Antony Loewenstein

Daniel Levy, former Israeli peace negotiator:

There is virtually no thread of reason running between the way he related to the rest of the world and its developments, particularly in the Middle East, and the positions he espoused on Israel-Palestine. Palestinian freedoms, rights and self-determination are somehow supposed to be attained without the recourse to leverage, international law, or meaningful international support, considered to be necessary and legitimate virtually everywhere else.’

Thuggery, criminality and in all likelihood illegality.

And this is our side (via IPS):

U.S. Special Operations Forces have been increasingly aiming their night-time raids, which have been the primary cause of Afghan anger at the U.S. military presence, at civilian non- combatants in order to exploit their possible intelligence value, according to a new study published by the Open Society Foundation and The Liaison Office.

The study provides new evidence of the degree to which the criteria used for targeting of individuals in night raids and for seizing them during raids have been loosened to include people who have not been identified as insurgents.

Based on interviews with current and former U.S. military officials with knowledge of the strategic thinking behind the raids, as well as Afghans who have been caught up in the raids, the authors of the study write that large numbers of civilians are being detained for brief periods of time merely to find out what they know about local insurgents – a practice the authors suggest may violate the Geneva Conventions on warfare.

A military officer who had approved night raids told one of the authors that targeting individuals believed to know one of the insurgents is a key factor in planning the raids. “If you can’t get the guy you want,” said the officer, “you get the guy who knows him.”

Even when people who are known to be civilians have not been targeted in a given raid, they have been detained when found on the compound of the target, on the ground that a person’s involvement in the insurgency “is not always clear until questioned”, according to military officer who has been involved in operational questions surrounding the raids interviewed for the report.

Raids prompted by the desire for intelligence can result in the deaths of civilians. The Afghan Analysts Network, a group of independent researchers based in Kabul, investigated a series of night raids in Nangarhar province in October-November 2010, and found that the raids were all targeting people who had met with a local religious cleric who was believed to be the Taliban shadow province governor.

Two civilians were killed in those raids when family members came to the defence of their relatives.

The report notes that many Afghans interviewed said night-time operations had targeted a number of compounds simultaneously, in some cases covering entire villages.

In a village in Qui Tapa district of Konduz province, SOF units, accompanied by Afghan army troops, conducted a raid that detained 80 to 100 people, according to the report. The interviewees said a masked informant pointed out those people to be taken a U.S. base to be interrogated.

The idea of using military operations to round up civilians to exploit their presumed knowledge of the insurgency has a long history in the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon official in charge of detainee affairs until the end of 2005 told IPS that concerns about “over-broad detention” in Afghanistan – meaning the practice of sweeping up large numbers of civilians – were countered by pressures for “more aggressive detention operations”.

Yes:

The four musicians – Tom Eisner, Nancy Elan and Sarah Streatfeild, all violinists, and Sue Sutherley, a cellist – had called for the cancellation of a September 1 Proms concert by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

They added their names and LPO [London Philharmonic Orchestra] affiliation to a letter published on August 30 which stated that “Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians fits the UN definition of apartheid”.

The four were handed a suspension of up to nine months by the LPO, which declared that “the orchestra would never restrict the right of its players to express themselves freely [but] such expression has to be independent of the LPO itself”.

If this doesn’t fit the definition of disaster capitalism, the term has no meaning (via the Guardian):

The scale of the rush by speculators, pension funds and global agri-businesses to acquire large areas of developing countries is far greater than previously thought, and is already leading to conflict, hunger and human rights abuses, says Oxfam.

The NGO has identified 227m ha (561m acre ha) of land – an area the size of north-west Europe – as having being reportedly sold, leased or licensed, largely in Africa and mostly to international investors in thousands of secretive deals since 2001. This compares with about 56m ha identified by the World Bank earlier this year, again predominantly in Africa.

The new land rush, which was triggered by food riots, a series of harvest failures following major droughts and the western investors moving out of the US property market in 2008, is being justified by governments and speculators in the name of growing food for hungry people and biofuels for environmental benefit.

But, says Oxfam, “many of the deals are in fact ‘land grabs’ where the rights and needs of the people previously living on the land are ignored, leaving them homeless and without land to grow enough food to eat and make a living”.

“Many of the world’s poorest people are being left worse off by the unprecedented pace of land deals and the frenetic competition for land. The blinkered scramble for land by investors is ignoring the people who live on the land and rely on it to survive,” said Oxfam chief executive Dame Barbara Stocking.

Oxfam expects the land grabbing to increase as populations grow. The report said: “The huge increase in demand for food will need to be met by land resources that are under increasing pressure from climate change, water depletion, and other resource constraints, and squeezed by biofuel production, carbon sequestration and forest conservation, timber production, and non-food crops.”

While some investors might claim to have experience in agricultural production, many may only be purchasing land speculatively, anticipating price increases in the coming years, a practice known as ‘land banking’.

In addition, developing countries are under pressure from the IMF, the World Bank and other regional banks to put farmland on the international market to increase economic development and improve the balance of payments.

The New York Times documents the shift in the Arab world at a time when Washington is largely viewed as siding with occupiers (Israel) and brutes (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain etc):

A last-ditch American effort to head off a Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations faltered. President Obamatried to qualify his own call, just a year ago, for a Palestinian state. And President Nicolas Sarkozy of France stepped forcefully into the void, with a proposal that pointedly repudiated Mr. Obama’s approach.

The extraordinary tableau Wednesday at the United Nations underscored a stark new reality: the United States is facing the prospect of having to share, or even cede, its decades-long role as the architect of Middle East peacemaking.

Even before Mr. Obama walked up to the General Assembly podium to make his difficult address, where he declared that “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the U.N.,” American officials acknowledged that their various last-minute attempts to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with help from European allies and Russia had collapsed.

American diplomats turned their attention to how to navigate a new era in which questions of Palestinian statehood are squarely on the global diplomatic agenda. There used to be three relevant players in any Middle East peace effort: the Palestinians, Israel and the United States. But expansions of settlements in the West Bank and a hardening of Israeli attitudes have isolated Israel and its main backer, the United States. Dissension among Palestinian factions has undermined the prospect for a new accord as well.

Finally, Washington politics has limited Mr. Obama’s ability to try to break the logjam if that means appearing to distance himself from Israel. Republicans have mounted a challenge to lure away Jewish voters who supported Democrats in the past, after some Jewish leaders sharply criticized Mr. Obama for trying to push Israel too hard.

The result has been two and a half years of stagnation on the Middle East peace front that has left Arabs — and many world leaders — frustrated, and ready to try an alternative to the American-centric approach that has prevailed since the 1970s.

“The U.S. cannot lead on an issue that it is so boxed in on by its domestic politics,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator in the government of Ehud Barak. “And therefore, with the region in such rapid upheaval and the two-state solution dying, as long as the U.S. is paralyzed, others are going to have to step up.”

The “war on terror” has seen an explosion of private contractors making a killing from catching and killing all Arabs, I mean, terrorists, around the globe. Accountability is close to non-existent so we have no real idea which companies are involved, how many people are hired or what they’re actually doing.

Remember, we’re told we live in democracies.

CNN reports:

Let’s say there is an American overseas, loading Hellfire missiles onto drones that are targeting and killing terrorists. Would it matter to you whether that person is a private contractor and not a U.S. service member?

That’s one of the questions lawmakers are still struggling with some 10 years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which, because of massive shortages in the government sector saw a boom in the private contracting industry.

The temporary hiring practice that began as a stopgap measure has ballooned into a multibillion-dollar industry where the line is often blurred between functions customarily handled by government employees and those carried out by hired contractors on behalf of the United States.

Contractors working for the military have made the news in recent years, but contractors are also gathering and analyzing intelligence information. Two of the victims of a suicide bomber who infiltrated a secret CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in December 2009 were contractors.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, said last week that after 9/11, “contractors were tasked to conduct intelligence operations, collection, exploitation, and analysis.”

The House Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee took up the issue Tuesday, hearing from a panel of experts about just how large the intelligence contracting community has become – and just how much they are needed.

Not all of that information is for public consumption. In fact, the overall budget remains classified, but experts such as Charlie Allen, a widely respected CIA veteran who now works for the Chertoff Group, a global consulting firm, testified that while there have been some improvements to the process, there is still much work to be done, not only in managing the contractor work force effectively, but in bringing more of a balance to some government agencies as well.

“In recent years, because of the complex, asymmetric threat of terrorism, these numbers have grown substantially, and finding the right balance of government workers, supported by qualified contractors with unique skill sets has become increasingly complex,” Allen told the committee.

One of those complexities comes with defining what functions contractors should and should not perform. The catchphrase for this is “inherently governmental,” and numerous studies have been done to determine just what that means. Allen testified that the Office of Federal Procurement Policy last week completed a policy letter titled “Performance of Inherently Governmental and Critical Functions.”

Mark Lowenthal, who was a high-ranking CIA official before joining the contractor work force, told the committee that during his time as assistant director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, half of his staff was made up of contractors.

 ”They managed planning projects for me, they ran investigations for me and represented me at meetings.” All of these duties were within the bounds of what contractors should do, Lowenthal testified.

 ”Their services were vital to the programs we undertook and carried out,” he said.

Barack Obama’s speech to the UN overnight was farcical in its ineptitude, showing once again how beholden America remains to a vision of apartheid Israel. Some “highlights”:

We seek a future where Palestinians live in a sovereign state of their own, with no limit to what they can achieve. There is no question that the Palestinians have seen that vision delayed for too long. And it is precisely because we believe so strongly in the aspirations of the Palestinian people that America has invested so much time and effort in the building of a Palestinian state, and the negotiations that can deliver a Palestinian state.

But understand this is well America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable, and our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring. S we believe that any lasting peace must acknowledge the very real security concerns that Israel faces every single day. Let’s be honest: Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel’s children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, looks out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map. The Jewish people carry the burden of centuries of exile, and persecution, and the fresh memory of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they are.

Those are facts. They cannot be denied. The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland. Israel deserves recognition. It deserves normal relations with its neighbors. And friends of the Palestinians do them no favors by ignoring this truth, just as friends of Israel must recognize the need to pursue a two state solution with a secure Israel next to an independent Palestine.

Obama has been one of Israel’s “best” friends, offering weapons, support for illegal colonies and diplomatic backing. In other words, indulging Israel’s self-destructive instinct.

But for some (mostly old Jews), Obama isn’t loving enough:

The former head of the media company is stepping down, amidst allegations he was too close to the US as revealed by Wikileaks, but he denies this:

The wider question, asked in Foreign Policy, is will the station retain its (mostly) aggressive style of insightful journalism?”

In recent weeks, the details of conversations between U.S. officials and Al Jazeera executives, including Khanfar, had been the subject of much chatter in the Arab world (Omar Chatriwala details that story for FP here). One October 2005 cable describes U.S. officials presenting Khanfar with the findings of a Defense Intelligence Agency report complaining about the network’s coverage, and him agreeing to remove a particularly inflammatory slideshow from Al Jazeera’s website. The cable was taken out of context and seized upon by the network’s critics as evidence of a CIA-Qatari conspiracy to manipulate Arabs in the service of U.S. foreign-policy goals.

Middle East Online is running with the headline “WikiLeaks topples Al Jazeera director.” But if Khanfar somehow had to resign because of the cable controversy, which has hurt Al Jazeera’s credibility in certain quarters, it doesn’t wash that his replacement would be a member of the Qatari royal family. Middle East Online also reports that unnamed Qatari officials were already looking to cashier Khanfar over a supposed dispute with Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian intellectual and former Knesset member who lives in Doha (and appears frequently on Al Jazeera).

So perhaps something else is going on. My sense from watching the Arabic network’s coverage over the past few months is that it had more or less dropped the pretense of independence, and at times seemed like the official network of the Qatari Foreign Ministry. For instance, its Libya coverage was utterly over-the-top, enthusiastic cheerleading for the rebels — and it just so happened that Qatar was heavily engaged in overthrowing Muammar al-Qaddafi. When Qatar brokered a peace agreement between warring factions in Darfur, Al Jazeera broke away from its normal coverage for two hours to show the final announcement. And, as many have noted, the Arabic channel’s usual aggression has been noticeably lacking when it comes to Bahrain.