Antony Loewenstein

The actions of an apartheid state with the full backing of the so-called civilised world:

Israeli policies in the West Bank harshly discriminate against Palestinian residents, depriving them of basic necessities while providing lavish amenities for Jewish settlements, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The report identifies discriminatory practices that have no legitimate security or other justification and calls on Israel, in addition to abiding by its international legal obligation to withdraw the settlements, to end these violations of Palestinians’ rights.

The 166-page report, “Separate and Unequal: Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” shows that Israel operates a two-tier system for the two populations of the West Bank in the large areas where it exercises exclusive control. The report is based on case studies comparing Israel’s starkly different treatment of settlements and next-door Palestinian communities in these areas. It calls on the US and EU member states and on businesses with operations in settlement areas to avoid supporting Israeli settlement policies that are inherently discriminatory and that violate international law.

“Palestinians face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits,” said Carroll Bogert, deputy executive director for external relations at Human Rights Watch. “While Israeli settlements flourish, Palestinians under Israeli control live in a time warp – not just separate, not just unequal, but sometimes even pushed off their lands and out of their homes.”

The massive expansion of a privatised and largely secret world is enveloping the West. Take military contracting and detention centres as two key examples.

This recent feature in the Sydney Morning Herald highlights the foul stench of unaccountable thugs outsourced by the state in China:

…In Tangshan city, a middle-class woman called Liu Yuhong told us how she had travelled to Beijing during the tense occasion of last year’s 60th anniversary National Day military parade. She had wanted to lodge a “petition”, or official complaint, seeking to learn the whereabouts of her parents who were being held in a labour camp (they had been detained for “petitioning” over a trivial property dispute).

Liu was taken by police, handed to private security operatives and dumped in an exposed row of bare concrete cells, where she was starved of food and water for five days. Liu’s face was beaten until the walls were speckled red and she was force-fed an unknown fluid until she vomited. She later miscarried on a concrete prison floor.

Liu’s case is gruesome but not unique. The extra-legal kidnapping of petitioners, subjecting them to abusive treatment and storing them in “black jails” is now commonplace. In fact, it is one of China’s fastest-growing industries. One private security company, Andingyuan, employed 3000 people to kidnap petitioners in Beijing on behalf of local governments, in daylight, until it was shut down two months ago.

A wonderful piece by John Naughton in the Guardian from early December that perfectly captures this Wikileaks moment:

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, “Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure.” What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.

Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.

But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won’t work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.

A reader sent me this disturbing move from the US Senate to supposedly protect whistle-blowers but in fact is the complete opposite. Wikileaks is causing worries across the political establishment:

On December 10, 2010, the Senate passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (S. 372) by unanimous consent. After a careful review of S. 372, the National Whistleblowers Center, the Federal Ethics Center, and the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition strongly recommend that the bill not be approved in its current form.  We urge the House of Representatives to fix the bill and send it back to the Senate for final approval.  Here is why the bill must be fixed:

1. New Summary Dismissal Authority.  The bill gives the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) sweeping new powers to dismiss whistleblower claims without a hearing.  The MSPB Administrative Judges will now be able to dismiss WPA claims without a hearing, based solely on affidavits filed by executive agencies.  If whistleblowers did not conduct extensive and expensive pre-trial depositions, they will be unable to rebut these affidavits, and their cases will be dismissed.  Even if the whistleblower is able to afford the significant additional fees and costs caused by the new summary dismissal proceedings, based on the track record of the AJs, the vast majority of cases will be summarily dismissed based on agency affidavits.  The opportunity to create a record at a hearing, or use the pre-hearing process as an opportunity to reach a settlement, will be lost.  This is a significant rollback of current rights that will make it more costly and more difficult for whistleblowers to prevail in any actions, despite any of the other reforms contained in the legislation.

Significantly, in one of the handful of positive Federal Circuit decisions, that Court has rejected numerous requests from the executive branch that the authority to dismiss cases summarily be judicially created.  The Court recognized that in 1978, when the Civil Service Reform Act was originally passed, this was a big issue and was hotly contested.  The whistleblowers prevailed at that time.  It would be a shame to lose that hard earned victory in an “Enhancement” act.

The Wikileaks news that really matters (and yet more evidence that the UN is far too keen to protect dictators rather than prosecute them):

The head of the United Nations offered Robert Mugabe a lucrative retirement package in an overseas haven if he stood down as Zimbabwe‘s president, according to claims quoted in leaked diplomatic cables.

The extraordinary offer was allegedly made by Kofi Annan, who was then the UN secretary general, at the millennium summit of world leaders in New York, according to a memo drawn up by American officials which was obtained by the WikiLeaks website.

The memo, written in September 2000, records a meeting between a US embassy official in Harare and a senior source in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the party opposed to Mugabe’s Zanu-PF.

According to the MDC source, whose name the Observer has redacted, “Kofi Annan, in the recent meeting in New York during the millennium summit offered Mugabe a deal to step down. Although [the MDC source] said the MDC was not privy to the details, he surmised that Annan’s supposed deal probably included provision of safe haven and a financial package from Libyan president [Gaddafi]. The opposition party heard that Mugabe turned down the offer the following day after discussing it with the first lady.”

The offer, which many Zimbabwean experts may simply dismiss as wishful thinking on the part of a frustrated MDC, was not the only one rumoured to have been made to Mugabe at that time. The cable reveals that Zanu-PF itself had put out “feelers” to see whether the MDC would be willing to allow Mugabe a “graceful exit” that was “in Zimbabwe’s national interest”.

So the Guardian has smeared Julian Assange with sexual allegations and the focus has inevitably shifted from what Wikileaks is doing to what Assange may have done:

As fresh snow erases the traces of Friday’s scrum of camera crews from the elegant lawns of a Georgian mansion in East Anglia, inside Ellingham Hall Julian Assange is considering his next move.

Transformed from cyber celebrity into household name, Assange – the man who kicked a diplomatic hornet’s nest across the globe – is carrying an extraordinary weight of controversy and opprobrium on his narrow shoulders.

Assange faces a whole new debate this weekend over his personal conduct, after the allegations made by two women in Sweden, who accuse him of sexual misconduct and rape, were published in their fullest form in the Guardian. An increasingly diverse cast of characters are forming unlikely coalitions over the case across ideological divides.

The accounts of the two women have led Stockholm authorities to request the extradition of Assange so that he can be questioned by a prosecutor. That request led to Assange spending nine days on remand in Wandsworth prison – a controversial decision by the courts, which was overturned on Tuesday when he was given £240,000 bail. He was released on Thursday after the high court dismissed an appeal from prosecutors against the bail decision.

A condition of his bail was that he reside at Ellingham Hall, the estate of former British Army officer and journalist Vaughan Smith, who offered bed and board as “an act of principle”.

Dismissed by his supporters as a smear campaign, the case against Assange now threatens to move from a sideshow to overwhelm the main act – the work he has done in his public life as editor of WikiLeaks. In part, Assange, 39, who has become a figurehead for whistleblowers, can blame this on supporters who have pressed accolades on the man rather than the cause, and who range from left wing historians, feminists and human rights campaigners to misogynist right wing bloggers and a porn baron.

Today Larry Flynt, the founder of American sex magazine Hustler, announced that he would give $50,000 (£32,000) to the Assange defence fund, calling him a “hero” who deserved a “ticker-tape parade”. Flynt’s support was not for WikiLeaks itself, but because he thought the rape charges a nonsense.

Assange has been called “the new Jason Bourne” by Jemima Khan, the “Ned Kelly of the Cyber Age” by members of the press in his native Australia and a libertine 007 by those who note his fondness for martinis.

On the other side, Republican US senators have lined up behind the Democrat secretary of state Hillary Clinton to condemn him. Sarah Palin claims that he is “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” that America should pursue “with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders.” George Packer of the New Yorker magazine, called Assange “megalomaniacal” and Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens called him “a middle man and peddler who resents the civilisation that nurtured him”. There have been disturbing calls from both Republicans and Democrats for him to be assassinated.

Smith agreed there was a “risk” of the allegations against Assange overshadowing WikiLeaks’ revelations. “When a friend of mine looks me in the eye and tells me they are not guilty I tend to believe them,” he said. “One has to remember that conviction rates are amazingly low, and I suppose if one had to stand back away from this – and I say this without trying to diminish claims of any form of crime of this nature – but if one takes enough distance one might observe that perhaps it is something of a distraction,” he told the Observer. “When, as I believe, he is determined to be innocent one might look on this and ask: was this in the interests of it all?”

…

But after Assange’s period in jail last week, the focus was switching. In today’s Guardian editorial, the newspaper explained why it had chosen to publish the sexual misconduct allegations in detail: “It is unusual for a sex-offence case to be presented outside of the judicial process in such a manner, but then it is unheard of for a defendant, his legal team and supporters to so vehemently and publicly attack women at the heart of a rape case.”

The paper is reflecting a growing discomfort among many, in both camps, at the widespread vilification – and naming – of the two alleged victims on websites and blogs, and also of the kind of language being used by people including Assange’s own lawyer Mark Stephens who referred to the allegation as a “honeytrap” .

“I have never heard the like. Legal representatives do not and should not stand on the steps outside a court of law and make such comments about their clients, it is neither right nor fitting,” said one outraged barrister. “It is certainly in my view deeply unprofessional.”

It’s understood that several high- profile Assange supporters have been shown what they understand to be translations of texts and emails to help persuade them Assange is not guilty of rape.

Human rights campaigner Bianca Jagger has directed her Twitter followers to a blog suggesting that one of the women had links to an anti-Castro Cuban group. She insisted to the Observer that she had been in court and taken great care over her analysis of the charges, and believed in Assange’s innocence. Michael Moore, the US film-maker, has suggested Sweden does not always pursue rape allegations. He has offered money towards the bail surety. Others have been suggesting that Assange has fallen foul to a pact between jealous female groupies. A range of deeply misogynistic blog posts have blamed “feminists”, despite insistence from people close to Assange that there is no conspiracy.

A new campaign called “talkaboutit” has been started online by Swedish women to defend the accusers from the extraordinary verbal attacks being made after Johanna Palmstom, of the Swedish thinktank Lacrimosa, wrote passionately this week in favour of justice being seen to take its course. But many young activists in the UK see a conspiracy with the power of the US at its heart.

Jim Cranshaw, 29, a campaigner with the UK Uncuts movement said that a commonly held view among young activists was that the allegations against Assange amounted to a witchhunt by the US. “The majority of my peers are deeply sceptical about the whole process. He is wanted by the most powerful country in the world and the timing of the allegations, the extradition attempts, it all seems too convenient.

John Pilger writes in the Independent that the entire process is flawed:

I don’t regard the Guardian article as revelatory but as more of what we know, plus scuttlebut. There are serious omissions. The impression is given that Julian Assange refused to attend a meeting with the Swedish director of prosecutions on 14 October. This is false. Assange offered to attend on the 15th and 16th. When these days weren’t suitable, he offered a complete week instead.

What happened in Sweden was a public smear, and trial by Swedish tabloid media. The chief prosecutor, Eva Fine, understood this. After making her own inquiries, she cancelled the arrest warrant. “Julian Assange is not suspected of rape,” she said. It was only the intervention of a leading political figure, Claes Borgstrom, that reactivated the case.

Palestinian feminist Asma Al-Ghoul pushes for secularism in Islamic Gaza.

It’s vital that growing Islamisation under Hamas is challenged:

Recently Asma garnered media attention for two incidents with the Hamas police. In the summer of 2009, she walked on a public Gaza beach with a mixed gender group, and visited a former male colleague and his family at a beachside villa. Asma and her friends were interrogated by Hamas moral police, and the men were forced to sign papers promising not repeat their “inappropriate” interactions with women. Asma later received anonymous death threats and was followed and closely monitored by police.

But there are glints of hope for secularists in Gaza. This August, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Asma and three foreign activist friends biked up the Gaza coastline in defiance of a Hamas ban on female bicycle-riding. To Asma’s delighted surprise, local Hamas police officers pursued two motorcyclists who had followed and harassed her. And she found that most civilians “were shocked in a funny way. They said, ‘Let’s go! Bravo!’ They asked, ‘Are you fasting [for Ramadan]?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m fasting!’”

Asma’s biking adventure led her to conclude that the discriminatory laws against women are “flexible.” She now believes that Hamas is “between two fires—how to keep civil society satisfied, and how to satisfy extreme groups.”

Wikileaks has made a call for similar websites to spring up and pry open the workings of nations.

The call is being answered.

An open letter published in the UK Guardian this week:

We are writing this statement in support of democracy.

Since Sunday, 28 November, WikiLeaks and five major newspapers from around the world (the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais) have been publishing redacted versions of leaked US diplomatic cables in an ongoing story that has become known as “Cablegate”. The identity of the original leaker is – as yet – unconfirmed.

This is not the first leak of confidential documentation that exposes governmental lies – and it won’t be the last. Secret information has long been used by elites to build and maintain power over huge populations of citizens, workers, armed forces and others. But when the secrets of the elite are revealed, the power they represent can be confronted and reversed.

Nor is this the first time that state (and other) forces of power have acted to prevent dissemination of information on the internet – and it won’t be the last.

Sites have been removed by their hosting companies, servers seized by police or other governmental authorities, take-down requests issued under the rule of law: none of these prevented information spreading.

But the issues run deeper than this. As former US president Thomas Jefferson once stated, “information is the currency of democracy”. Democracy – the rule of the people – as currently understood and practiced is, and has long been, severely restricted.

Power is abused in our name by governments and transnational corporations around the world: they fight illegal wars; abuse and kill people; pillage property and planet. The powerful accumulate wealth and force the majority – the rest of us – to pay for it: with our health, our freedom, our time, our money and with our lives. For a long time, we have been deceived about the reasons for this: it is our right for the truth to be known. Without that right, democracy cannot and does not exist. The current assault on WikiLeaks is yet another instance of democracy-hating by elites.

Now, we find we are witnessing a new level of info-struggle. We are witnessing how the emperor wears no clothes. We can see the lies made bare, we can see the posturing and propositioning that our governments participate in. We can see the collusion that occurs with transnational corporations and with global media giants. WikiLeaks and others are battling against powerful institutions bent on curtailing our knowledge of and influence over policies and structures that impact our lives: they are information heroes, not information villains. We see all this being done in our name, and we condemn it.

Thus, we pledge to not simply bear witness but to actively participate in this fight – for freedom of speech, for real democracy and for justice. We know this is only the beginning: de-masking the puppeteers facilitates action towards fairer and more just societies. We demand that the truth be heard. We stand at the doorway to a new, just and democratic world: a doorway we pledge to keep open and to march through. We stand with all the inhabitants of this world who are affected daily by governments that oppress the right to free speech and obstruct the path to true democracy.

Signed:

Andrei Morgan

Michael Albert

Jamie McClelland

Daniel Kahn Gillmor

Tachanka! collective

London Indymedia

John Pilger

Donnacha Delong, vice-president, National Union of Journalists

Yvonne Ridley, founder, Women In Journalism

Hessom Razavi

Mike Holderness, freelance journalist

Pennie Quinton, freelance journalist and human rights campaigner

May First/People Link

Phil Edwards

Sheffield Indymedia

Chris Grollman

Chris Anderson

David Graeber, reader in social anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Toile-Libre

Plentyfact collective

Koumbit Worker’s Committee

Sasha Costanza-Chock, fellow, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, Harvard University

Oh thank you, Bill McGowan:

It’s one thing for journalists to challenge the government, to serve as a check on its power. It’s another to assume a knee-jerk oppositionalism that’s out of touch with the middle register of the country and with wartime exigencies. Far from being rooted in responsibility and idealism about how our democracy functions, the cablegate stories are the rotten fruit of a punitive liberalism that takes the U.S. government to be so inherently evil that only the Fourth Estate, led by The Times and the odious Assange, can rectify the nation’s sins.

Yesterday, Bill Keller distanced himself from Assange, declaring at a Harvard forum that he didn’t see Assange as a“kindred spirit.”

Yet as the old saw goes, sleep with dogs and you wake up with fleas. Unlike Manning and Assange, it’s unlikely that The Times will stand in any court docket over this episode, but when one or both do, The Times will be standing next to them, morally at least.

These stories, via Wikileaks, if true are rather curious for a few key players. Western states are proven once again to largely ignore human rights (money is the key factor). And Michael Moore, for a film that certainly glorified the Cuban health system, is looking a little sheepish.

One:

Australia, Canada and several European countries have stopped pressuring Cuba over human rights in the hope of winning commercial favours from Havana, according to confidential US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

The western governments continued to pay lip service to concerns about political prisoners and censorship, but in reality were appeasing the island’s communist rulers, said Jonathan Farrar, the US head of mission.

The diplomat made scathing remarks about his colleagues shunning democracy activists, “kowtowing” to the Castro regime and joining what he scornfully termed the “best friends forever” camp.

“The Cuban government has been able to stonewall its independent civil society from foreign visitors who have, for the large part, been all too ready to give in to Cuban bullying and give up on these encounters,” Farrar said.

He named and shamed the countries Washington considers offenders in its battle, started half a century ago by JFK, to keep an international squeeze on the island.

“The Australian foreign minister, Switzerland‘s human rights special envoy and the Canadian cabinet level minister of the Americas not only failed to meet with non-government Cubans, they didn’t even bother to publicly call for more freedoms after visiting Cuba in November,” Farrar wrote.

Two:

Cuba banned Michael Moore‘s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana.

The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.

But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so “disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room”.

Castro’s government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it “knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.”

Sicko investigated healthcare in the US by comparing the for-profit, non-universal US system with the non-profit universal health care systems of other countries, including Cuba, France and the UK.

UPDATE: Actually, writes Mike Moore, Sicko was never banned in Cuba and this proves how unreliable US diplomats can be.