Antony Loewenstein

“MI5 tried to recruit senior al-Qaida figure Abu Qatada as an informer in a bid to keep terror off the streets of Britain, it was reported Wednesday.”

According to the UK Evening Standard, intelligence sources hoped that he “would not bite the hand that fed him” and “keep terrorism off the streets of the U.K.”

Let’s lay out the facts. The recent London bombings, both real and attempted, was a failure of the intelligence services. When citizens are killed and intelligence fails to pick up the signals, they’ve failed. But then, as we’ve learnt in Australia, governments are often only listening to information they want to receive, rather than alternate theories and ideas.

Of course, if you’re New York Times commentator and McCarthyist, Tom Friedman, the US government should draw up a list of individuals who believe that US actions may encourage violent reprisals.

Friedman is a man the Fairfax press publishes regularly, an acceptable “liberal” face of the American establishment. He is nothing of the sort, however, but rather the mouthpiece of well-connected Washingtonians. Who can forget his April 23, 1999 column during the war with Milosevic when he insisted “every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted.” Friedman supported the US military committing war crimes, but what did he care?

What are the war cheerleaders going to do? Where will they turn for the appropriate turn of phase now that the Bush administration has announced that the term “war on terror” will be phased out for more nuanced language.

“As the struggle evolves some of the language will evolve as well,” a senior Administration official said. ” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, said this week that he “objected to the use of the term ‘war on terrorism’ because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution”. The solution, he offered, was “more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military”.

Let’s give the Bush administration a head start in picking more hilariously simplistic terminology. Suggestions in comments. Allow me to start:

“Battle against hypocritical Western nations determined to play the friendship card when it suits – ie. Uzbekistan – and the scary face when it doesn’t”;

“Really aggressive stance against Islamic fundamentalism and a less aggressive stance against US-backed militias in Iraq”; and

“The right has won, the left has lost and the military budget should increase even further. Soldier on! Let’s militarise space.”

“Our military, police and other law enforcement agencies have completely shattered al-Qaida’s vertical and horizontal links. It no longer has any command, communication and propaganda structure in Pakistan.”

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, July 2005

Jane Fonda announced this week that she opposes the Iraq war and will be touring America spreading that message. Good for her. “I have not taken a stand on any war since Vietnam,” she recently told 600 people at a bookshop in Santa Fe. “I carry a lot of baggage from that.”

David Bloom deconstructs this distortion of the historical record. He remembers Fonda and then husband Tom Hayden visiting Beirut in 1982 and praising the brutal Israeli invasion.

Read the whole report.

While Prime Minister Howard visits the Australian troops in Iraq – and the media pack breathlessly report the details of the “wildest ride of his life” – he refuses to announce any timetable for withdrawal.

Back on planet Earth, and with increasing reports of civil war on the cards, calls for US withdrawal is growing louder. New York Times veteran John F. Burns reported last weekend that Shiite militias and Shiite and Kurdish-led army and police units, often backed by US and British forces, were themselves launching aggressive measures to tackle the insurgency, including kidnapping, torture and extra-judicial killing. And this would be different from the days of Saddam?

A Western-friendly government in Baghdad is unlikely in the long run. Ask Howard, Bush and Blair how they’d feel about an administration with close ties to “axis of evil” Iran? Howard visited Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari “in his capital, in his office as the democratic prime minister of Iraq”. More than a week since Seymour Hersh published his revelations surrounding American attempts to subvert the January elections, the Australian media continues to ignore the scoop.

I read the story again last night. If anybody, including Howard and his media cheerleaders, truly believe that the current Iraqi leadership was democratically elected, they’re as deluded as believing the existence of WMD.

While our leaders prepare to “deal” with Islamic extremism – and yet completely ignore any discussion about the foreign policy goals of the Howard government – a more disturbing report closer to home suggests that a great number of Australians hold homophobic views.

Queensland and Tasmania are the most bigoted states while Victoria is the least so. Males between the ages of 14 and 17 hold highly homophobic views and surprisingly, Catholics were least likely of the faithful to harbour fear and hatred of homosexuals. This result should shame us all:

“Overall, 35 per cent of respondents were intolerant of homosexuality. Four in 10 people surveyed in southern Sydney – almost half of men – described gay relationships as immoral. This compared with 27 per cent in the northern suburbs, 34.5 per cent in the west and 37.5 per cent in the south-west.”

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may end up costing the US over $700 billion. “Osama bin Laden doesn’t have to win; he will just bleed us to death,” says Michael Scheuer, former counterterrorism official at the CIA who led the search for bin Laden and recently retired after writing two books critical of the Clinton and Bush administrations. “He’s well on his way to doing it.”

In the wake of increasingly vicious anti-Muslim sentiment within the Australian community and the decision of a leading Islamic body to send letters to 200 Muslim clerics and leaders asking them to repudiate violence, racial harmony is hardly served by comments by The Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Robert Forsyth. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that “he had no time for Islam, whose teachings he believed were false.” Can you imagine the outcry if a leading Muslim leader announced on national television that Christianity was a pagan religion, based on superstition and a death cult?

Having said that, the spectacle of Melbourne’s Sheikh Mohomed Omran on ABC Lateline last night was an intriguing sight. His answers were vague, contradictory and confused when asked about terrorism, September 11 and Bin Laden. Host Tony Jones, though, was so aggressive – would he ever ask John Howard if he condemned American bombing raids in suburban Baghdad or Israeli incursions into Palestinian territory? – Omran almost had to convince viewers why he should be allowed to stay in Australia.

If people like Jones think the real problem in 2005 is an individual like Sheikh Omran, they’re sadly mistaken. But then, it’s far too confronting to assess Western culpability.

UPDATE: Hundreds of Muslims have considered leaving England after the London bombings, according to a Guardian poll. The fear of an anti-Muslim backlash is real.

“In their fight against the “rotten” Israeli democracy, the settlers have adopted the Holocaust symbols. They are ostentatiously wearing the Yellow Star that was imposed by the Nazis on the Jews before their extermination, only substituting orange for yellow. They inscribe their forearm with their identity number, like the numbers the Nazis tattooed on the Auschwitz prisoners. They call the government the “Judenrat”, after the Jewish councils appointed by the Nazis in the ghettoes, and liken the evacuation of the settlers from Gush Katif to the deportation of the Jews to the death camps. All this live on television.”

Welcome to Israel, 2005. Uri Avnery warns that the current protests, intimidation and violence by fanatical settlers is “an attempt to overturn by force the democratic system itself.”

Let there be no mistake. This is the result of nearly 40 years of governmental support for a movement based on racial superiority, discrimination, hatred of Arabs and a God-given right to the land. Let’s not say we have no idea from whence this comes.

Writer, journalist and academic Mark Danner correspondents with Los Angeles Times editorial and opinion editor Michael Kinsley. It’s a most informative discussion about the role of the mainstream media in our age, Iraq and the Downing Street Memo. Kinsley calls the memo “fairly worthless” and “will not persuade anyone who is not already persuaded” about Blair and Bush deceptions. Danner disagrees:

“Kinsley, like many others in the American press, wants to judge the memo’s ‘worth’ on whether or not it contains, as he says, ‘documentary proof that President Bush had firmly decided to go to war against Iraq by July 2002.’ As I have written, such ‘documentary proof’ – if we are talking about firm and incontrovertible evidence of what was in Mr. Bush’s mind at the time – is destined to prove elusive; the President can always claim, all appearances and outward evidence to the contrary, that he ‘hadn’t made up his mind.’ And so he has claimed.

The implications of the Memo, however, reveal a much wider truth. We await a Canberra Memo in years to come, the proof that John Howard’s government committed to the Iraq adventure months before saying so publicly.

Surjan Stevens’ Illinoise. Beautiful, spooky, melodic, poetic and downright brilliant.

ABC TV’s Australian Story tonight features an exclusive interview with top intelligence analyst Lieutenant Colonel Lance Collins. Aside from detailing the power and influence of the pro-Jakarta lobby within the Australian establishment during the late 90s – contributing to a denial of vital intelligence during Australia’s 1999 operation and placing troops in danger – the underlying thesis of Collins is far more disturbing.

Our intelligence services are determined to receive certain answers to certain questions, Collins alleges. “The problem with our intelligence system is it’s the politicians that choose or approve the choosing of bureaucrats that run it,” he says. “The system is very heavily weighted to produce a certain answer that is acceptable to a certain political party and its agenda rather than the nation and its wellbeing.”

A military source tells me that government policy and direction determines the kind of intelligence they are receiving. In other words, the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are regarded as necessary and good and intelligence that may provide alternative ways of seeing the situation are dismissed or ignored.

Don’t let our media paint Collins as a figure solely discussing Timor and Indonesia. This is a much bigger story. It directly affects our government’s ability to serve the country’s best interests and politically meddle in a field needing independence and forthright opinions, our intelligence services.