Tag: James Foley

Should ISIS Be Censored? Ctd

by Dish Staff

https://twitter.com/dickc/statuses/502005459067625473

Glenn Greenwald is upset at Twitter for censoring the video of James Foley’s beheading:

Given the savagery of the Foley video, it’s easy in isolation to cheer for its banning on Twitter. But that’s always how censorship functions: it invariably starts with the suppression of viewpoints which are so widely hated that the emotional response they produce drowns out any consideration of the principle being endorsed. It’s tempting to support criminalization of, say, racist views as long as one focuses on one’s contempt for those views and ignores the serious dangers of vesting the state with the general power to create lists of prohibited ideas. That’s why free speech defenders such as the ACLU so often represent and defend racists and others with heinous views in free speech cases: because that’s where free speech erosions become legitimized in the first instance when endorsed or acquiesced to.

The question posed by Twitter’s announcement is not whether you think it’s a good idea for people to see the Foley video. Instead, the relevant question is whether you want Twitter, Facebook and Google executives exercising vast power over what can be seen and read.

Jay Caspian Kang joins the debate, coming down on the same side as Greenwald:

Twitter is not an editorial outfit; it’s odd to think that a company that allows thousands of other gruesome videos, including other ISIS beheadings, would suddenly step in. Twitter, for example, allows creepshot accounts, in which men secretly take photos of women in public. (The sharing of creepshot photos has been banned on Reddit because it tended to target underage girls.) Where, exactly, is the enforcement line? …

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have taken an outsize share of the information market, mostly by acting as facilitators. As presently constructed, the policies at each company about what do in these extraordinary situations are still in flux and under-formed. Having families fill out a form on a Web site about a beheading and chalking up the removal of the video to ill-defined company policy does not accurately reflect the power of the image, nor the power of social media. If Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube want to imagine their networks as something of a public square that can, at times, inspire revolutionary movements, they should come up with a more transparent and thoughtful way to deal with the extraordinary footage that is sure to come through their servers.

On the other hand, Emerson Brooking notes, ISIS’s social media propaganda ops are a key element of its war effort:

Social media has proven a powerful tool in the Islamic State’s military offensives. When IS advanced on Mosul beginning June 10, the Iraqi army collapsed immediately. An estimated 60,000 officers and soldiers fled in the first day of fighting. As IS has pushed both south and eastward, threatening to both encircle Baghdad and crush the semiautonomous Kurds, the rout has accelerated. More than 200,000 Iraqi minorities escaped ahead of IS’ early August offensive, abandoning their towns en masse. In total, some 500,000 civilians are thought to have sought refuge in Kurdish-controlled lands. While it is doubtful that more than a fraction of Iraq’s fleeing soldiers and civilians have seen the Islamic State’s postings, it only takes a small handful for the rumors to take hold.

Either way, though, Ben Makuch stresses how futile it is to try and banish ISIS from social media entirely:

I reached out to a Canadian fighter by the nom de guerre Abu Turaab al-Kanadi (“the Canadian”) on Monday, to see what the reaction was among online IS fighters. He’d been booted from Twitter, which I asked him about on Kik messenger. He was very blunt as to what solicited the hand of Twitter officials. “Probably the severed heads,” al-Kanadi said, adding that he was not offered any warning emails or an explanation from Twitter as to why his account was suspended. But al-Kanadi didn’t seem bothered: “It’s whatever. I made a new one.”  … Banning Jihadists from Twitter already seems like an impossible feat, especially when at any moment there’s nothing stopping a banned fighter simply from recreating an account outside the auspices of Twitter officials. Unless you could somehow impose an internet black out on targeted regions of Iraq—even then, the Iraqi government did that with mixed results—it’s a near impossible task.

Foley’s Impossible Ransom

by Dish Staff

Before deciding to murder captive American journalist James Foley, ISIS had attempted to extort an enormous ransom from the US government in exchange for his release:

Long before the dark bluster behind ISIL’s rationale for killing an American civilian, there had reportedly been a call for a ransom. Philip Balboni, Foley’s boss at GlobalPost, told The Wall Street Journal that the captors demanded 100 million euros in exchange for Foley’s release. The New York Times reported the figure as $100 million USD, and says the captors also added other demands, including an exchange of prisoners being held by the United States. … Balboni also told WCVB, that the family received an email last week — after the U.S. began its bombing campaign against ISIL — indicating that they were going to kill Foley. That email made no demands and was “full of rage,” making no suggestion that he could be spared with a payment.

This revelation has left some people wondering why the administration was willing to trade with the Taliban for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, but not with ISIS for Foley. Joshua Keating makes the case for why those were the right calls:

As counterterrorism scholar Peter Neumann argued in a 2007 Foreign Affairs article, governments must at times negotiate and even grant concessions to groups it considers to be terrorists. The decision about whether to do so should be made less on the basis of the group’s relative odiousness than on whether such a deal could help stop violence. …

As I argued after the Bergdahl swap, the deal should be seen less in terms of what the U.S. was willing to give up for one soldier than as the Obama administration settling unfinished business before it pulls troops out of Afghanistan and gets out of the business of fighting the Taliban entirely. But a truce, or even a de-escalation of hostility, between the U.S. government and ISIS or any of its former affiliates in al-Qaida is hard to imagine. While the payment of a ransom could secure the release of a prisoner, it can do little beyond that except provide the group with much-needed funding. It would also encourage more kidnappings, both by ISIS and other groups that would be inspired by its example.

Will Saletan agrees that we were right to reject the ransom demand for Foley:

If you pay the ransom, you’re not just fueling the kidnap market. As Slate’s Josh Keating notes, you’re also funding ISIS’s war and its atrocities against civilians. Callimachi found that al-Qaida and its affiliates reaped a minimum of $125 million in ransoms in the last five years, and $66 million just last year. It’s now al-Qaida’s main revenue stream. And the demands won’t end with money. In addition to Sotloff, ISIS reportedly has at least three more American hostages it’s threatening to kill. It also has some Brits. The New York Times says ISIS “has sent a laundry list of demands for the release of the foreigners, starting with money but also prisoner swaps.” Altogether, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, ISIS and other extremists in Syria have about 20 foreign journalists. I fear for those reporters. I’m horrified by Foley’s death, and I know Sotloff is probably next. But we have to think about the next 20 hostages, and the 20 after that. Every time we ransom a reporter, we put a price tag on the next one.

Adam Taylor explores the practices of European countries that do pay ransoms for civilian hostages, and why those decisions are controversial:

In countries that may pay ransoms, there appear to be mixed feelings about the practice: Last year French President François Hollande told families of hostages being held in Africa’s Sahel region that no more ransoms would be paid, though a few months later there were reports in French media of more money paid out. Germany also has questioned its own payments to terrorists. “We need to ask ourselves whether or not we can live with the fact that the money we are paying in ransom for hostages,” a German government security expert said in a 2007 newspaper interview, “could be used to buy weapons that could kill our soldiers in Afghanistan.” Countries where hostages are taken have sometimes complained about ransoms, too. “Yemen constantly rejects handling the release of kidnapped hostages through the payment of ransoms to kidnappers,” Yemen’s foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, said in an interview with Saudi Arabia’s Asharq al-Aswat newspaper last year. “We do not want this conduct to expose many foreigners in Yemen to abduction as other kidnappers would seek to receive a ransom,” Qirbi explained.

Gary Sick offers his take in an interview with the Wire:

[A] live hostage is actually worth something. A dead hostage is really not worth anything. If they kill the second hostage, which they have suggested that’s what they’re going to do, they just lost the last of their bargaining effort. They have to ask themselves what they’re going to do. … I would say, in a cold-blooded way, that the second hostage’s value has gone up in their eyes unless they think something really significant could come from it. If they kill him and the bombing goes on, they’ve lost it.

Although this is all done with great bravado, I remember my good friend Danny Pearl, he was at the Wall Street Journal and al-Qaeda beheaded and killed him. One man was already hung for that. Another has admitted he carried out the beheading. If he ever comes to trial, he will be sentenced to death. Eventually, and it might be surprising, justice does catch up with these guys, and it is clearly a war crime. Killing an innocent civilian you are holding as a hostage is a war crime, period. If they ever get captured, they will be interrogated and they’re likely to be hanged for it. Now, in battle, they don’t think on it.

Will Foley’s Murder Change Obama’s Iraq Plans?

by Dish Staff

In the wake of James Foley’s murder, Fred Kaplan urges Obama to start building a regional coalition to defeat ISIS:

If the jihadists of ISIS are as dangerous as Obama says they are (and the evidence suggests they are), then it’s time to plow through diplomatic niceties and pursue the common interests of nations with which we otherwise might not get along. Yes, it’s politically awkward, to say the least, for Obama to make common cause, even on this one issue, with Assad (a monster whom he once said “must go”) and the mullahs of Tehran (most of whom regard America as the “great Satan”). But in World War II, Roosevelt and Churchill joined with Stalin to defeat Hitler—and, if they hadn’t, Hitler would have won.

The net against ISIS should be widened further. A good model here is the 1990–91 Gulf War, in which Presidents George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker assembled a vast coalition to push Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait. Nearly every Arab country in the region—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, even Syria—sent whole armored divisions or air wings. Many of them didn’t do much in the war, but the important point was that they were there. Their presence demonstrated that this wasn’t a war of Western imperialists against Muslim Iraq; it was a multinational war against aggression.

Jacob Siegel expects the US intervention in Iraq to escalate, but points out that merely holding the recent gains against ISIS will require a sustained involvement anyway:

Defeating ISIS in an open confrontation has not been part of any proposed plan, but weakening the group and pushing back its advances could go from the de facto U.S. approach to the official strategy if the air campaign expands. The most visible result of the air campaign is the retaking of the Mosul Dam, a key piece of infrastructure that ISIS captured from Kurdish forces in early August. After a sustained bombing campaign with more than half the total U.S. airstrikes so far, 51 out 84 targeting ISIS positions around the dam, it was retaken Tuesday by Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi special forces.

The dam is no longer in ISIS’s hands, but keeping it that way may require keeping American airpower on call for the foreseeable future.

Spencer Ackerman scopes out what sort of escalation might be in the works:

One option under consideration, not directly related to the Foley killing, is a request for hundreds of more US marines to deploy to Baghdad to bolster security at the US embassy and related installations. The request, made by the State Department recently, is said not to be a response to an new anticipated push by Isis into Baghdad, which it has stopped short of attempting to seize. An official who was not cleared to speak to the press characterized it as coming out of an abundance of caution. …

The US Central Command continued on Wednesday to send fighter jets and armed drones to harass Isis near the Mosul Dam, a critical piece of infrastructure that the US considers to no longer be under Isis control. The warplanes launched 14 strikes against Isis vehicles and weaponry, tacitly a rejection of Isis’ demand with the Foley killing that the US relent in its newest air campaign in Iraq.

Ramping up the air campaign may soon become easier, as Baghdad appears willing to let US bombers take off from Iraqi bases:

The back-channel discussions over the bases, which have not previously been reported, highlight the White House’s uncertainty about escalating its low-level air war against the Islamic State. President Barack Obama proudly pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq in late 2011. He has repeatedly stressed that the military campaign there that began Aug. 8 will be limited in both scope and duration. With broad swaths of Syria and Iraq under Islamic State control, key U.S. allies are pressing the administration to step up the fight. Taking off from Iraqi bases would make it much easier to do so because it would put the American aircraft closer to their targets.

“Everything is harder when you’re doing it from the outside,” a senior military official said. At issue is a little-noticed aspect of this air campaign: None of the strikes against Islamic State targets inside Iraq have been carried out by U.S. aircraft based inside Iraq.

Morrissey flags a new poll showing that 54 percent of the American public supports airstrikes against ISIS:

Obama deserves credit for taking action, if belatedly and perhaps not as robustly as some would like. So far, though, Americans aren’t inclined to think that his policies in Iraq have improved. His approval rating in June on the question was 42/52, and today it’s 42/51. In fact, slightly more strongly disapprove now (36%, from 34%) and slightly fewer strongly approve (16% from 17%) than in June, although all of those moves are within the margin of error. Interestingly, the American public likes the air strikes, but not arming the Kurds, which seems like more of a slam-dunk.

Foley’s British Executioner, Ctd

by Dish Staff

The ISIS jihadist who beheaded American journalist James Foley in a video released by the group on Tuesday has been identified:

As an international manhunt got under way on Wednesday, the English-speaking militant was identified to the Guardian by one of his former hostages as the ringleader of three British jihadists thought to be the main guards of foreign nationals in Raqqa, a stronghold of Islamic State (Isis) rebels. The militant who appeared on the Foley video, who called himself John and is believed to be from London, was said to be the main rebel negotiator during talks earlier this year to release 11 Islamic State hostages – who were eventually handed to Turkish officials after ransom demands were met.

The FBI, MI5 and Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command were all on Wednesday night racing to identify the militant who fronted the propaganda video that showed the brutal murder of Foley, the journalist who had been missing in Syria since 2012. Sources in Syria recognised the man as a point-man for hostage negotiations in Raqqa, where he is said to have held discussions with several families of jailed foreign nationals over the internet.

Josh Rogin and Eli Lake link Foley’s abduction and murder to a ring of foreign-born jihadists suspected in the kidnapping of other journalists in Syria. Several members of that ring were arrested and charged with false imprisonment shortly before Foley was kidnapped in November 2012:

The case fell apart because the two Western journalists who had been abducted in Syria in July 2012 and could identify the suspects did not appear to testify at the trial. One of them had testified against Shajul Islam at pretrial proceedings and said Islam was part of a cell of foreign-born extremists in Syria that included 10 to 15 U.K. citizens. Islam, through his lawyer, denied being involved in the abductions at the time.

One U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast that both U.S. and British counter-terrorism agencies have taken a keen interest in the suspected militants. “There is no official product on this yet for the intelligence community,” this official said. “But people who are out there and collecting on this believe the [Foley] abduction and the [Islam] trial are connected.”

The US had apparently tried to rescue Foley last month:

Details on the nature of the unsuccessful operation remained sparse late Wednesday. When American forces landed in eastern Syria — most likely in Raqqa province, where Foley is thought to have been held and killed — they came under heavy fire. The elite troops killed a number of militants, and one of the pilots involved in the operation sustained a minor injury when his aircraft came under fire, a senior administration official told Foreign Policy.

According to a defense official with knowledge of the situation, the operation occurred in early July. The same official added that the operation was based mostly on human intelligence — as opposed to satellite photographs and intercepted communications — and the military now believes the hostages had been moved from that location just days before the raid took place.

Obama denounced the killing in a press conference yesterday afternoon, calling ISIS a “cancer” but not committing to a particular course of action in response. After weighing the pros and cons of a retaliatory effort, Zack Beauchamp sees the president in a bind:

Obama’s Wednesday statement was two things: an emotional tribute to James Foley’s life, and a furious condemnation of ISIS and its goals. “Jim Foley’s life stands in stark contrast to his killers,” the president said. “[ISIS] has no ideology of any value to human beings. their ideology is bankrupt.”

What the presser wasn’t, however, was a policy address. Saying “the United States will continue to do what we must do to protect our people,” as Obama did, doesn’t say much about the choice between “hit them harder” and “don’t take the bait,” or any other clear US action or lack thereof. The American policy response is still just unclear. Regardless of what the US ends up doing, it should be clear that this isn’t an easy call for Obama. Sadly, it’s much harder to destroy ISIS than it is to condemn the atrocities they commit.

The Guardian weighs in on what Foley’s murder means in terms of the Anglo-American role in the fight against ISIS:

Bluntly put: if we target them, they will target us. The foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, was right to say on Wednesday that we – Americans and British in particular – have always been in their sights as one of the “far enemies” they reckon with. But fighter bombers over the Mosul dam, arms for the Kurds and help for the Baghdad government bring us more into the “near enemy” category, and that has consequences. Consequences in the region and, potentially, consequences at home in the United States and Europe.

We should not be alone in a contest with Isis. Regional powers should take on a greater role, perhaps even military, but certainly a more coherent diplomatic role. There should be a suspension of the rivalries which helped create the opportunity Isis seized.

 

Foley’s British Executioner

by Dish Staff

The unidentified jihadist who murdered James Foley in the video released yesterday spoke fluent English with a London accent, likely placing him among the hundreds of UK citizens who have traveled to Syria or Iraq to join up with ISIS. That revelation could motivate the UK to step up its involvement in the fight against the Islamic State:

“We’ve been saying for a very long time that there are significant numbers of British nationals in Syria, increasingly in Iraq, and one of the reasons why what is going on in Syria and Iraq is a direct threat to our own national security is the presence of significant numbers of our nationals who may at some stage seek to come back to the UK with the skills, the tradecraft that they’ve learned working with these terrorist organisations, potentially posing a threat to our domestic security here in the UK,” [Foreign Secretary Philip] Hammond said.

Hammond said Britain was committed to helping the Iraqi government fight Isis and that, although the Iraqi government “has made it clear that it does not need and actually wouldn’t welcome western boots on the ground”, it did want help with surveillance and technological equipment. Asked if Britain would send soldiers to Iraq to train Iraqi forces, Hammond said this was “certainly something that we would consider”.

Josh Halliday rounds up some expert analysis of why the killer’s nationality is significant:

Prof Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, said the militant was chosen to front the video to cause maximum impact in the west.

“This is significant because it signifies a turn towards threatening the west. They are saying we’re going to come after you if you bomb us,” he said. Neumann said British fighters had been carrying out “horrific acts” like beheadings, torture and executions for a year and a half, but this appeared to be the first with a western victim. …

Dr Erin Saltman, a senior researcher at Quilliam Foundation, said the footage was geared towards disaffected Islamist extremists in the west who would be able to empathise with the British-accented militant. “The video is quite a shock mainly because the two characters are an American and a Briton. That’s done very deliberately,” she said. “As soon as you have a fighter with a Middle East accent it becomes very easy to disassociate with that and say they’re brutal, they’re barbaric. But when you have a British citizen, raised in the UK, this is somebody we can empathise with.”

Jihadism expert Shiraz Maher calls British jihadists “amongst some of the most vicious and vociferous fighters who are out there”:

Maher warned that the self-proclaimed caliphate was likely to carry out more atrocities because of western efforts to help people in the region. “Unfortunately, the way the Foley video is framed, it makes it very clear now that IS (Isis) will react against any western involvement or intervention into the conflicts either in Syria or Iraq and that, of course, given that we are now helping minorities in Iraq – the Yazidis, the Kurds, for example – they regard that not just as an assault on them but they regard that ultimately as a declaration of war against Islam itself.

“And therefore, that is the sort of narrative we have, of course, heard from al-Qaida in the past. That will license them to attack targets and individuals and western interests as they see fit.” Maher said British and other Sunni Muslims initially went to Syria because of an “existential threat” to their faith from Shia Muslims, and their presence has since swelled Isis ranks and allowed it to increase its territory and influence.

Ed Morrissey responds to the possibility that the executioner or his compatriots may be former Guantánamo Bay detainees:

The orange jumpsuits are obviously referencing Guantanamo Bay, but the British seem concerned that there’s more than just symbolism now in play with ISIS. The US began releasing British subjects from Gitmo during the Bush administration under international pressure to shut down the facility, as well as releasing other detainees to their home countries, all of whom pledged to ensure that they would not return to the fight. We’ve seen plenty of recidivism since then, and all to this same end — to rejoin the jihad against the West and the nations in this region, and to recruit others to do the same.

It won’t be a surprise if the jihadist turns out to be a former Gitmo detainee, but it is a bit of a surprise that the UK doesn’t keep a close enough watch on those former detainees to account for their whereabouts immediately. After all, they have already been identified as threats, picked up in the battle zones far from home, which is how they ended up in Gitmo in the first place.

ISIS Murders James Foley

by Dish Staff

ISIS released a video yesterday purporting to show the beheading of American journalist James Foley and threatening to do the same to his colleague Steven Sotloff if the US does not immediately cease its air campaign against the militant group:

A propaganda video circulated on Tuesday showed a masked Isis fighter beheading a kneeling man dressed in an orange jumpsuit who is purported to be James Wright Foley, a photojournalist who went missing in Syria in 2012. The masked executioner spoke in English, with what sounded like a British accent, and said the slaying came in response to the air strikes ordered by President Barack Obama against Isis 12 days ago.

Isis, whose chief spokesman came under US state department sanctions on Monday, warned of further revenge – including on another man purported to be a captured US journalist, Steven Sotloff – and in the video the victim was made to read a statement blaming the US for his own murder. Foley has been missing in Syria since November 2012, where he went to report on the bloody struggle to overthrow dictator Bashar al-Assad. He was initially thought to have been captured by forces loyal to the Assad regime.

So how did he end up in the hands of ISIS? Christopher Dickey wonders:

In Syria, he was picked up by gunmen from what the Federal Bureau of Investigation called an “organized gang” shortly after he left an Internet café on November 22, 2012. In May 2013, GlobalPost President Philip Balboni said that “with a very high degree of confidence, we now believe that Jim was most likely abducted by a pro-regime militia group”—that is, one loyal to President Bashar Assad—and that he was being held near Damascus by the Syrian Air Force intelligence service. “Based on what we have learned,” said Balboni, “it is likely Jim is being held with one or more Western journalists, including most likely at least one other American.”

Several groups fighting against Assad have claimed that there is—or was—a tacit collaboration, at least, between his intelligence services and ISIS, since it served the savage Assad regime well to claim it was fighting a terrorist enemy even more brutal than its own forces.

Uri Friedman remarks that Foley, before his capture, was part of a dwindling cohort of journalists reporting directly from Syria:

“We have never been prouder of our son Jim,” Foley’s mother posted on Facebook on Tuesday evening. “He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people.”

That exposure is growing fainter by the day. Foley appears to have died while working in what is now the most dangerous place in the world to be a reporter—a country where dozens of journalists have been killed and kidnapped in recent years. As the Syrian conflict has grown more indiscriminately violent; as the Syrian government has targeted journalists, censored local news coverage, and barred foreign journalists from the country; as ever-stronger extremist groups have started seizing members of the press (and not even bothering to make demands for their release), news outlets around the world have pulled their staff from the country. Many Syrian journalists and citizen-journalists have been silenced.

Max Fisher knew him:

There will be many efforts in the coming days to derive meaning from Jim’s death. Some will say ISIS had him killed to punish the US for its recent air strikes against them in Iraq, some will say it was to egg the Americans on, and others will attribute it to simple madness. I would rather derive meaning from Jim’s life. As a journalist, I want to celebrate his dedication to truth and understanding. But that would sell him short. It is clear even just by secondhand accounts from the family that would do anything to help him, even when he insisted on returning to a war zone, and from the friends who were so enriched by knowing him, that Jim’s value was so much more.

Owen Jones is struck by the effectiveness of ISIS’s propaganda:

Everything about the video of Foley’s alleged murder was intended to chill. It is unlikely that Islamic State (Isis) selected an executor with a strong London accent for no reason. It was the Iraq war that first popularised the execution video but hearing the blood-curdling threats and dogma of Isis recited in tones that are all too familiar is itself a message.

Terrorism by definition aims to spread terror to achieve its political ends. One of the reasons Isis has outmanoeuvred its rivals is because it has embraced social media so effectively. By publicising its atrocities online, it tells would-be opponents what will happen if it is resisted, and this partly explains why so many have fled rather than confront Isis forces. The ruthless use of social media has proved instrumental in the toppling of entire cities. This operation is being gladly assisted by those in the west who portray Isis as a unique, undiluted evil that needs to be bombed out of existence, granting the militant group the mystique it clearly craves and relies on.

Shane Harris looks at how social media companies have tried to scrub references to the video:

Less than an hour after the video was first posted to YouTube, the company removed it. But the same video was soon posted by a different YouTube user, and it remained accessible for at least another half an hour. The company eventually removed the video from the user’s account, but it didn’t suspend the account itself, and within minutes, the user had posted it again. Twitter suspended the user’s account after he included a link to the video in his feed. …

But the social media companies are fighting a losing battle. They depend on users to flag offensive content or material that violates their terms of service — videos of murder undoubtedly do — but they don’t proactively police the photos, videos, and messages posted to their sites. The companies also have to determine whether posting violent rhetoric or messages constitutes promoting terrorists’ messages or is an act of free speech, and the distinction is not always clear.