Food security, however, does not equal food sovereignty, nor does it ensure that the roots of hunger in the world's poorest countries will be addressed. Feed the Future is likely to be yet another program that benefits large corporations and does little to address the real issues hindering agricultural growth in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Big Ag's Revolving Door

On June 14, 2010 USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah addressed a food security meeting of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Dakar, offering support

And while Shah admirably noted the role of women in agriculture and the importance of civil society in carrying out the FTF initiative, he stopped short of acknowledging the tremendous potential for agricultural development that already exists on the continent. For instance, there is the Tigray Project in Ethiopia that boosts food production through agro-ecological methods, and the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in Madagascar that uses organic and sustainable methods to increase rice yields as much as sevenfold. Instead, Shah spoke of new seed varieties introduced in Mali and the market viability of USAID-supported farming in Ghana.

This is hardly surprising coming from Shah, who recently served as the agricultural development director at the biotech-friendly Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation is a primary funder of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which despite its sustainability rhetoric is a vehicle for the promotion of genetically modified (GM) seeds in Africa. The revolving door doesn't stop there, however. Obama has brought a squad of pro-biotech officials into his administration, including former Monsanto Vice President Michael Taylor and former vice president of the lobbying group CropLife, Islam Siddiqui.

Wrong Solutions and Ignored Histories

Therefore, it is no surprise to hear FTF officials talk about the power of new seed varieties in ending hunger in Africa, despite their potentially disastrous consequences. The history of GM seeds and the green revolution in Asia shows that such approaches serve only to augment the profits of corporations like Monsanto while driving small farmers into debt. Although the green revolution in Asia did boost yields, study after study on African agriculture proves that organic, non-GMO agriculture is "better for food security than most conventional systems and is more likely to be sustainable in the longer term." Farming with GM seeds and fertilizers is a very top-heavy method that does not address the true causes of hunger and instead approaches food insecurity as a profit-making opportunity. Mamadou Goita, the executive director of the Institute for Research and the Promotion of Alternatives in Development (IRPAD) based in Mali, recognizes that "as is always the case with Africa, once again the world is obsessed with addressing the consequences while blatantly ignoring the root causes of the problem."

Many of these roots of hunger were planted in the 1980s by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank's Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), which bankrupted Africa of its crop diversity and traditional farming methods in favor of large-scale, market-led production. In fact, just as the United States began heavily subsidizing its own big industrial farms, the IMF prohibited African countries from subsidizing their own agricultural systems.

The result was a dumping of surplus goods such as rice and wheat from the United States into African economies. Local farmers couldn't compete with the prices and therefore couldn't sell their products even in their own communities. To make matters worse, many farmers had switched to export-worthy staples and away from traditional crops, making it even more difficult to feed their families.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

Though the FTF initiative does encourage host country governments to consult with civil society, its tight relationship with companies like Monsanto will severely undermine local and regional sovereignty over food resources. Monsanto has a history of hooking poor farmers on seeds and accompanying herbicides and pesticides they cannot afford to buy. Furthermore, though the Danforth Plant Science Center, one of FTF's partners, may hail the creation of a nutrient- and protein-rich cassava plant, it fails to recognize that crop diversity -- and thus diet diversity -- is nature's best remedy for nutrient deficiencies. By introducing single, silver-bullet crops into African soils, FTF risks creating a continent of monocrops that contribute to environmental degradation and declining human health, and which put societies at great risk if the crop fails.

At a recent U.S. House of Representatives hearing on FTF, members of Congress raised very few of these questions about the risks of GM seeds. On the whole, they welcomed the testimony of representatives of Monsanto and the Danforth Plant Science Center, both of whom hailed the potential benefits of "better" seeds. Even if those seeds can produce higher yields in the short term, more food does not mean less hunger or less poverty and a green revolution will not cure the problem of chronic hunger in Africa. A more sustainable solution involves approaches such as using indigenous varieties of crops that are drought-tolerant, teaching farmers about organic methods of composting and fertilizing, and planting a diversity of crops, thereby generating healthier soil. The best thing the United States could do with FTF is to promote and enhance traditional, agro-ecological methods of farming -- but then again, that wouldn't be profitable for private companies like Monsanto.

Many in Africa remain skeptical of GM seeds, which are often seen as a neocolonial tool by developed nations to further exploit Africa's vast natural resources. Countries such as Zambia have opposed the importation of food aid that is genetically engineered, and groups like Biowatch in South Africa have led successful legal cases against Monsanto. However, GM crops are already cultivated on a large scale in South Africa, and the absence of a large scientific community in Africa has allowed GMO-producing companies to dominate the debate. International organizations such as GRAIN and Food First are attempting to elevate the concerns around GM seeds in Africa through advocacy and outreach. The information these organizations are producing, along with scientific studies that highlight the health and environmental risks of GM crops, should be widely circulated.

Ensuring Accountability on Positive Advancements

Feed the Future does get a few things right, such as working with agricultural extension services in each individual country, assisting in the construction of roads to help farmers get their products to market, and establishing irrigation systems in dry regions of the world. It also recognizes the importance of country-led development and the necessity of women's involvement in agriculture projects, both of which are foundational to any development initiative.

However, for these proposals to be successful, FTF must enforce strict accountability and transparency mechanisms, particularly in countries whose governments are notoriously inattentive to the needs and aspirations of their citizens. FTF has chosen 20 countries in which to begin its work; among them are countries like Uganda, whose President Yoweri Museveni is considered corrupt and undemocratic. Thus, for infrastructure projects and extension services to be effective, FTF must ensure funding is carefully monitored and that the outcomes are objectively evaluated.

The global food sovereignty movement is growing. All over the world, communities and farmers are taking greater ownership over their land and food. "Food sovereignty is the people's right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems," offering "a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime." It will be a central area of discussion during the World Social Forum in Dakar in February, moving individuals to organize around the right to control their food and trade systems. By joining this movement in the United States, individuals can act in solidarity with the struggles facing African farmers, consumers, and producers. It will take this and more to change the direction of U.S. agricultural policy abroad and programs like Feed the Future.

Instead of pushing the corporate-friendly elements of FTF, the U.S. government could do more to assist agricultural growth in the global south by targeting the roots of the problem. By enacting fair trade laws, ending subsidies to large agribusinesses in the United States, tackling the causes and consequences of climate change, and supporting community-led attempts to organically and sustainably grow food, Obama could begin to make a positive contribution to U.S. Africa policy. In its current state, FTF may be more of a boon to companies like Monsanto than to Africans facing the realities of hunger and poverty.

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Since Israel raided the Gaza Freedom Flotilla on May 31, the flimsy existence of Tel Aviv began to splinter as the world nations collectively and categorically reacted to the atrocious mass killing of 9 peace activists in the international waters by the Israel Defense Forces.

Israel's unlawful, brutal killing of the unarmed civilians aboard the Freedom Flotilla sparked such a remarkable international condemnation that even the most stalwart allies of Tel Aviv in the EU zone recalled their ambassadors from Israel and called for a thorough, detailed investigation of the incident which they described as offensive and violent. The international condemnations were so extensive and intensive that even the most pessimistic Israeli politicians couldn't envisage. Four countries downgraded their diplomatic relations with Israel - in addition to the four countries that had cut their diplomatic ties with Israel during the 22-day Gaza war of 2008-2009, Twelve Latin American countries condemned the Israeli actions, Twenty-one European countries protested Israel and Twelve non-Arab Asian countries officially disapproved Tel Aviv.

The precursor of global protests to Israel was Turkey which had lost 9 of its citizens in the raid. In an insightful, thought-provoking and appreciable statement before his country's parliament, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan strongly questioned Israel's impunity from the international laws and called for a decisive end to the illegal actions of this regime: "It is no longer possible to cover up or ignore Israel's lawlessness. The international community must from now on say 'enough is enough'. Dry statements of condemnation are not enough ... There should be results."

At the beginning and when the first news was released, the extent of Israel's violence had not become clear to the public opinion; however, as the international peace activists began retelling the stories of their ordeal upon being deported by Tel Aviv to their respective countries, the world realized that a great calamity had taken place.

Upon his extradition to Istanbul, the Irish historian and activist Dr. Fintan Lane told the media about his terrible experience on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla which was unjustifiably attacked by the Israeli commandos on May 31: "when they boarded our boat, we resisted entirely peacefully. I sat on the floor and tried to reason with them, but the Israeli commandos physically attacked us. Fiachra (one of the Irish passengers aboard the flotilla) was dragged around the ground and I had a gun pointed in my face by a screaming commando. His mania was so intense that I genuinely feared for my life. Others received beatings."

The American peace activist and anti-imperialist speaker Kenneth O'Keefe was another passenger on board the Gaza aid convoy. He witnessed the death of two of his Turkish colleagues in person and was brutally harassed, tortured by the Israeli forces: "while in Israeli custody I, along with everyone else was subjected to endless abuse and flagrant acts of disrespect. Women and elderly were physically and mentally assaulted... in stress positions while hand cuffed to the point of losing circulation of blood in our hands. We were lied to incessantly, in fact I am awed at the routineness and comfort in their ability to lie, it is remarkable really. We were abused in just about every way imaginable and I myself was beaten and choked to the point of blacking out... and I was beaten again while in my cell."

Hassan Ghani, the 25-year-old Scottish journalist and media correspondent of the Press TV was also among the flotilla travelers. He was ruthlessly punished by the Israeli commandos in what he described as the "brutal Israeli assault" on the flotilla: "we didn't expect a ship with 32 different nationalities on board, with aid from 50 different countries on board, would be attacked in such a brutal manner... They began by throwing stun grenades on to the deck of the ship when people were in the middle of morning prayers. Then they began using rubber bullets, they tried to come aboard the ship from the side. People repelled the commandos with water cannons they had set up on the side of the ship. Then the Israelis used helicopters to drop people onto roof and there was scuffles on the roof. The Israeli solders had already opened fire on the ship, so people were grabbing anything they could to stop the attack in international waters."

Another painful account of the flotilla raid was retold by the prominent Swedish author Henning Mankell who described the Israeli actions as "committing murder": "they got very aggressive and ordered us to come down. There was one older man who was a little slow, so the Israelis attacked him with an electric stun gun. He was in a lot of pain. So was another passenger who was covered in paint after being hit with a paint ball missile. The commandos searched the ship thoroughly and emerged waving a razor and a metal-box cutting tool, which they claimed were "weapons" intended to be used against them. All the passengers were then herded into a group, with armed guards standing watch as the ship was taken to Israel When we got off... we were made to walk down a corridor of armed commandos who filmed all of us with cameras. They stole my mobile phone, my money, my clothes and my credit cards." Mankell said that he was held in a cell for 24 hours along with a Swedish Member of Parliament and then deported even "without his socks".

All of these accounts attest to the fact that Israel is being reprimanded by people from the four corners of the world who object to the inhuman policies and actions of Tel Aviv regardless of the nationality they belong to and the political stance they champion.

Today, it's known to everyone that Israel is a political entity which the United States supports in order to maintain its interests in the Middle East and subject the region's nations. In the other words, Israel plays the role of America's permanent representative in the Middle East and is entitled to resort to every possible mean to intimidate and bring under control the independent nations in the region. The fact is that Israel is a fragile and unstable political regime and every day of its shaky survival is hinged on the exertion of force and violating the rights of other nations. As the Iranian journalist Mohieddin Sajedi once noted, Israel cannot live without creating troubles. From mass killing to occupation, from assassination to the construction of illegal settlements, Israel continues to exist with illegal actions and this is what keeps them alive.

The main adversary of Israel is Iran. Israel has repeatedly warned Iran against the use of force and launch of a military strike on its nuclear facilities. The reason is clear. Iran is turning into an inspiring model for the independent nations around the world. Iran's 30-year-long resistance against imperialism and its courageous confrontation with the bullying superpowers has made it an example of victorious struggle with political arrogance and many independent nations on the face of world see Iran on the frontline of battle with the United States and its colonies such as Israel.

Iran is winning international popularity because it has demonstrated the effectiveness of self-sufficiency in nationalizing the nuclear energy. While Israel possesses up to 200 nuclear warheads in flagrant violation of the international law and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has made striking advancements in taking over the nuclear power and excelling in using it for peaceful purposes. The fact that Iran has succeeded in nationalizing the nuclear energy without the assistance of Western superpowers is indigestible for Israel which is the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East; that's why it has warned Iran against a preemptive military strike; however, the reality is that a 70-million-strong army stands by the resistance movement of Iran and a coalition of powerful troops consisted of the independent nations around the world, stand by Iran against the collapsing Israel forever.

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If a person had traveled forward in time, arriving from even the recent past, of say, twenty-five to thirty-years ago, and looked upon the present day United States -- he would have thought he had entered some alternative universe inhabited by deranged grotesques. Resembling a dadist reality television program, a sizable portion of the populace of the US (save our ugly, contemporary, sweatshop-assembled clothing) could pass for George Grosz or Max Beckmann caricatures from Weimar Republic Germany.

In the few public spaces remaining, the time traveler would encounter an over-weight, ill-informed citizenry, staring, compulsively, at hand-held electronic appliances, as if the actual world, on the other side of the small, glowing screen, held no interest for them. He would bear witness to an age when mass media imagery has crowded out and colonized almost every area of life, both public and private, and is peopled with caricatures of willful ignorance and brainless self-regard such as Sarah Palin.

As is the case with individuals, every era is endowed with a distinct character, something near a personality, all its own. If that personality could, over time, gain a sense of self-awareness, our own would blush in embarrassment viewing Palin ... Preening, sputtering her word salad palaver, resembling an aging prom queen turned infomercial spokesmodel and speaking as though she acquired the english language from shredded scraps of speeches by Ronald Reagan and random bits of Bazooka Joe bubble gum comix, she is possessed of such an extreme degree of incomprehensible self-regard it seems a form of derangement.

In little danger of gaining self-awareness, Palin both characterizes and is a caricature of the era: obsession with power and celebrity, mindless memes, and the endless, contrived drama and meaningless denouement on display in the short attention span theatre of corporate and social media -- all its devices and collective derangement -- that are reactionary in the shunning of substance and the determination to remain devoid of the deepening implications of human interaction. Ergo, these traits and characteristics are reflected in Palin and vice versa, then back again, ad infinitum, like distortions in carnival funhouse mirrors.

Does one get the feeling that the more powerless we feel, collectively, about the rising levels of economic exploitation exacted upon us and the accelerating rate of ecocide committed on the planet by corporate oligarchs, the more celebrity "news" and other tropes of empty distraction and denial will froth forth from the idiot imaginings of the pop culture douche-scape?

In our time, the understanding of the intrinsic value of almost every endeavor is reduced to the crackpot realism of its commodified and practical worth. In the popular imagination, manic commercial come-ons dominate the day, in which, images of beauty, as well as the force and foibles of human character, has been hijacked and appropriated for strictly commercial exploitation. Naturally, those who long for beauty in human or divine form turn away in mortification, and, more and more become possessed of compensatory prayers for the destruction of this empire of commercial vacuity. As the mind is ground to spittle in the gears of the corporate wheelhouse, one may begin to dream of, even yearn for, apocalypse -- a longing for a Götterdämmerung of kitsch.

For many years now, we have been witness to cultural fantasies(both of the religious and secular variety) of decline, decay, of even the end of civilization itself ... that are, perhaps, a collective wish for the taut bindings that modernity places on the psyche to be loosened. The modernist towers must fall; then our insular, nature-denuded mode of mind will be pulled down from its lofty precincts into the élan vital of primal dirt ... There, the sterility of the collective, corporatized mind will meet its end, and reborn passion and vital imaginings will bloom like wild flowers in a post-apocalyptic strip mall parking lot ... This is what, I suspect, lies beneath our fascination with apocalyptic scenarios. In these contemporary deluge myths, the hyper-commercialized and commodified psyche, befogged by its own convoluted libido, once destroyed, is now free to start life anew.

Concurrently, in the fundamentalist Christian imagination, narratives of consumerism and End Time Mythology interweave and meld, becoming a gospel of instant gratification and imminent destruction ... This is a religious cosmology resonating from a junk food paradigm: The Gospels of The Drive Thru Jesus; when The Rapture comes, our corporeal bodies will be cast aside like fast food wrappers.
But be warned, by eating of all that high caloric food, all of you Jesus-hungry Lard Asses of The Lord: If your clothes were to fall from you (as your prophecies claim) as you rise skyward, the sight of all your fat, sagging bodies, floating in air, will resemble anything but the dawning of eternal paradise -- instead the event will more likely resemble an endless tape loop of a porno video for fat fetishists shot in a zero gravity chamber.
The narrative of fundamentalist Christianity has become so encumbered with kitsch imagery that its followers hope for the destruction of the planet itself so that they can escape the soul-defying imprisonment of its creepy dogma.

Hence, the modernist conundrum is: how does one retain the depth and resonance of myth, without concretizing it into a pernicious, fundamentalist death cult? Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- the myths of the jealous, desert god -- present a problem, because they place the answer in heaven i.e., far away in a sterile paradise ... The gods of the earth have been cast-out as sinful. Hence, those religions become so obsessed with a fantasy of purity that earth-dwelling and subterranean drives and desires -- that were symbolized, for example, by the Greeks as the gods Hermes, Pan, and Hades -- appear to Christian believers as Satanic.

In other words, Christians, Jews and Muslims, with their gaze fixed on heaven, view their earthly, human half as demonic. Moreover, by becoming split-off from their human half, followers of monotheistic belief systems are prone to suffer all the ills they attribute to the devil. Satan does have a "wide stance" after all.

This is a view of the world devoid of nuance: it is a cosmology inhabited by angels of light or musky demons of darkness ... In the fantasy, there exists no Orpheus to fuse the two worlds in entrancing song ... no Hermes to guide the hero into the realm of keening and kvetching shades ... no Persephone -- her lips lacquered in pomegranate juice -- metaphorically ending the stasis of collective human childhood with the implications of all life's seasons.

In its monotheistic view of the world, these fundamentalist fantasies are comparable to logic-clutching, dry as dust, modernist narratives, because both perspectives are so confining, so stultifying to the heart and mind of an individual, that their adherents grow obsessed with fantasies of the world's demise as a way of escaping the confining nature of the belief system itself.

Accordingly, we, as a culture, may just get our wish. Beauty and mortification are the language of the soul. If one ignores beauty, then the mind will begin to dwell on beauty's hidden half: horror. One will see it everywhere. Hamlet laments:

O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
--Hamlet: Act 1, Scene 2.
William Shakespeare

There is an abiding bleakness present in the hidden half of the hyper-commercialized psyche -- a darkness visible; therein, one must gain a willingness to walk through, even pause, for a time in its stark and repellent landscape ... In order not to crackup, one must crack-wise ... to hang a hammock there, between death and the abyss. Apropos: in polar contrast to the froth, faux urgency, and con artist flattery of mass media imagery, one must be willing to accept the deepening effect of being powerless before the trajectory of history and the proliferation of human folly. Most of the time, there are no solutions, only revealing questions and clear-headed responses. For example:

Upon hearing Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, bray, "putting limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error."

Bill McKibben replied: "Summers is the perfect exemplar of that attitude: an incredibly smart guy whose context is so narrow it ends up making him very dumb indeed."

In my opinion, what caused Summer's level of intelligence to plummet at a Niagara Falls' grade incline can be traced to his unwavering fealty to the tenets of marketplace fundamentalism. The crackpot realist's notion that nature has no value in and of itself, and is only worth what it can be rendered down to as a commodity. The trees of a rain forest can be pulped to paper cups. A human being is only the content of his resume.

This amounts to dharma for dimwits: A bio defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered ... commodified things that were once living beings.

What Summers' view of existence refuses to acknowledge is: The unsettling truth that what we inflict upon the world we will eventually inflict upon ourselves. When we internalize a self-destructive notion such as a rain forest is expendable -- only fit for commercial exploitation -- then this is the demeaning manner in which we regard fellow human beings. Moreover, it is an absurd and dangerous fantasy to believe our species can have autonomy from nature, and we, for any extended length of time, can have mastery over it.

Federico García Lorca imagined this delusion of psychological separation from and mechanistic dominance over nature and fellow human beings as follows.

The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.
--Excerpt from: City That Does Not Sleep

Sadly, from evidence extant, both elite and hoi polloi of our era labor under this deranged perception. I reside on the island of Manhattan and I'm baffled that so many of my fellow New Yorkers (once a feisty, even belligerent breed) don't seem to care or even notice that they are being gamed. Our billionaire mayor protects his class; we pay for their follies, and they continue to grow richer. The game is so throughly rigged, even when they contrive to immolate the global economy, we get "austerity cuts," and they get on their Gulfstream jets and fly to Dubai.

As things stand at present, for the corporate class, their actions seem to yield no consequences. All this defies logic as well as gravity ... the invisible hand of the marketplace (actually the buckling backs of the middle and laboring classes) can't hold up their swaying tower of hubris much longer. But when it comes down, stand clear, there are no bystanders when an empire crumbles. Despite Larry Summer's pronouncements to the contrary.

Since poetic vision has no place in Summer's view of the world nor offers a solution for its ills, he may never seek counsel in what James Hillman has termed: the thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Hillman's view of the world offers a shift in perspective that could help restore our sense of beauty and tragedy, and, in doing so, bestow us with respect for our own humanity and a greater reverence for living things.

John Keats called earthly existence and the suffering therein a "vale of soul-making." In other words, we must descend into the human condition and into our own humanity in order to grow humble enough to learn and adapt to change. For our winged spirits must be forced out of their revelry of self-regard -- the intoxication of their sky-shackled swoon of impersonal flight (privileged passengers of corporate jets included) -- and be wounded by the conflicts and contretemps of this world and thus become more human.

This development means the end of grandiosity and the beginning of an appreciation of life's grandeur. Sarah Palin, Larry Summers, Mayor Bloomberg, and all the rest of the divas and supernumeraries contributing to the opera-scale cognitive dissidence of the age, will continue to belt out their crackpot realist arias, but, backstage, The Second Law of Thermodynamics has just begun to clear its throat.

I'll give the final word to Lorca:

No, I won't; I attack,
I attack the conspiring
of these empty offices
that will not broadcast the sufferings,
that rub out the plans of the forest,
and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed-up cattle
when their mooing fills the valley
where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.
--Federico García Lorca
Excerpt from: New York (Office and Attack)

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

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"Robots are pouring onto battlefields as if a new species of mechanotronic alien had just landed on our planet," the publication says in an editorial on their development in its July issue. "The prospect of androids that hunt down and kill on their own accord (shades of Terminator) should give us all pause. An automatic pilot that makes its own calls about whom to shoot violates the 'human' part of international humanitarian law, the one that recognizes that some weapons are so abhorrent that they just should be eliminated."

Since 2003, 7,000 unmanned aircraft and 12,000 ground vehicles have entered the U.S. military inventory, "entrusted with missions that range from seeking out snipers to bombing the hideouts of al-Qaeda higher-ups in Pakistan," writes P.W. Singer in an accompanying article titled "War of The Machines."

Singer, who directs the 21st Century Defense Initiative at The Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C., a non-profit research think tank, says robots include:

# Lockheed Martin's High-Altitude Airship, an unmanned blimp that carries a radar the length of a football field and can fly at nearly 19,800 meters for over a month at a time.

# Contractor QinetiQ North America's MAARS robot, resembling a tank that is armed with a machine gun and grenade launcher that does sentry and sniper duty.

# The miniature surveillance "bot" from contractor AeroVironment that "mimics a hummingbird in size and its ability to hover over a target" and which flaps its wings frenetically as its cameras observe a scene.

# The Counter-Rocket Artillery and Mortar, or C-RAM, which resembles Star Wars robot R2-D2 and is armed with a machine gun that can shoot down incoming missiles and is used to protect the Green Zone in Baghdad.

# The TALON ground robot that can defuse bombs and peeks over obstacles to hunt for enemies.

# The ChemBot, conceived by the University of Chicago and contractor iRobot, of Bedford, Mass., and which is "a bloblike machine that shifts shape, such that it is able to squeeze through a hole in the wall."

# The Predator drone that can track 12 targets at once and which has been used in combat since 1995. This unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) from General Atomics is armed with two lethal Hellfire missiles that have killed as many as 40 al-Qaeda leaders but which, by some estimates, have killed as many as 1,000 civilians across Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Author Singer writes that robots are machines built to operate in a "sense-think-act" paradigm. Information from their sensors is relayed to computer processors or artificial intelligence software that decide whether to activate their mechanical "effectors."

"The global Positioning Satellite system, video-game-like remote controls and a host of other technologies have made robots both useful and usable on the battlefield during the past decade," Singer writes. "The increased ability to observe, pinpoint and then attack targets in hostile settings without having to expose the human operator to danger became a priority after the 9/11 attacks...," he writes.

