Antony Loewenstein

This is what US/Australian/British liberation looks like:

A lack of U.S. coordination compounded by Afghan foot-dragging has stymied efforts to track billions of aid dollars poured into Afghanistan’s economy in the past decade, providing potential opportunities to launder money and finance the insurgency, according to Afghan officials and a new U.S. government audit.

The audit, released Wednesday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or Sigar, faulted both Afghan and U.S. agencies for failing to tighten controls over Afghanistan’s financial sector. The report focuses on fumbled efforts to monitor large amounts of cash moved through the country’s main commercial airport. The money is intended for aid and reconstruction efforts.

“Because of the level of corruption in Afghanistan and the continuing insurgency, the U.S. government’s lack of visibility over its funds is a significant concern,” the audit states. “Reports of as much as $10 million a day in cash leaving the Kabul International Airport have added to these concerns.”

More here.

John Pilger writes:

Long before it was possible to hack phones, Murdoch was waging a war on journalism, truth, humanity, and succeeded because he knew how to exploit a system that welcomed his devotion to the “free market”. He may be more extreme in his methods, but he is no different in kind from many of those now lining up to condemn him who have been his beneficiaries, mimics, collaborators, apologists.

As Gordon Brown turns on his former master, accusing him of running a “criminal-media nexus”, watch the palpable discomfort in the new parliamentary-media consensus. “We must not be backward-looking,” said a Labour MP. Those parliamentarians caught two years ago with both hands in the Westminster till, who did nothing to stop the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, and stood and cheered the war criminal responsible, are now “united” behind the “calm” figure of Ed Miliband. There is an acrid smell of business as usual.

Certainly, there is no “revolution”, as reported in the Guardian, which compared the fall of Murdoch with that of the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania in 1989. The overexcitement is understandable; Nick Davies’s scoop is a great one. Yet the truth is, Britain’s system of elite monopoly control of the media rests not on News International alone, but on the Mail and the Guardian and the BBC, perhaps the most influential of all. All share a corporate monoculture that sets the agenda of the “news”, defines acceptable politics by maintaining the fiction of distinctive parties, normalises unpopular wars and guards the limits of “free speech”. This will be strengthened by the illusion that a “bad apple” has been “rooted out”.

More here.

No kidding (and such news should be given to Western journalists who love talking about a “Facebook/Twitter revolution” in the Arab world):

Egyptians who turned to Facebook and Twitter to galvanize their revolt against Hosni Mubarak are starting to wonder whether faith in social media as the key to Egypt’s democratic future might be a little overdone.

As candidates jostle in the run-up to elections to replace military rule with a civilian democracy, politicians have latched onto the Web to show they are in tune with the youngsters who began the uprising against the veteran leader.

Many, including former United Nations nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei, have made it their campaign medium of choice for rallying local support and gathering funds, using Facebook’s interactivity to spread an image of democratic accountability.

But with illiteracy widespread and only a minority of Egypt’s 80 million population using the internet, relying on Facebook to drum up support could be a risky strategy.

Some candidates are sticking to old-fashioned tactics – pounding the streets, shaking hands and holding rallies before an election date has even been set.

Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, once a senior figure in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, is holding conferences in the sprawling suburbs of Cairo and other cities.

His speeches are big on patriotic rhetoric and thin on policy, but they allow ordinary voters to identify one man among a potentially confusing array of candidates.

“I will be Egypt’s servant, not the president of Egypt. I’ll be working for you all,” he told residents packed into a large tent in Al-Matariya, a poor district north of Cairo, last month.

“I was born and raised in the old neighborhoods of Egypt,” Aboul Fotouh told the crowd. “I know that what the citizen needs is to secure his needs and those of his family, in dignity.”

He then mingled with the residents to debate their problems.

The US Congress may express concern at the cowbody behaviour of many mercenaries in Afghanistan (which, of course, lessens local support for the glorious liberation they’ve experienced since 2001), but such things don’t concern former IDF prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg. He writes a curious post about protecting these brave souls who are presumably doing America’s fine work in the field of duty:

A couple of nights ago, I was hanging around a major Middle Eastern airport, on a long layover. I had just come from Islamabad (yes, I realize I didn’t share the information that I was in Pakistan with Goldblog readers while I was there — trust me, it was for my own good) and was waiting for a flight to the States, and I began to notice something very troubling (I’m not naming the airport, the airline or the flight number for reasons that will become clear).

It became instantly obvious that this flight was going to carry a large number of Afghanistan-based American contractors and active-duty military personnel back home. It wasn’t that the soldiers were in uniform — American soldiers don’t travel in uniform on international flights, for security reasons — but they may as well have been. One small example: I was sitting, at one point, next to an American man of obvious military bearing, a real barrel-chested freedom fighter sort, who wore a polo shirt inscribed with the words, “Army Aviation Association.” He was also carrying a camouflage tactical rucksack with his last name stitched on the back. He seemed like a senior-enough guy to have a Google profile, so I typed into my iPhone his last name, plus Afghanistan, plus “army aviation” and came up with his exact identity in 20 seconds. He is one of the key leaders of the military’s drone programs in Afghanistan. Now if I weren’t a patriot, but instead an anti-American jihadist, I might have seen this as an opportunity to do some damage.

Now of course, we were in an airport, a good airport with what I think is good security, but still, it seemed as if these people were inadvertently making themselves into obvious targets. I counted, in the crowd waiting to board the flight, five different guys wearing “Dyncorp” hats or shirts; Dyncorp is one of the biggest military contractors. I saw others wearing shirts labeled “General Dynamics” and “Iomax” and still others were wearing “Bagram Air Base” t-shirts, and almost all of these men — dozens and dozens of them — were wearing khaki tactical pants, Caterpillar boots, the whole non-uniform uniform. (And fanny-packs and those ridiculous wallet-on-a-string-around-your-neck things, but that is a separate fashion conversation.)

JTA reports:

Murdoch’s affection for Israel arose less out of his conservative sensibility than from his native Australian sympathy for the underdog fending off elites seized by conventional wisdoms, according to Isi Liebler, a longtime Australian Jewish community leader who now lives in Israel.

“From my personal communications with him, it’s something that built up,” Liebler told JTA. “He’s met Israelis, he’s been to Israel, he’s seen Israel as the plucky underdog when the rest of the world saw Israel as an occupier.”

Australian Jews noted the pro-Israel cast of Murdoch’s papers as early as the 1970s, before he had established ties with the Jewish community. The word from inside his company was that Israel was an issue that he cared about, which helped shape its coverage in his media properties.

Leading American investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill recently uncovered a secret CIA prison in Somalia. Big news? What a silly question, as he explained to ABC Radio PM last night:

MARK COLVIN: Now you have reported this story in America and you’ve been interviewed about it in public on the media in America.

Has there been much push back? Has there been much denial of what you’ve reported?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well I mean the interviews that I’ve done in terms of large media outlets in the United States, there’s only one of the big corporate networks that has interviewed me. It’s msnbc.

I was on Al Jazeera and then on Russian television and that’s – that’s about it. And then you know Australian media now and Canada…

MARK COLVIN: But so the big American media – the New York Times, the Washington Post, the big – CBS, NBC and so on have left you alone?

JEREMY SCAHILL: They haven’t touched this story at all. In fact you know what happened, my story went up New York time about 1pm on a day last week.

And at 5pm New York time CNN was running a story and it was just attributing the information to a US official and made no mention of my story or the context and just said that the CIA is helping Somalis to – in their counter-terrorism efforts and at times is assisting them in the interviewing of terrorism suspects.

And so you know what that was is a sort of classic CIA spin operation. They know the story’s going to come out. They know that the Nation magazine which I work for is a relatively small, not very powerful entity.

And so they go to CNN and say, hey here’s a good story for you. And CNN just prints it as though you know, as though their job is to print press releases for the CIA and not give any context.

MARK COLVIN: But there’s been no official denial?

JEREMY SCAHILL: No. What they – in fact they didn’t – I have to be careful about this – when I contacted the CIA a US government official was made available to me to comment on this. And they won’t allow me to name that official or to reveal the entity that they work for but only that they’re familiar with the program.

So having said that when I talked to them they were just trying to do damage control and trying to spin me saying, you know we’re not running that prison, the Somalis are running it. We’re not interrogating prisoners, we’re just debriefing them. You know, we’re not doing the interrogations ourself, we only do them jointly with the Somalis.

You know, they were trying to rely on semantics when the reality is I was told point blank in Somalia that the CIA is paying the salaries of the people that run that prison and the US official that was made available to me by the American government would not deny that and in fact confirmed it when I pressed him pretty hard on it.

No, they haven’t denied any aspect of it. They’ve only denied that they are running the prison.

I did not report that they were running the prison. I reported that the Somalis were officially running it but that the Americans were paying the personnel and interrogating prisoners which at the end of the day is very similar to running it. It’s just a semantic game.

And unfortunately my colleagues in the big media in the United States have allowed themselves to be used as conveyor belts for the propaganda of a US intelligence agency, and very effectively I would say.

As Australian authorities attempt to pursue former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks – tortured, held illegally and still pursued by leeches who love the authoritarian impulse of US foreign policy – a number of Australians, including me, are speaking out. Thanks to Overland journal for organising this:

On 20 July 2011, the Australian government served David Hicks with a notice of their intent to restrain any funds obtained from the sale of his book, Guantanamo: My Journey, under the Commonwealth Proceeds of Crime Act.

After Hicks was captured in Afghanistan and sold to the US by the Northern Alliance, he spent six years in Guantanamo Bay without trial or charges. He alleges that, during his detention, he was tortured. He spent much of his captivity in 24-hour solitary detention.

Hicks was eventually brought before a military commission, in a procedure condemned by lawyers and human rights groups everywhere. With no other way to get home, he accepted a deal, under which, in return for pleading guilty, he served a short sentence in Australia.

The arrangement was widely acknowledged as a political resolution to a case that was causing increasing embarrassment to both the US and Australian governments. Obviously, Hicks would never have been released had the Americans thought he represented the slightest threat.

Many Australians regard the treatment of David Hicks as an international outrage. What took place – what continues to take place – in Guantanamo Bay deserves more publicity, not less. If the government thinks it has done nothing wrong, it has nothing to fear from a full discussion of the Hicks case.

The move against Hicks’ memoirs should concern everyone. But it is of particular relevance to writers and publishers, precisely because of the direct interference into publications with which the government politically disagrees. How can Australian publishers feel safe publishing material that is controversial knowing that the Australian government is willing to use laws to financially penalise perceived opponents? Fundamentally, this is an issue of political censorship.

As lawyer Elizabeth O’Shea put it, ‘Anyone who believes in the right to a fair trial and freedom from torture should defend Hicks.’ The government’s application is to be heard 3 August in NSW. We’re asking those in the publishing industry to sign this petition (leave your name below or send us an email) because this action has alarming political and financial implications for writers and publishers everywhere.

Signed

Jacinda Woodhead – writer and editor
Dr Jeff Sparrow – writer and editor
Elizabeth O’Shea – lawyer
Dr Rjurik Davidson – writer and editor
Rodney Hall – author
James Bradley – novelist and critic
Julian Burnside AO QC
Sophie Cunningham – writer and editor
Dr Peter Minter – writer and editor
Alison Croggon – poet, critic and novelist
Professor Wendy Bacon – the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, UTS
The Hon Alastair Nicholson AO RFD QC
Mary Kostakidis – broadcaster and journalist
Emmett Stinson – lecturer in publishing and communications
Jo Case – writer and editor
Zoe Dattner – publisher
Professor Chris Nash – Monash University
John Marnell – editor
Adam Ford – writer and editor
Antony Loewenstein – journalist
John Martinkus – academic and journalist, University of Tasmania
Christos Tsiolkas – writer
Emily Maguire – writer
Kate Eltham – writer, publisher and arts manager
Clare Strahan – writer and editor
Joshua Mostafa – writer
Tim Coronel – publisher, editor and journalist
Greg Black
Roselina Press – writer and editor
Mark Davis – writer and academic

Stunning report in the UK Independent. Adding to this detail is the presence of private mercenaries working alongside Afghan and Western forces committing acts that may be illegal. Accountability is non-existent. Much more on this in time:

Covert forces of CIA-trained Afghan paramilitaries are being built up to continue the US-led war on the Taliban as thousands of US troops prepare to leave the country.

Members of one shadowy group of some 400 men in southern Kandahar province have given The Independent a unique insight into their training and secret operations against militants as foreign troops prepare to quit Afghanistan by 2014.

Senior figures within one of the forces revealed that they were taught hand-to-hand combat by foreign military advisers, were delivered to targets by US Black Hawk helicopters and have received a letter of thanks from President Hamid Karzai for their work.

Despite their apparent military successes, one of the groups, the Kandahar Strike Force, has been dogged by rights abuse allegations that have raised questions about their role when their foreign handlers leave the country.

“These forces are the most shadowy and the most unaccountable in the country and it’s a serious problem [that] nobody’s taking responsibility for,” said Rachel Reid, a senior policy adviser to the Open Society Foundation.

Under a revamped counterterror strategy released on 28 June, the US said it intended to “ensure the rapid degradation of al-Qa’ida’s leadership structure” – and those of its adherents – using covert tactics going “beyond traditional intelligence, military, and law-enforcement functions”.

Details of the group’s operation were given in interviews by three former members in a prison outside Kabul where they are serving sentences, along with 38 comrades, for the killing of a police chief in 2009. The shoot-out was sparked by the detention of a member of the Kandahar Strike Force. They are appealing against their convictions.

The paramilitary groups are concentrated in eastern and southern Afghanistan where they collect intelligence, secure the border with Pakistan, and launch raids on militants from al-Qa’ida, the Taliban and the host of other militant groups. Taliban sources have told The Independent that the Kandahar Strike Force is the outfit they fear most.

We’re learning more and more about the culture of entitlement, arrogance and denial within the Murdoch empire.

Here in Australia, there are growing calls for a parliamentary inquiry into the power of the media and lack of regulation. New Matilda has a few ideas and I was asked for mine:

A parliamentary inquiry into the Australian media scene is essential, and not just to examine the monopolistic practices of News Ltd. Every boss of every major media company should appear and be asked about the cosy, insular club that exists between the political and media elites. Understanding these relationships can only enhance our democracy.Some questions:

- How often do media editors and bosses meet with political leaders. When, where, what is discussed etc?

- As Eric Ellis states in the current issue of the Spectator Australia, Fairfax bosses allegedly spiked a feature in the Good Weekend many years ago of Wendi Deng (aka Mrs. Rupert Murdoch). Understanding that supposedly rival media companies aim to protect the other’s business interests, how often do you meet bosses of other companies and in what context? Have you ever spiked stories? And if so, for what purposes?

- How many journalists take free trips to America, Israel or other countries and always acknowledge this in their published work? What does such visits do to journalistic integrity? Should third parties be allowed to subsidise trips to domestic or international destinations?

- How should journalists and politicians relate to each other? Should private dinners or events attended by journalists and politicians be disclosed to readers if they directly relate to a story and could give the impression of influencing the story?

- Should there be limits on the amount of media any one company should be allowed to own? And should any one family or corporation, such as the Murdochs, be subject to investigation into potential conflicts of interests when owning media companies, casinos or other relevant assets?

- Should Australian defamation laws be tightened or weakened to allow greater accountability of what is published in the daily media?