Antony Loewenstein

No kidding:

US military support for foreign governments encourages terrorist groups to attack Americans, demonstrates a new study from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Essex.

Terrorist attacks on Americans are more likely to come from countries where the US provides military aid, stations troops and sells arms finds the study – the first to show a statistical correlation between American foreign policy and terrorism against its citizens.

The paper, ‘Foreign terror on Americans’, is published in the new edition of the Journal of Peace Research and explores the systematic patterns which appear to govern terrorist action. The authors are professor Eric Neumayer, from LSE, and professor Thomas Plümper, from the University of Essex.

They examined details of terorist attacks by foreigners on Americans between 1978 and 2005 to establish not only their number but also the country from which the action originated. Anti-American attacks were carried out by people from 91 different countries and 568 US citizens were killed (for the 9/11 attacks, only victims in aeroplanes were included).

The authors devised a statistical analysis of the figures. They estimated the effect of the level of US involvement (military aid, arms exports and troops stationed there) in each country – adjusted for that nation’s overall military strength  –  on the number of attacks originating from each country as well as the number of Americans killed. Their model showed that US military support had substantively strong effects on foreign terror on Americans: a significant rise on the measure of military aid (equal in statistical terms to a one standard deviation change) increased anti-American terrorism by 135 per cent. The same rise in arms exports corresponded to an increase in terrorism of 109 per cent and of 24 per cent in the case of military personnel.

The model is illustrated by events in, for example, Saudi Arabia whose people carried out no terrorist attacks on Americans before 1995. However, following the first Gulf War, the US temporarily stationed large numbers of troops in the country. Although most were soon withdrawn, this was followed by large amounts of weapons delivered to the Saudi regime for the rest of the 1990s. From 1995 to 2000, 43 Americans were killed by Saudi terrorists.

Professors Neumayer and Plümper say the statistical pattern bears out their theory of international terrorism as one in which terror leaders follow rational calculations. Terror groups engage in violence because their country does not allow democratic participation or because their goals are too unpopular to command support. In order to coerce a more powerful domestic regime, the sponsors of terrorism target the regime’s foreign supporters even though they are not its main opponents. However, suggest the authors, the foreign targets possess a strategic value because attacks on them deliver media attention and acknowledgement from peer groups and because the domestic government may owe its survival to foreign military aid.

The man still has it:

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

An important editorial in the Financial Times:

Middle East Report:

When the rhetoric is stripped away, the reasons return to the fateful decision to treat the September 11 attacks as an act of war, rather than a monstrous crime. That choice, though it will probably forever be portrayed as an unavoidable bow to the righteous fury of American citizens, emanated at least equally from raison d’état. Not only had 19 men with box cutters destroyed iconic buildings and sown panic in the two most strategic US cities, they had breached the walls of the mightiest military power the world has ever known, catching its watchmen unawares. The hijackers hailed, moreover, from the region of the globe where US interests most require the projection of invincibility. To secure its guardianship of Persian Gulf oil reserves, such a crucial component of its superpower status, the US felt compelled to stage as dramatic a show of force as it could muster. It so happened that the Bush administration was staffed with men and women who had been waiting for the occasion to make sure the world knew who was boss. The Obama administration, having inherited the aggressive forward deployments, is loath to rein them in without first demonstrating US dominion conclusively. Osama bin Laden surely knew what was he was doing in picking his targets, but the US national security state has chosen to fulfill his foul prophecy.

A leading Palestinian voice in Gaza is Haider Eid. I met him in the Strip in 2009. He is well known for piercing supposedly accepted truths about the conflict.

His latest article does not disappoint, puncturing those who are celebrating the possibility of a September UN vote to endorse Palestine:

The induced euphoria that characterizes discussions within the mainstream media around the upcoming declaration of an independent Palestinian state in September, ignores the stark realities on the ground and the warnings of critical commentators. Depicting such a declaration as a “breakthrough,” and a “challenge” to the defunct “peace process” and the right-wing government of Israel, serves to obscure Israel’s continued denial of Palestinian rights while reinforcing the international community’s implicit endorsement of an apartheid state in the Middle East.

The drive for recognition is led by Salam Fayyad, the appointed prime minister of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority. It is based on the decision made during the 1970s by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to adopt the more flexible program of a “two-state solution.” This program maintains that the Palestinian question, the essence of the Arab-Israeli conflict, can be resolved with the establishment of an “independent state” in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. In this program Palestinian refugees would return to the state of “Palestine” but not to their homes in Israel, which defines itself as “the state of Jews.” Yet “independence” does not deal with this issue, neither does it heed calls made by the 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel to transform the struggle into an anti-apartheid movement since they are treated as third-class citizens.

All this is supposed to be implemented after the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank and Gaza. Or will it merely be a redeployment of forces as witnessed during the Oslo period? Yet proponents of this strategy claim that independence guarantees that Israel will deal with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank as one people, and that the Palestinian question can be resolved according to international law, thus satisfying the minimum political and national rights of the Palestinian people. Forget about the fact that Israel has as many as 573 permanent barriers and checkpoints around the occupied West Bank, as well as an additional 69 “flying” checkpoints (“Promoting employment and entrepreneurship …,” Food and Agricultural Organization, 2010). And you might also want to ignore the fact that the existing Jewish-only colonies and roads and other Israeli infrastructure effectively annex more than 54 percent of the West Bank.

Very interesting new comments:

“…Barak believes that a UN declaration of Palestinian statehood without a prior Israeli political initiative will paint Israel into a corner previously occupied by South Africa during the apartheid era. His admonition is pungent and scathing: ‘There are elements in the world, quite powerful, in various countries, including friendly ones, in trade unions, [among] academics, consumers, green political parties’, he warns, ‘and this impetus has culminated in a broad movement called BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) which is what was done with South Africa. This will not happen overnight. The day after September, people will say: ‘so now October has come, the sky hasn’t fallen, nothing has happened’. This is not true.”

Will this happen in December or January?

“It will start coming at us like a glacier, from all corners. There are people in the European Council that deal with export and import, and they are capable, without any government decision, of inflicting significant damage on the Israeli economy. We will see this taking place in academia, we will see this taking place in dockworker unions, consumer groups, and this will seep into governments. This is unwise [apparently referring to Israeli policies which will bring about this outcome]. To me, this uncontrollable process looks more dangerous than what the [Israeli] public perceives at the moment. We have been ruling over another nation for 43 years, this is unprecedented. Perhaps China can allow itself to control some small nations in various corners of its empire, and perhaps Russia can [failing to discern that Tibetans and Chechens have citizenship]. We cannot, there is no chance that the world will accept this. The far right is exposing Israel to dangerous and unwarranted isolation.”

The ever-increasing growth of Serco in Australia is occurring while the company faces intense scrutiny over its record managing refugees in immigration. This story on ABC TV Lateline highlights the problems. I’m having a growing number of former and current Serco staff approaching me and wanting to speak about what they’re seeing in Australia’s dysfunctional detention centres. Stay tuned:

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: The immigration centre on Christmas Island was labelled a factory for mental illness after overcrowding and frustration led to a series of riots and disturbances.

Tonight, we’re bringing you a new perspective from inside the detention centre.

A guard has broken ranks with the Government and Serco, the secretive company that runs the centre, to give Lateline a disturbing account of working life inside the facility.

We’ve agreed to protect his identity because he fears for his job.

His language is colourful, at times even offensive, but his story adds to a sense of urgency that there are serious problems in the way Australia is managing the flow of asylum seekers.

Peter Lloyd reports.

ANONYMOUS GUARD: I thought I was going to go up there and change the world. You go up there – it’s an eye-opener, it’s just an eye-opener.

PETER LLOYD, REPORTER: When trouble breaks out on Christmas Island, security is the first line of defence, but according to at least one guard, when there’s an average of one officer for every hundred detainees, the mayhem is hard to contain.

ANONYMOUS GUARD: First off you go “Shit!” Then you just go and try and help the people who are not involved get out of the way, go to their rooms. And then if it’s out of control you just leave the scene to let them go.

PETER LLOYD: Every man for himself?

ANONYMOUS GUARD: Yeah, but you help your mates out first if anyone’s hurt or in trouble, you go and grab them, protect them, just drag everyone out and just let them go. We’re paying for it all and these monkeys are going, ripping everything apart. It’s just a wanted waste.

PETER LLOYD: He is a self-confessed angry man, angry at some asylum seekers and Serco, the company that runs the Christmas Island detention centre on behalf of the Federal Government.

ANONYMOUS GUARD: You’re shadowed for week and in you go. This is you, this is what you got to do, go for it. And you’re learning as you go. It’ll make you a stronger person or it’d turn you into a puddle.

PETER LLOYD: What sort of preparation and training did you get for this job?

ANONYMOUS GUARD: To put it bluntly: jack shit.

PETER LLOYD: He says he was hired to guard the fence line, but instead found himself working directly with asylum seekers and their desperate acts of self-harm.

ANONYMOUS GUARD: Slashings, hangings – or one hanging.

PETER LLOYD: What’s that like to witness?

ANONYMOUS GUARD: Messy. Blood getting – squirting everywhere. It’s not a nice feeling.

PETER LLOYD: What do you do?

ANONYMOUS GUARD: Just calm them down, wrap them up, shoof them off for medical, then clean up the mess.

PETER LLOYD: What happens to the paperwork when there is trouble?

ANONYMOUS GUARD: Your hands are tied. You might get unruly detainee, and Immigration will say, “Oh, no, you can’t do him, you can’t touch him.” Even if he pushes you or shoves you, you just look at him. If you write him up, sometimes he goes into Bin 13. And that’s it.

PETER LLOYD: On Christmas Island, “Bin 13″ is code for the document shredder. Among guards it’s popularly believed that Serco keeps the truth about what happens from the Government.

Here’s how a major American Jewish publication, Forward, discusses the Middle East, by looking into the real effects on US campuses of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions). The result? Not many tangible successes but something else has clearly been created; raising the rights of Palestinians under Zionist occupation. And that’s priceless:

An Israeli diplomat issued a stark warning to a roomful of Jewish communal professionals at a major Jewish convention last fall. The campaign to impose boycotts, divestment and sanctions on Israel, he said, amounts to putting “a practical warhead on the tip of an ideological rocket.”

The Israeli official, a public diplomacy officer with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs named D.J. Schneeweiss, was not alone in describing in drastic terms the threat posed by the international anti-Israel campaign, known by the acronym BDS, at the New Orleans convention of the Jewish Federations of North America. Since the blow-up months earlier at the University of California, Berkeley, over a student government resolution calling on the school to divest from firms selling weapons to Israel, concern over the BDS movement had been at the forefront of the Jewish communal agenda. Communal officials warned that it gave everyday activists a concrete outlet for their efforts.

And they were willing to do more than just talk: At the convention, officials announced the launch of a $6 million organization that would fight what supporters described as efforts to delegitimize Israel.

But there is little clarity from pro-Israel advocates on the precise scale of the threat, particularly as it exists on North American college campuses, a central battleground in the Israel debate. And while BDS leaders claim to be inspiring a sea change in the American discourse on Israel, they can enumerate few specific gains.

An extensive national survey by the Forward indicates that, despite a sharp increase in the past year, significant BDS activity on North American campuses is limited to a handful of instances since 2005, the year of the official launch of the BDS campaign. The Forward counted 17 instances at 14 campuses over the past six years of a boycott or divestment effort that was significant and well-organized enough to draw an active official response from a student government or campus administrative body.

In no instance has BDS action led to a university in the U.S. or Canada divesting from any company or permanently ceasing the sale of any product.

Both BDS activists and Jewish Israel advocates argue that the small number of significant campus BDS campaigns fails to capture the importance of the movement. But the Forward’s count calls into question the dire rhetoric and far-reaching claims employed by both the proponents and critics of BDS.

Though efforts to impose boycotts on Israeli goods or to divest from firms doing business with Israel date back decades, leaders of the current movement cite as their inspiration the July 2005 statement by scores of Palestinian civil society groups, calling on international supporters of the Palestinian cause to adopt tactics similar to those used to mobilize worldwide action against South Africa’s apartheid regime.

The paper’s editorial highlights the fear within the Zionist community. Note the complete lack of awareness of why BDS has become such a big issue globally; Israeli policies of occupation. This isn’t about Israel needing better PR but about realising that pressure will only increase until Zionists accept that full equality for all its citizens is vital:

If you can believe the breathless e-mails and exhortations sent to some parents of Jewish college students, the nation’s campuses are swarming with anti-Zionists ready to persuade unsuspecting Jewish students to sign up for the local branch of Hamas. We exaggerate, but not by much. There is an assumption that many campuses are increasingly dangerous places for Jewish students, breeding grounds for the insidious movement known as BDS — a push to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel in order to isolate the Jewish state from the family of nations.

Forward reporters spent several months examining that premise and here’s what they found: Only 17 instances of significant BDS activity occurred in North American campuses since 2005, the official start of the pro-Palestinian campaign. Now, that number does not include actions falling under the rubric of free speech — a lecture, a petition drive — because they are difficult to catalog and even more difficult to vilify. Universities, after all, are designed to be places where all manner of ideas are debated and challenged. But the number — only 17, over six years —does include any time groups have taken serious steps to swing campus policy away from supporting Israel.

And in no instance has BDS action led to a university in the U.S. or Canada divesting from any company or permanently ceasing the sale of any product.

By that measure, BDS on campus has so far failed.

Proponents won’t say that, of course, and neither will those opposed to BDS. Both sides have reason to play up the threat. And the truth is, what pro-Israel activists rightfully fear is what BDS supporters want: A shift in tone, a growing acceptability that Israel’s right to exist should be questioned, or even denied.

That threat is real, and it must be addressed, but it also must be kept in perspective. Fighting BDS cannot be turned into a cottage industry for the fearful and anxious. And these efforts must recognize that all calls to boycott are not the same. A group can support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state and still believe that buying products made in the occupied territories helps perpetuate an untenable, immoral situation. Boycotts are peaceful, legitimate tools of economic leverage, and don’t automatically lead to delegitimization.

The black citizens in Montgomery, Ala., who refused to ride segregated buses didn’t believe that their city shouldn’t exist. They were simply using economic clout to challenge and try to change an unjust system.

The real affront is when BDS is targeted against all of Israel, or against its legitimate means of defense. Then it is no longer challenging an unjust system, it is challenging the very right of Jews to govern themselves in their internationally-recognized homeland. That movement must be countered at every turn.

Hopefully, the mainstream leadership of Jewish communal organizations involved in anti-BDS work appreciate these distinctions. Parents must, as well. Those who came of age in the heady days of independence and military victory may find it difficult to know how to deal with criticism of contemporary Israel, and it may be harder still for college students who matured during intifidas and terrorist campaigns. But in confronting the challenge, we must not inflate it and risk making our opponents appear much stronger than they really are.

The media coverage of the murder of Osama Bin Laden continues apace (including my favourite kind of “journalism”, “US officials say…”. Because US officials have a glorious history of telling the truth.)

Sydney academic Evan Jones (an irregular contributor to this site) has written the following think piece:

Abuse of Power by the Advocates of Reason

Evan Jones

Pierre Bourdieu is (or was) a Frenchman. Thus in that category of people who the English-speaking world generally ignore or treat with derision. Much of what is written by French social theorists does not cross the Channel in good shape. But here is a bon mot that appears to capture succinctly the state of play in the English-speaking world post Abbottabad. And even more remarkable given that it is a spontaneous intervention in a public exchange.

The occasion? The Frankfurt Book Fair, 15 October 1995.

Included in Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of our Time, Polity Press, 1998; translated by Richard Nice.

“From deep inside the Islamic countries there comes a very profound question with regard to the false universalism of the West, or what I call the imperialism of the universal. France has been the supreme incarnation of this imperialism … If it is true that one form of universalism is no more than a nationalism which invokes the universal (human rights, etc.) in order to impose itself, then it becomes less easy to write off all fundamentalist reaction against it as reactionary.

“Scientific rationalism – the rationalism of the mathematical models which inspire the policy of the IMF or the World Bank, that of the law firms, great juridical multinationals which impose the traditions of American law on the whole planet, that of rational-action theories, etc. – is both the expression and the justification of a Western arrogance, which leads people to act as if they had the monopoly of reason and could set themselves up as world policemen, in other words as self-appointed holders of the monopoly of legitimate violence, capable of applying the force of arms in the service of universal justice.

“Terrorist violence, through the irrationalism of the despair which is almost always at its root, refers back to the inert violence of the powers which invoke reason. Economic coercion is often dressed up in juridical [rationales]. Imperialism drapes itself in the legitimacy of international bodies. And, through the very hypocrisy of the rationalizations intended to mask its double standards, it tends to provoke or justify, among the Arab, South American or African peoples, a very profound revolt against the reason which cannot be separated from the abuses of power which are armed or justified by reason (economic, scientific or any other). These ‘irrationalisms’ are partly the product of our rationalism, imperialist, invasive and conquering or mediocre, narrow, defensive, regressive and repressive, depending on the place and time.

“One is still defending reason when one fights those who mask their abuses of power under the appearances of reason or who use the weapons of reason to consolidate or justify an arbitrary empire.”

Bourdieu’s acculturising ‘symbolic violence’, draping the real violence, is resplendent in Obama’s speech and the triumphalist crowds.

Osama bin Laden exists because of the divergence between the West’s sustaining myths (freedom) and the reality (subjugation), a divergence most transparent at the hard edge of empire. OBL, a symptom, disappears from the scene; the divergence between myth and reality remains.

This divergence fuels the ‘war on terror’ from within, now a perpetual motion machine.

Meanwhile, the mutual embrace of the West and the Saudi regime, that paradigmatic myth-reality divergence, that prime propellant of OBL from spoiled brat to global bogeyman, stays firmly cemented in the bond of uncompromising self-interest.

Here’s what the corporate press would like us to believe. Causing carnage in Iraq by Western forces was justified to rid the place of “terrorists” but when Gaddafi does something similar in Libya he’s a blood-thirsty murderer.

Medialens dissects the hypocrisy.

Really:

The Wall Street Journal is trying to make a play for whistleblowers with its very own Wikileaks clone, SafeHouse. But SafeHouse is the opposite of safe, thanks to basic security flaws and fine print that lets the Journal rat on leakers.

SafeHouse, which launched today to much fanfare, promises to let leakers “securely share information with the Wall Street Journal,” by uploading documents directly to its servers, just like Wikileaks! But unlike Wikileaks, SafeHouse includes a doozy of a caveat in its Terms of Use:

“Except when we have a separately negotiated confidentiality agreement… we reserve the right to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities or to a requesting third party, without notice, in order to comply with any applicable laws and/or requests under legal process, to operate our systems properly, to protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies, and to safeguard the interests of others.”

So, go ahead and upload your explosive documents to SafeHouse. But if they publish a scoop based on your material and someone gets mad, they can sell you out to anyone for any reason, including the insanely broad one of safeguarding “the interests of others.” (And Rupert Murdoch, who controls the paper, sure has a lot of interests!)