Antony Loewenstein

Indeed (via the Guardian):

Tony Blair is facing calls for greater transparency in his role as Middle East peace envoy after it emerged that he visited Muammar Gaddafi in 2009 while JP Morgan, the investment bank that employs Blair as a £2m-a-year adviser, sought to negotiate a multibillion-pound loan from Libya.

Blair also championed two large business deals in the West Bank and Gaza involving telecoms and gas extraction which stood to benefit corporate clients of JP Morgan, according to a Dispatches investigation to be broadcast on Monday night.

Blair, who represents the diplomatic Quartet on the Middle East – the US, European Union, Russia and the United Nations – flew to see the former Libyan leader in January 2009 as JP Morgan tried to finalise a deal for the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) to loan a multibillion-pound sum to Rusal, the aluminium company run by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

LIA was set up by Gaddafi to manage the country’s wealth and was estimated to be worth $64bn (£41bn) last September.

Emails obtained by anti-corruption campaign group Global Witness and seen by the Guardian reveal JP Morgan’s vice chairman, Lord Renwick, invited the then vice chairman of LIA, Mustafa Zarti, to “finalise the terms of the mandate concerning Rusal before Mr Blair’s visit to Tripoli which is scheduled to take place on around 22 January”.

The meeting went ahead, but a spokesman for Blair denied the former prime minister had been involved in the proposed Rusal deal. A spokesman for JP Morgan said Blair had no knowledge of the proposal but could not explain why Blair’s visit to Gaddafi was raised in the email.

The Liberal Opposition leader Tony Abbott is interviewed in today’s Murdoch Australian by Greg Sheridan, a man who never saw a war he didn’t love to watch (from a distance). The message? Abbott loves America, Israel, the West, the “war on terror” and anything Washington asks. That’s not a foreign policy; its sycophancy:

I ask him whether Australia should oppose a resolution at the UN to declare a Palestinian state regardless of negotiations with Israel. Abbott replies: “My instinct would be to do nothing which would prejudice the continued viable existence of Israel. There are a number of countries close to Australia in outlook and values and Israel is certainly one of those [ed: so Australia values a violent occupation of another people?]. Israel is under existential threat in ways that probably no other country on Earth is and it does no good for Australia to seek brownie points with other countries by trifling with Israel’s security.”

Howard was the most pro-Israel prime minister Australia has produced. Abbott would be in Howard’s tradition, and perhaps even more so than Howard.

Abbott’s choice of the statesman he has most admired is, unsurprisingly, Winston Churchill, “the greatest democratic leader the world has seen”.

“In more recent times, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would rank up there with the best of them.”

But then he adds a perhaps surprising choice: “At least as a foreign policy prime minister, I also think Tony Blair made a very important and influential contribution.”

What Abbott likes about these leaders is that they didn’t apologise for Western civilisation and Western values. Apology is unlikely to be the dominant motif of Abbott’s foreign policy either.

The shameful legacy of Iraq should never be forgotten (via the Daily Mail):

The exhausted secret intelligence officer was heading home after a heavy session analysing reports from Iraq. As he stepped out through the high-security air-lock exit from MI6’s grand headquarters beside the Thames in London, a newspaper-seller’s placard caught his eye — ‘45 minutes from attack,’ it proclaimed.

Alarm bells rang in his head. It was September 2002, and Prime Minister Tony Blair had that day unveiled with great fanfare the government’s dossier detailing Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, as a justification for going to war.

He knew, in a way the public did not, the precise background to that headline. His first thought was that this was not what the original intelligence report had said. ‘If this goes wrong, we’re all screwed,’ he muttered to himself.

It did go wrong, spectacularly so, as a new history of MI6 by the BBC’s well-informed security correspondent Gordon Corera recounts. It’s a disturbing story of how tiny sparks of dubious information picked up in the backstreets of Baghdad and elsewhere were fanned into giant flames.

The result was a firecracker of a dossier which was pivotal in the run-up to the deeply divisive British and American invasion of Iraq. For many people, the scary information it disclosed — that Saddam was so advanced with his chemical and biological weapons that he could fire them with a mere 45 minutes notice — was a tipping point.

…

The ending of the Cold War and MI6’s legendary cat-and-mouse tussles with the KGB seemed to herald that redundancy. Then the post-9/11 era offered a new mission.

Out to prove it still had a vital use in the modern world, MI6 set to work.

Early drafts were begun of a dossier on Saddam’s weapons programmes.

Some MI6 officers were unhappy with the idea of working to so precise an agenda. ‘All our training, all our culture, bias, is against such a thing,’ one complained.

But there was no stopping what quickly became a juggernaut as Britain’s two most senior spies — Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, and John Scarlett, chairman of the government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, whose job was to sift and assess MI6’s information — became central to the build-up to war.

Dearlove in particular became one of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers and, according to officials, enjoyed a ‘privileged relationship’. Blair was open about his reliance on him to provide the central plank of the argument for intervening in Iraq. At one point he turned to his spy chief and said: ‘Richard, my fate is in your hands.’

Meanwhile, Scarlett was working closely with Downing Street, to the extent that Alastair Campbell, Blair’s all-powerful media director, would talk of him as a ‘mate’ and ‘a very good bloke’.

The JIC’s brief was to make its dossier suitable for publication to the public, in itself an unprecedented step in the publicity-shy world of spies. Campbell called for it to be ‘revelatory’. As the drafting process continued, Scarlett attended meetings chaired by Campbell to look at the presentation.

Intelligence was being sucked closer to policy than it had ever been before in MI6’s history.

Scarlett disputes this, maintaining that he was just putting information in the public domain not taking sides. Subordinates disagree.

‘We knew the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war,’ one senior military intelligence officer later complained. ‘Every fact was managed to make it as strong as possible.’

Direction and pressure were being applied on the JIC and its drafters, he maintained. A line had been crossed. Intelligence was being used as a tool for political persuasion.

One:

Throughout his years in power, Blair had regular secret meetings with Murdoch, many abroad, and was in regular telephone contact. Price has gone as far as to claim that Murdoch “seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet”.

Blair insisted no record was ever kept of the meetings or calls, so they were totally deniable. Cherie Blair has said that her husband’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 was a “close call”. So it was – and there is evidence that the final decision was taken only after Murdoch’s encouragement was received and his blessing given. Blair talked to the media tycoon three times on the telephone in the 10 days before the US-led invasion. Details obtained under freedom of information show Blair called Murdoch on 11 March, 13 March and 19 March 2003. British and US troops began the invasion on 20 March, with the Times and Sun voicing total support.

Two:

To begin with, [David] Cameron was wary of Murdoch. His first meetings with the tycoon went badly. After one meeting, a senior News International figure complained to me: “We told David exactly what to say and how to say it in order to please Rupert. But Cameron wouldn’t play ball. I can’t understand it.”

Cameron had made the deliberate decision to gain power without Murdoch’s assistance. Urged on by his senior aide – and probably his closest political friend, Steve Hilton – the future prime minister kept his distance.

But this strategy led to disaster in the polls. David Cameron was mocked and ridiculed in the Labour supporting Murdoch press, and by the summer of 2007 matters reached a crisis. There was talk that Gordon Brown, newly elected as Labour leader and Prime Minister, would call a snap election that autumn which he was widely expected to win handsomely.

It was at this point that George Osborne, then shadow chancellor and also Cameron’s closest strategic advisor, entered the fray. The immensely ambitious Osborne – who was already cultivating his own links with News International – made the case that Cameron should hire Andy Coulson.

Coulson was a brilliant News of the World executive, hand picked by Murdoch himself to go to the very top of the News International organisation. But his career had met with a setback a few months previously when he had been forced to resign as editor after the royal reporter Clive Goodman was sentenced to jail for hacking into the mobile phones of members of the royal household.

Cameron accepted Osborne’s view that there was no need to worry about this blot on Coulson’s record. This turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. Disastrously, Cameron imported Coulson into his inner team of advisors. In the short term, Coulson proved to be an excellent decision. He gave sound strategic advice, which helped Cameron see off the threat from Brown and enjoy a remarkable recovery in the opinion polls. But Coulson also performed one other function. He helped draw Cameron deep into the inner circle that surrounds Rupert Murdoch. In particular Cameron allowed himself to become a member of what is now known as the Chipping Norton set, a group of louche and affluent Londoners who centred around Rebekah Brooks’s Oxfordshire home, barely a mile from Cameron’s constituency residence.

Soon News International, through Coulson, had a key say in Conservative Party decision-making and even personnel appointments. It was News International, once again acting through Coulson, which effectively ordered Cameron to sack Dominic Grieve as his shadow home secretary in the autumn of 2008. Grieve was duly reshuffled in January 2009, after less than a year in the job. The irony of that decision is bitter today, for the decision given by News International for wanting Grieve out was that he was too soft on crime. Finally Cameron’s friendship with News International delivered the ultimate prize – the support of the Sun in the 2010 general election.

Startling information but I’d like to know how many corporate journalists will apologise for publishing these bogus reports all those years ago? Yes, I hear a deafening silence, too:

A top military intelligence official has said the discredited dossier on Iraq‘s weapons programme was drawn up “to make the case for war”, flatly contradicting persistent claims to the contrary by the Blair government, and in particular by Alastair Campbell, the former prime minister’s chief spin doctor.

In hitherto secret evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Major General Michael Laurie said: “We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.”

His evidence is devastating, as it is the first time such a senior intelligence officer has directly contradicted the then government’s claims about the dossier – and, perhaps more significantly, what Tony Blair and Campbell said when it was released seven months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Laurie, who was director general in the Defence Intelligence Staff, responsible for commanding and delivering raw and analysed intelligence, said: “I am writing to comment on the position taken by Alastair Campbell during his evidence to you … when he stated that the purpose of the dossier was not to make a case for war; I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given.”

He continued: “Alastair Campbell said to the inquiry that the purpose of the dossier was not ‘to make a case for war’. I had no doubt at that time this was exactly its purpose and these very words were used.”

Laurie said he recalled that the chief of defence intelligence, Air Marshal Sir Joe French, was “frequently inquiring whether we were missing something” and was under pressure. “We could find no evidence of planes, missiles or equipment that related to WMD [weapons of mass destruction], generally concluding that they must have been dismantled, buried or taken abroad. There has probably never been a greater detailed scrutiny of every piece of ground in any country.”

No kidding:

Plans to exploit Iraq’s oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world’s largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.

The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain’s involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair’s cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.

The documents were not offered as evidence in the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the Iraq war. In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, Shell denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as “highly inaccurate”. BP denied that it had any “strategic interest” in Iraq, while Tony Blair described “the oil conspiracy theory” as “the most absurd”.

But documents from October and November the previous year paint a very different picture.

Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq’s enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair’s military commitment to US plans for regime change.

The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP’s behalf because the oil giant feared it was being “locked out” of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: “Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis.”

The minister then promised to “report back to the companies before Christmas” on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq “post regime change”. Its minutes state: “Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity.”

After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office’s Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: “Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future… We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq.”

One:

Scientists from Britain and America visited the chemical weapons facility as it was being built in August 2006.

Nine months later Prime Minister Tony Blair met Col Gaddafi in Libya and set in motion the eventual release of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset el-Megrahi.

The cable, a copy of which was leaked to the WikiLeaks website and seen by The Daily Telegraph, detailed a visit by the scientists to a military facility in Tajura, on the outskirts of Tripoli.

The communique reports: “US and UK experts were both told that a lab under construction at the facility would be for chemical weapons defensive purposes.”

As Tony Blair prepares to visit Australia to share his invaluable lessons in killing Arabs and launching illegal wars – organised by one of the country’s largest Jewish families, the Pratts, who clearly love Blair for backing Israeli apartheid – it’s worth recalling what the former British Prime Minister has done.

Here’s Gareth Pierce in the Guardian on the moral and legal bankruptcy of fighting the “war on terror”:

During the past week academic institutions have expressed contrition at past links with Libya and parliament has debated whether control order legislation should continue. Yet there has been total silence as to why it was that Libyan dissidents came to form a significant block of those made subject to control orders, and to a second highly contentious measure: deportation to a country that practised torture.

Following the bombings in London on 7 July 2005, known within a day to have been carried out by young British nationals, Tony Blair said: “The rules of the game have changed.” Within weeks he had initiated an agreement with Colonel Gaddafi on the deportation of Libyan dissidents who had sought asylum and whose presence, he claimed, constituted one of the gravest threats to the security of this country.

As to why this small group required such urgent and extreme attention, parallel chronologies provide some clues. In 2005 Libyan oilfields were made available for public auction. Might there have been a two-way accommodation? You give us oil, we give you your dissidents?

In order to achieve the men’s removal to Libya, a country whose leader had a grim record of eliminating opponents, the government had created new mechanisms: memorandums of understanding (MOU), whereby regimes known to practice torture might sign up to an unenforceable promise that they would not torture deported individuals. Gaddafi was evidently a man who could be trusted, but for good measure an independent organisation would monitor the wellbeing of the men deported to Libya: the Gaddafi Foundation, headed by Gaddafi’s son Saif.

Mainstream television at its finest:

The depravity of bought intellectuals, not unlike many journalists who get wined and dined by US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan or in the halls of Washington, Canberra or London. Power can be appealing but it also corrupts:

A trip to Libya in 2006 by Anthony Giddens, the former London School of Economics director and eminent sociologist, when he met Muammar Gaddafi in his tent, was first vetted by the Libyan leader’s head of intelligence, leaked documents show.

Lord Giddens, guru of Labour’s third way, twice met Gaddafi on trips in 2006 and 2007 organised by Monitor Group, a US lobbying firm. Leaked documents show at least one trip was disclosed in advance to Abd Allah al-Sanusi, blamed for atrocities in the present uprising.

Giddens, 73, was LSE director for six years until 2003, is the author of 34 books published in 29 languages, and is credited with devising the “third way” political philosophy taken up by Tony Blair.

Monitor Group was paid more than £2m by the Libyan government in 2006 to conduct a “cleansing” campaign of its image, according to leaked documents.

A letter sent in July 2006 by executives at Monitor Group to Sanusi, also known as Abdullah Senussi, is about targeting influential academics to emphasise the emergence of “the New Libya”.

“We will create a network map to identify significant figures engaged or interested in Libya today … We will identify and encourage journalists, academics and contemporary thinkers who will have interest in publishing papers and articles on Libya,” the letter claims.

“We are delighted that after a number of conversations, Lord Giddens has now accepted our invitation to visit Libya in July,” the letter adds. It ends by saying to Sanusi: “We very much look forward to hearing from you with any questions or comments that you may have.”

…

As part of the fall-out, billionaire US financier George Soros last night apologised for having advised the LSE to take Libyan money. Soros studied at LSE as an undergraduate, and had advised the school that it was acceptable to receive the contribution from Gaddafi’s son, Saif, on the grounds that he appeared at the time to be a believer in open society and claimed to be working to move Libya in that direction. A spokesman for Soros said he had come to see that his advice was “a mistake in judgment, which he now greatly regrets”.

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

The latest BBC interview with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, situated in a fancy restaurant on the Mediterranean, was painful to watch. Clearly delusional and blaming drug-addled youth and al-Qaeda for the ongoing revolution in his country (which he claimed he didn’t lead, the “masses” were in charge), the Western media have labelled him “mad” and “dangerous to know”.

This is not a defence of Gaddafi or the countless crimes against his own people or outsiders. He should be held to account for all violations of international law. The crimes are multiple and must be punished.

Events in Libya are moving fast and I won’t try to cover all the latest developments here. Al-Jazeera English’s daily Libya blog is one of the best places to read all the news.

But it’s remarkable to watch how quickly Western leaders and commentators, many of whom have celebrated the increasing ties between them and Gaddafi, are suddenly calling for his departure.

It was seemingly only yesterday that a newfound, supposedly reliable ally in the “war on terror” had come in from the cold, rejected terrorism, ditched a nuclear program, given information about Pakistan’s covert nuclear program under AQ Khan and perhaps most importantly opened up Libya for Western businesses. The EU was only recently so keen to sell arms to Tripoli.

In the last years the West embraced Gaddafi and his children because he was the kind of dictator we could deal with. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has visited Libya a number of times as an employee of J.P. Morgan, who pays him millions of pounds annually, to push for banking opportunities.

Newly released documents indicate the Blair government wanted to provide weapons to Tripoli and train some of its military.

The current British government of David Cameron has at least acknowledged the moral bankruptcy of backing autocrats in the Middle East and not believing Arabs can rule themselves freely but his message was contradicted by travelling across the Middle East with arms dealers in tow to sell weapons to “democratic” Kuwait.

Why am I bringing all this sordid history up now? Because it shows the hypocrisy at the heart of Western political and media elites and how language is abused and selectively applied to the “good” and “evil”.

Gaddafi is clearly “mad” while western presidents or prime ministers, who have caused far worse carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Palestine, are still given respectful interviews in our media. It is inconceivable that an ABC or Murdoch journalist would openly call Tony Blair, Barack Obama, David Cameron or Nicholas Sarkozy a “war criminal”, even after they leave office. “We” are always better than “them”, a spurious democratic imprimatur that protects officialdom in our system. Killing literally hundreds of thousands of civilians – far in excess of anything Gaddafi could imagine – is ignored to maintain access to the powerful.

I’m reminded of the former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan in January. Aside from a few questions about the Iraq war, the two laughed about Condi’s piano playing. There was nothing about her authorising torture against terror suspects after 9/11 or the huge civilian death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Western commentators will show respect to a person such as Rice because she seems reasonable, calm and doesn’t dress in overly colourful garb like Gaddafi. This elaborate dance, an old tradition to protect a fellow powerful figure you’re likely to see at a cocktail party or media event in the weeks or month ahead, is what allows Rice to escape scrutiny, mockery or justice while somebody like Gaddafi is thrown to the wolves when he’s no longer useful. Piers Morgan is unlikely to catch him in Hollywood anytime soon.

This is despite the fact that she has unarguably caused far greater trauma to far more people than Gaddafi or Mubarak. Journalism all too often reflects and defends the government line because reporters inhabit a world where that is their only logical perspective.

As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald recently wrote:

“…’The American press’ generally and ‘senior American national security journalists’ in particular operate with a glaring, overwhelming bias that determines what they do and do not report:  namely, the desire to advance U.S. interests… America’s “establishment media” is properly described as such precisely because their overarching objective is to promote and defend establishment interests in what they report to – and conceal from – their readers.”

When it comes to Libya, how many Western media services even irregularly published voices from inside the country – bloggers, dissidents etc – that questioned how ordinary Libyans felt about the ever-increasing Western largesse being showered on Tripoli? US foreign policy, post the 2003 Iraq war, dictated a friendlier face towards “mad dog” Gaddafi and many Western writers bought this spin and transmitted it to their readers and viewers (“Gaddafi has a terrible record but in a remarkable transformation has ditched his nuclear program and embraced Tony Blair…”).

While the situation on the ground in Libya is dire and the border with Tunisia, reports Robert Fisk from the scene, is a seething mass of bodies, it seems everybody is now an expert on Libya. Foreign military intervention is being openly discussed, despite many Libyans being openly opposed to it and The Los Angeles Times editorialising against imposing a no-fly zone.

It’s time to put Libya into some perspective. Gaddafi may be a brute and autocrat but this didn’t suddenly occur in the last weeks. Good journalism has a responsibility to treat its subjects equally, not to the whims of US foreign policy (and therefore Australian foreign policy). Unfortunately, too many in the West view our behaviour as central to any radical change in the world; independence is unimagined.

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman wrote this week that the Arab revolutionaries were inspired by Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009. The “Arab” youth in his head said:

“Hmmm, let’s see. He’s young. I’m young. He’s dark-skinned. I’m dark-skinned. His middle name is Hussein. My name is Hussein. His grandfather is a Muslim. My grandfather is a Muslim. He is president of the United States. And I’m an unemployed young Arab with no vote and no voice in my future.”

Even though he was in Cairo during the uprising against Mubarak, Friedman clearly missed the deep anger at Washington’s funding and backing of the Egyptian dictator. Friedman is a “serious” writer, regularly re-published in the Fairfax press here, who argued Israel, the Beijing Olympics, Google Earth and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad were the main causes of the Arab protests. Seriously.

Finally, some ground rules for decent journalism in the Middle East in the midst of the new Arab world:

1)     Not every story is about Israel and its “security” (do Palestinians not have security concerns, too?). Base yourself somewhere other than Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Try the West Bank, Beirut, Cairo or Tunis.

2)     “Moderate” Arab regimes are anything but so don’t simply repeat State Department lines about “stability” in the region.

3)     Libya’s Gaddafi is a delusional thug but he’s an easy target. So is Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Don’t ignore such regimes but remember our own responsibility for backing Arab autocrats in the name of “stability”.

4)     Locate and cultivate local sources in multiple countries that send reliable information, therefore reducing the need to send in white correspondents for a few days, with no real knowledge of a nation, on the frontline of a battle they don’t really understand.

5)     Don’t fear everybody who talks about Islamic democracy or democracy with an Islamic hue.

6)     Don’t continually quote or interview Western officials who have spent a lifetime implementing failed and Israel-centric policies in the Middle East and frame them as “experts”. I’m talking about people such as neo-conservative, former George W Bush official and Barack Obama adviser Elliot Abrams and former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk. Their time has past. Move on.

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

This footage allegedly shows forces loyal to Gaddafi attacking homes in the city of Benghazi: