Antony Loewenstein

So this is where our supposed civilised world is heading. A disturbing piece in the weekend’s New York Times:

At the Zhuhai air show in southeastern China last November, Chinese companies startled some Americans by unveiling 25 different models of remotely controlled aircraft and showing video animation of a missile-armed drone taking out an armored vehicle and attacking a United States aircraft carrier.

The presentation appeared to be more marketing hype than military threat; the event is China’s biggest aviation market, drawing both Chinese and foreign military buyers. But it was stark evidence that the United States’ near monopoly on armed drones was coming to an end, with far-reaching consequences for American security, international law and the future of warfare.

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”

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So far, the United States has a huge lead in the number and sophistication of unmanned aerial vehicles (about 7,000, by one official’s estimate, mostly unarmed). The Air Force prefers to call them not U.A.V.’s but R.P.A.’s, or remotely piloted aircraft, in acknowledgment of the human role; Air Force officials should know, since their service is now training more pilots to operate drones than fighters and bombers.

Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis for the Teal Group, a company that tracks defense and aerospace markets, says global spending on research and procurement of drones over the next decade is expected to total more than $94 billion, including $9 billion on remotely piloted combat aircraft.

Israel and China are aggressively developing and marketing drones, and Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and several other countries are not far behind. The Defense Security Service, which protects the Pentagon and its contractors from espionage, warned in a report last year that American drone technology had become a prime target for foreign spies.

Former Foreign Service Officer at the US State Department, Peter Van Buren, has written a book about the disastrous Iraq invasion, of which he was a part. It’s an (almost) comical account of the gross ineptitude of the occupation and the massive amount of money wasted. Tax-payer money:

Very few people outside the agricultural world know that if the rooster in a flock dies the hens will continue to produce fertile eggs for up to four weeks because “sperm nests,” located in the ovary ducts of hens, collect and store sperm as a survival mechanism to ensure fertile eggs even after the male is gone. I had to know this as part of my role in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Like learning that Baghdad produced 8,000 tons of trash every day, who could have imagined when we invaded Iraq that such information would be important to the Global War on Terror? If I were to meet George W., I would tell him this by way of suggesting that he did not know what he was getting the country into.

I would also invite the former president along to visit a chicken-processing plant built with your tax dollars and overseen by my ePRT (embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team). We really bought into the chicken idea and spent like drunken sailors on shore leave to prove it. In this case, the price was $2.58 million for the facility.

The first indication this was all chicken shit was the smell as we arrived at the plant with a group of Embassy friends on a field trip. The odor that greeted us when we walked into what should have been the chicken-killing fields of Iraq was fresh paint. There was no evidence of chicken killing as we walked past a line of refrigerated coolers.

When we opened one fridge door, expecting to see chickens chilling, we found instead old buckets of paint. Our guide quickly noted that the plant had purchased 25 chickens that morning specifically to kill for us and to feature in a video on the glories of the new plant. This was good news, a 100% jump in productivity from previous days, when the plant killed no chickens at all.

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How many PRT staff members does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One to hire a contractor who fails to complete the job and two to write the press release in the dark.

We measured the impact of our projects by their effect on us, not by their effect on the Iraqis. Output was the word missing from the vocabulary of developing Iraq. Everything was measured only by what we put in — dollars spent, hours committed, people engaged, press releases written.

Bravo:

On Monday 26 September, three members of Veterans For Peace and a member of Code Pink confronted Donald Rumsfeld at a Boston stop of his book tour. I attempted to make a citizen’s arrest. Police hustled all four of us out, while a hostile rightwing crowd shouted and jeered. To get in, we had to dress nicely, pay $50 and give Rumsfeld a standing ovation so that we did not stand out from this crowd. The $50 got you a copy of his book, which I could not stomach taking. Once Rumsfeld started talking, at two-minute intervals, one of us got up to confront him.

Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and the rest of this crew are war criminals, according to international law. They lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They lied about Saddam Hussein being linked to 9/11. They lied about mobile weapons labs, yellowcake from Niger, how painless a war would be and countless other things. They instigated a program of torture in Guantánamo, Bagram and who knows how many other black sites. These lies were used as a pretext for initiating a war of aggression against a sovereign nation – an international war crime.

They are also guilty of violating the UN convention against torture (ratified by the US) and are responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and 5,000 Americans. Iraq has been devastated to the extent that, years later, many of its people still do not have 24-hour access to electricity. Much other infrastructure is destroyed in one of the oldest civilisations on the planet. Millions of Iraqis are refugees in other countries.

War criminals such as these need to be confronted at every opportunity. This is already happening. They cannot travel freely in Europe for fear of being arrested. However, the problem is not restricted to the Bush administration. Barack Obama is also guilty of war crimes, as he has continued and expanded the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. In all these countries, war and/or drone strikes have killed thousands of innocent people while doing nothing good and creating more people who hate American policy.

The New York Times after 9/11 was notorious for consistently siding with the Bush administration, especially backing the Iraq war thanks to the stenography of Judith Miller.

Bill Keller has just stepped down from his role as Executive Editor of the paper and writes this revealing essay about why he and many “liberals” embraced the Iraq war. His main reason (and we can be thankful for his honesty)? He wanted to be manly and tough and not be seen as a weak-willed liberal.

If this is the cream of the media crop, the corporate press should be trusted even less than we thought.

Here’s Keller:

During the months of public argument about how to deal with Saddam Hussein, I christened an imaginary association of pundits the I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might. It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations, including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack, the former C.I.A. analyst whose book, “The Threatening Storm,” became the liberal manual on the Iraqi threat. (Yes, it is surely relevant that this is exclusively a boys’ club.)

In several columns I laid out justifications for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. There were caveats — most significantly, that there was no reason to rush, that we should hold off to see whether Iraq’s behavior could be sufficiently contained by sanctions and inspections. Like many liberal hawks, I was ambivalent; Pollack said he was 55 to 45 for war, which feels about right.

But when the troops went in, they went with my blessing. Of course I don’t think President Bush was awaiting permission from The New York Times’s Op-Ed page — or, for that matter, from my friends in the Times newsroom, who during the prewar debate published some notoriously credulous stories about Iraqi weapons. The administration, however, was clearly pleased to cite the liberal hawks as evidence that invading Iraq was not just the impetuous act of cowboy neocons. Thus did Tony Judt in 2006 coin another, unkinder name for our club: “Bush’s Useful Idiots.”

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Iraq was not, as Afghanistan had been, the host country and operational base of the new strain of Islamic fascism represented by Al Qaeda. It is true that Hussein hosted some nasty characters, but so did many other dictators hostile to America. At the time, Iraq was one of seven countries designated as sponsors of terrorism by the State Department, and in the other six cases we settled for sanctions as recourse enough. And his conventional military — what was left of it after it was laid waste in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq in 1991 — was under close supervision.

That leaves the elusive weapons of mass destruction. We forget how broad the consensus was that Hussein was hiding the kind of weapons that could rain holocaust on a neighbor or be delivered to America by proxy. He had recently possessed chemical weapons (he used them against the Kurds), and it was only a few years since we had discovered he had an active ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Inspectors who combed the country after the first gulf war discovered a nuclear program far more advanced than our intelligence agencies had believed; so it is understandable that the next time around the analysts erred on the side of believing the worst.

We now know that the consensus was wrong, and that it was built in part on intelligence that our analysts had good reason to believe was cooked. Should we — those of us without security clearances — have known it in 2003? Certainly we should have been more suspicious of the administration’s assurances. Kenneth Pollack, the former C.I.A. analyst who is now at the Brookings Institution, concedes that he should have drilled deeper into the claims of the intelligence crunchers; he was misled, he says, by the fact that they had seriously underestimated Hussein in the past. A few journalists — notably Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder newspapers — emphasized conflicting intelligence that questioned Hussein’s capabilities. But assuming we couldn’t know for sure, what would have been acceptable odds? If there was only a 50-50 chance that Hussein was close to possessing a nuclear weapon, could we live with that? One in five? One in 10?

Colin Powell, who oversaw the campaign that drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991 and who was the most cautious member of President Bush’s war cabinet, was reluctantly convinced (duped, he would later say) that the W.M.D. risk merited military action. His word carried great weight. The journalist and author Fred Kaplan was one of many, I suspect, who joined the hawk club on the strength of Powell’s speech to the United Nations Security Council six weeks before the invasion.

“I was particularly struck by the tape-recording of an intelligence intercept that Powell played — a phone conversation in which one Iraqi Republican Guard officer tells another to clean out a site before the inspectors get there,” Kaplan recalled. We learned much later that the Iraqi officers wanted to erase traces of chemical weapons that had been stored before the first gulf war. Kaplan dropped out of the hawk club within a month when he concluded that, whether or not an invasion was morally justified, he doubted the Bush administration was up to the task. The rest of us were still a little drugged by testosterone. And maybe a little too pleased with ourselves for standing up to evil and defying the caricature of liberals as, to borrow a phrase from those days, brie-eating surrender monkeys.

I was interviewed last week by Radio Farda, Iranian Branch of Radio Free Europe, on my attitudes toward 9/11 and the subsequent decade. My answers were translated into Farsi so my English responses are below:

1) Do you remember how and where you got the info on 9/11?

I was in Melbourne, Australia and I remember normal TV programming being interrupted with the news that a plane had crashed into New York’s Twin Towers. At first, like most people, I had no idea what was going on but this soon changed. From day one, the Australian Prime Minister, who happened to be in America at the time, mirrored the rhetoric coming from the Bush White House, namely we believe in a military solution to this “war on terror”. Little has changed practically since then, except the rhetoric.

2) Did you cover the news on your site, journal or blog?

I didn’t have a blog and nor was I journalist.

3) In your opinion, how did media cover this news in your country?

Back then, the internet was in its infancy and the Australian media largely copied the American perspective which was both in shock (a totally understandable response) and blood-thirsty (far more disturbing). I opposed the war against Afghanistan, believing it would achieve little apart from greater destruction and sadly ten years later I have been proven right.

4) 10 years ago there was no Facebook, Twitter. How did the cyber world/citizen media role cover 9/11?

I recall reading some blogs after 9/11 to get a different perspective but I was most interested to try and understand the perspective of Muslims in the Middle East and Afghanistan, a nation my country (along with many others) was bombing into “liberation”.

5) Any story that really hit your memory after 10 years?

I remember well a conversation with a number of male and female friends about the idea that my country might force able-bodied young men into war, like Australia did during the Vietnam War. My female friends said that they wouldn’t let their male friends leave and would bring food and supplies in jail, if we were placed there. I remember there being some talk in the media about the possibility of conscription for then undefined conflicts. I certainly had no intention of joining the army to fight countless illegitimate wars in the name of “freedom”.

6)  After ten years, what is the 9/11 impact on the world?

9/11 has had a profoundly destructive effect on the world. America adopted the Israeli model of fighting terrorism – killing countless civilians in an attempt to prove superiority – and the effect has been a weakened West, militarily and morally, something I welcome. Over a million lives have been lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine and countless other nations. There’s no doubt that extreme Islamism is a threat but our leaders seem determined to answer primarily with the use of the gun. Such responses almost deserve punishment. I hope the coming decade brings a greater understanding that fighting violence with violence and occupying Muslim lands will only bring one outcome, so we should stop it.

Al Jazeera English captures the post 9/11 decade well, showing how the vast majority of journalists and media companies became propagandists for endless war against the Muslim world:

Two views, one from here in Australia and the other on the global scene.

From my perspective, the last decade has brought both remarkable levels of carnage by both Western actions and Islamists but also a growing awareness of where the real threats reside, and it isn’t from some men in a cave in Afghanistan or safe house in Pakistan.

Left Flank:

…In the shadow of the twin towers are other legacies: those of endless war waged by the West and the dramatic rise of Islamophobia globally. It is these consequences that confront us today. And the Left’s inability, in particular in Australia and the US, to mount a serious ongoing challenge to them remains a serious failing.

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It is for these reasons — the real human cost located in endless war and islamophobia, wreaked in the memory of those killed on 9/11 — progressive voices must return to bolder times.

One of my proudest moments as a Greens member was seeing Kerry Nettle fight her way through security and parliamentary members in order to deliver a letter from Mamdouh Habib’s wife to US President George Bush on his visit to Parliament in Canberra. The response from those in the vicinity, to block and manhandle Nettle, belies the relatively conservative nature of her action. While clearly Nettle knew approaching Bush would not be seen as ‘appropriate’, who could have imagined that others would feel their political views gave them the right to physically restrain a Senator just because she disagreed with them.

But gone are the days when Nettle’s office was an organising centre of the campaign against the Iraq War in Sydney, or senators recruited their staff for the activist credentials rather than ability to impact political spin in the mainstream and on social media.

Increasingly Brown and the Greens have equivocated on political issues that are seen as too Left wing. A strategy of minimising criticism of the party in the mainstream media, in order to possibly increase the national Greens vote, is the order of the day. This is despite the personal commitment of most party members and elected Greens parliamentarians to various questions — such as the decriminalisation of drug use and its treatment as a health issue, decreasing the funding form the public pursue to the elite wealthy private schools, or most recently on the question of justice for Palestinians. 

As success has come in the polls, and the number of representatives has increased in Parliament, the activist and progressive voice of the Greens has been diminished. So in recent weeks we have seen growing argument that the Greens should condemn the protests at Max Brenner chocolate shops, actions conducted by one part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Australia.

Some inside the party have claimed that the demonstrations were ‘violent’ (even though the footage on Youtube show police attacking protesters rather than the other way around) and that the large number of arrests at the first demonstration might reflect badly on the Greens. Yet the Greens have always been centrally involved in environmental campaigns such as those against the logging of old growth forests and the damming of the Franklin, which have by their nature resulted in very many arrests of activists. By this logic, it is fine — even a badge of honour — to be associated with Bob Brown as he was arrested in Tasmania’s wilderness, but we should condemn those campaigning around the BDS and attempting to end the brutal occupation and repression of 2.3 million Palestinian Arabs living the West Bank or the 1.6 million living in Gaza.

This has reached near-farcical proportions with the decision by recently elected NSW Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham to go to the Fairfax media to run a public campaign against the state party’s pro-BDS position. In an attempt to appear even-handed on the Israel-Palestine conflict (as if the balance of forces in the Middle East was ever even) he has joined the ‘Parliamentary Friends of Israel’ group, as well as a pro-Palestinian caucus. This is akin to joining a ‘Parliamentary Friends of South Africa’ group at the height of Apartheid.

Increasingly for some Greens, the priority is a squeaky clean image that plays well in the conservative mainstream media, rather than prosecuting established party policy or making the less popular argument on a crucial questions of human dignity. It is not enough to bleat words about human rights, if in the next breath you condemn those who are actively seeking and end to the Palestinian occupation. It may not be that the Greens as a whole want to be involved in organising the Max Brenner protests, although some members and MPs will, but to seek to alter the NSW party policy of supporting the BDS for ends related solely to political image is unconscionable.

More importantly, such political manoeuvres do not exist in a social vacuum. They have real impact on real people. Not only are the horrific conditions endured by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories being trivialised by those conservatives in the Greens unwilling to take a principled stand against Israel’s actions, the Australian debate over the BDS has unleashed a disturbing strain of hard Right and racist sentiment. Among all the confected slanders of ‘anti-semitism’ against BDS campaigners from the mainstream, there has been no similar condemnation of the far Right, Islamophobic organisations that have joined the defence of the chocolate shops. Groups like the Australian Defence League and the Australian Protectionist Party have linked their hatred of Muslims and Arabs with Israel’s role as regional spearhead in the West’s war against Islamism. Despite the horrific consequences of the far Right’s ideology being expressed in the Norwegian massacre in late July, there is growing activity among like-minded Islamophobes here. One would’ve thought that Greens like Brown and Buckingham would be more concerned about these developments. Instead their quest for mainstream acceptance seems to be blinding them to the malign state of pro-Israel politics in this country.

Ten years on from 9/11 one wonders if the Greens are developing selective amnesia about the realities of the War on Terror and its Islamophobic ideological veneer.

In a September 2001 essay titled “Game Over: The End of Warfare as Play,” Klein noted that the United States had fought a series of wars in which it had experienced few casualties. “This is a country that has come to believe in the ultimate oxymoron: a safe war,” she wrote. The attacks of 9/11 would change that, she believed. “The illusion of war without casualties has been forever shattered.” Today, she’s not so sure.

I suppose it was wishful thinking. As I watched footage of New Yorkers fleeing from the attacks, their terrified faces covered in dust from the collapsing towers, I was overwhelmed by how different these images were from the people-free videogame wars that my friends and I had grown up watching on CNN. Now that we were finally getting an unsanitized look at what it meant to be attacked from the air, I was sure it would change our hearts forever. But the Bush Administration was determined to tightly police what we saw of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, introducing “embedded” reporting, and banning photographs of returning caskets. They also let it be known that reporters who embedded themselves with local populations instead of with allied troops were acceptable military targets — as attacks on Al Jazeera reporters in Afghanistan and Iraq made clear.

The wars being waged by our governments in our names are today more distant to us than ever before. . Some of the fighting is carried out by mercenaries, who die without so much as a mention in the papers. And drone attacks have ushered in something even more dangerous than the “safe war” — the idea of “no touch” warfare. This sends a clear message to the civilians on the other side of our weapons that we consider our lives so much more valuable than theirs that we will no longer even bother showing up to kill them in person.

As we should have learned ten years ago, this is an extraordinarily dangerous message to send.

