Yesterday brought good and bad news in the spat over sovereignty in the South China Sea. At a meeting of the annual ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in Bali, Indonesia, representatives from the ASEAN countries and China agreed upon a set of guidelines for resolving territorial disputes in the sea, where six countries - China, Vietnam, the Phillippines, Brunei, Malaysia, and Taiwan - have overlapping sovereignty claims. The new deal, as outlined by the Jakarta Post, builds off the body's Declaration of Conduct (DOC), a nonbinding agreement signed in 2002 aimed at facilitating a legal agreement to resolve sovereignty disputes and prevent conflict in the region

Official reactions to the ARF deal have varied. Chinese assistant foreign minister and meeting co-chair Liu Zhenmin has called the agreement a "milestone document," and his fellow co-chair, Vietnamese assistant foreign minister Pham Quang Vinh, said it was "significant and a good start."  Nonetheless, it's important to note that the adopted guidelines are not legally binding; they merely reiterate the need to conform with the DOC, and they also lack a deadline for the implementation of a legal accord to resolve the conflict. Filipino Foreign Secretary Alberto del Rosario highlighted this concern when he said that more steps were needed to "add teeth" to the new deal.

Events later on Wednesday confirmed the Philippines's dissatisfaction with the ARF agreement. Four Filipino lawmakers and a Filipino military general ignored strong warnings from China and visited the island of Pagasa, the only island in the Spratlys populated by Filipinos, in a "peace and sovereignty mission." They joined residents to sing the national anthem and called for improvements in facilities on the island, which has no schools or hospitals for its 60 inhabitants. A spokesman from the Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed outrage about the visit.

Wednesday's events came as Hillary Clinton wrapped up her tour of India and prepared to join ASEAN representatives at the security forum in Bali. At the same meeting last year, she surprised Chinese officials when she called resolution of the sovereignty disputes a "leading diplomatic priority" for the U.S. She looks set to reiterate the position this year. We'll see whether China agrees.

Is China through with North Korea? That's the Guardian's takeaway from the exchanges between American diplomats and their Chinese and South Korean counterparts in the first batches of State Department cables released by Wikileaks on Sunday and Monday. "China has signalled its readiness to accept Korean reunification and is privately distancing itself from the North Korean regime," Simon Tisdall writes, and goes on to note evidence of "China's shift:" Nods of approval from Chinese officials for a single Korea governed from Seoul, expressions of alarm from Beijing about Pyongyang's 2009 missile tests, and a Chinese official's complaint that Kim Jong-il's regime is behaving like a "spoiled child."

It's all in there -- but sifting through the Wikileaks cables, that reading strikes me as a bit breathless. It's true that there are a couple of significant nods toward the idea of reunification. One comes in a 2009 meeting between Richard E. Hoagland and Cheng Guoping, respectively the American and Chinese ambassadors to Kazakhstan, at a hotel restaurant in the capital city of Astana. (Hoagland, incidentally, is a great reporter -- his account of the meeting is some of the best reading in the Wikileaks files.) "When asked about the reunification of Korea," Hoagland writes, "Guoping said China hopes for peaceful reunification in the long-term, but he expects the two countries to remain separate in the short-term."

The other is some intelligence relayed from South Korean then-Vice Foreign Minister Chun Yung-woo, who told U.S. Ambassador Kathleen Stephens that Chinese officials "would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a ‘benign alliance' -- as long as Korea was not hostile towards China." The breaking point, Chun reportedly told Stephens, was North Korea's 2006 nuclear test, after which Chinese officials were increasingly willing to "face the new reality" that North Korea had outlived its usefulness as a buffer between Chinese and American forces. Chun (in Stephens's paraphrase) notes that the "tremendous trade and labor-export opportunities for Chinese companies" in a newly opened North Korea might would make reunification easier to swallow, and points out that in any case, "China's strategic economic interests now lie with the United States, Japan, and South Korea -- not North Korea."

Otherwise, Beijing's sharpest words -- such as Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei's remark that the Kim regime is acting like a "spoiled child" trying to get the attention of the "adult" United States -- came mostly in the wake of Pyongyang's April 2009 missile test, in the context of Beijing's efforts to engage Washington in bilateral talks with Pyongyang, Kim Jong-il's principal diplomatic goal at the time. Beijing's emissaries mostly just seem to be trying to keep the Americans at the table.

