Uncommon Thought Journal

In the US, triple-digit losses on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were recouped in the final hour, resulting in small gains for the Dow and the other major indexes in volatile trading, following a sharp selloff on Thursday.

The Dow ended the day with a 10-point gain, following a 268-point plunge on Thursday. The index, which was below the 10,000 mark for most of the day, has lost 6.5 percent over the past two weeks.

All of the major European indexes closed down, with France's CAC-40 falling the most--3.4 percent, its biggest one-day drop since November 26. The Pan-European Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index was off 2.2 percent, its lowest close since November 3.

Japan's Nikkei fell 2.89 percent and the Shanghai Composite was off by 1.87 percent.

Stocks were down for the second day in Greece, Portugal and Spain, three heavily indebted eurozone countries whose ability to redeem bondholders--including major European and US banks--is increasingly in doubt. Prices of government bonds of all three countries continued to fall and interest rates rose further, as global investors increased pressure on the three governments to impose draconian austerity measures on their respective populations.

The cost of credit default swap (CDS) contracts on the debt of the three countries rose even more dramatically. Credit default swaps--now a multi-trillion-dollar market--are a form of unregulated derivatives in which CDS sellers guarantee the value of bonds held by CDS buyers. Rising CDS prices reflect eroding confidence in corporate or government bonds insured by the sellers of the CDS contracts.

The CDS market is a hotbed of speculation, since investors, including banks and hedge funds, can bet on the price of CDS contracts without holding the underlying bonds. The threat of sovereign default, most immediately by Greece, but also by Portugal and Spain, has provided an opportunity for speculators to drive up the price of insuring the countries' bonds by speculating on the likelihood of a default, thereby further undermining confidence in the countries' debt and increasing the prospects of such an outcome.

All three countries have pledged to impose sweeping cuts in public-sector jobs and wages and in social benefits, along with new consumption taxes, in line with demands from the European Union that they sharply reduce their budget deficits, currently 10 percent or more of their respective gross domestic products.

Greek President George Papandreou of the social-democratic PASOK party, who was elected last year on the basis of promises to reverse the right-wing policies of the preceding conservative government, this week announced plans for an across-the-board freeze on public sector wages along with a cut in allowances, which amounts to a wage cut of 4 percent. He also called for a pension "reform," which entails raising the retirement age, as well as higher fuel taxes.

The social-democratic Portuguese and Spanish governments have pledged to impose similar austerity measures.

Signs of mounting resistance by the working class in these countries are playing an enormous role in the tremors rippling through the global financial markets. There is a growing sense in governments and board rooms around the world that a major confrontation with the working class is coming, with potentially revolutionary implications.

The banks and the media are demanding that heads of state and parliaments demonstrate the "political will" and "political consensus" necessary to impose historic attacks on the working class. These phrases are euphemisms for a degree of ruthlessness that implies a readiness to employ state repression. However, the financial markets are at once skeptical over the willingness of political leaders to employ the required measures and anxious over the outcome of such a confrontation.

On Thursday, Greek workers launched the first in a series of strikes to protest the government's austerity package. Customs and tax officials began a 48-hour strike that shut ports and border crossings throughout the country. Strikes by other public and private-sector workers have been called for next week.

Greek farmers have been blockading highways in protest against government austerity proposals.

A major cause of the global stock selloff that began Thursday was the announcement by the Greek unions of a one-day general strike set for February 24. The unions had initially indicated their willingness to assist the PASOK government in carrying out its austerity plans, but have been forced by pressure from the working class to call the strike actions.

Union leaders hope to use the partial labor mobilizations to defuse popular anger and channel it behind nationalist slogans, while they maneuver to work out a deal with the government acceptable to the banks and the European Union. However, there are fears within ruling circles that the unions may not be able to contain the anger of workers and young people, who are already facing mass unemployment and declining living standards.

Portuguese and Spanish unions are also threatening to call strikes and protests.

Among other factors that precipitated the stock selloff was the failure of the Portuguese government to find buyers for the full amount of a government bond offering on Wednesday, and the defeat of its austerity package at the hands of opposition parties in parliament.

The debt crisis of the weaker countries in the 16-nation eurozone, including Ireland and Italy in addition to Greece, Portugal and Spain, is raising questions about the viability of the euro itself. There is increasing public speculation that the 11-year-old currency could collapse under the pressure of the economic and financial crisis.

In recent weeks, the euro has fallen precipitously against the US dollar and the yen. On Friday, it fell to $1.3620. It has declined 9 percent against the dollar since December.

This does not reflect any inherent strength of the US currency. On the contrary, looming above the debt crisis in Europe is the far greater crisis of the world's biggest debtor--the United States. It is no accident that the European crisis has erupted in the aftermath of last week's budget announcement by President Obama. The US budget plan revealed that the current deficit is $1.6 trillion, equivalent to 10.6 percent of the country's' gross domestic product, a record high since the end of World War II.

This approaches Greece's deficit ratio of 12.7 percent of GDP, is higher than that of Spain and twice the eurozone average. The US budget, moreover, projects trillion-dollar deficits for years to come.

As in every other industrialized country, the American state responded to the financial crash of 2008 by taking on the debts of its banks and essentially bankrupting its treasury in order to preserve the wealth of its financial elite. The Obama administration, no less than the governments of Europe, is demanding that the cost be borne by the general population in the form of sweeping cuts in basic social programs and a reduction in consumption--i.e., a permanent and dramatic decline in working class living standards.

Unlike in previous international financial crises, such as the Asian debt crisis of the 1990s, the United States cannot play the role of lender of last resort. The United States has irretrievably lost its previous position as the dominant world economic power, and its decline is reflected in growing challenges to the role of the dollar as the world reserve and trading currency.

At last month's World Economic Forum in Davos, French President Nicolas Sarkozy in his keynote speech said he would use his upcoming presidency of the Group of 20 nations to push for a new international monetary system in which the dollar would no longer be the primary reserve currency. And on Wednesday, Moody's Investors Service warned that the United States faces the loss of its triple-A sovereign credit rating unless Obama moves to slash the federal deficit by carrying out more draconian spending cuts than he has thus far announced.

It is the erosion of US economic power and solvency that lends to the sovereign debt crises in Greece, Portugal and other European countries such an explosive and universal character.

The recent rise in the dollar is the result of a "flight to safety" by investors who fear a collapse in world asset bubbles and consider US Treasury bonds, along with German government debt, to be a temporary haven. In important respects, the short-term reversal in the dollar's decline is an expression of a deepening of the crisis on world financial markets.

As a number of economists warned last year, the US policy of flooding financial markets with cheap credit on the basis of near-zero interest rates and the electronic equivalent of printing a trillion dollars--designed to prop up the major US banks and enable them to record bumper profits despite double-digit unemployment--fueled a huge wave of speculation on risky assets such as stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. These economists predicted that a major rise in the value of the dollar would pull the rug out from under this speculation, which was based on the assumption of a continued decline in the dollar, and force a rapid and destabilizing selloff of inflated assets.

It now appears that this collapse in asset bubbles has begun.

The author also recommends: Speculative recovery sows seeds of an even greater economic crash
[10 November 2009]

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Waging a decades-long psychological war against the American people, corporatist thugs embedded within the National Security State assure us that secrecy, deceit and imperial adventures that steal other peoples' resources are the one true path to national prosperity and universal happiness.

But what happens when those charged with protecting us from attack, actually aid and abet those who would kill us, and then handsomely profit from our slaughter in the process?

During a January 27 hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Under Secretary of State for Management, Patrick F. Kennedy, testified that the visa of accused bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, wasn't revoked at the specific request of secret state agencies.

Kennedy, a Bushist State Department holdover, was the former Director on National Intelligence for Management and headed the transition team that set up the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2005 under former Ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, a veteran of U.S. covert operations since the Vietnam war.

Given the avalanche of media interest, fueled by Fox News and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, whether or not the suspect should have been read his Miranda rights, the only coverage of the hearings that reported Kennedy's explosive testimony, was a brief article in the Detroit News.

Claiming that "revocation action would've disclosed what they were doing," Kennedy said that allowing the alleged terrorist to keep his visa would have "helped" federal investigators take down the entire network "rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort."

A "soldier" (indicted criminal) who would have murdered 300 air passengers if the detonator concealed in his underpants hadn't serendipitously failed to explode the device.

As Alex Lantier wrote February 3 on the World Socialist Web Site, the latest in a series of significant revelations "has been buried by the media." The socialist critic avers: "As of this writing, nearly a week after the hearing, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have published no articles on the subject. Nor have the broadcast or cable media reported on it."

Lantier charges that "despite--or perhaps more accurately, because of--the fact that this information exposes the official government story of the near-disaster to be a lie" the corporate media is fully complicit in the cover-up.

Weeks after the incident, it is now clear that intelligence agencies did far more than simply "watch" a potential terrorist. That they gave Abdulmutallab a leg up, bypassing airline security systems put in place after 9/11 that would have prevented him from boarding that plane, is also crystal clear.

The question is: was a reckless calculation made that gambled the lives of 300 air passengers for ruthless political purposes? If so, was it designed to destabilize the Obama government, thereby binding it ever-closer to a permanent, unelected, security apparatus that feathers its nest by serving the only constituency that matters--giant energy firms, defense-related corporations and those who finance them?

Is this scenario being played out in Washington where Republican right-wingers like Senators Susan Collins (ME), Tom Coburn (OK), John McCain (AZ), John Ensign (NV) and Lindsey Graham (SC), but also neocon Democrats such as Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), demand that the accused be turned over to the military for "special handling," thereby ratcheting-up pressure for increased domestic repression?

Just as pertinently, is this what White House insider Richard Wolffe meant when he said on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann January 4 that the "president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda." (emphasis added)

For weeks now, the Obama administration and the media have played the same broken record: despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a multitude of security agencies, ranging from the CIA, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a satrapy of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, "failed to connect the dots."

But as I have documented in previous reports, most recently on January 22, citing multiple domestic and foreign intelligence warnings, including a walk-in interview at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, by the suspect's own father, a former top official in the Nigerian government, consular officials and CIA officers passed the warning up the food chain--where it sat.

Abdulmutallab on the CIA and NCTC's Radar

The revelation that various agencies of America's shadow government made a deliberate decision that allowed Abdulmutallab to board Flight 253 is more extensive than previously disclosed.

Newsweek revealed February 2 that "a single intelligence community database operated by the CIA, known by the code name 'Hercules'," held all the "'bits and pieces' of intelligence that White House officials believe could have led U.S. authorities to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before last December 25."

However, even though the agencies had assembled information on the suspect in a single computer system where it was readily accessible to analysts, anonymous "intelligence officials" told journalist Mark Hosenball that "all source" analysts at CIA and NCTC "which both had access to 'Hercules,' were unable to assemble the intelligence scraps in time to prevent Abdulmutallab from boarding his Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underpants."

The unnamed officials told Hosenball that the failure to stop the suspect "validates assertions by White House and congressional investigators that the alleged lapses in the handling of intelligence related to Abdulmutallab did not stem from a failure of sometimes turf-conscious spy agencies to share information with each other."

"Instead," Newsweek reports, "they point to the intelligence analysis carried out by the CIA and NCTC."

As I previously reported, citing a January 18 investigation by The New York Times, the National Security Agency "learned from a communications intercept" that a man named "'Umar Farouk'--the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab--had volunteered for a coming operation." Additional NSA intercepts in December "mentioned the date of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were 'looking for ways to get somebody out' or 'for ways to move people to the West,' one senior administration official said."

Running for cover, an intelligence official told Newsweek: "The volume of any database doesn't matter much. That, by itself, doesn't get you anywhere." An interesting spin, when one considers the multibillion dollar expansion by NSA, as investigative journalist James Bamford reported last November.

The official continues, "Nor does the mere fact that the NCTC and the CIA have shared access to material. The key is knowing what to look for, how to bring together different bits and scraps of information that--on the surface and in an ocean of data--don't appear to be connected." Conversely, knowing which "bits and scraps" to ignore from a parapolitical perspective, may have played an equally critical role in a presumed analytical "lapse."

"This is hard stuff," the anonymous source pontificates. "It's not a case of punching in a couple of search terms, sitting back, and waiting for enlightenment. Once you know the answer, it seems easy. But in real life, you don't get the answer ahead of time."

Really?

To the contrary, as with the September 11, 2001 hijack team, the Flight 253 affair seems to indicate that the decision to allow Abdulmutallab to board the plane was a political, not a law enforcement decision that led analysts not to "connect" more than a few of the "dots."

As we now know, prior to 9/11, the Pentagon's Able Danger unit had amassed terabytes of data on al-Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States. According to published reports, the unit had obtained detailed information on ringleader, the drug-addled Mohammed Atta, and other members of the suicide squad. Yet just scant months before the atrocity, the unit was shuttered and the data destroyed.

Corporate media and the 9/11 Commission have advanced two contradictory propositions on Able Danger's demise: the Pentagon unit hadn't gathered intelligence on Atta and claims to contrary were overblown or they illegally obtained information on ordinary Americans and were shut down for inadvertent spying.

However as researcher Paul Thompson revealed in The Terror Timeline, Able Danger had identified Americans, only they were the wrong Americans. According to Thompson, the unit pegged "future National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and other prominent Americans as potential security risks" over their illicit dealings with foreign governments.

How's that for an inconvenient truth!

As with earlier warnings of impending terrorist strikes, political efficacy trumped the safety and security of the American people. This is underscored by January 20 testimony by NCTC Director, Bushist embed Michael E. Leiter, before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

CongressDaily revealed that Leiter told the senators, "I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another."

Journalist Chris Strohm disclosed that intelligence officials "acknowledged the government knowingly allows foreigners whose names are on terrorist watch lists to enter the country in order to track their movement and activities," a fact now confirmed by Patrick F. Kennedy's January 27 testimony before the House Committee.

Similar to the Detroit News report on Kennedy's admission, to date, not a single media outlet picked-up the trail and investigated CongressDaily's chilling disclosure.

Burying the Evidence, "Moving On"

Corporate media are chock-a-block with reports of efforts by right-wing Republicans and some Democrats to brand the Obama administration as "soft on terrorism."

As readers are well aware, Antifascist Calling doesn't carry water for the Obama administration; a government that has rightly been characterized as a slick makeover of the previous regime. However it must be acknowledged, unlike Bushist torture freaks, in Abdulmutallab's case constitutional norms were followed and a criminal suspect lawfully charged for an egregious act.

In "new normal" America however, not disappearing a suspect into a gulag, subject to tender ministrations by "enhanced interrogation" specialists (torturers) is viewed as a bad thing in our debased political culture.

Meanwhile media stenographers scrupulously ignore, with a single-mindedness one has come to expect from totalitarian regimes, considerable evidence that elements of the intelligence-security apparatus could be charged as accessories before and after the fact with Abdulmutallab's alleged offense.

In his prepared statement to the House Committee, Kennedy asserted that "following his father's November 19 visit to the Embassy, we sent a cable to the Washington intelligence and law enforcement community through proper channels (the Visas Viper system) that 'Information at post suggests [that Farouk] may be involved in Yemeni-based extremists.' At the same time, the Consular Section entered Abdulmutallab into the Consular Lookout and Support System database known as CLASS."

When it was discovered that officials in Abuja had misspelled the suspect's name "information about previous visas issued to him and the fact that he currently held a valid U.S. visa was not included in the cable."

Despite the misspelling however, "the CLASS entry resulted in a lookout using the correct spelling that was shared automatically with the primary lookout system used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and accessible to other agencies."

In other words, even though the initial Embassy cable misspelled Abdulmutallab's name, the "lookout" notification sent out to intelligence agencies, specifically DHS, should have warranted further action. And it also appears that initially it did.

As both the Los Angeles Times and CongressDaily reported, Customs and Border Protection agents obtained the suspect's name from the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment or TIDE database, maintained by the NCTC and planned to question Abdulmutallab when Flight 253 landed in Detroit on arrival from Amsterdam.

However, as CongressDaily subsequently revealed, CBP agents "had information about alleged terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab three days before his departure" and not during the flight as the Los Angeles Times report initially suggested.

As we now know, information fed to NCTC's database contained specific warnings from the State Department--as did the CIA's "Hercules" system as Newsweek reported, and "that White House officials believe could have led U.S. authorities to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before last December 25," according to the newsmagazine's anonymous sources.

Why did the State Department fail to revoke the accused terrorist's visa?

When questioned by Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS), Kennedy told the panel, "We will revoke the visa of any individual who is a threat to the United States, but we do take one preliminary step."

Kennedy explained, "We ask our law enforcement and intelligence community partners, 'Do you have eyes on this person and do you want us to let this person proceed under your surveillance so that you may potentially break a larger plot?'"

The Undersecretary added: "And one of the members [of the intelligence community]--and we'd be glad to give you that [information] ... in private [closed session]--said, 'Please, do not revoke this visa. We have eyes on this person. We are following this person who has the visa for the purpose of trying to roll up an entire network, not just stop one person.'"

In other words, despite multiple sourced reports from American and overseas security agencies that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was planning to launch an attack, probably on Christmas Day, deploying an asset identified by NSA intercepts as a "Nigerian" named "Umar Farouk," high-level intelligence officials, claiming to have "eyes" on the alleged AQAP operative, a suspected suicide bomber to boot, allowed him to board an airliner packed with nearly 300 passengers and crew.

In a prepared statement to the Committee, NCTC Director Leiter said, "Let's start with this clear assertion: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should not have stepped on that plane. The counterterrorism system failed and we told the President we are determined to do better."

However, neither House Committee members, nor the corporate media which suppressed the story entirely, challenged Leiter's statement of a week earlier when he testified before a Senate panel that intelligence agencies allow watch listed terrorists to enter the country "because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another."

If Leiter's testimony was taken under oath, he should be brought up on charges of perjury since he next asserted that "Intelligence Community analysts who were working hard on immediate threats to Americans in Yemen did not understand the fragments of intelligence on what turned out later to be Mr. Abdulmutallab, so they did not push him onto the terrorist watchlist."

This claim, as with practically all the "facts" released to the American people by the White House, Congress or by the secret state agencies themselves, is a rank mendacity.

As Newsweek's unnamed sources claim, CIA and NCTC analysts did have access to an "intelligence community database," "Hercules," and that it held all the available data on Abdulmutallab and "validates assertions by the White House and congressional investigators" that the failure to stop the bomber were not due to bungled efforts "to connect the dots."

As I reported last month, during a December 22 meeting at the White House, President Obama was briefed by top officials from the CIA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security "who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them," as The New York Times disclosed January 18.

Last month, Newsweek reported that "intelligence analysts had 'highlighted' an evolving 'strategic threat'," and that "'some of the improvised explosive device tactics AQAP might use against U.S. interests were highlighted' in other 'finished intelligence products'."

"Finished intelligence products" on an evolving plot to destroy an airliner are hardly "fragments," as Leiter deceitfully testified to the House Committee. Cheekily, NCTC's head honcho falsely claimed that his agency, the recipient of billions of dollars in taxpayer largesse, "did not correlate the specific information that would have been required to help keep Abdulmutallab off that Northwest Airlines flight."

Citing the need to "improve" intelligence capabilities by accelerating "information technology enhancements, to include knowledge discovery, database integration, cross-database searches, and the ability to correlate biographic information with terrorism-related intelligence," Leiter implies that billions more in handouts to security contractors are needed to "solve" the problem.

This from the Director of an agency that under his watch wasted more than $500 million on its flawed Railhead project to "upgrade" the TIDE database, an initiative "crippled by technical failures and contractor mismanagement," as the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and congressional investigators revealed back in 2008.

Contractor hanky-panky aside, the problem is not one of technical "upgrades" to an agency that seems more concerned with facilitating the entrance of terrorists into the country "for some reason or another" than stopping them.

Rather, it is imperative that the American people demand that Congress and the Executive Branch, which in theory, controls the gaggle of alphabet-soup satrapies in cahoots with the most rotten and predatory sectors of the U.S. ruling class, clean house and bring to book, the rightist elements aligned with the petroleum-intelligence nexus who continue to deploy terror gangs such as al-Qaeda as strategic assets.

That they do so regardless of the cost, to the American people and to the victims of illegal U.S. wars and occupations, is a sign that the system, verging on bankruptcy will soon veer even further out of any effective democratic control.

How else can one interpret Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair's chilling assertion to the Senate Committee on Intelligence that he was "highly certain" that al-Qaeda "or one of its affiliates" will attempt a large-scale attack on American soil within the next six months," as The New York Times reported.

"We judge that al Qaeda maintains its intent to attack the homeland, preferably with a large-scale operation that would cause mass casualties, harm the U.S. economy or both," Blair wrote in his annual threat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

As investigative journalist Russ Baker wrote in his essential book, Family of Secrets, "Authoritarianism thrives in a climate of fear, and the [Bush] administration invoked fear continually. But when it came to security, there was the usual exemption for large corporate entities [and] the tattoo of terror was relentless, especially during the political high season."

Not much has changed since Barack Obama became president. Many of the same dodgy players who ramped-up production lines at the fear factory for the Bush/Cheney team are still in place, doing what they do best: hitting the corporate "sweet spot" for their clients in the Military-Industrial-Security-Complex.

In the weeks since the attempted destruction of Flight 253, one thing is certain: the White House, Congress, the intelligence agencies and their handmaidens, the corporate media, are participating in a massive cover-up.

And as we enter the "political high season," what might come next is anyone's guess.


Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press , Uncommon Thought Journal, CJO's Avenger212, and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.
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Deciphering the available clues regarding the nature of Israel's immediate military objectives is not always easy, but it is possible. One indicator that could serve as a foundation for any serious prediction of Israel's actions is Israel's historical tendency to seek a perpetual state of war. Peace, real peace, has never been a long-term policy.

"Unlike many others, I consider that peace is not a goal in itself but only a means to guarantee our existence," claimed Yossi Peled, a former army general and current Cabinet Minister in Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government.

Israeli official policy - military or otherwise - is governed by the same Zionist diktats that long preceded the establishment of the state of Israel. If anything has changed since early Zionists outlined their vision, it was the interpretation of those directives. The substance has remained intact.

For example, Zionist visionary, Vladimir Jabotinsky stated in 1923 that Zionist "colonization can...continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall which the native population cannot break through." He was not then referring to an actual wall. While his vision took on various manifestations throughout the years, in 2002 it was translated into a real wall aimed at prejudicing any just solution with the Palestinians. Now, most unfortunately, Egypt has also started building its own steel wall along its border with the war-devastated and impoverished Gaza Strip.

One thing we all know by now is that Israel is a highly militarized country. Its definition of 'existence' can only be ensured by its uncontested military dominance at all fronts, thus the devastating link between Palestine and Lebanon. This link makes any analysis of Israel's military intents in Gaza, that excludes Lebanon - and in fact, Syria - seriously lacking.

Consider, for example, the unprecedented Israeli crackdown on the Second Palestinian Uprising which started in September 2000. How is that linked to Lebanon? Israel had been freshly defeated by the Lebanese resistance, led by Hizbullah, and was forced to end its occupation of most of South Lebanon in May 2000. Israel wanted to send an unmistakable message to Palestinians that this defeat was in fact not a defeat at all, and that any attempt at duplicating the Lebanese resistance model in Palestine would be ruthlessly suppressed. Israel's exaggeration in the use of its highly sophisticated military to stifle a largely popular revolution was extremely costly to Palestinians in terms of human toll.

Israel's 34-day war on Lebanon in July 2006 was an Israeli attempt at destroying Arab resistance, and restoring its metaphorical iron wall. It backfired, resulting in a real - not figurative - Israeli defeat. Israel, then, did what it does best. It used its superior air force, destroyed much of Lebanon's civilian infrastructure and killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The resistance, with humble means, killed more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers during combat.

Not only had Hizbullah penetrated the Israeli iron wall, it had also filled it with holes. It challenged, like never before, the Israeli army's notion of invincibility and illusion of security. Something went horribly wrong in Lebanon.

Since then, the Israeli army, intelligence, propagandists and politicians have been in constant preparation for another showdown. But before such pending battle, the nation needed to renew its faith in its army and government intelligence; thus the war in Gaza late December 2008.

As appalling as it was for Israeli families to gather en masse near the Israeli Gaza border, and watch giddily as Gaza and Gazans were blown to smithereens, the act was most rational. The victims of the war may have been Palestinians in Gaza, but the target audience was Israelis. The brutal and largely one-sided war united Israelis, including their self-proclaimed leftist parties in one rare moment of solidarity. Here was proof that the IDF still had enough strength to report military achievements.

Of course, Israel's military strategists knew well that their war crimes in Gaza were a clumsy attempt at regaining national confidence. The tightly lipped politicians and army generals wanted to give the impression that all was working according to plan. But the total media blackout, and the orchestrated footage of Israeli soldiers flashing military signs and waving flags on their way back to Israel were clear indications of an attempt to improve a problematic image.

Thus Yossi Peled's calculated comments on January 23: "In my estimation, understanding and knowledge it is almost clear to me that it is a matter of time before there is a military clash in the north." Further, he claimed that "We are heading toward a new confrontation, but I don't know when it will happen, just as we did not know when the second Lebanon war would erupt."

Peled is of course right. There will be a new confrontation. New strategies will be employed. Israel will raise the stakes, and will try to draw Syria in, and push for a regional war. A Lebanon that defines itself based on the terms of resistance - following the failure to politically co-opt Hizbullah - is utterly unacceptable from the Israeli viewpoint. That said, Peled might be creating a measured distraction from efforts aimed at igniting yet another war - against the besieged resistance in Gaza, or something entirely different. (Hamas' recent announcement that its senior military leader Mahmoud al- Mabhouh was killed late January in Dubai at the hands of Israeli intelligence is also an indication of the involved efforts of Israel that goes much further than specific boundaries.)

Will it be Gaza or Lebanon first? Israel is sending mixed messages, and deliberately so. Hamas, Hizbullah and their supporters understand well the Israeli tactic and must be preparing for the various possibilities. They know Israel cannot live without its iron walls, and are determined to prevent any more from being built at their expense.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story.

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Unnamed sources who spoke to Newsweek magazine said the Obama Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has concluded that John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who penned the infamous memos, used "poor judgment" but will not be subject to disciplinary action. Yoo and Bybee worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, along with Steven Bradbury, who is also named in the report.

The conclusions of the OPR report provide yet another demonstration of President Barack Obama's defense of the anti-democratic and criminal practices of the Bush administration in the "war on terror," and the current administration's resolve that no one--especially those at the highest levels of government--will be held to account.

An earlier version of the OPR report completed in December 2008 concluded that Yoo, presently a University of California at Berkeley law professor, and Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge on the 9th Circuit, violated professional standards when they drafted an August 2002 legal opinion authorizing brutal methods by the CIA in the interrogation of suspected terrorist detainees.

The OPR recommended referral of their cases to state bar associations, which could have revoked their law licenses. Bybee also could have faced an impeachment inquiry before Congress. However, under a new review of the OPR report ordered by Attorney General Eric Holder shortly after he took charge of the Justice Department, the two will not face even these weak sanctions.

In early 2009, the Obama Justice Department began to water down the conclusions of the OPR probe, which was initiated in mid-2004 during the Bush administration following disagreements between the Office of Legal Counsel and White House lawyers over the Bush administration's defense of "enhanced interrogation" techniques justified by the Yoo-Bybee opinions.

David Margolis, a 34-year career prosecutor at the Justice Department, was eventually tasked by Holder with reviewing the final version of the OPR report. It was reportedly Margolis who downgraded the report's initial findings against Yoo and Bybee from "professional misconduct" to "poor judgment."

As recently as December, Obama administration lawyers under the direction of Holder supported the dismissal of a case brought against Yoo by Jose Padilla, the US citizen held incommunicado and tortured for more than two years after his arrest at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

Earlier last year, Obama administration attorneys supported the dismissal of suits brought by a wide range of victims, including those subject to "extraordinary rendition," targets of government eavesdropping, and detainees transported from the Middle East to US military bases in Afghanistan.

The Justice Department's defense of Yoo and Bybee testifies to the Obama administration's continuation of the police-state structures developed under Bush. The memos drafted by Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury were solicited by the Bush White House to provide pseudo-legal justification for systematic torture that was already being carried out by CIA interrogators.

The memos made the gruesome and legally absurd argument that "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding, threats of death, sleep deprivation, extreme variations of temperature, and the use of psychotropic drugs do not rise to the level of torture unless they inflict pain equivalent to "major organ failure" or death.

Since authoring the memos, Yoo has gone on to write three books in which he defends his doctrine that the president as the "commander in chief" in wartime possesses unlimited powers, including the right to authorize torture and other illegal acts. In one of his August 2002 memos, he asserted that CIA agents accused of torturing Al Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in "self-defense" to prevent future terror attacks.

Newsweek notes that the OPR report is "sharply critical" of the "legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding"' and other torture methods used by CIA interrogators after September 11, and that it will provide "many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process."

This is, however, merely window dressing for a cover-up of war crimes and crimes against the democratic rights of the American people and tacit sanction for the continuation of such practices. Obama has frequently touted his "ban" on torture, but this remains an empty and cynical gesture under conditions where the government protects former government officials who authorized these crimes.

There are two major reasons why the Obama administration continues to block any prosecution of those responsible for authorizing torture. First, the Democratic Party is complicit in the crimes of the Bush administration. Democratic congressional leaders were briefed by Bush officials on the torture practices and violations of democratic rights and international law, and supported them.

Second, such policies continue under the current administration.

One year after assuming office, Obama has broken his pledge to close the Guantanamo detention camp and blocked suits by Guantanamo detainees challenging their detention. He has explicitly defended the Bush administration policies of indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, and military tribunals. The US military prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan continues to hold hundreds of prisoners, without charge or trial, under barbaric conditions.

Obama is going one step further than Bush by seeking to establish a military prison in Illinois where prisoners will be held indefinitely without charge or trial and subjected to treatment defined by international and US law as torture. He is thereby institutionalizing on US soil the illegal, police-state methods improvised by Bush.

Obama has moreover upheld the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, with Yemen becoming the latest target of US threats, along with Iran.

The administration's de facto support for John Yoo and his torture memo accomplices is of a piece with these policies, which are supported by both big business parties. Under conditions of expanding militarism abroad and deepening social inequality at home, there is no section of the political establishment committed to the defense of democratic rights.

Democratic rights can be defended only through the independent mobilization of the working class against the Obama administration, the Democrats and Republicans, and the capitalist system which is the source of war and repression.

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For years, AT&T, Verizon, MCI and others fed the Bureau phone records of journalists and citizens under the guise of America's endless, and highly profitable, "War on Terror."

Between 2002 and 2007, the FBI illegally collected more than 4,000 U.S. telephone records, citing bogus terrorism threats or simply by persuading telephone companies to hand over the records. Why? Because the FBI could and the telecoms were more than willing to help out a "friend"--and reap profits accrued by shredding the Constitution in the process.

So egregious had these practices become that "based on nothing more than e-mail messages or scribbled requests on Post-it notes, the phone employees turned over customer calling records" to the FBI, The New York Times reported.

And when questions about these dodgy practices were raised internally, top FBI managers "up to the assistant director level" approved CAU's blatantly illegal methodology and responded by "crafting a 'blanket' national security letter to authorize all past searches that had not been covered by open cases," The Washington Post disclosed.

"On some occasions" according to the Times, "the phone employees allowed the F.B.I. to upload call records to government databases. On others, they allowed agents to view records on their computer screens, a practice that became known as 'sneak peeks'."

"But in a surprise buried at the end of the 289-page report" Wired disclosed, "the inspector general also reveals that the Obama administration issued a secret rule almost two weeks ago saying it was legal for the FBI to have skirted federal privacy protections."

Investigative journalist Ryan Singel revealed that the "Obama administration retroactively legalized the entire fiasco through a secret ruling from the Office of Legal Counsel nearly two weeks ago."

"That's the same office" Singel writes, "from which John Yoo blessed President George W. Bush's torture techniques and warrantless wiretapping of Americans' communications that crossed the border."

While corporate media frame these stories as if they were practices of the far-distant Bushist past, former telephone technician and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, who leaked documents on the existence of secret NSA-controlled spy rooms embedded in AT&T switching offices across the country, believes otherwise.

Klein told Wired journalist David Kravets January 29, that the President's Surveillance Program (PSP) and internal AT&T documents suggest that the program "was just the tip of an eavesdropping iceberg."

According to Klein, these programs are not "targeted" against suspected terrorists but rather "show an untargeted, massive vacuum cleaner sweeping up millions of peoples' communications every second automatically."

Yet despite overwhelming evidence of lawbreaking by the secret state and their corporate partners, on January 21 U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker tossed out the EFF's lawsuit, Jewell v. NSA, filed on behalf of AT&T customers fighting the National Security Agency's illegal operations that target millions of citizens' phone calls, emails and web searches.

In a cowardly ruling that skirts the issue of Americans' privacy rights, Walker reaffirmed the unlimited power of the so-called "Unitary Executive," Bushist double-speak for a presidential dictatorship; a position embraced by current Oval Office resident, the discredited "change" President, Barack Obama.

In a further sign that the Executive Branch and secret state agencies are above the law, Walker ruled that harm done to U.S. citizens and legal residents under the PSP, was not a "particularized injury" but instead was a "generalized grievance" because almost everyone in the United States has a phone and Internet service.

Chillingly, Walker asserted that "a citizen may not gain standing by claiming a right to have the government follow the law." This pitiful summary judgement merely affirms the obvious: America is a lawless state where neither citizens nor "co-equal" branches of government, Congress and the Courts, can challenge the quintessentially political decisions made in secret by the Executive Branch.

Despite the fact that an audit by the Justice Department's own Office of the Inspector General found that the FBI and telecom grifters colluded together to violate federal wiretapping laws, to wit, the Electronic Communications Protection Act (ECPA) and continue to do so today, Walker's ruling means that Americans are left without an legal mechanism to redress the systematic destruction of their rights.

According to enforcement provisions of ECPA: "A court issuing an order under this section against a telecommunications carrier, a manufacturer of telecommunications transmission or switching equipment, or a provider of telecommunications support services may impose a civil penalty of up to $10,000 per day for each day in violation after the issuance of the order or after such future date as the court may specify."

It is all-too-clear that were these lawsuits to go forward and the telecoms lose, the giant phone companies and internet service providers, which the Justice Department was forced to admit in court papers are an "arm of the government ... when it comes to secret spying," as Wired reported in October, would potentially face astronomical fines.

Strip away Walker's mendacious reasoning and what we're left with is another in an endless series of moves by the capitalist state to defend the interests of their political masters: the corporate oligarchy and financial swindlers who resort to police state methods of rule to shore-up a crumbling empire.

EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston denounced the ruling and said, "The alarming upshot of the court's decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional."

Last June, Walker dismissed EFF's Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit that targeted illegal collaboration between AT&T and the NSA. In that case, the court ruled that the telecoms enjoyed retroactive immunity from liability when the Democratic-controlled Congress, and then-Senator and corporatist presidential candidate Barack Obama, voted in favor of the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA).

Antifascist Calling reported that the Obama administration argued that Jewell too, must be dismissed on similar grounds. Taking a page from the Bush/Cheney playbook, the government claimed that should Jewell go forward, it would require disclosure of "privileged state secrets."

As I wrote at the time, the claim of "sovereign immunity" and a "state secrets" privilege means that the government can never be held accountable for blatant illegalities under any federal statute. In other words, under such conditions the "rule of law" is a fraudulent exercise and gross criminality, when sanctioned at the highest levels of the state, becomes the norm as formerly democratic and republican forms of self-governance slip ineluctably towards the abyss of presidential dictatorship.

Following in the footsteps of his White House predecessor, the cynical nature of Obama's rhetoric is all the more remarkable, considering that the president announced last September amid great fanfare that his administration will "impose new limits on the government assertion of the state secrets privilege used to block lawsuits for national security reasons," according to The New York Times.

Despite administration posturing that it would be the most "open" in history, "more than 300 individuals and groups have sued the government to get records" in the year since Obama assumed office, The Washington Post reported January 27.

"In case after case" the Post disclosed, "plaintiffs say little has changed since the Bush administration years, when most began their quests for records. Agencies still often fight requests for disclosure, contending that national security and internal decision-making need to be protected."

Nowhere is this penchant for secrecy more pronounced then by the Obama administration's steadfast refusal to turn over the names of telecom lobbyists who bought-off their congressional allies in the run-up to the passage of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been litigating a Freedom of Information Act request against the government, demanding that the administration turn over the names of corporate lobbyists who had contacted Congress, the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on behalf of their telecom clients bid for retroactive immunity under the FAA.

According to EFF, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon lobbyists forked over bundles of cash, as the watchdog group MAPLight revealed in 2008, when they published a list of campaign contributions to congressional Democrats who changed their votes on FAA once the wheels had been sufficiently greased.

Despite claims of "openness" and "transparency," the administration is still fighting hard to conceal the names of these lobbyists from the American people. In December, EFF reported that the Justice Department "argued to the appeals court that 'there is no public interest in the compelled disclosure of the representatives' identities'."

Having pledged to the American people that his would be an administration based on the rule of law and public accountability, the Obama presidency has proven itself to be just as secretive and mendacious as the Bush/Cheney cabal that ruled the roost for eight long and bloody years.

Our "forward looking" president, and the ruling class elites who have presided over the destruction of our democracy demonstrate on a daily basis the accountability-averse culture that has been a staple of American political life for decades.

While the federal courts toss out suits by citizens demanding that their right to privacy not be sacrificed to corporate looters and their police state accomplices, the architects of torture and driftnet surveillance get a free pass.

Newsweek reported January 29, that a long-awaited report from the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) "clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the 'torture' memos of professional-misconduct allegations."

Leaving aside Newsweek's placement of quotation marks around the word "torture," a practice fully in keeping with the corporate media's consensus that such heinous practices have "kept us safe," Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman write that while the probe "is sharply critical" of the "legal reasoning" used to justify CIA and Pentagon crimes however, "a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding."

That earlier version had concluded that two of the key authors of Bushist torture and surveillance policies, Federal Appeals Court Judge Jay Bybee and University of California law professor John Yoo, "violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics."

"But the reviewer" Newsweek notes, "career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed 'poor judgment'."

By downgrading OPR's original finding, the Justice Department is no longer obligated to send a referral to state bar associations "for potential disciplinary action--which, in Bybee's case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry."

Despite the tortured reasoning of blind Obama loyalists, Dick Cheney's "Unitary Executive" is alive and well.

After all, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!


Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press , Uncommon Thought Journal, CJO's Avenger212, and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.
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In Tipu Sultan's lineage, a child by the name of Inayat Khan was born in the year 1882 in a noble Indian family. Inayat Khan's mother was a descendent from the immediate family of Tipu Sultan. He was introduced to the Suhrawardiyya, Qadiriyya and Naqshbandi orders of Sufism but his primary initiation was into the Nizamiyya sub-branch of the Chishti Order. He was also indebted to the philosophical Vedanta/Shankara spirituality of Hinduism.

With his mentor's encouragement Inayat Khan, later to be known as Hazrat Inayat Khan, left India in 1910 to come to the West, travelling first as a touring musician and then as a teacher of Sufism, visiting three continents. Eventually he married Ora Ray Baker from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was later known as Pirani Ameena Begum. Ora Baker was the half-sister of American yogi and scholar, Pierre Bernard, her guardian at the time she met Hazrat Inayat Khan.

Inayat Khan had four children with Pirani Ameena Begum-two sons and two daughters-with the eldest being Noor-un-Nisa. Noor-un-Nisa, later known as Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan, was born in the Kremlin in 1913 where her father was received as guest of the Czar Nicholas II. The Czar, his country troubled by internal unrest and looming war, was seeking spiritual solutions to the problems facing his regime. Therefore, the influential Gregory Rasputin invited Inayat Khan to visit Russia in order to share with the Emperor's family and court his Sufistic doctrines of peace and love.

In 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the Khan family left Russia for London and lived in Bloomsbury, while Noor attended kindergarten at Notting Hill. In 1920, they settled in France, moving into a house in Suresnes near Paris, a gift from a supporter of the Sufi movement. After the death of her father in 1927, Noor had to take additional responsibility for her grief-stricken mother and her younger siblings. The young girl, variously described as calm, timid, astute, and pensive, studied child psychology at the Sorbonne and music at Paris conservatory under the famous Nadia Boulanger, composing for harp and piano. She started a career of writing poetry and children's stories and became a regular contributor to children's magazines and French radio. In 1939 her book, Twenty Jataka Tales, inspired by the Jātaka tales of Buddhist tradition, was published in London.

After the outbreak of World War II, when France was overrun by the Wehrmacht in 1940, the family fled from Paris to Bordeaux and from there by sea to London, landing in Falmouth, Cornwall in June 1940. Although Noor Inayat Khan was deeply influenced by the pacifist teachings of her father, she and her brother Vilayat Inayat Khan decided to help defeat Nazi tyranny. (Vilayat Inayat Khan later became head of the Sufi Order International.) So on November 19, 1940 she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), and as an Aircraftwoman 2nd Class, she was sent to be trained as a wireless operator. Later she was recruited to join F (France) Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and in early February 1943 she was posted to the Air Ministry, Directorate of Air Intelligence. During her training she adopted the name Nora Baker.

Her fluency in French and her competency in wireless operation--coupled with a shortage of experienced agents--made her a desirable candidate for service in Nazi-occupied France. On the night between 16/17 June 1943, cryptonymed 'Madeleine' and under the cover identity of Jeanne-Marie Regnier, Noor Inayat Khan was dropped behind enemy lines in occupied France.

Together with two other women SOE agents, Noor joined the Physician network led by Francis Suttill, code named Prosper. Over the next month and a half, all the other Physician network radio operators were arrested by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). In spite of the danger, Noor rejected an offer to return to Britain and continued transmitting as the last essential link between London and Paris. Moving from place to place, she managed to escape capture while maintaining wireless communications with London. Finally, Noor Inayat Khan was betrayed to the Germans allegedly by a French Air Force pilot who worked as a double agent for the Nazis.

On or around 13 October 1943 Inayat Khan was arrested and interrogated at the SD Headquarters in Paris. Though SOE trainers had expressed doubts about Inayat Khan's gentle and innocent character, on her arrest she fought like a tigress. Thereafter, the SD officers were afraid of her and she was treated as an extremely dangerous prisoner. Hans Kieffer, the former head of Gestapo in Paris, testified after the war that she didn't give the Gestapo a single piece of information despite continuous grilling.

On 25 November 1943, Inayat Khan escaped from the SD Headquarters, along with two other SOE Agents but was captured in the immediate vicinity. There was an air raid alert as they escaped across the roof and regulations required a count of prisoners at such times. Their escape was discovered before they could get away. Consequently, Inayat Khan was taken to Germany on 27 November 1943 "for safe custody" and imprisoned at Pforzheim in solitary confinement, without any contact with the outside world and in complete secrecy.

She was classified as "highly dangerous" and shackled in chains most of the time. As the prison director testified after the war, Noor Inayat Khan remained uncooperative and continued to refuse to give any information on her work or her fellow operatives. On 11 September 1944 Noor Inayat Khan and three other SOE agents from Karlsruhe prison, Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damerment, were moved to the Dachau Concentration Camp.

It was a crisp Munich morning on September 13, 1944 when the four shackled women were led to the execution grounds. All were made to kneel. Friedrich Wilhelm Ruppert, the SS trooper in charge of executions, gave the orders to shoot. By eyewitness account, one by one the troopers shot Madeleine Damerment, Eliane Plewman, and Yolande Beekman.

Come the turn of the fourth prisoner, Wilhelm stopped the executioners. He stepped forward and hit the fourth prisoner with his gun butt. When she fell to the ground, he kicked her till she was reduced to a bloody mess. She was raised to her knees forcibly. Wilhelm then shot her in the back of her head thus bringing to an abrupt end the short life of Princess, spy, heroine, martyr Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan, a great great granddaughter of Tipu Sultan, the last Muslim sovereign of South India. One died fighting British imperialism. The other died for Britain fighting Nazi imperialism. Her last word was "Liberté". She was 30 years old.

Noor Inayat Khan was posthumously awarded a British Mention in Dispatches and a French Croix de Guerre with Gold Star. Noor Inayat Khan was the third of three World War II FANY members to be awarded the George Cross, Britain's highest award for gallantry not on the battle field.

So what do we do dear readers? Be happy that she lived or sad because she died? Or salute her cherished memory and move on with a mournful heart?

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In a recent article entitled "Israel Must Get Used to the New Turkey," Suat Kiniklioğlu, Deputy Chairman of External Affairs for Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) wrote, "Israel appears to be yearning for the golden 1990s, which were the product of a very specific situation in the region. Those days are over and are unlikely to come back even if the Justice and Development Party (AKP) ends up no longer being in government."

This assessment seems more consistent with reality.

One would agree with Avnery's optimistic reading of events if the recent row was caused by just a couple of isolated incidents, for example, the gutsy public exchange over Gaza between Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Israel's President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in late January 2009, or the recent premeditated humiliation of Oguz Celikkol, Turkish Ambassador to Israel, by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

However, these incidents are anything but isolated. They reflect a clear and probably irreversible shift in Turkish foreign policy towards Israel, the US and the Middle East as a whole.

For decades Turkey was torn between its historical ties to Muslim and Arab countries on the one hand, and the unstoppable drive towards Westernization on the other. The latter seemed much more influential in forming the new Turkish identity in its individual, collective, and thus foreign policy manifestation and outlook.

But even during the push and pull, Turkey grew in import as a political and economic player. It also grew into a nation with a decisive sense of sovereignty, a growing sense of pride and a daring capacity for asserting itself as a regional power.

In the 1970s, when 'political Islam' was on the rise throughout the region, Turkey was experiencing its own rethink, and various politicians and groups began grappling with the idea of taking political Islam to a whole new level.

In fact, it was Dr. Necmettin Erbakan, the Prime Minister of Turkey between 1996 and 1997 who began pushing against the conventional notion of Turkey as a second-class NATO member desperate to identify with everything Western.

In the late 1980s Erbakan's Rafah Party (the Welfare Party) took Turkey by storm. The party was hardly apologetic about its Islamic roots and attitude. Its rise to power as a result of the 1995 general elections raised alarm, as the securely 'pro-Western' Turkey was deviating from the very the rigid script that wrote off the country's regional role as that of a "lackey of NATO." According to Salama A Salama, who coined the phrase in a recent article in Al-Ahram Weekly, Turkey is no longer this 'lackey'. And according to Kiniklioğlu, that's something "Israel must get used to".

The days of Erbakan might be long gone. But the man's legacy registered something that never departed Turkish national consciousness. He pushed the boundary, dared to champion pro-Palestinian policies, defied Western dictates and even pressed for economic repositioning of his country with the creation of the Developing Eight (D-8), uniting the most politically significant Arab and Muslim countries. When Erbakan was forced to step down in a 'postmodernist' military coup, it was understood as the end of short-lived political experiment which ended up proving that even a benign form of political Islam was not to be tolerated in Turkey. The army emerged, once again, all powerful.

But things have changed drastically since then. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) was elected to power in 2002. The AK Party leadership was composed of savvy, yet principled politicians who aimed for change and even a geopolitical shift in their country's regional political outlook.

The AK Party began to lead a self-assertive Turkey which was neither pleading for European acceptance nor American validation. By rejecting the use of Turkish territories as a launchpad of a US strike against Iraq in 2003, Turkey was acquiring a voice, and a strong one at that - with wide democratic representation and growing popular support.

The trend continued, and in recent years Turkey dared translate its political power and prowess into action, without immediately severing the political and military balances that took years to build. So, for example, while it continued to honor past military deals with Israel, it also made many successful overtures to Syria and Iran. And, in being willing to be seen as a unifier in the age of Muslim and Arab disunity, it refused to take part in the conveniently set up camps of 'moderates' and 'extremists'. Instead it maintained good ties with all its neighbors, and its Arab allies.

Starting in 2007, the US began seeing the emergence of the "New Turkey". US President Barack Obama's visit to the country soon after his inauguration was one of many signs that the West was taking notice of Turkey's 'special' status. Turkey is not to be bullied, threatened, or intimidated. Even Israel, which has for long defied the norms of diplomacy, is now becoming more aware of its limits, thanks to Turkish President Abdullah Gül. Following Israel's belligerent insult of the Turkish Ambassador, he said, "Unless there is a formal apology from Israel, we're going to put Celikkol on the first plane back to Ankara." Israel, of course, apologized, and humbly so.

It took Turkey many years to reach this level of confidence and the country is hardly eager to be anyone's 'lackey' now. More, Turkey's united and constant stance in support of Gaza, and its outspokenness against the threats against Lebanon, Iran and Syria show clearly that the old days of "warmth" are well behind us.

Turkey, of course, will find a very receptive audience among Arabs and Muslims all over the world who are desperate for a powerful and sensible leadership to defend and champion their causes. Needless to say, for the besieged Palestinians in Gaza, Erdogan is becoming a household name, a folk hero, a new Nasser in fact. The same sentiment is shared throughout the region.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story.

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The conference offered nothing concrete in terms of new assistance, instead scheduling a donors meeting at the United Nations in March. Much of the rhetoric coming out of the gathering seemed to bear little relationship to the situation on the ground in Haiti, where 150,000 people have been confirmed dead, hundreds of thousands more are wounded and over 1.5 million are homeless.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, representing what remains of the Haitian government, together with foreign ministers from Europe and the Americas spoke of respect for Haitian sovereignty, subordination of foreign military forces to humanitarian efforts, and allowing Haitians to determine and lead their own reconstruction efforts.

Some leading officials, including International Monetary Fund Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, have gone so far as to speak in terms of a "Marshall Plan" for Haiti.

In reality, Haiti is now being run by the US military, which has deployed over 13,000 troops and unilaterally taken control of the country's airport and port facilities. The Pentagon has dominated the provision of relief, which it has subordinated to the number one priority of deploying combat-equipped US soldiers and Marines, much to the detriment of injured and hungry Haitians waiting for life-saving medical supplies and food.

The US newsweekly Time gave expression to the real situation, referring to the top US military commander in the country, US Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, as "the de facto king of Haiti." Meanwhile, the Haitian people have seen or heard nothing of Haitian President René Préval.

Behind the talk of Haitians determining their own future and the country's government leading the way, what is being discussed is a plan worked out in the months before the earthquake that is dictated by the profit interests of US banks and corporations, together with those of Haiti's wealthy elite.

Speaking to reporters en route from Washington to Montreal, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to this plan, while praising the work of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in seeking to implement it in his position as United Nations envoy to Haiti.

"He had just had a conference with 500 businesspeople," she said. "They were signing contracts, they were making investments."

She continued: "So we have a plan. It was a legitimate plan, it was done in conjunction with other international donors, with the United Nations. And I don't want to start from scratch, but we have to recognize the changed challenges we are now confronting."

The plan, worked up at the behest of the UN last year, is aimed at expanding the Haitian economy through the development of free trade zones based on garment sweatshops in which Haitian workers would be paid near-starvation wages.

The initiative was based on a report prepared for the UN last year by Oxford University economics professor Paul Collier. The report perversely cast Haiti's poverty--the deepest in the Western Hemisphere--as its number one asset in the global capitalist economy.

"Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China, which is the global benchmark," Collier wrote.

This "asset" is something that both Washington and Haiti's parasitical ruling elite have jealously guarded. Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown twice--in 1991 and 2004--in bloody coups orchestrated by the CIA in conjunction with Haitian factory owners, in large measure for proposing to raise the country's minimum wage.

After his election for a second term in 2000, Aristide doubled the minimum wage and banned piece work in the garment factories, provoking fierce opposition from the owners of these enterprises. Andy Apaid, the Haitian-American owner of the largest sweatshops in Haiti and one of the Clintons' key allies in the new "development" plan, was a key figure in the 2004 coup, which saw Aristide abducted and bundled out of the country by US troops and thousands of Haitians massacred by right-wing death squads.

Last year, following mass demonstrations by students and workers in which several people were killed and wounded, President Préval was forced to accept an increase in the minimum wage that had been passed by the Haitian legislature. However, he enacted a sub-minimum wage for the garment assembly industry of $2.98 a day--approximately one-twentieth of the minimum wage in the US.

While such a system will make super-profits for garment manufacturers and further enrich Haiti's native oligarchy, it will do nothing to alleviate the country's grinding poverty and will only deepen its pervasive social inequality, the worst in the hemisphere. Garment assembly involves importing pieces of clothing that are put together in free trade zones and then exported out again, with virtually no impact on the local economy.

While Secretary Clinton indicated that this slave labor blueprint is the one Washington is still working off of in the wake of the January 12 earthquake, she allowed that the catastrophe would require making some modifications.

Clinton praised Bellerive for talking about "decentralizing" the Haitian economy. "As part of our multilateral efforts to assist Haiti, we should look at how we decentralize economic opportunity and work with the Haitian government and people to support resettlement, which they are doing on their own as people leave Port-au-Prince and return to the countryside from which most of them came," she said.

The Haitian authorities, backed by Washington and the UN, have begun implementing a plan to move hundreds of thousands of predominantly poor people out of Port-au-Prince and into resettlement camps. Ground has been cleared for one of these at Croix-des-Bouquets, eight miles from the capital, which would house 10,000 people. Other sites are being chosen, with the idea that those evacuated from the capital will be permanently housed there.

In a society in which social divisions are so stark, the so-called reconstruction plan for Haiti is inevitably developing along class lines. It may well emerge that the new resettlement camps will serve as captive labor for free trade zones erected in close proximity.

Meanwhile, Port-au-Prince will be reconstructed as a smaller city, geared to the interests of the country's wealthy. This was hinted at in a statement by the Haiti's ambassador to Washington, Raymond Joseph. Speaking on a C-SPAN television broadcast about the tragedy that has been inflicted upon the Haitian people, he said, "There is a silver lining. What was not politically possible was done by the earthquake. We will rebuild differently."

Such social re-engineering in the interests of a native ruling class and foreign capital, and at the expense of the broad masses of Haitian workers and poor, will inevitably provoke social upheavals and resistance. This is why Washington has placed getting "boots on the ground" ahead of saving the lives of the earthquake's victims.

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Then along came Mr. Wonderful with his irresistible smile and infectious inspiration. He wooed you with his charm, that smile, and his engaging discourse-so articulate by comparison with the unintelligible babbling you had put up with for eight years. He cared about you and your children. No longer were you alone; like Martin Luther King, he had a dream-a dream congruent with yours, and the passion you both shared for the dream was hypnotic and felt deeply spiritual. You actually thought that he was a messenger sent from another world to rescue you and take you out of the nightmare. He used transcendent terms like "hope", "change", "yes we can." And not only were you totally surrendered to his embrace, but you begged everyone else to do the same. He's our only hope, you told them and yourself. You could scarcely contain your ecstasy when they all chose him in the last hours of the eight years you had all excruciatingly endured.

It was a new day, one year ago at this time. Your sighs of relief could not have been longer or deeper. You and your children were now safe at last.

But today, you ponder reflectively the past year, and what you have now come to understand is that the hero you married is a prisoner. You believed him when he told you he was free and at liberty to make the changes he proclaimed. You trusted him, committed yourself to him, and fought for him. And now you discover that he's betrayed you and that his actions really aren't that divergent from his predecessor's. In fact, he is a prisoner of the same forces that terrorized you for the previous eight years. Fooled again. Betrayed. You sink into despair and depression. You talk to your friends-the others who also believed in him. You feel those old and familiar emotions you felt from 2001-2008 that you thought you'd never have to feel again. "What can we do?" you ask. "What are our options?"

The affair is over, and you don't know whether to cry, rage, get drunk, stay stoned, or rethink leaving the country. You've married a prisoner; you've made another bad choice. You feel bitter and perhaps a little self-loathing. In fact, you want to take a shower because you feel dirty all over.

OK, I could be talking about a real love affair here between two people-one a professional con artist and the other, an enabler. Or I could be talking about a nation of hopeful citizens who wanted to believe so desperately that their new hero would reverse the course set forth by the sociopaths of the previous administration and lead them forward to a better, more humane life, a more bonded community, a saner world for themselves and their children.

What we all must ask ourselves at the end of a relationship that turned out badly-a relationship at the end of which we felt betrayed and disappointed is quite simply: What is my part? Why did I make this choice? What did I not wish to see? What were the red flags I chose to ignore?

This week, Michael Moore was interviewed by Democracy Now and confessed his sense of betrayal and disappointment with Obama's first year. What I heard from him and hear from almost every progressive liberal who expresses similar sentiments is a jaw-dropping naïveté regarding the nomination of candidate Obama and the system he represents. It is the epitome of the definition of insanity: repeating a behavior proven erroneous without exception, time after time, yet expecting that the next time, the result will be different.

Yet both sadly and fortunately, as is true whenever the betrayer shows his true colors, this is a teaching moment for the enablers. And this particular teaching moment is more important, more momentous than any in our national history. Why? Because of what is at stake in terms of the future of the planet, and that future is inextricably connected with a paradigm to which we have been "married" as a people since the birth of our nation.

Last week's Supreme Court ruling lifting limits on campaign financing by corporations was truly the last nail in the coffin of democracy and sealed the fundamental definition of fascism attributed to Mussolini which was simply, "the corporate state." Abramoff rules, and politicians no longer have any reason to function other than corporate whores. As a friend suggested to me a few days ago, members of Congress should now dress themselves in NASCAR uniforms indicating which corporations own them so that we don't need to bother researching the facts but can see them wearing the information on their bodies.

During the 2007-2008 hyperventilating euphoria of progressives regarding the candidacy of Obama, my website, Speaking Truth to Power, was exposing Obama's corporate connections and forecasting that little if anything would significantly change with his election. I was labeled Debbie Downer from Doom and Gloomville and called a conspiracy nut. And so here we are: Revelations from Matt Taibbi and others regarding Goldman Sachs as the largest contributor to Obama's election campaign, an escalation of war in Afghanistan above and beyond the proportions of Bush's war in Iraq, Obama's sanctioning of Bush's policies on torture, Obama's prone position in relation to Wall St. and his choice to surround himself with economic advisors who were directly responsible for creating economic collapse-I could continue ad nauseum. The similitude between the policies of Bush II and Obama are so glaring that last week, progressive journalist, Danny Schechter, asked, "Has Obama Become Bush II?" (I am particularly fond of the Photoshopped image attending the article-a picture worth more than a thousand words.)

In this teaching moment, those disappointed and despairing of their tryst with Obama have a golden opportunity to ask themselves what his betrayal of them reveals regarding the political and economic systems of America and the reality that no politician can even be nominated for the Presidency by the two-party monstrosity, let alone elected, unless that candidate is permanently dressed in his or her NASCAR uniform. If you do not ask this question, you will continue living out the definition of insanity with every national election because you refuse to look deeply at the fundamentals of how the corporate state functions. You will cover its rotting stench with come cloying cologne of "hope" and thereby not only enable your betrayers but waste precious time by not attending to life and death issues.

My 2006 book, U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You, endeavored first and foremost to leave the reader with an understanding of who owns and operates the American political system. Others have offered their brilliant analyses-Naomi Klein in Shock Doctrine, Mike Ruppert in Crossing The Rubicon, and Kevin Phillips in Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. Your failed love affair with Obama is now your teaching moment-a critical opportunity to research these four books above and buy out of the putrid, perfidious American political system and buy into making your local community resilient and self-sufficient.

I have long since rejected the American political system and have not voted in any national election since 2000, nor will I again in my lifetime. To do so is to buy into a system that has created what for years I have termed the Toxic Triangle of energy depletion, economic meltdown, and environmental devastation. Every drop of human energy I invest in that system is energy divested from working with my community, my neighborhood, and my loved ones to respond to the current and coming horrors that have been wrought by the three "E's": catastrophic climate chaos, multitudes of environmental refugees, impending global food shortages, the depletion of safe and clean drinking water worldwide, widespread droughts and environmental disasters, unprecedented energy depletion, environmental illnesses and pandemics, and global economic cataclysm.

Visionaries such as Buckminster Fuller, E.F. Schumacher, and Herman Daly have demonstrated that global challenges are most effectively addressed on the local level, where pragmatic responses and options can be created as an alternative to investment in the fantasy of global solutions. That is to say that in the 21^st century, "global" is synonymous with "corporate" and therefore guaranteed to exacerbate rather than grapple with the daunting issues confronting the earth community.

Some individuals argue that focusing on re-localization forces us to ignore the global corporatism of an international ruling elite. My response is to ask why we must do one or the other. It is crucial in my opinion to be aware of the powers that be and their machinations, but I must also ask, what realistically, any of us can do to alter or avert their agenda? The answer is nothing; however, there is much we can do to protect ourselves and our communities from it by becoming self-sufficient and resilient.

On Inauguration Day, 2009, I was intrigued as I watched the swearing in of Obama, by the presence of one man standing behind and to the right of Obama--none other than Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. I doubt that the positioning was intentional, but for me, it was symbolic. It forces me to ask, which interests, which ruling elite families are "standing behind and to the right" of Obama? To what extent is he their creation and theirs alone? For that reason, I chose a photo of that symbolic moment to accompany this article. Take a closer look and think about it deeply. On Inauguration Day, I scoured the internet to find a photo of Rockefeller standing behind Obama during the Oath of Office because I knew its symbolism would later be appreciated by many more Americans than just me. This moment is the moment I had in mind.

Some enablers are capable of changing their behavior and making saner choices. For example, those that have a magnetic attraction to prisoners might find themselves losing interest because they have discovered the deeper meaning of freedom-the ability to create with the support of others, authentic, meaningful responses that do not seduce one into the prison system itself.

This particular affair is over. The "hopium" has worn off. It's time to choose whether you will pursue another affair with another prisoner or walk away from all forms of incarceration, theirs and yours. This is your teaching moment.

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It helps to know that three current constitutional amendments resulted because of Supreme Court decisions that needed remedial action: the Eleventh Amendment (shoring up states' legal immunity), the Sixteenth Amendment (authorizing a federal income tax), and the Twenty-sixth Amendment (assuring eighteen-year-olds the right to vote).

Among the current efforts MoveToAmend.org has already received nearly 50,000 signatories to support is plan, particularly: Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

Another active group is ReclaimDemocracy.org advocating: Corporations and other for-profit institutions are prohibited from attempting to influence the outcome of elections, legislation or government policy through the use of aggregate resources or by rewarding or repaying employees or directors to exert such influence.

Ultimate Civics, a project of Earth Island Institute, wants this: This amendment affirms that constitutional rights extend only to human persons. Corporations, partnerships, and other organization entities are not human persons and, therefore, are not entitled to constitutional protections.

Largely missing from all this attention to the need for a new constitutional amendment, however, is the recognition that Congress, already corrupted by corporate and other special interest money, is very unlikely - no, make that will surely never propose any such amendment. Nor will any congressional attempts at fixing the Supreme Court problem with legislation do what is needed. In fact, there has been an older movement to take all private money out of federal elections and go to total public financing, which would offer the benefit of opening up the US political system to competitive third party candidates. But this too has never received strong support.

What merits far more attention and support is the use of the alternative path to amending the US Constitution offered in Article V. However, the convention of state delegates option has never been used because Congress has stubbornly refused to obey this part of the Constitution, as if they have a right to pick and choose what to obey, despite the one and only requirement for an Article V convention being satisfied. Indeed, there have been some 750 applications for a convention from all 50 states, more than the two-thirds requirement. A major reason Congress has gotten away with this illegal behavior is that nearly all organized political interests on the left and right have opposed a convention. Why? Because they like their current ability to corrupt Congress through lobbying and other forms of spending and fear true reforms of our political and government system through amendments proposed by a convention, which still must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Both ratification and the exact words in Article V prevent any wholesale rewriting of the entire Constitution.

If Americans want to fix the recent, awful Supreme Court decision, then they should rally behind the effort of the nonpartisan Friends of the Article V Convention at foavc.org. They only advocate for making Congress obey the Constitution and call the first convention, but not specific amendments.

All those campaigning for a new constitutional amendment to accomplish any type of reform to improve the US should recognize that voting in new members of Congress or a President has proven to be totally ineffective in achieving necessary reforms to make government work better. The two-party plutocracy is far too corrupted by business and other special interests. The Founders gave us the Article V convention option because they anticipated the failure of the federal government to honestly serve public interests. Now, more than ever, is the time to use what they gave us. Now is the time for Americans to stop being constitutional hypocrites, saying they love and honor the US Constitution but refusing to make Congress obey every part of it, especially Article V.

How about President Obama who used to teach constitutional law getting behind this, especially because he reacted to the recent Supreme Court decision this way: "a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans." Wouldn't it be logical for the president to demand that Congress obey the Constitution?

Finally, when corporations are given more freedoms as if they are persons the inevitable result is that citizens lose freedoms and liberties, something that conservatives and libertarians in particular should recognize.

[Joel S. Hirschhorn is a co-founder of Friends of the Article V Convention; contact him through delusionaldemocracy.com]

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