During last week’s Sydney Writer’s Festival, before my PEN lecture on free speech, I was interviewed by ABC TV News about the growing threat to our freedoms in the West, as governments and private companies monitor and collect our digital details:
No real secrets here but at least it’s acknowledged that the extreme, often racist and discriminatory polices of the Zionist state assisted Washington after September 11. And the greatest irony of all? Neither country feels safe. Here’s the Times of Israel:
The world changed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice told an audience in Israel Sunday, and so did the relationship between the United States and Israel.
While Jerusalem and Washington were always good friends, after the attacks they became allies “with a common cause in the fight against people who would seek political gain by attacking civilians, parents and children,” she said.
Rice also described the first panicked minutes for the US administration on 9/11, including the moment she raised her voice to president George W. Bush.
The former secretary was speaking before a rapt audience outside Tel Aviv Sunday, during a conference on homeland security technology sponsored by Motorola Solutions. The company maintains a large research facility in Israel, said CEO Greg Brown, telling the audience of nearly 1,000 that most of the leading edge homeland security technology in use in the world today was developed in Israel.
It was 9/11 that drove this point home for the Bush administration, for which Rice was serving as national security adviser at the time. Rice told the audience in riveting detail of the first moments after the attack on the World Trade Center, recalling that she told her staff that the report of the first plane hitting the Trade Center’s North Tower was “a strange accident.” She shared that observation with Bush, who was in Florida at the time, and the president concurred.
Twenty minutes later, when the second plane hit the South Tower, there was no doubt in Rice’s mind that the US was under attack — “the first attack against civilians on US territory since the [Anglo-American] War of 1812.”
With the White House in panic mode, Rice quickly convened a meeting with staffers, and attempted to get in touch with top officials. “I called [secretary of state Colin] Powell but he was in Peru, so I couldn’t reach him. I called [CIA director] George Tenet but he had already been taken to a bunker. I called [secretary of defense] Don Rumsfeld, and they told me that his phone just kept ringing, with no answer.
“Then I saw on TV a plane hit the Pentagon,” Rice continued. “Just then I was able to get in touch with President Bush, and I did something that I had never done before, and would never do again. I raised my voice to the president of the United States. He told me that he was going to get on a plane and come home,” Rice recounted, adding that she practically yelled at Bush, urging him to stay put in Florida. “I told him that we are under attack, and that buildings were being hit all over Washington.”
It was a “moment that mattered,” Rice said, in more ways than one. First, it demonstrated how vulnerable the US really was. The attack “changed the conception of security. We were the world’s most powerful country, but we couldn’t stop a bunch of terrorists from one of the poorest countries in the world, who spent just $300,000 to mount an attack on us.”
Furthermore, the attack and its ramifications — including, Rice said, the possibility that American forces might have to shoot down civilian aircraft if it appeared that other sites, like the White House, might be hit — convinced the US that it significantly needed to ramp up security, but in a way that would have as minimal an effect on the average citizen as possible.
“We realized that Israel, our good friend, was very advanced in this area. Security has been a concern of Israel’s since the day it was born.”
Israel, she added, has successfully developed many technologies and methods to fight terror and enable day-to-day life to go on, and the US turned to Israel, and companies like Motorola Solutions — much of whose technology is developed in Israel — for help.
Rice, who is now a private citizen, was in Israel as a guest of the company. Speaking earlier, Brown said that Motorola Solutions had recruited her in order to benefit from “her guidance in foreign affairs” in developing solutions for homeland security.
Israel, he said, had the manpower, the technology, and “unfortunately” the experience to prove the efficacy of the technology being developed for homeland security purposes.
This trip, Brown added, was Rice’s 25th to Israel, making Israel one of her most-visited foreign destinations. And there was another significant connection Rice had to Israel, or rather, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Secretary Rice grew up in Denver — seven houses down the street from Prime Minister Netanyahu,” who lived in the town while his father, the recently deceased Benzion Netanyahu, taught at a local university.
A privatised future where companies desperately want citizens to stay and remain in prison? It’s here, today:
Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.
The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.
Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations.
If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.
Meanwhile, inmates subsist in bare-bones conditions with few programs to give them a better shot at becoming productive citizens. Each inmate is worth $24.39 a day in state money, and sheriffs trade them like horses, unloading a few extras on a colleague who has openings. A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.
In the past two decades, Louisiana’s prison population has doubled, costing taxpayers billions while New Orleans continues to lead the nation in homicides.
This is what you call a necessary attempt to assert sovereignty. One question; how many private contractors have been involved in this sordid process? The New York Times reveals an important American embarrassment and Iraqi assertion of independence:
In the face of spiraling costs and Iraqi officials who say they never wanted it in the first place, the State Department has slashed — and may jettison entirely by the end of the year — a multibillion-dollar police training program that was to have been the centerpiece of a hugely expanded civilian mission here.
What was originally envisioned as a training cadre of about 350 American law enforcement officers was quickly scaled back to 190 and then to 100. The latest restructuring calls for 50 advisers, but most experts and even some State Department officials say even they may be withdrawn by the end of this year.
The training effort, which began in October and has already cost $500 million, was conceived of as the largest component of a mission billed as the most ambitious American aid effort since the Marshall Plan. Instead, it has emerged as the latest high-profile example of the waning American influence here following the military withdrawal, and it reflects a costly miscalculation on the part of American officials, who did not count on the Iraqi government to assert its sovereignty so aggressively.
“I think that with the departure of the military, the Iraqis decided to say, ‘O.K., how large is the American presence here?’ ” said James F. Jeffrey, the American ambassador to Iraq, in an interview. “How large should it be? How does this equate with our sovereignty? In various areas they obviously expressed some concerns.”
Last year the State Department embarked on $343 million worth of construction projects around the country to upgrade facilities to accommodate the police training program, which was to have comprised hundreds of trainers and more than 1,000 support staff members working in three cities — Baghdad, Erbil and Basra — for five years. But like so much else in the nine years of war, occupation and reconstruction here, it has not gone as planned.
A lesson given by an American police instructor to a class of Iraqi trainees neatly encapsulated the program’s failings. There are two clues that could indicate someone is planning a suicide attack, the instructor said: a large bank withdrawal and heavy drinking.
The problem with that advice, which was recounted by Ginger Cruz, the former deputy inspector general at the American Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, was that few Iraqis have bank accounts and an extremist Sunni Muslim bent on carrying out a suicide attack is likely to consider drinking a cardinal sin.
Last month many of the Iraqi police officials who had been participating in the training suddenly refused to attend the seminars and PowerPoint presentations given by the Americans, saying they saw little benefit from the sessions.
The Iraqis have also insisted that the training sessions be held at their own facilities, rather than American ones. But reflecting the mistrust that remains between Iraqi and American officials, the State Department’s security guards will not allow the trainers to establish set meeting times at Iraqi facilities, so as not to set a pattern for insurgents, who still sometimes infiltrate Iraq’s military and police.
The largest of the construction projects, an upgrade at the Baghdad Police College that included installing protective covering over double-wide residence trailers (to shield against mortar attacks) and new dining and laundry facilities and seminar rooms, was recently abandoned, unfinished, after an expenditure of more than $100 million. The remaining police advisers will instead work out of the American Embassy compound, where they will have limited ability to interact with Iraqi police officials.
Robert M. Perito, director of the Security Sector Governance Center of Innovation at the United States Institute of Peace, called the project a “small program for a lot of money.”
“The first problem is the State Department doesn’t operate in dangerous environments,” said Mr. Perito, who last year wrote a history of United States police training in Iraq. “As soon as the U.S. military left, the State Department was on its own. And that immediately ran the price up and restricted the ability of advisers to move around.”
The State Department has consistently defended the program, even after it was whittled down in scope and criticized publicly by the head of Iraq’s Interior Ministry, Adnan al-Assadi, who last year questioned the wisdom of spending so much on a program the Iraqis never sought.
Long after most Western forces have left, private security firms will still be there turning a profit (via EU Observer):
The EU’s external action service (EEAS) plans to spend up to €50 million on private security guards for its Afghanistan mission over the next four years.
The EEAS unveiled the tender on Thursday (10 May), saying the money would be spent on “protection of staff, their families in the country, visitors from headquarters or other EU institutions, the premises and the goods of the EU delegation in Afghanistan.”
The contract – valued at between €30 million and €50 million plus VAT – is to cover at least 100 security guards, as well as “mobile patrol teams, equipment [and] armoured cars.”
It is aiming to sign up a big company with prior experience in Afghanistan – the winning bidder must have an annual turnover of at least €20 million and 400 staff.
Five companies are eligible to compete – the Hungarian-based Argus, Canada’s Gardaworld, British firms G4S and Page Group, and French company Geos – after getting on an EEAS private security shortlist last year.
The tender also stipulates applicants must present “an official document issued from the competent Afghan authority that certifies that the company is entitled to operate security services in Afghanistan” before the contract is signed.
It must also “be compliant with the Karzai decree concerning private security companies in Afghanistan (Presidential Decree 62),” referring to a ruling by Afghan leader Hamid Karzai in 2010 regulating the sector.
The EEAS has faced criticism for its handling of a recent tender on Libya after it signed a €10 million contract with G4S despite the fact it does not have permission from Libya’s post-war authority, the National Transitional Council (NTC), to operate on its territory. The EEAS says it does not need permission. But the NTC says it does.
The legal situation in Afghanistan creates room for confusion.
Positive news:
Today, a federal appellate court dismissed the appeals of two private military contractors who had argued they were immune from litigation when they engage in torture. The corporate defendants, CACI and L-3, have argued that they should receive the same protections as the United States government and that, therefore, any of their wartime activities – including torture – are similarly beyond review of the courts. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, remanded the cases to the district courts that had previously rejected the corporations’ novel claims of immunity, in order to allow fact-finding to proceed. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is co-counsel on the cases, which were filed in 2008.
“Today’s ruling provides an opportunity for victims of torture at Abu Ghraib to tell their stories to an American court and to obtain justice from the private military contractors who played such a prominent role in one of the most shocking episodes of abuse in recent American history,” said CCR Legal Director, Baher Azmy, who co-argued the case.
The corporate defendants in the consolidated cases, who were hired to provide interpretation and interrogation services, are alleged to have subjected the plaintiffs to electric shocks, rape and other forms of sexual assault, forced nudity, broken bones, and deprivation of oxygen, food and water. The two cases were brought on behalf of 76 Iraqis who were subjected to brutal, sadistic acts in detention centers Iraq by employees of the corporate defendants. Court martial and other testimony from soldiers convicted of serious abuse in Iraq directly link both companies to instances of torture. All of the plaintiffs were released from detention without charge.
Said Susan Burke, lead counsel on the case who also participated in oral argument before the full court, “The ruling is especially important in light of the unprecedented rise in the use of private military contractors in war zones. Ultimately, these cases should be about whether the actions of the defendants constituted war crimes and torture in violation of the law and not about whether or not the perpetrators should receive impunity even if they engaged in torture.”
In December, a coalition of groups, including retired military officers and human rights NGOs and experts, filed amicus briefs arguing that for-profit corporations cannot be considered equivalent to U.S. soldiers and should face justice under traditional legal principles that govern illegal conduct. The military officers’ brief expressed concern that “persons engaging in shocking behavior that the U.S. military does not itself tolerate for its own members have broad impunity from accountability.”
En banc appellate review, by all judges on a federal appeals court, is a rare occurrence, reserved for cases in which the issues raised are deemed to be of particular legal and constitutional importance. Fourteen judges heard the appeal, with 11 of the judges deciding in the plaintiffs favor.
This is basically propaganda for a new computer game (even if it claims to be a documentary) and yet the film provides disturbing insights into how the merging between reality and fiction is here:
Business reporting often ignores the vast bulk of human beings and focuses solely on company profits. Take this lead story in today’s Murdoch Australian:
Papua New Guinea specialist Highlands Pacific has long been known as an asset-rich, share-price-poor type of stock. There is a feeling out there that this year could well see that change for the better, due to a couple of milestones that are to be clocked up.
The first is the commissioning of the $US1.5 billion ($1.47bn) Ramu nickel-cobalt project in PNG, 8.56 per cent-owned by Highlands and with the ability for it to go to an eventual 20.55 per cent stake.
China’s MCC is the major partner and operator of the project, which has cost more than originally planned and is two years behind schedule.
None of that really matters to Highlands as it has been carried in the development.
Assume a long-term nickel price of $US9 a pound (now $US8 a pound) and Highlands could receive $US3 million-$US5m a year up until about 2018, when project debt is assumed to be paid off. After that, Highlands’ stake increases to 11.3 per cent and its share of free cashflow could be $US15m-$US20m a year, with the option to go to a 20.55 per cent equity interest should it desire.
All that is not bad in itself for a company that yesterday was being valued by the market at $106m (15.5c a share).
Given Ramu’s development cost, it seems fair enough to suggest Highland’s market cap is covered by the Ramu interest alone.
But just like a late-night TV ad throwing in steak knives as part of the deal, there is more to Highlands, most notably its 18.8 per cent stake in the Xstrata-led Frieda River copper-gold project in PNG.
It is one of the world’s biggest undeveloped copper-gold deposits (12.9 million tonnes of copper and 20 million ounces of gold). Xstrata delayed a feasibility study into its development to December this year.
That raised concerns in some quarters that Xstrata had gone cold on the project. But the reality is that Xstrata delayed it to study power options for Frieda River in greater depth. The emerging availability of gas in that part of the world means that the original plan for an $US810m hydro-power project could be replaced with the cheaper option of gas-fired power.
Like Ramu before it, the delay at Frieda River is neither here nor there, given that when it is developed it is going to be around for decades.
Throw in Highlands’ exploration hunt near the almost exhausted Ok Tedi copper-gold mine in the Star Mountains in PNG, and it is easy to see why valuations of Highlands runs well ahead of its current share price. Euroz settled on a 40c share price target in a recent research note on the company after first having arrived at a 51c valuation.
Understand any of that? Of course you didn’t, you’re a real person who actually wonders what social and environmental impact such explorations may have on the poor people of PNG.
Here’s the Oxford Business Group highlighting calls for the PNG government to make sure these vast revenues don’t all leave the country:
A series of significant mineral finds in Papua New Guinea (PNG) have highlighted the role exports are set to play in the nation’s economic future. However, there have been calls from industry players and opposition officials asking the government to do more to ensure revenues stay in the country.
In mid-April, state-owned Petromin announced that it had found a 364-metre intersection of porphyry copper, molybdenum and gold mineralisation at its Ipi River prospect, located 50 km north of its Tolukuma gold mine in Central Province.
In the same month, Australia-based Indochine Mining announced that gold and silver finds at Mount Kare had underlined the “outstanding potential” of the project to become one of PNG’s next major mining operations. Officials also revealed that KULA Gold’s Woodlark Island project, which has estimated reserves of 700,000 ounces, was on track to start producing in 2014.
A disaster is not the event itself, but the trauma of the event. By adjusting to looming collapse in advance, your lifestyle can change gradually, at your own pace. ARK-INC offers holidays in apocalyptic landscapes, low-tech home comforts, and materials for self-evaluation.
The number of lawsuits filed by multinationals against governments is growing globally. It truly shows who controls this world.
It’s time for a serious fight-back. Evidence for the prosecution (via the Guardian):
Lloyds Banking Group has become embroiled in a row over its investment in a company accused of involvement in the rendition of terror suspects on behalf of the CIA.
Lloyds, which is just under 40% owned by the taxpayer, is one of a number of leading City institutions under fire for investing in US giant Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), which is accused of helping to organise covert US government flights of terror suspects to Guantánamo Bay and other clandestine “black sites” around the world.
Reprieve, the legal human rights charity run by the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, alleges that during the flights, suspects – some of whom were later proved innocent – were “stripped, dressed in a diaper and tracksuit, goggles and earphones, and had their hands and feet shackled”. Once delivered to the clandestine locations, they were subjected to beatings and sleep deprivation and forced into stress positions, a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross says.
CSC, which is facing a backlash for allegedly botching its handling of a £3bn contract to upgrade the NHS IT system, has refused to comment on claims it was involved in rendition. It has also refused to sign a Reprieve pledge to “never knowingly facilitate torture” in the future. The claims about its involvement in rendition flights have not been confirmed.
Reprieve has written to CSC investors to ask them to put pressure on the company to take a public stand against torture.
Some of the City’s biggest institutions, including Lloyds and insurer Aviva, have demanded that CSC immediately address allegations that it played a part in arranging extraordinary rendition flights.
The only people really benefitting from the steady stream of asylum seekers to Australia are the heads of multinational Serco. Sydney’s Sun Herald reports:
A surge in asylum seeker boats has delivered an explosion in profits for the private company operating Australia’s detention centres.
Serco Australia, a division of a British multinational, enjoyed a 45 per cent rise in net profits to $59 million last year.
The revenue of the company, which has the mandate to run the immigration detention services on behalf of the federal government, almost doubled from $369 million to $693 million.
Serco Australia’s compliance with local laws on reporting financial statements has been less impressive. Once again, in contravention of the Corporations Act, its financial statements were filed late this year.
And the disclosure in its accounts, according to a leading academic in the field of accounting and regulation, failed to comply with Australian accounting standards.
”Rules are rules,” said Jeffrey Knapp, a senior lecturer at the University of NSW. ”Serco has broken them. Serco Australia Pty Ltd is a reporting entity and should do a general purpose financial report like BHP or Telstra, including full disclosures of related-party transactions and balances.”
Serco’s high cash flow, low debt levels and 35 per cent profit margins would make it the envy of the corporate elite. Few of Australia’s top 100 companies matched the profit rises or margins of Serco when they last reported. Serco’s profits had also doubled the year before.
The rise in the number of asylum seekers since the breakdown of the government’s Malaysia plan has led to an increase in detention centres from 12 to 20 across the mainland, Tasmania and Christmas Island. In the 2010-11 financial year, a total of 8874 people were taken into detention. It has also meant a lucrative new $1 billion contract for Serco, in a deal renegotiated with the government last December. A contract to manage the immigration residential housing program had blown out from $44.5 million to $85.6 million.
It is difficult to tell from Serco Australia’s financial statements how profitable is the outsourcing of immigration detention.
