Antony Loewenstein

How very revealing. Here’s New York Times editor Bill Keller in a long essay for a forthcoming Times book, “Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Expanded Coverage from The New York Times“, talking about his paper’s view on Wikileaks. Apart from the almost obligatory slamming of founder Julian Assange, Keller explains the relationship with the White House and how much he loves America:

The first articles in the project, which we called the War Logs, were scheduled to go up on the Web sites of The Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel on Sunday, July 25. We approached the White House days before that to get its reaction to the huge breach of secrecy as well as to specific articles we planned to write — including a major one about Pakistan’s ambiguous role as an American ally. On July 24, the day before the War Logs went live, I attended a farewell party for Roger Cohen, a columnist for The Times and The International Herald Tribune, that was given by Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A voracious consumer of inside information, Holbrooke had a decent idea of what was coming, and he pulled me away from the crowd to show me the fusillade of cabinet-level e-mail ricocheting through his BlackBerry, thus demonstrating both the frantic anxiety in the administration and, not incidentally, the fact that he was very much in the loop. The Pakistan article, in particular, would complicate his life. But one of Holbrooke’s many gifts was his ability to make pretty good lemonade out of the bitterest lemons; he was already spinning the reports of Pakistani duplicity as leverage he could use to pull the Pakistanis back into closer alignment with American interests. Five months later, when Holbrooke — just 69, and seemingly indestructible — died of a torn aorta, I remembered that evening. And what I remembered best was that he was as excited to be on the cusp of a big story as I was.

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Because of the range of the material and the very nature of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the War Logs. Dean Baquet, our Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on Nov. 19. The following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.

The meeting was off the record, but it is fair to say the mood was tense. Scott Shane, one reporter who participated in the meeting, described “an undertone of suppressed outrage and frustration.”

Subsequent meetings, which soon gave way to daily conference calls, were more businesslike. Before each discussion, our Washington bureau sent over a batch of specific cables that we intended to use in the coming days. They were circulated to regional specialists, who funneled their reactions to a small group at State, who came to our daily conversations with a list of priorities and arguments to back them up. We relayed the government’s concerns, and our own decisions regarding them, to the other news outlets.

The administration’s concerns generally fell into three categories. First was the importance of protecting individuals who had spoken candidly to American diplomats in oppressive countries. We almost always agreed on those and were grateful to the government for pointing out some we overlooked.

“We were all aware of dire stakes for some of the people named in the cables if we failed to obscure their identities,” Shane wrote to me later, recalling the nature of the meetings. Like many of us, Shane has worked in countries where dissent can mean prison or worse. “That sometimes meant not just removing the name but also references to institutions that might give a clue to an identity and sometimes even the dates of conversations, which might be compared with surveillance tapes of an American Embassy to reveal who was visiting the diplomats that day.”

The second category included sensitive American programs, usually related to intelligence. We agreed to withhold some of this information, like a cable describing an intelligence-sharing program that took years to arrange and might be lost if exposed. In other cases, we went away convinced that publication would cause some embarrassment but no real harm.

The third category consisted of cables that disclosed candid comments by and about foreign officials, including heads of state. The State Department feared publication would strain relations with those countries. We were mostly unconvinced.

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Although it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news, our attitude toward these issues is far from indifferent. The journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target, and in the wake of 9/11 our journalists plunged into the ruins to tell the story of what happened here. Moreover, The Times has nine staff correspondents assigned to the two wars still being waged in the wake of that attack, plus a rotating cast of photographers, visiting writers and scores of local stringers and support staff. They work in this high-risk environment because, while there are many places you can go for opinions about the war, there are few places — and fewer by the day — where you can go to find honest, on-the-scene reporting about what is happening. We take extraordinary precautions to keep them safe, but we have had two of our Iraqi journalists murdered for doing their jobs. We have had four journalists held hostage by the Taliban — two of them for seven months. We had one Afghan journalist killed in a rescue attempt. Last October, while I was in Kabul, we got word that a photographer embedded for us with troops near Kandahar stepped on an improvised mine and lost both his legs.