An extract from his new book reveals an atmosphere of mass hysteria, post 9/11 patriotism and blind hatred in the land of the free:

‘I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it … No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out [of him]. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ band, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore’, and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realise, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.”

Glenn Beck, live on the Glenn Beck show, 17 May 2005

Wishes for my early demise seemed to be everywhere. They were certainly on the mind of CNN‘s Bill Hemmer one sunny July morning in 2004. Holding a microphone in front of my face on the floor of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, live on CNN, he asked me what I thought about how the American people were feeling about Michael Moore: “I’ve heard people say they wish Michael Moore were dead.” Hemmer said it like he was simply stating the obvious, like, “of course they want to kill you!” He just assumed his audience already understood this truism, as surely as they accept that the sun rises in the east and corn comes on a cob.

To be fair to Hemmer, I was not unaware that my movies had made a lot of people mad. It was not unusual for fans to randomly come up and hug me and say, “I’m so happy you’re still here!” They didn’t mean in the building.

Why was I still alive? For more than a year there had been threats, intimidation, harassment and even assaults in broad daylight. It was the first year of the Iraq war, and I was told by a top security expert (who is often used by the federal government for assassination prevention) that “there is no one in America other than President Bush who is in more danger than you”.

One:

The US and Australia schemed unsuccessfully in 2005 to block Mohamed ElBaradei’s election to a third term as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a newly leaked US diplomatic cable shows.

Both countries were unhappy with Mr ElBaradei’s “unhelpful” response to Iran’s nuclear program, but the bid to prevent his re-election to the nuclear regulatory agency’s leadership ultimately failed for lack of international support.

The February 18, 2005 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks overnight opens a window into the effort, describing a lunch conversation between Australian officials and a US special envoy for nuclear non-proliferation, Jackie Sanders.

The cable spotlights US and Australian concerns over the Egyptian diplomat’s interpretation that Iran had a “right” to civilian nuclear power, and his reluctance to declare Iran in non-compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Two:

A secret State Department diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks has revealed that one of the primary reasons behind Israeli objections to Palestinian statehood is that lack of statehood keeps Palestinian territories outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which prosecutes war crimes.

Military Advocate General for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Avichai Mandelblit met with US Ambassador James B. Cunningham in February of 2010 to discuss investigations into allegations of misconduct during Israel’s attacks on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009, called Operation Cast Lead.

Mandelblit noted to Cunningham that Palestinian Authority Justice Minister Ali Kashan had requested that ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo investigate alleged Israeli war crimes in the occupied territories since 2002, up to and including Operation Cast Lead. The cable reads: “Mandelblit said several legal opinions had been delivered to Ocampo noting that the ICC had no legal jurisdiction due to the PA’s lack of statehood…”

The dialogue is unusually blunt, since Israel’s public objections to Palestinian statehood at the United Nations, to be voted upon this month, have been mundane and political in nature.

After requesting multiple times that the US “state publicly its position that the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel regarding the Gaza operation,” Mandelblit “warned that PA pursuit of Israel through the ICC would be viewed as war by the GOI [Government of Israel].”

Mandelblit seems to deflect allegations of war crimes, not by denying they took place, but by dismissing them via a legal technicality. Accompanying Mandelblit was IDF Head of the International Law Department Col. Liron Libman who “noted that the ICC was the most dangerous issue for Israel,” reads the cable.

This week has seen the release of over 250,000 US cables in an orgy of information, including war crimes by the US military in Iraq that unsurprisingly isn’t receiving the kind of coverage it deserves in America itself and an Israeli official saying “we don’t do Gandhi very well” when explaining the desired violent IDF response to non-violent Palestinian protests in the West Bank.

But Salon’s Glenn Greenwald rightly criticises all parties involved in unloading so much information without proper checks and balances. There’s surely responsibility of the people releasing information to ensure as much as possible that people’s lives aren’t threatened (and there is no evidence thus far that this has happened but releasing names and sources of US embassies certainly increases the risk):

A series of unintentional though negligent acts by multiple parties — WikiLeaks, The Guardian’s investigative reporter David Leigh, and Open Leaks’ Daniel Domscheit-Berg — has resulted in the publication of all 251,287 diplomatic cables, in unredacted form, leaked last year to WikiLeaks (allegedly by Bradley Manning).  Der Spiegel (in English) has the best and most comprehensive step-by-step account of how this occurred. 

