The jaw is any opposable articulated structure at the entrance of the mouth.

In most vertebrates, the jaws are bony or cartilaginous and oppose vertically, comprising an upper jaw and a lower jaw. The vertebrate jaw is derived from the most anterior two pharyngeal arches supporting the gills, and usually bears numerous teeth.

Moray eels have two sets of jaws: the oral jaws that capture prey and the pharyngeal jaws that advance into the mouth and move prey from the oral jaws to the esophagus for swallowing

The vertebrate jaw probably originally evolved in the Silurian period and appeared in the Placoderm fish which further diversified in the Devonian. The two most anterior pharyngeal arches are thought to have become the jaw itself and the hyoid arch, respectively. The hyoid system suspends the jaw from the braincase of the skull, permitting great mobility of the jaws. While there is no fossil evidence directly to support this theory, it makes sense in light of the numbers of pharyngeal arches that are visible in extant jawed vertebrates (the Gnathostomes), which have seven arches, and primitive jawless vertebrates (the Agnatha), which have nine.

It is thought that the original selective advantage garnered by the jaw was not related to feeding, but to increased respiration efficiency. The jaws were used in the buccal pump (observable in modern fish and amphibians) that pumps water across the gills of fish or air into the lungs in the case of amphibians. Over evolutionary time the more familiar use of jaws (to humans), in feeding, was selected for and became a very important function in vertebrates. Many teleost fish have substantially modified their jaws for suction feeding and jaw protrusion, resulting in highly complex jaws with dozens of bones involved.

The jaw in tetrapods is substantially simplified compared to fish. Most of the upper jaw bones (premaxilla, maxilla, jugal, quadratojugal, and quadrate) have been fused to the braincase, while the lower jaw bones (dentary, splenial, angular, surangular, and articular) have been fused together into a unit called the mandible. The jaw articulates via a hinge joint between the quadrate and articular. The jaws of tetrapods exhibit varying degrees of mobility between jaw bones. Some species have jaw bones completely fused, while others may have joints allowing for mobility of the dentary, quadrate, or maxilla. The snake skull shows the greatest degree of cranial kinesis, in order to allow the snake to swallow large prey items.

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By Sudipto Ganguly

Afghan cricket team captain Mohammad Nabi Esa Khil (C) holds the ACC Cup after the team’s arrival in Kabul, in this October 12, 2013 file photo, following Afghanistan’s qualification for the 2015 Cricket World Cup. Surrounded by thousands of makeshift tents in the dusty refugee camp he called home, not even in his wildest dreams could Mohammad Nabi have believed that his decision to while away the hours with a miniature cricket bat would lead him to play in the 2015 World Cup. To match feature CRICKET-AFGHANISTAN/     REUTERS/Omar Sobhani/Files

MUMBAI (Reuters) – Surrounded by thousands of makeshift tents in the dusty refugee camp he called home, not even in his wildest dreams could Mohammad Nabi have believed that his decision to while away the hours with a miniature cricket bat would lead him to play in the 2015 World Cup.

Like most of his team mates, Nabi got the first taste of the sport while living in a refugee camp in Peshawar, after his parents had fled Afghanistan while the country was ravaged by the Soviet war.

With no access to television or other forms of entertainment in the camps, a simple game involving a bat and a ball seemed to be the obvious option for the children to spend time.

“I picked up cricket on the streets in Pakistan. We used to play with tennis balls,” Nabi, who captained the team during the qualification campaign, told Reuters.

Cricket gained prominence in Afghanistan as the refugees started returning to the country in the 1990s.

But the idea of rubbing shoulders with top players such as Younus Khan, Misbah-ul-Haq or Michael Clarke in the sport’s most prestigious and glamorous tournament would still have been a far-fetched dream.

After all it was only in June this year that the International Cricket Council, the world governing body of the sport, granted Afghanistan Associate status, which is the second tier of membership behind the 10 test-playing nations.

But the lack of pedigree or facilities did not stop cricket’s greenhorns from beating Kenya in Sharjah this month to qualify for their maiden 50-over World Cup.

The unexpected qualification has only fired their ambition as the war-torn country eyes regular competition with top-tier cricket teams to reach the next level.

“We believe it will be the start of a new phase for Afghanistan,” Noor Muhammad Murad, the chief executive of the country’s cricket board, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Thousands of ecstatic fans, for whom insurgency and bomb attacks are part of a daily routine, flocked to the stadium in Kabul to welcome their heroes on their return from Dubai.

ASSOCIATES NO MORE

Playing against associate members does not excite the Afghans any more as they believe that competing against stronger opponents is the only way to improve before the World Cup.

But that plan is yet to materialise as none of the Asian countries have shown interest in playing against them.

Noor has written relentlessly to cricket boards of neighbors India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and even plans to visit them in the near future to nail down a chance to play against the more established nations of the sport.

“If you compare our situation with Scotland, we have clean-swept them. But England is giving them a chance to play ODIs, Australia is giving them chance, Pakistan is giving them chance,” Noor rued.
“We need the experience. We are eligible for the Asia Cup but we are not allowed to play.”

Top-tier countries maybe worried about lack of interest in a match against Afghanistan but Noor tried to allay those fears.

Most new entrants end up being the whipping boys when playing against prominent teams in tournaments like the World Cup but Afghanistan has vowed that they will not be travelling to Australia and New Zealand to just make up the numbers.

“Afghanistan will ensure that they will play a very competitive game in the World Cup and not let the competition seem easy against our team,” Noor said.

ADDED FUNDS

With more than 15 months left for the tournament, most would be happy to sit back, enjoy the accolades that are pouring in and delve in celebration but not the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB).
The ACB rather wants to use the occasion as a springboard to develop the sport in the country.

The World Cup qualification has brought in added funds from the ICC and they plan use it to invest in a 500-day program to prepare for the 2015 tournament and improve cricket facilities.

While most of the fund will be spent in conducting foreign tours, super-skill training and coaching programs, some money will also be earmarked for improving the mental strength of players.

Afghanistan currently has two international stadiums and nine turf grounds which pales in comparison with neighboring India, where 49 grounds have hosted international matches and where academies grow in major cities like mushrooms every month.

(Editing by Pritha Sarkar)

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By Michael Georgy and Tom Perry

People and police are seen through a hole in the wall of the al-Azhar university administration building after students tried to break-in during student protests in Cairo October 30, 2013. Egyptian police fired teargas at protesting students at Cairo’s al-Azhar university on Wednesday hours after authorities announced the detention of Muslim Brotherhood leader Essam El-Erian, part of a crackdown against the Islamist movement. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt (Reuters) – In Egypt’s second city, medical student Ahmed Nabil lives in fear that the police may come and arrest him any day. As a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he is part of a movement facing an onslaught by the security forces which toppled Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in July.

“These days we can be picked up at any time,” said Nabil, whose parents are also members of the organization, Egypt’s oldest Islamist movement and a supporter of Mursi.

The Brotherhood’s discipline and hierarchy helped it win elections after the 2011 popular uprising that ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak, eventually propelling Mursi into power. But now the army-led government and its supporters regard the Brotherhood as a terrorist group and enemy of the state. The security forces and police, feared and despised under Mubarak, are lauded for cracking down on the organization.

