A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

• News flash to hookers; Washington won’t give you anything you haven’t paid dearly for
• Alliances in the name of fighting a bigger enemy
• US elites don’t want to hear about failings of US elites
• Rove and Sweden make sweet passionate love
• Wikileaks; don’t shoot the messenger
• Leaking is a noble profession
• Zionist separation is in the state’s bloodstream
• China’s black sites used and abused by private firms
• Shut down the web or face a Wikileaks inspired future
• Finding ways to dismiss leakers in the US

News flash to hookers; Washington won’t give you anything you haven’t paid dearly for Posted: 19 Dec 2010 03:41 PM PST Kenneth Davidson in the Age gets it right: As former Liberal prime minister John Gorton said in the 1960s, too many Australian politicians and bureaucrats are infected by the puppy dog syndrome: roll over and get your tummy tickled. Not much has changed. We are seen as a loyal ally. In Washington this gives Australian politicians and diplomats plenty of access but no influence when our interests aren’t in line with America’s.

Alliances in the name of fighting a bigger enemy Posted: 19 Dec 2010 03:29 PM PST Julian Assange is currently living in Britain under the roof of one Vaughan Smith, a man who believes in a free press. More on him here: Veteran BBC correspondent Loyn, who has known Smith for almost 20 years and worked with him in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, said Assange and Smith met “relatively recently” when Assange used the club as his London base. The BBC correspondent says Smith is “intrigued by Julian and his work” and outraged by the way Assange has been treated. “Vaughan has an old-fashioned sense of libertarian values. He supports Julian’s commitment and courage, even though he doesn’t necessarily support all the leaks, and wanted to help,” said Loyn. “Vaughan is an idealistic man who established the Frontline Club because he strongly believed in it—despite the huge financial risk.” During his days as a cameraman, the risks were even greater. Smith was shot twice, leading him to joke he had “been shot more times than he had been credited by the BBC.” He filmed the only uncontrolled footage of the Gulf War in 1991 after he bluffed his way into an active service unit disguised as a British Army officer. On their dangerous trips together, the BBC veteran remembers Smith as “tough, very resilient and single-minded” as they trekked though Afghanistan living on boiled lentils cooked by Loyn. But there was more to Smith than just his physical toughness. He was one of the first cameramen to edit his work on a laptop in the field before transmitting it back home. Loyn explains: “He had cutting-edge skills and always like to push the boundaries.” It is that same ferocious determination in Assange to push the boundaries which Smith so admires and why he finds the “professorial” WikiLeaks’ founder “fascinating” company, according to Smith’s friends.

US elites don’t want to hear about failings of US elites Posted: 19 Dec 2010 03:17 PM PST This is what passes for serious commentary in the US mainstream media. Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, after smearing Julian Assange and Wikileaks – “I confess I’d like to throw a cream pie in his face myself” – doesn’t like to be told that his beloved US may not be such a fan of free speech after all: It’s little wonder that Ellsberg himself empathizes with WikiLeaks. At a news conference at the National Press Club on Thursday – shortly before going to chain himself to the White House fence in a protest – the 79-year-old Ellsberg said Assange is a hero. Convicting Assange, he said, “would mean that the crown had returned to America . . . and that we’re really under a monarchical system of total control of information.” Ellsberg was accompanied by an activist from Assange’s Australia, who lectured Americans on free speech. “We thought that America stood firm for the Constitution, for its First Amendment rights,” said the activist, Brett Solomon. “If something has changed, then let us know.” That bloke was as insufferable as Assange.

Rove and Sweden make sweet passionate love Posted: 19 Dec 2010 03:09 PM PST Sweden is not an independent nation: Karl Rove’s help for Sweden as it assists the Obama administration’s prosecution against WikiLeaks could be the latest example of the adage, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” Rove has advised Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt for the past two years after resigning as Bush White House political advisor in mid-2007. Rove’s resignation followed the scandalous Bush mid-term political purge of nine of the nation’s 93 powerful U.S. attorneys. These days, Sweden and the United States are apparently undertaking a political prosecution as audacious and important as those by the notorious “loyal Bushies” earlier this decade against U.S. Democrats. The U.S. prosecution of WikiLeaks, if successful, could criminalize many kinds of investigative news reporting about government affairs, not just the WikiLeaks disclosures that are embarrassing Sweden as well as the Bush and Obama administrations. Authorities in both countries are setting the stage with pre-indictment sex and spy smears against WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, plus an Interpol manhunt.

Wikileaks; don’t shoot the messenger Posted: 19 Dec 2010 05:37 AM PST The kind of Australian stamp we’d like to see.

Leaking is a noble profession Posted: 19 Dec 2010 04:08 AM PST Will Julian Assange regret being one of the key whistle-blower enablers? If history is any guide – thinking of Daniel Ellsberg and Philip Agee – don’t count on it.

Zionist separation is in the state’s bloodstream Posted: 19 Dec 2010 04:04 AM PST The actions of an apartheid state with the full backing of the so-called civilised world: Israeli policies in the West Bank harshly discriminate against Palestinian residents, depriving them of basic necessities while providing lavish amenities for Jewish settlements, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The report identifies discriminatory practices that have no legitimate security or other justification and calls on Israel, in addition to abiding by its international legal obligation to withdraw the settlements, to end these violations of Palestinians’ rights. The 166-page report, “Separate and Unequal: Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” shows that Israel operates a two-tier system for the two populations of the West Bank in the large areas where it exercises exclusive control. The report is based on case studies comparing Israel’s starkly different treatment of settlements and next-door Palestinian communities in these areas. It calls on the US and EU member states and on businesses with operations in settlement areas to avoid supporting Israeli settlement policies that are inherently discriminatory and that violate international law. “Palestinians face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits,” said Carroll Bogert, deputy executive director for external relations at Human Rights Watch. “While Israeli settlements flourish, Palestinians under Israeli control live in a time warp – not just separate, not just unequal, but sometimes even pushed off their lands and out of their homes.”

China’s black sites used and abused by private firms Posted: 18 Dec 2010 11:19 PM PST The massive expansion of a privatised and largely secret world is enveloping the West. Take military contracting and detention centres as two key examples. This recent feature in the Sydney Morning Herald highlights the foul stench of unaccountable thugs outsourced by the state in China: …In Tangshan city, a middle-class woman called Liu Yuhong told us how she had travelled to Beijing during the tense occasion of last year’s 60th anniversary National Day military parade. She had wanted to lodge a “petition”, or official complaint, seeking to learn the whereabouts of her parents who were being held in a labour camp (they had been detained for “petitioning” over a trivial property dispute). Liu was taken by police, handed to private security operatives and dumped in an exposed row of bare concrete cells, where she was starved of food and water for five days. Liu’s face was beaten until the walls were speckled red and she was force-fed an unknown fluid until she vomited. She later miscarried on a concrete prison floor. Liu’s case is gruesome but not unique. The extra-legal kidnapping of petitioners, subjecting them to abusive treatment and storing them in “black jails” is now commonplace. In fact, it is one of China’s fastest-growing industries. One private security company, Andingyuan, employed 3000 people to kidnap petitioners in Beijing on behalf of local governments, in daylight, until it was shut down two months ago.

Shut down the web or face a Wikileaks inspired future Posted: 18 Dec 2010 09:52 PM PST A wonderful piece by John Naughton in the Guardian from early December that perfectly captures this Wikileaks moment: What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger. As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, “Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure.” What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net. Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will. But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won’t work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.

Finding ways to dismiss leakers in the US Posted: 18 Dec 2010 09:12 PM PST A reader sent me this disturbing move from the US Senate to supposedly protect whistle-blowers but in fact is the complete opposite. Wikileaks is causing worries across the political establishment: On December 10, 2010, the Senate passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (S. 372) by unanimous consent. After a careful review of S. 372, the National Whistleblowers Center, the Federal Ethics Center, and the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition strongly recommend that the bill not be approved in its current form.  We urge the House of Representatives to fix the bill and send it back to the Senate for final approval.  Here is why the bill must be fixed: 1. New Summary Dismissal Authority.  The bill gives the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) sweeping new powers to dismiss whistleblower claims without a hearing.  The MSPB Administrative Judges will now be able to dismiss WPA claimswithout a hearing, based solely on affidavits filed by executive agencies.  If whistleblowers did not conduct extensive and expensive pre-trial depositions, they will be unable to rebut these affidavits, and their cases will be dismissed.  Even if the whistleblower is able to afford the significant additional fees and costs caused by the new summary dismissal proceedings, based on the track record of the AJs, the vast majority of cases will be summarily dismissed based on agency affidavits.  The opportunity to create a record at a hearing, or use the pre-hearing process as an opportunity to reach a settlement, will be lost.  This is a significant rollback of current rights that will make it more costly and more difficult for whistleblowers to prevail in any actions, despite any of the other reforms contained in the legislation. Significantly, in one of the handful of positive Federal Circuit decisions, that Court has rejected numerous requests from the executive branch that the authority to dismiss cases summarily be judicially created.  The Court recognized that in 1978, when the Civil Service Reform Act was originally passed, this was a big issue and was hotly contested.  The whistleblowers prevailed at that time.  It would be a shame to lose that hard earned victory in an “Enhancement” act.