Starting Points

Jan 2, 2010

Rap Sheet

by Jill Lapore

Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, who met three years ago in a Hartford drug-treatment center and shared a room in a halfway house in between stints in prison, were both seasoned burglars, though Hayes, a forty-four-year-old crack addict, was quite a bit older than Komisarjevsky, who was twenty-six, and the great-grandson of a Russian princess. In the spring of 2007, both men were paroled. Hayes, whose arrest record stretches back to 1980, had served about three years of a five-year sentence for third-degree burglary, and Komisarjevsky had finished half of a nine-year sentence for burglary in the second degree. Hayes moved in with his mother, in Winsted, in Litchfield County; Komisarjevsky went back to his home town, Cheshire, a suburb about fifteen miles north of New Haven. They kept in touch. On July 23, 2007, authorities say, Hayes and Komisarjevsky broke into the Cheshire home of William Petit, Jr., an endocrinologist, and tortured the family through the night, raping Petit’s wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and at least one of the couple’s two daughters. In the morning, Hayes and Komisarjevsky are said to have forced Hawke-Petit, a school nurse who suffered from multiple sclerosis, into the family car and taken her to a local bank, where she withdrew fifteen thousand dollars, after which a suspicious teller alerted the police. The two men allegedly then took Hawke-Petit back to the house, killed her, set the house on fire, and fled in the Petits’ S.U.V., though not far: they crashed into a police barricade, just past the driveway.

Inside the house, a four-bedroom Colonial, police found three bodies. Hawke-Petit, forty-eight, had been strangled. Seventeen-year-old Hayley Petit, who, that September, was to start college at Dartmouth, died of smoke inhalation. Her eleven-year-old sister, Michaela, was found tied to a bed, her body badly burned after having been doused with gasoline. Only William Petit, who had been bound with rope, beaten in the head with a baseball bat, and left for dead in the cellar, survived.

Hayes and Komisarjevsky have been charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, arson, and murder. Jury selection for Hayes’s trial is scheduled to begin in January, in New Haven. William Petit, who is expected to testify about what happened that night, had asked not to be put through that ordeal twice, but his request for a single trial was denied. A trial date for Komisarjevsky has not yet been set. The state is seeking the death penalty.

Every murder raises terrible questions that no trial, no law, no punishment can answer. What forces make it possible for one human being to take the life of another? Murders can be solved and even explained—at least, that’s the operating assumption of criminal investigation and the narrative logic behind every whodunit—but to think about a specific murder with any clarity, or for very long, can be difficult, and viscerally painful. Maybe the brisk trade in lurid violence as spectacle has something to do with it: one either watches or averts one’s eyes; dispassionate reflection rarely enters into it. Scholars ranging from theologians and psychologists to evolutionary biologists have offered theories about murder—theories of evil, theories of disease, theories of disposition—but the analytical burden placed on any general discussion of murder, freighted, as it is, with atrocity, is nearly unbearable. Nothing suffices, or can.

Between the convulsive emotional response to a single murder and an elusive general theory of murder lies another kind of contemplation: the study of the murderousness of nations. The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany. Why? Historians haven’t often asked this question. Even historians who like to try to solve cold cases usually cede to sociologists and other social scientists the study of what makes murder rates rise and fall, or what might account for why one country is more murderous than another. Only in the nineteen-seventies did historians begin studying homicide in any systematic way. In the United States, that effort was led by Eric Monkkonen, who died in 2005, his promising work unfinished. Monkkonen’s research has been taken up by Randolph Roth, whose book “American Homicide” (Harvard; $45) offers a vast investigation of murder, in the aggregate, and over time. Roth’s argument is profoundly unsettling. There is and always has been, he claims, an American way of murder. It is the price of our politics.

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In the archives, murders are easier to count than other crimes. Rapes go unreported, thefts can be hidden, adultery isn’t necessarily actionable, but murder will nearly always out. Murders enter the historical record through coroners’ inquests, court transcripts, parish ledgers, and even tombstones. “Fell by the hands of William Beadle / an infatuated Man who closed the / horrid sacrifice of his Wife / & Children with his own destruction,” reads the headstone of Lydia Beadle, of Wethersfield, Connecticut, who was murdered, along with her two children, in 1782. The number of uncounted murders, known as the “dark figure,” is thought to be quite small. Given enough archival research, historians can conceivably count, with fair accuracy, the frequency with which people of earlier eras killed one another, with this caveat: the farther back you go in time—and the documentary trail doesn’t go back much farther than 1300—the more fragmentary the record and the bigger the dark figure.

Pieter Spierenburg, a professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, sifts through the evidence in “A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present” (Polity; $24.95). In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century.

In the United States, the picture could hardly be more different. The American homicide rate has been higher than Europe’s from the start, and higher at just about every stage since. It has also fluctuated, sometimes wildly. During the Colonial period, the homicide rate fell, but in the nineteenth century, while Europe’s kept sinking, the U.S. rate went up and up. In the twentieth century, the rate in the United States dropped to about five during the years following the Second World War, but then rose, reaching about eleven in 1991. It has since fallen once again, to just above five, a rate that is, nevertheless, twice that of any other affluent democracy.

What accounts for this remarkable difference? Guns leap to mind: in 2008, firearms were involved in two-thirds of all murders in the United States. Yet Roth, who supports gun control, insists that the prevalence of guns in America, and our lax gun laws, can’t account for the whole spread, and a few scholars have argued that laws allowing concealed weapons actually lower the murder rate, by deterring assaults. Some Europeans suspect that Americans haven’t undergone the same “civilizing process,” as if, unmoored from Europe, Colonial Americans went murderously adrift. Spierenburg speculates that democracy came too soon to the United States. By the time European states became democracies, the populace had accepted the authority of the state. But the American Revolution happened before Americans had got used to the idea of a state monopoly on force. Americans therefore preserved for themselves not only the right to bear arms—rather than yielding that right to a strong central government—but also medieval manners: impulsiveness, crudeness, and fidelity to a culture of honor. We’re backward, in other words, because we became free before we learned how to control ourselves.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone buys these arguments, and Monkkonen himself took a different, though equally conjectural, approach. At the time of his death, he had been working on an article called “Homicide: Explaining America’s Exceptionalism,” which hypothesized that four factors accounted for the centuries-long differences between American and European homicide rates: mobility, federalism, slavery, and tolerance. Mobility breaks social ties; federalism is a weak form of government; slavery not only rationalized a culture of violence among white Southerners (where the murder rate has been disproportionately high, as it has, and remains, in many of the so-called law-and-order states) but also infected American culture; and American judges and juries have historically proved less willing than their European counterparts to convict murderers, tolerating, among other crimes, racial murders and killings by jealous spouses.

Roth, who teaches at Ohio State, wants to bring into this debate hard facts and rigorous methods. He rejects arguments about the “civilizing process” by pointing out that people didn’t necessarily intend to murder one another more often in the premodern world; they merely succeeded more often. Given modern medicine—emergency response, trauma surgery, antibiotics, and wound care—three out of every four people murdered before 1850 would probably survive today. Roth heads a collaborative project, dedicated to Monkkonen, called the Historical Violence Database, which has assembled reports of murders in several of the original thirteen colonies; nineteenth-century records from five states, seven cities, and thirty-four counties; and a wealth of twentieth-century statistics, chiefly from the Uniform Crime Reports kept by the F.B.I. beginning in 1930. As a discussion of the available data, “American Homicide” is rich, fascinating, and unrivalled. As an explanation, though, it gets dubious. Roth’s work involves three steps: first, he uses his database to count murders (he’s primarily interested in homicides among unrelated adults); then, using surviving censuses to count people, he calculates the homicide rate; finally, he attempts to explain what factors correlate with that rate, across four centuries. It’s the last step that’s the most wobbly.

Historians haven’t studied murder much, but criminologists have. Although most criminologists trace the homicide rate back only a few decades, Roth takes his lead from their work. The fluctuations in the homicide rate since the nineteen-forties have at least something to do with demography. A vastly disproportionate number of murderers and murder victims are young adult men. When baby boomers reached that age bracket, the homicide rate soared. Now that they’ve aged out of their most lethal years, the rate has fallen. To Roth, the demographic explanation of the postwar crime boom and bust falls short, but, where other social scientists have investigated economic conditions like joblessness or government policies like gun control to fill the explanatory gap, Roth favors the argument made by a criminologist named Gary LaFree, in a book called “Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America” (1998). LaFree observed that the crime rate correlates, inversely, with public faith in government and trust in elected officials. So, for instance, the Vietnam era, marked by declining confidence in elected officials, experienced a rising crime rate. He measured that faith and trust by consulting national opinion surveys taken beginning in 1958, which asked questions like “How much of the time can you trust the government to do what is right?”

Roth attempts to graft LaFree’s argument onto all of American history. He has determined that four factors correlate with the homicide rate: faith that government is stable and capable of enforcing just laws; trust in the integrity of legitimately elected officials; solidarity among social groups based on race, religion, or political affiliation; and confidence that the social hierarchy allows for respect to be earned without recourse to violence. When and where people hold these sentiments, the homicide rate is low; when and where they don’t, it’s high.

Whatever you think about the value of public-opinion polls, LaFree at least had them. Roth doesn’t. How do you measure the belief that government is stable in 1695 or 1786 or 1814 or 1902? You can’t. You can only look at what was happening in those years and tell a story about what you think people believed about their government, and, if you know what the homicide rate is, it’s easy to find a story that fits your data. The homicide rate in New England fell from a high, in 1637, of a hundred and twenty to under one, in 1800, chiefly by dropping, rather dramatically, after the Pequot War and King Philip’s War. Roth argues that the rate fell, over all, as judicial institutions were established and people developed faith in them, and that the rate fell, sharply, after these wars because conflicts with hostile neighbors brought the colonists together. But it seems equally plausible to argue that the homicide rate in Colonial New England tracks the European decline quite nicely, over all, and drops, in a stepwise fashion, after wars because they diminish the population of young men, leaving fewer potential murderers and murder victims around. Both interpretations make sense; neither has been demonstrated.

The implications of Roth’s argument are, as he realizes, distressing. Democracy requires dissent. If a high American murder rate is a function of not placing our trust in government, are we doomed to endure a high murder rate? Roth takes his case all the way to the White House: “The statistics make it clear that in the twentieth century, homicide rates have fallen during the terms of presidents who have inspired the poor or have governed from the center with a popular mandate, and they have risen during the terms of presidents who presided over political and economic crises, abused their power, or engaged in unpopular wars.” The homicide rate appears to correlate with Presidential approval ratings. If Roth is right, electing a bad President is dangerous and inciting people to hate any President, good or bad, could be deadly. But which is the cart, and which the horse? The Presidential approval rate might be a proxy for all sorts of measures of a well or poorly adjusted society. Or maybe there’s another horse, somewhere, some third factor, that determines both the Presidential approval rate and the homicide rate. It’s hard to say, partly because, in using quantitative methods to make an argument about the human condition, Roth has wandered into a no man’s land between the social sciences and the humanities. After a while, arguments made in that no man’s land tend to devolve into meaninglessness: good government is good, bad government is bad, and everything’s better when everything’s better. Correlating murder with a lack of faith and trust may contain its horror, but only because, in a bar graph, atrocity yields to banality.

Every September, the F.B.I. issues a report on crime, a compilation of statistics for the previous year. It does not offer an interpretation of this immense quantity of data. “We leave that up to the academics and the criminologists and the sociologists,” an F.B.I. spokesman said, upon the release of this year’s report. For all the number crunching, it’s clear that there is no such thing as an average murder. Even if there were, what happened at the Petits’ house in Cheshire, Connecticut, on July 23, 2007, wouldn’t be it, and not just because of that crime’s particular depravity. Much about the case is out of the ordinary. The victims were white and wealthy; murder victims are disproportionately black and poor. Exceptional, high-profile crimes often lead to legislative action driven by citizen initiative. California’s controversial three-strikes law, a ballot measure, was proposed by a Fresno photographer whose daughter was murdered. Last year, after the Petit murders, the Connecticut legislature doubled and tripled mandatory penalties for second- and third-time offenders. “Big cases make bad laws” is a criminological axiom, and one with which Mark A. R. Kleiman agrees, in “When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment” (Princeton; $29.95).* Kleiman blames big cases and bad laws for another distinctive feature of American life: 2.3 million people are currently behind bars in the United States. That works out to nearly one in every hundred adults, the highest rate anywhere in the world, and four times the world average. Prison crowding may have been one reason that Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky were paroled. Although the crime rate today is fifteen per cent lower than it was twenty-five years ago, the incarceration rate is four times as high. At what point, Kleiman wonders, will incarceration be a greater social ill than crime? He proposes, for lesser offenders, punishments that are swift and certain but not necessarily severe: a night in jail, instead of a warning, for missing a meeting with a parole officer, say, and ten nights the next time. Whether or not Kleiman’s recommendations are practical, Connecticut, reeling from the Petit murders, is heading in the opposite direction.

The F.B.I. may leave the analysis of crime to academics, but, in the past few decades, the government has, increasingly, left the punishment of criminals up to public opinion. William Petit and his sister * Johanna Petit-Chapman serve as the honorary co-chairs of Three Strikes Now, a grass-roots organization lobbying the state legislature to adopt California-style mandatory sentencing of life without the possibility of parole for third-time violent offenders. The Cheshire case has also dominated the state’s death-penalty debate, a debate that, nationwide, has long centered on race. In Connecticut, whose population is eighty-four per cent white, six of the ten men on death row are black. (Both Hayes and Komisarjevsky are white.) Earlier this year, the Connecticut legislature voted to abolish the death penalty. William Petit publicly denounced the bill, and Jodi Rell, the state’s governor, a Republican, vetoed it.

Capital punishment has been on the books in Connecticut since 1642. Three strikes has been tried before, too. In Colonial America, many crimes, including murder, were punishable by death and, for lesser crimes, Connecticut, like many colonies, mandated the death penalty for third-time offenders. That began to change on September 7, 1768, when a burglar named Isaac Frasier was hanged in Fairfield. Frasier had shown early evidence of a “thievish Disposition.” “Men go from one degree of wickedness to another,” the town’s minister said in a sermon at the gallows titled “Excessive Wickedness, the Way to an untimely Death.” Convicted of burglary in New Haven, Frasier was whipped and branded and had his ears cropped. Caught again in Fairfield in 1766, he received the same punishment “and was solemnly warned . . . that death would be his punishment on a third Conviction.” When Frasier robbed another house, he was sentenced to death. “The Government of Connecticut have always been remarkably tender of putting persons to Death,” one observer noted. But when Frasier applied to the legislature for clemency, he was denied. Said the pastor at the gallows, “Justice requires that you should suffer.”

An outcry followed. Two weeks after Frasier’s death, a Hartford newspaper published an essay called “An Answer to a very important Question, viz. Whether any community has a right to punish any species of theft with death?” The writer’s answer—an emphatic no—borrowed extensively from Cesare Beccaria’s treatise “On Crimes and Punishments,” published in 1764. Beccaria, an Italian nobleman, argued against capital punishment—which was, at the time, widespread in Europe, too—on two grounds: first, in a republic men do not forfeit their lives to the government; and, second, capital punishment does not deter crime. Beccaria argued (and Kleiman has merely revisited that argument) that punishments, to be effective, must be swift and certain but not necessarily severe. Punishments, he insisted, should be proportionate to crimes, whose dangerousness could be measured, in “degrees,” by their injury to society. For the crime of murder, Beccaria considered life in prison to be both more just and a more effective deterrent than execution.

The first American edition of Beccaria’s treatise was published in 1777, and it reached a wide audience in Connecticut beginning in 1786, when it was serialized in a New Haven newspaper. “If we glance at the pages of history, we will find that laws, which surely are, or ought to be, compacts of free men, have been, for the most part, a mere tool for the passions of some,” Beccaria wrote. This argument held particular appeal for a people who had just finished waging a war against the passions of King George; adopting Beccaria’s recommendations came to seem, in a fundamental sense, American, as if the United States had a special role to play, as a republic, in the abolition of capital punishment. In 1784, the Yale senior class debated whether the death penalty was “too severe & rigorous in the United States for the present Stage of Society.”

In the seventeen-nineties, five states abolished the death penalty for all crimes except murder. By the eighteen-twenties, all Northern states reserved capital punishment for first-degree murder. When incarceration replaced all corporal and most capital punishment, Americans built prisons, and sentenced criminals to jail time. In 1846, Michigan became the first state to abolish the death penalty. Twice, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the governor of Connecticut asked the state’s legislature to do the same, to no avail.

In the course of the twentieth century, capital punishment was abolished in much of the world, including all of Western Europe, but not in the United States. Germany, Austria, and Italy stopped executing criminals after the Second World War. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, other European countries began limiting capital punishment. Denmark abolished it entirely in 1978; the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand in the nineteen-eighties; Britain, Canada, and Belgium in the nineteen-nineties. In many parts of the United States, the death penalty was, if not outlawed, abandoned. Except for a serial murderer named Michael Ross, who was killed by lethal injection in 2005, after he waived his right to appeal because he wanted to die, no one has been executed in Connecticut, or anywhere else in New England, since 1960.

Not so elsewhere. Since 1976, more than a thousand people have been executed in the United States, a third of them in Texas. If Hayes and Komisarjevsky are found guilty and sentenced to death instead of life in prison without the possibility of parole, they will be killed by lethal injection. China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia execute more criminals, but, among affluent democracies, the death penalty, like the U.S. homicide and incarceration rates, marks an American exception, or, looked at another way, an anachronism.

Long ago, Beccaria pointed out the meaningfulness of the correspondence, over time, between crime and punishment, between one kind of violence and another. If the history of murder contains a lesson, Beccaria believed, it was this: “The countries and times most notorious for severity of punishment have always been those in which the bloodiest and most inhumane of deeds were committed.”

Murder has a history, but it isn’t always edifying, and sometimes the history of crime and punishment has a chilling sameness. The prospect of death didn’t deter Barnett Davenport, a Connecticut murderer who was hanged in 1780, at the age of nineteen. “No man becomes a devil in a minute,” Davenport said, in a confession made a week before he mounted the gallows. His life of crime began when, at the age of twelve, he stole some watermelons from a neighbor’s garden. More than once, he was caught. But by the time he was eighteen he had advanced from pilfering eggs and potatoes to stealing horses. He fought in the Revolution and then deserted. He went to live in the house of a man named Caleb Mallery, near Litchfield. On February 3, 1780, “a night big with uncommon horror” (and a year with an elevated homicide rate), Davenport killed Mallery, Mallery’s wife, and their seven-year-old granddaughter, beating their heads in with a pestle and a rifle. Next, he pried open the family’s money chest and took from it a pile of bills and a handful of coins. Then he set the house on fire, leaving inside two more children, ages six and four. He was captured, and swiftly hanged. In his confession, he recalled that Caleb Mallery had cried out, in between blows, “Tell me what you do it for!” History does not record the murderer’s reply.

Turkey, Georgia, UAE bankroll Caucasus rebels

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Created 02/01/2010 - 20:00

Militants in Russia's volatile North Caucasus region of Dagestan have received financing from supporters in Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates, television said Saturday, after a special operation yielded notebooks of expenses kept by rebels.

The notebooks seized during a special operation in Dagestan conducted by the Federal Security Service (FSB) on New Year's Eve show the rebels had received hefty donations from their foreign sponsors, national television said, airing footage from the press department of the Dagestan branch of FSB.

"Tens of millions of rubles came from the United Arab Emirates, Georgia, Turkey and Azerbajan," NTV channel said. Rossia television channel added that supporters from Saudi Arabia were also among the foreign sponsors.

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"The sums are huge," Rossia channel said. "There was never any doubt anyway that militants in the North Caucasus have been generously bankrolled. But that generously...."

The notebooks show that rebels also extorted money from local businessmen and unscrupulous officials, television reports said.

"The money was distributed among various groups" in Dagestan and was used to finance purchases of arms, medicine and cars, they said.

The notebooks belonged to the leader of Dagestan's rebels, Umalat Magomedov also known by his nom de guerre as Al-Bara, television reports said, adding he was one of four rebels killed during the December 31 operation in the town of Khasavyurt.

"In spring, Al Qaeda's emissary in the Caucasus appointed Magomedov commander of the Dagestan front," Rossia channel said.

Authorities have also seized machine guns, grenade launchers and 45 cell phones containing rebels' phone numbers.

Authorities have long said that Islamist rebels receive financing from abroad.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in August acknowledged "foreign" elements as a factor fomenting instability in the region, but stressed the root cause of the problem was within Russia itself, referring to corruption among law enforcement personnel.

Clashes between government forces and Islamist rebels are common in Dagestan.

Dagestan's neighbour Chechnya was the site of two bloody separatist wars after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and a low-level insurgency persists in the region despite the end of major hostilities.

Somali Charged With Attempted Murder Of Danish Cartoonist

Stefan Bos | Budapest 02 January 2010

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS

A man charged with the attempted murder of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard is carried into court on a stretcher in Aarhus, Denmark, Saturday, Jan. 2, 2010

A Somali man with alleged links to terrorist groups al-Shabab and al-Qaida has been charged with an attempt to kill a Danish cartoonist whose depiction of the Prophet Muhammed sparked outrage in the Muslim world.

Police and medical personnel carried an injured Somali man strapped to a stretcher into a Danish court Saturday, just hours after his alleged attempt to kill Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. The suspect's face was covered by a blanket and under Danish privacy laws his name has not been revealed.

The 28-year-old man was later charged with two counts of attempted murder for Friday's attack on Westergaard, whose cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban in 2005 ignited riots and outrage among Muslims worldwide. The suspect denied the charges.

Denmark's intelligence service claimed that the alleged attacker had close ties to the Somali terrorist groups al-Shabab and al-Qaida in eastern Africa.

The man apparently broke into Westergaard's home near the town of Aarhus about 200 kilometers northwest of the capital Copenhagen.

Seventy-four-year-old Westergaard fled with his granddaughter to a special safe room in his house where he could call police.

He said in remarks aired by Danish television that he escaped unhurt after a tense stand-off. Cartoonist Westergaard explains the man tried to enter the area where he and his grandchild sought shelter. He says the suspect also shouted abusive language as he tried to break down the (entrance) door. Westergaard adds that he was able to contact police. In his words "It was scary. It was close, really close, but we did it."

The deputy chief superintendent of the Aarhus police, Fritz Keldsen, told reporters that his forces arrived late Friday within minutes after receiving Westergaard's distress call.

He confirmed that the man was shot after apparently threatening police with an axe and a knife. Keldsen says police came in large numbers after receiving an alarm message from Westergaard's home. He explains that when police confronted the suspect he moved away from the scene. Keldsen adds, "He then attacked the police patrol. He did that, so they were qualified to shoot him."

Police reportedly shot the man twice, but said the suspect's life was not in danger.

Officials said artist Westergaard has been moved to an undisclosed location for his own protection.

The Associated Press reports that a moderate Muslim organization in Denmark, the Danish Muslim Union, condemned the attack in statement Saturday.

Somali Rebels Pledge to Send Fighters to Aid Yemen Jihad

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By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Senior leaders of the Shabab rebels promised Friday to send their fighters beyond Somalia to Yemen and wherever jihad beckoned.

In a military ceremony here, where the rebels publicly showed off hundreds of new recruits, Sheik Muktar Robow, a senior rebel official, said the group would “send fighters to Yemen to assist our brothers.”

He said that the fighters had been trained to fight the African Union peacekeeping force and the transitional federal government in Somalia but that Yemen was just across the Gulf of Aden and that “our brothers must be ready for our welcome.”

While it was not clear when or whether the rebels could carry out their threat, the avowed goals signaled a shift in strategy from an Islamist insurgency that has drawn foreign fighters here to one that aims to provide them to insurgencies abroad.

The Shabab have increased their ties with Al Qaeda, which has recently been fighting the American-backed military in Yemen.

A Shabab spokesman, Sheik Ali Mohamoud Rageh, said the fighters, who had just completed military training, would fight in every corner of the world that is ready for jihad, or holy war.

The Shabab and allied Islamist insurgent groups control most of Somalia, while the weak transitional government controls a small enclave in Mogadishu, the capital, under the protection of African Union peacekeeping troops.

At the ceremony on Friday at a rebel camp near the former animal market in northern Mogadishu, hundreds of jubilant fighters paraded before reporters and senior rebel leaders chanting, “God is great.” It was the first time the rebels had presented their recruits to the news media.

The officials rebuffed reports of a split among Shabab fighters and vowed that they would unite with a rival rebel group, Hizbul Islam.

Somalia has not had effective central government since the former government was overthrown by armed clan militias in 1991, leading to the current chaos.

Karzai Choices for Afghan Cabinet Are Mostly Rejected

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By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — In a clear signal to President Hamid Karzai that he cannot count on Parliament for support, lawmakers resoundingly rejected most of his nominees for cabinet posts and expressed discontent with the candidates’ competence.

Of Mr. Karzai’s 24 cabinet nominees, 17 were rejected and 7 approved. Of those who received votes of confidence, all but one are currently cabinet ministers.

The president’s office had no comment on Saturday’s vote; the deputy spokesman, Hamid Elmi, said a news conference would be held on Sunday.

After being declared the winner of an election tainted by fraud, Mr. Karzai has been under pressure from Western leaders and Afghan opposition figures to help make things right by choosing cabinet officials not linked to corruption or incompetence. Parliament’s action on Saturday made it clear that they felt he had not met those requirements.

In particular, they said that they were not consulted enough during the nomination process and that many cabinet nominees lacked the professional backgrounds necessary to do their jobs. However, ethnic politics were also in play, raising questions about whether lawmakers were primarily interested in being partisan defenders of their own ethnic constituencies, though many denied that that was a factor.

“The members of the Parliament cast their vote based on merit, not based on tribal or ideology or factional interests,” said Kabir Rangbar, an independent member from Kabul. “This is a reaction against Karzai’s choices.”

The effects of the move were difficult to predict, since it is possible that Mr. Karzai will try to make recess appointments once Parliament leaves for its winter break. But over all, it suggested a deepening divide between the president and Parliament. And it could also leave a number of ministries adrift, under the uncertain leadership of deputy ministers who lack political power.

“The significance of the rejection has to do with politics and Karzai’s failure to build a cabinet that spoke to a wide enough spectrum of people, and also with the weakening of his political machine,” said Alex Thier, the director of the Pakistan-Afghanistan program at the United States Institute of Peace, a Washington-based research group.

Of those confirmed, four were Pashtuns, one Tajik, one Uzbek and one Sadat. The only woman to be nominated was turned down, as were a Turkmen and three Hazara candidates. In all, seven ministers who were nominated for second terms were voted down, including the ministers of public health, telecommunications and counternarcotics.

Five of the most prominent and successful ministers during Mr. Karzai’s first term, the defense, interior, finance, education and agriculture ministers, were endorsed for second terms. They were also the ministers, with one exception, who had strong American backing, according to people close to the process.

A spokeswoman for the American Embassy issued a noncommittal statement supporting Parliament’s right to vet candidates, but did not make detailed comments on specific candidates.

Shukria Barakzai, a member of Parliament from Kabul, said she observed opposition to nominees who represented political parties. She noted that Ismail Khan, a powerful member of the Jamiat Party and a former commander from the western province of Herat, was rejected, while the former commerce minister Mohammed Sharwani, an Uzbek, who is viewed as an independent, was confirmed as the minister of mines. Similarly, the finance minister, Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal, who is viewed as independent, was endorsed for a second term.

“Those who came as a representative of a group, they failed,” Ms. Barakzai said. “I hope it will be a good lesson for President Karzai that when the issue of reform comes, he is not alone; the members of Parliament really want reform. It was the moderates and the technocrats who got the vote of confidence.”

Fatima Aziz, a Tajik who represents the northern province of Kunduz, differed from her colleagues in saying that she thought ethnicity had played a part in the votes. She said she was disappointed that several nominees from minorities had not done well.

Of the 246 Parliament members, 232 were present, which meant that each minister had to get at least 117 votes to win approval. The voting was by secret ballot. Notably, none of the ministers received ringing endorsements; not one received even two-thirds of the votes, and some were confirmed by barely a handful of votes.

Several lawmakers said that over all, they thought the voting and the rejection represented a new era for Parliament and one in which they were better representing their constituents.

“It’s very essential to bring or to make a balance between the power of the president and the power of the Parliament,” Mr. Rangbar said. “The voice of the people had been widely ignored before, but today Parliament members showed with full confidence they are speaking for their constituents.”

Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.

Jan 1, 2010

In Evin Prison

Image by Sylvia Westenbroek via Flickr

By Claire Messud

My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran

by Haleh Esfandiari

Ecco, 230 pp., $25.99

Extraordinary events in Iran over the past six months have brought us images, voices, and narratives until recently unimaginable; they reveal, among other things, how little we understand about quotidian life in that country since the revolution. In the United States, we are nevertheless aware, with a dark tremor, of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, the black hole of the hard-liners' repressive system. Emblematic of the regime, it is a site of torture and interrogation, of isolation, and of emotional as well as physical violence. It is a prison for the breaking of souls.

Prominent intellectuals, politicians, activists, and journalists have vanished into its maw. Many, like the Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi, who died in 2003 after being brutally beaten, or the twenty-nine Iranian prisoners executed in July 2008, have not survived to speak of their ordeals there. Many others remain incarcerated, among them scores of reformists arrested during the summer's demonstrations and, in particular, the Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, originally arrested in 2007 at the same time as Haleh Esfandiari, and recently shockingly condemned, at a show trial, to at least twelve years in prison.

In this company, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., is one of the lucky ones. An apparently unlikely candidate for arrest—a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother at the time of her imprisonment in 2007, Esfandiari was in Iran to visit her ninety-three-year-old mother—she was sucked into the surreal vortex of the nation's Intelligence Ministry, interrogated for months, and held in solitary confinement for four months. Her release was apparently the direct result of an exchange of letters between Lee Hamilton, her employer and the director of the Wilson Center, and the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; although Esfandiari's husband, the historian Shaul Bakhash, along with many others (including the editors of The New York Review) campaigned tirelessly for her freedom, both in the United States and around the world. As she makes clear, it is impossible to know exactly what confluence of events led her captors to set her free: so much of their understanding of the world and of her role in it remained opaque to the last.

In the wake of her experience, Esfandiari has written a memoir of considerable delicacy and sophistication. My Prison, My Home is, primarily, an account of her annus horribilis, from the initial staged "robbery" when she was on her way to Tehran airport on December 30, 2006, that left her conveniently without a passport and unable to leave the country, through her lockup and eventual liberation almost eight months later. But Esfandiari also provides us with a lucid, concise history of Iran through the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first, and with it an outline of her own remarkable life across continents and cultures. She is restrained in her telling—the book is filled with vivid details and facts, rather than emotional outpouring—a decision for which her narrative is only the more powerful; but her position as someone who fully understands both America and Iran affords her the opportunity to elucidate, for American readers, some of the apparent mysteries of her native culture.

In order for us to make sense of her imprisonment, we need to grasp both its historical background and Esfandiari's own particular life story. (This assertion may seem painfully rudimentary, but facts that are common knowledge to any Iranian, such as the people's abiding resentment of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that restored the Shah to power, seem frequently to have eluded our nation's policymakers.)

Cosmopolitan and intellectual, Esfandiari's own upbringing reminds the reader of Iran as the West once knew it. She is the older child of an Iranian botanist, himself the descendant of regional governors and politicians from the eastern city of Kerman, and of an Austrian mother. Her parents met at university in Vienna before the war. Raised between her mother's German-style home and her grandmother's traditional Iranian household, Esfandiari, like her parents, attended university in Vienna:

While I stayed clear of the student movement,...my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture.

Having completed her doctorate, she returned to Iran in 1964 at the age of twenty-four.

Esfandiari lays out the vital information of her nation's history alongside her own. The pivotal power struggle in the early 1950s between the Shah and his prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who sought to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, took place when Haleh was only a child, but

even as an eleven-year-old I was caught up in these currents, as were the rest of the students at the normally staid Jeanne d'Arc [a Catholic girls' school run by French nuns]. We had all become politicized and wanted the British out.

Unfortunately, the CIA did not agree with the schoolgirls. (The importance of the Jeanne d'Arc school in educating the young women of Iran's future elite in pre-revolutionary times is evident: a quick glance at contact information for alumnae shows them to be predominantly working professionals, with most of them living in the diaspora.) The Esfandiari household's relation to the Mossadegh uprising was complicated, moreover, because "the family was divided.... Mossadegh, the aristocrat who had emerged as a defender of the masses, was a close relative."

Esfandiari explains the increasing difficulties of the Shah's regime during the course of the 1960s and 1970s—although she does not provide the sort of lavish detail about his infamous material excesses that can be found in Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski's Shah of Shahs (1985) or Christopher de Bellaigue's riveting In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs (2005)—and she makes these problems concrete in relation to her own life. Her first career upon returning to Iran was as a journalist. She translated and wrote for the nation's largest daily newspaper, Kayhan, where she met her future husband, Shaul Bakhash, while they were both covering a visit to Iran by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. (That Bakhash is Jewish and she a Muslim was, at the time of their marriage in 1965, "highly unusual," but by no means scandalous: her conservative Muslim grandmother blessed their union.) After leaving Tehran for several years so that Bakhash could pursue his academic career at Harvard and Oxford, the couple returned in 1972.

Although she went back to Kayhan, Esfandiari found that she could not stay there long: "Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter." When Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda's protégé, Amir Taheri, was appointed editor of the paper, Esfandiari quit, and went to work for the Women's Organization of Iran (WOI), a women's rights group founded in 1966.

In a moving aside—and one that feels particularly significant, given the growing influence of women in the current Iranian reform movement and their heightened presence on the streets during last summer's demonstrations, as was noted in the anonymous "Letter from Tehran" published in The New Yorker in early October—Esfandiari comments on her work with WOI, which lasted until 1975:

After the revolution, the clerics sought to undo as many of our accomplishments as they could.... But I believe the WOI played a role in making a new generation of women conscious of their rights, and these women were determined not to be relegated to second-class status again. For these reasons, my three years at the WOI remain among the most rewarding of my working life. I became, and remain, an unrepentant feminist.

From there, Esfandiari went on to the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, a cultural organization set up by and named after the Shah's third wife (herself a graduate of the Jeanne d'Arc school), through which she oversaw museums and cultural centers. From this vantage, she watched the Shah's Iran crumbling around her:

By 1977, for example, Tehran's "poetry nights" at the German-sponsored Goethe Institute had taken on a decidedly political color. Large gatherings listened while poets read from works praising liberty and criticizing oppression. Lawyers and intellectuals addressed open letters to the prime minister and the shah calling for the reinstitution of basic freedoms and the release of political prisoners.

In this setting, Esfandiari explains, the popular appeal of Khomeini—who had publicly and volubly denounced the Shah since the early 1960s, and had lived in exile in Turkey, Iraq, and France—gained inexorable momentum. While the Shah's opponents were politically diverse, ranging from Communists to intellectuals to civil servants, "Khomeini's clerical lieutenants came to dominate the movement, and Khomeini emerged as its undisputed leader." During 1978, demonstrations grew exponentially in size and force, and Esfandiari writes that "the regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation."

While Esfandiari is clear about some sources of the unrest, she does not dwell on the people's grievances against the Shah. It is enlightening to read Kapus´cin´ski's account of life in the Shah's last years of rule, written at the time of the revolution, and to note how familiar the Pahlavi regime's methods sound to any of us reading the newspapers today:

More than a hundred thousand young Iranians were studying in Europe and America.... Today more Iranian doctors practice in San Francisco or Hamburg than in Tebriz or Meshed. They did not return even for the generous salaries the Shah offered. They feared Savak [the Shah's secret police, comparable to the contemporary Intelligence Ministry].... An Iranian at home could not read the books of the country's best writers (because they came out only abroad), could not see the films of its outstanding directors (because they were not allowed to be shown in Iran), could not listen to the voices of its intellectuals (because they were condemned to silence).

