My latest for The Intercept:
CIA DIRECTOR JOHN BRENNAN wrapped up a two-day visit to Cairo this week where he held meetings with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and security officials to discuss regional developments and terrorism.
Brennan, a 25-year CIA veteran who has played a role backing some of the most controversial post-9/11 policies, lauded the strategic relations between Egypt and the United States and emphasized the need to boost cooperation in all areas, including on security issues, according to a statement from the presidential spokesperson’s office.
As chief architect of the Obama administration’s secret drone program, Brennan has been dubbed the “assassination czar.” He has also publicly supported the CIA’s use of torture — or what the U.S. government has called “enhanced interrogation techniques” — and has vociferously defended the government’s policy of mass domestic surveillance.
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My first piece for The Intercept:
AFTER NEARLY 10 MONTHS of war, the destruction of Yemen continues with little respite for civilians.
On Sunday, a hospital in northern Yemen supported by Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym, MSF) was bombed, killing at least five people and destroying several buildings that were part of the facility. Ten people were injured in the attack, including three of the group’s staff.
The humanitarian group said it cannot confirm the origin of the attack but that planes were seen flying over the facility at the time. The only air power currently operating in Yemen is a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states that have waged a relentless bombing campaign since March.
More than 6,000 people have been killed in the war, including over 2,800 civilians, the majority of them from airstrikes, according to the United Nations. The United States has backed the Saudi-led coalition with logistical and intelligence support, including crucial aerial refueling and targeting assistance, as well as billions of dollars worth of arms sales.
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My second piece on Yemen for GlobalPost’s Longreads on Conflict:
HUDEIDAH, Yemen — The second floor of the dialysis clinic here looks more like a refugee camp than a kidney treatment center.
A few dozen patients have been living here for days, sleeping on either plastic chairs or the grime-covered floor. They are waiting for treatment but the clinic’s machines are not working. With each passing day the toxins in their blood increase. They get sicker. They can do nothing but wait.
Like all of Yemen, they are slowly dying.
The dialysis center represents all that is wrong with the country right now. Yemen is the site of a civil war, with one side backed by a Saudi-led coalition, the other led by the Houthi rebel movement. For nine months Saudi Arabia has been both bombing the country, at times indiscriminately. It has also imposed a crippling blockade.
The results have been dire for what was already the poorest country in the region. Food is scarce and Yemenis everywhere are going hungry. Officials say the country is on the brink of famine. The blockade has also prevented deliveries of fuel, which inhibits the ability of Yemenis to travel — for treatment at a dialysis center, for example. It has also led to an energy crisis. Electricity is intermittent at best. Meanwhile, violence has displaced millions. For all these reasons, the economy has essentially collapsed.
Saudi Arabia put together a coalition of Arab countries that is directly supported by the United States. The stated goal is to drive back the Houthi rebels and reinstall the country’s ousted president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour. Mansour is friendly to Saudi Arabia and the United States, allowing the latter to conduct its counterterrorism campaigns inside the country. For Saudi Arabia, the war is about countering perceived Iranian influence on a neighboring country.
The airstrikes alone have devastated Yemen, hitting civilian targets like weddings and hospitals with disturbing regularity. The blockade, meanwhile, is having a quieter, slower, but ultimately more deadly impact.
Saudi Arabia says the blockade is preventing weapons from reaching the Houthis. But it is also preventing humanitarian aid from reaching Yemenis. The Houthis and their allies have set up their own blockades in areas they control, making the problem even worse.
Effectively, Yemenis are being strangled to death. Every day that passes they lose more and more of the essentials: food, water, shelter, fuel and health care.
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My first of a two-part series on Yemen for GlobalPost’s Longreads on Conflict:
SANABAN, Yemen — Ayman al-Sanabani beamed as he entered his family’s home on his wedding day. He was greeting his new bride, Gamila, who was in a bedroom surrounded by friends. Ayman sat beside her for several minutes, receiving warm words of congratulations.
It would be the young couple’s first and only encounter as husband and wife.
The terrifying power of a bomb is how it can alter life so dramatically, so completely, so instantaneously. How it can crush concrete, rip apart flesh, and snuff out life. The moments before the pilot pulls the trigger and sends the missile screeching down choreograph the final dance with fate: another step forward into a room, a turn around a corner, a walk outside to get some air — trivial actions that determine everything afterward.
This power is a fact of life in Yemen now. It is brought forth by a coalition of Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia and supported by the United States. The airstrikes have been relentless since March, a period now of eight months. They are supposed to be targeting a local rebel group, but appear largely indiscriminate, regularly hitting civilian targets. Thousands of people have been killed. Human rights groups say some of these strikes amount to war crimes.
The al-Sanabani home sits on the crest of a small hill overlooking this village some 90 miles south of the capital, where low-slung houses are clustered near plots of yellowed farmland that are dotted by small trees. In the near horizon, reddish-brown mountains loom over the landscape. On any given day, it’s a beautiful place.
It was Oct. 7. Ayman and two of his brothers were all getting married in a joint ceremony. Hundreds of relatives and neighbors had come to take part. Their three-story house was brightly decorated. Colored lights draped down from the roof toward two large tents, which were erected to accommodate the vast numbers of guests. Children scampered outside, shooting fireworks into the night sky.
Fighter jets roared overhead but the guests paid little attention to the menacing sounds. Sanaban had never been targeted before. It was considered a safe place.
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My piece for The Progressive on repression against journalists in Egypt is not online but here is a sample:
CAIRO—Two years ago in December, Egyptian security forces raided Al Jazeera producer Baher Mohamed’s house at dawn, breaking down the doors of the apartment where he and his pregnant wife and two young children were sleeping. The family woke up to gunfire when police shot their dog. Mohamed was blindfolded and driven away. He would not return for more than a year.
Hours earlier, two of his colleagues, Peter Greste, an Australian correspondent for the channel, and Mohamed Fahmy, a dual Canadian-Egyptian citizen who was the acting Cairo bureau chief, were arrested at the Marriott hotel where they had been working.
In a climate of growing official repression of journalists in Egypt under President Abdel al-Fattah al-Sisi, the three were accused of belonging to or aiding a terrorist organization and spreading false news that endangered national security. Mohamed and Fahmy spent the first month of their detention in the maximum security wing of Egypt’s notorious Tora prison complex, known as “Akrab”—Arabic for scorpion. They were held in solitary confinement twenty-four hours a day in insect-infested cells with no bed, books, shower or sunlight before being transferred to another, slightly better section of the jail.
Their trial, which human rights groups and the media denounced as comically flawed, was held in a converted lecture hall at the Police Institute within Tora’s prison walls. Prosecution evidence included a song by musician Gotye, footage of trotting horses, and a press conference in Kenya.
Nevertheless, in June 2014, Judge Nagy Shehata returned a guilty verdict and sentenced the three journalists to seven years in prison. Mohamed received an extra three years for possession of a spent bullet casing, a souvenir from a work trip in Libya. Shehata added a trademark flourish, writing in his verdict that the journalists “were brought together by the Devil” to destabilize the country.
In a heart-wrenching moment after the ruling, Fahmy grabbed the mesh cage of the defendants dock and screamed for justice as courtroom guards hauled the three Al Jazeera journalists away. A number of correspondents covering the trial—some of whom were friends of the three journalists—openly wept in court.
Article in the Toronto Star on the verdict:
A court in Egypt sentenced a Canadian journalist and two of his colleagues to three years in prison on Saturday, the latest twist in a highly publicized case that has sparked global condemnation of the Egyptian government.
Canadian citizen Mohamed Fahmy, who served as the acting Cairo bureau chief of Al Jazeera English, was present in court along with Egyptian producer Baher Mohamed. Australian correspondent Peter Greste was deported earlier this year and convicted in absentia.
Judge Hassan Farid began his verdict by addressing, “the great Egyptian people.” He went on to say that the defendants “are not journalists” and that they were using unlicensed equipment, operating without proper permission and broadcasting material harmful to Egypt. Baher Mohamed received an additional six months in prison and a fine of 5,000 Egyptian pounds.
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Follow up piece:
Mohamed Fahmy’s family visits him in jail, calls for Stephen Harper’s public intervention
My investigation for Foriegn Policy on the disappearance and death of a Ain Shams university student:
CAIRO — On May 19, Islam Salah al-Din Atitu woke up early and headed to Ain Shams University in Cairo’s Abbaseya district to take his final humanities exam. The fourth-year engineering student from Cairo’s Ain Shams neighborhood was on the cusp of graduating with a degree in electrical engineering. He had studied hard and worked his way through the test with relative ease. Twenty minutes after the exam was done, he walked outside the campus gates. It was the last time he was seen alive.
The next day Egypt’s Interior Ministry pronounced Atitu dead, claiming in a statement that he had been killed in a gun battle with police on the outskirts of Cairo. His body later turned up in the city morgue. A leaked photo shows him wrapped in a white shroud, with only his face visible. The top of his head is swathed in thick bandages.
His death prompted outrage and fear among students at Ain Shams University and became a topic on Egypt’s nightly television talk shows and in newspapers. Amid a renewed crackdown conducted by Egypt’s security forces, his case stands out.
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The article was translated into Arabic by the website noonpost
My interview on NPR’s Morning Edition:
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My latest for The Nation from Sana'a:
Sanaa, Yemen—Dr. Shawky Ali Abdel Gadeer struggled beneath the rubble for his cell phone. It was just after 2 AM on June 12. A missile had smashed into his house in Sanaa’s historic Old City, burying him and his relatives beneath the ancient bricks. The 40-year-old pharmacist managed to call his mother. He described where he was, and told her to find help. Local residents began to dig in the darkness. By the time they pulled him out roughly four hours later, he was dead.
Four other Gadeer family members were killed in the strike: Hassan, his wife Amat al-Malik, Abdullah, and his 16-year-old son Rashad. Rashad’s body was the last to be retrieved, at 6 PM. Residents wrapped his corpse in a blanket and carried him out from the rubble and through the picturesque gingerbread-style buildings to be buried.
The Saudi military later denied responsibility for the attack.
“They are liars, should we not believe our own eyes?” says Abdullah Kallala, Dr. Shawky’s uncle. His hands and clothes are covered in earth and dust from digging out his relatives. Beside him, four family members are carefully salvaging what they can from the ruins of the house—blankets, a toy car, a kettle. “Is there a weapons store here or any Scud missiles? There is nothing,” he says.
For nearly three months, Saudi Arabia, backed by a coalition of Arab countries, has been bombing Yemen on an almost daily basis in a campaign against the Houthis, a rebel group that has taken over large parts of the country, including the capital.
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My interview on Democracy Now! from Sana'a:
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