Antony Loewenstein

Who trusts Washington to keep the internet free?

The US military has appointed its first senior general to direct cyber warfare – despite fears that the move marks another stage in the militarisation of cyberspace.

The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon’s ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world’s computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland.

The creation of America’s most senior cyber warrior comes just days after the US air force disclosed that some 30,000 of its troops had been re-assigned from technical support “to the frontlines of cyber warfare”.

The creation of Cyber Command is in response to increasing anxiety over the vulnerability of the US’s military and other networks to a cyber attack.

James Miller, the deputy under-secretary of defence for policy, has hinted that the US might consider a conventional military response to certain kinds of online attack.

…

While Alexander has tried to play down the offensive aspects of his command, the Pentagon has been more explicit, stating on Friday that Cyber Command will “direct the operations and defence of specified Department of Defense information networks [involving some 90,000 military personnel] and prepare to, when directed, conduct full-spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, [to] ensure US allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.”

The complex issues facing Cyber Command were thrown into relief earlier this year when the Washington Post revealed details of a so-called “dot-mil” operation by Fort Meade’s cyber warfare unit, backed by Alexander, to shut down a “honeytrap website” set up by the Saudis and the CIA to target Islamist extremists planning attacks in Saudi Arabia.

The Pentagon became convinced that the forum was being used to co-ordinate the entry of jihadi fighters into Iraq.

Despite the strong objections of the CIA, the site was attacked by the Fort Meade cyber warfare unit. As a result, some 300 other servers in the Saudi kingdom, Germany and Texas also were inadvertently shut down.

Are you a Zionist and in need of tools to sell the wonderful democracy known as Israel? Concerned that too many people see the Jewish state as an occupier? Hope that finding new tactics will assist the noble act of selling Israel to the world?

Rest easy, help has arrived:

In 2001, IDC Herzliya students Gur Braslavi and Ariel Halevi won the Oxford Union Debating Competition for teams from foreign countries. Nine years later, their joint company, Debate Ltd., was chosen to carry out the Israeli government’s new public diplomacy initiative.

The company recently took on a contract to conduct 200 workshops in which its instructors teach regular Israelis the arts of rhetoric and persuasion. If the pilot proves successful, it will likely be extended and multiplied. By creating an army of amateur ambassadors, Israel hopes to counter negative media portrayals and improve its image abroad.

“Define terrorism,” said the instructor, entering the boardroom of the Tel Aviv district branch of the Histadrut labor union. “Come on. You’ve all experienced it. Tell me what terrorism means,” he urged.

After overcoming their surprise at the abrupt and irregular entrance, the 15 participants – members of the Histadrut’s under-27 exchange mission to Berlin – started suggesting answers.

“War,” threw out one. “A threat,” said another. “A lethal danger.” “Violence.” “Injury to civilians,” more people shot out.

“OK. By those definitions, is Israel a terrorist?” asked the instructor.

In the silence that followed the question, the instructor, a good-looking man in his late twenties or early thirties wearing a button-down shirt and sporting a short haircut, took a pause to introduce himself.

“My name is Ran Michaelis, and I am a senior instructor at Debate. Debate is a company that specializes in interpersonal relations and project management. We work with organizations in Israel and federations abroad on Israeli advocacy, on behalf of the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora affairs.”

“I was once asked that very question by an Arab woman after a lecture I gave at Richmond University,” said Michaelis, returning to his question. “I told her Israel’s definition of terrorism, which is: the attempt to harm or kill innocent civilians.

“Without pausing for a second, she pulled out a photo of an Israeli soldier aiming a rifle at an old Palestinian woman. She pointed her finger at me, and shouted: ‘You, and all the Israelis are not innocent! According to your own definition, suicide bombers are not terrorists.’

“My question to you,” Michaelis asked the group, “is: How do you answer her?”

In the hours that followed, Michaelis taught the group how best to answer the woman’s question, as well as many others. Throughout the workshop, he challenged the participants with difficult situations, all of which have come up over the years, and provided them with the best tools to approach resolving them.

Like a young soldier returning from battle, Michaelis regaled the participants with stories from Israel’s hasbara front lines, sharing his experience of speaking before hostile audiences of anti-Israel students and leftist professors in American universities, tackling issues ranging from the security barrier to the Goldstone report.

“The basic structure of the workshops was developed during an all-night marathon that Gur and I held,” explained Debate co-founder Ariel Halevi. “After an intensive brainstorming session, we attempted to turn what we knew intuitively into an organized lesson plan. The 14-hour session resulted in five principles of effective advocacy. Later we added two more, to create the backbone of the method.”

The seven principles of effective advocacy are a set of analytical and rhetorical tools that help give novice advocates the means of engaging people on issues regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“It’s not about information, it’s about knowledge. It’s about navigating the discussion effectively. Every one of the principles offers a different tactic to tackle issues that come up in encounters with foreigners,” saidHalevi.

The first principle the participants are taught is the importance of terminology.

“Don’t enter into a conversation before you are clear about the terminology you’re using,” Michaelis urged. “For example, 95 percent of thesecurity barrier that Israel built around Judea and Samaria is a fence, yet people continually refer to it as a wall. The word “wall” tends to conjure up images of the Berlin Wall. It is an inaccurate and misleading characterization of the barrier and its function – keeping out terrorists.

“I have no problem with you talking about the merits or problems of the barrier, but make sure that the conversation sticks to the facts, and not to an Israel-hater’s misrepresentation of them,” said Michaelis.

Other words to watch out for, according to the seven-principle method, are apartheid, assassinations, freedom fighters and human shields.

“Each one of them carries some kind of mental or emotional infrastructure. If you overlook the terms people use and dive straight into the ideological discussion, you are overlooking a major obstacle that someone put in your place, preventing the audience from relating to you,” saidHalevi.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on America’s continuing policies to deny human beings the right of appeal to terrorism charges. Obama equals Bush:

So congratulations to the United States and Barack Obama for winning the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind.

…

This is what Barack Obama has done to the habeas clause of the Constitution:  if you are in Thailand (as one of the petitioners in this case was) and the U.S. abducts you and flies you to Guantanamo, then you have the right to have a federal court determine if there is sufficient evidence to hold you.  If, however, President Obama orders that you be taken from Thailand to Bagram rather than to Guantanamo, then you will have no rights of any kind, and he can order you detained there indefinitely without any right to a habeas review.

Although Israel says it plans to stop this mission, the aim is clear and should be warmly supported:

The biggest attempt by international aid groups to break the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip has gotten underway.

Nine ships under the banner, Freedom Flotilla, began their journey to Gaza on Saturday, despite warnings from Israel that they will be stopped for “breaching Israeli law”.

The vessels are carrying 5,000 tonnes of reconstruction materials, school supplies and medical equipment.

The biggest of the nine ships set off from Istanbul, Turkey, heading to the south western city of Antalya where two other Turkish ships will be waiting to join the convoy.

The three ships will then travel to the waters off Athens and Crete to rendezvous with the other six, before making the four-day journey to Gaza.

A handy reminder by Noam Chomsky from 2008 that the corporate press have a particular interest in mouthing US foreign policy goals (and all this is relevant in light of the ongoing irrational hatred against the Islamic Republic):

To take another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino writes that “Iran’s intransigence [about nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts by the rest of the world to curtail Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.” The rest of the world happens to exclude the large majority of the world: the non-aligned movement, which forcefully endorses Iran’s right to enrich Uranium, in accord with the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). But they are not part of the world, since they do not reflexively accept U.S. orders.

We might tarry for a moment to ask whether there is any solution to the U.S./Iran confrontation over nuclear weapons. Here is one idea: (1) Iran should have the right to develop nuclear energy, but not weapons, in accord with the NPT. (2) A nuclear weapons-free zone should be established in the region, including Iran, Israel and U.S. forces deployed there. (3) The U.S. should accept the NPT. (4) The U.S. should end threats against Iran, and turn to diplomacy.

The proposals are not original. These are the preferences of the overwhelming majority of Americans, and also Iranians, in polls by World Public Opinion, which found that Americans and Iranians agree on basic issues. At a forum at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies when the polls were released a year ago, Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, said the polls showed “the common sense of both the American people and the Iranian people, [who] seem to be able to rise above the rhetoric of their own leaders to find common sense solutions to some of the most crucial questions” facing the two nations, favoring pragmatic, diplomatic solutions to their differences. The results suggest that if the U.S. and Iran were functioning democratic societies, this very dangerous confrontation could probably be resolved peaceably.

Perhaps the ideologues should simply tell the young that the church should intervene in every aspect of our lives. It may be coming to an American state near you:

Education officials in the US state of Texas have adopted new guidelines to the school curriculum, which critics say will politicise teaching.

