The Nation July 8-15, 2013

A Syrian Quagmire?
 Ojai, Calif.
 Thanks and praises for “In Dubious Battle” [May 27], your concise summary of the Syrian situation and the pitfalls and implications of military involvement. The warmongers never seem to learn from history. As you state, the only sensible approach is to provide humanitarian aid for the growing refugee problem and use this cooperation to avoid a broader conflict.
 JOHN KERTISZ 
 * * * New York City
 Having spent 2004–06 in Syria, I am disheartened by the blind rush to oust Bashar al-Assad. I remain in contact with many Syrians who would prefer not to have a new government forced on them at the end of a gun by the outside world. I witnessed the aftermath of US intervention in Iraq, where I was filming…

A school of fish swims peacefully in the ocean. Out of sight, a net is spread beneath it. At the edges of the net is a circle of fishing boats. Suddenly, the fishermen yank up the edges of the net, and in an instant the calm, open ocean becomes a boiling caldron, an exitless, rapidly shrinking prison in which the fish thrash in vain for freedom and life. 
 Increasingly, the American people are like this school of fish in the moments before the net is pulled up. The net in question is of course the Internet and associated instruments of data collection, and the fishermen are corporations and the government. That is, to use the more common metaphor, we have come to live alongside the machinery of a turnkey…

A WIN FOR VOTING RIGHTS: On June 17, the Supreme Court handed down a 7–2 opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who recently called the Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” So it was surprising to see him take the lead in a decision that helps protect voting rights.
 The ruling, in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, goes back to 2004, when Arizona approved Proposition 200, a stringent anti-immigration law that required proof of citizenship to register to vote. The law had a chilling effect: 31,000 people had their registration forms rejected after its enactment, and the percentage of voters enrolled through registration drives in Maricopa County fell from 24 percent in 2004 to 6 percent in 2007.
 Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals…

Since we learned that the government has been collecting and storing Americans’ call data for years, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein; her counterpart in the House, Mike Rogers; and James Clapper, director of national intelligence, have been trying to claim it is not as bad as it sounds. The collection doesn’t include the content of communications, merely “metadata,” they argue, and anyway, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court limits the circumstances under which the government can access this information. “The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization,” says Clapper.
 In other words, the government’s response amounts to “trust us.”
 But Americans have…

Handily thumping a passel of ultraconservative politicians—including Saeed Jalili, Iran’s current chief nuclear negotiator, who won just 11 percent of the vote—Hassan Rouhani, a moderate cleric, garnered a stunning victory in Iran’s June 14 presidential election. He’ll take over from the erratic and bombastic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in August. 
 Rouhani has close ties to the country’s reformist bloc, but he’s also a political insider: he served as national security adviser to President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989–97) and then worked closely with President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), serving as his chief negotiator in nuclear talks with Britain, France and Germany. Both Rafsanjani, the shrewd billionaire businessman who has long wanted to end Iran’s economic isolation, and Khatami, the godfather of the reformists, endorsed Rouhani just days before the vote, signaling to…

Under the direction of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s then-dictator, the country’s military forces engaged in crimes against humanity—including genocide—against the indigenous people in the Ixil region of the department of Quiché, according to the findings of a three-judge panel. (A constitutional court later vacated the sentence on technical grounds but did not challenge the findings [see Kate Doyle, “Guatemala’s Genocide on Trial,” June 10/17].) Largely ignored during the trial, as a thoughtful piece by The New York Times’s Elisabeth Malkin observed, was the role of top Reagan administration officials—including Ronald Reagan himself—in helping to empower and then cover up the Guatemalan military’s crimes.
 When Ríos Montt executed his coup in March 1982, US Ambassador Frederic Chapin—perhaps naïvely, perhaps cynically—welcomed the event with the words “The Guatemalan government has come…