A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

Are we training Afghan forces to torture and kill?

Posted: 12 Sep 2011

We are constantly told in Australia that our brave boys in Afghanistan are training the local army.

A new Human Rights Watch report reveals the reality of so much Western training (some of which is privatised); corruption, torture and death squads is what we appear to be leaving behind, presuming we ever depart:

Militias and some units of the new US-backed Afghan Local Police are committing serious human rights abuses, but the government is not providing proper oversight or holding them accountable, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The Afghan government and the US should sever ties with irregular armed groups and take immediate steps to create properly trained and vetted security forces that are held accountable for their actions.

The 102-page report, “‘Just Don’t Call It a Militia:’ Impunity, Militias and the ‘Afghan Local Police,’” documents serious abuses, such as killings, rape, arbitrary detention, abductions, forcible land grabs, and illegal raids by irregular armed groups in northern Kunduz province and the Afghan Local Police (ALP) force in Baghlan, Herat, and Uruzgan provinces. The Afghan government has failed to hold these forces to account, fostering future abuses and generating support for the Taliban and other opposition forces, Human Rights Watch found.

“The Afghan government has responded to the insurgency by reactivating militias that threaten the lives of ordinary Afghans” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Kabul and Washington need to make a clean break from supporting abusive and destabilizing militias to have any hope of a viable, long-term security strategy.”

UN vote on Palestine puts two-state solution in permanent freeze

Posted: 12 Sep 2011

The “dream” is over, liberal Zionists. It’s never going to happen in any reasonable way. So the alternatives are clear; one state or permanent apartheid. Which side are you on?

Ilan Pappe writes in Electronic Intifada:

We are all going to be invited to the funeral of the two-state solution if and when the UN General Assembly announces the acceptance of Palestine as a member state.

The support of the vast majority of the organization’s members would complete a cycle that began in 1967 and which granted the ill-advised two-state solution the backing of every powerful and less powerful actor on the international and regional stages.

Even inside Israel, the support engulfed eventually the right as well as the left and center of Zionist politics. And yet despite the previous and future support, everybody inside and outside Palestine seems to concede that the occupation will continue and that even in the best of all scenarios, there will be a greater and racist Israel next to a fragmented and useless bantustan.

The charade will end in September or October — when the Palestinian Authority plans to submit its request for UN membership as a full member — in one of two ways.

It could be either painful and violent, if Israel continues to enjoy international immunity and is allowed to finalize by sheer brutal force its mapping of post-Oslo Palestine. Or it could end in a revolutionary and much more peaceful way with the gradual replacement of the old fabrications with solid new truths about peace and reconciliation for Palestine. Or perhaps the first scenario is an unfortunate precondition for the second. Time will tell.

…

The recent disruption of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra performance at the prestigious BBC Proms in London shocked the gentle Israelis more than any genocidal event in their own history.

But more than anything else, as reported by senior Israeli journalists who were there, they were flabbergasted by the presence of so many Jews among the protesters. These very journalists kept depicting in the past the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and BDS activists as terrorist groups and extremists of the worst kind. They believed their own reports. To its credit, the mini-intifada at the Royal Albert Hall at least confused them.

In Palestine itself the time has come to move the discourse of one state into political action and maybe adopt the new dictionary. The dispossession is everywhere and therefore the repossession and reconciliation have to occur everywhere.

If the relationship between Jews and Palestinians is to be reformulated on a just and democratic basis, one can accept neither the old buried map of the two-state solution nor its logic of partition. This also means that the sacred distinction made between Jewish settlements near Haifa and those near Nablus should be put in the grave as well.

The distinction should be made between those Jews who are willing to discuss a reformulation of the relationship, change of regime and equal status and those who are not, regardless of where they live now. There are surprising phenomena in this respect if one studies well the human and political fabric of 2011 historic Palestine, ruled as it is by the Israeli regime: the willingness for a dialogue is sometimes more evident beyond the 1967 line rather than inside it.

The dialogue from within for a change of regime, the question of representation and the BDS movement are all part and parcel of the same effort to bring justice and peace to Palestine. What we will bury — hopefully — in September was one of the major obstacles in the way to realizing this vision.

Nothing like a good war that enriches the leeches

Posted: 11 Sep 2011

The list of private companies gouging America and its allies since 9/11 is long and dubious. For example (via Mother Jones):

In 2007, US planners decided to pave a 64-mile mountain road between the Afghan towns of Khost and Gardez. They figured it would take $69 million to complete, but the cost swelled to $176 million. Much of that was spent on security, including a lot that went to a local big-swinger known as “Arafat,” who’s now believed to have been working for the insurgents. In May, the New York Times reported that “a stretch of the highway completed just six months ago is already falling apart and remains treacherous.”

A recently released US report found that up to $60 billion had been lost or spent on corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade. What glorious wars! And America has still lost both conflicts. Almost comical. Almost.

Charles Tiefer of the Wartime Contracting Commission speaks to Democracy Now!:

There’s no question that while President Obama came in—and you quoted his—you had the recording of his statement when he came in—enthusiastic for more competition, there has not been follow-through. During the budget debates, you do not see enough real reform. The commission looked and found that the current system for providing services, logistic services, like dining facilities, depends on what we called mini-monopolies. There is one company, Fluor, that gets all the logistics work in northern Afghanistan, the new work. There is one company, DynCorp, that gets all the logistics work in southern Afghanistan. And so, there’s no competition over the billions of dollars in new work. None at all.

…

We had the top officials in the Pentagon came in. And when we asked them, “Why haven’t you made changes?” — let me give you another example, although—which is—could fit with the previous ones: a $2 billion contract for bringing in bulk food commodities in Afghanistan to Supreme Foodservice. Its time was up. It was supposed to be competed. They weren’t ready to compete it. It was extended another $2 billion. And when we asked why, the answer came back, “Well, we weren’t ready. We didn’t have the people. We didn’t have the preparations ready to conduct a competition of that.” The Under Secretary of Defense, Under Secretary Carter, I asked this, and he said, “Well, you just sometimes have to extend these contracts. It’s the wrong thing to stop the incumbent at the end of them.”

This is how writers with spine relate to the real world

Posted: 11 Sep 2011

Literary events aren’t devoid of real world politics (well, they shouldn’t be, anyway). The recent cancellation of a proposed Kashmir literature event was a stunning example of such issues being brought into the public domain.

One of the key players behind protesting the event, Basharat Peer, writes wonderfully in The Hindu about why he acted as he did. A writer with real conscience (who I saw speak at this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival about the troubles in Kashmir):

A few days back, the Harud Literary Festival, which was due to take place in Srinagar from September 21 to 24, was cancelled amid great controversy. The event was to be held on the campus of Delhi Public School located outside Srinagar, next to the biggest military camp in Kashmir, the Badami Bagh cantonment. Vijay Dhar, who owns the school, was the main sponsor of the Harud festival. A businessman with strong Congress Party connections, he was an adviser to Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s. Recently, Mr. Dhar was cheerleading the Indian Army’s “normalcy drive” in Kashmir by hosting an army-sponsored and organised cricket tournament, the Kashmir Premier League, on the grounds of his school.

Before the Harud was talked about in the press, I had conveyed my apprehensions to the organisers — the novelist and festival producer Namita Gokhale and her partners, Teamwork Productions headed by Sanjoy Roy and Sheuli Sethi — and suggested holding the festival independently, without any political connections. They chose otherwise. It thus became impossible for me, as an independent writer, to be part of such an event. If I had decided to attend the festival, given the obvious political connections of Harud’s lead sponsor, then tomorrow I would not be able to say no to an event funded by people connected to other political establishments and ideologies. This was the same reason I stayed away, despite several invitations, from the conferences organised by Ghulam Nabi Fai, the Kashmiri-American lobbyist who turned out to be on the payroll of Pakistan’s Inter Services Agency.

…

We did write an open letter raising political questions, along with several other journalists, academics, and writers, and it was posted on the blog, Kafila.org, giving others the option to sign it if they wished. After describing the situation in the State, our letter said: “We fear, therefore, that holding such a festival would, willy-nilly, dovetail with the state’s concerted attempt to portray that all is normal in Kashmir. Even as the reality on the ground is one of utter abnormality and a state of acute militarisation and suppression of dissent, rights and freedoms”. We added that we would “firmly support the idea of a literary/artistic festival in Kashmir if we were convinced that its organising was wholly free from state interference and designs, and was not meant to give legitimacy to a brutal, repressive regime.”

A few days later, the Harud organisers called off the festival citing threats of violence and a movement to boycott the festival. “A few people who began the movement to boycott the festival have no qualms in [sic] speaking on and about Kashmir across international forums, but have refused to allow other voices, including writers, poets and theatre people from the Valley and across India to enjoy the right to express themselves at the Harud festival,” the statement announcing the cancellation alleged.

This statement essentially implies that Mirza Waheed and I, who have spoken and written across the world about Kashmir, are censors throttling other writers, poets, and theatre people from expressing themselves. This is completely untrue. We did not attempt to persuade anyone who wanted to attend Harud from not attending. We didn’t call for a boycott of the festival. Our Open Letter, in fact ended on the following note: “This letter is an attempt to state our position and to urge the festival participants to ponder some of these issues and concerns.” All we did was to make and state our decision to stay away. The decision to cancel the festival was not ours, but that of the organisers.

It has also been said that our opposition to the festival has denied young Kashmiris a chance to interact with several visiting authors. Let this be clear: Young Kashmiris don’t depend on a glance or a hasty chat with a visiting author to understand the mechanics of writing. An intense conversation about the craft and politics of writing has been going on, away from the glare of the press and frenzy of social media, in many rooms in Kashmir. The journalist Muzamil Jaleel has been running a writers’ workshop every Sunday from his living room for several years now, where scores of young Kashmiri boys and girls discuss their writing and read the best and the brightest of fiction and non-fiction writers. It is a room I have visited on several Sundays to talk to Muzamil’s students.

In my parents’ house, in coffee shops in Srinagar, in online chats and emails, that process continues. When I was a 21-year-old struggling to learn to write, a writer friend told me what to read and how to read. Many of us who signed the open letter critiquing the Harud festival have been passing on the torch, editing short stories, reading personal essays, bringing graphic novels and tomes of fiction and non-fiction for the boys and girls who are growing up to tell the story of Kashmir and the stories of places and ideas beyond Kashmir. It is in those quiet and committed engagements spanning years that Kashmir’s writers are being made, not by pitching a few shamiyanas.

They are not desperate for an autograph; they are reading, thinking, writing in the solitude of their rooms. They won’t be seeking crumbs at a table, they won’t mortgage their souls to government cultural academies and Doordarshan Kashmir, they won’t go begging at the doors of DAVP offices in Delhi. The strength of their work will tear open the gates.

Cluey firms making good money from Australian government’s privatisation obsession

Posted: 11 Sep 2011

The Canberra Times reveals who is making a killing, largely invisible in the public domain and likely to only make more money in the years ahead; privatisation is a bi-partisan disease:

Detention centre operators, an international training company, a NSW Government department and a multinational IT firm are the big winners from the Federal Government’s immigration policies.

An analysis of tender data by The Canberra Times has identified, for the first time, the companies that have won the most lucrative contracts from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship since 2008.

Combined with information from DIAC, a fuller picture has emerged of the true cost of the Federal Government’s asylum-seeker policy, with a refugee advocate saying the money could be better deployed in cheaper community-based alternatives.

The tenders data shows that multinational detention centre operators G4S and Serco have been the biggest financial beneficiaries of the Federal Government’s mandatory detention policies.

Detention centre operator Serco tops the list, thanks to its five-year contract to run Australia’s immigration detention network. The contract, worth $279million in 2009, was quietly revised upwards to $712million in July.

Serco also has another contract worth $44million to provide ”Immigration Residential Housing and Immigration Transit” to DIAC.

Serco won the tender from rival G4S, which had been running the detention centres since 2003 under a $580million contract.

…

DIAC said yesterday that as of September 8, 4873 boat people and crew members were being held in Christmas Island and mainland detention facilities. This did not include the boat, carrying 72 people, which landed on Friday.

In June, 6403 people were being held in immigration detention.

The department expects the cost of detaining asylum-seekers to fall in the current financial year to $628.7million. It says the cost of running the Curtin detention centre – this year $108million – will fall $20million next year.

Asylum Seeker Resource Centre chief executive Kon Karapanagiotidis said his non-profit organisation cared for asylum-seekers in the community for just $4.80 per person per day, providing food, public transport, legal services, a GP, and other services.

Hooters remembers September 11 in a way that smells of class

Posted: 11 Sep 2011

No, this isn’t cheapening the memory of 9/11 and the disastrous decade since:

Former NYT head admits backing for Iraq war because he wanted to be manly

Posted: 11 Sep 2011

The New York Times after 9/11 was notorious for consistently siding with the Bush administration, especially backing the Iraq war thanks to the stenography of Judith Miller.

Bill Keller has just stepped down from his role as Executive Editor of the paper and writes this revealing essay about why he and many “liberals” embraced the Iraq war. His main reason (and we can be thankful for his honesty)? He wanted to be manly and tough and not be seen as a weak-willed liberal.

If this is the cream of the media crop, the corporate press should be trusted even less than we thought.

Here’s Keller:

During the months of public argument about how to deal with Saddam Hussein, I christened an imaginary association of pundits the I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might. It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations, including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack, the former C.I.A. analyst whose book, “The Threatening Storm,” became the liberal manual on the Iraqi threat. (Yes, it is surely relevant that this is exclusively a boys’ club.)

In several columns I laid out justifications for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. There were caveats — most significantly, that there was no reason to rush, that we should hold off to see whether Iraq’s behavior could be sufficiently contained by sanctions and inspections. Like many liberal hawks, I was ambivalent; Pollack said he was 55 to 45 for war, which feels about right.

But when the troops went in, they went with my blessing. Of course I don’t think President Bush was awaiting permission from The New York Times’s Op-Ed page — or, for that matter, from my friends in the Times newsroom, who during the prewar debate published some notoriously credulous stories about Iraqi weapons. The administration, however, was clearly pleased to cite the liberal hawks as evidence that invading Iraq was not just the impetuous act of cowboy neocons. Thus did Tony Judt in 2006 coin another, unkinder name for our club: “Bush’s Useful Idiots.”

…

Iraq was not, as Afghanistan had been, the host country and operational base of the new strain of Islamic fascism represented by Al Qaeda. It is true that Hussein hosted some nasty characters, but so did many other dictators hostile to America. At the time, Iraq was one of seven countries designated as sponsors of terrorism by the State Department, and in the other six cases we settled for sanctions as recourse enough. And his conventional military — what was left of it after it was laid waste in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq in 1991 — was under close supervision.

That leaves the elusive weapons of mass destruction. We forget how broad the consensus was that Hussein was hiding the kind of weapons that could rain holocaust on a neighbor or be delivered to America by proxy. He had recently possessed chemical weapons (he used them against the Kurds), and it was only a few years since we had discovered he had an active ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Inspectors who combed the country after the first gulf war discovered a nuclear program far more advanced than our intelligence agencies had believed; so it is understandable that the next time around the analysts erred on the side of believing the worst.

We now know that the consensus was wrong, and that it was built in part on intelligence that our analysts had good reason to believe was cooked. Should we — those of us without security clearances — have known it in 2003? Certainly we should have been more suspicious of the administration’s assurances. Kenneth Pollack, the former C.I.A. analyst who is now at the Brookings Institution, concedes that he should have drilled deeper into the claims of the intelligence crunchers; he was misled, he says, by the fact that they had seriously underestimated Hussein in the past. A few journalists — notably Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder newspapers — emphasized conflicting intelligence that questioned Hussein’s capabilities. But assuming we couldn’t know for sure, what would have been acceptable odds? If there was only a 50-50 chance that Hussein was close to possessing a nuclear weapon, could we live with that? One in five? One in 10?

Colin Powell, who oversaw the campaign that drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991 and who was the most cautious member of President Bush’s war cabinet, was reluctantly convinced (duped, he would later say) that the W.M.D. risk merited military action. His word carried great weight. The journalist and author Fred Kaplan was one of many, I suspect, who joined the hawk club on the strength of Powell’s speech to the United Nations Security Council six weeks before the invasion.

“I was particularly struck by the tape-recording of an intelligence intercept that Powell played — a phone conversation in which one Iraqi Republican Guard officer tells another to clean out a site before the inspectors get there,” Kaplanrecalled. We learned much later that the Iraqi officers wanted to erase traces of chemical weapons that had been stored before the first gulf war. Kaplan dropped out of the hawk club within a month when he concluded that, whether or not an invasion was morally justified, he doubted the Bush administration was up to the task. The rest of us were still a little drugged by testosterone. And maybe a little too pleased with ourselves for standing up to evil and defying the caricature of liberals as, to borrow a phrase from those days, brie-eating surrender monkeys.