David E. Sanger's take in the New York Times better captures the essence of the cables, which is to say their ambiguity -- based on the selective evidence here, Beijing seems only somewhat less in the dark about what exactly is going on in Pyongyang than North Korea's enemies. Other corners of the Wikileaks trove are rich in plot and detail: the Obama administration's slow disenchantment with Turkey, byzantine Azeri-Iranian money laundering schemes, Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh's entanglements with the U.S. military. The North Korean cables are mostly a lot of chatter around the edges of a giant question mark. As Sanger writes, they "are long on educated guesses and short on facts, illustrating why their subject is known as the Black Hole of Asia." The dominant mood of the Chinese diplomats who appear throughout them is exhaustion -- a sense, plenty familiar in Washington and Seoul, that no one really knows what to do next.

In an inspired bit of YouTube surfing, Gawker has assembled a compilation of military recruitment commercials from around the world. There are a few clunkers -- three minutes is an awful long time to watch a Russian paratrooper sort of rapping in front of an obstacle course -- and I have my doubts that this Japanese ad is not an elaborate sophomoric hoax, but on the whole they make for pretty fascinating viewing.

Watching these as an American, the most immediately noticeable thing is how little time most of the ads spend overtly appealing to patriotism. There's Estonia, which does it cheekily, and Lebanon, which does it with a slow-motion sentimentality that would be cloying under other circumstances but is actually quite poignant in the context of a country that is eternally trying to keep things together. France and India, meanwhile, both hearken back to the U.S. military ads of the pre-9/11 era, in which we mostly see the life-advancing stuff that enlistment is supposed to get you, with a minimum of actual warfighting. (A career in the Indian army evidently prepares you for a lifetime of golfing and competitive diving.)

The Ukrainian army opts for an admirably straightforward "you'll get girls" approach. Singapore features a naval vessel transforming into a giant robot, presumably developed to contain the same giant lava monsters that have long plagued the U.S. Marines. Britain's jarring entry -- which a student of post-colonialism would have a field day with -- looks like it was directed by Fernando Meirelles. (This kind of "I dare you" approach to recruiting must work in the U.K. -- back in the '90s, when the U.S. Army was mostly promoting itself as a way to pay for college, the Brits ran magazine ads showing a Royal Marine eating worms as part of a survival training course.)

But the real winner here, I think, is Sweden, which is promoting military service to young women as a means of avoiding working as an au pair for awful Americans:

BlackBerry phones may be unwelcome guests at dinner parties, in class, or at the movies, but in the UAE, the smartphones have recently been labeled a "security threat."

"As a result of how Blackberry data is managed and stored, in their current form, certain Blackberry applications allow people to misuse the service, causing serious social, judicial and national security repercussions," an authority from the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority declared.

Despite what may appear to be honest "social [and] judicial" concerns, Emrati officials are annoyed because they can't access BlackBerry users' personal data. Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerrys, stores their customers' data overseas - outside of the UAE's jurisdiction.

But, this is just the latest attempt at censorship. A year ago, the country's biggest state-run mobile provider Etisalat, promoted an update to the phone that would have allowed the company to access users' personal data like emails and text messages; but it was met with fierce opposition. More recently, Bahrain banned  BlackBerry's "Urgent News" app which aggregated stories from the country's six main newspapers.

Reporters Without Borders listed the UAE as an "Enemy of the Internet" and recently stated that the UAE  "regards the services offered by BlackBerry, especially its instant messaging, as an obstacle to its goal of reinforcing censorship, filtering and surveillance."

The era of the BlackBerry (or CrackBerry, its affectionate nickname) may be over, according to recent figures: In America, R.I.M's share of the smartphone market fell to 41 percent in the first quarter, down from 55 percent last year. But its sales are still increasing overseas. If Dubai still wants to become the financial capital of the world, they're going to have to embrace the CrackBerry.

Google's January investigation into Chinese hacking of over twenty companies and the emails of dozens of human rights activists has highlighted an increasingly potent form of espionage:

"Cyber espionage is the great equalizer. Countries no longer have to spend billions to build globe-spanning satellites to pursue high-level intelligence gathering, when they can do so via the web..."

That is from a joint report released today by the Information Warfare Monitor and Shadowserver Foundation called "Shadows in the Cloud". It details how China-based hackers stole secret documents from the Indian Defense Ministry, the Dalai Lama's offices and the U.N over the past year. Although the report acknowledges no Chinese government link to what they dub the "Shadow Network," the information harvested is unlikely to be of much benefit to individuals. It includes secret assessments of India's security in regions bordering Tibet, Bangladesh and Myanmar; missile systems; information on the domestic Maoist insurgency; and embassy assessments of Indian relations with West Africa, Russia, former Soviet republics and the Middle East.

Reuters neatly summarizes the report's conclusions into how the attackers operated:

"The cyber-spies used popular online services, including Twitter, Google's Google Groups and Yahoo mail, to access infected computers, ultimately directing them to communicate with command and control servers in China"

Although the Chinese government has denied any involvement and made clear that it views hacking as an international crime, it will be interesting to see if it investigates such hacker networks operating from its territory. There is surely enough evidence to do so. On the other hand, it is no secret that the U.S. also hosts a large number of the world' cybercriminals; a recent report from Symantec's Message Labs showed that while the bulk of the world's targetted email attacks (28 percent) originate in China, 14 percent originate in the U.S.

In fact, since the Google-China debacle exploded, grievances in the American media have seemed to focus on freedom of speech and freedom from censorship rather than on issues of espionage. The Indian press also seems somewhat unconcerned -- the report has gotten little attention there and the Chinese government has brushed it off as media hype. It just seems that all parties are resigned to the fact, at least tacitly, that this is the way things work nowadays.

As part of an open-source  assessment of "security, safety, and border control" threats associated with the Winter Olympics, the Department of Homeland Security's National Operations Center has launched "Social Media Event Monitoring Initiative" to see what's being said online. This entails "monitoring publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards" to assess possible homeland security threats. Among the many fine online sources the NOC is monitoring, is this blog!

Our Olympics coverage has been pretty minimal this year so I can't imagine we've provided a whole lot of useful intel, but thanks for reading, guys! Have you checked out this cool photo essay yet?

(Thanks to Josh R. for the tip.) 

There isn't a whole lot of news in the just-released White House Security Review  on the Christmas bombing attempt. (Not sure what James Jones was so "shocked" by.) As President Obama basically said two days ago, the U.S.government "had sufficient information" to disrupt the plot, primarily by placing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on a the no-fly list, but the intelligence community failed to "connect the dots." The report recommends a number of reforms and reviews to improve communications and strengthen the watchlist, but also finds that major fixes aren't needed:

A reorganization of the intelligence or broader counterterrorism community is not required to address problems that surfaced in the review, a fact made clear by countless other successful efforts to thwart ongoing plots. 

That should please the editors of the Financial Times who argued in a smart editorial today against undertaking major bureaucratic reorganizations:

In one way the US is the victim of its own increased efforts. After 9/11 the US created new agencies, and agencies within agencies. Proliferating bureaucracies gather more data, but connecting the silos and empowering somebody to act gets harder.

In addition, as information increases, background noise goes up too. One of the US watch-lists includes half a million names. That number, which will probably now rise, is already too high to be much use. The no-fly and selective-screening lists, on the other hand, are too small, since Mr Abdulmutallab was not on them.

I do worry that making the watchlisting system more aggressive will open up a can of worms (Just ask Nelson Mandela.)  but from this review, the administration seems to be proceeding with caution.

I just participated in a telephone conference call held by the Council on Foreign Relations, explaining why the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suspected Sept. 11 mastermind, in a federal court is a good plan in terms of national security and public relations.

John B. Bellinger III, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow and former Bush administration advisor, downplayed security concerns, and instead emphasized the importance of a fair trial, best served by a civilian setting.

Bellinger also stressed that he does not think the debate between using federal courts versus military commissions is one that can be answered -- and that the government should go on a case-by-case basis. "As with everything in the detainee debate, people tend to make it look like it is black or white," he said.

For K.S.M., against whom there is plenty of evidence (as with Timothy McVeigh and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman), Bellinger supports the use of the federal justice system. On the other hand, he said it is difficult to imagine anything but military commissions in the case of certain crimes committed abroad and by actors captured by soldiers also off U.S. soil, such as alleged militants "pulled out of caves in Tora Bora."

Steven Simon, also a CFR fellow, argued that while justice might be equally served by both systems, the U.S. will be fostering vital public relations by holding the trial in a federal court. He said trying K.S.M. in New York might have a similar impact as the Nuremburg Trials against the Nazis. "Whether this will have an effect and how big the effect will be remains to be seen. We know that the election of Barack Obama was greeted with some enthusiasm as a sign of change and a break with the past," he said. "The trial of K.S.M. could draw a similar bright line."

When you think about communist propaganda, you might think of Stalin glaring down at you from a wall, happy workers singing in strangely clean factories and well-thumbed copies of Mao's little red book.

But it's the twenty-first century, and even commies must keep up with the times. A dissident faction of Peru's Shining Path -- VRAE -- is now making its case online, with a website and You Tube uploads of revolutionarily inspiring songs. 

The songs performed by a VRAE leader in the Andean musical style of Huayño assure the listener that:

Imperialism will be defeated/socialism will flower the world/ imperialism, mainly genocidal Yankees, sucks the blood of the millions of poor around the world/to combat them, to defeat them, is our task/to annihilate them with our forces is our obligation."

 
But, the political analysis on their website is even better. They tear apart the jailed Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman, labeling him a "revisionist" and a terrorist, and criticize governments such as Nepal, Hamas and Bolivia for practicing pseudo-socialism.

The tract reads like a blast from the past, as if the Amazon fosters active denial of lost battles (many Japanese immigrants in Brazil famously denied their emperor's defeat for nearly a decade). In a shout out to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, they call him the natural leader of socialism, upon whom it is incumbent to lead the armed fight against Yankee imperialism. They urge unity in this:

We must put to one side the narrow nationalism which is very noxious and damaging ... [and which is] parasitically fomented by Yankee imperialism and its lackeys."

Extra points for their genious use of the word lackey together with Yankee imperialism-- when's the last time you heard that one?

While it's all song and talk -- and assurances of democratic intentions -- on the internet, Peruvian authorities are somewhat concerned about the possibility of the narco-terrorist group recruiting more followers. Leaders from the main Shining Path group, which put down arms a decade ago, are contemplating running for office in upcoming Peruvian elections.

Sudan's president has allegedly replaced Salah Gosh, the veteran chief of the country's National Intelligence and Security Services, with the organization's deputy general manager.

It's not clear why the switch was made; the BBC reports only that Gosh has now been named President Omar al-Bashir's "adviser."

Gen. Mohamed Atta al-Mawla is in his early fifties and holds a degree in engineering, according to one Sudanese newspaper. In 1992, Mawla signed on with the country's national security bureau and has been working in government ever since, even serving a year-long stint at the Sudanese embassy in Kenya.

His most curious position? "Peace advisory secretary-general."

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on a leaked Pentagon document showing that one in seven detainees released from Guantanamo has returned to terrorism. 

An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are engaged in terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.

The conclusion could strengthen the arguments of critics who have warned against the transfer or release of any more detainees as part of President Obama's plan to shut down the prison by January. Past Pentagon reports on Guantánamo recidivism have been met with skepticism from civil liberties groups and criticized for their lack of detail. 

The one-in-seven statistic is problematic. It might be too high. It might be too low. The category of "terrorism or militant activity" is broad; tracking released detainees and determining what they're doing -- that's not easy.

It's clear that the finding will put additional pressure on Obama administration officials to hold detainees, rather than release them. 

More interesting will be the reaction of Bush administration defenders to this statistic. Does it mean we're minting terrorists in Guantanamo? Or does it mean these people were always too dangerous to release?

I breathed a great sigh of relief with the Iranian government's announcement of the release of journalist Roxana Saberi, who Tehran convicted of spying for the United States.

Saberi was initially arrested in January for buying a bottle of wine. When in custody, officials realized she had no press credentials (which had been revoked in 2006). Her trial lasted only an hour, and she was sent to the infamous Evin prison with an eight-year sentence. 

And, joining Spencer Ackerman here, I hope that Saberi's release will draw attention to the plight of two other imprisoned journalists: Euna Lee and Laura Ling of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's Current TV.

North Korea has held the pair incommunicado since the end of March. The Wall Street Journal reports:

U.S. officials have said less about Ms. Lee and Ms. Ling than they have about an American reporter, Roxana Saberi, who was recently convicted of espionage in Iran. The strategy is partly a gamble that not provoking the North Koreans may lead to a speedy resolution, analysts say, but it's also a sign of the increased uncertainty in dealing with Pyongyang.

U.S. officials have said little about the journalists' situation, but have indicated they aren't making progress with Pyongyang. A person not in government who is familiar with the situation said that North Korea isn't talking to the U.S. at all.

Here's from a McClatchy story (h/t Andrew Sullivan):

North Korea appears to be holding the women in a protocol house in Pyongyang.

"The rumor was that they are being housed at one of the guest villas," said Han S. Park, a University of Georgia expert who was visiting North Korea as part of a private U.S. delegation after the women were captured. Park told CNN International that the North Koreans scoffed at any suggestion that the Americans were receiving harsh treatment.

"They laughed. 'We are not Guantanamo.' That's what they said," Park said.

Still, it's a worrisome situation. Washington has far more dialogue and slowly warming relations with Tehran. More importantly, both governments had something at stake in ensuring the Saberi incident didn't become the Saberi fiasco.

Not so with Lee and Ling, and the U.S. and North Korean governments. Even if the Swedish diplomat who conducts relations for the U.S. managed to negotiate for their release, he'd have few obvious carrots or sticks to reach for, and the DPRK would have little reason to be magnanimous. 

I also hope the U.S. considers releasing or charging the foreign journalist it has in custody in Iraq. The U.S. says that Reuters photographer Ibrahim Jassam, arrested in a raid on his home in September, poses a threat to security and continues to hold him -- despite an Iraqi court ruling this winter that he should be freed. 

For lists of and information on currently imprisoned reporters, see here and here. (The worse offender in the detention of journalists? China.)

STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images

There's been a wealth of information released on the treatment and torture of detainees in U.S. custody in the past days. Here's a capsule of the new news:

• The Senate Armed Services Committee released a declassified report, written in November, 2008.  The report describes how the Pentagon used SERE techniques, meant to help captured soldiers resist foreign interrogators, to break down U.S. detainees.

• A New York Times story pointed out that the CIA did no due diligence on the history of SERE techniques before using them on detainees.

• The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a narrative history of the harsh treatment of detainees like Abu Zubayda. It works through the myriad overlapping Office of Legal Counsel opinions pertaining to detainee treatment.  

• Last week, the Obama administration released four memos, requested by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act, detailing the Bush administration's legal case for torture. The memos, which had few redactions, described in intricate detail what happened to detainees during interrogations -- including forced nudity, forced wakefulness, beatings and slappings.  

• A blogger parsing released memos found that Abu Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, two of the three people waterboarded at the hands of CIA interrogators, were waterboarded 266 times. 

• Questions arose about whether the brutal treatment of detainees ever led to actionable intelligence. To this end, in a Fox News interview, former Vice President Dick Cheney asked for the release of memos showing that waterboarding worked. Marc Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, took to the pages of the Washington Post's editorial section to argue that enhanced interrogation prevented terrorist attacks.

• President Obama went forward and back about the prosecution for the CIA agents who tortured detainees; ultimately the decision belongs to Attorney General Eric Holder. Top torture reporter Jane Mayer at The New Yorker started to deconstruct the "invisibility cloak" President Obama cast last week. 

Bloomberg reports that the holding company for collapsed New York investment bank Lehman Brothers is hanging on to a valuable asset until prices rebound, to help pay off the company's creditors.

The asset? Uranium. How much? Enough for a bomb, if you knew how to do it.

Lehman, once the fourth-largest investment bank, has an estimated $200 billion in unsecured liabilities left to pay. The uranium, which may be as much as 500,000 pounds, might fetch $20 million at today’s prices of about $40.50 per pound, said traders who asked not to be named because of the confidential nature of the data. Marsal said the traders’ estimate of Lehman’s uranium holding is “reasonable,” while declining to be more specific....

Lehman “tested” the uranium market after its bankruptcy filing in an effort to raise cash, pulling back after it did because “everyone was low balling,” Marsal said. With $10 billion in the till today from other asset sales, Lehman isn’t in a hurry any longer to sell uranium, he said.

“We plan on gradually selling this material over the next two years,” he said. “We are not dumping this on the market and have no fire-sale mentality.”

Goodness.