Activists urge boycott of Jerusalem literature festivalElectronic Intifada - 9 Apr 2008rr r r r rr r rr r rr r rr rr rrr rThe first International Writers’ Festival is scheduled to take place 11-15 May 2008 in Jerusalem, just three days after Israel’s official celebrations of 60 years of independence. Substantially financed by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, this festival must necessarily be seen in the context of the Israeli government’s wider public relations campaign to bring international artistic, cultural and political figures to brighten the state’s image on the international stage.
In memory of Esther: Cinema DuniaElectronic Intifada - 9 Apr 2008rr r r r rr r rr r rr r rr rr rrr rWhen I think of cinema in Ramallah, I think of Esther Jallad. She and her family were expelled from their wealthy home in the port city of Jaffa in 1948 and found themselves in the hilly village of Ramallah. In her displacement, Esther carried one passion with her: she loved to go to the movies. She lived conveniently, next to one of the three cinemas in Ramallah, Cinema Dunia. Raja Shehadeh remembers a woman whose life imitated art, and a lost Palestinian past.
Petraeus: the view from IranCampaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 9 Apr 2008Summary: While the big international TV networks focused on Petraeus and how he thought things were getting better, the concern here in Iran was that both the general and the diplomat said the US would stay in Iraq long after the UN mandate expires. That and something called “AQI” which we didn’t immediately understand before a presenter explained that it stood for al-Qaida in Iraq. Given that the US has paid off the Sunni insurgency to become the spooky “Awakening Council”, it’s not easy to see who now comprises AQI. source: Guardianread more
The Roving Eye: Evil Iran, the new al-QaedaCampaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 9 Apr 2008Summary: The war on Iraq ended five years ago today. No: the war on Iraq actually started five years ago today. For those who still live under the spell of a Bush “we create our own reality” administration, the Lieberman-Graham piece is soothing. For McCain supporters, it’s confirmation of the road map ahead – The Hundred Year War plus “bomb, bomb, Iran”. As for the majority of the American public, which has had enough of an endless war that has torn the country apart, it’s nothing but an insult to their collective intelligence. source: Asia Times Onlineread more
American Comintern: Six decades of covert operations in BritainUKWatch.net - 9 Apr 2008Is the Cold War the best guide to how Britain should deal with Islam? That is what Charles Moore (pictured) suggested in a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies last month: Think of the long debate about how best to deal with trade union militancy and with its relationship to Communist infiltration during the Cold War. It was not, in fact, the Conservatives who first tried to tackle this. It began as a conflict within the Labour movement in which a few brave souls, like Frank Chapple of the Electricians, would not bow to the extremist tactics. As Moore admits, ‘the analogies between British trade unions and an ancient world religion are inexact, to put it mildly.’ Nevertheless, the anti-communist paradigm is becoming increasingly influential as a template for dealing with Islamist extremism. Moore’s Policy Exchange colleague Dean Godson wrote in 2006: During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence. At the moment, the extremists largely have the field to themselves. As I have noted previously , the Information Research Department and Encounter were both covert operations, created as part of a wider effort known as the ‘Cultural Cold War.’ The CIA ran Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was secretly funded throughout the 1950s and early 1960s to carry out propaganda among European intellectuals. Some of those involved had carried out similar activities for Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s as agents of the Comintern. One former Comintern delegate was Jay Lovestone, the one-time head of the American Communist Party and disciple of Nikolai Bukharin. His Communist Party (Opposition) faction of the 1930s became over time an anti-communist network with close links to the US Government. Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown’s boss, [from] 1955 was run by James Jesus Angleton. Lovestone’s task was to infiltrate European trade unions, weed out dubious elements, and promote the rise of leaders acceptable to Washington. During this period, Lovestone supplied Angleton with voluminous reports on trade union affairs in Britain, compiled with the assistance of his contacts in the TUC and the Labour Party1. A key member of the Lovestoneite network in Britain was Dean Godson’s father, the US labour attach, Joseph Godson. He attempted to ‘weed out’ the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, while promoting the rival Labour Party faction led by Hugh Gaitskell. Gaitskell held a series of secret meetings at the Russell Hotel, where he planned the expulsion campaign with Sam Watson, the leader of the Durham miners. Also in attendance was the Labour Attach at the American Embassy in London, Joe Godson. One of the most important post-war events in the Labour Party’s internal affairs was overseen by an American spook2. The fullest description of Godson’s role is in Hugh Wilford’s ‘Calling the Tune?’, an admirably nuanced account which is often sympathetic to US labour diplomacy: His Lovestonite style – obsessively anti-communist, hectoring, conspiratorial – in time alienated even his closest allies. For example, Arthur Deakin, that most hardline of Labour anti-communists, entertained misgivings about his involvement in TUC affairs, while Gaitskell himself had similar concerns about his role in the Labour Party3. Joe Godson retained his interest in British affairs after moving to other diplomatic posts. He helped to found the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding, a little-known organisation that came to the attention of the Guardian in the mid-1980s because it was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which had become embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal. The committee is the labour section of the British Atlantic Committee, which lobbies for Nato among European trade unionists. It has no connection with the Labour Party but its members include figures from the Labour and trade union rightwing, including Lord Chapple, Mr Roy Mason, and Lord Stewart, former Labour foreign secretary. One of its American vice-presidents, Mr Lane Kirland, is on NED’s board of directors. Funding of the committee, founded in 1976 by a former US embassy labour attache, Mr Joseph Godson, remained a secret until 1980, when the British government said that Nato had given 32,000 over the previous four years. Mr Godson told the Guardian that he understood the money had come from the American Youth Council. He had complained to the endowment fund for its inaccuracy, but ‘I don’t object to anything which funds a good cause4.’ Among those implicated in the Iran-Contra affair was Joe Godson’s elder son. In 1981, Roy Godson was appointed by Elliot Abrams to head the International Youth Year Commission, which came under Congressional investigation in 19875. Although he escaped prosecution, an independent counsel?s report concluded that he had helped Oliver North channel funding to the Contras through the Heritage Foundation.
Roy Godson went onto become a leading figure in the academic study of intelligence, with a particular expertise in propaganda, disinformation, covert action and counterintelligence . As head of the National Strategy Information Center, he presided over the development of a distinctive neo-con philosophy of intelligence: Two longtime advocates of the type of flexible intelligence operation put in motion by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith are Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, senior associates at the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) in the 1990s. The NSIC along with a half-dozen other think-tanks and committees produced reports in the mid-1990s that recommended intelligence reforms. As it turns out, the NSIC’s recommendations had the most influence in shaping the intelligence practices of the George W Bush administration. In a 1998 essay Shulsky and Schmitt linked this emerging theory of intelligence to the philosophy of Leo Strauss . Shulsky in particular would have the opportunity to put that theory into practice as head of the Pentagon?s Office of Special Plans prior to the Iraq War. Journalist Robert Dreyfuss captured a snapshot of the situation in the run-up to the conflict in December 2002: Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq, according to former CIA officials. Key officials of the Department of Defense are also producing their own unverified intelligence reports to justify war. Much of the questionable information comes from Iraqi exiles long regarded with suspicion by CIA professionals. A parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation, in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, collects the information from the exiles and scours other raw intelligence for useful tidbits to make the case for preemptive war. These morsels sometimes go directly to the president. ?Informed sources say the person in charge of the unnamed unit is Abram Shulsky, another key member of the Perle-Wolfowitz war party,? Dreyfuss noted. ?Roy Godson, the head of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and a colleague of Shulsky’s for many years, has high hopes for the success of the Pentagon’s Iraq intelligence unit, despite its small size when arrayed against the CIA’s might. ?It might turn out to be a David against Goliath,? says Godson6.” At the same time, Feith?s office was devising plans to revive covert operations in Europe, with a new focus on Islam. In December 2002, The New York Times reported that “the Defense Department is considering issuing a secret directive to the American military to conduct covert operations aimed at influencing public opinion and policy makers in friendly and neutral countries.” Such a program, for example, could include efforts to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that have become breeding grounds for Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism across the Middle East, Asia and Europe. It might even include setting up schools with secret American financing to teach a moderate Islamic position laced with sympathetic depictions of how the religion is practiced in America, officials said. Not everyone in the Pentagon was happy about these proposals: Some are troubled by suggestions that the military might pay journalists to write stories favorable to American policies or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of American policies. Implementing this strategy would have required changes to the Pentagon directive governing information operations, allowing ‘adversarial decision-making’ to be targeted, rather than the more restrictive ‘adversary decision-making.’ Former US Army Colonel Sam Gardiner has claimed that a 2003 London conference was briefed about a change on exactly these lines by Captain Gerald Mauer, the Pentagon’s Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations. Gardiner has compiled a list of misleading news stories which he believes resulted from such information operations. A notable inclusion is the April 2003 series of stories claiming that George Galloway had received payoffs from Saddam Hussein. One of the papers which ran the story was the Daily Telegraph, then under Charles Moore?s editorship. The Telegraph was ultimately ordered to pay Galloway 150,000 in damages as a result. After leaving the Telegraph, Moore would go on to chair Policy Exchange, the think-tank which the BBC accused of fabricating evidence about British mosques. In advocating a return to cold war covert operations, Moore and Godson do nothing to allay the fear that such episodes are the results of methods that owe more to the world of intelligence than the ethos of journalism or scholarship. Notes: 1. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders, Granta Books 2000, pp329-30. 2. Smear! Wilson & the Secret State, by Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, Fourth Estate Limited 1991, p14. 3. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War, Calling the Tune? By Hugh Wilford, Frank Cass Publishers 2003, p180. 4. Britons get cash from US ‘slush fund’ / British organisations receiving money from US sources to ‘promote democracy’, The Guardian, 9 December 1985. 5. House probes link between Contras and youth commission, by Pat O?Brien, United Press International, 23 March 1987. 6. The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA; Devising bad intelligence to promote bad policy, by Robert Dreyfuss, The American Prospect, 16 December 2002.
Justice Department Increasingly Avoiding Corporate ProsecutionsDemocracy Now - 9 Apr 2008The Justice Department has put off prosecuting more than fifty companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years. The decline in prosecutions is seen as a deliberate and dramatic shift in policy. While the news reported in a front-page article in the New York Times surprised many, the Justice Department’s use of so called “deferred prosecution agreements” is nothing new. Back in 2005, a report released by the Corporate Crime Reporter profiled dozens of these cases and warned against their use. We speak with Russell Mokhiber, editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.
China’s Great Leap: Human Rights Watch on the Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights ChallengesDemocracy Now - 9 Apr 2008Thousands of protesters turned out in San Francisco to protest the Olympic torch relay and this year’s Beijing Games. Similar protests condemning China”s human rights abuses have attempted to disrupt the torch along its earlier stops in Athens, Istanbul, Paris, and London. We speak with Human RIghts Watch’s Minky Worden, who is editor of a new book, “China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges.”
Headlines for April 10, 2008Democracy Now - 9 Apr 2008Report: Top Admin Officials Approved Assault, Waterboarding of CIA Prisoners, 4 Killed in U.S. Attack on Sadr City, Baghdad Under Curfew on 5th Anniversary of U.S. Seizure, Iraqi Judiciary Calls for Release of Bilal Hussein from U.S. Military Jail, Dems Seek Delay of Colombia Trade Pact, Fighting Renews in Gaza, Jimmy Carter to Meet Exiled Hamas Leader, Haiti Food Protests Enter 2nd Week, IMF: U.S. Mortgage Crisis Worse Shock Since Great Depression, Clinton, Wal-Mart Founder Trade Praise in 1991 Video, Lawmakers Urge Probe of Alleged Cover-up on Halloween Photos
Days of Action for Squats and Autonomous SpacesIndymedia UK - 9 Apr 2008Following a meeting in the autonomous space ‘Les Tanneries’ in Dijon last year, there was a call out for two days of decentralised actions in defence of free spaces and for an anti-capitalist popular culture. The aim of the days of action, Friday 11th and Saturday 12th April, is to develop interconnections and solidarity between squats and autonomous spaces and help create more visibility for them as a european/global political movement.Public actions are planned all over europe and beyond – in the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Serbia, Sweden, Prague and as far away as New Zealand. In Copenhagen things have already kicked off with an advance action in support of creating a new Ungdomshuset ‘Youth House’ took place with 5000 people taking part in a demo followed by a massive street party.In the UK, new squats have already been opened – one in Leeds City Centre, Nottingham, and London. In Reading the Common Ground Squatted Community Garden will be re-opened, and a privatised area of the Town Centre will be reclaimed for a free cafe; Manchester is up for space invading with a demonstration and street party; Nottingham has two days of food, workshops, films, discussion, zines, free jumble stalls and partying; London has art exhibitions, squatters estate agency, skill sharing and more along with a benefit gig for the Advisory Service For Squatters.Throughout the weekend there will be independent media coverage of actions, video and radio reports from around Europe.Links, UK: Birmingham | London | Leeds | Reading | Manchester | NottinghamOther links: April2008 website | wiki
