A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

Would you like privatised jail care, man?

Posted: 06 Jan 2011 02:33 AM PST

Privatised prisons are a growing blight on the Western world. Governments love them because they pass responsibility to somebody else. But when profits come before care, the system is sick:

Arnold Porter was serious, and seriously worried. He was dizzy and short of breath, he told Dr. William Sightler, with a crushing, tightening sensation in his chest with pain shooting up once side of his neck. “Maybe I have a clogged artery. This is not my normal health,” he told Dr. Sightler. “Please help. I need something fast done.”

Slow motion heart attacks, in which symptoms leading up to full cardiac arrest build and worsen gradually over weeks or months are quite common. Porter should have been a lucky man, being able to bring his heart attack symptoms into in a physician’s office, except for one thing. Porter was a prisoner at Georgia’s Wheeler Correctional facility, operated by the notorious Corrections Corporation of America. And William Slighter was their doctor, not his.

According to a complaint filed in US District Court in Dublin Ga, Porter repeatedly and insistently sought medical aid throughout the month of December 2006, informing Dr. Sightler and a prison nurse of his symptoms, and urgently requesting some kind, any kind of diagnostic treatment for his chest pain, shortness of breath, profuse sweating and the other classic markers of cardiac disease. By December 29, the complaint states, Porter’s symptoms were well documented in his file, but the first appointment with Dr. Sightler was delayed a full 35 days. It was at this appointment that Porter stated he thought he might have a clogged artery, and asked for help.

Dr. Sightler, Nurse Newcurt, and the prison’s Director of Nursing Carolyn White, the complaint alleges, did nothing. Wheeler is a privatized prison, run by a highly profitable corporation. Private prisons, as well as publicly-run prisons with privatized medical care have built-in reasons to skimp on diagnostic testing and all kinds of care. Medical care costs money, and they’re in business to make it, not to spend it.

Now the Wikileaks genie is out of the bottle

Posted: 06 Jan 2011 02:18 AM PST

The US government may have to realise that good citizens and employees may want to speak out and expose the truth:

The White House has instructed every US government department and agency to create “insider threat” programmes that will ferret out disgruntled or untrustworthy employees who might be tempted to leak the sort of state secrets recently made public by the website WikiLeaks.

A 13-page memo detailing the new policy urges senior civil servants to beef up cyber security and hire teams of psychiatrists and sociologists who can “detect behavioural changes”. They will then monitor the moods and attitudes of staff who are allowed to access classified information.

The move is designed to prevent further embarrassing disclosures of the sort which have dominated the news in recent months. Unfortunately, just 48 hours after the memo was sent, a copy was leaked to staff at NBC news, who duly posted it on their website.

“Do you have an insider threat programme or the foundation for such a programme?” it asks department heads, adding that they should keep a close eye on the “relative happiness” of workers, because a staffer who displays “despondence and grumpiness” is likely to be untrustworthy.

In a passage which recalls a level of paranoia last seen during the Cold War, it asks whether agencies are using lie-detector tests or are trying to identify “unusually high occurrences of foreign travel, contacts, or foreign preference” by members of their staff.

The author of the leaked document, Jacob J Lew, is the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. He seems particularly anxious to prevent the media from getting its hands on embarrassing information.

“Are all employees required to report their contacts with the media?” the memo asks, suggesting that staff should even be monitored once they leave the Civil Service: “Do you capture evidence of pre-employment and/or post-employment activities or participation in online media data mining sites like WikiLeaks or Open Leaks?”

Israel looks at Iran approvingly

Posted: 05 Jan 2011 11:42 PM PST

So here we are. As the Israeli Knesset starts investigations into left-wing groups that dare question Zionist occupation and war,web censorship is now happening at the country’s only international airport. Perhaps Tel Aviv looks at Tehran and would like advice how to block “offensive” websites:

Internet sites of political organizations, both left-wing and right-wing, have been barred from viewing at Ben-Gurion Airport, Haaretz has learned.

They are blocked by an information filtering company that classifies them as “dangerous.”

Barred sites include leftist organizations Breaking the Silence, Machsom Watch, Peace Now and Taayush and the rightist Legal Forum for the Land of Israel and World Headquarters to Save the People and Land of Israel.

Sites operated by parties and other groups with political affiliations were easily accessed.

The Airport Authority provides wireless Internet services to passengers at Ben-Gurion International Airport through the 012 Internet provider.

Asked whether any site could be accessed from the terminal, an 012 official admitted that some sites may have been blocked.

The “error” notice appearing on the political groups’ sites directs surfers to the Fortinet information protection company’s web-filtering system.

Netanel Davidi, CEO of the Altal information security company, said the filtering system “can trace sites with offensive content and block access to them, after users worldwide mark and categorize them. The system also blacklists hostile sites and prevents access to them.”

“The general instructions to 012 is to allow free surfing to all except bandwidth-heavy sites that stream video, music and the like. This is to enable most passengers to surf uninterruptedly. Porn and gambling sites have also been blocked, as is customary,” IAA said.

It added that 012 is using a technological filtering device that “categorizes controversial sites.”

Peace Now secretary general Yariv Oppenheimer said “it’s regrettable that people leaving Israel should be made to feel as though they were leaving China or North Korea. Only backward countries bar Internet sites expressing political opinions.”

Monbiot takes on critics and shows transparency

Posted: 05 Jan 2011 11:33 PM PST

What a shame it’s come to this. George Monbiot, wonderful British columnist, journalist and author, has written a short piece about his finances to prove he has nothing to hide from critics who spend absurd amounts of time criticising anybody who dares challenge the status-quo. I salute him:

Regular readers will know that I have a thick skin. In view of the response I get from the army of trolls and astroturfers who spend much of their time attacking me, I need it. But even by their usual standards of viciousness, the attacks have taken a particularly nasty turn over the past few months. Now a new meme is circulating: that I am a millionaire, living alone in a vast house like a reincarnation of Howard Hughes. I’m painfully aware that if you don’t address such myths, they quickly spread, and become established as facts. So I’m going to take an unusual and risky step, and lay out the extent of my wealth.

It won’t take very long. My only valuable asset is my house, which I bought in 2007 for £278,000. That’s very expensive by the standards of most countries, but not in the UK, where house-prices are ridiculous. In 2010, the average house price in this country was £246,000. Not all of it is mine: the bank owns part of it.

And no, I don’t live there by myself. I have a daughter and two lodgers, who occupy what would otherwise have been the spare rooms. There are no spare bedrooms in my house.

As for the rest of my assets, they consist of the following:

– £8,000 in a savings account, set aside for the taxman.

– A pension, which, being freelance, I pay for myself. It is currently destined, unless I can raise my contributions, to pay out the princely sum of £3,000 a year.

That’s it. I have no stocks, shares, other houses, land (apart from my garden) or other investments. I did have more savings, but I spent them on greening my house.

So, while I’m much better off than the great majority of the world’s people, and better off than most people in Britain, I am no millionaire. I have an ordinary middle-class income and ordinary middle-class assets. Very few people make a lot of money from left-wing journalism, and I’m not among them.

Israel embraces fascism and where is the Zionist Diaspora?

Posted: 05 Jan 2011 10:15 PM PST

One:

Just hours after the Knesset approved a motion calling for a parliamentary investigation into the activity of B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence and other groups, National Union MK Michael Ben-Ari referred to members of the leftist organizations as “traitors who must be persecuted at any cost.”

Speaking at an SOS Israel conference in Jerusalem Wednesday evening, Ben-Ari called the leftists “germs” and “enemies of Israel.”

The rightist lawmaker went as far as equating the leftist organizations to Hamas and Hezbollah.

In an audio tape obtained by Ynet, Ben-Ari can be heard saying, “Elements that want to destroy the Jewish state are operating within the State of Israel. They are nothing short of traitors. They are persecuting IDF soldiers and want to castrate our resilience.

“I see the people from Peace Now; they each have a private car. Every clerk has the finest equipment. Who funds all of this? The greatest Israel haters are funding this. If we’ll have to enact a law in the Knesset to eradicate this dangerous enemy, that is what we’ll do. Such a germ can destroy Israeli society. This enemy threatens the state’s existence,” he added.

Extreme rightist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who also attended the conference, called on activists to protest outside the homes of the leaders of the leftist groups “and explain to their neighbors that these are people who harm IDF soldiers and cause Israel damage.

“We must also face them on the legal front – file lawsuits and show them we are not suckers. Those who harm the State of Israel and its soldiers will be punished,” he said.

In addition to the mass support from right-wing factions, the proposal to set up an inquiry commission into the activity of leftist groups was also backed by three members of Kadima, which heads the opposition. “We must erect a democratic and Zionist barrier against the use of human rights claims at the expense of Israeli patriotism,” MK Otniel Schneller said.

Today’s Haaretz editorial:

The more Israel’s isolation in the world increases as a result of the government shunning the peace process, the more energy the right-wing parties, led by Yisrael Beiteinu, are investing in silencing internal criticism.

It may seem ironic that Avigdor Lieberman, the same foreign minister responsible for some of the crises that have led to Israel’s delegitimization, is the person leading this crusade to silence and persecute leftist and human rights groups in Israel, a crusade that culminated yesterday in the initiative to establish a parliamentary panel of inquiry to “investigate” such organizations as Breaking the Silence, Yesh Gvul B’Tselem on the grounds that they are “damaging Israel’s legitimacy.”

But it shouldn’t seem ironic, since these things all go together, as history shows: Confrontational leadership that attempts – out of ideology or cynicism – to establish its rule by disseminating fear, paranoia and hatred toward the entire world, will not stop at destroying foreign relations. It will blame the results of its mistakes on internal enemies, on a fifth column.

The extent of the political right’s cynicism is evident in the fact that its demand to “investigate” “the intervention of foreigners in Israel’s affairs” is directed only at left-wing groups, while “foreign” interference in the country’s affairs by the supporters and financiers of the settlement movement is ignored and silenced with a wink.

There is nothing new in criticism being leveled at those who spread information or opinions that are not always convenient for the reigning national-security narrative.

What is new is the intensity of the “persecution of the left,” which has become not only a craze but a replacement for any sort of policy.

The blame for this wave of attacks lies with the “sit and do nothing” policy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who despite lip service to the contrary here and there, is celebrating the victory of this fatalistic and pessimistic narrative – the narrative that claims that the conflict with the Arabs is insolvable and all that that can be done is to manage it. And the more detached and fragile this “management policy” becomes, the greater the incentive to uproot any information that threatens to pull the ground from under it.

Persecuting internal political rivals will do nothing to convince anyone of the just path of the right-wing government headed by Netanyahu and Lieberman. It will only undermine Israeli democracy even further.

Gideon Levy, one of the few mainstream voices of sanity in Israel, writes what many Zionists are thinking. Democracy, indeed:

It’s high time a legal ban on the Israeli left be instituted. Why do we continue beating around the bush? Why do we need such a taxing, exhaustive legislative process in enacting law after law? What’s the use of all these various proposals and amendments? In lieu of all the aforementioned, let’s just do one very simple thing: declare the left an illegal entity in the State of Israel. From then on, whoever thinks left, acts left, demonstrates left or tolerates left will belong in jail.

Let’s build another “holding facility” for foreigners, but this time for the foreigners from within – the leftists – thus purging and purifying our camp. Such a step would accurately reflect the zeitgeist that has taken hold among the majority of Israelis, and allow them to sketch a genuine portrait of Israeli democracy.

In the Israel of 2011, it’s no longer legitimate to belong to the left. It’s illegitimate to campaign for human rights or to oppose the occupation or to investigate war crimes. Such actions earn Israelis a mark of shame. A land-stealing settler is a Zionist; a warmongering right-winger is a patriot; an inciting rabbi is a spiritual leader; a racist who expels foreigners is a loyal citizen. Only the leftist is a traitor.

Vanity Fair and strange editorial priorities

Posted: 05 Jan 2011

Sigh.

Killing Afghans should not be cost free

Posted: 05 Jan 2011 04:09 PM PST

This is what can happen to a privatised mercenary in a war zone. Brutal sentence in a tough land but why should we be so shocked? If we believe in accountability, then justice must be served. Allowing foreigners to escape local laws is one of the major reasons so many Iraqis and Afghans hate the West:

A former Australian soldier has been spared the death penalty for murder in Afghanistan and instead has been sentenced to 20 years’ jail.

This was revealed in court documents obtained by The Australian.

Robert William Langdon was convicted of murdering an Afghan colleague during a violent dispute while they were escorting a convoy to American military bases in mid-2009. Both men were working for Four Horseman International, a US private security company.

After shooting the man, referred to in court as Karimullah, Langdon then tried to stage a fake Taliban attack in which he had colleagues shoot randomly into the air before he threw a hand grenade inside the vehicle in which Karimullah lay dead.

He was arrested later that day at Kabul airport as he tried to board a flight to Dubai.

After twice being sentenced to death, at the First Court and then at his appeal in January last year, Langdon paid a sizeable amount of compensation, known in Afghanistan as ibra, to appease Karimullah’s family. Langdon’s family, from Port Augusta in South Australia, was reported to have said the money was raised through family and friends.

The Australian has obtained a copy of the sentencing document, handed down in a secret, in-camera hearing by the Supreme Court on October 11 last year.

Langdon’s family and his Australian lawyer, Stephen Kenny, said they were unaware of the judgment until contacted by The Australian this week.

Court officials said Langdon would have been informed of the decision but it was not known whether this happened.

Kimberley Motley, an American lawyer who has set up a private practice in Afghanistan and represented seven Western prisoners last year, said defendants, both Afghani and foreign, were discriminated against under the fledgling Afghan justice system.

“I think the ability to get a fair trial is, frankly, impossible,” Ms Motley said.

“In the trials I have been involved in, I have never seen a witness or indeed a policeman brought to court.”

She said this was a violation of UN conventions giving the accused the right to face their accusers.

Langdon, whom she briefly represented, could file a petition for revision with the Supreme Court to have his case reopened, Ms Motley said. But she said Mr Karzai, to her knowledge, had never shown clemency to any foreign prisoner who had been sentenced by an Afghan court.