Antony Loewenstein

The Islamic Republic may soon be targeted by the Bush administration:

There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was the only senior official urging delay in taking any offensive action. The decision to go ahead with plans to attack Iran is the direct result of concerns being expressed over the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where Iranian ally Hezbollah appears to have gained the upper hand against government forces and might be able to dominate the fractious political situation. The White House contacted the Iranian government directly yesterday through a channel provided by the leadership of the Kurdish region in Iraq, which has traditionally had close ties to Tehran. The US demanded that Iran admit that it has been interfering in Iraq and also commit itself to taking steps to end the support of various militant groups. There was also a warning about interfering in Lebanon. The Iranian government reportedly responded quickly, restating its position that it would not discuss the matter until the US ceases its own meddling employing Iranian dissident groups.

While dead American troops are being treated as respectfully as one would expect by the Bush cabal:

The U.S. military will no longer cremate troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan at a Dover facility that also cremates pets, the Pentagon announced Friday evening at a hastily scheduled news conference.

Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman, said there was “no evidence whatsoever that any human remains were mistreated” or that any troops were cremated at the facility designated for pets.

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Raw Story provides necessary context to the latest missive from US Vice President Dick Cheney:

George W. Bush has made the world a more hopeful place.

This from Vice President Dick Cheney, who spoke to a crowd of Oklahoma Republicans Friday evening.

“When the history is written, it will be said this is a safer country and more hopeful world because George Bush was president,” Cheney said, according to Oklahoma’s Tulsa World.

Of Iraq, Cheney quipped: “Our strategy is the right strategy. The only way we can lose is to quit.”

If the US departs, he said, it would show America “doesn’t have the stomach for a fight.” Cheney himself received five draft deferments to avoid service in the Vietnam war.

To justify a US presence in the wartorn region, Cheney cited the Russian experience in Afghanistan.

“We were engaged in that country, lending support to the mujahadeen against Soviet forces,” he said. “Afterwards, everybody walked away and forgot about Afghanistan. What followed was a civil war and the emergence of the Taliban. In 1996, Osama Bin Laden was invited into Afghanistan. He trained thousands of terrorists, some of whom were part of the attacks here on the United States.”

He didn’t mention the the US pulled out of Afghanistan as well, after the defeat of the Soviets, or that US business, including those in Texas during George W. Bush’s term as governor, engaged in business with the Taliban regime.

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My latest New Matilda column is about the Bin Laden family and its influence in the world:

The Western world still understands little about the motivations behind the September 11, 2001 attacks nearly seven years after the fact. American journalist Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize winner, foreign correspondent, Washington Post managing editor and contributor to the New Yorker, details in his acclaimed 2004 book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001, that the events of that fateful September day were both predictable and would probably not have happened without the former assistance of the CIA.

“As the years passed”, he argues, “these radical Islamic networks adopted some of the secret deception-laden tradecraft of the formal intelligence services [Western and Pakistani], methods they sometimes acquired through direct training.”

In his new book, The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and its Fortune, Coll continues his thesis about the expansive Bin Laden family and its intimate relationships with the highest echelons of the American political elite. Osama Bin Laden is only one small part of the puzzle, his influence greatly exaggerated by a Western media keen to find a bogeyman for the rise in Islamic fundamentalism.

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The New York Times features a stunning report in today’s edition, on the Pentagon’s manipulation of information about the “war on terror”:

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

An interactive feature explains more.

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As a regular contributor to ABC Unleashed, I was asked to offer a suggestion for this weekend’s 2020 Summit on Australia’s future:

Australian troops are causing more harm than good in Afghanistan. Engaged in an unwinnable war against a so-called enemy that enjoys widespread public support and growing anger at NATO’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians, Kevin Rudd’s recent suggestion of eradicating poppy fields shows how out of touch he is with reality on the ground. The central government, run by a corrupt clique led by Hamid Karzai, controls little of the country and is filled with war-lords who terrorised the nation in decades past.

Australia should withdraw troops as quickly as possible and instead provide humanitarian support and UN backing.

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Latrine Graffiti, Kuwait and Afghanistan:

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Jan Egeland, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, on the world’s greatest problems in 2008:

One is still eastern Congo, catastrophically neglected. It was the biggest loss of lives on our watch these last fifteen years: five million people died. Darfur has spread as a conflict and as a catastrophe to Chad and the Central African Republic. But certainly Iraq and Afghanistan is still unfolding as a hemorrhage of human life.

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Welcome to the modern face of the Republican Party.

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After winning an Oscar for his documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, Alex Gibney has a new target in his sights:

The filmmaker who won an Academy Award Sunday night for best documentary is next turning his attention to the Jack Abramoff scandal, including GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s role in investigating the affair.

Alex Gibney, who made last year’s “Taxi to the Dark Side,” about the lethal interrogation of an Afghani taxicab driver by American military forces, told Politico his Abramoff film would be coming out later this year. Its tentative title: “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.”

“The film should give viewers a greater understanding, in a blow-by-blow way, of how the political process works, particularly with regards to lobbying,” Gibney says. “This movie will have it all: wild international intrigue, money changing hands in unexpected places, etc. It will be fun. As someone said about an earlier picture I made: ‘It’s a comedy that turns into farce and ends up in horror.’”

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The film Taxi to the Dark Side has won Best Documentary at last night’s Oscars.

My friend, Melbourne-born and New York based Eva Orner, was the co-winner.

It’s a wonderful achievement.

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