A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

This is how a “liberal” newspaper works in the 21st century (well, one that still takes advertising). From a New Yorkmagazine feature on Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger:

His paper is running out of money: It lost roughly $50 million last year, and though it’s subsidized by a nonprofit trust, at that rate it can survive for at most another five years. Thus, the new American edition: 30 journalists turning out daily columns, reporting, and incessant live-blogging—not just on Americans but for Americans. 

“Why are we in America?” he asks, facing me across a small round table in a corner office, another sleek white box. There’s barely a picture on the wall or a paper on the desk—it’s as clutter-free as a monk’s quarters. “We’re in America because a third of our audience is in America.” The Guardianhas about 20 million monthly online readers in the United States, he says—a natural growth opportunity. But Rusbridger’s plan doesn’t require the company to ever actually turn a profit. “Within four years we will have brought losses down to a single figure,” he says. That’s a single figure in millions of pounds. “Which is sustainable.”

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“I’m not a Murdoch hater,” Rusbridger says, though he makes a point of noting he “effectively called us liars.” More important: He’s also not afraid of him. People believed “it was a bad mistake to make an enemy of Murdoch,” Rusbridger says. “News International knew that, and they felt that that gave them some kind of immunity. And so they didn’t have to play by the normal rules, and they would get away with it.”

There are similarly well-established competitors in this country, too, of course, and Rusbridger acknowledges he can’t compete here with the firepower of newspapers like the Times. And so the American edition, which is web-only, depends on less labor-intensive strategies, notably what Rusbridger calls “open journalism,” in which readers help report the news. “I believe that is quicker in building an audience,” he says, “and is editorially a better account of the world.” It doesn’t hurt that it’s also cheaper.

Next time you hear Western governments talking about human rights, remember this case. The British and American authorities routinely lie. It’s what power does. Stunning investigation by the UK Guardian:

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.

Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn’t stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. “My left eye was closed when the tape was applied,” she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. “But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony.” The journey would last around 17 hours.

Bouchar, then aged 30, had become a victim of the process known as extraordinaryrendition. She and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan Islamist militant fighting Muammar Gaddafi, had been abducted in Bangkok and were being flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons in Libya, a country where she had never before set foot. However, Bouchar’s case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.

Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar’s husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK – a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant.

This year, the Crown Prosecution Service announced police had launched an investigation into the “alleged rendition and alleged ill-treatment” of Bouchar and Belhaj, and a second operation in which a Libyan family of six were flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons.

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Two weeks after the couple were rendered to Libya, Tony Blair paid his first visit to the country, embracing Gaddafi and declaring that Libya had recognised “a common cause, with us, in the fight against al-Qaida extremism and terrorism”. At the same time, in London, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110m deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.