We are invested in the struggle against murderous extremism in another sense. The virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings but also at our values and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

So we have no doubts about where our sympathies lie in this clash of values. And yet we cannot let those sympathies transform us into propagandists, even for a system we respect.

Following the ever-growing traction of the recent Reporters Without Borders statement outlining the human rights abuses in Sri Lanka and the Galle Literary Festival’s response to it, journalist Eric Ellis sent me two of his articles (one from 2005 and the other from 2006) that show how the organisers have a history of courting the elites at the expense of serious human rights understanding.

Cultural events don’t exist in a vacuum.

It’s healthy that a major literary figure is made to consider his involvement in an Israeli event. Visiting the Zionist state isn’t simply just another place; it’s a nation that is institutionally desperate not to talk about its occupation:

Ian McEwan has replied to pro-Palestinian writers who have accused him of accepting the “corrupt and cynical” Jerusalem prize for literature by insisting on his right to engage in dialogue with Israelis across the region’s political divide.

The novelist has said he will accept the prize – awarded to authors for their exploration of individual freedom in society – at next month’s Jerusalem book fair, as it is a literary, and not a political award and has said that he opposes both illegal Israeli settlements and Hamas terrorism.

In a letter to the Guardian on Monday, 20 signatories from a group called British Writers in Support of Palestine, including the novelist and critic John Berger and poets Naomi Foyle and Judith Kazantzis, urged him to boycott the award as they see it as “a cruel joke and a propaganda tool for the Israeli state”, adding: “McEwan believes that the Jerusalem book fair which awards the prize represents a blameless civil society. In fact [it] is organised by the … municipality, a key institution of the Israeli state and a major instrument in the illegal colonisation of East Jerusalem”.

In his response, published in tomorrow’s paper, McEwan, author of books including Atonement and Enduring Love, says: “You and I disagree on what one should do. I’m for finding out for myself, and for dialogue, engagement, and looking for ways in which literature, especially fiction, with its impulse to enter other minds, can reach across political divides.

“There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics and for me the emblem in this respect is Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra [a collection of musicians from across the Middle East] – surely a beam of hope in a dark landscape, though denigrated by the Israeli religious right and Hamas. If your organisation is against this particular project, then clearly we have nothing more to say to each other.”

He added: “As for the Jerusalem prize itself, its list of previous recipients is eloquent enough. Bertrand Russell, Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag, Arthur Miller, Simone de Beauvoir – I hope you will have the humility to accept that these writers had at least as much concern for freedom and human dignity as you do yourselves. Your ‘line’ is not the only one. Courtesy obliges you to respect my decision, as I would yours to stay away.”

The fact that this story appears in Australia’s leading Murdoch broadsheet is encouraging. Anything from Israel must be clearly marked as such. Why shouldn’t it be? Consumers should know that Israeli products face a global boycott campaign.

The NSW government has warned Coles to stop labelling imported fruit as Australian produce, amid suggestions the food giant is branding Israeli fruit as local to avoid a consumer boycott.

Primary Industries Minister Steve Whan said yesterday the NSW Food Authority had “recently been made aware of breaches in relation to the country of origin labelling of unpackaged fresh produce in a small number of food retail businesses”.

“In keeping with the authority’s graduated enforcement policy, a warning letter was issued to the offending businesses; we are continuing to monitor the situation and in the event further breaches are found these businesses risk further enforcement action,” Mr Whan said.

“Labelling imported food as Australian is up there with one of the most un-Australian things you can do.”

Although Mr Whan did not identify the retailers concerned, Coles spokesman Jim Cooper yesterday confirmed Coles was one of those to have been contacted by the Food Authority. “We are currently following up the queries and will respond to the Food Authority in due course,” Mr Cooper said.

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The government crackdown comes after a Sydney City councillor, Irene Doutney, and individual consumers reported on extensive evidence that Coles was mislabelling fruit.

Ms Doutney said that at Coles Broadway, “Fruit such as Jaffa red grapefruit, which other shops have correctly labelled ‘product of Israel’, is being labelled as a ‘product of Australia’.”

Mr Cooper said activists with a “pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli” bent had tried to apply pressure on Coles over its purchase of Israeli products.

But he insisted: “Any allegation that fruit is being deliberately mislabelled to avoid action from pressure groups on political matters is ridiculous.”

When we released this statement over Sri Lanka recently, I would never have imagined its global impact.

What does it show? That a strongly-worded statement can have an effect and raise uncomfortable and necessary questions for an event that is far too keen to avoid the realities in dictatorship Sri Lanka.

The latest:

South African award-winning novelist and playwright Damon Galgut has boycotted a literary festival in Sri Lanka because of concerns over the country’s rights record, organisers said Thursday.

Galgut, a winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2003 for “The Good Doctor”, set in post-apartheid South Africa, declined to take part in the Galle Literary Festival despite arriving in Sri Lanka this week, organisers said.

“We are sorry to announce that Damon Galgut has decided to lend his support to the ongoing international campaign by rights activists to highlight shortfalls in human rights here,” Shyam Selvadurai, the festival curator said.

“It’s an unfortunate situation for us that Damon heeded this ridiculous campaign,” Selvadurai told reporters. “But the festival will go on, with over 60 writers participating.”

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and a Sri Lankan right group last week asked foreign writers to boycott the five-day Galle festival because of alleged rights abuses in Sri Lanka.

Galgut, whose latest novel, “In a Strange Room,” is shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, was not immediately available for comment.

RSF said Wednesday that “hundreds” of Internet users had signed a boycott petition led by Noam Chomsky, Arundathi Roy, Ken Loach, Antony Loewenstein, Tariq Ali, Dave Rampton and R Cheran.

Nobel laureate Turkish-born Orhan Pamuk and his partner, fellow writer Kiran Desai, last week pulled out of the festival.

Pamuk’s agent in India declined to give a reason while festival organisers said their absence was unrelated to the RSF campaign.

Pamuk, author of “Snow” and “The Black Book,” attended the Jaipur Literary Festival in India last week.

Despite the international campaign, hundreds of local and foreign book lovers flocked to the festival that is held inside a colonial-era sea-front fort in Galle, 72 miles (115 kilometres) south of Colombo.

Just how keen is the Australian government to send back hapless refugees to a rogue and illegitimate regime that can’t even maintain security in the capital?

A plan to automatically deport failed Afghan asylum seekers from Australia has been condemned by a coalition of organisations and prominent experts.

The Australian government reached an agreement with Afghan authorities in mid-January under which failed asylum seekers will be sent directly back to the war-torn country.

Australian Immigration Minister Chris Bowen hailed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which formalised the pact as a major breakthrough in tightening Australia’s borders against people smugglers and non-refugees.

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United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Regional Representative Richard Towle was also a signatory on the deal.

But the move has been strongly criticised, with leading Australia-based social-justice group, the Edmund Rice Centre, saying there is no reason to believe returned Afghans will be safe.

“Over the past eight years, the Edmund Rice Centre’s research into Australia’s deportations has found that returning asylum seekers to Afghanistan has produced direct and fatal consequences,” the organisation said in a statement on Thursday.

It said the consequences had been felt by the returned asylum seekers themselves and their immediate families.

“Many others have suffered threats and attacks, and today live with the well-founded fear of the very persecution they sought to escape.

“Many Afghan asylum seekers in Australia are members of the Hazara ethnic minority – objects of discrimination and persecution in Afghanistan for decades.

“There is no reason to believe that the ethnic and sectarian factors, fuelling hostility towards them, have dissipated.”

The statement issued by the Edmund Rice Centre was signed by 42 organisations including the Refugee Council of Australia and the Uniting Church in Australia.

More than 14 prominent experts in the fields of social justice, religion and health have also added their names to the statement.

It just gets worse and worse. But really, what can be expected when one side of a conflict is funded, armed and backed by the occupier?

One:

British intelligence helped draw up a secret plan for a wide-ranging crackdown on the Islamist movement Hamas which became a security blueprint for the Palestinian Authority, leaked documents reveal. The plan asked for the internment of leaders and activists, the closure of radio stations and the replacement of imams in mosques.

