The World Tomorrow is becoming essential weekly viewing (here’s past episodes). The latest edition features Alaa Abd El-Fattah from Egypt and Nabeel Rajab from Bahrain, two remarkable men who show dedication to free their countries from internal and external (read US) tyranny:
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.
Tragically, many Australian Jews take comfort from this same delusion, almost enjoying imagining it’s 1933. All the time.
This piece from a South African newspaper highlights the dilemma and hopes for a much better future:
Of all the studies conducted on the position of the Jewish establishment during apartheid, perhaps the most authoritative has been Gideon Shimoni’s Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa. Published in 2003, the text argues that while individual Jews protested the laws of the National Party regime in numbers disproportionate to the relative size of the community—Jews, after all, never made up more than 4% of the white minority—the semi-official leadership tacitly accepted the policies of race-based discrimination.
…
There are some Jews in South Africa who, while fully supporting the principles on which the Jewish state was formed, do not support the Netanyahu administration “right or wrong”. Unfortunately, this is not a minority that is growing nearly as fast as the Beinart faction in America, and most evidence would suggest it is not growing at all. Young South African Jews appear either to be turning to religion (where old ways of thinking predominate), are failing to respond to the Israel question with an updated set of facts (for instance, the fact that the Netanyahu administration is once again offering Israelis incentives for settling in the territories), or are abandoning the debate altogether.
So the South African Jewish community, given its compromised history, may have greater need of a voice like Peter Beinart’s than the Jews of the United States. A cause for hope is that South African Jewry can also claim a list of names that spoke against the mainstream when the consequences were more severe than excommunication.
…Issuing subpoenas to journalists to force them to reveal their sources is now obsolete — unnecessary — because the U.S. Government’s Surveillance State is so vast, so comprehensive, that it already knows who is talking to whom. It now subpoenas and harasses reporters simply to force them to confirm in court what they have already learned through surveillance, but the limitless Surveillance State it has created has rendered undetected whistleblowing — or undetected anything — virtually impossible.
Over a decade occupying the place, hundreds of billions spent and this is the result (via the Washington Post):
After signing a 10-year lease and spending more than $80 million on a site envisioned as the United States’ diplomatic hub in northern Afghanistan, American officials say they have abandoned their plans, deeming the location for the proposed compound too dangerous.
Eager to raise an American flag and open a consulate in a bustling downtown district of the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, officials in 2009 sought waivers to stringent State Department building rules and overlooked significant security problems at the site, documents show. The problems included relying on local building techniques that made the compound vulnerable to a car bombing, according to an assessment by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that was obtained by The Washington Post.
The decision to give up on the site is the clearest sign to date that, as the U.S.-led military coalition starts to draw down troops amid mounting security concerns, American diplomats are being forced to reassess how to safely keep a viable presence in Afghanistan. The plan for the Mazar-e Sharif consulate, as laid out in a previously undisclosed diplomatic memorandum, is a cautionary tale of wishful thinking, poor planning and the type of stark choices the U.S. government will have to make in coming years as it tries to wind down its role in the war.
In March 2009, Richard C. Holbrooke, who had recently been appointed President Obama’s envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, lobbied for the establishment of a consulate in Mazar-e Sharif within 60 days, according to the memo. The city was deemed relatively safe at the time, far removed from Taliban strongholds of the south. A consulate just a short walk from Mazar-e Sharif’s Blue Mosque, one of the country’s most sacred religious sites, was seen as a way to reassure members of the ethnic Tajik and Uzbek minorities that dominate the north that the United States was committed to Afghanistan for the long haul.
“At the time, [Holbrooke] pushed hard to identify property and stand up an interim consulate, on a very tight timeline, to signal our commitment to the Afghan people,” according to the January memo by Martin Kelly, the acting management counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Holbrooke died in 2010 of complications from heart surgery.
The global onslaught of vulture capitalists continues space:
Giant US military-industrial company Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) is in the running to win a slice of a controversial £1.5 billion (US$2.43 billion) contract to transform the West Midlands and Surrey police forces in Britain, The (London) Times reported.
Hailed as the largest police privatization scheme in the UK, it has been suggested the private companies who win the contract will be tasked to perform several police functions — including patrols, detention and criminal investigation.
KBR, a former subsidiary of the Halliburton group, has attracted its share of criticism over the large contracts it won with the US government during the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The corporation also helped to build the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
The Times reported that it was among four groups shortlisted to win the British police contract, a number whittled down from more than 200.
A KBR spokesman said its bid was the first time the corporation had attempted to get involved in regular policing.
“KBR is not involved in policing; instead, our objective in the privatization of the police force is to get more police doing actual police work while KBR brings operational efficiencies to the back office with the objective of achieving an overall lower cost of service while improving service levels,” the spokesman said.
With police planning to hold a protest march next week against the push to privative the force, KBR’s involvement in the bidding process will possibly add fuel to the fire.
“This is the latest move that seems to be designed to make the police more and more remote from the public we serve,” said Julie Nesbit, of the Police Federation.
“We believe simply that if you call a cop, you should get a cop, not a security guard, not a uniformed civilian nor an employee of a major international conglomerate. We believe it’s what the public expect and believe that there should be a public debate before parts of the police service are sold off to the highest bidder.”
Police Superintendents’ Association President Derek Barnett said the public should be more involved in the push towards privatization.
“The legitimacy of policing stems from the fact that it takes place with the consent of the public; it is only right, therefore, that the public should have a say in who they want to deliver operational policing services,” he said.
Away from the slop offered by mainstream propagandists, Washington’s occupation of Afghanistan will continue for years to come, as Gareth Porter explains:
The optics surrounding the Barack Obama administration’s “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement with Afghanistan and the Memorandums of Understanding accompanying it emphasise transition to Afghan responsibility and an end to U.S. war.
But the only substantive agreement reached between the U.S. and Afghanistan – well hidden in the agreements – has been to allow powerful U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to continue to carry out the unilateral night raids on private homes that are universally hated in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan.
The presentation of the new agreement on a surprise trip by President Obama to Afghanistan, with a prime time presidential address and repeated briefings for the press, allows Obama to go into a tight presidential election campaign on a platform of ending an unpopular U.S. war in Afghanistan.
It also allows President Hamid Karzai to claim he has gotten control over the SOF night raids while getting a 10-year commitment of U.S. economic support.
But the actual text of the agreement and of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids included in it by reference will not end the U.S. war in Afghanistan, nor will they give Karzai control over night raids.
The Obama administration’s success in obscuring those facts is the real story behind the ostensible story of the agreement.
Obama’s decisions on how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan in 2014 and beyond and what their mission will be will only be made in a “Bilateral Security Agreement” still to be negotiated. Although the senior officials did not provide any specific information about those negotiations in their briefings for news media, the Strategic Partnership text specifies that they are to begin the signing of the present agreement “with the goal of concluding within one year”.
That means Obama does not have to announce any decisions about stationing of U.S. forces in Afghanistan before the 2012 presidential election, allowing him to emphasise that he is getting out of Afghanistan and sidestep the question of a long-term commitment of troops in Afghanistan.
In a positive review of Peter Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism in Rolling Stone, this telling quote:
Another anonymous source is a “senior State Department official,” who recently traveled with Secretary Clinton from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the West Bank: “There was a kind of silence and people were careful, but it was like, my God, you crossed that border and it was apartheid.”
A truly remarkable story that reads like a thriller but reveals a dark side of Chinese repression that we should never forget. The New York Times reports:
Injuries suffered in the course of a daring nighttime escape. A covert appeal from underground activists to top State Department officials for humanitarian protection. A car chase through the streets of Beijing to spirit a dissident to safety inside the fortified American Embassy.
Those are among the new details that emerged Wednesday from the 10-day saga of Chen Guangcheng, the blind rights lawyer who escaped house arrest in rural Shandong Province, and then, after managing to reach Beijing and come under American protection, was the subject of a series of highly unusual secret negotiations with the Chinese government.
The story involved intrigue, heroics and ultimately what some of the people involved called a betrayal. And it is a tale, related by activists, friends of Mr. Chen’s and embassy officials, that so far does not have a clear ending, with Mr. Chen expressing new fears about his safety if he remains in China.
But regardless of the ultimate outcome, the tale of what happened to Mr. Chen and how he was handled by the Americans is likely to be remembered for years to come as one of the most dramatic episodes in the long, torturous history of relations between the United States and China.
“Chen’s triumphant escape from his barbaric confinement is inspiring to all of us,” said Li Fangping, a lawyer who represented Mr. Chen during the trial in 2006 that led to more than four years of imprisonment on what he said were legally dubious charges. “Whatever the eventual outcome, it can only have a positive influence on China’s human rights situation.”
The seeds of Mr. Chen’s remarkable flight were planted months ago, friends and supporters said, when he and his wife began plotting his escape from the farmhouse where they had been confined since his release from jail in September 2010.
Although there were no legal charges pending against the couple, local officials had decided to turn their home into a makeshift prison with high walls, well-paid guards and sheets of metal to cover their windows. The local government’s goal was twofold: to prevent Mr. Chen from engaging in his legal work against coercive family-planning policies and to keep the couple cut off from the outside world.
When the Chens broke the rules — by trying to sneak out messages or secretly detailing their mistreatment in a homemade video — they were viciously beaten.
As part of the plan, Mr. Chen feigned sickness for weeks, tricking his minders into thinking he was bedridden. Then, on a moonless night on April 22, he began his mad dash from Dongshigu village, heaving himself over the first of several walls while the guards slept. It was during the first few minutes of his scramble that Mr. Chen severely injured his foot. In all, he told friends he fell 200 times as he made his made his way to a predetermined pickup point.
Once there, he slid a battery into the cellphone he had in his pocket and called He Peirong, a former English teacher from the distant city of Nanjing. Ms. He was part of a loose network of freelance rights advocates who had been trying to draw attention to his plight for more than a year. She had tried in previous months to visit Mr. Chen and his wife several times. Each attempt was repelled by the guards at Dongshigu’s entry points. Sometimes they beat her, and on one occasion the men robbed her of her money and cellphone and then dumped her in a faraway field.
Civil disobedience, she had told friends, was having little impact.
With Mr. Chen in her car, a decision had to be made: try to surreptitiously leave the country through the help of Christian activists, or stay in an attempt to establish an independent life within China. “Chen made it clear that he had no interest in becoming an exile,” said Bob Fu, an exiled Chinese dissident whose organization, ChinaAid, has helped others make the overland escape. “He wanted to stay in China and try to make things better.”
This is a growing issue since 9/11, where the US military and others are perfectly happy to corrupt the NGO process by delivering so-called aid and development themselves, therefore trying to convince people under occupation that the military will “save” them. The vitally important separation between the military and aid has largely disappeared.
This story in the New York Times offers just one example of the CIA, not known for its intelligence when operating overseas, causing yet more harm:
In the shadows of the American operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the fate of a small-town Pakistani doctor recruited by the C.I.A. to help track the Qaeda leader still looms between the two countries, a sore spot neither can leave untouched.
Picked up by Pakistani intelligence agents days after the Bin Laden raid a year ago and now in secret detention, the doctor, Shakil Afridi, has embodied the tensions between Washington and Islamabad. To some American officials he is a hero, worthy of praise and protection; Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has personally appealed for his release. But inside Pakistan’s powerful military, still smarting from the raid on its soil, he is seen as a traitor who should face treason charges that could bring his execution. “We need to make an example of him,” one senior intelligence official said.
Beyond hard feelings and talk, however, his case has had a much wider effect: It has also roiled the humanitarian community in Pakistan, giving rise to a wave of restrictions that have compromised multimillion dollar aid operations serving millions of vulnerable Pakistanis.
…
The danger that American intelligence work can taint an entire profession has been the subject of debate and restrictions since the 1970s. By policy, the C.I.A. has not placed spies abroad under cover as Peace Corps volunteers or American Fulbright scholars. They cannot pose as journalists accredited to American news organizations except with a waiver from the president or the C.I.A. director.
Loch K. Johnson, a professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia who was on the staffs of Congressional intelligence reform panels in the 1970s and the 1990s, said every job category used by the agency abroad for spying produces complaints.
“If they use an oil rigger, businesses say it endangers all the other oil riggers,” said Mr. Johnson, who recalled discussing the matter with William E. Colby, the C.I.A.’s director from 1973 to 1976, who complained then about “a melting ice floe of adequate cover” as scandal led to new limits.
But Mr. Johnson said he did believe it was a mistake for the C.I.A. to use public health workers like Dr. Afridi in developing countries. “That’s a particularly sensitive group that does ethical and important work in very dangerous areas,” he said.
Working for the New York Times in Israel seems to guarantee a disturbing lack of transparency. FAIR reports:
After the news broke that New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner had a son who enlisted in the Israeli army (Extra!, 1/27/10), Times public editor Clark Hoyt noted (2/6/10) that it was problematic for Bronner to continue reporting on “one of the world’s most intense” conflicts while his son took up arms for one side. Hoyt spoke to a former Times Jerusalem bureau chief, David Shipler, who stressed the importance of disclosing this relationship to readers.
Bronner is now close to the end of his tenure in Jerusalem. But two years after that controversy, the New York Times has yet to learn the importance of disclosure. And the concealed relationship again concerns a Timesreporter who writes from Jerusalem: This time, it’s correspondent Isabel Kershner.
Kershner has a record of misleading reporting (Extra!, 7/10, 4/11, 1/12) that reflects the New York Times’ bias toward the Israeli government perspective.
But even more damning is this: Her husband, Hirsh Goodman, works for the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) as a senior research fellow and director of the Charles and Andrea Bronfman Program on Information Strategy, tasked with shaping a positive image of Israel in the media. An examination of articles that Kershner has written or contributed to since 2009 reveals that she overwhelmingly relies on the INSS for think tank analysis about events in the region.
The close family tie Kershner has to the leading Israeli think tank, a branch of Tel Aviv University, has never been disclosed to readers of the New York Times. The paper did not return requests for comment.
The INSS is well-connected to both the Israeli government and its military. Many of its associates come from government or military careers; its website boasts of the group’s “strong association with the political and military establishment.” In 2010, according to INSS financial documents, the Israeli government gave the institute about $72,000.
