Foreign Policy

Just when you think that you’ve heard it all: I learned from General McChrystal’s new book that in early 2003, when McChrystal was on the Joint Staff, that Central Command, then led by Gen. Tommy R. Franks, “initially prohibited the Pentagon staffs from viewing their internal Web site out of a (common) fear of giving ‘higher headquarters visibility into unfinalized planning products.”

McChrystal comments that, “Such absurdities reflect that most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.”

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

I mean, our admirals had been watching the British fight German submarines for years. Yet there seems to have been no thought given on how to have land-based aircraft carry torpedoes and work with the surface Navy. As FDR (who had been a civilian official of the Navy Department in his younger days) wrote to Churchill in March 1942, “My Navy has definitely been slack in preparing for this submarine war off our coast.”

Australian War Memorial/Wikimedia Commons

The presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, may be on a mountaintop — but the March 14 talks there between President Barack Obama and representatives of the Gulf monarchies will not be a summit. The absence of Saudi King Salman is being spun by the White House as of little consequence, but it is hard not to conclude that the Saudi decision is anything less than a huge and intentional diplomatic snub.

The principal issue is, without doubt, Iran and the emerging deal over its nuclear program, which in the Gulf’s eyes validates Tehran’s nuclear status and strokes its aspirations to be the regional hegemon. Despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts during his visit to Riyadh last week, the Gulf Arabs appear unconvinced by the substance of the deal and downright skeptical of U.S. views of its implications for stability in the region.

King Salman’s cancellation came less than a day after the White House had said there would be a one-on-one meeting between Obama and the Saudi monarch. So far, the White House has not spun Salman’s boycott in terms of a logistical challenge, such as the king’s refusal to be flown in a helicopter. (His predecessor, King Abdullah, “did not do helicopters,” one official in George W. Bush’s administration told me. When staffers arranged a meeting at Bush’s Texas ranch, the monarch was forced to travel, like some rock star, in a luxury bus.)

Despite soothing words from new Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, the real Saudi position became more apparent when the king’s substitutes — Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef and Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman — stopped in Paris on their way to the United States for talks with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who has taken the hardest line in the negotiations with Iran. The meeting comes just a week after French President Francois Hollande was guest of honor in Riyadh at a GCC meeting, the agenda of which was essentially a dress rehearsal for the Camp David summit.

For those keeping count, Hollande met four GCC heads of state in Riyadh, while Obama will meet just two in Washington this week. Of the other royal no-shows, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates and Oman’s Sultan Qaboos are probably not well enough to travel, while Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa likely acted out of monarchial solidarity with King Salman. The two heads of state who are heading to Washington are Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Jaber al-Sabah, aged 85, and Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani of Qatar, aged 34.

Gulf societies are traditionally hierarchical, with a focus on position and age, so managing the protocol of the sessions — particularly the “portrait” at the end of the Camp David meeting — could be challenging. In King Salman’s absence, arguably the key character will be his son, Mohammed bin Salman, who is often described as thirty-something but who may be only 29 — and who certainly has better lines of communication to the Saudi monarch than his older cousin, Mohammed bin Nayef, who officially leads the Saudi delegation.

Will Mohammed bin Salman be present at the expected bilateral meeting with Obama, making a one-on-one into a two-on-one? At the very least, the summit will give the president a chance to get to know the king’s son. The only public information about his attitude toward the United States is a Wikileaks memo that noted he refused to go to the U.S. embassy to receive a visa, because it would require him to be fingerprinted, in the words of the current king, “like some criminal.”

Mohammed bin Nayef is regarded as bureaucratic Washington’s favorite prince for his cooperation on counterterrorism in his other role as interior minister. The White House, however, may not share this view: In a recent interview with the New York Times’s Tom Friedman, Obama blamed Gulf interior ministers like bin Nayef for enforcing a system where there are “no legitimate political outlets for grievances.”

While Saudi Arabia is receiving all the attention, the summit could also shed light on how other Gulf royals are adapting to Washington’s outreach to Tehran. Will Emir Sabah of Kuwait, who advocates conciliation rather than confrontation but whose territory lies closest to Iran, be given center stage? And what may Emir Tamim of Qatar, a state that is traditionally the maverick within the GCC, be plotting? Some hint may emerge at a briefing by Qatar Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Muhammad al-Attiyah to Washington foreign policy types on the early afternoon of May 13.

The most energetic person at the summit may be Crown Prince Muhammad bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, who is leading the UAE delegation. Though he doesn’t brief the media or think-tankers, he is rumored to be as disappointed as anyone with the Obama administration’s perceived naiveté on Iran. But the crown prince is walking a fine line: he believes the way forward is simultaneously to hug the United States while aligning himself with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who he perceives as the future leader of the kingdom — sooner rather than later.

The elephant in the room will obviously be Iran, which the GCC blames for supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, exerting a malevolent influence over Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government, backing the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and inciting mischief among Shiites in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province. But there will be a smaller elephant in the room as well: Israel.

Jerusalem’s opposition to the Iran deal is compounded by the evident mutual distrust and dislike between Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Until King Salman’s cancellation, it seemed as if Netanyahu could be painted as being the odd man out at the party. As the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, often a good proxy for Obama White House thinking, wrote last week: “It’s a peculiar reversal of roles, in which the Gulf Arabs … are becoming the responsible and conciliatory opposition, while Netanyahu … remains at loggerheads with Obama.” Although it is probably too much to think of an open Israeli alliance with Gulf Arabs against Iran, it does seem that the Gulf capitals find the Israeli perspective on Tehran’s intentions more convincing than U.S. offerings.

For Israel, a louder Gulf chorus voicing concerns about any deal is probably too much to hope for. The White House’s bottom line for Camp David is to stop any condemnation of the emerging deal with Iran by the Gulf Arabs. That is still possible — but the other signal likely to emerge from the summit is the Gulf states’ persistent disquiet with the Obama administration’s diplomacy, which is sure to be noted by both Tehran and in the capital of every U.S. ally across the world.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

A new age of cyberwarfare is dawning, and a little-known State Department official named Christopher Painter — a self-described computer geek who made his name prosecuting hackers — is racing to digital battlegrounds around the world to help stave off potential future threats.

One of his stops was in South America, where he visited Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, to hear about what those countries were doing to protect computer networks. One was in Costa Rica, to tout the U.S. vision for the Internet, including security. Another was in The Hague, to, among other things, promote international cooperation in cyberspace.

“It’s been a hectic couple of weeks,” he said

There’s a reason for that. Last month, Arlington, Va.-based security firm Lookingglass released a report detailing a full-scale cyber war being waged by Russia against Ukraine. Russia, Lookingglass concluded, was hacking Ukrainian computers and vacuuming up classified intelligence that could be used on the battlefield. The week before, the Pentagon publicly released a new strategic document declaring, for the first time, that it was prepared to pair cyber war with conventional warfare in future conflicts, such as by disrupting another country’s military networks to block it from attacking U.S. targets

Painter is charged with finding answers to some of thorniest policy questions confronting Washington in the digital age: How to wage cyber war, how not to, and how nations can or even should cooperate on establishing rules for cyber offense.

Countries have found it so hard to sort out answers to these difficult subjects, Painter is setting his sights low, at least for now. One of his initial goals: Promoting a set of voluntary international standards, such as one that says that nations should not knowingly support online activities that damage critical infrastructure that provides services to the public.

“We’re in the relative infancy of thinking about this issue,” Painter said. “This is a fast-changing technology. We’re at the beginning of the road.”

Other, related debates — on surveillance and cyber defense — are further along. Congress is working through a renewal of expiring provisions of the Patriot Act. Other countries are getting in on the act as well: France’s National Assembly this month approved a bill being dubbed “the French Patriot Act,” which controversially allows the government to collect mass e-mail data, and Canada’s House of Commons last week passed anti-terrorism legislation that critics contend endangers online privacy. Congress also has a good chance this year to pass a cybersecurity bill that fosters threat data sharing between companies and the government.

The nascent conversation about cyber offense draws, in some ways, on existing international law, but in other ways has no historical precedent, because cyber war is unlike any other kind of war. Government hackers can do tremendous damage to an enemy country without touching it physically or using any troops or military hardware whatsoever, and without leaving much of a trace about who is responsible. It also upends the traditional notion of deterrence in a realm where the often-invisible attacks make it hard to figure out whom to retaliate against and signal that offense will be answered with offense. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what an offensive weapon even is, since so many cyber tools have both offensive and defensive uses.

The U.S. position is complicated by how advanced its offensive capabilities are in relation to the rest of the world — not only in how far it’s willing to go to limit itself, but also how willing anyone else is to listen because of how it aggressively the U.S. has used its technological edge to spy on other countries and, in the case of Iran, directly attack their infrastructure.

“The United States is in a very unique position. It’s definitely in a class of its own when it comes to cyber offensive operations,” said Henry Farrell, an international affairs professor at George Washington University. “The other problem is that it’s in a class of its own in the unique vulnerability to various forms of cyber attack.”

And for the United States, there are both domestic and global components of the debate over what kind of offensive authorities it should have. While the Obama administration tries to figure out what kind of posture it wants to take on the international stage, some in Congress are agitating for the executive branch to say what it can do on offense, and under what circumstances. If the executive branch doesn’t do that, Congress might do it for them. Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), is among those contemplating taking action; he is weighing an amendment to the annual defense policy bill that would spell out what the Defense Department’s cyber offensive and defensive capabilities should be.

There are widespread worries across Capitol Hill, meanwhile, that Washington isn’t doing enough to keep up with steady stream of cyber attacks designed to steal corporate secrets and financial data. That never-ending drumbeat has in recent months afflicted Anthem, the second-biggest U.S. health insurer in which hackers accessed personal data like Social Security numbers for millions of customers, and JPMorgan Chase, in which a sophisticated cyber attack compromised the accounts of millions of households and small businesses. McAfee, a leading cyber defense firm, estimates that there are hundreds of cyber attacks per minute.

One major question House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry of Texas and others want to resolve is what the U.S. government should do in instances like the Sony hack last fall, which led to the release of reams of sensitive corporate emails, movie scripts, and even digital copies of unreleased films. President Barack Obama blamed the North Korean government, which was angry over the unflattering portrayal of Kim Jong-un in the film “The Interview,” then promised the United States would “respond proportionally.”

Some cyber experts have subsequently raised doubts about whether Pyongyang was actually behind the attack. If they were, it would mark a milestone as the first time government hackers in one country attacked a private firm in another.

“We don’t have the proper structure in place because our thinking and policies have not evolved to the reality of what cyber is as a domain of warfare,” Thornberry said in an interview. “We don’t really have authorities in place about how to defend civilian/private networks, much less what sort of offensive preemptive retaliatory actions potentially the government would take on their behalf.”

But lawmakers also want to be prepared for more catastrophic attacks, like an assault on the electricity grid, which is largely controlled by private sector computer networks. As far back as 2009, there were reports of foreign governments infiltrating the U.S. electricity grid, and while they didn’t damage the networks they penetrated, National Security Agency director Adm. Michael Rogers has warned they would be a major target in a large scale cyber war.

Painter, who considers himself an early aficionado of computer technology, has said he began playing with a primitive personal computer while he was at college in the 1980s. After graduating from Cornell in 1980 and Stanford law school in 1984, he gravitated toward tech-oriented lawsuits, and prosecuted the most prominent early hacking cases, securing a conviction in 1999 of the famed hacker Kevin Mitnick — said to be the inspiration for the film “War Games” — for stealing files from companies like Sun Microsystems and Motorola. Later, Painter moved to the Justice Department headquarters and the White House to work on cyber issues.

One thing Painter isn’t looking for, in all his travels, is any kind of comprehensive cyber treaty to somehow tackle the myriad security topics — or, to use his quote from “Lord of the Rings” during a panel in The Hague, “one ring to rule them all.”

Because of how complicated and formless the cyber offense problem is, and how new it is compared to more established forms of warfare, the idea of any kind of comprehensive cyber treaty has been set aside — not just by the United States but many other countries as well, at least for now. Instead, Painter’s focus has been on creating a commonly held set of principles — “norms” — that nations adhere to on a voluntary, legally non-binding basis.

Painter maintains that the emphasis on norms isn’t about preserving “American hegemony.” Yet many others have noted a distinct lack of interest from the United States when it comes to taking any kind of action that could limit its own offensive options.

“Just as a general matter, administrations of any stripe are certainly not looking to limit their ability in legislation and would probably be loathe in international regulation to swear off particular lines of attack,” said Michael Allen, a former top National Security Council staffer in the George W. Bush administration and former staff director for the House Intelligence Committee who now is managing director at Beacon Global Strategies, a consulting firm. “I don’t think people are eager to start immediately signing up to regimes, norms or certainly not laws, without serious consideration, that begin to restrict this new tool of warfare in its infancy.”

Michael Hayden, a former NSA director and now a principal at the Chertoff Group consulting firm, said the bigger issue is simply that a cyber treaty would be unenforceable. It’s easy enough to cheat on a biological weapons treaty, he said; imagine how easy it would be to cheat on a cyber treaty, since sophisticated hackers can leave no fingerprints whatsoever.

The reason it would easy, he said, is because of how hard it is to determine, forensically, who’s behind any given attack at any time. The landmark 2013 Mandiant report that tracked a host of cyber attacks netting government documents and company secrets to a Chinese military unit was the result of six years of work, and it ultimately could place the attacks as originating only from the doorstep of the building suspected of conducting the hacking.

The same problem of so-called attribution for attacks applies under existing international law. In April, both Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and current NSA chief Rogers made headlines for saying cyberwarfare fell under international law, although that was not a new position for the U.S. government. The origins of that position emerged from a United Nations Group of Governmental Experts that declared a set of principles in 2013, a group that included China.

Some legal experts contended that the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iranian nuclear centrifuges, reportedly a collaboration between the United States and Israel, was a violation of international law because it was an “act of force.”

“That’s already a violation of international law unless you have a justification for that,” said David Fidler, and Indiana University law professor serving as a visiting fellow for cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That’s even if anyone acknowledges they were involved, which they don’t do.”

Fidler said some of the “norms” under discussion in the cyber sphere are merely restatements of norms or international laws that apply to existing forms of warfare, and are either unworkable because they don’t apply to cyberspace or originate from poorly agreed-upon definitions of terminology.

As an example, he pointed to a proposal from Temple Law professor Duncan Hollis to create an e-SOS, similar to the distress signal ships at sea send when they are in trouble and merchant vessels are obligated to respond with help. In the event that a country is under cyber attack, Fidler asked, does it really want a nation like Russia getting into its networks to lend a hand?

Additionally, the U.S. message on norms about cyber intrusions hasn’t always been well received, given the wide scale international electronic spying revealed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, Fidler said. To the rest of the world, he said, “it kind of looks like the U.S. has given up on norms and is relying on unilateral action,” especially when combined with an April executive order to financially punish foreign hackers.

It’s not, he said, that the State Department is doing poor work advancing cyber norms – it’s that doing so is inherently difficult, especially under the circumstances.

For his part, Painter acknowledged that there’s much more to be done in figuring out how international law applies to cyberspace. What does the international law of warfare dictating “proportionality in attack” apply there? That kind of question is going to take a ton of academic work, Painter said.

It’s a subject that has nonetheless made Congress antsy. In February, House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) joined with House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) to write a letter to National Security Adviser Susan Rice, asking how the Obama administration defined different attacks and how it was prepared to respond to them.

McCaul said he hasn’t received a response to the letter. But he said he and Royce are preparing legislation outlining what they expect from the State Department on those questions.

Others on Capitol Hill said they see gaps in the administration’s authorities and doctrines, but aren’t yet ready to press their case without more examination, among them Thornberry and a leading Democrat on his committee, Rep. Jim Langevin.

“We’re developing capabilities faster than the policies and doctrines that control them,” said Rhode Island’s Langevin, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Emerging Threats Subcommittee. “There’s the need for further definition for actions to do things like defend the nation.

“The vast majority of the systems at risk are not DOD systems. They’re in the private sector,” Langevin said. “In a worst-case scenario, DOD is going to be asked to defend them. If there’s an active cyber attack going on on our electrical grid and DOD has to step in and shuts down the entity that’s carrying out that cyber attack, you can imagine that has all sorts of ramifications.”

Over time, Fidler said he expects the State Department to get more creative on the development of cyber offense norms. There also might be some other kinds of international consultation that could de-escalate cyber, with both Fidler and Painter touting the Global Forum for Cyber Expertise that launched in The Hague to build up the capabilities of developing nations to handle cybersecurity.

But, again, it’s very early.

Painter, citing one estimate, said that “when you compare it to the process of nuclear rules, it took about 40 years to get grounded.”

“I don’t anticipate the length of time to socialize and draw lines is going to be anywhere near as long as nuclear,” he said. Still, “it’s not an overnight process.”

Ulrich Baumgarten via Getty Images

Joe, congratulations on your nomination to become the 19th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As you plow through the millions of emails, letters, and phone calls of support that are stacking up at the moment, I know you are already thinking about your agenda for the fall, assuming your confirmation goes well — which of course it will. The support and goodwill on The Hill is palpable, notable, sincere, and a potential source of real strength for you, by the way.

Your selection reflects deep credit on your beloved U.S. Marine Corps; rewards the hard work you have put into a brilliant career; and will require the ongoing deep support and love of your family. During our time together in NATO, I was so impressed to see your intellect, character, and creativity on display first hand as our NATO/ISAF commander in Afghanistan. The same traits you brought to that incredibly challenging assignment will serve you well in this new post.

I know leaving the Corps and the position of commandant — one you revere — is a very hard task for you. You will always have the touchstone of your Marine roots, but the nation has bigger responsibilities in store for you, and no one will be better at leaving service parochialism at the door. Your broad and meaningful joint graduate education — both at The Fletcher School at Tufts (full disclosure: where I am dean) and at Georgetown University — will stand you in good stead in that regard.

You’ll get a ton of advice going forward, most of which will be worth about what you pay for it. But having spent many years focused on these key areas, I would like to offer a few challenges and ideas to think about as you build a transition team and focus on both first steps and long term issues (all following Senate confirmation, of course).

Dodging the 2016 political venom. An election year can be a lost year in Washington, as petty politics reinforces the useless gridlock that plagues our capital. You are fortunate to have as defense secretary Ash Carter, not a particularly political or polarizing figure. He is, essentially, an enlightened bipartisan technocrat (in the best sense of that term) who has extraordinarily broad bureaucratic skills in the Washington arena. Joe, the innate ability you have to “disagree without becoming disagreeable” will help; but there will be times when nothing you say will be acceptable either to one side or the other in heated debate. Have a thick skin, and recognize the mud will splash pretty equally from both sides of the aisle over time.

People and money. While as chairman you will be principally advising the president and the national security team on military operations, we both know that a significant part of your job will be taken up with the issues surrounding personnel and budget. At the top of the list is always taking care of the force — something you have done throughout your time in uniform. Of particular note as you come into office this fall will be the debates over retirement and pay. Frankly, it is time to modernize the retirement system — while appropriately grandfathering those already in the service — and you will be a leading voice in making this fair but functional. On the budget side, you’ll need to keep hammering for a solution to the mindless sequestration cuts. Neither will be fun debates to have, but both will require your leadership form the uniformed side.

Countering violent extremism. The radical Islamic agenda will naturally be front and center for you. The best approach is to use hard power in the short term, but find ways to play the long game within an interagency approach. While your focus must be on the front-end combat requirements, you can play a powerful voice supporting partners like State, Treasury, USAID, and the intelligence community as they get at the longer-term issues — which are economic, cultural, political, and diplomatic. Again, your voice will be important to make sure we use both hard and soft power intelligently.

Standing firm with Russia. There are certainly zones of cooperation with Russia (counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and piracy) but they are increasingly few and far between. While we don’t want to stumble back into a new Cold War, we need to face down the bullying approach of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine specifically — and more generally around the Russia’s periphery. NATO is key, and your intimate and personal knowledge of the various commanders from your time hosting them in Kabul will be a significant asset. Spend quality time with the incoming chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Gen. Petr Pavel of the Czech Republic, and meet with the leading European chiefs of defense (Britain, France, Germany, and Italy) as soon as you can.

Balancing Asia. China will rise, and they will threaten the South China Sea with what new Pacific Commander Adm. Harry Harris has called, “the great wall of sand” — the building of artificial islands to claim sovereignty. China will not only irritate and threaten their neighbors in Southeast Asia, they will press up against Japan in the Northeast. The U.S. role will be to provide balance, build our relationships with treaty allies and partners alike, and ensure North Korea does not go completely off the rails. Your physical presence early and often will be helpful and necessary. And nobody knows this region better than Admiral Harris, who takes up his post just before you — lean on his advice.

Preparing for cyber conflict. The dogs of war are ready to slip free online. Expect on your watch over the next four years to see a major incident that impacts the national electrical grid, a significant cyberstrike on a U.S. combat system, and increasingly vicious hacks on the U.S. financial network. You will need to think through the role of CYBERCOM and whether or not we should begin to move toward a Cyber Force, much as we thought about creating an Air Force after World War II. Perhaps the time is right to at least build a cyber force along the model of US Special Operations Command. One big event will demand that we do so; why not get ahead of the curve?

Beware the black swans. Three big possibilities are a pandemic, a nuclear detonation, or a huge humanitarian disaster. You can bet on at least one in your four years as chairman, perhaps two. A pandemic in the class of the 1918 Spanish Influenza would be a global disaster and is not unlikely. A loose nuclear weapon, while unlikely, is a potential global catastrophe and ongoing proliferation increases the chances. And another significant tsunami or a huge earthquake (say on the west coast of the United States) is not impossible. These low probability, high impact events cannot be discounted.

To prepare for them, you need a small, innovative, “red cell” on the Joint Staff that can help predict these outlier events, then provide first-order recommendations for responses that can be tasked to the various combatant commands. This Disaster Innovation Cell could be a crucial resource on your close-in team. But part of the process should also focus on providing military support to civilian authorities via interagency coordination.

Joe, good luck in an incredibly challenging but meaningful assignment. Godspeed and open water to you.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — On a recent Saturday morning, Saudi national guardsman Abdulaziz Al Omran and his friend Khaled bin Mohammed sat down at a cafe on Tahlia St. to discuss their country’s military operations in Yemen. The 30-somethings wore designer sunglasses, one with shorts and a t-shirt and other in the baggy pants of a Riyadh hipster. They blended in amid a handful of tables full of similarly dressed young men.

For the last six weeks, Saudi Arabia has launched airstrikes in Yemen aimed at re-installing the country’s president, now in exile in the kingdom, and stopping Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

Here on Tahlia St., a café-lined corridor at the center of social life for young men in Riyadh, the Yemen campaign is popular. Omran and bin Mohammed’s normal banter about weekend plans has been supplemented by talk of border security and regional rival Iran, they said. In the years since the Arab Spring, Tehran has seized influence in three major Arab capitals — Damascus, Baghdad, and Sanaa. They lauded the fact that Saudi Arabia drew a red line at Yemen, which sits at the foot of the Arabian Peninsula.

“The recent strikes should have happened years ago,” said Omran as he sipped his coffee. “Until now, we are still facing dangers from Yemen.”

Bin Mohammed nodded in reply, and announced proudly that he was joining the National Guard, the military branch seen as the protectors of the monarchy. “I pray they send me to Yemen so I can fight the Houthis,” he said. Several fellow coffee drinkers looked on as his voice rose with emotion.

As Gulf leaders gather for a summit at Camp David on Wednesday, Yemen is likely to be on the agenda. White House and Gulf officials have said the meeting will reaffirm U.S. ties to the Arab Gulf monarchs, in the face of a looming deal between the United States and Iran over its nuclear program. While Riyadh argues that it is at war in Yemen with Iranian proxies who threaten the kingdom’s security, Washington has gently pushed for an end — or at least a pause — to the military activity as the humanitarian crisis there deepens. A five-day ceasefire is set to begin on May 12 to allow aid and medicine to move into besieged areas — but all indications suggest that the war will resume after this brief hiatus. In the hours before the truce was set to begin, Saudi Arabia amassed troops along the Yemeni border and Houthi rebels battered the Saudi cities of Jizan and Najran with rockets.

One reason the Saudis seem in no hurry to end the fight is that there has so far been no hint of public dissatisfaction at the military campaign. Both in the tightly-controlled domestic press and social media, many have praised the Saudi efforts: Newspapers laud each day’s airstrikes, the radio plays songs in praise of the operation, and Twitter and Facebook are alight with praise and heroic-looking montages of the king. Some Saudi women took up a social media campaign urging fellow females to put aside fears of long deployments and marry soldiers, explained 26-year-old Alanood at a café in central Riyadh.

Surely, not everyone here agrees — but malcontents are for now keeping quiet. And even some former critics of the monarchy have come out in support of the operation, piling public praise on Riyadh.                

“We are all with Yemen,” tweeted Saudi cleric Salman al-Ouda, a frequent critic of the monarchy who has served jail time for his criticism. The Yemeni people should “recover their freedom and independence, dignity, security and options and against Persian domination,” the Islamist preacher continued.

Such support could be key for a new monarch, who has ordered dramatic changes to the kingdom’s government in his first 100 days in office. Since taking the crown in January, the new monarch has reorganized the government, reshuffled the cabinet, and revamped the succession order, placing his son second-in-line to the throne.

Liberals, too, have voiced uncommon support. From his home in East Riyadh, writer and translator Khaled al-Ghannami — a former religious radical who reformed and became an outspoken critic of the government-backed clerical authorities.

“King Abdullah was a good man, but we also believe that his period was very weak one,” he says. “For years and years, we see threats that we are going to be invaded. Hezbollah in Iraq said it. The Houthis in Yemen said it. Honestly, Saudis felt very insulted…. King Salman preserved our dignity again.”

Analysts say this growing pro-Saudi sentiment extends beyond the country’s borders, to Sunnis across the Gulf. “A sense of Arabness is being revived by the Saudi government as it is trying to build a regional Arab bloc against Iran,” says Jorg Determann, assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. “The Saudis would like to encourage a common Arab front: of Arabic-speaking states and also Sunni states.”

A 45-minute drive north of Riyadh, on the dusty campus of Saudi Arabia’s counter-radicalization program, counselors say they hope their country’s Yemen operation will also win over another cohort: Islamic extremists.

Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry says some 2,500 Saudis have left to Iraq and Syria in recent years to join groups such as the Islamic State and the al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra. Many of the young recruits — the average age is between 18 and 25, according to the Interior Ministry — see their jihadist mission as an essentially humanitarian one. For years, they have watched fellow Sunnis in Syria and Iraq suffer at the hands of Iranian allies — whether Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus or Shiite militias in Iraq. Radical groups use the suffering as a lure: You have a duty to help, they say, because no state or government is fighting back against Iran.

At the Mohammed bin Nayef Center for Counseling and Care, where all returned foreign fighters must spend at least three months before returning to society, religious counselors say the Saudi operation in Yemen has given them a counter argument. “[The Yemen operation] show[s] them that when it is suitable, your government will do the right thing,” says Dr. Hameed al-Shaygi, a counselor at the center and professor of the sociology of crime at King Saud University. “You cannot take these actions with your own hands and do it by yourself.”

The domestic story mirrors an argument Saudi Arabia has repeatedly made overseas: that allowing Iranian influence to fester will only feed the agenda of radical groups. “In Yemen, you empower al Qaeda if you allow the Houthis to fight them, but if you stop the Houthis and help create an inclusive government, everyone will unite against al Qaeda,” argues Saud Al Tamamy, a professor of political science at King Saud University. “[Doing so] will not allow al Qaeda to use the argument that the Sunnis are oppressed.”

In other words, the Saudi de-radicalization program aims to convince the jihadists that the Saudi state can do a better job at helping Sunnis than any individuals can on their own. Nearly 3,000 jihadists have made their way through the kingdom’s rehabilitation program since it began in 2005. According to the Center’s director, Maj. Gen. Nasser Al Mutairi, 86 percent of them have returned to their normal lives without incident; 13 percent have relapsed, and of those, half have been re-arrested.

Proponents of the approach say they are confident it will work even better now with new leadership at the helm. King Salman is markedly closer to the religious elite than his predecessor, and the intervention in Yemen, his supporters say, has rallied Sunnis of all stripes to his side.

“It’s like a competition: who will stand up for Sunnis against radical Shiites? The Islamic State is someone with a good stolen car,” says Abdullah Al-Shammri, a former Saudi diplomat, making an analogy to the Yemen operation. “[The Yemen operation] is the newest Porsche.”

Saudi Arabia’s stance on Yemen has emboldened many here and across the Gulf to imagine new theaters for Riyadh’s regional influence. They see the tides turning against Tehran and think: If Saudi Arabia is willing to push back in Yemen, why not in other Arab capitals like Damascus and Baghdad, too? The Syrian opposition is wondering out loud whether Saudi Arabia may start transferring more advanced weapons to the rebels, even if the United States objects. Riyadh recently said it would soon host a conference of opposition groups fighting Assad, in a bid to unify competing rebel factions.

“When the Yemen situation happened and the Saudis and others went into that coalition, they did so without the green light from the Americans. Now they feel they could do the same in Syria,” says Adib Shishakly, the opposition Syrian National Coalition’s official representative to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. “I think with the new Saudi administration, and with the guts they had to go to Yemen, things will change dramatically for us.”

Yet the biggest risk to the Saudi regional leadership — and domestic unity — may be the Yemen operation itself. So far, airstrikes have been judged simply on the merit of the initiative itself, not on whether they is working. “For Iran now, this card — the Houthis — is burned,” says Mohammed Al Sulami, an assistant professor of Iranian history at Umm al-Qura University and one of the kingdom’s few fluent Farsi speakers. “Tehran will now try to fortify their relations with Syria and Iraq. But it’s over for them in Yemen.”

But Riyadh’s position may weaken if the conflict drags on further, or fails to push back the Houthis. The Saudi coalition has met a number of its military objectives, such as eliminating the Houthis’ stocks of ballistic missiles, but have so far failed to push the rebels from either the capital of Sanaa or the port city of Aden after six weeks of bombing.

International criticism may also start to grate. On May 10, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator for Yemen accused the Saudi-led coalition of breaking international law, bombing schools and hospitals in a barrage of 130 airstrikes over 24 hours. Relief organizations are also warning of a humanitarian catastrophe as the conflict drags on.

So far, however, the war remains popular. Most Saudis say that the Yemen operation was warranted, and that the Houthis do indeed pose a direct threat. Back on Tahlia St., the young men say they are ready to fight.

“I support the attack, we need to show the Houthis we have military power,” says 24-year-old Ibrahim. Soon, he adds, he’ll join the army.

This report was produced with the support of a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

MOHAMMED MAHJOUB/AFP/Getty Images

Pakistan

Gunmen kill 42 in attack on bus in Karachi

Gunmen on motorbikes attacked a bus carrying 42 people who were members of the minority Ismaili Muslim community on Wednesday (CNN, BBC). Six  attackers used 9 mm pistols to shoot at the 60 people on the bus as they were traveling to a Shia place of worship in Karachi. After the attack, the bus was driven to a hospital parking lot. Jundallah, a violent extremist group that targets Pakistan’s Shiite Muslim minority claimed responsibility for the attack. “This is the first such incident of its kind towards the Ismaili community,” said Zohra Yusuf, the chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “Nothing on this scale has ever been seen before.” Previously, the Ismaili community was not targeted by extremist groups, unlike many of the other minority Shiite groups.

Pakistan hangs former MQM worker for murder

On Tuesday, Pakistan hanged Saulat Mirza,  a former Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) worker convicted of murder,  after delaying his execution multiple times (BBC, Dawn). Mirza was convicted in 1999 of killing the head of Karachi’s power utility service, Shahid Hamid. His execution was scheduled for March 19, 2015 after Pakistan lifted its unofficial moratorium on the death penalty earlier this year following a deadly attack on a school in Peshawar. His execution was delayed after he released a video alleging that the killing of Hamid was ordered by MQM chief Altaf Hussain. His video-taped allegations came just one week after authorities raided MQM headquarters in Karachi. Hussain, who lives in self-imposed exile in London, has denied any involvement in the murder of Hamid.

Nepal

Casualties rise from second earthquake

A U.S. Marine helicopter in Nepal carrying six U.S. Marines and two Nepalese soldiers went missing Tuesday evening while delivering aid to victims of the latest earthquake. The helicopter and its crew have yet to be found, but officials are hopeful that the helicopter did not crash (BBC).

As of early Wednesday, Nepal’s National Emergency Operation Center had reported 65 deaths and 1,988 injuries as a result of Tuesday’searthquake (New York Times). India’s home minister said 16 people were killed in the northeastern state of Bihar, with an additional person killed in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. CCTV, the Chinese state-run broadcaster, reported one person killed by the earthquake in Tibet. The earlier earthquake on April 25 has killed over 8,000 people.

India

Opposition renews criticism of government’s land bill

Opponents of the government’s proposed land acquisition bill once again took aim at the legislation in India’s lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha (NDTV, The Times of India, Zee News, The Huffington Post). The bill has been introduced by the ruling party, the BJP, and it would make it easier for the government to acquire land for development. Critics of the bill claim it hurts the poor, particularly farmers, while proponents argue that it is a much-needed measure that can streamline economic development efforts. The proposed law was previously debated in the Lok Sabha in April. Rahul Gandhi, a leader of the opposition Congress party in Parliament, took advantage of the new debate and proclaimed that the government has “murdered” the existing land acquisition laws. Gandhi has been the most vocal opponent of the bill after returning from a mysterious voluntary two-month hiatus from Parliament. The bill has stalled in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India’s parliament, where the government is in a minority.

Study finds lack of regulatory approval for drug combinations sold in India

A study published Tuesday in the medical journal PLOS Medicine found that almost two-thirds of drug combinations sold in India to treat pain, depression, and psychotic conditions lack adequate regulatory approval (Reuters). These cocktails of drugs are known as fixed-dose combinations (FDCs). In 2012, an Indian parliamentary panel had warned that a large number of FDCs were reaching the market only with approval from state regulators, despite laws requiring regulatory approval from the central government for all new drugs, including FDCs. In some cases, according to the study, some of the individual drugs included in the FDCs were banned or unapproved internationally. The lead researcher of the study, Dr. Patricia McGettigan of Queen Mary University of London, argues that India should ban the sale and manufacturing of FDCs not approved by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO), the country’s central regulatory authority on pharmaceuticals (Science Daily).

Google to expand in India

Google and the government of the state of Telangana have signed a deal for Google to build a 2 million square foot campus outside the city of Hyderabad. Google will invest 10 billion rupees ($156 million) in what would become the company’s largest campus outside the United States and Google’s first company-owned campus in Asia (Livemint). Construction for the facility will begin in 2016 and is expected to be completed by 2019. Google currently has four offices in India, in the cities of Bengaluru, Mumbai, Gurgaon, and Hyderabad. The new facility would double the size of Google’s Indian workforce from 6,500 to 13,000, according to Telangana IT Minister KT Rama Rao (The Times of India). Meanwhile, Hyderabad may also become the first Indian city to be entirely covered by Google Street View, which provides panoramic street-level imagery for Google’s map services.Google is negotiating with the Indian home ministry for permission to expand this service at a city-wide level, and the company has agreed to the Telangana government’s request to launch the service in Hyderabad (Hindustan Times).

Afghanistan

Afghan first lady speaks at awards luncheon

Afghan first lady Rula Ghani spoke at the National Democratic Institute’s (NDI) 2015 Madeleine K. Albright luncheon on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. (Pajhwok). At the luncheon, NDI awarded its 2015 Albright Grant to the Worker Women Social Organization (WWSO), a grassroots group based in Kandahar, Afghanistan that empowers young girls to become leaders through after-school programs and training sessions. Ghani’s remarks focused largely on the plight of Afghan women, but her tone was optimistic. She said: “Afghan women are among the strongest women I have ever had the privilege to know,” and added that “they are hardworking, persistent, resourceful, and they are tough. If they need support and help it is not because they are weak or clueless but because they are strong and will put every little bit of support to good use.”

Afghanistan, Pakistan pledge to fight terrorism together

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed to fight terrorism together in a press conference on Tuesday at the end of Sharif’s first visit to Kabul since Ghani’s inauguration (Guardian). Strengthening relations with Pakistan has been a top priority for Ghani, who previously hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, who was also part of the most recent delegation. At the press conference, Sharif said: “I assure you, Mr. President, that the enemies of Afghanistan cannot be friends of Pakistan.” He explained that “any effort by any militant or group to destabilize Afghanistan will be dealt with severely and such elements will be outlawed and hunted down.”

The Senate just dealt a serious blow to U.S. trade policy. Nominally, it was a procedural measure on whether to proceed to a vote on a Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) package, and 52 senators actually voted in favor. But 45 senators opposed — more than enough to block the move to cut off debate. The repercussions of such parliamentary maneuvering for U.S. foreign policy could be very serious indeed.

I wrote last week about the perilous state of the U.S. trade agenda. While the Obama administration had worked assiduously on the international aspect of ambitious trade deals, it had neglected the domestic debate. It had finally reached a point at which talks with trade partners could not advance and deals could not conclude without TPA. The figurative lateness of the hour meant that Obama administration needed a whole sequence of congressional votes to go its way in quick succession. That approach worked on the first stage – getting TPA bills reported out of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees. But that feat was accomplished with a sort of shell game that caught up with trade proponents today.

There is not just one trade bill moving through; there are four. In addition to TPA, there is a bill to renew and fund Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), one to renew trade preference programs, and one to deal with customs matters. The virtue of having these four separate bills was that problematic amendments could be shunted off onto the more “optional” bills. But that just delayed the day of reckoning. Trade opponents understood the approach — move their amendments to bills that would never pass, while keeping TPA clean. Hence, the argument leading up to today’s vote was how the bills would be bundled together. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tried to move TPP and TAA as a package; opponents insisted all four bills move together.

The vote was nearly along party lines. One Democrat supported (Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware). Sen. McConnell ended up switching his vote to “no” for procedural reasons, which made him the only Republican to oppose.

One might ask why this is such a big deal. It was a procedural motion, not a final verdict. The Senate could take the motion up again, if it wanted to (McConnell’s procedural ploy allows him to raise it). A new deal could be struck. The president could twist arms within his own party.

The problem is that momentum was not moving in TPA’s direction. The president has been pushing on the issue — hard. He just did not seem to move anyone. There aren’t many more votes to be had on the Republican side (Sens. Graham and Rubio did not vote). Other than Hillary Clinton coming out in favor of TPA, it is hard to see what could change on the Democratic side.

Sen. McConnell could accede to Democratic demands and bundle the four bills together, but he might well lose more Republican votes than he gained among Democrats. Further, some of the objectionable provisions (e.g., currency manipulation clauses) have been labeled deal-killers by the administration.

This leaves the administration’s foreign policy in tatters. On the trade front, no partner country will want to make sensitive concessions if the deal will be blocked in Congress. Further, it badly undermines the administration’s credibility, as U.S. negotiators had repeatedly assured other countries that they had U.S. domestic politics under control. Even if this is only a temporary delay, there is very little time to push through the big Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal before next year’s election is upon us; the delay itself could block the deal.

The connection from commercial policy to foreign policy comes because of the central role that the TPP played in the administration’s pivot (or “rebalance”) to Asia. The TPP is seen as a key test of U.S. commitment to the region, and the Obama administration had labeled the pivot its top foreign policy priority.

The danger now is that trade partners and allies will see the United States as rudderless, isolationist, and unreliable for at least the next year and a half, if not beyond.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. president, frustrated by the costs of involvement in the Middle East that had been a huge burden on America for years, ordered his intelligence services into action. The course they chose was regime change. Operatives took the initiative, secretly raising an army to depose the offending ruler.

The president was Thomas Jefferson. The date was 1805. Since its early days, the United States, like European nations, had been forced by the Barbary pirates into paying tribute to avoid the capture and harassment of sailing vessels. Jefferson had previously hoped to raise an international coalition to depose Tripoli’s pasha, but due to European hesitation, he acted unilaterally. The result was what the CIA now describes on its website as “the United States’ first covert attempt to overthrow a foreign government.”

Initially, the U.S. effort was a seeming success; as soon as it was clear that the Americans were posed to remove the pasha and replace him with his brother, a treaty was struck. American hostilities in the region, however, were not fully resolved for another decade.

Much in this story is chilling in its familiarity. The United States doesn’t seem to have come too far in the intervening two centuries. The country is again embroiled in interminable hostilities in the Middle East. And once more at the center of the action are U.S. intelligence services.

During the nation’s first years of existence, President George Washington sought funding for secret services that he felt were essential to U.S. security. The allocations for those spying activities consumed roughly 10 percent of the U.S. budget—a grand sum measuring roughly $1 million. In 2014, the reported budget for U.S. intelligence activities was approximately $68 billion, down from its 2010 high of $80 billion.

Despite its deep roots and the resources that have been poured into it, today’s intelligence community stands at a watershed. It has been battered by criticism for its role in torture programs and other abuses, by a long string of costly intelligence failures, and by shock at the overreaching surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. It has gone through several major overhauls, including the post-9/11 creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and a more recent reshuffling at the CIA overseen by Director John Brennan. The formation of the ODNI, intended to enhance coordination among spy agencies, actually exacerbated tensions. Rivalries among special operators in the military, military intelligence, and the CIA over whose teams should take the lead in combating terrorism threats worldwide have compounded internal strains. The failure of top policymakers to effectively utilize intelligence or understand its inherent limitations has only worsened these problems.

All this turmoil has come at a time when the profound transformational consequences of the advent of the information age have raised serious questions about the future of intelligence. Those questions extend to the role of the intelligence community in the national security apparatus, the means of achieving intelligence goals, and the appropriate limitations that ought to be placed on intelligence activities in a free society. Changes have been coming so rapidly that reflection about the best way to address such issues has been forced to take a back seat to the operational concerns that have bedeviled the intelligence community during the past decade and a half.

Yet there is an ever more urgent need for a rethink of how, why, when, where, and by what means intelligence is gathered, analyzed, and utilized. It is still the early days of the information revolution. The pace of breakthroughs will only accelerate, and the consequences will shift from incremental improvements in productivity and connectivity to fundamental changes in the nature of society, power, war, and peace.

By 2020, it is estimated, 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet—most of them embedded microprocessors that will offer real-time insights into every aspect of life on the planet. Furthermore, effectively every human being, every organization, and every government on Earth will be connected in a man-made system for the first time in history. Each of those billions of microprocessors and each connection on the web will be a potential entry point for surveillance and spying. What’s more, thanks to drones and nanodevices that can be hidden and embedded on targets by the millions, humans stand at the dawn of an era of potentially ubiquitous sensing. (This is not to speak of the gradual impact artificial intelligence will have on how people direct, conduct, and analyze what is gathered.)

If the world does not set limits, preferably by international treaty, as to what is fair game in this system—in terms of both surveillance and cyberconflict—humanity runs the risk of entering a period that will make Big Brother dystopian fantasies pale by comparison. Central to this process of setting limits will be having a public debate about the philosophical building blocks of the system: what is privacy, who owns the data each sensor produces, how should people divvy up the rights of individuals, corporations, and states. Furthermore, intelligence agencies will have to be reorganized to deal with these new realities, and so too will entire national security systems. Increasingly, the Internet will be the terrain on which most future battles will be fought, won, or lost; information warriors, many of them from the IC, will be the principal combatants.

It will be essential that the world reconsider views on the classification of information. Vastly more information is publicly available than could likely ever be gathered covertly. Such open-source information is easier to verify, easier to share, of greater use to policymakers, and essential to the kind of public-private collaboration that will be required in the new security environment. Conversely, estimates from career intelligence consumers suggest the vast majority of what is available via classified channels is also available or discoverable via open sources. Not classifying it would save billions of dollars.

The most modern information systems are designed to serve consumers of information. The intelligence apparatus is perversely oriented to the needs and concerns of information producers. It is centralized when most systems are distributed, and it is hard to search when most focus on making that easy. This makes sense in some (though very few) cases in order to protect sources and methods. But overall, the apparatus should be reformed to enhance officials’ ability to make informed decisions using blended open- and closed-source data.

Moving analysts closer to the consumers also makes sense. The United States should be restoring its withering mechanisms of foresight, such as the National Intelligence Council, by relieving them of the burden of being glorified memo writers for the National Security Council. The most important and elusive objective of good intelligence systems is not providing the right answers—it is coming up with the right questions. That requires special processes, independence, and a creative freedom that today’s news-fed, politically driven system is becoming worse and worse at executing.

Finally, it is time to acknowledge that the reorganization—namely, the formation of the ODNI—that took place in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was a mess. It was in fact just the latest in a series of unsatisfactory efforts that began with the creation of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and then included the formation of the CIA. All were meant to knit together the proliferating number of spy agencies in the United States (now up to 17). But in each case, the result was not coordination, but the creation of new bureaucracies and weakened communication.

The intelligence community needs fewer agencies, fewer bosses, less redundancy, lower costs, and more orientation toward focusing on the right missions in the right way. All the forces of the information age—the explosion of new sources and means of gathering intelligence—will create new temptations in the opposite direction. But if America gives in to them, it is likely to get results that will amplify the failures of recent decades, while failing to build on the tradition of serving a vital role that has marked America’s intelligence services since the infancy of the country.

Illustration by Matthew Hollister

White House spokesman Josh Earnest weighed in on New England Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady’s suspension Tuesday, reminding the American megastar that he’s a role model to “people around the world.” Turns out many of those people are very, very unhappy with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

To those uninitiated on the intricacies of the scandal dominating the American sports scene and widely known as Deflategate or Ballghazi: Brady is an Ugg-shilling celebrity who’s won five Super Bowls with the Patriots (his most recent title came this year), earns a $8 million annual salary, and is married to supermodel Gisele Bündchen, just three of the factors that lead American football fans outside of New England to generally despise him. This week, Goodell suspended him for four games for playing with footballs that weren’t properly inflated. Hence, Deflategate.

Goodell, who is also disliked by many NFL fans for inconsistent punishments, a hefty 2013 salary of $44 million, and general corporate buffoonery on behalf of the league, also slapped the Patriots with a million dollar fine and took away some of the team’s future draft picks.

As the rest of the football world celebrates, Patriots fans are incensed over the punishment, which they deem too harsh, and this outrage isn’t limited to American shores. As Earnest suggested, there are Patriot fans around the world. From the looks of things online, they’re as outraged as their American counterparts.

A group called Dutch Patriots Fans, which is registered as an official fan club on the Patriot’s website (all of the groups mentioned below are registered with the team, a loose affiliation that does not suggest any financial backing from the club), fired off a series of tweets condemning Goodell and and backing their embattled number 12. Check one out below:

#NoBradyNoBanner

— Dutch Patriots Fans (@DutchPatriots) May 12, 2015

The group followed also retweeted a series of images expressing support for Brady, who, up to this point, is defiant in face of the punishment.

The UKPatriots, a group based in United Kingdom, also took to media to express their outrage, rounding up all the hashtags being used to back Brady.

#TimeToUnite #FreeTomBrady #NoBradyNoBanner #UKPatriots @Patriots

— UKPatriots (@UKPatriots) May 12, 2015

Then came this from a group called Patriots Sweden:

Oproportionerligt. #FreeBrady

— Patriots Sweden (@PatriotsSweden) May 12, 2015

Translation: Disproportionate.

The Patriots España, a group based in Spain, calls the Well’s investigation a witch hunt in the tweet below (they condemned Goodell with harsher tweets that aren’t safe for a family Web site):

La sanción es desproporcionada,demuestra lo adentro que la tienen. Por muchas cazas de brujas que hagan volveremos a ganar!!! #FireGoodell

— Patriots España (@PatsESP) May 11, 2015

They then retweeted this image:

@PatsESP #FireGoodell #FreeBrady #NoBradyNoBanner #ZonaRojaNFL #NFLesp #FSylosabes pic.twitter.com/a51zm5nXpz

— Flying Elvis (@ElvisFlying) May 12, 2015

The Hungarian Patriots Fan Club isn’t happy either and posted this picture in support of their QB.

Goodell often likes to say the NFL is a global game, a notion many American fans scoff at. But at the very least, these tweets show some football sentiments are universal — strong feelings about Tom Brady, one way or the other.

Photo Credit: Billie Weiss/Getty Images

New Zealanders are pretty irked by the revelation that their government used taxpayer money to air-freight nearly 1,000 sheep to Saudi Arabia.

The sheep shipment was part of a $4.4 million deal (6 million New Zealand dollars) to set up a New Zealand-sponsored “agribusiness service hub and demonstration farm” in eastern Saudi Arabia. The New Zealand government says the scheme is an important investment for its country, where sheep famously outnumber people six-to-one, and where the meat trade with Saudi Arabia is worth millions.

But many are blasting it as a move to mollify the powerful Saudi businessman who owns the farm where the sheep have been sent, and who also has invested deeply in New Zealand’s own sheep industry.

New Zealand announced a general ban on shipments of live farm animals in 2004, amid outrage from animal rights groups over livestock packed into “reeking, squalid” ships and a shipping disaster in which more than 5,000 sheep died on an Australian vessel en route to Saudi Arabia.

The ban left Saudi tycoon Hamood Al Ali al-Khalaf sheep-hungry and angry over the loss of business.

Skeptical Kiwis see the new sheep delivery as undue compensation for the well-connected al-Khalaf at a time when New Zealand is trying to cement a free trade deal in the Gulf. New Zealand jetted the sheep to Saudi Arabia late last year, but the scheme is just now making news after Prime Minister John Key’s recent visit to the Gulf to negotiate the trade deal.

Further fueling the anger is the revelation, from New Zealand television network TVNZ, that al-Khalaf also was the buyer of the animals that died in the 2004 sheep disaster.

“If this is the man who was behind the lamb deaths that led to the ban on live sheep in the first place then [Prime Minister] John Key and [Trade Minister] Tim Groser have just made fools of themselves at the taxpayer’s expense,” opposition trade spokesman David Parker told TVNZ.

New Zealand’s Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy has called the scheme “a sound investment” – and one that can eventually “help us land the free trade agreement.” The government says the 2004 shipping disaster was why the sheep traveled by plane this time around.

Halal meat orders from Muslim have long brought New Zealand, as well as Australia, lots of business. But many Kiwis’ response to the latest deal is: “Baa, humbug!”

Bethany Clarke/Getty Images for Wool Week

Researchers funded by the World Bank arrived at a wildly unorthodox and unexpectedly effective strategy for preventing HIV in the African nation of Lesotho: A lottery program that offered participants an opportunity to win cash on the condition that they tested negative for sexually transmitted infections.