The disclosure of the British plan, drawn up by the intelligence service in conjunction with Whitehall officials in 2004, and passed by a Jerusalem-based MI6 officer to the senior PA security official at the time, Jibril Rajoub, is contained in the cache of confidential documents obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared with the Guardian. The documents also highlight the intimate level of military and security cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli forces.

The bulk of the British plan has since been carried out by the West Bank-based PA security apparatus which is increasingly criticised for authoritarian rule and human rights abuses, including detention without trial and torture.

The British documents, which have been independently authenticated by the Guardian, included detailed proposals for a security taskforce based on the UK’s “trusted” Palestinian Authority contacts, outside the control of “traditional security chiefs”, with “direct lines” to Israel intelligence.

It lists suicide bombers and rockets as issues that need urgent attention.

Two:

Tony Blair, envoy of the Middle East quartet, was attacked by Palestinian officials for being biased in favour of Israeli security needs and seeming “to advocate an apartheid-like approach to dealing with the occupied West Bank”, the Palestine papers reveal.

The former prime minister, appointed to the job in September 2007, made the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem his base for efforts to boost the West Bank economy and improve Palestinian governance – key strands of the overall western strategy of backing the Palestinian Authority and shunning Hamas during negotiations with Israel.

He encountered little of the hostility he faced in Britain or the Arab world over the war in Iraq but met resistance when his initial plans for development projects were scorned for ignoring the realities of occupation and prioritising Israel’s security over Palestinian economic needs.

“The overall tone, without making any judgment as to intent, is paternalistic and frequently uses the style and jargon of the Israeli occupation authorities,” complained a memo by the PA’s negotiations support unit reviewing his proposals. “Some of the terms (eg ‘separate lanes’ and ‘tourist-friendly checkpoints’) are unacceptable to Palestinians.”

In February 2008, Blair is recorded as telling the quartet – made up of the UN, US, EU and Russia – that he has a good relationship with Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak. But he warns that the current approach to the Gaza Strip – under siege since the Hamas takeover – “is wrong and needs to change immediately”. Blair found it “discouraging” that there had been no progress since the Annapolis conference, and feared “bad consequences”. But a Russian diplomat present at the meeting “got the impression that Blair was talking like Bush’s representative”.

Three:

The Annapolis process was meant to be a round of peace talks aimed at reaching an agreement to solve the decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But instead of focusing on resolving the core issues at hand, why did Palestinian negotiators spend so much time during the meetings denigrating their political rivals, Hamas?

The Palestine Papers reveal that Fatah was obsessed with maintaining political supremacy over Hamas, with Israel’s cooperation, especially following the 2006 electoral victory of the Islamist movement. Documents obtained by Al Jazeera also show the extent to which the Palestinian Authority cracked down on Hamas institutions to weaken the group and strengthen its own relationship with Israel.

At the height of negotiations, on April 7, 2008, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni was unequivocal in summing up Israel’s policy: “Our strategic view is to strengthen you and weaken Hamas.”

Working with Israel to weaken Hamas also appeared to be in the Palestinian Authority’s interest. During a May 6, 2008 security meeting between Yoav Mordechai, the head of the Israeli army civil administration in the West Bank, and Hazem Atallah, the head of the Palestinian Civil Police, Hamas was a prominent subject of discussion.

Yoav Mordechai: How is your fight against “civilian” Hamas: the officers, people in municipalities, etc. This is a serious threat.

Hazem Atallah: I don’t work at the political level, but I agree we need to deal with this.

Yoav Mordechai: Hamas needs to be declared illegal by your President. So far it is only the militants that are illegal.

Atallah: There is also the request for tear gas canisters. You previously gave us these back in 96.”

Yoav Mordechai: We gave some to you for Balata 2 weeks ago. What do you need them for?

Atallah: Riot control. We want to avoid a situation where the security agencies may be forced to fire on unarmed civilians.

Never mind that tear gas canisters have proven that they can be just as deadly as live bullet rounds, the exchange also foreshadows a crackdown on Hamas’ social institutions in the West Bank.

Amira Hass documents in Haaretz yet another atrocity committed by the IDF in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.

Look at what our world has created; mercenaries with government backing:

Erik Prince, the founder of the international security giant Blackwater Worldwide, is backing an effort by a controversial South African mercenary firm to insert itself into Somalia’s bloody civil war by protecting government leaders, training Somali troops, and battling pirates and Islamic militants there, according to American and Western officials.

The disclosure comes as Mr. Prince sells off his interest in the company he built into a behemoth with billions of dollars in American government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, work that mired him in lawsuits and investigations amid reports of reckless behavior by his operatives, including causing the deaths of civilians in Iraq. His efforts to wade into the chaos of Somalia appear to be Mr. Prince’s latest endeavor to remain at the center of a campaign against Islamic radicalism in some of the world’s most war-ravaged corners. Mr. Prince moved to the United Arab Emirates late last year.

With its barely functional government and a fierce hostility to foreign armies since the hasty American withdrawal from Mogadishu in the early 1990s, Somalia is a country where Western militaries have long feared to tread. The Somali government has been cornered in a small patch of Mogadishu by the Shabab, a Somali militant group with ties to Al Qaeda.

This, along with the growing menace of piracy off Somalia’s shores, has created an opportunity for private security companies like the South African firm Saracen International to fill the security vacuum created by years of civil war. It is another illustration of how private security firms are playing a bigger role in wars around the world, with some governments seeing them as a way to supplement overtaxed armies, while others complain that they are unaccountable.

Hello delusion, my name is Britain:

Foreign Secretary William Hague welcomed Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman at the start of his three-day visit to the UK.

They met for an hour at the Foreign Office. Afterwards the Foreign Secretary gave Foreign Minister Lieberman a tour of the Cabinet War Rooms.

The Foreign Secretary stressed the British government’s commitment to a strong bilateral relationship with Israel. The UK, and the Foreign Secretary personally, sees Israel as a close friend of longstanding. The Foreign Secretary underlined the UK’s opposition to efforts to delegitimise Israel. They welcomed efforts to deepen economic and scientific co-operation between the UK and Israel, and confirmed that the next meeting of the UK/Israel Strategic Dialogue would take place in Jerusalem on 17 March.

The Ministers discussed regional issues, including their shared determination to see a resolution to Iran’s nuclear programme to avoid an arms race in the Middle East.

The Ministers’ discussions centred on the Middle East Peace Process. The Foreign Secretary made clear that while the UK understands Israel’s security concerns, the current freeze in the Peace Process is not in the interests of Israelis, Palestinians or the wider region. He stressed that the window for peace in the Middle East is closing, and that continued occupation is eroding Israeli security and international support for Israel, and hampering the region’s economic potential.

The Foreign Secretary made clear again the British Government’s view that the construction of settlements is illegal, an obstacle to peace, and should stop. He underlined the need for Israel and the Palestinian Authority to find a way back to negotiations as soon as possible in order to reach a lasting two state solution.

When was the last time Sri Lanka was serious about peace with its Tamil minority?

Activists have accused the Sri Lankan military of manufacturing components for landmines while the government was involved in an internationally-sponsored ceasefire with Tamil rebels and receiving millions of pounds in aid for de-mining projects.

The Tamil activists claim to have obtained classified documents they say show the Sri Lankan military sought tenders from several suppliers in Colombo and bought parts to produce remote-control detonators for Claymore anti-personnel mines. The documents, which have been seen by The Independent but which cannot be independently verified, have been dismissed by the military as fake. According to experts, the use of Claymore mines detonated by remote control would not be in breach of the comprehensive Ottawa Treaty of 1997. However, the activists claim that given Sri Lanka has always denied it manufactured parts for anti-personnel mines, the purported revelations about the detonators demand investigation.

The Reverend SJ Emmanuel, president of the Global Tamil Forum (GTF), which said it obtained the documents from a senior Sri Lankan military source, asked that a panel established by the UN examines whether both the army and Tamil rebels manufactured mines. “How much more evidence do we have to produce for the international community to act upon?” he asked.

The documents date from summer 2006, when the Sri Lankan authorities were involved in a Norwegian-brokered ceasefire with the Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Tzipi Livni, Israel’s opposition leader:

I was the Minister of Justice. I am a lawyer…But I am against law — international law in particular.  Law in general.