Snowden the 'traitor' looms over Pulitzers

New York (AFP) - Hero or traitor? America is still polarized over Edward Snowden and whether the newspapers that exposed the extent of NSA's vast global spying network should be lauded or condemned.

Ten months later, the question on journalists' lips is whether America's most prestigious journalism prize, the Pulitzers, will honor them when the annual awards are announced Monday.

For most journalists, there is no debate.

In arguably the most influential story of the decade, The Guardian and The Washington Post broke sensational new ground by exposing how the US government monitors the data of millions.

But the leaks embarrassed the government, strained relations with allies angered that Americans had been tapping into the private phone calls of leaders and sparked a debate within the United States on the merits and morality of mass surveillance.

Public opinion is at worst divided. Many believe Americans have a right to know what the government is doing. Others say Snowden is a traitor and a criminal who should be prosecuted.

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Paul Janensch, professor emeritus at Quinnipiac University's School of Communications, predicted tension between journalists and more establishment members of the Pulitzer jury.

"These are fabulous pieces of journalism on the one hand, but on the other hand the documents were leaked, they were classified, they were distressing to the US government," Janensch said.

"And the person who provided the information took refuge in Russia, so I understand there can be serious debate."

- Journalists as 'accomplices' -

In January, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested that journalists reporting on the leaks had acted as Snowden's "accomplices."

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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks via videoconference at the "Virtual Conversation With E …

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, U.S. journalists who interviewed Snowden in Hong Kong, returned home to the United States on Friday for the first time after breaking the story.

They told reporters after receiving a George Polk Award for their coverage with The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill and the Post's Barton Gellman that they fear arrest and being subpoenaed.

"I can't imagine a more appropriate choice for a Pulitzer Prize," New York University media studies professor Mark Miller told AFP.

"Glenn Greenwald has done what American journalists are supposed to do, which is serve the public interest by shedding a bright light on egregious abuse of power by the government."

There is "tremendous pressure" on journalists to toe the line, Miller said, despite America's relaxed press freedom laws.

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"The real journalistic heros in this country tend to be the mavericks, the eccentrics, those who dare to report stories that are often dismissed derisively as 'conspiracy theory,'" he added.

Media experts say there is no evidence that any of the reporting endangered national security, and Greenwald, Poitras and MacAskill have emphasized how carefully they had treated the material.

Their supporters say it would be damaging for the credibility of the Pultizer Board, which has a reputation for being conservative, not to honor the biggest scoop in a decade.

"They would have surrendered to the right-wing or the culturally conservative on security questions in American politics," said Christopher Simpson, communications professor at American University in Washington.

American media is considered more conservative on questions of U.S. national security than foreign publications.

"Not withstanding the Internet and everything else, there's a significant gap between news coverage in the US and Europe, most especially on international issues," Simpson said.

"I think the European coverage defers less to what the CIA might want than the US press does, and that includes The Washington Post and The New York Times."

But Rem Rieder, media editor for USA TODAY, said that public opinion and coverage had evolved over the last 10 months.

Coverage that initially criticized Snowden as a slacker has increasingly focused more on what he disclosed and what Americans should do about it.

"Whatever the Pulitzer Board does, the reaction at all levels in our culture will be mixed," Janensch said.

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Church of England Faces ‘Crisis’ as Gay Priest Weds

Canon Jeremy Pemberton, 58, a divorced hospital chaplain, wed his long-term partner Laurence Cunnington, 51, on Saturday afternoon.

By Edward Malnick, The Telegraph, UK - April 12, 2014

http://tinyurl.com/nuny8lz

A priest has become the first in Britain to defy the Church of England’s ban on gay clergy marrying.

Canon Jeremy Pemberton, 58, a divorced hospital chaplain, wed his long-term partner Laurence Cunnington, 51, on Saturday afternoon.

Campaigners expressed delight that the couple had taken advantage of Britain’s newly-introduced gay marriage laws and urged bishops to “bless” their partnership. They predict he will be the first of many gay clergy to marry.

But a leading member of the Church’s conservative evangelical wing called for “discipline” of any clergy seen to be breaking the rules. He warned of a “crisis” if the leadership failed to take action.

Canon Pemberton, who has five children, is a chaplain at Lincoln hospital and also works in the Church’s Southwell and Nottingham diocese. In 2012 he was a signatory to a letter to The Telegraph from dozens of clergy warning that if the Church refused to permit gay weddings in its own churches they would advise members of their congregations to marry elsewhere.

Earlier this year an acrimonious row broke out within the Church after the House of Bishops decided to ban gay clergy from marrying when same-sex marriage became legal last month. The decision, which means that anyone defying the ban could face lengthy disciplinary measures, was welcomed by traditionalists but infuriated liberals and campaigners for gay rights.

Although the Church of England formally objected to the introduction of gay marriage and has opted out of performing the ceremonies, there have been growing signs of a more relaxed stance on homosexuality. Bishops agreed that gay couples who get married will be able to ask for special prayers after the ceremony.

However, on Saturday night the Rev Preb Rod Thomas, chairman of the Reform evangelical group, said: “There’s no doubt that there is pressure within some parts of the church for the Church to change its mind on sexuality.

“If there is not clear discipline then it is the equivalent to saying ‘we really didn’t mean what we said.’ It will precipitate a crisis.”

He warned that traditionalists “who stick by the biblical understanding” of marriage would be unable to accept a “messy compromise”, potentially leading to a situation similar to in the US where a traditionalist splinter Church has emerged from the liberal Episcopal Church.

However, the Rev Colin Coward, a friend of Canon Pemberton’s and director of the Changing Attitude campaign group, of which he is a former trustee, said: “I’m really, really happy for Jeremy and his partner that they are finally able to get married after a long time of being together as a couple.

“I hope the bishops find a way to affirm and bless their relationship rather than taking action against them.”

Dr Giles Fraser, the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s, also congratulated the couple.

The Bishop of Lincoln, the Rt Rev Christopher Lowson, said: “I am aware that a member of the clergy who works in the Diocese of Lincoln has married a partner of the same sex. The priest concerned wrote to me in advance to explain his intention and we had a subsequent meeting in which I explained the guidelines of the House of Bishops.”

America’s Ugly Win in Afghanistan

America is creaking towards an ugly win in Afghanistan. With the growth of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) program and the currently successful presidential elections, we’re finally creating something that looks more like historical Afghanistan and less like the imagined Geneva-on-the-Helmand of 2001. Historical Afghanistan might be ugly; but an ugly win is still a win.

In terms of the endgame, Afghanistan was always a riskier war than Iraq. Both have been routinely compared with Vietnam, because of the counterinsurgency element, the godforsaken element, and perhaps some national psychological masochism. Even less-gloomy Americans were occasionally visited by the shade of helicopters lifting off the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, one jump ahead of the hit man and the North Vietnamese Army.

Related: Endgame in Afghanistan—Just 3,000 Vulnerable Troops

In Iraq, that was an absurd comparison. The US invasion disenfranchised a minority Sunni regime and placed the Shia majority in power. For all the talk about democracy, that was the realpolitik result. Shorn of their post-colonial advantages, the Sunnis who comprised most of the insurgency would almost certainly never again rule Iraq, simply by weight of numbers. Absent a general uprising among Shias, there was not an existential threat to the new Iraqi government.

Afghanistan is quite different. There we are fighting an insurgency based in the Pashtuns, a majority ethnic group that has always ruled modern Afghanistan. If the Taliban regained enough support among that base, their overthrow of the Kabul would be very possible.

The saving grace for us is that Afghanistan doesn’t have to have a strong central government. Since the founding of the modern state under Ahmed Shah in 1747, the history of the Afghan government has been one of constant negotiation between the center and the periphery. Though on the daily edge of anarchy, the periphery’s loyalties could be rented by a mixture of bribery, flattery, and brutality. Under competent leadership, like Ahmed Shah, local powerbrokers along the periphery have been mostly allied to the center. Under incompetent rulers like his son Timur, they have been violently less so.

Unsurprisingly, despite earlier Western efforts, Afghanistan keeps trying to reboot to its default setting. The Afghan war looks like a patchwork of highly local, messy tribal feuds because…Afghanistan is mostly a patchwork of highly local, messy tribal feuds. To force it to be otherwise is ahistorical -- and for too long the US and NATO policy have been ahistorical.