For Esfandiari and Bakhash, with a small daughter at the time, the upheaval of the revolution was too uncertain: Esfandiari took their daughter to London in early December 1978 for two weeks, to "wait things out."

In fact, however, she would not return home for many years. Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979 and within ten days the Shah's monarchy collapsed. Now "armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime—many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist." Bakhash had been offered a visiting professorship at Princeton, and the family moved to the United States, where they have lived since. Esfandiari taught Persian at Princeton until 1992. She then wrote her first book, Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution (1997), with the support of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and was asked by Robert Litwak, then the Wilson Center's director of the Division for International Studies, to start a Middle East program there, where she still works.

Esfandiari first returned to Iran in 1992, encouraged by the more liberal climate fostered by the relatively pragmatic President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his then minister of culture, Mohammad Khatami. After her father's death in 1995, she visited more frequently, to help care for her aging mother. She says of the late 1990s and early 2000s:

These were years when the possibility of fundamental change seemed real and when Iranians believed, for a brief moment, that they could take charge of their own lives and government. It was not to be, and it was heartbreaking to me to witness the snuffing out of so much promise and hope.

Following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, however, the tenor of society changed so much that "I made it a point on these trips to stay away from even mildly 'political' people." Unfortunately, her efforts were insufficient to protect her from the roving eye of the Intelligence Ministry, "heir to the Shah's secret police, SAVAK," although far more murderous even than they, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of dissenters.

This institution defined Esfandiari's existence from December 30, 2006, when she was to have returned home to Washington, D.C., until September 2007, when she finally did; and her interactions with its emissaries make for astounding reading. The experience was absurd, horrendous, and disturbingly banal: in a final, blackly comic flourish, her principal interrogator, Mr. Ja'fari, presented her, on the eve of her departure, with a gift: "a large, beautiful inlaid box" containing a leather-bound volume of the poetry of Hafez, Iran's famed fourteenth-century poet: "I examined this curious gift, turning over and over in my mind its intended meaning. It was truly bizarre. The Intelligence Ministry was sending a message: 'No hard feelings. Let's be friends.'" As she says of them, "It's the way we play the game," and there is, about the surreal dance of her eight months in their hands, the quality of a game—destructive, potentially lethal, but a game nevertheless.

The Intelligence Ministry existed for Esfandiari primarily in the form of two men: her chief interrogator, Ja'fari, and his superior, Hajj Agha. Ja'fari she first met in early January 2007 at an interrogation center in a "house...modeled after the Petit Trianon," where he questioned her for long hours at a time, over a fortnight:

He was in his mid-thirties, of medium height, with a bit of stubble on his face. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath a modified safari jacket. A smirk never left his face. His manner alternated between solicitous official...and faceless bureaucrat.

Hajj Agha, the more gracious and apparently accommodating of the two men, with whom she had more dealings once she was imprisoned in early May 2007, emerges in spite of his urbanity as the more sinister: his name is honorific rather than personal ("Hajj" refers to one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; "Agha" is a title for a military officer), so he is, in fact, nameless; and as Esfandiari was not permitted to see his face, and forced to face the wall, he remains, hideously, a cipher.

Ja'fari's line of questioning was, from the outset, clear: "He imagined that the Wilson Center was an agency of the American government, that we were implicated in some nefarious plot against the Islamic Republic, and that we routinely held secret meetings to plan strategy to this end." Esfandiari marvels, "How does one persuade a man with Ja'fari's mind-set that the Ford Foundation...is not part of a 'Zionist conspiracy'? How could I convince him that my husband was not an Israeli agent?"

More specifically, Esfandiari came to realize that Ja'fari and the Intelligence Ministry feared "that the Wilson Center was part of a conspiracy to bring about a velvet revolution...in Iran":

It was the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute (OSI) that earned Ja'fari's most intense scrutiny. The OSI was part of the Soros Foundations.... [It] had been active in newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union.... In these countries, mass popular movements led by intellectuals and opposition parties had succeeded in bringing down Soviet-style governments. These movements became known as "velvet revolutions" or "rainbow revolutions" because of their peaceful, nonviolent nature and because protesters had adopted a particular identifying color—orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, for example. In the twisted mind of Ja'fari and his colleagues, the Soros Foundations had caused these velvet revolutions, and since George Soros was a Jew, a shadowy, Jewish conspiracy hovered in the wings.

The wildness of this paranoia is of course all the more intriguing because it is not, in some details, so very far from reality: orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, and green in Iran? This year's thwarted presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi may not have sought to provoke a "velvet revolution," but in their passionate cries for democratic reform, his supporters were not far from doing so, and their resistance, albeit less visibly, continues. While it is madness to blame the United States and Britain for supposedly coordinating and manipulating this discontent, Ja'fari is not wrong to be alarmed, or wrong to imagine that the West would wish for the reformists' success.

Nevertheless, to appreciate that a faction of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry (because it becomes clear, during Esfandiari's ordeal, that there are bickering factions behind the scrim: "one ready to let me go, the other determined to hold on to me") would seriously believe that the OSI was responsible for the revolutions in former Soviet countries, and intent on a similar strategy in Iran, is already to grasp the strange, novelistic, mutual incomprehensions that exist between Iran and the United States: we could not have imagined that they could genuinely imagine that. Suddenly, with Esfandiari's explanation, Tehran's apparently lunatic assertions about Western involvement in the events of June of this year take on a new tenor: it is vital that we understand that this is not mere rhetorical flourish. At least some portion of the Iranian establishment may believe, or believe they have to believe, these statements to be true.

Esfandiari's interrogations changed in nature, intensity, and locale. She was called upon to answer questions in writing, to provide documents and information pertaining to her work and life, and to speak on camera in a filmed "interview" that was broadcast nationally, along with those of two other prisoners: the political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (who had already been released, and who described the broadcast as "a page out of Stalinist Russia and George Orwell's 1984 ") and the social scientist and urban planner Kian Tajbakhsh. But the focus of the discussions never changed.

The questioning did, however, cease for a time: after the "Petit Trianon" interrogations and before Esfandiari's arrest, there were "eleven weeks of silence. It was a period of anxious waiting, which I tried to fill in various ways.... I spent my days in a figurative crouch...waiting for the blow to fall." This hiatus, during which she did not know what her fate might be, was nothing short of psychological torture:

My entanglement with the Intelligence Ministry meant I would never again feel safe in Iran, even at home. I could no longer carry out an unguarded conversation over the telephone. I believed the intelligence people were reading my e-mail. My nerves were always on edge.... I hated being cooped up in the apartment, but I was uncomfortable going out....

Mutti and I became increasingly isolated. The small group of academic "insiders" who had generously tried to help me began to disappear from my life....

I could no longer see the beauty of the landscape I had always loved. I saw only the gray ugliness of the streets, the piles of uncollected garbage, the potholes, the dirty water in the canals, the smog and the snarled traffic.

