More than two weeks ago, US Secretary of State John Kerry lambasted the procedures of the Iranian presidential elections, which he said have “no regard for popular will”. He described the Iranian government's steps to slow down or cut off Internet access ahead of the vote as “trouble signs” that will deprive Iranians of the ability to share information and exchange ideas. While Kerry was rebuking the Tehran regime, former CIA operative Edward Snowden was leaking documents to The Guardian newspaper revealing how the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying on the global Internet community since 2007. By participating in a secret programme called PRISM, American companies like Google, Yahoo, Skype, Apple and Facebook, among others, gave the NSA direct access to their systems, allowing for surveillance on live communications and stored information like search histories. The documents revealed that the NSA devised a data-mining tool that maps the volume of intelligence derived from each country based on a “heat map” of colours. Green — like North America, most of Africa and Europe — are the least subject to surveillance, followed by yellow, orange and red. Iran where surveillance is highest is red, followed by Pakistan, Jordan then Egypt, which is orange. Like his predecessors, Kerry was exercising the role of freedoms and democracy defender and spokesman. Since 1977, the US State Department has been issuing annual reports assessing human rights, religious freedoms and democracy in other countries — the way a super power positions itself superiorly. And we the people of the countries marked as worst on the US scale of human rights and democratic systems acknowledged our very real oppression and cited the violations documented by the State Department as evidence against our authoritarian regimes, which all US governments supported. But our oxymoronic approach to the US was taken to another level when, 10 years after its invasion of Iraq and its disastrous consequences on the once powerful and important nation, we're barely criticising its involvement in Syria. While most anti-Bashar Al-Assad views have bitterly spoken against Hizbullah's active involvement and also their new archenemies the takfiris (extremist Sunni Muslim groups who brand non-conformists apostates), few are condemning the Syrian opposition's cooperation with Washington. Nobody is asking why we're horrified by the takfiris and Hizbullah, resentful of Iran and Russia, but nonchalant — if not neutral — about the American factor? Proponents of the uprising against Al-Assad aren't questioning the meaning of a Syrian revolution that won the support of the same US establishment that continues to pledge unwavering support to Israel. And by the same token, Saudi and Qatari roles on the same side of the Syrian divide. Despite the many differences between the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the dynamics of Syria now (even in terms of US involvement), the then metaphorical condemnation of Iraqi opposition figures entering Baghdad “on US tanks” reflected clarity towards the obvious. Today, Arab political circles exchange information on Kerry's talks with the Syrian opposition, the Barack Obama administration's willingness to arm the rebels, and the military council of the Free Syrian Army's pleas to Obama himself, without a hint of criticism. Should we at this point of the Arab Spring wonder if it exposed our capitulation to US dominance just as we were hailing the waning of the Pax Americana two years ago? In Egypt's troubled revolution, both opposition and government continue to eye Washington's posturing towards both, because in their weakness it matters. On the tenth anniversary of Iraq's invasion, which was in March, a shocking report by Al-Jazeera's Dahr Jamail exposed how 14.7 per cent of Fallujah's babies — the city shelled with 2,000 tonnes of depleted uranium ammunitions by US and British forces — are born with serious birth defects. This is 14 times the documented rate in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the city of Basra, as in all of Iraq, cancer rates have increased sevenfold since 2003. In our seeming desensitisation to war crimes, our indifference towards US hypocrisy has almost been rendered cliché. We've ceased to demand that US — and British — war criminals be tried for war crimes and shied away from this discourse. PRISM — the most important leak in US history — and the NSA's “intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them,” in Snowden's words, haven't unfazed us either. But then they shouldn't. What they should do is serve as a wake-up call to our own double standards and how we've permitted ourselves to be manipulated by US official discourse. Officials who kill innocent civilians are not only called Bashar Al-Assad and Saddam Hussein. Terrorists aren't only “Islamist militants”. Iran isn't the only state abusing the Internet. And it's the US administration that has systematically debased the legacy and norms of international justice by resisting the International Criminal Court, invading Iraq and Afghanistan in only two years, and creating and sustaining Guantanamo, “the gulag of our times” to borrow Amnesty's words. In the same spirit, but on a much smaller scale, the US administration has violated its own Fourth Amendment by expanding surveillance and the powers of the NSA to unprecedented levels. This is largely an American problem that brave people like Snowden refuse to accept. But in our revolutionary spirit and quest for the rule of just laws, democratic values and national independence, PRISM is only a reminder for us to hold the US administration accountable to the same values we claim to be fighting for. It can't be part of any chapter of the Arab Spring.
