"CYOA" military provokes press freedom crisis in "Middle East's only democracy"

The Israeli right and its American apologists often refer to the country as the Middle East's only democracy as a sort of inoculation against the slightest suggestion that the actions of Jewish state's government are in any way less than perfect.

(e.g.: It's okay for Israel to commit war crimes or crimes against humanity because it's "the only democracy in the Middle East," just as it's okay for the US to do the same because it's the self-proclaimed "leader of the free world.")

Like the US, Israel is often caricatured as a monolithic state where everyone subscribes to the prevailing militaristic orthodoxy. However in both countries, the reality is much more nuanced. While they don't scream hysterically non-stop like the settlers and others on the far right, there is a not-insignificant percentage of civilized Israelis that support a rational, sensible path toward peace that acknowledges Palestinians as humans, a path that, unlike militarism, might actually have a chance to work.

This group of civilized Israelis is trying to do something controversial: hold the country's security establishment accountable. The establishment has responded by provoking a freedom of the press crisis in "the Middle East's only democracy."

Alternet has a remarkable story on the scandal.

Anat Kam is a 23-year-old Israeli journalist who allegedly procured confidential documents while she worked in an Israeli Army general’s office during her mandatory military service. The documents revealed that in 2007, Israeli Army forces assassinated a Palestinian Islamic Jihad member in direct contravention of a Supreme Court order that banned the killing of wanted militants if there was a reasonable chance to arrest them first. Two top Israeli military officials, former Central Command Chief Major General Yair Naveh, Operations Directorate Head Major General Tal Russo, and Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, who directed the assault on Gaza in 2008 and 09, are said to have been incriminated in the documents.

Kam allegedly photocopied the documents and passed them along to the security reporter for Haaretz, one of Israel's leading daily newspapers, which published an article based on them.

This aroused the ire of the Israeli military, which since 1988 has demanded that journalists submit all "material relevant to the security of the state" to the military censor for review, and which compels all journalists seeking an official Israeli press card (GPO card) to sign on to the censorship policy. By all accounts, Blau submitted his article for review to the censor and was cleared for publication.

Kam was detained and placed under house arrest last year, though news of this only started coming out in the last few weeks. She is now on trial for treason and espionage and faces up to 14 years in prison.

Meanwhile, the journalist who published the article is hiding in London. He is terrified to return to Israel. His hard-hitting reports on Israeli Army abuses in the occupied West Bank have made him the bane of the military establishment. "At least ten journalists inside Israel have told me [Blau] is the real target," a reporter working in Israel and Palestine told me. "And everyone is saying they’re simply prosecuting Kam to make an example out of her."

The Israeli Shin Bet security service secured a gag order on the media from an apparent rubber stamp judge who had spent almost her entire career in military courts. The order, issued in January, forbade journalists and bloggers in Israel not only from reporting on the details of Kam’s prosecution, but from even acknowledging that she had been detained. A reporter I spoke to was publishing stories on the scandal under an anonymous byline. The New York Times has done the same, meaning even Ethan Bronner might be afraid of the Shin Bet.

The gag order was so secret that even the Speaker of the Knesset was reportedly not allowed to see it.

Perhaps this is the "Middle East's only democracy"'s own ironic way to mark the 40th anniversary of the US Pentagon Papers.


Note: Please see the Alternet story, which links to a number of other relevant places.

Safety claims of hydraulic fracking called into question

Many people in southern New York are concerned about a new natural gas drilling project in the Marcellus Shale which involves the controversial procedure known as hydraulic fracking. It's controversial because critics claim that it threatens the drinking water supply. The NYS Department of Environmental Conservation claims that very few problems are associated with fracking but a good investigative piece in the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin seriously calls those claims into question.

MLS website disaster

For a league run almost entirely by PR hacks, it's little surprise that Major League Soccer tries to spin and control information more tightly than the Kremlin. In that context, the recent launch of its new website was a PR catastrophe for a league hoping to capitalize on a World Cup year. The Fake Sigi blog has a revealing analysis of the clusterf**k. Perhaps the most revealing thing of all is that despite the length of the piece, there were still screwups he left out.

Fools to the left of me, jokers to the right

Facing a gargantuan $9 billion deficit and a budget due today, legislative misleaders have decided to send their members on a week-and-a-half vacation.

Senate Democratic boss John Sampson pooh-poohed critics with the same excuse legislative misleaders proffer every year: better to have a good, late budget than a bad, on-time budget. I guess it never occurred to these April Fools that it's their JOB to give us a budget that's both responsible AND on-time.

I nearly snorted soda out of my nose laughing at Sampson's excuse. The budget's always late but when was the last time the legislature gave us a good budget? If we'd actually been given these mythical "good, but late" budgets in the past, we wouldn't be in quite the fiscal mess we're in now.

By being the latest misleader to pose the false choice between a responsible budget and an on-time budget, Sen. Sampson and his colleagues don't seem to be aware of the responsibilities of the job, so let me enlighten him.

Maybe if the legislature had focused more on making tough budgetary decisions in the last few months, rather than micromanaging restaurant chefs' use of that dangerous toxin table salt, April Fools like Sampson wouldn't have to continually offer us the false choice between a responsible budget and on-time one. Real leaders would be capable of doing both.

But since Sen. Sampson is so blase about deadlines, perhaps he and the rest of NYS government won't mind if I wait until April 20 or May 10 or whenever the legislature gets around to doing its job and pass a budget before I send in my tax return.

It seems a cruel irony that New York's budget is due on April Fools' Day. Year after year, the joke's on us.

Che, Lumumba and... Foday Sankoh?

This essay is part of an occasional feature on this blog that presents compelling stories from elsewhere in the world, particularly Africa, that are little reported in the American media. It's part of my campaign to get people to realize there is a lot going on in the world outside the US, IsraelStine and the Trumped Up Enemy of the Month. A list of all pieces in this series can be found found here..

I was in the library last night and noticed in the new arrivals section DVD entitled The Empire in Africa (I won't link to it because I don't want to encourage any one to spend a dime enriching the pockets of its makers). My curiosity piqued, I took a look and was nauseated to discover it was an apologia mythologizing the Revolutionary United Front. The RUF were the Sierra Leonian rebels who became infamous for the forced conscription of children, for the drugging of those child soldiers and for chopping off the hands and arms of women and children.

This was not the invention of some international propaganda campaign, as the 'documentary' implies. I lived in Guinea at the height of the Sierra Leonian civil war and met numerous refugees who fled the RUF's savagery, including a few who had lost limbs.

The Sierra Leonian government and military were filled at the time with brutal and thieving scumbags, no doubt. But no one's dared make an apologia to them. Whatever anti-corporate ideology the RUF might allegedly have had when it formed in the early 90s quickly evaporated. It became nothing more than an unimaginably savage organized crime gang that used ANY means necessary to line the pockets of its leaders.

The documentarian who made this offensive trash owes an apology to all the people killed, maimed and displaced by his sainted RUF.

Clean campaign financing in Maine

The Boston Globe has a good piece on Maine has tried to implement a sane system for financing electoral campaigns, one driven by human beings.

The GlobalFoundries black hole wants to suck even more taxpayer money

Matt over a Farenell Photography noticed that GlobalFoundries (formerly AMD) is seeking even more taxpayer money for its Luther Forest project in Malta, NY. This sum is in addition to the $1.2 BILLION in corporate welfare the conglomerate has already been handed over.

Tellingly, a GlobalFoundries spokesman would not say precisely how much money the company is seeking from the state, how large the expansion could be or how many jobs may be created if the expansion occurs

Meanwhile, schools, parks and hospitals are facing dramatic cuts in state aid, some even mooting closure, while schools and municipalities are looking at hikes to the state's already sky high property taxes.

As Sarah Palin (who I never thought would say anything worth repeating in public) might say: "Not just no, HELL NO."

Take advantage of this extra special offer before it expires... two years ago!

In past entries, I've talked about the newspaper industry's tendency toward self-cannibalization. I'm starting to get a full understand of the depth of its plight.

One example is that falling revenues has pushed papers to shed copy editors. That decreased oversight leads to a lower quality product which hurts revenue even further. But it can hurt revenue in other ways.

I bought a copy of The Post-Star at the news stand this morning, for one of the last times before its imminent 100 percent price rise.

In it, I found a card offering home delivery of the daily.

I could get the paper delivered 7 days a week for a mere $2.00 a week.

But if that was too expensive, I could get it delivered on only the weekends for significantly less price of... umm... $2.00 a week.

But I had to hurry to take advantage of this extraspecialsuperfantasticallyawesome offer.

It expires June 30, 2008.