Antony Loewenstein

Honesty is such a rare beast in journalism. Perhaps that’s why it takes a master who doesn’t fear a corporate overlord to silence/intimidate (ignore the petty intro):

DOHA, Qatar—David Remnick, call your office.

In a speech billed as a discussion of the Bush and Obama eras, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh delivered a rambling, conspiracy-laden diatribe here Monday expressing his disappointment with President Barack Obama and his dissatisfaction with the direction of U.S. foreign policy.

“Just when we needed an angry black man,” he began, his arm perched jauntily on the podium, “we didn’t get one.”

It quickly went downhill from there.

Hersh, whose exposés of gross abuses by members of the U.S. military in Vietnam and Iraq have earned him worldwide fame and high journalistic honors, said he was writing a book on what he called the “Cheney-Bush years” and saw little difference between that period and the Obama administration.

He said that he was keeping a “checklist” of aggressive U.S. policies that remained in place, including torture and “rendition” of terrorist suspects to allied countries, which he alleged was ongoing.

He also charged that U.S. foreign policy had been hijacked by a cabal of neoconservative “crusaders” in the former vice president’s office and now in the special operations community.

“What I’m really talking about is how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over,” he said of his forthcoming book. “It’s not only that the neocons took it over but how easily they did it — how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced.”

Hersh then brought up the widespread looting that took place in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. “In the Cheney shop, the attitude was, ‘What’s this? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they’re all worried about some looting? … Don’t they get it? We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody’s gonna give a damn.’”

“That’s the attitude,” he continued. “We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That’s an attitude that pervades, I’m here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command.”

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, “are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.”

Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization commited to “defence of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering,” according to its website.

“Many of them are members of Opus Dei,” Hersh continued. “They do see what they’re doing — and this is not an atypical attitude among some military — it’s a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function.”

“They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins,” he continued. “They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.””

Hersh relayed that he had recently spoken with “a man in the intelligence community… somebody in the joint special operations business” about the downfall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. “He said, ‘Oh my God, he was such a good ally.’”

“Tunisia’s going to change the game,” Hersh added later. “It’s going to scare the hell out of a lot of people.”

Moving to Pakistan, where Hersh noted he had been friendly with Benazir Bhutto, the journalist told of a dinner meeting with Asif Ali Zardari, the late prime minister’s husband, in which Hersh said the Pakistani president was brutally disdainful of his own people.

Hersh described a trip he made to Swat, where the Pakistani military had just dislodged Taliban insurgents who had taken over the scenic valley, a traditional vacation area for the urban middle class. Hersh said he asked Zardari about the tent cities he saw along the road, where people were living in harsh, unsanitary conditions.

“Well, those people there in Swat, that’s what they deserve,” the Pakistani president replied, according to Hersh. Asked why, Hersh said Zardari responded, “Because they supported the Taliban.” (Note: Hersh’s conversation is not recounted in his 2009 New Yorker article on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, presumably because it coudn’t be verified.)

The veteran journalist also alleged that the CIA station chief in Islamabad, who was recently recalled after his name surfaced in Pakistani court documents and in the lively Pakistani press, had actually been fired for disputing the plans of Gen. David Petraeus, who took over the Afghan war last summer after General McChrystal was summarily dismissed.

“When Petraeus issued a very optimistic report about the war in December that he gave to the president,” Hersh said, the station chief “just declared it was bankrupt… internally. He just said ‘This is completely wrongheaded. The policy’s wrongheaded.’ Off he goes. Out he goes.”

“I’ve given up being disillusioned about the CIA,” Hersh said. “They’re trained to lie, period. They will lie to their president, they will lie certainly to the Congress, and they will lie to the American people. That’s all there is to it.”

Hersh was speaking on the invitation of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, which operates a branch campus in Qatar.

The recent news that the US State Department will be taking an acclaimed documentary about Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg to show around the world has upset Fox News. The US shouldn’t be “airing its dirty linen” to the globe, says the national security “reporter”. Watch and learn how real media messaging works:

Wonder why the American public is largely ignorant about the world?

They’re fed content to make them obsessed with themselves:

America was founded upon the principle of liberty and freedom, but guess who was covering the quest for freedom in Tunisia extensively yesterday? Al Jazeera, not the American news TV Networks.

I am utterly disgusted by how American TV channels have abandoned an important historic event of our time. Tunisian people took to the streets and toppled a Saddam-like totalitarian regime, but their voices and images from their revolution did not make it to the American viewers.

CNN, FOX News and MSNBC were busy interviewing celebrities and discussing pet-related stories.

At work, I was able to follow Al Jazeera’s minute-by-minute coverage of the revolution through my iPhone. The Qatari network has an iPhone app that live broadcasts their news, in addition to its presence on Facebook, Twitter and Al Jazeera Blogs.

It was simply everywhere and for free!

