A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Robert Fisk remembers the war mongers who longed for Muslim blood post 9/11

Posted: 04 Sep 2011

And the veteran Middle East journalist utters one of the key reasons the terrorist attacks happened; Israeli occupation of Palestine:

By their books, ye shall know them.

I’m talking about the volumes, the libraries – nay, the very halls of literature – which the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 have spawned. Many are spavined with pseudo-patriotism and self-regard, others rotten with the hopeless mythology of CIA/Mossad culprits, a few (from the Muslim world, alas) even referring to the killers as “boys”, almost all avoiding the one thing which any cop looks for after a street crime: the motive.

Why so, I ask myself, after 10 years of war, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, lies and hypocrisy and betrayal and sadistic torture by the Americans – our MI5 chaps just heard, understood, maybe looked, of course no touchy-touchy nonsense – and the Taliban? Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears? Are we still not able to say those three sentences: The 19 murderers of 9/11 claimed they were Muslims. They came from a place called the Middle East. Is there a problem out there?

American publishers first went to war in 2001 with massive photo-memorial volumes. Their titles spoke for themselves: Above Hallowed Ground, So Others Might Live, Strong of Heart, What We Saw, The Final Frontier, A Fury for God, The Shadow of Swords… Seeing this stuff piled on newsstands across America, who could doubt that the US was going to go to war? And long before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, another pile of tomes arrived to justify the war after the war. Most prominent among them was ex-CIA spook Kenneth Pollack’s The Threatening Storm – and didn’t we all remember Churchill’s The Gathering Storm? – which, needless to say, compared the forthcoming battle against Saddam with the crisis faced by Britain and France in 1938.

There were two themes to this work by Pollack – “one of the world’s leading experts on Iraq,” the blurb told readers, among whom was Fareed Zakaria (“one of the most important books on American foreign policy in years,” he drivelled) – the first of which was a detailed account of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction; none of which, as we know, actually existed. The second theme was the opportunity to sever the “linkage” between “the Iraq issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict”.

The Palestinians, deprived of the support of powerful Iraq, went the narrative, would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation. Pollack referred to the Palestinians’ “vicious terrorist campaign” – but without any criticism of Israel. He wrote of “weekly terrorist attacks followed by Israeli responses (sic)”, the standard Israeli version of events. America’s bias towards Israel was no more than an Arab “belief”. Well, at least the egregious Pollack had worked out, in however slovenly a fashion, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had something to do with 9/11, even if Saddam had not.

…

Publication of the official 9/11 report – in 2004, but read the new edition of 2011 – is indeed worth study, if only for the realities it does present, although its opening sentences read more like those of a novel than of a government inquiry. “Tuesday … dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States… For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey. Among the travellers were Mohamed Atta…” Were these guys, I ask myself, interns at Time magazine?

But I’m drawn to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan whose The Eleventh Day confronts what the West refused to face in the years that followed 9/11. “All the evidence … indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators – at every level,” they write. One of the organisers of the attack believed it would make Americans concentrate on “the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel”. Palestine, the authors state, “was certainly the principal political grievance … driving the young Arabs (who had lived) in Hamburg”.

The motivation for the attacks was “ducked” even by the official 9/11 report, say the authors. The commissioners had disagreed on this “issue” – cliché code word for “problem” – and its two most senior officials, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, were later to explain: “This was sensitive ground …Commissioners who argued that al-Qa’ida was motivated by a religious ideology – and not by opposition to American policies – rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict… In their view, listing US support for Israel as a root cause of al-Qa’ida’s opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy.” And there you have it.

Newsflash; Greens politician isn’t anti-Semitic but…

Posted: 04 Sep 2011

Those cuddly fools at Murdoch’s Australian. The paper has spent the last months (and years) finding any way possible to smear individuals who back Palestine. It’s failed miserably, of course, as the rights of Palestinians has never been more understood globally.