The lotteries led to a 21.4 percent reduction in HIV incidence among participants over a two-year period, and a reduction of more than 60 percent among participants identified as “risk-loving individuals” — those who were identified at the study’s start as people who enjoyed risky behavior.

“We are the first to find a significant reduction in HIV incidence though behavioral intervention,” Professor Martina Björkman Nyqvist of the Stockholm School of Economics, a lead researcher on the project, told Foreign Policy.

In Lesotho — a small, mountainous country of 2.1 million that is completely surrounded by South Africa — some 43 percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day and 23 percent of adults are infected with HIV. Among young people the infection rate is even higher, with 41 percent of people between the ages of 30 and 34 are infected with the disease.

Researchers worked with 3,029 volunteers in 29 villages across the country to see whether the opportunity to enter a lottery in exchange for a clean test result might lower these infection rates. Participants testing negative for curable sexually transmitted infections were entered automatically to win cash prizes of either $50 or $100. While the study focused on HIV, the lottery was tied to other STIs, so that HIV-positive individuals, for whom safe behavior is paramount, could also participate. All participants, including members of the control group, received in-kind rewards for participation.

The lotteries were most successful among risk seekers, identified through “the perceived value of a risky gamble.” “As risky sexual behavior, which is responsible for the vast majority of new HIV infections, also involves a risky gamble, lottery programs may better target those at higher risk of getting infected by HIV,” the authors wrote in a World Bank working paper published in March.

In a country with a low life expectancy, the consequences of sexual risk-taking can seem distant and the rewards immediate, Nyqvist said. The lotteries were designed to rebalance that psychological equation.

“Broadly, it has been popular in the past decade or so within international development to look at conditional cash transfer programs, and these have been found to have big effects when it comes to school attendance, health checkups, these kind of things,” Nyqvist said, referring to programs that offer small payments in reward for compliance with a set of criteria. The Lesotho program takes that line of thinking and adds a twist: Higher risk, higher reward.

“The perceived return from participating in a lottery may also be higher than the return from an incentive program that pays the expected return with certainty,” Nyqvist and her co-authors wrote.

But the researchers sounded a note of caution about applying these findings to other countries. “The results are really big, amazingly big,” Nyqvist said. “But the results apply to Lesotho. To conclude that this has external validity, we would need to replicate the lotteries elsewhere.” One condition she identified as specific to the region was the unusually high levels of infection.

The conventional wisdom on HIV/AIDS prevention argues that fighting the infection requires making condoms more widely available, improving accessibility to antiretroviral drug regimes, and educating the public about the virus and how it spreads. This latest findings do not necessarily dispute that thinking, but point to a new, simple, and cheap approach.

Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Senate Democrats stalled President Barack Obama’s trade agenda Tuesday, bucking his ambitious plans to increase U.S. exports in favor of labor unions and tougher protections for overseas workers.

In a 52-45 vote, the Senate failed to get enough votes to open debate on so-called “fast-track” legislation that sought to speed approval of the 12-nation Trade Promotion Authority without last-minute congressional meddling. Instead, Tuesday’s vote — which fell short because it lacked support among Obama’s fellow Democrats — potentially creates a new stumbling block for ongoing negotiations with Pacific Rim countries grappling with the most aggressive trade agreement in decades.

Democrats who oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership have pushed for added enforcement measures in the deal to protect against potentially unfair advantages, such as currency manipulation in Japan or poor labor laws in Vietnam.

“Free trade can be good for the United States, but only if it is done right — leveling the playing field for all workers; protecting workers’ rights, human rights, and the environment; and addressing serious imbalances including currency manipulation,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said in a statement after he voted against the motion to begin debating the bill.

Now, the White House and Republicans may have to agree to add some of those provisions in order to get the “fast track” bill out of the Senate. But that might not go over well with the rest of Washington’s negotiating partners. Adding requirements that could be seen as chiding other countries may undermine U.S. trade officials’ ability to deliver a deal.

Another major criticism from opponents is that the negotiations haven’t been subject to public view.

“The president is asking us to vote to grease the skids on a trade deal that has largely been negotiated but that is still held in secret,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in an interview with NPR news before the vote.

The trade agreement, along with another European pact, are both part of the Obama administration’s ambitious agenda to lower barriers for U.S. companies abroad and increase exports. But trade negotiations have faced stiff opposition from unions, many liberal lawmakers, and some Americans who associate trade pacts with job losses that happened across the country as globalization spurred outsourcing over the past few decades. Vocal opponents have argued that another trade pact will again leave U.S. workers worse off.

“The reason this went badly for them is that enough senators listened to the folks back home who have been telling them that they don’t want to make it easier to ship jobs overseas,” said Jason Stanford, spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Fast Track.

The trade negotiations have gotten the support from Hollywood and other big industries. Music moguls and movie-makers are hoping the deal will include beefed-up copyright protection that could prove lucrative for the struggling industry. Other industrial giants, from consumer products companies to Wall Street banks, also see the TPP’s intellectual property provisions as key selling points in a regional trade pact that could bring together an estimated $27 trillion worth of economic activity.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, in particular, is seen as a key piece of the Obama administration’s rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific region. U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said last month that the trade pact is worth as much to U.S. prospects in the region as a new aircraft carrier. Analysts have recently called for Washington to promote ambitious trade deals with partners and allies in Asia, while excluding China, to strengthen America’s ability to push back against Beijing’s growing financial and military might.

Natalie Behring/Getty Images

Enthusiasm for reforming our democracies has been gaining momentum. From the pages of Foreign Policy to the colorful criticisms of comedian Russell Brand, it is evident that a long-overdue public conversation on this topic is finally getting started.

There is no lack of proposals. For example, in their recent Foreign Policy piece, John Boik and colleagues focus on decentralized, emergent, tech-driven solutions such as participatory budgeting, local currency systems, and open government. They are confident that such innovations have a good chance of “spreading virally” and bringing about major change. Internet-based solutions, in particular, have captured our collective imagination. From Pia Mancini’s blockbuster TED presentation to New Scientist‘s recent coverage of “digital democracy,” we’re eager to believe that smartphone apps and novel online platforms hold the key to reinventing our way of governance. This seems only natural: after all, the same technologies have already radically reconfigured large swaths of our daily lives.

To put it bluntly, I believe that focusing on innovations of this sort is a dangerous distraction. Sure, empowering citizens at the local level and through trendy new technologies — and the greater public involvement in policy-making this promises — are positive developments. But we must remember that the bulk of political power still lies in the hands of the professional politicians that govern our nations. Being able to affect how things are run in our neighborhood is great, but how much of a victory is that if we have so little control over our national governments? Similarly, technology that lets us “crowd-source” writing legislation is fine, but how much good will this do us if the political class continues to have the final say on what actually becomes law?Instead of letting ourselves become distracted by the glitter of the local and the technological, we should focus on reclaiming some real political power at the top levels of government. The question is: how might we do so?

As described in my book, Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen’s Guide to Reinventing Politics, a number of extraordinarily encouraging experiments along these lines have taken place in British Columbia, Oregon, and elsewhere over the last decade. What they all have in common is citizen deliberation: the use of large panels of randomly selected citizens to carefully reflect and decide on complex policy matters, a practice which dates back to ancient Greece. Expanding on this experience could usher in a fundamental change to the nature of government.

The idea of involving ordinary citizens in real-world policy-making will come as a shock to many, but skepticism invariably dissipates as people come to understand how citizen deliberation works in practice. A panel of randomly-selected participants carries out in-depth study and analysis of the issue at hand, including consultations with policy-makers, interest groups, scientific experts and others. They deliberate, at length and with the assistance of skilled facilitators, about the available policy choices and their possible impact. The process has nothing in common with the rowdy scenes and uninformed shouting matches that characterized, for example, the town hall meetings on healthcare reform in the United States.

A commonly voiced concern is whether ordinary citizens have what it takes — are they smart enough to address complex policy issues? Here, too, doubts prove unfounded. Stanford Professor James Fishkin, one of the world’s foremost experts on citizen deliberation, writes that “the public is very smart if you give them a chance. If people think their voice actually matters, they’ll do the hard work, really study, … ask the experts smart questions and then make tough decisions. When they hear the experts disagreeing, they’re forced to think for themselves. About 70% change their minds in the process.” He assures that “citizens can become better informed and master the most complex issues of state government if they are given the chance.”

The promise of citizen deliberation is that it could free policy-making from the well-known biases that plague professional politicians. Ordinary citizens, chosen at random, can act in what they perceive to be the true public interest, free from the pressures of facing reelection. The role of money in politics and the dangers of hyper-partisanship are increasingly obvious in today’s politics, but letting ordinary citizens make policy avoids these pitfalls — they must neither cater to the interests of those who funded their campaign nor hew to the party line. They don’t have to worry about how necessary-but-unpopular measures will adversely impact their popularity. Perhaps just as importantly, they will be truly representative of the general population, in the sense that such a citizen panel, by virtue of being drawn at random, will tend to mirror the entire citizenry in terms of gender, age, occupation, socio-economic background and political attitudes — very much unlike the privileged political class that currently rules us.

But perhaps the most exciting aspect is that none of this is idle, academic speculation. Recent experiences show how well citizen deliberation works in practice. In 2004, a randomly-chosen panel of 160 citizens was tasked by the government of the Canadian province of British Columbia with reforming the province’s electoral system. After drawing on the input of a wide variety of experts, consulting the public, and deliberating at length, the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform ended up suggesting a type of electoral system that, in the words of Professor David Farrell, a renowned expert on electoral systems, “politicians, given a choice, would probably least like to see introduced but which voters, given a choice, should choose.” The assembly’s proposal was later approved by 58 percent of the popular vote in a referendum, yet regrettably failed to meet the strict requirements imposed by the provincial government for its results to be considered binding and, for that reason, has yet to be implemented.

Similarly encouraging results are reported from the U.S. state of Oregon. Since 2010, citizen deliberation has been used to assist Oregon voters in state-wide ballot initiatives. In a process known as the “Citizen Initiative Review,” a panel of about 25 randomly chosen Oregonians is tasked with carefully researching and deliberating on the ballot measure up for a vote. At the end of this process, an accessible and highly informative set of “key findings”, as well as an indication of how many panelists ultimately supported and opposed the proposed measure, are presented as a “citizens’ statement” in the pamphlet that voters receive in the mail before a ballot. Research confirms that this citizens’ statement not only makes voters better-informed, but also has a substantial influence on the voting behavior of those who read it.

As these examples make evident, gradually incorporating citizen deliberation into our political institutions holds huge promise. By having a representative microcosm of the general population directly engage in thoughtful, informed policy-making, we have a mechanism that powerfully sidesteps the biases of the traditional political class while also avoiding the unreflective and uninformed behavior that plagues nearly all forms of direct democracy — including the increasingly popular digital ones.

Crucially, and by virtue of the random sampling at the heart of the process, citizen deliberation is also immune to another big problem that afflicts most proposals for more grassroots styles of democracy: self-selection. Whenever participation — whether on- or offline — is open to the public at large, those who take the time and effort to make themselves heard will invariably tend be those who feel most strongly about the topic at hand. (This often means that they also espouse the most extreme views.) Citizen deliberation, on the other hand, ensures that the public voice that emerges from the process is indicative of what the whole population would think about that topic, if only it had the time and resources to carefully deliberate.

So, how might citizen deliberation be used to bring about major changes to our political systems? The most promising proposal, which repeatedly appears in the work of academics and democratic reformers alike, is to create a “citizens’ chamber” in our parliaments. Think for a moment about the tremendous potential demonstrated by the experiments in both British Columbia and Oregon over the last decade: if ad hoc citizen panels work so well, why not try to tap into this source of reasoned, public-spirited decision-making on a more permanent basis? This citizens’ chamber could supervise the work of the elected political class, ensuring that professional politicians did not betray the trust of those they represent. When a sufficiently large majority of the citizens’ chamber deemed that to be the case, it would have the power either to veto the decisions made by elected officials or at least submit them to a popular vote. This is the true potential of citizen deliberation as a way to radically transform our way of doing politics.

Given our political system’s current crisis of legitimacy, we have before us a unique opportunity to truly democratize our way of doing politics. The technology we should be excited about is one that actually dates back 2,500 years. Digital democracy, as well as the other modern developments discussed earlier, promise to give the public a better chance of making itself heard by the political class. Yet, as was already evident to the ancient Athenians, only citizen deliberation can ensure that the public will speak in a way that is, not only empowered, but at the same time representative, reasoned and well-informed.

Photo Credit: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

In March, as the eastern Ukrainian town of Debaltseve suffered heavy fighting despite a recent ceasefire agreement, journalist Nastya Stanko made a disturbing report: “People from Debaltseve told us that the army from NATO, the Polish army, and the U.S. army were all in Debaltseve,” wrote Stanko, a co-founder of independent Ukrainian broadcaster Hromadske.tv. “These people believed that if they were evacuated, they would be killed. So they wouldn’t come out of their basements.” These residents believed what they had seen on Russian television broadcasts. Employing World War II references that trigger traumatic memories, these broadcasts propagate a narrative that paints the popularly elected regime in Ukraine as a Western-backed, ultra-nationalist, fascist junta, conducting pogroms against the Russian-speaking population of eastern and southern Ukraine.

For Ukrainians and observers of the crisis, the Kremlin’s steady campaign of misinformation is a cause of serious concern. Michael Weiss and Peter Pomerantsev have convincingly argued that the Kremlin “weaponizes” information by disseminating outlandish lies, seeking to sow confusion and manipulate public opinion. Initiatives in Europe and the U.S. seek to counter the influence of RT, the well-funded Russian international TV channel that has proven a highly effective disseminator of Kremlin propaganda, with expanded Russian-language reporting from government-run broadcasters such as Voice of America. The Ukrainian Ministry of Information recently announced plans to respond to RT’s international broadcasts with a channel they will call Ukraine Tomorrow. They also plan to combat Russia’s online trolling campaigns with its own “iArmy,” all on the ministry’s modest annual budget of $184,000. By comparison, RT’s 2015 budget is roughly $247 million.

The western and Ukrainian approaches — even if they were adequately resourced — are not the right ones. Fighting propaganda head-on with counter-propaganda is not just unrealistic, but also deeply flawed. My colleague Katya Myasnikova from Ukraine’s Independent Association of Broadcasters memorably likened it to “treating cancer with tuberculosis.” It’s a dirty fight that takes the low ground and has proven highly ineffective at changing minds and winning trust. Instead, fighting propaganda with counter-propaganda only breeds despair, cynicism, and confusion among the target populations.

The people of eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region — those bunkered in their basements in Debaltseve as well as the over one million displaced — are ill-suited as targets for a western PR offensive and the hyper-patriotic messages of the Ukrainian media. What they urgently need instead is factual and highly practical information — “news you can use,” as one U.S. publication once referred to it — that will make an immediate difference in their lives. Rather than fighting Russia’s media spin doctors with bombastic “messaging” from the west or from Kyiv, we should concentrate instead on supporting excellent local journalism and furthering the distribution of objective news and information. This includes detailed reporting on ways to keep people safe, fed, clothed, sheltered, connected with families and friends, and how to rebuild their lives. There are already media outlets stepping up to this challenge in Ukraine, and we should be supporting them.

These informational needs of Ukraine’s war-torn eastern communities are detailed in Internews’ rapid response report, “Ukraine: Trapped in a Propaganda War. Abandoned. Frustrated. Stigmatized.” This report suggests that humanitarian information about where to get much-needed fundamental resources is the most immediate need for these populations. Beyond this immediate information, these people need to regain a sense of agency –which can only be supported by well-targeted, objective information. While propaganda and endless conspiracy theories erodes people’s right to know, diminishing their dignity and respect, the reporting of locally relevant information can be a powerful first step toward rebuilding trust among these disaffected communities — trust in both the Ukrainian government and in quality media as a reliable source of information.

Long before hostilities erupted in the east, Ukrainians had only a wavering trust in media. Major broadcast media outlets were controlled by oligarchs or political interests and served as instruments through which they waged their political and economic vendettas. After the Maidan revolution was followed quickly by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the rise of pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass, moderate voices could be — and often were — characterized as anti-patriotic. Today, Ukraine’s national media focus largely on covering the war, following “patriotic” editorial policies that dedicate little time or attention to the humanitarian crisis and its consequences.

In the rebel-held territories, media freedom has been all but dismantled, as most of the region’s journalists have fled and separatists have asserted strict control over information resources. They have launched at least four new TV stations and a host of radio stations broadcasting programming ranging from traditional Cossack songs to talk shows on which guests debate the finer points of Russian Orthodoxy — clearly an ideological project. They have allowed few Ukrainian journalists to enter the areas under their control. As a result, neither Ukraine’s national nor its local media have been able to function effectively as a public service media for the east.

That is not to say that there are no media outlets in Ukraine doing the right thing. Moderate voices such as the online Hromadske.tv, the Hromadske radio network, and its affiliates in Kyiv, the Donbass, and Zaporizhzhya are standing up to the challenge. Almost all of these outlets are new players that emerged from the grassroots during the Euromaidan revolution. They belong to the journalists and activists themselves, rather than to oligarchs or the state, and their focus is on local rather than national news. They are not only covering the conflict, but giving those affected by it a voice, allowing genuine and important grievances to be aired, and demanding accountability from the government.

It is unfortunate that most of these outlets are online-only and that their reach among the elderly and the poor — two of the groups most dramatically affected by the conflict — is limited. Helping these outlets spread their message and diversify the way they deliver it — and not fighting Russian lies with lies of our own — is one way Ukraine and the West can win the information war.

The photo shows the filming of the show DebatePro on First National, a state-run Ukrainian television station.
Photo Credit: Internews

The disappearance of a U.S. Marine helicopter in Nepal shows just how fraught relief efforts in the country, ravaged by a recent earthquake and a series of powerful aftershocks, can be for foreign militaries and aid organizations trying to dig the Nepalese people out of the rubble.

The Pentagon confirmed Tuesday that a Marine UH-1 Huey, conducting relief work near Charikot, Nepal, is missing. Six Marines and two Nepalese Army soldiers were onboard. In a statement, the Defense Department said emergency personnel are responding to the alert.

The Marines’ efforts are part of a larger push to get aid to Nepal, which has been devastated by an April 25 7.8 magnitude earthquake that left buildings in ruin, climbers on Mount Everest scrambling to survive an avalanche, and some Nepalese running into the streets in search of safety. A series of aftershocks, including one Tuesday, only added to the devastation. According to official estimates, 8,151 are now dead.

The Pentagon operation is part of a broader effort by American relief organizations, as well as U.S.-based climbing companies that charge hikers tens of thousands of dollars to attempt to scale Everest, the highest peak in the world. Captain Randy Bittinger, a spokesman for the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department in suburban Virginia, told FP recently that an emergency response team from his department — including 57 of task force workers and six canine handlers — was dispatched to Nepal to assist U.S. efforts there.

Gordon Janow, director of programs at Alpine Ascents International, a Seattle-based company that hosts ascents to Everest’s peak, said his organization donated food and medical supplies already in Nepal to rescue efforts.

“We’ve got a host of supplies at Base Camp from the expeditions,” he said. “A lot of people walked out [of Everest base camp] and a lot of people who needed help got evacuated.”

Other countries, including India and China, are also sending relief workers and supplies to Nepal. The government in Kathmandu, rotted by years of corruption, is struggling to adequately respond to the scale of the disaster, the worst earthquake in Nepal since 1934.

The Defense Department calls its efforts in Nepal “Operation Sahayogi Haat.” According to a recent news release, a team of 300 and a series of military aircraft are conducting relief operations there, working with USAID to deliver 50 tons of relief supplies and transport people out of disaster zones. The service members involved in the operation are stationed at the U.S. military base at Okinawa, Japan.

Photo Credit: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

South Asia, home to one-fifth of the world’s population and growing fast, has undergone major democratic transitions in the past decade. Today, all the countries in the region are governed by democratic systems. With Nepal’s successful toppling of its monarchy a decade ago and Pakistan’s transition to democracy from military rule, the portents have never been so encouraging. Similarly, Afghanistan, the victim of perennial conflict, is also moving towards democratic governance and reform. These developments are ground-breaking given the turbulent history of the region.

Yet, on one vital test of democracy — freedom of the press — the region is lagging. Between 2013 and 2015, South Asia remained one of the most repressed regions for journalists. According to Reporters without Borders, which publishes a press freedom annual index ranking 180 countries based on the freedom granted to members of the press, countries in South Asia rank discouragingly low.

Most of the countries in South Asia have scores in the bottom two tiers on the press freedom index. In the 2015 index, South Asian countries remained fairly stagnant from previous years: Pakistan ranked at 159th place; Bangladesh was ranked 146th; Sri Lanka was ranked 165th; and the Maldives was ranked at 112th place.

The working environment for journalists somewhat improved in India, Nepal, and Afghanistan. India’s ranking improved from 140th place in 2014 to 136th in 2015, Nepal improved its ranking to 105th place from 120th place, and Afghanistan showed some improvement by earning 122nd place in 2015, up from 128th place.

Media freedoms are under attack in most countries in the region. Ahmede Hussain, head of The Daily Star Books in Bangladesh, in an interview with the author said: “In the last few years, three television channels have been banned and the editor of the right wing Daily Amar Desh [My Country] was imprisoned.” Hussain added: “Senior leaders of the ruling party quite openly threaten, sometimes in the parliament, to take action against the independent media for running reports that do not run in their favor.” At least four bloggers in Bangladesh were killed during the last two years for their views on the country, with the latest occurring just yesterday, and impunity persists despite nationwide protests.

The situation in Sri Lanka is even more worrisome. During 2014, the government pressed the media to not report the violence against Muslims in the country’s southwest. Those who ventured to cover the sectarian clashes had their equipment destroyed or were physically attacked. Furthermore, the government-supported paramilitary groups were accused of murdering a newspaper journalist, Aiyathurai Nadesan, in Batticaloa. On the positive side, the newly-elected president, Maithripala Sirisena, promised to end repression in his January 2015 acceptance speech, hopefully reversing some of the past trends.

Pakistan remains most inexplicable. Despite the explosion of private media in the past decade, press freedoms have drastically reversed since the beginning of the decade. In 2002, Pakistan ranked 119th but dropped to 150th place only two years later. In a recent interview, Pakistan’s prominent journalist Hamid Mir (who took six bullets to his body last year for highlighting human rights abuses) said: “I am still under threat. I am using a bulletproof vehicle these days and move with private guards… I am not touching some sensitive issues these days.” Two private television channels were suspended in 2014 for bringing national institutions into disrepute and dozens of journalists faced threats to their lives, especially in conflict zones such as the southwestern province of Balochistan and the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan. Mir’s conclusion is worth noting, he said: “Pakistani media are losing their freedom very fast… If media will lose their freedom, then there will be no democracy and if there will be no democracy it will be difficult for the state of Pakistan to survive.”

In the Maldives, journalists brave high-handed tactics by state authorities and violent gangs. Last August, a local journalist, Ahmed Rilwan Abdulla, was abducted by unknown persons, and remains missing.

While India has much to celebrate on the evolution of its democratic system, recent press trends are disconcerting. Journalists in India face multiple pressure points. Sumit Galhotra of the Committee to Protect Journalists told the author: “The state has been clamping down on media freedoms and engaging in flagrant censorship. The Modi government’s recent ban on Al Jazeera and documentaries like India’s Daughter are prime examples.” At the same time, Galhotra said: “Journalists are being threatened and silenced by various non-state actors that include religious and political groups, criminal elements, and corporate houses.”

For the world’s largest democracy, it is disconcerting to hear senior investigative journalists saying that big businesses handing out legal notices has become standard practice in the country.

In Nepal, journalists continue to face peculiar hurdles. While the recent conviction and sentencing of the mastermind in journalist Uma Singh’s murder marks a step in the right direction towards addressing the culture of impunity, Nepal still has a long way to go in fostering a safe and secure environment for journalists. Not unlike other countries, self-censorship is rife.

While the situation in Afghanistan may be improving (Afghanistan is up six spots from last year), challenges to journalists remain. Last year, local and foreign journalists came under attack while covering the presidential elections while foreign journalists were shot by a police officer in Khost.

The majority of South Asians are young, below the age of 30, participating in communications revolution via new media. Digital freedoms have also come under threat in recent years, despite low levels of internet penetration. In Bangladesh, the government arrested a shopkeeper for lampooning the country’s leadership on Facebook, and in Pakistan, a parliamentary committee has approved a draconian draft bill that will curtail online freedoms. In India, the Supreme Court in March struck down a clause of the Information Technology Act that made publishing offensive online material punishable by three years in jail but upheld the government’s right to block websites after following due procedure.

None of the countries in the region are ranked as “free” by the global watchdog Freedom House. Only India, Nepal, and the Maldives are categorized partly free, while the remaining is placed in the “not free” category. (Civil and political liberties and media freedoms are inherent to Freedom House rankings.)

Democracy is not limited to elections, nor does the existence of a parliament ensure citizens’ freedoms. The right to information is central to a democratic polity and muzzling of freedoms of the press endangers the region’s democratic gains made in recent years. International rights groups need to work closely with their local counterparts in tracking the abuses and alerting the international community as authoritarian forces struggle with the aspirations of a young, restive population that seeks more transparency.

AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

On an otherwise ordinary night in May 2011, Robert Childs realized his friend, Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, might be on the verge of becoming a terrorist. The two men, who attended a Seattle mosque together, ate fried chicken at Abdul-Latif’s small apartment with his wife and young son. Afterward, Abdul-Latif walked Childs to the dimly lit parking lot outside his building, where his guest’s orange 1979 Chevy Suburban was sitting. There, he posed a startling question: Could Childs help him get some guns?

Abdul-Latif said he wanted to carry out an attack inspired by the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, in which Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people. But unlike Hasan, who acted alone, he was looking for associates. “I already have a guy that wants to do it, if you want to come in with it,” Childs recalls Abdul-Latif saying.

A skinny white man with close-cropped brown hair, Childs, then 35, had previously boasted to Abdul-Latif about his skill with guns. His father had been a Marine, and Childs had trained with pistols and rifles at a military boarding school. By contrast, 33-year-old Abdul-Latif, who kept his black scalp shaved and beard full, had limited experience with firearms. He’d once held up a 7-Eleven with two plastic toy guns and had served three years in prison for the robbery.

Hoping to drive away quickly, Childs told me, “I didn’t give him a yes or no that night.” He wasn’t going to help his friend, but he was worried about the startling request nonetheless. What if Abdul-Latif committed a crime with guns he got elsewhere? Could Childs be implicated for not informing police about their conversation? A convicted rapist and child molester, Childs had already served three stints behind bars—a total of nine years. Recently released, he was trying to turn over a new leaf.

Childs set up a meeting with Samuel DeJesus, a detective with the Seattle Police Department (SPD) and told him about the encounter. According to Childs, DeJesus asked him whether he would help authorities build a case against Abdul-Latif. “What do you want in return?” DeJesus added. “I wanted my whole record wiped off,” Childs recollects. The SPD, he claims, gave him the impression it could make that happen. (DeJesus declined to comment for this article.)

Within a matter of days, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) entered the picture. Abdul-Latif had popped up on the bureau’s radar after he posted several videos on YouTube that April and May, showing him criticizing Western society and insisting that peace could never be made with non-Muslims. When the FBI learned about Childs’s information, a result of the SPD’s involvement in a joint homeland security effort with the bureau, agents met with him and said they would be working on the case. Childs was happy to oblige the power move. “If you can’t trust the FBI,” he reasoned, “who can you trust?” And so he became part of the FBI’s post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus; comprising more than 15,000 informants, it is the largest domestic spying network in U.S. history.

Childs began wearing recording equipment when he met with Abdul-Latif. On June 14, 2011, the FBI gave him a cache of weapons—a grenade, assault rifles, and handguns—that he showed to Abdul-Latif in the back of a car. Childs demonstrated how to switch out magazines and chamber a round. When Childs removed the grenade from a duffel bag, Abdul-Latif seemed amazed. “For real?” he asked, according to an FBI affidavit. “If you throw it, it will blow up?” Pull out the pin, Childs explained—then throw.

A week later, on the evening of June 22, Childs, Abdul-Latif, and a third man, Walli Mujahidh, met at a chop shop to discuss plans to storm the Seattle Military Entrance Processing Station, where fresh-faced Army enlistees report to duty for the first time. (“They are being sent to the front lines to kill our brothers and sisters,” Abdul-Latif had said a few days earlier in a conversation caught on Childs’s recording device.) As Childs was showing his companions how to use FBI-provided M16 assault rifles, the bureau pounced: Agents threw a stun grenade and stormed the room. Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were arrested.

Although he wasn’t named publicly, Childs was immediately held up as an American hero. “But for the courage of the cooperating witness, and the efforts of multiple agencies working long and intense hours,” Laura Laughlin, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Seattle office, said in a news release the day after the operation, “the subjects might have been able to carry out their brutal plan.”

Today, Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh are serving 18 and 17 years, respectively, for conspiracy to murder officers and agents of the United States and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. But serious questions have emerged about whether, had it not been for the FBI’s efforts, the two ever would have gotten their hands on the means to commit serious crimes. According to local media and the men’s attorneys, Abdul-Latif had a history of mental problems and attempting suicide. Not long before the bust, he had filed for bankruptcy protection. Mujahidh was a penniless drifter diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and bipolar tendencies who had done 12 stays at psychiatric hospitals. In other words, they were arguably among the “fragile human beings” whom, according to Karen Greenberg of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s School of Law, the FBI often targets in stings.

Meanwhile, Childs’s “courage” has been all but forgotten. He says he was paid handsomely for luring Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh, but his criminal record was never expunged. He now lives more than 3,000 miles from Seattle, in Key West, Florida; he is homeless, riding a bicycle around town and sleeping in a secluded spot of mangrove forest near U.S. Highway 1. “I feel just as much a victim of the FBI as Abdul-Latif,” Childs says, smoking a cigarette one afternoon in March 2015 at an outdoor table at a pizza restaurant. He wears a state-provided ankle monitor—a tangible reminder that he is a sex offender.

In the domestic war on terror, the front lines are often manned by unsettled—or unsettling—figures like Childs, criminals and hustlers commissioned by the FBI to pursue equally problematic or susceptible targets. And while the informants hope that their assignments will put money in their pockets, erase their troubled pasts, or both, in many cases the bureau cuts off contact when operations are over.

To protect the homeland, in other words, the FBI exploits bad guys to catch what it claims are worse ones. It’s a dirty 21st-century spy game aptly summarized by a popular saying at the bureau: “To catch the devil, you have to go to hell.”

After the intelligencE failures of 9/11, the White House told the FBI that there should never be another attack on U.S. soil. The bureau’s mission was to find the terrorists before they struck. Al Qaeda, in turn, knew it wouldn’t be easy to again send actors into the United States to launch a coordinated attack. Instead, it moved to what FBI officials describe as a “franchise model”: using online avenues to encourage young Muslims in the West to commit violence. Law enforcement officials view the Fort Hood shooting as a realization of this model. Prior to the attack, Hasan had exchanged emails with Anwar al-
Awlaki, the U.S.-born cleric known for posting videos on YouTube advocating violence against America and for masterminding al Qaeda’s slickly designed online magazine, Inspire. (Awlaki was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.)

Concerns about franchise operations have made American-bred “lone wolf” terrorists the FBI’s new focus. Agents want to catch them just as they make the leap from sympathizer to potential attacker, so the bureau has recruited informants to infiltrate Muslim communities nationwide. Their task: gather information on men who seem interested in violence. Critics, however, allege the intelligence net has been cast even wider. In 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union brought suit against the FBI for instructing an informant in Southern California “not to target any particular individuals they believed were involved in criminal activity, but to gather as much information as possible on members of the Muslim community, and to focus on people who were more devout in their religious practice.”

In many cases, the FBI has directed informants to pose as terrorists and to provide both the means—weapons, for instance—and opportunities for targets to participate in plots. Arrests often follow: According to Human Rights Watch, nearly half of the more than 500 terrorism-related cases brought in federal courts between Sept. 11, 2011, and July 2014 involved informants, and about 30 percent placed informants in roles where they actively helped foment terrorism schemes.

Rights activists have accused the FBI of using informants to manufacture terrorists in order to demonstrate the bureau’s effectiveness and justify its $3.3 billion annual counterterrorism budget. Human Rights Watch has noted that investigations “have targeted individuals who do not appear to have been involved in terrorist plotting or financing at the time the government began to investigate them” and that some efforts have been aimed at “particularly vulnerable individuals (including people with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent).”

Among these individuals is James Cromitie, a broke Wal-Mart employee with a history of mental problems whom an FBI informant offered $250,000 to bomb synagogues and shoot down military supply planes in New York. Another informant convinced Rezwan Ferdaus, a young American of Bangladeshi background, to engage in a plot to bomb the Capitol. When he was arrested, Ferdaus was being treated for mental illness. FBI agents tracking Sami Osmakac—a Kosovo-born man with schizoaffective disorder now serving 40 years for planning attacks in Tampa, Florida—were caught on record describing him as a “retarded fool” whose aspirations to commit violence were “wishy-washy.”

The FBI isn’t just taking advantage of its targets’ vulnerabilities, however. It is also capitalizing on informants’ weaknesses and, in many cases, turning a blind eye to their own crimes. When he started working for the bureau, Shahed Hussain, the informant in the Cromitie case, had been convicted of fraud for providing driver’s licenses to illegal U.S. residents and was trying to avoid deportation to Pakistan, where he faced a murder charge. Hussain was paid $98,000 for spying and was also spared an indictment for bankruptcy fraud. The informant in the Ferdaus case, identified in court records only as “Khalil,” had a heroin habit and was caught 
shoplifting while wearing a wire. The man who spied on Osmakac, a Palestinian-
American named Abdul Raouf Dabus, was facing foreclosure proceedings on his business and house in Florida when he worked for the FBI and was paid $20,000.

Other informants have included fraud artists, drug dealers, and a bodybuilder turned con man. A 2013 USA Today investigation found that the FBI allowed informants to break the law 5,658 times in a single calendar year. “It’s the irony of informants,” says James Wedick, a former FBI supervisory agent. “You can’t trust these guys.… But when we put these informants in front of judges and juries, we simply say, ‘You can trust him. He’s with us.’”

With his rocky criminal past, Childs fit right in among this inauspicious FBI crew.

Robert Childs was born in Indianapolis in 1976 to Jackie, a nurse, and Robert Sr., who had served in Vietnam. The two separated shortly after their son was born, and Childs lived with his father and stepmother, Mary Fleenor. According to both Fleenor and Childs, Robert Sr. was abusive. “He had beat me so bad, I could not sit down,” Childs recalls of one encounter with his father.

At 16, Childs set out on his own, winding up in California, where he says he earned his GED diploma. He later hitchhiked to the town of Issaquah, Washington. But he wasn’t there for long before getting into trouble: In October 1994, a woman contacted the police, alleging that Childs had raped her 14-year-old daughter. According to a statement made by the victim, Childs met the girl at a local arcade, went home with her, and forced himself on her while repeating the words, “It’ll be all right.” Childs was convicted and spent six months in jail, followed by a year on probation.

A second offense occurred not long after. In 1996, Childs, who by then was 20, met a 15-year-old girl at a mall in Seattle. According to police, the pair went to a park and fondled each other. The girl’s mother filed a report, and Childs later pleaded guilty to child molestation.

Back in prison, Childs befriended a white Muslim inmate and decided to convert. “[Islam] made sense to me at the time,” he says. He studied the Quran relentlessly: “When I do something, I go full blow.” He also admits to adopting a militant religious attitude. He avoided associating with anyone who wasn’t Muslim, and he and his new friends discussed atrocities committed against Muslims around the world, particularly in Chechnya, where Islamic fighters were resisting Russian control.

After he was released in 1998, Childs settled in Seattle and married a woman named Jo. He says he started a cleaning business and acquired clients that included a car dealership, dentist, and culinary school. Childs didn’t have employees, but he brought people on as independent contractors if he had more work than he could handle.

Sometimes, Childs gave jobs to Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, whom he says he knew because the two men’s wives were friendly. Abdul-Latif didn’t have cleaning experience, but it didn’t matter: He was a Muslim. “It was about keeping business and money within the community,” Childs says.

In February 2007, Childs’s marriage was falling apart, and he decided to fulfill a long-held desire to fight for Islam. Being a mujahid, he believed, was the “highest plane” he could reach. Childs says he sold his business to Abdul-Latif and headed toward Chechnya, by way of Turkey. He wound up in the Turkish city of Malatya, where (to his surprise) he became friends with a German Christian missionary named Tilman Geske. But in April 2007, he says, tragedy struck: Geske and two other missionaries were tortured and killed by five Muslim men. According to media that covered the incident, a note left at the scene of the crime read, “This should serve as a lesson to the enemies of our religion. We did it for our country.”

Childs was distraught. He was no longer interested in fighting in Chechnya or anywhere else. “Do I want to be this person?” Childs considered. “Do I want to be known as a killer?”

When he returned to the United States, Jo was living in California, so Childs followed her there in hopes of repairing their marriage. But he was arrested for failing to register as a sex offender and spent three more years behind bars. Afterward, he made his way back to Seattle, where he started working at a dive shop. Although his religious fervor had waned, Childs attended a local mosque—and it was there, one day in early 2011, that he ran into his old friend Abdul-Latif.

Childs says his first meeting with the FBI took place in an industrial area of south Seattle, where police kept and maintained fleet cars. “The FBI interviewed me, questioned me about Abdul-Latif and his motives,” Childs says. When a deal to have his criminal record expunged came up, he claims “nothing was made out to be any different” from what it had been in his earlier conversation with the SPD’s DeJesus.

According to Childs, however, DeJesus approached him privately and urged him not to trust the bureau. The detective said the agents were interested in what the case could do for them, not in holding up their end of any bargain. “This case is what they call a career-maker,” Childs remembers DeJesus saying.

Childs dismissed the warning and recorded many hours of conversations with Abdul-Latif from June 6 to June 22, 2011. “If we gonna die, we gotta die taking some kafirs with us,” Abdul-
Latif said at one point, referring to non-Muslims. Once Mujahidh, a friend of Abdul-Latif, was in the mix, Childs recorded him too. At dinner on June 21, Mujahidh asked about the plot to attack the military processing center: “So we are going in and killing everybody?” Childs said they would only kill anyone “in green” or with a military haircut. “This is my way of getting rid of sins, man,” Mujahidh said, according to government documents. “I got so many of ’em.”

Before the FBI raid, Childs told Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh that the site—the chop shop—was owned by a Muslim. He says that officials placed a Quran on a table inside the facility to make the story a little more believable.

After the arrests, Childs says he was congratulated on a job well done and was told to wait in an interrogation room at a Seattle law enforcement office. He recollects FBI agents coming in to give him updates—for instance, “Mujahidh is singing like a bird.” Childs was excited but also scared: “I do remember asking very specifically, ‘Nobody’s gonna know it was me, right?’”

Less than a week later, Childs says the FBI called him to set up a meeting. Agents picked him up at home and, inside a sedan with tinted windows, told him there was nothing they could do about his record. “You should be happy you did this as a citizen,” he recalls them saying. “That should be reward enough.” Childs claims DeJesus pressured the bureau to do better. At a subsequent meeting, agents told him they could offer money. Childs says they agreed on $100,000; a sentencing memorandum compiled by Abdul-Latif’s defense counsel describes Childs’s payoff as being approximately this amount. (The FBI declined to comment, citing a “longstanding policy of not commenting on sources, methods and techniques.”)

Childs says he wound up receiving $90,000 in installments over several months. But it quickly disappeared. A friend stole about $30,000 of the money, Childs claims, and he dropped another $20,000 on a boat and even more on a new Ford Excursion in which he installed expensive stereo equipment. “I got carried away,” he admits.

At the same time, Childs says he kept working as an informant with the SPD. He was gathering information on local anti-war protesters until one day his name and mug shot appeared in the Seattle Times, associated with the Abdul-Latif case. He suspects FBI agents leaked it because the money issue had made his relationship with the bureau tense.

“All of a sudden, my name goes everywhere,” Childs recalls. With information about his sex offenses in the news, he felt that the “hero” part of his identity went “completely out the window.”

Childs isn’t the first informant to feel abandoned by the FBI. Mohamed Alanssi, a Yemeni national, helped agents investigate Brooklyn’s hawaladars—underground Muslim money brokers—and Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, who the bureau believed was raising funds for al Qaeda in New York. On Nov. 15, 2004, Alanssi faxed letters to the FBI in New York and to the Washington Post. He said his handler would not let him travel to Yemen to see his sick wife, and that he feared testifying as an informant would endanger his family. “Why you don’t care about my life and my family’s life?” Alanssi wrote in one of the letters. That afternoon, dressed in a suit soaked with gasoline, Alanssi set himself on fire outside the gates of the White House. Secret Service agents put out the flames, but not before 30 percent of his body had been burned.

In another case, Craig Monteilh—the bodybuilder turned con man, and the informant in the American Civil Liberties Union’s 2011 case—spent months spying on mosques while pretending to be a convert to Islam named Farouk al-Aziz. In December 2007, police in Irvine, California, charged him with stealing $157,000 from two women as part of a scam to buy and sell human growth hormone. Monteilh later claimed FBI agents instructed him to plead guilty in order to protect his cover; in exchange, the charges would eventually be removed from his record. In a 2010 lawsuit against the FBI, however, Monteilh alleged that the bureau reneged on its promises. He later dropped the suit after agreeing to what he terms a “confidential settlement.”

The FBI often seems quick to wash its hands of trouble that informants cause or allegations they raise. But no matter how murky or embarrassing an informant’s involvement in a case is, it rarely hampers an agent’s or handler’s career. Steve Tidwell, who supervised Monteilh’s operation, retired from the bureau and is now a managing director for former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s private security firm. There’s also former agent Ali Soufan, whose book about 9/11 and al Qaeda, The Black Banners, was a New York Times best-seller. Today, he runs a multinational private security company. One of the informants Soufan supervised was Saeed Torres, the subject of a new documentary, (T)ERROR, which won a Special Jury Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The movie depicts Torres, a former Black Panther and convict, as destitute and angry after being involved in sting operations that some critics have described as entrapment.

In one scene, Torres tells the filmmakers, “The government will use you, and they will drop your ass like a hot motherfuckin’ stone.”

After being exposed in the newspaper, Childs decided he couldn’t stay in the Pacific Northwest. He headed east, stopping briefly in Indianapolis to visit his stepmother, and then kept going until he reached Key West in October 2013. He rented a room and landed bartending gigs. In July 2014, however, the manager of a local Johnny Rockets restaurant told police that Childs, a former employee, had 
rung up five transactions totaling $863.11 on a stolen American Express card. Officers quickly realized Childs was a sex offender who hadn’t registered since arriving in Florida. When they arrested him, according to a police report, Childs claimed “he was hiding from a previous case he worked with detectives in Seattle, Wash.”

After learning of Childs’s arrest, DeJesus petitioned authorities to offer leniency. “For all intents and purposes, Robert Childs was a hero,” DeJesus wrote in an email to prosecutors, obtained from Florida authorities through an information request. Ultimately, Childs pleaded guilty to credit card fraud and no contest to failing to register as a sex offender. He agreed to be designated a “sexual predator,” was given time served, and got out of jail this January.

By then, his name had gotten around Key West—a small, gossipy town—and the room he’d been renting was no longer available. He says none of the bars on Duval Street, Key West’s main drag, would hire him. He claimed his address as under a highway overpass and started going to a Burger King almost daily to charge his ankle monitor.

When he began working for the FBI, Childs thought he was saddling up with white knights. That is no longer the case. “They get people who are vulnerable and desperate,” Childs says of the bureau’s informant program. “We are led to believe we can trust the FBI. I 
have no trust for them.… The public shouldn’t either.”

There’s no doubt that Amos Yee’s depiction of Singapore’s late founder Lee Kuan Yew in carnal embrace with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is somewhat lewd. The Singaporean teenager’s creation, which pastes Lee and Thatcher’s faces onto a women’s health website’s line drawing of what might be called an energetic sex position, falls far outside of usual Singaporean political discourse, which is hemmed in by severe sedition, defamation, and obscenity laws.

On Tuesday, a Singaporean court convicted Yee on obscenity charges related to that drawing and a series of statements that the court deemed offensive to Christians. Yee is now on probation and will be subject to a sentencing hearing in June. He still could face three years in prison.

A closing statement filed by Yee’s lawyers argued that the dirty Lee-Thatcher picture “is not a pornographic image, either calculated to (or in fact tending to) arouse the Likely Viewers of the Image or turn them toward trying this particular sex position.”

After Lee’s death in March, Singapore entered a period of national mourning that the 16-year-old Yee challenged with a gleeful video published four days after the former premier’s death. In the video, titled “Lee Kuan Yew Is Finally Dead!” Yee compares the dead leader to Jesus and says both men were “power-hungry and malicious but deceive others into thinking that they are compassionate and kind.”

On Monday, Judge Jasvender Kaur said Yee’s online activities should meet the “strongest possible disapproval and condemnation.” But due to his young age, he will be released on probation for $7,500 in bail on the condition that he take down his offending posts.

Yee’s case has emerged as a symbol of Singapore’s harsh restrictions on freedom of speech, but in his home country, Yee remains a controversial figure whom many Singaporeans believe deserves punishment.

Why would people want to support amos yee? Insulting a religion is not free speech

— Hani (هانى) (@allesandria) May 12, 2015

I'm not encouraging people to attack Amos Yee..but…okla I feel he deserves it still..at least once.

— ED.shiliang (@shilianglim) April 30, 2015

On Monday, a Singaporean court sentenced Neo Gim Huah, a 49-year-old man offended by Yee’s pranks, to three weeks in jail after he slapped the teenager at one of his court appearances.

Others think the foul-mouthed teenager with the scratchy voice has captured something fundamental – and troubling – about Singaporean culture’s hive-mindedness and narrow ideas of what’s acceptable.

All this petty persecution of AmosYee really shows how immature and inexperienced the SG public, media and govt are in handling free speech.

— yt (@wanderwegg) May 7, 2015

After his conviction, Yee told reporters that he was “conflicted.” “I don’t know if I should celebrate my release or mourn my sentence,” he said.

ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images

In the Athens of 450 B.C.E., Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles wrote plays in which the devastating outcomes were the consequence of the very character of its protagonists. Today, Greece is living a similar tragedy, because the people have inflicted it on themselves. The drama may seem endless — a succession of similar and recurrent meetings and market jitters — but the noose is tightening on the Greek government: It managed to make Tuesday’s $840 million debt payment only by forcing hospitals, universities, and local governments to deposit their cash with the central bank. The government may not have the money to pay salaries and pensions this month; meanwhile, another $1.2 billion debt comes due next month.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is hinting that the kind of austerity creditors demand would require a referendum. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble encourages that approach, since it would force Greeks to make an up-or-down choice about whether they are willing to make the changes necessary to remain in the Eurozone.

The Greek people don’t want to ditch the euro, but they also don’t want to continue the painful austerity that is necessary for Greece to remain part of the currency union. The narrative is taking hold that Greeks are uniquely irresponsible: tax cheats and budget cookers who deserve their suffering. The recklessness of Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis seems to personify the critique. But what is surprising about the Greek default drama is actually not that their politics have turned populist, but that the society has held up so well in the extreme circumstances it has endured the past five years: GDP has contracted by more than 25 percent since 2010 and unemployment is higher than in the United States during the Great Depression.

The economics for Greece are daunting. The government is indebted to the tune of $376 billion. That’s nearly twice the country’s gross domestic product. They’ve already been bailed out twice by the European Union; preventing a market rout required the head of the European Central Bank (ECB) to commit the EU to do “anything necessary” to preserve the currency. In the longer term, the Greek government will almost surely require a fresh infusion of up to $50 billion. And Greece owes another $1.5 billion in June. Athens is hoping that the ECB will hand over the profits made from the Greek debt it holds — in essence, asking bond holders to have taken risk for no gain. That the ECB is even considering this option demonstrates how much Europeans want to keep the currency union intact.

The problem is that no one wants to trade with Athens. The Greek government was only able to lure $2.2 million in securities purchases this month. The European Central Bank will no longer accept Greek government bonds as collateral in lending. Neither the International Monetary Fund (IMF) nor the EU will unlock further assistance without the Greek government committing to reforms it was elected to repudiate. Absent a policy reversal that creditors have adamantly ruled out, Greece will be in default.

Default is looming less for economic than political reasons. Greece’s government was elected making promises on which it cannot deliver, and Tsipras seems to lack the political skill to bring along the public for what is necessary. As economist Thomas Sowell wrote of the sub-prime housing crisis in the United States, it’s not economics that created the problem, but politics. Money has been rushing out of Greece because of political uncertainty about whether the government can pay its debts and whether it will find accommodation with its creditors. But it’s not about economic fundamentals at this point. It’s the antics of the Syriza politicians that have so aggravated its creditors (who are now almost exclusively the IMF, the ECB, and other European governments) and market makers (analysts and potential investors).

Syriza mistakenly believed it could extort better terms from other European governments by loudly proclaiming itself to be tribunes of the people. But other EU governments got elected, too, and they are likewise accountable to voters who are unmoved by Greece’s problems. Syriza also wrongly thought it could foster debtor country solidarity — an uprising by Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus (and maybe even France) against Teutonic austerity. That failed miserably: there might not be warm, fuzzy feelings toward Berlin these days, but many Europeans have endured stringent austerity measures since the 2008 financial crisis and believe Greeks have been living beyond their means. The governments of those countries, and the German keystone of the EU, are in no mood to be lectured to by Syriza’s left-wing academics who’ve never had to put together a budget.

Greece had a primary surplus when Syriza took office — that is, tax receipts were sufficient to operate the government if debt were excused; now even outright default wouldn’t make Greece solvent. The government would still need to borrow money to pay salaries and pensions. And if Athens defaults, who would lend it the money to get back on its feet? Either Greece will be bailed out again by the EU or it will have to return to markets for financing — at even more prohibitive rates. Default would also further constrict revenues due to general economic disruption and reduced tax payments. So even if the Greek government defaults in the next few months, Greece’s troubles won’t end.

The tragedy of all this is that Greece had been through the worst of its austerity and realignment. Economic growth was turning up at the end of 2014. Bond issuances were selling at manageable long-term interest rates. And the European Central Bank had effectively deterred markets’ predatory instinct to pick apart a common currency with uncommon risk ratios. If only Greeks had been a little more patient; if only their establishment politicians had a little more credibility with the public to argue that the worst was over. Perhaps then Syriza wouldn’t have been elected and the Greek tragedy we are likely to see play out would have been averted.

TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP/Getty Images