In this period, Esfandiari came to realize that while she "had always thought of my dual Iranian-American nationality as an accurate reflection of the two worlds and two cultures between which I shuttled," the reality was different: "My adopted country and the country of my birth were engaged in a dangerous, undeclared war; and I, and many others like me, were caught in their cross fire." The Americans' support for Saddam Hussein during the eight-year Iran–Iraq war; the Iranian funding of Hezbollah; the bombings in Lebanon in 1983 and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the George W. Bush administration's "democracy promotion" program, "a policy of promoting regime change by trying to give money to dissidents"—all of this history played into the fate of a single woman on a visit to her aged, widowed mother in Tehran.

Finally, on May 2, 2007, Ja'fari announced that Esfandiari was being arrested and taken to Evin, to solitary confinement, where she would spend the next four months. Her vivid account of this experience, from her initial blindfolding upon entering the prison, provides us with a wholly unsensational picture both of her treatment and of her own psychological resistance. We learn what her cell looked like, how she slept and washed, what she ate, how she did her laundry, how the interrogations were conducted, what the guards were like—in short, all the details that enable us to imagine the imprisonment clearly. Esfandiari tells of her considerable weight loss, of her resistance to the prison doctors, and of the skin complaint that she worried might be cancer.

Inevitably, the mental toll of her incarceration is less readily communicable, but here, too, Esfandiari provides pragmatic explanations of her decisions and thoughts: "From the first day, I decided that if I were to avoid succumbing to despair, I had to impose a strict discipline on myself.... I knew I had to be mentally strong, keep my wits about me, remain focused on the interrogations," a decision that meant she would not dwell on her family and friends, and would instead devote much of her time to doing exercises to remain physically strong and fit. "While I exercised, I composed two books—not on paper but in my head. One was a biography of my paternal grandmother.... The other book was a children's story for my granddaughters." Eventually, she was allowed to borrow books from Kian Tajbakhsh, also in Evin at the time (although she did not meet him: "I never once spoke to another inmate").

Only once does Esfandiari speak of breaking down, following her one visit from her mother: not wanting her captors to see her vulnerability, she asked to take a shower: "In the shower, I let go of myself and cried copiously. I cried for what I had done to my mother. Instead of the calm, happy old age she deserved, she was experiencing a living hell." Even small moments of kindness in the prison proved hard to bear: when one of the guards, Hajj Khanum, brought her a flower, "a tiny rose, the size of my middle finger," or when another she had nicknamed Sunny Face brought in a rice dish that Esfandiari had taught her to cook, she was all but overcome.

Through these women guards, a number of whom were distinctly sympathetic to her plight, Esfandiari brings us a portrait of women's lives in contemporary Iran rather different from that of Azar Nafisi's lively literature students in her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003):

They seemed all to come from the same working-class or lower-middle-class background. They were all religious, prayed regularly, and observed a strict form of the hijab. They were raised in traditional homes, but their lives were in flux. All had finished secondary school; one had been to university; one had trained at a seminary and another aspired to do so. They had learned to care about their looks, their clothes, their weight, and their health. At least one aspired to go to America.

In her isolation, Esfandiari was almost wholly unaware of the extensive efforts underway to secure her release, including interventions from European governments. She did not know how long she might remain in isolation and was leery of all promising indications—such as Hajj Agha's question in June: "How do you know Obama?"

She fought back with rage and defiance—"I knew I must not let them break me"—and with her insistence, even when it was most difficult, on retaining perspective:

Outside prison, Ja'fari's and Hajj Agha's repeated references to "the triangle," "plots," and "conspiracies" seemed outlandish, even amusing. In solitary confinement, under interrogation, cut off from the outside world, accused of the most serious crimes against the state, I found these endlessly repeated assertions sin- ister: part of a world of secret cabals, plotters, and conspiracies in which I was supposedly involved without being aware of it. I had to be careful not to lose my grip on reality or to succumb to Hajj Agha's deceptive view of the world.

This, of course, is the struggle for any prisoner in such a situation; but it is also the struggle for the Iranian people at large: How not to succumb to the regime's view of the world? Theirs is a society of constant contradictions, of mirrors and masks, of both authority and a theater of authority, to which they must subscribe. They, too, are terrorized by prolonged uncertainty, never knowing the limits of what is allowed—can women show their hair in public this month without fear of arrest? Can weddings allow dancing in private homes this year, or will the morals police break down the door? Can the press question the regime this week, or will the newspapers be shut down? Can you demonstrate freely today, or might you be arrested, tortured, and killed?

For Esfandiari, even in her darkest hour, there was always the American knowledge of the actuality of "reality as it might be": it hovered almost in sight, a passport and a plane journey away. Whether, before Lee Hamilton's letter to Khamenei apparently led to her release, this knowledge made the ordeal more or less endurable is hard to say. But as an Iranian, she was also always aware of the ironies of her native society; she could be at once fully in the world and yet not of it, and this may have been her salvation. She knew that her guards, for the most part, were not her enemies; and while shocked, she was perhaps not surprised when Ja'fari and "the boys," his colleagues at the Intelligence Ministry, presented her with the gift of a book of poetry at the end of her time in Evin. Perhaps they thought that, in spite of the horrors they had inflicted upon her, the greatness of the poet Hafez was something on which they could all agree.

Wikipedia article 'Haleh Esfandiari' with many additional resources

After Salahi incident, some blacks say Secret Service isn't vigilant enough

Image via Wikipedia

By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 1, 2010; C07

Virginia socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi's crashing of President Obama's first state dinner in the White House on Nov. 24 prompted a ripple of concern among African Americans nationwide that lingers still.

"You are talking probably 100 percent concern about the president's safety from my listeners," said Joe Madison, known as "the Black Eagle," who hosts a popular nationwide radio program that attracts mostly African American listeners. "People are worried. My callers think there's not the intensity to protect this president given his unique history. It shouldn't be business as usual."

On the streets of Washington last week, the concern was palpable.

Joseine Applewhite, a 40-year-old legal assistant from the District, said she is worrying about Obama's safety. "I think the Secret Service needs to step up their game a little bit," she said. "After all, the first lady was there on the night of the state dinner, and I believe the kids were also. I think a lot of black folks are angry about it. And why weren't the Salahis arrested? Black folks are asking themselves that question. I am just upset about all of it."

Doug Pierce, 38, who was touring downtown Washington with his family from Cleveland, Tenn., where he works as a cook, also questioned whether the Secret Service is doing an adequate job.

"They allowed that couple to get in there, so obviously someone's not doing their job," Pierce said, standing near the White House gates. "You can't help worrying about the president. He's a black man, and it's probably a lot of people out in the world trying to get to him."

* * *

A poll conducted Dec. 9 by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics showed that 48 percent of black respondents were just somewhat or not at all confident in the Secret Service's ability to protect the president, compared with 37 percent who answered the same question in a poll conducted Jan. 9, less than two weeks before Obama's inauguration. The comparable figures for white respondents were 37 percent and 32 percent.

Many blacks as well as whites think Obama is in greater danger of assassination than some previous presidents because of his historic role. There are also some blacks who suspect -- rightly or wrongly -- that the Secret Service won't work as hard to protect a black president, a point of view that has its roots in the nation's complicated racial history.

Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, who recently was called before a congressional committee worried about the security breach at the White House, said the agency is well aware of this suspicion but disagrees with it. The Secret Service is committing more resources to the security of the first family than it ever has, Sullivan said.

"Regardless of who the president is, we know there's always someone out there who wants to harm the president," Sullivan said. "The fact that he's African American has never been lost on us."

Sullivan noted that citizens have been quick to contact the agency to report worries. "We want the public to be engaged," he said in an interview at his H Street office. "We know the consequences of what could happen if we don't do our job right."

Sullivan said the agency put corrective measures in place following the state dinner incident. "Nobody has beaten up on us more than we ourselves have," he said. "But we have to move on. We don't have the luxury of sitting back, and we are moving forward. Our people are focused."

But such sentiments have been met with skepticism among many African Americans, who have long suspected that law enforcement at all levels of government is tainted by racism. That includes the 6,000-employee Secret Service, which is embroiled in a class-action lawsuit filed by black agents who allege discrimination. (Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the agency, said it could not respond to questions about ongoing litigation.)

"When J. Edgar Hoover was running the FBI, the image of law enforcement in the black community was at its lowest," said Ronald Walters, professor emeritus of government and politics at the University of Maryland. "Hoover had a feeling that African American leaders were not as patriotic as he thought they should be. He systematically went after them."

One of Hoover's longtime targets was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., father of the modern-day civil rights movement. Hoover had King's conversations wiretapped and spread rumors about him that many would come to find repellent.

"It took a long time and a lot of experience," added Walters, "for African Americans to develop the attitude that domestic security services were no friend of the African American community." Incidents of police brutality during and after the civil rights movement haven't helped, he said.

Walters said he and other blacks were alarmed recently at the sight of armed protesters in Phoenix and Portsmouth, N.H., near where the president was talking about his proposed changes in the health-care system. "Look at all those people who showed up with guns," Walters says of the Phoenix incident. "You just couldn't imagine Ronald Reagan speaking within 1,000 yards and there being people with guns, and the Secret Service or law enforcement not doing anything about it."

The Secret Service says the incidents in both Arizona and New Hampshire did not catch the agency off guard, explaining that it could not trample over local jurisdictions that allow for the open display of firearms. "Those people were in very strict parameters of being able to carry a weapon," Donovan said. "If they were going to impact our route of the motorcade, they were going to be removed. Part of the myth out there is that they were in close proximity to our routes. We would not drive a protectee near someone with a weapon."

What is the reality of the physical threat against Obama? It's hard to pin down.

Presidents typically receive about 3,000 threats a year, Secret Service experts have said, although the agency refused to discuss specific numbers.

In strategic budget documents, officials acknowledged that the threat environment was especially high last year -- because of factors including wars overseas, domestic tensions and Obama's history-making presidential bid -- and is expected to remain high.

While hostility directed at former president George W. Bush and vice president Dick Cheney tended to be associated with U.S. policies abroad, antipathy toward Obama emanates from domestic extremists, Secret Service officials said. He received the earliest protection for a presidential candidate in history-- less than a hundred days after he announced -- because of threats; and at the most visible moments of his trek to the White House, threat levels reached historic levels, government officials said. However, the number of threats has since fallen back to levels seen by Bush and Bill Clinton at this point in their terms.

But threats are only one barometer of security concerns -- and a poor one in some ways, Secret Service officials said. Research into dozens of individuals who have actually attacked presidents in recent decades shows nearly all were previously unknown to the Secret Service.

* * *

African Americans have expressed concern about the safety of other black public figures aspiring to the presidency. There were concerns about Jesse Jackson's safety during his two presidential campaigns. Alma Powell, wife of Republican star and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, who had been wooed to seek his party's nomination, famously said she preferred her husband didn't run, fearing for his safety. Powell chose not to run.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee and is in contact with the Secret Service on security issues, says blacks have worried about Obama's safety because they still vividly recall the mourning in the aftermath of King's assassination and that reverberates on the federal holiday commemorating King's birth.

Norton said she was as shocked as anybody when the Salahis were able to gain access to the White House uninvited. "As an elected official, I go to the White House quite often," she said. "I never expected anybody to get past the palace gates without ID!"

Even so, she said, "I have every reason to believe this is not your grandfather's Secret Service. I have no doubt that the Secret Service has a whole new game book when it comes to Obama. They just didn't have it when it came to getting inside the White House itself."

It would appear that Obama shares Norton's confidence.

"Three years ago, the men and women of the Secret Service undertook an historic mission -- to put their lives on the line to protect a presidential candidate and his family, earlier than ever before," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said in a statement. "Every morning, President Obama wakes up grateful for their exceptional commitment to their job and their service to the country."

In sharp contrast with Gaza, casualties decline in West Bank

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By Howard Schneider and Samuel Sockol
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 1, 2010; A08

JERUSALEM -- The first year in a decade without a suicide bombing, as well as an expanded Palestinian security force, resulted in a decline in the number of Israeli and Palestinian casualties in the occupied West Bank in 2009 -- a contrast to the hundreds of Palestinian lives claimed by last winter's war in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Data from Israel's Shin Bet security agency and the United Nations showed a sharp drop in casualties in the West Bank, policed by a mix of Israeli security and intelligence agencies, as well as a Palestinian force that, under the control of the Palestinian Authority, has worked more closely with Israel.

According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 27 Palestinians in the West Bank or East Jerusalem died in "conflict-related" clashes with Israelis during the year -- less than half the number in 2008. The agency, which monitors conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, has collected data only since 2005. But OCHA officials said the number of Palestinian fatalities in 2009 is probably the lowest in at least a decade, which included a violent uprising beginning in 2000.

Overall, 15 Israelis died in conflict-related violence in 2009, compared with 36 in 2008, according to the Shin Bet's annual security report.

Five of the deaths involved attacks in or emanating from the West Bank, said the agency, which documented a sharp drop overall in attacks on Israelis. The Shin Bet said there were 636 attacks in the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the year -- a reduction of about 30 percent.

About 90 percent of those attacks involved makeshift firebombs or Molotov cocktails, which typically do not cause injuries. There was a far sharper drop, of about 75 percent, to 35, in the number of West Bank shooting and bomb attacks against Israelis over the year. Of particular note, "no suicide attacks were registered," the Shin Bet reported.

Of the other 10 Israelis killed in conflict-related violence during 2009, nine were felled by militant attacks or friendly fire during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces had left the strip by Jan. 21.

The death toll on the Palestinian side from the operation was far higher. OCHA data attributed 1,355 Palestinian deaths to the three-week operation, launched in response to Hamas rocket attacks on Israel. Israel estimates the figure at 1,166.

More than 566 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel in 2009, a sharp decline from the year before. Most of them were fired during Cast Lead.

About 90 Gazans have since been killed, according to OCHA data.

Gaza remains under an economic embargo and a strict blockade, a point emphasized in recent days when hundreds of international protesters arrived in Egypt hoping to cross into the Mediterranean enclave through the town of Rafah for a planned Gaza Freedom March on Thursday.

Egypt, which typically keeps the Rafah crossing closed, allowed only about 100 members of the group to enter. A gathering of protesters in downtown Cairo was broken up by Egyptian security forces, according to a group member.

Those allowed to enter Gaza joined a rally that was complemented by a gathering of several hundred at the Erez crossing on the Israeli side of the border. There, a crowd of Israeli Arabs and peace activists waved Palestinian flags and criticized the restrictions that prevent the movement of people and goods into and out of the strip.

Sockol, a special correspondent, reported from Erez.