whole al-Qaeda story, Coll's book clarifies our understanding. First, Osama bin Laden was not a product of a medieval mentality, or of some rigid "Islamic" way of thinking, but of the modern world—its conflicts, ideas, and, not least, its gadgets, ease of communication, media-produced images, and even fantasies.

Second, while he came from a wealthy and well-connected family, Osama, along with the estimated fifty-three other children of Mohamed bin Laden, did not inherit, or have access to, enormous sums of money: Coll assesses his wealth, calculated on the basis of Mohamed's estate, divided proportionately between the children, at around $24 million, and at least some of this he is believed to have lost in business ventures in Sudan during his time there in the 1990s. What Osama bin Laden did, and to a degree still does, have is the ability to make use of contacts and to raise money. This network includes sympathetic members of the bin Laden family, among them some of his sisters and half-sisters; informal contacts in the Saudi elite; and, not least, parts of the Pakistani intelligence and business communities.

Third, although the attacks on Manhattan and Washington in September 2001 were direct hits on American soil, Osama bin Laden's aims do not encompass the defeat of the United States, or the conquest of the West, by, or "for," Islam: the attacks on Europe and the US are, in Arabian tribal terminology, "raids." The "planes operation," as it was originally called when it was first conceived in 1998, was designed to be a spectacular piece of theater, what anarchists used to call "Propaganda of the Deed," a provocation that would draw the US military into further, and costly, conflicts in the Middle East, primarily Afghanistan. This was also the original purpose of the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor in October 2000, an operation that failed to sink the missile-carrying vessel, but that did kill seventeen American servicemen.

The original plan for September 11 seems to have envisaged no fewer than ten simultaneous hijackings and targets on the West as well as the East Coast of the US. As we now can see so clearly, even the scaled-down four-plane operation more than served its purposes, drawing America into a war in Afghanistan which it appeared to win, in 2001, but which has now turned very much the other way. It also led to something Osama bin Laden seems not to have envisaged, a war in Iraq, which, even if it can be stabilized, has served as a recruiting ground, and symbol, for jihadis across the region.

There is, however, a fourth, and wider, lesson of the world portrayed in Coll's book, namely that of the business practices and modus operandi of the Arabian business and political leaders. During the spike in oil prices in the first half of 2008, much was made in the Western financial press of possible joint ventures with, and major investments by, Middle Eastern sources of capital, and in particular of the growing influence of Arab, along with Russian, Chinese, and Singaporean, "Sovereign Wealth Funds" in investing in the West. A lot of people in banks, and other cash-starved enterprises, are hoping that these donors will help them out of the current world financial crisis. At the same time, Western governments and bank regulators demand that these new investors comply with standards of transparency and what is generally termed "good governance"; this means knowing the source of the funds being invested, the institutional structure of the donor bodies, and the relationship between private and state sectors, and individuals, within the donor communities.

Eminently desirable as such Western-style reforms may be, Steve Coll makes it clear that they are fundamentally incompatible with the financial and decision-making culture of Saudi Arabia and, by extension, of other Middle Eastern states. No major decisions, on investment or payment, are taken in formal meetings. Funds may seem to be attached to particular private donors or entrepreneurs, like members of the bin Laden family, but it is often their links to influential members of the ruling family that provide the key to their wealth: thus any attempt to separate state from private interests is doomed from the start. As for legal commitment, an estimated 80 percent of contracts signed in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia are not carried out. And as is well known, "commissions," "kickbacks," "local partners," and the rest are ubiquitously necessary.

What is more striking about The Bin Ladens are two themes that are not addressed, omissions that follow perhaps inexorably from Coll's approach to the story. One is a consideration of the qualities that have made Osama bin Laden and his associates so attractive to some in the Muslim world and beyond. Osama bin Laden's rise is explained not just by his skill with videos, fund-raising, and theatrical mass murder, but also by the chord he strikes among millions of people who, for a variety of reasons, resent the domination though not necessarily the life-style of the West, and in particular of the United States.

By devoting little attention to the larger bin Laden phenomenon, Coll leaves for the most part unexplored the question of what it was that Osama himself felt he was responding to, and the longer-run impact and endurance of the loose movement he initiated and inspired. In the final part of the book, Coll describes the situation of each of the main branches of the bin Laden family since September 2001, ending with a couple of chapters on Osama, portrayed here as on the defensive and increasingly unstable and eclectic in his choice of targets and ideological themes. The al-Qaeda leader—who may, according to some reports, be in the lawless frontier area of Pakistan—is evidently much aged and tested by his recent experience. He has had to contend with repeated divisions within Islamist ranks, and al-Qaeda has apparently failed to build a coherent international organization. Here the point is very well made by Coll that the origins and development of Osama's thinking are not to be found in anything traditional or scriptural, but are, rather, a response to the tensions of modern Saudi Arabia and of the Middle East as a whole.

In focusing on bin Laden's family background, Coll does not seem to recognize the extent to which, in some ways, history is, broadly speaking, going Osama's way. The US will not be able to maintain a permanent presence in Iraq, and even if the present state survives it will in all likelihood become an ally of Iran's. Turkey has been increasingly alienated from the West, and particularly from the United States. The Muslim Brotherhood is gaining popularity in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Kuwait—a trend that has reportedly increased in response to the recent conflict in Gaza. Most importantly, in the opinion of many firsthand observers, the attempt to build a new Western state in Afghanistan seems doomed to failure.

As bin Laden—"a global news junkie," according to Coll—surveys the world on the Internet and postpones, as all revolutionaries must, his dreams of a worldwide insurgency, he must be gratified to see how his old associates in Afghanistan, the Taliban, and his old patrons and allies in the Pakistani security system are, after the initial US successes of 2001, very much back in business. While it is too early to be sure who inspired, trained, and organized the recent Bombay attackers, there can be little doubt that they will be viewed with pleasure, when not enthusiasm, by al-Qaeda. President Obama has said in a television interview with al-Arabiya that "we are...communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest." But the burden of past US policies in the region, both before and after September 11, remains heavy.

