Monthly Archive for March, 2010

Don’t trust our government to keep us safe from terrorism

Published on 31 March 2010 in General. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

Next step you hear something in the media about the Australian government being “tough on terror” (and the media cheer-leaders behind them), remember this:

A Supreme Court judge has attacked the Australian Federal Police for bungling a two-year investigation into three men who sent funds to Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger separatists.

The agents’ action included improperly arresting a suspect and abusing his rights.

The AFP’s mistakes occurred during its 2007 arrest and questioning of Arumugan Rajeevan, who is one of three men who will be sentenced in the Victorian Supreme Court today for providing money to a terrorist organisation.

Federal agents arrested Rajeevan at gunpoint despite having no legal basis to do so. They refused requests from a barrister and lawyer to speak to him during his five-hour voluntary interview, and subjected him to questioning described by Justice Paul Coghlan as ”really well over the top” and ”outrageous”.

The AFP, which was heavily criticised over its handling of another terrorist investigation, into Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef, said it could not comment on the case until the men had been sentenced. However, it is believed the AFP has already made changes to deal with the problems that arose during the Tamil Tigers investigation.

Australian prosecutors last year withdraw all terrorism charges against Rajeevan, Aruran Vinayagamoorthy and Sivarajah Yathavan.

In December, they pleaded guilty to a lesser charge under the charter of the United Nations Act, a federal law that makes it a criminal offence to provide an asset to a terrorist organisation proscribed by either the UN or the Australian government.

In pretrial comments in January last year – which could not be reported at the time – Justice Coghlan said federal agents had ”abused” the rights of Rajeevan.

He said the manner in which Rajeevan was questioned by federal agent Patricia Reynolds was ”beyond any training a proper investigator can have” and a ”fundamental departure from the [proper] principles”.

After hearing a section of the interview, he said: ”The man is being abused … we’ve seen an example of at least half an hour of an interview in which there is an absolute … departure from the principles that would apply [in a normal interview].”

Rajeevan was questioned by Ms Reynolds and another female agent. ”Whether it’s good girl, bad girl, I don’t know, but every time Ms Reynolds comes into it it’s pretty full on,” Justice Coghlan said of the interview. After his criticism, the prosecution decided not to use Mr Rajeevan’s interview as part of its case.

The judge also queried why the AFP did not let barrister Philip Boulton, QC, and lawyer Adam Houda speak to Rajeevan while he was being questioned.

He described as ”frighteningly high handed” Rajeevan’s arrest at gunpoint in 2007 by federal agents and warned police they risked incriminating themselves by testifying about the potentially unlawful arrest.

He said it appeared that federal agents had used their claim that Rajeevan was voluntarily co-operating with them after his improper arrest to afford him ”less rights … than you would have in circumstances that you’re under arrest”.

After federal agents arrested Rajeevan, police realised they didn’t have enough evidence to hold him and told him he would be ”unarrested”.

”The notion that somebody can be arrested unlawfully and then just unarrested at somebody else’s whim is bizarre,” Justice Coghlan said.

The crown has alleged the trio supplied more than $1 million to the Tamil Tigers..

Jewish “leader” asks Australia to ignore Israeli crimes

Published on 31 March 2010 in Israel. 10 Comments Tags: , , , .

So this is how the Zionist establishment wants to be known: defending extra-judicial murder. Well done, lads, you make us fellow Jews proud:

The nation’s peak Jewish organisation has warned it would be an “extreme” reaction for the government to expel an Israeli diplomat as retaliation for the fake passport scandal.

In its first public comments since Britain last week expelled an Israeli diplomat, raising pressure on Australia to follow suit, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry has called on the Rudd government to take a different path.

ECAJ president Robert Goot told The Australian: “I think it would be an extreme reaction or possibly an overreaction (to expel an Israeli diplomat). The Jewish community would hope the Australian government might adopt a more nuanced position, depending on the outcome of the (Australian Federal Police) investigation.”

The government says it will not make a decision on whether to take further diplomatic action against Israel until it receives a final report by the AFP into whether the Israeli government was involved in the use of fake Australian passports.

Four fake Australian passports were used by an assassination squad in Dubai in January during their murder of a Hamas leader, a plot widely believed to have been masterminded by Israeli spy agency Mossad.

Gordon Brown’s government in London last week expelled an Israeli diplomat as punishment for the use of British passports in the Dubai killings after a British report found it was “highly likely” that Israel was involved in the fake passports. The AFP has a copy of the British report, but Mr Goot said that other countries whose passports were used in the operation, including Germany, France and Ireland, had not expelled any diplomats.

Mr Goot added that Britain’s decision might have been linked to the domestic politics of that nation’s forthcoming election campaign. “We note with dismay the actions taken by the British government over the passport issue,” Mr Goot said.

He described as “sensible and astute” comments made last week by Tony Abbott, who called on the government not to expel an Israeli diplomat and to be sympathetic to Israel’s unique security situation.

Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser this week criticised the Opposition Leader’s comments as “thoroughly ill-advised” and said Australian politicians should not be blind to Israel’s faults.

Mr Goot said he believed the relationship between Israel and Australia would ultimately be unharmed by the controversy. He denied that there had been a slow drift in the relationship under the Rudd government.

Light posting for a while

Published on 31 March 2010 in General. 0 Comments

I’ll be travelling for the next while, so posting may be a little erratic.

Hang tight, I’ll return from the forest soon enough.

Please don’t drop our bombs on poor Palestinians

Published on 31 March 2010 in Israel. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Perhaps, step by step, Western nations are realising Israel illegally uses their weapons against civilians:

A group of British lawmakers are expected to call Tuesday for the reevaluation of arms deals with Israel after a recently published report claimed that British weapons were “almost certainly” used in Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, The Guardian reported.

“It is regrettable that arms exports to Israel were almost certainly used in Operation Cast Lead,” the U.K. daily The Guardian quoted the Commons committee on strategic export controls report.

“This is in direct contravention to the U.K. government’s policy that U.K. arms exports to Israel should not be used in the occupied territories,” the report said.

Making Muslims dislike you even more

Published on 30 March 2010 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Yet another counter-productive and utterly clueless Western government program in the post 9/11 world:

A key government policy on countering extremism in Britain has “stigmatised and alienated” Muslims and undermined community relations, a Commons report says today.

Many Muslims told the cross-party committee of MPs that they believed the purpose of the Prevent programme was to “spy” on Asian communities, and that the Government was using funding to engineer a moderate form of acceptable Islam.

The Communities and Local Government Committee said ministers should investigate claims the strategy had been hijacked by police and MI5 to gather intelligence on alleged radicals.

Committee chairman Phyllis Starkey said: “Many witnesses believe Prevent has been used to ‘spy’ on Muslim communities. The misuse of terms such as ‘intelligence gathering’ among Prevent partners has clearly discredited the programme and fed distrust.

A mainstream reporter who wants to talk about occupation

Published on 30 March 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Leading Australian journalist Paul McGeough answers some questions for newmatilda.com:

What’s the headline you’d most like to see on the front page of a daily newspaper?
World’s last arms manufacturer closes plant, joins former competitors aiding agriculture projects in Africa.

What question should we ask our next interviewee?
Australia is occupied by a foreign power and you join the resistance — where would you draw the line between name-calling and suicide-bombing?

Signs of life inside North Korea

Published on 30 March 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

After my book The Blogging Revolution was released, I was constantly asked why I hadn’t examined North Korea. I always said it was simply because the internet barely existed in the Communist nation.

Now, via the New York Times, a glimpse:

North Korea, one of the world’s most impenetrable nations, is facing a new threat: networks of its own citizens feeding information about life there to South Korea and its Western allies.

The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea’s near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers’ phoned and texted reports on Web sites.

The work is risky. Recruiters spend months identifying and coaxing potential informants, all the while evading agents from the North and the Chinese police bent on stopping their work. The North Koreans face even greater danger; exposure could lead to imprisonment — or death.

The result has been a news free-for-all, a jumble of sometimes confirmed but often contradictory reports. Some have been important; the Web sites were the first to report the outrage among North Koreans over a drastic currency revaluation late last year. Other articles have been more prosaic, covering topics like whether North Koreans keep pets and their complaints about the price of rice.

But the fact that such news is leaking out at all is something of a revolution for a brutally efficient gulag state that has forcibly cloistered its people for decades even as other closed societies have reluctantly accepted at least some of the intrusions of a more wired world.

Google slaps down Australia

Published on 30 March 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Is Australia trying to look foolish or do they truly want to look like a bumbling authoritarian state?

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has launched a stinging attack on Google and its credibility in response to the search giant’s campaign against the government’s internet filtering policy.

In an interview on ABC Radio last night, Senator Conroy also said he was unaware of complaints the Obama administration said it had raised with the government over the policy.

The government intends to introduce legislation within weeks forcing all ISPs to block a blacklist of “refused classification” websites for all Australians.

Senator Conroy has said the blacklist will largely include deplorable content such as child pornography, bestiality material and instructions on crime, but a large and growing group of academics, technology companies and lobby groups say the scope of the filters is too broad and will not make a meaningful impact on internet safety for children.

Google, which has recently been involved in a censorship spat with China, has been one of the filtering policy’s harshest critics. It has identified a range of politically sensitive and innocuous material, such as sexual health discussions and discussions on euthanasia, which could be blocked by the filters.

Last week, it said it had held discussions with users and parents around Australia and “the strong view from parents was that the government’s proposal goes too far and would take away their freedom of choice around what information they and their children can access”.

Google also said implementing mandatory filtering across Australia’s millions of internet users could “negatively impact user access speeds”, while filtering material from high-volume sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter “appears not to be technologically possible as it would have such a serious impact on internet access”.

“We have a number of other concerns, including that filtering may give a false sense of security to parents, it could damage Australia’s international reputation and it can be easily circumvented,” Google wrote.

What us Jews should be thinking about this Passover

Published on 30 March 2010 in Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Happy Passover to all my (observant) Jewish readers.

Akiva Eldar in Haaretz has a message for you all:

One of the harshest of the 10 plagues has smitten the children of Israel this Passover, and they are stumbling about in pitch darkness, bumping blindly into anyone in their way as they head toward the edge of the precipice. Warm friends, cool friends, icy enemies: Jordan and Turkey, Brazil and Britain, Germany and Australia – it’s all the same.

And if that’s not enough, the myopic Jewish state also has gone and collided head-on with the ally that offers existential support. Israel has become an environmental hazard and its own greatest threat. For 43 years, Israel has been ruled by people who have refused to see reality. They speak of “united Jerusalem,” knowing that no other country has recognized the annexation of the eastern part of the city. They sent 300,000 people to settle land they know does not belong to them. As early as September 1967, Theodor Meron, then the legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, said there was a categorical prohibition against civilian settlement in occupied territories, under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Meron – who would become the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and is now a member of the Appeals Chamber for both that court and a similar one for Rwanda – wrote to prime minister Levi Eshkol in a top-secret memorandum: “I fear there is great sensitivity in the world today about the whole question of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, and any legal arguments that we try to find will not remove the heavy international pressure, from friendly states as well.”

It is true that for many years, we have managed to grope our way through the dark and keep the pressure at bay. We did so with the assistance of our neighbors, who were afflicted with the same shortsightedness.

On Sunday, however, the Arab League marked the eighth anniversary of its peace proposals, which offer Israel normalization in exchange for an end to the occupation and an agreed solution to the refugee problem, in accordance with UN Resolution 194. But Israel behaves as if it had never heard of this historic initiative. For the last year, it was too busy realizing its dubious right to establish an illegal settlement in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, turning a blind eye to reality, has tried to persuade the world that what applies to Tel Aviv also applies to Sheikh Jarrah. He simply refuses to see that the world is sick of us. It’s easier for him to focus on his similarly nearsighted followers in AIPAC. Tonight they’ll all swear “Next year in rebuilt Jerusalem” – including the construction in Ramat Shlomo, of course.

Hillary Clinton is not Jewish, but it was she who had to remind the AIPAC Jews what demography will do to their favorite Jewish democracy in the Middle East. A few days earlier, she had come back from Moscow, where she took part in one of the Quartet’s most important meetings. Israeli politicians and media were too busy with the cold reception awaiting Netanyahu at the White House. They never gave any thought to the decision by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations to turn Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s state-building plan from a unilateral initiative into an international project.

The Quartet declared that it was backing the plan, proposed in August 2009, to establish a Palestinian state within 24 months. This was an expression of the Palestinians’ serious commitment that the state have a just and proper government and be a responsible neighbor. This means Israel has less than a year and a half to come to an agreement with the Palestinians on the permanent borders, Jerusalem and the refugees. If the Palestinians stick to Fayyad’s path, in August 2011, the international community, led by the United States, can be expected to recognize the West Bank and East Jerusalem as an independent country occupied by a foreign power. Will Netanyahu still be trying to explain that Jerusalem isn’t a settlement?

For 43 years, the Israeli public – schoolchildren, TV viewers, Knesset members and Supreme Court judges – have been living in the darkness of the occupation, which some call liberation. The school system and its textbooks, the army and its maps, the language and the “heritage” have all been mobilized to help keep Israelis blind to the truth. Luckily, the Gentiles clearly see the connection between the menace of Iranian control spreading across the Middle East and the curse of Israeli control over Islamic holy places.

Monday night, when we read the Passover Haggadah, we should note the plague that follows darkness. That may open our eyes.

Is Wikileaks the most important website in the world?

Published on 30 March 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The latest Wikileaks drama:

Whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks is planning to release a video that reveals what it’s calling a Pentagon “cover-up” of an incident in which numerous civilians and journalists were murdered in an airstrike, according to a recent media advisory.

The video will be released on April 5 at the National Press Club, the group said.

They also noted their members have recently been tailed by individuals under State Department diplomatic immunity, and that “one related person was detained for 22 hours” while authorities seized computer equipment.

In a video released Friday, a Russia Today broadcast discusses the pending release of the video WikiLeaks first announced in a tweet on Feb. 20, 2010, which read: “Finally cracked the encryption to US military video in which journalists, among others, are shot. Thanks to all who donated $/CPUs.”

A follow-up on March 22 announced their reveal date.

“Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations,” founder Julian Assange writes. “We’ve become used to the level of security service interest in us and have established procedures to ignore that interest. But the increase in surveillance activities this last month, in a time when we are barely publishing due to fundraising, are excessive.”

On Tuesday evening, followers of the WikiLeaks Twitter feed were startled to read, “WikiLeaks is currently under an aggressive US and Icelandic surveillance operation.” This was followed a few minutes later by “If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our Apr 5 film. And you know who is responsible.” A succeeding message warned, “We have airline records of the State Dep/CIA tails. Don’t think you can get away with it. You cannot. This is WikiLeaks.”

What Washington does for its little Jewish friend

Published on 30 March 2010 in Israel. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak:

The United States is a central source for Israel’s qualitative edge [over its enemies] in advanced weapons systems, $3 billion in annual financial aid, ammunition and spare parts that are spread out here in American storage facilities within Israel, and upon which the IDF relies as an ‘oxygen supply’ in time of war.

…

I believe it is our duty to work toward an arrangement that marks out a clear border inside Israel on the basis of security and demographic considerations.

Obama wants peace in our time (and the Middle East may not be ready)

Published on 30 March 2010 in Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Either a massive game-changer or a case of massive American over-reach (hello Zionist lobby, Congress etc?)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s demands during his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Tuesday point to an intention to impose a permanent settlement on Israel and the Palestinians in less than two years, political sources in Jerusalem say.

Israeli officials view the demands that Obama made at the White House as the tip of the iceberg under which lies a dramatic change in U.S. policy toward Israel.

Of 10 demands posed by Obama, four deal with Jerusalem: opening a Palestinian commercial interests office in East Jerusalem, an end to the razing of structures in Palestinian neighborhoods in the capital, stopping construction in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and not building the neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo.

But another key demand – to discuss the dispute’s core issues during the indirect talks that are planned – is perceived in Jerusalem as problematic because it implies that direct negotiations would be bypassed. This would set up a framework through which the Americans would be able to impose a final settlement.

It is not just Obama’s demands that are perceived as problematic, but also the new modus operandi of American diplomacy. The fact that the White House and State Department have been in contact with Israel’s European allies, first and foremost Germany, is seen as part of an effort to isolate Israel and put enormous political pressure on it.

Israeli officials say that the Obama administration’s new policy contradicts commitments made by previous administrations, as well as a letter from George W. Bush in 2004 to the prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon. According to this view, the new policy is also incongruous with the framework posed by Bill Clinton in 2000.

Senior Israeli sources say that as a result of the U.S. administration’s policies, the Palestinians will toughen their stance and seriously undermine the peace process’ chances of success.

Moreover, sources in Jerusalem say that the new American positions undermine the principle of credibility that has guided U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. Ignoring specific promises made to its Israeli ally would make other American allies lose trust in its commitments to them.

Israeli officials warn that if the United States shirks its past commitments, the willingness of the Israeli public to put its trust in future American guarantees will be undermined – as will the superpower’s regional and international standing.

Google helps clarify what web freedom should mean?

Published on 30 March 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Does the web need a bill of rights?

Jeff Jarvis writes in the Guardian that Google’s recent move in China is significant:

Google’s business strategy is dead simple: the more we use the internet, the more Google makes. If governments are allowed and enabled to restrict freedom on the internet to a lowest common denominator (as the UK’s libel tourism does for publishing), and if we worry that our data in the cloud is not secure, and if citizens of totalitarian states fear the internet will be used to jail them, then we will trust and use it less. Google loses. We all lose.

How to treat a major media mogul who loves page 3 girls and illegal wire-tapping

Published on 29 March 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

What the BBC needs to do more often:

“Find someone to articulately tell James Murdoch to fuck off.”

Taking from the rich and giving to the poor

Published on 29 March 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: .

This week the Robin Hood Tax campaign launches in Australia.

Here’s the global campaign video:

And the aim?

The Robin Hood Tax is a tiny tax on banks, hedge funds and other finance institutions that would raise billions to tackle poverty and climate change, at home and abroad.

It can start as low as 0.005 per cent – and average 0.05 per cent. But when levied on the billions of dollars moving round the global finance system daily through transactions like as foreign exchange, derivatives  and share deals, it could raise hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

That can provide for vital investment in crucial public services like healthcare and schools, aid the fight against global poverty and climate change, and ask the banks to play their part in helping shape the future of our world.

The tax would not be levied on everyday banking transactions conducted by individuals.

The one-person reporter army is coming to an end (thankfully)

Published on 29 March 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: .

2009 was the year that journalism took a (healthy) turn towards more a collaborative future:

Up until now, journalism has been devoted to verified facts – but the crowdsourced approach is generally not about using previously trusted sources. Instead of checking each contribution and verifying it individually, this was the start of a new statistical approach.

…

In terms of journalistic coverage of last year, crowd-sourced journalism had a finger in most of the bigger pies.

“Obama is the greatest disaster for Israel”

Published on 29 March 2010 in Israel. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

It’s hard to tell if this remains simply a lover’s tiff (with no real consequence for the offending party, Israel) or something more. Certainly a war of words has erupted, and it’s rather fun to watch:

Israel‘s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, tried to smooth over a breach in relations with the US today, speaking out against unnamed confidants who described Barack Obama as pro-Palestinian and Israel’s “greatest disaster”.

Netanyahu made his first public comments after a fraught visit to Washington last week, where he held a long but low-key meeting with Obama that ended with significant disagreement.

Israeli reports said the US was pressing Israel to freeze settlement construction in East Jerusalem and to extend a temporary, partial curb on West Bank settlement building. But so far Netanyahu has shown no sign that he will bow to pressure from Washington. One of his most senior cabinet ministers was reported today as saying the US demands were unacceptable and there would be no compromise.

The Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli newspaper, sparked the premier’s anger when it quoted unnamed Netanyahu confidants delivering extraordinary criticisms of the US administration. One said Obama and Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, had “adopted a patently Palestinian line”.

“We’re talking about something that is diseased and insane,” the confidant told the paper. “The situation is catastrophic. We have a problem with a very, very hostile administration. There’s never been anything like this before. This president wants to establish the Palestinian state and he wants to give them Jerusalem … You could say Obama is the greatest disaster for Israel, a strategic disaster.”

US drone attacks are not legal

Published on 29 March 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

An interesting Al-Jazeera English report that explains how the American use of pilotless drones in the “war on terror” has no legal framework. Good to know the world’s only super-power operates illegally:

East Jerusalem should not be touched

Published on 29 March 2010 in Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

While Gideon Levy in Haaretz hopes and prays Barack Obama keeps up his pressure on Israel:

Obama is asking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and through him every Israeli, to finally speak the truth. He’s asking Netanyahu and the rest of us: What on earth do you actually want? Enough with the misleading answers; the moment of truth is here. Enough with the tricks – a neighborhood here, a settlement expansion there. Just tell us: Where are you heading? Do you want to go on receiving unprecedented aid from the United States, do you want to become part of the Middle East, do you want to achieve peace?

If you do, please start behaving accordingly, including halting all construction in all settlements, everywhere, for all time, and begin evacuating them instead. Any action by Israel would be reminiscent of the three no’s of Khartoum: No to ending the occupation, no to peace, no to friendship with America.

The US President is pushing up a steep hill (presuming, of course, he actually wants to truly end the occupation, a highly debatable point):

Two opinion polls suggest many Israelis want their government to continue building settlements in East Jerusalem, even if it brings a rift with the Americans.

Letting go of America and being happy about it

Published on 29 March 2010 in General and Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Is it even conceivable that Australian politicians (or Israelis) would ever say this publicly?

MPs today urged the government to adopt a more hard-headed approach towards the US and avoid the phrase “the special relationship” as Britain’s influence over America was likely to diminish.

The 14-member cross-party foreign affairs committee said that the phrase coined by Winston Churchill more than 60 years ago no longer reflects political reality and should be dropped.