Informed Comment

Chris Woods and Jack Serle write at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Though the hour was late, Yemen’s social media was still very much awake.

A US drone’s missiles had just slammed into a convoy of vehicles in a remote part of Yemen, killing three alleged militants.

The attack – like all other US drone strikes outside warzones – was supposed to be clandestine. Yet within minutes Sanaa-based lawyer Haykal Bafana was reporting the strike in almost-realtime. Just after 1am on May 17 he posted the following on Twitter:

#Yemen NOW | Missile strike on car in Wadi Hadhramaut. Near city of Shibam. Suspected US drone attack.

— Haykal Bafana (@BaFana3) May 16, 2012

As Bafana later explained to the Bureau, his relatives live in Shibam, a town of 30,000. ‘When the drone struck, the town – which was then experiencing a power cut – had completely lit up. My relatives got straight on the phone to tell me about the attack.’

‘No attacks so far’
The day prior to the strike Bafana had already tweeted that drones were behaving suspiciously in the area. Hadhramaut province, a sparsely-populated former sultanate, is far from Yemen’s troubled south, where most of the fighting and US drone strikes are currently taking place.

There has been militant activity there for some years, report locals, and surveillance drones have been active at night since 2010. But until now there had never been a drone strike. ‘But suddenly four or five days ago, my relatives were reporting drones over them in daylight, all the time, which was rare. Militants were also being seen moving about in the area, maybe preparing the way for an evacuation from the fighting in the south. Everyone was expecting something to happen’, Bafana recalls. He tweeted the news to his followers.

#Yemen | Hearing multiple claims of drone sightings in Hadhramaut, especially in Shibam/Qatn directorates (KSA route). No attacks so far. — Haykal Bafana (@BaFana3) May 15, 2012

When the deadly attack finally came in the early hours of Thursday morning, the target itself was hardly a secret.

Earlier, Arabic-language online media in the provincial capital of al-Mukalla had reported that a convoy of alleged al Qaeda rebels was heading north. That news was also swiftly tweeted.

Others were clearly also charting the convoy’s progress. As the vehicles approached Shibam at around 1am local time, at least one car, a Toyota Hilax, was destroyed by missiles from above. Yemen’s own air force has neither the know-how nor the equipment to launch a precision strike on moving vehicles in the dark.

Lawyer Haykal Bafana

News agencies would later report the attack as a drone strike, naming two of the dead as Zeid bin Taleb and Mutii Bilalafi, both described as local al Qaeda leaders. Like the dozens of US drone strikes in Yemen that preceded it, Thursday’s attack was supposed to be secret. Yet Twitter and other social media were tracking in near-real time the events surrounding the operation.

‘It is incredible how the same type of technology used by the CIA to kill people with drones in the Yemen, is empowering the Yemenis to tweet the attacks as they are happening,’ Noel Sharkey, professor of robotics at the University of Sheffield told the Bureau.

‘They can send us all pictures and bring us closer to the horror they are experiencing. Technology in the small may eventually bring down the over-use of military technology in the large.’

#NoDrones
Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter – which played an important role in Yemen’s Arab Spring uprising – are now being used by activists to draw attention to a large increase in US drone strikes in recent weeks.

As Haykal Bafana notes, within minutes of his tweeting Monday’s attack the news was also posted on Facebook and on local Arabic micro-news sites. ‘Web use is as low as 2% here in Yemen. But it still makes a big difference. Many people get their news from the small local media sites rather than from foreign or state agencies. And Twitter is increasingly important.’

When President Obama’s chief counter terrorism adviser John Brennan visited Sanaa on Sunday, Twitter witnessed an online protest with the hashtag NoDrones.

Brennan do you hear us?!!! We say #NoDrones #NoDrones #NoDrones. You are killing innocent people and creating more enemies in #Yemen. — نون عربية (@NoonArabia) May 13, 2012

Yemen-based youth activist Sadam al-Adwar (@sadamtweety), for example, said ‘I’m against #terrorism & #extremism, i’m also against #drones. It’s counter-productive & fuels more extremism.’

And @WomanFromYemen, otherwise known as NGO consultant Atiaf al-Wazir, told her more than 8,000 followers: ‘For every headline you read regarding “militants” killed by drones in #Yemen, think of the civilians killed that are not reported. #NoDrones.’

Liveblogging without knowing it
Yesterday’s Yemen drone strike appears to be the first in which events were reported on in real time.

‘I’ve never heard of an example of people tweeting while drones were actually in the area,’ said Dr Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Policy, an expert on Yemen security issues.

‘It really gets to the myth that you can keep these strikes covert, and if you do not have an information campaign that supports their use, you leave yourself flat-footed by people reporting what is being done in real time.’

There is a precedent. Last year a Pakistani man unknowingly tweeted the presence of US Special Forces attack helicopters on the way to kill Osama bin Laden. On May 1 last year Pakistani IT consultant Sohaib Athar tweeted the following.

Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).

— Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 1, 2011

After a ‘huge window shaking bang’ he debated the significance of the night’s events on Twitter, even as US Special Forces carried out their controversial raid. He quipped to a follower that ‘moving to Abbottabad was part of the ‘being safe’ strategy.’

But as the news of Bin Laden’s death broke Athar lamented ‘Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.’

Follow chrisjwoods and jackserle on Twitter

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Mirrored from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

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A federal judge has ruled unconstitutional portions of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which provided for indefinite imprisonment for journalists and activists who reported on organizations deemed ‘terrorist’ by the US government.

Judge Katherine Forrest ruled,

“The statute at issue places the public at undue risk of having their speech chilled for the purported protection from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘associated forces’ – i.e., ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’ The vagueness of Section 1021 does not allow the average citizen, or even the government itself, to understand with the type of definiteness to which our citizens are entitled, or what conduct comes within its scope.”

The vagueness is such that prominent figures such as Rudy Giuliani have palled around with the MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq or People’s Holy Jihadis) of Iran, which was on the terrorism watch list for years, with no adverse reaction from the government. But now the Israel lobbies have succeeded in getting the MEK, which has a secret alliance with Israeli intelligence, removed from the list! So could you meet them before? Report on their views? Now? Note that remaining on the list is Lebanon’s Hizbullah, a national liberation organization that got back Lebanese territory from an illegal Israeli invasion and occupation that killed tens of thousands of people.

If we let the US government determine to whom we can speak and what we can say, assuming our words represent no clear and present danger of provoking violence, we may as well just trade in our US passports for an Iranian one.

You know, the Right Wing in Congress has been pulling this stuff for decades, and it only stops when the real Americans put their feet down. Ted Kennedy used to just rule this kind of bullcrap out of bounds in the Senate. But apparently Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi just don’t care, and neither does Barack Obama. There are a whole series of bad decisions that the three of them could have stopped if they had bothered.

Cenk Uygur interviews journalist Tangerine Bolen on the implications:

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h/t @Amirmizroch

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The Facebook IPO may or may not be a good business investment, but the Facebook phenomenon hasn’t faded in one area of the world– the Middle East. The social networking site, along with Twitter, was deployed by the young revolutionaries in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria as an aid to toppling the sclerotic old kleptocracies that were ruining their lives, and they are so far 4 for 2.

While General Motors recently pulled its advertising from Facebook, expressing skepticism that it was selling many cars, Middle East advertisers are still flocking to the site. They caution, however, that you can’t just pile up robot-induced ‘likes’– you have to set up an interactive site (probably with an employee to run it). Arab advertisers are interested in the site’s vast expansion, and it has implications even for gaming. (“Game over” and similar phrases played a role in the 2011 revolutions).

The site continues to grow in popularity in the region. Facebook users jumped from 19 million at the end of 2010 to 43 million today. Arabic is the fastest growing language at Facebook.

Egypt is the single largest source of subscribers, with nearly 11 million. That is about 13% of the population, and about 63 percent of the online population. Egypt is number 20 in the world for Facebook usage.

For women in a conservative society where public space is defined as male, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube offer significant avenues for public speaking and leadership. Likewise, because the old men of the military council and the political parties are not adept at the internet, it is an arena of youth leadership and culture. People also use it a lot for cultural purposes, as with advertising music concerts or public talks of wide interest. The Egyptian newspapers, bewilderingly, lack any announcements of events of that sort (I don’t even see many movie ads in them).

The next few countries by absolute numbers in the region are Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia. But note that the UAE is tiny in population, so that the proportion of the population using Facebook must be enormous.

The users, as one might expect, are mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings, and about 65% are male, while 35% are female.

There is no correlation between Facebook penetration and revolutionary politics. Algeria has seen only small demonstrations, and the National Liberation Front (FLN), the old line party that made the 1962 revolution, won last week’s parliamentary elections. Morocco saw some demonstrations in the thousands, and the king announced some small reforms (he will now appoint the prime minister from the ranks of the largest party in parliament), but there hasn’t been a big change.

I don’t know of any trouble in the UAE at all. In Saudi Arabia there were some demonstrations last year, and there have been rallies in the Shiite Eastern Province, but the Kingdom increased social welfare benefits and pumped more oil, and seems to have bribed the population to stay quiet. In the face of the twin threats to the Gulf oil monarchies of the Arab Spring and of Iranian power, the Saudis have launched an initiative to turn the Gulf Cooperation Council (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia) into a European Union-type entity. The policy especially emphasized a Saudi-Bahrain union to contain the restive Bahrain Shiite majority. But the initiative appears to have faltered on GCC fears of Saudi hegemony. In any case, Facebook hasn’t been used except in Bahrain (which has relatively low penetration) for revolutionary purposes in the Gulf.

Facebook is a tool of communications. It can be used for lots of purposes. Where the young people wanted to use it to make a revolution, as in Tunisia and Egypt, it helped them. But it doesn’t cause anything to happen in and of itself. Political will is still primary.

In Egypt, it is ominous that a committee is looking in to UAE-style filtering of the internet, allegedly to block pornographic sites. But filters, once set, and can be used politically. The committee noticed with dismay, however, that when the Mubarak government pulled the plug on the internet in Egypt, Twitter usage surged by 30,000 in that country, suggesting that people had workarounds (probably mainly satellite-based services).

I find it interesting that Facebook does not seem to be important in the Egyptian presidential race. I can’t see that any of the candidates have active sites with large numbers of likes. It is mostly campaign posters and one televised debate, and newspaper and t.v. reporting on speeches. You wonder if the young people maybe are not that interested, since most of the plausible candidates are rather ancient.

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Angie Zambarakji writes at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

A girl’s school in Saudi Arabia has defied a ban on sport for girls by letting pupils play basketball. This comes comes after Human Rights Watch has claimed that women’s limited access to sport was contributing to rising obesity in the country.

Under the Kingdom’s strict Islamic legal system, girls are not allowed to play sports at state-run schools, although some private girls’ schools have sports programmes. Powerful Saudi clerics have also issued religious rulings against female participation in sports.

Sports minister Prince Nawwaf al-Faisal, who is also the head of the Saudi National Olympic Committee, told Al-Watan recently that the kingdom will not send female athletes to participate in the London Olympics. Like Qatar and Brunei, Saudi Arabia has never had a female athlete compete in the Olympics. However, Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that bars women from competitive sports in general.

There is nothing in the Qur’an that forbids Muslim women from exercising, but in conservative Muslim countries women are often banned from exercising uncovered, and from having physical contact with men.

Besides facing discrimination in schools and competitive sports, Saudi women also encounter obstacles when exercising for their health or playing team sports for fun. In 2009, the kingdom announced a ban on licensing gyms for women, and the government went as far as closing established women’s gyms.

In 2009, Sheikh Abdullah al-Maneea, who sits on the official Supreme Council of Religious Scholars, said the ‘movement and jumping’ needed in football and basketball might cause girls to tear their hymens. This might give the appearance that they had lost their virginity.

In Saudi Arabia, women must also have the permission of a male ‘guardian’, usually the closest male relative, to travel, work and have elective surgery. They are also banned from driving. The country’s religious police, the mutawwa’in, often subject women to harassment and physical punishment if they break any of these laws.

These laws, together with cultural and religious expectations, effectively limit women to a sedentary lifestyle – and this has contributed to rising obesity among Saudi women.

Forty-five per cent of middle-aged Saudi women are obese, according to a 2010 study conducted by the Saudi Diabetes and Endocrinology Society. The study showed that a number of factors have contributed to the spread of obesity among Saudis, one of them being the lack of physical activity. The prevalence of obesity among women was found to be far greater than among men.

In February, Human Rights Watch published a report, Steps of the Devil: Denial of Women’s and Girls’ Rights to Sport in Saudi Arabia, on the systematic discrimination against women in sport in Saudi Arabia, and the impact this has had on rates of obesity and diabetes, especially among women and girls.

Although Saudi Arabia has signed treaties that recognise the rights of women and girls to physical education, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Human Rights Watch found that in practice women are systematically excluded from sport and exercise.

The report found that while there are plans to improve access to sport in girls’ schools, there are few options for staying fit for women: the few health clubs that have sports or fitness equipment can be prohibitively expensive, while team sports for women are almost non-existent.

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Mirrored from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

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The news is going around breathlessly that 50.4% of births in the US in the past 12 months were to families categorized as ethnic minorities, presaging the time when ‘whites will be a minority’ in the US.

The unselfconscious deployment of these categories just takes your breath away. Who gets to decide which ones are ‘white’ and which ones ‘ethnic minorities?’

As historians such as David Roediger have shown, the idea of ‘whiteness’ is a relatively new racial category, and it has changed enormously over time.

Whiteness as it was constructed in the nineteenth century was not about skin color but about being Protestant and propertied. There were even distinctions within the group. WASP or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant did not refer to all Protestants of English heritage, but rather to a northeast elite that tended to marry within themselves and to have a disproportionate hold on political and business office. The Scottish-American elite was another subgroup (Presbyterian as opposed to Episcopalian).

So not all whites were equally white. Moreover, Catholic immigrants such as the Irish, the Poles and the Italians were either not considered white when they first came or were denoted as a lesser category of white. Jews, Arabs, Japanese and Chinese were also not considered white. Indeed, a special law was made to keep Chinese in particular out of the country.

Over time, the Catholic minorities who immigrated into the US in the big 1880-1924 wave, before racist immigration laws were implemented, became accepted as ‘white.’ In the past 30 years, Jews have been accepted as white. It is even possible, I think, to argue that middle class Blacks on the model of Bill Cosby’s the Huxtables have become ‘white.’ You’ll note that Harry Reid said of Obama the candidate that he ‘had no dialect,’ so for older ‘whites,’ blackness was in part cultural, wrought up with an imagined African-American speech pattern. Thus, the Obamas are in some sense ‘white,’ producing that odd argument about whether Obama is ‘black enough,’ which non-Americans must have found baffling.

In 1965 the US was finally too embarrassed to go on with the racist immigration laws and put a ceiling of 25,000 for each country in the world. That change kick-started a whole new big wave of immigration, which may now be ending. About a million a year had been coming, half of them from Latin America.

The Latinos have for the moment been categorized as non-white, but surely everyone can see how arbitrary that is. Many Latinos in Argentina and Brazil are of Italian ancestry. If they come to the US now, they are a ‘minority’ or ‘brown.’ But their cousins who just came straight to Rhode Island are ‘white.’ For that matter, why is there a difference among people who speak Romance languages and practice Catholicism, such that a Colombian is a ‘minority’ but a Calabrian is not? And consider that if a Sephardic Jewish family of Spanish ancestry immigrates from Israel, they are ‘white,’ but Spanish Catholic families who settled in Mexico and then came to the US recently are not (that’s an interesting reversal!)

Arabs are an interesting case. I’d argue that Lebanese Christians became ‘white.’ Arab Muslims were on the verge of becoming white before 9/11 but may have been at least temporarily demoted. (They are white in the census categories, but social acceptance has fallen). My guess is that demotion is a temporary blip, since they are typically well educated and well off, and over time economic eliteness tends to produce racial eliteness in the US.

And, the old prejudices against the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox ‘Slavs’ has completely collapsed, so no one thinks Poles or other Eastern Europeans are not ‘white.’

So given the history of ‘whiteness,’ likely the new wave of Latinos will be awarded the category over time. My guess is that Asians will be, as well. Remember, it isn’t about ‘race,’ it is about a weird kind of social status. By the way, Apartheid South Africa declared Japanese to be ‘white.’

Ultimately, the whole idea of whiteness can only be kept going through a set of racial and class exclusions. Working-class African-Americans eternally get the short end of the stick. Recent immigrant groups are often excluded along with them.

The better outcome would be to just stop using the word ‘white.’ As should be clear from the above, it doesn’t actually mean anything. If you really had to categorize citizens of the US by ancestry (why?), use geographical terms. We have African-Americans. Why not have European-Americans or Euros? Since there may not be a currency called that much longer, we can repurpose the term.

We should also stop using the phrase ‘ethnic minority’ to refer to post-1965 immigrant groups if we are not going to apply it to the post-1880 wave. Just be specific. If you mean Latinos, say that. If you mean Asian-Americans, say that. And, you may need a term for the new wave of African immigrants other than “African-American,” since they aren’t exactly the same (Africans have complained to me about this issue).

Me, I don’t want to be called ‘white’ and I hope we can get rid of the whole idea of whiteness. You go back a thousand years and all of us have diverse ancestries. Most Europeans are part Arab and many are part Jewish. In the US, a lot of people have Native and African ancestors that they don’t know about anymore.

Best of all if we can just say that in the US, we are all Americans and stop categorizing people with regard to their adaptation to ultraviolet waves. It is anyway a temporary adaptation. If you took Swedes and left them in the Congo for 13,000 years, the mothers that could shield their embryos from harsh ultraviolet rays better would be selected for, and they would be darker, and eventually the group would be ‘black.’ If you took Congolese to Sweden, the mothers that could provide their embryos vitamin D more reliably in a low UV environment would be selected for, and over time the group would get ‘white.’ (In fact, we’re all from Africa, so that is exactly what happened historically). It is a minor epidermal health issue, not a matter of character or essence. Get rid of it.

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Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi addressed Egyptian troops on Wednesday and attempted to raise their morale for praising them as the guarantors of Egypt’s security.

Al-Masrawi reports:

“Field Marshal Tantawi said, “We are heading in the right direction.” He deplored the allegations that sometimes issue from activist organizations “that we are in enmity with this state or that or that we will abrogate a treaty with such-and-such country”… He added, “We do not enter into war save if we are forced to and because we feel there in danger. For that reason, we must always keep our eyes wide…”

Some Egyptians are afraid that the army will attempt to tamper with the elections so as to bring Ahmad Shafiq to power. (He is a man of the old regime and only barely survived politically). He appears to have been attempting to allay those suspicions.

Incredibly, Tantawi’s speech was misinterpreted in Israel as a threat of some sort. The speech was just trying to reassert control over the troops, and to encourage them to pride in country. He implicitly criticized Egypt’s Left and far right, insisting on the foreign policy status quo, and reaffirming that Egypt’s hefty army would never be deployed aggressively.

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