Here we come to the other clamoring silence in this book, one obscured all the more by the subtitle "An Arabian Family in the American Century." One of the leitmotifs of the book is the embrace by the Saudi Arabian elite, and in particular by the majority of the bin Laden family, male and female, of American consumerism and American business. Yet there is a larger question here of who, in the end, had the greater influence on whom. For Osama bin Laden, with at least some support from others in the clan, turned into the greatest enemy of the United States in the early twenty-first century.

At the same time, Coll's recognition of the interaction between Saudi and US government officials and businessmen may serve to displace, even obscure, the historic responsibility which America should bear, and which few care to investigate, for the rise of al-Qaeda itself. This, to an outside observer, is the most striking failure of the post–September 11 debate within the US: the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington are blamed on everything from the Koran to current Saudi educational practices. But the central stimulant and conditioner of the rise of al-Qaeda and of Osama bin Laden himself, namely US policy in Afghanistan in the last decade of the cold war in particular, and in the Muslim world more generally, is neglected.^[5]

As Steve Coll shows, that Osama bin Laden himself apparently did not meet with US officers is in itself trivial; backed as he was by the Pakistani and Saudi intelligence forces in the conflict with the Soviet Union, bin Laden was both a recruiting sergeant and logistics officer, later prone to exaggerating his role, in an international campaign orchestrated from Washington. In this sense, for all his distance from the other, more compliant, members of the family, Osama bin Laden was as much a part of the involvement with America, and of American global strategy in its supposed "century," as were those Saudis who bought properties in Florida and Texas, or who invested in US businesses. And lest we forget, and for reasons that go far beyond the plans, malevolence, and indeed survival of one aberrant visionary, this story is still far from over.

Notes

^[1]The quality of publications and analysis has changed quite dramatically over the past decade. Whereas only a while ago there were few serious academic or journalistic studies of Saudi Arabia, and all of these were by outside observers (Richard Johns, Helen Lackner), we now have a score of books that explain how the country works. Perhaps the first author to do this was the Russian Arab expert Alexei Vassiliev in The History of Saudi Arabia ( NYU Press, 2000). The French social scientist Pascal Ménoret, in The Saudi Enigma (Zed, 2005), a book based on two years living in the country, and the British political economist Tim Niblock, in his recently published The Political Economy of Saudi Arabia (Routledge, 2007), have also helped to lift the curtain. Two women authors with a Saudi connection have done much to remedy past ignorance as well: Dr. Mai Yamani and Dr. Madawi al-Rasheed, in their studies of contemporary Saudi Arabia, have provided analysis that is at once rich in detail and convincing in overall judgment.

As for Saudi Arabian literature, there is the monumental trilogy of the late Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, an epic narrative, on the grand nineteenth-century European scale, of the origins and early years of the Saudi kingdom, published by Vintage in 1989 in a translation by Peter Theroux. The Saudi poet, ambassador, and minister Ghazi al-Ghosaibi has also written a number of telling and evocative novels and short stories. And lest anyone be tempted to regard such things as impossible in such an apparently closed society, there is also a literature written by Saudi women, some of which has been published in Voices of Change: Short Stories by Saudi Arabian Women Writers, edited by Abubaker Bagader, Ava M. Heinrichsdorff, and Deborah S. Akers (Lynne Rienner, 1998).

^[2]Penguin, 2004; reviewed in these pages by Ahmed Rashid, May 27, 2004.

^[3]There are occasional slips: thus, on page 399, any account of the Bosnian war should include, among the enemies of the Muslim Bosnians, not only Croatians but also Serbs; on page 462 Coll confuses the Arabic word for Jerusalem, al-Quds, with the al-Aqsa mosque; whatever license there may legitimately be in the transcription of Arabic words, there cannot be two d 's in Mujahideen.

^[4]Some difference may also be noted in the accounts which the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal, gave of Saudi involvement in inter-Yemeni conflicts. According to Coll, Prince Turki was approached by Osama bin Laden with proposals regarding Yemen, which were rejected. According to Richard Clarke, who later ran the counterterrorism program in the Clinton White House, it was Turki himself who asked bin Laden to get involved. Both these accounts conflict with what Turki told me, in an interview in 2004 in his London office when he was ambassador to the United Kingdom. He told me that his branch of Saudi intelligence, the General Directorship, had no responsibility for Yemen, this being traditionally the preserve of the governor of the neighboring Saudi province of Najran.

^[5]A similar silence can be noted in the recent film Charlie Wilson's War, directed by Mike Nichols, an account of the role of a right-wing Texan congressman, played by Tom Hanks, in mobilizing support for the Afghan Mujahideen. In the original script by Aaron Sorkin, of West Wing fame, there was a moment when Hanks, hearing of the September 11 attacks, flashes back to his role in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but this was removed from the final version. Perhaps it was judged too complicated for movie audiences.

---

Letters

April 30, 2009: The Editors, Corrections

How Nuclear Weapons Can Keep You Safe - Newsweek

Image via Wikipedia

By Jonathan Tepperman | NEWSWEEK

Published Aug 29, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Sep 7, 2009

On Sept. 24, President Barack Obama will bring together 14 world leaders for a special U.N. Security Council meeting in New York. On the agenda: how to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The summit is the latest step in the administration's campaign to eliminate nukes, a priority Obama stressed on the campaign trail and formally announced in April during his speech in Prague. U.S. attempts to stop Iran from acquiring the bomb and to pry the weapons out of North Korea's fingers are also key parts of this campaign.

These efforts are all grounded in the same proposition: that, as Obama has said several times, nuclear weapons represent the "gravest threat" to U.S. security. This argument has a lot going for it. It's strongly intuitive, as anyone who's ever seen pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki knows. It's also popular; U.S. presidents have been making similar noises since the Eisenhower administration, and halting the spread of nukes (if not eliminating them altogether) is one of the few things Obama, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, and Benjamin Netanyahu can all agree on. There's just one problem with the reasoning: it may well be wrong.

A growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous, as Obama and most people assume. The bomb may actually make us safer. In this era of rogue states and transnational terrorists, that idea sounds so obviously wrongheaded that few politicians or policymakers are willing to entertain it. But that's a mistake. Knowing the truth about nukes would have a profound impact on government policy. Obama's idealistic campaign, so out of character for a pragmatic administration, may be unlikely to get far (past presidents have tried and failed). But it's not even clear he should make the effort. There are more important measures the U.S. government can and should take to make the real world safer, and these mustn't be ignored in the name of a dreamy ideal (a nuke-free planet) that's both unrealistic and possibly undesirable.

The argument that nuclear weapons can be agents of peace as well as destruction rests on two deceptively simple observations. First, nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. Second, there's never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war between two states that possess them. Just stop for a second and think about that: it's hard to overstate how remarkable it is, especially given the singular viciousness of the 20th century. As Kenneth Waltz, the leading "nuclear optimist" and a professor emeritus of political science at UC Berkeley puts it, "We now have 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It's striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states."

To understand why—and why the next 64 years are likely to play out the same way—you need to start by recognizing that all states are rational on some basic level. Their leaders may be stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend to do things only when they're pretty sure they can get away with them. Take war: a country will start a fight only when it's almost certain it can get what it wants at an acceptable price. Not even Hitler or Saddam waged wars they didn't think they could win. The problem historically has been that leaders often make the wrong gamble and underestimate the other side—and millions of innocents pay the price.

Nuclear weapons change all that by making the costs of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Suddenly, when both sides have the ability to turn the other to ashes with the push of a button—and everybody knows it—the basic math shifts. Even the craziest tin-pot dictator is forced to accept that war with a nuclear state is unwinnable and thus not worth the effort. As Waltz puts it, "Why fight if you can't win and might lose everything?"

Why indeed? The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling, it's led to what's known as the nuclear peace: the virtually unprecedented stretch since the end of World War II in which all the world's major powers have avoided coming to blows. They did fight proxy wars, ranging from Korea to Vietnam to Angola to Latin America. But these never matched the furious destruction of full-on, great-power war (World War II alone was responsible for some 50 million to 70 million deaths). And since the end of the Cold War, such bloodshed has declined precipitously. Meanwhile, the nuclear powers have scrupulously avoided direct combat, and there's very good reason to think they always will. There have been some near misses, but a close look at these cases is fundamentally reassuring—because in each instance, very different leaders all came to the same safe conclusion.

Take the mother of all nuclear standoffs: the Cuban missile crisis. For 13 days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union each threatened the other with destruction. But both countries soon stepped back from the brink when they recognized that a war would have meant curtains for everyone. As important as the fact that they did is the reason why: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's aide Fyodor Burlatsky said later on, "It is impossible to win a nuclear war, and both sides realized that, maybe for the first time."

The record since then shows the same pattern repeating: nuclear-armed enemies slide toward war, then pull back, always for the same reasons. The best recent example is India and Pakistan, which fought three bloody wars after independence before acquiring their own nukes in 1998. Getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction didn't do anything to lessen their animosity. But it did dramatically mellow their behavior. Since acquiring atomic weapons, the two sides have never fought another war, despite severe provocations (like Pakistani-based terrorist attacks on India in 2001 and 2008). They have skirmished once. But during that flare-up, in Kashmir in 1999, both countries were careful to keep the fighting limited and to avoid threatening the other's vital interests. Sumit Ganguly, an Indiana University professor and coauthor of the forthcoming India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, has found that on both sides, officials' thinking was strikingly similar to that of the Russians and Americans in 1962. The prospect of war brought Delhi and Islamabad face to face with a nuclear holocaust, and leaders in each country did what they had to do to avoid it.

Nuclear pessimists—and there are many—insist that even if this pattern has held in the past, it's crazy to rely on it in the future, for several reasons. The first is that today's nuclear wannabes are so completely unhinged, you'd be mad to trust them with a bomb. Take the sybaritic Kim Jong Il, who's never missed a chance to demonstrate his battiness, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has denied the Holocaust and promised the destruction of Israel, and who, according to some respected Middle East scholars, runs a messianic martyrdom cult that would welcome nuclear obliteration. These regimes are the ultimate rogues, the thinking goes—and there's no deterring rogues.

But are Kim and Ahmadinejad really scarier and crazier than were Stalin and Mao? It might look that way from Seoul or Tel Aviv, but history says otherwise. Khrushchev, remember, threatened to "bury" the United States, and in 1957, Mao blithely declared that a nuclear war with America wouldn't be so bad because even "if half of mankind died … the whole world would become socialist." Pyongyang and Tehran support terrorism—but so did Moscow and Beijing. And as for seeming suicidal, Michael Desch of the University of Notre Dame points out that Stalin and Mao are the real record holders here: both were responsible for the deaths of some 20 million of their own citizens.

Yet when push came to shove, their regimes balked at nuclear suicide, and so would today's international bogeymen. For all of Ahmadinejad's antics, his power is limited, and the clerical regime has always proved rational and pragmatic when its life is on the line. Revolutionary Iran has never started a war, has done deals with both Washington and Jerusalem, and sued for peace in its war with Iraq (which Saddam started) once it realized it couldn't win. North Korea, meanwhile, is a tiny, impoverished, family-run country with a history of being invaded; its overwhelming preoccupation is survival, and every time it becomes more belligerent it reverses itself a few months later (witness last week, when Pyongyang told Seoul and Washington it was ready to return to the bargaining table). These countries may be brutally oppressive, but nothing in their behavior suggests they have a death wish.