What's more, Singer intimates that we ain't seen nothin' yet. "The inexorable growth in computing power means that today's recently enlisted soldiers may end their careers witnessing robots powered by computers literally a billion times more capable than those currently available," he writes.

In an editorial titled "Terminate the Terminators," Scientific American warns, "Some might call a ban on autonomous robots naïve or complain that it would tie the hands of soldiers faced with irregular warfare. But although robots have clear tactical advantages, they carry a heavy strategic price."

"The laws of war are an act not of charity but of self-interest," the editorial continues. "The U.S. would be weakened, not strengthened, if chemical and biological weapons were widespread, and the same is true of robots. They are a cheap way to offset conventional military, and other nations and groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon are already deploying them...We can never put the genie back into the bottle, but putting a hold on further development of this technology could limit the damage."

While this is perfectly true, the sentiment of the Editors is unlikely garner much support inside the Pentagon, which now dominates the planet military from 1,000 bases in the U.S. and 800 more overseas and has the financial wherewithal to manufacture countless robots, which Hezbollah does not.

The prospect of waging wars on battlefields ll,000 kilometers distant by remote control from computer terminals near Las Vegas, Nev., without exposing its own personnel to harm may seem like a dream come true to the Pentagon---but because of its persistent aggressiveness much of the rest of humanity may see it as a nightmare. As the Scientific American article points out, as a result of the deadly Predator strikes, a leading Pakistan newspaper has already branded the U.S. a "principal hate figure." That is, of course, precisely how the "Empire," with its Imperial Walkers and robot soldiers, was perceived by the "human" rebels in the 1977 movie "Star Wars." Need I say more?

Sherwood Ross is an American public relations consultant "for good causes." He has contributed to many national magazines and formerly worked for major dailies and wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

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And when authorities searched the plane and found its cargo consisted solely of 128 identical black suitcases marked "private," packed with cocaine valued at more than $100 million, the silence was deafening.

But now a Bloomberg Markets magazine report, "Wachovia's Drug Habit," reveals that drug traffickers bought that plane, and perhaps fifty others, "with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.," Wachovia and Bank of America.

The Justice Department charge sheet against the bank tells us that between 2003 and 2008, Wachovia handled $378.4 billion for Mexican currency exchanges, "the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history."

"A sum" Bloomberg averred, equal to one-third of Mexico's current gross domestic product."

Since 2006, some 22,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence. Thousands more have been wounded, countless others "disappeared," torture and illegal imprisonment is rampant.

In a frightening echo of the Reagan administration's anti-communist jihad in Central America during the 1980s, the Bush and now, Obama administration has poured fuel on the fire with some $1.4 billion in "War on Drugs" funding under Plan Mérida. Much of that "aid" is destined to purchase military equipment for repressive police, specialized paramilitary units and the Mexican Army.

There is also evidence of direct U.S. military involvement. In June, The Narco News Bulletin reported that "a special operations task force under the command of the Pentagon is currently in place south of the border providing advice and training to the Mexican Army in gathering intelligence, infiltrating and, as needed, taking direct action against narco-trafficking organizations."

One former U.S. government official told investigative journalist Bill Conroy, "'Black operations have been going on forever. The recent [mainstream] media reports about those operations under the Obama administration make it sound like it's a big scoop, but it's nothing new for those who understand how things really work'."

But, as numerous investigations by American and Mexican journalists have revealed, there is strong evidence of collusion between the Mexican Army and the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels. A former Juarez police commander told NPR in May that "the intention of the army is to try and get rid of the Juarez cartel, so that [Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman] Chapo's [Sinaloa] cartel is the strongest."

The cosy relations among the world's biggest banks, drug trafficking organizations and the U.S. military-intelligence apparatus is not however, a new phenomenon. What is different today is the scale and sheer scope of the corruption involved. As Michel Chossudovsky points out,

This trade can only prosper if the main actors involved in narcotics have "political friends in high places." As legal and illegal undertakings are increasingly intertwined, the dividing line between "businesspeople" and criminals is blurred. In turn, the relationship among criminals, politicians and members of the intelligence establishment has tainted the structures of the state and the role of its institutions, including the military. (The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century, Montreal: Global Research, 2010, pp. 195-196)

While the Bloomberg story should cast new light on highly-profitable links amongst major financial institutions and narcotrafficking organizations in what may be protected drug rackets green-lighted by corrupt officials, media silence, particularly by outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, threaten to propel what should be an international scandal into a one-off news item scheduled for a trip down the memory hole.

"Cocaine One"

If, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman claims "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist," then perhaps too, drug cartels work their "market magic" with their own "hidden fist" or, as the Russians like to say a krysha, a web of protectors--and facilitators--drawn from business, finance, organized crime and the secret world of intelligence.

Dubbed "Cocaine One" by Hopsicker, the DC-9 was curious for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that "one of the chief shareholders" of a dodgy outfit called SkyWay Aircraft "is a private investment bank in Dallas which also raised funds for a Mexican industrialist with reported ties to a Cali and Juarez Cartel narcotics trafficker."

More curious still, the airline kitted-out its fleet with distinctive colors and a seal "designed to impersonate planes from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security." And when he learned that "SkyWay's genesis can be traced to In-Q-Tel Inc., a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group owned, operated, and financed out of the black box budget of the Central Intelligence Agency," well you can bet corporate media ran themselves ragged investigating that!

To top it off, when another drug plane crash landed in the Yucatan Peninsula eighteen months later and broke apart, a Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) that spilled "4 tons of cocaine across a muddy field," Hopsicker reported that it had originated from the same network and used the same source for its financing, the "Casa de Cambio Puebla SA, a country-wide network of currency exchanges."

And to make matters even more intriguing from a parapolitical perspective, after searching through FAA records Hopsicker discovered that the Gulfstream II business jet "was owned by a secretive Midwestern media baron and Republican fund-raiser, who had a business partner who, incredibly, owned the other American drug plane, the DC-9, recently busted in Mexico."

In fact, as Bloomberg investigative journalist Michael Smith learned years later, these were the same planes and same currency exchange which Hopsicker reported back in 2007 traffickers had used to purchase drug jets with funds laundered through Wachovia.

"One customer that Wachovia took on in 2004 was Casa de Cambio Puebla SA," Smith wrote. The Puebla, Mexico currency exchange was the brainchild of Pedro Alatorre, a "businessman" who "had created front companies for cartels."

Alatorre, and 70 others connected to his network, were seized in 2007 by Mexican law enforcement officials. Authorities discovered that the accused drug money launderer and airline broker for the cartels controlled 23 accounts at the Wachovia Bank branch in Miami and that it held some $11 million, subsequently frozen by U.S. investigators.

In 2008, a Miami federal grand jury indicted Alatorre, now awaiting trial in Mexico along with three other executives, charging them with drug trafficking and money laundering, accusing the company of using "shell firms to launder $720 million through U.S. banks." The Justice Department is currently seeking Alatorre's extradition from Mexico.

According to Bloomberg, "Puebla executives used the stolen identities of 74 people to launder money through Wachovia accounts." Jose Luis Marmolejo, the former head of the Mexican attorney general's financial crimes unit told Smith, "Wachovia handled all the transfers, and they never reported any as suspicious."

Some $300,000 was transferred by Wachovia to a Bank of America branch in Oklahoma City. With cash in hand Bloomberg reports, traffickers "used the funds to buy the DC-9 through Oklahoma City aircraft broker U.S. Aircraft Titles Inc." When queried by Smith about the sale, "U.S. Aircraft Titles President Sue White declined to comment."

Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the Wachovia case said in a press release that "Wachovia's blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations."

Yet, as Hopsicker wrote nearly three years ago, "the politically-explosive implications of the scandal may explain why American officials have been reluctant to move against, or even name, the true owners of the planes and basically 'turned a blind eye' to the American involvement exposed by the drug trafficking seizures."

As of this writing, no Americans have been criminally charged in the cash-for drug planes banking conspiracy.

"Troubled Assets" or Something More Sinister?

When Wells Fargo bought Wachovia, once America's fourth largest bank in 2008 at the fire-sale price of $12.8 billion, the bank and its former CEO, Kennedy "Ken" Thompson, who "retired at the request of the board" before the full-extent of the financial meltdown hit home, were in deep trouble.

Before the Wells takeover, Wachovia had been on a veritable shopping spree. After the firm's 2001 merger with First Union Bank, Wachovia merged with the Prudential Securities division of Prudential Financial, Inc., with Wachovia controlling the lion's share of the firm's $532.1 billion in assets. This was followed by the bank's purchase of Metropolitan West Securities, adding a $50 billion portfolio of securities and loans to the bank's Lending division. In 2004, Wachovia followed-up with the $14.3 billion acquisition of SouthTrust Corporation.

Apparently flush with cash and new market clout, Wachovia set it sights on acquiring California-based Golden West Financial. Golden West operated branches under the name World Savings Bank and was the nation's second largest savings and loan. At the time of the buy-out, Golden West had over $125 billion in assets. For Wachovia however, it was a deal too far.

With an enormous housing bubble fully inflated, and a new speculative merger-mania in full swing, one can only surmise that the need for liquidity at any price, had driven banking giants such as Wachovia to play dumb when shadier, yet highly-profitable transactions, such as the "arrangement" with Casa de Cambio Puebla SA, were involved.

Bleeding cash faster than you can say "mortgage backed securities," Wachovia was on the hook for their 2006 $26 billion buy-out of Golden West Financial at the peak of the housing bubble, a move that BusinessWeek reported generated "resistance from his own management team" but ignored by Thompson.

Why? "Because no one outside of Thompson and Golden West CEO Herb Sandler seemed to like the deal from the moment it was announced," a company insider told BusinessWeek.

While the buy-out may have given Thompson "the beachhead in California he had long desired ... the ink was barely dry on the Golden West deal in late 2006 when the housing bubble in markets including California and Florida began to deflate."

Hammered by the housing bust, Wachovia's share price, which had risen to $70.51 per share when the Golden West deal was announced had slid to $5.71 per share by October 2008. In other words, Wachovia, along with the world's economy, began circling the proverbial drain.

However you slice it, although it was clear that the Golden West deal had gone south quicker than you can say "credit default swaps," this didn't seem to stop Wachovia from paying "smartest guy in the room" Thompson $15.6 million in total compensation in 2007, a year after the fatal Golden West transaction. Nor did these losses stop the bank from showering Thompson with a severance package worth nearly $8 million.

But was something else going on here?

Wells Fargo bank admitted in a signed Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the federal government that they would not contest charges brought by the Justice Department in its indictment of the bank.

The banking giant was forced to admit charges by prosecutors that "On numerous occasions, monies were deposited into a CDC [Casa de Cambio] by a drug trafficking organization. Using false identities, the CDC then wired that money through its Wachovia correspondent bank accounts for the purchase of airplanes for drug trafficking organizations. On various dates between 2004 and 2007, at least four of those airplanes were seized by foreign law enforcement agencies cooperating with the United States and were found to contain large quantities of cocaine."

Bloomberg reported that Wells Fargo, in the wake of the settlement "declined to answer specific questions, including how much it made by handling $378.4 billion--including $4 billion of cash--from Mexican exchange companies."

There was however, more than "troubled assets" and charges of money laundering to the story. In fact, the purchase of these drug planes have been tied to some of the Bush administration's most secretive "War On Terror" programs.

Drug Flights, CIA Renditions. Just Another Day at the Office!

Replicating a pattern used by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, the secret state used a network of cut-outs and legitimate businesses to transport prisoners to Agency black sites for "special handling."

During Iran-Contra it was "guns in, drugs out." Today one might say its "drugs in, tortured prisoners out." The results however, were the same; egregious crimes and lawbreaking on a staggering scale.

Subsequent investigations by Narco News revealed that "this particular Gulfstream II (tail number N987SA), was used between 2003 and 2005 by the CIA for at least three trips between the U.S. east coast and Guantanamo Bay, home to the infamous 'terrorist' prison camp," Bill Conroy reported.

"In addition," Conroy wrote, "the two SkyWay companies are associated with individuals who have done highly sensitive work for the Department of Defense or U.S. intelligence agencies, public records show and Narco News sources confirm."

According to AFP, the Mexican daily El Universal said "it had obtained documents from the United States and the European Parliament which 'show that that plane flew several times to Guantanamo, Cuba, presumably to transfer terrorism suspects,'" the French newswire reported.

The plane was carrying "Colombian drugs" bound for the U.S. for the "fugitive leader of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin 'Chapo' Guzman," when it crashed in the Yucatan.

According to El Universal, the Federal Aviation Administration's "logbook registered that the plane had traveled between US territory and the US military base in Guantanamo," and that its last registered owner was "Clyde O'Connor in Pompano Beach, Florida."

The Independent confirmed separately in January of this year that "Evidence points to aircraft--familiarly known as 'torture taxis'--used by the CIA to move captives seized in its kidnapping or 'extraordinary rendition' operations through Gatwick and other airports in the EU being simultaneously used for drug distribution in the Western hemisphere."

Hugh O'Shaughnessy, confirming earlier reporting by Bill Conroy and Daniel Hopsicker said that "a Gulfstream II jet aircraft N9875A identified by the British Government and the European Parliament as being involved in this traffic crashed in Mexico in September 2008 while en route from Colombia to the US with a load of more than three tons of cocaine."

While O'Shaughnessy got the tail-number and date wrong, he's correct when he states that U.S. intelligence assets "continue the drug dealing they indulged in during the Iran-Contra affair of the Reagan years."

Narco News, citing DEA sources, learned that the crashed Gulfstream loaded with four tons of cocaine "was part of an operation being carried out by a Department of Homeland Security agency."

However in a later report, Mark Conrad, a former supervisory special agent with ICE's predecessor agency, U.S. Customs, told Narco News that the crashed Gulfstream used to transport drugs and prisoners was controlled by the CIA and "that the CIA, not ICE ... [was] actually the U.S. agency controlling the ... operation. If this were the case, then "any individuals or companies involved in a CIA-backed operation, even ones that are complicit in drug trafficking, would be off limits to U.S. law enforcers due to the cloak of national security the CIA can invoke."

In other words, a jet purchased by drug traffickers with funds laundered through an American bank and used in the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program may have been part of a protected drug operation by U.S. intelligence agencies. An operation furthermore, whose purpose is still unknown.

This report tracks closely with evidence uncovered by Peter Dale Scott. In a recent piece in Japan Focus Scott wrote that "it is not surprising that the U.S. Government, following the lead of the CIA, has over the years become a protector of drug traffickers against criminal prosecution in this country."

"A recent spectacular example" Scott tells us, drawing on research from his forthcoming book, is the curious case of CIA Venezuelan asset, General Ramon Guillén Davila.

General Ramon Guillén Davila, chief of a CIA-created anti-drug unit in Venezuela, was indicted in Miami for smuggling a ton of cocaine into the United States. According to the New York Times, "The CIA, over the objections of the Drug Enforcement Administration, approved the shipment of at least one ton of pure cocaine to Miami International Airport as a way of gathering information about the Colombian drug cartels." Time magazine reported that a single shipment amounted to 998 pounds, following earlier ones "totaling nearly 2,000 pounds." Mike Wallace confirmed that "the CIA-national guard undercover operation quickly accumulated this cocaine, over a ton and a half that was smuggled from Colombia into Venezuela." According to the Wall Street Journal, the total amount of drugs smuggled by Gen. Guillén may have been more than 22 tons. (Fueling America's War Machine: Deep Politics and the CIA's Global Drug Connection (in press, due Fall 2010 from Rowman & Littlefield).

Scott adds that "the United States never asked for Guillén's extradition from Venezuela to stand trial; and in 2007, when he was arrested in Venezuela for plotting to assassinate President Hugo Chavez, his indictment was still sealed in Miami. Meanwhile, CIA officer Mark McFarlin, whom DEA Chief Bonner had also wished to indict, was never indicted at all; he merely resigned."

But the stench of Iran-Contra, like that of the CIA's torture program, as with earlier secret state machinations with drug cartels never went away; in fact, like a cancer, one managed drug operation seamlessly metastasized into another.

Greasing the Wheels

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODOC) state in their 2010 Annual Report that "money-laundering is the method by which criminals disguise the illegal origins of their wealth and protect their asset bases in order to avoid suspicion of law enforcement and to prevent leaving a trail of incriminating evidence," and that financial institutions, particularly U.S. and European banks are key to efforts to choke-off illicit profits from the grisly trade.

The trouble is these institutions, along with U.S. intelligence agencies, are the problem.

UNODOC estimate that profits derived from narcotics rackets amount to some $600 billion annually and that up to $1.5 trillion dollars in drug money is laundered through seemingly legitimate enterprises.

Part of the fallout from capitalism's economic meltdown has been that "drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis," The Observer disclosed late last year.

Antonio Maria Costa, UNODOC's director, told the British newspaper he saw evidence that proceeds from the illicit trade were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year and that "a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result."

The UN drugs chief said that in "many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital." And with markets tanking and major bank failures nearly a daily occurrence, "liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor."

According to Costa, "Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."

Web of Corruption

Although the UN's top anti-narcotics official declined to identify either the countries or banks that have benefited from the murderous trade, a web of corruption envelops the entire financial sector of the capitalist economy as the quest for "liquid assets" trumps everything.

Martin Woods, once director of Wachovia's anti-money-laundering unit in London told Bloomberg, "It's the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy." Woods told the magazine he "quit the bank in disgust" after executives "ignored his documentation that drug dealers were funneling money through Wachovia's branch network."

Despite warnings from the Treasury Department since 1996 that Mexican currency exchanges were laundering drug money through U.S. banks, "Wachovia ignored warnings by regulators and police, according to the deferred-prosecution agreement," Bloomberg reported.

"As early as 2004, Wachovia understood the risk," the bank admitted in court. "Despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in the business."

At the bank's anti-money laundering unit in London, Woods and his counterpart Jim DeFazio in Charlotte, NC told Smith "they suspected that drug dealers were using the bank to move funds."

Former Scotland Yard investigator Woods, said he "spotted illegible signatures and other suspicious markings on traveler's checks from Mexican exchange companies," and that he sent copies of his report to the U.K.'s Financial Services Authority, the DEA and U.S. Treasury Department.

But rather than being rewarded for his diligence, Woods told Smith "his bosses instructed him to keep quiet and tried to have him fired." In one meeting, "a bank official insisted Woods shouldn't have filed suspicious activity reports to the government, as both U.S. and U.K. laws require."

According to a whistleblower suit filed with an employment tribunal in London, Barrons reported last year before the Wachovia scandal broke, that Woods claimed "his bosses bullied and demoted him, then withdrew his reports of other suspicious activities in Eastern Europe."

It gets worse. Woods' complaint alleges "that Wachovia staff may have even tipped off Mexican-exchange clients about his laundering suspicions," and the veteran investigator told Wachovia officials "he feared for his safety."

In response, bank spokesperson Mary Eshet said at the time, "Wachovia believes that it has acted appropriately in its business dealings, and Mr. Woods' claims to the contrary are without merit."

Meanwhile, on the American side of the pond, 21-year FBI veteran DeFazio said "he told bank executives in 2005 that the DEA was probing the transfers through Wachovia to buy the planes." The bank ignored his warnings and continued along on their merry way until their indictment.

The law enforcement veteran told Bloomberg, "I think they looked at the money and said, 'The hell with it. We're going to bring it in, and look at all the money we'll make'."

The former Scotland yard investigator added, "If you don't see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you're missing the point."

But Wachovia wasn't the only large financial institution "missing the point." Bloomberg also revealed that Bank of America and the London-based "HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe's biggest bank by assets," American Express Bank, Banco Santander SA, Citigroup Inc., as well as "the world's largest money transfer firm," Western Union were also up to their eyeballs in dubious transactions.

In 1994 for example, American Express paid $14 million to settle with the federal government after "two employees were convicted in a criminal case involving drug trafficker Juan Garcia Abrego."

Yet between 1999-2004, Bloomberg reported "the bank failed to stop clients from laundering $55 million of narcotics funds, the bank admitted in a deferred-prosecution agreement in August 2007 ... and paid $65 million to the U.S. and promised not to break the law again." Charges were dismissed a year later under terms of the agreement.

And back in 2004, The Independent disclosed that "HSBC, the UK's largest bank, have been slammed for lax money-laundering procedures in a report by a US Senate subcommittee."

Journalists Hugh O'Shaughnessy and Paul Lashmar revealed that "the UK-based multinational stands accused of laxity in the fight against money laundering, drug trafficking, corruption and terrorism, notably in the oil-rich African state of Equatorial Guinea."

"In one of the few cases" when the scandal-plagued and now-shuttered Riggs Bank "seems to have properly followed US anti-money-laundering legislation," Riggs formally asked HSBC and a Spanish bank, Banco Santander, "to divulge the identities of the owners of two companies that kept accounts with them and that were receiving suspicious wire transfers totalling in excess of $35m (£20m). The banks refused to say who the owners were."

Bloomberg disclosed that "federal agents caught people who work for Mexican cartels depositing illicit funds in Bank of America accounts in Atlanta, Chicago and Brownsville, Texas, from 2002 to 2009." Authorities contend that "Mexican drug dealers used shell companies to open accounts at London-based HSBC."

Nevertheless, neither bank were accused of wrongdoing by the federal government and both firms denied any involvement in money laundering schemes.

Bank of America spokeswoman Shirley Norton told Smith that they "strictly follow the government rules." Norton said, "Bank of America takes its anti-money-laundering responsibilities very seriously," a fact not readily apparent from Bloomberg Markets investigation.

Both Norton and HSBC spokesman Roy Caple told Smith that "[privacy] laws bar them from discussing specific clients."

And so it goes.

Fallout? What Fallout!

In the wake of Wachovia's admission to federal prosecutors, Wells Fargo will pay "$160 million in fines and penalties, less than 2 percent of its $12.3 billion profit in 2009."

"If Wells Fargo keeps its pledge," Bloomberg reports, then "according to the agreement [the federal government will] drop all charges against the bank in March 2011."

Why might that be? Large banks are immune from vigorous prosecution for violating the Bank Secrecy Act "by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory."

Veteran Senate investigator Jack Blum, who led probes into the Iran-Contra drug connection and the CIA's favorite shadow bank during the 1980s, the Bank of Credit and Commerce (BCCI) told Bloomberg, "the theory is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for big banks."

"There's no capacity to regulate or punish them because they're too big to be threatened with failure," Blum says. "They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line, until they're caught."

Meanwhile as the bodies pile up, there's no jail time for executives and the assets of firms that could charitably be described as part of a "continuing criminal enterprise" haven't been seized; only a slap on the wrist and a promise to "do better next time."

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, Rowan's Avenger, 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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They tell me I am a heretic.

I tell them to please open their eyes and look around. That they will find every city, town, village and family now infested with these bigots. That these pious killers appeal to the worst passions of the human heart. That they sow the seeds of dissonance and hatred wherever they go. That sectarian hatred is only the beginning and a time is not very far when, in the name of God, they will get brother to denounce brother, wives to inform on their husbands, mothers to accuse their children and neighbors to spy on their neighbors. I tell them that given the power these extremists will punish dissent with whip, chain, and slaughter. They laugh at me and tell me scornfully that I am a heretic. They say why should mercy be shown to someone whom God will burn in eternal fire? They promise me dark dungeons as my ultimate abode where my flesh will rot in the clasp of chains and flames will devour me forever.

I tell them that the bigots are living fossils embedded in the rock of faith. That they are as stuck in time as in that rock. That mentally this species can neither advance nor recede. That after exhausting all their energies on stopping people from advancement of any kind, they are left with none to improve their own lot. That the supreme desire of their heart is to force all others to adopt their creed. And that for this very purpose they denounces free-thinking as a crime, calling this crime as heresy and people like me as heretics. They tell me that I am a heretic and exile, imprisonment, torture, and death are the only solution to rid the country and the faith of people like me.

I tell them these extremists are a people that revere gods of death, murder and vengeance. That they kill innocent human beings, including women and children, on whims, and strike terror into the hearts of an average decent human being. That for them killing is not just a business tool but also a means with which to spread fear, perpetuate chaos and preach their dark gospel. That any ideology that asks for killing in its name is to be shunned like plague. I tell them to look around and see for themselves what blood-smeared mournful land our country has become. A once beautiful land, now it is torn and tormented, plundered and ravaged, disfigured by the scars of countless wounds, tottering at the edge of a dark bottomless abyss. They reject my misgivings sneeringly and call me a heretic. They say hell is my place for thinking what I think.

When I point out to them that for thousands of years the 'sky religions' have exhausted every conceivable punishment, that every nerve, every tendon in the human body capable of pain has been explored and pressed upon to force all people to hold the same religious opinions yet they failed and reason survived. They tell me I am a heretic for thinking just that and that God hates people like me with a pitiless and inestimable hatred. And whilst his vice regents on earth will persecute me while I am alive, He will burn me forever when I am up there-they say.

I tell them that from times immemorial every priest has regarded himself as the viceroy of God. They tell me I am a heretic. That he equates disrespect shown to him as an insult offered to God. They tell me I am a heretic. That he asks none to think but only to obey. They tell me I am a heretic. That he considers his word to be the word of God. They tell me I am a heretic. That the world has been at the mercy of ignorant and furious priests, whose eyes feasted upon the agonies they inflicted upon rational men. They tell me I am a heretic.

I point them to the words of Ingersoll, that great man of reason, who said, "acting, as they believed, or pretended to believe, under the command of God ; stimulated by the hope of infinite reward in another world- hating heretics with every drop of their bestial blood ; savage beyond description merciless beyond conception,- these infamous priests, in a kind of frenzied joy, leaped upon the helpless victims of their rage. They crushed their bones in iron boots ; tore their quivering flesh with iron hooks and pincers ; cut off their lips and eyelids ; pulled out their nails, and into the bleeding quick thrust needles; tore out their tongues; extinguished their eyes ; stretched them upon racks ; flayed them alive ; crucified them with their heads downward ; exposed them to wild beasts ; burned them at the stake ; mocked their cries and groans ; ravished their wives ; robbed their children, and then prayed to God to finish the holy work in hell." They tell me I am a heretic and the same is in store for me here and in the hereafter.

Am I a heretic?

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Let's take a look at the context for the language of the Palestinian Authority's complaints. In a speech made in early July, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas referred to any direct talks with Israel as 'futile.' Thousands of newspapers and news sites beamed this 'headline', highlighting the word 'futile' between inverted commas - as if it constituted some kind of earth-shattering revelation. But anyone following the Middle East, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular already knows that such talks will be 'futile'. More, Israel has hardly made secret its lack of desire for a peaceful and just settlement.

Mr. Abbas, however, has managed to insert his relevance as a 'player' in the conflict, using one cleverly coined word. This word has had as much of an impact in Arabic as has in English.

Of course, none of this means that Abbas has actually adopted a serious shift in course. One need not dig up old archives to remember that the PA president felt the same way about the so-called 'proximity talks' with Israel last May. Before they began, he also expressed his opinion that the talks would be futile. He further insisted that no talks, direct or otherwise, would resume without a complete Israeli halt in settlement constructions in occupied East Jerusalem. After this grand declaration, Abbas went along with the proximity talks charade, while Palestinian families continued to be uprooted from their homes in their historic city. Only one barrier was removed before embarking on the proximity talks: Abbas and his men quit complaining.

Nearly two months later, when it is evident to all that the proximity talks were indeed 'futile' - especially as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has triumphed over US President Barack Obama in his most recent visit to Washington - Mr. Abbas finds himself in desperate need for another line of defense. Thus, the new campaign attacking predictably 'futile' direct talks with Israel.

Mr. Abbas is not the only actor in this drama. Others have also been doing their job, as efficiently and as true to form as ever. Yasser Abed Rabbo, who has worn several hats in the past and is now one of Mr. Abbas's aides, stated that the PA "will not enter new negotiations that could take more than 10 years." This promise - that the Palestinian leadership will not be fooled into talks for the sake of talking and with no timeframe - is not the first of its kind to come from Abed Rabbo, and it's unlikely to be the last. Abbas' aide will most likely continue sharing the same tired insight over and over again, because it's the scripted part that any 'moderate' - as in self-seeking - Palestinian official must reiterate to remain relevant. How else could they give the impression that the PA still serves the role of the bulwark against Israeli illegal territorial encroachment and military occupation?

Ahmed Qurei, former Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister and ex-Prime Minister, recently spoke at a Hebrew University Conference, entitled: "The Israeli-Palestinian Proximity Talks: Lessons from Past Negotiations." The conference was organized by Hebrew University's Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace. The place and occasion of this conference could not be more significant. First, much of the Hebrew University was built on 'ethnically cleansed' Palestinian land. Second, Qurei spoke at an Israeli University in an occupied city, at a time when activists and academics from all over the world, including several from Israel, are leading a cultural and academic boycott of Israeli universities to protest the terrible role these institutions have played in Israeli violence against Palestinians.

Worse, immediately before his speech, Qurei had met with former Israeli Foreign Minister and acting Prime Minister, Tzipi Livni. Livni had ordered and supervised the unprecedented killing and maiming of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009. The level of inhumanity she displayed during those days was met with outrage around the world, including from many in Israel itself. But all the blood was brushed under the carpet, as "Livni (and) Abu Ala exchange(d) 'niceties'", according to the Jerusalem Post.

Just try to imagine the fury that all Palestinians - and especially those besieged in destroyed Gaza - must have felt as Qurei and Livni shook hands and smiled for cameras. As for Qurei's academic and political contributions, the Post reported that, "at the conference, Qurei said Netanyahu had not really frozen West Bank settlement construction, and added that Israel's actions were preventing direct talks."

Considering the numerous compromises that Qurei afforded in his very attendance of the conference, and his handshaking with Livni, one fails to understand the point of such statements.

These empty declarations will have no bearing on the outcome of events, nor will they force Netanyahu and his right-wing government to think twice as they carry on demolishing homes and uprooting trees. But they are more important than ever for the PA, as voices are rising in Washington, in London and elsewhere, demanding that the US and its partners acknowledge, if not 'engage' Hamas. Such a prospect is bad news for the West Bank Palestinian leadership, which understands that its relevance to the 'peace process' hinges on the constant dismissal of Hamas. Therefore, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah will continue to adhere to its methodology: don't criticize Israel too harshly, so as not to lose favor; follow the US dictates, so as to maintain a 'moderate' status and many privileges; and always give an impression to Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that the PA is the one and only defender of Jerusalem.

One wonders how much longer the Palestinian leadership can sustain this act, which is in fact the real exercise of futility.

- Ramzy Baroud (ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.

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The global media has presented Greece, tiny Greece, as the epicenter of the second stage of the global financial crisis, much as it portrayed Wall Street as ground zero of the first stage.

Yet there is an interesting difference in the narratives surrounding these two episodes.
Narratives in Conflict

The unregulated activities of financial institutions, which created ever more complex instruments to magically multiply money, created the Wall Street crash that morphed into the global financial crisis.

With Greece, however, the narrative goes this way: This country piled up an unsustainable debt load to build a welfare state it could not afford, and is now the spendthrift that must tighten its belt. Brussels, Berlin, and the banks are the dour Puritans now exacting penance from the Mediterranean hedonists for living beyond their means and committing the sin of pride by hosting the costly 2004 Olympics.

This penance comes in the form of a European Union-International Monetary Fund program that will increase the country's value-added tax to 23 percent, raise the retirement age to 65 for both men and women, make deep cuts in pensions and public sector wages, and eliminate practices promoting job security. The ostensible aim of the exercise is to radically slim down the welfare state and get the spoiled Greeks to live within their means.

Although the welfare-state narrative contains some nuggets of truth, it is fundamentally flawed. The Greek crisis essentially stems from the same frenzied drive of finance capital to draw profits from the massive indiscriminate extension of credit that led to the implosion of Wall Street. The Greek crisis falls into the pattern traced by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly: Periods of frenzied speculative lending are inexorably followed by government or sovereign debt defaults, or near defaults. Like the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the so-called sovereign debt problem of countries like Greece, Europe, Spain, and Portugal is principally a supply-driven crisis, not a demand-driven one.

In their drive to raise more and more profits from lending, Europe's banks poured an estimated $2.5 trillion into what are now the most troubled European economies: Ireland, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain. German and French banks hold 70 percent of Greece's $400 billion debt. German banks were great buyers of toxic subprime assets from U.S. financial institutions, and they applied the same lack of discrimination to buying Greek government bonds. For their part French banks, according to the Bank of International Settlements, increased their lending to Greece by 23 percent, to Spain by 11 percent, and to Portugal by 26 percent.

The frenzied Greek credit scene featured not only European financial actors. Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs showed Greek financial authorities how financial instruments known as derivatives could be used to make large chunks of Greek debt "disappear," thus making the national accounts look good to bankers eager to lend more. Then the very same agency turned around and, engaging in derivatives trading known as "credit default swaps," bet on the possibility that Greece would default, raising the country's cost of borrowing from the banks but making a tidy profit for itself.

If ever there was a crisis created by global finance, Greece is suffering from it right now.
Hijacking the Narrative

There are two key reasons why the Greek narrative has become a time-worn cautionary tale of people living beyond their means, rather than a case of financial irresponsibility on the part of bankers and investors.

First of all, financial institutions successfully hijacked the narrative of crisis to serve their own ends. The big banks are now truly worried about the awful state of their balance sheets, impaired as they are by the toxic subprime assets they took on and realizing that they severely overextended their lending operations. The principal way they seek to rebuild their balance sheets is to generate fresh capital by using their debtors as pawns. As the centerpiece of this strategy, the banks seek to persuade the public authorities to bail them out once more, as the authorities did in the first stage of the crisis in the form of rescue funds and a low prime lending rate.

The banks were confident that the dominant Eurozone governments would never allow Greece and the other highly indebted European countries to default because it would lead to the collapse of the euro. By having the markets bet against Greece and raising its cost of borrowing, the banks knew that the Eurozone governments would come out with a bailout package, most of which would go toward servicing the Greek debt to them. Promoted as rescuing Greece, the massive 110-billion-euro package, put together by the dominant Eurozone governments and the IMF, will largely go toward rescuing the banks from their irresponsible, unregulated lending frenzy.

The banks and international financial institutions played this same old confidence game on developing country debtors during the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s, and on Thailand and Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s. The same austerity measures -- then known as structural adjustment -- followed lending binges from northern banks and speculators. And the scenario played out the same way: Pin the blame on the victims by characterizing them as living beyond their means, get public agencies to rescue you with money upfront, and stick the people with the terrible task of paying off the loan by committing a massive chunk of their present and future income streams as payments to the lending agencies.

No doubt the authorities are preparing similarly massive multibillion-euro rescue packages for the banks that overextended themselves in Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.
Shifting the Blame

The second reason for promoting the "living beyond one's means" narrative in the case of Greece and the other severely indebted countries is to deflect the pressures for tighter financial regulation, which have come from citizens and governments since the start of the global crisis. The banks want to have their cake and eat it too. They secured bailout funds from governments in the first phase of the crisis, but don't want to honor what governments told their citizens was an essential part of the deal: the strengthening of financial regulation.

Governments, from the United States to China and Greece, had resorted to massive stimulus programs to keep the real economy from collapsing during the first phase of the financial crisis. By promoting a narrative that moves the spotlight from lack of financial regulation to this massive government spending as the key problem of the global economy, the banks seek to forestall the imposition of a tough regulatory regime.

But this is playing with fire. Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman and others have warned that if this narrative is successful, the lack of new stimulus programs and tough banking regulations will result in a double-dip recession, if not a full-blown depression. Unfortunately, as the recent G-20 meeting in Toronto suggests, governments in Europe and the United States are caving in to the short-sighted agenda of the banks, who have the backing of unreconstructed neoliberal ideologues that continue to see the activist, interventionist state as the fundamental problem. These ideologues believe that a deep recession and even a depression is the natural process by which an economy stabilizes itself, and that Keynesian spending to avert a collapse will only delay the inevitable.
Resistance: Will It Make a Difference?

The Greeks are not taking all this lying down. Massive protests greeted the ratification of the EU-IMF package by the Greek parliament on July 8. In an earlier and much larger protest on May 5, 400,000 people turned out in Athens in the biggest demonstration since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974. Yet, street protests seem to do little to avert the social catastrophe that will unfold with the EU-IMF program. The economy is set to contract by 4 percent in 2010. According to Alexis Tsipras, president of the left parliamentary coalition Synapsismos, the unemployment rate will likely rise from 15 to 20 percent in two years, with the rate among young people expected to hit 30 percent.

As for poverty, a recent joint survey by Kapa Research and the London School of Economics found that, even before the current crisis, close to a third of Greece's 11 million people lived close to the poverty line. This process of creating a "third world" within Greece will only be accelerated by the Brussels-IMF adjustment program.

Ironically, this adjustment is being presided over by a Socialist government headed by George Papandreou voted into office last October to reverse the corruption of the previous conservative administration and the ill effects of its economic policies. There is resistance within Papandreou's party PASOK to the EU-IMF plan, admits the party's international secretary Paulina Lampsa. But the overwhelming sense among the party's parliamentary contingent is TINA, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it: "there is no alternative."
The Consequences of Compliance

Faced with the program's savage consequences, an increasing number of Greeks are talking about adopting a strategy of threatening default or a radical unilateral reduction of debt. Such an approach could be coordinated, says Tsipras, with Europe's other debt-burdened countries, like Portugal and Spain. Here Argentina may provide a model: it gave its creditors a memorable haircut in 2003 by paying only 25 cents for every dollar it owed. Not only did Argentina get away with it, but the resources that would otherwise have left the country as debt service was channeled into the domestic economy, triggering an average annual economic growth rate of 10 percent between 2003 and 2008.

The "Argentine Solution" is certainly fraught with risk. But the consequences of surrender are painfully clear, if we examine the records of countries that submitted to IMF adjustment. Forking over 25 to 30 percent of the government budget yearly to foreign creditors, the Philippines in the mid-1980s entered a decade of stagnation from which it has never recovered and which condemned it to a permanent poverty rate of over 30 percent. Squeezed by draconian adjustment measures, Mexico was sucked into two decades of continuing economic crisis, with consequences such as the pervasive narcotics traffic that has brought it to the brink of being a failed state. The current state of virtual class war in Thailand can be traced partly to the political fallout of the economic sufferings of the IMF austerity program imposed on that country a decade ago.

The Brussels-IMF adjustment of Greece shows that finance capitalism in the throes of crisis no longer respects the North-South divide. The cynics would say, "Welcome to the Third World, Greece."

But this is no time for cynicism. Rather, it's a key moment for global solidarity. We're all in this together now.

Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, representing the party-list Akbayan. He is also the author of Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009). He is columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus and can be reached at waldenbello@yahoo.com

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Understanding the real nature of resistance, however, is not easy. No newsbyte could be thorough enough to explain why people, as a people, resist. Even if such an arduous task was possible, the news might not want to convey it, as it would directly clash with mainstream interpretations of violence and non-violent resistance. The Afghanistan story must remain committed to the same language: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Lebanon must be represented in terms of a menacing Iran-backed Hizbullah. Palestine's Hamas must be forever shown as a militant group sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state. Any attempt at offering an alternative reading is tantamount to sympathizing with terrorists and justifying violence.

The deliberate conflation and misuse of terminology has made it almost impossible to understand, and thus to actually resolve bloody conflicts.

Even those who purport to sympathize with resisting nations often contribute to the confusion. Activists from Western countries tend to follow an academic comprehension of what is happening in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Thus certain ideas are perpetuated: suicide bombings bad, non-violent resistance good; Hamas rockets bad, slingshots good; armed resistance bad, vigils in front of Red Cross offices good. Many activists will quote Martin Luther King Jr., but not Malcolm X. They will infuse a selective understanding of Gandhi, but never of Guevara. This supposedly 'strategic' discourse has robbed many of what could be a precious understanding of resistance - as both concept and culture.

Between the reductionst mainstream understanding of resistance as violent and terrorist and the 'alternative' defacing of an inspiring and compelling cultural experience, resistance as a culture is lost. The two overriding definitions offer no more than narrow depictions. Both render those attempting to relay the viewpoint of the resisting culture as almost always on the defensive. Thus we repeatedly hear the same statements: no, we are not terrorists; no, we are not violent, we actually have a rich culture of non-violent resistance; no, Hamas is not affiliated with al-Qaeda; no, Hizbullah is not an Iranian agent. Ironically, Israeli writers, intellectuals and academicians own up to much less than their Palestinian counterparts, although the former tend to defend aggression and the latter defend, or at least try to explain their resistance to aggression. Also ironic is the fact that instead of seeking to understand why people resist, many wish to debate about how to suppress their resistance.

By resistance as a culture, I am referencing Edward Said's elucidation of "culture (as) a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration." When cultures resist, they don't scheme and play politics. Nor do they sadistically brutalize. Their decisions as to whether to engage in armed struggle or to employ non-violent methods, whether to target civilians or not, whether to conspire with foreign elements or not are all purely strategic. They are hardly of direct relevance to the concept or resistance itself. Mixing between the two suggests is manipulative or plain ignorant.

If resistance is "the action of opposing something that you disapprove or disagree with", then a culture of resistance is what occurs when an entire culture reaches this collective decision to oppose that disagreeable element - often a foreign occupation. The decision is not a calculated one. It is engendered through a long process in which self-awareness, self-assertion, tradition, collective experiences, symbols and many more factors interact in specific ways. This might be new to the wealth of that culture's past experiences, but it is very much an internal process.

It's almost like a chemical reaction, but even more complex since it isn't always easy to separate its elements. Thus it is also not easy to fully comprehend, and, in the case of an invading army, it is not easily suppressed. This is how I tried to explain the first Palestinian uprising of 1987, which I lived in its entirely in Gaza:

"It's not easy to isolate specific dates and events that spark popular revolutions. Genuine collective rebellion cannot be rationalized though a coherent line of logic that elapses time and space; its rather a culmination of experiences that unite the individual to the collective, their conscious and subconscious, their relationships with their immediate surroundings and with that which is not so immediate, all colliding and exploding into a fury that cannot be suppressed." (My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story)

Foreign occupiers tend to fight popular resistance through several means. One includes a varied amount of violence aiming to disorient, destroy and rebuild a nation to any desired image (read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine). Another strategy is to weaken the very components that give a culture its unique identity and inner strengths - and thus defuse the culture's ability to resist. The former requires firepower, while the latter can be achieved through soft means of control. Many 'third world' nations that boast of their sovereignty and independence might in fact be very much occupied, but due to their fragmented and overpowered cultures - through globalization, for example - they are unable to comprehend the extent of their tragedy and dependency. Others, who might effectively be occupied, often possess a culture of resistance that makes it impossible for their occupiers to achieve any of their desired objectives.

In Gaza, Palestine, while the media speaks endlessly of rockets and Israeli security, and debates who is really responsible for holding Palestinians in the strip hostage, no heed is paid to the little children living in tents by the ruins of homes they lost in the latest Israeli onslaught. These kids participate in the same culture of resistance that Gaza has witnessed over the course of six decades. In their notebooks they draw fighters with guns, kids with slingshots, women with flags, as well as menacing Israeli tanks and warplanes, graves dotted with the word 'martyr', and destroyed homes. Throughout, the word 'victory' is persistently used.

When I was in Iraq, I witnessed a local version of these kids' drawings. And while I have yet to see Afghani children's scrapbooks, I can easily imagine their content too.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.

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While I'm the last to defend dictators, this is a completely unsubstantiated claim of what happened in Syria. Perhaps worse, the assertion about Israel is just false. Israel's first invasion of Lebanon was just about that bloody.

And what of the achievements of the Six Day War, a war deliberately calculated by Israel's establishment to win the land of the self-defined Greater Israel - all the Palestinian territories plus slices of Syria and Lebanon - it had failed to grab at its founding?

Israel went so far as to attack ruthlessly an American intelligence ship to suppress information of General Dayan's movements of armor, the general's purpose being the quick seizure of all the lands Israel desired and then presenting the world with a fait accompli.

And how do you reckon the toll of misery of decade after decade of hundreds of thousands of refugees plus the forty-plus years of truly abusive occupation?

I could continue, for unquestionably the invasion of Iraq was about and for Israel's benefit. That's million people killed and a couple of million refugees, refugees taken, in large part, by poor Syria.

"So is it true, as many defenders of Israel claim, that the Jewish state is judged by different standards from other countries? I believe it is."

This completely ignores the fact of Israel's establishment constantly claiming that is the only democracy and representative of human rights in its part of the world.

If you claim one standard but behave by another - truly indistinguishable from the region's dictators - I do think the world is entitled to comment. Israel holds ten thousand illegal prisoners, imposes a ghastly blockade for over three years, imposes countless checkpoints on people's ordinary lives in the West Bank, regularly assassinates those with whom it disagrees, and uses every underhanded technical gimmick it can think of to keep stealing other people's land.

Indeed, it could be well argued that the kind of Israel we see has effectively retarded the development of democracy in the Arab world. Israel's cooperative friend Mubarak, a dictator of thirty years, is supported by everything the United States can think of, suppressing all genuine democratic movements. For a long time, it was the same with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Opposing Israel's excesses has provided a rallying cry for every dictator in the region. At the same time, the United States and Israel would prefer these populations suppressed by dictators who in private mind their own business or are even rather cooperative, a la Mubarak.

"That all Jews, including Israeli Jews, should remain haunted by a horrible past is understandable. But it must never be used to justify aggression against others."

But that is precisely what Israel's establishment and its army of apologists abroad do, day and night. It is, if you will, a ghastly form of special pleading.

"There are other reasons, however, for the double standard directed at Israel. One is what the liberal Israeli philosopher and peace activist Avishai Margalit has called "moral racism." The bloodlust of an African or Asian people is not taken as seriously that of a European - or other white - people."

But isn't that exactly what happens inside Israel? Day in and out in countless ways, Sephardic Jews are not treated with the same respect and regard as Ashkenazi Jews. And the poor small lot of dark-skinned African Jews are treated with palpable contempt. The world should have higher standards than Israel itself in these matters?

"...the legacy of colonialism works against Israel in another way, too."

Oh please, this is tiresome old idea to trot out. Besides, in the eyes of most Arabs, Israel is itself an example of colonialism. Here is a tiny enclave - truly a garrison state - living in the midst of many tens of millions of people for whose cultures and aspirations it has absolutely no understanding or sympathy. You could draw a parallel to Israel's position today with that of European Crusaders who built massive forts in the Middle East at places like Acre.

In the end, if Israel expects to be treated as a normal country, it must behave like one.

Surely, most people, including likely most Jews, know Israel has yet to behave as anything resembling a normal country.

__________________________

Note: Response to the comment of a reader

"Islam is the problem behind virtually all the problems that Israel faces."

What a preposterous statement.

Does the author realize that there are more than a billion Muslims in the world?

How can any thinking person speak this way, condemning with one glib sentence about a fifth of the world's population?

There is no history, also, of Muslims being especially hostile to Jews. Indeed, Islam adopted many of Judaism's prophets and customs as its own.

Further still, until the creation of modern Israel, most Muslims in the Middle East treated Jews decently.

Israel, since its inception, has practiced a behavior towards its neighbors summed up by the Zionist slogan, "the iron wall."

"The iron wall" means ignoring neighbors as legitimate residents of the region, treating neighbors with contempt and violence - in effect, a very hostile form of shunning.

Who can defend such treatment instead of living in peace and respect?

Yes, there were always bound to be some hostilities - after all, Israel proper is on land taken from people who lived there for countless generations - but I think a different approach would have achieved different results.

Israel could easily have made it worth the Palestinians' while with assistance and compensation instead of spending vast sums on armaments in a mini-Cold War.

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Articles have now appeared in the Hong Kong and Chinese press exposing these headline wage rises as bogus. The China Times, a business newspaper, pointed out on July 4 that, despite increases in the basic wage levels at Foxconn, its 800,000 employees are actually worse off than before. The announced pay rises added up to 122 percent but a drastic cut in overtime, accompanied by intensified workloads, means an actual income decline of nearly one third.

An assembly line worker told China Times: "After hearing about the wage increases, I was excited for a long time, thinking I could get 2500-2600 yuan [a month], but the result is no more overtime and the income drops sharply." He explained that he used to earn 1,900 yuan ($US280) a month with overtime, but in June earned just 1,300 yuan. At the same time, his workload increased from assembling 15 components per hour to 16-17.

Other firms in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong are using the Foxconn ruse. A worker at an auto parts factory in Foshan, where strikes in Honda's plants took place, told the China Times that he was "forced to have pay increase". The worker explained: "Before the wage increase our basic salary was 850 yuan [a month] with a 80 yuan full attendance bonus, but after lifting our basic pay to 920 yuan, there were no more bonuses." In other words, the pay increase was in reality a pay cut.

Workers at a toy factory in Dongguan's Houjie township complained of similar tricks. Their boss promised them 200 yuan more a month, but started to charge them 150 yuan a month for food that had previously been provided without charge. So the wage rise amounted to just 50 yuan a month, or $US7.40.

At Foxconn, the wage rises were part of a carefully orchestrated public relations exercise, not only aimed at placating workers. It also reassured major international companies such as Apple, Nokia and Sony that their corporate image was not going to tarnished by the exposure of the inhumane, sweatshop conditions where their products were manufactured.

The South China Morning Post Magazine in June pointed to the widespread discontent among workers in Foxconn's giant complexes in Shenzhen that house 420,000 employees. The pay increase of 33 percent for Foxconn's Shenzhen workers to 1,200 yuan a month was only a little higher than the local minimum wage. A worker explained: "Foxconn are very smart; they say it's a pay rise but we actually earn less. It's meaningless. They will increase daily quotas to make up for lost time. It's always the same."

Another worker told the newspaper: "I am still required to work 11 hours a day, from 7.30 am to 7.30 pm, seven days a week ... Although the company guaranteed at least one day off every week after 13 suicide attempts, the policy hasn't been carried out. One of the few improvements was that our supervisor broadcast pop songs after we complained that all work and no play made workers dull boys. But even that was cancelled after just a few days."

Production line managers continue to enforce a demerit system for petty offences that results in pay deductions. Lu Bingdong, 22-year-old worker, is part of a line with a daily quota of 21,000 Apple iPhones. He explained: "You can lose points for having long [finger]nails, being late, yawning, eating, sitting on the floor, walking quickly. There's a whole load of things. Just one point means losing my monthly bonus."

Foxconn, like many smaller companies, operates on thin profit margins. Major Western corporations have refused to pay higher prices for their products. Professor Lin Jiang of Sun Yat-sen University told the China Times that a wage increase of more than 5 percent would be unbearable for most enterprises in Dongguan. The large headline wage increases were therefore "mirages" for workers.

Foxconn, one of the world's Fortune 500 corporations, recorded a share price fall of nearly 7 percent on June 30, after announcing net losses of $18.7 million in the first half of 2010. Foxconn's share price has plunged by more than 50 percent this year, amid investor concerns about labour unrest and losses. Morgan Stanley has downgraded Foxconn's stock to "underweight", while JPMorgan warned that 2010 will be "a bad year" for the company as one of its major clients, Nokia, faces a stagnant market for its smart phones, partly due to the deepening economic crisis in Europe.

Foxconn is pressing ahead with long-held plans to relocate from Shenzhen to inland areas where official minimum wages are much lower. A huge new plant housing 300,000 workers is proposed in Henan province, where the local minimum wage is only 600 yuan a month, even after a 33 percent increase this year. Meanwhile the two plants in Shenzhen will be merged, with some production being transferred to factories in Chengdu or Tianjin, where wages are lower. For all Foxconn's hype about giving workers back their "dignity" with higher pay, its reaction is to seek out cheaper labour.

Other employers are exploiting the cheap labour of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia or Burma. They earn less than $5 or 34 yuan a day and receive no bonuses, overtime or other benefits. A shoe factory owner in Dongguan, who employed over 200 Cambodian and Lao workers or a quarter of his total workforce, was cited by Forbes magazine on July 1: "They are hard workers and obedient employees. They could work 15 to 16 hours a day and work for a month without any break."

Jeff Joerres, chief executive of Manpower, one of the world's largest recruitment companies, told the Financial Times last week that large capital-intensive American companies were thinking twice about investing in China. Their concern was not only workers' demands for higher wages, but the danger of political instability associated with labour unrest. Joerres referred to the greater attractiveness of Vietnam and other cheap labour platforms--with the implicit message to Beijing that it must suppress strikes to remain competitive.

Peter Morici, a former chief economist for US International Trade Commission, told Investor's Business Daily on July 2 that US corporations would find "China to be a much more hostile place do business" as the unrest of workers spread. The newspaper noted that the conventional wisdom of investors was that China's authoritarian government "could keep workers in check". But Charles Wolf, a senior Rand Corp economist, warned that the regime was not all-powerful. "They have their hands full with a lot of things, and controlling labour unrest is one of them," he said.

Rural discontent is also emerging. Farmers began a protest on June 24 against inadequate compensation for land requisitioned for industrial projects at Deyang in Sichuan province. More than 300 protestors were injured and 200 arrested after a violent crackdown by 1,000 armed police against 5,000 villagers on July 3.

The four-day strike by workers at the Japanese-owned Tianjin Mitsumi Electric Co. ended last Saturday after management apparently made limited concessions to workers' demands for higher wages and better conditions. A two-day strike that halted production at a Honda assembly plant in Guangzhou ended yesterday. The facility manufactures the Honda Jazz for export to Europe. But like earlier strikes, none of the underlying issues have been resolved. The attempts by Foxconn and other companies to dupe their employees by offering large wage rises with one hand, and taking them back with another will only breed resentment and anger, fuelling even more determined strikes and protests in the future.

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The human rights agency has confirmed that 35 women and children were killed following the latest US attacks on an alleged al-Qaeda hideout in Yemen. Initially, there were attempts to bury the story, and Yemen officially denied that civilians were killed as a result of the December 17 attack on al-Majala in southern Yemen. However, it has been simply impossible to conceal what is now considered the largest loss of life in one single US attack in the country.

If the civilian casualties were indeed a miscalculation on the part of the US military, there should no longer be any doubt about the fact that cluster munitions are far too dangerous a weapon to be utilized in war. And they certainly have no place whatsoever in civilian areas. The human casualties are too large to justify.

Yemen is not alone. Gaza, Lebanon and Afghanistan are also stark examples of the untold loss and suffering caused by cluster bombs. Meanwhile, the unrepentant Israeli army will not consider dropping the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas altogether. Instead it is pondering ways to make them 'safer'. The Jerusalem Post reported on July 2 that the army "has recently carried out a series of tests with a bomblet that has a specially designed self-destruct mechanism which dramatically reduces the amount of unexploded ordnance." During the Israeli onslaught in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Israel fired millions of bomblets, mostly into South Lebanon. Aside from the immediate devastation and causalities, unexploded ordnance continues to victimize Lebanon's civilians, most of whom are children. Dozens of lives have been lost since the end of this war.

In Gaza, the same terrible scenario was repeated between 2008 and 2009. Unlike Lebanon, however, trapped Palestinians in Gaza had nowhere to go.

Now Israel is anticipating another war with the Lebanese resistance. In preparation for this, an Israeli PR campaign is already underway. It seeks to convince public opinion that Israel is doing its utmost to avoid civilian casualties. "As a result of the collateral damage and international condemnation, and ahead of a potential new conflict with Hizbullah, the IDF has decided to evaluate the M85 bomblet manufactured by the government-owned Israeli Military Industries (IMI)," the Jerusalem Post reported.

Of course, Israel's friends, especially those who are yet to ratify the Convention on Cluster Munitions, will be pleased by the initial successes of the Israeli army testing. Under pressure to ratify the agreement, these countries are only too eager to offer a 'safer' version of current cluster bomb models. This would help not only to maintain the huge profits generated from this morally abhorrent business, it would also hopefully quell growing criticism by civil society and other world governments.

In December 2008, the United States, Russia and China, among others, sent a terrible message to the rest of the world. They refused to take part in the historic signing of the treaty that banned the production and use of cluster bombs. In a world that is plagued by war, military occupation and terrorism, the involvement of the great military powers in signing and ratifying the agreement would have signaled - if only symbolically - the willingness of these countries to spare civilians' unjustifiable deaths and the lasting scars of war.

Fortunately, the refusal didn't completely impede an international agreement. The incessant activism of many conscientious individuals and organizations came to fruition on December 3 and 4 in Oslo, Norway, when ninety-three countries signed a treaty banning the weapon.

Unfortunately, albeit unsurprisingly, the US, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan - a group that includes the biggest makers and users of the weapon - neither attended the Ireland negotiations of May 2008, and nor did they show any interest in signing the agreement in Oslo.

Most countries that have signed the accords are not involved in any active military conflict. They are also not in any way benefiting from the lucrative cluster munition industry.

The treaty was the outcome of intensive campaigning by the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC), a group of non-governmental organizations. CMC is determined to carry on with its campaigning to bring more signatories to the fold.

But without the involvement of the major producers and active users of the weapon, the Oslo ceremony remained largely symbolic. However, there is nothing symbolic about the pain and bitter losses experienced by the many victims of cluster bombs. According to the group Handicap International, a third of cluster-bomb victims are children. Equally alarming, 98 percent of the weapon's overall victims are civilians. The group estimates that about 100,000 people have been maimed or killed by cluster bombs around the world since 1965. Unlike conventional weapons, cluster bomblets survive for many years, luring little children with their attractive appearance. Children often mistake the bomblets for candy or toys.

Recently, some encouraging news emerged from the Netherlands. Maxime Verhagen, Minister of Foreign Affairs, urged his country's House of Representative to ratify the Convention, which bans the production, possessions and use of such munitions. The ban leaves no room for any misguided interpretations and does not care for the Israeli army's experimentations.

In his speech, Verhagen claimed, "Cluster munitions are unreliable and imprecise, and their use poses a grave danger to the civilian population...Years after a conflict has ended, people - especially children - can fall victim to unexploded submunition from cluster bombs."

To date, the agreement has been signed by 106 countries and ratified by 36 - and will enter into force on August 1, despite the fact that the big players refuse to take part.

The Netherlands' push is certainly a step in the right direction. But much more remains to be done. The onus is also on civil societies in countries that are yet to ratify the agreement or sign it in the first place. "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men (and women) to do nothing." This holds as true in the issue of cluster bombs, as in any other where human rights are violated and ignored.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.

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No wonder that people easily spend decades eating unhealthy foods or living a sedentary lifestyle, or both, without appreciating or internalizing the inevitable negative and serious health impacts, from heart disease to all kinds of cancers, for example.

No wonder that all kinds of technologies that offer immediate rewards or benefits are embraced while long term negative impacts are easily ignored. Maybe cell phones really do cause brain cancer. Maybe deep ocean drilling for oil will fail and cause exactly what we are now witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP fiasco.

But we like cell phones and we refuse to take the many actions to rid society of its addiction to petroleum and so we willingly accept our time blindness no matter how many experts and researchers try to warn us about the terrible long term impacts. In other words, near term benefits blind us to long term costs. As economists might say, those long term costs are heavily discounted.

It is not just that individuals are time blind, but that there is collective time blindness. It is so powerful that conventional institutions we think of as protecting people and society are impotent. That's how powerful time blindness is.

Worse yet, the really smart people know how to take advantage of mass time blindness. Think of business and corporations that create mass market products and technologies that seduce people because their negative consequences fall victim to deeply embedded time blindness. Think of all the Ponzi schemes that have victimized so many people out of many billions of dollars. By the time that negative impacts occur it startles and amazes people as if they could not have been predicted. Wrong! In all cases of catastrophes and crises there is always a record of some people correctly forecasting them. But they are ignored. Why? Time blindness. That vision of an awful, deadly future becomes invisible because of our time blindness, or it merely is seen as fantasy, speculation or entertainment.

Want another example? Try the classic one of over population: Too many humans on planet Earth using too many resources. Those not falling prey to time blindness have been trying to warn humanity for a very long time that a lower birth rate and fewer people would actually result in high quality of life for people, with less social conflicts, wars and terrorism. Also think global warming or climate change. Though there are clear impacts now, major calamities will become future shocks because of so much time blindness.

We ignore time blindness at our peril. The real lesson of the BP oil disaster is far more significant than merely one technology or one incompetent and immoral company that wrecks havoc and pain on so many people as well as ruining so much of the natural environment. We need to spend a lot more time understanding intrinsic time blindness as a kind of mental disability, and how to teach people to avoid it. One person has been doing just that for decades. Check out the work of Jack Alpert at skil.org.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn at delusionaldemocracy.com.]

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Talk about a possible double-dip recession misses the larger reality: For many millions of Americans the first recession is still here; there has been no recovery for them. Too bad President Obama cannot comprehend that. Nice that only 23 percent of people believe that his policies have made economic conditions better. Maybe they got the change they were waiting for.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center provides disturbing data that no amount of lies from politicians can refute. Without a lot more consumer spending, remember, the US economy will not regain lasting health. The scope of the economic shock is shown by the 60 percent of Americans that have cut down on borrowing and spending. And nearly 50 percent are in worse financial shape because of the economic downturn. Forty percent of adults have tapped savings and retirement accounts to make ends meet. Nearly 25 percent have had to borrow money from someone. Ten percent have moved back with their parents to survive the economic tsunami, and that rises to 24 percent for workers between 18 and 29 years old.

More and more Americans now recognize that retirement will have to wait. For those 62 and older and still working, 35 percent have postponed retirement. That jumps to 60 percent as a likely action for working adults between ages 50 and 61. Replace the golden years with the disappointment years, especially when inevitable reduced Social Security and Medicare benefits hit hard.

For those still lucky enough to have jobs, the Commerce Department reports that the personal savings rate in May -- the part of wage income that goes unspent -- rose to 4 percent, the highest amount in nearly a year, as anxious consumers faced continued economic woes, such as fears about losing jobs or homes, affording food and health care, and a tumbling stock market.

And always remember that the official jobless rate of just under 10 percent is pure bunk; it really is close to 20 percent nationally, and a lot worse in many places and for African-Americans and Hispanics. The average time for being without a job is now six months, with many more people jobless for a whole lot more, often several years. All this means suppressed consumer spending and continued high home foreclosure rates. No big surprise that consumer confidence crashed almost 10 points between May and June. Welcome to high anxiety.

Also keep in mind that even as the general consumer spending shows little life, the Upper Class keeps on living it up. Gallup reported "Upper-income Americans' self-reported spending rose 33% to an average of $145 per day in May -- up from $109 per day in April 2010 and May 2009, and the highest monthly average since November 2008." The rest of the population's self-reported spending averaged $59 per day in May. So, rich Americans are spending nearly twice as much as the vast majority of Americans every day. Indeed, Tiffany reports sales up 17 percent in the jeweler's most recent quarter. Overall US luxury sales, says MasterCard SpendingPulse, jumped 22.7 percent in March, over the previous year. The increase in luxury buying appears to be coming almost totally from the "ultra-affluents," those households making over $250,000 a year. Their first-quarter spending increased 22.6 percent, meaning that they have returned to spending at pre-recession levels.

And here is a gem of a new statistic. In 2009, the Economic Policy Institute reports that the typical working American with a four-year college degree took home $1,025 per week, $5 a week less than Americans with a four-year degree took home, after adjusting for inflation, in the year 2000. How's that for progress?

Meanwhile, almost half of U.S. companies that reduced or suspended their contributions to employee retirement plans during the recession haven't restored them.

The ultra ugly truth is that there is very little hope for the US economy providing true prosperity for the vast majority of people in the foreseeable future. Unemployment will remain high and consumer spending will remain low except for the wealthy. Economic inequality is terrible and punishing most Americans who should forget about that fabled American dream. To visualize America's staggeringly unequal distribution of wealth, suggests University of Tennessee at Martin historian David Barber, envision a 100-seat auditorium filled with 100 people. If seating in that auditorium reflected our current wealth distribution, the single richest person in the hall "would be able to spread out smartly" over nearly 43 seats. The poorest 60 would have to squeeze into just one.

As government deficits continue at historic high levels there will be even more pain as local and state governments cut employment and services. All the economic impacts of the BP oil spill in the Gulf region will continue to expand and reverberate and it is doubtful that enough money will come from BP to those in pain soon enough to prevent catastrophes for millions of people.

Some impacted people may turn to religion as if God has not already shown total disdain for humanity. Some will delude themselves that voting for certain candidates in the coming midterm elections will help. Others will bury themselves in various distractions or choose to believe the political lies of President Obama and other politicians. [How did all that federal stimulus spending work for you?] Perhaps far more Lower Class people [Are you in denial about your Lower Class status?] should consider the advice of the deeply cynical: Kill Yourself. If only politicians would take that advice.

Happy Fourth of July. Time to try and remember the good old days.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn at delusionaldemocracy.com.]

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There is a storm on in Washington after the firing of the general regarding the Afghan imbroglio. Obtuse statements are flying every which way. We are not going to withdraw but, we are going to withdraw but, we are going to stay on but, we are going to partially start withdrawing but, we are winning but, we are not losing but, we are talking to the Taliban but, we are not talking to the Taliban but...etc. etc.  Regardless however, the deniers of America's huge Afghan pratfall continue trying to flog new life into the panting behemoth.

But for its arrogance, one would have taken no pleasure in the humbling of the titan. After all, it is supposedly the 'moral leader' of the world. Yet so far gone was the giant's haughtiness in the Neocon's era-taking on the weak, bombing them back to stone age and announcing sneeringly to the world, 'we don't do body count'-that one awaits the occasion with a wincing anticipation. For the event will scatter near and far, bits and pieces of the legend of American supremacy and the mirage of an empire.

It is a sad moment, however, to witness America's squirming state. Sad because not very long back certain charlatans at the helm of affairs in this great country, a country that welcomed to its bosom victims of the abuse of other powers for centuries, turned it into the greatest abuser of power itself. And in so doing, wrote its epitaph on the one hand and a revival of the very retrograde forces they were apparently fighting on the other.

Now that a concluding dose is indeed likely to be administered to the Empire building dream, its time to take a look at the hows and whys of it all.

Perhaps the biggest single cause of the debacle is that while America, drunk with power and taut with an over bulging military muscle fed nonstop on  steroids of high tech weaponry, stayed glued to its strategy of dominance, the world quietly passed her by. Thus intoxicated, fixated on grandeur, deaf to saner voices, she failed to notice that there are limits to the power of even a super power. With brute force in far flung corners of the earth, using an un-oiled military ramrod, it tried to roughly shove down its targets' parched throats alien economic, political, and cultural packages. That the subjects tend to throw up such forced-fed foreign doses was clear to all but the American leaders.

Furthermore, to fool the gullible American citizenry, America's previous administration rode bareback on 'God is on our side' moral conviction. In using this age old 'god factor' to let loose the dogs of war they forgot that they were about to take on a people who consider themselves as 'God's most chosen people' with a certainty that has no equal on planet earth. They also did not take into account that when divinities are made to clash, good and evil so fuse with each other in the ensuing melee that it is hard to tell one from another.

Now when the Americans go back to their island, they need to ponder over what went wrong. They need to record for posterity how the world's best-paid, best-trained and best-equipped army was forced to its knees by fighters armed only with light weapons but armored faith. For this, the American military philosophers stand beholden to future generations of American leaders.

Here are a few suggestions for putting together this historic document.

Embossed in bold golden letters under the title on the cover should be American historian Howard Zinn's quote that says, "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people". Then from the first chapter onwards, the historians should start putting together how in its willful, premeditated genocide of an innocent people, every canon of the United Nations and the 1945 Nuremberg Charters, the International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions was blown to bits by the criminal cabal then ruling the United States of America.

Next they should catalogue not just the murder of a million plus human beings, but also America's bullying unilateralism, dismissive approach towards international treaties, rude attitude towards other nations and cultures, and disrespect for institutions of the world government. They should confess the real reason for America's onslaught on a defenseless, but resource rich people. They should admit in clear words that it was nothing other than that there is no limit to the horrors that the ruling American class will not inflict to stay in power and gobble up the fast dwindling resources of planet earth. They should record for posterity the ugly truth of America's wars and inform the Americans that these wars were waged for nothing other than corporate power and global conquest not withstanding the death, destruction and oppression these caused.

They should then record the dichotomies of American policies. They should note, for instance, how America has been supporting Israel, a state bristling with nuclear weapons, not a signatory to nuclear pacts and baring its nuclear fangs at the slightest of provocations, but had a sledge hammer out for Iran for even saying the word 'nuclear'. They should record in the manuscript the irony that Iraq was blown into smithereens for violating a few trumped up UN resolutions yet Israel, the world's record holder of violations of UN resolutions, never gets even a rap on the knuckles for the same.

They should neatly manifest the names of all the dictators that America has been bedding with while wanting to win the 'hearts and minds' of the nations they suppressed. And that from Idi Amin of Uganda, General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, General Zia of Pakistan to Pol Pot of Cambodia, America has been the biggest friend and patron of the most crooked and brutal dictators the world over. The end result of this 'happy union', it may be noted, was that America, that principal champion of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, herself became the architect of the darkest dungeons on earth. And that reckless American acts of arbitrary detentions, extraordinary renditions, torture, and abuse of prisoners of war in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan shamed even those of certain banana republics in the Third World.

The last chapter, all written in bold, should be sub-divided into four parts titled as;

Part-1. Why an ideology cannot be bombed out of a people.

Part-2. How the only way to defeat an ideology is with a better ideology.

Part-3. Some people push back.

Part-4. Lessons.

The epic volume should be titled as "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings" and Shelley's instructive warning should be given as its concluding epitaph.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

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In our topsy-turvy world where truth and lies coexist equally and sociopathic business elites reign supreme, it would hardly be a stretch to theorize that cyber war is the continuation of parapolitical crime by other means.

Through the Wormhole

In Speed and Politics, cultural theorist Paul Virilio argued that "history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems." With electronic communications now blanketing the globe, it was only a matter of time before our political masters, (temporarily) outflanked by the subversive uses to which new media lend themselves, would deploy what Virilio called the "integral accident" (9/11 being one of many examples) and gin-up entirely new categories of threats, "Cyber Pearl Harbor" comes to mind, from which of course, they would "save us."

That the revolving door connecting the military and the corporations who service war making is a highly-profitable redoubt for those involved, has been analyzed here at great length. With new moves to tighten the screws on the immediate horizon, and as "Change" reveals itself for what it always was, an Orwellian exercise in public diplomacy, hitting the "kill switch" serves as an apt descriptor for the new, repressive growth sector that links technophilic fantasies of "net-centric" warfare to the burgeoning "homeland security" market.

Back in March, Wired investigative journalist Ryan Singel wrote that the "biggest threat to the open internet" isn't "Chinese hackers" or "greedy ISPs" but corporatist warriors like former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.

Having retreated to his old haunt as a senior vice president with the ultra-spooky firm Booz Allen Hamilton (a post he held for a decade before joining the Bush administration), McConnell stands to make millions as Booz Allen's parent company, the secretive private equity powerhouse, The Carlyle Group, plans to take the firm public and sell some $300 million worth of shares, The Wall Street Journal reported last week.

"With its deep ties to the defense establishment" the Journal notes, "Booz Allen has become embedded in a range of military operations such as planning war games and intelligence initiatives." That Carlyle Group investors have made out like proverbial bandits during the endless "War on Terror" goes without saying. With "relatively low debt levels for a leveraged buyout," the investment "has been a successful one for Carlyle, which has benefited from the U.S. government's increasing reliance on outsourcing in defense."

And with 15,000 employees in the Washington area, most with coveted top secret and above security clearances, Booz Allen's clients include a panoply of secret state agencies such as the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, NSA and the U.S. Air Force. With tentacles enlacing virtually all facets of the secretive world of outsourced intelligence, the firm has emerged as one of the major players in the cybersecurity niche market.

While McConnell and his minions may not know much about "SQL injection hacks," Singel points out that what makes this spook's spook dangerous (after all, he was NSA Director under Clinton) "is that he knows about social engineering. ... And now he says we need to re-engineer the internet."

Accordingly, Washington Technology reported in April, that under McConnell's watchful eye, the firm landed a $14.4 million contract to build a new bunker for U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM). Chump change by Pentagon standards perhaps, but the spigot is open and salad days are surely ahead.

Now that CYBERCOM has come on-line as a "subordinate unified command" of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), it's dual-hatted Director, Air Force General Keith B. Alexander confirmed by the Senate and with a fourth, gleaming star firmly affixed on his epaulettes, the real fun can begin.

A denizen of the shadows with a résumé to match, Alexander is also Director of the National Security Agency (hence the appellation "dual-hatted"), the Pentagon satrapy responsible for everything from battlefield signals- and electronic intelligence (SIGINT and ELINT), commercial and industrial espionage (ECHELON) to illegal driftnet spying programs targeting U.S. citizens.

Spooky résumé aside, what should concern us here is what Alexander will actually do at the Pentagon's new cyberwar shop.

A Fact Sheet posted by STRATCOM informs us that CYBERCOM "plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes, and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full-spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, CYBERCOM's offensive nature is underlined by the role it will play as STRATCOM's operational cyber wing. The training of thousands of qualified airmen, as The Register revealed last month, will form the nucleus of an "elite corps of cyberwarfare operatives," underscoring the command's signal importance to the secret state and the corporations they so lovingly serve.

Cybersecurity: The New Corporatist "Sweet Spot"

Fueling administration moves to "beef up," i.e. tighten state controls over the free flow of information is cash, lots of it. The Washington Post reported June 22 that "Cybersecurity, fast becoming Washington's growth industry of choice, appears to be in line for a multibillion-dollar injection of federal research dollars, according to a senior intelligence official."

"Delivering the keynote address at a recent cybersecurity summit sponsored by Defense Daily," veteran Post reporter and CIA media asset, Walter Pincus, informs us that "Dawn Meyerriecks, deputy director of national intelligence for acquisition and technology, said that along with the White House Office of Science and Technology, her office is going to sponsor major research 'where the government's about to spend multiple billions of dollars'."

Bingo!

According to a Defense Daily profile, before her appointment by Obama's recently fired Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, Meyerriecks was the chief technology officer with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), described on DISA's web site as a "combat support agency" that "engineers and provides command and control capabilities and enterprise infrastructure to continuously operate and assure a global net-centric enterprise in direct support to joint warfighters, National level leaders, and other mission and coalition partners across the full spectrum of operations."

During Defense Daily's June 11 confab at the Marriott Hotel in Washington (generously sponsored by Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics and The Analysis Group), Meyerriecks emphasized although "tons of products" have been commercially developed promising enhanced security, "there's not an answer Band-Aid that is going to come with this."

All the more reason then, to shower billions of taxpayer dollars on impoverished defense and security corps, while preaching "fiscal austerity" to "greedy" workers and homeowners facing a new wave of foreclosures at the hands of cash strapped banks.

"We're starting to question whether or not the fundamental precepts are right," Meyerriecks said, "and that's really what, at least initially, this [new research] will be aimed at."

Presumably, the billions about to feed the "new security paradigm," all in the interest of "keeping us safe" of course, means "we need to be really innovative, because I think we're going to run out of runway on our current approach," she said.

Washington Technology reported Meyerriecks as saying "We don't have any fixed ideas about what the answers are." Therefore, "we're looking for traditional and nontraditional partnering in sourcing."

Amongst the "innovative research" fields which the ODNI, the Department of Homeland Security and one can assume, NSA/CYBERCOM, will soon be exploring are what Washington Technology describe as: "Multiple security levels for government and non-government organizations. Security systems that change constantly to create 'moving targets' for hackers," and more ominously for privacy rights, coercive "methods to motivate individuals to improve their cybersecurity practices."

The Secret State's Internet Control Bill

Since major policy moves by administration flacks always come in waves, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy June 18, that in order to fight "homegrown terrorism" the monitoring of internet communications "is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security," the Associated Press reported.

While the Obama regime has stepped-up attacks on policy critics who have disclosed vital information concealed from the American people, prosecuting whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake, who spilled the beans on corrupt NSA shenanigans with grifting defense and security corps, and wages a low-level war against WikiLeaks, Cryptome, Public Intelligence and other secret spilling web sites, it continues to shield those who oversaw high crimes and misdemeanors during the previous and current regimes.

In this light, Napolitano's statement that "we can significantly advance security without having a deleterious impact on individual rights in most instances," is a rank mendacity.

With enough airspace to fly a drone through, the Home Sec boss told the gathering "at the same time, there are situations where trade-offs are inevitable." What those "situations" are or what "trade-offs" were being contemplated by the administration was not specified by Napolitano; arch neocon Joe Lieberman however, graciously obliged.

As "Cyber War" joins the (failed) "War on Drugs" and the equally murderous "War on Terror" as America's latest bête noire and panic all rolled into one reeking mass of disinformation, Senators Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Tom Carper (D-DE) introduced the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 in the Senate.

The bill empowers the Director of a new National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC), to be housed in the Department of Homeland Security, to develop a "process" whereby owners and operators of "critical infrastructure" will develop "response plans" for what the legislation calls "a national cybersecurity emergency."

This particularly pernicious piece of legislative flotsam would hand the President the power to declare a "national cyber-emergency" at his discretion and would force private companies, internet service providers and search engines to "comply with the new risk-based security requirements." Accordingly, "in coordination with the private sector ... the President [can] authorize emergency measures to protect the nation's most critical infrastructure if a cyber vulnerability is being exploited or is about to be exploited."

Under terms of the bill, such "emergency measures" can force ISPs to "take action" if so directed by the President, to limit, or even to sever their connections to the internet for up to 30 days.

While the administration, so far, has not explicitly endorsed Lieberman's bill, DHS Deputy Undersecretary Philip Reitinger told reporters that he "agreed" with the thrust of the legislation and that the Executive Branch "may need to take extraordinary measures" in the event of a "crisis."

Under the 1934 Communications Act, the World Socialist Web Site points out, "the president may, under 'threat of war,' seize control of any 'facilities or stations for wire communications'."

"Though dated," socialist critic Mike Ingram avers, "that definition would clearly apply to broadband providers or Web sites. Anyone disobeying a presidential order can be imprisoned for one year. In addition to making explicit the inclusion of Internet providers, a central component of the Lieberman bill is a promise of immunity from financial claims for any private company which carries through an order from the federal government."

Under terms of the legislation, the president requires no advance notification to Congress in order to hit the internet "kill switch," and his authority to reign supreme over the free speech rights of Americans can be extended for up to six months after the "state of war" has expired.

While the bill's supporters, which include the secret state lobby shop, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) claim the Lieberman-Collins-Carper legislation is intended to create a "shield" to defend the U.S. and its largest corporate benefactors from the "looming threat" of a "Cyber 9/11," one cannot discount the billions of dollars in plum government contracts that will fall into the laps of the largest defense and security corps, the primary beneficiaries of this legislation; thus the bill's immunity provisions.

Indeed, current INSA Chairwoman, Frances Fragos Townsend, the former Bushist Homeland Security Adviser, was appointed in 2007 as National Continuity Coordinator under the auspices of National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51) and was assigned responsibility for coordinating the development and implementation of Federal continuity of government (COG) policies. As readers of Antifascist Calling are aware, plans include contingencies for a declaration of martial law in the event of a "catastrophic emergency." Whether or not a "national cybersecurity emergency" would fall under the penumbral cone of silence envisaged by NSPD-51 to "maintain order" is anyone's guess.

However, in a June 23 letter to Lieberman-Collins-Carper, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and 23 other privacy and civil liberties groups, insisted that "changes are needed to ensure that cybersecurity measures do not unnecessarily infringe on free speech, privacy, and other civil liberties interests."

CDT states that while "the bill makes it clear that it does not authorize electronic surveillance beyond that authorized in current law, we are concerned that the emergency actions that could be compelled could include shutting down or limiting Internet communications that might be carried over covered critical infrastructure systems."

Additionally, CDT avers that the bill "requires CCI owners to share cybersecurity 'incident' information with DHS, which will share some of that information with law enforcement and intelligence personnel." While Lieberman-Collins-Carper claim that "incident reporting" doesn't authorize "any federal entity" to compel disclosure "or conduct surveillance," the bill does not indicate what might be included in an 'incident report' and we are concerned that personally-identifiable information will be included." Count on it!

In a press release, INSA's chairwoman declared that the legislation is important in "establishing a public-private partnership to promote national cyber security priorities, strengthen and clarify authorities regarding the protection of federal civilian systems, and improve national cyber security defenses."

Amongst the heavy-hitters who will profit financially from developing a "public-private partnership to promote national cyber security priorities," include INSA "Founding Members" BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, CSC, General Dynamics, HP, Lockheed Martin, ManTech International, Microsoft, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Talk about one hand washing the other! A casual glance at Washington Technology's 2010 list of the Top 100 Federal Government Contractors provides a telling definition of the term "stakeholder"!

Blanket Surveillance Made Easy: Einstein 3's Roll-Out

During a recent Cyberspace Symposium staged by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA), an industry lobby group chock-a-block with defense and security corps, a series of video presentations set the tone, and the agenda, for CYBERCOM and the secret state's new push for heimat cybersecurity.

During a question and answer session "with a small group of reporters" in sync with the alarmist twaddle peddled by AFCEA and STRATCOM, Defense Systems' Amber Corrin informed us that "one possibility" floated by Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynne III to "keep us safe," is the deployment of the privacy-killing Einstein 2 and Einstein 3 intrusion detection and prevention systems on civilian networks.

"To support such a move" Defense Systems reported, "a task force comprising industry and government information technology and defense interests ... has been forged to examine issues surrounding critical infrastructure network security."

As Antifascist Calling reported last July, Einstein 3 is based on technology developed by NSA under its Tutelage program, a subordinate project of NSA's larger and more pervasive privacy-killing Stellar Wind surveillance operation.

Einstein 3's deep-packet inspection technology can read the content of email messages and other private electronic communications. Those deemed "threats" to national security networks can then be forwarded to analysts and "attack signatures" (or suspect political messages) are then stored in a massive NSA-controlled database for future reference.

Federal Computer Week disclosed in March that the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) "plans to partner with a commercial Internet Service Provider and another government agency to pilot technology developed by the National Security Agency to automate the process of detecting cyber intrusions into civilian agencies' systems."

"The exercise," according to reporter Ben Bain "aims to demonstrate the ability of an ISP to select and redirect Internet traffic from a participating government agency using the new technology. The exercise would also be used demonstrate the ability for U.S. CERT to apply intrusion detection and prevention to that traffic and to generate automated alerts about selected cyber threats."

That testing is currently underway and has been undertaken under authority of National Security Presidential Directive 54, signed by President George W. Bush in 2008 in the waning days of his administration. While the vast majority of NSPD-54 is classified top secret, hints of its privacy-killing capabilities were revealed in the sanitized version of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) released by the Obama White House in March.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed suit against the government in federal court after their Freedom of Information Act request to the National Security Agency was rejected by securocrats. The agency refused to release NSPD-54, since incorporated into Obama's CNCI, stating that they "have been withheld in their entirety" because they are "exempt from release" on grounds of "national security."

In a follow-up piece earlier this month, Federal Computer Week disclosed that the exercise "will also allow the Homeland Security Department, which runs the Einstein program, to share monitored information with the National Security Agency, though that data is not supposed to include message content."

"The recent combination of those three elements--reading e-mail messages, asking companies to participate in the monitoring program, and getting the NSA in the loop--has set off alarm bells about future uses of Einstein 3," FCW's John Zyskowski disclosed.

Those bells have been ringing for decades, tolling the death of our democratic republic. As military-style command and control systems proliferate, supporting everything from "zero-tolerance" policing and urban surveillance, the deployment of packet-sniffing technologies will soon join CCTV cameras, license plate readers and "watchlists," thus setting the stage for the next phase of the secret state's securitization of daily life.



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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Then through a microphone the cashier boomed to the boy, "Is that all?" I wondered if he knew what was about to happen, or if some form of oral manual was required to hold his hand through. Like an expert, however, he flawlessly, and without prompting, held up his bag of chips to the glass, the cashier scanned it from inside, he dropped his cash, she pushed his change, and he walked off undaunted. "Next!" she called out. Disturbed to my core, I burst my gums open, and undoubtedly inspired security concerns. It took a couple of minutes to recompose and let out a short request for $20 worth of gas.

As I returned home, the scene replayed in my mind - the boy stepping before me, lifting his baggage; the cashier responding with precision; the boy stoic but studied in this art, walking off without care; and my inability to pull him aside, shake him up, and let him know what had just happened was a travesty and a manifestation of how unmanageable society has become - where human beings fall into cubicles in the workplace of life, where contact is diminished drastically, where the frenzy-for-safety forces many into partitioning themselves (professionally and personally). I felt a failure for stifling the urge to put in his hand Henry Giroux's "Public Spaces, Private Lives" and clamor: "Read this or Die! You now live in a Glass Society, younger brother; and you had better get used to it because the worst is yet to arrive, and your elders rank you so low on the priority rung that to expect rectification anytime soon would usher in many dashed hopes which at your age cannot be healthy."

So far gone are the days when corner stores provided meaning for a whole community: when customer and clerk spoke the same tongue, shared the same values and communicated without concern. In a Glass Society, occasional "hi's" and "hellos" are exchanged, but sincerity falls short. It becomes just polite conduct to acknowledge the other person's humanity - but briefly enough to prevent unnecessary badger. Workers in the same office don't know each other. Sure, they "collaborate" on "projects" and "brainstorm" on "ideas," but relationships are outlawed. Each one is against the other. Each one just as suspicious of the other. Each one trying to annihilate the other - at any signs of weakness.

Society, not just schools anymore, is becoming modeled after the prison culture: most are inmates, a few are guards (who fare little better than inmates), and only one or two, wardens, can claim autonomy over their affairs. Inmates know guards have families to feed, and that the paycheck often comes at their expense. Guards know inmates deserve better from the society they owe debt to, but to protest policies could lead to loss of paycheck - or worse. Each one works daily to bend rules and cut schemes. Each one is aware of the other's deeds. Each one has, more or less, abandoned hope for a transformed society.

Inmates get their share of family visits - but under the jurisdiction of guidelines and regulations which, if followed correctly, smother just about all that is real and authentic about family time. And time is crucial here - for only a few minutes can inmates spend catching up on the last week, month or year: filled with birthdays, sick stories, prison hardship, Halloween costumes, academic issues, loss, joy, loneliness, melancholy, drama. Many inmates cannot even share the warmth of a child or spouse's hands. A glass window would have to suffice.

Skeptics can wonder through any corporate workplace today, and observe the conducts of employees - how close contact is, how high voices rise, how thick the tension feels. Most likely they would find human beings reduced to numbers and drones, who have functions to perform that must be carried out without complaint - however dehumanizing, however demoralizing. The same batch of skeptics should also escape to any Ivy League school in the country, and take note of the sounds issuing from most classrooms, of the communication between teacher and student, of the sense of rancid competition that destroys any possibility of meaningful education.

The more society drifts toward a partitioned and prisoned sensibility, the less chance young people have at any existence worthy of the title "human." In December 2006, a Texas four-year-old was hit with an in-school suspension for "inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment." He hugged a teacher's aide and "rubbed his face in [her] chest." (There goes tomorrow's felon!) With no-touch policies increasingly frequent - and, school officials argue, necessary - five-year-olds comforting grieving friends could end up whacked with the discipline stick.

It's easy to tell the bolts safeguarding the sanity of any society have been capped off when affection is criminalized, when children learn that to care for others, to resist narcissism, might incur harsh reprimand - and even be branded "sexual harassment." Awful as it is that kids today find few adults interested in their affairs, now when they attempt to correct a society losing touch with its humanity, all sorts of arbitrary - and, really, asinine - regulations show up to keep them in check.

If partitioning and prisoning wouldn't do, privatizing sure would. Advertising creeps up at every nook, cranny and corner of schools these days. On buses and scorecards, in hallways and cafeterias, in textbooks and bathrooms - brands drive hard bargains to kids. Schools even push snack and soda products without mercy - the same products highlighted in health classes as sure to command an early grave. No longer considered a public necessity, a condition without with a useful society ceases to exist, schools now fall under the impressions of companies and corporate foundations, flailing around market concepts like "bottom line" and "balancing budgets" and "tightening belts." Four decades back, Hannah Arendt spoke of this "decay of public services" as "the automatic results of the needs of mass societies that have become unmanageable."

A week back, I walked into a recently renovated branch of my local public library and, feeling a bit groggy, whisked off to the coffee table. On it stood two electronic coffeemakers, cream and sugar jars, stir straws and cup lids. There were, however, no cups. A librarian I complained to explained cups were no more free and would have to be purchased at 50 cents apiece. The urge once again overwhelmed me badly, and I let loose in front of him. I ended up with a steaming cup that day, but I knew complicity this time was indefensible.

At the same branch, a lady stands daily by the reception door - the last of three - welcoming and sending off customers. One door away, a DVD vending machine waits, stocked with scores of recent flicks, as well featuring a built-in screen displaying trailers. At the same branch, a plastic "Customer Service" banner hangs high in the main room. No wonder that when most kids stagger into libraries nowadays, their first stop is the computer's section; and not to tidy up an assignment, but to waste hours away on gaming sites.

And who dares blame them?

When they find more in common with animated characters than human beings, who dares blame them? When the jolting thrill that exercise or playtime or recess once afforded is deprived, who dares blame them? When all around glasses are erected, insane policies are presented and public spaces are resented, who dares blame them?

This emerging generation has been set up for what might mark the greatest disaster of a century - and it remains oblivious. Life has been so distorted but yet so normalized that many kids growing up today couldn't tell the difference between W. E. B. Du Bois and Wal-Mart - after all, both have something to say about education. It is natural that kids should imitate adults, but it is self-damning that adults should see how shabby a future awaits youth and refuse to take up necessary action.

It's time for true "revolution of values," as King called for almost 50 years ago. Only few today relish this current mode that has made life intolerably burdensome and even tyrannous to most. Many would rather do away with it and restore some semblance of sanity. There is, of course, the danger of hearkening to the cries of insincere pariahs like Glenn Beck who order a return to "simpler times"; but such commands nonetheless resonate high amongst crowds - boundless by ideology or political alliance - who find little substance in the world today.

Neoliberalism has run amok; extreme materialism has broken its countless promises; jingoism is losing grip fast. Only a real movement against any abuse of public life can restore hope in such dark times as this. The Civil Rights Movement did it. The Women's Rights Movement did it. The Labor Rights Movement did it. And this generation has no other choice. But the powers-that-be will only surrender when citizens work and struggle like the devil for a world deserving of their daily sacrifice.

Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,-the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all!

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President Obama missed what the BP oil spill disaster is really about. Though unquestionably an environmental disaster, the BP oil spill is much much more.

The BP oil spill is part of the same problem as the financial crisis: The BP oil spill and the banking crisis are two examples of the era we are living in, the era of corporate anarchy.

In a nutshell, in this era of corporate anarchy, corporations do not have to abide by any rules--none at all. Legal, moral, ethical, even financial rules are irrelevant. They have all been rescinded in the pursuit of profit--literally nothing else matters.

As a result, corporations currently exist in a state of almost pure anarchy--but an anarchy directly related to their size: The larger the corporation, the greater its absolute freedom to do and act as it pleases. That's why so many medium-sized corporations are hell-bent on growth over profits: The biggest of them all, like BP and Goldman Sachs, live in a positively Hobbesian State of Nature, free to do as they please, with nary a consequence.

The added bonus to this, though, is that the largest corporations have convinced the governments and the people of the "Too Big To Fail" fallacy--they have convinced the world that if they cease to exist, the sky will fall atop our collective heads. So if they fail, they must be saved--without argument, without penalty, and without reform.

Let's take BP: British Petroleum caused the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. There were various Federal Government agencies charged with supervising their operations--but all of those agencies deferred to BP, before the accident. As a large corporation--one of the largest oil companies in the world--BP operated more or less without any Government supervision. As is emerging, because of this lax and toothless supervision, safety rules and procedures were ignored. Insane risks were taken. No safety contingency plans were drawn up.

From what some memos are saying, disaster was inevitable.

Once the accident happened, BP controlled the information it released concerning the disaster. BP unilaterally decided not to proceed with an immediate top-kill of the well--instead, BP risked a wider disaster, in order to save the oil field by drilling a "relief well". BP's reasoning was simple: By implementing an immediate top-kill, BP would have sacrificed the oil field (and lost its investment) in order to save the environment. BP did not do this. Instead, it tried to stretch out the process, so as to salvage the oil field (and the profits) with the "relief well". But when it became impossible to hide the extent of the damage--when the smell of oil permeated the clear skies of Louisiana a hundred miles from the site of the spill--BP tried to implement the top-kill. We know how that ended.

Where was Authority? Where was Someone In Charge? The fact was, there was no one in charge. There was no one supervising--or at any rate, the ones who were supposed to be supervising had had their teeth yanked. And BP knew it--so they did whatever they wanted, regardless of the risks, or the costs.

Worst of all, BP realizes that, if it finally cannot get a handle on the oil spill disaster, they can simply fob it off on the U.S. Government--in other words, the people of the United States will wind up cleaning BP's mess. BP knows that no one will hold it accountable--BP knows that it will get away with it.

No one was holding the banks accountable either. It's no accident that American and European banks nearly went broke, but banks here in Chile sailed along smoothly: That's because banks here are regulated up the wazoo. They literally can't fart without an independent banking inspector supervising them, and then getting a stamped form in triplicate. When Chile's banks went bust in the crisis of 1980, it put paid to any illusions that the banks knew what they were doing--the government bailed out the banks then, but kept them under glass ever after.

But in Europe and America, the story was the Greenspan Put. Easy Al was so convinced that the banks would "self-regulate" that he pulled the teeth of the Fed, the banks regulatory agency, and let the "free market" have its way.

With this free pass, what do you think the banks did? They went anarchic--they invented all sorts of clever "financial products" that exponentially increased risk, rather than mitigating it. We all saw how that movie ended. When Lehman busted and the credit markets froze, a slap-dash improvised "rescue package" was drawn up, then the $700 billion TARP, then Quantitative Easing, all of these efforts lubed up with a lot of talk to "strengthening the regulatory environment" and "protecting the financial markets".

The upshot? The banks did whatever they pleased--with no supervision. And when their recklessness led inevitably to the catastrophe in the Fall of '08, the banks got bailed out--with no repercussions. The biggest ones even managed to turn a profit off the tax payer-funded bail-outs!

Even after the worst of the crisis--when the effects of no regulation and no supervision were clearly understood--nothing happened. The zero-regulation, zero-supervision regime continued.

This isn't the case for people, for individuals: People are regulated, people are controlled. Individuals are supervised and limited in what they can do and say--and no one complains. On the contrary--everyone is relieved, because it protects us all from the unreasonable behavior of an individual.

As an individual, I am limited in countless ways, from the trivial, like jaywalking, to the severe, like murder. I can't even speak up and yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater--I would be arrested for inciting a panic, the general good of avoiding a potentially lethal stampede overriding my need to express myself by yelling "Fire!" when there is none.

Curiously, individuals--ordinary people--are being supervised and regulated more and more stringently. Yet at the same time, corporations are becoming more and more free to do as they please. No one notices how strange this is--we have even lost the social framework to even talkabout regulating and supervising corporations, because too many foolish pundits equate supervision and regulation with Socialism. Yet curiously, personal freedom is being chipped away, day by day, without a peep from these pundits.

Meanwhile, the banks run amok.

Meanwhile, BP runs amok.

We can look at other industries--Big Pharma, for one--but there's no real need: Big Pharma will fit the same pattern as BP and the banks. Get so big that you can do whatever you want, and no one will challenge you, not even the government. Carry out practices that will inevitably create a crisis--like unsafe drilling, like toxic bonds--and be confident that you will be bailed out.

Bailed out, and allowed to continue, unfettered. "Allowed" to continue, unfettered? I'm sorry, I mis-spoke: Encouraged to continue, unfettered.

This era of corporate anarchy is reaching a crisis point--we can all sense it. Yet the leadership in the United States and Europe is making no effort to solve the root problem. Perhaps they don't see the problem. Perhaps they are beholden to corporate masters. Whatever the case, in his speech, President Obama made ridiculous references to "clean energy" while ignoring the cause of the BP oil spill disaster, the cause of the financial crisis, the cause of the spiralling health-care costs--the corporate anarchy that underlines them all.

This era of corporate anarchy is wrecking the world--literally, if you've been tuning in to images of the oil billowing out a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico.

I think we are at the fork in the road: One path leads to revolutionary change, if not outright revolution. The other, appeasement and stasis, as the corporations grind the country down.

My own sense is, there will be no revolutionary change. The corporations won. They won when they convinced the best and brightest--of which I used to be--that the only path to success was through a corporate career. No necessarily through for-profit corporations--Lefties never seem to quite get how pernicious and corporatist the non-profits really are; or perhaps they do know, but are clever enough not to criticize them, since those non-profits and NGO's pay for their meals.

Obama is a corporatist--he's one of Them. So there'll be more bullshit talk about "clean energy" and "energy independence", while the root cause--corporate anarchy--is left undisturbed.

Once again: Thank God I no longer live in America. It's too sad a thing, to watch while a great nation slowly goes down the tubes.

Gonzalo Lira, a novelist and filmmaker (and economist) currently living in Chile and writing at Gonzalo Lira

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Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land. The Niger Delta -- where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface -- has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless.

BP is talking about cleaning up the mess they made. But what does clean-up really mean? Is it no visible oil on the surface of the water?  How can life survive after being embraced by oil?  What fish or birds would ever want to make love?  

In the Niger Delta the villain is Shell. Oil leaks in the region are also a result of oil thieves and aging pipelines, no longer properly being maintained. The people in the Niger Delta have been battling for years to control their destiny and protect their environment.

One wonders what will happen here in the United States? Will a populist movement organize against a big oil company? Will the "small" people fight back?

