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Syria’s defense minister and President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law were killed in a Damascus suicide bomb attack carried out by a bodyguard on Wednesday, the most serious blow to Assad’s high command in the country’s 16-month-old rebellion.
The bomber, said by a security source to be a bodyguard assigned to Assad’s inner circle, struck a meeting attended by ministers and senior security officials as battles raged within sight of the presidential palace.
State television said Defence Minister Daoud Rajha and Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, the deputy defence minister, had been killed in a “terrorist bombing” and pledged to wipe out “criminal gangs”.
A Syrian security source confirmed Shawkat, 62, - a pillar of Assad’s rule - was killed and said intelligence chief Hisham Bekhtyar was wounded. State television said Interior Minister Mohammad Ibrahim al-Shaar had also been wounded in the blast.
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Mother Jones obtains Syrian government hit list containing thousands of names
From Mother Jones:
A 718-page digital document obtained by Mother Jones contains names, phone numbers, neighborhoods, and alleged activities of thousands of dissidents apparently targeted by the Syrian government. Three experts asked separately by Mother Jones to examine the document—essentially a massive spreadsheet, whose contents are in Arabic—say they believe that it is authentic. As Bashar Al-Assad’s military continues a deadly crackdown on dissent inside the country, the list appears to confirm in explicit detail the scale of the regime’s domestic surveillance and its methodical efforts to destroy widespread opposition.
(Source: matthewkeys)
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New York Times Middle East Correspondent Anthony Shadid dies while on assignment in Syria
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A change in policy: Twitter announced Thursday that it would begin restricting Tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East.
“Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world,” the Twitter blog said.
Read more: Twitter to restrict user content in some countries
WTF, Twitter???
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American reporting is problematic throughout the third world, but because the American military/industrial/financial/academic/media complex is so directly implicated in the Middle East, the consequences of such bad reporting are more significant. Journalists end up serving as propagandists justifying the killing of innocent people instead of a voice for those innocent people. Our job should not be about speaking truth to power. Those in power know the truth, they just don’t care, and they serve systems greater than themselves anyway. It’s about speaking truth to the people, to those not in power, in order to empower them, or unfortunately, sometimes to leave them feeling bitter and cynical.
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Good episode of The Stream today, discussing Obama’s Arab Spring speech today and a look at internet activist group Anonymous.
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Unholy Alliance: How Syria is Bringing Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia Together
Many smart people, in Washington and elsewhere, have long been willing to forgive the Assad family for their many sins, going back to the tenure of Bashar’s father, Hafiz al Assad, who ruled from 1971 to 2000. The allure of bringing the Syrian-Israeli state of war to an end and the tantalizing possibility (a fantasy, it turns out) of breaking the Tehran-Damascus axis led observers to believe that Hafiz was capable of making peace and that Bashar was a reformer. Bashar has been tolerated, engaged, even supported in the hopes that the world could entice him, with the prospects of good relations with the West, to change. But there was never any real evidence that Damascus was genuinely interested in peace or reform.
As the world (slowly) comes to grips with the horror of Syria and the Assads, there remains a coalition of nations that appear to be acting under the belief that the Assad regime is better than what might come next. It’s an odd group in the rather strange new world of the Middle East: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey.Read more at The Atlantic
I think it says A LOT when we are finding these 3 countries in a sort of agreement, and over a man so brutal and ruthless. The fact that they can set aside their differences and agree to support this man demonstrates how these uprisings are shaking up the region in more ways than one. These countries are visibly threatened by the waves of protests, otherwise, what other cause could them to even share a headline together that doesn’t involve one nuking the other?
These authoritarian regimes are not sustainable. They are extremely damaging, with nothing but short-term policies of accruing wealth and maintaining hegemony at all costs as the main interests driving these regimes, all at the expense of an exponentially growing population. Each of these regimes represent pressure cookers slowly building up, decade by decade; and one by one, they are exploding. The killing is not sustainable, the injustice is not sustainable, the corruption is not sustainable, and they all know it. These authoritarian regimes come with an expiration date, and the power to enforce that expiration date is at the hands of the people.
Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia’s compliance in supporting Assad indicate that while their politics represent opposite sides of the spectrum, they have absolutely no interest in a democratic, just, and corrupt-free Middle East.
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In late December I saw some tweets emerging from Tunisia that warned of trouble to come. Since then, three Arab countries have witnessed a revolution - and to highlight the role of social media, Ben Connors and I created this video for Al Jazeera’s “Empire”.
Click here for the longer video as it ran on Empire.
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Tomorrow’s cover today The Americans, the Europeans and the Arabs must all hold their nerve.
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