Still, even if Iran or North Korea are deterrable, nuclear pessimists fear they'll give or sell their deadly toys to terrorists, who aren't—for it's hard to bomb a group with no return address. Yet look closely, and the risk of a WMD handoff starts to seem overblown. For one thing, assuming Iran is able to actually build a nuke, Desch explains that "it doesn't make sense that they'd then give something they regard as central to their survival to groups like Hizbullah, over which they have limited control. As for Al Qaeda, they don't even share common interests. Why would the mullahs give Osama bin Laden the crown jewels?" To do so would be fatal, for Washington has made it very clear that it would regard any terrorist use of a WMD as an attack by the country that supplied it—and would respond accordingly.

A much greater threat is that a nuclear North Korea or Pakistan could collapse and lose control of its weapons entirely. Yet here again history offers some comfort. China acquired its first nuke in 1964, just two years before it descended into the mad chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when virtually every Chinese institution was threatened—except for its nuclear infrastructure, which remained secure. "It was nearly a coup," says Desch, "yet with all the unrest, nobody ever thought that there might be an unauthorized nuclear use." The Soviets' weapons were also kept largely safe (with U.S. help) during the breakup of their union in the early '90s. And in recent years Moscow has greatly upped its defense spending (by 20 to 30 percent a year), using some of the cash to modernize and protect its arsenal.

As for Pakistan, it has taken numerous precautions to ensure that its own weapons are insulated from the country's chaos, installing complicated firing mechanisms to prevent a launch by lone radicals, for example, and instituting special training and screening for its nuclear personnel to ensure they're not infiltrated by extremists. Even if the Pakistani state did collapse entirely—the nightmare scenario—the chance of a Taliban bomb would still be remote. Desch argues that the idea that terrorists "could use these weapons radically underestimates the difficulty of actually operating a modern nuclear arsenal. These things need constant maintenance and they're very easy to disable. So the idea that these things could be stuffed into a gunnysack and smuggled across the Rio Grande is preposterous."

The risk of an arms race—with, say, other Persian Gulf states rushing to build a bomb after Iran got one—is a bit harder to dispel. Once again, however, history is instructive. "In 64 years, the most nuclear-weapons states we've ever had is 12," says Waltz. "Now with North Korea we're at nine. That's not proliferation; that's spread at glacial pace." Nuclear weapons are so controversial and expensive that only countries that deem them absolutely critical to their survival go through the extreme trouble of acquiring them. That's why South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan voluntarily gave theirs up in the early '90s, and why other countries like Brazil and Argentina dropped nascent programs. This doesn't guarantee that one or more of Iran's neighbors—Egypt or Saudi Arabia, say—might not still go for the bomb if Iran manages to build one. But the risks of a rapid spread are low, especially given Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent suggestion that the United States would extend a nuclear umbrella over the region, as Washington has over South Korea and Japan, if Iran does complete a bomb. If one or two Gulf states nonetheless decided to pursue their own weapon, that still might not be so disastrous, given the way that bombs tend to mellow behavior.

Put this all together and nuclear weapons start to seem a lot less frightening. So why have so few people in Washington recognized this? Most of us suffer from what Desch calls a nuclear phobia, an irrational fear that's grounded in good evidence—nuclear weapons are terrifying—but that keeps us from making clear, coldblooded calculations about just how dangerous possessing them actually is. The logic of nuclear peace rests on a scary bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in exchange for a much bigger chance that something very bad—conventional war—won't happen. This may well be a rational bet to take, especially if that first risk is very small indeed. But it's a tough case to make to the public.

Still, it's worth keeping in mind as Obama coaxes the world toward nuclear disarmament—especially because he's destined to fail. The Russians and Chinese have shown little inclination to give up their nukes, for several reasons—chief among them that the U.S. is vastly more powerful in conventional terms, and these weapons are thus their main way of leveling the playing field. Moscow and Beijing would likely be unmoved by anything short of a unilateral U.S. disarmament, which no one in Washington contemplates. And even if Russia and China (and France, Britain, Israel, India, and Pakistan) could be coaxed to abandon their weapons, we'd still live with the fear that any of them could quickly and secretly rearm. Meanwhile, the U.S. campaign to slow Iran's weapons program and reverse North Korea's is also unlikely to work. States want nukes if they feel their survival is in jeopardy. The Obama administration may have dropped talk of regime change, but it continues to threaten Pyongyang and Tehran. That ensures the standoff will continue, for so long as these states feel insecure, they'll never give up their nuclear dreams.

Given this reality, Washington would be wiser to focus on making the world we actually live in—the nuclear world—safer. This involves several steps, few of which the Obama administration has mentioned but which it should emphasize in its Nuclear Posture Review due at the end of the year. To start, the logic of deterrence works only if everybody knows who has a nuclear arsenal and thus can't be attacked—as Peter Sellers puts it in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, "The whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!" So the United States should make sure everyone knows roughly who has what, to keep anyone from getting dangerous ideas. On a similar note, the United States should put more effort into advancing what Harvard's Graham Allison calls "nuclear forensics," an emerging discipline that would allow scientists to trace any nuclear device exploded anywhere, by anybody—be it a state or a terrorist—back to its manufacturer and point of origin (since this would convince rogues they can't risk selling bombs to bad guys).