Tech Crunch, a popular Web publication that offers technology news and analysis, summed it up in this article on how American news networks failed in covering the news. The article discussed how tweeps criticized American TV networks that were busy broadcasting news related to Marta Stewart’s dog and a guy who was arrested for drunk-driving a donkey in Texas on MSNBC, while CNN was busy interviewing the Jeopardy host about a robot contestant.

This is not journalism. What Al Jazeera did is!

And thanks to the social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook that brought the news to the American public, along with a few articles American newspapers published later in the afternoon yesterday.

Many know that Al Jazeera is unavailable in most American states, the thing that deprives millions of American viewers of watching breaking news with real, good reporting.

Making Al Jazeera, or at least BBC World (not the awful BBC America) available on air, cable or satellite will provide Americans with an alternate source to watch real news, not the heroic rescue attempt of a puppy who was stuck in a freezing river.

Wonderful editorial in the Northern Territory News:

The Federal Government’s attempt to gag journalists reporting on asylum seekers in the Territory is contemptible – and laughable.

Contemptible because it is undemocratic; laughable because it won’t work.

Canberra has told the NT News it broke the law by speaking to an asylum seeker.

It also said a complaint had been lodged with the police.

It turns out that both these things are untrue.

It seems that the federal Immigration Department has resorted to threats, bully-boy tactics and deceit in a bid to prevent coverage of a news story embarrassing to itself.

As it is, secrecy already surrounds asylum seekers and the way they are handled in the Territory.

The Immigration Department contracts out some services, for which it is responsible, to Serco – a giant foreign company.

Serco in turn has subcontracted out to MSS Security in Darwin.

MSS – until recently – subcontracted out again to other smaller companies.

Each time, lines of responsibility blur.

And it gives bureaucrats the opportunity to refuse to discuss some elements of asylum seeker “management” – a public interest issue – under the guise of commercial-in-confidence.

Thus Territorians are not ever likely to see reports about the riot or the mass breakout and protest at the troubled Darwin Detention Centre last year.

Australia is a democratic country and Territorians have every right to know what’s going on with the asylum seekers in their midst.

Territorians may agree with the content of some stories; they may strongly disagree with others.

But either way, they have a right to know.

Canberra, of course, would prefer that reporting on asylum seekers stemmed only from its press releases. That’s not going to happen.

The Federal Government needs reminding that it exists to serve the people – not itself.

Christopher Hitchens may be sharing his bromance with Tony Blair in the latest Vanity Fair, but back in the real world away from elite cocktail party chatter, Britain stands condemned:

UK authorities passed information about British nationals to notorious Bangladeshi intelligence agencies and police units, then pressed for information while the men were being held at a secret interrogation centre where inmates are known to have died under torture.

A Guardian investigation into counter-terrorism co-operation between the UK and Bangladesh has revealed a detailed picture of the last Labour government’s reliance on overseas intelligence agencies that were known to use torture.

Meetings and exchanges of information took place between British and Bangladeshi officials in an effort to protect the UK from attacks that might be fomented in Bangladesh, according to sources in both countries.

The likelihood that a number of suspects would be tortured as a result of the meetings went unmentioned, according to the sources. Subsequently, more than a dozen men of dual British-Bangladeshi nationality were placed under investigation, and at least some suffered horrific abuse from the Bangladeshi authorities.

At one point Jacqui Smith, then home secretary, flew to Dhaka for face-to-face meetings with senior officials from one agency, the Directorate-General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), whose use of torture had been the subject of a detailed report by Human Rights Watch, the New York-based NGO, less than eight weeks earlier. Seven months before the visit, a report prepared by Smith’s own department had documented the widespread concern about the routine use of torture in Bangladesh. Smith spoke publicly during the visit about the dangers that could be posed by dual nationals; privately, according to a senior DGFI counter-terrorism officer, she urged that the agency investigate a number of individuals about whom the British were suspicious.

In September it emerged that in recent years MI5 and MI6 have always asked the home secretary or foreign secretary for permission before conducting any information exchange where there was a risk of an individual being tortured. Smith, her successor Alan Johnson and David Miliband, the foreign secretary during the period of the joint UK-Bangladeshi counter-terrorism campaign, have declined to answer questions about the matter.

The issue of Australia’s immigration detention centres is routinely misreported/ignored by corporate media.

British multinational Serco runs all the country’s centres – not that you’d know that by reading most media reporting – and here’s just a few latest examples of where this information routinely lies (ie. a black hole):

One:

Hundreds of asylum seekers at the Curtin Detention Centre near Derby have gone on hunger strike this morning and are refusing to even drink water, according to a refugee advocate.

Advocate Pamela Curr said a detainee told her of the protest in a short telephone conversation earlier today.

“Some of the men have been on hunger strike for three weeks and some have been taken to hospital because they’ve collapsed … he said two people are in hospital that he knows of,” she said.

“I asked him if he would consider drinking water – and he said ‘I would consider it, but nobody wants to do it. We have decided no.’”

Ms Curr said she had been told that the men, mostly young Afghani males, were frustrated at not being told anything by the Department about how their cases were proceeding.

He had also claimed that access to the internet had been blocked, she said [I have heard from refugee activists that Serco has been responsible for this decision].