This incident is unfortunate in the extreme for multiple reasons: it’s possible that diplomatic sources identified in the cables (including whistleblowers and human rights activists) will be harmed; this will be used by enemies of transparency and WikiLeaks to disparage both and even fuel efforts to prosecute the group; it implicates a newspaper, The Guardian, that generally produces very good and responsible journalism; it likely increases political pressure to impose more severe punishment on Bradley Manning if he’s found guilty of having leaked these cables; and it will completely obscure the already-ignored, important revelations of serious wrongdoing from these documents.  It’s a disaster from every angle.

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That said, and as many well-intentioned transparency supporters correctly point out, WikiLeaks deserves some of the blame for what happened here; any group that devotes itself to enabling leaks has the responsibility to safeguard what it receives and to do everything possible to avoid harm to innocent people.  Regardless of who is at fault — more on that in a minute — WikiLeaks, due to insufficient security measures, failed to fulfill that duty here.  There’s just no getting around that (although ultimate responsibility for safeguarding the identity of America’s diplomatic sources rests with the U.S. Government, which is at least as guilty as WikiLeaks in failing to exerise due care to safeguard these cables; if this information is really so sensitive and one wants to blame someone for inadequate security measures, start with the U.S. Government, which gave full access to these documents to hundreds of thousands of people around the world, at least).

Despite the fault fairly assigned to WikiLeaks, one point should be absolutely clear: there was nothing intentional about WikiLeaks’ publication of the cables in unredacted form.  They ultimately had no choice.  Ever since WikiLekas was widely criticized (including by me) for publishing Afghan War documents without redacting the names of some sources (though much blame also lay with the U.S. Government for rebuffing its request for redaction advice), the group has been meticulous about protecting the identity of innocents.  The New York Times’ Scott Shane today describes “efforts by WikiLeaks and journalists to remove the names of vulnerable people in repressive countries” in subsequent releases; indeed, WikiLeaks ”used software to remove proper names from Iraq war documents and worked with news organizations to redact the cables.”  After that Afghan release, the group has demonstrated a serious, diligent commitment to avoiding pointless exposure of innocent people — certainly far more care than the U.S. Government took in safeguarding these documents.

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That said, there’s little doubt that release of all these documents in unredacted form poses real risk to some of the individuals identified in them, and that is truly lamentable.  But it is just as true that WikiLeaks easily remains an important force for good.  The acts of deliberate evil committed by the world’s most powerful factions which it has exposed vastly outweigh the mistakes which this still-young and pioneering organization has made.  And the harm caused by corrupt, excessive secrecy easily outweighs the harm caused by unauthorized, inadvisable leaks.

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2008:

Yadlin replied that the Palestinians are only Israel’s number four threat in the IDI’s assessment, following Iran, Syria, and Hizballah. Although the Palestinians are not the IDI’s top concern, Yadlin said he would answer the question by noting that it will take time to marry Netanyahu’s approach to Fayyad’s. If the parties attempt to move straight to resolving the conflict, the attempt will collapse and result in violence as in the start of the Second Intifada after the 2000 Camp David summit. The key question is how can the Palestinian Authority control terrorism. Yadlin said the USSC General Dayton is doing “a very good job” of training the PA Security Forces, but Yadlin quoted Dayton as saying that the PASF will need three to five years to build its counter-terrorist capabilities, including a functioning justice system.

Yadlin said the IDF is out of the Jenin area unless it receives reports of a “ticking bomb.” The PA, however, is ignoring Gaza and Fayyad insists on paying salaries in Gaza, which helps Hamas. Yadlin said this is a “big mistake.” Yadlin noted that the Palestinians have created two entities. President Abbas and Fayyad condemn terrorism and stress that Palestinian national goals can be achieved through negotiations. They rule in the West Bank with Israel’s assistance. In Gaza, a terrorist organization is in power and Hamas preaches that Palestinian aspirations can be achieved through terrorism. This division provides Israel with a “historic opportunity” to prove that Hamas’ approach will fail.

2004:

In terms of the U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship, the Israeli media overwhelmingly agreed that the first Bush administration had been a good friend to Israel. “Conventional wisdom in Israel,” wrote a senior columnist from pluralist Yediot Aharonot on November 1, “is that Bush was and will be the ideal American president from Israel’s perspective. The best there is. Israel has no interest in seeing him replaced, and it has every interest in seeing him reelected.” Most commentators agreed, however, that both candidates shared a political record of support for Israel – for better or for worse. A senior columnist for left-wing Ha’aretz observed on October 18 that “regardless of whether Bush is reelected or John Kerry takes his place, there will be no `pressure’ from America” in terms of U.S.-Israel relations.