The Brotherhood denounces violence and says it is committed to peaceful protest. But as members go into hiding, its key building blocks – local groups of seven members known as usras – are under pressure.

“The most important person for me is the head of my usra,” said Nabil. “I get everything from him.”

In Nabil’s eyes, the usras, which provide everything from Koran studies to marriage counseling, are crumbling. That raises the risk the organization will fracture, and that some members will abandon peaceful activism to take up arms.

In a sign of how the Brotherhood is retreating, Nabil has bought a new, unregistered mobile phone. He encrypts text messages and is careful about what he writes on Facebook, fearful that the authorities are monitoring communications.

Nabil said he has lost five friends killed in demonstrations and that he narrowly escaped arrest when he took part in a protest. He worries about survival and avoiding jail. The clampdown, he said, could radicalize some members.

This month suspected militants killed six Egyptian soldiers near the Suez Canal, fired rocket propelled grenades at a state satellite station in Cairo and exploded a car bomb near an Egyptian army intelligence building in the city of Ismailia. More than 50 people have been killed and more than 270 wounded in recent clashes between the police and protesters supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
Even as questions remain over who mounts such attacks, it seems clear the recruitment pool for radicals has grown significantly since Mursi’s overthrow.

“Not all people in the opposition can go on resisting peacefully if this unbelievable pressure continues, especially the detentions of leaders who pushed the movement to remain peaceful,” said Nabil. Before they were imprisoned, top Brotherhood leaders often told followers that avoiding violence would give the movement the moral high ground against the government.

“All these military actions against us, including killing and torture and arrests, push us to respond with force. One prays that God ends the crisis before we reach the situation in Syria,” he said, referring to civil war in that country. “As our grand guide (top leader) said, ‘Our peaceful ways are stronger than a bullet.’”

The government makes no distinction between the Brotherhood and al Qaeda-inspired militants based in the Sinai Peninsula who have sharply stepped up attacks against soldiers and police since Mursi was overthrown. The authorities say the Brotherhood’s members are terrorists out to spread an Islamic caliphate across several nations, not focus on Egypt’s well-being.

A top security official who has monitored the Brotherhood for decades told Reuters: “The usra has been destroyed in a very big way. The Brotherhood member is taught not to think on his own, just to take orders. This is how the group functions. So if there is no one to give them orders it means the group is in trouble.”

CELL DECAY

The usra was devised by Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, to indoctrinate and mobilize followers. Usras typically used to meet once a week for at least three hours, usually at the home of a member. The usra leader could be so pivotal that members sought their permission to travel to Cairo.

During past crackdowns, the usra survived by adapting. Its size was reduced to three members when restrictions were tightened. Those small units avoided arrest by speaking while walking down streets or meeting in tea houses, not homes. In prison, the usra became the number of men in each cell.

After Mursi fell, the Brotherhood had hoped to mobilize millions of protesters; but the army reacted forcefully, bulldozing a protest camp at Rabaa al-Adawiya in eastern Cairo on August 14, killing hundreds of Mursi’s supporters. Security forces have arrested many top Brotherhood leaders, including Mursi, on charges of inciting or perpetrating violence.

Before the leaders were detained, they sent messages to Brotherhood officials urging them to ensure that usras continued, according to the head of an usra and other Brotherhood members. But members are struggling.

In Alexandria, Abu Bakr al-Masri is the head of an usra and worships in a spartan Brotherhood mosque on the bottom floor of an apartment building. For decades, the Brotherhood has used such mosques in rundown neighborhoods across Egypt to deepen its influence and raise funds.

Masri’s usra has not met since Mursi fell. He is proud of his position but worried because he can no longer guide young men.

“I gave people advice on everything. Even if you have trouble with your wife you come to me,” he said, sitting in his apartment, a block from the mosque. “The usra is under a lot of pressure now. I speak to people in the usra by phone, but it is always brief and we never have a chance to speak about the important issues.”

There are usras for women and Masri’s wife, Um Abdullah, heads one. It, too, has not met since July and she is a member of another that has stopped gathering.

“I am sitting here doing nothing,” she said, complaining about the Brotherhood’s isolation. Um Abdullah, who was veiled, is tasked with spreading the Brotherhood’s views of how Muslim families should approach life. There is little scope for that now. “I used to be able to go out in the streets and tell other women about our vision, about the true Muslim family,” she said. “Now I can only wander in our building and speak to my neighbors.”

The Brotherhood has few options. Many Egyptians turned sharply against the organization during Mursi’s year as president. He was accused of trying to give himself sweeping powers, entrenching the Brotherhood in the institutions of state and mismanaging the economy. The Brotherhood denies those charges.

While limited protests by Mursi supporters continue, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, head of the military, has announced a political roadmap promising new elections. The transition includes rewriting the constitution that was drafted by an Islamist-dominated assembly, passed in a referendum and signed into law by Mursi. The most contentious feature of the new constitution may be a clause banning religious political parties.

The Brotherhood wants nothing to do with the transition and its supporters are retreating. In one tight-knit Brotherhood community in Alexandria, four families have already fled for fear of arrest after the security forces and army began conducting overnight searches of apartment buildings, according to local Brotherhood supporters.

EXTREMIST RISK

In the office of Ahmed Fahim, a lawyer in Alexandria who represents Muslim Brotherhood members, stands a photograph of a past leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, an offshoot of the Brotherhood. It’s a small sign of Fahim’s defiance.

His day usually starts with a brief walk to the courthouse, which he believes treats the Brotherhood unfairly. “Why do they let common criminals see their day in court while Muslim Brotherhood detainees are seen as a security risk and are only allowed hearings in jail?” he said.

A Justice Ministry official said security forces advise the ministry that taking Brotherhood members to a courthouse poses a security risk because there could be protests and other problems.

For Fahim, all around are reminders of the Brotherhood’s steep fall from power. In the street a young boy sells posters showing army chief Sisi with Gulf Arab leaders who pumped billions of dollars into Egypt after Mursi fell. At the courthouse, overlooking the sea, a blue police truck displays a poster showing Sisi beside Gamal Abdel Nasser, a former president of Egypt who ordered a crackdown on the Brotherhood after an attempt to assassinate him.

Fahim seemed resigned to the idea that the Brotherhood will experience hardship. “We knew from the beginning that our path would not be lined with roses, but thorns,” he said. He no longer thinks it is realistic to demand Mursi’s reinstatement.

He worries about the fate of the usra – but also the possibility that members of the Muslim Brotherhood may turn to armed struggle. “People won’t be able to hold back,” he said, though he calls for restraint.

At his modest apartment, Fahim spoke proudly about how his son Muiz, 10, and daughter Amena, 7, joined him at the demonstration at Rabaa al-Adawiya, which at times swelled to tens of thousands of protesters. The family laughed when the daughter said she didn’t like Sisi or Mubarak. But the mood soured when they recalled how the Rabaa protest was crushed.

The conversation turned to how unpopular the Brotherhood is. A joke doing the rounds illustrated the grim mood: A boy who wants to have his father killed leaves their fifth floor apartment, goes to the ground floor and posts a sign at the entrance, “Muslim Brotherhood headquarters is located on the fifth floor, apartment three.”

Like Fahim, some outside experts fear the severity of the crackdown could backfire. “The weekly usra meeting is a very important tool in shaping the mindset and behavior of Brotherhood members. The alternative might be an extreme path,” said Khalil al-Anani, senior fellow at The Middle East Institute in Washington.

“This might replicate the 1950s and 1960s when the state cut links between the leadership and grassroots, leading in the end to the deviation of youth and creation of groups that started insurgencies.”
While Reuters found no evidence of Brotherhood members joining extremist groups, the authorities are now portraying most Islamists as one broad group of terrorists.

ARMY CONTROL

When reporters first met Nabil, the medical student in Alexandria, he was upbeat about the prospect of the Brotherhood returning to power. He had spent a great deal of time reading commentaries from Brotherhood officials about how many military coups had ultimately failed.

He was especially interested in reading about Algeria. There the army’s decision to cancel elections in 1991, which Islamists had won, plunged the North African country into a civil war that killed at least 150,000 people.

But later Nabil grew downbeat. With the top Muslim Brotherhood leaders behind bars and his usra leader on the run, Nabil has no one to help him get through tough times. Fear of arrest has forced Islamists to cut down on protests. Maintaining secrecy is important: Protest locations are only shared with a few. False destinations are sometimes announced on Facebook to confuse the authorities.

If Nabil does run into his ursa leader at a protest, there is little time to talk, he said. Demonstrations are often cut short to avoid clashes with security forces, who may have been tipped off by informers.

Pro-government activists called baltagiya, or thugs, usually attack the processions from behind, using everything from rocks to swords and guns, demonstrators say. Nabil pointed to Egyptian flags held by Brotherhood members and said: “Actually those flags have another purpose. When we are attacked, people holding them flip them around and use the wooden poles to defend protesters.”

He cannot count, as the Brotherhood once did, on popular support. During one demonstration, Nabil and a friend looked up at the balconies of surrounding buildings to find people insulting them and hurling water. “Every week we count the numbers of people who are against us,” he said.

There is no doubt the army-backed government has the upper hand, and Brotherhood members often compare the current campaign against the group to the repression imposed by Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s.

In Alexandria, Abdel Latif Mohammed, a Brotherhood member who is now too old to kneel for prayers in the mosque, recalled how jailers during Nasser’s crackdown whipped his feet and then set dogs on him. He recalled, too, that 15,000 people were arrested in one night. Yet in Mohammed’s eyes, the current situation is worse.

No government spokesman would comment on the scale of the crackdown. But a senior security official told Reuters: “This group has to be stopped. They are terrorists with an international agenda. They don’t care about Egypt.”

Even lawyers who defend Muslim Brotherhood members say they no longer feel safe and move from one house to another to avoid arrest. In August, in an interview with Reuters, Khalaf Bayoumi, a leading Muslim Brotherhood lawyer in Alexandria, predicted he would be arrested. He is now being held with other Islamists at the sprawling Borg al-Arab prison on the edge of Alexandria.

Visitors to the prison say groups of 35 Mursi supporters are crowded into cells built for 10. Army tanks guard the premises.

Before he was incarcerated, Bayoumi said that to survive, the Brotherhood must preserve the usra. “If the Brotherhood loses that, the group will fall,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Abdel Rahman Youssef in Alexandria; Editing By Richard Woods and Simon Robinson)

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In addition to local and municipal races in many areas of the state, voters statewide will decide the fate of nine proposed constitutional amendments to the Texas Constitution in a statewide election on Tuesday, Nov. 5. And, the balloting will be the first time the state incorporates its new voter ID rules. Early voting for the upcoming election began Monday and concluded on Friday, Nov. 1.

Before a voter can cast a ballot in that election, he or she must show one of seven forms of approved identification. They include a Texas driver license issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), a DPS-issued personal identification card, a DPS-issued concealed handgun license, a U.S. military ID card with photo, a U.S. citizenship certificate with photo or a U.S. passport.

Although there are nine proposed amendments to be decided, one – Proposition 6 – has been getting most of the attention. The proposed amendment would create the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas and the State Water Implementation Revenue Fund for Texas. If approved by voters, the Texas Legislature has already provided a mechanism for funding – authorizing a one-time $2 billion investment from the state’s rainy day fund. Those funds would allow for financing of local water projects that are part of the 2012 State Water Plan through affordable bonding.

Among these projects that are part of the state plan are conservation and reuse projects, desalination projects, new pipelines, reservoirs and more. Officials are hopeful the $2 billion from the rainy day fund will provide a continuing revenue source for water projects as loans are paid back. These funds will be managed by the Texas Water Development Board.

The remaining proposed amendments include:

Proposition One – Providing a tax exemption for all or part of the market value of the residence homestead of the surviving spouse or a member of the U.S. military who was killed in action.

Proposition Two – Eliminates a requirement for a State Medical Education Board and a State Medical Education Fund, neither of which is currently in operation.

Proposition Three – Allows the governing body of a political entity such as a municipality, county, etc. to extend the date by which aircraft parts held by a business in the state as exempt from property tax as “Freeport goods” must be transported outside the state to retain their tax-exempt status.

Proposition Four – Allows for a tax exemption on part of the market value of the residence homestead of a partially disabled veteran or his or her surviving spouse if the residence was donated to the veteran by a charitable organization.

Proposition Five – Authorizes reverse mortgage advances to be used to purchase a homestead the borrower will use as his or her primary residence and expands the conditions under which a lender may require repayment to include failure to occupy the homestead within the period specified in the agreement.

Proposition Seven – Allows a home-rule municipality to include in its charter how to fill a vacancy on its governing body for an unexpired term of 12 months or less.
Proposition Eight – Allows repeal of a part of the constitution that allows for creating a hospital district in Hidalgo County because of the restriction on the limitation of the property tax rate that can be imposed.

Proposition Nine – Would expand the types of sanctions that can be assessed by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct on a judge or justice, including public admonition, warning, reprimand or mandatory training or education in addition to punitive sanctions.

An analysis of each of the proposed amendments is provided by the Texas Legislative Council (see: http://www.tlc.state.tx.us/pubsconamend/analyses13/analyses13.pdf)
NEXT WEEK: On Nov. 5, voters also will decide more than $5.2 billion in bond issues for cities, counties, school district and other taxing entities.

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By Adil James, TMO

One of the older and stronger mosques in the Detroit area is so not by virtue of the wealth of its congregants but more because of the faith and commitment and involvement of the community, who stand together to rise above the many difficulties that face them in a difficult neighborhood, trying to bring the light of faith to those most in need of it.

The Muslim Center of Detroit, based at Davison and Wilson, held a fundraiser Saturday evening at the Doubletree in Dearborn.  About 500 people were present for the dinner and speeches, and for a fundraiser which collected, it was estimated late the night of the fundraiser, about $80,000.

One of the main purposes of the evening was to get the mosque out of debt.  The MC of the evening was Imam Saleem Khalid.  The theme, “The Beginnings of a New Tomorrow.” 

Zarinah El-Amin Naeem spoke very movingly about the mosque’s history as a home and focal point for its families, of its having begun in 1985 “for the pure worship of Allah” and the inclusion of Muslims of all ethnicities–she described its guiding principles as being “faith, family, and work.” 

“It started with a few families that started on faith–Allah blessed their effort, making The Muslim Center instrumental and strategic for helping people,” and she mentioned many different community service programs that have helped and that continue to help the people nearby the mosque, whether Muslim or not–one excellent example was the Huda Clinic, but she also listed programs that “fed, clothed and warmed thousands of souls through the years.”

She spoke also of the education in Islam that was provided at the mosque, where people could enroll in classes about fiqh, seerah, and aqeedah.

She also explained that it is a “halal outlet for fun where the entire family comes.”

“The Muslim Center brings you closer to each other and closer to Allah.”

She also described the “Halal Jazz Cafe.”

Imam Siraj Wahhaj was the keynote speaker and in many ways the focus of the evening, functioning as a speaker and also as the fundraiser.  He spoke at length before beginning the fundraising–one of his themes was that Muslims must seek self-reliance, especially by buying rather than renting buildings–he gave several examples where people were weakened by their dependence on landlords. 

He quoted a biblical passage that was actually very moving, quoting the advice that you (believers) should marry, and have children, and help your children, boys and girls, to marry, and seek the peace of the country in which you live, so that you and the country in which you live can grow in prosperity together.

Then he spoke of the growing world problem especially in Westernized countries unfortunately of low birth rates. 

This event was very successful and all speakers spoke well and about interesting subjects.

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By Noor H. Salem, TMO

blackbeanbrownies.wordpress.com

Question: I run off to work and never have time to prepare lunch.  I found instant noodle soup cups that are prepared by adding boiling water. They have chicken flavors and vegetables in the soup. Is this a good idea for a mid-day lunch?

Answer:

Quick meals, high-speed, drive-thru, and instant meals; this country is running on stress. We want to do everything, but we want it done faster and quicker.  Do note though, faster and quicker does not mean healthier. In fact, being under stress around the clock could harm one’s health in the long run. Now, let’s get to the focus: instant soups. Instant noodle soups consist of noodles, dehydrated vegetables (a few pieces of corn, carrots, and peas), chicken stock, and flavoring. But what’s really in the soup? Well, the noodles are made up of enriched flour, which is bleached. The three of four pieces of peas and corn you find in your soup is not even a quarter of a serving. You need vegetables at lunch! The “chicken”-let’s not go there. Tons of artificial and natural flavorings are added to create the stock flavoring. The majority of these soups have over 38 ingredients, a lot more than what you’d use a home. MSG, hydrogenated oils, and a ton of other harmful cheap ingredients are what make your soup so instant and “good”. This soup is not a good lunch. You’re not getting healthy carbohydrates, lacking protein, vegetables, and healthy fats.

You could simply prepare a big batch of soup with lots of fresh vegetables, unbleached noodles, natural stock, grass-fed meat, and your own favorite spices. Pack it in a well-sealed glass tuber ware and you’re good to go. You’d be getting your balanced proteins, carbohydrates, and fats in one dish. You won’t need 38+ ingredients to make it taste good, and you’ll feel good yourself.

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The unprecedented Saudi refusal to take up its Security Council seat is not just about Syria but a response to the Iranian threat

By Robert Fisk

The Muslim world’s historic – and deeply tragic – chasm between Sunni and Shia Islam is having worldwide repercussions. Syria’s civil war, America’s craven alliance with the Sunni Gulf autocracies, and Sunni (as well as Israeli) suspicions of Shia Iran are affecting even the work of the United Nations.

Saudi Arabia’s petulant refusal last week to take its place among non-voting members of the Security Council, an unprecedented step by any UN member, was intended to express the dictatorial monarchy’s displeasure with Washington’s refusal to bomb Syria after the use of chemical weapons in Damascus – but it also represented Saudi fears that Barack Obama might respond to Iranian overtures for better relations with the West.

The Saudi head of intelligence, Prince Bandar bin Sultan – a true buddy of President George W Bush during his 22 years as ambassador in Washington – has now rattled his tin drum to warn the Americans that Saudi Arabia will make a “major shift” in its relations with the US, not just because of its failure to attack Syria but for its inability to produce a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
What this “major shift” might be – save for the usual Saudi hot air about its independence from US foreign policy – was a secret that the prince kept to himself.
Israel, of course, never loses an opportunity to publicise – quite accurately – how closely many of its Middle East policies now coincide with those of the wealthy potentates of the Arab Gulf.
Hatred of the Shia/Alawite Syrian regime, an unquenchable suspicion of Shia Iran’s nuclear plans and a general fear of Shia expansion is turning the unelected Sunni Arab monarchies into proxy allies of the Israeli state they have often sworn to destroy. Hardly, one imagines, the kind of notion that Prince Bandar wishes to publicise.

Furthermore, America’s latest contribution to Middle East “peace” could be the sale of $10.8bn worth of missiles and arms to Sunni Saudi Arabia and the equally Sunni United Arab Emirates, including GBU-39 bombs – the weapons cutely called “bunker-busters” – which they could use against Shia Iran. Israel, of course, possesses the very same armaments.

Whether the hapless Mr Kerry – whose risible promise of an “unbelievably small” attack on Syria made him the laughing stock of the Middle East – understands the degree to which he is committing his country to the Sunni side in Islam’s oldest conflict is the subject of much debate in the Arab world. His response to the Saudi refusal to take its place in the UN Security Council has been almost as weird.

After lunch on Monday at the Paris home of the Saudi Foreign Minister, Saud al-Faisal, Kerry – via his usual anonymous officials – said that he valued the autocracy’s leadership in the region, shared Riyadh’s desire to de-nuclearise Iran and to bring an end to the Syrian war.  But Kerry’s insistence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime must abandon power means that a Sunni government would take over Syria; and his wish to disarm Shia Iran – however notional its nuclear threat may be – would ensure that Sunni military power would dominate the Middle East from the Afghan border to the Mediterranean.

Few realise that Yemen constitutes another of the Saudi-Iranian battlegrounds in the region.

Saudi enthusiasm for Salafist groups in Yemen – including the Islah party, which is allegedly funded by Qatar, though it denies receiving any external support – is one reason why the post-Saleh regime in Sanaa has been supporting the Zaidi Shia Houthi “rebels” whose home provinces of Sa’adah, al Jawf and Hajja border Saudi Arabia. The Houthis are – according to the Sunni Saudis – supported by Iran.

The minority Sunni monarchy in Bahrain – supported by the Saudis and of course by the compliant governments of the US, Britain, et al – is likewise accusing Shia Iran of colluding with the island’s majority Shias. Oddly, Prince Bandar, in his comments, claimed that Barack Obama had failed to support Saudi policy in Bahrain – which involved sending its own troops into the island to help repress Shia demonstrators in 2011 – when in fact America’s silence over the regime’s paramilitary violence was the nearest Washington could go in offering its backing to the Sunni minority and his Royal Highness the King of Bahrain.

All in all, then, a mighty Western love affair with Sunni Islam – a love that very definitely cannot speak its name in an Arab Gulf world in which “democracy”, “moderation”, “partnership” and outright dictatorship are interchangeable – which neither Washington nor London nor Paris (nor indeed Moscow or Beijing) will acknowledge. But, needless to say, there are a few irritating – and incongruous – ripples in this mutual passion.

The Saudis, for example, blame Obama for allowing Egypt’s decadent Hosni Mubarak to be overthrown. They blame the Americans for supporting the elected Muslim Brother Mohamed Morsi as president – elections not being terribly popular in the Gulf – and the Saudis are now throwing cash at Egypt’s new military regime. Assad in Damascus also offered his congratulations to the Egyptian military. Was the Egyptian army not, after all – like Assad himself – trying to prevent religious extremists from taking power?

Fair enough – providing we remember that the Saudis are really supporting the Egyptian Salafists who cynically gave their loyalty to the Egyptian military, and that Saudi-financed Salafists are among the fiercest opponents of Assad.

Thankfully for Kerry and his European mates, the absence of any institutional memory in the State Department, Foreign Office or Quai d’Orsay means that no one need remember that 15 of the 19 mass-killers of 9/11 were also Salafists and – let us above all, please God, forget this – were all Sunni citizens of Saudi Arabia.[sic]

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By Warren Strobel

Pelicans sit on pilings along the Dauphin Island Parkway, Alabama May 5, 2010. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Forty years after an Arab oil embargo throttled the U.S. economy, surging North American energy production has brought the United States closer to a long-dreamed “energy independence” that is reshaping its goals and role in the Middle East.

On October 17, 1973, OPEC announced an oil embargo against the United States and any other country that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. That use of oil as a diplomatic weapon has driven an American yearning for disengagement from the Middle East and its problems ever since.

Such a strategic divorce is unlikely to occur soon, current and former U.S. officials say. Washington has too much invested in the region, from support for allies like Israel to the fight against Islamic militants.

But the United States is less vulnerable to Middle East oil shocks, current and former U.S. officials say, and may be less likely to station large ground and naval forces in the region in the future.

More problematically, it will have to find a way to cooperate in the Middle East with energy-hungry China, they said. And ties with Saudi Arabia, long nurtured by oil commerce, have been jolted by diplomatic disagreements over Iran, Syria and Egypt, and could fray further.

In the decades that followed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries embargo, “you could not make plans in the Middle East or involving Middle East crises, without keeping in mind the considerations of the oil market,” Henry Kissinger, who was Secretary of State during the 1973 oil shock, said on Wednesday.

“But that is now changing substantially with the, I wouldn’t say ‘self sufficiency’ but narrowing the gap between supply and demand in North America, that is now of huge strategic consequence,” Kissinger said at a conference hosted by the group Securing America’s Future Energy.

The United States is less reliant each month on Middle East energy, thanks to increasing production of both oil and natural gas from technologies such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which allows extraction of oil and gas from shale deposits.

The country could be energy self-sufficient – producing enough to meet its own needs – by 2020, according to several analyses, and a debate has begun on whether to end an effective ban on U.S. crude oil exports.

The growth of the United States as an energy power is already making a difference in foreign policy.

Last year, Washington and its European allies orchestrated a partial boycott of Iranian oil, to compel Tehran to return to talks about its nuclear program. The sanctions against Iran took roughly 1 million barrels per day off world markets – without the oil price spikes many predicted.

Increased oil supplies from the United States, and elsewhere, “really helped us tremendously in our negotiations,” with potential partners, a senior State Department official said.

ENERGY SUPERPOWER

Weary of war after years of costly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is wary of intervening in crises like that in Syria, and took on a limited role in oil-rich Libya’s 2011 civil war.

U.S. oil production has helped dampen price spikes from disruptions in places such as Libya, officials and analysts said, and with it pressure for U.S. intervention.

Retired Adm. Dennis Blair, former U.S. Director of National Intelligence, said that the United States’ increased energy output affords it the flexibility to reposition some military forces now in the Middle East “over the horizon,” where they could be called on in a crisis.

Blair did not suggest specifics, but said such a change would be a return to the traditional U.S. defense posture before a build up of U.S. forces in the region that began with a major oil tanker escort operation in the Gulf in the 1980s and increased with two wars with Iraq.

“We have the opportunity to refine our policy,” he said.

Publicly and privately, U.S. officials increasingly are emphasizing that the United States has no plans to leave the Middle East or retreat into isolationism.

“Reduced energy imports do not mean the United States can or should disengage from the Middle East or the world,” then-White House national security adviser Tom Donilon said in a speech in April.

“We have a set of enduring national security interests” in the region, Donilon said, citing Israel’s security, the fight against terrorism and “our historic stabilizing role in protecting regional allies and partners.”

The United States is also the only country that has been able to bring Israelis and Palestinians together to negotiate peace, and provides security guarantees to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states.
And America is still affected by global oil markets and the prices they set. The Saudis remain the key producer, with excess capacity to make up for unexpected supply shortages.

A February report by Citigroup said that Gulf Arabs will continue to seek U.S. security guarantees, particularly in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring” revolutions. But it warned there could be fresh tensions between the United States and non-democratic governments in the Middle East and elsewhere due to the change in energy balances.

By the end of the decade, the United States “could be freed from the shackles involved in sacrificing a values-driven policy focusing on human rights and democratic institutions in order to secure cooperation from resource-rich despotic regimes,” Citigroup said.

Allies for decades, Washington and Riyadh find their interests now diverging on such key issues as how to support the rebels in Syria’s civil war, the intensifying U.S. diplomacy with Iran and the military coup in Egypt.

AWKWARD DUET WITH CHINA

The coming years could see an awkward – or even tense – geopolitical duet between the United States and China in the Middle East, testing Americans’ willingness to share responsibility — and influence.

China’s imports are surging and it will overtake the United States as the world’s No. 1 oil importer in 2017, according to Wood Mackenzie energy and mining consulting group.

The United States could end up ensuring that energy supplies transit safely to China thanks to U.S. Navy patrols of the Straits of Hormuz at the outlet to the oil-rich Gulf.

The reason: Washington has every interest in seeing energy-hungry China’s needs met to avoid global disruption, but does not want to be displaced as the Middle East’s dominant outside power, energy analysts said.

U.S. officials appear to have mixed feelings about this scenario, hoping China will help share the security burden – up to a point.

“We don’t want China patrolling the sea lanes for us,” said Michael Levi, director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Program on Energy Security and Climate Change.

The arrangement opens up other questions, officials and analysts said. Will Washington seek concessions from Beijing in return for its help? Will China supplant the United States as the chief defender of the Middle East status quo?

“There’s a set of evolving geopolitical equations here that start to become really interesting,” said the State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“The question that I get asked the most whenever I’m in China is, ‘Is the United States still going to be engaged in trying to maintain peace and stability in the Middle East, and in transit lanes?’” he said.

(Additional reporting by Tim Gardner and Arshad Mohammed. Editing by Alistair Bell, Peter Henderson and Grant McCool)

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TRANSCRIPT

Glenn Greenwald, Guardian Columnist.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the latest National Security Agency revelations, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. Earlier today, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo published an article co-written by Greenwald revealing the NSA recently tracked over 60 million calls in Spain in the space of a month. For the past year, he’s been a columnist at The Guardian newspaper. He is leaving the paper this week to join a new media venture funded by eBay founder, multibillionaire Pierre Omidyar. Glenn Greenwald joins us by Democracy Now! video stream from his home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Glenn. Let’s start off with the latest news from Spain to Germany.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, there’s a series of reports that have appeared in several different European countries over the past two weeks or so. As you indicated, there is a report this morning in El Mundo, which I co-authored, reporting that the NSA in one month, December of 2012, collected the data on 60 million telephone calls made to and from people in Spain. There was an article similar to that one in Le Monde, the Paris daily, the week before, that I also co-authored, indicating that the NSA had collected 70 million telephone calls and stored them in their system to be monitored and analyzed. And there have been a series of reports, of course, in Germany, really over the last three months, mostly co-authored by Laura Poitras, the American filmmaker with whom I’ve been working on the Snowden story from the start, about systematic and bulk spying on the people of Germany, and, more recently, targeting the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, that has caused a very significant political controversy and underscoring the principal point—is what these stories do—which is that it really is the goal of the NSA, as I’ve said many times before, to eliminate privacy worldwide by ensuring that all forms of human electronic communication are subject to its ever-growing surveillance net.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how the German spying worked. I mean, for Germans, Angela Merkel’s phone is very famous. Can you explain why? I mean her cellphone that she uses through all sessions of Parliament. There have been pieces, whole pieces, just written about her phone, well before this information came out.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, the NSA uses different techniques. One of the main techniques that it uses, as Der Spiegel in its cover story reported this week, is, through a consulate in Berlin, the NSA sends people who pretend to be diplomats, who are actually there to engage in mass surveillance on the German population, as well as to target the individual cellphone calls of prominent German politicians such as its chancellor. We did a similar report here in Brazil on the targeting of President Dilma Rousseff. And the same has happened in Mexico, where both the current and former Mexican presidents were targeted with similar forms of surveillance. And often the way that this is done is through people who pretend to be diplomats stationed at what pretends to be a consulate, but which is really an NSA outpost that exploits its positioning in the nation’s capital under diplomatic treaties to target the population and the leading democratically elected leaders with very invasive surveillance.

AMY GOODMAN: And the embassy itself, its placement, this massive embassy building that the United States moved into in 2008?

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. The Der Spiegel report is using a document that demonstrates that that embassy is essentially the outpost for NSA spying. And this is quite common for the NSA to do in capitals in the allies most closely aligned with the United States. And obviously what this does is it undermines trust between these allies and the American government. It also makes a mockery out of diplomatic treaties, which really do bar the exploitation of diplomatic relations, diplomatic buildings and other forms of diplomacy as a means to engage in surveillance, both on citizens indiscriminately and democratically elected leaders, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: On Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel demanded the United States strike a no-spying agreement with Berlin and Paris by the end of the year, saying alleged espionage against two of Washington’s closest EU allies had to be stopped.

CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL: [translated] I think the most important thing is to find a basis for the future on which we can operate. And as I said today, trust needs to be rebuilt, which implies that trust has been severely shaken. And the members of the European Union shared those concerns today. But we all know that we have such important tasks in the world that we can only master together and that we are responsible for our mutual security, that we simply need to look into the future. Obviously, words will not be sufficient. True change is necessary.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. Glenn Greenwald, you mentioned, you know, the spying on democratically elected leaders. She was being spied on even before she was chancellor.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right, exactly. And the current Mexican president was, as well, prior to his being elected. The United States government has created a spying system—and this is the picture that really emerges from all of the documents—that is obsessed, institutionally, with identifying any kinds of communications that it cannot intrude and then developing technologies in order to invade them, without really any thought as to the underlying rationale, a weighing of benefits and costs. It really is a spying system that exists simply to spy for its own sake, to augment the power of the United States government, to make sure that it has full understanding of what everyone in the world is thinking and doing and choosing and deciding. And that is really a very consequential—and, I think, menacing—development for the world and for the idea of individual privacy on the Internet and through telephones. And it’s up to the world, I think, to decide what should be done in light of these revelations.

AMY GOODMAN: During Friday’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was questioned about NSA spying of the German chancellor.

NEDRA PICKLER: Thanks, Jay. I want to follow up on your comment in yesterday’s briefing about how the United States is not and will not monitor German Chancellor Merkel’s communications. Lawmakers in Berlin have objected to that answer because you didn’t say whether her communications were monitored in the past. So I want to ask you: Has the United States monitored the chancellor’s phone calls in the past?

PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: Nedra, we are not going to comment publicly on every specified alleged intelligence activity. And as a matter of policy, we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations. As I mentioned yesterday, the president spoke with Chancellor Merkel, reassured her that the United States is not and will not monitor the chancellor’s communications.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, your response?

GLENN GREENWALD: Remember, all of the stories that we are reporting are based on the NSA’s own internal documents, the claims that the NSA has made to itself and to its four closest allies when it comes to surveillance programs, which is the U.K., Canada, New Zealand and Australia. And so, I think at this point there’s really nobody rational who doubts the veracity of any of these reports. They’ve proven to be true in every single case. So when the documents prove or when other evidence proves that Chancellor Merkel was targeted with this kind of surveillance, it’s obviously the case that she was. And Jay Carney’s refusal to deny that she was such a target, after making a point to say she no longer will be in the future and is not right at this very second, I think, obviously, demonstrates that. That is the difficulty for the U.S. government, is there’s no way for them to demonize or to discredit the reporting that we’re doing, precisely because the reporting that we’re doing is based very faithfully on the claims that the NSA itself makes in their own documents.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, this is Congressman Peter King, chair of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press. He defended the NSA’s spying.

REP. PETER KING: I think the president should stop apologizing, stop being defensive. The reality is, the NSA has saved thousands of lives, not just in the United States, but also in France and Germany and throughout Europe. And, you know, the French are some ones to talk, when the fact is, they’ve carried out spying operations against the United States, both the government and industry. As far as Germany, that’s where the Hamburg plot began, which led to 9/11. They’ve had dealings with Iran and Iraq, North Korea—the French and the Germans and other European countries. We’re not doing this for the fun of it. This is to gather valuable intelligence, which helps not just us, but also helps the Europeans.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Congressmember Peter King, who may well be running for president of the United States. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, are Democratic partisans at all embarrassed by the fact that the most vocal proponents of these NSA spying programs, aside from people like Dianne Feinstein, are the very Republicans whom they spent years deriding as these radicals and extremists, people like Peter King or John Boehner or Michele Bachmann, all of whom have very vigorously defended President Obama’s spying program? Does that give Democrats any pause at all about what the real value or purpose of these spying programs are?

What Peter King is essentially telling the French and telling the world is that they ought to be grateful that the United States government is invading the privacy of their citizens by the millions and intercepting their communications data. And I think that message is resonating really quite poorly around the world. This is not 1982, where the United States can simply dictate imperialistically to the rest of the world what it ought to be grateful for and have the rest of the world necessarily accept it with reverence. It’s a much different world. And I think Peter King lives in that age that no longer really exists.

But look, this is the claim that every power faction uses whenever they engage in mass surveillance, which is they try to tell the population, “Don’t worry. We’re doing this because we love you. We want to protect you. This is for your own good.” And in every single case when powerful factions are permitted to engage in surveillance in the dark without really any accountability—not often, but inevitably, always—it is radically abused. And that’s what makes this so dangerous.

