Antony Loewenstein

Another angle of the Wikileaks information dump is the way in which it may be used to justify military action against Tehran.

Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch explains and refutes that bogus comparison (neo-cons and the Zionist lobby, are you listening?)

Most of the response to the WikiLeaks Afghanistan document release thus far has focused on the absence of major revelations, with most of the details reinforcing existing analysis rather than undermining official discourse about the war. A similar response is appropriate to a story making the rounds that the documents bolster the case for significant connections between Iran and al-Qaeda. Information in the documents, according to the Wall Street Journal, “appear to give new evidence of direct contacts between Iranian officials and the Taliban’s and al Qaeda’s senior leadership.” What’s more important in these stories than the details found in the documents about Iran’s activities in Afghanistan is the attempt to spin them into a narrative of “Iranian ties to al-Qaeda” to bolster the weak case for an American attack on Iran.

There’s no secret about Iran’s role in Afghanistan, of course — this has long been a staple of the debate over Afghan policy, and has also long been pointed out as an area of potential cooperation or conflict between Washington and Tehran. As with much of the rest of the WikiLeaks documents, much of what has been found about Iran’s role in Afghanistan is already generally known, while other information in them is of dubious provenance. It’s not like we didn’t know about Iran and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. These new details do add to the case for taking Iran into account more effectively when designing Afghanistan policy, on both the military and political dimensions. But they don’t add up to some kind of smoking gun demonstrating an Iranian alliance with al-Qaeda.

Of course this man isn’t a terrorist, merely a misguided Jewish man. If he was Muslim, of course…

Police released the head rabbi of a prominent yeshiva yesterday hours after arresting him for encouraging to kill non-Jews.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva and author of “The King’s Torah,” was arrested early yesterday morning at his home in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. His book describes how it is possible to kill non-Jews according to halakha (Jewish religious law ).

Detectives first carried out a search at the yeshiva, where they confiscated 30 copies of the book. The investigation and arrest were carried out on the orders of Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan.

The preface of the book, which was published in November, states that it is forbidden to kill non-Jews – but the book then apparently describes the context in which it is permitted to do so.

According to Shapira, it is permissible to kill a non-Jew who threatens Israel even if the person is classified as a Righteous Gentile. His book says that any gentile who supports war against Israel can also be killed.

Killing the children of a leader in order to pressure him, the rabbi continues, is also permissible. In general, according to the book, it is okay to kill children if they “stand in the way – children are often doing this.” “They stand in the way of rescue in their presence and they are doing this without wanting to,” he writes. “Nonetheless, killing them is allowed because their presence supports murder. There is justification in harming infants if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us. Under such circumstances the blow can be directed at them and not only by targeting adults.”

The daily Maariv’s report on the book was immediately followed by calls for Shapira’s arrest and a petition was filed with the High Court of Justice for a ban on the book’s distribution. The petition was rejected as premature.

From the Guardian money blog:

Every week a Guardian Money reader submits a question, and it’s up to you to help him or her out – a selection of the best answers will appear in next Saturday’s paper.

This week’s question:

A friend has been giving me a hard time after seeing Israeli fruit in my home. (She also disapproves of me using supermarkets.) She’s urging me to join a consumer boycott, but I don’t think these work. Leaving aside the issues, do these campaigns really make a difference?

What are your thoughts?

The Australian Wikileaks connection:

Classified US Defence Department documents leaked to the WikiLeaks website this week suggest the Australian Defence Force covered up the killing of an Afghan policeman by Australian troops.

Buried among the 90,000 intelligence documents is a log entry about the killing of an Afghan man by an Australian mentoring and reconstruction taskforce (MRTF) patrol in the southern province of Oruzgan in December 2008.

The initial report says a suspected suicide bomber approached the patrol and was shot dead. The report was amended later in the day to show the man was a policeman, was not carrying explosives of any kind and that he was twice ordered to stop before he was shot. The Chief of the Defence Force, Angus Houston, said in a statement five months later that the man had a ”suspicious wire leading across his body”, and he was ordered twice through an interpreter to stop.

But Air Chief Marshal Houston did not disclose in the statement that the man was a police officer, or that he was not carrying explosives.

”A review of the operational circumstances found that the man behaved and appeared in a manner that was consistent with intelligence reporting of a suicide bomber that was planning an attack,” Air Chief Marshal Houston said.

”The MRTF patrol had been involved in a combat operation the previous day and an [improvised explosive device] had exploded in the vicinity of the patrol. The review officer found that the MRTF patrol had acted appropriately, in accordance with the threat and within their rules of engagement.

”I stress, however, that I regard the completion of these inquiries as a high priority and I assure you that I will make the findings available to you soon as I can.”

The Guardian offers a fascinating explanation of how they processed the massive amount of documents given to them by Wikileaks.

