Antony Loewenstein

After America withdraws most of its troops, the New York Times, a key paper that backed the invasion in 2003, editorialised yesterday and sounded contrite (a little, though no mention of the mainstream media’s drum-boat towards the conflict):

America’s reputation has yet to fully recover from the horrors of Abu Ghraib. The country is still paying a huge price for President George W. Bush’s decision to shortchange the war in Afghanistan. American policy makers, for generations to come, must study these mistakes carefully and ensure that they are not repeated.

…President Obama, who first ran for office campaigning against the war, has never wavered on his promise to bring the troops home. The last few thousand will be out of Iraq by year’s end. We celebrate their return. But this country must never forget the intolerable costs of a war started on arrogance and lies.

As importantly, America is leaving around 16,000 private contractors in the country, a fact missed by most of the corporate press, happy to simply rehash White House press releases. MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan was a rare exception:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Interesting piece on the New York Times At War blog:

Several weeks ago, we heard that a local businessman had purchased some trailers from a closing American base.

We were told the trailers were parked at a nearby junkyard, so one afternoon I headed out with our security team to find them.

I didn’t believe we were on to the greatest story. But I thought that the scene of some broken-down trailers that had been used by the Americans would be a new way to tell the story of the military withdrawal.

On our way to the junkyard, we got lost. Really lost. Our drivers thought they knew where they were going, but we kept on finding ourselves at dead ends.

The drivers tried to call for directions, but that didn’t seem to be any help. The fact that Iraq doesn’t have many street signs didn’t help, either.

For what seemed like hours — but was really about 30 minutes — we just drove around this dreary residential neighborhood, which didn’t even have paved streets.

After a while, I grew frustrated and concerned. I’m the most cautious in the bureau when it comes to taking jaunts into the city, and I didn’t think anything good could come of the situation. We were clearly outsiders, circling the neighborhood, and residents were staring at us.

I thought, what was the big deal if I didn’t get the scene of some broken-down trailers?

As soon as I raised the idea of turning back, the guards and drivers said that they had just figured out where the junkyard was, and one of our Iraqi reporters with us told me to relax.

While students in Gaza continue being blocked to study outside the Strip simply because they’re students (thank you democratic Israel), now and then the reality of unquestioned Western support for Zionism seeps into the mainstream. Even to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Not that he suggests any serious pressure should be applied on Israel but it’s a start:

I have a simple motto when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I love both Israelis and Palestinians, but God save me from some of their American friends — those who want to love them to death, literally.

That thought came to mind last week when Newt Gingrich took the Republican competition to grovel for Jewish votes — by outloving Israel — to a new low by suggesting that the Palestinians are an “invented” people and not a real nation entitled to a state.

This was supposed to show that Newt loves Israel more than Mitt Romney, who only told the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom that he would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem because “I don’t seek to take actions independent of what our allies think is best, and if Israel’s leaders thought that a move of that nature would be helpful to their efforts, then that’s something I’ll be inclined to do. … I don’t think America should play the role of the leader of the peace process. Instead, we should stand by our ally.”

That’s right. America’s role is to just applaud whatever Israel does, serve as its A.T.M. and shut up. We have no interests of our own. And this guy’s running for president?

As for Newt, well, let’s see: If the 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians are not a real people entitled to their own state, that must mean Israel is entitled to permanently occupy the West Bank and that must mean — as far as Newt is concerned — that Israel’s choices are: 1) to permanently deprive the West Bank Palestinians of Israeli citizenship and put Israel on the road to apartheid; 2) to evict the West Bank Palestinians through ethnic cleansing and put Israel on the road to the International Criminal Court in the Hague; or 3) to treat the Palestinians in the West Bank as citizens, just like Israeli Arabs, and lay the foundation for Israel to become a binational state. And this is called being “pro-Israel”?

I’d never claim to speak for American Jews, but I’m certain there are many out there like me, who strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to a state, who understand that Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood yet remains a democracy, but who are deeply worried about where Israel is going today. My guess is we’re the minority when it comes to secular American Jews. We still care. Many other Jews are just drifting away.

I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused.

More than ten years after 9/11, the Obama administration remains determined to maintain flawed military trials for terror suspects but as this New York Times investigation reveals, housing people on the US mainland hasn’t caused the end of America:

It is the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate.

An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare.

Among them is Ismail Royer, serving 20 years for helping friends go to an extremist training camp in Pakistan. In a letter from the highest-security prison in the United States, Mr. Royer describes his remarkable neighbors at twice-a-week outdoor exercise sessions, each prisoner alone in his own wire cage under the Colorado sky. “That’s really the only interaction I have with other inmates,” he wrote from the federal Supermax, 100 miles south of Denver.

There is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, Mr. Royer wrote. Terry Nichols, who conspired to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. Ahmed Ressam, the would-be “millennium bomber,” who plotted to attack Los Angeles International Airport. And Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

In recent weeks, Congress has reignited an old debate, with some arguing that only military justice is appropriate for terrorist suspects. But military tribunals have proved excruciatingly slow and imprisonment at Guantánamo hugely costly — $800,000 per inmate a year, compared with $25,000 in federal prison.

The criminal justice system, meanwhile, has absorbed the surge of terrorism cases since 2001 without calamity, and without the international criticism that Guantánamo has attracted for holding prisoners without trial. A decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, an examination of how the prisons have handled the challenge of extremist violence reveals some striking facts:

¶ Big numbers. Today, 171 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. As of Oct. 1, the federal Bureau of Prisons reported that it was holding 362 people convicted in terrorism-related cases, 269 with what the bureau calls a connection to international terrorism — up from just 50 in 2000. An additional 93 inmates have a connection to domestic terrorism.

¶ Lengthy sentences. Terrorists who plotted to massacre Americans are likely to die in prison. Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in 2010, is serving a sentence of life without parole at the Supermax, as are Zacarias Moussaoui, a Qaeda operative arrested in 2001, and Mr. Reid, the shoe bomber, among others. But many inmates whose conduct fell far short of outright terrorism are serving sentences of a decade or more, the result of a calculated prevention strategy to sideline radicals well before they could initiate deadly plots.

¶ Special units. Since 2006, the Bureau of Prisons has moved many of those convicted in terrorism cases to two special units that severely restrict visits and phone calls. But in creating what are Muslim-dominated units, prison officials have inadvertently fostered a sense of solidarity and defiance, and set off a long-running legal dispute over limits on group prayer. Officials have warned in court filings about the danger of radicalization, but the Bureau of Prisons has nothing comparable to the deradicalization programs instituted in many countries.

¶ Quiet releases. More than 300 prisoners have completed their sentences and been freed since 2001. Their convictions involved not outright violence but “material support” for a terrorist group; financial or document fraud; weapons violations; and a range of other crimes. About half are foreign citizens and were deported; the Americans have blended into communities around the country, refusing news media interviews and avoiding attention.

¶ Rare recidivism. By contrast with the record at Guantánamo, where the Defense Department says that about 25 percent of those released are known or suspected of subsequently joining militant groups, it appears extraordinarily rare for the federal prison inmates with past terrorist ties to plot violence after their release. The government keeps a close eye on them: prison intelligence officers report regularly to the Justice Department on visitors, letters and phone calls of inmates linked to terrorism. Before the prisoners are freed, F.B.I. agents typically interview them, and probation officers track them for years.

Both the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress often cite the threat of homegrown terrorism. But the Bureau of Prisons has proven remarkably resistant to outside scrutiny of the inmates it houses, who might offer a unique window on the problem.

How very revealing. Former State Department spokesman PJ Crowley speaks at an American university, praises the New York Times for co-ordinating with the White House on which Wikileaks documents should be revealed but argues that Julian Assange should not be prosecuted (from around 30:30):

Yes:

Mainstream media and editors came under fire from WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange at the Global Editors Network summit in Hong Kong today, as he accused most journalists of entering the profession to “crawl up the ladder of power to become associated with power”.

Addressing the conference via Skype, Assange told the audience of editors that most journalists aim to “sit at same table as those you hold to account” and as a result editors “become corrupted”.

“We all know what is going on. As insiders we all know when people in the media become powerful … editors are invited to sit at the table of those powerful individuals and the reality is that’s why most journalists go into journalism. It is to crawl up the ladder of power to become associated with power, to sit at the same table as those you hold to account.

“Editors become corrupted and they do not hold those very people to account, we know that. What is new is that the rest of the world is starting to know it. Not just as a result of reaction to attack by Washington on WikiLeaks, it is starting to know it as a result of there being other forms of publishing, unmediated publishing. There is a crisis of legitimacy within the mainstream press, a rightful crisis of legitimacy.

“We always maintained the line that our moral justification for our existence … is our moral virtue and our moral virtue is holding power to account. If the press doesn’t hold powerful corporations and governments to account then how can a democratic process work? But the mainstream press has failed in that task and failures are becoming evident and corruption in individual cases are becoming evident.

“The mainstream press is not able to be its own gatekeeper any more,” he added.

Speaking after Assange, Sylvie Kauffmann, editorial director of Le Monde – one of the media partners involved in the release of the US embassy cables – responded saying “I didn’t do this job to crawl up the ladder of the powerful”.

“I don’t think this accusation stands,” she added.

During Assange’s speech – which came a day before the one year anniversary of the US embassy cables release and a day after WikiLeaks was awarded a Walkley award for most outstanding contribution to journalism – he also discussed the redaction process carried out by its news partners to remove material from the cables which he said would breach human rights.

As a comparison, he claimed that while the Guardian redacted one in four cables, the Hindu in India redacted just three out of 5000 cables, and questioned this “discrepancy”.

Kauffmann said she was “sorry” certain papers had been singled out which were not represented on the panel.

Returning to the debate later, Assange responded to Kauffmann by also questioning Le Monde’s redaction decisions. He also followed up on earlier criticisms of former media partners such as the Guardian and New York Times by saying: “Both of these organisations have done fine work with us, their best stories were very good.”

But he said, in his opinion, the “best journalism” from the cables has come not from “old democracies” but from countries including “India, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Kenya”.

“Those journalists are more courageous, hard working and often younger than ones in older democracies. And for them the stakes are higher and therefore journalism has more ability to impact the power structures within the country.”

When asked whether any information should be kept private, he re-stated the “duty” of news organisations. “Media organisations have a duty and that is to inform the public. We should be very careful about compromising that prime objective.”

My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Sun Herald:

Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography
Julian Assange (Text, $29.95)

This is unlike any book you’ve ever read. Take one of the most recognisable figures in the world, sit him down for hours of interviews and sign a multimillion-dollar contract to publish an authorised autobiography. Talk about government secrets, challenging American hegemony, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and unlock the motivations behind a truly revolutionary spirit.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Australian Julian Assange, is the subject of this curious release, a book that has been rejected as dishonest and incomplete by the man himself. The original publisher, Canongate, calls it an “unauthorised first draft” while Assange has stated that neither he nor the ghostwriter Andrew O’Hagan knew what would appear in the public domain when the title appeared. “Canongate is profiteering from an unfinished and erroneous draft,” Assange wrote.

Despite these hesitations, this book is a fascinating read. Most of the titillating media coverage so far has focused on the alleged sexual assaults by Assange on two Swedish women – he vehemently denies doing anything wrong and says “it has already turned out to be the most expensive phone call I didn’t make” – but the interest actually lies elsewhere. His likely extradition to Sweden is a sideshow.

Assange says his nomadism (“it suits some people’s situations”) was due to his mother’s destructive relationship with The Family cult in Australia and her abusive partner. Computers became a refuge, as he explains poetically: “Computers provided a positive space in a negative field; they showed us we could start again, against ‘selfhood’, against ‘society’, building something less flawed and less corrupt in these fresh pastures of code.”

Assange offers pithy social commentary on Australian society when his hacking began, a strong sense of rejecting the parochialism that this country then offered. “We felt we were the dead centre of the turning world,” he argues, “no less significant than cutting-edge computer guys in Berlin or San Francisco … We felt we could lead the world, which is a nice thing to feel at the bottom of the planet.”

The evolution of WikiLeaks, launched in 2006, was at once radical and simple. Assange believed in remaking the world in a transparent way that was guaranteed to upset the powerful.

“I was, always will be, more concerned with the wars going on around the world than with making things easier for myself.”

Assange has little time for most journalists, who he sees as lazy and unwilling to spend the required time to investigate documents dropped in their lap by WikiLeaks. This attitude undeniably contributed to the breakdown in relationships with The New York Times and The Guardian, two outlets Assange believes treated his integrity and independence with contempt.

In one curious aside, Assange notes, after the WikiLeaks release of documents relating to the American war effort, the material gained a steadily increasing amount of respect: “Some military personnel themselves began visiting our site, to see what kind of replacement parts they might need for their vehicles,” he writes. “Irony of ironies; some NATO military contractor would appear in a chatroom saying can you help me find a wheel for my armoured vehicle.”

Assange is portrayed as a man dedicated to exposing the secrets of lying governments in the service of war. He’s impatient, harsh on his own foibles and doesn’t suffer fools. He dismisses the excessive secrecy and collusion between journalists and officials during the prosecution of battle. “Open government is only worthy of the name when it is a real, lived value, not an empty branding exercise,” he argues.

The grand legacy of WikiLeaks, away from the petty personality politics, is undeniably positive.

Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker that in the rush to accept the Israeli and American line over Iran – Tehran is a major threat and must be isolated (pretty much the same argument they’ve been making for a decade or more) – skepticism and rationality has once again disappeared:

I’ve been reporting on Iran and the bomb for The New Yorker for the past decade, with a focus on the repeatedly inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran. The goal of the high-risk American covert operations was to find something physical—a “smoking calutron,” as a knowledgeable official once told me—to show the world that Iran was working on warheads at an undisclosed site, to make the evidence public, and then to attack and destroy the site.

In typically idiosyncratic style, David Carr writes in the New York Times – hardly a paper with much respect for Wikileaks for most of this year – outlines the myriad of issues faced by Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Regardless, we must defend transparency in government and challenge the inherent secrecy of “democracies”:

Let’s concede that WikiLeaks, whatever its excesses, represented a genuinely new paradigm for transparency and accountability. It became a fundamentally different and powerful whistle, one that could be blown anonymously — or not, as it turned out — to very remarkable effect. Whistle-blowers in possession of valuable and perhaps incriminating corporate and government information now had a global dead drop on the Web. Traditional news organizations watched, first out of curiosity and then with competitive avidity, as WikiLeaks began to reveal classified government information that in some instances brought the lie to the official story.

But while WikiLeaks reduced the friction in leaking secret documents, it did not reduce the peril to those who might choose to do so. Part of the promise of WikiLeaks was that it would eliminate digital fingerprints. While those efforts seemed to work, military prosecutors were nonetheless able to tag Pfc. Bradley E. Manning as a suspect using traditional investigative measures.  Private Manning, who is accused of leaking many of the more important WikiLeaks documents, is being held in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., accused of “aiding the enemy.” His presence there is a stark reminder that despite campaign promises about openness and transparency in governing, the Obama administration has a very hard-line approach when it comes to state secrets, one that has not only affirmed the Bush administration’s approach, but has done so with renewed focus. Just 17 months into his administration, President Obama had already prosecuted more alleged leakers than any of his predecessors.

All of this is a reminder that when it comes to leaking, it is not whistles that are in short supply, but whistleblowers. WikiLeaks represented a major technological advance in the art and mechanism of the leak, and it eliminated the need to spend many secret hours at the copy machine, as Daniel Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers. But easing the modality of transmission does not obviate the legal and social strictures against making the private public.

After WikiLeaks began revealing confidential documents, news organizations including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal set up their own versions of digital dead drops, but no significant stories have emerged from those efforts. The technological muscle required to maintain a robust site, as evidenced by WikiLeaks’s on-and-off again operational status, is significant and hard to come by.

And Mr. Assange, who came on the global stage in spectral fashion, seeming to ride on a digital carpet above the laws of various jurisdictions, has proved extremely vulnerable. He became the face of a new kind of asymmetric informational warfare, and his high profile, along with what may have been some poor personal choices, have brought him back to earth with a thud.

Julian Assange on The New York Times: Part 1 from NYT eXaminer on Vimeo.

Any illusions about the American empire’s footprint reducing in the Middle East is fictional. Washington is keen to more closely partner with any dictatorship it can. But of course this isn’t meddling, it’s just what empire’s do. Note this irony-free comment in a lead New York Times piece that details the Obama administration’s desire to build a physical presence on the ground in a range of brutal states (all in the name of moving towards democracy, clearly):

“We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region, which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Tajikistan after the president’s announcement.

Well, that didn’t take long. Even before Gaddafi was found and murdered, Western businesses were dreaming of the huge profits that could be made. Disaster capitalism on crack.

Now, in a front page New York Times story, the joys continue:

The guns in Libya have barely quieted, and NATO’s military assistance to the rebellion that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qaddafiwill not end officially until Monday. But a new invasion force is already plotting its own landing on the shores of Tripoli.

Western security, construction and infrastructure companies that see profit-making opportunities receding in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned their sights on Libya, now free of four decades of dictatorship. Entrepreneurs are abuzz about the business potential of a country with huge needs and the oil to pay for them, plus the competitive advantage of Libyan gratitude toward the United States and its NATO partners.

A week before Colonel Qaddafi’s death on Oct. 20, a delegation from 80 French companies arrived in Tripoli to meet officials of the Transitional National Council, the interim government. Last week, the new British defense minister, Philip Hammond, urged British companies to “pack their suitcases” and head to Tripoli.

When Colonel Qaddafi’s body was still on public display, a British venture, Trango Special Projects, pitched its support services to companies looking to cash in. “Whilst speculation continues regarding Qaddafi’s killing,” Trango said on its Web site, “are you and your business ready to return to Libya?”

The company offered rooms at its Tripoli villa and transport “by our discreet mixed British and Libyan security team.” Its discretion does not come cheaply. The price for a 10-minute ride from the airport, for which the ordinary cab fare is about $5, is listed at 500 British pounds, or about $800.

“There is a gold rush of sorts taking place right now,” said David Hamod, president and chief executive officer of the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce. “And the Europeans and Asians are way ahead of us. I’m getting calls daily from members of the business community in Libya. They say, ‘Come back, we don’t want the Americans to lose out.’ ”

Yet there is hesitancy on both sides, and so far the talk greatly exceeds the action. The Transitional National Council, hoping to avoid any echo of the rank corruption of the Qaddafi era, has said no long-term contracts will be signed until an elected government is in place. And with cities still bristling with arms and jobless young men, Libya does not offer anything like a safe business environment — hence the pitches from security providers.

Like France and Britain, the United States may benefit from the Libyan authorities’ appreciation of NATO’s critical air support for the revolution. Whatever the rigor of new rules governing contracts, Western companies hope to have some advantage over, say, China, which was offering to sell arms to Colonel Qaddafi as recently as July.