And it’s not surprising that people like Peter King are finding common cause with people like Dianne Feinstein or even Nancy Pelosi, the sort of establishment leaders of both political parties, to defend these systems, because these systems do vest those in power with extreme amounts of authority to do all sorts of things that people in power always want to do.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein is introducing legislation that would codify the NSA spying, that would grant the NSA explicit authority to gather records, listing the numbers, duration and time of all U.S. telephone calls, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, is there anything more indicative of just how broken Washington is, that the person who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is a committee that was created in the wake of the findings of the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, that was intended to serve as a restraint and a check on what the Intelligence Committee does, is the greatest loyalist and the most servile devotee of protecting and shielding the authority of that community, named Dianne Feinstein? I mean, it just shows how—what a complete joke and a travesty the idea of congressional oversight has actually become.

And what the Dianne Feinsteins and the John Boehners of the world are doing right this very minute is they know that the public is outraged by these revelations, that they need to be placated symbolically. And so, what they’re trying to do is to devise legislation that, with this very Orwellian tactic, will slap the word “reform” on it and say that it’s designed to reel in some of the abuses of theNSA, but which are really—in title, are designed to let the NSA continue to do exactly what they’ve been doing, and in many cases, as you just suggested, even strengthen the NSA further. Remember, these are the people who defended, who joined together—the Republican and Democratic party leadership defended, with the White House, the ability of the NSA to continue to bulk spy on American citizens, to collect all of our phone bills, showing all of the telephone calls we make and receive. And there’s a coalition of outsiders in Washington, both on the right and the left, who are working to undermine that. But the tactics of the NSA loyalists, like Dianne Feinstein, is to produce legislation that they can deceive people into believing is reform, when in reality it does the opposite.

AMY GOODMAN: In an interview on Thursday, the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, called for newspapers to stop reporting on its secret surveillance.

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: I think it’s wrong that—that newspaper reporters have all these documents, 50,000 or whatever they have, and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know, it just doesn’t make sense. We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers. But from my perspective, it’s wrong, and to allow this go on is wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, that was Keith Alexander.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. First of all, what General Alexander said there—and remember, he’s probably the most powerful military official in the United States. I think everybody, more or less, agrees on that. He didn’t actually say that newspapers should stop publishing. He said something far more pernicious. He said, “We,” namely the government, “should come up with ways to stop them from continuing to report.” And he then said, “I’m not really sure exactly what ways there are, but the courts and the Congress should try and figure that out.” Now, I can’t imagine, in a minimally free country, how courts and Congress could get together and stop journalists from reporting on newsworthy stories, the way that General Alexander is calling for something to be done. I mean, if that isn’t an extraordinarily creepy and authoritarian expression of sentiment, I don’t really know what is. And to think that this is the person who Democratic loyalists and Republican authoritarians argue should be entrusted with this massive, suspicionless spying system and to control it and operate it in the dark is stunning. Who would ever trust anyone, let alone somebody who has that instinct for the government to silence journalists, with running that kind of a system?

I also noticed that he said something very interesting and disturbing, which is, he sees journalists as, quote, “selling” documents. Now, selling top-secret documents, which was what he accused journalists of, is espionage. It’s treason. It’s what people like Aldrich Ames and other people are in prison for life for having done. So is that what the government, the United States government—is that the official view of the U.S. government about what this reporting is, that we are “selling” top-secret documents? That didn’t just come out of the air, that phraseology. That must be lingering somewhere. And I think it’s an extremely disturbing interview that he gave that requires a lot more attention.

AMY GOODMAN: Should security officials, like James Clapper, head of national intelligence, who lied before Congress when they asked if he was spying on Americans and said, “No,” and afterward said he doesn’t know what possessed him to lie—he didn’t use the word “lie” there, to not tell, you know, the full truth—should they be charged with perjury?

GLENN GREENWALD: Of course. I mean, it’s not technically perjury, because I believe that the committee chairman, before which he appeared, did not actually swear him and force him to take an oath. This is an informal practice that’s very bad in Washington. When top officials testify before the Senate, they don’t require them often to take an oath, because it’s somehow insulting to their integrity or something to ask them to do it. But whether you take an oath or not, it’s a felony under the United States code to mislead and lie to the American Congress. There were officials prosecuted under that statute as part of the Iran-Contra scandal, although many of them were ultimately pardoned and otherwise shielded. Baseball players were prosecuted under this statute for going before Congress and falsely denying steroid use.

So, for the top national security official in the United States to go to the Senate and lie to their faces and deny that the NSA is doing exactly that which our reporting proved that the NSA was in fact doing is plainly a crime, and of course he should be prosecuted, and would be prosecuted if we lived under anything resembling the rule of law, where everybody is held and treated equally under the law, regardless of position or prestige. Of course, we don’t have that kind of system, which is why no Wall Street executives have been prosecuted, no top-level Bush officials were prosecuted for torture or warrantless eavesdropping, and why James Clapper hasn’t been prosecuted despite telling an overt lie to Congress. And what’s even more amazing, though, Amy, is that not only has James Clapper not been prosecuted, he hasn’t even lost his job. He’s still the director of national intelligence many months after his lie was revealed, because there is no accountability for the top-level people in Washington.

And the final thing to say about that is, there’s all kinds of American journalists who love to go on television and accuse Edward Snowden of committing all these grave and horrible crimes. They’re so brave when it comes to declaring Edward Snowden to be a criminal and calling for [inaudible]. Not one of them has ever gone on television and said, “James Clapper committed crimes, and he ought to be prosecuted.” The question that you just asked journalistically is such an important and obvious one, yet not—none of the David Gregorys or Jeffrey Toobins or all these American journalists who fancy themselves as aggressive, tough reporters, would ever dare utter the idea that James Clapper ought to be arrested or prosecuted for the crimes that he committed, because they’re there to serve those interests and not to challenge or be adversarial to them.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, opinions are changing, meaning the pundits and writers are changing their views, like Richard Cohen of The Washington Post_, whose latest piecestory.html says, “What are we to make of Edward Snowden? I know what I once made of him. He was no real whistleblower, I wrote, but ‘ridiculously cinematic’ and ‘narcissistic’ as well. As time has proved, my judgments were just plain wrong,” he says. And I want you to respond to that and also the significance of this weekend’s protest, because I dare say what has changed is the massive grassroots response, whether it’s in the streets or just people being horrified at what’s taking place. But the significance of the rally that took place on Saturday that Edward Snowden sent a message to?

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, you know, look, Richard Cohen is—has long been one of the most, I would say, trite and dishonest American columnists. He has his job because these positions have always been life-tenure positions. Once you get a job as a Washington Post columist, you keep it forever. That said, the facts that have emerged are so completely contrary to the script from which these Washington journalists were reading, all in unison at the very beginning, that he just couldn’t any longer maintain that with a straight face. Literally—I went back when I was writing my book, and I looked at all this—within 24 to 48 hours of Edward Snowden’s identity being revealed by our article on June 10th in The Guardian, countless pundits and reporters and Democratic Party loyalists were—who didn’t know the first thing about Snowden—were all singing the same song, which is that he was a fame-seeking narcissist—this was the cliché they all invoked—and wanted to damage the United States. And the facts were always so completely contrary to that. He refused every single television interview once he revealed himself, because he wanted to make sure that the focus stayed away from him personally and stayed on the substance of the NSA revelations. And as Richard Cohen finally realized and pointed out, he could have done all sorts of things with the material that he possessed, if he wanted to harm the United States or was interested in enriching himself. He could have sold it to foreign intelligence services for millions of dollars. He could have passed it to enemy governments. He did none of that. He sacrificed his entire life, unraveled his life, sacrificed his liberty, in order to inform the world about what was being done to their privacy. And so, the script, the clichés that they were all given and which they all mindlessly recited, that he was a fame-seeking narcissist, couldn’t have been further from the truth. And kudos to Richard Cohen for finally acknowledging and admitting that.

As far as the rally is concerned, you know, I think there was an attempt early on to say that people in general don’t really care about privacy, don’t care about civil liberties. I’ve been hearing this for the last seven or eight years as I’ve made that my principal focus. And the fact that here we are five months later, and these revelations are every bit as consequential and are riveting people around the world as they were five months ago, just proves how true that is. The fact that there is a rally of people who are disregarding the sort of standard partisan divisions or ideological conflicts coming together—right, left, center—and realizing that their enemies are the people in government from both political parties who believe that their powers should be exercised in secret and with no accountability, really is a testament to how much privacy is valued around the world. Human beings understand instinctively why the private realm is so crucial. Edward Snowden is considered a hero in countless nations around the world. And it is true, of course, that there’s an authoritarian strain in American political culture that says that has anybody who defies government authority and dictate, who exposes things that government officials shall—have decreed shall be kept secret, is an evil and bad person, but this is really a fringe and increasingly marginalized view. And I think you see people use the Internet increasingly for everything that they do more, coming to see these—this surveillance system over which they have no control and didn’t know about until four months ago as being really dangerous and threatening.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, it isn’t—something that isn’t not talked about as much or written about as much, extremely threatening to these governments—for example, what you exposed in Brazil working with Globo, the newspaper, the spying, the—most of the media has focused on Dilma Rousseff, the president, and she refused to come to a state dinner in protest this month. But the spying on Petrobras goes to bigger point, that—since the Cold War is over, that a lot of U.S. intelligence is used to spy for corporations. And the significance of this, of what the NSA is doing?

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, it’s a really important point, Amy. I mean, the spying on the individual leaders gets a lot of attention, in part because those individual leaders seem not to get truly angry until it’s revealed that not just millions of their citizens, but actually they themselves, are being spied on. That’s just the nature of political leaders.

But the bulk of the reporting has been about two things in these other countries: number one, the mass indiscriminate spying on the populations, millions and millions of calls and emails every single day; and then, secondly, what you just referenced, which is the clearly economic espionage. That’s significant for two reasons. Number one, the U.S. government has gone around telling the world, from President Obama on down, from the beginning of these stories, that this spying is necessary and justified to protect the American people from terrorism and to preserve national security. And yet, so much of the reporting we’ve done has proven that to be an utter lie. I mean, they’re spying on Petrobras, as you just said. They are spying on the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy in conjunction with the Canadian intelligence service, which just happens to oversee the industry in Brazil in which Canadian companies have the greatest interest. We’ve reported on extreme levels of surveillance at the Organization of American States or at economic conferences in Latin America designed to negotiate economic accords between countries. And so, what it’s really doing is it’s making it clear that the United States government’s claims to the world cannot be trusted, that when President Obama opens his mouth and justifies these programs, everyone now knows that what comes out of his mouth is false. And I think that’s the job of journalists in—to hold people accountable that way, but it also has serious repercussions for how American politicians are perceived in the world and what the role of the United States government is in the world.

But the other aspect to it is, is that the United States government has been very vocally running around for years accusing China of engaging in espionage and surveillance for economic advantage and industrial advantage. And these revelations prove that the United States is doing exactly the same thing. And if you reveal to populations around the world that their calls are being spied on by the millions, they’ll first wonder, “Why are my calls of interest to the U.S. government?” But when it becomes apparent that the United States government is doing this for economic advantage, they start to feel personally implicated, like they’re being actually robbed. Petrobras is an incredibly important company for Brazil. It funds a lot of their social programs, and it’s state-owned. It’s a source of national pride. And people understand that the reason they’re spying on Petrobras or on the Ministry of Mines and Energy or economic conferences isn’t because they think there are terrorists or other bad people inside those institutions; it’s because the United States government wants undue economic advantage—exactly what they denied they do and what they claim only China does.

AMY GOODMAN: Pretty interesting that after you testified in the Brazilian Senate, the members of the Senate put on Edward Snowden masks.

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By Zeynep Kandur, Ä°stanbul, Turkey

To the Editor:

Women shout slogans to protest against a ban on the wearing Islamic head scarves in universities, in Ankara, Turkey.  Photograph by Burhan Ozbilici, AP

In response to the letter written by Professor Carol Delaney, dated October 9, 2013:

Professor Delaney claims that the lifting of the ban by the Turkish government on headscarves in government offices is not a step towards democracy, but rather a step on the slippery slope towards the Islamist state Prime Minster Erdogan desires.

First of all, let it be stated for the record that Prime Minister Erdogan has never expressed a desire to establish an Islamic state. After ten years of single-party rule, AK Party has made no move towards an Islamic state.

The lifting of the headscarf ban is something that has directly affected 65% of the adult female population in Turkey; to classify this as undemocratic is beyond comprehension. During the summer Gezi Park events, a letter was posted on Change. Org (link http://smart.aksam.com.tr/Home/ newsdetail?7/guncel/basortusuz-kadinlardan-basortusune-ozgurluk-bildirisi/haber-221420). The letter, signed by a large number of secular women, states that any form of discrimination between covered and non-covered women in Turkey is unacceptable.

For decades covered women have been denied equal rights; they have been prevented from pursuing further education. They have been denied the right to pursue a career in public employment. More insidiously, they were even prevented from attending graduation ceremonies for their children or loved ones, or seeking services from public offices. The end result was that covered women, who form a majority of the adult female population in Turkey, were marginalized in their own nation.

It is time that this politicization of the headscarf in Turkey comes to an end. The headscarf was made into a political symbol when it was banned in government offices. It was not politicized by those who wore it. It was politicized by those who wanted to remove it from the public sphere. The lifting of the ban is an attempt to restore balance in society.Indeed, the proposed regulations include a punishment for those who force women to remove their headscarves, as well as for those who force women to wear headscarves.

The claim that the headscarf in Turkey differs from the West is unacceptable. Throughout Turkey women from all levels of education, academics, business women and artists, wear the headscarf as an expression of their sincere belief. To suggest that these women are being manipulated or forced into wearing the headscarf is denigrating their belief and their intelligence. Moreover, how one interprets the command to cover in the Qur’an is surely a matter of personal choice, and cannot be dictated by another, in particular a person outside the religion.

Here Professor Delaney has taken advantage of her academic identity while abandoning the principle of objectivity. What she has written is reminiscent of Orientalism, a sociological approach that blatantly denigrated Eastern cultures. This can only mean that there are still people who continue to see non-Western societies as being made up of second-class beings who are in need of civilization. This reflects poorly both on Professor Delaney and on the field of anthropology.

It is time that the issue of the headscarf is removed from the agenda. It is time that women are allowed to make their own choice about wearing or not wearing a headscarf. It is time that the headscarf becomes a personal decision, not a political one.

Zeynep Jane Louise Kandur (translator, teacher)

Tugba Ercan (teacher)

AyÅŸe KardaÅŸ (advisor to the Prime Minister)

Assistant Professor Åžule Albayrak (university lecturer)

Please go to http://chn.ge/1bE0CiR and sign the petition.

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