The kind of debate over Palestine that seems almost impossible here in the US or Australia. Unthinking Zionism helps nobody but unthinking Zionists:

David Cameron‘s forthright description of Gaza as a “prison camp” – and its implied criticism of Israel – has struck a chord with many Conservatives but infuriated some commentators.

During a state visit to Turkey the prime minister stoked up the rhetorical pressure on Netayahu’s government without a balancing comment apportioning any blame for the seige of Gaza to Hamas, which controls the territory.

The Conservative Home website recorded strident views from both sides of the debate.

“The Liberal Democrats in the coalition government will approve of Mr Cameron’s tone on Israel but the government in Jerusalem will take a very dim view of the intervention,” the website noted.

“The use of such an emotive term and the lack of any balancing condemnation of the Hamas regime that terrorises Gaza will also disappoint Conservative supporters of Israel.”

One commentator on the site said: “For once I agree with Cameron. It’s about time a leader had the guts to stand up to this terrorist state and condemn it for its brutal actions.”

Others were less keen: “Cameron is clearly sucking up to the Muslim world and bashing Israel is the best way of doing so,” said one.

On the Daily Telegraph website the columnist Mary Riddell supported the prime minister. “[The prime minister] has indicated that Britain will not humour the Netanyahu government over Gaza. There are some encouraging signs that Mr Cameron, oppportunistic and Europhobic in opposition, may evolve a firmer and more creditable foreign policy than many supposed.”

The paper’s executive foreign editor, Con Coughlin, took a contrary view. “The real culprit is the militant Palestinian group Hamas which, having seized control of Gaza through force of arms, has persisted with its policy of campaigning for the destruction of the state of Israel,” he said.

The Liberal Democrats have long supported a loosening of the Israeli stranglehold on Gaza, allowing greater access for construction materials to help citizens rebuild their homes and businesses.

Last month the deputy prime minister and Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, called on Israel to lift its “unjustifiable and untenable” blockade of the Gaza Strip, following the storming by Israeli commandos of a ship carrying aid to the Palestinian territory.

“Whilst, of course, Israel has every right to defend itself and its citizens from any attack, it must now move towards lifting the blockade in Gaza as soon as possible,” Clegg said.

UNRWA image from the Summer Games in Gaza:

What a jolly good war. Money well spent:

The Defense Department is unable to properly account for $8.7 billion out of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil revenue entrusted to it between 2004 and 2007, according to a newly released audit that underscores a pattern of poor record-keeping during the war.

Of that amount, the military failed to provide any records at all for $2.6 billion in purported reconstruction expenditure, says the report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which is responsible for monitoring U.S. spending in Iraq. The rest of the money was not properly deposited in special accounts as required under Treasury Department rules, making it difficult to trace how it was spent.

Never trust a “Pentagon official”. Journalists should know better than trusting such anonymous sources. But of course they don’t. Hence this story:

An ongoing Pentagon review of the massive flood of secret documents made public by the WikiLeaks website has so far found no evidence that the disclosure harmed U.S. national security or endangered American troops in the field, a Pentagon official told NBC News on Monday. The initial Pentagon assessment is far less dramatic than initial statements from the Obama White House Sunday night after three major news organizations – The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel — published what was touted as an unprecedented “secret archive” of classified military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan.

The Tea Party essentially backs an Israeli strike against Iran.

The Wikileaks revelations are a spin problem to be solved, according to the White House mouth piece, Politico:

The White House is dismissing the 92,000 Afghan war reports posted by WikiLeaks as old news — but the document dump poses a potent new threat to President Barack Obama’s delicately balanced Afghanistan policy.

The field reports — raw, classified documents that portray Pakistani officials as double agents, working with both the United States and the Taliban — have rekindled long-standing doubts about the reliability of America’s most important strategic partner in the region.

As important, the reports are prompting a new wave of scrutiny of the war among Obama’s allies on Capitol Hill — with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry saying Monday they might initiate new “calibrations” of U.S. strategy in an unpopular and bloody war.

That’s bad news for Obama, who needs time, patience and congressional elasticity if his new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, is to have any chance of implementing his Afghanistan surge strategy before the planned start of troop withdrawals next summer.

“Whether WikiLeaks uncovered anything new isn’t actually important — it’s on the front page of every newspaper in the country; the media is now focused on Afghanistan, and that makes it a big deal,” said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on India and Pakistan.

“The public is now more skeptical about the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan than they were last week, and that makes it real,” said Markey, who was a South Asia analyst during the Bush administration.

Added one Senate aide: “Anyone who’s been paying even the vaguest attention to this issue found nothing new in this thing, but there’s also no doubt that this ratchets up the level of anxiety in the Democratic Caucus.”

More spinning here.