A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

West Bank “boom” a little shaky

Posted: 02 Aug 2010

How’s that West Bank “development” going?

Ali Abunimah investigates.

Zionism always trumps human rights and they aren’t connected

Posted: 02 Aug 2010

Just the latest sign that Israel is a racist state that only wants to benefit Jews. Charming kind of “democracy”:

Israel moved Sunday to deport the offspring of hundreds of migrant workers, mostly small children who were born in Israel, speak Hebrew and have never seen their parents’ native countries.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the new policy was intended to stem a flood of illegal immigrants, whose children receive state-funded education and healthcare benefits, and to defend Israel’s Jewish identity.

“On the one hand, this problem is a humanitarian problem,” Netanyahu said during a meeting Sunday of the Cabinet, which had debated the move for nearly a year. “We all feel and understand the hearts of children. But on the other hand, there are Zionist considerations and ensuring the Jewish character of the state of Israel.

The lack of intelligence of American intelligence

Posted: 02 Aug 2010

Fulton Armstrong is a former US intelligence officer who sent the following letter to the New York Review of Books and explains how the US intelligence community is close to broken (so remember this when a forthcoming report appears on Iran):

I was a member of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), as national intelligence officer (NIO) for Latin America, from 2000 to 2004. The NIC is the intelligence community’s senior analytical group responsible for preparing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), including the Iraq WMDNIE. At the time, it reported to the director of the CIA, George Tenet, in his “intelligence community hat” and was located at CIA headquarters. Although the NIC is an interagency body, the CIA has always dominated its staff and work.

The first congressional briefing I ever took part in as an NIO, along with my colleagues, included discussion of WMDs, and it started with fifteen minutes of paeans of praise by Jesse Helms, and other Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for our intelligence work. Several of the NIOs were praised for having embraced the findings of the Rumsfeld Commission, which pressed upon the Clinton administration a hyped analysis of the missile threat (and rationale for an accelerated “missile defense strategy”). The NIOs clearly knew what was going on in that room. Intelligence officers are all trained to remind the recipients of their reports that they are never to take sides in a policy debate. These NIOs, however, said nothing and were clearly happy with the praise by the Republican committee members.

The National Intelligence Estimate produced by these NIOs on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, with the participation of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, was not subjected to the customary “peer review” of the National Intelligence Council because, after delaying the project for months, the NIOs didn’t have a spare hour for the discussion and debate that the council’s review would have provided. But we knew what they were up to. During our closed-door council meetings, they would eagerly report their progress in dividing the fifteen coordinating agencies that had contributed to the NIE. They boasted how, after an obviously extensive search, they finally found an Energy Department employee willing to contradict his agency’s consensus position that Iraq’s missile tubes were not, as the administration and the NIOs asserted, centrifuge tubes.

The NIOs who were preparing the NIE also boasted how they found an Air Force analyst to dissent from his service’s position that Iraq’s little unmanned surveillance planes could not be armed. They were happy that challenges to their and the administration’s assumptions about Iraq’s chemical weapons and biological weapons capabilities were minimal; after all, who’s going to try to prove a negative?

The most back-patting, however, was reserved for their success in forcing the State Department’s intelligence shop, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), to take a “footnote”—a dissent at the bottom of the page—on a lesser judgment in the paper rather than on the overarching judgment that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. One of the NIOs smiled when he reported that INR couldn’t prove that Saddam did not have WMDs and that no one wanted to be seen as defending Saddam anyway. That was exactly the Bush administration’s political strategy as well. Instead of allowing INR to develop an alternative analysis in the main text of the NIE—the proper form for a different view when the information is so obviously weak—the NIOs humiliated the only agency at the table, the State Department’s INR, that dared to question the administration’s preordained conclusions.

When we on the National Intelligence Council finally got a full read of the National Intelligence Estimate on WMDs, after its publication, a couple of us expressed grave reservations about the fatally weak evidence and the obsessively one-sided interpretation of what shreds of information it contained. (We were not told at the time that “Curveball” was a solitary source of obviously questionable credentials, nor that contradictory evidence was actually suppressed from the intelligence collection and dissemination process.) One colleague said it was clearly a paper written to provide a rationale for a predetermined policy decision to go to war. When I challenged the lack of evidence and the lack of alternative explanations, including forcing the questions raised by the INR into a lowly footnote, one of the WMD-promoting NIOs leaned forward and bellowed: “Who are you to question this paper? Even The Washington Post and The New York Times agree with us.” The irony was complete: previously respected reporters, spoon-fed by Bush administration officials, were now being used to provide cover for the NIOs’ similar compromise in accepting the administration’s view.

The National Intelligence Council and director of central intelligence, George Tenet, gave the NIOs concerned with WMDs big cash awards for producing the NIE, and seven years later and seventeen months into the Obama administration they remain in the same or equivalent jobs. The Bush administration left office, and its defenders still claim that the errors in the WMD debacle were innocent, just as the hyperventilation about “yellowcake” from Niger in a State of the Union address—cleared by a careerist in a CIA line office who worked closely with the administration and the NIC on WMD issues—was said to be innocent. Intelligence community spokesmen are rolled out to deny allegations of politicization, even though at least one of them, a former analyst who threatened to resign several times because of political pressures when he was working on Cuba, has witnessed it close up and paid a short-term career price for resisting it.

Covering up or ignoring the problem of politicization won’t make it go away. US intelligence will continue to fail again and again until we resolve it.

Independent minds back the Taliban

Posted: 02 Aug 2010

A great piece of journalism, courtesy of Stephen Grey in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Kandahar, Afghanistan. We visited the snooker club at the Kandahar Coffee Shop. It didn’t sell coffee. And I can’t play snooker. So we ordered burgers and filmed street life from the terrace: the traffic went around the roundabout and a manic flock of doves circled a hundred feet above. US soldiers drove by in huge armoured trucks, policemen stopped white Toyota Corollas and searched their trunks for bombs, and gunmen of every species drove around in their SUVs and pickup trucks.

Round the corner was our hotel. Half of it was destroyed earlier this year when a man walked past, pushing a bomb on a cart. He was heading for another target but when challenged by police, he and his cart – and the side of the hotel – were blown up. The bomb was detonated by the policemen’s shots. The hotel owner is busy rebuilding. He’s expecting an influx of journalists and trade when Nato conducts what until lately was called the “summer offensive” or even “the battle for Kandahar” but now, causing confusion, is just a “complex military-political effort”.

Everyone is still playing up the game in line with a recent ABC News headline, “Campaign for Kandahar May Be America’s Last Chance to Win Over Afghans”. On a visit to Kandahar, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, described the city as “as critical in Afghanistan as Baghdad was in Iraq in the surge”.

Sadly for the US, almost everyone supports the Taliban rebels. Even Nato commanders. A senior officer said: “If I was a young man, I’d be fighting with the Taliban.”

New York Times wanted to be scooped on Wikileaks data

Posted: 01 Aug 2010

Last night’s SBS Dateline featured a fascinating piece about the background to the recent Wikileaks release. Check out the whole thing but this bit interested me particularly:

As the new material starts to circulate between the three publications the full scope of the data becomes clearer, and one of the partners seems to be getting a little nervous.

JULIAN ASSANGE: The latest squabble is not over the date, they are all happy with that, the precise time. So, anyway, The Times came back and said they don’t want to go first. They want us to scoop them.

GAVIN MACFADYEN: So they can claim they were reprinting someone else’s news. Exactly.

JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s right, so they can claim that we didn’t – we weren’t involved, we are just reporting what someone else did.

GAVIN MACFADYEN: It’s good. So who is going first.

JULIAN ASSANGE: ‘The New York Times’, wants, wants a web-start-up press – they want a web start up press to scoop them.

Are more Jews waking up from their slumber?

Posted: 01 Aug 2010

UK Prospect magazine publishes a short piece by Antony Lerman that encourages the British government to be more critical of Israel because that’s what growing numbers of Jews want. Not subservience to the Zionist state:

David Cameron’s description of Gaza as a “prison camp” and his strong condemnation of Israel over the Turkish Gaza flotilla has, predictably, angered some commentators and politicians and pleased others. But if those who attacked his words, like Stuart Polak, director of the Conservative Friends of Israel, believe they are reflecting popular opinion among British Jews, they are wrong—according to the latest survey evidence.

In an online poll of British Jews conducted by the institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) with advice from Ipsos MORI, more than half of the respondents agreed that Israel should negotiate with Hamas. While this alone doesn’t prove that most British Jews would agree with Cameron’s “prison camp” terminology, when taken together with other data from the poll the “signs of considerable disquiet” identified by JPR director Jonathan Boyd are clear. For example, 55 per cent agree that Israel is “an occupying power in the West Bank” and 40 per cent believe controlling the West Bank is not vital to Israel’s security.

It’s true that British Jews also feel a continuing close attachment to Israel—most of the respondents said that Jews have a special responsibility for its survival—and the Jewish Chronicle used the report to declare the British Jewish bond with Israel “as strong as ever.” But when the majority of respondents (67 per cent) also see Israeli politics as corrupt, and three quarters think that orthodox Judaism has too much influence in Israeli society, British Jews are sending a strong signal to Israel’s government.

Do the opinions of British Jews matter? Not nearly as much as the views of American Jews, of course. But support from the Jewish community worldwide has always been vital for providing Israel with legitimacy for its actions. And with traditional Israeli political circles and think tanks in a virtual panic today about left-wing “delegitimisation” of Israel—most effectively orchestrated from London, or so it’s claimed by Israel’s Reut Institute—hanging on to that support has become increasingly important. The data from the JPR survey is only the latest reinforcement to an existing picture revealing how difficult the shoring up of Jewish solidarity has become.

Nothing good in major party politics in Australia, move on

Posted: 01 Aug 2010

Jeff Sparrow writes on the ABC that Australian politics is filled with the gutless, pathetic and predictable:

Take refugees. Yes, if Labor had taken a principled stand against xenophobia in the past, there would, quite probably, have been a short-term political penalty. Nonetheless, a campaign that had sought to humanise rather than demonise asylum seekers could, eventually, have reframed the debate, positioning the conservatives as mean-spirited and vicious, a party of old white men out of touch with contemporary multicultural Australia.

But the ALP ducked that difficult argument and joined the anti-immigrant caravan. The result? Here we are in 2010, with the refugee issue still presented in the terms set by John Howard — except that it’s now a Labor PM denouncing political correctness and pledging not to allow the foreign hordes to put a foot on Australian soil.

How, exactly, was that ever supposed to work? Was it meant to undercut the Liberals? If so, how? As Tony Abbott has shown, it’s always possible to go harder on refugees. In a race to the Right, the conservatives will always win. Why wouldn’t they? It’s their territory, after all.