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US military will incorporate counter-atrocity planning into its operating procedures
a presidential study directive (number 10^↑) issued in 2011 that aimed to bridge the gap between national interest and altruistic intervention. It claimed that "preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest" as well as "a core moral responsibility of the United States. Our security is affected when masses of civilians are slaughtered, refugees flow across borders, and murderers wreak havoc on regional stability and livelihoods. America's reputation suffers, and our ability to bring about change is constrained, when we are perceived as idle in the face of mass atrocities and genocide."
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- genocide campaigners should beware functioning as the administration’s cheerleaders. Even if atrocity-prevention is a national interest, that hardly means it will trump other national interests - strategic and commercial, for example.The fate of the "ethical dimension" of New Labour’s foreign policy is a warning: it remained just a dimension, and an increasingly subordinate one at that.
- It is one thing to sanction your enemies in the name of fine ideals, but if you don’t mobilise the United Nations to do the same against your allies, these ideals are tarnished
- Israel’s leaders, the pro-Israel lobby in the US, and some "genocide scholars" are already framing their proposed attack as "genocide prevention". Yet the last thing genocide prevention needs is to be linked to aggressive war, which will severely discredit the whole idea.
- The Atrocities Prevention Board, to live up to its name, cannot ignore the way that US military policies daily produce atrocities. Genocide campaigners need to be alive to these dangers, and campaign against US policy when it too causes violence against civilians. The potential of the Obama administration’s latest moves to prevent some atrocities should be noted, but there must be sustained vigilance lest they end up being mobilised to produce other atrocities.

Apr

2012

BILLS-112hres632ih.pdf (application/pdf Object)

www.gpo.gov/...BILLS-112hres632ih.pdf

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Turkey US diplomacy Syria

Apr

2012

Assassination Attempts Revive Suspicions in Lebanon About Syrian Intervention - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...about-syrian-intervention.html

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Lebanon Syria hezbollah politics assassination

Apr

2012

Letter -- Blocking the Property and Suspending Entry into the United States of Certain Persons with Respect to Grave Human Rights Abuses by the Governments of Iran and Syria via Information Technology | The White House

www.whitehouse.gov/...try-united-states-certain-pers

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internet censorship surveillance US USA Iran Syria

Apr

2012

Friends of Syria Conference - a set on Flickr

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images Tunisia Syria

Tahrir, 2 Feb 2012 - a set on Flickr

www.flickr.com/...72157629147612647

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Egypt images Syria

Mar

2012

BBC News - Ali Ferzat: Revolution redefines art in Syria

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-middle-east-17491184

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art Syria censorship cartoons revolution

Mar

2012

Telecomix Broadcast System

tbs.okhin.fr

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Syria video

Mar

2012

Syria uprising, Twitter, and social-media revolution fatigue. - Slate Magazine

www.slate.com/...media_revolution_fatigue_.html

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Syria Egypt revolutions Twitter socialmedia

As we can see from these estimates below, the volume of Syria-related tweets (as a percentage of overall tweets) appears considerably lower than the volume related to the uprisings in Egypt and Iran. The estimates were constructed using multiple published Web sources reporting on number of tweets for the observed events as well as total Twitter traffic over time, including Twitter's blog, Customer Insight Group, Mashable, the Sysomos blog, and a dataset acquired via Twapperkeeper.
The Iranian protests in 2009 marked the first time that social media let us witness this kind of protest in a closed society from the citizens' point of view. The world watched, transfixed, as the death of protester Neda Agha-Soltan was caught on video. Now, these kinds of horrifying images have become alarmingly common.
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- The revolution in Egypt was relatively short, fast, and explosive. The Syrian uprising, by contrast, has been going on for 11 long months. Certain moments have refocused the world's attention, such as the siege of Homs in early February or the deaths of journalists Anthony Shadid, Marie Colvin, and Rémi Ochlik. Otherwise, much of the Syrian uprising has tragically resembled, as NPR's Andy Carvin puts it, "the proverbial boiling of the frog." While Carvin and others have been devotedly tweeting about Syria, he acknowledges that the length of the uprising might deter some news coverage. "I could imagine editors saying, what's the new angle here?" he says.
- social media and mainstream media tend to be mutually reinforcing, so the dearth of one affects the other
- for the average observer, the Syrian uprising lacks a clear and consistent narrative. The Assad regime's brutal repression is plain to see, but other aspects of the 11-month uprising are less clear. Some ask: Who exactly is the opposition, and what do the majority of Syrians actually want? Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that this confusion and lack of context spreads to the Twittersphere. With some exceptions, the Syrian tweeps who "are tweeting in English are not tweeting in the same way as Egyptians. They are not providing accuracy and context, nor is it really specific or retweetable."
- there is no clear or easy solution to Syria's suffering