Hoeksteen Live: campaign watch met Rob Zwetsloot interviews met Eske van Egerschot, John Goring, Bart Robbers, Annelize v.d. Stoel, Arjan de Wolf 15 aug 2012

We volgen de verkiezingscampagne voor de 2e kamerverkiezingen van september 2012. Deze aflevering: Rob Zwetsloot bespreekt de campagne tot nu tor met Eske van Egerschot, John Goring, Bart Robbers, Annelize v.d. Stoel, Arjan de Wolf, e.a. Live vanuit Witzenhausen Gallery Amsterdam
15 aug 2012 13:00 – 17:00 C.E.T. livestream.com/HoeksteenLive Qik.com/HoeksteenCornerStone

NL Verkiezingen 2012 Versnel de evaluatie van de wietpas

ma 30 jul 2012, 16:33u – Tofik Dibi

GroenLinks wil dat de evaluatie naar de invoering van de wietpas versneld wordt uitgevoerd. Bovendien moet minister Ivo Opstelten (Justitie) bekendmaken hoeveel meldingen van drugsoverlast er de afgelopen maanden zijn geregistreerd. Volgens de Volkskrant is het kopen van wiet op straat tegenwoordig kinderlijk eenvoudig. GroenLinks vindt dit een gevaarlijke ontwikkeling. Het ontbreekt op straat aan kwaliteitscontrole en men kan bij straatdealers eenvoudiger aan andere drugs komen. Daarnaast is voor buurtbewoners de overlast de afgelopen maanden gestegen.

groenlinks.nl

Consequences of the Fall of the Syrian Regime

By George Friedman | July 24, 2012

We have entered the endgame in Syria. That doesn’t mean that we have reached the end by any means, but it does mean that the precondition has been met for the fall of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. We have argued that so long as the military and security apparatus remain intact and effective, the regime could endure. Although they continue to function, neither appears intact any longer; their control of key areas such as Damascus and Aleppo is in doubt, and the reliability of their personnel, given defections, is no longer certain. We had thought that there was a reasonable chance of the al Assad regime surviving completely. That is no longer the case. At a certain point — in our view, after the defection of a Syrian pilot June 21 and then the defection of the Tlass clan — key members of the regime began to recalculate the probability of survival and their interests. The regime has not unraveled, but it is unraveling.

The speculation over al Assad’s whereabouts and heavy fighting in Damascus is simply part of the regime’s problems. Rumors, whether true or not, create uncertainty that the regime cannot afford right now. The outcome is unclear. On the one hand, a new regime might emerge that could exercise control. On the other hand, Syria could collapse into a Lebanon situation in which it disintegrates into regions held by various factions, with no effective central government. 

‘The Light in Her Eyes:’ Documenting A Syrian Story of Education and Inspiration

By:

Jon Silberg

When artist/filmmaker Julia Meltzer first visited Damascus in 2006, well before any of the current political upheaval, she encountered many surprising aspects of life inside Syria. One such unexpected phenomenon came in the form of Houda al-Habash, a devout Muslim woman who had been teaching the Koran to local girls, some as young as 3 years old—an undertaking that sat well with neither the region’s male-dominated religious community nor the more secular groups in favor of women’s empowerment.

“I know how rare it is for girls to be encouraged to read classical Arabic,” says Meltzer. “I thought, ‘This isn’t a story I’ve seen and I want to understand more about why people are choosing to come here.’”

Interestingly, much of the complexity that inspired her to direct The Light in Her Eyes with filmmaker Laura Nix also made the production an incredible challenge. “Doing anything in Syria is difficult,” Meltzer begins. “Getting someone to allow you to teach a class as a foreigner, let alone make a film, is unusual.”

Meltzer and Nix visited Syria three times from 2008-10, armed with aPanasonic AG-HVX200 and enough P2 cards to get through about four hours of shooting a day. They shot extensive interviews with al-Habash and many of the girls and women who participated in the classes, and they had access to the classes themselves, where they shot a great deal of material.

The production kit had to be kept to an absolute minimum since the project was being done under the radar of the authorities. In addition to the camera they had a tripod, two small Litepanels units, a stand, and a boom mic that went through a small mixer where practical and directly into the HVX200’s input otherwise. Meltzer, who shot the majority of the material herself, also rode audio levels and conducted interviews through a translator.

At the end of the day, Meltzer would download the P2 cards to hard drives via a laptop and do some initial editing in Apple Final Cut Pro 7. Meltzer and Nix completed cutting in the United States with editors Monique Zavistovski and Nathaniel Fregoso. The finished film was onlined and graded in Apple Color at Santa Monica post house Different by Design.

(L-R) Julia Meltzer, Houda al-Habash, Laura Nix

During shooting, the crew was also minimal. “I couldn’t work with men because they were not allowed in the mosque,” Meltzer explains. “We brought in cinematographer Anne Etheridge for part of the shoot, but otherwise it was just me.”

Throughout production, the filmmakers were always concerned that the shoot would be shut down. “We couldn’t get into the country with a lot of gear,” she says. “We didn’t have official permission to make a film in Syria. We had to put the batteries in our socks!

“We would always enter Syria through Lebanon,” she adds. “If you get turned back at Lebanon, you can go to Beirut and try again later—you don’t have to leave the region. We did get stopped at that border once and they took out everything we had, but I was able to talk my way out of it. Of course you could never do this in Syria now, but I said I was there to shoot my friend’s wedding. Everyone has a videographer at their wedding. They still called security and the police met us in Damascus, but they were nice about it and let us just go on our way. There was actually an advantage to being women filmmakers in that part of the world: no one takes you seriously.”

Interviewing Houda al-Habash

After the filmmakers completed shooting, Meltzer reports it still took over a year with the material to find a structure for the final 87-minute film. The broadcast cut comes in at 58 minutes. “It’s hard to tell a story about a conservative Muslim woman and win people over to her side,” she observes. “People come to it with very strong feelings about Muslim women—especially Muslim women wearing the hijab. How do you make that person complicated and appealing and tell a story with an arc? It’s ultimately an observational film about a world few people know about—we’re asking the audience to step into this world and just see what it’s about.”

As a postscript, it should be noted that it would be impossible to make this film in the Middle East’s current political climate. “The school is closed,” Meltzer notes. “It’s a totally different world than it was just a few years ago when we were there. But ultimately, I think the sentiment that drives these women in the film is very much what’s driving what’s happening throughout the Middle East.”

More Military Spies: Why the CIA Is Applauding the Pentagon’s Intelligence Grab – By Jennifer Sims

Last month, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced the creation of a new U.S. espionage agency: the Defense Clandestine Service, or DCS. DCS is expected to expand the Pentagon’s espionage personnel by several hundred over the next few years, while reportedly leaving budgets largely unchanged. The news nonetheless surprised some observers in Washington because the move appeared, at least initially, to be a direct challenge to the Central Intelligence Agency, whose National Clandestine Service leads the country’s spy work overseas. Then came a second surprise: former CIA officers and other intelligence experts started applauding. The question is why.

Four reasons stand out. First, DCS can be regarded as a rebranding and upgrading of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s espionage unit, the Defense HUMINT Service (HUMINT stands for “human intelligence”), which was created in 1992 to improve the coordination and accountability of military espionage. The CIA has long supported the efforts to improve the military’s HUMINT tradecraft, but despaired because the military’s case officers never stayed long in their jobs. The new DCS will have ranking general officers and field grade officers who stay put for the long term.

Second, the CIA likes the idea behind DCS because it has been gaining advantages from improved military espionage over the past few years — the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden is just one example of the kind of success that close collaboration can achieve. The CIA would like to have that capability against national targets outside the current war zones. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military services, diplomats, and law enforcement officers all need discriminating and persistent engagement with an increasingly dispersed and mercurial adversary. Thanks to the growth of broadband communications and social networking, terrorists, drug syndicates, and arms traffickers operate as overlapping networks. This is a new kind of engagement that requires innovative operations within the legal bounds of civil societies. To respond to such threats, the CIA and the Pentagon see advantages in working as a networked team too. So, the better human intelligence that comes from the military, the better the National Clandestine Service.

For the CIA, the less agreeable issue with the creation of DCS is the notion that the military might be producing the best case officers against some targets. The CIA holds that good case officers can recruit anyone. But recruiting agents is only one part of espionage; other parts involve assessing knowledge, judging risk and reliability, and then knowing what to ask for next. Against military targets, the military may be most successful. Think of it this way: if you want to collect intelligence on the nuclear weapons capabilities of a foreign state, would you prefer to have scientists or non-scientists recruiting foreign physicists and weapons designers?

Third is the matter of integration. Good national and strategic intelligence is critical for operations against transnational targets, but while the military’s tactical awareness is improving rapidly, strategic context has often been lacking. Case in point: in January 2010, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, now head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote “Fixing Intelligence in Afghanistan,” a stinging report on intelligence deficiencies on the battlefield. The CIA has had a hard time improving the situation without being granted direct access to the problems that the military wants solved. DCS can help bridge the divide.

Fourth, chasing today’s amorphous, mobile targets, such as insurgents or terrorists, is logistically difficult. Since the Pentagon has an unparalleled global reach and specializes in logistics, and the CIA has deep ties with target countries, it makes sense to gain economies of scale through combined and complementary operations. That will require overcoming the trust gap that has sometimes weakened military-civilian intelligence cooperation. Rather than representing an escalation of turf tensions, DCS is a boost to the cooperation that has been developing for some years through institutionalized joint training and collaboration in the field. Former CIA officials I have spoken with expressed optimism about the Pentagon’s new initiative, using the raid that killed Osama bin Laden to illustrate the point.

The creation of DCS, however, also poses several risks. Chief among them is the prospect that the CIA will lose control over choosing targets and creating priorities for collection as the requirements for defense HUMINT gain further attention and federal budget cutting forces intelligence dollars to decline overall. The State Department, with no clandestine capability of its own, relies on the CIA to remember its needs too. As the CIA works ever closer with DCS, State’s priorities may get less attention than they should.

More, if the creation of DCS simply increases the Defense Department’s presence inside U.S. embassies, it may complicate the role of CIA station chiefs and U.S. ambassadors, who are legally responsible for operations in the countries in which they are stationed. A stronger Pentagon role might throw off the delicate balance required for effective in-country intelligence operations. The priorities of regional combatant commanders, ambassadors, and civilian intelligence agencies do not always align. If collection priorities or covert actions become skewed toward what the Pentagon wants, civilian policymaking might be compromised, and the risks of poorly coordinated field operations will increase.

To ensure that improved military espionage does not degrade intelligence support for diplomacy and other national security operations, CIA chiefs of station need to retain their status as national managers of human intelligence. Working with ambassadors and combatant commands, the CIA can keep the system infused with the balance of purpose that the National Security Council and the president expect.