Antony Loewenstein

The influence of Likud-style, extreme Zionism at the heart of the British government is becoming clearer by the day.

Such moves are prevalent in most Western democracies and usually remain unquestioned. They should not.

This news emerged only by chance recently due to a political scandal:

Adam Werritty was at a meeting between the former defence secretary Dr Liam Fox and the Israeli secret service, Whitehall sources have disclosed.

The meeting between Dr Fox, Mr Werritty and the head of Mossad will raise further concerns about Mr Werritty’s role and his connections to the Ministry of Defence.

It has emerged that Mr Werritty has met several Iranian and Israeli figures in recent years, but his meeting with the secretive head of Mossad will increase concerns about the sensitive information available to Mr Werritty.

It casts doubt on the assertion of Sir Gus O’ Donnell that there was “nothing in the evidence” to suggest that Mr Werritty had access to classified information.

Mr Werritty has visited Iran on several occasions and met Iranian opposition groups in Washington and London over the past few years.

In May 2009, Mr Werritty arranged a meeting in Portcullis House between Dr Fox and an Iranian lobbyist with close links to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime.

In February this year, Mr Werritty arranged a dinner with Dr Fox, Matthew Gould, Britain’s ambassador to Israel, and senior political figures – understood to include Israeli intelligence agents – during an Israeli security conference in Herzliya. Iranian sanctions are understood to have been discussed at this meeting.

Mr Werritty also attended the Herzliya conference two years earlier, in February 2009, as an “expert” on Iran.

On that occasion, the British Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom), a pro-Israeli lobbying organisation, paid for his flight and hotel.

Despite Mr Werritty having no official MoD capacity, it is understood that the Israelis believed that Mr Werritty was regarded as Dr Fox’s chief of staff.

The chairman of Bicom is Poju Zabloudowicz, a billionaire whose companies have donated money to the Conservative Partyand.

A spokesman said: “For many years, Poju Zabloudowicz has helped fund not-for-profit organisations, not individuals, due to his passion for the promotion of peace and understanding between peoples in the United States, Europe and the Middle East.”

Despite a company such as G4S having a shocking human rights record in Britain and globally, this clearly has little impact on the firm receiving new contracts. After all, failure is rewarded in disaster capitalism. Privatisation will make everything more “efficient”, haven’t you heard?

The Guardian reports on the latest British experiment in vulnerable people’s lives:

A lot of care has been paid to the interior decoration of the new centre designed to hold families facing deportation from this country. Each of the nine apartments is named after a flower – lavender, iris, orchid – and pictures of these flowers are painted on the doors to the flats. The centre has an indoor play area for young children, decorated with animal murals, and a recreation area for teenagers, with a pool table. There’s a computer zone, a mosque and a non-denominational prayer area, as well as family-friendly communal kitchens. Outside there is a mini-adventure playground and extensive gardens.

There are also two boundary fences that make it impossible for residents to leave the premises unsupervised, and the centre is staffed by workers from the security firm G4S, paid by the UK Border Agency (UKBA). Guests are brought here by escorts, after being arrested at their homes. Belongings are x-rayed, and adults are taken aside to be searched on arrival. The pretty, white-gabled building will be inspected by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons.

Officials avoid referring to Cedars as a detention centre, describing it instead as a “pre-departure accommodation centre” to hold families whose immigration requests have failed and need to be removed from the country. The children’s charity Barnardo’s (which campaigns for an end to child detention) has been contracted to work with the children who are housed there, and its chief executive, Anne Marie Carrie, says its involvement will ensure that the new regime never recreates the scandals of the old “immigration removal centre” Yarl’s Wood, particularly the notorious, now-closed family unit, where families of failed asylum seekers were held (often at length).

But there is a lot that is confusing about the new site. Is it a detention centre? Does it represent an end to the detention of children, which the government promised in its coalition manifesto last year? Is the presence of Barnardo’s a constructive attempt to ensure that conditions are better, or (as some asylum charities argue) just a useful fig leaf?

…

Earlier this year, it began to be obvious that far more children were being detained at the ports than the coalition had anticipated when they promised to end child detention. During an unannounced inspection of a holding facility at Heathrow Terminal 4, prison inspectors witnessed a G4S member of staff, wearing latex gloves, telling a five-year-old French boy: “You’re a big boy now so I have to search you.”

…

All G4S staff working at Cedars are being trained by Barnardo’s in child welfare, but Carrie admits to some unease about cooperating with G4S, which has a mixed record on working with asylum seekers.

“I’m not an idiot. I know that there are concerns about them as an organisation,” she says. “But we’re not there to work for G4S. Their job is to run the facility on behalf of UKBA, they are accountable to UKBA. I’m accountable to the children and families who are in there, and I’m accountable to my wider stakeholders, and to my staff at Barnardo’s.”

Struggling for the best way to describe the place, she says it looks like an “upmarket” holiday resort, perhaps a bit like Center Parcs, before adding: “Let’s not pretend it’s that, but … It looks the best facility it can be. It looks family-centred, child-centred …”

Noam Chomsky made the following comments earlier this week at Barnard College in New York City:

Israeli Jews are people. Palestinians are unpeople. And a lot follows from that as clear illustrations constantly. So, here’s a clipping, if I remembered to bring it, from the New York Times. Front-page story, Wednesday, October 12th, the lead story is “Deal with Hamas Will Free Israeli Held Since 2006.” That’s Gilad Shalit. And right next to it is a—running right across the top of the front page is a picture of four women kind of agonized over the fate of Gilad Shalit. “Friends and supporters of the family of Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit received word of the deal at the family’s protest tent in Jerusalem.” Well, that’s understandable, actually. I think he should have been released a long time ago. But there’s something missing from this whole story. So, like, there’s no pictures of Palestinian women, and no discussion, in fact, in the story of—what about the Palestinian prisoners being released? Where do they come from?

And there’s a lot to say about that. So, for example, we don’t know — at least I don’t read it in the Times — whether the release includes the Palestinian—the elected Palestinian officials who were kidnapped and imprisoned by Israel in 2007 when the United States, the European Union and Israel decided to dissolve the only freely elected legislature in the Arab world. That’s called “democracy promotion,” technically, in case you’re not familiar with the term. So I don’t know what happened to them. There are also other people who have been in prison exactly as long as Gilad Shalit—in fact, one day longer. The day before Gilad Shalit was captured at the border, Israeli troops entered Gaza, kidnapped two brothers, the Muamar brothers, spirited them across the border, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, of course. And they’ve disappeared into Israel’s prison system. I haven’t a clue what happened to them; I’ve never seen a word about it. And as far as I know, nobody cares, which makes sense. After all, unpeople. Whatever you think about capturing the soldier, a soldier from an attacking army, plainly kidnapping civilians is a far more severe crime. But that’s only if they’re people. This case really doesn’t matter. It’s not that it’s unknown, so if you look back at the press the day after the Muamar brothers were captured, there’s a couple lines here and there. But it’s just insignificant, of course—which makes some sense, because there are lots of others in prison, thousands of them, many without charges.

Walter Pincus dares to go there:

As the country reviews its spending on defense and foreign assistance, it is time to examine the funding the United States provides to Israel.

Let me put it another way: Nine days ago, the Israeli cabinet reacted to months of demonstrations against the high cost of living there and agreed to raise taxes on corporations and people with high incomes ($130,000 a year). It also approved cutting more than $850 million, or about 5 percent, from its roughly $16 billion defense budget in each of the next two years.

If Israel can reduce its defense spending because of its domestic economic problems, shouldn’t the United States — which must cut military costs because of its major budget deficit — consider reducing its aid to Israel?

…

Look for a minute at the bizarre formula that has become an element of U.S.-Israel military aid, the so-called qualitative military edge (QME). Enshrined in congressional legislation, it requires certification that any proposed arms sale to any other country in the Middle East “will not adversely affect Israel’s qualitative military edge over military threats to Israel.”

In 2009 meetings with defense officials in Israel, Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher “reiterated the United States’ strong commitment” to the formula and “expressed appreciation” for Israel’s willingness to work with newly created “QME working groups,” according to a cable of her meetings that was released by WikiLeaks.

The formula has an obvious problem. Because some neighboring countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are U.S. allies but also considered threats by Israel, arms provided to them automatically mean that better weapons must go to Israel. The result is a U.S.-generated arms race.

For example, the threat to both countries from Iran led the Saudis in 2010 to begin negotiations to purchase advanced F-15 fighters. In turn, Israel — using $2.75 billion in American military assistance — has been allowed to buy 20 of the new F-35 fifth-generation stealth fighters being developed by the United States and eight other nations.

As Syria continues to groan under intense violence between government troops, opposition elements and unknown outside forces, this story in the UK Independent is eerie:

Vogue magazine famously called her a “rose in the desert”, while Paris Match proclaimed she was the “element of light in a country full of shadow zones”. But when Syria’s glamorous First Lady invited a group of aid workers to discuss the security situation with her last month, she appeared to have lost her gloss.

During the meeting, British-born Asma al-Assad – who grew up in Acton and attended a Church of England school in west London – came face to face with aid workers who had witnessed at first hand the brutality of her husband’s regime. Yet according to one volunteer who was present, the former investment banker and mother of President Bashar al-Assad’s three children appeared utterly unmoved when she heard about the plight of protesters.

“We told her about the killing of protesters,” said the man, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. “We told her about the security forces attacking demonstrators. About them taking wounded people from cars and preventing people from getting to hospital … There was no reaction. She didn’t react at all. It was just like I was telling a normal story, something that happens every day.”

Gawker has a little piece of recent history that reflects the (usually squalid) relationship between the mainstream media and US military:

Public relations is about “relationships.” Flacks develop “relationships” with reporters by calling them and yelling at them until the reporters start to realize, before they write something, that an unpleasant conversation might ensue. So they start to be…more careful. We recently came across an internal email written by Daniel Senor, the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, that summed up the dynamic in crystalline fashion.

In August 2003, Senor was in Baghdad and serving as the public face of the rapidly devolving occupation of Iraq under Paul Bremer. He wrote an email to Dorrance Smith, a former ABC News producer who was serving as a media adviser to the CPA, laying out the “issues” he was facing in getting positive TV coverage in Iraq (we obtained the email via the Freedom of Information Act). Senor’s main problem? TV correspondents and producers weren’t in Iraq long enough for Senor to get his hooks in them:

“Some print reporters have made a long-term commitment to their Iraq bureaus (e.g. Rajiv Chandrasekeran of the Post & Alissa Rubin of the LA Times are each here for another year). They know they’ve got to deal with us for a while, and their reporting reflects it. The television correspondents/producers are the opposite. They come in and out on 3-week stints, and therefore find no need to invest in their relationships with Bremer & Co. They just do a bunch of hit-and-runs—2 weeks of ‘Iraq has gone to hell —US bodybags piling up, blah blah blah.’ How do we get longer commitments?”

Blah blah blah. For the record, Rubin and Chandrasekeran are both good reporters (though Chandrasekeran’s a bit of a prima donna). But when you’re in it for the long haul—in any beat, really—you have to deal with certain realities. You realize that you’re going to have to see Dan Senor’s face every day, and he’s reading every word, and next time you start to write about the body bags, you think about it. You start to invest in your relationship with Bremer and his staff. And your reporting reflects it.

My following book review appeared in last weekend’s Sydney Sun Herald newspaper:

The Triple Agent
Joby Warrick
(Scribe, $32.95)
Reviewed by Antony Loewenstein

The war in Afghanistan is the longest in modern American history. This year has been the most deadly for Afghan civilians.

British MP Rory Stewart wrote in The New York Times that the presence of foreign troops and private security was inflaming the situation and making peace impossible: “Helmand is less safe in 2011 with 32,000 foreign troops in the province than it was in 2005, when there were only 300.”

Amid this chaos sits the CIA, the highly secretive (and largely unaccountable) organisation given the job, by successive US presidents, of tracking, capturing or killing supposed insurgents and bringing “victory”. This book documents one infamous case of how horribly wrong and misguided this stated aim can be.

In December 2009, a group of senior CIA operatives were based in Khost, Afghanistan, and were ready to greet Humam Khalil al-Balawi, a man they believed was the ultimate al-Qaeda insider who would give America invaluable intelligence on the terrorist organisation. Instead, he detonated a bomb strapped to his chest and killed seven CIA operatives, a deep blow to the agency.

The mercenary company Blackwater is front and centre of the story, often in charge of protecting CIA installations and officers in conflict zones, despite a troubling human rights record.

Such firms have been invaluable to America’s war machine since the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, without which Washington could not fight its countless battles around the world.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning book reads like a thriller but is infused with a deep sympathy for the war America is fighting in Afghanistan and the “war on terror” in general.

For example, US drone attacks in Pakistan are only seen as “killing terrorists”, whereas the facts tell a different, more disturbing story.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism recently released a study that found hundreds of civilians had been killed by drones since 2004.

Author Joby Warrick does not seem too concerned with such details, praising the supposed heroism of drone pilots killing remotely from back in America. But Warrick knows how to tell a cracking story and the importance of this book is to reveal the legal black hole of Washington’s actions globally, and the cultural and social ineptitude of US forces in countries they occupy.

This is an insider’s book written by a journalist who admires his countryfolk entrusted with allegedly defending the homeland.

Few doubts are expressed and the work closes with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.

It is framed as a retribution for the CIA deaths – a closing of the circle.

American foreign policy has never looked so tawdry and obsessed with revenge.

The eloquence of arguing for a different world (still continuing in Sydney, by the way) is a movement fueled by anger, technology and passion: