Antony Loewenstein

NOVANEWS

How long will Cablegate last?

Posted: 01 May 2011 05:20 PM PDT

Julian Assange tells a Bulgarian publication of investigative journalism:

We are not yet sure exactly how long it will take to publish all the cables. Our system is to contact at least one media organisation in each country the cables originate from and give them cables that are of interest to their market. They then read, analyse and write on these, feeding us the redacted version of the cable. When we have worked with media in each country and various NGOs from around the world and they have all found as many stories of interest as they can, and have the resources to, then we shall do the work to publish each and every cable. This could be six months away, or over a year. We do not know as it depends on how many stories the media are discovering. Currently we are creating headlines around the world on a daily basis, so it certainly will not be any time soon.
…
I believe in the right to communicate and the inviolability of history, privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful.

In case it wasn’t clear; Australia is America’s bitch

Posted: 01 May 2011 04:56 PM PDT

Really:

Australia secretly worked with the United States to weaken a key international treaty to ban cluster bombs, leaked US diplomatic cables show.
Despite taking a high-profile stance against cluster munitions – condemned as the cause of large numbers of civilian casualties – Australia was privately prepared to pull out of international negotiations on a global ban of the weapons if this threatened ties with US forces.
The US continues to use cluster munitions as ”a legitimate and useful weapon”, including in Afghanistan, and has affirmed that it will not sign the treaty to ban them. The disclosure comes as Federal Parliament prepares to consider a bill to ratify Australia’s signature of the Convention on Cluster Munitions. 
The draft legislation has attracted sharp criticism from non-government organisations for not matching the spirit of the treaty. One US group complained the legislation could be interpreted to ”allow Australian military personnel to load and aim the gun, so long as they did not pull the trigger”.
Diplomatic cables from the US embassy in Canberra – leaked to WikiLeaks and provided exclusively to the Herald – reveal Kevin Rudd’s newly elected government in 2007 immediately told the US it was prepared to withdraw from the negotiations if key ”red line” issues were not addressed – especially the inclusion of a loophole to allow signatories to the convention to co-operate with military forces using cluster bombs.
Opened for signature in Oslo in December 2008, the convention prohibits the use, transfer and stockpile of cluster bombs – weapons that deliver numerous smaller bombs into a target area. Cluster munitions have been condemned by humanitarian groups for remaining as explosive hazards for decades after the end of military conflicts.
The US embassy in Canberra expressed appreciation in February 2008 for Labor’s position, which was considered critical to efforts to defeat ”hardline” countries and non-government organisations which were seeking a comprehensive ban.
The US diplomatic reports show Australia secretly lobbied Asian countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, on the issue and Canberra sought advice from Washington regarding which African countries engaged in military co-operation with the US might be recruited to vote with Australia on key parts of the treaty text.
In December 2007, the US embassy reported that the then foreign affairs minister, Stephen Smith, and the defence minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, had agreed to such a negotiating position.
In April 2008, a Foreign Affairs arms control expert, Dr Ada Chueng, told the US embassy that Australia ”shared US frustration and concern with Germany’s obstinacy” on the issue of defence co-operation, and that Australia would make formal representations to Berlin once the US had provided Canberra with ”specific” points to raise.
Along with Britain, Canada and Japan, Australia was ultimately successful in securing the desired loophole on defence co-operation.
Foreign Affairs officials informed US diplomats that while Australian troops would not be permitted to use cluster munitions, personnel would be free to participate in ”tactical planning” for the deployment of such weapons.
 

We are supporting violent suppression of non-violent Palestinian resistance

Posted: 01 May 2011 08:26 AM PDT

 Read on.

Read here to understand why US created hatred post 9/11

Posted: 01 May 2011 06:37 AM PDT

The recently released Wikileaks files on Guantanamo Bay showed a US empire arrogant on fear and power.But here’s an insight from Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Army colonel who served as Colin Powell’s right-hand at the State Department, that explains a lot. From a speech in 2009 on the “mosaic philosophy”:

This philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals–in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.
Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees’ innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.

Israel either recognises Hamas/Fatah or becomes more of pariah state

Posted: 01 May 2011 06:11 AM PDT

Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz:

Israel’s Pavlovian response to Palestinian reconciliation, which included the usual threats of boycott, is the result of the ingrained anxiety of people who no longer control the process. For five years, Israel has done everything to change the outcome of Hamas’ watershed victory in the elections in the territories. It did not recognize the Hamas government or the unity government, and of course, it did not recognize the Hamas government that arose after that organization’s brutal takeover of the Gaza Strip.
Gaza became a synonym for Hamas; that is, for terror, and the West Bank stood for the land of unlimited possibilities. Israel made an enormous contribution toward building up Hamas into an institution, not only an organization. The cruel closure of Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, turning Gaza into a battle zone and the saga of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, with Israel continuing to negotiate with Hamas while striking out against it – all this has transformed Gaza into a symbol of the occupation and a focus of international empathy.
…
This self-delusion refuses to recognize the changing reality in the Middle East, the changing of the guard among leaders and peoples and the self-interested moves of Western powers that are longing for new partnerships in the Middle East to replace the ones that have disappeared. Israel is not included in that new address list. Its good name is being torn to shreds.
But Israel has a rare opportunity to rewind the film back five years – not only to understand that the two parts of the Palestinian people are one entity, but to correct the mistakes it made in 2006. It must deal with the entire Palestinian government, even if that government includes Hamas representatives. Israel can, of course, repeat its mistakes, but then Israel, and not the Palestinian state, will become a country that threatens its own citizens.

