Antony Loewenstein

Boys who like to play with deadly toys, your wishes have come true:

After some behind the scenes wrangling, the Obama administration and Congress agreed this week on terms for new defense trade agreements that will allow freer movement of military goods with two of its top allies.

The Defense Trade Cooperation Treaties, which were signed with the British and Australian governments, were approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sept. 21 and now must be ratified by two thirds of the Senate. Accompanying implementation legislation must also  passed by both the Senate and then the House.

“This bipartisan vote comes after three years of negotiations and thorough examination. It is a critical step toward enhancing our cooperative efforts to combat the mutual threats we face,” committee chairman John Kerry (D-MA) said in a statement. “These treaties help make cooperation between the United States and two of its closest allies more streamlined, efficient, and effective by removing unnecessary bureaucratic delays.”

Basically, the treaties will remove the need for the British and Australian governments, and a select group of companies from those countries, to apply for arms export control licenses when buying or selling military items for joint projects they are working on with the United States. This will primarily affect the allies’ cooperation in Afghanistan, but it could also have implications for a host of other programs, including missile defense. Nuclear technology and other highly sensitive technologies are not included in the agreements.

Though the vote was unanimous and the agreements enjoy bipartisan support in Congress, it still took three years to get from the initial signing of the agreements to this point. The Bush administration signed the treaties in 2007, after failing in several attempts, dating back to 2003, to push through legislation permitting “executive agreements,” which would not have required Congressional advice and consent.

Congress insisted on maintaining its ability to oversee and monitor these agreements, which are the first of their kind, besides Canada’s country-specific exemption. Lawmakers held hearings in 2008 and 2009 as part an effort to make sure Congress could ensure the agreements were properly enforced and that violations would be punished.

“Senator Lugar and I crafted these resolutions, and the accompanying implementing legislation, to ensure that our law enforcement officials will have the tools they need to catch and prosecute anyone who might try to abuse the treaty regimes,” Kerry said. “These measures will also fully preserve long-standing Congressional prerogatives in the oversight of military assistance and cooperation.”

Administration sources said that in the home stretch leading up to the committee vote, Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher played a large role in ironing out differences, not only between the administration and Congress, but also between the State Department and the Justice Department.

No full Senate vote has yet been scheduled.

The shameful lies of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa to the United Nations General Assembly  on September 23:

No nation on earth can wish Sri Lanka’s Tamil community more good fortune than Sri Lanka itself.

The truth is far uglier.

At last, some coverage in the Australian media about Serco, the British multinational running the country’s detention centres. It doesn’t offer much new – and there is a desperate need for a thorough examination of the real relationship between Serco and the government – so more, please:

On Monday before the 36-year-old Fijian Josefa Rauluni fell to his death from a rooftop at Villawood detention centre, staff of the British company managing the centre, Serco, hauled mattresses to the footpath to break his fall. It was a busy day for Serco.

In Ireland its employees were managing the nation’s traffic lights. In the US they were running prisons, border security and defence systems. Public transport kept them busy in Dubai and South Australia. Welfare-to-work programs, schools, prisons and detention centres (or ”custodial accommodation” in company literature) were administered in Britain. Serco people were building military hospitals in Germany and helping to decommission US military bases in Iraq.

Some of Serco’s 70,000 staff were running both a new bicycle network in London and Britain’s five-satellite military communications network – evidently to inflame conspiracy theorists, it is called Skynet, the name of the evil computer system hell-bent on destroying mankind in the Terminator films.

Serco even manages Greenwich Mean Time.

There is a common factor in this apparently disparate $5 billion operation: Serco does the things governments no longer want to do.

”They are like a living organism that has found a very rich payload of nutrients and they are growing faster and faster,” says the NSW MP John Kaye, who has a keen interest in the growth of the private sector in the public sphere.

This is rather depressing. Here’s Jordan’s King Abdullah talking to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show about how “moderate” he is and the “extremists” are upsetting the Middle East.

Yes, because running a US-backed police state completely makes you “moderate”. His country’s influence is decreasing, not least because he so slavishly follows US foreign policy in the region:

A small but significant number of Israelis refuse to serve in occupied Palestine and face jail time for having a conscience.

Here’s Omer Shoshan, 19, and his story:

He’s from the town of Yehud, near Tel Aviv, was sentenced to 20 days of imprisonment. Omer Shoshan enlisted in the Israeli military eight months ago. It was already as a soldier that he decided to refuse to continue his military service.

And from his letter of refusal:

I refuse to be part of the Israel Defence Forces, an army that occupies and oppresses a Palestinian population on a daily basis, which undermines the chances to achieve peace, and thus also Israel’s security, and which corrupts the moral and democratic character of the state.

For more than 40 years the IDF has been daily oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories and denying them their most basic rights to live normally. This includes hampering their freedom of movement, undermining their economy, hurting their bodies, illegally arresting them and committing many other severe crimes that usually fail to make it to the mainstream media. The very fact that any simple soldier serving beyond the Green Line has power over the lives of local residents and can force them to do as he pleases is illegal and undemocratic, and obtains the exact opposite of what it is supposed to – it produces more terrorists, increases hatred towards us and undermines any realistic chances for peace. So what purpose does this oppression really serve? Only one – perpetuating the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal in their own right and which are the obstacle to reaching a compromise between the two peoples.

Even before enlisting I had my doubts about whether or not to join the army, whether to support the army that represents my country or to refuse. I eventually decided to enlist, because I felt that I could refuse from within, to do things otherwise, to effect change. Today I understand that the army’s actions in the occupied territories themselves, its very presence there, are what constitutes the occupation, and no action I could make, not even if I offer a more positive treatment to Palestinian civilians, could make any difference.

I believe that in a country that claims to be a democracy, it is good and even necessary for each of us to voice criticism and indignation when the country is wrong. The IDF is an organisation that fights for interests that I don’t believe in, performs anti-democratic and immoral actions and seriously undermines the chances to achieve piece. I am no longer willing to be part of it.

What the Australian parliament needs are more satirists offering their expert opinion:

What a story:

Little doubt remains that the Stuxnet worm represents one of the most sophisticated digital attacks on critical infrastructure systems that cybersecurity researchers have ever seen. The motives of whoever launched that attack is a far murkier question–but a mounting stack of theories is starting to point to a targeted sabotage of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The latest, put forward by Frank Rieger, a researcher at security and encryption firm GSMK, posits in a Frankfurt newspaper (translation here) and on his blog that Stuxnet targetted a nuclear enrichment facility in the Iranian town of Natanz. Stuxnet has spread internationally, but the vast majority of infections have happened in Iran, according to numbers from antivirus firm Symantec in July.

Rieger points to signs that Stuxnet was engineered to infect systems as early as January 2009. And in July 2009, whistle-blower site Wikileaks posted a note from an anonymous source describing a nuclear accident in Natanz. The head of Iran’s nuclear program resigned shortly thereafter, and Rieger points to official Iranian numbers that showed a reduction in working enrichment centrifuges.

Need more evidence how dysfunctional and undemocratic is the relationship between Serco and the Australian government?

Detainees who protested on the roof of a Sydney detention centre this week have been put in maximum security isolation as punishment, a refugee advocate says.

Nine Chinese nationals, including five men and four women, one of whom is two months pregnant, climbed on to the roof of the Villawood centre on Wednesday morning.

One of them came down at 4pm on Thursday and the rest followed about six hours later.

Another 11 asylum seekers ended a 30-hour protest on the roof on Tuesday night.

Justice Action Network spokesman Jamal Daoud says he believes all but one of the rooftop protesters are now in maximum security compounds.

“All of them are in Stage One at the moment, except the pregnant woman – she was taken to hospital last night,” said Mr Daoud, who has been in regular contact with detainees.

“They usually put someone in there for punishment…. They are in isolation, they are not allowed to go outside the room.”

Serco, the company that runs the centre, declined to comment on the asylum seekers’ situation and told AAP all inquiries should be referred to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC).

A DIAC spokesman refused to comment on where the protesters were housed, saying it was a matter for Serco.

“As far as where they’re housed, that’s a matter for Serco and their ongoing management of the centre,” he said.

South Africa knows a thing or two about apartheid. No wonder growing numbers of people there won’t tolerate similar or worse behaviour in the Zionist state:

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Unisa vice-chancellor Barney Pityana and author Breyten Breytenbach have added their voices to calls for the University of Johannesburg to sever academic ties with Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

The cooperation between the two universities dates from the 1980s, when the local partner was called Rand Afrikaans University. The agreement now under fire involves scientific interaction and was signed in August last year, renewing a controversial apartheid-era collaboration, its critics say.

On Wednesday next week UJ’s senate will hear recommendations on the future of the university’s ties with Ben-Gurion.

The Mail & Guardian reported in May that the senate had debated the matter then and had asked a senate subcommittee headed by deputy vice-chancellor Adam Habib to make recommendations within three months.

“We have concluded our deliberations and arrived at recommendations,” Habib told the M&G. “It has taken a long time because the matter is highly contested. And I can’t say what our senate will decide.”

Tutu, Pityana and Breytenbach are recent signatories to an online petition launched after the May senate meeting. It calls for “the suspension of UJ’s agreement with Ben-Gurion” and this week had notched up nearly 200 signatories.

Law professor John Dugard, theologian Allan Boesak, ANC stalwart Kader Asmal, struggle veteran and language-rights expert Neville Alexander, poet Antjie Krog, former Freedom of Expression Institute director Jane Duncan and Wits University sociologist Ran Greenstein are among other recent additions to the petition.

Leading the fight to retain ties with Ben-Gurion is the South African Associates of Ben-Gurion University, whose chairperson, Herby Rosenberg, told the M&G he had thought the senate meeting in question would be held late in October and he would “need to make inquiries” before commenting.

His organisation’s president, Bertie Lubner, was on a plane and unavailable, he said. The associates arranged that local advocate David Unter-halter and Ben-Gurion professor Ilan Troen argue in the May senate meeting for retaining ties with UJ, the M&G
reported at the time.
The petition’s signatories come from a range of local universities and identify themselves as “the academic community of South Africa, a country with a history of brute racism on the one hand and both academic acquiescence and resistance to it on the other”.

“The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has had disastrous effects on access to education for Palestinians,” the petition reads.

“While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintainingthe occupation.”

By virtue of its ties with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and the arms industry, Ben-Gurion “structurally supports and facilitates the Israeli occupation”, the petition says.

One example of its “complicity is its agreement with the IDF to provide full university qualification to army pilots within a special [Ben-Gurion] programme,” it says.

The petition calls on UJ’s senate to suspend the relationship with Ben-Gurion until, “as a minimum”, Israel “adheres to international law and … as did some South African universities during the struggle against South African apartheid, openly declares itself against the occupation and withdraws all privileges for the soldiers who enforce it”.

U.S. Businessman: Blackwater Paid Me to Buy Steroids and Weapons on Black Market for Its Shooters.

Seriously.

The ongoing pain in Sri Lanka, the rise of Sinhalese authoritarianism and Tamil oppression. Former UN spokesman in Colombo Gordon Weiss explains on Australian TV:

The largely secret war now being fought by unaccountable private firms. This is how the West fights battles:

More private contractors than soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, the first time in history that corporate casualties have outweighed military losses on America’s battlefields.

More than 250 civilians working under U.S. contracts died in the war zones between January and June 2010, according to a ProPublica analysis of the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Labor, which tracks contractor deaths. In the same period, 235 soldiers died, according to Pentagon figures.

his milestone in the privatization of modern U.S. warfare reflects both the drawdown in military forces in Iraq and the central role of contractors in providing logistics support to local armies and police forces, contracting and military experts said.

Steven Schooner, a professor of government contracting at George Washington University Law School, said that the contractor deaths show how the risks of war have increasingly been absorbed by the private sector. Private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan provide fuel, food and protective services to U.S. outposts — jobs once performed by soldiers.