I’ll be off-line for the next few days and so there won’t be regular news updates until late Friday. But in the meantime I have scheduled a lot of interesting feature articles which will appear here over this period. — PW
News updates
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Journalists must hold power to account — not serve as puppets of the elite
George Monbiot writes:
Is Murdoch now finished in the UK? As the pursuit of Gordon Brown by the Sunday Times and the Sun blows the hacking scandal into new corners of the old man’s empire, this story begins to feel like the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. The naked attempt to destroy Brown by any means, including hacking the medical files of his sick baby son, means that there is no obvious limit to the story’s ramifications.
Daniel Pudles 1207 Illustration by Daniel PudlesThe scandal radically changes public perceptions of how politics works, the danger corporate power presents to democracy, and the extent to which it has compromised and corrupted the Metropolitan police, who have now been dragged in so deep they are beginning to look like Murdoch’s private army. It has electrified a dozy parliament and subjected the least accountable and most corrupt profession in Britain – journalism – to belated public scrutiny.
The cracks are appearing in the most unexpected places. Look at the remarkable admission by the rightwing columnist Janet Daley in this week’s Sunday Telegraph. “British political journalism is basically a club to which politicians and journalists both belong,” she wrote. “It is this familiarity, this intimacy, this set of shared assumptions … which is the real corruptor of political life. The self-limiting spectrum of what can and cannot be said … the self-reinforcing cowardice which takes for granted that certain vested interests are too powerful to be worth confronting. All of these things are constant dangers in the political life of any democracy.”
Most national journalists are embedded, immersed in the society, beliefs and culture of the people they are meant to hold to account. They are fascinated by power struggles among the elite but have little interest in the conflict between the elite and those they dominate. They celebrate those with agency and ignore those without.
The end of the world
Why Rupert Murdoch love$ God: world’s biggest sleaze mogul also getting rich from Christian moralizers
Frank Schaeffer writes:
Here’s what you might not know about Rupert Murdoch: he’s one of the leading religion publishers in the world.
Maybe one day soon Murdoch will go to jail as might his son, as will several of their UK editors if many alleged and disgusting and illegal acts of pirate “journalism” are proved true, ranging from bribing the police to hacking the phones of bereaved family members of killed service men and women and child murder victims. Make no mistake: when it comes to the Murdoch media “empire” we’re talking about the lowest form of “journalism” as detailed by the Guardian newspaper.
So are religious moralizers and others writing about religious and/or “moral” themes prepared to enrich the Murdoch “ media juggernaut” forever while Rupert Murdoch further corrupts UK, American and Australian politics while his companies trade in human misery for profit by hacking murder victim’s phones, paying off the police, elevating smut to a national sport and even hacking the phones of killed soldiers’ families?
You bet!
Rupert Murdoch is one of America’s number one publishers of evangelical and other religious books, including the 33-million seller Purpose Driven Life by mega pastor and anti-gay activist Rick Warren. Murdoch is also publisher of “progressive” Rob Bell’s Love Wins.
Rick Warren, Rob Bell and company helped Murdoch fund his tabloid-topless-women-on-page-3 empire, phone hacking of murdered teens and Fox News’ spreading “birther” and “death panel” lies about the president. They helped Murdoch by enriching him. And these weren’t unknown authors just lucky to get published anywhere, they could have picked anybody to sell their books.
4 ways the Murdoch scandal points to rot at the top
Adele M. Stan writes:
It started with a phone-hacking scandal at a British tabloid, but the scandal now engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire encompasses several of his newspapers, including the once-venerable U.K. paper, the Sunday Times, and points to malfeasance by Murdoch’s top lieutenant, Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International who is now based in New York in his current role as CEO of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. News International is the News Corp division that comprises all of Murdoch’s British papers.
Although yesterday’s revelations are rich in new details, those details simply reinforce a narrative that has long defined the company ethos of News Corp, an ethos we describe in four points:
- The targeting of Rupert Murdoch’s political enemies
- Lying to public officials in official investigations
- Buying the silence of troublesome employees
- Lack of full disclosure of conflicts of interest
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports:
Thousands of online protestors used Facebook and Twitter to urge others not to buy The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times or even to watch Sky.
One Facebook group called ‘Boycott News International’, which boasts nearly 8,000 members, insisted its members should to refuse to buy the company’s newspaper titles.
It added that cancelling subscriptions to Sky would also send a clear message to the troubled 80-year-old chairman.
Meanwhile, a similar twitter campaign registered the domain name boycottmurdoch.com yesterday, with the intention of creating a site to bring “anti-Murdoch campaigners together for effective action.”
Its home page claimed the media mogul’s companies “propagate a false image of the world, exaggerate news stories, and spin an agenda which fits Murdoch’s business interests.”
Israel’s boycott ban is down to siege mentality
Carlo Strenger writes:
The flood of anti-democratic laws that were proposed, and partially implemented, by the current Knesset, elected in February 2009, constitute one of the darkest chapters in Israeli history. The opening salvo was provided by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party with its Nakba law, that forbids the public commemoration of the expulsion of approximately 750000 Palestinians during the 1948 war.
Since then, a growing number of attempts were made to curtail freedom of expression and to make life for human rights groups more difficult. The latest instance is the boycott law that was passed on Monday by the Knesset, even though its legal advisor believes it to be a problematic infringement on freedom of speech. This law makes any call for boycotting Israel economically, culturally or academically a civil offence that can be punished with a fine. Any public body making such a call will lose its legal status and will no longer be eligible for tax-deductible contributions.
The law, as Knesset member Nitzan Horowitz from the leftist Meretz party said, is outrageous, shameful and an embarrassment to Israel’s democracy.
Despite the outrage, I will try to analyse the question: what stands behind this frenzy of attempts to shut down criticism? The answer, I believe, is simpler than many assume: it is fear, stupidity and confusion.
‘Please continue to be with us’ –a Palestinian’s letter to int’l supporters
Mondoweiss has a letter from a Palestinian woman to the supporters of Palestine:
I would like to talk to you as the voice of the thousands of Palestinians who appreciate what you are doing. You who have a great commitment to human rights and who actually act upon your beliefs, you risk your life to both witness and tell the truth of what you see. You are a group of people who understand what is happening in the holy land and have decided to dedicate your time, money and energy to the issue. You demonstrate that religion nor race is important when it comes to standing up for the rights of human beings. And every step you take justice and humanity wins.
I want you to trust that your actions are making a difference and changing the violence we see here in our land. Your solidarity is helping fuel our nonviolent fight. Palestinians face many kinds of violence and torture. However, being ignored is the worst punishment of all. Those who refuse to hear and see us are just as bad as those who occupy us. Those who stand in solidarity with us send a strong message of humanity and are helping us to overcome our suffering. In the middle of all this crisis, your help puts a smile on our face. From this smile you will always be welcome in our hearts even if you are unable to enter our land.
Your solidarity reminds the world that we are all one human family and that we Palestinians are still part of it. Please do not give up. Even if your boats do not make it to the shores of Gaza or if your planes refuse to fly, the unseen effects are still huge.
I want to say thank you for all that your work involves. Thank you for booking your tickets, taking time off from work, leaving your loved ones, and for all of the other small things, I am truly grateful.
Please continue to be with us, hand in hand, in our non-violent struggle. We need to reach the end of the path of occupation and your presence on this journey is crucial, we cannot make it alone.
I hope one day to share a coffee with you in my home or in yours, for when this day comes we will have reached our freedom.
Does the US getting into a fight with Syria help the Syrian opposition or the regime?
Joshua Landis writes:
“Bashar al-Assad is not indispensable and the United States has no interest in his regime staying in power,” US Secretary of State Hillary stated on Monday after Syrian crowds pelted the Damascus Embassy with stones, calling Ambassador Ford a “dog.”
While Clinton turned up the rhetorical head a notch, President Assad must taken satisfaction in the dust up with the great conspirator. From the outset of the uprising four months ago, the Syrian regime has been accusing Washington of orchestrating its troubles. According to reports from Syria, the pro-regime public has been galvanized by Ambassador Fords actions in Hama. They see it a proof that the US is acting as the puppeteer and takes an active role in the uprising. His trip to Hama to demonstrate US support for the demonstrations was the sort of provocation, Damascus authorities had been waiting for. Now it is a US-Syrian confrontation. World news programs have ramped up their coverage that had been flagging. I cannot tell you how many calls I received today compared to the last week of comparative quiet.
What is unclear is whether the Syrian opposition will gain from this controversy. Will the increased international news coverage and augmented US role in this Syrian drama prove to be a boon for the opposition? Will it make up for any damage the opposition suffers from local accusations that it is but a spearhead of a vast imperialist-Zionist conspiracy?
Certainly, Ford’s credibility is restored in Washington. Even Republicans will have to laud him as a local hero. Only yesterday they branded him an Assad propaganda tool. The State Department will also look good. But are these antics helping the Syrian opposition or Assad?
Karzai’s brother killed by guard in Kandahar home
The Washington Post reports:
The half-brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai was assassinated by one of his security guards inside his house in Kandahar on Tuesday morning, a political killing that will reverberate widely through the country and could destabilize a key region in the U.S. military’s campaign against the Taliban, according to witnesses and Afghan officials.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of Kandahar’s provincial council who was widely considered the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan, had been meeting with tribal elders and politicians in his heavily fortified home in downtown Kandahar city when a security guard walked into his meeting room and requested a private discussion, according to two people at the house at the time. Karzai and the guard left for another room, and shortly afterwards three gunshots rang out.
CIA organised fake vaccination drive to get Osama bin Laden’s family DNA
The Guardian reports:
The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family, a Guardian investigation has found.
As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents.
The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for co-operating with American intelligence agents.
Relations between Washington and Islamabad, already severely strained by the Bin Laden operation, have deteriorated considerably since then. The doctor’s arrest has exacerbated these tensions. The US is understood to be concerned for the doctor’s safety, and is thought to have intervened on his behalf.
The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound last summer. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.
Israel passes law banning free speech
Haaretz reports:
The Knesset passed Monday a law penalizing persons or organizations that boycott Israel or the settlements, by a vote of 47 to 38.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not present during the vote. MK Zeev Elkin (Likud), who proposed the law, said the law is not meant to silence people, but “to protect the citizens of Israel.”
According to the law, a person or an organization calling for the boycott of Israel, including the settlements, can be sued by the boycott’s targets without having to prove that they sustained damage. The court will then decide how much compensation is to be paid. The second part of the law says a person or a company that declare a boycott of Israel or the settlements will not be able to bid in government tenders.
MK Nitzan Horowitz from Meretz blasted the law, calling it outrageous and shameful. “We are dealing with a legislation that is an embarrassment to Israeli democracy and makes people around the world wonder if there is actually a democracy here,” he said. Ilan Gilon, another Meretz MK, said the law would further delegitimize Israel.
Kadima opposition party spokesman said the Netanyahu government is damaging Israel. “Netanyahu has crossed a red line of political foolishness today and national irresponsibility, knowing the meaning of the law and it’s severity, while giving in to the extreme right that is taking over the Likkud.”
Israel expels 39 pro-Palestinian activists over weekend, holds 81 more in jail
A standoff between Israel and dozens of detained European pro-Palestinian activists continued Monday, with some of them refusing to be put on return flights.
More than 81 were still being held in an Israeli jail early Monday, three days after being refused entry on landing at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport.
“Some of them refuse to be returned while with others, it is only a matter of finding a vacant seat on a flight,” said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. “The only delay is a vacancy on a free flight,” he added.
Some 39 had been expelled by Monday, including 10 Germans who landed in Frankfurt late Sunday. Among the expelled was an 82-year-old German, who complained that despite his advanced age, he was kept on a transportation vehicle for hours, then brought to Beer Sheva prison with the other activists. He said he had only told Israeli security at Ben-Gurion that he wished to “visit friends in Israel and Palestine.” Palmor said he had no information of the specific case, which outraged many.
The spokesman said Israel had denied entry to anyone who was on a list published by the Welcome to Palestine campaign, as soon as the coalition of Palestinian groups announced the activists would participate in unauthorized protests against the Israeli occupation.
While Murdoch’s papers targeted former PM Gordon Brown, Tony Blair tried to protect Murdoch
The Guardian reports:
Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account, his legal file as well as his family’s medical records.
There is also evidence that a private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him.
That investigator also targeted another Labour MP who was the subject of hostile inquiries by the News of the World, but it has not confirmed whether News International was specifically involved in trawling police computers for information on Brown.
Separately, Brown’s tax paperwork was taken from his accountant’s office apparently by hacking into the firm’s computer. This was passed to another newspaper.
Brown was targeted during a period of more than 10 years, both as chancellor of the exchequer and as prime minister. Some of the activity clearly was illegal.
The Mail on Sunday reported:
Tony Blair urged Gordon Brown to persuade the Labour MP who led the campaign to expose News of the World phone-hacking to back off, friends of Mr Brown said last night.
Well-placed sources said Mr Blair, who has close links with the paper’s owner Rupert Murdoch, wanted Mr Brown to get his ally Tom Watson to lay off the News International (NI) title, but Mr Brown refused.
Mr Watson’s two-year crusade played a major part in Mr Murdoch’s shock decision to close the paper after today’s edition.
UK govt. official: Murdoch made Cameron eat a ‘shit sandwich’ which turned into a three-course dinner
The Independent reports:
For more than 30 years now there have been two truths about Rupert Murdoch’s increasingly infrequent visitations to the British outpost of his media empire.
The first: anyone who is anyone in the world of politics and business angles for (and is delighted by) any kind of audience with the great man.
The second is the chill his visit engenders amongst his senior editors and executives in Wapping [News International’s London headquarters].
Yesterday as Mr Murdoch’s corporate Boeing 737 jet, complete with a boardroom and double bed, touched down at Luton Airport, it was clear how much has changed in the last week. The chill in Wapping is still there – worse than ever – but the audiences for Mr Murdoch have dried up.
He and his company – feted by David Cameron and Ed Miliband just two weeks ago at the News International Summer Party – have become a political liability. To paraphrase the famous quote: “It was News of the World wot lost it”. Yesterday Downing Street made it very clear that Mr Cameron would be neither meeting nor speaking to Mr Murdoch on this visit.
Privately Government sources are blunter. They are incandescent at the political damage done by the phone-hacking scandal and angry that News Corp has not voluntarily suspended its attempted takeover of BSkyB in the wake of the allegations.
They feel they are getting unfairly blamed for not stopping the takeover and the impression is growing that they are still in the pocket of the company. “We always knew we were going to have to eat a shit sandwich over the BSkyB deal,” said one. “We didn’t know it would turn into a three course dinner.”
David Carr writes:
[H]ow did we find out that a British tabloid was hacking thousands of voice mails of private citizens? Not from the British government, with its wan, inconclusive investigations, but from other newspapers.
Think of it. There was Mr. Murdoch, tying on a napkin and ready to dine on the other 60 percent of BSkyB that he did not already have. But just as he was about to swallow yet another tasty morsel, the hands at his throat belonged to, yes, newspaper journalists.
Newspapers, it turns out, are still powerful things, and not just in the way that Mr. Murdoch has historically deployed them.
The Guardian stayed on the phone-hacking story like a dog on a meat bone, acting very much in the British tradition of a crusading press, and goosing the story back to life after years of dormancy. Other papers, including The New York Times, reported executive and police complicity that gave the lie to the company’s “few bad apples” explanation. As recently as last week, Vanity Fair broke stories about police complicity.
Mr. Murdoch, ever the populist, prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect.
His corporation may be able to pick governments, but holding them accountable is also in the realm of newspaper journalism, an earnest concept of public service that has rarely been of much interest to him.
The coverage last week, on a suddenly fast-moving story that had been moving only in increments, destabilized the ledge that the News Corporation had been standing on. James Murdoch regretted everything and took responsibility for almost nothing. What looked like an opportunity for him to prove his mettle as a manager of crisis might yet engulf him.
Andy Coulson, the former editor of News of the World who became the chief spokesman for Mr. Cameron, has been arrested. And Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International and previous editor of The News of the World, responded by saying that it was “inconceivable” that she knew of the hacking.
I’d suggest it was inconceivable she did not know, given the number of hacking targets. What editor doesn’t know where her stories come from, especially stories chock full of highly private, delicious conversations. Did Ms. Brooks think they were borne in through the window by magic fairies?
‘If there wasn’t a Glenn Beck, Israel would have had to invent one’
Ami Kaufman reports on Glenn Beck’s visit to Israel’s Knesset today:
Outside the Negev hall, the atmosphere was like before a rock concert, complete with the pushing and shoving. Most attendees were religious, all the way from knitted kippas to haredim. After we sat down, it was only a few minutes wait till the star came in. Almost immediately the whole room stood up, including the Members of Knesset, and gave the man a standing ovation.
This was only the beginning of the biggest love-fest I’ve ever seen. At times, I was squirming in my chair. Considering how Beck has been accused of anti-semitism, the amount of love was particularly odd. Just recently, pundit Dana Milbank of the Washington Post listed a few of Beck’s feats in this field:
…hosting a guest on his show who describes as “accurate” the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; likening Reform rabbis to “radicalized Islam”; calling Holocaust survivor George Soros a “puppet master,” a bloodsucker and a Nazi collaborator; touting the work of a Nazi sympathizer who referred to Eisenhower as “Ike the Kike”; and claiming the Jews killed Jesus.
But I guess it takes one to know one, which is why I wasn’t surprised to see Baruch Marzel (the notorious Kahanist and in my humble opinion of of the most dangerous people this country has seen) taking a seat to hear Beck’s sermon.
MK Danny Danon (Likud), the committe chairman, warned the audience not to clap in the Knesset. Yet to no avail. Dannon went on to introduce Beck as “a friend of Israel. If there wasn’t a Glenn Beck, Israel would have had to invent one.”
The first thing Beck did was apologize for not wearing a tie. He proceeded to tell some kind of story about clothes and meeting a vice premier here, where Danon cut in and said: “Which vice? We have many vices,” which is where I said under my breath: ‘You got that right, Danny boy! Many vices indeed!”
American Jewish atheist refused entry to Israel on suspicion of converting to Islam
Amira Hass reports:
With regard to a young American Jew named Harald Fuller-Bennett, the Taglit-Birthright project to some extent achieved its goal. The project brings young Jews from around the world for a trip in Israel “in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people,” to quote its own words. And indeed, about two years after coming on a Taglit-Birthright tour, Fuller-Bennett intended to visit Israel again.
But this time, the people working to diminish the distance between him and Israel were two Tel Aviv lawyers, Omer Shatz and Iftach Cohen, and Jerusalem District Court Judge Yoram Noam. Together, they overturned a bizarre attempt by the Shin Bet security service to accuse him of having connections with terrorists and intending to convert to Islam – for which reasons it barred him from entering Israel for 10 years.
Fuller-Bennett is now 30 years old. On his Taglit-Birthright tour in January 2008, he said, “I gained a lot of sympathy for Israelis and for the multitude of challenges they face (and the many mistakes the government is currently making in facing them ). We had a number of engaging Israeli military members on our bus. I am still Facebook friends with some of them. My conversations with them taught me much about the complexity of modern Israel, and the difficulty of being born into a state with a siege mentality.”
Fuller-Bennett joined a group within the Taglit program called “Peace, Pluralism and Social Justice.” He is not certain that this subgroup of Taglit is still active, but the fact of its existence shows the organizers recognized that there are young Jews whose interest in Israel has not eliminated their capacity for criticism. “We had questions about Israel but wanted to see for ourselves,” Fuller-Bennett said.
But it was not his participation in Taglit’s “most lefty, peacenik” group, as Fuller-Bennett defines it, that made the Shin Bet decide this employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture was dangerous.
That happened on May 2, 2010, when he and his girlfriend (now his fiancee ) landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport for a week-long visit to Israel. This would have been his third visit to the country. But to their astonishment, after his passport was stamped for entry, he was taken aside, interrogated and put on a plane back to the United States. The fresh stamp was crossed out with two diagonal lines and the additional stamp: “Denied Entry.”
The great generational threat
Glenn Greenwald writes:
In just the past two months alone (all subsequent to the killing of Osama bin Laden), the U.S. Government has taken the following steps in the name of battling the Terrorist menace: extended the Patriot Act by four years without a single reform; begun a new CIA drone attack campaign in Yemen; launched drone attacks in Somalia; slaughtered more civilians in Pakistan; attempted to assassinate U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki far from any battlefield and without a whiff of due process; invoked secrecy doctrines to conceal legal memos setting forth its views of its own domestic warrantless surveillance powers; announced a “withdrawal”plan for Afghanistan that entails double the number of troops in that country as were there when Obama was inaugurated; and invoked a very expansive view of its detention powers under the 2001 AUMF by detaining an alleged member of al-Shabab on a floating prison, without charges, Miranda warnings, or access to a lawyer. That’s all independent of a whole slew of drastically expanded surveillance powers seized over the past two years in the name of the same threat.
Behold the mammoth, life-altering, nation-threatening danger justifying this endless — and ongoing — erosion of safeguards, checks and liberties, from The Los Angeles Times (h/t Antony Loewenstein):
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that the United States is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” Al Qaeda as a terrorist threat, but that doing so would require killing or capturing the group’s 10 to 20 remaining leaders.
Heading to Afghanistan for the first time since taking office earlier this month, Panetta said that intelligence uncovered in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May showed that 10 years of U.S. operations against Al Qaeda had left it with fewer than two dozen key operatives, most of whom are in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa.
In one sense, it’s commendable that Panetta is acknowledging this, though he’s doing so to protect the President from political attacks in the wake of his announced withdrawal of 30,000 troops from Afghanistan. But in another, more important sense, Panetta knows that this disclosure won’t even slightly impede the always-expanding National Security State and the War on Terror which justifies it — just like the acknowledgment long ago that there were fewer than 100 Al Qaeda operatives in all of Afghanistan had no effect on our decade-long war there. That’s because — as the above-described events of the last eight weeks demonstrate — civil liberties assaults and expansions of executive power are not what the U.S. Government does in response to some actual problem; it’s what the public-private consortium composing the U.S. Government is. Terrorist villains are the pretext for, not the cause of, those policies, and they will continue irrespective of the scope or magnitude of Terrorism.
Roger Waters on Israel’s pending anti-boycott law
(H/t Noam Sheizaf. More on the Knesset’s boycott bill here.)