Antony Loewenstein

Project on Government Oversight uncover a terrible tale of the US establishment punishing somebody who dared tell the truth about the US war machine:

On a hot, parched day in June 2004, a convoy of Humvees was making its way across Iraq’s Sunni Triangle when a roadside bomb exploded, mangling the head vehicle and knocking lead gunman Mike Helms unconscious. The force of the impact blew 2,000 rounds of ammunition from the Humvee. The other soldiers, seeing Helms’ limp frame, thought he was dead.

Helms, an intelligence specialist deployed to the Army’s 902^nd Military Intelligence (MI) Group, was alive—but he was wrongfully denied military medical care. When he tried to speak out about the U.S. military’s poor treatment of deployed civilians in Iraq, he plunged into a whistleblower’s worst nightmare: as he was losing his health, reprisal against him caused him to lose his livelihood.

A previously undisclosed Department of Defense (DoD) InspectorGeneral (IG) report obtained by POGO and dated October 2010, substantiates Helms’ claim that the military retaliated against him because of his whistleblowing. As the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2011 makes its way through Congress, there is no better time to shed light on Helms’ story.

“I just told the truth about what happened to me,” Helms told POGO in an interview. “But I didn’t have any protection. If it was up to some people, I would never work in the federal government again.”

Helms was hired as a federal civilian employee, but was eventually authorized to work as a lead gunman, partly because of his former soldier experience. According to Helms, there were not enough personnel for the convoys, so he was moved to the position to ensure there was enough trained military crew on the task force. The U.S. military treated Helms as a soldier: he ate military rations, worked alongside troops and came under enemy fire. 

But all that changed when Helms was actually injured by enemy fire. According to DoD policy, civilians who are injured while deployed are supposed to receive the same treatment as military members. However, according to an unclassified DoD paper from 2005 on Helms’ case, this policy is often overlooked, because it is uncommon for DoD civilians sustain war-related injuries that require extensive recovery periods.

Surreal:

On Thursday, a Manhattan auction house will be accepting bids on one of the more disturbing books to come onto the U.S. antiquarian book market in some time: Adolf Hitler’s personal copy of a city-by-city, state-by-state guide to the location of America’s Jewish population.

The book includes detailed data on towns like Peabody and Brookline, Massachusetts, the boroughs of New York City, as well as the farther-flung population clusters in states like Arizona, Arkansas, Minnesota and California. It also provides details of several hundred Jewish organizations, including B’nai B’rith and the Anti-Defamation League, along with names of key individuals and their addresses.

In light of the Holocaust, it is a disquieting compendium.

The 137-page report, “Statistik, Presse und Organisationen des Judentums in den Vereinigten Staaten und Kanada” (Statistics, Media, and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada), was compiled in 1944 by Heinz Kloss, a German linguist who specialized in minorities and visited the United States in the early 1930s.

Like many Nazi-era publications, the Kloss report, printed on cheap, highly acidic paper, is brittle and chipping. The cover, which bears a diagonal warning “For Official Use Only,” has become detached. On the verso is a bookplate with a stylized eagle perched on an oak branch clutching a laurel-wreathed swastika in its talons. It is framed, in bold-face type, “Ex Libris Adolf Hitler.”

How very revealing. Former State Department spokesman PJ Crowley speaks at an American university, praises the New York Times for co-ordinating with the White House on which Wikileaks documents should be revealed but argues that Julian Assange should not be prosecuted (from around 30:30):

Some would Perry is simply being honest. Successive US Presidents have condemned colonies in the West Bank and done nothing but enable them:

Cracks, very small cracks, are starting to appear in the age-old blindness towards Israeli apartheid. Why? Because a mute person knows that indefinite Zionist occupation of Palestinian land is bad for Palestinians, awful for Israelis and madness for America and the world (via Politico):

Two of the Democratic Party’s core institutions are challenging a bipartisan consensus on Israel and Palestine that has dominated American foreign policy for more than a decade.

The Center for American Progress, the party’s key hub of ideas and strategy, and Media Matters, a central messaging organization, have emerged as vocal critics of their party’s staunchly pro-Israel congressional leadership and have been at odds, at times, with Barack Obama’s White House, which has acted as a reluctant ally to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government.

The differences are ones of tone – but also of bright lines of principle – and while they haven’t yet made any visible impact on Democratic policy, they’ve shaken up the Washington foreign policy conversation and broadened the space for discussing a heretical and often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political margins.

The daily battle is waged in Media Matters’ emails, on CAP’s blogs, Middle East Progress and ThinkProgress and most of all on Twitter, where a Media Mattters official, MJ Rosenberg, regularly heaps vitriol on those who disagree as “Iraq war neocon liar” (the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) or having “dual loyalties” to the U.S. and Israel (the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin). And while the Center for American Progress tends to walk a more careful line, warm words for Israel can be hard to find on its blogs.

Events of recent years such as GOP attacks on Obama as insufficiently loyal to Israel, Israel’s controversial raid on a Turkish ship bound for Gaza and debates over the Iranian nuclear program have deepened the divide between some on the Democratic left and the party’s mainstream foreign policy apparatus.

“Like segregation in the American South, the siege of Gaza (and the entire Israeli occupation, for that matter) is a moral abomination that should be intolerable to anyone claiming progressive values,” wrote Matt Duss, a CAP policy analyst and the director of Middle East Progress, last year, after an Israeli raid on a flotilla challenging the blockade of Gaza turned violent.

Private prisons and detention centres are booming businesses (hello Serco). Crisis, real or otherwise, are exploited by corporations who come in to supposedly save the day (cut costs, increase efficiency etc).

The reality, explained in this piece on Alternet about the US, is rather different:

In a recently published report, “Banking on Bondage: Mass Incarceration and Private Prisons,” the American Civil Liberties Union examines the history of prison privatization and finds that private prison companies owe their continued and prosperous existence to skyrocketing immigration detention post September 11 as well as the firm hold they have gained over elected and appointed officials.

David Shapiro, the primary author of the ACLU report, told AlterNet that prior to the early 1980s, private prisons were “virtually nonexistent.” That quickly changed as the War on Drugs ‘tough on crime’ mentality swept the nation with institution of draconian sentencing and release laws for nonviolent offenders, causing an explosion in US incarceration rate.  State and federal governments increasingly struggled with overcrowded prisons and the rising costs of housing the rapidly growing pool of inmates.  

Coupled with the emergence of privatization madness under Ronald Reagan (a pattern that has continued under both Democrat and Republican administrations), skyrocketing imprisonment presented the perfect opportunity for the private sector to get in on the action, with promises of cost savings and more efficient operations than government-run facilities.  In 1984, the Corrections Corporation of America was awarded a contract to operate a public jail in Hamilton County, Tennessee, and the nation’s first-ever private prison was born. 

According to the ACLU report, From 1970 to 2005, the number of people locked up in the US shot up by 700 percent. Meanwhile, between 1990 and 2009 the number of prisoners behind private prison bars exploded from 7,000 to 129,000 inmates, a growth rate of 1600 percent.  But the private prison boom of the ‘90s did not last. 

…

According to the ACLU report, heightened immigration enforcement following the 2001 terrorist attacks were largely responsible for resurrecting the private prison boom…

The One Voice campaign is left to using a washed up Seinfeld character to support a Zionist state:

The American Jewish establishment cares little about Palestinians and prefers to talk about easy access to Zionist paradise. Some, like Peter Beinart, recognise the crisis and the effect of a decades-old Israeli occupation. Rather bad for the Zionist brand.

But not to worry, Australia’s Prime Minister sails on regardless, giving the same talking points that have been re-hashed hundreds of times. Naturally, the Australian Jewish News places the “news” on its cover:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard reaffirmed Australia’s commitment to Israel at a NAB Yachad Scholarship Fund luncheon on Friday last week.

“A just and secure Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people is an indispensable part of a just and secure world,” she said.

The scholarship fund was established in 2002 and award grants to Australians to undertake study in Israel in areas such as education, environment and technology.

Gillard addressed the capacity crowd, which included Australian Jewry’s top brass, at the Maia function centre at Docklands in Melbourne and spoke of the global importance of a secure and viable Israel.

“We are two countries separated by distance, but united by values. Liberal democracies that seek freedom and peace,” Gillard said.

…

With the recent Executive Council of Australian Jewry report into anti-Semitism finding an alarming spike in incidents, Gillard looked forward to a time of tolerance and peace for worldwide Jewry.

“In the common era there has never been a century where the Jewish people have known safety. May this century be the first. May this be the time when people of good will, Israelis and Palestinians alike, sit together at a table and find a lasting peace.”

Israeli Ambassador to Australia Yuval Rotem spoke of an Israel that transcended politics, depicting a trailblazing nation at the vanguard of technology, culture and education.

“Today we are reminded more strongly than ever that the story of Israel is defined by much more than mere politics. Our nation is painted with stories of innovation, creativity and discovery,” Rotem said.

This is an interesting story in yesterday’s Murdoch Australian that reveals the role of multinationals such as Halliburton in Australia:

Former coal-seam gas mechanical technician Roy Michie, who spent eight years working fracking wells across Australia, claims the industry is dominated by “cowboys” who are subject to substandard regulation.

Mr Michie, who worked for US energy giant Halliburton’s CSG operations, said he had spent an earlier decade working for traditional mining companies and the cultures between the two activities were worlds apart.

“From a WA underground mining perspective you knew what the rules were and weren’t, and what was supposed to happen,” Mr Michie said.

“Oil and gas just doesn’t seem to have any rules, it just depends on who is running the show on the day as to what you will do and how you will do it.”

Those claims are vigorously contested by the CSG industry which says it abides by rigorous protocols, with extraction approvals regularly containing hundreds of conditions and requirements to protect the environment and worker safety.

Mr Michie’s comments come as a Senate committee last week called for a moratorium for all future CSG projects until further research was carried out into issues such as the disposal of salt by-product.

Mr Michie, who worked for the fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, arm of Halliburton in the Cooper Basin in South Australia and the Surat Basin in Queensland, said he quit working in the sector earlier this year over concerns about poor leadership and controls.

He said while working on CSG wells for Halliburton, which contracts to major CSG extractors, he had been unable to obtain basic information such as how close to a well head a naked flame was permitted.

Halliburton spokeswoman Zelma Branch denied the company had weak controls or practices. “Halliburton is committed to protecting public health and the environment in all of its business activities,” Ms Branch said.

Mr Michie said suggestions by the industry that the chemicals used in fracking were harmless were not true. “Some chemicals we use, like castor oil, are harmless but there are also some very nasty chemicals as well.”

Fund-raising for an occupying army is simply business as usual in Hollywood: