What is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

It’s become a familiar routine, and one that you’d only understand if you were the son of immigrants whose home country is in the news almost exclusively for violence. You wake up, check your phone, and see the news alerts that “something” happened. Some alerts include the names of someone prominent among the dead, and some mention a death toll. You rub your eyes and start to wake up for real.

Now it hits that you’ve seen this scene before, the last time something like this happened, and you’re 2,000 miles and 7 hours behind the news. It all went down while you were asleep. All you can do now is try to react or make sense of it.

A bomb blast exploded in downtown Beirut today. A senior politician in the Western-backed coalition, a close ally and friend of the Hariri family, Mohammed Chatah, was among those dead, along with at least five other people unlucky enough to be going about their day in the same area.

This same story has played out too many other times in Lebanon. As the fires in Syria continue to burn, Lebanon will be prone to flare-ups. Most politicians there find it difficult to remain neutral in a conflict so intertwined with Lebanon’s future, and so affected by larger regional powers, and so they are involved, one way or another.

And the aftermath is always the same. The party targeted will make an accusation. The accused will deny it. The dead will be buried, and life will go in Lebanon.

It’s not that the people have given up hope. It’s not that they are indifferent towards the violence. It’s the feeling of inevitability, of familiarity with what’s about to happen next. And the shrug that says “This has happened before in my lifetime, it’s happening again, and it will happen tomorrow. It’s out of my control.”
Because it sometimes does feel like it’s out of our control. Lebanon’s location, population, and the land it occupies have been both a blessing and a curse. My favorite way to describe Lebanon to friends who haven’t seen it is that you can have a beer on the beach, get in your car, and in an hour you’ll be on top of a mountain. The land is beautiful, and its location is desirable and advantageous. Lebanon is bordered on two sides by Syria, one by the sea, and one by Israel. There are at least six distinct religious groups in the country that constitute sizable minorities, at least 5% of the population each. Two of the largest power players in the region, Iran and Saudi Arabia, hold important influence over large parts of the government and country.

Although the country is known for its lengthy civil war, Lebanon hasn’t fought its own battles. It’s been fighting the battles of the region, of other countries, of powers much larger than its own. The push and pull of the regional cold war, fomented by the interference and king-making of the US government, has frequently played out in Lebanon. The only thing the people of Lebanon have control over is what they choose to do next.

The CIA is competing with the NSA for the title of "Most Secretive Organization in America". Prize unknown.

The release of a 6,000 page Senate report detailing the CIA’s torture and interrogation techniques during the Bush administration is being held up by intelligence officials and their Republican friends in the Senate, on the grounds that the report contains factual errors. Whether there actually are factual errors, we don’t know, because the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee maintain that the only errors the Agency pointed out to them was a “minor” one, which has since been corrected.

Why the Agency would want to stonewall the release of this report isn’t surprising, however. According to those familiar with the it, the report concludes that the interrogation techniques employed by the CIA during the Bush administration did not produce any information that led to the capture or death of any terrorist leaders, and in reality was counterproductive. This evidence would be damning to the proponents of torture, who claim that the country is safer because of these techniques, and that we would not have been able to kill Osama bin Laden and kill or capture any of his colleagues if not for using torture. 

It’s not clear if the CIA is hoping to block the release of the report forever, though. It could be. Another possibility is that the agency could be wrangling for time to present some sort of legal block to the release, on the grounds that the report could endanger national security, although this is unlikely. The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is that it is stalling to build concern around the veracity of the report’s facts, thus throwing the report’s conclusions into doubt right from the get go. It already has allies in the Republicans on the Committee, who have stated their opposition to the report’s damning of their former boss’s national security accomplishments. (A CBS/New York Times poll from earlier this year found that about half of Americans felt that George W. Bush had made the country safer during his presidency). You can bet that they would be making the rounds after the report’s release to fire shots at its findings. 

Which is all the more reason why we should hope that this report sees the light of day sooner rather than later. By revealing to the American people the facts around the effects of torture on our national security, it allows us to not only hold our current leaders more accountable, but make more informed decisions in the future. The same CBS/New York Times poll found that 37 percent of Americans thought waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques were sometimes justified. The number is less than half, but it’s not small enough, and it is no doubt buoyed by many people’s belief that these techniques have extracted useful information. The report would finally prove that notion to be false, a lie peddled by the organization and administration whose existence and MO depended on the American people believing it. Torturing our enemies not only damages our human rights record, it damages our national security record. It’s time for the current administration to push for this report’s release, hold those responsible for crimes accountable, and help the CIA and the entire country move past this regrettable chapter. 

Yet another drone strike gone wrong

Drone strike kills 15 wedding-goers in Yemen

It feels like we hear this story all too often. A US drone strike in Yemen hit a convoy of cars that were part of a wedding party, killing at least ten and up to seventeen innocent people. Local authorities said the intended target was al-Qaeda operatives. The number of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen has increased since Obama took office, and although the President has earned praise from many people on their effectiveness in eliminating terrorist threats, these strikes are a mark on his legacy and should be on the conscience of all Americans. They’re tantamount to sham trials and executions.

When an operation is run in this level of secrecy, we lose the notion of accountability. Who’s to blame when an aerial attack goes wrong and innocent civilians on the way to a wedding are killed? In most branches of the US military, attacks on civilians are investigated and there’s (usually) a clear determination as to who’s responsible. They can be investigated, disciplined if necessary and action can be taken to rectify the process. In the ambiguous and hazy environment of drone attacks, however, we don’t have the ability to hold those responsible for mistakes accountable, which makes the future efficacy of these operations extremely discouraging.  

The argument that these strikes are effective in combatting terrorism doesn’t hold sway when you consider the lives of those living under them - it’s a truly frightening existence. To a Yemeni (or a Pakistani), a drone strike is a random killing from the sky. They see no troops on the ground, who have faces and are humans just like them. Their entire notion of the US military is one of indiscriminate and omnipotent firepower, one that frequently cuts down civilians as well as combatants. And these combatants are benefitting from our drone strikes. Every mistake the US military makes that ends up killing civilians can be used as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. There is little evidence to show that the fear of a drone strike is dissuading many combatants from continuing the fight. 

It’s up to the US people to hold their government accountable for events like this, and the operations that led to it. If more people understood the consequences of these attacks, the support for them would decline. The American people never voted for this shadow war. They have no one to hold accountable for the mistakes made in it. And they shouldn’t stand by and let it continue. 

A Long Winter for Syrian Refugees

Heavy Snow Hammers Refugee Camps in Lebanon

     Syrian refugees in Lebanon are now having to weather not only a brutal civil war, but an unforgiving winter storm. As we here in the states start to thaw from our own winter storm, frigid weather and snow has hit many areas of Syria and Lebanon, bringing with it tough conditions for thousands. A large number of the approximately 800,000 Syrians who have fled to their smaller neighbor are living in makeshift camps and homes, many of these no more than plastic tarps made to keep out the rain and sun. Temperatures in the Bekaa Valley though, where around a third of the refugees have settled, have plunged to freezing and there’s little the people there can do to weather the storm.
The Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon has escalated in recent months, as more and more people cross the border to escape the fighting. The Syrian government has made important gains in recent weeks and months, but you can expect the inevitable increased funding and resistance from Saudi-funded forces to push back, drawing out this civil war even longer. This isn’t to say that refugees will easily be able to return to their homes after the war is done, either. Whether the Assad government remains standing or not, it’s likely that life will be dangerous as whoever ends up on top works to consolidate power and squash any opposition. This is a common occurrence in countries post-regime change, as the new (or newly affirmed) leadership works to ensure that its hold on power is absolute (after the Iranian Revolution of 1979,  a Khomeini-appointee named Sadeq Khalkhali carried hundreds of political executions, most of them without the benefit of a trial or jury, including a former prime minister).
In the meantime, Lebanon is already strained under the 450,000 Palestinian refugees already living within its borders. Although the refugees have largely carved out communities and camps for themselves throughout the country, the delicate sectarian balance in Lebanon makes it ripe for conflict. So far, thankfully, a tragic event like the Sabra and Shatila massacres hasn’t befallen the vulnerable Syrian refugee communities.
As the conflict stretches on, however, more and more Syrians escape into neighboring countries and there are more and more chances that spill over conflicts will rise. It also becomes increasingly apparent that the true losers in these unforgiving proxy wars aren’t countries or governments, but the people themselves.

On politics and media, and why we might be the problem

Although I’d like to believe that I’m not the kind of person who commentates on the mainstream media, living at home and not working has enabled me to not only easily receive a lot of my news from mainstream TV, but to have the luxury of thinking about how it’s delivered. I’ve come to rely on CNN for its round-the-clock coverage of news stories, no matter how undeserving of coverage they might be, and I take a perverse pleasure in sitting on my couch fuming about how poor I find their reporting.

I get that people like politics. It’s exciting, divisive, competitive, and there’s nothing quite like assigning the blame to the other party. But the media’s reliance on this back and forth between Republicans and Democrats as the only way to frame a news story is a disservice to both its viewership and its own reputation.

Since the launch of the Obamacare website, the bulk of the mainstream news coverage has been on not the merits of the law, including both its successes and shortcomings, but the political impact that the various glitches of the website have had. Whether this is because CNN doesn’t have anyone on their commentary panels that’s a healthcare expert, or because they believe the law is too confusing for their viewers to understand, it’s incredibly frustrating to hear the same rounds of “How will this affect the 2014 Midterm elections?” as the lead in for Obamacare stories. Why don’t we hear about how the law is affecting millions of Americans, good and bad? The main focus for an entire week was that the President’s earlier statement about who could keep their health insurance ended up not being true. However, the focus wasn’t on why people couldn’t keep their insurance, only that the President originally said they could and now they couldn’t. People have been viewing it as a reflection on the President’s credibility — it is, but that’s not the only story. At this point, the President’s credibility only matters in that it would help him win an election. He doesn’t have any more of those, so why does it matter?

Because the media can spin a story based on it. It’s this endless cycle that keeps us in the media’s grip. They only report on things in as much as it gives them a story either six minutes or six months down the road. This isn’t a new characteristic of the industry — it’s always been the case. It’s a business and it needs viewers to continue. So then the problem must be with the viewers. Are people actually interested in things only as CNN presents them?

It certainly feels like the general public’s perception of issues is in scope with the methods that CNN uses to present them. Although unscientific, it’s difficult not to glean a lot of information from Jimmy Kimmel’s experiment of asking people on the street whether they preferred the Affordable Care Act to Obamacare, and displaying the results. Many of the big political issues like Obamacare are very dense and unless a person has studied healthcare policy and economics, they’ll find it difficult to make a reasoned argument for or against the merits of the law. What they’ll instead stand for are the base opinions or values that they themselves hold, or that they’ve been told about by one of the political pundits on CNN. The media knows this, and doesn’t bother seriously studying the issues. It looks at the issues in the same depth that a person understands it.

A example of this approach can be seen in how Governor Chris Christie is mentioned in the media. The focus is more on how Christie is viewed and whether he is seen as pragmatic by voters and Americans, and almost not at all on his policies, his actions, or most importantly his record as Governor. This is in part due to Christie’s ability to make bold and controversial statements that steal the focus from anything that he is doing as governor. He must have found this out early in his career, and has been exploiting it ever since to make a name and image for himself, and not tied down to any ideology that could be attacked by his opponents. The media has gone along with this, as Christie is much more interesting to view in sound bites than in studying the effect his policies have had on poor New Jerseyans, or the state’s schools.

Perhaps the best way to combat these deficiencies of our media is for us to educate those around us as to the issues. This doesn’t mean to convince them of one policy against another, but rather to ensure that the actual policies themselves are studied. This is the only way to ensure that we can clearly see the impact that policies have on us, instead of being distracted by the politics.