A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

• When a media mogul has more power than government
• Taking on Murdoch bullying front and centre
• “Relationships with Palestinians make present the terrible things done in our name”
• The Greens must push Labor to question Israel
• Obama and Bush should dine together and share ideas about torture
• Fisk tackles honour killings and spares no details

When a media mogul has more power than government Posted: 10 Sep 2010 Oh my. Democracy is so threatened that some have become fearful of a former Australian media man who trades smears for a living: Senior parliamentarians declined to give evidence in court against a News of the World journalist for fear of upsetting News International, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats said today. Simon Hughes, whose phone was hacked by an investigator on behalf of the NoW, told the Commons that other MPs declined to join him in the witness box in 2006 out of fear. “I have absolutely no doubt that some people were not willing to give evidence because they were afraid,” Hughes said. “They were afraid of going into the public domain to take on people working either directly or indirectly for one of our land’s major newspapers.” It is understood that his remarks apply to at least one former cabinet minister. The evidence from Hughes in 2006 helped convict Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by the NoW, and its former royal editor Clive Goodman. The warning from Hughes was echoed by Tom Watson, a Labour member of the Commons culture select committee, who said that MPs were scared of senior News International figures such as its chief executive Rebekah Brooks. Speaking in a Commons debate, in which MPs agreed to refer the phone-hacking scandal to the powerful standards and privileges committee, Watson said: “The truth is that, in this House we are all, in our own way, scared of the Rebekah Brookses of this world. “It is almost laughable that we sit here in parliament, the central institution of our sacred democracy – among us are some of the most powerful people in the land – yet we are scared of the power that Rebekah Brooks wields without a jot of responsibility or accountability. “The barons of the media, with their red-topped assassins, are the biggest beasts in the modern jungle. They have no predators; they are untouchable. They laugh at the law; they sneer at parliament. They have the power to hurt us, and they do, with gusto and precision, with joy and criminality. Prime ministers quail before them, and that is how they like it. That, indeed, has become how they insist upon it, and we are powerless in the face of them. We are afraid. If we oppose this motion, it is to our shame.” And the big man didn’t escape criticism (something almost unimaginable in Australia, such is the cowardly behaviour of parliamentarians): Rupert Murdoch found himself under fire for the first time in the phone-hacking scandal today when his judgment was called into question during a parliamentary debate. As Conservative MPs raised concerns about News International, Murdoch was criticised for promoting Rebekah Brooks after she admitted illegal payments were made to police by the News of the World. Labour MPs used parliamentary privilege in the commons debate to criticise the chairman and CEO of News Corporation, which owns the newspaper publisher, and his senior executives, who are battling claims that the NoW endorsed the illegal hacking of mobile phones. Tom Watson, a Labour member of the Commons culture select committee, placed Murdoch in the line of fire by accusing him of appointing Brooks as chief executive of News International knowing that she had admitted that illegal payments had been made to police. The former minister cited evidence by Brooks to the culture committee in 2003 in which she admitted that the News of the World had paid police officers in the past for stories. This was condemned by the committee and by the Met as illegal. “When Murdoch appointed Brooks he did so in that knowledge,” Watson said of the ruling from the Commons committee. Les Hinton, then chair of News International, later told the committee that Brooks subsequently told him she had “not authorised payments to policemen”; he said her evidence was meant to suggest “there had been payments in the past”.

Taking on Murdoch bullying front and centre Posted: 09 Sep 2010 Australian Greens leader Bob Brown, as recounted by Australian Financial Review journalist Laura Tingle: [Murdoch’s Australian newspaper] sees itself as a determinant of democracy in Australia. It believes it has replaced the people and it’s time to bell the cat. It’s stepped out of the role of the fourth estate to think it’s the determinant of who has seats in the parliament, and it needs to be taken on.

“Relationships with Palestinians make present the terrible things done in our name” Posted: 09 Sep 2010 While most Israeli Jews are sleep-walking through their lives, mostly oblivious to Palestinians and the occupation, there are notable exceptions. The invaluable Israeli blog Promised Land gives the story. If only there were more Israelis like this: Poet Klil Zisapel was one of twelve Israeli women that took a group of Palestinian women and children on a fun outing to Tel Aviv, knowingly violating the Entry into Israel Act. In an interview to Promised Land Blog Klil explains her own reasons for taking part in this initiative, and shares some of the experiences of that special day An unusual ad appeared in the Haaretz daily a month or so ago: it held the story of twelve Israeli women about how they took a group of Palestinian women and children on a fun outing in Tel Aviv; by doing so they intentionally violated Israel’s entry laws and, like their Palestinian travel-mates, taking on the risk of long-term imprisonment. Since the nineties, the Palestinian population is denied permission to leave the West Bank without special authorization from Israel’s military – and such permits are only given to a select few. “We crossed the checkpoint with them [the Palestinian women] and knowingly violated the Entry into Israel Act. We are hereby declaring this fact publicly… we do not recognize the legitimacy of the Entry Into Israel Act, which permits every Israeli and every Jew to move freely throughout most of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and denies that right to the Palestinian, whose land this is, as well,” said the ad which they published in Haaretz. Following the publication, a right-wing organization filed a complaint with the police, demanding that the ad signatories be prosecuted. The penalty set forth by law for the crime of moving from the Palestinian Authority into Israel any person who does not have a legal pass to be there is up to two years of imprisonment. Poet Klil Zisapel was one of the Israeli women who took part in organizing the Israeli-Palestinian trip to Tel Aviv. She talks here about the motivation behind the public flouting of the law, the decisions about where to travel, and the shared experiences of that day. Q: Why did you decide to flout the Entry into Israel Act openly? Klil Zisapel: “I suppose that this idea comes into being in every one of the Israelis who travels to and from the Occupied Territories and who has any kind of personal relationship with Palestinians. A personal relationship brings into consciousness the absurdity of the situation and makes it impossible to forget the terrible strictures imposed on the population which is living on its own land, in areas that are under Israeli occupation. A real relationship with anyone, beyond the wall and on the other side of the checkpoints, suddenly focuses in the life of an Israeli Jew like me the enormous price that tens of thousands of innocent people on the other side are made to pay. “It is a daily price, a wicket and strangulatory one – it cannot be described only in words, or at least it cannot be grasped through the enumeration of the prohibitions and restriction in their own right. Relationships with Palestinians make present the terrible things done in our name, as Israelis, and the constant presence of these pangs from our conscience arouses the need to rise up and cross boundaries.

The Greens must push Labor to question Israel Posted: 09 Sep 2010 Don’t worry Zionists, neither major political party has any intention of questioning anything Israel ever does because Israel is a state that clearly needs only blind backing: The Labor Party has insisted its official agreement with The Greens is unlikely to have an impact on its support for Israel.

Obama and Bush should dine together and share ideas about torture Posted: 09 Sep 2010 The similarity between Barack Obama and George W. Bush in their prosecution of the “war on terror” is increasingly clear. Just in case it isn’t obvious how deep this illegality goes, here’s Michael Hayden, Mr. Bush’s last CIA director, talking to the Washington Times: You’ve got state secrets, targeted killings, indefinite detention, renditions, the opposition to extending the right of habeas corpus to prisoners at Bagram [in Afghanistan]. And although it is slightly different, Obama has been as aggressive as President Bush in defending prerogatives about who he has to inform in Congress for executive covert action. Washington’s war on whistle-blowers, or even individuals who dare reveal anything about the failed war in Afghanistan, are also under the pump: Defense Department officials are negotiating to buy and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of an Afghan war memoir they say contains intelligence secrets, according to two people familiar with the dispute. The publication of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony A. Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, has divided military security reviewers and highlighted the uncertainty about what information poses a genuine threat to security. Disputes between the government and former intelligence officials over whether their books reveal too much have become commonplace. But veterans of the publishing industry and intelligence agencies could not recall another case in which an agency sought to dispose of a book that had already been printed. Army reviewers suggested various changes and redactions and signed off on the edited book in January, saying they had “no objection on legal or operational security grounds,” and the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, planned for an Aug. 31 release. But when the Defense Intelligence Agency saw the manuscript in July and showed it to other spy agencies, reviewers identified more than 200 passages suspected of containing classified information, setting off a scramble by Pentagon officials to stop the book’s distribution. Release of the book “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security,” Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess Jr., the D.I.A. director, wrote in an Aug. 6 memorandum. He said reviewers at the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and United States Special Operations Command had all found classified information in the manuscript. The disputed material includes the names of American intelligence officers who served with Colonel Shaffer and his accounts of clandestine operations, including N.S.A. eavesdropping operations, according to two people briefed on the Pentagon’s objections. They asked not to be named because the negotiations are supposed to be confidential. By the time the D.I.A. objected, however, several dozen copies of the unexpurgated 299-page book had already been sent out to potential reviewers, and some copies found their way to online booksellers. The New York Times was able to buy a copy online late last week. The dispute arises as the Obama administration is cracking down on disclosures of classified information to the news media, pursuing three such prosecutions to date, the first since 1985. Separately, the military has charged an Army private with giving tens of thousands of classified documents to the organization WikiLeaks.

Fisk tackles honour killings and spares no details Posted: 09 Sep 2010 I finally read last night Robert Fisk’s devastating essay on honour killings around the world. It’s moving and shocking, crosses borders and religions and remains a largely ignored issue. His latest, on the situation in Egypt, continues the investigation. Journalism at its finest.