Antony Loewenstein

Italian footballer Paolo Di Canio – “a fascist but not a racist” – has been given some appropriate punishment:

“Paolo Di Canio, the Lazio forward who has become the darling of the neo-fascist right with his repeated straight-arm salutes, has been summoned by the mayor of Rome to listen to fellow Italians who survived the Nazi death camps.

“The move is part of an initiative by the mayor that has already brought AS Roma players and officials face to face with Holocaust survivors in the city hall. For almost two hours on Thursday, Francesco Totti and the other members of the Serie A side listened in silence as former concentration-camp inmates appealed to them to stop playing as soon as they saw Nazi symbols in the crowd.”

Di Canio may be ignorant but Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi caused outrage in 2003 by suggesting Mussolini “never killed anyone” and merely “sent people on holiday to confine them.”

Leonard Fein, The Forward, February 10:

“Here’s a puzzle, a small piece of a much larger set of nagging issues that bubbles just beneath the surface of our ordinary lives: On December 23, 2005, Lawrence Kaplan, a senior editor of The New Republic, asserted in The Wall Street Journal that ‘Israeli officials were lukewarm about the war [in Iraq] from the outset, being far more concerned with the threat from Iran.’

“Yet now we have a book by James Risen, national security correspondent for The New York Times, titled ‘State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,’ that argues the exact opposite.

“In a section on the prewar jockeying in Washington, Risen describes the role of Paul Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of defense. Wolfowitz, he writes, found the CIA ‘insufficiently hawkish,’ believed it ‘an arrogant, rogue institution…unwilling to support administration policymakers.’ Specifically, Wolfowitz insisted on examining ‘the possibility that Saddam Hussein was behind the [September 11] attacks on the United States,’ a possibility that the CIA discounted.

“Now comes the kicker: ‘Israeli intelligence played a hidden role in convincing Wolfowitz that he couldn’t trust the CIA… Israeli intelligence officials frequently travelled to Washington to brief top American officials, but CIA analysts were often sceptical of Israeli intelligence reports, knowing that Mossad had very strong – even transparent – biases about the Arab world.’ Wolfowitz, who ‘had begun meeting personally with top Israeli intelligence officials,’ preferred the Mossad’s analysis to the CIA’s.

“Now it cannot be that Israeli officials were at one and the same time ‘lukewarm about the war’ yet busy shuttling back and forth to encourage Wolfowitz’s evident eagerness for that same war. From all that we know regarding Wolfowitz and his ideological associates – Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and others – the Risen version seems to me the more plausible.”

The full truth of the Iraq war is yet to emerge, though Israel’s key involvement is a given. Now that the Jewish state’s head of domestic security says he misses Saddam, one can be assured that the gross failure of the Iraq war is starting to bite.

After a group of British academics decided to boycott Israel in 2005 (though later overturned), the inevitable second stage is upon us:

“A group including some of Britain’s most prominent architects is considering calling for an economic boycott of Israel’s construction industry in protest at the building of Israeli settlements and the separation barrier in the Occupied Territories.

“The group said that architects, planners and engineers working on Israeli projects in the occupied territories were ‘complicit in social, political and economic oppression’, and ‘in violation of their professional code of ethics’.

“It said that: ‘Planning, architecture and other construction disciplines are being used to promote an apartheid system of environmental control.’”

While the chairman of the Israel Architects’ Association may claim that the boycott is inappropriate because “the Government of Israel, which evacuated the Gaza Strip, is currently showing goodwill and trying to reach an agreement”, the co-ordinator of the proposed boycott argues that, “since nothing seems to deter Israel, and western governments remain silent, civil society has to pressure Israel and those creating the physical reality of these injustices that are the cause of such instability in the Middle East.”

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

“More than half of the terror suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay have not been accused of committing hostile acts against the United States or its allies, two of the detainees’ lawyers said in a report released Tuesday.

“Compiled from declassified Defense Department evaluations of the more than 500 detainees at the Cuba facility, the report says just 8 percent are listed as fighters for a terrorist group, while 30 percent are considered members of a terrorist group and the remaining 60 percent were just ‘associated with’ terrorists.

“The evaluations were completed as part of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted during 2004 to determine if the prisoners were being correctly held as enemy combatants. So far just 10 of the detainees have been formally charged with crimes and are headed for military tribunals.

“According to the report, 55 percent of the detainees are informally accused of committing a hostile act. But the descriptions of their actions ranged from a high-ranking Taliban member who tortured and killed Afghan natives to people who possessed rifles, used a guest house or wore olive drab clothing.”

Remind me to watch people in “olive drab clothing.” One wonders where Australian captive David Hicks fits into the picture. His father, Terry, yesterday accused the US of holding his son as the “token white fella.”

In further Guantanamo revelations, a recent article in the National Journal provides “powerful evidence confirming what many of us have suspected for years”:

- A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on ‘the battlefield in Afghanistan’ (as Bush asserted) while ‘trying to kill American forces’ (as McClellan claimed).

- Fewer than 20% of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been al-Qaeda members.

- Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone al-Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the al-Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.

- The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability. These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on as the Arabs fled war-torn Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002 – including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers.

- And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over.

