Antony Loewenstein

How we built a Western-backed, torturing nation:

How the newly released US military files reveal an instruction to ignore detainee abuse by Iraqi authorities.

Why are we surprised that Iran worked to influence events in Iraq after the 2003 invasion? Wikileaks shows the extent of Tehran’s understandable role.

When America invades a country, it’s called liberation. When Iran “meddles” in Iraq’s internal affairs, it’s called terrorism.

Private mercenaries have been integral to the “war on terror”, so much so that Western aid groups are warning the Afghan government that without them the country will miss billions of dollars in aid:

More than a billion dollars worth of aid projects in Afghanistan will have to be cancelled by the end of the month if Hamid Karzaiprivate security companies should be disbanded by the end of the year, according to figures seen by the Guardian.

Foreign contractors insist on private security companies to protect their staff, and warn that the presidential decree, first issued in August, will put workers in jeopardy.

Now figures presented by companies running aid projects to the US Embassy in Kabul show that the proposed revolution to the country’s security industry will “severely handicap the counter-insurgency strategy” in the country and “put in jeopardy substantial humanitarian and development efforts”.

The report, collated by Overseas Security Advisory Council, a group representing the private sector but which works under the auspices of the US State Department, offers the best available guess of the effect on development work by 59 organisations that work on US funded projects, including massive road-building programmes and agricultural support.

The estimates suggest that of a total of $5.1bn worth of US aid earmarked for spending by the 59 companies, 18 projects worth $1.4bn would have to be shut down, starting at the end of this month.

The Wikileaks Iraq logs have revealed the US reliance on contractors and their complete lack of accountability. The New York Times have a piece about all this and feature the Australian company Unity Resources Group:

In 2007, a convoy operated by Unity Resources Group, based in Dubai, shot at an approaching vehicle near the Green Zone in Baghdad, wounded a bodyguard for President Jalal Talabani of Iraq and did not report the shooting until Mr. Talabani’s staff contacted the American authorities, one report said.

When asked about the incident last week, a Unity official, Jim LeBlanc, said that “in a time of numerous suicide vehicle attacks, a vehicle had presented itself in a profile that was consistent with the behavior of a suicide attacker.” Unity guards fired “carefully aimed warning shots” when the vehicle refused to stop, Mr. LeBlanc said, and the company did not initially believe that anyone had been hurt.

Only when contacted by American investigators did Unity realize that “an Iraqi security force member” had been struck by a ricochet, and from that point on, the company fully cooperated, Mr. LeBlanc said. After the investigation, he said, “all Unity members were cleared to immediately return to work.”

And still more recently, in July 2009, local contractors with the 77th Security Company drove into a neighborhood in the northern city of Erbil and began shooting at random, setting off a firefight with an off-duty police officer and wounding three women, another report said.

“It is assessed that this drunken group of individuals were out having a good time and firing their weapons,” the incident report concluded.

Mmm:

In a telling, if not surprising finding, Der Spiegel reports that, in the 391,832 documents, the word “democracy” appears only eight times—improvised explosive devices are mentioned 146,895 times.

Seriously, if this is the Middle East “peace process”, we’re all doomed:

In perhaps the shortest round of peace negotiations in the history of their conflict, talks between the Israelis and Palestinians have ground to a halt and show little sign of resuming.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas haven’t met since Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton brought the two together on Sept. 15 in Jerusalem, two weeks after President Obama launched the resumption of negotiations on Palestinian statehood in Washington with much fanfare, including the presence of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Now, the nearly six-week pause threatens to become permanent.

Pressure to restart the talks eased after the Arab League said it would wait a month – until Nov. 8 – before ending Abbas’s mandate for negotiations, thus pushing the issue beyond the U.S. midterm elections. But if Republicans score big gains, some Israelis argue, that could limit Obama’s ability to pressure Israel to make concessions. U.S. peace envoy George J. Mitchell is supposed to return to the region, but no date has been set.

In a speech Wednesday to Palestinian peace activists, Clinton acknowledged that “I cannot stand here tonight and tell you there is some magic formula that I have discovered that will break through the current impasse.”

While the administration has set a goal of achieving an agreement less than 11 months from now, Clinton at one point suggested a much longer time frame: “The future holds the possibility of progress, if not in our lifetimes, then certainly in our children’s.”

The proximate cause of the breakdown is Israel’s decision not to extend a 10-month partial freeze of settlement building on Palestinian lands, but in the view of many analysts, the problems go much deeper.

The Obama administration, worried that the impending end of the settlement freeze would leave a potentially dangerous vacuum, rushed into talks without a plan for dealing with the end of the moratorium, officials acknowledge. The hope was that sheer momentum would carry the talks forward.

That’s right, Serco now sees the health sector as a new area in which to profit. Clearly increased public funding on health is a controversial idea in the 21st century:

The [Western Australian] State Government has named private company Serco Australia as its preferred option to provide non-clinical support services to the $2 billion Fiona Stanley Hospital.

Health Minister Kim Hames said Serco Australia Pty Ltd had been chosen due to its local, national and international experience in facilities management service.

The selection comes nearly a year after the State Government called for expressions of interest.

The services that Serco will potentially provide include engineering and building maintenance, security, ground maintenance, linen, catering and cleaning.

“During the evaluation, the Government team reviewed sites in Australia and internationally where Serco already provided health support services,” Dr Hames said.

“At every hospital, staff and patients confirmed that services were of the highest quality and worked cohesively with public sector clinical staff.

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“I would like to take this opportunity once again to reassure staff working in support services in existing hospitals that no permanent member of staff will become redundant as a consequence of the decision to outsource non-clinical services at Fiona Stanley Hospital.”

Both parties will now start contract negotiations with finalisation expected later this year.

The 783-bed Fiona Stanley Hospital is scheduled to open in 2014.

What a government with accountability would do is determine what its soldiers may have done in war and investigate. Not stonewall or ignore or deny. “Our boys”, from Britain, America and Australia, have committed countless abuses in the last ten years in the “war on terror”:

The UN has called on Barack Obama to order a full investigation of US forces’ involvement in human rights abuses in Iraq after a massive leak of military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.

The call, by the UN’s chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, came as Phil Shiner, human rights specialist at Public Interest Lawyers in the UK, warned that some of the deaths documented in the Iraq war logs could have involved British forces and would be pursued through the UK courts. He demanded a public inquiry into allegations that British troops were responsible for civilian deaths during the conflict.

The Guardian has analysed the 400,000 documents, the biggest leak in US military history, and found 15,000 previously unreported civilian deaths. The logs show how US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and generally unpunished.

Nowak said that if the files released through WikiLeaks pointed to clear violations of the UN Convention Against Torture the Obama administration had an obligation to investigate them.

The logs paint a disturbing picture of the relationship between US and Iraqi forces. Nowak said that UN human rights agreements obliged states to criminalise every form of torture, whether directly or indirectly, and to investigate any allegations of abuse.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Nowak, who has spent years investigating allegations of US participation in extraordinary rendition and the abuse of detainees held by coalition forces, said the Obama administration had a legal and moral obligation to fully investigate credible claims of US forces’ complicity in torture.

A failure to investigate, Nowak suggested, would be a failure of the Obama government to recognise its obligations under international law. He said the principle of “non-refoulement” prohibited states from transferring detainees to other countries that could pose a risk to their personal safety.

Today a Muslim, Christian and (very small) Jewish audience watched the documentary about Norman Finkelstein, American Radical, and then I interviewed Finkelstein himself via Skype. It was all organised by Father Dave and held in his wonderful church in inner Sydney.

Full video is coming soon of the event but Finkelstein remains a staunch backer of the two-state solution, forcing Israel to abide by international law and a critic of boycott, divestment and sanctions (arguing its goals are too vague).

So the Australian government is not interested in investigating any potential war crimes in Iraq but the messenger who brought the news. Don’t be surprised:

Defence Minister Stephen Smith says the release of almost 400,000 US documents about the Iraq War could create a security risk for Australia.

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has published classified material that suggests US commanders ignored torture conducted by Iraqi security forces.

Defence set up a taskforce to go through classified documents about the Afghanistan war released by the website earlier this year, and Mr Smith says the same taskforce will go through the latest documents.

“It’s an early history and we have no troops or forces or personnel militarily in Iraq, and so therefore the danger in that respect is less,” he said.

“It still does potentially give people an insight into the way into which we do operations and it does potentially put people at risk who have assisted us in the past.

“We’ll go through that painstaking course and treat it in exactly the same way we’ve treated the earlier unauthorised disclosure of classified military information.”

Mr Smith says the taskforce has found the release of classified material about the Afghanistan war has not put Australian troops at risk.

“The great danger of releasing such unauthorised information is that it does prejudice the security of our operations, it enables to have an insight into them, but the substance of that report is that no damage has been done,” he said.

Governments across the world are fuming over the latest WikiLeaks release.

The UK Guardian unpacks the latest Wikileaks Iraq logs, interactively:

17 October 2006 was a typical day in one of the bloodiest years of the Iraq conflict – 136 dead Iraqis, 10 dead Americans and hundreds of violent incidents. Watch the 24 hours of carnage unfold, log by log, minute by minute.

While Hugo Chavez shamefully embraces Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and utterly ignores Tehran’s horrific human rights record, Nasrin Alavi highlights the struggles inside Iran that deserve global support:

The Iranian state has to come to terms with the reality that, a generation after the revolution, no hardline Islamic student group is (or has been) able to gain control of any Iranian campus through free elections.

In the same week that Ahmadinejad was hailed as a hero of resistance in Lebanon, fellow inmates of the imprisoned human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, told of her nightly interrogation sessions and the screams that could be heard from her cell. We have also heard from the father of student Hamed Rouhinejad, who has related his desperate efforts to get guards at the same prison to take delivery of his son’s medication for multiple sclerosis, “begging them to keep it refrigerated so it doesn’t go off.”

When a loopy preacher in Florida threatened to burn the Koran, there were violent protests across the Arab world, but when pro-Ahmadinejad militia attacked the offices of Grand Ayatollah Saanei last June, leaving his books and tattered copies of the Koran in their wake, a deafening silence was heard from Iran’s neighbours. Had these events taken place in the occupied territories, I suspect the response would not have been so mute. Is this not the same gross hypocrisy and double standard that we in the region often accuse the west of?

Today Iranians who are standing up for their rights deserve to be acknowledged by their Arab neighbours. Their struggle is part of a long walk to freedom that began with the creation of the first elected parliament in the region in 1906. By 1911 authoritarian rule was implemented as Britain and imperial Russia strangled the early aspirations of Iranians for democratic change. A generation later, the democratically elected government of Mossadegh was finished off in a coup backed by Britain and the US.

Whether in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia or Iran, we are all familiar with pitiful old men who sit blaming and cursing the ghosts of a colonial past. These men are forever warning us of the enemies in the shadows who will conspire and thwart our every move.

But Iran is a country of the young, where two out of every three people you see on the streets are likely to be under 30. It is also the only country in the middle east where people can’t blame corruption, tyranny or even their daily hardship on their American-backed leaders.

We buried our colonial parents during the 1979 revolution. Today, the children of that revolution are banishing the ghosts that debilitated their forefathers by demanding that we hold ourselves accountable—both for our failures and for our successes.