A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

• Australians respect Wikileaks so take a step back
• Just remind me why the MSM keeps on publishing this man?
• Behold US Zionist lobby PR
• Israel told US it would keep Gaza on brink of collapse
• Don’t ignore the oppression-backing Better Place gloss
• The philosophy behind Openleaks
• Two pictures of criminal US adventures in the Middle East
• US journalists are scared of being seen as anything other than lovers of power
• Hello media, there aren’t too equal sides under occupation
• Ahmadinejad as the moderate

Australians respect Wikileaks so take a step back Posted: 05 Jan 2011 03:42 PM PST The people have spoken: Australian voters are sharply at odds with the Prime Minister over the release of classified US government cables, a new poll has found. The survey suggests just one-quarter of voters agree with Julia Gillard that the diplomatic cables recently published by WikiLeaks should have remained secret. The findings show 59 per cent support WikiLeaks in making the cables public and 25 per cent oppose it.   The survey of 1000 Australians by UMR Research was conducted between December 16 and 21, three weeks after the cables began appearing. UMR’s managing director, John Utting said support for the release of the cables was strongest among men, the more affluent and younger voters, and the better educated. “There is little difference between the two major parties, while Green voters overwhelmingly support the release,” he said.   Mr Utting said he most significant finding was ”the almost complete lack of support” for prosecution of Mr Assange. “The public is overwhelmingly against this. There is just no support for it.”

Just remind me why the MSM keeps on publishing this man? Posted: 05 Jan 2011 03:32 PM PST Sound familiar? It’s been a very long time since Jewish-speaking peoples brought benefit to humanity by, say, developing new medicines and technology or advancing democracy and human rights. Indeed, the area where the Jews seem most adept at innovation would be terrorism. Airplane hijackings, suicide bombings, and mega-terrorism are among their claims to originality. Oh wait…

Behold US Zionist lobby PR Posted: 05 Jan 2011 03:01 PM PST This is the best they can do? Good luck to them:

Israel told US it would keep Gaza on brink of collapse Posted: 05 Jan 2011 03:12 AM PST The Middle East’s Only Democracy Inc: Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to U.S. diplomatic cables published by a Norwegian daily on Wednesday. Three cables cited by the Aftenposten newspaper, which has said it has all 250,000 U.S. cables leaked to WikiLeaks, showed that Israel kept the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv briefed on its internationally criticized blockade of the Gaza Strip. The territory, home to 1.3 million Palestinians, is run by the Islamist Hamas group, which is shunned by the West over its refusal to recognize Israel, renounce violence or accept existing interim Israeli-Palestinian peace deals. “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to (U.S. embassy economic officers) on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge,” one of the cables read. Israel wanted the coastal territory’s economy “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis,” according to the November 3, 2008 cable.

Don’t ignore the oppression-backing Better Place gloss Posted: 05 Jan 2011 02:40 AM PST Israeli electric car company Better Place is accused of providing charging stations in the occupied West Bank and being run by former military men suspected of war crimes. The firm has received media coverage in Australia, mainly over allegations of favourable business deals, but nothing about backing apartheid in Palestine. The Zionist state’s attempts at greening its image is underway. We shouldn’t be fooled by this kind of propaganda piece in theJerusalem Post which praises the wonderful innovation of Better Place. Perhaps, but on whose backs? Dead Arabs: After a successful run of high-tech and computer-related innovation, Israel is focusing its ambitions on the next big thing — preparing the world for life without coal and oil. Israel is driving to become a world leader in alternative energy, with the government throwing its support behind cutting-edge technologies. The number of private entrepreneurs entering the so-called “clean-tech” sector has swelled dramatically. Already, a number of firms are moving to roll out new ideas. Perhaps the country’s best known clean-tech company —Project Better Place — aims next year to activate a network of charging stations for electric cars across Israel, which would be one of the most extensive such grids in the world. Others are still in early stages. On a 10-meter (yard) stretch of a northern highway, the firm Innowattech tested out its system of tile-like generators, which are installed under roads and convert the weight and motion of passing vehicles into electricity. It is now looking to expand, claiming that a kilometer-long (0.6-mile) lane of its generators could power more than 200 households. Alex Klein, an analyst at Emerging Energy Research, a Cambridge, Mass., research firm, said Israel has in a way benefited from its small size, forcing it to develop products for export. “Given that it has a small market locally, its role will continue to be innovating new next-generation technology. Pound for pound it is a pretty key incubator of technologies,” he said. Israel already has a formidable track record. Bolstered in large part by veterans of shadowy high-tech military units, it helped develop such innovations as instant messaging, Internet telephony and wireless computer chips. The government is now pushing for that entrepreneurial drive to be directed into environmentally clean technologies, not only as an economic opportunity but as a necessity for an arid, resource-poor nation. Israel, which now depends almost entirely for its energy on imported coal and natural gas, has set a goal to have 10 percent of its electricity generated by alternative means by 2020. In November, the government approved a plan to spend $600 million over the next decade to reach that goal, with much of the money poured into encouraging green construction and development of new technologies. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu presented the plan as a security necessity. “I view this as a national goal of the highest importance because the addiction to oil has led to the Western world being dependent on the oil-producing countries and harms the standing and security of the state of Israel,” he said.

The philosophy behind Openleaks Posted: 04 Jan 2011 10:08 PM PST Daniel Domscheit-Berg, once of Wikileaks and now working on the OpenLeaks project, spoke last last year about his plans and how to bring truly transparent information:   Here’s a rough transcript. Extract: There’s project staff that has to manage all of this, that has to take care of all the servers. There’s the whole public that wants to be informed, that wants some buzz going on, some website they can go to and see what’s happening. There are NGOs. There’s the press. There potentially is the government that has their own interests. So these are all sorts of different parties. And what we found out what is one of the most important points here is that they all scale completely differently. Some of these are very quick. They are very dynamic. If you had a system to manage them efficiently, you could pull in a lot of resources. And others are very slow. They need time to do work properly. They are stuck in their own organizations that have slow processes or whatever. So they all have different capabilities to scale, and that’s why all of that has to be broken down somehow, so that you can address all of these areas in the fashion that is most suitable for them. If we look at how leaks work, actually, we can see two different areas. Or basically actually that is a—it’s going from the local scale to a global scale, and there’s a lot in between. But if you look at the local scale, on a per-country level for example, or if you go even lower in the regional or physically local level, then these have localized problems. So you need to make sure that you transport the information as close to where it matters as possible, just because something about corruption in a small department in a small town here in Germany or in another place in the world will just drown in the flood of let’s say in the vicinity of a release of a few thousand documents from a war, or diplomatic cables or whatever. So these two cannot compete with each other, or they cannot even coexist with each other, because one thing is just going to shut up the other thing. So what you need to make sure is that you distribute the material as close to where it matters as possible.

Two pictures of criminal US adventures in the Middle East Posted: 04 Jan 2011 04:32 PM PST One: Roads, canals and schools built in Afghanistan as part of a special U.S. military program are crumbling under Afghan stewardship, despite steps imposed over the past year to ensure that reconstruction money is not being wasted, according to government reports and interviews with military and civilian personnel. U.S. troops in Afghanistan have spent $2 billion over six years on 16,000 humanitarian projects through the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, which gives a battalion-level commander the power to treat aid dollars as ammunition. Two: In the spring of 2008, Gen. David H. Petraeus decided he had spent enough time gazing from his helicopter at an empty and desolate lake on the banks of the Tigris River. He ordered the lake refilled and turned into a water park for all of Baghdad to enjoy. The military doctrine behind the project holds that cash can be as effective as bullets. Under Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq at the time, that principle gained unprecedented emphasis, and it has become a cornerstone of the war effort in Afghanistan, now under Petraeus’s command. But today the Baghdad park is nearly waterless, more than two years after a U.S. military inauguration ceremony that included a marching band and water-scooter rides. Much of the compound is in ruins, swing sets have become piles of twisted steel, and the personal watercraft’s engines have been gutted for spare parts. The troubled history of the venture speaks to the limitations and mishandling of a program that has provided U.S. military commanders with $5 billion for projects in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past six years. The program has given officers enormous flexibility to address urgent needs with few bureaucratic hassles.

US journalists are scared of being seen as anything other than lovers of power Posted: 04 Jan 2011 04:26 PM PST This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Here’s Newsweek explaining why so few major American reporters are standing up for Wikileaks. This supposed obsession with “balance” – which usually means little more than siding with the powerful – is spurious and regarded as such across the world (see here): So why are American journalists hesitant to speak up for Assange? There are essentially three reasons. 1. Refusal to engage in advocacy: American journalists, unlike many of their foreign counterparts, have a strong commitment to objectivity and nonpartisanship. At many mainstream media organizations, signing petitions is verboten, and many journalists impose such rules on themselves. According to Shapiro, who co-wrote the Columbia letter, when they circulated the document, “Some people said, ‘As a journalist, I make it my practice never to sign a petition.’ ” As an example, Bill Grueskin, the dean of academic affairs at Columbia’s Journalism School, did not sign. Asked why by NEWSWEEK, he said he’s “not much of one for signing group letters.” 2. Opposition to Assange’s purpose: That same notion of objectivity shared by journalists makes many of them suspicious of WikiLeaks’s journalistic bona fides. Assange has an advocacy mission: to disrupt the functioning of governments. Many investigative journalists, like the famous muckrakers at the turn of the last century, have had a similar orientation, says Shapiro, who wrote the book Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America. “WikiLeaks springs from the same purpose as investigative journalism: a sense that the system is corrupt and the truth can be told,” says Shapiro. “It’s a reformist rather than radical agenda.” Even so, many mainstream reporters, editors, and producers might see associating with Assange as inappropriately endorsing an advocacy mission. 3. Opposition to Assange’s methods: Some journalists, while perhaps believing Assange should not be prosecuted, are so disgusted with his approach that they are reluctant to weigh in publicly. Sam Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University, did not sign the letter his colleagues circulated because, “I felt the letter did not adequately criticize the recklessness—the disregard for the consequences of human lives—of a massive dump of confidential info.” Freedman says prosecuting Assange would set a dangerous precedent for legitimate journalists. But many think, as Freedman does, that Assange did not exhibit the judiciousness that a journalist must when releasing classified information.

Hello media, there aren’t too equal sides under occupation Posted: 04 Jan 2011 04:20 PM PST Calling on bravery in Middle East reporting. Few takers? Keen to appease the Zionist lobby? Worried about a lack of balance against Israeli crimes? Best work for the BBC, then. Jonathan Cook investigates.

Ahmadinejad as the moderate Posted: 04 Jan 2011 04:10 PM PST Really: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sought some kind of nuclear fuel swap deal more than a year ago, but faced internal pressures from hard-liners who viewed it as a “virtual defeat,” according to US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. The report, available on the WikiLeaks website Tuesday, also suggested Iran trusted the United States more than ally Russia to follow through with the UN-backed proposal: providing reactor-ready fuel in exchange for Iran giving up control of its low-enriched uranium stockpile.