Antony Loewenstein

This is how the Bush administration hypes the terror “threat”:

Israel, the Zionist lobby, the Iraq war and US foreign policy.

A discussion.

When will dictatorships ever learn?

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has directed the country’s ISPs to block access to the videos sharing website YouTube for allegedly featuring a blasphemous video.

However, and according to the Pakistani “Don’t Block The Blog” there are two theories that could explain PTA’s recent move to ban YouTube: vote rigging videos showing alleged evidence of election fraud in Karachi and a blasphemous video disgracing Prophet Mohammed.

Blocking a site such as YouTube is the height of futility. Users will simply access web proxies to get around the block.

Noam Chomsky, February 23:

Amid the outpouring of good news from across the region, there is now much earnest debate among political candidates, government officials and commentators concerning the options available to the US in Iraq. One voice is consistently missing: that of Iraqis. Their “shared beliefs” are well known, as in the past. But they cannot be permitted to choose their own path any more than young children can. Only the conquerors have that right. 

Following the recent attempted closure of the Wikileaks site by a California judge, the move has spectacularly backfired. The story received international media coverage.

Here’s the legal low-down.

Kosovo declares independence.

Palestine next?

This is the real Iraq:

What the U.S. has been calling the success of a “surge”, many Iraqis see as evidence of catastrophe. Where U.S. forces point to peace and calm, local Iraqis find an eerie silence. 

And when U.S. forces speak of a reduction in violence, many Iraqis simply do not know what they are talking about.

Hundreds died in a series of explosions in Baghdad last month. This was despite the strongest ever security measures taken by the U.S. military, riding the “surge” in security forces and their activities.

The death toll is high, according to the website icasualties.org, which provides reliable numbers of Iraqi civilian and security deaths.

In January this year 485 civilians were killed, according to the website. It says the number is based on news reports, and that “actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers recorded on this site.”

The average month in 2005, before the “surge” was launched, saw 568 civilian deaths. In January 2006, the month before the “surge” began, 590 civilians died.

Many of the killings have taken place in the most well guarded areas of Baghdad. And they have continued this month.

The power of the internet giant is getting way out of hand:

Google’s efforts to engulf the world’s medical records will begin in Cleveland.

Today, the search engine cum world power announced a joint project with the Cleveland Clinic, an 87-year-old not-for-profit medical center, that will see between 1,500 and 10,000 of the center’s patients entrust their personal records to Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Yes, between 1,500 and 10,000. Presumably, Google and the Cleveland Clinic anticipate that a few thousand patients will ultimately decide this idea is way too creepy.

In any event, the project marks the debut of a long-awaited/long-dreaded online health service from the Mountain View, California web giant. Google has previously said that this store-your-medical-records offering would be available to the general public sometime in 2008.

Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, February 20:

There’s been predictably little interesting discussion in the United States of Fidel Castro’s retirement as Cuba’s commandante en jefe, maximo etc. That’s because in the U.S. political mainstream, Cuba policy has for a generation been grotesquely disfigured by a collective kow-towing — yes, collective, it was that craven Mr. Clinton who signed into law the Draconian Helms-Burton act that made it infinitely more difficult for any U.S. president to actually lift the embargo — to the Cuban-American Ahmed Chalabi figures of Miami, still fantasizing about a day when they’ll regain their plantations and poor people of color will once again know their place. But let’s not for a moment forget the mirror-image of that view so common on the left, where Castro’s patent fear of his own people and reluctance to trust them to debate ideas and options (much less hold competitive elections that, in all probability, he’d have easily won) is strenuously rationalized on the basis of the CIA’s repeated efforts to kill him. (Sure, they repeatedly tried to kill Castro, and Washington might like to manipulate Cuba’s politics given half a chance, but those are not sound reasons to imprison economists or avoid discussing policy options even within the Communist Party.)

What fascinates me, however, is the guilty pleasure with which so many millions of people around the world revere Fidel Castro — revere him, but wouldn’t dream of emulating his approach to economics or governance. People, in other words, who would not be comfortable actually living in Castro’s Cuba, much as they like the idea of him sticking it the arrogant yanqui, his physical and political survival a sure sign that Washington’s awesome power has limits — and can therefore be challenged.

From prostitutes to Super bowl tickets, a federal probe reveals how contractors in Iraq cheated the US.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is trying to force his people in a direction a majority reject. Iason Athanasiadis explains:

Before the crackdown, the event was little more than a bothersome national institution. For a few weeks every late spring, the grim-faced guardians of public mores would venture out in their olive-green uniforms, black official chadors, and Mercedes police cars to play cat-and-mouse with their mostly female prey, forced by the rising summer heat to stretch the seams of Islamically acceptable couture. On street corners and crowded squares, girlfriends sent text messages to one another on accessorized mobile phones and swapped tips on which parts of the city the morality police was conducting stop-and-search operations.

At a time when some deft Iranian diplomacy is increasing Tehran’s influence throughout the Middle East, the domestic social situation is more dire than at almost any other time since the Revolution. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad broke his preelection promise to preserve the hard-won social liberties of the past decade as he seeks a return to the original Revolutionary ideals of public virtue and an Islamic society. But many Iranians have moved on from the submissive first days of the Islamic Republic, when morality militias and curfews governed the streets after dusk. The new generation mounts actions of social insubordination that their parents only dreamed of.

This kind of news speaks for itself:

“Whipping workers for taking part in May Day ceremonies is a most inhuman action aimed at destroying the gains of the world working class, for which millions of workers around the world have given up their lives and endured much hardship. The issuing and carrying out of the medieval sentence of whipping for workers in Iran is a warning to the world working class, and we expect that you dear friends and workers of the world will strongly and firmly react to it”.

China continues its eradication program of the internet:

News from the Ministry of Public Security is that 13 Chinese ministries have been taking a joint action since last month to regulate online order, with the emphasis being given to the cleaning out of such content as candid snapshots, nude pictures and “unhealthy” adult literature.

During the campaign, the Chinese ministries will focus on cracking down on four kinds of illegal behavior, including spreading abundant erotic information to make profit by taking advantage of Internet and mobile phones; launching bawdry websites in a foreign country to spread unhealthy content to and develop members in China; organizing obscene online performances or prostitution-related activities; and committing such crimes as online fraud, theft, gambling and sale of forbidden goods.

Aside from spending an incredible amount of time trying to filter “subversive” material online, the regime also has a few pollution problems.