A politically tougher but equally important step would be to make sure that any nuclear weapons state has what's called a "survivable second strike option," a means of ensuring that even if attacked, it could still shoot back, since this is the best way to persuade its enemies not to bother trying to incapacitate it through a surprise attack (as Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund points out, this can be done with a small arsenal and need not necessitate a big buildup). Finally, Washington should continue doing what it's done with Russia and Pakistan to help those regimes keep their weapons safe. The administration has announced plans to help secure loose nukes, and that's all to the good. But it should be prepared to offer the same technology and training to other new nuclear states if they emerge—even if they're U.S. enemies. Critics will scream that doing so would reward bad behavior and encourage it in others. It might. But it would also help keep everyone safe from an accidental launch, which seems a lot more important. None of these steps will be easy to pitch to the public, even for a president as gifted and nimble as Obama. But as he heads into a rare nuclear summit in late September, the least he could do is hold a frank debate on what's really the best strategy for securing the world from—or with—these weapons. Given the stakes, he can hardly afford not to.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Nuclear-arms control heads Obama's Moscow agenda (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Obama's Youth Shaped His Nuclear-Free Vision (nytimes.com)
• North Korea raises hopes with message from Kim (telegraph.co.uk)

U.S. GAO - Fair Lending: Data Limitations and the Fragmented U.S. Financial Regulatory Structure Challenge Federal Oversight and Enforcement Efforts

Image via Wikipedia

GAO-09-704 July 15, 2009
Highlights Page (PDF) Full Report (PDF, 102 pages) Accessible Text Recommendations (HTML)

Summary The Fair Housing Act (FHA) and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA)--the "fair lending laws"--prohibit discrimination in lending. Responsibility for their oversight is shared among three enforcement agencies--the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Department of Justice (DOJ)--and five depository institution regulators--the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve), National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). This report examines (1) data used by agencies and the public to detect potential violations and options to enhance the data, (2) federal oversight of lenders that are identified as at heightened risk of violating the fair lending laws, and (3) recent cases involving fair lending laws and associated enforcement challenges. GAO analyzed fair lending laws, relevant research, and interviewed agency officials, lenders, and consumer groups. GAO also reviewed 152 depository institution fair lending examination files. Depending upon file availability by regulator, GAO reviewed all relevant files or a random sample as appropriate. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires certain lenders to collect and publicly report data on the race, national origin, and sex of mortgage loan borrowers. Enforcement agencies and depository institution regulators use HMDA data to identify outliers--lenders that may have violated fair lending laws--and focus their investigations and examinations accordingly. But, HMDA data also have limitations; they do not include information on the credit risks of mortgage borrowers, which may limit regulators' and the public's capacity to identify lenders most likely to be engaged in discriminatory practices without first conducting labor-intensive reviews. Another data limitation is that lenders are not required to report data on the race, ethnicity, and sex of nonmortgage loan borrowers--such as small businesses, which limits oversight of such lending. While requiring lenders to report additional data would impose costs on them, particularly smaller institutions, options exist to mitigate such costs to some degree, such as limiting the reporting requirements to larger institutions. Without additional data, agencies' and regulators' capacity to identify potential lending discrimination is limited. GAO identified the following limitations in the consistency and effectiveness of fair lending oversight that are largely attributable to the fragmented U.S. financial regulatory system: (1) Federal oversight of lenders that may represent heightened risks of fair lending law violations is limited. For example, the enforcement agencies are responsible for monitoring independent mortgage lenders' compliance with the fair lending laws. Such lenders have been large originators of subprime mortgage loans in recent years and have more frequently been identified through analysis of HMDA data as outliers than depository institutions, such as banks. Depository institution regulators are more likely to assess the activities of outliers and, unlike enforcement agencies, they routinely assess the compliance of lenders that are not outliers. As a result, many fair lending violations at independent lenders may go undetected, and efforts to deter potential violations may be ineffective. (2) Although depository institution regulators' fair lending oversight efforts may be more comprehensive, the division of responsibility among multiple agencies raises questions about the consistency and effectiveness of their efforts. For example, each regulator uses a different approach to analyze HMDA data to identify outliers and examination documentation varies. Moreover, since 2005, OTS, the Federal Reserve, and FDIC have referred more than 100 lenders to DOJ for further investigations of potential fair lending violations, as required by ECOA, while OCC made one referral and NCUA none. Enforcement agencies have settled relatively few (eight) fair lending cases since 2005. Agencies identified several enforcement challenges, including the complexity of fair lending cases, difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff, and the constraints of ECOA's 2-year statute of limitations. Recommendations Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work. Director: Team: Phone: Orice Williams Brown Government Accountability Office: Financial Markets and Community Investment (202) 512-5837 Matters for Congressional Consideration Recommendation: To facilitate the capacity of federal enforcement agencies and depository institution regulators as well as independent researchers to identify lenders that may be engaged in discriminatory practices in violation of the fair lending laws, Congress may wish to consider the merits of additional data collection and reporting options. These varying options pertain to obtaining key underwriting data for mortgage loans, such as credit scores as well as LTV and DTI ratios, and personal characteristic (such as race, ethnicity and sex) and relevant underwriting data for nonmortgage loans. Status: In process Comments: When we determine what steps the Congress has taken, we will provide updated information. Recommendation: To help ensure that all potential risks for fair lending violations are thoroughly investigated and sufficient time is available to do so, Congress may wish to consider extending the statute of limitations on ECOA violations. Status: In process Comments: When we determine what steps the Congress has taken, we will provide updated information. Recommendation: As Congress debates the reform of the financial regulatory system, it may wish to take steps to help ensure that consumers are adequately protected, that laws such as the fair lending laws are comprehensive and consistently applied, and that oversight is efficient and effective. Any new structure should address gaps and inconsistencies in the oversight of independent mortgage brokers and nonbank subsidiaries, as well as address the potentially inconsistent oversight provided by depository institution regulators. Status: In process Comments: When we determine what steps the Congress has taken, we will provide updated information. Recommendations for Executive Action Recommendation: To help strengthen fair lending oversight and enforcement, DOJ, FDIC, Federal Reserve, FTC, HUD, NCUA, OCC, and OTS should work collaboratively to identify approaches to better assess the potential risk for discrimination during the preapplication phase of mortgage lending. For example, the agencies and depository institution regulators could further consider the use of testers, perhaps on a pilot basis, as well as surveys of mortgage loan borrowers and applicants or alternative means to better assess the potential risk for discrimination during this critical phase of the mortgage lending process. Agency Affected: Department of Housing and Urban Development Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Department of Justice Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Department of the Treasury: Office of Thrift Supervision Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Department of the Treasury: Office of the Comptroller of the Currency Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Federal Reserve System Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: Federal Trade Commission Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information. Agency Affected: National Credit Union Administration Status: In process Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

French Parliament to Investigate a Possible Ban on the Burqa and Niqab - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS — It is a measure of France’s confusion about Islam and its own Muslim citizens that in the political furor here over “banning the burqa,” as the argument goes, the garment at issue is not really the burqa at all, but the niqab.

