A.Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Don’t trust Serco and friends to manage asylum seekers in Australia

Posted: 09 Oct 2011

Under-trained. Under-staffed. Traumatised. And that’s just the employees of disaster capitalist companies, loved by governments, to add “efficiency” to a straining refugee system.

Paige Taylor reports in today’s Australian:

An English backpacker on a tourist visa, Australians straight from high school and overseas students are among hundreds of casual workers earning up to $450 a day as “officers” in immigration detention centres.

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen has used his special powers under the Migration Act to turn the casual workers into guards authorised to deal with asylum-seekers and respond to incidents such as riots and suicide attempts, The Australian has confirmed.

They are allowed to perform almost all of the same duties as guards from contractor Serco, who are required, under the strict terms of a contract with the Immigration Department, to complete training that covers cultural awareness and cross-cultural communication, suicide awareness and the government’s detention values.

Mr Bowen used his “instrument of authorisation” to empower workers from subcontractor MSS in May last year and from Wilson Security in October last year. Each holds a Certificate II in Security Operations, according to Serco. Industry-wide, the course can take five to 10 days to complete.

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“Some of them are just hopeless,” one MSS worker said yesterday.

“You get ones who aren’t fit for work or who are too young to handle what you see in there . . . that includes Serco people.”

There are 62 MSS workers on Christmas Island and a similar number of Serco guards.

The debate about the qualifications and training of all guards began in March during mass walkouts, scuffles with detainees and rioting. This month an inquest into the suicide at Sydney’s Villawood detention centre of Fijian asylum-seeker Josefa Rauluni was told that two officers who dealt with him before his death were trained in the use of force, but not in Australia, nor to the specifications in Serco’s contract.

Serco has rigorously defended its training regime. Its own employees complete a four-week induction that begins off site and finishes in the workplace, a Serco spokesman said.

Serco began using subcontractors to supply guards last year when the number of people in detention rocketed as a result of the government’s decision to suspend processing asylum claims for boatpeople from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

Serco maintains that its subcontractors are suitably trained. “(They) hold licences to act as security officers including a level II in Security Operations. Regular checks are undertaken to verify this is the case,” a Serco spokesman said.

An MSS worker who lasted less than a week on Christmas Island is among at least three flown home for medical reasons this year. He had severe and long-term health problems associated with obesity and diabetes.

One 18-year-old woman said she had no idea what to do when she was placed inside the Christmas Island detention centre as a “rover” among more than 2400 men.

“I was shitting myself the whole time,” she said.

The out of control drone future

Posted: 09 Oct 2011

So this is where our supposed civilised world is heading. A disturbing piece in the weekend’s New York Times:

At the Zhuhai air show in southeastern China last November, Chinese companies startled some Americans by unveiling 25 different models of remotely controlled aircraft and showing video animation of a missile-armed drone taking out an armored vehicle and attacking a United States aircraft carrier.

The presentation appeared to be more marketing hype than military threat; the event is China’s biggest aviation market, drawing both Chinese and foreign military buyers. But it was stark evidence that the United States’ near monopoly on armed drones was coming to an end, with far-reaching consequences for American security, international law and the future of warfare.

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”

…

So far, the United States has a huge lead in the number and sophistication of unmanned aerial vehicles (about 7,000, by one official’s estimate, mostly unarmed). The Air Force prefers to call them not U.A.V.’s but R.P.A.’s, or remotely piloted aircraft, in acknowledgment of the human role; Air Force officials should know, since their service is now training more pilots to operate drones than fighters and bombers.

Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis for the Teal Group, a company that tracks defense and aerospace markets, says global spending on research and procurement of drones over the next decade is expected to total more than $94 billion, including $9 billion on remotely piloted combat aircraft.

Israel and China are aggressively developing and marketing drones, and Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and several other countries are not far behind. The Defense Security Service, which protects the Pentagon and its contractors from espionage, warned in a report last year that American drone technology had become a prime target for foreign spies.

ABC interview on Palestine, UN statehood and one-state solution

Posted: 09 Oct 2011

Debate around Palestinian statehood is becoming increasingly polarised, but necessarily so. While Israel continues to build illegal settlements in the West Bank, a two-state solution is dead and buried. That only leaves eternal apartheid or a one-state solution, my favoured option, a truly democratic state.

Last week I was extensively interviewed by ABC radio on these very subjects:

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

MSM finds it tough to report on #OccupyWallStreet as corporate interests are key

Posted: 09 Oct 2011

As Chevron has destroyed the Amazon, now firm gets access in Australia

Posted: 09 Oct 2011

The development and exploitation of natural resources by corporates is on the march globally. Take the proposed gas hubin the Kimberely in Western Australia. Governments are usually far too keen to please corporations, with locals and environmental concerns largely ignored.

Chevron recently announced a massive LNG project off the Western Australian coast.

Such moves are reflective of predatory capitalism with little or no thought into the records of the companies being granted access.

Tonight’s Sunday Night TV program featured a story about Chevron polluting in Ecuador. A responsible government would not ignore evidence of a company willfully shunning its responsibilities to properly manage the environment:

Legacy of Tamil Tigers still resonate

Posted: 09 Oct 2011

Renouncing terrorism as part of a national liberation struggle is a complex business, either done for pragmatic reasons or genuine remorse. Whatever the reason, Tamils in Sri Lanka remain deeply oppressed:

Five years after they were caught buying arms for Sri Lankan rebels, three Canadians have signed an open letter from prison acknowledging they were wrong and renouncing political violence.

“We incorrectly believed that violence could achieve the goals that we sought,” they wrote. “We now realize that what we did was not helpful in leading to a positive resolution of the issues that existed in Sri Lanka.”

The rejection of armed militancy is a complete reversal for the Toronto men, who were part of the international weapons procurement network that supplied the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE, during Sri Lanka’s long civil war.

But since being caught in New York shopping for $1-million worth of surface-to-air missiles and AK-47 assault rifles — a crime that earned them sentences of at least 25 years — the men have apparently had a change of heart.

“Each of us has come to the conclusion that the criminal activity for which we have been sentenced has caused much harm to all citizens of Sri Lanka,” wrote Sathajhan Sarachandran, Thiruthanikan Thanigasalam and Sahilal Sabaratnam.

“We incorrectly believed that supporting LTTE ideology on armed violence would bring peace to Tamil people. We refrain from those believes [sic] now,” reads the joint letter signed by each of them at their prison in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Aug. 21. The letter, obtained exclusively by the National Post, was to be released publicly in the coming days.

The repudiation of political violence is the first of its kind to emerge from Canadians actively involved in supporting the Tamil Tigers, a federally banned armed separatist group that has long been active in Toronto.

Assange speaks in London at ten year anniversary of Afghan war squalor

Posted: 09 Oct 2011

When we understand that wars come about as a result of lies, peddled to the British public and the American public and public all over Europe and other countries, then who are the war criminals? It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists, journalists are war criminals.

And Assange, interviewed at the same London rally, talks about the role of intervention in Libya and beyond.

What really happened when Tzipi Livni came to Britain?

Posted: 08 Oct 2011