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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Islamists Blamed for Uptick in Sinai Violence Following Morsi’s Ouster

An Al Jazeera English documentary looking at post-Mubarak Egypt through the lens of the Sinai Peninsula, produced by Anjali Kamat and broadcast on Dec. 18, 2012.

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick in Cairo reported this week, since the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi at the hands of Egypt’s military and the subsequent crackdown on Islamists there has been “a sharp uptick in violence in the relatively lawless Sinai region,” with attacks on security forces and Christians in the strategic but volatile peninsula.

On Monday, Islamists militants there attacked fired rocket-propelled grenades at a bus, killing three people and injuring seventeen, according to Egyptian state television. My colleague explained:

Mr. Morsi’s opponents blame his Islamist allies in the Muslim Brotherhood for encouraging the retaliation, but leaders of the group say it has not condoned violence in Egypt since the British occupation.

Although the attacks are very likely carried out by more militant Islamists angry at Mr. Morsi’s removal, some Brotherhood leaders have gone as far as suggesting that Egyptian intelligence agencies manufactured the violence or reports of violence as a way to cast blame on the Brotherhood.

Sinai is a profound strategic asset for Egypt, bordered on the west by the Suez Canal and on the east by Gaza and Israel, which occupied the region after the 1967 war.

British Pathé archival footage of the Sinai during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Israel returned the region to Egyptian control in 1982, under an agreement that placed strict limits were on the Egypt’s ability to deploy military forces in Sinai.

The peninsula is one of the poorest areas of Egypt, and has a long history as the stage for regional conflict, official neglect and spasms of violence.

Since Mr. Morsi’s ouster on July 3, at least thirteen people have been killed in the recent wave of attacks and dozens more have been wounded, according to Reuters, a slow but steady toll that is contributing to a sense that Sinai - an arid and mountainous wedge of land between Egypt’s major urban centers, Israel and the Gaza Strip - is slipping deeper into a state of lawlessness and chaos.

But those attacks have not just targeted uniformed members of the security forces, and Christian civilians living in the Sinai Peninsula have found themselves in militant’s cross hairs in recent weeks as well. In the days after Mr. Morsi’s ouster there were anti-Christian attacks in six of Egypt’s 27 provinces according to The Associated Press, including at least two separate, grisly killings in Sinai.

On July 6 a Coptic priest, 39-year-old Mina Aboud, was shot by unknown gunmen as he walked down a street in El-Arish, the largest city in Sinai and the capital of North Sinai province, the English-language news site Mada Masr reported.

On July 11, the decapitated body of a 60-year-old Christian man, Magdy Habashi, was discovered in a graveyard in the North Sinai town of Sheikh Zuweid, The A.P. reported. A Christian activist group, the Maspero Youth Union, posted an extremely graphic picture on Facebook, said to show Mr. Habashi’s severed head sitting on top of his stomach in what appeared to be a morgue. The group referred to him by the name Magdy Lamaey Habib, and said in a brief statement accompanying the picture that he was “a martyr of Christ” who had been killed by “jihadist followers of Mohamed Morsi.”

Video of a burning gas pipeline near El-Arish in Sinai, posted online on July 7 by the Egyptian news site Al-Masry Al-Youm

Lina Attalah and Mohamed Adam, two reporters for the Cairo-based Mada Masa, traveled to Sinai shortly after Mr. Morsi was removed from power to report on fears that the abrupt end of his presidency had turned the region into a “war zone.” While they met many people there who were angered by the military’s latest intervention in Egyptian politics, they also found suggestions that the peninsula might have become “a tool in a power play between Islamists and the military.”

There has been no evidence of organizational ties between militant groups operating in Sinai and the Muslim Brotherhood; there are in fact reported ideological rifts with these groups condemning the Brotherhood’s compromised commitment to the Islamist project.

But Islamists interviewed by Mada Masr in Sinai do not rule out that this could be a violent reaction to Morsi’s ouster, out of rage at the military’s eradication of what would have been the beginning of an Islamic project.

The scope of this reaction is yet to be seen, but also many in Sinai foresee deliberate exaggerations by the military to justify their consolidated grip on power. For them, many facts reported in Sinai are imaginary; and the essential fact is that the peninsula is a tool in a power play between Islamists and the military.

If the country’s two most well-organized political adversaries are indeed using the Sinai as a tool in a larger power play, they would not be the first ones to do so. Outsiders have long seen the peninsula as a means to an end, as Nicolas Pelham wrote in The New York Review of Books last year.

For Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who returned the peninsula to Egypt, it was a buffer zone between the Jewish state and a long-time foe, Mr. Pelham explained. Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president deposed in 2011, saw in its pristine beaches and coral reefs countless land deals waiting to be made. After regaining control of Sinai in 1982, his government began to transform its sparsely populated southern reaches into a string of tourist resorts, such as world-renowned Sharm El-Sheikh.

Under Mubarak, Sharm El-Sheikh and other beach towns played host to millions of package tourists and more than a few regional summits, but the peninsula’s largely Bedouin indigenous population was excluded from the economic boom. They were “ostracized by the Mubarak regime,” which viewed them “as a potential fifth column” for all manner of social ills, from Islamic militancy to what some called their collaboration with Israel during their 15 years of occupation, Mr. Pelham wrote.

Mr. Pelham, who wrote a paper on the region for the British think tank Chatham House last year, visited Sinai in August, 2012, one week after masked gunmen killed 16 Egyptian soldiers, the most violent incident to take place in the peninsula in years and a shocking black eye for the country’s mighty armed forces, which just weeks earlier had turned over power to Mr. Morsi.

In his Chatham House paper, “Sinai: The Buffer Erodes,” Mr. Pelham wrote: “Perhaps for the first time since Israel’s withdrawal 30 years earlier, the August 2012 killing of 16 Egyptian soldiers elevated North Sinai from a peripheral backwater to centre stage in Egyptian consciousness. Egyptians awoke to the reality of a security vacuum that three decades of lacklustre efforts had failed to fill.”

In response, Egypt’s military swept through the Sinai and Mr. Morsi demanded the resignation of the army chief, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, a move celebrated at the time as a signal that the new civilian president had brought the military fully to heel. But in Sinai, Mr. Pelham wrote, people were outraged by the government response.

To understand the visceral Bedouin anger over what at the time amounted to the rather mild response of six arrests for the killing of sixteen soldiers, I had to delve into the Bedouin’s troubled relationship with Mubarak’s pharaonic authority. For twenty years, the Bedouin watched as Mubarak and his cronies sequestrated their lands for the tourist industry, and gave nothing back. Bedouin attempts to obtain title deeds for long-demarcated tribal tracts were rebuffed, and their applications for posts in the army, the Interior Ministry, the foreign service, and any decision-making job in the state utilities were declined. While Mubarak built his hotel complexes on Sinai’s southern coast far away from the Bedouin population centers, northeastern Sinai, where Sheikh Asad and most Bedouin live, was starved of investment. Funds for a project to siphon water from the Nile to the arid coastal plain dried up soon after construction began. Frustrated by systematic rejection, between 2004 and 2006 North Sinai’s edouin sought revenge, bombing South Sinai’s hotels and killing over a hundred.

Mubarak’s dragnet that followed only protracted the conflict. Barred by the Camp David Accords from sending soldiers to Sinai, Interior Ministry forces penned and tortured thousands in cells with standing room only. Many inmates and their relatives came to view Egypt as much an occupying force as they had Israel. After lying low during Mubarak’s twilight years and busying themselves with the development of the alternative tunnel economy to Gaza, they saw Mubarak’s downfall as an opportunity for revenge according to time-honored codes with no statute of limitations. (Sinai’s Bedouin tell a joke about a man who confides that he has avenged his brother’s killing after fifty years. Why the hurry, asks his cousin.)

In Cairo and other Nile Valley cities Egyptians routed Mubarak’s regime with mass protests, but in Sinai the Bedouin used rocket-propelled grenades. Former torturers were driven from cities and warned never to return. Armed groups targeted Egypt’s trade routes, ambushing trucks carrying goods between Egypt and Israel, and repeatedly bombed the pipelines transporting gas to Israel and Jordan until Egypt turned off the taps.

In December 2012, Anjali Kamat, a correspondent for the Al Jazeera English program “Fault Lines,” produced a long video report that used Sinai as a lens through which to examine the many changes that Egypt has faced since the 2011 ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak. She found that for many of the region’s residents, its history of neglect and harsh treatment at the hands of Cairo was a fresh wound that had never been given the chance to heal.

Hossam Bahgat, the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a human rights organization based in Cairo, was interviewed for Ms. Kamat’s documentary. He told her that he believed that Sinai’s strategic location had been a curse for its inhabitants because it lead the government to view the region and its people through a security lens.

“Sinai’s place between Egypt and Israel has been a curse. The reason Sinai never really received any attention from the central government, any fair share of development funding, is it’s proximity to Israel,” Mr. Bahgat told Ms. Kamat. “Since 1967 they’ve been going from Israeli occupation to what they now agree is Egyptian occupation, unfortunately.”

Ms. Attalah, the reporter for Mada Masr, was also interviewed in Ms. Kamat’s film, where she argued that Sinai’s instability can be traced back to the empty promises of an authoritarian state, that once pledged to develop the region but only ever treated it as a security problem.

After Israel returned the region to Egyptian control, Ms. Attalah said, “there were a lot of promises to the people of Sinai that now that Sinai is back to the Egyptian territories, there would be massive development.” But those were promises that the central government would not fulfill, engendering a widespread and slow-boiling frustration. “Actually, it is the state that is prompting illegality, just because you have an over-riding sense of political and economic marginalization,” she said.



After Zimmerman Verdict, 4 Jurors Distance Themselves From One Who Spoke

Four of the jurors in the murder trial of George Zimmerman have issued a brief statement saying that the opinions of the lone, anonymous juror who has spoken publicly since the verdict are not “in any way representative” of their views.

As my colleague Lizette Alvarez reported, that juror told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Monday night how she came to decide that Mr. Zimmerman was not guilty in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager.

Juror B-37, as she was identified, was one of six jurors, all women. She said she believed that Mr. Martin had attacked Mr. Zimmerman and that, fearing for his life, Mr. Zimmerman had had no choice but to shoot the teenager. “It pretty much happened the way George said it happened,” she said in the interview.

In their statement, released late Tuesday, four other jurors said Juror B-37’s views “were her own.”

We, the undersigned jurors, understand there is a great deal of interest in this case. But we ask you to remember that we are not public officials and we did not invite this type of attention into our lives. We also wish to point out that the opinions of Juror B-37 expressed on the Anderson Cooper show were her own, and not in any way representative of the jurors listed below.

On Wednesday, Juror B-37 issued a statement to CNN, calling on legislators to change the laws that, she said, left her no choice but to vote to acquit Mr. Zimmerman. She also said she would not give any more interviews.

“My prayers are with all those who have the influence and power to modify the laws that left me with no verdict option other than ‘not guilty’ in order to remain within the instructions,” she said. “No other family should be forced to endure what the Martin family has endured.”

Protesters gathered outside the office of Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, demanding that he ask legislators to change the state’s self-defense laws, which include the “stand your ground” provision. But Mr. Scott said there was no need to change the “stand your ground” law.

Members of the group, calling themselves “Dream Defenders,” said on Wednesday that they were prepared to wait until Mr. Scott â€" who has been traveling outside of the capital, Tallahassee â€" met with them.



Marine Who Urinated on Taliban Corpses Says He Has No Regrets

A United States Marine who was videotaped with several others urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in 2011 said in remarks broadcast this week that he had no regrets about the incident and would do it again out of revenge for the killing of American soldiers.

Staff Sgt. Joseph Chamblin said in an interview with North Carolina’s WSOC-TV Channel 9 that he was with a team on a mission to stop Taliban insurgents who were making improvised bombs, and at one point they were sent out to recover the bodies of Taliban fighters following a gun battle. That was after a fellow member of the military, Sgt. Mark Bradley, was killed by an roadside bomb, the network reported.

Sergeant Chamblin said the platoon wanted revenge. “We’re human. Who wouldn’t if you lost your brother or mother? Wouldn’t you want revenge?”

He later added, in part, that the action was intended to have a “psychological effect” on the Taliban forces, because as he described it, an “infidel” touching their bodies would prevent them from going to paradise in the afterlife. “So, now these insurgents see what happens when you mess with us.”

“I regret maybe any repercussion it might have had on the Marines. But do I regret doing it? Hell no,” Sergeant Chamblin said. Asked if he would do it again, he said, “Yup.”

The video showing the Marines urinating came to light and was widely disseminated on video-sharing Web sites including LiveLeak and YouTube in January last year. It provoked anger and condemnation in Afghanistan and around the world. Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said at the time it was “absolutely inconsistent” with American values.

The American-led coalition in Afghanistan said in a statement that the behavior “dishonors the sacrifices and core values of every service member representing the 50 nations of the coalition.”

Pentagon officials said the video had been made between March and September 2011, when the battalion was stationed in Helmand, a strategic Taliban province. Seven of the approximately 1,000 Marines in the battalion were killed during the seven-month deployment, according to The New York Times report on the incident.

Sergeant Chamblin later added in the interview: “Do you want the Marine Corps to be a group of Boy Scout pretty boys or do you want guys that will go out there and kill the people that are trying to take advantage of your country and kill Americans?”

“Which do you want?” he continued. “Because you can’t have both.”

At a court-martial last December, Sergeant Chamblin pleaded guilty to charges of dereliction of duty and wrongfully urinating on a deceased enemy combatant. His sentence was a reduction in rank and forfeiture of $500 in pay, the Marine Corps said in a Reuters report.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Two Tales of Plummeting Prices

When a new digital device gets a big price cut, it’s usually good news for consumers, but it’s usually a sign of poor sales, too â€" even if the maker of the device doesn’t want to admit that publicly.

Take the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone, which, after disappointing sales, dropped significantly in price just a few months after release.

When it was released in the United States in March, the Z10 cost $200 with a contract. Now the Z10 is free at Best Buy with an AT&T contract, or for $50 with Verizon. In Canada, where the Z10 was released in February and where sales were stronger, the smartphone is $100 to $150.

Or take Microsoft’s Surface tablet. It cost $500 when it was released in October, but it is now $350 on Microsoft’s Web site. Analysts estimate that demand for the tablet was weak during the holiday quarter.

It has become a tradition for company representatives to shrug off a major price cut and say that these types of sales always happen. That was Nokia’s explanation when it halved the Lumia 900’s price soon after release, and AT&T’s explanation for the price cut of the HTC First, the Facebook phone. Neither of those devices were selling well.

Meanwhile, the price of the iPhone 5, one of the best-selling smartphones in the world, hasn’t changed since its release in September.

Adam Emery, a BlackBerry spokesman, said that trimming the price of a smartphone was part of normal procedure:

Like any other smartphone maker, we, along with our partners, make adjustments as we roll out new elements of the product portfolio. And with the recent arrival of our flagship BlackBerry Q10 smartphone, now is the right time to adjust the price for the BlackBerry Z10 all touch device. As we have said, we will be introducing several BlackBerry 10 devices before the end of our fiscal year. It’s part of life cycle management to tier the pricing for current devices to make room for the next ones. This is just one element of our marketing strategy that will ensure we remain aggressive in a very competitive market landscape.

Microsoft’s response is a bit different. The software maker, which is a new player in the mobile hardware market, says it has been happy with past promotions it has done for the Surface, like one in Japan where customers received a free keyboard cover when they bought the tablet. So it says it is sharply cutting the price to get the tablet into even more people’s hands:

We’ve been seeing great success with pricing and cover promotions over the past several months on Surface RT in the U.S. and other markets. People who buy Surface love Surface, and we’re excited about all those additional people out sharing their excitement for Surface with other people.

Sales for mobile devices do happen. But Jan Dawson, a telecom analyst at Ovum, says that if a device is still new, a big discount is typically a sign that its sales didn’t start off strong and the company is trying to clear out inventory.

“In the case of the Z10 it seems to have happened pretty quickly,” he said of BlackBerry’s phone, “which probably means one of two things: It’s selling poorly, or they want to clear inventory before bringing out something more appealing later this year.”



A Taliban Commander Writes to Malala Yousafzai

A senior Taliban commander blamed Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot in the head by the militant group last year, for provoking the attack by “smearing” the Islamists, according to a copy of his letter published on Wednesday by Britain’s Channel 4 News.

The four-page letter, addressing the 16-year-old education advocate in English, was signed by the militant Adnan Rashid, a former Pakistani Air Force officer who took part in an attempt to assassinate Gen. Pervez Musharraf a decade ago and escaped from prison last year, in the biggest jailbreak in Pakistani history. (To read the letter below, click on the full-screen option at the lower right of the document viewer.)

As the Channel 4 News correspondent Fatima Manji explains, at the start of the letter provided to the news organization by the militants, the commander stressed that he was writing in a personal capacity, not in the name of the Pakistani Taliban, officially known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. He told Ms. Yousafzai “when you were attacked it was shocking for me, I wished it would never happened,” but quickly shifted the blame for the shooting last October in Pakistan’s Swat Valley on to the shoulders of the victim.

Writing in somewhat idiosyncratic English, the commander claimed that the “Taliban never attacked you because of going to school or you were education lover.” He continued: “Taliban or Mujahideen are not against the education of any men or women or girl. Taliban believe that you were intentionally writing against them and running a smearing campaign to malign their efforts to establish Islamic system in Swat and your writings were provocative.”

Video obtained by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn in 2012, said to show the Taliban commander Adnan Rashid, a former air force officer who escaped from jail last year.

The letter appears to have been written on Saturday, because it contains a direct reference to Ms. Yousafzai’s emotional plea for universal education in her address to the United Nations on Friday (a body he refers to as the “UNO”).

You have said in your speech yesterday that pen is mightier than sword, so they attacked you for your sword not for your books or school. There were thousands of girls who were going to school and college before and after the Taliban insurgency in Swat, would you explain why were only you on their hit list???

Mr. Rashid also tried to convince the young woman that western notions of education are a continuation of a centuries-old plot to indoctrinate former subjects of the British empire by citing remarks made by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the pioneer of colonial education in India, “dated 2nd February, 1835, about what type of education system is required in Indian sub-continent to replace the Muslim education system.” The letter accurately quotes Macaulay’s statement, recorded in the British Bureau of Education’s minutes from Feb. 2, 1835: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, â€" a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

The commander then reveals to Ms. Yousafzai what he describes as the plot in favor of Jews and Freemasons concealed in western systems of education:

This was and this is the plan and mission of this so-called education system for which you are ready to die, for which UNO takes you to their office to produce more and more Asians in blood but English in taste, to produce more and more Africans in color but English in opinion, to produce more and more non-English people but English in morale. This so-called education made Obama, the mass murder, your ideal, isn’t it?

Why they want to make all human beings English? because Englishmen are the staunch supporters and slaves of Jews. Do you know Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the founder and symbol of English education in India was a freemasons.

The letter ends with an appeal to the young woman to return to Pakistan and enroll in a religious school, known as a madrassa.

I advise you to come back home, adopt the Islamic and Pushtoon culture, join any female Islamic madrassa near your home town, study and learn the book of Allah, use your pen for Islam and plight of Muslim ummah and reveal the conspiracy of tiny elite who want toenslave the whole humanity for their evil agendas in the name of new world order.

Pakistani journalists and bloggers writing in English on Twitter responded to the letter by noting with horror that it seemed to reveal how close the worldview of the extremists is now to mainstream political positions.



Policies on License Plate Readers Vary Widely, Says A.C.L.U.

Minnesota State Patrol deletes the data after 48 hours. New Jersey requires its police departments to hold the data for five years. Grapevine, Tex., doesn’t specify, which means the city could keep the data for as long as it wants. Some police agencies are allowed to use the information picked up by license plate readers for any criminal investigation. Other agencies also share the information with so-called fusion centers, where data from various government sources are kept.

The A.C.L.U. says you should care because the license readers are another form of location tracking. It warns that “enormous databases of motorists’ location information are being created” that could lead law enforcement authorities “to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives.”

License plate readers are often attached to bridges, street lights, and police patrol cars. They snap pictures of the license plate, record the date and time, and corresponding software turns it into readable data that can be stored and analyzed.

The readers present a classic case of how new technology bewilders the law. There is nothing that prohibits cameras in public places from collecting images. But the collection and analysis of location data has stumped judges, with some noting what a powerful window it can be into a person’s private life.

The mayor of Minneapolis learned from a public records request filed by The Star Tribune last year that license plate readers in his city had picked up his car 41 times in the previous year.

Only a handful of states have enacted laws on how the data can be kept and used, the A.C.L.U. report said.



Policies on License Plate Readers Vary Widely, Says A.C.L.U.

Minnesota State Patrol deletes the data after 48 hours. New Jersey requires its police departments to hold the data for five years. Grapevine, Tex., doesn’t specify, which means the city could keep the data for as long as it wants. Some police agencies are allowed to use the information picked up by license plate readers for any criminal investigation. Other agencies also share the information with so-called fusion centers, where data from various government sources are kept.

The A.C.L.U. says you should care because the license readers are another form of location tracking. It warns that “enormous databases of motorists’ location information are being created” that could lead law enforcement authorities “to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives.”

License plate readers are often attached to bridges, street lights, and police patrol cars. They snap pictures of the license plate, record the date and time, and corresponding software turns it into readable data that can be stored and analyzed.

The readers present a classic case of how new technology bewilders the law. There is nothing that prohibits cameras in public places from collecting images. But the collection and analysis of location data has stumped judges, with some noting what a powerful window it can be into a person’s private life.

The mayor of Minneapolis learned from a public records request filed by The Star Tribune last year that license plate readers in his city had picked up his car 41 times in the previous year.

Only a handful of states have enacted laws on how the data can be kept and used, the A.C.L.U. report said.



Google Said to Weigh Supplying TV Channels

The company has begun talks with major media companies about licensing TV channels, according to people with knowledge of the meetings.

Google Said to Weigh Supplying TV Channels

The company has begun talks with major media companies about licensing TV channels, according to people with knowledge of the meetings.

Inventive, at Least in Court

The Federal Trade Commission is singling out companies that engage in “a variety of aggressive litigation tactics,” like hiding behind shell companies when suing.