Mark Follman is a senior editor at Mother Jones. He is a former editor of Salon and a cofounder of the MediaBugs project. His reporting and commentary have also appeared in Salon, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Fox News, andNational Public Radio. The in-depth investigation into mass shootings he led for MoJo was honored with the 2013 Izzy Award.
Update, July 18: A bomb blast in Damascus has killed at least three of Bashar Al-Assad's top aides, including his minister of defense and brother-in-law. In Washington, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the conflict "is rapidly spinning out of control," and worried openly about the regime's large chemical weapons arsenal, parts of which Assad has reportedly moved out of storage in recent days.
Update, May 27: More than 90 people were massacred by Syrian military forces in the village of Houla on Saturday, according to the New York Times. Among those reportedly killed were at least 32 children under the age of 10, many of them found with "what appeared to be bullet holes in their temples."
Update, March 6: Republican congressional leaders are at odds about dealing with Syria: John McCain wants to begin US air strikes. John Boehner says the situation is too complicated for the US to get involved militarily right now.
Update, March 1: After a nearly month-long assault, the Syrian Army has overwhelmed the main rebel stronghold in Homs and retaken control. Uprisings continue in other cities. The ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee said on Thursday that the US should make no moves to intervene directly in the conflict in the near term.
Update, Feb. 29: Reports on Wednesday indicated a ground offensive by the Syrian military moved deeper into the city of Homs. The continued assault comes a day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during testimony before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would fit the definition of "war criminal." (Clinton did not, however, state that the international community should bring charges; she stressed that doing so could make it even more difficult to wrest Assad from power.)
Update, Feb. 27: Scores more have been reported killed on Monday as the Syrian military continues its relentless bombing of Homs and towns in the northwestern area of Idlib. The EU has ratched up sanctions including a freeze on European-held assets of the Syrian central bank. Syria's Interior Ministry announced that voters had overwhelmingly approved a new Constitution aimed at reform; Western leaders slammed the referendum as having no credibility amid the widespread violence.
Update, Feb. 24: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other world leaders gathered in Tunis on Friday, calling for humanitarian aid and a UN peacekeeping force to be allowed into Syria. President Obama also weighed in, saying, "We are going to continue to keep the pressure up and look for every tool available to prevent the slaughter of innocents in Syria."
Update, Feb. 22: The Syrian government's military assault on Homs has reached its 19th day; according to reports from activist groups, more than 80 people have been killed in the latest attacks. Those killed include two Western journalists: reporter Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London and Remi Olchik, a photographer from France.
Update, Feb. 16: Awful news: Preeminent foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid, who chronicled the Iraq war and Arab Spring like no other, died Thursday while reporting inside Syria. He apparently succumbed to an asthma attack. He was 43. Just a few weeks ago he spoke with Mother Jonesabout his invaluable work.
Update, Feb. 12: The Arab League asked the UN Security Council on Sunday to send peacekeepers to Syria. The League's resolution also calls for "opening channels of communication with the Syrian opposition and providing all forms of political and financial support to it." The Syrian government "categorically rejected" the resolution. (Syria was booted from the League in November.)
Meanwhile, Al Qaeda and other Islamist organizations have been calling for a jihad against the Assad regime, ostensibly throwing their support behind the rebels. (Syrian pro-democracy activists have previously rejected endorsement from Al Qaeda.) For instance, Al Qaeda in Iraq—which maintains an operational network in Syria—released a statement encouraging rebel forces to plant roadside bombs and carry out "hit-and-run operations" against regime loyalists.
Update, Feb. 11: A Syrian military general was assassinated in Damascus on Saturday, as a violent government offensive in Homs continued into its second week.
Update, Feb. 6: The US shut down its embassy in Damascus on Monday, with the State Department announcing that "all American personnel have now departed the country." Reports from activists and opposition groups on Monday said that dozens more people have been killed by government forces in Homs.
Update, Feb. 4: On Saturday morning, the UN Security Council held a meeting to vote on a draft resolution that would demand an end to Syria's violent crackdown on protesters and civilians. Thirteen countries voted in favor of the measure, but Russia (facing its own mass protests today) and China vetoed.
BBC News reports that Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, said that "any further bloodshed" will be on the hands of the Russian and Chinese actors. Gerard Araud, the French ambassador, said that China and Russia had "made themselves complicit in a policy of repression," and that "[this] is a sad day for this council, a sad day for all Syrians, and a sad day for democracy."
Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin and Chinese ambassador Li Baodong defended their votes, stating that fellow council members had ignored their proposed amendments to the resolution. Margaret Besheer reports that Churkin also said: "I would certainly agree that tragic events are happening in Syria...[but the UN Security Council is] not the only diplomatic tool on this planet."
Earlier in the day, President Obama issued a statement condemning the Syrian regime's "unspeakable assault against the people of Homs," and repeated that the "international community must work to protect the Syrian people from this abhorrent brutality." The statement also read that, "the Assad regime must come to an end."
Update, Feb. 3: On Friday, multiple reports from activists inside Syria described massive shelling and an army offensive in the central Syrian city of Homs. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts the casualty figure at over a hundred, and claims many hundreds more are injured; otherestimates have the body count at 200 and climbing. Activists report that "nail bombs" were used by the army during a mortar attack on the Khaldiyeh neighborhood. The reports come 30 years after the infamous Hama Massacre was conducted by the Syrian army over the course of four weeks in February 1982 (the operation was ordered by President Hafez al-Assad, father and predecessor to Syria's current ruler Bashar al-Assad).
In response to the news, anti-Assad rallies erupted at Syrian embassies in several major cities, including Cairo, Kuwait City, London, Berlin, and Washington, DC. Some of the embassies—including those in London and Cairo—were stormed by protesters, leading to arrests and property damage.
The UN Security Council is scheduled to convene Saturday morning to discuss a much-debated draft resolution on Syria. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that same morning in Munich.
Here's a rundown of the deteriorating situation in Syria:
The basics: Syria is an Arab country with more than 22 million people; it borders many of the major players in the Middle East (Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey) and is roughly the size of North Dakota. Syria famously lost the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967, during the Arab-Israeli war; negotiations between the two countries have been minimal in recent years. Like many countries in the region, Syria's main export is oil. Unlike Saudi Arabia or Iran, however, Syria's oil reserves are relatively small; it ranks 33rd in the world. Syria is home to a smorgasbord of ethnicities and religions: Arabs, Kurds, Christians, Sunnis, Alawites, and Druze. The capital, Damascus, is a bustling metropolis (many believe it to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world) but is not the site of the country's most significant protests (though rebels captured parts of the city in late January). That city, Hama, is the country's fourth-largest, with fewer than 1 million occupants.
What's happening now? Ever since March 2011, Syrians, especially those in the country's central region, have protested the iron-fisted government headed by Bashar al-Assad. During the first week of August the Syrian army began a brutal campaign to control Hama, using tanks and troop assaults to kill citizens in a seemingly indiscriminate manner. The situation has continued to escalate in 2012. In late January, rebels known as the Free Syrian Army, reportedly took control of a portion of Damascus' suburbs. On January 31, Syrian government forces, according to Reuters, "reasserted control" of the Damascus suburbs. Elsewhere, in Homs, a central-Syrian town with more than a million people, Syrian government forces killed nearly 100 people—activists say 55 civilians were killed—on January 31. The Free Syrian Army has fought on, asserting that "half of the country" is now effectively a no-go zone for Assad's security forces. Since November, at least 3,000 Syrians reportedly have been killed.
Who's in charge?: Assad has ruled Syria since 2000. His father, Hafez al-Assad, a member of the Baath Party, came to power in 1970 after leading a bloodless coup. Assad's family came from a minority religious sect: the Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam. Thirty years ago, Assad launched one of the most brutal massacres in the modern history of the Middle East: His troops killed nearly 20,000 people in the city of Hama. In 2000, Hafez Assad died, and Bashar took over. To some, the shift from Hafez to Bashar suggested an opportunity (albeit a limited one) for Syria to become a more politically moderate society. Last year, Vogue magazine perpetuated that notion with a widely remarked profile of first lady Asma al-Assad published during the height of the Arab Spring. It stated that Syria was "the safest country in the Middle East." Clearly that couldn't have been more off-base, with Bashar apparently intent on following in his father's footsteps. (Vogue scrubbed its archives of the Assad profile, but the internet doesn't forget.)
There was overwhelming bipartisan agreement on Tuesday night that Gabrielle Giffords' arrival for President Obama's State of the Union address was the most compelling moment of the evening. Watch the footage and there's simply no arguing with that—the Arizona congresswoman looked terrific. Her incredible comeback from a near-fatal shooting one year ago seems all the more remarkable each time she appears in public. (Not that she doesn't face challenges ahead; a video she released over the weekend, in which she announced that she's stepping down from her congressional seat to focus on her further recovery, is equally moving.) Her story is as potent a mix of painful and inspirational as there is, and you'd hope that it could stand as something of an antidote to the poisonous politics of the era.
Which is why some news out of Missouri on Tuesday was particularly stomach-churning: Just hours before Giffords made her way into the nation's Capitol, an unknown provocateur was stalking the halls of the Missouri Capitol, tagging the doors of lawmakers—most of them Democratic women—with images of rifle crosshairs. From the Columbia Daily Tribune:
Orange stickers with an image of rifle crosshairs were found Tuesday on the office doors of several Democratic state senators, prompting an investigation by Missouri Capitol Police, Senate Administrator Jim Howerton said. The stickers were on the doors of all four Democratic women in the Senate—Jolie Justus and Kiki Curls, both of Kansas City, and Maria Chapelle-Nadal and Robin Wright-Jones, both of St. Louis, Justus said. One similar sticker was found on the nameplate outside the door of state Rep. Scott Dieckhaus, R-Washington.
"If anyone thinks this was a prank, it is not a prank," Justus said after discussing the discovery of the stickers on the Senate floor. "You don't joke about someone's personal safety." A sticker also was found on the door of Sen. Victor Callahan, D-Kansas City and the Democrats' floor leader.
Sen. Chapelle-Nadal herself weighed in on Twitter and didn't mince words, emphasizing her disapproval with "#DisgracefulCowards." (Her tweets are "protected" but one was posted by St. Louis Activist Hub.)
It's an apt moment to recall that Giffords once criticized Sarah Palin for using a map that literally put political enemies in the crosshairs. "We need to realize that the rhetoric…for example, we're on Sarah Palin's 'targeted' list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted, we're in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district," Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC in spring 2010. "When people do that, they've gotta realize that there are consequences to that action."
We all know what followed.
Palin and other conservatives strongly rejected the notion that their imagery and rhetoric had anything to do with the bloodbath in Arizona a year ago. And no one can know what was truly in the deranged mind of Jared Loughner. But common sense says that when enough targeted political vitriol mixes with enough guns, bad things will eventually happen.
[NOTE: This post is being regularly updated with new developments, including reactions from US authorities, the Taliban, and the media. Scroll to the bottom for the latest.]
The Marine Corps is investigating a YouTube video posted early Wednesday that appears to show four Marines urinating on the heads of Afghans they'd just killed in a firefight. "Have a great day, buddy," one of the Marines can be heard saying on the footage.
The video was posted to YouTube by a user calling himself "semperfilonevoice," a play on the Corps' "Semper Fidelis" motto that suggests the poster might be a Marine with regrets about the warfighters' conduct. (The video, posted by London's Daily Telegraph and TMZ earlier today, is also reposted below. Warning: It contains graphic content.)
The poster of the video alleges that the urinators are members of Scout Sniper Team 4, an elite advance combat unit within the Camp Lejeune, N.C.-based Third Battalion, Second Marines. Their identities remain unknown at this point, but the video does contain at least one clue suggesting that's plausible. One service member in the video can be seen holding an M40 rifle, which is typically issued to sniper teams, but not to regular line units. Elements of the 3/2 Marines have seen some fierce fighting in Afghanistan, including a deployment last year to the province of Now Zad—called "Apocalypse Now Zad" by some—in which seven American fighters lost their lives.
Attempts by Mother Jones to contact the poster of the video were unsuccessful; calls to the 2nd Marine Division—the 3/2's parent unit—and to the Pentagon seeking further information about the video were not immediately returned. But a Marine spokesperson told TMZ that the video would be "fully investigated." "While we have not yet verified the origin or authenticity of this video, the actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps," she said. It's also important to note that it remains unclear as to where and when the video footage was taken.
According to the Geneva Conventions, which the US military observes, combatants must "at all times, and particularly after an engagement...search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled." They are also required to "ensure that the dead are honourably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged, that their graves are respected, grouped if possible according to the nationality of the deceased, properly maintained and marked so that they may always be found." (The UK's rules for its military members are even more explicit, threatening court-martial for any soldier for "maltreatment" of a dead enemy.)
Sentiments were divided among some YouTube commenters regarding the video. "You must be living under a rock, have you EVER seen the videos of the Taliban with dead body pieces," one defender of the alleged Marines wrote. "This video is nothing, ABSOLUTELY nothing compared to what they did to us Americans."
But one commenter, who identified himself as a veteran, was less willing to dismiss the behavior in the video: "Thanks fellas, you just pissed away everything me and my boys fought for."
UPDATE 1, Thursday, Jan. 12, 7:00 a.m. EST: The original video has been removed from YouTube by the user; thanks to MoJo reader Craig Boehman for providing the copy below.
UPDATE 2, Thursday, 10:00 a.m. EST: In a statement to the BBC, Pentagon spokesman and Navy Capt. John Kirby said: "We are deeply troubled by the video. Whoever it is, and whatever the circumstances—which we know is under investigation—it is egregious behaviour and unacceptable for a member of the military." The Marine Corps headquarters gave a similar message: "The actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps. This matter will be fully investigated.''
UPDATE 3, Thursday, 1:30 p.m. EST: A Taliban spokesman tells the Christian Science Monitor that the video makes no difference in the group's ongoing peace talks with the Western powers. "It's not a new thing that has happened. It's normal with the American forces and their allies. The foreign forces have always discriminated and abused human rights in Afghanistan," Qari Yousef Ahmadi told the news site. He added, however, "It's an act that makes a person feel ashamed to watch it or talk about it."
As media reactions to the video go, few so far are as powerful as this one from Hamilton Nolan of Gawker, titled "Piss on War: Death, Desecration, and Afghanistan." It must be read in its entirety, but here's a graphic excerpt:
Excerpt from "Piss on War": Courtesy Gawker
UPDATE 4, Thursday, 1:40 p.m. EST: A Marine Corps source speaking anonymously tells Reuters that the service has confirmed the video is authentic, and it's identified the unit shown in the tape. It's believed to be a contingent of the 3/2 Marines, which is consistent with the statements of the anonymous user who originally published the video to YouTube.
At a press conference, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed what she called the "deplorable behavior" in the video, adding that "the United States remains strongly committed to helping build a secure, peaceful, prosperous, democratic future for the people of Afghanistan":
UPDATE 5: Thursday, 4:00 p.m. EST: My colleague Adam Serwer flags a blog post from Islamophobe extraordinaire Pam Geller extolling the video. She writes: "I love these Marines. Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial." Surprisingly, there's more fascinating backstory here, and Adam's got it.
UPDATE 6: Thursday, 6:45 p.m. EST: Reuters reports that two of the four Marines seen in a video have been identified. Apparently the footage could be from last year: According to an unnamed Marine Corps official, the two men identified are still part of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, based out of Camp Lejeune, and their unit served in Afghanistan's Helmand province from March until September of 2011.
UPDATE 7: Thursday, 8:30 p.m. EST: Geller isn't the only right-winger to offer a repugnant response to the video. Radio host Dana Loesch—who is also employed by CNN, where she appears regularly as a political commentator—cheered the Marines' behavior and said, "I'd drop trou and do it too."
UPDATE 8: Friday, Jan. 13, 1 p.m. EST: Where do the GOP presidential hopefuls stand on the Marine video? There's no way of knowing, because not one has released a statement on it, and no reporter has yet pressed them for an opinion. Even though 2008 presidential nominee John McCain said the video "does great damage" and makes him "sad," and the commandant of the Marine Corps condemned it, and a Medal of Honor recipient said there was no excuse for it, and a bevy of Marines and other combat veterans past and present have said they're "universally disgusted by it and ashamed," there's been nary a word of condemnation—or even acknowledgement—from the GOP 2012 field. The candidates have long attacked President Obama's anti-terrorism and war strategies and made the case that they can keep America safer, but on this issue they're curiously silent. There are three more Republican debates between now and Tuesday, when voters in South Carolina select their preferred candidate; it remains to be seen whether the aspiring commanders-in-chief will address the Marines' behavior, and its implications for US foreign policy and a culture of respect, dignity, and the rule of law.
UPDATE 9: Friday, 2:10 p.m. EST: CNN pundit Dana Loesch has doubled down on her comments from yesterday. "I was using absurdity to highlight absurdity," she says, claiming that progressives have distorted her message and are attacking her unfairly. Decide for yourself what she meant—here's a more complete transcript of what she said on her radio show on Thursday:
Now we have a bunch of progressives that are talking smack about our military because there were marines caught urinating on corpses, Taliban corpses....Can someone explain to me if there's supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who, as part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans? I'd drop trou and do it too. That's me though. I want a million cool points for these guys. Is that harsh to say? Come on people, this is a war. What do you think this is?
Loesch also said this morning that the "Left is attacking me so they can avoid calling this Obama's Abu Ghraib. It can't be Obama's fault like it was Bush's." It's long been known that the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were the result of policy designed and directed from inside the Bush White House. On what basis does Loesch equate the behavior of these four Marines? That's a question she's not answering.
Meanwhile, CNN—which has paid Loesch since last February to be part of the "Best Political Team on Television"—is distancing itself from the situation. Spokesperson Edie Emery said in a statement to Politico, "CNN contributors are commentators who express a wide range of viewpoints—on and off of CNN—that often provoke strong agreement or disagreement. Their viewpoints are their own."
UPDATE 10: Friday, 3:15 p.m. EST: The Marines have appointed a general to handle the investigation into the urination video and decide what disciplinary action should be taken against the service members who appeared in or distributed the video, Stars and Stripes reports. Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser's investigation will be in addition to a criminal probe already set up by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Additionally, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan announced the military will run mandatory training for all troops on how to handle casualties. "I require all [NATO] personnel to treat all coalition, Afghan National Security Forces, civilians and insurgent dead with the appropriate dignity and respect," the commander, Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, said Friday.
Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) wrote an email, published by the Weekly Standard, castigating critics of the Marines shown in the video. "All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?" He conceded that the Marines should be punished administratively, the lowest level of discipline permitted under military law, and added, "As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell." West, an Iraq vet who resigned from the Army after "menacing" and allegedly "mock executing" an Iraq police officer during an interrogation, is a tea party GOP freshman who's gained notoriety for uncivil and Islamphobic statements in the past.
By contrast, TIME magazine's Nate Rawlings, who also served two tours in Iraq as an Army combat officer, writes that while killing is a part of the job, it is "not a sport or a game." "You can't teach someone how to be human," he writes, but "you can lead and inspire and teach and cajole and most importantly supervise young troops. That’s the way to prevent these things from happening again."
UPDATE 11: Sunday, 1:30 p.m. EST: A Republican presidential candidate has finally weighed in on the video controversy—expressing outrage at an alleged anti-military bias in the US government, rather than at the Marine "kids" shown urinating on corpses in the video. "These kids made a mistake, there's no doubt about it," Rick Perry told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday morning (video below). "But to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top." Perry also suggested that Patton and Churchill had engaged in similar behavior in their times. "Obviously, 18, 19-year-olds make stupid mistakes all too often," Perry said. "What's really disturbing to me is just, kind of, the over-the-top-rhetoric from this administration and their disdain for the military." As previous updates show, the Marines, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the three-star Army general in charge of Western forces in Afghanistan all took clear stances against the video and initiated the criminal investigations. It's unclear whether Perry meant to argue that these military institutions, too, were showing "disdain for the military."
UPDATE 12: Sunday, 3:30 p.m. EST: Animal activists are using the Marine video furor to draw attention to another video, uploaded anonymously to the internet last November, that appears to show US Army soldiers beating a sheep to unconsciousness (and possibly death) by repeated blows to the head with an aluminum baseball bat. (Warning: The video is graphic and disturbing.) Several of the soldiers can be heard laughing as the sheep attempts to stand up and is hit, again and again.
PETA President Ingrid Newkirk discussed the video on Huffington Post Friday. "PETA did what it always does when someone blows the whistle on these incidents of gratuitous cruelty: We wrote to Secretary of the Army John McHugh [PDF] and then, when no answer was forthcoming, to other high-ranking officers," she wrote. "No one—not PETA and not the thousands of people who have seen this video and are rightly disturbed by it—has received any acknowledgment, not even a single comforting word, that an investigation has been started."
By now you've heard about politicians denouncing the anti-Wall Street uprising, from Eric "Beware the mob" Cantor to Herman "Get a job!" Cain. The hostility from the political right is hardly a surprise. But in recent days things have taken a curious turn among the right-wing commentariat, with a fixation on feces, urine, drugs, and sex. For these folks Occupy Wall Street isn't so much about an economic crisis or even class warfare—it's crass warfare, with "Revenge of the Dirty Hippies" invading a city near you!
Read on for the best of the worst, gathered up using Storify.
Earlier this week I wrote about a piece published on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com that relies so heavily on flawed assertions about a new global-warming study that it's ripe for a retraction. Not only did the piece wrongly attribute an author to the new study, published in Nature in late August, but it also recycled an old quote from that person to promote its claim that the study definitively refuted human-caused climate change. (The study, as I explained in detail, did nothing of the sort.)
Multiple attempts the prior week to reach Breitbart and the writer of the piece, Chriss W. Street, about the erroneous contents had failed to get their attention. But apparently my story (and subsequent posts in The New York Times, Salon and Media Matters) did: An editor's note appeared on the Big Government piece later the same day. Unfortunately, it's more of a wreck than it is rectifying. Breitbart.com's "in-house counsel" Joel Pollak says in the note:
Earlier today, Mother Jones...accused Andrew Breitbart of a "global warming blunder" because the piece below cited Jykri Kauppinen as an author of a Nature study on cosmic rays. The author of the piece, Chriss W. Street, has indicated that Kauppinen is the author of a separate submission to Nature in 2010 that also contests the UN Climate Panel's "consensus" view on the degree to which human activity contributes to global climate change. Street stands by his argument, regardless of the minor citation error that Breitbart's habitual critics on the left have attempted to magnify.
Why Street failed to "indicate" in his piece the true orgin of Kauppinen's comments, and why he passed them off as a conclusion of the study just published in Nature, Pollak doesn't say. Nor does Pollak explain why the piece continues to state, erroneously, that Kauppinen is one of the new study's authors. (Chalk it up, perhaps, to the stuff of "minor citation.") As for Big Government's blatantly wrong claim that the new studydebunks overwhelming scientific consensus on humanity's role in climate change, it seems that one was, well, simply too hot for them to touch.
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