For example, why does Afghanistan need a national police force? The US doesn’t have a national police force, nor would we likely accept one. Why would we encourage total strangers and ethnic enemies to come into tribal Pashtun villages and enforce order? We’d probably have better luck using Martians to enforce order, if we had Martian battalions with some basic counterinsurgency training. Say what you will about the carnivorous tripods from War of the Worlds, but at least the Ghilzai Pashtuns have no preexisting ethnic antipathies towards them.

Related: The Afghan Report that Could Have Saved the US Billions

There are two recent reasons for optimism, however. One is the growth of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), which began in 2010 as a program that recruited rural Afghans to protect their own villages. Stationed in their own villages, ALP members knew who Taliban was and who was not.

The ALP has been so strategically successful that their authorization has expanded from 10,000 to 30,000 fighters, with about 24,000 as of October 2013. Though there have been some well-publicized problems, localism works. The most recent Pentagon report on the war said that the ALP was “one of the most resilient institutions in the ANSF,” or Afghan National Security Forces, with the ANSF’s highest casualty rate and one of the lowest monthly attrition rates.

The ALP has been so successful because it is an institution that reflects, belatedly, the historically local basis of Afghan governance and power. The effectiveness of that localism comes with a cost, obviously: increased distance from Kabul’s control and supervision. Currently, the ALP’s partnership with US special operations forces keeps ALP members within fairly tight left-and-right limits of behavior. As US forces draw down, that supervision will be replaced by Kabul’s ability to manage them and the district police chiefs nominally in charge.

Related: Afghanistan’s Surprises

Probably, those left and right limits will expand somewhat. This is provincial Afghanistan, after all, not the Upper West Side. There will be a basic Ten Commandments for local security forces aligned with Kabul and the US: thou shalt not harbor Al-Qaeda’s Most Wanted; thou shalt not abuse prisoners; thou shalt send some of your girls to school. But it’s better – for them and for us – than what came before. By recognizing that, US efforts are tacking closer to something that looks like an historically sustainable Afghan state.

The second necessity for victory is a responsible-looking central government with which foreign countries can interact. To be a sustainable recipient of Western aid, Afghanistan simply must have a more sympathetic government than Hamid Karzai or somewhat thuggish local power brokers. Only with a regular supply of Western aid will the Kabul government be able to bribe the regional powerbrokers to tilt towards it, and stay within our commandments. And if they don’t – if they really don’t, and flaunt it – then eventually they may have to die. An American high-end special operations capability in Afghanistan is critical not for Al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorists, but also to drop the hammer if local warlords step too far out of line.

It’s thus not unreasonable to be optimistic about Afghanistan. Finally, our prefab Afghan institutions are beginning to look like traditional Afghan institutions. Continuing to expand the ALP program, and removing its officially “temporary” status, would bring them closer yet. The canonization of local power centers, combined with a responsible-looking Afghan government in Kabul, can constitute a sustainable solution, even a win. And one within our left and right limits, broadly speaking.

MOSCOW (AP) — More than 10,000 people turned out in Moscow on Sunday for an anti-Kremlin rally to denounce Russian state television's news coverage, particularly of the crisis in neighboring Ukraine.

In promoting the Kremlin line, state television has portrayed the new pro-Western government in Ukraine as a "fascist junta" under the control of the U.S. government and determined to oppress Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. The broadcasts have taken on a harsh anti-American tone.

Some of those who took part in the demonstration, called a "March of Truth," carried blue and yellow Ukrainian flags. One woman, wearing a traditional Ukrainian wreath of flowers on her head, held up a sign with President Vladimir Putin's picture and the words: "Stop lying."

Among those who spoke to the crowd was Andrei Zubov, a history professor who was fired from one of Moscow's most prestigious universities last month after criticizing Russia's military intervention in Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. Zubov argued against the annexation of Crimea by comparing it with Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria on the eve of World War II.

Zubov told the crowd that by lying to the Russian people on television, the government was leading the country toward "an abyss."

The U.S. and Ukrainian governments have accused Russia of orchestrating the unrest in eastern Ukraine in an effort to split the country. Russia has denied any involvement.