Detainees’ moods had lifted in October after the Federal Government lifted its six-month processing ban for Afghani asylum seekers.

Ms Curr said many of the detainees had been interviewed in November but since then, about 150 people had been rejected as refugees.

Two:

The Gillard government wants to raze the habitat of an endangered West Australian cockatoo to build its latest immigration detention centre, but is relying on permission from a hostile Barnett government.

The Northam detention centre was to hold 1200 asylum-seekers by March and a further 300 by June but has been hit by delays. The Immigration Department now hopes the first 600 detainees will be moved there in late March or early April.

The entire proposed camp is subject to a public comment period and has been referred to the Federal Department of Sustainability, Water, Population and Communities because it requires clearing banksia woodland found to be a feeding ground of the Carnaby’s black cockatoo — an endangered native bird found only in parts of southwest WA.

“The design of the detention centre will ensure minimal clearing of the identified black cockatoo foraging habitat in the northwest of the project is required. Clearing in this section will be less than one hectare in area,” says a report prepared for the Immigration Department by environmental consultants GHD.

Neither story mentions Serco despite the firm being directly relevant to both situations. That’s bad journalism.

If any evidence was needed that the Australian government is so desperate to rid itself of refugees, it’s now done a deal with one of the most corrupt regimes in the world, Afghanistan. Furthermore, what kind of pressure has Serco placed on Canberra to lessen its loads in the over-flowing detention centres?

Australia has the green light to deport thousands of Afghan asylum seekers after reaching a historic agreement with the Afghan government.

The Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Afghan Refugee Minister, Jamaher Anwary, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Sydney yesterday.

It enables the forced return of Afghans whose bids for asylum fail. The move is alarming security experts and refugee advocates.

Mr Bowen said it would deter Afghans considering travelling to Australia. ”Never, all through the Howard years, never before today, has there been an involuntary return from Australia to Afghanistan,” he said.

”To dissuade people from risking their lives by joining people-smuggling ventures, it is important that Afghans found not to be owed protection by Australia are returned to Afghanistan.”

About 2600 Afghans are in Australia’s detention centres. Of those, 49 must win court appeals to avoid imminent deportation.

The opposition was sceptical about the agreement, saying it was only as good as the government’s will to enforce it. ”The minister is unable to say when anyone is going to be returned,” said its immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison. ”It’s not clear to me the government has the resolve to implement this.”

In three years, only three asylum seekers have been returned to Afghanistan – all last year after volunteering to go. In 2008 and 2009, 126 people were returned to their countries of origin.

The director of the Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy at the Australian National University, William Maley, warned that ethnic Hazaras, in particular, should not be deported without extreme caution. ”The security situation in Afghanistan is extremely unsettling,” he said.

He cast doubt on the security expertise of Australian officials making refugee assessments.

The decapitation of 11 Hazaras in Oruzgan province in June contradicted a cable from the Kabul embassy proclaiming a ”golden age” for Hazaras, he said.

A fine cartoon appearing in today’s Sydney Morning Herald.

I’m sure Israel is shaking; two close allies chastise Israel and then do absolutely nothing about it. That’s pointless loyalty:

Britain and Australia urged Israel to refrain from settlement building on the West Bank and called for a “return to direct talks” between Israel and the Palestinians.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the Middle East peace process had featured in Tuesday’s summit with his Australian counterpart Kevin Rudd and defence ministers Liam Fox and Stephen Smith.

“Our joint belief (is) that the parties involved should return to direct talks and refrain from acts that undermine confidence such as settlement building,” Hague told reporters.

It follows calls from UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Monday for Israel to freeze settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories, after Israeli media reported that Israel is to approve 1,400 new settler homes.

That push, reportedly into east Jerusalem, is in defiance of pressure to halt settlement building that has stalled peace talks with the Palestinians.

The Palestinians halted direct talks with Israel, brokered by the United States, in September after Israel refused to extend a moratorium on settlement building. Israel says the construction should be an issue discussed in direct talks.

Naomi Klein at her very best speaking recently at a TED conference in Washington DC:

Sharing and hearing stories and experiences with a global audience is one of the most satisfying parts of my work.

In that spirit, I’m honoured to be invited to the Jaipur Literature Festival in India that starts later this week. I’m a guest of the festival and will be involved in two major sessions:

Reporting the Occupation
David Finkel, Jon Lee Anderson & Rory Stewart
Moderated by Antony Loewenstein

I Shall Not Hate
Izzeldin Abuelaish in conversation with Antony Loewenstein

Finkel is a Washington Post journalist, Anderson works for the New Yorker and Stewart is an academic, commentator and former British official in Iraq.

Abuelaish is a Palestinian doctor who tragically lost daughters during Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2009.

It’ll be a week of connections, challenges and fun in one of the most exciting nations on earth.

Stay tuned.

PS. Posting may be light in the next day/s while in transit.

China gives the Pentagon its biggest boost for years by daring to develop a sophisticated arms industry.