The changes include teaching that the UN could be a threat to American freedom, and that the Founding Fathers may not have intended a complete separation of church and state.

Critics say the changes are ideological and distort history.

However, proponents argue they are redressing a liberal bias in education.

Analysts say Texas, with five million schoolchildren, wields substantial influence on school curriculums across the US.

The BBC’s Rajesh Mirchandani in Los Angeles says publishers of textbooks used nationally often print what Texas wants to teach.

Jefferson out

Students in Texas will now be taught the benefits of US free-market economics and how government taxation can harm economic progress.

They will study how American ideals benefit the world but organisations such as the UN could be a threat to personal freedom.

And Thomas Jefferson has been dropped from a list of enlightenment thinkers in the world-history curriculum, despite being one of the Founding Fathers who is credited with developing the idea that church and state should be separate.

Following the much-discussed essay in the New York Review of Books on “saving” liberal Zionism, here’s the relatively liberal Zionist Forward newspaper in an editorial (and note the inability to take real responsibility for decades of Zionist backing for utterly inhumane policies in the occupied territories):

Can you be a liberal and a Zionist today? In a long and thoughtful essay in the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart accurately describes how and why so many young American Jews are becoming alienated from Israel and blames the American Jewish establishment for its lock-step support of the Israeli government’s current policies and attitudes. His provocative argument has fostered a robust online conversation, as you’d expect, but one question posed by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg caught our eye. After lamenting how “claustrophobic” he feels in confronting the subject, Goldberg asks:

“Who else is still out there arguing that you can be liberal and Zionist at the same time, meaning, pro-Israel and anti-occupation?”

Well, we are.

Beinart’s essay is alarmist to a fault, and, in our opinion, doesn’t take into account the responsibility that Palestinians and the entire Arab world bear in further isolating Israel and sometimes leaving it no choice but to, say, build a security barrier to protect its citizens. His central thesis, though, seems sadly true: “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

But the task of reconciling this tension between love for Israel and attachment to traditional liberal values such as human rights, religious pluralism, equal citizenship and territorial compromise has not been abandoned. It is being fully explored on our pages and in our blogs, in works by J.J. Goldberg, Leonard Fein, Yossi Alpher, Jay Michaelson and many others. More broadly, the wish to resolve the tension has fueled political movements such as J Street, and myriad efforts on the religious and cultural scene, here and in Israel, to express those liberal values in non-traditional venues and idioms.

If young American Jews are disengaging from Israel — or connecting to it from a more politically right-wing, religiously Orthodox perspective — the fault lies not only with AIPAC and other organizations that too often confuse dissent with disloyalty. Responsibility also lies with a more potent establishment: the parents, schools and synagogues who should be teaching the next generation to speak Hebrew, practice ritual, grapple with Jewish text and access a tradition built on dialogue and debate.

To be a fully realized 21st century Jew, one must engage with Israel in some fashion. But too many families and communities have failed to provide the tools to do that in a meaningful way, substituting easy rhetoric for the hard task of real commitment. Young people see through that sleight-of-hand and either search for a more authentic version of Judaism in the growing attraction to Orthodoxy, or merely shrug and walk away.

For those who believe that “liberal Zionism” isn’t an outdated oxymoron, but a cause to be nurtured, Beinart’s essay was another reminder of the challenge that lies ahead. But it need not be a lonely one.

The underground political group Generation Wave (GW) are documenting the brutality inside Burma:

GW itself was formed after the “Saffron Revolution” in September 2007 when rising fuel prices provoked thousands of monks to take to the streets in protest. Civilians joined the movement, but the military junta cracked down, leaving hundreds dead and thousands imprisoned.

Following the crackdown, a group of protesters, who had been friends since high school, started GW as a way to inspire new activists inside Myanmar. Having analyzed revolutions worldwide and the opposition movement in their country they decided to focus on non-violent resistance.

In two and half years, the group has carried out what they call “action campaigns” almost every week. Their main activities include anti-government graffiti in busy places, handing out pamphlets and writing and distributing political music.

“The youth of Burma have seen so many activists thrown behind bars, they have seen monks killed in the streets, so many are turning their back to the struggle for human rights,” said Min Yan Naing, founder of GW. “Our job and aim is to bring them back and make them feel the responsibility to change our country and better the lives for all Burmese people.”

I salute them.

What Britain is now doing. Let’s not be under any illusions about a Tory Minister allegedly looking into torture by a previous government – after all, major parties in most democracies usually protect the other from serious investigations into foreign policy issues – but such events aren’t happening in the US or Australia:

The judicial inquiry announced by the foreign secretary into Britain’s role in torture and rendition since September 2001 is poised to shed extraordinary light on one of the darkest episodes in the country’s recent history.

It is expected to expose not only details of the activities of the security and intelligence officials alleged to have colluded in torture since 9/11, but also the identities of the senior figures in government who authorised those activities.

William Hague‘s decision follows a series of reports in the Guardian and other media over the last five years about the manner in which British intelligence officers were told they could interrogate terrorism suspects they knew were being tortured, and the way in which that secret policy was used in effect to subcontract torture to overseas intelligence agencies.

There has also been a steady drip of disclosures about the way in which British territory, airspace and facilities have been used during America’s programme of extraordinary rendition and about orders that led to British special forces in Iraq handing over detainees to US forces, despite fears they were to be tortured.

Finally, the British army has been forced to admit that at least eight people died in its custody in Iraq, including a number who were being interrogated using illegal techniques including hooding.

Those who have been most bitterly resisting an inquiry – including a number of senior figures in the last government – may have been dismayed to see the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition formed, as this maximised the chances of a judicial inquiry being established.

Last autumn the Lib Dems passed a conference resolution calling for an inquiry, while a number of Tory backbenchers have been putting pressure on the leadership to establish an inquiry.

When a more detailed announcement is made, the human rights groups, MPs and lawyers who have been demanding an inquiry will want to ensure that it satisfies their calls for an effective and, as far as possible, transparent investigation.

Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said: “The new government is to be congratulated on this hugely significant announcement, which represents a real break from the past. This investigation must leave no stone unturned.”

Sara MacNeice, terrorism and security campaign manager of Amnesty International UK, said: “We would welcome an inquiry into UK complicity in torture overseas. Any inquiry must be thorough, independent and impartial. The findings should be made public and those responsible for abuses must be held to account.” Philippe Sands QC, professor of law at University College London, said the inquiry should have happened long ago. “To restore trust in government, both here and abroad, and to get to the truth the inquiry needs to be deep and broad and as open as possible,” he said.

“It should address in particular who authorised what and when and why, what the relevant legal advice said, and how it related to any change in US practice in 2002 and 2003.”

The inquiry will also need to consider how it can offer immunity from prosecution to witnesses who testify before it.

Although there is little provision in international law for immunity being offered to those who have been complicit in torture, the inquiry may need to reassure some witnesses that they will not incriminate themselves. It may even be that the MI5 officer known as Witness B, currently at the centre of a Scotland Yard investigation, could benefit from an immunity deal. To establish the full truth, the inquiry will need to discover:

• Who authorised the bilateral agreements with the US, signed three weeks after the 9/11 attacks under article V of the North Atlantic treaty, that led to the UK offering logistic support for the CIA’s rendition programme of kidnap and torture.

• Whether any other such bilateral agreements were signed that led to human rights abuses during the so-called war on terror.

• Who drew up, and who authorised, the secret interrogation policy, transmitted in January 2002 to all MI5 and MI6 agents in Afghanistan, telling them they could interrogate people who were being tortured, as long as they did not participate and were not “seen to condone it”.

• How was that policy further developed in mid-2004, why and by whom.

• Which ministers authorised these policies.

• What Downing Street knew about the torture of the British resident Binyam Mohamed, and about the torture in Pakistan and elsewhere of several British citizens suspected of planning terrorist attacks since 2001.

• What the last foreign and home secretaries, David Miliband and Alan Johnson, knew about the UK’s involvement in torture and rendition, what they did – and critically, what they may not have done – in an attempt to bring it to an end.

The inquiry will also be under pressure to publish the interrogation policy as it has stood since mid-2004 – even though Miliband said last year that this could never be done as it would “give succour” to the country’s enemies.

It will also want to examine any drafts of that policy, which could also have been used to govern the conduct of British intelligence officers interrogating detainees held overseas. Also relevant to the inquiry will be the transcripts of a number of court hearings held in camera, including part of the civil proceedings brought on behalf of Mohamed, and the criminal prosecutions of two terrorists. After learning what had been concealed by the use of courtroom secrecy at the trial of a man who lost a number of fingernails after being detained and questioned in Pakistan at the suggestion of British authorities, David Davis, the former shadow home secretary, told the Commons: “I cannot imagine a more obvious case of the outsourcing of torture.”

I’m coming late to this essay but there’s a long piece in the New York Review of Books by Peter Beinart talking about the failure of American Jewish elites and the wider Zionist community to understand the real effects of blind backing for Israel. Arabs are openly loathed and yet liberal, American Jewry is walking away:

In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning. It remains the lingua franca in part for generational reasons, because many older American Zionists still see themselves as liberals of a sort. They vote Democratic; they are unmoved by biblical claims to the West Bank; they see average Palestinians as decent people betrayed by bad leaders; and they are secular. They don’t want Jewish organizations to criticize Israel from the left, but neither do they want them to be agents of the Israeli right.

These American Zionists are largely the product of a particular era. Many were shaped by the terrifying days leading up to the Six-Day War, when it appeared that Israel might be overrun, and by the bitter aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, when much of the world seemed to turn against the Jewish state. In that crucible, Israel became their Jewish identity, often in conjunction with the Holocaust, which the 1967 and 1973 wars helped make central to American Jewish life. These Jews embraced Zionism before the settler movement became a major force in Israeli politics, before the 1982 Lebanon war, before the first intifada. They fell in love with an Israel that was more secular, less divided, and less shaped by the culture, politics, and theology of occupation. And by downplaying the significance of Avigdor Lieberman, the settlers, and Shas, American Jewish groups allow these older Zionists to continue to identify with that more internally cohesive, more innocent Israel of their youth, an Israel that now only exists in their memories.

But these secular Zionists aren’t reproducing themselves. Their children have no memory of Arab armies massed on Israel’s border and of Israel surviving in part thanks to urgent military assistance from the United States. Instead, they have grown up viewing Israel as a regional hegemon and an occupying power. As a result, they are more conscious than their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates liberal ideals, and less willing to grant Israel an exemption because its survival seems in peril. Because they have inherited their parents’ liberalism, they cannot embrace their uncritical Zionism. Because their liberalism is real, they can see that the liberalism of the American Jewish establishment is fake.

To sustain their uncritical brand of Zionism, therefore, America’s Jewish organizations will need to look elsewhere to replenish their ranks. They will need to find young American Jews who have come of age during the West Bank occupation but are not troubled by it. And those young American Jews will come disproportionately from the Orthodox world.

…

This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.

For a major American publication, relatively strong stuff, if a little late to the party. Sure, Beinart’s essential message is to save liberal Zionism, a belief that Israel is essentially good but has been corrupted by the post-1967 occupation, though it’s a start (and was going to appear initially in the New York Times magazine, apparently).

It’s curious that Beinart relatively accurately details the myopia of the American Zionist establishment (echoed in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, all seemingly incapable and unwilling to address the profound costs of the Nakba and ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza) without really delving deeply into true democracy for the country. Here’s Beinart with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg:

I’m not asking Israel to be Utopian. I’m not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I’m not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I’m actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel’s security and for its status as a Jewish state. What I am asking is that Israel not do things that foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, because if it is does that it will become–and I’m quoting Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak here–an “apartheid state.”

What a revealing few sentences. The care for Palestinians is really very secondary to securing his liberal, Zionist pedigree. Beinart is clearly troubled by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians but remains torn between allowing all citizens of Israel and Palestine equal rights – something he enjoys in the US – and abiding by his Zionist beliefs.

This internal struggle is something I’m hearing from Jewish students here in New Zealand. Yesterday during a talk at Victoria University in Wellington, a number of young Jews, around 25, were clearly pained about some aspects of Israel’s behaviour but kept on asking how it was possible to be so critical of Israel as a Jew. They talked about the two-state solution and Palestinian rights like they were automatically going to happen soon enough as opposed to the reality of a nation moving in the opposite direction. Such Jews have spent many years hearing pro-Israel propaganda from family and friends but something doesn’t now feel right. They hear and see news about Gaza and occupation and they almost can’t believe Israel is doing such awful things, in their name.

Beinart’s essay is an attempt to almost explain how torn Jews such as himself have become. That’s encouraging and welcome but it simply isn’t enough. Palestinians are under occupation and his major worry seems to be “saving” Zionism from being known solely (as opposed to now?) as a brutal and intolerant ideology.