Patrick Cockburn has written a very important essay on Syria in the London Review of Books (attached below). The essay is aptly titled but has only a few oblique, albeit important, references to Sykes – Picot Agreement, a document some readers may not familiar with. Let's begin with a little background.
The Sykes-Picot agreement (it was a secret agreement concocted by two bureaucrats) is one of the most cynical documents in the creation of the modern Middle East.
The Encylopaedia Britannica describes it accurately as follows:
It was a … “secret convention made during World War I (1916) between Great Britain and France, with the assent of imperial Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas. The agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes
First, Syria has been spilling refugees all over the region. Jordan is poor, Iraq is fragile and even their smaller contingent is causing trouble. Lebanon experiences a fragile balance of ethnic and sectarian tensions. The 420,000 new residents upset that balance and threaten to tip the country into chaos like it had in the 1980s.
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Second, the Kurds were mostly at peace with Turkey until Syria fell into disorder. The Syrian government withdrew from Kurdish turf to reduce their interest in the fighting, then it is possible both Syria and Iran had a hand in setting the Kurdish PKK‘s insurgency back in motion against Turkey. Neither Iran nor Syria wants any trouble with the Kurds in their territory, both want to preserve the Shia arc from Iran to Syria, Sunni majority Turkey has been trending more Islamist in its thinking, and has chosen to back the Sunni majority rebellion in Syria.
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The Turkish choice to focus on the Sunni aspect of the rebellion rather than an inclusive government that would respect the Alawite, Druze, and Christian minorities is a sticking point for the U.S. If things go badly Syria may become a bigger, badder, bloodier version of what Lebanon was like thirty years ago.
This is the first article of our Spy Without Borders series. This article has been co-authored byTamir Israel, Staff Lawyer at CIPPIC and Katitza Rodriguez, EFF International Rights Director. The Spy Without Borders series are looking into how the information disclosed in the NSA leaks affect the international community and how they highlight one part of an international system of surveillance that dissolves what national privacy protections any of us have, whereever we live. You can follow theSpy Without Bordershere.
Introduction
Much of the U.S. media coverage of last week’s NSA revelations has concentrated on its impact on the constitutional rights of U.S.-based Internet users. But what about the billions of Internet users around the world whose private information is stored on U.S. servers, or whose data travels across U.S. networks or is otherwise accessible through them?
While the details are still emerging, what is clear is that many of the newly exposed surveillance activities have been shaped by U.S. foreign intelligence surveillance laws. The secret court that rubberstamped the collection of phone records from Verizon came from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a secret court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); the PRISM requests, the U.S. government has said, were FISA orders intended to target non-American persons outside of the United States.
As U.S. officials have repeated, FISA is designed to protect the rights of “U.S. persons” (citizens, permanent residents, and others on U.S. soil) in the face of operations targeting foreigners. But regardless of their effectiveness (or lack thereof) in achieving this objective, these slim protections offer nothing to the vast majority of Internet users around the world. Privacy expert, Caspar Bowden, has gone so far as to say that U.S. foreign intelligence powers “offer[] zero protection to foreigners’ data in U.S. Clouds.”
In this article, we will look into how the NSA leaks may affect the rest of the world, and how they highlight one part of an international system of surveillance that dissolves what national privacy protections any of us have, where ever we live.
Global Communications Networks & Trans-border Surveillance
M. Al-Sabbak • S. Sadik Ali • O. Savabi •G. Savabi • S. Dastgiri • M. Savabieasfahan
Bull Environ Contam Toxicol (2012) 89:937–944DOI 10.1007/s00128-012-0817-2
Abstract Between October 1994 and October 1995, the number of birth defects per 1,000 live births in Al Basrah Maternity Hospital was 1.37. In 2003, the number of birth defects in Al Basrah Maternity Hospital was 23 per 1,000 live births. Within less than a decade, the occurrence of con-genital birth defects increased by an astonishing 17-fold in the same hospital. A yearly account of the occurrence and types of birth defects, between 2003 and 2011, in Al Basrah Maternity Hospital, was reported. Metal levels in hair, toe-nail, and tooth samples of residents of Al Basrah were also provided. The enamel portion of the deciduous tooth from a child with birth defects from Al Basrah (4.19 lg/g) had nearly three times higher lead than the whole teeth of children living in unimpacted areas. Lead was 1.4 times higher in the tooth enamel of parents of children with birth defects (2,497 ± 1,400 lg/g, mean ± SD) compared to parents of normal children (1,826 ± 1,819 lg/g). Our data suggested that birth defects in the Iraqi cities of Al Basrah (in the south of Iraq) and Fallujah (in central Iraq) are mainly folate-dependent. This knowledge offers possible treatment options and remediation plans for at-risk Iraqi populations.
The data-collection debate we need to have is not about civil liberties.
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
Weekly Standard, June 24, 2013
Should Americans fear the possible abuse of the intercept power of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland? Absolutely. In the midst of the unfolding scandal at the IRS, we understand that bureaucracies are callous creatures, capable of manipulation. In addition to deliberate misuse, closed intelligence agencies can make mistakes in surveilling legitimate targets, causing mountains of trouble. Consider Muslim names. Because of their commonness and the lack of standardized transliteration, they can befuddle scholars, let alone intelligence analysts, who seldom have fluency in Islamic languages. Although one is hard pressed to think of a case since 9/11 in which mistaken identity, or a willful or unintentional leak of intercept intelligence, immiserated an American citizen, these things can happen. NSA civilian employees, soldiers, FBI agents, CIA case officers, prosecutors, and our elected officials are not always angels. Even though encryption is mathematically easier to accomplish than decryption, the potential for abuse of digital communication is always there—all the more since few Americans resort to encryption of their everyday emails.
But fearing the NSA, which has been a staple of Hollywood for decades, requires you to believe that hundreds, if not thousands, of American employees in the organization are in on a conspiracy. In the Edward Snowden-is-a-legitimate-NSA-whistleblower narrative, it also requires that very liberal senators and congressmen are complicit in propagating a civil-rights-chewing national surveillance system.
Phi Beta Iota: The rest of the world is sick of US misbehavior, upset at the continued posture of the US Government in covering up rather than remediating such persistent abuses, and saddened by the idiocy and passivity of the US public in the face of such atrocities. The national shame is enduring — and an obstacle to any possible progress on any front as long as the current Administration remains in lock-step with the mis-steps of its predecessor's crimes against humanity.
Three Explicit Photos and Full Article Below the Line
