NOVANEWS
Nice crime wave across the Zionist state
3 December 2010
Israel. 0 Comments Tags: Judaism, United States, Wikileaks, Zionism
And the revelations continue:
US Ambassador to Israel James Cunningham expressed concern with the growing threat of organized crime in Israel in a cable from the US Embassy in Tel Aviv leaked this week on the WikiLeaks website entitled “Israel, a promised land fore organized crime?”
Cunningham questioned Israel’s ability to deal with the growing problem.
If this isn’t fascism in Israel, then what is?
3 December 2010
Israel. 0 Comments Tags: human rights, Judaism, Palestine, Zionism.
33% of Israelis support placing Israeli Palestinian citizens in concentration camps during wartime.
Australia is in Afghanistan to support this?
3 December 2010
Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Britain, Iran, United States, Wikileaks.
Oh what a glorious war:
Britain’s four-year military stewardship of the troubled Helmand province has been scorned by President Hamid Karzai, top Afghan officials and the US commander of Nato troops, according to secret US diplomatic cables.
The dispatches expose a devastating contempt for the British failure to impose security and connect with ordinary Afghans.
The leaked US embassy cables covering Afghanistan also reveal:
• Widespread suspicion of high-level corruption in the Afghan government, with one cable detailing how the vice-president was carrying $52m in his suitcase when he was stopped at Dubai airport.
• Iran’s growing influence in Afghanistan as Tehran finances senior politicians and, the cables allege, trains Taliban militants.
• Anger among America’s allies when they discovered that the US military was charging a 15% handling fee on hundreds of millions of dollars being raised internationally to build up the Afghan army.
The criticism of the British operation in Helmand centres on its failure to establish security in Sangin – the town which has become totemic as the place that has claimed more British lives than any other in Afghanistan.
Is Assange being an “anarchist” a bad thing?
2 December 2010
Tags: mainstream media, United States, Wikileaks.
Yet another mainstream media story focused on US “embarrassment” over the Wikileaks documents. What’s a corporate journalist to do when his/her main source (the government) is being pounding daily in the press?
The United States scrambled to contain the fallout from the slow-motion leak of cables from its embassies worldwide Wednesday as new documents showed American diplomats casting a jaundiced eye toward corruption’s grip on Russia.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally made “several dozen” calls to counterparts in other countries in an effort to mitigate the damage from WikiLeaks, a website that facilitates the anonymous leaking of secret information, a senior State Department official said.
In a CNN interview Wednesday night, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley called WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange an “anarchist.”
“He’s trying to undermine the collaboration, the cooperation, the system by which we engage with other governments, cooperate with other governments and solve regional challenges,” Crowley told CNN’s “John King USA.” But while Clinton is facing other world leaders, “trying to solve the world’s challenges,” Assange is in hiding, he said.
Wikileaks here to stay so take that
2 December 2010
Tags: censorship, internet, United States, Wikileaks.
Looks like our censoring friends are going to have troubles bringing down Wikileaks:
SHANE MCLEOD: Wikileaks says its founder Julian Assange is going to stay in hiding because he may be at risk of being assassinated.
A spokeswoman for the website says the Australian citizen will maintain a low profile amidst calls by some for his arrest and prosecution for releasing sensitive diplomatic cables.
The self-styled whistleblower is starting to suffer setbacks on another front.
It has been kicked off its servers in the United States run by web-host Amazon.Com.
Amazon hasn’t made any comment – but the decision has been applauded by the US Senator Joe Lieberman — who heads the Homeland Security Committee.
He says Amazon made the ‘right decision’ and has set a standard for other companies that WikiLeaks is using to distribute its material.
WikiLeaks says it’ll move its data to servers in Europe.
Earlier I spoke to Professor Scott Silliman, an expert on national security law at Duke University.
I asked him what options the US had to try to force WikiLeaks offline.
SCOTT SILLIMAN: The options as far as trying to take the site down are very, very limited. As best we know, the site is licensed in Iceland, that’s where the server is and there is very little that the United States can do legally to shut down the site.
It has certainly a right operate on the Internet so there is not a really good legal option for the United States with regard to WikiLeaks itself.
What’s a few cluster bombs between mates?
2 December 2010
Tags: Britain, human rights, United States, Wikileaks.
Another revelation to confirm our belief in the robust democratic beliefs of the US and Britain:
British and American officials colluded in a plan to hoodwink parliament over a proposed ban on cluster bombs, the Guardian can disclose.
According to leaked US embassy dispatches, David Miliband, who was Britain’s foreign secretary under Labour, approved the use of a loophole to manoeuvre around the ban and allow the US to keep the munitions on British territory.
Unlike Britain, the US had refused to sign up to an international convention that bans the weapons because of the widespread injury they cause to civilians.
The US military asserted that cluster bombs were “legitimate weapons that provide a vital military capability” and wanted to carry on using British bases regardless of the ban.
Whitehall officials proposed that a specially created loophole to grant the US a free hand should be concealed from parliament in case it “complicated or muddied” the MPs’ debate.
Gordon Brown, as prime minister, had swung his political weight in 2008 behind the treaty to ban the use and stockpiling of cluster bombs. Britain therefore signed it, contrary to earlier assurances made by British officials to their US counterparts.
The US had stockpiles of cluster munitions at bases on British soil and intended to keep them, regardless of the treaty.
When the bill to ratify the treaty was going through parliament this year, the then Labour foreign ministers Glenys Kinnock and Chris Bryant repeatedly proclaimed that US cluster munition arsenals would be removed from British territory by the declared deadline of 2013.
But a different picture emerges from a confidential account of a meeting between UK and US officials in May last year.
It shows that the two governments concocted the “concept” of allowing US forces to store their cluster weapons as “temporary exceptions” and on a “case-by-case” basis for specific military operations.
Foreign Office officials “confirmed that the concept was accepted at highest levels of the government, as that idea had been included in the draft letter from minister [David] Miliband to secretary [of state Hillary] Clinton”.
US cluster munitions are permanently stored on ships off the coast of the Diego Garcia airbase in the Indian Ocean, the cables reveal. The base is crucial for US military missions in the Middle East. Diego Garcia, still deemed British territory, has been occupied by the US military since its inhabitants were expelled in the 1960s and 1970s. The British concept of a “temporary exception” to oblige the US does not appear to be envisaged in the treaty. But the British arranged that “any movement of cluster munitions from ships at Diego Garcia to planes there, temporary transit, or use from British territory … would require the temporary exception”.
Nicholas Pickard, head of the Foreign Office’s security policy unit, is quoted as saying: “It would be better for the US government and HMG [the British government] not to reach final agreement on this temporary agreement understanding until after the [treaty] ratification process is completed in parliament, so that they can tell parliamentarians that they have requested the US government to remove its cluster munitions by 2013, without complicating/muddying the debate by having to indicate that this request is open to exceptions.”
Lady Kinnock subsequently promised parliament that there would be no “permanent stockpiles of cluster munitions on UK territory” after the treaty as the US had decided it no longer needed them on British soil.
Where’s the media guts over Wikileaks?
2 December 2010
Tags: Australia, Barack Obama, Bush administration, censorship, Judaism, mainstream media, Murdoch, neo-conservatives, New York Times, United States, Wikileaks, Zionism
My following article appears on ABC Unleashed today:
The rolling revelations of the WikiLeaks US embassy cables will continue for months but equally interesting is the reaction of the global media.
Many in the British media establishment, not given advance look at the documents, fumed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and repeated government spin that the release would endanger lives. This is from media groups who claim to believe in press freedom and there is no evidence that any WikiLeaks releases have harmed a soul, something even acknowledged by the US government.
It is expected that governments affected by the leaks would be upset but this week has seen a very clear fault-line expanding between those who endorse an authoritarian mindset towards leakers and others who understand the importance of airing America’s dirty tricks to the world.
Assange makes no secret of wanting to harm the image of the US and lessen American power. Indeed, in an interview this week
“US officials have for 50 years trotted out this line when they are afraid the public is going to see how they really behave”, Assange said.
Ironically, many of the public figures today allegedly worried about US lives being lost are the same people who wholly backed the war in Iraq, Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan.
It’s unsurprising that Fox News-funded Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin both condemn the release (with the latter comparing Assange to Al Qaeda). Bill O’Reilly said the “traitor” who leaked the information to WikiLeaks should be “executed”.
The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, a Jewish neo-conservative who backs endless war in the Middle East, wants Assange silenced and the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer argues for the prosecution of journalistic “collaborators” with WikiLeaks. A senior adviser to Canadian leader Stephen Harper states Assange should be murdered by drone attack.
Predictably, many in the mainstream media have mimicked the Obama administration’s concerns over the leaks.
It was painful on Monday listening to ABC radio’s The World Today grilling a New York Times journalist about his paper’s decision to publish some of the revelations. Virtually every question asked by host Eleanor Hall could have come from the State Department. The contents and implications of the cables were mostly ignored.
The ABC reporter in Washington also heavily featured official perspectives at the expense of real analysis of the release. It’s been left to astute bloggers to articulate the importance of establishment embarrassment at a time when US foreign policy under Obama has mostly continued the pattern set by the Bush administration.
One example is the litany of documents that prove Israel and the US looking to spy on Palestinian officials and gather information such as frequent flyer and credit card numbers. Many in the Israeli press are pleased that the documents prove that US-backed autocrats support the hardline Israeli stance on attacking Iran. Why a supposedly democratic nation like Israel would want to be in bed with one of the most brutal regimes in the world, Saudi Arabia, has gone largely unremarked.
But little of this has surfaced in the corporate press as they’ve been too busy repeating the talking points of outraged officials in Canberra, London and Washington. The reaction of Arab bloggers has also been mostly ignored.
The details of the WikiLeaks story are arguably the most interesting. For example, the New York Times supposedly had to rely on the Guardian for the documents because Assange had been displeased with a recent profile of him in the Times. Editor Bill Keller was keen to negotiate with the White House which documents would not offend American goals.
The Washington Post reports that the Wall Street Journal and CNN, offered the cables but refused, were told by WikiLeaks that they would be liable for $US100,000 if any embargo was broken.
But where is the bravery in the media assessing the fallout of the leaks? Slate’s Jack Shafer calls for the resignation of Hillary Clinton because of the hard evidence that she demanded her foreign-service officials to spy on friend and foe. Here was – in black and white – documentation that shows Washington engaged in a global network of espionage. When Tehran or Beijing acts similarly, it’s called terrorism.
And where are the legal and civil rights lobbies in Australia as growing threats against Assange and his website increase by the day? A handful are speaking out, including Sydney University’s Ben Saul, claiming that Australia’s priority should be asking America about its crimes revealed in the WikiLeaks dump. Few journalists are arguing similarly.
Rupert Murdoch columnist Andrew Bolt defends the spying as a necessary price to pay to maintain American hegemony in the world seemingly oblivious to the fact that Washington’s ability to influence the world has irreversibly declined since September 11, 2001, helped by a lessening of fear towards American power.
Indeed, there seems to be a major degree of jealousy within the mainstream media. Why haven’t more of them been leaked key documents? Why did sources rely on WikiLeaks instead of a major news organisation? As Assange told Forbes this week, in lieu of another major leak related to a major US bank in early 2011:
“We’re totally source-dependent. We get what we get. As our profile rises in a certain area, we get more in a particular area. People say, ‘Why don’t you release more leaks form the Taliban?’ So I say ‘Hey, help us, tell more Taliban dissidents about us’.”
Many journalists and editors would read that and wonder why Taliban dissidents hadn’t contacted them.
Perhaps somebody should examine what the motives of Assange actually are; he’s written a manifesto of sorts years ago.
But professional frustration isn’t the only key issue here. It’s the media’s overly-respectful posture towards authority. There is an overly-suspicious attitude towards people like Assange who refuse to play the traditional media game. He’s an outsider with exclusive information. He hasn’t spent years cultivating contacts inside the media tent. And he doesn’t spend most of his free time socialising with political staffers, editors and insiders.
John Kampfner, chief executive of Index on Censorship, reminds journalists of the truth:
“All governments have a legitimate right to protect national security. This should be a specific, and closely scrutinised, area of policy. Most of our secrecy rules are designed merely to protect politicians and officials from embarrassment.”
The Australian media’s performance this week has been mixed at best. There has been a fascination with the Gillard Government’s response and an attempt to mitigate the potential embarrassment for authorities.
The vast bulk of the local reporting – Paul McGeough in Fairfax was a notable exception though he mistakenly claimed the previous WikiLeaks drops on Iraq and Afghanistan were “relatively harmless” – has challenged the reliability of Assange and questioned his sanity and seriousness. A Fairfax video was entitled, ‘Assange reliability under question’ when in fact nobody credibly claimed the cables were falsified.
It’s as if the corporate press can’t quite bring itself to acknowledge the lies told by the US government, fearful of losing access in the process. Instead, many in the Australian press are giving valuable space to the US ambassador in Canberra who unsurprisingly condemns the leaks.
Moreover, one of the key take-away points from the revelations is the US contempt for democracy around the world. Public opinion can be essentially ignored for the perceived greater good; backing Zionist and Arab dictatorships in the name of oil security. We should care that US officials pressured nations not to investigate alleged human rights committed by the US post 9/11.
Interestingly, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) just announced that no part of WikiLeaks remains on the Australian blacklist of banned websites.
All WikiLeaks releases bring up questions of accountability of the organisation itself. This week leading human rights groups expressed concern that activists in repressive regimes, who may have had contact with US embassies, could be named in the cables and threatened.
Pentagon Paper’s leaker Daniel Ellsberg said this week that WikiLeaks had made “mistakes” in the past by inadvertently releasing names and personal details in previous dumps. He also stressed that the Pentagon was prone to exaggerating the threat posed to anyone listed in the documents. Quite simply, there is zero evidence of lives being threatened or lost over any WikiLeaks documents though a Canadian aid worker claims the cables will hurt dissidents in repressive regimes.
The job of real journalists is not to insulate officials or governments from embarrassment but to investigate legitimate stories relevant to the public interest. Note how many reporters are primarily worried about Washington’s loss of information, not the details contained within the files.
Damaging the “national interest” is a principle that should be questioned when policies of the state are deliberately designed to ensure secrecy over state-sponsored terrorism. Transparency and accountability are what WikiLeaks offers. Those who oppose it must be vigorously challenged. with America’s ABC he said that Washington simply wasn’t credible when they claimed the release of documents would hurt individuals.
Wikileaks unloads on the vestiges of our faux democracy
2 December 2010
Tags: human rights, Russia, United States, Wikileaks.
The UK Guardian is doing wonderful work this week, publishing a litany of information over the Wikileaks dump.
Every day brings huge new revelations, leaving so many in the mainstream media simply ignoring the best bits (hello ABC Radio’s AM today, utterly shunning anything about the issues).
One:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wanted to expose China‘s and Russia‘s secrets as much as those of the US, and believes Hillary Clinton should resign if she ordered diplomats to engage in espionage.
“[Clinton] should resign if it could be shown that she was responsible for ordering US diplomatic figures to engage in espionage of UN activities, in violation of the international covenants to which the US signed up,” he said in an interview with Time magazine, published yesterday following the leak of secret US diplomatic cables that have caused huge embarrassment for the country.
Assange gave the interview via Skype from an undisclosed location after a warrant was issued by Interpol following rape allegations in Sweden, which his lawyer said amounted to persecution and a smear campaign.
While Assange has been accused by former members of the WikiLeaks project of obsessively focusing on the US, he said countries with less transparency, such as China and Russia, had the most potential to be reformed by whistleblowers.
“We believe it is the most closed societies that have the most reform potential,” he said. Assange said that while parts of the Chinese government and security services “appear terrified of free speech” he believed it was “an optimistic sign because it means speech can still cause reform.”
He added: “Journalism and writing is capable of achieving change which is why Chinese authorities are so scared of it.”
Assange argued that countries like China could be easier to reform than countries like the US and the UK, which “have been so heavily fiscalised through contractual obligations that political change doesn’t seem to result in economic change, which in other words means that political change doesn’t result in change.”
While secrecy was important, Assange said, in keeping the identity of sources hidden, secrecy “shouldn’t be used to cover up abuses.”
He said that revealing abuses could lead to positive changes in countries and organisations. “They have one of two choices … to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavours, and proud to display them to the public” or “to lock down internally and to balkanise, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.”
Turning back to the US, Assange said he believed American society was “becoming more closed” and its “relative degree of openness … probably peaked in about 1978, and has been on the way down, unfortunately, since.”
Speaking about accusations that he had singled out the US as a force for harm in the world, Assange said the view lacked “the necessary subtlety”.
“I don’t think the US is, by world standards, an exception; rather it is a very interesting case both for its abuses and for some of its founding principles.”
Assange said the media interest in the WikiLeaks cables had been tremendous.
“The media scrutiny and the reaction are so tremendous that it actually eclipses our ability to understand it,” he said, with “a tremendous rearrangement of viewings about many different countries”.
Assange also gave a glimpse into why WikiLeaks had chosen to partner with traditional media organisations to release the files, rather than, as might have been expected, amateur bloggers. In 2006, “we thought we would have the analytical work done by bloggers and people who wrote Wikipedia articles and so on,” he said.
But “when people write political commentary on blogs or other social media, it is my experience that it is not, with some exceptions, their goal to expose the truth.
“Rather, it is their goal to position themselves amongst their peers on whatever the issue of the day is. The most effective, the most economical way to do that, is simply to take the story that’s going around, [which] has already created a marketable audience for itself, and say whether they’re in favour of that interpretation or not.”
Now, he said, the analytical work was “done by professional journalists we work with and by professional human rights activists. It is not done by the broader community.” Social networks acted as amplifiers, he added – and, as WikiLeaks gained more publicity, an important supplier of source material.
Two:
Russia tried to block the extradition of the suspected international arms trafficker Viktor Bout from Thailand to America by bribing key witnesses, the US claims.
Diplomats in Bangkok alleged in cables released by WikiLeaks that Bout’s “Russian supporters” had paid witnesses to give false testimony during his extradition hearing.
Dubbed the “merchant of death”, Bout was seized by the Thai authorities in March 2008 but only extradited to the US on 16 November this year. The US accuses him of conspiring to sell millions of dollars of weapons to Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) rebels to kill Americans. The Kremlin strongly opposed his extradition.
The Russian businessman, accused of running arms-trafficking networks around the world, maintains he is innocent in a case that turned into an undignified tug-of-war between Washington and Moscow.
In a cable written on 13 February 2009, US diplomats said that in the year after Bout’s arrest, extradition proceedings in Thailand were “going in the way we want” – albeit at a “painfully slow” pace.
More recently, however, the case had taken a worryingly wrong turn: “There have been disturbing indications that Bout’s … and Russian supporters have been using money and influence in an attempt to block extradition,” the diplomats reported.
Three:
The WikiLeaks website exposé of the inner workings of American diplomacy continued Wednesday, with revelations that Berlin pushed for the U.S. to impose a settlement freeze on Israel.
According to a telegram published by the whistleblowing website, two weeks before Israel’s inner cabinet decided on a settlement construction freeze in November 2009, a senior German government official urged the United States to threaten Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he did not agree to a moratorium, Washington would withdraw its support for blocking a vote on the Goldstone Report at the United Nations Security Council.
Four:
A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.
In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.
But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.
The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles – supposedly called the BM-25 – from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.
The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from Wikileaks but from The Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable.
The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish “at the request of the Obama administration”. That meant that its readers could not compare the highly- distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website.
As a result, a key Wikileaks document which should have resulted in stories calling into question the thrust of the Obama administration’s ballistic missile defense policy in Europe based on an alleged Iranian missile threat has instead produced a spate of stories buttressing anti-Iran hysteria.
Amazon crushes free speech and we’re watching
2 December 2010
Tags: censorship, internet, United States, Wikileaks.
This is a disgrace and shows the utterly spinelessness of some in corporate America. We will not forget:
The United States struck its first blow against WikiLeaks after Amazon.com pulled the plug on hosting the whistleblowing website in an apparent reaction to heavy political pressure.
The main website and a sub-site devoted to the diplomatic documents were unavailable from the US and Europe on Wednesday, as Amazon servers refused to acknowledge requests for data.
The plug was pulled as the influential senator and chairman of the homeland security committee, Joe Lieberman, called for a boycott of the site by US companies.
“[Amazon’s] decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material,” he said.
“I call on any other company or organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them.”
The department of homeland security confirmed Amazon’s move, referring journalists to Lieberman’s statement.
WikiLeaks tweeted in response: “WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free – fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe.”
The development came amid increasingly angry and polarised political opinion in America over WikiLeaks, with some conservatives calling for the organisation’s founder, Julian Assange, to be executed as a spy. Availability of his website has been patchy since Sunday, when it started to come under a series of internet-based attacks by unknown hackers. WikiLeaks dealt with the attacks in part by moving to servers run by Amazon Web Services, which is self-service.
Amazon.com would not comment on its relationship with WikiLeaks or whether it forced the site to leave. Messages seeking comment from WikiLeaks were not immediately returned.
Colombo starts to feel heat over killings of Tamils
2 December 2010
Tags: human rights, Sri Lanka, United States, Wikileaks
Wow. What a Guardian headline: “WikiLeaks cables: ‘Sri Lankan president responsible for massacre of Tamils’”:
American diplomats believed that the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, bore responsibility for a massacre last year that is the subject of a UN war crimes inquiry, according to a leaked US cable.
Lawyers for Tamil activists in Britain are seeking an arrest warrant against President Rajapaksa for alleged war crimes committed last year at the bloody end of the long-running civil war against Tamil separatists. Rajapaksa, who is in the UK, is due to meet the defence secretary, Liam Fox, tomorrow and had an address to the Oxford Union scheduled for Fridaycancelled due to security concerns.
Thousands of Tamils are thought to have died in a few days in May 2009, when a large concentration of Tamil Tiger guerrillas and civilians, crammed in a small coastal strip, came under heavy bombardment from Sri Lankan government forces.
In a cable sent on 15 January this year, the US ambassador in Colombo, Patricia Butenis, said one of the reasons there was such little progress towards a genuine Sri Lankan inquiry into the killings was that the president and the former army commander, Sarath Fonseka, were largely responsible. “There are no examples we know of a regime undertaking wholesale investigations of its own troops or senior officials for war crimes while that regime or government remained in power,” Butenis noted.
“In Sri Lanka this is further complicated by the fact that responsibility for many alleged crimes rests with the country’s senior civilian and military leadership, including President Rajapaksa and his brothers and opposition candidate General Fonseka.” Fonseka was convicted of corruption by a court martial this year.
In her cable to Washington, Butenis seeks to explain why there is so little momentum towards the formation of a “truth and reconciliation” commission, or any other form of accountability.
Most Tamil Tiger commanders, also under suspicion for war crimes such as the use of civilians as human shields, had been killed at the end of the war.
President Rajapaksa had meanwhile fought an election campaign promising to resist any international efforts to prosecute “war heroes” in the nation’s army.
Not only was the Colombo government not interested in investigating itself, but Tamils in Sri Lanka – unlike those abroad – were also nervous about the issue as it might make them targets for reprisals.
Butenis wrote: “While they wanted to keep the issue alive for possible future action, Tamil leaders with whom we spoke in Colombo, Jaffna and elsewhere said now was not time and that pushing hard on the issue would make them ‘vulnerable’.
“Accountability is clearly an issue of importance for the ultimate political and moral health of Sri Lankan society,” the ambassador concluded, but she did not think it would happen any time soon.
All those private lobbyists in DC wondering if their money will come this month
on 1 December 2010
Tags: United States, Wikileaks.
Feel the fear as the political elites scramble for cover. The poor dears, having to find ways to defend behaviour by their well-paying clients:
Much has been written about the State Department’s intensive effort to deal with the release of secret diplomatic cables by the website WikiLeaks, but there is also a separate, massive effort to deal with the crisis by the embassies of foreign governments, aided by the paid lobbyists and consultants who represent them.
Working as a Washington lobbyist for a foreign country is usually a pretty sweet gig. These hired guns keep governments informed on anything in town that could affect their country’s diplomatic or political interests — for a hefty monthly fee, of course. Lobbyists apply added elbow grease when relevant legislation needs cheerleading on Capitol Hill. Consultants work harder when foreign officials are in town or there’s a pressing bilateral issue. But overall, crises are relatively rare.
Not this week, though: It’s all hands on deck on K Street, as firms are fielding frantic and constant requests from diplomats in foreign capitals, trying to make sense of the released and soon-to-be-released WikiLeaks State Department cables.
“When was the last time that every embassy and every consultancy in town went into crisis mode simultaneously,” one consultant with clients in Europe and Asia told The Cable. This consultant said that his firm has been totally swamped since Sunday’s initial document dump with panicked emails, rushed conference calls, and requests for information.
“Basically you have governments that have absolutely no idea what’s in these documents. And everybody from senior officials to embassy personnel to Washington consultants are in a mad scramble to go through each new batch of documents as they come out to identify items that are potential vulnerabilities, paint their bosses in an unflattering light, or reveal some sensitive information,” the consultant said. “The entire chain of command is in panic mode with every new release.”
…
“The spectrum goes from panicked to intrigued, optimistic to ape shit.”
Sarkozy, like Gillard, Cameron et al, long to look into the eyes of US President
1 December 2010
Tags: Australia, Britain, France, Julia Gillard, United States, Wikileaks.
Just what the world needs; another Western leader desperate to be loved by America:
President Nicolas Sarkozy is an unusually solid French friend of America. He is also a “mercurial” man operating in “a zone of monarch-like impunity” surrounded by advisers often too fearful to give honest counsel, according to leaked cables from the United States Embassy in Paris.
Last December, the American ambassador shared an anecdote with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton: when the mayor of Paris had the Eiffel Tower lighted in Turkey’s national colors for a visit by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in April 2009, aides to Mr. Sarkozy, a staunch opponent of Turkey’s entry to the European Union, rerouted the presidential plane so he would not see it.
“Élysée contacts have reported to us the great lengths they will go to avoid disagreeing” with Mr. Sarkozy “or provoking his displeasure,” said the cable, signed by Ambassador Charles H. Rivkin. It was part of a trove of documents obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations.
Five years of correspondence between Paris and Washington chronicle a spectacular post-Iraq turnabout between one of the West’s most complicated diplomatic couples. Mr. Sarkozy, who took office in May 2007, was described even last year as “the most pro-American French president since World War II” and a “force multiplier” for American foreign policy interests.
President Nicolas Sarkozy is an unusually solid French friend of America. He is also a “mercurial” man operating in “a zone of monarch-like impunity” surrounded by advisers often too fearful to give honest counsel, according to leaked cables from the United States Embassy in Paris.
Last December, the American ambassador shared an anecdote with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton: when the mayor of Paris had the Eiffel Tower lighted in Turkey’s national colors for a visit by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in April 2009, aides to Mr. Sarkozy, a staunch opponent of Turkey’s entry to the European Union, rerouted the presidential plane so he would not see it.
“Élysée contacts have reported to us the great lengths they will go to avoid disagreeing” with Mr. Sarkozy “or provoking his displeasure,” said the cable, signed by Ambassador Charles H. Rivkin. It was part of a trove of documents obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations.
Five years of correspondence between Paris and Washington chronicle a spectacular post-Iraq turnabout between one of the West’s most complicated diplomatic couples. Mr. Sarkozy, who took office in May 2007, was described even last year as “the most pro-American French president since World War II” and a “force multiplier” for American foreign policy interests.
Zionist weapons tested on Arabs then sold to the world
1 December 2010
Tags: arms industry, Islam, Judaism, mainstream media, Palestine, terrorism, West Bank, Zionism.
A disturbing piece in the LA Times that shows how Israel is profiting from marketing “anti-terrorist” gear. And Palestinians are guinea pigs:
As the threat of terrorism spreads, Israel has moved aggressively to turn domestic security technology into one of its biggest exports.
More than 400 Israeli companies export about $1.5 billion annually in domestic security goods and technology, including biometric devices, tear gas canisters, anti-intrusion systems, airport screening machines, explosives detectors and remote-controlled vehicles.
…
“Israel’s domestic market is tiny,” said Alon Slonim, vice president for international marketing at Ispra, which manufactures tear gas and other riot gear. “The only way to grow is to export.”
Competing with mass-producing firms in nations such as the United States and China is challenging, Slonim said, so Israeli companies need to be creative to stand out.
For example, based on Israel’s experience in dealing with Palestinian protests and uprisings against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Ispra designed tear gas canisters made of softer plastic to reduce the risk of injury if the projectiles hit demonstrators. The canisters are also designed to blow up shortly after they disperse their gas, to discourage protesters from picking them up and tossing them back at police.
Then this quote is utterly offensive and isn’t even countered by an alternative point of view. Note the not so subtle connection between extremism and Islam.
Israel’s experience in combating Palestinian extremists has made Israeli companies somewhat expert in guerrilla tactics, rocket attacks and suicide bombers, said Doron Havazelet, director of the new Homeland Security Institute at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
“The proximity of Israeli culture to Islamic culture produces a better understanding of the issues,” he said. “Israel is a country that stood at this front line earlier than most others.”
How dare you look into our boys doing bad things, says US
1 December 2010
Tags: torture, United States, war on terror, Wikileaks
Here are just two examples of Washington pressuring nations not to pursue investigations into alleged human rights abuses committed by the US post 9/11. Real democracy in action.
One:
US officials tried to influence Spanish prosecutors and government officials to head off court investigations into Guantánamo Bay torture allegations, secret CIA “extraordinary rendition” flights and the killing of a Spanish journalist by US troops in Iraq, according to secret US diplomatic cables.
Among their biggest worries were investigations pursued by the magistrate Baltasar Garzón, who US officials described as having “an anti-American streak”.
“We are certainly under no illusions about the individual with whom we are dealing,” they said after he opened an investigation into torture at Guantánamo Bay prison camp. “Judge Garzon has been a storied and controversial figure in recent Spanish history, whose ambition and pursuit of the spotlight may be without rival.”
The revelations contained in the leaked documents will be embarrassing to Spanish prosecutors who shared information on cases they were involved in, and whose identities the Americans wanted protected.
They included the attorney general, Candido Conde-Pumpido, national court chief prosecutor, Javier Zaragoza, and fellow prosecutor Vicente González Mota, responsible for the CIA flights affair.
Zaragoza is revealed as a valuable source who accuses Garzón of opening some human rights cases in order to “drum up more speaking fees”. He proved to be an ally as the US tried to stem a flood of investigations at Spain‘s national court – one of the world’s most vigorous courts in exercising international jurisdiction over human rights crimes.
A major worry was a torture case brought by a Spanish non-governmental organisation against six senior Bush administration officials, including the former attorney general Alberto Gonzales.
Senator Mel Martinez, a former Republican party chairman, and the US embassy’s charge d’affaires visited the Spanish foreign ministry to warn the investigation would have consequences. “Martinez and the charge underscored that the prosecutions would … have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship,” the officials reported.
Officials in Madrid discussed with Zaragoza ways in which a US investigation into the same allegations might be opened in order to force the Spanish court to close its own case. “Zaragoza has also told us that if a proceeding regarding this matter were underway in the US, that would effectively bar proceedings in Spain. We intend to further explore this option with him informally,” they said.
Garzón, who opened a separate torture investigation, was deemed to put self-promotion first. “We suspect Garzón will wring all the publicity he can from the case unless and until he is forced to give it up,” said the officials.
“Zaragoza said he had challenged Garzón directly and personally on this latest case, asking if he was trying to drum up more speaking fees,” they reported.
They noted that Garzón was already in hot water over his investigation into human rights crimes committed under Spain’s former dictator General Francisco Franco. As a result Garzón now looks set to be removed from his job by supreme court judges next year.
“Zaragoza doubts Garzón will risk a second such complaint,” they said.
But US officials worried he would go down fighting. “It is hard for us to see why the publicity-loving Garzón would shut off his headline-generating machine unless forced to do so,” they reported. “We also fear Garzón – far from being deterred by threats of disciplinary action – may welcome the chance for martyrdom, knowing the case will attract worldwide attention.”
When another Spanish magistrate began investigating the alleged use of a Spanish airport for secret CIA flights carrying terror suspects, officials noted that US policy was to deal with these cases in closed-door conversations with governments.
They were especially alarmed when magistrates and prosecutors in both Spain and Germany began comparing notes. “This co-ordination among independent investigators will complicate our efforts to manage this case at a discreet government-to-government level,” they warned.
Two:
So far, the 251,287 secret State Department cables leaked by Wikileaks have been more embarrassing to the United States than particularly revealing. But one exchange between U.S. and German officials reveals a sad reality about the tangled web woven by the Bush administration when it decided to engage in torture — and highlights how President Obama has kept the U.S. ensnared by that legacy.
According to this leaked document, the U.S. State Department in 2007 warned Germany that issuance of arrest warrants for CIA officers involved in the kidnapping of an innocent German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, imprisoned for months in Afghanistan and allegedly tortured there would “have a negative impact” on the two countries’ relationship. Indeed, Deputy Chief of Mission John M. Koenig reminded German Deputy National Security Adviser Rolf Nikel that a similar move by Italy, which a year earlier had prosecuted CIA officers for their involvement in the kidnapping from Milan and rendition to Egypt of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, had “repercussions to U.S.-Italian bilateral relations.”According to the cable, which appears to summarize the two officials’ conversation, “The DCM pointed out that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German Government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S.”
Scott Horton at Harpers adds details to this last case:
The El-Masri cable suggests that the Embassy in Berlin was trying to protect thirteen CIA agents then subject to an arrest warrant. These agents’ true names are now known, and an arrest warrant continues to hang over them–now issued by Spanish prosecutors after American diplomatic pressure effectively chilled the German investigation. But the most noteworthy thing about this cable is the addressee—Condoleezza Rice. Might she and her legal advisor, John Bellinger, have had an interest in the El-Masri case that went beyond their purely professional interest in U.S.-German diplomatic relations?
The decision to “snatch” El-Masri and lock him up in the “salt pit” involved the extraordinary renditions program, and it seems as a matter of routine that this would have required not only the approval of the CIA’s top echelon but also the White House-based National Security Council.
It’s highly likely that Rice and Bellinger would have been involved in the decision to “snatch” and imprison El-Masri. If authority was given by Rice, then responsibility for the mistake—which might well include criminal law accountability—may also rest with her, and this fact would also not have escaped Koenig as he performed his diplomatic duties.
