Antony Loewenstein

Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray cuts through the lies and unloads:

UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond’s visit to Tashkent on 28 February was not covered in any UK mainstream media that I can find, which is peculiar, given the media’s obsession with covering anything to do with “Our heroes” in Afghanistan. It was not really the kind of visit the state would want to publciise, with Hammond in the rather unheroic position of having his knees firmly placed on the acres of marble floor of Tashkent’s presidentiail palace, with his tongue well and truly stuck up Karimov’s arse.

NATO, including the UK, needs to transit Uzbekistan to get its 14,000 vehicles out of Afghanistan, having well and truly queered the pitch of an exit through Pakistan by a decade of bombing the locals. The Karimov family had already made hundreds of millions in profit through a monopoly of providing haulage and logistical services to supplies going in to Afghanistan. With NATO’s demoralised forces sitting on an incredibly large stockpile of materiel in effect stuck in the country as the utterly fruitless occupation ends, the Karimovs are in a position to ramp up extortion.

That will not only involve huge cash payments going to the Karimov family from the British taxpayer, disguised as transit fees, railway charges, fuel provision etc. It will also include a raft of political demands. Karimov had already in 2011 secured the ending of EU sanctions, and the international respectability he craves for his regime through an official visit to Brussels and call on EU President Barroso.

Now as a condition of facilitating our retreat, Karimov is insisting on a full visit to Tashkent by David Cameron in 2013 or 2014, a state visit by Karimov to the UK in 2015 and acceptance of Gulnara Karimova as Uzbek Ambassador in London. He is also keen to acquire a variety of state of the art UK weapons and surveillance systems for use against his own people. The strong steer from No 10 is that these Karimov demands will have to be accepted.

What a fascinating piece of history, via the Washington Post, and an indication that mercenaries and private contractors have been part of war well before the “war on terror”:

As U.S.-funded Afghan jihadists battled the Soviets in the late 1980s, the unassuming American-run bar in this ancient frontier city bulged with gossiping foreigners. Today, with another Afghan conflict winding down, the watering hole practically echoes with emptiness.

Through it all, Khan Afsar, the Khyber Club’s unlikely bartender, had a front-row seat.

Except Afsar did not actually have a seat in his spot behind the bar, and all the standing recently became too much to bear. So he has stepped down after nearly 25 years of six-day workweeks that he says left him with admiration for Americans, a rare sentiment in Peshawar and in Pakistan at large.

“They are good people” — not to mention good tippers, Afsar said. “They are helping us.”

As a recent Saturday evening shift began, a lone Canadian patron sipped beer at the bar and predicted that the crowd was unlikely to improve. The scene seemed a metaphor for U.S.-Pakistan relations, which boomed with cooperation during the Afghan resistance but now gape with mistrust.

Yet Afsar himself is a symbol of the ground-level relations between Americans and Pakistanis, which, despite the diplomatic tensions, are typically far more amiable than sour. Over the decades, Afsar — a devout Muslim who never tried alcohol — served as a steadfast and good-natured ambassador for Pakistan, building a trail of admirers now scattered around the globe.

“For a modest fellow from a mountain village . . . he supervised and served the foreign lunatics with kindness, merriment and unflappable aplomb,” Stephen Masty, who managed the bar in the early 1990s, wrote in an e-mail.

…

Things began changing about five years ago, as Islamist militants expanded their reach and launched attacks in northwest Pakistan. Hostility toward Americans rose, and many international organizations withdrew foreign workers to Islamabad, the capital. The club’s security walls multiplied, and more American customers sported beards and tattoos, said Yusuf Ghaznavi, a Pakistani American who has been a fixture at the club for two decades.

“I presume they were contractors,” Ghaznavi said. “Their main concern was A, how soon they are going to get out, and B, how much money they are making.”

As bilateral tensions soared, Pakistan ordered the departure of most U.S. military representatives, many of whom had been based in Peshawar. The American mission in Peshawar now has a skeleton staff whose security guidelines prohibit much movement in the city. 

The role of real journalists is to question so-called established truths and make officials uncomfortable. Being too close to power is the role of court reporters. Sadly, the vast bulk of corporate hacks are dead keen to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful and remain unwilling to seriously challenge, for example, the rush to war (hello Murdoch’s Australian today, essentially demanding military action against Iran).

I’m writing a chapter in a forthcoming collection I’m co-editing on the incestuous relationship between the military and the media, an issue that has interested me for years (here’s an essay of mine in 2004 detailing the New York Times helping the Bush administration sell its bogus war against Iraq).

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald skewers in his latest column the disease that will never die:

The New York Times‘ Public Editor Arthur Brisbane unwittingly sparked an intense and likely enduring controversy yesterday when he pondered — as though it were some agonizing, complex dilemma — whether news reporters “should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” That’s basically the equivalent of pondering in a medical journal whether doctors should treat diseases, or asking in a law review article whether lawyers should defend the legal interests of their clients, etc.: reporting facts that conflict with public claims (what Brisbane tellingly demeaned as being “truth vigilantes”) is one of the defining functions of journalism, at least in theory. Subsequent attempts to explain what he meant, along with a response from theNYT‘s Executive Editor, Jill Abramson, will only add fuel to the fire.

Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky both have excellent analyses of the Brisbane controversy — which, as they point out, sparked such intense reaction because it captured and inflamed long-standing anger toward media outlets for mindlessly amplifying statements without examining whether they’re true. As Stephen Colbert put it in his still-extraordinary 2006 speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home.” While reporters typically react with fury over the suggestion that they are stenographers, Brisbane was essentially posting that this is all they are, and then earnestly wondering aloud whether they should be anything more than that, as though it was some sort of exotic or edgy suggestion.

That most reporters faithfully follow the stenographer model — uncritically writing down what people say and then leaving it at that — is so obvious that it’s hardly worth the effort to demonstrate it. There are important exceptions to this practice even at the most establishment media outlets, where diligent andintrepid investigative journalism exposes the secret corruption of the most powerful. But by and large, most establishment news coverage consists of announcing that someone or other has made some claim, then (at most) adding that someone else has made a conflicting claim, and then walking away. This isn’t merely the practice of journalists; rather, as Rosen points out, it’s virtually their religion. They simply do not believe that reporting facts is what they should be doing. Recall David Gregory’s impassioned defense of the media’s behavior in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when he rejected complaints that journalists failed to document falsehoods from Bush officials because “it’s not our role“ and then sneered that only an ideologue would want them to do so (shortly thereafter, NBC named Gregory the new host of Meet the Press).

Literally every day, one finds major news stories that consist of little more than the uncritical conveying of official claims, often protected by journalists not only from critical scrutiny but — thanks to the shield of anonymity they subserviently extend — from all forms of accountability. Just to take one highly illustrative example from last week, the NYT published an article by Eric Schmitt based almost entirely on the assertions of anonymous officials, announcing that “a nearly two-month lull in American drone strikes in Pakistan has helped embolden Al Qaeda and several Pakistani militant factions to regroup, increase attacks against Pakistani security forces and threaten intensified strikes against allied forces in Afghanistan.” No criticisms of drone attacks were included. Three days later, the U.S. resumed drone attacks, after which the same Eric Schmitt immediately ran to inform us, citing Reuters, that the drone strike killed “at least three militants” (as always, “militant” in American media discourse means: any person who dies when an American missile shot from a drone detonates).

Many in the corporate press love to luxuriate over drones, those seemingly silent and deadly killers against America’s “enemies”.

The reality is rather different, explains Nick Turse in TomDispatch:

According to statistics provided to TomDispatch by the Air Force, Predators have flown the lion’s share of hours in America’s drone wars.  As of October 1st, MQ-1’s had spent more than 1 million hours in the air, 965,000 of those in “combat,” since being introduced into military service.  The newer, more heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper, by comparison, has flown 215,000 hours, 180,000 of them in combat.  (The Air Force refuses to release information about the workload of the RQ-170 Sentinel.)  And these numbers continue to rise.  This year alone, Predators have logged 228,000 flight hours compared to 190,000 in 2010.

An analysis of official Air Force data conducted by TomDispatch indicates that its drones crashed in spectacular fashion no less than 13 times in 2011, including that May 5th crash in Kandahar.

…

The failure to achieve victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with a perceived success in the Libyan war – significantly fought with airpower including drones – has convinced many in the military not to abandon foreign wars, but to change their approach.  Long-term occupations involving tens of thousands of troops and the use of counterinsurgency tactics are to be traded in for drone and special forces operations.

Remotely piloted aircraft have regularly been touted, in the press and the military, as wonder weapons, the way, not so long ago, counterinsurgency tactics were being promoted as an elixir for military failure.  Like the airplane, the tank, and nuclear weapons before it, the drone has been touted as a game-changer, destined to alter the very essence of warfare.

Instead, like the others, it has increasingly proven to be a non-game-changer of a weapon with ordinary vulnerabilities.  Its technology is fallible and its efforts have often been counterproductive in these last years.  For example, the inability of pilots watching computer monitors on the other side of the planet to discriminate between armed combatants and innocent civilians has proven a continuing problem for the military’s drone operations, while the CIA’s judge-jury-executioner assassination program is widely considered to have run afoulof international law – and, in the case of Pakistan, to be alienating an entire population.  The drone increasingly looks less like a winning weapon than a machine for generating opposition and enemies.

Committee to Protect Journalists offers a grim end of year report:

Pakistan remained the deadliest country for the press for a second year, while across the world coverage of political unrest proved unusually dangerous in 2011, the Committee to Protect Journalists found in its year-end survey of journalist fatalities. CPJ’s analysis found notable shifts from historical data: Targeted murders declined while deaths during dangerous assignments such as the coverage of street protests reached their highest level on record. Photographers and camera operators, often the most vulnerable during violent unrest, died at rates more than twice the historical average.

At least 43 journalists were killed around the world in direct relation to their work in 2011, with the seven deaths in Pakistan marking the heaviest losses in a single nation. Libya and Iraq, each with five fatalities, and Mexico, with three deaths, also ranked high worldwide for journalism-related fatalities. The global tally is consistent with the toll recorded in 2010, when 44 journalists died in connection with their work. CPJ is investigating another 35 deaths in 2011 to determine whether they were work-related.

My friend Benjamin Gilmour, author of the wonderful new book Paramedico - he works alongside ambulance workers across the world – speaks on commercial Australian TV and mentions US crimes with drones against the people of Pakistan:

My following book review appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

An investigative journalist finds altered weather patterns are already having a significant impact.

We are constantly bombarded with evidence of apocalyptic climate change – uncontrollable weather patterns that will irreversibly destroy sustainable life on planet Earth. Deniers argue such warnings are exaggerated.

The Republican US presidential candidate, Rick Perry, recently said scientists were manipulating data ”so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects”.

News Limited’s Andrew Bolt, writing from his office in Melbourne, equally claims that a religious-type fundamentalism exists around global warming and we should simply remain relaxed and comfortable about occasional changes in climate.

My following investigation appeared in Crikey this week:

It was a Saturday night community event and could have been in any small Australian town. A fund-raiser was being held for the Thai floods victims and proceedings began with local boys and girls playing short classical pieces on an electric piano. The room was colourful with red tablecloths and a predominantly Chinese, Thai and Malay audience, with a smattering of white Anglos.

This was Christmas Island in November and I was there to visit the large detention centre run by British multinational Serco and the Immigration Department. With a population of about 1500, situated three-and-a-half hours from Perth and serviced by only one airline, Virgin, as an Australian satellite, the island should be a tourist Mecca. Warm weather, Buddhist temples on the coast, palm trees, beautiful vistas across the Indian Ocean, lush rainforests, coconuts falling from trees and unique birds all contribute to a tropical oasis.

But these facts ignore what the Australian government has created out of sight and out of mind. “Everybody thinks of us as a prison island,” a United Christmas Island Workers union member told me. “I travel to Australia or Asia and that’s all they say.”

Gordon Thomson, head of the United Christmas Island Workers union — currently leading a fight against CI’s phosphate mine owners over higher wage demands — said: “We shouldn’t lock people up; it’s like a prison here.”

Christmas Island is full of contradictions. One night I attended, with hundreds of others, an annual event at a Buddhist temple. Two shamans were flown in from Malaysia to bless the community. One, with detailed tattoos on his back and arms, sucked two dummies for five hours while handing out sweets to children. He and his colleague were apparently in a trance and kept the crowd transfixed while the Malay community provided massive helpings of rice, meat, water and beer for the assembled crowd. Large, colourful incense rockets lit the night sky with wisps of jumping fire.

During the evening, I spoke to a young teacher who worked with small children in detention on the island. He had arrived with high hopes of being able to change the system from within. He said Serco staff were friendly enough but told a revealing anecdote. His school had put together an induction manual and gave it to Serco to examine. The response was that some Serco staff were unable to complete the task because they couldn’t read or write.

The island’s biggest employer is now Serco, with most of the workers housed in ’70s style, low-rise apartment blocks. The island’s infrastructure, despite periodic Australian government funding, is lacking, and resentment towards Canberra was palpable. As more boats arrive — I saw two carrying 100 asylum seekers come into shallow waters — many residents told me they couldn’t understand why asylum seekers were being so well housed while they still waited on better and more affordable housing and job opportunities.

The Labor government’s island administrator, Brian Lacy, said he regularly asked Canberra for more resources and had hired a consultant to assist designing a tourist campaign to reframe the island as more than just a prison.

The detention centre is situated on the far side of the island, a long way from any habitation; my visits there required navigating around various road closures due to the current crab migration. During the March riots, footage of a burning detention centre shocked Australia and the world. Viewing that vantage point requires a short hike up a hill. Road access is now blocked, I was told, to deny media easy accessibility.

The vista was expansive and revealing. The amount of resources required to maintain such a centre — when prices on the island for even the most basic products grow exponentially — is extraordinary. Currently holding about 700 asylum seekers, from a peak of more than 3000 earlier this year, an Immigration Department spokeswoman told me the instruction from Canberra was now to maintain relatively low numbers to avoid over-crowding and rising tensions. Nobody sleeps in tents at the centre any more, a common occurrence in the past.

The feeling of isolation, similar to the Curtin detention centre, is key to the soaring mental health problems of staff and detainees. Sister Joan Kelleher, who lives on the island and daily visits detainees, told me she was against mandatory detention because she saw the effects it was having on the men she was seeing.

On the day that I encountered Sister Kelleher on the foreshore, she was accompanied by four Afghan Hazara men, ranging in age from 30s to 40s, who were allowed a few hours with the woman, wading in the ocean and cooking a barbecue of sausages, onions and bread rolls. They had all been in detention, in Darwin and on Christmas Island, for more than 20 months and were awaiting judicial reviews of their claims. They were all on anti-depressant medication and keen to tell me their stories about repression in the Pakistani town of Quetta, where their wives and children still lived in constant danger.

The following day, a few hours before I left, I was finally granted access inside the detention centre to see one Hazara Afghan (after initially being rejected by bureaucrats on the mainland and negotiating with the facility’s departmental manager). I was introduced to the head case manager, Sally, after being ushered through what she acknowledged was “a maximum security prison”. She later added: “If it was built more recently it would be different, softer, less like a jail.”

After passing through heavy security doors, we arrived in a compound of clinical meeting rooms. Sally said Mohammed (not his real name) would arrive shortly. In the meantime she said she was happy to answer any of my questions (by this stage I knew I was getting red-carpet treatment, if such a thing was possible.)

I asked if she believed privatised detention, companies designed to make a profit from asylum seekers, was preferable. Although Sally said there were problems, she said Serco was an essential partner because the public service simply wasn’t capable of handling security, “intel gathering” and other services unless “we hire many more people”.

It reflected something I saw in other centres across the country, the symbiotic relationship between DIAC and Serco: they can’t live without the other and support each other’s secretive culture.

Mohammed arrived and through a Farsi translator — who told me he was from Afghanistan and came by boat in 1999 — explained that he was very depressed after 22 months in detention. He barely made eye contact and looked down at his hands during our time together. He couldn’t go back to Pakistan for safety reasons but he said DIAC never gave any concrete details about his upcoming judicial review. He took six different anti-depressants daily.

*Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist currently working on a book about disaster capitalism

Now this is interesting. Since September 11, 2001, we’ve heard constant bleating from many conservatives and keyboard warriors that we shouldn’t “deal with terrorists” (er, apart from our friends who practice terrorism, of course).

The Guardian on reality in the real world:

A controversial new book produced by one of the world’s best-known aid agencies, Médecins sans Frontières, lifts the lid on the often deeply uncomfortable compromises aid organisations are forced to make while working in conflicts.

How humanitarian aid organisations work – and the sometimes unintended consequences of their actions – has been brutally cross-examined in recent years, not least by the critical Dutch author Linda Polman.

MSF’s collection of essays, Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed, has provided the most detailed and self-critical inside account of the deals aid agencies are forced to negotiate, often with groups and regimes which abuse human rights, to continue their work.

Launched to mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of the medical aid agency, the book offers a rare and unflinching portrait of some of MSF’s most difficult recent operations, including in Sri Lanka, Somalia, Burma, Pakistan and Gaza.

Amid the criticism that has been levelled at aid organisations – including the charge that humanitarian operations have sometimes prolonged conflict through imposed alliances with warring parties – the book asks: what constitutes an acceptable compromise with political and military figures?

Known for often being the last group on the ground offering assistance when others have pulled out, MSF decided that a candid examination of these operations was in keeping with its best tradition.

MSF found itself in an unenviable position in Sri Lanka. Suspected by the government of being pro-Tamil Tiger, MSF found itself co-opted to working within a government “pacification policy that had settled the ethnic question in Sri Lanka by bombings and military surveillance”.

In Somalia, MSF was forced to run many operations by “remote control” because of the risk from Islamist fighters. In 2009, MSF was subjected to a 5% tax on the salary of all MSF employees by the al-Qaida linked al-Shabaab militia, not to mention “registration” costs of $10,000 (£6,300) per project, a $20,000 tax every six months and was told to dismiss all female employees.

Benoit Leduc, head of mission for MSF, France, told the Guardian: “Each al-Shabaab demand leads to more discussions on the restrictions we are prepared to accept or that it is reasonable to accept in such a complex situation …

“[But] insofar as al-Shabaab controls the majority of the country and Mogadishu in particular [at the time Leduc is speaking of], all we can do is accept reality. It is crucial that our patients are not selected on the basis of their allegiance or membership of certain groups, and that we don’t choose whom we talk to – including those claiming to be from al-Qaida.”

Marie Noelle Rodrigue, operations director of MSF in Paris, said: “The time has come to explain the fragile equilibrium between the price it is necessary for an organisation to pay so that you are helping the victims.

“Often that means making a compromise to a degree where you are helping the authorities. This is a question that no-one has wanted to examine and it is good that MSF have looked into it and I think we are happy that we’ve done it honestly.”

She added: “I think too often there is a mystery about what goes on in the humanitarian world behind closed doors, despite the fact that people know there is often a price to pay to help the victims.

“What is crucial is the examination of how you make these kinds of difficult decisions.”

My following book review appeared in last weekend’s Sydney Sun Herald newspaper:

The Triple Agent
Joby Warrick
(Scribe, $32.95)
Reviewed by Antony Loewenstein

The war in Afghanistan is the longest in modern American history. This year has been the most deadly for Afghan civilians.

British MP Rory Stewart wrote in The New York Times that the presence of foreign troops and private security was inflaming the situation and making peace impossible: “Helmand is less safe in 2011 with 32,000 foreign troops in the province than it was in 2005, when there were only 300.”

Amid this chaos sits the CIA, the highly secretive (and largely unaccountable) organisation given the job, by successive US presidents, of tracking, capturing or killing supposed insurgents and bringing “victory”. This book documents one infamous case of how horribly wrong and misguided this stated aim can be.

In December 2009, a group of senior CIA operatives were based in Khost, Afghanistan, and were ready to greet Humam Khalil al-Balawi, a man they believed was the ultimate al-Qaeda insider who would give America invaluable intelligence on the terrorist organisation. Instead, he detonated a bomb strapped to his chest and killed seven CIA operatives, a deep blow to the agency.

The mercenary company Blackwater is front and centre of the story, often in charge of protecting CIA installations and officers in conflict zones, despite a troubling human rights record.

Such firms have been invaluable to America’s war machine since the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, without which Washington could not fight its countless battles around the world.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning book reads like a thriller but is infused with a deep sympathy for the war America is fighting in Afghanistan and the “war on terror” in general.

For example, US drone attacks in Pakistan are only seen as “killing terrorists”, whereas the facts tell a different, more disturbing story.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism recently released a study that found hundreds of civilians had been killed by drones since 2004.

Author Joby Warrick does not seem too concerned with such details, praising the supposed heroism of drone pilots killing remotely from back in America. But Warrick knows how to tell a cracking story and the importance of this book is to reveal the legal black hole of Washington’s actions globally, and the cultural and social ineptitude of US forces in countries they occupy.

This is an insider’s book written by a journalist who admires his countryfolk entrusted with allegedly defending the homeland.

Few doubts are expressed and the work closes with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.

It is framed as a retribution for the CIA deaths – a closing of the circle.

American foreign policy has never looked so tawdry and obsessed with revenge.