Deadly Syrian stalemate spurs new diplomacy, little hope

Galvanized by a Syrian death toll that has doubled to 36,000 in little more than a month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has called for a new rebel hierarchy to direct the fighting against President Bashar Assad and steer Syria back to peaceful ethnic and religious coexistence.

The latest proposal for halting Syria's 19-month-old civil war brings little new strategy to the crisis. Rather, it vents frustration with the international community’s own "divisions, dysfunctionality and powerlessness," as the International Crisis Group recently noted, that have prevented brokering an end to the bloodshed.

Like European leaders before her, Clinton acknowledged this week that the West’s reliance on out-of-touch exiles within the Paris-based Syrian National Council has done more harm than good in the effort to have opposition forces speak with one voice on their plans for a post-Assad future.

Clinton told reporters accompanying her on a trip to North Africa and the Balkans on Wednesday that the Obama administration will be suggesting names and organizations it believes should play prominent roles in a reconfigured rebel alliance that Western diplomats hope to see emerge from Arab League-sponsored talks next week in the Qatari capital, Doha.

But the U.S. push to get the opposition’s act together also exudes desperation. In the two months since a failed rebel campaign to take strategic ground around major cities, fighting has ground down to a bloody impasse, giving neither Assad nor his opponents hope of imminent victory on the battlefields.

The rebels’ summer offensive also exposed the widening role of Islamic extremists who have entered the fight, bringing arms and combat experience to the side of Assad’s fractured opponents. But the Islamic militants’ alignment with Syrians trying to topple Assad also gives weight to the regime’s claims to be fighting off terrorists, not domestic political foes.

Clinton reiterated the West’s insistence that Assad have no role in Syria’s future. That prompted immediate pushback by Russia and China, which have opposed what they call foreign interference in Syrian domestic affairs.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was in Paris for talks with his French counterpart when Clinton announced the Obama administration’s latest initiative. A longtime ally and arms supplier to Syria, Russia has blocked three United Nations Security Council resolutions to censure Assad and, along with China, has rejected Western demands that the Syrian president resign and leave the country.

"If the position of our partners remains the departure of this leader who they do not like, the bloodbath will continue," Lavrov warned.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi registered Beijing’s objections by unveiling a "four-point plan" for bringing peace to Syria that reiterates the communist state’s position that the future of Syria be left for Syrians -- including Assad -- to decide.

Beijing has a solid history of blocking international intervention on human rights grounds, apparently fearing China could become a target of such actions because of its harsh treatment of dissent and political opponents.

For some Middle East experts, the solution to Syria’s crisis lies somewhere between the Russian-Chinese "hands-off" policy and the U.S.-led Western view that only regime change will bring about peace.

"This conflict is for Syrians and their neighbors to resolve, with European and Russian involvement. The U.S. should stay one removed," said Ed Husain, senior fellow in Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He described Clinton’s appeal for a new rebel leadership structure as "laudable, but a year too late."

"She’s driven by a desire to want to help now, but also to ensure a smooth transition in a post-Assad Syria. Sadly, reality on the ground dictates otherwise,” Husain said, alluding to entrenched battles that portend a long standoff.

Growing fears that extremists are gaining clout with the rebels also complicates diplomacy, as Syria’s Shiite, Christian, Kurdish and other minority sects are wary of how they would fare under a Sunni-dominated government allied with fundamentalist jihadis.

Clinton emphasized that extremist forces should be excluded from any new opposition forum that might emerge from Doha.

"It may seem ironic to call for a broad tent and then say 'except for those guys.' But I think the administration and other countries concerned about the future of Syria know that one of the challenges will be to have an analysis of who is who in the opposition,” said Charles Ries, a career U.S. diplomat now heading Rand Corp.’s Center for Middle East Public Policy.

Ries sees the need for "more movement on the ground in Syria" before Assad or the rebels are ready to submit to negotiations on the country’s future.

He is hesitant to declare the civil war a stalemate or the Russian-Chinese position unchangeable in the long run. But with rebels pinned down in the urban areas they hold and warding off attacks by Assad’s superior armed forces, he said, no one seems to think Assad is in the kind of imminent danger of being ousted that would be the catalyst for negotiation and compromise.

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Follow Carol J. Williams at www.twitter.com/cjwilliamslat

Photo: A Syrian rebel fighter last month defends territory near Aleppo, one of many urban battlegrounds the opponents of President Bashar Assad are now struggling to hold. Credit: Zac Baillie / AFP/Getty Images

Russian lawmakers vote to expand definition of treason, espionage

MOSCOW -- The upper house of Russia's parliament voted Wednesday to broaden the definition of espionage and high treason, continuing what many activists view as a crackdown on dissent in the country.

The legislation, which will become law if signed by President Vladimir Putin, expands the definition of espionage and high treason to encompass "the rendering of financial, material-technical or other assistance to a foreign state, international or other organization or their representatives in the activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation."

The bill was approved by 138 of the 139 lawmakers present in the Federal Council, the parliament's upper house.

The legislation, which was submitted by the Federal Security Service, the successor of the Soviet KGB, offers officials wide room for interpretation and could undercut the development of democracy in Russia, warned Mikhail Fedotov, head of the Presidential Council of Civic Society and Human Rights.

"If approached literally, the bill creates totally unlimited possibilities of finding high treason in any action," Fedotov said in an interview Wednesday. "If a passerby asks me in a Moscow street for directions to the Kremlin and duly gets them from me and later turns out to be a member of an organization working against our national security, I will automatically become a person guilty of high treason."

Bahrain bans all protests and rallies, citing security threats

Bahrain has banned all protests and rallies, arguing that a complete stop to such gatherings is needed to maintain security in the island nation.

Interior Minister Sheik Rashid ibn Abdullah Khalifa ordered the move, a sweeping attempt to bring its long-simmering unrest to a halt. An Interior Ministry statement issued Tuesday said “rallies and gatherings were associated with violence, rioting and attacks on public and private property.... They also were a major threat to the safety of the public.”

Anyone calling for rallies or taking part in them would face “legal actions,” the statement said.

Bahrain has been roiled by protests for more than a year by dissidents upset with the Sunni Muslim monarchy over police abuses and the marginalization of Shiite Muslims. While the government has undertaken some reforms, human rights groups and activists say abuses have continued, including the jailing of peaceful protesters. Amnesty International laments many “prisoners of conscience” remain behind bars.

Guantanamo terrorism convictions proving vulnerable on appeal

Salim Hamdan has been home in his native Yemen for nearly four years since completing his sentence at Guantanamo Bay for providing "material support to terrorism" -- six years of domestic service to Osama bin Laden as gardener, bodyguard and driver.

One of only seven Guantanamo captives to be sentenced for alleged war crimes by the Pentagon's military commissions, Hamdan had his conviction vacated this week by a unanimous federal appeals court panel on grounds that the assistance he provided the late Al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan wasn't defined as a war crime until five years after his 2001 capture.

Hamdan is already at liberty and moving on with his life, his pro bono attorney reported Thursday after informing his client by telephone that his appeal was successful. The 40-year-old taxi driver with a fourth-grade education was pleased to be cleansed of the "war criminal" label but doesn't plan to pursue an uphill battle for compensation, said the attorney, Harry Schneider of Seattle.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said the government was still reviewing the ruling and would have no comment.

The ruling will serve as binding precedent in the appeals of other Guantanamo detainees convicted for war crimes ex post facto, Schneider predicted. The next likely beneficiary of the tribunal's overreaching prosecutions, defense attorneys say, could be defiant Al Qaeda propagandist Ali Hamza Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence at the U.S. military prison in southern Cuba.

Within hours of the decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Australian convict David Hicks' lawyer announced that he would seek to have his client's guilty plea revoked and conditions of his release to Australia stricken. Attorney Stephen Kenny also said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Co. that he would pursue compensation for Hicks and an investigation of whether the Canberra government aided and abetted his wrongful imprisonment.

A kangaroo skinner who trained at an Al Qaeda base in Afghanistan before fleeing the October 2001 U.S.-led invasion, Hicks was arrested trying to cross into Pakistan and held at Guantanamo for six years. He was released to his homeland as part of his plea deal, which prohibits him from appealing his case or disclosing details of his experience for monetary gain.

Bahlul, a Yemeni like Hamdan, also was convicted at his uncontested 2008 trial of solicitation of murder in a recruiting video he produced for Al Qaeda. David Glazier, an international law professor at Loyola Law School, said legal scholars began speculating that the solicitation charge might be ruled beyond the commissions' jurisdiction after the same Washington appeals court that threw out material support as a legal charge canceled oral arguments in the Bahlul appeal just before it issued the Hamdan decision.

"There's been some discussion in the blogosphere about whether or not this means the end of conspiracy as well," said Glazier, who was a career Navy surface warfare officer before earning his law degree.

Only one of the seven Guantanamo convictions has involved crimes recognized as a violation of the international law of war: the murder, attempted murder and spying charges against Canadian Omar Ahmed Khadr, who was recently transferred to Canadian custody to serve out the six years left on his term.

Prosecutors at the military commissions have relied on material support and conspiracy to get convictions or plea bargains in the few completed cases, but Glazier argues that those "inchoate offenses" aren't considered war crimes under international law. Only after Congress passed the 2006 Military Commissions Act did the Guantanamo tribunal have jurisdiction to try suspects for those crimes, said the appeals court panel, which is made up entirely of Republican appointees.

J. Wells Dixon, senior attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has provided legal representation to hundreds of the nearly 800 men detained at Guantanamo since 2002, predicted that "conspiracy is the next military commissions charge on the chopping block."

"The Hamdan decision is significant because it is an illustration of the inherent problems in creating a second-rate system of justice that we make up as we go along," he said of the commissions, the original version of which was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2006, prompting a hurried redo, the Military Commissions Act, three months later.

Five "high-value detainees" facing death penalty trials for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have been in the Guantanamo courtroom this week, bringing pretrial motions and theatrics to the forum.

In the first prosecution on charges widely accepted as war crimes, Army Col. James Pohl, the presiding judge, has been inundated with peripheral considerations, such as whether self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed should be allowed to wear a camouflage hunter's vest in the courtroom to project a warrior image.

Pohl has also had to rule on whether mold and rodent infestation at the defense attorneys work space on the remote base compromises their ability to prepare for trial, and whether any mention of mistreatment during CIA interrogations risks revealing national security secrets.

"Regardless of the underlying conduct and the quality of evidence the government presents at trial, there is no certainty that those convictions will stand" federal civilian court review, Dixon said. "For the Obama administration to continue to pursue military commissions charges is a real gamble."

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Follow Carol J. Williams at www.twitter.com/cjwilliamslat

Photo: Artist's sketch shows alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, right, speaking with a member of his legal team during a hearing at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Credit: Janet Hamlin

 

U.N. rights chief decries U.S. Border Patrol's 'excessive force'

MEXICO CITY -- The United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized U.S. Border Patrol officers Thursday for resorting to “excessive use of force,” according to news reports, a week after a 16-year-old boy was fatally shot by officers after allegedly throwing rocks at them near the Mexican border town of Nogales.

“There have been very many young people, teenagers, who have been killed at the border,” the commissioner, Navi Pillay, said at a news conference in Geneva, according to wire services. “The reports reaching me are that there has been excessive use of force by the U.S. border patrols while they are enforcing the immigration laws.”

U.S. officials allege that the shooting victim, Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, was smuggling drugs before the Oct. 10 incident, which has been strongly condemned by the Mexican government.

The FBI is investigating the matter, and the Department of Homeland Security is reviewing its guidelines for the use of force by border agencies.

At least 16 civilians have been killed by border agents since 2010, many of them during rock-throwing incidents involving suspected drug smugglers.

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--Richard Fausset

Photo:  A U.S. Border Patrol vehicle keeps watch along the border fence in Nogales, Ariz, on Aug. 9, 2012.  Credit: Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press

Imprisoned lawyer in Iran goes on hunger strike

TEHRAN -- An Iranian human rights lawyer whose jailing spurred an international outcry is now going on a  hunger strike, frustrated by restrictions on her family, her husband said Thursday.

Nasrin Sotoudeh, 49, was convicted last year of acting against national security and spreading propaganda against the government. The attorney, known for defending Iranian dissidents, had earlier angered the judiciary by denouncing the unannounced execution of one of her clients, whom she was allowed to meet only briefly.

She was sentenced last year to 11 years in jail and banned from practicing law for 20 years, to the outrage of fellow activists and global human rights groups. At the time, the U.S. State Department decried the sentence as an unjust and harsh attempt to silence defenders of democracy and human rights in the country. Amnesty International calls her a “prisoner of conscience.”

Her sentence has since been commuted to six years and she will be allowed to begin practicing law again after a decade. But while Sotoudeh now faces fewer years behind bars, other restrictions have been imposed on her and her family as she passes the days in Evin Prison in Tehran.

This summer, husband Reza Khandan and their daughter were forbidden from leaving the country. Sotoudeh has since been barred from hugging him and her two children on prison visits, her husband says. Instead, the family must communicate by phone behind a clear barrier.

Rights group: Libya didn't investigate deaths of Kadafi loyalists

Despite promises to do so, Libya has failed to investigate the deaths of scores of people loyal to late strongman Moammar Kadafi, who appear to have been executed after his capture last year in “a bloody revenge,” Human Rights Watch said in a report released Wednesday.

The report sheds new light on the downfall of Kadafi in October 2011 and its aftermath. Though exactly how the Libyan leader was killed remains murky, the rights group argues that videos and other evidence indicate vengeful militias from the city of Misurata captured, disarmed and executed at least 66 people from his convoy at a hotel in Surt that same day.

Many of the corpses had their hands tied behind their backs, it reported. Videos of Kadafi's son Mutassim suggest he was taken to Misurata and killed, Human Rights Watch said. Footage of Moammar Kadafi himself calls into question whether he was killed in crossfire, showing militia fighters stabbing his buttocks with a bayonet.

“We understood there needed to be a trial, but we couldn’t control everyone,” Eastern Coast militia brigade commander Khalid Ahmed Raid told the rights group. “Some acted beyond our control.”

Former Balkan leader proclaims innocence of genocide charges

LONDON -- Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic declared his innocence and argued that he tried to stop the violent 1990s conflict in his Balkans homeland as he began his defense against war crimes charges Tuesday before an international tribunal in The Hague.

The ex-president of the wartime Republika Sprska faces 10 counts of genocide and related war crimes  committed during the Balkan conflict that followed the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.

“Instead of being accused, I should be rewarded for all the good things I’ve done, namely that I did everything in human power to avoid the war," said Karadzic, 67, who looked relaxed but resigned with a professorial air. "The number of victims in our war was three to four times less than the number reported.” 

Karadzic stands accused of aiding and abetting some of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II, committed primarily against Bosnian Muslims and Croats. He is charged with having a hand in the notorious killing of over 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica; in the “sniping and shelling to kill, maim, wound and terrorize the civilian inhabitants of Sarajevo” resulting in the death of thousands of civilians; and in the taking of hostages, including U.N. peacekeepers and military observers, to use as a human shields against NATO airstrikes.

“Everybody who knows me knows that I am not an autocrat ... that I am not intolerant, on the contrary I am a mild-mannered man, a tolerant man, with a great capacity for understanding others,” Karadzic told the court as he denied the charges.

Pakistani girl shot by Taliban being moved to Britain for treatment

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The 14-year-old Swat girl shot by Taliban gunmen because of her advocacy for girls' education is being flown to Britain for treatment likely to include surgery to repair damage to her skull and neurological rehabilitation, the Pakistani military said Monday.

Malala Yousafzai is being transported in an aircraft equipped with specialized medical equipment and supplied by the United Arab Emirates. Pakistani doctors in consultation with international medical experts concluded that “Malala will require prolonged care to fully recover from the physical and psychological effects of trauma that she has received,” according to a statement issued by the Pakistani military.

Malala’s family was consulted before the decision was made to transport her to Britain, the statement said.

PHOTOS: Malala Yousafzai

The bullet pierced her left temple, causing damage to her skull, and lodged near her spine, Pakistani military officials have said. Doctors told Pakistani media last week that she did not suffer any significant brain damage. They have described her condition as serious but improving. Last week, surgeons removed the bullet from her neck.

“It was the view that if Malala was going to be transferred overseas to a center which could provide the required integrated care, then it should be during this time window, while her condition was optimal and before any unforeseen complications had set in,” the statement said.

Arrests made in attack on Pakistani girl Malala Yousafzai

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As pressure mounted on Pakistani police to track down militants behind last week’s assassination attempt of Malala Yousafzai, authorities confirmed Sunday the arrests of three brothers suspected of involvement in the attack on the 14-year-old Swat Valley girl.

Authorities have rounded up more than 100 people and detained them for questioning, though almost all were later released. Police took the three brothers into custody early Saturday after a raid on their house in Akbarpura, a small village outside of the northwest city of Peshawar.

The three men, Qari Inamullah, Obaid Ullah and Abdul Hadi, are originally from the Swat Valley, a picturesque tourist haven that was under control of Taliban insurgents until summer 2009, when the Pakistani army launched a large offensive to retake the territory. Authorities do not believe any of the three men were the gunmen who tried to kill Malala, but they would not discuss what role the men may have played.

“Investigations are in the very early stage,” said Iftikhar Hussain, information minister for Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the province where Swat Valley is located.