A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

• People of Gaza remain under siege and largely ignored
• Exclusive photos from Sydney Wikileaks rally
• The Left and the Right in Australia are (mostly) united behind Wikileaks
• This is what online civil disobedience looks like
• Australia’s Channel 10 TV News on Sydney Wikileaks protest
• Scahill on why Washington and Obama are earning hatred around Islamic world
• Al Jazeera covers Sydney Wikileaks solidarity event
• US government doesn’t quite get the internet part 8622
• US wonders; how can we find way to get Iraq to kill our men and start war?
• So many Jews are AWOL on Palestinian rights

People of Gaza remain under siege and largely ignored   Posted: 11 Dec 2010 04:56 AM PST Life is anything but normal in the Gaza Strip: Air strikes by Israeli warplanes at dawn on Thursday caused serious damage to the Gaza Strip’s only power plant, plunging the territory — which already suffers from frequent outages — into darkness. Media reports said the air strikes hit two sites belonging to Hamas near the Gaza power plant in Moghraqa village, central Gaza. Engineer Darar Abu Sisi, director of operations for the Gaza plant, told The Electronic Intifada that at 2:47am an Israeli air attack on a Hamas site near the power plant scattered rocks and debris into the air. A rock crashed into the a current transformer and voltage transformer in a substation, causing the unit to shut down. The damage forced the plant to reduce production from its usual 65 megawatts daily to about 35 megawatts, Abu Sisi said, far short of current needs. Unless the damage is repaired it may lead to even longer outages than the power cuts people in Gaza already live with. “I believe that the Gaza power company has been able to coordinate with the Israeli side and we hope that this time they will be able to bring the needed spare part through Israeli land crossings, which are closed of course because of the Israeli siege,” Abu Sisi told The Electronic Intifada. Even before Thursday’s bombing, Gaza residents face prolonged power outages of six to eight hours per day, adding to the severe hardships caused by the prolonged Israeli siege that prevents people and goods from moving freely in and out of Gaza. Abu Sisi estimated that the outages would increase to eight to ten hours per day.

Exclusive photos from Sydney Wikileaks rally Posted: 11 Dec 2010 12:01 AM PST   More here.

The Left and the Right in Australia are (mostly) united behind Wikileaks Posted: 10 Dec 2010 11:32 PM PST Wikileaks is bringing together some strange coalitions in Australia, individuals with different political views who recognise Julian Assange as a man who has dared challenge the establishment in ways rarely, if ever, seen. Of course the powerful hate him. But truths aren’t so easily dismissed. Only those who care so deeply about maintaining society’s status-quo won’t be moved to support this paradigm shifting idea. Here’s Laurie Oakes in News Ltd: The high point of the week on television was Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd flapping his elbows like wings and saying: “Quack, quack, quack.” He was, of course, illustrating his claim that US embassy criticism of him in the WikiLeak cables is “water off a duck’s back”. What else could the former prime minister do? It was either laugh or cry. Miranda Devine in the Murdoch press: The official fury unleashed against Assange is largely about the embarrassment WikiLeaks has created for diplomats. But the United States is lucky it is Assange controlling the information, because he does abide by some sort of virtuous moral code. Today’s Australian: Julia Gillard is facing a revolt from MPs in her left-wing parliamentary faction, enraged at the treatment of Julian Assange. The MPs are demanding the government stop treating Mr Assange as a criminal and protect his rights as an Australian citizen and whistleblower. A large number of MPs have spoken to The Weekend Australian to express grave concerns at the language ministers and the Prime Minister are using in relation to Mr Assange. Laurie Ferguson, a friend and factional colleague of Ms Gillard who was dumped as parliamentary secretary for multicultural affairs and settlement services, told The Weekend Australian the government had overreacted to the WikiLeaks release of secret US documents. He said the information that had been released was crucial to democracy and exposing the truth. “It hasn’t been borne out that people have been endangered by this information,” Mr Ferguson said. “On the other side of the ledger, I think it is important that the world is informed on how intense the Saudis are about Iran’s nuclear program and, for instance, that some members of the federal Labor Party caucus are so heavily engaged in briefing another nation.” Mr Ferguson took a veiled swipe at Sports Minister Mark Arbib, saying he was glad it was now well-known that the right-wing Labor frontbencher was a secret source for the US government. His comments came as Attorney-General Robert McClelland was yesterday unable to explain how Mr Assange had broken Australian law. Mr McClelland indicated an Australian Federal Police investigation into whether WikiLeaks had committed a criminal act could go on for more than a year. The government has come under fire after Ms Gillard appeared to pass judgment on Mr Assange, declaring that “the foundation stone of this WikiLeaks issue is an illegal act”. One senior left-wing MP said, on the condition of anonymity, that the government had taken a “harsh” line on Mr Assange and had “angered” its left-wing base internally and in the community. Another said Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd had “got it right” on the WikiLeaks case while Ms Gillard had “messed it up”. Mr Rudd this week took aim at US security levels surrounding the handling of classified confidential information, rather than Mr Assange. He said those who originally leaked the documents were legally liable. The left-wing Labor MP who heads the economics caucus committee, Sharon Grierson, said she had sympathy for Mr Assange because he believed in freedom of information and the public interest test being applied. “It’s terribly important to keep asserting that Australians will always and do always look after their citizens,” Ms Grierson said. “They have rights and protection under the law, and we would all want to see those applied in that case.” Ms Grierson said the world had embraced the open, globalised flow of information, and had to deal with its consequences. “We now have to find ways to respond to that which are reasonable, not irrational in any way,” she said. West Australian Labor MP Melissa Parke said the Swedish rape charges against Mr Assange were unusual and he should not be treated as a criminal. “I am concerned about the statements in the United States that Julian Assange or his family should be subjected to physical violence, and I strongly condemn them,” Ms Parke said. “The charges from Sweden sound highly unusual on the basis of the information available, and I expect the British courts to take a long hard look at that before any decision on extradition is made. “As to the actions of WikiLeaks and whether they have broken any laws, the fact is we don’t know. I think it is therefore wrong for anyone to suggest Julian Assange is a criminal.” Hundreds of people in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne protested yesterday against the treatment of Mr Assange. Criminal lawyer Rob Stary told a Melbourne rally the Australian government was a “sycophant” of the US. He compared Mr Assange to fellow Australians David Hicks and Jack Thomas, saying their conviction on terrorism charges were helped by the government’s “propaganda machine”. In Brisbane, lawyer Peter Russo, who defended Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef against failed terrorism charges, told a rally it was important to understand that the real issue at stake in the WikiLeaks case was freedom. “It’s not only the freedom of the individual, it’s the freedom of all of us.” Activist group GetUp is buying advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Times newspapers defending WikiLeaks. More than 50,000 people have signed the petition circulated by the group, which ran a vocal campaign against the treatment of Hicks. Queensland MP Graham Perrett said he was a strong supporter of whistleblowing and transparency. “However I’m unsure that any indiscriminate mass release of information is going to ensure no lives are put at risk,” he said. It was the government’s job to ensure Australian citizens were given full legal protection, Mr Perrett said. “I would suggest we need to look after all of our citizens abroad, irrespective of what they are charged with,” he said. “We must preserve the rule of law, and a fair trial is an essential part of this.” Mr McClelland yesterday stressed it was not his responsibility to determine guilt or innocence. He said the Australian Federal Police had been asked to examine whether any Australian laws had been breached by Mr Assange. But asked to clarify the government’s position, Mr McClelland repeated his assertion that it would be illegal in Australia to obtain or distribute classified documents. “I said by way of analogy that if . . . serving military personnel or officer of the commonwealth had access to a similar database in Australia and took confidential national security classified information off that website and revealed it, I have no doubt it would raise issues of potential criminality.” Asked about the AFP inquiries into the case, Mr McClelland said it took a long time for the investigation into leaks by public servant Godwin Grech to reach a conclusion, and people needed to take a “reality check”. And Paul Kelly, the Serious Murdoch hack, writes in the Australian that closeness between Australia and America (who is fellating whom here?) is jolly healthy for all concerned: Nobody should be surprised that the US embassy was speaking regularly to Labor figures such as NSW powerbroker Senator Mark Arbib, former minister Bob McMullan and MP Michael Danby. It is a long tradition. The intimacy of political exchanges between the nations helps make the relationship special and has been facilitated by annual meetings of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. In past decades the Americans had close ties with Bob Hawke, Kim Beazley and former senator Stephen Loosley. Rudd himself was a valued intimate of high-placed US officials in Washington when Labor was in opposition. This week Loosley told The Australian he had briefed the US nearly 20 years ago to expect Paul Keating to replace Hawke as PM. Insights into key events in domestic politics on both sides are integral to such exchanges. You can lay money, however, these cables are mild compared with cables from the US embassy when Mark Latham was ALP leader. This provoked the greatest period of US alarm about Australia for decades. Concern about the damage Latham might perpetrate resonated at high levels in Washington, and Rudd and Beazley were involved in talks with US officials on how Latham could best be managed. The practice of close ties between Labor’s right wing and the US tended to be overlooked during the Howard era given the media’s obsession about the links between John Howard and George W. Bush. That Arbib reassured the Americans about Julia Gillard is hardly a surprise. It is interesting, however, that he told them he backed the Iraq military commitment. The tradition of political intimacy between the ALP right wing and the US has passed to a new generation; witness Chris Bowen, Stephen Conroy, Bill Shorten and Arbib, each of them increasingly wired into US networks. These exchanges, of course, are not just one way. Australia has had a succession of Washington ambassadors with excellent inside contacts; witness John McCarthy, Andrew Peacock, Michael Thawley, Dennis Richardson and now Beazley. One of the consequences is that Howard expected Bush to become president in 2001 and had an agenda ready to greet him. In the context, talk about Arbib being an “agent of influence” or a US spy is naive and ignorant of how Australia-US relations are conducted.

This is what online civil disobedience looks like Posted: 10 Dec 2010 11:03 PM PST Yesterday’s Guardian editorial tackles the first round of the new info war: In a cyber attack known as Operation Payback, a group of online activists called Anonymous targeted the websites of companies that had treated WikiLeaks like a bad smell. Visa, MasterCard, Paypal and Amazon have all had their websites, and in some cases their services, affected. Welcome to the world of the chaotic good. It is chaotic. But is it good? These companies all considered that their association with WikiLeaks damaged their brand image, a reflection prompted in some cases by a helpful call from the US state department. In essence they are trying to have it both ways: pretending in their marketing that they are free spirits and enablers of the cyber world, but only living up to that image as long as they don’t upset anyone really important. At Amazon there is real confusion between the two roles: it refused to host WikiLeaks but continued to sell an eBook of the leaked cables online. The hacktivists of Anonymous may be accused of many things – such as immaturity or being run by a herd instinct. But theirs is the cyber equivalent of non-violent action or civil disobedience. It disrupts rather than damages. In challenging the credit card companies and the web hosts in this way, they are reminding these businesses that their brand reputation relies not only on how the state department sees them, but also on how they maintain their independence in the eyes of their users. Not all the targets of the internet activists are the right ones. The website of the Swedish prosecution authority, which is currently attempting to extradite Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, on rape charges, and the website of Claes Borgström, the Stockholm lawyer representing the two women who made the allegations, were also brought down. As our interview with Mr Borgström makes clear, these women are going through hell: first for being the alleged victims of sexual assault, and second for being accused of involvement in some form of CIA honeytrap. The women’s right to anonymity has been abandoned online as bloggers rake through their CVs. In Sweden, as in other countries, the burden of proof lies with the prosecution, and the test, beyond reasonable doubt, is set high. Far better would be to let the legal systems in Sweden and Britain take their course. In times when big business and governments attempt to monitor and control everything, there is a need as never before for an internet that remains a free and universal form of communication. WikiLeaks’ chief crime has been to speak truth to power. What is at stake is nothing less than the freedom of the internet. All the rest is a sideshow distracting attention from the real battle that is being fought. We should all keep focus on the true target.

Australia’s Channel 10 TV News on Sydney Wikileaks protest Posted: 10 Dec 2010 10:57 PM PST

Scahill on why Washington and Obama are earning hatred around Islamic world Posted: 10 Dec 2010 10:54 PM PST Leading US reporter Jeremy Scahill, testifying before the US House Judiciary Committee, discusses America’s secret wars in the Muslim world (something highlighted by recent Wikileaks revelations): My name is Jeremy Scahill. I am the National Security correspondent for The Nation magazine. I recently returned from a two-week unembedded reporting trip to Afghanistan. I would like to thank the Chairman and the Committee for inviting me to participate in this important hearing. As we sit here today in Washington, across the globe the United States is engaged in multiple wars. Some, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, are well known to the US public and to the Congress. They are covered in the media and are subject to Congressional review. Despite the perception that we know what is happening in Afghanistan, what is rarely discussed in any depth in Congress or the media is the vast number of innocent Afghan civilians that are being killed on a regular basis in US night raids and the heavy bombing that has been reinstated by General David Petraeus. I saw the impact of these civilian deaths first-hand and I can say that in some cases our own actions are helping to increase the strength and expand the size of the Taliban and the broader insurgency in Afghanistan. As the war rages on in Afghanistan and–despite spin to the contrary–in Iraq as well, US Special Operations Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency are engaged in parallel, covert, shadow wars that are waged in near total darkness and largely away from effective or meaningful Congressional oversight or journalistic scrutiny. The actions and consequences of these wars is seldom discussed in public or investigated by the Congress. The current US strategy can be summed up as follows: We are trying to kill our way to peace. And the killing fields are growing in number.

Al Jazeera covers Sydney Wikileaks solidarity event Posted: 10 Dec 2010 10:28 PM PST Al Jazeera English covered the Sydney rally for Wikileaks yesterday: Pro-WikiLeaks demonstrations have been held across Australia against the arrest of Julian Assange, the whistleblowing website’s founder. In Sydney, around 500 demonstrators [editor; more like 1500 people] gathered on Friday, to push for the release of Assange, who is in a British jail fighting extradition to Sweden on sex crime allegations. A group of WikiLeaks supporters also staged a rally in Brisbane, calling on the Australian government to respect freedom of expression. WikiLeaks, which has provoked fury in Washington with its publications, vowed it would continue making public details of the 250,000 secret diplomatic US cables it had obtained. Assange, an Australian citizen, has been in a UK jail waiting for news on whether or not he will be extradited to Sweden in relation to a number of allegations of sexual crimes made against him in that country. Those who attended the rally in Sydney also condemned the Australian government for its stand on the issue. “To say to the Australian government, the [Julia] Gillard Government … behaviour in the last two weeks has been utterly outrageous, outrageous,” Antony Loewenstein, one of the organisers said while addressing the crowd. The US government and others across the world have argued the publication of cables is irresponsible and could put their national security at risk. The WikiLeaks website was shut down after apparent political pressure on service providers, but WikiLeaks said there were now 750 global mirror sites meaning the data so far released remained publicly available. Embarrassment WikiLeaks has continued to embarrass the Australian government, with the latest batch of leaked cables revealing that Kevin Rudd, the foreign minister. derided the contributions of France and Germany in Afghanistan. The cables, published in the Australian newspaper Fairfax, reported how Rudd likened the European fight against the Taliban to “organising folk-dancing festivals”. In another of the cables sent to Washington in November 2009 Rudd, as prime minister, confided that the outlook in Afghanistan “scares the hell out of me”. Protesters in Sydney said they were angry that Assange was arrested after voicing the truth. Australia has previously faced some criticism in the media for not standing by Assange. Robert McClelland, the attorney-general, and Gillard, the prime minister, have voiced strong criticism of Assange and WikiLeaks.

US government doesn’t quite get the internet part 8622 Posted: 10 Dec 2010 10:24 PM PST The CIA, keeping the US safe: Looks like the CIA created a “honeypot” wikileaks mirror at wikileaks.psytek.net, presumably to see who is downloading the leaks—but they screwed up the anonymization. A quick Google reveals who’s behind psytek.net. Wonder what other mirrors they set up, but with better cloaking?

US wonders; how can we find way to get Iraq to kill our men and start war? Posted: 10 Dec 2010 10:09 PM PST Just in case you need any more confirmation of the kinds of minds running the US: Jon [Stewart] welcomes retired general Hugh Shelton as his guest.  Shelton is the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he has written a new memoir — in which he makes startling allegations about U.S. military conduct. General Shelton alleges that a cabinet member in the Clinton administration was willing to kill a U.S. pilot to provoke war with Saddam Hussein and Iraq. The general states that in 1997, airmen were flying over Iraq each day, and were facing ground artillery fire from Iraqi forces. A Clinton aide then came up with this “clever” plan: “Fly one of our [aircraft] low enough so that Saddam could actually shoot it down.” Once the plane and the pilot were shot down, the U.S. would have an excuse to attack Iraq.

So many Jews are AWOL on Palestinian rights Posted: 10 Dec 2010 10:02 PM PST To his credit, Roger Cohen highlights in the New York Times the ongoing denial of mainstream Zionist groups in the US: Ira Stup was raised in Philadelphia attending Jewish day school and camps. He found his home in the Jewish community and was “intoxicated with Jewish democracy” as framed in the ideals of Israel’s foundation. Now he has returned deeply troubled from a one-year fellowship based in Tel Aviv. The worst single incident occurred on Ben Yehuda Street in central Jerusalem. Stup, 24, a Columbia graduate, was returning from a rally with a couple of friends carrying a banner that said, “Zionists are not settlers.” A group of religious Jews wearing yarmulkes approached, spat on them and started punching. “About 20 people saw the whole thing and just watched. They were screaming, ‘You are not real Jews.’ Most of them were American. It was one of the most disappointing moments of my life — you can disagree as much as you want with a banner but to allow violence and not react is outrageous. For me it was a turning point. Nobody previously had said I was not a real Jew.” The view that American Jews supportive of Israel but critical of its policies are not “real Jews” is, however, widespread. Israel-right-or-wrong continues to be the core approach of major U.S. Jewish organizations, from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. To oppose the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank (“Zionists are not settlers”), or question growing anti-Arab bigotry as personified by Israel’s rightist foreign minister and illustrated by the “loyalty oath” debate, or ask whether the “de-legitimization” of Israel might not have something to do with its own actions is to incur these organizations’ steady ire. This is what people with a conscious should be doing, including Jews: A group of 26 senior former European leaders who held power during the past decade are calling for strong measures against Israel in response to its settlement policy and refusal to abide by international law. In an unusual letter sent Thursday to the leadership of the European Union and the governments of the EU’s 27 member states, the signatories, including former heads of state, ministers and heads of European organizations, criticize Israel’s policies.