Antony Loewenstein's Blog, page 224
July 15, 2012
Talking #LeftTurn on The Small Picture Podcasts
I was interviewed last week by Stuart Beaton for The Small Picture Podcasts. We talked #LeftTurn, the mainstream media and alternative political realities. He’s based in China:
#LeftTurn on Sydney’s 2SER Radio
I was interviewed last week by Jessica Minshall on Sydney’s 2SER Radio’s The Third Degree on my recent book #LeftTurn and Australian politics and media in general:
Beyond the rhetorical flourish, Obama is typical US President
In a long and pretty unremarkable look at Barack Obama’s attitude towards the Israel/Palestine conflict in the Washington Post yesterday, this paragraph reveals all you need to know. The Zionist lobby has far too influence in US politics and Obama in practice is little different to every President before him when it comes to accepting Israeli arguments:
Last month, Obama gathered another group of Jewish leaders at the White House, this time Orthodox rabbis and lay leaders.
Diament, the Obama law school acquaintance, introduced the president. He called him a man who, like many of the Jewish leaders around the table, advocated for change based on principle.
Diament had not attended the first meeting between Obama and Jewish leaders almost three years earlier, when the president outlined the need to establish credibility with the Arab states.
But to Diament, who had been briefed on that gathering, Obama’s message on this June day was far different.
“My administration is not being evenhanded,” Obama said, according to notes taken by some of the participants. “We are being decidedly more attentive to Israel’s security needs,” a statement that attendees believed was a reference to how the president viewed the eventual terms of a peace deal.
Diament said he thought, “Three years ago ‘evenhandedness’ was the gold standard in Middle East peace-making. Now it is something that is being avoided.”
Where, then, does a president who promised a new approach to the old Middle East and ultimately failed to deliver begin if he wins a second term?
“The president’s view now is that this is about the Israelis and the Palestinians,” said Rhodes, his deputy national security adviser. “These really are their choices to make.”
During the meeting last month, Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, asked Obama for his assessment of the past three years.
Those in the room had their opinions — on the “kishkes question,” on the need for a close relationship with Israel, and on Palestinian will. Now it was Obama’s turn to explain his view of the work he had done to secure an elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace.
“Mr. President, what lessons have you learned?” Goldin asked.
“That it’s really hard,” Obama said.
July 14, 2012
Baseball in the time of (Haitian) cholera
A powerful film about a nation that has been abused by nature, multinationals and the UN:
What’s some billions lost in Iraq between friends?
No heads will roll and nothing will be remembered. History is forgotten. Money was wasted and for what? Today’s Iraq is burning:
After years of following the paper trail of $51 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars provided to rebuild a broken Iraq, the U.S. government can say with certainty that too much was wasted. But it can’t say how much.
In what it called its final audit report, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds on Friday spelled out a range of accounting weaknesses that put “billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation” in the largest reconstruction project of its kind in U.S. history.
“The precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known,” the report said.
The auditors found huge problems accounting for the huge sums, but one small example of failure stood out: A contractor got away with charging $80 for a pipe fitting that its competitor was selling for $1.41. Why? The company’s billing documents were reviewed sloppily by U.S. contracting officers or were not reviewed at all.
With dry understatement, the inspector general said that while he couldn’t pinpoint the amount wasted, it “could be substantial.”
Asked why the exact amount squandered can never be determined, the inspector general’s office referred The Associated Press to a report it did in February 2009 titled “Hard Lessons,” in which it said the auditors — much like the reconstruction managers themselves — faced personnel shortages and other hazards.
“Given the vicissitudes of the reconstruction effort — which was dogged from the start by persistent violence, shifting goals, constantly changing contracting practices and undermined by a lack of unity of effort — a complete accounting of all reconstruction expenditures is impossible to achieve,” the report concluded.
July 13, 2012
Why Zionist PR is failing (and will continue to do so)
Juan Cole has some useful tips that will be ignored by the Zionist establishment. For them, belligerence and accusing any critics of anti-Semitism is a way of life. All the while, Israel is committing a very public form of suicide:
1) Giving the finger to any ‘peace process’
2) Hypocrisy
3) Disregard for the rule of law
4) Punitive Policies toward non-combatants
5) Violations of international law
Cole concludes:
Israeli policies are no more off limits to criticism than are Argentinian or Indonesian ones, despite what the country’s remarkably thin-skinned and intolerant partisans often allege. And, when the chorus of criticism is coming from Anglicans, Presbyterians, the UK Foreign Office, the Austrian Senate, and UNESCCO, that is a pretty wide set of world institutions not easily pigeon-holed as mere bigots. Maybe it is time for the Israeli government to reconsider the self-destructive course it is on, which likely will lead to the end of the state some decades hence, as Israeli President Shimon Peres is frantically warning.
Vulture capitalists fails and yet its masters will thrive
One (via the Guardian):
The depth of the crisis over G4S‘s Olympic security preparations became increasingly clear on Thursday as recruits revealed details of a “totally chaotic” selection process and police joined the military in bracing themselves to fill the void left by the private security contractor.
Guards told how, with 14 days to go until the Olympics opening ceremony, they had received no schedules, uniforms or training on x-ray machines. Others said they had been allocated to venues hundreds of miles from where they lived, been sent rotas intended for other employees, and offered shifts after they had failed G4S’s own vetting.
The West Midlands Police Federation reported that its officers were being prepared to guard the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, which will host the football tournament, amid concerns G4S would not be able to cover the security requirements.
“We have to find officers until the army arrives and we don’t know where we are going to find them from,” said Chris Jones, secretary of the federation.
G4S has got a £284m contract to provide 13,700 guards, but only has 4,000 in place. It says a further 9,000 are in the pipeline.
G4S sent an urgent request on Thursday to retired police asking them to help. A memo to the National Association of Retired Police Officers said: “G4S Policing Solutions are currently and urgently recruiting for extra support for the Olympics. These are immediate starts with this Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday available. We require ex-police officers ideally with some level of security clearance and with a Security Industry Association [accreditation], however neither is compulsory.”
Robert Brown, a former police sergeant, told the Guardian that he pulled out of the recruitment process for the Games after seeing it close at hand.
He said: “They were trying to process hundreds of people and we had to fill out endless forms. It was totally chaotic and it was obvious to me that this was being done too quickly and too late.”
Another G4S trainee, an ex-policeman, described the process as “an utter farce”.
He added: “There were people who couldn’t spell their own name. The staff were having to help them. Most people hadn’t filled in their application forms correctly. Some didn’t know what references were and others said they didn’t have anyone who could act as a referee. The G4S people were having to prompt them, saying things like “what about your uncle?”
Two (via Common Dreams):
The United Nations is increasingly hiring private military contractors for protecting its staff and operations, threat assessments, and a wide array of security services.
According to a new report by the independent policy watchdog Global Policy Forum, the increased used of mercenary-style groups by the world body is both troubling and dangerous. Citing various reports from governments, NGOs and media outlets, the GPF says such firms have a history of committing serious human rights abuses, killing or injuring innocent civilians, engaging in financial malfeasance and other breaches of national and international laws.
Between 2009 and 2010 alone, the US increased its use of private security services by 73 percent (from 44 million to 76 million dollars), according to the report.
“When you look at 2006 to 2011, use of PMSCs in field missions have increased by 250 percent,” Lou Pingeot, program coordinator at GPF and lead author of the report, told Inter Press Service in an interview.
“In the absence of guidelines and clear responsibility for security outsourcing,” says the report, “the UN has hired companies well-known for their misconduct, violence and financial irregularities – and hired them repeatedly.”
Three (via Huffington Post):
For many years now, private military and security contractor (PMSC) advocates have argued that utilization of PMSC in United Nations peace operations offers an alternative to doing nothing or trying to organize a frequently dysfunctional U.N.-sponsored, often ill-equipped and organized intervention.
Indeed, about ten years ago, Doug Brooks, head of the International Stability Operations Association (ISOA), a PMSC advocacy group, wrote in a paper that:
“PMCs offer the only military forces both willing and capable to provide rapid and effective military services in most Third World conflicts. PMC operations in the past have saved tens of thousands of lives, but their potential is even greater. Working as “force multipliers” PMCs can provide the competent military backbone to ensure the success of UN or regional multinational peacekeeping or peace enforcement operations.” As sweeping generalizations go that, to use my childhood Yiddish, takes a lot of chutzpah.
Don’t get me wrong. While I’m the first to agree that U.N. operations often leave a lot to be desired, a U.N. blue helmet peace operation can only be as successful as members of the Security Council want it to be. Given the often radically differing agendas and interests of Council members that doesn’t happen very often.
And to be objective about it, the United Nation already employs large number of private contractors for all sorts of humanitarian purposes and has greatly increased its use of these companies in recent years. But does the record to date with regard to PMSC use by the U.N. encourage even greater use of and dependence on PMSC?
July 12, 2012
Wikileaks wins important legal fight against Visa cowardice
Here’s a just released Wikileaks statement:
In a case against Valitor, formerly VISA Iceland, Reykjavík District Court just ruled the company had violated contract laws by blocking credit card donations to Wikileaks. After WikiLeaks’ publications revealing U.S. war crimes and statecraft in 2010, U.S. financial institutions, including VISA, MasterCard, Bank of America, erected a banking blockade against WikiLeaks wholly outside of any judicial or administrative process. The blockade stripped away over 95% of donations from supporters of WikiLeaks, costing the organization in excess of USD 20M.
The court ruled that the donation gateway should be reopened within 14 days otherwise Valitor will be penalized with a fine of 800 000 ISK daily. WikiLeaks is persuing several actions against the blockade and a European Commission preliminary investigation into the blockade was started last July. A Commission decision on whether to pursue the financial services companies involved in the blockade is expected before the end of August.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said “This is a significant victory against Washington’s attempt to silence WikiLeaks. We will not be silenced. Economic censorship is censorship. It is wrong. When it’s done outside of the rule of law its doubly wrong. One by one those involved in the attempted censorship of WikiLeaks will find themselves on the wrong side of history.”
For more information on the WikiLeaks banking blockade see http://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade
