From the New York Times yesterday, explaining the White House position:
…if a country cannot deal with a terrorism problem on its own, the United States reserves the right to act unilaterally.
If any state acts without boundaries or ignores international law, it should be treated as a rogue player.
At what point will neo-con Jews, who support torture, be regarded as the pariahs that they truly are?
What is life like for Palestinians in the occupied territories?
One of the finest chroniclers of the conflict, Jonathan Cook, explains.
My following book review appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on November 29:
My Story: The Tale Of A Terrorist Who Wasn’t
By Mamdouh Habib; with Julia Collingwood;
Scribe, 272 pp, $32.95
Before tortured Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib was released in 2005, then prime minister John Howard said his government didn’t “have any apology to offer” and refused to consider compensation. Greens leader Bob Brown described Habib’s treatment as “one of the most shameful episodes in Australian political history”.
This book supports that statement. Habib writes that his “belief in Islam has guided me all my life … I’ve tried to be as straight and honest as possible, and help people whenever I could – sometimes to my own detriment.” Habib’s support for the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman (the Blind Sheik), is disconcerting yet his life, not unlike that of David Hicks, is one of searching for meaning.
The work begins in Egypt, the country of Habib’s birth, and he paints a moving picture of growing up in Alexandria and his experiences with various manual jobs and the army. The nation, he laments, “was all about who you knew, and bribing the right people”.
It wasn’t until 2001 – he was living in Sydney with his wife, Maha, and children – that he finally felt “optimistic” about the future after years of struggling with failed businesses. Alas, this sentiment didn’t last long as he was visited in Dubai by ASIO officials and asked to spy for them, reporting on any contact with suspected terrorists such as Jack Thomas and Rabiyah Hutchinson.
Habib endows this encounter with a beautiful, Monty Pythonesque quality. The authorities appeared to be amateurs, mimicking foreign accents and playing the “good cop, bad cop” routine.
It was reminiscent of the interview with innocent “terror” suspect Mohamed Haneef in 2007 and the gross ignorance of the Federal Police of even the simplest tenets of Islam. These are the people, after all, who are supposed to protect us.
The powerful passages of the book describe Habib’s capture in Pakistan in 2001 and more than three years of incarceration in Egypt and Guantanamo Bay with, he claims convincingly, the full knowledge of the Australian Government. He was tortured through sleep deprivation, the application of electric shocks “everywhere on my body” and multiple, unidentified drugs.
He alleges that Americans consistently beat him up in Cuba and mocked his hunger strikes. Reading these sections it’s hard to ignore evidence, revealed in The New Yorker journalist Jane Meyer’s book, The Dark Side, that the Bush Administration shunned warnings from the CIA six years ago that up to a third of the people held at Guantanamo Bay were imprisoned in error. Habib tells countless stories of fellow prisoners who were humiliated and broken in the care of the Americans.
It reads in parts too much like a casual conversation – and a more skeptical perspective would have been helpful when Habib discusses the role of al-Qaeda members – but this is an important contribution to the literature on the “war on terror”. Years after the establishment of a parallel legal and ethical framework, we barely know anything about its implementation.
War crimes were committed in our name.
What can we really expect from the Obama administration and its policies towards Israel/Palestine?
Why are the Iranians seemingly pleased with the passage of the Security Agreement between Iraq and the US by the Iraqi parliament?
On the day before Islamic terrorists launched their latest attack on Mumbai, Sydney writer Antony Loewenstein delivered a speech at Harvard University in the US.
Readers, it’s time to admit something (already picked up by this crafty Murdoch hack in Sydney.)
My words at Harvard this week actually triggered a sleeper cell in India. Blame me. In fact, blame me for all the terrorism against the West in the last years (especially the legitimate targeting of Israelis in the occupied territories and Americans and Australians in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
The Right’s anti-intellectualism continues on its merry way.
UPDATE: Anybody notice the irony of a Murdoch pundit challenging my writing abilities while his column online is titled, “Antony Loewenstein and delisions of grandeur”?
Twitter comes of age – the Mumbai coverage was way ahead of traditional media.
Settler Nazis continue to cause chaos (and the global Jewish Diaspora remains silent):
Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian ambulances in the West Bank village of Dier Esteyah on Wednesday, according to witnesses.
Red Crescent ambulances were parked in the northern West Bank city of Nablus on Wednesday when settlers wrote provocative slogans, such as “Death to Arabs” and others, according to the Red Crescent.
The Iraqi parliament voted by an overwhelming show of hands yesterday to end US military control of their country – a crucial turning point in the Iraq conflict. The security agreement, the outcome of lengthy and rancorous negotiations, requires US forces to leave Iraqi cities, towns and villages by 30 June next year. American troops must withdraw from all Iraqi territory by 31 December 2011.
Until then, US forces will come under Iraqi supervision for the first time. Currently the US military can do what they like. In future, they will have to consult Iraqi officers before every operation and obtain Iraqi arrest warrants.
Just what exactly is the massive US embassy in Baghdad exactly for?
The reality of Afghanistan today.