It might be a good idea to bring Nigerian fishermen and folks from Louisiana to Washington and have them sit side by side and tell their stories. There is a similar (if not singular) narrative taking place and it is beginning to sound too much like science-fiction.

The fear of a black planet could be one engulfed by oil.

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This evidence indicating apparent research and experimentation on detainees opens the door to potential additional legal liability for the CIA and Bush-era officials. There is no publicly available evidence that the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel determined that the alleged experimentation and research performed on detainees was lawful, as it did with the "enhanced" techniques themselves.

"The CIA appears to have broken all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation," said Frank Donaghue, PHR's Chief Executive Officer. "Not only are these alleged acts gross violations of human rights law, they are a grave affront to America's core values."

Physicians for Human Rights demands that President Obama direct the Attorney General to investigate these allegations, and if a crime is found to have been committed, prosecute those responsible. Additionally, Congress must immediately amend the War Crimes Act (WCA) to remove changes made to the WCA in 2006 by the Bush Administration that allow a more permissive definition of the crime of illegal experimentation on detainees in US custody. The more lenient 2006 language of the WCA was made retroactive to all acts committed by US personnel since 1997.

"In their attempt to justify the war crime of torture, the CIA appears to have committed another alleged war crime - illegal experimentation on prisoners," said Nathaniel A. Raymond, Director of PHR's Campaign Against Torture and lead report author. "Justice Department lawyers appear to never have assessed the lawfulness of the alleged research on detainees in CIA custody, despite how essential it appears to have been to their legal cover for torture."

PHR's report, Experiments in Torture, is relevant to present-day national security interrogations, as well as Bush-era detainee treatment policies. As recently as February, 2010, President Obama's then director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, disclosed that the US had established an elite interrogation unit that will conduct "scientific research" to improve the questioning of suspected terrorists. Admiral Blair declined to provide important details about this effort.

"If health professionals participated in unethical human subject research and experimentation they should be held to account," stated Scott A. Allen, MD, a medical advisor to Physicians for Human Rights and lead medical author of the report. "Any health professional who violates their ethical codes by employing their professional expertise to calibrate and study the infliction of harm disgraces the health profession and makes a mockery of the practice of medicine."

Several prominent individuals and organizations in addition to PHR will file a complaint this week with the US Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) and call for an OHRP investigation of the CIA's Office of Medical Services.

The PHR report indicates that there is evidence that health professionals engaged in research on detainees that violates the Geneva Conventions, The Common Rule, the Nuremberg Code and other international and domestic prohibitions against illegal human subject research and experimentation. Declassified government documents indicate that:

* Research and medical experimentation on detainees was used to measure the effects of large- volume waterboarding and adjust the procedure according to the results. After medical monitoring and advice, the CIA experimentally added saline, in an attempt to prevent putting detainees in a coma or killing them through over-ingestion of large amounts of plain water. The report observes: "'Waterboarding 2.0' was the product of the CIA's developing and field-testing an intentionally harmful practice, using systematic medical monitoring and the application of subsequent generalizable knowledge."
* Health professionals monitored sleep deprivation on more than a dozen detainees in 48-, 96- and 180-hour increments. This research was apparently used to monitor and assess the effects of varying levels of sleep deprivation to support legal definitions of torture and to plan future sleep deprivation techniques.
* Health professionals appear to have analyzed data, based on their observations of 25 detainees who were subjected to individual and combined applications of "enhanced" interrogation techniques, to determine whether one type of application over another would increase the subject's "susceptibility to severe pain." The alleged research appears to have been undertaken only to assess the legality of the "enhanced" interrogation tactics and to guide future application of the techniques.

Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program is the most in-depth expert review to date of the legal and medical ethics issues concerning health professionals' involvement in researching, designing and supervising the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation program. The Experiments in Torture report is the result of six months of investigation and the review of thousands of pages of government documents. It has been peer-reviewed by outside experts in the medical, biomedical and research ethics fields, legal experts, health professionals and experts in the treatment of torture survivors.

The lead author for this report was Nathaniel Raymond, Director of the Campaign Against Torture, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the lead medical author was Scott Allen, MD, Co-Director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University and Medical Advisor to PHR. They were joined in its writing by Vincent Iacopino, MD, PhD, PHR Senior Medical Advisor; Allen Keller, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, NYU School of Medicine, Director, Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture; Stephen Soldz, PhD, President-elect of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and Director of the Center for Research, Evaluation and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; Steven Reisner, PhD, PHR Advisor on Ethics and Psychology; and John Bradshaw, JD, PHR Chief Policy Officer and Director of PHR's Washington Office.

The report was extensively peer reviewed by leading experts in related medical, legal, ethical and governmental fields addressed in the document.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) mobilizes the health professions to advance the health and dignity of all people by protecting human rights. As a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, PHR shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

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The statement alone indicates the momentous political shift that's currently underway in the Middle East. While the shift isn't entirely new, one dares to claim it might now be a lasting one. To borrow from Erdogan's own assessment of the political fallout that followed Israel's raid, the damage is "irreparable."

Countless analyses have emerged in the wake of the long-planned and calculated Israeli attack on the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, which claimed the lives of nine, mostly Turkish peace activists.

In "Turkey's Strategic U-Turn, Israel's Tactical Mistakes," published in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Ofra Bengio suggested Turkey's position was purely strategic. But he also chastised Israel for driving Turkey further and faster "toward the Arab and Muslim worlds."

In this week's Zaman, a Turkish publication, Bulent Kenes wrote: "As a result of the Davos (where the Turkish prime minister stormed out of a televised discussion with Israeli President Shimon Peres, after accusing him and Israel of murder), the myth that Israel is untouchable was destroyed by Erdogan, and because of that Israel nurses a hatred for Turkey."

In fact, the Davos incident is significant not because it demonstrates that Israel can be criticized, but rather because it was Turkey -- and not any other easily dismissible party -- that dared to voice such criticism.

Writing in the Financial Times under the title, "Erdogan turns to face East in a delicate balancing act," David Gardner places Turkey's political turn within a European context. He sums up that thought in a quote uttered by no other than Robert Gates, US defense secretary: "If there is anything to the notion that Turkey is moving Eastward, it is in no small part because it was pushed, and pushed by some in Europe refusing to give Turkey the kind of organic link to the West that Turkey sought." But what many analysts missed was the larger political and historical context, not only as pertaining to Israel and Turkey, but to the whole region and all its players, including the US itself. Only this context can help us understand the logic behind Israel's seemingly erratic behavior.

In 1996, Israeli leaders appeared very confident. A group of neoconservative American politicians had laid out a road map for Israel to ensure complete dominance over the Middle East. In the document entitled, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," Turkey was mentioned four times. Each reference envisaged the country as a tool to "contain, destabilize, and roll back some of .. (the) most dangerous threats" to Israel. That very "vision" in fact served as the backbone of the larger strategy used by the US, as it carried out its heedless military adventures in the Middle East.

Frustrated by the American failure to reshape the region and unquestioningly eliminate anything and everything that Israel might perceive as a threat, Israel took matters into its own hands. However, in 2006 and between 2008 and 2009, it was up for major surprises. Superior firepower doesn't guarantee military victory. More, while Israel had once more demonstrated its capacity to inflict untold damage on people and infrastructure, the Israeli weapon was no longer strategically effective. In other words, Israel's military advantage could no longer translate into political gains, and this was a game-changer.

There are many issues the Israeli leadership has had to wrangle with in recent years. The US, Israel's most faithful benefactor, is now on a crisis management mode in Iraq and Afghanistan, struggling on all fronts, whether political, military or economic. That recoil has further emboldened Israel's enemies, who are no longer intimidated by the American bogyman. Israel's desperate attempt at using its own military to achieve its grand objectives has also failed, and miserably so.

With options growing even more limited, Israel now understands that Gaza is its last card; ending the siege or ceasing the killings could be understood as another indication of political weakness, a risk that Israel is not ready to take.

Turkey, on the other hand, was fighting -- and mostly winning -- its own battles. Democracy in Turkey has never been as healthy and meaningful as it is today. Turkey has also eased its chase of the proverbial dangling carrot, of EU membership, especially considering the arrogant attitude of some EU members who perceive Turkey as too large and too Muslim to be trusted. Turkey needed new platforms, new options and a more diverse strategy.

But that is where many analysts went wrong. Turkey's popular government has not entered the Middle Eastern political foray to pick fights. On the contrary, the Turkish government has for years been trying to get involved as a peacemaker, a mediator between various parties. So, yes, Turkey's political shift was largely strategic, but it was not ill-intentioned.

The uninvited Turkish involvement, however, is highly irritating to Israel. Turkey's approach to its new role grew agitating to Israel when the role wasn't confined to being that of the host -- in indirect talks between Syria and Israel, for example. Instead, Turkey began to take increasingly solid and determined political stances. Thus the Davos episode.

By participating at such a high capacity in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, with firm intentions of breaking the siege, Turkey was escalating its involvement well beyond Israel's comfort zone. Therefore, Israel needed a decisive response that would send a message to Turkey -- and any daring other -- about crossing the line of what is and is not acceptable. It's ironic how the neoconservatives' "A Clean Break" envisaged an Israeli violation of the political and geographic boundaries of its neighbors, with the help of Turkey. Yet, 14 years later, it was Turkey, with representatives from 32 other countries, which came with a peaceful armada to breach what Israel perceived as its own political domain.

The Israeli response, as bloody as it was, can only be understood within this larger context. Erdogan's statements and the popular support his government enjoys show that Turkey has decided to take on the Israeli challenge. The US government was exposed as ineffectual and hostage to the failing Israeli agenda in the region, thanks to the lobby. Ironically it is now the neoconservatives who are leading the charge against Turkey, the very country they had hoped would become Israel's willing ally in its apocalyptic vision.

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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Writing way back in the year 1900, poet James Elroy Flecker summed up the view the Western world held of the region at the time;

Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells, When shadows pass gigantic on the sand, And softly through the silence beat the bells, Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

Dating back over 6000 years, some of the earliest indications of mining anywhere in the world come from Afghanistan. Afghanistan, for example, has always been a well-known source of precious and semi-precious stones and above all its lapis lazuli. The blue lapis lazuli stone in the famous funeral mask of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen was reportedly exported from Badakhshan in Afghanistan to Egypt in 1300 BC.

During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, geological investigations were closed to the Western world. The Soviets, however, did carry out sporadic mining surveys in the country neatly cataloguing these on charts and maps. Though much of this record was destroyed during the armed resistance to the Soviet occupation, and later during the messy Taliban rule, some did survive.

It was thus that in 2004, when the Americans undertook the so called reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, some geologists came across fascinating sets of old Soviet charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul. The information more than hinted at major mineral deposits in the country.

That got the US Geological Survey team's antennae up. They promptly got an old Orion P-3 aircraft, configured it with advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment, loaded it up with the Russian survey charts and maps and began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan's mineral resources. They flew well over 70 per cent of the country in the year 2006. The data they put together was so promising that they returned in 2007, this time with instruments that offered a 3-D contour of mineral deposits deep below the surface. In the end, what was started as a hunch turned out to be the most wide-ranging geological survey ever conducted in Afghanistan. The results, not shared internationally till then, were breathtaking.

Due to the universally slow pace of bureaucracy, however, files containing this astonishing array of records kept gathering dust for next the two years in US filing cabinets. It was only in 2009 that a Pentagon task force called 'Business Development Task Force' (whatever it stands for) stumbled upon this wealth of information. Not very much later the Pentagon task force brought in teams of American mining experts and had them poring over the survey's findings. Eureka!, the experts shouted to themselves at the end of the study, with their head honchos reaching for the nearest telephones simultaneously.

The Times broke the story in a screaming headline on June 13, 2010. Reportedly, the deposits are so rich in quality and quantity that according to the NYT "Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world." Having a worth of approximately one trillion US dollars, Afghanistan is said to be loaded with bulging veins of gold, copper, iron, cobalt and critical industrial metals like Lithium. The country's present gross domestic product stands at a puny $12 billion.

The biggest mineral deposits discovered so far are of iron and copper. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, and some rare earth elements. An internal Pentagon memo, according to the same report, states that "Afghanistan could become the 'Saudi Arabia of lithium'." Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command called it a 'stunning potential'. Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines, said, "this will become the backbone of the Afghan economy."

Intriguingly, the Times slipped in another interesting report the very next day i.e. on June 14th. According to this one, the bidding for rights to explore the reserves could begin in as little as six months and that Afghan officials believed that there was even more wealth than announced so far. According to these officials, it was so because, "in part the surveyors did not examine closely the entire country and at least 30 percent of it has yet to be fully investigated."

The NYT articles of the 13th and 14th June surreptitiously raise two other issues. One, the Taliban could now fight ever more viciously for their country's untapped wealth. And two, regional actors like China are likely to warm up to the idea of having these untold riches just in their backyard.

Well!!! One could let the two stories go by as straightforward reporting but for one other report. In this report of 14th June, the viability of President Obama's plan to begin pulling out by July 2011 has been questioned. Ever ready regional specialist Bruce Reidel of Brookings Institution, who helped formulate the administration's first Afghan strategy in early 2009 has been reported as saying, "things are not looking good, there's not much sign of the turnaround that people were hoping for." While Mr. Reidel did say that pouring in more troops was politically infeasible, he also added, "pulling out altogether would make the United States vulnerable to a terrorist attack organized by Al Qaeda and originating in a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan."

Now the scribe could have simply said 'eat your heart out Dick Cheney' and let the news slip by as sensational but routine, or draw certain not so routine conclusions from the reportage. Just some of these are;

1. The mineral finds were too big a news to keep under wraps any longer.

2. The time to share the lolly i.e. the bidding time, was just around the corner at which time the sudden announcement of the finds would have looked even more suspicious.

3. The current American Administration, which had promised a pullout in a rush of blood at the start, is increasingly finding out that the withdrawal option not only means a loss of face, it is also not possible to just fold up and go home. (discussed elsewhere in greater details)

Essentially, then, it all boils down to this for the good old US of A. Cut and run and be damned, or stay and fight and be damned but have your pockets full by the time the bullhorn is sounded.

So yes, eat your heart out Dick Cheney for you missed it by a click but urge Dubya's successors to start building the world's second largest embassy in Kabul, the first one having been already built in the other colony.

To the grand strategic thinkers of Pakistani variety especially, therefore, one has this to say; start getting your danders up, but make haste slowly this time for no one is going any where any time too soon. Let the grand masters have their fill of the Manna first.

And to the poor Afghans unable to extract from the bowels of the earth what is rightfully theirs, this, "God sends the meat but the devil sends the cooks."

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The New York Times reported Wednesday ("Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News") that "Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials."

The Times article describes the media "being kept at bay" is merely "another example of a broader problem of officials' filtering what images of the spill the public sees," adding that "Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources."

Essentially, BP and the authorities are trying to suppress information about the oil spill just as the US military, with the complicity of the American media, has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. From Vietnam came images of wounded and dying soldiers, which had a significant impact on public opinion; from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, notes Newsweek magazine, "pictures of dead otters, fish, and birds, as well as oil-covered shorelines, ignited nationwide outrage and led to a backlash against Exxon." The Pentagon and the corporate elite have learned a simple lesson: by whatever means necessary, prevent the population from learning the truth.

The Times observes, "Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor at the Associated Press, likened the situation to reporters being embedded with the military in Afghanistan. 'There is a continued effort to keep control over the access,' Mr. Oreskes said. 'And even in places where the government is cooperating with us to provide access, it's still a problem because it's still access obtained through the government.'"

Indeed CNN has described its correspondent, Kyra Phillips, as "embedded" with US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen.

There are numerous examples of BP and the government blocking media coverage of the oil spill. A CBS television crew was threatened in late May with arrest for attempting to film an oil-covered beach in Louisiana. A vessel carrying BP contractors and Coast Guard officials stopped the crew, and the pilot told CBS reporters, "This is BP rules, it's not ours."

A reporter from Mother Jones recounted in detail how local deputies, at the behest of BP, prevented journalists from reaching Elmer's Island Wildlife Refuge, also in Louisiana. An oil company representative told the reporter, "BP's in charge because 'it's BP's oil.'"

An airplane pilot planning to carry a New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter over the oil slick was denied permission for the flight. "We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?" recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. "The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: 'Not allowed.'"

When Associated Press photographer Gerald Herbert attempted to accompany Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of Jacques Cousteau, on a trip to Breton Island, a national wildlife refuge off the barrier islands of Louisiana, the US Coast Guard intervened. Newsweek reports, "Upon approaching the island, a Coast Guard boat stopped them. 'The first question was, 'Is there any press with you?' says Herbert.' They answered yes, and the Coast Guard said they couldn't be there. 'I had to bite my tongue. That should have no bearing.'"

Newsweek comments: "Photographers who have traveled to the Gulf commonly say they believe that BP has exerted more control over coverage of the spill with the cooperation of the federal government and local law enforcement. 'It's a running joke among the journalists covering the story that the words 'Coast Guard' affixed to any vehicle, vessel, or plane should be prefixed with 'BP,'' says Charlie Varley, a Louisiana-based photographer. 'It would be funny if it were not so serious.'"

At 10 pm the evening before a scheduled trip by Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, along with a group of journalists, on the Gulf of Mexico, reports the New York Times, "someone from the Department of Homeland Security's legislative affairs office called the senator's office to tell them that no journalists would be allowed.

"'They said it was the Department of Homeland Security's response-wide policy not to allow elected officials and media on the same 'federal asset,'' said Bryan Gulley, a spokesman for the senator. 'No further elaboration' was given, Mr. Gulley added."

A reporter and photographer from the New York Daily News were told by a BP contractor that they could not have access to a public beach on Grand Isle, Louisiana. A local sheriff, brought in by the BP employee, told the reporter that "news media had to fill out paperwork and then be escorted by a BP official to get access to the beach." (New York Times)

The stories go on and on, underscoring, on the one hand, the determination of BP to conceal the catastrophe by suppressing images of the spill on land and sea. Financial questions are at the heart of this. The extent of the devastation has a bearing on the immediate fate of BP's share price, as well as the amount of the damages eventually levied against the oil giant.

On the other hand, the collusion of the Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Aviation Administration and other institutions with the censorship efforts of a private corporation reveals something about the character of the Obama administration and all levels of the government in the US: they are entirely subservient to the interests of big business and equally hostile to the interests of the American population.

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Speaking at the West Point military academy late last month, President Obama was even more upbeat, declaring that as US troops depart, "a strong American civilian presence will help Iraqis forge political and economic progress" towards establishing "a democratic Iraq that is sovereign and stable and self-reliant".

The reality is entirely different. Even after the September deadline, the US military will maintain a huge military presence of 50,000 troops, ostensibly in "non-combat" and "training" roles, to prop up a puppet regime in Baghdad, which, three months after the national election, is yet to be formed. While the character of the American occupation of Iraq is changing, its underlying purpose--to maintain the country firmly under US domination--remains the same.

In his comments last Friday, General Odierno declared that the "drawdown" was ahead of schedule--600,000 containers of gear and 18,000 vehicles moved out; and the number of bases down from 500 last year to 126 and set to decline to 94 by September 1. What is actually underway, however, is not a withdrawal, but a vast consolidation in preparation for the long-term occupation of the country by US forces.

The Stars and Stripes newspaper noted in an article on June 1 that the ratification of the US-Iraq security agreement in November 2008 governing the drawdown was followed by a massive expansion of base construction work. "In all, the military finished $496 million in base construction projects during 2009, the highest annual figure since the war began and nearly a quarter of the $2.1 billion spent on American bases in Iraq since 2004. An additional $323 million worth of projects are set to be completed this year."

While the number of US bases may be declining, the Pentagon is establishing what are known as "enduring presence posts"--including four major bases: Joint Base Balad in the north, Camp Adder in southern Iraq, Al-Asad Air Base in the west and the Victory Base Complex around Baghdad International Airport. These are sprawling fortified facilities--Balad alone currently houses more than 20,000 troops. In addition to the 50,000 troops that will remain, there will be up to 65,000 contractors after September 1.

Under the 2008 agreement, the US military handed over internal security functions to Iraqi forces last year, but, under the guise of "training" and "support", retains tighter supervision of the army and police. Moreover the Iraqi government can always "request" US troop assistance in mounting operations. As Odierno explained in a letter to US personnel on June 1, even after all US combat troops leave, "we will continue to conduct partnered counter-terrorism operations and provide combat enablers to help the Iraqi Security Forces maintain pressure on the extremist networks."

The 2008 agreement sets December 31, 2011 as the deadline for all US troops to quit Iraq, but the construction of huge new US bases indicates a long-term US military presence under a Strategic Framework Agreement that is yet to be negotiated. As Stars and Stripes pointed out, "the nascent condition of the Iraqi Air Force... could lead the Iraqi government to request that a US training force remain in the country beyond 2011, most likely at Balad."

Accompanying the troop drawdown is a buildup of civilian operations centred on the US embassy in Baghdad. The new embassy, situated in the fortified Green Zone, is the largest and most expensive in the world. Opened in January 2009, the complex includes 21 buildings, occupies 0.4 square kilometres and houses 1,000 regular employees as well as up to 3,000 additional staff. The embassy's No 2 diplomat Cameron Munter told the Washington Post last month: "Our commitment will not be on the scale of numbers and money that the military has. But it will be extraordinarily substantial."

The Post also touched on certain sensitive projects that would not be handed over to embassy staff, including "the collection of intelligence, initiatives to counter what the military calls 'malign Iranian influence', and the integration of tens of thousands of former insurgents the military turned into Sunni paramilitary groups." In other words, the US military will remain actively involved in monitoring and manipulating the sectarian divisions that Washington has exploited since the 2003 invasion to assert its control.

The "ending" of the insurgency, trumpeted by the Pentagon and White House, has involved the ruthless suppression of opposition to the US occupation, resulting in the deaths of more than a million Iraqis, another two million driven into exile, and tens of thousands detained and tortured. Iraqi "democracy" rests on a police state apparatus developed and honed by the US military. The "legitimate and credible" election in March was only open to those parties and politicians that accepted the occupation.

Seven years of war has had a devastating impact on the Iraqi people. Unemployment and underemployment remain high. According to last month's Brookings Iraq Index, as of last year, only 20 percent of the population had access to proper sanitation, 45 percent to clean water, 50 percent to more than 12 hours a day of electricity, 50 percent to adequate housing and 30 percent to health services. A 2007 World Bank survey found that 23 percent of people were living in poverty on less than $US2.20 a day.

The criminal US invasion of Iraq was not aimed at helping the Iraqi people. Rather, its purpose was to subjugate the country in order to establish control over its vast energy reserves and to transform it into a base for wider American strategic objectives in the Middle East and Central Asia. Having bloodily suppressed resistance in Iraq, the Obama administration is pulling its troops out in order to expand its neo-colonial war in Afghanistan and for new military aggression in other parts of the globe.

Being left behind is an extensive American civilian and military apparatus that will continue to control the levers of power in Baghdad, bully the Iraqi government into line on matters concerning US interests, keep a watchful eye on the country's festering sectarian tensions and leave the door open to a rapid return of US troops.

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Somehow I cannot do that, and it leaves me 'dazed and confused' when the mass of information that is available reveals quite transparently that all the major disaster news items are related and that the sum total of them all is that on our current course, we are all facing dramatic and perhaps traumatic changes to our lifestyles. Today's news items that leave me dazed and confused run the full spectrum of scary items: Euro devaluation; massive oil pools in Gulf of Mexico heading towards Gulf Stream; Arctic long term ice rotting away; 145th Canadian and 1000th U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan; Israel continues occupying Palestine.

Economics

The global economy appears to be nothing more than a giant Ponzi scheme that will fall apart as soon as a critical person, institute, or mass of investors stops believing they can reap more profits from it. Finance capitalism displays its fault lines all across Europe as the EU in conjunction with the IMF and World Bank - the Washington consensus - bailed out Greece. This imposes on Greece an austerity program that has long proven that it does more to impoverish the middle and lower classes offering more regressive taxation accompanied by a decline in social services and social benefits ranging from medical services, through education to pensions and income assistance.

The bailouts in Greece and the resulting market chaos from a frightened financial sector will take its toll, as usual with the masses absorbing most of the losses in the form of higher taxes and degraded services, public and private. With one big thump, neo-liberalism and its finance capitalism has arrived in Greece, soon perhaps to be followed by Spain, Portugal, Italy and who know what others to join Latvia, Estonia, and Iceland as failing Euro-states.

For all the rhetoric spewed out by global economists, it only goes to strengthen my long held belief that economists are essentially useless and the "science" of economics is an oxymoron as it is based on invented formulas from imagined markets. It also strengthens my fear that sometime soon, combined with all the other elements in the economic news concerning banks and mortgages and employment stats, something catastrophic will happen to make everyone's savings and earnings next to worthless.

Oiling the Military

And then when it costs an estimated one million dollars a day to maintain one U.S. soldier in the Middle East, it only emphasizes how the military is very much involved with our current global economy, in more ways than one. Along with the cost of the war - in the hundreds of billions of dollars, leading into the trillions - are the costs to the occupied countries from a wide range of parameters including civilian infrastructure (housing, water, electricity, schools, and hospitals), chemical poisons (from various ordinances including depleted uranium and white phosphorous), internal refugees, and the destruction of local economies, increasing the chances of graft, oppression, and criminal activities.

Which still omits the purpose behind the wars in the first place, supposedly based on a global war on terror, and the spreading of democracy and freedom throughout the Middle East...while the reality of the wars is the opportunistic events of 9/11 enabling an excuse to become a global military hegemon trying to capture the oil, gas, and mineral wealth of the region at the same time containing the rising power of China and the re-assertiveness of Russia.

Of course the part of the military news reported this week is the 145th Canadian soldier and the 1000th U.S. soldier to die in Afghanistan, most of them from IEDs buried at roadside or in car bombs, as with this incident in Kabul. Broadly suggested on the patriotic front is that we must all support our troops, something I find hard to do when Canadian troops are not much more than allies for the U.S.'s intent on military control of the world. Seldom is mention given to the thousands, hundreds of thousands, of the local populations killed directly from military action or indirectly from its many collateral consequences. An indigenous person who fights against foreign occupation immediately becomes a terrorist, yet the real terror being spread comes from the reported imminent assault by U.S./NATO forces against Kandahar, even though similar actions in the much less populated villages of Marjah has been an understated failure.

Another tie in militarily is of course Iran and Israel. With Israel thumbing their collective noses at the U.S. administration, unthreatened by U.S. military strength as it has its own finely tuned military - supported in a large part through U.S. 'aid' and supplies of high tech military equipment - the U.S./Israel/Iran triangle creates the fearful situation of another impending military action, perhaps leading into the use of nuclear weapons depending on the fierceness or not of Iranian resistance. That scenario is currently tempered by the news report of Brazil's Lula reaching a limited agreement with Iran and Turkey on the transportation and servicing of enriched uranium, but it waits to be seen how the U.S. and Israel argue their way around this diplomatic action that bypasses their efforts at control.

And then on into Pakistan, 'Obama's war' of choice, undeclared, fought through covert operations within the population and within the government agencies, while a large clear majority of the citizens see the U.S. as the biggest threat to the country. It is also fought through high tech warriors at computers well away from the actual situations, relying on nothing more than their own gut level despisal of the indigenous populations. The Pakistan situation goes to show that the main U.S. response to its declining global economic role, its reliance on oil for the vast majority of its economic demands, its only true method of resolving any situation it does not like, is to send in the military. Who's next? Iran? Venezuela? Korea? As the U.S. empire becomes even more aggressive militarily, I can only think again, we're all facing something quite dramatic and traumatic!

More oil

Totally unrelated to all this military and economic garbage, at least as presented by the media, are the two news items this week that supposedly have an impact on the environment. Which they do, but their impact and significance go far beyond the reporting of the actual information as narrowly presented in the news and most commentaries.

The biggest news is that of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has had no real impact on the economy, other than the regional economy of tourism and fisheries along the Gulf Coast, but no earth shaking effect on the dollar or the overall economy, perhaps more significant if it reaches the Gulf Stream and on into the Atlantic.... Yet it is all too representative of the overall economy. The necessity for oil in our high energy, easy energy economy, the disdain for environmental safeguards, placing profits above the environment we live in, the ignoring of information concerning the drilling operations such as the partial failure of a rubberized protective pressure gasket signals that the corporate world, the supra-national corporations that have effectively superseded governments in many areas, could care less about anything but their own profits.

Our easy energy economy relies on oil and its derivative products. Everything we do, everything we have, is all related to the easy energy provided by oil, a resource that is at or very near its peak, with not a slow rundown on a bell curve at the end, but a roller coaster style drop off as extraction becomes more difficult for a variety of reasons. Our agriculture runs on oil, from the fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides through to its transportation thousands of miles away to the homes of those that can afford the luxury of thousand mile meals. Our health structures, medicines, tourism, our whole civic structure based on the automobile, the world of plastics, the energy needed to make and use all the consumptive demands of our society rely on oil.

All that consumption is expressed in the other news item concerning the Arctic ice cover. The climate change deniers will not go away, but there is irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing. That evidence comes in part from the Arctic ice, now with only twenty per cent of it remaining as long term multi-year ice, the rest is new annual ice. The surprise comes from the awareness that although the winter ice appeared to have regained its cover - as it had - the multi-year ice had diminished greatly and what was left was a conglomeration of rotten ice and new ice. More evidence comes from the indigenous people, the Inuit, who have lived there for millennia and now are unable to read the ice and weather patterns as they change rapidly from their long ancestral observations. The culture changes with it as new names for new phenomena of weather and flora and fauna are being introduced.

All that oil, coal, and natural gas, our natural heritage from millions of years ago when the climate created an enormous energy bounty harvested naturally from the sun, we have squandered on an easy fast paced uncaring life in the short term for a decidedly undetermined, uncertain, and freaky future. The developed countries bounty comes from the easy energy domination of oil and the corporate structures controlling global wealth and global finances. Our changing climate with its wider range of variability is very much still an unknown...but what is known is that the ice cover, which was forecast to be gone in a century or so from the Arctic ocean, is now possibly going to disappear completely (except for winter ice cover) within a decade or so.

There in the Arctic is the confluence of our oily greed, our uncaring effluent affluence, our military solutions to world problems. When I look at the responses to natural and man made disasters around the world I shudder to think what would be the consequence of another major military action that could result in the use of nuclear weapons. I shudder to think what the climate might throw at us as it continues along its unpredictable responses to the carbon energy we are pumping back into the atmosphere. The economy, which in the news is generally front and center, becomes a matter of worthlessness when faced with what could be large and sudden changes in the status of global energy and weather systems.

Solutions....

I sometimes wonder if there are any realistic solutions given human nature, its short term perspectives, its vanity, and its supposed intelligence that somehow always seems to create some form of blowback for its actions. There are solutions, ones that would still create dramatic change but hopefully soften the trauma for everyone. The changes need to be significant and not just the cosmetic panaceas that cover - and conceal - the symptoms but do little for the actual underlying problem of living in a militarized consumptive finance-oriented society

In no particular order, as they are all complementary actions, there are several ideas that need to be put into action, hopefully through a rapid evolution of common sense intelligence toward the planet and its inhabitants, as revolutionary ideas while founded on good ideas and great plans, often create a deterioration into violence that nullifies the intent of the actions in the first place.

Israel/Palestine/Iran and the rest of the Middle East

Israel/Palestine are the symbolic focus of the militarized activity in the Middle East and South Asia. The tie in between the Israeli and U.S. military in all its components (industry, politics, technology, finance) demonstrates the perversity of human nature in relation to a falsely created 'other'. The 'other' for the Israelis occupying Palestinian lands are the Palestinian 'terrorists' conveniently supported by the U.S. designation of any thought or action against their occupying forces as being terroristic. The solution to any problem in for both countries has proven to be some kind of military violence, neither truly wishing to negotiate, with its implications of equal bargaining rights and acknowledgement of legitimate grievances on the part of the occupied and subjugated peoples.

This part of the solution is simple but I do not see it happening. The occupiers need to go home. The brief spate of democracy that went awry - with Hezbollah gaining recognition in Lebanon, Hamas defeating Fatah in Palestine, the Shia's gaining power in Iraq with a challenge to U.S. occupation, and Egypt cracking down violently on its renewed opposition to autocratic rule - challenged the very theoretical philosophical rhetoric of democracy and freedom that these countries pretend to uphold. This part of the solution should happen, but it won't, as the other imperial factors of resources and finances are slowly nibbling away at the security and wealth of the 'homeland'. The empire will not go away peacefully.

Corporations

Another solution not likely to happen due to the power structures involved and the political and military tie ins is that of controlling the corporations. The supranational corporations - many larger than governments, most having entitlements to sue, threaten, lobby and challenge national governments that even the local citizens do not have, all provided by agreements that were decided upon in thoroughly non-democratic fashion - need to be shut down. Perhaps not totally disbanded, but they need to have their political and legal powers greatly curtailed if not abolished.

Corporations are set up for one purpose - to create wealth for the owners and avoid legal responsibility for anything else while doing so. The big corporations need to be brought under national civilian control, meaning essentially under national law based on human rights, social rights, and environmental responsibility. Responsibilities for the environment, workers conditions and rights, product recycling should all be implemented at both the global and national level. The cost of doing business should include the real costs on the environment and the people that work and live in that environment. Failing that, they should simply be disbanded - nationalized and broken apart.

There would be of course much screeching and crying about the loss of wealth and the loss of employment and the crashing of the global GDP and all the other economic ills that our current finance capitalism and debt burdened financing are creating anyway. With the environment threatened and in return giving humanity a literal unexpected blowback, with the economy teetering on the edge of chaos, the main solution will come from taking away the power of the corporations over the legitimate concerns of a country's citizens.

Many of these corporations rely on the 'hidden fist' of the military for their survival, both for capturing and harnessing resources and markets, but also as part and parcel of the militarily financed corporations that create so much havoc globally. To think they will go peacefully away when their very foundation is threatened by the shrinking energy resources of the world is illusory. Citizens and duly elected governments need to stand up for their integrity and get rid of the power of the corporations that truly rule our lives.

Think skeptically, act positively - live locally, think globally

The foundations of a soft-landing for the restructuring of our relationship with the environment and the decreasing ease of carbon based energy resources needs to start with information and education. With human intelligence and craftiness much could be done to alleviate any hard landings from environmental change, economic collapse, and the loss of easy energy. I have to question whether any government, whether any group really has the power to do this as the inertia within a society based on fast fuel and ease of transportation and manufacturing energy will be hard to transform.

The elites in society will wish to remain the elites and hoard as much wealth and power they can retain as events change around them. Very few people will be accepting of giving up their privileges, very few will be accepting of giving up their easy entertainment and comfortable thoughtless manners that lead us closer and closer to an ultimate need to change and restructure. Change is certain. The environment will dictate that to us very soon, denial or not. The loss of carbon energy will dictate that to us very soon, denial or not.

I expect the news not to change much. What I can hope for is that as many citizens as are able will read and inform themselves about all the global concerns by comparing and contrasting the words with the actions of the current powers, corporate, political, and military. They truly create a dissonant sound, confusing, obfuscating, lying and concealing. Read, be informed, think skeoyically, act positively (act actively - be an activist, let your voice be heard), live locally while thinking globally. In the meantime, I remain, still, dazed at the possible significance of it all for my future and current and future generations of my family, confused by the apparent inability of others to see that action and not complacence is needed to make real progress towards a successful future.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles' work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.

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From a young age, I would embark with my family on the short journey from our refugee camp to the beach. We went on a haggard cart, laboriously pulled by an equally gaunt donkey. The moment our feet touched the warm sand, the deafening screams would commence. Little feet would run faster than Olympic champions and for a few hours all our cares would dissipate. Here there was no occupation, no prison, no refugee status. Everything smelled and tasted of salt and watermelon. My mother would sit atop a torn, checkered blanket to secure it from the wild winds. She would giggle at my father's frantic calls to his sons, trying to stop them from going too deep into the water.

I would duck my own head underwater, and hear the haunting humming of the sea. Then I'd retreat, stand back and stare at the horizon.

When I was five or six, I believed that immediately behind the horizon there was a country called Australia. People from there were free to go and come as they pleased. There were no soldiers, guns, or snipers. The Australians - for some unknown reason - liked us very much, and would one day visit us. When I revealed my beliefs to my brothers, they were not convinced. But my fantasy grew, as did the list of all the other countries immediately behind the horizon. One of these was America, where people spoke funny. Another was France, where people ate nothing but cheese.

I would scavenge the beach looking for "evidence" of the existing world beyond the horizon. I looked for bottles with strange lettering, cans and dirty plastic washed ashore from faraway ships. My joy would be compounded when the letters were in Arabic. I would struggle to read them myself. I also learned of such countries as Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Morocco. People who lived there were Arabs like us, and Muslims who prayed five times a day. I was dumbfounded. The sea was apparently more mysterious than I'd ever imagined.

Before the first Palestinian uprising of 1987, the Gaza beach was yet to be declared off-limits and converted into a closed military zone. The fishermen were still allowed to fish, although only for a few nautical miles. We were allowed to swim and picnic, although not past 6 pm. Then one day the Israeli army jeeps came whooshing down the paved road that separated the beach from the refugee camp. They demanded immediate evacuation at gunpoint. My parents screamed in panic, herding us back to the camp in only our swimming shorts.

Breaking news on Israeli television declared that the Israeli navy had intercepted Palestinian terrorists on rubber boats making their way towards Israel. All were killed or captured, except for one that might be heading towards the Gaza sea. Confusion was ominous, especially as I saw images of captured Palestinian men on Israeli television. They were hauling the dead bodies of their Palestinian comrades while being surrounded by armed, triumphant Israeli troops.

I tried to convince my father to go and wait by the beach for the other Palestinians. He smiled pityingly and said nothing. The news later declared the boat was perhaps lost at sea, or had sunk. Still, I wouldn't lose hope. I begged my mother to prepare her specialty tea with sage, and leave out some toasted bread and cheese. I waited until dawn for the "terrorists" lost at sea to arrive at our refugee camp. If they made it, I wanted them to have something to eat. But they never arrived.

After this incident, boats began showing up on the horizon. They belonged to the Israeli navy. The seemingly hapless Gaza sea was now dangerous and rife with possibilities. Thus, my trips to the beach increased. Even as I grew older, and even during Israeli military curfews, I would climb to the roof of our house, and stare at the horizon. Some boats, somewhere, somehow were heading towards Gaza. The harder life became, the greater my faith grew.

Today, decades later, I stand by some alien sea, far away from home, from Gaza. I have been denied the right to visit Palestine for years. I stand here and I think of all those back home, waiting for the boats to arrive. This time the possibility is real. I follow the news, with the stifling awareness of a grown up, and also with the giddiness and trepidation of my six year old self. I imagine Freedom Flotilla loaded with food, medicine and toys, immediately behind the horizon, getting close to turning the old dream into reality. The dream that all the countries that my brothers thought were fictitious in fact existed, embodied in five ships and 700 peace activists. They represented humanity, they cared for us. I thought of some little kids making a feast of toasted bread, yellow cheese and sage tea, waiting for their saviors.

When breaking news declared that the boats had been attacked just before crossing the Gaza horizon, killing and wounding many activists, the six-year-old in me was crushed. I wept. I lost the power to articulate. No political analysis could suffice. No news reports could explain to all the six-years-olds in Gaza why their heroes were murdered and kidnapped, simply for trying to breach the horizon.

But despite the pain that is now too deep, the lives that were so unfairly taken, the tears that were shed across the world for the Freedom Flotilla, I know now that my fantasy was not a child's dream. That there were people from Australia, France, Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, the US and many other countries, who were coming to us in boats loaded with gifts from those who, for some reason, really liked us.

I cannot wait to get to Gaza, on top of a boat, so I can tell my brothers, "I told you so."

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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With Stone's prescriptive warning in mind, the CIA, allegedly in retaliation for the failed May 1 Times Square bomb attempt, fired 18 missiles targeting militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area May 11, "killing at least 14 fighters and wounding 4," according to an unnamed "security official" cited by The New York Times.

In the area however, American claims are hotly disputed. Lahore's English-language daily The News reported that since January 1, the CIA has mounted "33 drone attacks in only four months of the current year compared to 47 reported in entire 2009."

Reporting on the ground, Javid Aziz Khan disclosed that while "some top militants were killed in the attacks," the overwhelming number of victims "remained innocent civilians." A sad and sorry tale unknown to most Americans, caught up in the riveting drama between "mean girl" Jill and "snarky" Bethenny on Bravo's The Real Housewives of New York City!

Despite cozy, some might say corrupt, relations between his administration and the oil industry responsible for the petroleum-fueled apocalypse in the Gulf of Mexico, one campaign promise that "change" president Obama has kept is his expansion of U.S.-led regional wars, bringing death, destruction and chaos to Pakistan, a nation that America famously claims as a close "friend and ally."

So warm and fuzzy are relations between the two nuclear-armed states that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently warned that Pakistan will face "severe consequences" should a successful attack on the U.S. mainland be linked to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or other militants allied with the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda.

Since Clinton's belligerent threats earlier this month, The Washington Post reported May 29 that "the U.S. military is reviewing options for a unilateral strike in Pakistan in the event that a successful attack on American soil is traced to the country's tribal areas, according to senior military officials."

Anonymous officials "stressed that a U.S. reprisal would be contemplated only under extreme circumstances," according to a sanctioned leak to the Post, "such as a catastrophic attack that leaves President Obama convinced that the ongoing campaign of CIA drone strikes is insufficient."

However, Pakistan Body Count, a web site administered by computer scientist Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, a fierce critic of CIA-Pentagon drone strikes and terrorist attacks launched by fascistic jihadi thugs, draws a direct correlation between America's robo-war and murderous strikes on civilians by crazed suicide fanbois.

"Whether it is a suicide bombing or an attack by a flying drone, for me it's the same, a Pakistani got killed," the web site declares right up front. And the grim evidence seems to bolster Usmani's analysis. In an e-mail to Wired, the computer specialist told journalist Noah Shachtman: "I highly doubt that U.S. drones are doing anything to stop suicide bombing, as it is evident from the data, the number of suicide bombing is almost directly proportional to the drones attacks. More drones, and we have more SB [suicide bomb] attack[s] in our country."

According to the web site, since 1995 suicide bombings by rightist miscreants, many of whom were "trained up fierce" by the CIA or by Pakistan's shadowy Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) during America's anti-Soviet jihad, accounted for 3,676 dead and some 9,289 injured civilians. Since 2004 when the tactic was first implemented, U.S. drone strikes have claimed 1,332 lives and injured 453 others.

Usmani's grim statistics reveal that only 2.5% of drone strikes have taken out al-Qaeda targets, but they have fueled sectarian killings and sown chaos across the region, an intended effect fully consonant with America's long range goal to secure access and control over the mineral and petrochemical wealth of the Eurasian heartland.

Next-Gen Killer Robots

Meanwhile back in the heimat, the CIA and Pentagon are planning a major expansion of the drone fleet. And with newer, faster and stealthier high-tech death machines ready to roll off the assembly lines of several giant defense corps, the prospect of fattening the bottom-line of well-heeled aerospace grifters and fighting and winning America's endless "War On Terror" must have Washington pols jumping for joy.

As Antifascist Calling reported earlier this month, General Atomics rolled-out their next generation killer robot, the Avenger, a jet powered drone the firm hopes will be in the running for a lucrative Air Force/CIA contract to build what the secret state has dubbed the MQ-X.

And with the Defense Department "reassessing its view of unmanned aerial vehicles," Defense Systems reported that the Pentagon is "deciding what the military needs from UAVs beyond their traditional use as a platform to gather intelligence and fire weapons."

Reporter Amber Corrin averred that next-gen SkyNet death bots "will need to take on additional duties including cargo transport, refueling and possible medical applications, and they will need to be interoperable with different platforms, users and military services."

Accordingly, "the military should concentrate on developing modular, plug-and-play aircraft built on standardized interfaces--one aircraft for multiple missions, similar frames for one platform," Col. Dale Fridley, director of the Air Force Unmanned Aerial Systems Task Force told the publication. The MQ-X, the follow-on to existing MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reaper drones was hailed by Fridley as the "embodiment of the flight plan."

But during a period of profound economic crisis, the Defense Department is also exploring ways to arm smaller, and cheaper, drones for service in America's resource-grabbing wars and occupations.

Defense Industry Daily reported in April that while the U.S. Army's "RQ-7 Shadow battalion-level UAVs have seen their flight hours increase to up 8,000 per month in Iraq," the differences between the Army's workhorse drone and their larger cousins "is that the Shadow has been too small and light to be armed." Clearly a boo-hoo for battlespace commanders.

But "with ultra-small missiles still in development, and missions in Afghanistan occurring beyond artillery support range," the eyes-on-the-prize publication tells us that "arming the Army's Shadow UAVs has become an even more important objective."

Considering that the RQ-7 Shadow's average cost per unit is $500,000 and the price for one MQ-1 Predator is in the $5 million range, while the larger and bloodthirstier MQ-9 Reaper costs anywhere between $10-12 million depending on the estimate, the attraction for arming the little beast can't be lost on cost-conscious Pentagon accountants!

This would certainly be good news to beltway bandit AAI Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of defense powerhouse Textron Systems Corporation, that builds the RQ-7. So serious has the Army become, envious perhaps of the sexy publicity generated by their CIA and Air Force rivals in the "compressing the kill chain" department, that the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command issued an April solicitation "on weapons systems ready for production and suitable for integration on the RQ-7B with POP 300D laser designator payload Shadow Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs)."

The RFI specifies that a "potential weapons systems must be ready to field within 12 months from the date of a potential contract award. The primary interest is in weapon systems approximately 25 lbs or less total system weight (to include munition, launcher, wiring, fire control interface, etc). The weapons system should be able to engage stationary and moving targets such as light vehicles and dismounted combatants in day and night conditions with low collateral damage when launched from a Shadow UAS flying at speeds of 60-70 knots and between 5,000 and 12,000 feet Above Ground Level (AGL)."

Judging by the reaction to the solicitation, firms such as Kollmorgen Corporation, Arete Associates, Aerovironment, Inc., General Dynamics, BEI Systems & Sensors Company and GE Aviation Systems LLC are falling over themselves as they lust after a piece of the Pentagon's lucrative Shadow weaponization contract.

But wait, there's more!

The nose-tweaking, British high-tech zine, The Register, reported May 11 that the Boeing Corporation, the CIA's torture-flight booking agents, "held a public unveiling of its 'Phantom Ray' jet-fighter sized robot stealth plane."

A product of the giant defense firm's "Phantom Works" advanced products division, a rival of Lockheed Martin's much-storied "Skunk Works, the Phantom Ray is heavily-based on a decades' worth of research by the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on the X-45C, a project "which envisaged the aircraft penetrating hostile airspace and preying on surface-to-air missile batteries," according to Space.com.

A Boeing press release states that after "only two years of development" (not counting of course, DARPA's taxpayer-supplied boodle) the Phantom Ray "combines survivability with a powerful arsenal of new capabilities."

Dennis Muilenburg, president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, told the assembled throngs in St. Louis who witnessed the unveiling, "Phantom Ray offers a host of options for our customers as a test bed for advanced technologies, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; suppression of enemy air defenses; electronic attack and autonomous aerial refueling--the possibilities are nearly endless."

The Register's Lewis Page however was less than enthused by the flackery. Indeed, the former Royal Naval officer isn't one to mince words, writing "the US and its Western allies already have far more sophisticated air power than they actually need, and that in fact a long break before the next generation of aerial killware might be in order."

But hey, with billions in potential dollars fluttering around Boeing like moths to a flame, never mind that "the machine will not, in fact, provide any actual national security benefit" Page opines, "but rather the pale ghost of such: specifically a 'specter of security'."

Not to be outdone however, Northrop Grumman, the manufacturer of the cost-overrun plagued RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drone, recently rolled-out a fighter-sized UAV, the X-47B.

A carrier-based behemoth with a 62-foot wingspan that weighs 45,000 pounds at takeoff, the firm is producing the platform for the U.S. Navy. Popular Mechanics reported in 2009 that the X-47B "would be a technological step forward--besides carrying stealth features, it is supposed to have the ability to execute some maneuvers, such as refueling in midflight, autonomously."

Needless to say, Navy "dominance" doesn't come cheap. Northrop Grumman informs us that the "six-year $635.8 million contract calls for the development of two X-47B fighter-sized, long-range, high endurance aircraft designated the X-47B. Test activities are in progress that will lead to completion of the Navy's carrier launch and recovery objectives by 2013. Successful at-sea trials will set the stage for potential follow-on acquisition programs."

Northrop's offering in the hot robot kill-machine market was spawned by DARPA's Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) program which was terminated in 2006. The program, as with other spooky DARPA offerings, was "transitioned" to the Joint Program Office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, the home of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).

As a side note, the AFRL successfully launched Boeing Corp's X-51 Waverider on May 26, a hypersonic ramjet-powered vehicle that was accelerated to Mach 5 or 3585 MPH over the Pacific. Hypersonic craft and conventionally-armed ballistic missiles are intended as key components of the Pentagon's mad "Prompt Global Strike" program to "put steel on target" in under an hour. The new weapons systems are touted as a means for our "change" president to "greatly diminish America's reliance on its nuclear arsenal," The New York Times duly reported, faithfully regurgitating White House talking points.

