Antony Loewenstein

I’m proud to have signed the following statement, just released publicly, that asks the Chinese regime to release famed artist Ai Weiwei:

This is an open letter from members of the Australian creative community to the Chinese Ambassador in Australia about the disappearance of artist and activist Ai Weiwei

To Chen Yuming, Chinese Ambassador to Australia,

We write to you today in relation to Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

As you may know Ai was detained on 3 April 2011 at Beijing airport by Chinese police. His studio was then sealed off and his staff and wife interrogated. All this occurred without any given reasons or charges lain.

When on 7 April the Chinese ministry announced that he had been arrested for alleged economic crimes no proof was given and no official charge made.

His studio was then searched again and on 9 April his accountant, driver Zhang Jingsong and studio partner Liu Zhenggang disappeared. Ai Weiwei’s assistant Wen Tao has also been missing since Ai’s arrest on 3 April.

It has now been 39 days since the disappearance of Ai. 9 May was the date that Ai should have been released unless there is an official charge. No official notifications have been given regarding his whereabouts or reason for detainment.

The EU and US have protested Ai’s detention and the international arts community has rallied behind his cause. The international Council of Museums has collected more than 90,000 signatures and countless petitions have been organised.

We are deeply concerned about the kidnapping and disappearance of Ai Weiwei and his colleagues. We call on the Chinese government to carry out fair and open legal proceedings.

We believe the arrest of Ai Weiwei represents a watershed. His arrest came days after his Twitter comments about the Jasmine revolution and the arrest of such a high profile figure in China spreads the concern of human rights, freedom of speech and artistic expression.

We the creative community of Australia as friends and neighbours of China call for the immediate release of Ai Weiwei.

Signed
John Connell, author and filmmaker
Jane Campion, filmmaker
David Malouf, author
Lisa Havilah, director, Carriageworks
John Maynard, filmmaker
Chrissy Sharpe, director, The Wheeler Centre
Bridget Iken, filmmaker
Delia Falconer, writer
Natalie Wood, fashion designer
Professor Stuart Rees AM, director, Sydney Peace Foundation
Duncan Graham, playwright
Anna Schwartz, gallery owner
William Yang, photographer
Tony Ayers, filmmaker
Jeff Sparrow, writer, editor Overland literary journal
Tom Zubrycki, filmmaker
Gabrielle Carey, author
Antony Loewenstein, independent journalist and author
Debra Adelaide, vice president, PEN Sydney
Robyn Martin-Weber, art consultant
Paola Morabito, filmmaker
Professor Wendy Bacon, University of Technology, Sydney
Jodie Passmore, filmmaker
Ben Ferris, director, Sydney film school
Annette Shun Wah, writer, actor, producer
Dr. Nicholas Ng, composer
Kevina Jo Smith, artist
Benjamin Law, writer
Mark Bradshaw, composer
Professor Rónán McDonald, Australian Ireland Fund Chair of Modern Irish Studies
Helen Bowden, producer
Mark Walkley, author
Xu Wang, artist
Daniel Stricker, musician/label manager
Helen Fitzgerald, art director
Kirin J Callinan, musician
Jenna Price, journalist and academic
Danielle Zorbas, producer
Billy Maynard, photographer
Larin Sullivan, filmmaker
Vivian Huynh, copywriter/musician
Jack Jeweller, curator and writer
Jiao Chen, filmmaker
Chi Vu, writer director
Tom Cho, author
Benedict Andrews, theatre director
Andrew Santamaria, musician and environmental engineer.
Tristan Ceddia, publisher
Rebecca Conroy, director billandgeorge
Hana Shimada, artist
Jonathan Zawada, designer/artist
Amelia Groom, author
Robert Milne, publisher
Matthew Hopkins, artist
Charlie Sofo, artist
Jeff Yiu, photgrapher
Caterina Scardino, stylist
Brami Jegan, activist
Russell Smith, lecturer ANU
Hugo O’Connor, producer
Sam Bryant, filmmaker
Dr Tseen Khoo, grant developer
Cinnamon van Reyk, museum curator
Brent Clough, broadcaster
Dr Simone Lazaroo, writer, senior lecturer, Murdoch University
Nicole Bearman, producer, cultural programs and events
Luke Bacon, composer
Trischelle Roberts, musician
Miska Mandic, musician
Morry Schwartz, publisher
Kath Shleper, filmmaker

Here is the devastating Channel 4 in Britain documentary on the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka. Assisted by China, Israel, India and the US, Colombo murdered over 40,000 Tamil civilians. We will not forget. And we will demand accountability:

The US is unsurprisingly worried about cyber attacks from hackers, Russia, China or even a friendly nation. The future of warfare may well be fought in a different space altogether.

But this report proves how unprepared America is for the inevitable attempts to understand its inner workings. The problem lies in how hackers are viewed. Is Wikileaks in the same category? Clearly not, but Washington’s counter-attack may be far too draconian for a supposed democracy:

The Pentagon is about to roll out an expanded effort to safeguard its contractors from hackers and is building a virtual firing range in cyberspace to test new technologies, according to officials familiar with the plans, as a recent wave of cyber attacks boosts concerns about U.S. vulnerability to digital warfare.

The twin efforts show how President Barack Obama’s administration is racing on multiple fronts to plug the holes in U.S. cyber defenses.

Notwithstanding the military’s efforts, however, the overall gap appears to be widening, as adversaries and criminals move faster than government and corporations, and technologies such as mobile applications for smart phones proliferate more rapidly than policymakers can respond, officials and analysts said.

A Reuters examination of American cyber readiness produced the following findings:

* Spin-offs of the malicious code dubbed “agent.btz” used to attack the military’s U.S. Central Command in 2008 are still roiling U.S. networks today. People inside and outside the U.S. government strongly suspect Russia was behind the attack, which was the most significant known breach of military networks.

* There are serious questions about the security of “cloud computing,” even as the U.S. government prepares to embrace that technology in a big way for its cost savings.

* The U.S. electrical grid and other critical nodes are still vulnerable to cyber attack, 13 years after then-President Bill Clinton declared that protecting critical infrastructure was a national priority.

* While some progress has been made in coordinating among government agencies with different missions, and across the public-private sector gap, much remains to be done.

* Government officials say one of the things they fear most is a so-called “zero-day attack,” exploiting a vulnerability unknown to the software developer until the strike hits.

That’s the technique that was used by the Stuxnet worm that snarled Iran’s enriched uranium-producing centrifuges last summer, and which many experts say may have been created by the United States or Israel. A mere 12 months later, would-be hackers can readily find digital tool kits for building Stuxnet-like weapons on the Internet, according to a private-sector expert who requested anonymity.

“We’re much better off (technologically) than we were a few years ago, but we have not kept pace with opponents,” said Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “The network is so deeply flawed that it can’t be secured.”

“IT’S LIKE AN INSECT INFESTATION”

In recent months hackers have broken into the SecurID tokens used by millions of people, targeting data from defense contractors Lockheed Martin, L3 and almost certainly others; launched a sophisticated strike on the International Monetary Fund; and breached digital barriers to grab account information from Sony, Google, Citigroup and a long list of others.

The latest high-profile victims were the public websites of the CIA and the U.S. Senate – whose committees are drafting legislation to improve coordination of cyber defenses.

Terabytes of data are flying out the door, and billions of dollars are lost in remediation costs and reputational harm, government and private security experts said in interviews. The head of the U.S. military’s Cyber Command, General Keith Alexander, has estimated that Pentagon computer systems are probed by would-be assailants 250,000 times each hour.

Promoting web freedom is a noble idea, especially since so many autocratic regimes and Western multinationals are working together to stop citizens accessing the glories of information on the internet.

But this idea is full of potential problems (via the New York Times), not least because Washington has a shocking record of supporting dictatorships at the expense of democracy and this won’t stop anytime soon. It’s called hypocrisy. Besides, being funded by the US to challenge US-backed regimes will likely end in tears, torture or worse:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.

The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.

The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.

…

Mrs. Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause. But the State Department has carefully framed its support as promoting free speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at destabilizing autocratic governments.

That distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media. “You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ — they’re the same thing,” Mr. Shirky said.

He added that the United States could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them.

My following book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald:

THE NET DELUSION
Evgeny Morozov
Allen Lane,
408pp, $29.95

As people in the Middle East have been protesting in the streets against Western-backed dictators and using social media to connect and circumvent state repression, it would be easy to dismiss The Net Delusion as almost irrelevant.

Born in Belarus, Evgeny Morozov collects mountains of evidence to claim the internet isn’t able to bring freedom, democracy and liberalism.

Sceptics would tell him to watch Al-Jazeera and see the power of the Facebook generation in action.

In fact, it is a dangerous fantasy to believe, he argues, because countless regimes are using the same tools as activists – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and email – to monitor and catch dissidents.

He writes that “the only space where the West (especially the United States) is still unabashedly eager to promote democracy is in cyberspace. The Freedom Agenda is out; the Twitter Agenda is in.”

Morozov condemns “cyber-utopians” for wanting to build a world where borders are no more. Instead, he says these well-meaning people “did not predict how useful it would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for surveillance” and the increasingly sophisticated methods of web censorship.

Furthermore, Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Nokia and web security firms have all willingly colluded with a range of brutal states to turn a profit.

The Western media are largely to blame for creating the illusion of web-inspired democracy. During the Iranian uprisings in June 2009, many journalists dubbed it the Twitter Revolution, closely following countless tweets from the streets of Tehran. However, it was soon discovered that many of the tweets originated in California and not the Islamic republic. The myth had already been born.

None of these facts is designed to lessen the bravery of demonstrators against autocracies – and Morozov praises countless dissidents in China, the Arab world and beyond – but lazy journalists seemingly crave easy and often inaccurate narratives of nimble young keyboard warriors against sluggish old men in golden palaces.

The New York Times’s Roger Cohen was right when he wrote in January that “the internet’s impact has been to expose the great delusion that has led Western governments to buttress Arab autocrats; that the only alternative to them was Islamic jihadists”.

But most protesters in the streets of Egypt had no access to the internet or any use for it and the main gripes were economic rather than ideological. However, it is undeniable that many of the young organised through online networks and clearly surprised the former Mubarak regime with their ability to harness a mainstream call for change.

Morozov, hailing from a country that knows about disappearances and suppression, urges the West to “stop glorifying those living in authoritarian governments”.

One of the Western fallacies of web usage in non-democratic nations is the belief that people are all looking for political content as a way to cope with repression. In fact, as Morozov proves with research, an experiment in 2007 with strangers in autocratic regimes found that instead of looking for dissenting material they “searched for nude pictures of Gwen Stefani and photos of a panty-less Britney Spears”.

I noted similar trends in China when researching my book The Blogging Revolution and found most Chinese youth were interested in downloading movies and music and meeting boys and girls. Politics was the furthest thing from their minds.

This would change only if economic conditions worsened. A wise government would pre-empt these problems by allowing citizens to let off steam; Beijing has undoubtedly opened up online debate in the past decade, though there are certainly set boundaries and red lines not to cross.

Morozov sometimes underestimates the importance of people in repressive states feeling less alone and mixing with like-minded individuals. Witness the persecuted gay community in Iran, the websites connecting this beleaguered population and the space to discuss an identity denied by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ultimately, The Net Delusion is necessary because it challenges comfortable Western thinking about the modern nature of authoritarianism.

This year we have already been left to ponder the irony of the US State Department deploying its resources to pressure Arab regimes not to block communications and social media while the stated agenda of Washington is a matrix of control across the region.

These policies are clearly contradictory and a person in US-backed Saudi Arabia and Bahrain won’t be fooled into believing Western benevolence if they can merely use Twitter every day.

Fascinating Rolling Stone feature:

At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as “the Chairman” – Roger Ailes.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”

A surreal environment in a country where human rights campaigning is an issue largely seen as a Western plot to undermine Beijing:

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

“Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”

Memories from his detention at Jixi re-education-through-labour camp in Heilongjiang province from 2004 still haunt Liu. As well as backbreaking mining toil, he carved chopsticks and toothpicks out of planks of wood until his hands were raw and assembled car seat covers that the prison exported to South Korea and Japan. He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.

But it was the forced online gaming that was the most surreal part of his imprisonment. The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real.

“If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,” he said.

It is known as “gold farming”, the practice of building up credits and online value through the monotonous repetition of basic tasks in online games such as World of Warcraft. The trade in virtual assets is very real, and outside the control of the games’ makers. Millions of gamers around the world are prepared to pay real money for such online credits, which they can use to progress in the online games.

An important editorial in the Financial Times:

My following article appears in today’s ABC The Drum:

The Wikileaks-released Guantanamo Bay files provide an invaluable insight into the mindset of the US and its allies since September 11.

An infrastructure of torture was implemented, a practice still defended by the US government today, to allegedly protect the homeland from future attack.

The result was hundreds of innocent men kidnapped and incarcerated without trial – a “legal and moral disaster”, according to The New York Times – and President Obama continues shielding torturers in the previous and current administrations. He has pledged to Look Forward and Not Back. The current President has merely extended the Bush administration’s indefinite detention regime for so-called terror suspects.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald unleashed necessary fury about this reality:

The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically.

Yet this authoritarian impulse to believe untested claims by the US government is exactly what many in the media have been doing for years, repeating without question deliberately leaked intelligence files on the “worst of the worst” prisoners.

One local example is The Australian columnist Chris Kenny, failed Liberal politician and former chief of staff to former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. During a Twitter conversation on Wednesday with Paul Barrett, a former Secretary of Australian Departments of Defence and Primary Industries & Energy, Kenny wrote, “You’re arguing to set free people who have murdered thousands” when Barrett asked why the US refused to conduct fair and open trials for individuals who had never faced justice.

In Kenny’s worldview, the American military has smeared hundreds of Muslims as terrorists and that’s good enough for him. The fact that the Wikileaks file shows the vast majority of Guantanamo Bay detainees had no connection to September 11 or terrorism can be ignored.

This has been the default position of the vast bulk of the corporate press since 9/11. In Australia, especially the Murdoch press has smeared former Guantanamo Bay inmates David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib. This continued with Downer who called both men “terrible, terrible people”, perhaps because he fears what an independent investigation may find in regards to his own government’s alleged complicity in their long incarceration.

Australian journalist Sally Neighbour published an analysis a few days ago that inadvertently undermined her own paper’s years of misleading reporting:

The dossiers on Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks reveal the so-called evidence used to justify their incarceration to be a confused mishmash replete with glaring factual errors and inconsistencies, principally based on self-incrimination that would not be admitted in a proper court of law and tainted by the inclusion of information obtained under torture.

What Neighbour conveniently omitted from her report were the journalists and editors who have dined for years on rehashing US government released propaganda against Hicks and Habib, including The Australian, and smearing them constantly. Clearly media accountability was not on the agenda for a decade of establishment stenography. Today’s Australian editorial begrudgingly acknowledges the torture suffered by Habib and Hicks but issues no apology for spending years accusing them both of terrorism.

Thankfully this week’s Sydney Morning Herald editorially called the treatment of Hicks and Habib by its rightful name, torture.

It took one of the world’s more diligent and un-embedded journalists on Guantanamo Bay inmates, Andy Worthington, to unpack the Wikileaks revelations and highlight the decade of ignoring legal precedent for the Cuban and American black hole down which countless men were tortured and housed.

Reading Worthington’s copious work over the years makes a reader wonder why more mainstream reporters didn’t investigate the prison camp with a very critical eye. Is it because, as a former Bush official said, too many US journalists wanted to be seen as “patriotic” and protect America’s “interests”. Truth came a distant third. Guantanamo Bay was a place where psychological experiments and torture was common-place.

But what of the latest Wikileaks revelations themselves which, for the record, should be seen as merely US official opinion rather than actual factual reporting? We learn that the US allowed a number of repressive country’s intelligence services access to Guantanamo Bay detainees, including officials from China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

This highly prejudicial process was also committed by Australia during the Howard government when it emerged in 2005 that Chinese officials were allowed to interrogate Chinese asylum seekers in Sydney’s Villawood detention centre.

In the years after 9/11 (and also before), America was kidnapping terror suspects and sending them through extraordinary rendition to authoritarian states where these prisoners would be tortured for information. The latest Guantanamo Bay files confirm that Washington was also asking repressive regimes to assist them in identifying people as well as probably threatening their families back home.

The Wikileaks files detail America’s treatment of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj who languished without charge for six years in Guantanamo Bay. It can now be confirmed that he was only held in the prison camp because the Bush administration hated the Qatar-based news network and wanted to gain more information about its alleged connection to terrorism. It is a chilling warning to media companies the world over.

The response of the Obama administration to the latest document dump was typically Orwellian. The lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay were told, even after the mainstream press had widely disseminated the Wikileaks documents, that the files remained legally classified. The New York Times perfectly highlighted the issue:

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern law professor who represents Abu Zubaydah, the detainee accused of being a terrorist facilitator who was waterboarded by the Central Intelligence Agency, said he could not comment on the newly disclosed assessment of his client, which is posted on The Times Web site.“Everyone else can talk about it,” Mr. Margulies said. “I can’t talk about it.”

Although Wikileaks itself was not a major focus of this release (only briefly, anyway), it again proved the power of the whistle-blowing website. Western news organisations were forced to collaborate with an organisation with a relatively small staff and budget. The obvious question remains; why didn’t The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Guardian receive the scoop with their own investigations?

If former US army soldier Bradley Manning was the leaker of this information – President Obama has already said Manning is guilty, undoubtedly affecting any potential trial – he has given the world an invaluable insight into a superpower’s tyranny; he is a patriot in the truest sense of the word.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.

I appeared last night on ABCTV News 24′s The Drum alongside ABC journalist Marius Benson and lobbyist Sue Cato (video here).

While China, we learn via Wikileaks, ignores Australia’s supposed concerns for human rights, I asked if Prime Minister Julia Gillard actually cared about human rights as there had been no public comments from her after this week’s Guantanamo Bay files on countless innocent prisoners tortured by the world’s super-power. US crimes are not abuses in the eyes of our political and media elites. The words “human rights” are used as a political weapon as opposed to being something to cherish. Gillard’s current trip to China is solely about trade and military ties. Can the media and politicians be honest about this, please?

We discussed the alleged medical experimentation in Guantanamo Bay and the doctors complicit in the process. Both David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have accused the US of doing this to them and yet we still don’t take their allegations seriously; how much did the Australian government know?

Finally, the UN report on war crimes in Sri Lanka during the country’s civil war (the massive allegations have unsurprisingly been denied by Colombo). The fact that up to 40,000 innocents may have been murdered by Sri Lanka (and far less by the Tamil Tigers) requires a robust and international trial. I called on Australia and the global community to back a transparent inquiry (a position supported by a Guardian editorial). Like the Goldstone report into Israeli and Hamas crimes, this latest UN investigation warrants the most serious response, despite China, the US, the West and Australia all likely to not show much enthusiasm.

Sadly, Canberra is more concerned about working with Colombo to stop poor Tamils getting onto boats and coming to Australia. So much for our priority ever being human rights accountability.

The UN-led report on the country’s civil war is clear. Death and destruction on a massive scale. Former UN spokesman Gordon Weiss in Colombo says that the UN kept quiet during the last months of the war instead of speaking honestly about what they knew was happening in the north of the country:

ALI MOORE: This report criticises the UN for failing to take action, especially by not publicly talking about casualty figures, which the report and the authors say could have strengthened the call for the protection of civilians. You were the UN spokesman. Why didn’t that happen?

GORDON WEISS: Yeah, well, I was the UN spokesman and I was making statements about numbers, but there was obviously a decision taken not to use the specific figures that we were gathering. I was also part of that particular cell that’s mentioned inside the report who were trying to calculate casualty figures on a daily basis. But there was a decision taken up the chain not to use those figures.

ALI MOORE: Was that a decision you believe that was taken under pressure from the Sri Lankan Government? Was it a calculated decision to ensure the UN could stay in the country?

GORDON WEISS: I think the broader view was that if the UN used those figures it would make the UN’s position in the country untenable, and the UN mission was not a political mission or a peace-keeping mission or an observer mission, it was a humanitarian mission. So you had a lot of humanitarian agencies who were there trying to deliver the basics to those who were caught up in the siege.

ALI MOORE: So was that in essence a judgement that it was better to be there and be silent than not be there at all?

GORDON WEISS: I think it was, yes.

ALI MOORE: Was that right, do you think, in hindsight?

GORDON WEISS: No. I didn’t believe that it was right, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to change that.

ALI MOORE: In your view, though, clearly the UN could have done more?

GORDON WEISS: Yes, but in my view the UN can always do more. I mean, I don’t think the UN is ever in situations where it just gets things right. You know, this was a very, very tough theatre. It was the cutting edge of humanitarian action. It was always going to be tough. So that the UN got something wrong is no surprise; the question really is the degree to which it got it wrong.

The international community now has an obvious decision to make. Take action against Sri Lanka or remain silent, therefore guaranteeing other states will behave similarly (Israel, the US, China etc). The UN report is very clear on what both Colombo and the Tamil Tigers did to civilians. Tragically, in yet another example of UN gutlessness, it appears that directions were given to local staff to remain silent during the war. Shameful:

After the Sri Lanka war crimes report by the UN Panel of Experts was quietly presented to the UN Security Council by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Inner City Press asked Ban two questions about the report.

Among his answers on Sri Lanka, Ban implicitly acknowledged the report’s charge that the UN withheld casualty figures during the conflict.

Asked  to “respond to the criticisms in the report that the UN failed in those last months to do what it could to help protect civilians, including keeping statistics of the actual casualty figures back,” Ban said that the Sri Lankan authorities said that they couldn’t guarantee the safety of UN staff:

“the security situation was very precarious, at the last stage of the crisis. And we were told by the Sri Lankan Government, as I understand and remember, that the Sri Lankan Government would not be able to ensure the safety and security of United Nations missions there. Then we were compelled to take the necessary action according to their advice.”