Antony Loewenstein

This is classic mainstream “journalism” in the Washington Post. America has the right to intervene anywhere, haven’t you heard?

The CIA is expected to maintain a large clandestine presence in Iraq and Afghanistan long after the departure of conventional U.S. troops as part of a plan by the Obama administration to rely on a combination of spies and Special Operations forces to protect U.S. interests in the two longtime war zones, U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials said that the CIA’s stations in Kabul and Baghdad will probably remain the agency’s largest overseas outposts for years, even if they shrink from record staffing levels set at the height of American efforts in those nations to fend off insurgencies and install capable governments.

The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in December has moved the CIA’s emphasis there toward more traditional espionage — monitoring developments in the increasingly antagonistic government, seeking to suppress al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the country and countering the influence of Iran.

In Afghanistan, the CIA is expected to have a more aggressively operational role. U.S. officials said the agency’s paramilitary capabilities are seen as tools for keeping the Taliban off balance, protecting the government in Kabul and preserving access to Afghan airstrips that enable armed CIA drones to hunt al-Qaeda remnants in Pakistan.

As President Obama seeks to end a decade of large-scale conflict, the emerging assignments for the CIA suggest it will play a significant part in the administration’s search for ways to exert U.S. power in more streamlined and surgical ways.

As a result, the CIA station in Kabul — which at one point had responsibility for as many as 1,000 agency employees in Afghanistan — is expected to expand its collaboration with Special Operations forces when the drawdown of conventional troops begins.

Navy Adm. William McRaven, the Special Operations commander who directed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last year, signaled the transition during remarks Tuesday in Washington. “I have no doubt that Special Operations will be the last to leave Afghanistan,” McRaven said.

The CIA declined to comment. But current and former intelligence officials quibbled with the accuracy of McRaven’s assertion.

“I would say the agency will be the last to leave,” said a CIA veteran with extensive experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “We were the first to get there” after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the former official said.

As autocratic regimes, hackers, trouble-makers and fools aim to bring down websites that challenge authoritarian rule, such spaces need to be nurtured and protected. Reporters Without Borders on an important project:

Filtering, denial of service attacks, withdrawal of content – censors use many different methods to silence news websites. In addition to drawing attention to these acts of censorship and providing the victims with legal, material and financial help, Reporters Without Borders has now decided to provide them with technical assistance as well.

So that independent news websites that are targeted by cyber-attacks and government blocking can continue posting information online, Reporters Without Borders is going to start mirroring sites. The first sites to be mirrored are those of the Chechen magazine Dosh and the Sri Lankan online newspaperLanka-e News. We urge Internet users all over the world to create more mirrors of these sites in an act of solidarity.

If a cyber-attack renders Doshdu.ru inaccessible again, as it was during last December’s parliamentary elections in Russia, Internet users will be able to access the exact copy created by Reporters Without Borders, http://dosh.rsf.org. The mirror will be regularly and automatically updated.

Mirror sites can also be used to circumvent blocking by governments. For example, the Lanka-e-News site, http://lankaenews.com, has been blocked in Sri Lanka since October 2011 (by blocking the site domain name or the hosting server’s IP address), but Internet users in Sri Lanka will be able to access the Reporters Without Borders mirror site, http://lankaenesw.rsf.org, which is hosted on another server with another domain name.

If the mirror is itself later also blocked, the creation of further mirror sites together with a regularly updated list of these mirrors will continue to render the blocking ineffective in a Streisand effect.

Reporters Without Borders will soon create other mirrors and urges Internet users who want to help combat censorship and have the ability to host a site on a web server to follow suit. A list of the mirror sites will be updated on this page. If you want to participate, send the URL of the mirror site you have created to wefightcensorship [at] rsf.org. We will add it to the list below. The next mirroring operations launched by Reporters Without Borders will be reported on the @RSF_RWB and @RSFNet Twitter accounts with the #RSFmirror hashtag.

Amira Hass in Haaretz explains:

News came this week of three individual battles against Israel’s discriminatory regime that have scored gains. Bedouin from the Jahalin tribe will not be expelled to a community next to the Abu Dis dump, and their school will not be demolished. A tender for a luxury development in Lifta, a Palestinian village on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, destroyed in 1948, was withdrawn by court order. And Munther Fahmi, the Jerusalem-born owner of the bookstore in East Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel, will be allowed to remain in the city of his birth. Millions of hours of work and immeasurable amounts of endurance on the part of Palestinians has paid off.

Perhaps it was the Jahalin ecological school made of used tires, in the Khan al-Ahmar community, that pierced the thick Israeli hide and drew enough international attention to make the Israeli destruction authorities think twice. For the refugees of Lifta (who now live in Jerusalem ), it was presumably their uncommon access to their ruined homes that prompted them to appeal against the damage to their heritage and its beauty. Their appeal, filed jointly with Israeli activists and organizations, led to the exposure of problems with the development tender. And the signatures of authors Amos Oz and David Grossman, as well as those of other public figures, surely sent the Interior Ministry the message that it would be misguided to deport Fahmi from his birthplace.

How tempting it is to think that these three examples contain some magic formula that could be copied to ensure the success of thousands of other battles.

But they don’t. The awareness that these are exceptions to the rule tempers the already low-key celebrations. It is not yet clear whether all the Jahalin living in tent compounds on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem will be saved from a forced move to near the dump, a plan cooked up over the past year. But the occupation authorities remain determined to commit more violations of international law and to concentrate this protected population in a single, permanent location. The affected community will be allowed to review and comment at the end of the planning process but will not be consulted during it.

Despite protests, including from Europe, the enormous expanse of Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli control, continues to be an Israeli laboratory for implementing sophisticated methods for the hidden deportation of Palestinians.

…

Rabbis for Human Rights? This organization is not involved only in the battles of Lifta and the Jahalin. It takes part in dozens of other campaigns, most of them Sisyphean, to rescue people from the evil jaws of the regime of Jewish privilege. They are, unintentionally, bold and painful attempts to save “Jewish” from being a synonym in Israel for racist, lordly, hard-hearted, hypocritical, shortsighted.

Interesting comment here, and undeniably true, in the UK Press Gazette. There are so few truly courageous journalists from the Murdoch stable who would know this to be true but refuse to speak out; gotta pay the mortgage on that charming 4 bedroom place, remember?

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre yesterday said other Fleet Street editors are not given freedom to edit and that Britain could not have invaded Iraq without the support of News International proprietor Rupert Murdoch.

Dacre revealed that he has turned down opportunities to edit The Times and the Telegraph because he believes that other proprietors would not have given him the freedom that Daily Mail and General Trustowner Lord Rothermere has.

He said: “Rupert Murdoch has been a very great proprietor in his time, but I don’t think he would have given me the freedom I wished to have as an editor…

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that he had strong views which he communicated to his editors and expected them to be followed. The classic case is the Iraq War.

“I’m not sure that the Blair government or Tony Blair would have been able to take the British people to war if it hadn’t been for the implacable support provided by the Murdoch papers. There’s no doubt that came from Mr Murdoch himself.”

In written evidence, Dacre expanded on the theme of editorial independence:

“In my time I have turned down editorships of The Times and The Telegraph. One reason I did so is that at the Mail I enjoy total freedom from proprietorial and managerial interference, a freedom that is not necessarily found in other newspaper groups.

This isn’t me. Really. Truly:

Via the New York Times comes a story that burns with resentment towards those ungrateful Iraqis. I mean, Washington “liberated” you and now you aren’t grateful every day for causing chaos in the country?

Less than two months after American troops left, the State Department is preparing to slash by as much as half the enormous diplomatic presence it had planned for Iraq, a sharp sign of declining American influence in the country.

Officials in Baghdad and Washington said that Ambassador James F. Jeffrey and other senior State Department officials were reconsidering the size and scope of the embassy, where the staff has swelled to nearly 16,000 people, mostly contractors.

The expansive diplomatic operation and the $750 million embassy building, the largest of its kind in the world, were billed as necessary to nurture a postwar Iraq on its shaky path to democracy and establish normal relations between two countries linked by blood and mutual suspicion. But the Americans have been frustrated by what they see as Iraqi obstructionism and are now largely confined to the embassy because of security concerns, unable to interact enough with ordinary Iraqis to justify the $6 billion annual price tag.

The swift realization among some top officials that the diplomatic buildup may have been ill advised represents a remarkable pivot for the State Department, in that officials spent more than a year planning the expansion and that many of the thousands of additional personnel have only recently arrived.

Michael W. McClellan, the embassy spokesman, said in a statement, “Over the last year and continuing this year the Department of State and the Embassy in Baghdad have been considering ways to appropriately reduce the size of the U.S. mission in Iraq, primarily by decreasing the number of contractors needed to support the embassy’s operations.”

Mr. McClellan said the number of diplomats — currently about 2,000 — was also “subject to adjustment as appropriate.”

To make the cuts, he said the embassy was “hiring Iraqi staff and sourcing more goods and services to the local economy.”

After the American troops departed in December, life became more difficult for the thousands of diplomats and contractors left behind. Convoys of food that had been escorted by the United States military from Kuwait were delayed at border crossings as Iraqis demanded documentation that the Americans were unaccustomed to providing.

Within days, the salad bar at the embassy dining hall ran low. Sometimes there was no sugar or Splenda for coffee. On chicken-wing night, wings were rationed at six per person. Over the holidays, housing units were stocked with Meals Ready to Eat, the prepared food for soldiers in the field.

At every turn, the Americans say, the Iraqi government has interfered with the activities of the diplomatic mission, one they grant that the Iraqis never asked for or agreed upon. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s office — and sometimes even the prime minister himself — now must approve visas for all Americans, resulting in lengthy delays. American diplomats have had trouble setting up meetings with Iraqi officials.

For their part, the Iraqis say they are simply enforcing their laws and protecting their sovereignty in the absence of a working agreement with the Americans on the embassy.

“The main issue between Iraqis and the U.S. Embassy is that we have not seen, and do not know anything about, an agreement between the Iraqi government and the U.S.,” said Nahida al-Dayni, a lawmaker and member of Iraqiya, a largely Sunni bloc in Parliament.

A worrying development in Australia (courtesy of the Greens):

Minister Joe Ludwig, representing the Attorney General in the Senate, confirmed in Question Time today that the Australia Federal Police monitors coal seam gas protesters and that the government outsources some intelligence gathering to private consultants.

“Farmers in Queensland trying to protect their land from coal seam gas mining, and parents concerned about their children’s health, will be understandably outraged that they may be under surveillance by the Australian Federal Police,” Australian Greens Deputy Leader, Senator Christine Milne, said.

“What an extraordinary use of taxpayers’ money to spy on legitimate protesters in order to protect the commercial interests of polluting companies.

“State Premiers need to indicate whether their police agencies are working hand in glove with the AFP and energy companies to maximise penalties for protesters and increase surveillance on citizens trying to defend their properties against coal seam gas developers.

“Is it true that energy companies and the police are working together to maximise charges for protesters? Are Anna Bligh, Barry O’Farrell, Ted Bailleu and Martin Ferguson working together to maximise surveillance?

“Minister Ludwig confirmed today, in response to my question, that some surveillance of protesters is being outsourced to a private agency – the National Open Source Intelligence Centre.

“I encourage people, as Minister Ludwig did, to put in FOI requests to the AFP and state agencies for any surveillance files being kept on them.”

Via the Guardian:

It’s almost as if Rahm Emanuel was lifting a page from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine – as if he was reading her account of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” as a cookbook recipe, rather than as the ominous episode that it was. In record time, Emanuel successfully exploited the fact that Chicago will host the upcoming G8 and Nato summit meetings to increase his police powers and extend police surveillance, to outsource city services and privatize financial gains, and to make permanent new limitations on political dissent. It all happened – very rapidly and without time for dissent – with the passage of rushed security and anti-protest measures adopted by the city council on 18 January 2012.

Sadly, we are all too familiar with the recipe by now: first, hype up and blow out of proportion a crisis (and if there isn’t a real crisis, as in Chicago, then create one), call in the heavy artillery and rapidly seize the opportunity to expand executive power, to redistribute wealth for private gain and to suppress political dissent.

Nir Rosen, one of the finest independent journalists around, sends the following message to the essential Angry Arab:

so media accounts of yesterday’s fighting in Homs are not exactly accurate. they make it seem as if this is Hama in 1982 all over again and Homs has fallen. In fact the armed opposition controls more territory in Homs than ever before and yesterday’s attack did not result in any loss of territory. Yesterday opposition fighters defeated the regime checkpoint at the Qahira roundabout and they seized a tank or armored personnel carrier. This followed similar successes against the Bab Dreib checkpoint and the Bustan al Diwan checkpoint. In response to this last provocation yesterday the regime started shelling with mortars from the Qalaa on the high ground and the State Security headquarters in Ghota. a couple of stray mortars also fell in the Qusur neighborhood. shelling started at 8:30 PM and lasted until 4 AM. There was no fighting in Homs, just shelling from these safe locations (from the point of view of the regime), suggesting they are unable to actually attack Khaldiyeh with regime fighters. its an interesting new phase. also, no opposition fighters were killed in the attack. and up to 130 people in Khaldiyeh were killed and 800 wounded (like i said not fighters). now thats a lot of people but if you were watching the news yesterday you would think that Homs was destroyed while in fact this attack can also be seen as a sign of the regime’s weakness in the city. i have never seen a conflict covered as poorly as this one, with less interest in empirically collected data and more reliance on hysteria and manipulation and rumor.

Via The New Age newspaper:

The South African government might consider supporting sanctions against Israel as it explores a variety of peaceful methods to step up support for the Palestinians’ fight for freedom and independence.

“We want to step up our support of the Palestinians and are investigating a number of peaceful ways to upgrade this support. We have no problem with supporting the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aganist Israel,” Minister of Arts and Culture Paul Mashatile told The New Age.

Mashatile was addressing a press conference in Pretoria yesterday at the Department of Arts and Culture, during the signing of a cultural agreement between South Africa and Palestine.

During the signing Palestnian Arts and Culture Minister Siham Barghouti and Palestinian Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture Musa Abu Ghreibeh, exchanged gifts with their South African counterparts, Minister Mashatile and deputy minister Joe Pehle. 

Later on in the year the Palestinians will host South Africa’s Arts and Culture Week, where South African artists and cultural entrepreneurs will present cultural exhibitions from their country.

Mashatile’s statement presents a considerable upping of the ante in South Africa’s long-standing support for the Palestinians and the cementing of a relationship that goes back decades, to when the ANC was struggling against the former apartheid government.

“Your Excellency, we count the people of Palestine among those patriots who stood by us in our struggle for national liberation,” Mashatile told the Palestinian delegation as he recalled former President Nelson Mandela’s 1997 speech to honor the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

“Having achieved our freedom we can fall into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others face. Yet we would be less human if we do so,” said Mandela in 1997.

BDS supporters argue that Israel’s continued illegal occupation of the Palestinians territories and expropriation of Palestinians land, water and other resources can only be stopped when sanctions against Israel begin to bite economically

“We are grateful for South Africa’s support for our efforts to become members of the international community and look towards you for guidance in our continued struggle,” said Barghouti.

The two delegations agreed that future cooperation would include language development, heritage preservation, literature exchanges and exhibitions.

Mainstream support for Wikileaks is often far removed from the daily news cycle. Many journalists seem to feel uncomfortable backing Wikileaks (and Julian Assange) because of his ongoing legal issues, forgetting the key miracle behind the site; the profound challenges to the established information order and exposing the sycophancy between journalists and corporate power.

I was asked, alongside a number of other people including John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, to speak about what Wikileaks means for me, as part of a global series called Did You Have Any Idea?

DID YOU HAVE ANY IDEA? – with Antony LOEWNSTEIN (Part 2) from CaTV on Vimeo.

This is typical corporate media reporting on “our” wars. Ideologically embedded New York Times reporters in Washington DC are handed information from the White House and essentially write a press release for the Obama administration. Any mention of the huge role of private contractors in Afghanistan, a group that will continue to grow, like in Iraq, as US forces draw down? Of course not:

The United States’ plan to wind down its combat role in Afghanistan a year earlier than expected relies on shifting responsibility to Special Operations forces that hunt insurgent leaders and train local troops, according to senior Pentagon officials and military officers. These forces could remain in the country well after theNATO mission ends in late 2014.

The plan, if approved by President Obama, would amount to the most significant evolution in the military campaign since Mr. Obama sent in 32,000 more troops to wage an intensive and costly counterinsurgency effort.

Under the emerging plan, American conventional forces, focused on policing large parts of Afghanistan, will be the first to leave, while thousands of American Special Operations forces remain, making up an increasing percentage of the troops on the ground; their number may even grow.

The evolving strategy is far different from the withdrawal plan for Iraq, where almost all American forces, conventional or otherwise, have left. Iraq has devolved into sectarian violence ever since the withdrawal in December, which threatens to undo the political and security gains there.