Gideon Levy, Haaretz:

The path to Palestinian reconciliation is still long, and the path to statehood even longer. In the alleys of Jenin and the tunnels of Rafah there is still nothing to celebrate. In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv there is still nothing to worry about, to feel threatened by or even to rejoice about – as if we have been given a public relations “asset.” If a unity government is set up, and if free elections are held, there will be a new possibility. Israel needs to welcome this, with the appropriate reservations.
How depressing was the South African Freedom Day party in Tel Aviv over the weekend. While South African ambassador Ismail Coovadia, a person who knows a thing or two about “terrorist organizations” with which it is “forbidden” to negotiate, and whose representatives have been governing for the past 20 years a free and relatively impressive country, spoke about the chances of Palestinian reconciliation, minister Benny Begin sought to frighten those present about the prospect of democratization in the Arab world, painting as black a picture as possible. That is because we are unchanged. The days go by, a year passes, but the song remains the same.

Israel can do what it wants to whomever it wants (says pro-settler Zionist)

Posted: 01 May 2011 05:01 AM PDT

Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick loves Zionist aggression…anywhere.In her latest column, she instructs Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to ignore the world, continue occupying Arabs and expanding the occupation. She even mentions Sydney’s Marrickville (brief) embrace of BDS:

The same people telling us to commit suicide now lest we face the firing squad in September would also have us believe that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is the single greatest threat to the economy. But that lie was put paid this month with the demise of the Australian town of Marrickville’s BDS-inspired boycott.
Last December, the anti-Israel coalition running the town council voted to institute a trade, sports and academic boycott against Israel. Two weeks ago the council was forced to cancel its decision after it learned that it would cost $3.4 million to institute it. Cheaper Israeli products and services would have to be replaced with more expensive non-Israeli ones.
Both Israel’s booming foreign trade and the swift demise of the Marrickville boycott movement demonstrate that the specter of international isolation in the event that Israel extricates itself from the Palestinian peace process charade is nothing more than a bluff. The notion that Israel will be worse off it Netanyahu admits that Abbas has again chosen war against the Jews over peace with us has no credibility.
 

Killing our enemies from the comfort of a distant bunker

Posted: 30 Apr 2011 07:20 PM PDT

The future of warfare is largely privatised, unaccountable, designed to kill “terrorists” and almost guaranteed to convince US war planners that conflict is cost-free in terms of American lives:

Here’s how the U.S. Air Force wants to hunt the next generation of its enemies: A tiny drone sneaks up to a suspect, paints him with an unnoticed powder or goo that allows American forces to follow him everywhere he goes — until they train a missile on him.
On Tuesday, the Air Force issued a call for help making a miniature drone that could covertly drop a mysterious and unspecified tracking “dust” onto people, allowing them to be tracked from a distance. The proposal says its useful for all kinds of random things, from identifying friendly forces and civilians to tracking wildlife. But the motive behind a covert drone tagger likely has less to do with sneaking up on spotted owls and more to do with painting a target on the backs of tomorrow’s terrorists.
Effectively tracking foes has become a high priority — and deeply secret — research effort for the Pentagon, which has struggled at times to sort out insurgent from innocent in places like Afghanistan. The Navy has a $450 million contractwith Herndon, Virginia’s Blackbird Technologies, Inc. to produce tiny beacons to make terrorists trackable. The Defense Department has been pouring serious cash — $210 million that they’ll admit to — to find advanced new ways to do this so-called “Tagging, Tracking and Locating” work, as Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger noted in Popular Science last year.
The research she cataloged is as mind-boggling as it is varied. Ideas range from uniquely-identifiable insect pheromones to infrared gear that tracks people with their “thermal fingerprint.” One company, Voxtel, makes tiny nanocrystals that can be hidden in clear liquids and seen through night vision goggles.
A 2007 briefing from U.S. Special Operations Command on targeting technology stated that SOCOM was looking for “perfumes” and “stains” that would mark out bad guys from a distance. The presentation  listed a “bioreactive taggant” as a “current capability” next to a picture of what looks like a painted or bruised arm.
Another tracking technology is “smart dust” — a long-forecast cloud of tiny sensors that stick to target human or his clothes. And that seems to be what the Air Force wants its mini drone configured for.
The solicitation floats the idea of dropping a “dust-like” cloud of electromagnetic signal-radiating taggants, either on top of the target or in his path so that he’ll walk into it.  To do that, they’d need to either do some high-altitude “crop-dusting” of the target or launch a small munition that would blow out the taggant in mid-air when it was nearby.
It may be a signal that the smart-dust technology is at least feasible enough to plan a vehicle around. In her article, Weinberger notes that Darpa-funded researchers had drones that could drop clouds of taggants the size of a grain of rice as early as 2001.