The military trials are a sham, based largely on guilt-by-association claims. Writer Stuart Taylor explains:

“The administration’s unspoken logic appears to be: Better to ruin the lives of 10 innocent men than to let one who might be a terrorist go free. This logic would be understandable if the end of protecting American lives justified any and all means, including the wrecking of many more innocent non-American lives…”

Such realities perfectly explain the cynicism towards the US in certain parts of the world. Some of us prefer to simply regard the US as a rogue state.

- Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez tells Tony Blair to “go right to hell” and accuses him of being a “pawn of imperialism.”

- The Danish editor of “those” cartoons interviewed neo-con and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes in 2004.

- John Howard thinks the Greens are offensive. This is clearly much more problematic than sending a country to war on a lie. On a related topic, the Murdoch broadsheet says the local arts community is arrogant and out of touch. That rather reminds me of someone else…

- New Orleans is rebuilding.

The head of Israel’s domestic security agency, Yuval Diskin, proves Israel’s belief in Middle Eastern democracy:

“When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos. I’m not sure we won’t miss Saddam.”

While Nato dismisses the possibility of Israel entering the club as a “security umbrella” to protect the Jewish state from Iran and the World Jewish Congress launches a campaign against the Islamic state, John Pilger explains that the Western powers are preparing for a war of aggression:

“Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret agenda that has nothing to do with the Tehran regime’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction. That Washington has managed to coerce enough members of the International Atomic Energy Agency into participating in a diplomatic charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it intimidated and bribed the “international community” into attacking Iraq in 1991.

“Iran offers no ‘nuclear threat’. There is not the slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly said his inspectors have found nothing to support American and Israeli claims. Iran has done nothing illegal; it has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor has it engaged in the occupation of a foreign country – unlike the United States, Britain and Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to allow inspectors to ‘go anywhere and see anything’ – unlike the US and Israel. The latter has refused to recognise the NPT, and has between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle Eastern states.”

Not unlike Britain, Washington is likely to ask Australia for troops and assistance. It is unlikely John Howard would deny the request and it is therefore vital to begin a campaign to avert a potentially catastrophic conflict.

Amira Hass, Haaretz, February 8:

“The attempt to explain to Israelis that such acts of vengeance are puny compared to the intensity of the Israeli assault on every individual, and against the entire Palestinian community, is doomed to failure. On a daily basis, Israel attacks every Palestinian with systematic variety. The aggregation is lethal, even if the killing of a nine-year-old girl or setting a dog on an elderly woman are not daily occurrences. It’s that aggregation that undermines any attempt to conduct a normal life. It’s being locked up in the West Bank’s enclaves, so that simple routines like going to school, work, or visiting family are impossible. There’s the unceasing expropriation of land for roads and security fences for settlements; the trees uprooted by the army, livelihoods that are cut off daily, and the insult of that; the army’s prohibition, on security grounds, against accessing farm and grazing lands; the break-ins to houses in the middle of the night, which the Israeli public rarely if ever hears about; the hours of waiting at checkpoints; the frightened children; the aimed rifles.”

Eva Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, explains why his country will continue to cultivate coca:

“You have to realise that, for us, the coca leaf is not cocaine and as such growing coca is not narco-trafficking. Neither is chewing coca nor making products from it that are separate from narcotics. The coca leaf has had an important role to play in our culture for thousands of years. It is used in many rituals. If, for example, you want to ask someone to marry you, you carry a coca leaf to them. It plays an important role in many aspects of life.”

Read a fascinating interview with the new leader about British imperialism, US attempts to smear him and plans for his impoverished nation. It’s worth remembering that, “in the 182 years since it was granted independence from Spain, this chaotic and crippled country has welcomed and waved goodbye to more than 190 failed governments.”

In related news, Costa Rica is also turning away from the US orbit.

“A dispute over the fate of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem threatened Wednesday to ignite tensions in Holy City as workers removed skeletons from the site despite Muslim pleas for the work to end.

“Israeli developers and archaeologists are removing the tombs to make room for the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center to build a multi-million-dollar Museum of Tolerance, dedicated in part to promoting understanding among different religions. Muslims are incensed.

“Mufti Ikrema Sabri, the senior Islamic cleric in Jerusalem, on Wednesday demanded that the dig stop at the site which until 1948 served as the main Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.

“‘There should be a complete cessation of work on the cemetery because it is sacred for the Muslims,’ Sabri told The Associated Press. The Waqf, the Muslim council in Jerusalem that Sabri oversees, was not consulted on the dig, he said. The cemetery was in use for 15 decades and friends of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad are buried there, Sabri said.”

Imagine the justified outcry if a Muslim country desecrated Jewish graves?

“The George W. Bush administration’s adoption of a policy of threatening to use military force against Iran disregarded a series of official intelligence estimates going back many years that consistently judged Iran’s fear of a U.S. attack to be a major motivating factor in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

“Two former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials who were directly involved in producing CIA estimates on Iran revealed in separate interviews with IPS that the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) on Iran have consistently portrayed its concerns about the military threat posed by the United States as a central consideration in Tehran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.

“Paul Pillar, who managed the writing of all NIEs on Iran from 2000 to 2005 as the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, told IPS that all of the NIEs on Iran during that period addressed the Iranian fears of U.S. attack explicitly and related their desire for nuclear weapons to those fears.”