A.Loewenstein Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

 

 

What you need to know about the Afghan war and aren’t afraid to ask

Posted: 16 Feb 2012

With the war in Afghanistan an unmitigated clusterfuck, it’s remarkable still how many voices in the corporate press talk about goals, achievements and possibilities (usually given by anonymous “officials”).
American journalist Michael Hastings obtains a fascinating document recently that reveals the depth of the mess:

Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military’s top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?” Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.
Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We’ve decided to publish it in full; it’s well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.
Here is the report’s damning opening lines: “Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.” Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is “open source” – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. “If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,” Davis writes. “It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II.”

Hastings speaks about this on Democracy Now! yesterday.

 

Civil strife serious possibility in PNG due to vulture capitalism

Posted: 15 Feb 2012

My following investigation appears in Crikey today:

The story led the business pages in Papua New Guinea’s Post-Courier in early February. “Analyst: PNG on verge of change” screamed the headline. British-based market analysts Bdaily Business Network praised the $US17.3 billion Exxon-Mobil led LNG project. “[It] is the most important single development in the history of PNG”, it stated, coming online for overseas markets in 2014.
But the reality away from corporate spin is a simmering conflict. A source close to the Southern Highlands land owners, the site of the major LNG project, predicts civil strife in the coming years. Locals are starting to collect weapons and grenades for the coming fight. Sabotage and attacks on pipelines are likely. Weapons are being smuggled in from Indonesia, including West Papua and Thursday Island near Australia.
“I fear what is coming unless something changes soon,” he says at a local Chinese restaurant covered in Coke-coloured wallpaper. “We are not being heard and feel we have no choice. We know we will be out-gunned, and Exxon, being an American company, may receive US government support, but this is about dignity and our rights.”
Stanley Mamu, editor of the LNG Watch blog, fears a Bougainville-style war over resources. It is almost inevitable, he argues, unless Exxon and the government listen to the grievances of the local people. Tensions are already high after a deadly landslide in January was blamed on nearby mining blasts.
LNG project managing director Peter Graham told Radio Australia last year he was satisfied with the “extraordinarily consultative process” with the landowners. That would be news to most of them.
A story in PNG’s Sunday Chronicle in mid-February highlights their anger. Two landowner chiefs demanded Exxon “fulfil relocation” plans previously agreed to. They complain about Exxon-hired private security firm G4S — the company has implanted itself in the highest echelons of the national government, I am told by countless NGOs — and local police using excessive force to re-open a key access road to the LNG project. They warn that other residents will heed a call to join them in resisting the development.
A former commander in the PNG army during the Bougainville “crisis” of the 1990s warned in 2010 that the presence of a foreign militia company such as G4S heightened the chances of another conflict: “They [G4S] have no appreciation of the local customs, culture and the people.”
I recently travelled to Papa Lea-Lea, about 30 minutes from downtown Port Moresby, to investigate a key LNG hub of the project. Driving through impoverished communities living alongside the shore, we pass small villages along the cracked road — small houses built of stilts to keep them from sinking. “They would have to move if a cyclone hit,” an Oxfam PNG staff member who accompanied me says matter-of-factly.
Passing a roadblock — our driver is forced to pay a small bribe to a policeman because he doesn’t hold a driver’s licence — we soon see kilometres of high fences behind which sit LNG facilities in various stages of completion. Security guards watch us drive past. On one side of the road is the beaten-up land of the project, the other is lush, rolling hills. Oxfam tells me some landowners have done deals with Exxon for the use of their property while others complain they aren’t properly consulted before work has begun.
Oxfam recently released a report on the LNG’s impacts in the area after engaging an LNG Impact Listening Project. The results were decidedly mixed and explained how alcohol abuse by men and women was leading to a spike in HIV infection, domestic assault and infidelity. One woman from Porebada said that road construction caused excessive dust that affected the growth of bananas, mangoes and paw paws. “Every time we go to find our gardens polluted.”
The current Peter O’Neill government supports the LNG project as strongly as Michael Somare’s. Australian billionaire Clive Palmer recently announced his likely entry into the LNG race, saying: “If we find gas, we develop it and make billions of dollars out of it.” During my visit the re-entry of Shell into PNG was also warmly embraced as a key driver of LNG opportunities.
Australia still pours millions into the country as a supposed insurance policy against imminent collapse. Former foreign minister Alexander Downer recently wrote in The National that his government “rebuilt PNG’s economy” and “helped end the Bougainville crisis” when in reality — as Crikey has reported —  the Howard years entrenched the rot that has continued under the expanded Labor aid program (much of which goes on “boomerang aid”).
My time in Madang with the progressive NGO Bismarck Ramu Group (BRG) was a welcome change, one of the few organisations in the country that believes the only sustainable way forward for PNG is to reject all Australian support and find alternatives to mining and forestry projects, such as agriculture.
BRG’s Rosa Koian tells me there were countless examples just in her province — a polluting Chinese-owned Ramu Nickel mine and an equally polluting Filipino-run cannery — that show how corporate giants can mislead locals. Poor communication was a factor so BRG’s community workers take locals being romanced by corporations to areas where such firms have set up. “We have had 250 years of failed capitalism here,” Rosa says.
Terry is a key losing litigant in a recently completed case by landowners against the Chinese-owned MCC, which runs the Ramu Nickel mine in Madang. He claims violent intimidation by the company and has witnessed pollution in the water near his village. “Every day I hope the world comes to an end,” he says to me in despair. The top courts, ministers and federal government are all colluding to support the mine, he says.
MCC advertising in the local press claims the company is “ready to deliver”. But perhaps not for the people in Madang.
*Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist currently working on a book about vulture capitalism. Read here his first PNG report from Bougainville.

 

Post Gaddafi Libya for North Koreans

Posted: 15 Feb 2012

My friend Yaara Bou-Melhem on Al-Jazeera tells the story of Asian migrant workers:

The tortured method of Murdoch’s British empire uncovering its crimes

Posted: 15 Feb 2012

Columbia Journalism Review ask the right questions about this murky investigation:

The New York Times piqued my interest by writing this on Sunday:

“Dozens of people — lawyers, forensic accountants, forensic computer technicians and, sometimes, police officers — gather daily at a site in Thomas More Square here, where News International is based, searching through 300 million e-mails and other documents stretching back a decade.”Here we are presented with the spectacle of police and News Corp. cheek-by-jowl investigating together a scandal that the company covered up for years and which involves the police themselves. If you think that sounds a bit awk, you’re not alone.

Behind it is a sticky question: What happens when an organization accused of systematically breaking the law is a news publisher with legitimate interests in protecting confidential sources? The tension is thick on the ground: News International’s newspapers are under criminal investigation for thousands of alleged crimes, including deadly serious ones like bribing police and other public officials, but the company also has sensitive information regarding its legitimate newsgathering.

On one hand, giving cops free run of the place could easily result in the exposure of confidential sources and the chilling of future whistleblowers, who would understandably think twice about ever talking to the press.
On the other, after years of News Corp. stonewalling, police can’t simply trust the company to sift through its own data on the cops’ behalf.

 

One day soon Haaretz may realise that 2 state solution will never happen

Posted: 15 Feb 2012

Long ago, in the mind of many Israelis, the supposed separation between Israel and the occupied territories disappeared. The paper’s editorial:

Construction of the new cultural auditorium in Ariel, taking students on tours of the West Bank, and now the plan to turn the ‘university center’ in Ariel into a full-fledged university, are erasing the pre-1967 borders from the collective consciousness of both Palestinians and Israelis.
When the violent conflict in the territories was at its height a decade or so ago, then IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon said Israel’s goal was to sear the Palestinians’ consciousness with the understanding that violence doesn’t pay.
Today, the government in which Ya’alon now serves as a minister doesn’t miss an opportunity to sear the consciousness of Palestinians and Israelis alike with the idea that a diplomatic agreement on a two-state solution is no longer on the table.
The expansion of settlements and the legalization of outposts have contributed to the physical erasure of the Green Line. Construction of the new cultural auditorium in Ariel, taking students on tours of the West Bank, and now the plan to turn the “university center” in Ariel into a full-fledged university, are similarly erasing the pre-1967 borders from the collective consciousness of both Palestinians and Israelis.
The budgetary implications of the decision made by a subcommittee of the Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria – that the Ariel University Center meets the requirements for becoming a university – are dwarfed by the diplomatic and educational message this decision sends out. This message could be heard clearly when Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar pledged to upgrade the university center during a recent visit to Ariel, explaining that he views it as an “important anchor” of Israel’s presence in the northern West Bank.
As noted by the approximately 300 academics who signed a petition against upgrading the academic center, the initial establishment of a college in Ariel stemmed from political considerations that had no connection to the development needs of Israeli academia. In response to the lecturers’ protest, the university center’s president, Prof. Dan Meyerstein, argued that the decision on whether to recognize the university should be based on academic criteria, not its location.
But Ariel is not just another “location.” It is situated in occupied territory that is a focus of controversy both within Israeli society and in the international community. The State of Israel has barred Palestinians from most of the territory of the West Bank. They are permitted to build Ariel’s houses, but not to live there. Ariel, like all the other settlements, is a closed military zone as far as they are concerned.
If the government wishes to keep the two-state solution in the public consciousness, and/or to protect the status of Israeli universities within the international academic community, it would do better to call a halt to this dangerous move that the education minister is promoting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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