Antony Loewenstein

Following my lead story in Crikey yesterday on the role of Australian troops in US-led assassination squads, the following responses appear today. For the record, a number of people have contacted me since publication and confirmed the allegations in the story. Much more in the coming years:

Neil James, Executive Director, Australia Defence Association: As the independent, non-partisan, national public-interest watchdog for defence and wider national security issues, can we point out that the article by Antony Loewenstein in yesterday’s Crikey suffered two substantial and serious flaws that surely should have been challenged and corrected during the Crikey editorial process. Or else the whole article should have been spiked as crap, not journalism, or even as reasonable comment in public debate.

First, the article was merely a mixture of undergraduate-level urban rumours, historical myth (especially about the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War) and left-wing conspiracy theory, flavoured by numerous factual mistakes, misrepresentations and misunderstandings about our defence force, its compliance with international law and, indeed, the way Australia actually works as a democracy ruled by law.

Even the two Australian sources cited, such as an equally fact-free, six-year old, long-discredited Brian Toohey article in the Australian Financial Review, and a more recent but also unbalanced and quite factually erroneous article by Sally Neighbour in The Monthly, provided no actual basis for the specific and general claims made. Journalists quoting other mistaken journalists is not substantiation.

Second, everyone is free to write such tripe but it was plainly very irresponsible of Crikey to publish it. Our soldiers are deployed in Afghanistan fighting a UN-endorsed war at the lawful direction of our elected government, and on our behalf. It is unfair at best for any Australian to make their job harder or more dangerous by writing or publishing biased nonsense that can be so easily misused in Al Qa’eda propaganda. There is no excuse to betray the men and women of our defence force by such stupid, thoughtless and irresponsible claims. If you disagree with the war in Afghanistan, argue with our government (using facts), not endanger our troops (by wild claims).

Let us also be clear here about what Crikey has boldly stated. “Crikey understands Australia has been engaged in such behaviour [alleged assassinations contrary to the Laws of Armed Conflict] in the past decade in the Middle East, leaving Canberra and its officials open to potential charges of war crimes and prosecution in an [sic] international criminal court”.

Previous Ministers for Defence and the current Chief of Defence Force have pointed out on several previous occasions — when journalists have made incorrect claims about “assassinations” — that the ADF, including its Special Forces, have not and do not ever assassinate anybody. They do not even deliberately kill anyone, except in battle, and where authorised by Australian rules-of-engagement grounded in the Laws of Armed Conflict and the ethics of a professional defence force made up of fellow Australians.

Similar denials have been made by Ministers responsible for ASIS. No journalist, or polemicist, has ever been able to back up such a claim with a single substantiated fact. Furthermore, as in this case, every journalist’s sole defence when challenged to prove it has been merely to cite older unsubstantiated claims by other unprofessional journalists or ideologues.

Then there is the determined lack of balance that permeated the article. The numerous denials by the Ministers and CDF are not even mentioned. No military or intelligence historian was cited either. The only two academic experts consulted, a defence finance expert and a lawyer who does not specialise in LOAC, naturally commented on a hypothetical basis only (and I suspect were not quoted accurately anyway). Both made the unsurprising qualified observation that, if true, such acts would be illegal.

Neither, however, offered any confirmation of the wild claims made or that they considered such claims might or could be true. Moreover, neither the ADA as the relevant public-interest watchdog, or the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers as the relevant professional body, were asked for an opinion. Antony has consulted us before so the omission this time is puzzling if one assumes he approached the topic objectively.

And just in case someone claims that the ADA is somehow biased, may I point out our extensive record of condemning the use of torture, rendition and assassination in the UN-endorsed international campaign against Islamist terrorism (usually referred to incorrectly by polemicists as the supposed “war on terror”).

Professor Douglas Kirsner, School of International & Political Studies, Deakin University, writes: Antony Loewenstein suspects that Australian SAS soldiers are committing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. His evidence: a six year old article by Brian Toohey claiming that Australian soldiers are being clandestinely trained in assassination preparations, and, Loewenstein says with no evidence, that it’s gone beyond that. He makes allusions to US Phoenix operation during Vietnam and to such operations being carried out currently by the US, through Wikileaks. So what has this to do with Australia?

The evidence is nothing but the usual Loewenstein conspiracy theory innuendo. “Unspoken and unasked”, Australian soldiers are involved in “preparations for assassinations”. When Crikey (i.e., Loewenstein) contacted national security reporters, they knew nothing about it. Sounds sinister? Sally Neighbour’s Monthly cover story mentioned little about illegal activities. (Still more sinister — what are they hiding?). Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Mark Thomson knew nothing about it and thought it a silly idea anyway. (It must be true then). Ben Saul from the University of Sydney knew nothing of any such activities of Alliance Base. (Therefore true) If it were true, then that would be bad, etc., etc.

There is a credibility gap here, but it lies with Loewenstein and Crikey. This appalling investigative journalism is not even fit for your rumour bin. Israel-obsessed Loewenstein has crossed the line with outrageous allegations about our defence forces, based only upon innuendo and far-left conspiracy theories.

Preview of John Pilger’s new film:

Zionist democracy in action:

Springwater continues to be vital to Palestinian farmers, but recently, at the settlers’ initiative, many springs on the other side of the Green Line have been turned into tourism sites from which the Palestinians are barred. Hebrew-language signs have been posted near many springs; some places have become memorial sites for settlers killed in terror attacks or during military service.

Brown signs dot Samaria’s roads bearing the Hebrew name of a nearby spring. This name is likely to appear on the Springs Route’s site list on a tourist map of local councils such as Mateh Binyamin in southern Samaria.

Near the settlement of Talmon, which can be entered through guarded gates, a sign points to a site called Tal Springs. While a reporter visited this site, a settler appeared with a herd of goats, claiming he was in charge of the area and every visit must be coordinated with him.

“Thanks to me you don’t see any Arabs here,” he said. At a nearby spring, which was added to the list of tourism sites, it was made clear that the area’s non-Jewish residents are not wanted. A large sign on a building nearby declares “Death to the Arabs.”

According to Dror Etkes, who has been researching construction in the settlements for several years, at least 25 springs are undergoing development for tourism. “Access to these springs has been blocked to the Palestinians, and there are dozens of other springs that the settlers have marked as targets for takeover,” he says.

I was again invited onto ABC TV News24′s The Drum last night (video here for two weeks and my previous appearance is here.) The guests were New South Wales Liberal politician Pru Goward and lobbyist Simon Banks.

We discussed a range of issues including the imposition of a detention centre in a small South Australian town (and people wonder why there’s resentment), the need to not privatise the national broadband network, and the Pope’s barely-there acknowledgment that condoms, sex and homosexuality actually exist.

Near the end of the show, during a debate about the role of the new federal parliament, I said; “wouldn’t it be great if journalists walked away from politicians who didn’t answer their questions [after asking them the same question a number of times]?” An empty studio, with the clock ticking, would certainly reveal to the public who is avoiding accountability.

Credit where it’s due. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post headlines this story, “‘War criminal’ gets a UN job’. It’s way to bash the UN but also reveals how Colombo feels completely protected within the international system. China protects her. Just like the US protects Israel. While civilians are being murdered:

Some startling facts:

- There are now more than 500 million active Facebook users, with 50% logging on to the site on any given day. Worldwide, users collectively spend 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook.

- Google’s email service Gmail ended July with 186 million worldwide users, a 22% increase from the same time a year ago. Both Microsoft’s Windows Hotmail (nearly 346 million users) and Yahoo’s email (303 million users) are larger, but aren’t growing as rapidly.

- As of September, Twitter, which launched in 2006, had 175 million registered users posting an estimated 95 million tweets each day.

- There are now more than five billion mobile phone connections worldwide. In many regions, penetration exceeds 100%, meaning more than one connection per person. Research earlier this year found that teenagers in American now use text as their main method of communication, with more than 30% of US teens sending more than 100 texts a day.

- More than 25% of the UK’s population – some 16 million people – accessed the internet from mobile phones in December 2009. Nearly half those total minutes online via mobile devices were spent at Facebook Mobile – 2.2bn minutes out of 4.8bn – with Google on 400m in a very distant second.

My following lead article appears in today’s edition of Crikey:

Elite Australian soldiers are involved in covert operations for the Americans in the “war on terror”, co-ordinated through the top-secret, Paris-based centre Alliance Base. There has been no public discussion about these missions, but Crikey understands the soldiers are involved in targeting, interrogation and assassinations in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Australians are recruited for the jobs, and nominally remain on the army’s books though they are not working for the Australian government while in the field. They don’t wear Australian uniforms but are trained and sometimes transported into war zones by American mercenary companies. Only men with SAS training or similar are eligible for the program and dozens not hundreds are reportedly involved.

Unspoken and unasked is the role of outsourced Australian soldiers in partly privatised missions for Washington.

During the Vietnam War, the Americans ran the Phoenix Program, covert assassination hit squads to kill supposed enemies. Tens of thousands were murdered. Recent WikiLeaks revelations detail similar activity in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Crikey understands Australia has been engaged in such behaviour in the past decade in the Middle East, leaving Canberra and its officials open to potential charges of war crimes and prosecution in an international criminal court. Several Australians engaged in the missions have concerns about the tasks, it’s understood, including the poor quality of intelligence provided to identity alleged insurgents to be captured for interrogation. For example, they are concerned that Afghans with a grudge are passing on suspect information to eradicate local enemies.