Last week Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon was forced to write a letter stating she wasn’t anti-Semitic but on Saturday a response continued the smears:

NSW Greens senator Lee Rhiannon is correct when she says that one can criticise Israel without being anti-Semitic (Letters, 2/9).

It is, however, hardly surprising that when she regularly criticises Israel and never gives the country the benefit of any doubt, that some people might well misunderstand her motives.

Rhiannon and other extremist elements within the Greens have frequently indulged in intemperate and ill-informed attacks on Israel.

The NSW Greens state conference, for example, recently passed a proposal by “consensus” to “boycott Israeli goods, trading and military arrangements, and sporting, cultural and economic events as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestinian territory”. This radical policy, now official NSW Greens policy, is not only at odds with the policies of both main parties and the majority of Australians, it is also at odds with the policy of the federal Greens which voted against a similarly worded proposal at its last conference.

Rhiannon’s denial that she harbours any anti-Semitic sentiment should be accepted and respected but she would do well to reflect on whether any of her own statements in relation to Israel have been so intemperate that a false impression of her motivations has been given.

Bill Anderson, Surrey Hills, Vic

Here’s why America will continue to be so hated and the CIA can be thanked

Posted: 04 Sep 2011

Killing countless people around the world doesn’t exactly bring love (or respect or even fear anymore), so a fascinating but disturbing piece in the Washington Post that inadvertently documents the decline of an empire:

Behind a nondescript door at CIA headquarters, the agency has assembled a new counterterrorism unit whose job is to find al-Qaeda targets in Yemen. A corresponding commotion has been underway in the Arabian Peninsula, where construction workers have been laying out a secret new runway for CIA drones.

When the missiles start falling, it will mark another expansion of the paramilitary mission of the CIA.

In the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the agency has undergone a fundamental transformation. Although the CIA continues to gather intelligence and furnish analysis on a vast array of subjects, its focus and resources are increasingly centered on the cold counterterrorism objective of finding targets to capture or kill.

The shift has been gradual enough that its magnitude can be difficult to grasp. Drone strikes that once seemed impossibly futuristic are so routine that they rarely attract public attention unless a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure is killed.

But framed against the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 2001 attacks — as well as the arrival next week of retired Gen. David H. Petraeus as the CIA’s director — the extent of the agency’s reorientation comes into sharper view:

●The drone program has killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians since 2001, a staggering figure for an agency that has a long history of supporting proxy forces in bloody conflicts but rarely pulled the trigger on its own.

●The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which had 300 employees on the day of the attacks, now exceeds al-Qaeda’s core membership around the globe. With about 2,000 on its staff, the CTC accounts for 10 percent of the agency’s workforce, has designated officers in almost every significant overseas post and controls the CIA’s expanding fleet of drones.

●Even the agency’s analytic branch, which traditionally existed to provide insights to policymakers, has been enlisted in the hunt. About 20 percent of CIA analysts are now “targeters” scanning data for individuals to recruit, arrest or place in the cross­hairs of a drone. The skill is in such demand that the CIA made targeting a designated career track five years ago, meaning analysts can collect raises and promotions without having to leave the targeting field.

This is what Israel loves doing (building illegal colonies)

Posted: 04 Sep 2011

One more nail in the coffin of the Jewish state:

With the end of the building freeze, construction has started up in Judea and Samaria (Yesha) communities. In fact, said the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), building jumped 660% in Judea and Samaria during the first half of 2011, as compared to the previous year.

While the statistic was certainly breathtaking, the actual numbers on the ground were less impressive: Construction started on 546 new homes in Yesha communities during the period. Still, it was a sharp improvement over the number of housing starts in the first half of 2010, when only 72 housing starts were announced.

Officials of the Yesha Council said they were pleased with the increase, but that clearly many more new homes were needed. “We need at least 500 new homes a month, not just in half a year, in order to accomodate all the families who want to live in Yesha.” Last week, Arutz Sheva reported on how dozens of American families who sought to buy or rent homes in Efrat were unable to do so because of the lack of housing there.

Who really benefits from the bogus “war on terror” (and it isn’t us)?

Posted: 04 Sep 2011

With the 10 year anniversary of 9/11 just around the corner, except an orgy of self-delusion over the disastrous decade just over. So many wars and deaths and is the West safer? No chance. But a select few corporations have done very well, thanks very much. Disaster capitalism on steroids.  The Guardian reports:

The scale of the CIA‘s rendition programme has been laid bare in court documents that illustrate in minute detail how the US contracted out the secret transportation of suspects to a network of private American companies.

The manner in which American firms flew terrorism suspects to locations around the world, where they were often tortured, has emerged after one of the companies sued another in a dispute over fees. As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the mass of invoices, receipts, contracts and email correspondence – submitted as evidence to a court in upstate New York – provides a unique glimpse into a world in which the “war on terror” became just another charter opportunity for American businesses.

As a result of the case, the identities of some of the corporations involved in the rendition programme have been disclosed for the first time, along with the names of some of the executives who knew the purpose of the flights.

One unintended consequence may be that some of those corporations and individuals are now at risk of being sued in proceedings brought on behalf of the al-Qaida and Taliban suspects who were the victims of the programme.

The New York case concerns Sportsflight, an aircraft broker, and Richmor, an aircraft operator. Sportsflight entered into an arrangement to make a Gulfstream IV executive jet available at $4,900 an hour rather than the market rate of $5,450. A crew was available to fly at 12 hours’ notice. The government wanted “the cheapest aircraft to fulfil a mission”, Sportsflight’s owner, Don Moss, told the court. But it was the early days of the rendition programme, and business was booming: the court heard that Sportsflight told Richmor: “The client says we’re going to be very, very busy.”

Invoices submitted to the court as evidence tally with flights suspected of ferrying around individuals who were captured and delivered into the CIA’s network of secret jails around the world. Some of the invoices present in stark detail the expense claims that crew members were submitting on their secret journeys, down to £3 biscuits and £30 bottles of wine.

One Gulfstream jet has been identified as the aircraft that rendered an Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar after CIA agents kidnapped him in broad daylight in Milan in February 2003 and took him to Cairo, where he says he was tortured.

…

The court documents make only passing reference to the human cargo being transported. Enough details of the rendition programme generally have now been disclosed to know that men on these flights were usually sedated through anal suppositories before being dressed in nappies and orange boiler suits, then hooded and muffled and trussed up in the back of the aircraft. The precise conditions in which suspects were transported on Richmor flights are not known.

And there’s more:

Despite the attempts to keep costs down, the invoices submitted to the court as evidence show that some rendition operations were eye-wateringly expensive. In November 2002, for example, Gulfstream N85VM made a six-day round trip from Washington, taking in Guantánamo Bay, Shannon, Dubai, Kabul, and Edinburgh (pdf). Richmor’s bill was for $240,643 and 95 cents, including catering, landing fees and the cost of an additional crew member.

Another operation that month, which saw the Gulfstream fly from Washington to Kabul via Shannon and Dubai, (pdf) and return via Dubai and Luton, north of London, resulted in a bill from Richmor for $198,930 and 30 cents.

Bizarrely, given the purpose of the flights, Richmor was expected to meet US federal regulations, meaning rendition aircraft (pdf) were designated as drug-free workplaces, to be operated only by companies that took affirmative action to employ workers with disabilities.

The real value of the documents is the way they allow the most comprehensive and verifiable picture to date of the CIA’s so-called “ghost planes” to be mapped out. In the past, White House administrations under both George W Bush and Barack Obama have moved to ensure that details of the programme did not leak out from court proceedings.

Who really wants Serco to remain in Australia? Not the people

Posted: 03 Sep 2011

With so many unanswered questions, privatisation is not the way forward for helping people. But then again, that’s not the point, is it? It’s about profit above humanity: