Antony Loewenstein

Just another average day in occupied Palestine (via Haaretz):

The state has confirmed that, acting without a court order, the army has barred Palestinian villagers from freely accessing their farmland for two years. The admission was made in the state’s response to a High Court petition filed last year by Beit Furik residents.

The plots farmed by the residents of Beit Furik, which is southeast of Nablus, border several unauthorized outposts that were built near the Itamar settlement over the past decade and are known as the Gidonim outposts. In 2010, the Israel Defense Forces began preventing villagers from accessing their fields freely. As a result they must coordinate their farmwork with the army, in accordance with deployment levels.

Such events give weight to boycotting Israel, writes Ben White in the New Statesman (and I agree):

A fortnight ago, dozens of actors, playwrights and directors called on The Globe to cancel a planned performance by Israel’s national theatre company Habima, to avoid complicity with “human rights violations and the illegal colonisation of occupied land”.

Along with Emma Thompson, Mike Leigh and Caryl Churchill, opposition to the invitation includes Mark Rylance, founding artistic director of The Globe. The letter follows on from anearlier call by ‘Boycott From Within’, a group of Israelis who support the Palestinians’ Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign.

Since then, the letter’s critics have responded in an over the top fashion, successfully missed the point. Howard Jacobson reached for absurd clichés (“Kafkaesque”, “McCarthyism”) while Simon Callow and Louise Mensch signed a letter describing the boycott call an example of “the continued persecution of Jews”.

“Theatre ban ‘like Nazi book burning’ say West End stars” ran a headline in The Jewish Chronicle, whose editor Stephen Pollard compared pro-Palestinian protesters at the Proms to “Nazi party members” in “Weimar Germany” (as did Labour MP Denis MacShane who recentlylinked the murders in Toulouse to Palestine solidarity motions in UK trade unions).

This shameless blustering ignores the specific reasons for the Habima boycott call, namely that the company performs in illegal West Bank settlements – colonies that form a key part of Israel’s apartheid regime – and indeed promised Israel’s Minister of Culture that it would “deal with any problems hindering such performances”.

The wider context is the decision by Palestinians to call for BDS as part of their efforts to secure basic rights and freedoms. That call, endorsed by trade unions, faith groups, political factions, and civil society organisations, includes cultural boycott. Groups like the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) play a critical role in mobilising supportfor the Palestinian struggle.

Culture does not operate in some special, apolitical space – just like academic institutions in Israel are also not removed from complicity in systematic human rights abuses. As the Habima general manager put it, the invitation by The Globe is an “honourable accomplishment for the State of Israel in general”.

It’s only terrorism if “they” do it. Here’s a classic case of the American system protecting officials who brazenly break laws and get away with it:

American intelligence agencies including the CIA and the FBI have won a court ruling allowing them to withhold evidence from British MPs about suspected UK involvement in “extraordinary rendition” – the secret arrests and alleged torture of terror suspects.

This is how a “liberal” newspaper works in the 21st century (well, one that still takes advertising). From a New York magazine 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.”

…

“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.

…

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.

The rise of privatised detention centres and prisons globally is an issue that receives far too little scrutiny in the media (yesterday’s Al Jazeera’s The Stream was a notable exception). The profit motive inevitably skews priorities.

Here’s a great piece from this week’s New York Times by Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen that asks the necessary questions:

Immigration control has traditionally been viewed as an inalienable sovereign function of the state. But today migration management has increasingly been taken over by private contractors. Proponents of privatization have been keen to argue that the use of contractors does not mean that governments lose control. Yet, privatization introduces a corporate veil that blurs both public oversight and legal accountability.

Despite efforts to introduce outside supervisors, performance reports and other monitoring mechanisms, the private nature of these companies breaks the ordinary administrative chain of command, placing both governments and the public at a disadvantage in terms of ensuring transparency.

Private companies seldom have an interest in securing public oversight, as any criticism may entail negative economic consequences. Australasian Correctional Management, which ran detention centers in Australia from 1998 to 2004, was known to require medical staff members or teachers entering its facilities to sign confidentiality agreements preventing them from disclosing any information regarding detainees or the administration of the centers. Being foreigners, migrants and refugees have always had a hard time gaining access to outside complaint mechanisms and advocacy institutions. As an employee in charge of reviewing disciplinary cases at a Corrections Corporation of America facility in Houston once told a reporter from this paper, “I’m the Supreme Court.”

The corporate veil also distorts lines of legal responsibility. Human rights law is largely designed on the presumption that it is states and not private companies that exercise sovereign powers like detention or border control. Legally holding governments accountable for human rights violations by contractors requires an additional step showing that it is the state and not just the corporation or individual employee that is responsible for the misconduct.

…

As the world’s largest security company with more than 650,000 employees, G4S is involved in a plethora of migration functions all over the world, from operating immigration detention centers in Britain to carrying out passenger screening at airports in Europe, Canada and the Middle East. In America, G4S operates a fleet of custom-built fortified buses that serve as deportation transports for illegal migrants caught along the United States-Mexico border. Just last month, the U.K. Border Agency signed a new contract with G4S worth up to $337 million to house asylum seekers.

G4S’s success in this market shows that deportation, detention and border control have become big business. Boeing’s current contract to set up and operate a high-tech border surveillance system along the United States-Mexico border is worth $1.3 billion and involves nearly 100 subcontractors. The Florida-based Geo Group — one of G4S’s main competitors — manages 7,000 detention beds in the United States and, until recently, at the Guantánamo Bay detention center, where migrants intercepted in the Caribbean are transferred. N.G.O.s and international organizations profit, too. In 2010, the International Organization for Migration was paid $265 million to assist governments in returning migrants to their home countries, among other activities.

The migration control industry covers not only detention and deportations but also border control. Many airlines today employ former immigration officers or themselves contract security companies to perform the document, forgery and profiling checks required by destination states. In Israel, the West Bank checkpoints are gradually being transferred to private security companies.

No kidding:

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

This is how power works, a rare window into modern politics. If you thought the war in Libya was truly about liberating the Libyan people, 99% of players behind it had other ideas. Here’s the UK Telegraph:

A major Tory donor whose oil firm was given government help to set up a supply deal in Libya was a dinner guest at Downing Street, it has been disclosed.

David Cameron invited Ian Taylor, the boss of the oil company Vitol, weeks after it emerged that a secret “Libyan oil cell” run from the Foreign Office had brokered a lucrative deal for Vitol to supply oil to rebel forces in the north African country.

When the controversy blew up last September, No 10 had to fend off accusations that Vitol, which has close links to the international development minister, Alan Duncan, was given preferential treatment.

Weeks later, on Nov 2, Mr Taylor, who has donated £466,100 to the Conservative Party since Mr Cameron became leader, was one of six guests at an intimate dinner party with the prime minister in Downing Street.

Last night Opposition MPs demanded to know whether Vitol’s deal with the National Transitional Council in Libya was discussed at the dinner, which was also attended by Mr Taylor’s wife, Christine. Labour said the dinner added to “the perception that policy is purchased by donors”. Downing Street said Mr Taylor, 55, was invited to “the social dinner for strong and long-term supporters of the party”.

Mr Cameron went ahead with the dinner despite a series of questions about possible preferential treatment for Vitol, the world’s largest oil trader.

The Government had admitted that a secret committee, said to have been set up at the suggestion of Mr Duncan, arranged meetings between Vitol and the Libyan rebels fighting Col Muammar Gaddafi. Mr Duncan is a close friend of Mr Taylor, having worked for Vitol in the 1990s, and as a consultant for Arawak, a company part-owned by Vitol.

Mr Duncan said the work of the oil cell was above board and other companies were not prepared to take the risk of opening a supply route to the Libyan rebels. But oil industry insiders suggested that Vitol benefited from “good contacts”. Last night Michael Dugher, shadow minister without portfolio, said: “Questions have to be asked about the Prime Minister’s relationship with Ian Taylor.”

The private dinner in November was one of four disclosed by Downing Street yesterday that were attended by people who have donated more than £50,000.

So many stories and so much missed deliberately or wilfully ignored. Interesting extract from a new book, The phone hacking scandal: journalism on trial. This is by Justin Schlosberg and details how many key media outlets consistently fail to hold power to account (and no, it ain’t an accident):

The performance of serious media in relation to the WikiLeaks cables reveals a troubling picture. Far from championing the whistleblowing cause, the strategy adopted by the mainstream media effectively deligitimised WikiLeaks, marginalised stories of significant public interest, and succumbed to the very whims of exclusivity and sensationalism which foreground the Hackgate scandal.

Above all, it resulted in an ideological filter which side-lined stories pointing to domestic political corruption of an acutely serious and pervasive nature: the subversion of accountability institutions.

In particular, two cables highlighted apparent attempts by officials to mislead parliament over cluster bombs legislation and to undermine the on-going Iraq war inquiry, both with a view to suppressing sensitive aspects of transatlantic military cooperation.

These stories were distinct from the more headline-friendly controversies featuring charismatic personalities and easy-to-tell narratives…

Amidst the avalanche, certain cables did emerge during the sample period which pointed to serious political corruption in the UK, particularly as regards military co-operation with the US. Two stories stand out in this respect.

The first emerged on the third day of the cables and revealed that, according to the US ambassador in London, British officials had assured the US government that they had ‘put measures in place’ to protect US interests during the Iraq war inquiry.

The news value of this cable, both in terms of ‘new information’ and public interest weight was underlined by several journalists interviewed for this study.

According to Carl Dinnen, reporter for the Channel 4 news, ‘if somebody’s potentially saying that they’re capable of influencing an independent public inquiry into something as important as the Iraq war, that’s hugely significant’.

Television journalists were asked during interviews to rank selected stories based on their news value.

Seven out of the eight respondents ranked the above story as of equal or greater news value than the story regarding criticism of the UK war effort in Afghanistan by US and Afghan officials.

Five of the respondents considered it to be headline material warranting extended analysis and investigation.

This contrasts sharply with the content sample analysed in which criticism of the UK war effort attracted more airtime than any other story during the first five days of coverage, despite only emerging on the penultimate day of the sample period.

In stark contrast, the Iraq inquiry story was absent from all news reports and received only passing mention as a ‘news in brief’ piece on one edition within the sample.

This marginalisation was broadly reflective of The Guardian’s coverage which featured the story only as a relatively minor 300-word article on page 12.

The second story pointing to UK political corruption over military cooperation with the US emerged on day four of the coverage. It was based on a secret account of a meeting between British foreign office officials and their US counterparts in 2009.

In it, UK officials are said to have suggested that a planned loophole in forthcoming legislation banning cluster bombs should be kept from parliament.

Crucially, the loophole would allow US cluster bombs to be kept on British soil in the island territory of Diego Garcia…

The striking implication of this communiqué is that the the US and UK governments had effectively colluded in an attempt to mislead parliament and undermine a crucial piece of human rights legislation.

Once again however, the story was all but entirely absent from the television sample analysed, mentioned only briefly during a live two-way at 11pm on the BBC‘s second channel.

The topic was introduced by the anchor not as a story pointing to corruption, but rather ‘confusion over what the former foreign secretary said about cluster bombs’.

Curiously, however, in this case marginalisation on television was not entirely reflective of The Guardian’s coverage which featured the story as a 900-word article on its front page.

The title also contrasted starkly from the anchor introduction onNewsnight: “SECRET DEAL LET AMERICANS SIDESTEP CLUSTER BOMB BAN: Officials concealed from parliament how US is allowed to bring weapons on to British soil in defiance of treaty.”

Nevertheless, the edition as a whole was dominated by reports about Russian state corruption which dwarfed the cluster bombs story in both billing and word count.

We are left with a picture of the British ‘serious’ news sector, consisting of the paper that brokered Cablegate and the core of public service television, as seemingly more concerned with diplomatic gossip and corruption in foreign governments than that within the British state.

For all the resources and publicity that the mainstream media brought to bear on the cable releases, information arguably of the most acute British public interest remained confined to the side lines…

The latest in a series of stunning Channel 4 documentaries about war crimes in Sri Lanka (here’s the first part from last year):

This speaks for itself (via the Guardian):

Politicians and journalists have had an unhealthily close relationship to one another, according to Chris Blackhurst, editor of The Independent

He told a Bath literature festival audience that MPs and reporters formed “a giant club” at Westminster.

Successive governments had courted newspaper proprietors, said Blackhurst, and told of his time at the Daily Express where he was deputy editor to Rosie Boycott.

They were appointed by Lord Hollick, a Labour peer, and the paper was moved away from its traditional Conservative support.

Blackhurst said: “We were trying to turn the paper into a more liberal and upmarket paper but management lost its nerve. They sold the paper toRichard Desmond…

“Within a fortnight, the heavy bulk of the Labour cabinet was fawning over Desmond. We were really shocked by it.”

…

Two other panellists, Labour MP Tristram Hunt and Lib-Dem MP Don Foster, also referred to the political-media nexus.

Hunt said a “symbiotic relationship between the press and politics” had always existed.

But Foster said the relationship between Westminster and the media should be regulated. “Politicians are trying to manipulate the media and the media is trying to sell papers… It’s got to change.”

…

A fourth panelist, the former Guardian staffer Malcolm Dean, pointed out that those “newspapers with the lowest level of trust have the highest circulation and papers with the highest level of trust have the lowest circulation”.

The world’s largest security company, privately run for profit, wants to run even more of our lives. Open Democracy explains:

A violent burglary. The scenes of crime officer who visits your house is employed by G4S. Fibre samples are found, swabs taken and despatched to G4S Forensics. A suspect is held in police cells run by G4S, appears before magistrates trained by the company. At Crown Court the accused is found guilty, sentenced, driven to a G4S prison in a G4S van. On probation he attends a G4S work programme wearing a G4S electronic tag.

This is not some dystopian future. All this and more is happening in Britain today. I have only brought together in one story a small sample of the domestic activities of G4S, the world’s largest security company. 

And the story is turning darker. Last week the Guardian broke news that West Midlands and Surrey police have invited bids from G4S and others to take over delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police. According to the Guardian [7]:

“The breathtaking list of policing activities up for grabs includes investigating crimes, detaining suspects, developing cases, responding to and investigating incidents, supporting victims and witnesses, managing high-risk individuals, patrolling neighbourhoods, managing intelligence, managing engagement with the public, as well as more traditional back-office functions, such as managing forensics, providing legal services, managing the vehicle fleet, finance and human resources.”

A West Midlands police authority spokesman told the Guardian:

“Combining with the business sector is aimed at totally transforming the way the force currently does business – improving the service provided to the public.”

It’s the largest police privatisation contract so far, with a potential value of £1.5 billion over seven years, rising to a possible £3.5 billion depending on how many other English forces get involved.

Our criminal justice system already provides a highly profitable supply chain to corporate interests. G4S, one of government’s favourite companies (slogan “Securing Your World”) is moving ever closer towards cartel control of every step of the process. Here are some details from the big picture.

Late last year, Lincolnshire Police handed control of all police “services” to G4S [8] for perhaps 25 years, the first ten years alone valued at £200 million.

So, G4S runs Lincolnshire’s police cells and police control rooms (with only two police officers supervising), its crime management bureau, ticket office, collisions units, criminal justice units, firearms licensing, the hiring and firing of police officers, and police computers as well as fleets of police cars, police procurement and police finances.

This past January, Scotland’s SNP government introduced a bill to create a single Scottish police force [9] to “save £1.7 billion”.

Is it the intention of the SNP government and Scottish police leaders to make the financial savings by privatising the entire Single Scottish police force?

John Shaw, managing director of G4S Police Support Services, has already held secret talks with leaders of two Scottish police forces [10]. In February last year the SNP Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill shared a platform with John Shaw at the Policing Scotland summit [11]. In March G4S was handed a contract to transport [12] every prisoner in Scotland for the next seven years.

As more and more police “services” are being fast-tracked for outsourcing, the combination of contracts awarded piecemeal, with no Monopolies Commission oversight, is resulting in G4S grabbing contracts and policing power across the country.

The British Guardian is a paper with a fine reporting record albeit with blind spots incorporated (including Wikileaks and war).

They’ve just released a startling new ad that aims to showcase its “open journalism” style:

Back in 1996, this is how the newspaper last promoted itself: