Today's Headlines and Commentary
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to all.
The news cycle belongs to Iran.
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Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to all.
Predictably, Rand Paul argues in Foreign Policy that the President's proposed reforms fall short of protecting Americans. And David Rothkopf of FP has harsher words for the President's Friday address:
The news cycle belongs to Iran. The interim nuclear deal struck between the P5+1 and Iran takes effect today; Tehran is temporarily slowing its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Here is the New York Times story; Bloomberg says investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency have reported that suspension activities began at about 9 a.m. local time. The BBC confirms that Iran's concessions boil down to four:
Iran will start diluting its stockpile of 20%-enriched uraniumAll 20%-enriched uranium will be gone within six monthsDaily access will be provided to the Fordo uranium enrichment site near the holy city of QomMonthly inspections will be allowed at the Arak heavy water reactor
Foreign ministers are meeting in the Swiss city of Montreux on Wednesday in advance of the Syria peace talks---and the UN has invited Iran, apparently catching the U.S. off-guard, writes the Times. Objections are mounting, according to the same newspaper, in light of Iran's acceptance of the invitation but refusal to meet preconditions. The Syrian Coalition is threatening to withdraw from talks unless UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon retracts the invitation, says Reuters.
The Washington Post notes that the peace conference, like efforts to eradicate Syria's chemical weapons stockpile, has a subtext---it will require the cooperation of the Assad regime, which suggests Syria's embattled leader won't be going anywhere soon. Indeed, this weekend Interfax news agency quoted President Bashar al-Assad as refusing to step down, though now his office is claiming, without further elaboration, that the story is inaccurate. The Guardian has details.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of an al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebel group, called for rebel factions to stop fighting and unite against the Assad government. The message's authenticity could not be confirmed, says the Associated Press.
Seven separate bombs killed 26 people and wounded 67 today in Baghdad, reports Al Jazeera, as security forces fight Sunni Muslim militants around Falluja and Ramadi. The U.S. is rushing small arms to the Iraqi government in hopes they will be passed on to local Sunni tribes battling militants for control of Anbar Province, reports the Times. Iraq has launched an offensive to push al-Qaeda out of a city west of Baghdad, wrote the AP this weekend.
The Taliban killed 20 soldiers on Sunday near North Waziristan and another 10 people in a crowded market near Pakistan army headquarters on Monday. Reuters has more.
Last Friday, Taliban suicide bombers blew apart a popular Lebanese restaurant in downtown Kabul, killing 21 people, including 13 foreigners from at least half a dozen countries. The massacre marks one of the largest in-country attacks on Western civilians in a decade, according to the Times. Another Times story suggests the attacks "ha[ve] helped bridge an emotional divide" between ordinary Afghans and the few thousand Westerners in Afghanistan who until recently were largely shielded from the war's violence.
Attackers armed with machetes ambushed Muslims in Bangui, killing 22 people in the latest episode of brutal sectarian violence in the Central African Republic. Here's the AP.
Ukraine is in tumult. The BBC reports that violent clashes have broken out across Kiev as anti-government protesters demonstrate against restrictive new laws designed to dismantle the public protests that have swept the capital since November. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has agreed to negotiate with the pro-EU opposition.
President Vladimir Putin is promising 40,000 police and special forces officers at the Olympic Games, reports the Los Angeles Times. For its part, the U.S. is sending fewer American security experts to Sochi than to any other Olympics in the past ten years, observes the Wall Street Journal. U.S. intelligence officials say Russia's historic reluctance to allow foreign military forces into the country may be problematic, should the U.S. need to evacuate Americans from the Games. Here's the Reuters story, via the Guardian.
Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, who has been held in North Korea for over a year now, appeared at a news conference to appeal to the U.S. for negotiations securing his release. The Times has details.
As usual, surveillance news commands its own corner of the mediaverse:
Everyone has an opinion on President Obama's Friday speech on NSA reforms. Geoffrey Stone, one of the five members of the President's Review Group, weighs in on the President's response to three of the group's recommendations over at the New Republic.
Barton Gellman of the Post says that President Obama's claim that “the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security" relies on a narrow definition of "spying":
It does not include the ingestion of tens of trillions of records about the telephone calls, e-mails, locations and relationships of people for whom there is no suspicion of relevance to any threat.
At just the moment when the country needed the constitutional scholar who was bold enough to speak truth to power---the man who many of us thought we were electing in 2008 and then again in 2012---we instead got the wobbly, vague, 'trust me' of a run-of-the-mill pol.
Josh Gerstein of Politico suggests that several Obama administration officials have reason to think twice about giving Snowden clemency, given the fiasco over Clinton-pardoned financier Marc Rich.
House and Senate intelligence committee heads Rep. Mike Rogers and Sen. Dianne Feinstein went on NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday to applaud the President's speech. Rogers suggested that Russia may have helped Snowden leak NSA documents and then skip town. The Times cites a senior FBI official who stated on Sunday that the Bureau still believes Snowden acted solo. Here's the Washington Post's "Washington Wire" overview of the support and criticism from Congress post-speech.
Meanwhile Sean Wilentz of the New Republic questions the uniformly "adultatory treatment" that leakers Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange have enjoyed in the media. He writes:
Where liberals, let alone right-wingers, have portrayed the leakers as truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors, that’s hardly their goal. In fact, the leakers despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.
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Jane Chong is former deputy managing editor of Lawfare. She served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and is a graduate of Yale Law School and Duke University.
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