A burqa is the all-enveloping cloak, often blue, with a woven grill over the eyes, that many Afghan women wear, and it is almost never seen in France. The niqab, often black, leaves the eyes uncovered.

Still, a movement against it that started with a Communist mayor near Lyon has gotten traction within France’s ruling center-right party, which claims to be defending French values, and among many on the left, who say they are defending women’s rights. A parliamentary commission will soon meet to investigate whether to ban the burqa — in other words, any cloak that covers most of the face.

The debate is indicative of the deep ambivalence about social customs among even a small minority of France’s Muslim citizens, and of the signal fear that France’s principles of citizens’ rights, equality and secularism are being undermined.

French discomfort with organized religion, dating from the 1789 revolution and the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church, is aggravated by these foreign customs, which are associated in the Western mind with repression of women.

André Gerin, a Communist Party legislator and mayor of Vénissieux, a Lyon suburb with many Muslims from North Africa, began the affair in late June by initiating a motion, signed by 57 other legislators, calling for the parliamentary commission.

“The burqa is the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Gerin said. “Islamism really threatens us.” In a letter to the government, he wrote: “It is time to take a stand on this issue that concerns thousands of citizens who are worried to see imprisoned, totally veiled women.”

A few days later, President Nicolas Sarkozy said that “the burqa is not welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” He did not say how it would be made unwelcome, however, or whether he intended to extend existing laws that already ban head scarves or any other religious symbol from public schools.

For Mr. Sarkozy, who defends participation in the Afghan war as a matter of women’s rights, “the problem of the burqa is not a religious problem,” he said. “It is a problem of liberty and the dignity of women. It is a sign of servitude and degradation.”

There is a strong suspicion that Mr. Sarkozy, who has supported religious freedom, is playing politics in a time of economic unhappiness and social anxiety. But he also seems to want to restrict more radical and puritanical forms of Islam from gaining further hold here.

The French press has been full of heated opinion pieces, charts about different Islamic veils, stories about public swimming pools and the burqini, an Islamic swimsuit that covers the body and the hair (but not the face). Women wearing the niqab, many of them French converts to Islam, have said that they have freely chosen to cover themselves after marriage. Others say solemnly that to stigmatize or ban the veil would only cause more women to wear it, out of protest.

Last year, Faiza Silmi, now 33, was denied French citizenship in part for wearing the niqab, bringing a legal judgment about personal dress into the home. In an interview with Le Monde, Ms. Silmi said that she chose to wear the niqab after her marriage, even if her own mother thought it was “a little too much.”

“Don’t believe for a moment that I am submissive to my husband!” she said. “I’m the one who takes care of the documents and the money.”

Passions have been so high that when domestic intelligence issued a report saying that only 367 women in France wore a full veil, it seemed to make no difference.

For many French Muslims, the entire discussion is an embarrassment and an incitement to racial and religious hatred.

M’hammed Henniche is the secretary for the private Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis. He is French first of all, he said, and he is appalled.

“There’s nothing but confusion,” he said. “What they’re talking about is the niqab, but I think choosing to use burqa instead is not an accident. They chose a word that is associated with Afghanistan, and that spreads a negative, scary image.

“There are laws in France that force women to show their face, in certain situations, at the town hall, at the bank,” Mr. Henniche added. “Women who wear niqab take it off when they must. But in the streets, everyone is free. They’re spinning this story in order to stigmatize a community.”

Even existing laws are misunderstood, he said, with a woman refused entry to a bank because employees thought a head scarf was illegal. “It’s a dangerous slip, going from a ban in school to a ban in the streets,” he said.

John R. Bowen, who wrote “Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space,” has been asked to testify by the parliamentary commission.

“French political discourse is internally conflicted,” said Mr. Bowen, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. There is confusion about different kinds of public space, he said — the street, and places that belong to the state but are not freely open to the public, like schools.

France took from Rousseau the principle that no intermediate group or affiliation should stand between the citizen and the state, which represents the general interest, Mr. Bowen said. But Rousseau also championed the right to form private associations, or clubs. It was not until 1901, however, that the state allowed some unions or associations, Mr. Bowen said, and not until 1981 that foreigners could form them.

Muslim groups then started religious tutoring, seen as promoting Islam, and clubs based on ethnicity or religion are viewed with great suspicion, Mr. Bowen said. “There is a sense that people who are publicly displaying their religious or ethnic characteristics are a slap in the face of French applied political theory.”

Mr. Bowen does not think there will be a law banning the niqab. Nor does Yazid Sabeg, Mr. Sarkozy’s commissioner for diversity and equal opportunity, who said it would be unenforceable.

“Even if they ban the burqa, it will not stop there,” Mr. Henniche, of the Muslim group, said. “There is a permanent demand for legislating against Muslims. This could go really bad, and I’m scared of it. I feel like they’re turning the screws on us.”

Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Paris.

Related articles by Zemanta

• French Lawmaker: Burqa Ban Can Be Gradual (huffingtonpost.com)
• "The issue of the burqa is not a religious issue; it is a question of freedom and of women's dignity." (althouse.blogspot.com)

Sri Lankan Journalist Punished for Writing About Army - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By LYDIA POLGREEN

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — On World Press Freedom Day in May, President Obama held up J. S. Tissainayagam, the editor of a crusading magazine in Sri Lanka who has been jailed since March 2008, as a symbol of the oppression of the media.