A 2004 article by Brian Toohey in The Australian Financial Review first raised the involvement of “Australian troops conducting clandestine operations in Iraq that go far beyond what has been revealed to the Australian public or the Labor opposition”. Toohey reported the CIA trained “Australian graduates” in “assassination techniques” but they “have not yet been asked to put it into practice, as far as can be ascertained”.

Crikey understands that this is no longer the case and that Australia has been involved in preparations for assassinations.

Toohey wrote that the covert teams work for very short periods of time, earn good money, take luxury breaks in Europe to unwind and remain based in a Gulf state. The program, initiated during the Howard years, has continued since the 2007 election of the Labor Party but it remains unclear which levels of government are briefed on the missions.

One source said that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) could be sometimes involved, as Howard government legislation allowed our foreign spy service to carry weapons, allegedly only in self-defence.

Crikey has spoken to several national security journalists in Australia and overseas and discovered that very few concrete details of the program are available.

The recent cover story in The Monthly by Sally Neighbour on the intelligence services in Australia barely mentioned the role of Australia’s overseas intelligence services. Although she documented the excessive secrecy (compared to the US) of intelligence and counter-terror operations, missions involving illegality — kidnapping, assassination, rendition, etc — weren’t touched on extensively.

Crikey asked the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Mark Thomson about these top-secret Australian jobs and he said he had never heard of them. If it was happening, he stated, it was a “bad idea” because he wondered which local and international laws covered the tasks. Furthermore, possible breaches of the Geneva Convention concerned him. “There would be serious questions over accountability,” Thomson stressed.

Alliance Base was first named publicly by Dana Priest in The Washington Post in 2005 and revealed the establishment in 2002 of a Western counter-terrorist intelligence centre (CTIC) in Paris. It is headed by a French general and largely funded by CIA’s counter-terrorist centre. It hosts and trains officers from France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Britain and the US and “analyses the transnational movement of terrorist suspects and develops operations to catch or spy on them”.

Alliance Base was chosen as a name because al-Qaeda means “the base” in Arabic.

Ben Saul, co-director at Sydney Centre for International Law at The University of Sydney, also hadn’t heard of Alliance Base but told Crikey that there were some serious legal questions over the missions. The actual role of the Australian government determines its responsibility before the law. For example, Saul told me, if the individual being targeted was part of a terrorist group and this intelligence was accurate, killing them could be justified.

However, the involvement of private companies in the tasks opens up further transparency questions. The mercenary company “must comply with the laws of armed conflict, international, humanitarian law and a process of post-facto investigation into any killings”.

Saul worried that Canberra was deliberately turning a blind eye to the more extreme actions of the US in war zones. “If Australia is a partner in the program, it ups the legal responsibility.”

The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill reported in late 2009 that private mercenary company Blackwater was working at “the centre of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.”

Scahill’s source claimed that the program is so “compartmentalised” that senior figures within the Obama Administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.

Crikey understands the situation could be similar in Australia with high levels of the Australian government and defence establishment willing to use private firms to undertake some of the most sensitive “counter-terrorism” tasks. Plausible deniability is the name of the game, leaving no direct Australian government-backed fingerprints on actions that international law deems illegal.

The relationship between governments and private military contractors is massively expanding under the Obama administration. According to the essential “War is Business” blog:

“At the start of the Iraq invasion, the US military spent twice as much on its own personnel as it did on procurement from private sources. Within a few years’ time, the military was spending three times as much on outside contractors as on its own men and women in uniform.”

Australia’s bid to ingratiate itself with Washington was on display during the recent visit of Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, with the South Australian government lobbying for more training facilities on its soil. The Gillard government pledged to open the country to even more US military hardware and opportunities and Gillard spoke of an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan.

Fairfax recently exposed Australian training of Afghan warlords here in Australia despite independent reporting that indicates a surging Taliban across the country, and it’s being reported today that Australian-owned security company Compass Integrated Security Solutions has been accused of abuses in Afghanistan — including theft and corruption — by the US Senate’s Committee on Armed Services.

*Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution and is working on a book about disaster capitalism.

As the drums of war continue to beat, just who is really telling the truth about the Islamic Republic?

Since 2007, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – with the support of the United States, Israel and European allies UK, France and Germany – has been demanding that Iran explain a set of purported internal documents portraying a covert Iranian military program of research and development of nuclear weapons. The “laptop documents,” supposedly obtained from a stolen Iranian computer by an unknown source and given to US intelligence in 2004, include a series of drawings of a missile re-entry vehicle that appears to be an effort to accommodate a nuclear weapon, as well as reports on high explosives testing for what appeared to be a detonator for a nuclear weapon.

In one report after another, the IAEA has suggested that Iran has failed to cooperate with its inquiry into that alleged research, and that the agency, therefore, cannot verify that it has not diverted nuclear material to military purposes.

That issue remains central to US policy toward Iran. The Obama administration says there can be no diplomatic negotiations with Iran unless Iran satisfies the IAEA fully in regard to the allegations derived from the documents that it had covert nuclear weapons program.

That position is based on the premise that the intelligence documents that Iran has been asked to explain are genuine. The evidence now available, however, indicates that they are fabrications.

The drawings of the Iranian missile warhead that were said by the IAEA to show an intent to accommodate a nuclear weapon actually depict a missile design that Iran is now known to have already abandoned in favor of an improved model by the time the technical drawings were allegedly made. And one of the major components of the purported Iranian military research program allegedly included a project labeled with a number that turns out to have been assigned by Iran’s civilian nuclear authority years before the covert program is said to have been initiated.

The former head of the agency’s safeguards department, Olli Heinonen, who shaped its approach to the issue of the intelligence documents from 2005 and 2010, has offered no real explanation for these anomalies in recent interviews with Truthout.

These telltale indicators of fraud bring into question the central pillar of the case against Iran and raise more fundamental questions about the handling of the Iranian nuclear issue by the IAEA, the United States and its key European allies.

Food security and the selling off of Australia’s farmland to the highest bidder is finally starting to get some mainstream media attention:

Much of the dairying industry, from farm gate to supermarket shelves, was carved up by Japan, Europe and New Zealand over the previous decade. It all suggests that other countries are far more aware than Australia that food production, and the companies that support it, will become more valuable this century and beyond – especially in a world where population pressure and environmental degradation issues will make them more scarce.

”Food security” – a phrase rarely heard half a decade ago – is becoming a public issue. Politicians are scrambling to formulate policies, suggesting that their polling and talkback radio are reflecting public concerns.

Gingered by the Greens senator, Christine Milne, in the election campaign, the Labor minority government promised a National Food Plan ”from paddock to plate”, formally committing to it in the contract to secure government that the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, signed with the independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor.

Blindly accepting “free trade” as the solution to all our problems is a fool’s game. And yet politicians on both major sides of politics bow to the religion of privatisation. We are starting to pay the price.

Didi Remez writes in Israel that some in the local press are capable of detailing the shameless spin of the Netanyahu regime.

In the Diaspora, meanwhile, Israel is a holy state that only strives for peace on a daily basis.

Key Australian opposition figure George Brandis proudly stated on Friday on ABC TV that his side’s 12 years of power led to this:

What we were doing in Government was we were privatising Government businesses. We weren’t creating new Government monopolies.

The massive growth in private mercenary companies since 9/11 is exposed with yet another investigation. But the end result? More outsourcing to unaccountable companies who are desperate for wars to continue and expand. Killing is a good business:

An Australian-owned security company has been accused of a litany of abuses in Afghanistan – including theft and corruption – by a powerful US Senate committee.

The company, Compass Integrated Security Solutions, which is owned by the son of a former Australian cricketer, has been accused of undermining the international effort in the country while earning millions of dollars.

The accusations are found in the October report on private security contractors in Afghanistan by the US Senate’s Committee on Armed Services.

Specifically, Compass has been accused of:

- Paying Afghan generals and police commanders to source serving soldiers and police for its private security units in contravention of various policies.

- Hiring guards, arming them and sending them out on jobs without any training, in breach of its own policies.

- Failing to discipline its employees when they robbed service stations, sold Compass ammunition on the black market and threatened to attack a Compass camp after being criticised.

Liberal senator Russell Trood said the behaviour of the company, which has held contracts with the Australian Defence Department, is yet another example of the lack of regulation relating to private military companies.

”These contractors are a phenomenon which has grown exponentially over the last decade, and has become such a widespread practice that our procedures of oversight haven’t really caught up,” he said.

The company is owned by Australian Peter McCosker. He is the son of Australian cricketer Rick McCosker, famous for continuing to play during a 1977 Test match despite having his jaw broken.

Compass, based in Dubai, has been in operation for five years and employs more than 2300 security guards in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Like many other private military and security companies, it has an opaque structure and is also known as Compass Security, Compass Service Solutions and Compass Limited Iraq. One of its major contracts was with a food and fuel supplier to the international forces in Afghanistan, the Supreme Group.