On Monday, a judge in Sri Lanka sentenced Mr. Tissainayagam to 20 years of hard labor for violating the country’s tough antiterrorism laws by writing articles highly critical of a government military offensive against Tamil Tiger rebels who had controlled a large chunk of Sri Lanka’s north.

Mr. Tissainayagam, who is Tamil, was the editor of the now-defunct North Eastern Monthly magazine, and was accused of accepting money and other support from the Tigers. He was convicted under laws that give harsh sentences for offenses like using racially divisive language or promoting disharmony. These laws were enacted in response to the Tamil Tiger insurgency. The insurgents, members of the Hindu Tamil minority, sought a separate state from Sri Lanka’s Buddhist, Sinhalese majority. The government decisively defeated the Tigers in a bloody final battle on a strip of beach in northern Sri Lanka in May, ending one of Asia’s longest civil wars.

As is often the case with local journalists in conflict zones, Mr. Tissainayagam’s reporting reflected the prevailing point of view of the minority to which he belonged, but the government argued that his work went further.

“The Constitution itself gives freedom of press, but that doesn’t allow anybody to spread false information to spur ethnic violence,” Sudarshana DeSilva, the prosecutor, told the court, Reuters reported.

But rights advocates say that Mr. Tissainayagam’s sentence reflects the plight of Sri Lanka’s embattled press corps. At least seven journalists have been killed since 2007, including some singled out by the Tamil Tigers. Many more have fled the country.

“It is very serious blow,” said Sanjana Hattotuwa, editor of Groundviews, a citizen journalism Web site. “It sends a chilling message that the independent expression of opinion is no longer tolerated in Sri Lanka.”

Lucien Rajakarunanayake, spokesman for Sri Lanka’s president and a columnist, said that Mr. Tissainayagam had the right to appeal.

“The court has believed the evidence placed before it,” Mr. Rajakarunanayake said. “That he did accept money from a terrorist organization and did work that furthered the cause of terrorism in this country.”

The sentence is sure to increase pressure from the West on Sri Lanka’s government, which has been criticized for its handling of the last battle against the Tamil Tigers and the treatment of Tamils displaced by the war.

Mr. Tissainayagam’s lawyer told reporters that he planned to appeal. Though he confessed, he later said that the confession was given under duress. Legal experts said that the antiterrorism laws under which he was convicted violated the Constitution.

Asanga Welikala, a lawyer who has written on press freedom in Sri Lanka, said that the law was so vague that practically any speech could be prosecuted.

“Totally unacceptable that we should have such a law, and even more unacceptable that a court of law should feel that this journalist should get the maximum possible sentence under that law for simply doing his job,” he said.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Jail term for S Lanka journalist (news.bbc.co.uk)
• The Lede: Calls for Sri Lankan War-Crimes Inquiry (thelede.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Sri Lanka: Tissainayagam wins international award for ‘courageous and ethical journalism’ (tamilnet.com)

Turkey and Armenia to Establish Diplomatic Ties - NYTimes.com

By SEBNEM ARSU

ISTANBUL — Turkey and Armenia, whose century of hostilities constitutes one of the world’s most enduring and acrimonious international rivalries, have agreed to establish diplomatic relations, the two countries announced Monday.

In a breakthrough that came after a year of tiny steps across a still-sealed border and furtive bilateral talks in Switzerland, the foreign ministries of the two countries said that they would begin talks aimed at producing a formal agreement.

The joint statement said they had agreed “to start political negotiations” but did not touch on when or how some of their more intractable disputes would be addressed, starting with the killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turk government from 1915 to 1918, which the Turkish government has denied was genocide.

The two countries have never had diplomatic relations, and their border has been closed since 1993, when Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, went to war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. At the border, soldiers of Turkey, a NATO country, face Russian ones, called in by Armenia, across a mini-Iron Curtain.

Turkey supported Azerbaijan in the dispute, but Russia’s military action in Georgia last year shifted the security calculus in the region. After the war in Georgia, Turkey sought to improve ties with its neighbors in the Caucasus, and Armenia elected a new government interested in reciprocating.

Both countries hope an eventual opening of the border will benefit their struggling economies. Currently, there are limited charter flights between the countries but no real trade.

For Turkey, better relations with Armenia could improve its chances for admission to the European Union, where the genocide issue remains one of the main obstacles, and remove a bone of contention over the same issue with the United States, which has a large Armenian community.

The Swiss-mediated talks began last year, keeping a low profile to avoid exciting nationalist antagonism in both countries. Armenia’s insistence that border and trade relations be normalized before any discussion of genocide began helped push the most contentious issue to the back burner.

Last September, President Abdullah Gul of Turkey attended a Turkey-Armenia soccer match in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, the first visit by a Turkish leader in the two nations’ history.

The symbolic gesture, dubbed soccer diplomacy, was widely opposed in both countries, where bitter ethnic enmity commands large majorities.

The central dispute is the genocide, about which there is little dispute among historians. Turkey has resisted the label, arguing that the Armenians were killed in warfare.

The next round of talks is scheduled to last six weeks, ending about the time of a World Cup match between Turkey and Armenia in Istanbul. President Serge Sargsyan of Armenia is invited to attend.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Turkey and Armenia set for ties (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Breaking barriers (news.bbc.co.uk)
• The frozen conflicts start to thaw (guardian.co.uk)

Attorney General Plans Reshaping of Civil Rights Division - NYTimes.com

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Seven months after taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is reshaping the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division by pushing it back into some of the most important areas of American political life, including voting rights, housing, employment, bank lending practices and redistricting after the 2010 census.

As part of this shift, the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly. President George W. Bush’s appointees had discouraged such tactics, preferring to focus on individual cases in which there is evidence of intentional discrimination.

To bolster a unit that has been battered by heavy turnover and a scandal over politically tinged hiring under the Bush administration, the Obama White House has also proposed a hiring spree that would swell the ranks of several hundred civil rights lawyers with more than 50 additional lawyers, a significant increase for a relatively small but powerful division of the government.

The division is “getting back to doing what it has traditionally done,” Mr. Holder said in an interview. “But it’s really only a start. I think the wounds that were inflicted on this division were deep, and it will take some time for them to fully heal.”

Few agencies are more engaged in the nation’s social and cultural debates than the Civil Rights Division, which was founded in 1957 to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

The division has been at the center of a number of controversies over the decades, serving as a proxy for disputes between liberals and conservatives in matters like school busing and affirmative action. When the Nixon administration took office, it sought to delay school desegregation plans reached under former President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Reagan administration dropped the division’s policy of opposing tax-exempt status for racially discriminatory private schools. And former President Bill Clinton withdrew his first nominee to lead the division, Lani Guinier, after her writings about racial quotas were criticized.

But such dust-ups were minor when compared with sweeping changes at the division under the Bush administration, longtime career civil rights lawyers say.

Now the changes that Mr. Holder is pushing through have led some conservatives, still stinging from accusations that the Bush appointees “politicized” the unit, to start throwing the same charge back at President Obama’s team.

The agency’s critics cite the downsizing of a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panther Party, an investigation into whether an Arizona sheriff’s enforcement of immigration laws has discriminated against Hispanics, and the recent blocking of a new rule requiring Georgia voters to prove their citizenship. (Under the Bush administration, the division had signed off on a similar law requiring Georgia voters to furnish photographic identification, rejecting criticism that legitimate minority voters are disproportionately more likely not to have driver’s licenses or passports.)

Among the critics, Hans von Spakovsky, a former key Bush-era official at the division, has accused the Obama team of “nakedly political” maneuvers.

Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, rejected such criticism, saying those cases were decided “based on the facts and the law.”

Under the Bush administration, the agency shifted away from its traditional core focus on accusations of racial discrimination, channeling resources into areas like religious discrimination and human trafficking.

Department officials are working to avoid unleashing potential controversies as they rebuild the division’s more traditional efforts on behalf of minorities.

They are not planning to dismantle the new initiatives, rather to hire enough additional lawyers to do everything. The administration’s fiscal year 2010 budget request includes an increase of about $22 million for the division, an 18 percent increase from the 2009 budget. Other changes are already apparent.

The division has filed about 10 “friend of the court” briefs in private discrimination-related lawsuits since Mr. Obama’s inauguration, a practice that had dwindled in the previous administration.

In July, moreover, the division’s acting head, Loretta King, sent a memorandum to every federal agency urging more aggressive enforcement of regulations that forbid recipients of taxpayer money from policies that have a disparate impact on minorities.

The division has also lifted Bush-era rules that some career staff members saw as micromanagement or impediments, like restrictions on internal communications and a ban on front-line career lawyers’ making recommendations on whether to approve proposed changes to election laws.

Other changes from the Bush years may be harder to roll back. The division’s downgrading of the New Black Panther Party charges, which were filed in the final days of the Bush administration, has had rippling consequences. It apparently prompted Senate Republicans to put a hold on President Obama’s nominee to lead the division as assistant attorney general for civil rights, Thomas Perez.

The delay in Mr. Perez’s arrival, in turn, is stalling plans to review section managers installed by the Bush team, including several regarded with suspicion by civil rights advocacy groups. Under federal law, top-level career officials may not be transferred to other positions for the first 120 days after a new agency head is confirmed.

Bush-era changes to the division’s permanent rank may also have lingering effects. From 2003 to 2007, Bush political appointees blocked liberals from career jobs and promotions, which they steered to fellow conservatives, whom one such official privately described as “real Americans,” a department inspector general report found. The practice, which no previous administration had done, violated civil service laws, it said.

As morale plunged among veterans, turnover accelerated. The Obama transition team’s confidential report on the division, obtained by The New York Times, says 236 civil rights lawyers left from 2003 to 2007. (The division has about 350 lawyers.)

Many of their replacements had scant civil rights experience and were graduates of lower-ranked law schools. The transition report says the era of hiring such “inexperienced or poorly qualified” lawyers — who are now themselves protected by civil service laws — has left lasting damage.

“While some of the political hires have performed competently and a number of others have left, the net effect of the politicized hiring process and the brain drain is an attorney work force largely ill-equipped to handle the complex, big-impact litigation that should comprise a significant part” of the division’s docket, the transition report said.

At the end of the Bush administration, the attorney general at the time, Michael B. Mukasey, began to make changes intended to reduce political influence over entry-level career lawyer hiring. The Civil Rights Division is now seeking to expand those changes.

It is developing a new hiring policy under which panels of career employees — not political appointees — would decide both whom to hire and to promote for positions from interns to veteran lawyers. The policy could be completed as early as this month.

“We wanted to create a very transparent policy that will stand the test of time and ensure that we hire the best and brightest,” said Mark Kappelhoff, a longtime civil rights lawyer who is the division’s acting principal deputy assistant attorney general.

Some conservatives are skeptical that such a policy will keep politics out of hiring, however. Robert Driscoll, a division political appointee from 2001 to 2003, said career civil rights lawyers are “overwhelmingly left-leaning” and will favor liberals.

“If you are the Obama administration and you allow the career staff to do all the hiring, you will get the same people you would probably get if you did it yourself,” he said. “In some ways, it’s a masterstroke by them.”

Mr. Holder has elsewhere called for social changes with civil rights overtones, like the passage of a federal hate-crimes law, the elimination of the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine and greater financing for indigent defense.

By contrast, he described his Civil Rights Division efforts as more restoration than change. The recent moves, he argued, are a return to its basic approach under presidents of both parties — despite some policy shifts between Republican and Democratic administrations — before the “sea change” and “aberration” of the Bush years.

“Of course there are going to be critics,” Mr. Holder said. But, he argued, “any objective observer” would see the recent approach as consistent with “the historical mission of the division, not straying into some kind of liberal orthodoxy. It really is just a function of enforcing the statutes.”