According to a blurb on Northrop Grumman's web site, the X-47B "will be a transformational, carrier-capable, multi-mission, unmanned combat air vehicle. Strike fighter-sized, it is a survivable, long range, high endurance and persistent platform capable of a variety of missions including Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, and Time Sensitive Targeting/Strike."

As currently envisaged by the Navy, should tests pan out, the vehicle would potentially be another "first" for a forward looking Empire such as ours: a fully autonomous killer robot capable of conducting its "mission" deploying live weapons and foregoing the need to communicate with either drone pilots or supervisors. Carrier trials are slated to begin in 2011. A corporate Data Sheet informs us that the X-47B will fly at 40,000 feet, with a range of 2,100 nautical miles, have an air speed described as "high subsonic" with weapons bays loaded with 4,500 pounds of ordnance.

As the bodies continue piling up, and more and more "hajis" learn to "hate us for our freedom," rest assured, corporate America is doing everything in their power to keep us safe!


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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Obama heaped copious praise on the general in a Rose Garden appearance Saturday. "Jim is one of our nation's most experienced and most respected intelligence professionals," Obama said. "He possesses a quality that I value in all my advisers: a willingness to tell leaders what we need to know even if it's not what we want to hear," according to a White House transcript of the president's remarks.

Clapper, who faces a tough confirmation fight in the Senate, would direct the 16-agency U.S. "Intelligence Community." From his perch in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Clapper would coordinate America's formidable spy apparatus as it wages a global shadow war to control other people's resources and secure geostrategic advantage over their imperialist rivals.

The position of DNI was created after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the Director has neither operational control nor budgetary authority over any of the agencies he oversees as the nation's top spymaster. Bureaucratic in-fighting and turf battles within the security apparat, particularly with the CIA under Leon Panetta, but also with insiders such as White House counterterrorism adviser, the former CIA torture-enabler, John Brennan, have fueled internecine feuds amongst the various players.

If confirmed by the Senate, Clapper would replace retired Admiral Dennis C. Blair, who was pressured to resign by the Obama regime May 28, over so-called "intelligence failures," resulting from the aborted Christmas Day attempted bombing aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit and the failed May 1 Times Square car bombing.

As Antifascist Calling revealed in a series of articles earlier this year, far from being a failure to "connect the dots," as with the 9/11 provocation itself, the American secret state possessed sufficient information that should have prevented alleged bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding that plane and placing the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk.

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), an ODNI fiefdom, was cited for "lapses" and faulted for its failure to collate information in their possession. But as I reported, during January 20 testimony to the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, NCTC head honcho Michael E. Leiter told the panel: "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."

Under Secretary of State for Management, Patrick F. Kennedy, testified before the House Homeland Security Committee January 27, that the State Department did not revoke the would-be bomber's passport at the specific request of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Kennedy claimed that "revocation action would've disclosed what they were doing." The Undersecretary 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."

While the would-be suicide fanbois kept his passport, one "reform" that the "change" administration implemented was a directive by President Obama authorizing the assassination of American citizens accused of terrorism. Death sentences would be carried out without any legal recourse whatsoever, simply on the basis of unsubstantiated Executive Branch allegations.

Clapper, 69, is a close ally of current Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a former CIA Director under Poppy Bush and an architect of the Iran-Contra coverup. Currently the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Clapper replaced Stephen A. Cambone in 2007, a crony of former Secretary of Defense, the unindicted war criminal Donald Rumsfeld.

Like many retired military officials who leverage national "service" as entrée to the lucrative world of outsourced corporate spying, Clapper was the Chief Operating Officer for Detica DFI, a British intelligence and security firm that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the scandal-tainted BAE Systems.

According to a blurb on the firm's web site, "Detica specialises in collecting, managing and exploiting information to reveal actionable intelligence." Doubtless, Clapper found himself right at home.

Last October, the British high-tech news magazine The Register, revealed that Detica and Lockheed Martin had secured a multi-billion pound contract with the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.'s National Security Agency for work on a domestic snooping project called "Mastering the Internet." That top secret program is currently developing systems and methods for extracting intelligence from huge volumes of surveillance data generated by online services.

Similar programs are currently underway here in the heimat, many of which are linked to the secretive Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI). Last month's stand-up of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) found top Pentagon officials and the defense contractors whom they so loyally serve, floating the idea "that the Defense Department might start a protective program for civilian networks, based on a deeply controversial effort to keep hackers out of the government's pipes," Wired reported.

"A 356-page classified plan" journalist Noah Shachtman disclosed, "outlining CYBERCOM's rise is being put into action." According to Wired, "procedures are now being worked out for CYBERCOM to help the Department of Homeland Security defend government and civilian networks."

Wired reported last week that "Joe Lieberman wants to give the federal government the power to take over civilian networks' security, if there's an 'imminent cyber threat.' It's part of a draft bill, co-sponsored by Senators Lieberman and Susan Collins, that provides the Department of Homeland Security broad authority to ensure that 'critical infrastructure' stays up and running in the face of a looming hack attack."

Two of the agencies that would fall under Clapper's brief are DHS and NSA, both of which are charged with "protecting" critical network infrastructure in the unlikely event of a massive cyber attack.

Prior to his current position as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, between 2001-2006 Clapper was the Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a DOD combat support agency charged with developing "imagery and map-based intelligence solutions for U.S. national defense, homeland security and safety of navigation."

Accordingly, NGA "provides timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security objectives" gathered by America's super-secret fleet of spy satellites flown by its "sister" organization, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) as well as imagery and geospatial information derived from drones or other air based U.S. assets.

One can be fairly certain that NGA's "map-based intelligence solutions" for homeland security have been deployed for domestic repression. As Antifascist Calling reported in 2008, according to a planning document released by the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks, in the run-up to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, NGA was in the thick of things as a gaggle of federal and state law enforcement agencies targeted activists and journalists for preemptive arrest.

Before leading NGA, Clapper was Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the principal producer and manager of military intelligence for the Pentagon. Investigative journalist Tim Shorrock revealed in his essential book, Spies For Hire, that with an annual estimated budget of $1 billion, DIA employs some 11,000 military and civilian personnel, "35 percent of whom are contractors."

According to Shorrock's analysis for CorpWatch, principal security corps doing yeoman's work for DIA include BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, Inc. CACI International, Inc. and L-3 Communications Inc.

In reporting Clapper's selection as DNI, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have emphasized the general's "decades of experience" in getting America's sprawling secret state under Executive Branch control.

According to the Times, Clapper's announcement amounts "to pushing the reset button for the president," as Obama tries to "recalibrate" an intelligence and security apparatus that has "undergone continued revamping since the debacle leading up to the Iraq war," one that "still lacks the cohesion necessary in an evolving war with terrorists."

The Journal, on the other hand, has stressed that despite "resistance" by Democratic and Republican party grifters on Capitol Hill, Clapper "has significant backing among intelligence professionals, who also note that he is the most experienced individual willing to take the job."

The Journal reports that one of Clapper's "earliest moves was to shut a Pentagon database, called TALON, that was supposed to track terrorist threats to military bases but was found to also contain information on antiwar protesters."

TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice) was a spying database that was under the operational control of the U.S. Air Force. It was authorized by neocon warmonger and serial intelligence fabricator, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz in 2002. By 2004 however, TALON became the "property" of the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), a secretive and heavily-outsourced Pentagon satrapy run by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone.

Following media revelations of the program, in 2007 The National Security Archive published a series of documents outlining CIFA's illegal domestic operations; surveillance that continues today under new Pentagon programs authorized by Obama's discredited "change" regime, as revealed last summer by Democracy Now!.

While the Journal is technically correct that the TALON database was removed from CIFA's control by Clapper, the TALON system itself was offloaded, as I previously reported back in 2008, to the FBI and now reside in a Bureau database known as Guardian and e-Guardian.

Even though CIFA has since been supplanted by the DIA's Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC), SourceWatch revealed that "in accordance with intelligence oversight requirements," DOD "will maintain a record copy of the collected data," including data illegally collected on antiwar activists, continues to exist somewhere deep in the bowels of the Pentagon for future reference.

Whether or not Clapper is confirmed by the Senate, illegal wars of aggression will continue; drones will still rain death and destruction upon unarmed civilians; America's pit bull in the Middle East, Israel, will carry out international acts of piracy and murder on the high seas with impunity as Gaza starves; and the Executive Branch will complete the destruction of the Constitution and the rule of law at home to "keep us safe."



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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As hundreds of thousands of gallons a day of oil (liberally seasoned with the Corexit dispersant) flow into the Gulf of Mexico, but we are told that the Gulf is large and the spill a minute amount within that vastness. Now we are watching the viscous oil killing the marshes of Louisiana and making its way around the Gulf - to Florida today.

And within that stinking sludge we see the birds and wildlife who have become so coated it is difficult to tell what they are.

Across the Gulf is an ever-growing "sheen" of oil - moving with the wind and the tide. However, not all the oil is on the surface. An unknown amount moves through the various depths and are subject to the complex edies and currents of any large body of water. In the Gulf of Mexico, the strongest current is the "Loop Current." That flow is already circulating the oil around the Gulf of Mexico including towards Cuba.

As the gushing oil has moved east, there is now public admission that the Atlantic is also at risk - particularly the East Coast of the U.S. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research produced a simulation (below) and reported "Ocean currents likely to carry oil along Atlantic coast".

From YouTube posting by ncaruar

The simulation shows that the oil could hit not just the East Coast of the United States, but continue to drift towards the Mid-Atlantic - and the North Atlantic current. That path will ultimately take it to the Arctic. In its wake, will swim and feed the marine life of the coasts and marshes; the fish and mammals, the plankton and crabs. It will impact the entire marine food chain. While most of the impact will likely contaminate the life of the Gulf, it seems highly unlikely that it will stay there.

The BP disaster, also known as the Macondo Prospect well, could continue to gush until at least August 2010 - and perhaps much longer. Millions of gallons of oil and natural gas will create growing dead zones and plumes that capture all life in its wake. The Gulf of Mexico could indeed become a "dead sea" for decades. The question is whether the Atlantic will share that fate.

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There is no denial - and no shame - in the fact that most Muslims hold their Prophet in the highest regard. Despite the continued decrease in the number of faithful in increasingly secularized Western societies, Muslims are clinching even tighter to their faith. However, while the outrage over the latest transgression by some Facebook user and his "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" may appear as a straightforward news story - that of Western values vs Muslim narrow-mindedness - the true underpinnings of the outrage is suspiciously missing.

The naïve depiction by Western media makes it easy for 'freedom of expression' enthusiasts to condemn Muslims for yet again failing the democracy test.

The latest Facebook episode is a remake of the same old story. Some ill-intended 'artist', under the guise of freedom of speech, takes on a confrontational mission, knowing fully the response such an act would generate, and perhaps the lives that would be lost. Muslim masses, predictably, respond through angry protests, burning flags, denouncing America, Israel, Zionism, Facebook, Youtube and so on. Strangely, the very governments that are considered US allies tend to be on the forefront of condemning the 'blasphemous' provocations. Muslim masses are thus exploited on all fronts - by the media, by anti-Muslims, by rightwing forces in the West, and their own governments.

This, in turn, gives more ammunition to the Islamaphobes who constantly try to fan the flames in order to validate their racist perception of Muslims. The likes of Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz, and other 'experts' invade our TV screens and take on the responsibility of lecturing the world on Islam. They use the same reductionist and racist language that they have utilized for years in the guise of academic jargon.

Why, though, are these 'academics' and 'intellectuals' eager to discredit Islam? And why are Muslims playing right into their hands?

It behooves us all to remember that some of those who champion freedom of expression are selective in their advocacy. Freedom of expression becomes important when the holiest symbols of Islam and its Prophet are paraded, ridiculed and stereotyped. However, these very advocates are enraged when the opinions being expressed are inconsistent with their own agenda, which is overtly militant and hegemonic, and refuses to take into consideration any honest opinion on Israel and its war crimes against Palestinians. One needs to repeat the way that the respected South African Judge Richard Goldstone, himself Jewish, was depicted for pointing out the horrendous crimes committed in Gaza during Israel's most recent war. More, these individuals seem completely oblivious when Muslims are denied the right to express their own values. When, for example, was the last time a rightwing fanatic stood up for a Muslim woman's right to cover her hair or face?

It must be stated, however, that discrediting Muslims and Islam is not a random strategy. It is very much in tandem with an overriding agenda that has occupied the thinking of many rightwing and Zionist ideologues for years, especially following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the rising of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim fervor in various Western countries. The aim is to dehumanize Muslims, to make them seem less civilized, and thus less worthy of equal human rights. In other words, Muslims cannot be treated using the same standards that apply to Westerners, because they have failed to subscribe to Western values. The angry protests in Pakistan are supposedly proof of this. This makes war easy and sanctions morally justifiable.

Why are Muslims playing right into this scenario? Actually, they are not, although it would seem otherwise. The fact is, many Muslims nations are caught between two layers of oppressions: that of outsiders - wars and occupation, interference in their countries' affairs, all forms of humiliation and exploitation - and internal pressures - corruption, oppression and denial of rights, including, yes, freedom of expression, speech, assembly and democracy itself. These rights are also denied by the very countries that are seen as 'pro-American.'

Under these external and internal pressures, Muslim societies embrace even tighter their everlasting Islamic symbols. Islam, for many Muslims, represents more than just a way of life and an answer to unworldly questions. It also provides a sense of hope, and it helps to maintain a level of solidarity and societal cohesion. The harder people's lives become, the more impoverished, oppressed and abused, the stronger their faith grows.

Considering all of this, insulting Islam, depicting the Prophet in degrading (or any other) ways, bashing Islamic symbols and values is equivalent to denying Muslim masses with their last and only chance at dignity and hope.

Those who are under the impression that Muslims are opposed to freedom of expression are only seeing a small part of the picture. Those versed in history understand that it was Muslim advancements in science, art and literature, and their most impressive translations of the great works of ancient civilizations that allowed Europe to bask in the sun of its renaissance.

Moreover, those who are sensible enough to see the big picture will understand that when a Pakistani woman chants "Death to Facebook" - as pitiful and confusing such phrase may sound - she is not actually referring to a social networking website. Far from it, especially since numerous Muslims have utilized Facebook to share their own ideas with the rest of the world. What the woman is chanting against is the manipulation of freedom of expression to further humiliate her people. She is standing in solidarity with European Muslim communities who are under a most intense attack on their civil rights and liberties. She is angry at the war in Afghanistan, the constant bombing of innocents in Pakistan, the occupation of Iraq, the rape of women and the parading of naked prisoners, the siege in Gaza. She is angry about the Western double standards regarding democracy, about her own oppression and her people's misfortunes. And so much more.

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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What is happening with the BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf is the destruction of precious and irreplaceable marine environment. More specifically, it is resulting in the destruction of whole ecosystems. Currently, the most visible destruction is occurring in the rich fisheries of the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The "solution" for BP is to pay fisherman (and others) for their loss of income. However, as has been eloquently stated by some of the local people interviewed, this is about more than money. How do you put a price on a heritage?

We can look at "heritage" in a number of ways. The connection to fishing (including shrimping, crabbing, and the oyster farms) has passed from one generation to the next. Even those not directly engaged in these activities for their livelihood are variously impacted from "recreational" and subsistence activities, to the daily food and cuisine of the Gulf Coast. It is at once a natural heritage and a cultural one. It is at once a personal embedding and part of the deep bonds of shared experience and environment. There is no dollar amount that can be placed on a culture. Hiring local men to clean beaches or haul boom may (barely) meet their family economic needs, but does not replace their livelihoods. In fact, for many folks, their skills are largely worthless (from an economic perspective) with the loss of the Gulf and the marshes.

This human-caused destruction has "economic" impacts for sure. However, more importantly it is removing the capacity to continue a way of life. It is removing the capacity to pass on a heritage. This is an important component of the story that is an almost hidden public side of this disaster. It makes real an issue that many in the United States have failed to understand or appreciate. Namely, you can't pay people for the destruction of their lives and culture.

Capacity is an important concept to grasp in this disaster. The economic failure of families and businesses that are happening along the coast is not a matter of lack of desire, or skill, nor ability. It is that the capacity to attain those things has been removed. One can't wish fish into existence. One cannot dust off the oysters coated in oil and Corexit and have those oysters reproduce. What BP's unchecked gusher has done is to undermine the capacity to continue - economically and culturally.

In a society that has increasingly been focused on "everything is economics," and "everything is money," the importance of "other things" has been minimized beyond recognition. This has been part of a long, embedded process of cultural minimization. It is historically reflected in the forced life changes placed on the tribes of the United States where the deliberate destruction of ways of life were seen as positive things to do. Namely, bringing the "heathens" into the "right" world of the European-based colonizers.

This theme was so "successful" that it carried over into other endeavors beyond the shores of the United States - particularly in South America, though certainly elsewhere. The "plans" historical and modern were to bring "those" people into the modern age. We could use their land and resources for our purposes, but we would give them ... villages down the road with running water, schools, and a medical clinic; or new jobs in factories producing goods for our consumption (that they could not afford).

One of the ugly realities was (and is) the removal of the capacity for "those" people to continue "their way of life." All too frequently, there is a virtually permanent removal of that capacity. So, for example when the forests of the Amazon are destroyed to make room for ranches and resource extraction, the lives of the people of those forests are gone forever. This is part of what we are witnessing right now along the U.S. Gulf coast. The death of the ecosystem means the death of a way of life for millions of people. With the shrimp, crab, fish gone - likely for decades if not forever - then those who have for generations made their livelihood from that natural wealth have had that capacity to live and pass on "their way of life" ripped from them.

Sure, BP (even at its most generous) may pay the fishers, and shrimpers, and tour guides, and restraunteers (and many others) for their economic losses for this year (and perhaps several years in the future). However, money will not replace their "way of life." Money will not replace the soul of a culture.

The capacity to fish has been removed. Giving a previously self-supporting people "fish" feeds them only for today.

It is said that the people are "angry." The reality is that as the oil and toxic dispersant have rolled into the marshes and shores, the people have watched a death and they are in a rage of grief. Something central to their lives and souls has died and is dying. However, it did not simply die, it was murdered. What justice is there for this crime? How ?do you make a people - and an ecosystem - "whole?"

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While reputable author and world renowned journalist Deepak Tripathi agrees with this grim view, he doesn't think all is lost. He believes that there is still a chance, an opportunity even to redress the injustice and reverse the terrible mistakes that were made.

A compelling writer and a meticulous researcher, Tripathi's work is both gripping and comprehensive. His latest book, Overcoming The Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan serves as a glaring reminder of what military power can do when it goes unchecked, and when it is combined with religious fanaticism or misguided political ideology.

The book's first chapter starts with a quote by Abraham Lincoln, and it ends with another by Martin Luther King Jr, which serve as a clear indication of Tripathi's own moral stances. Tripathi courageously exposes the policies of the Bush administration and its neoconservative clique, which took advantage of the terrible attacks of September 11, 2001 to reassert the authority of a weakening superpower. But the push to reclaim America's standing actually preceded the terrorist attacks. In fact, Tripathi claims that "the ideological vehicle used to get George W. Bush elected to the White House in November 2000 was the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Several of its founders were close to Bush and secured key positions in his first administration."

This assertion is of immense importance. In its statement of Principles, dated June 3, 1997, PNAC warned of the "danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge," because the US seems to lack "the resolve to shape a century favorable to American principles and interests." One of the recommendations was to "increase the defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future."

But with the Cold War being settled in favor of the US, there seemed little need to invest in what the neoconservatives saw as an acceptance of "responsibility of America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security."

September 11 was the very opportunity which allowed the militancy of a small, detached and very influential group to define and eventually dictate the policies of the United States. "We stand together to win the war against terrorism," Bush said on September 11. This was not simply a declaration of war against an elusive enemy, but also a declaration of unreserved violence and political imprudence, a blank check to reconfigure the world.

Tripathi has done a superb job in addressing this topic. His successful approach is largely owed to his ability to locate the book within a most suitable historical and intellectual, as opposed to a purely political or event-driven context. This approach is a direct challenge to those who wish to examine the Bush legacy with September 11 as a starting point. Such a point might be considered rational, but it in fact represents a reductionist approach to history, and can only allow a limited understanding of its consequences. Tripathi has no such illusions.

In 'With Us or Without Us', Tripathi emphasizes that a better understanding of the war in Afghanistan requires a historical analysis of the US-Pakistan relations that takes us to the Regan administration, and even earlier. Important names, dates and events appear in that historical examination, and are quickly tied into the immediate past and present. Without such context, there can be no true understanding of what took place in Afghanistan under the Bush regime, and what continues to unfold there. Tripathi's narrative replaces the media's caricatured account of both wars, and instead provides an objective study of rational events and those who shaped them.

Indeed, it was not Bush and his neoconservative friends alone who wrought such disasters to the world. A whole array of individuals provided political cover and even, to a lesser extent, material support. In 'The Battle for Afghanistan', Tripathi shows how the likes of Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi colluded with Bush's War on Terror. The bombs began falling on Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 and are yet to cease falling, despite the fact that Bush is no longer in the White House.

This is largely what makes Tripathi's book so important. It is not about Bush as a man, but Bush's legacy. This legacy is an inheritance of other political legacies of various administrations and numerous interests. It continues to engulf, if not control US foreign policy to the present day. To detain that perpetual deterioration in world affairs, a proper deconstruction of history is a must.

But why should we reiterate what we already know? Isn't enough that most of us at least acknowledge already that to link Iraq to al-Qaeda and September 11, 2001 is absurd? That the weapons of mass destruction allegations were a baseless concoction and a complete fraud? No, it is not enough. A better understanding of the world doesn't automatically make it a better place. Whether we like it or not, Bush and the neoconservatives got away with serious crimes. And the peoples of both Afghanistan and Iraq continue to suffer.

The US must and will withdraw from both countries, largely because the stubborn resistance of their peoples will eventually prevail. However, Americans must discuss more than "an exist strategy". They should also discuss how they got there in the first place, when they supposedly had a democratic system with political transparency and accountability. Obama might someday act upon his promises to shut down the US gulag at Guantánamo Bay, but the challenge will remain in understanding how America allowed few individuals to suspend such basic principles as habeas corpus, which Tripathi so ably traced to the Magna Carta under King John of England back in June 1215.

Deepak Tripathi's Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan gives us a well structured understanding of a seemingly chaotic legacy, and answers many of the innumerable unanswered questions. It is an honest and formidable attempt at understanding one of the darkest periods in the history of America and the world. We owe him more than a thank you. He deserves an earnest attempt from us to understand his book, and to act upon his counsel.

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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And with moves by Barack Obama's "change" regime to strip Americans of their Miranda rights, "delay" their appearance before a lawful court should they be accused of a national security crime, or even assassinate them if an arm of the secret state fingers them as terrorists (evidence optional), it's a sure bet that as "ideas about security infect virtually all aspects of public policy," as Stephen Graham avers in Cities Under Siege, new silver bullets will be needed to "keep us safe."

Deep Learning: A Nerdy Way to Kill People

Long-time readers of Antifascist Calling are well-aware of the host of bizarre projects hatched in darkness by the Pentagon's geek squad, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Working on things like Biologically Inspired Platforms and Systems that investigate the natural world, the better to create "significant new defense capabilities," the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is focused "on understanding, and then emulating, the unique locomotion and chemical, visual, and aural sensing capabilities of animals," in order to hand warfighters neat, new tools to kill people.

Think robo-insects that crawl up walls and fire a bullet into the head of an unsuspecting "terrorist"--or more likely these days, some dissident, journalist or whistleblower--peacefully tucked in for the night.

But biologists and neuroscientists aren't the only ones in on the fun: computer specialists and systems' designers, you too can fight the War On Terror!

One new project, Deep Learning, on tap from the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), proposes to "build a universal machine learning engine that uses a single set of methods in multiple layers (at least three internally) to generate progressively more sophisticated representations of patterns, invariants, and correlations from data inputs."

DARPA avers that "a rapidly increasing volume of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) information is available to the Department of Defense (DOD) as a result of the increasing numbers, sophistication, and resolution of ISR resources and capabilities. The amount of video data produced annually by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) alone is in the petabyte range, and growing rapidly."

Therefore, "The goal of the envisioned Deep Learning program is to discover and instantiate in a learning machine (Deep Learning System) a single set of methods that, when applied repeatedly across multiple layers of the machine, yield more useful representations of audio/visual, sensor, and language information, using less labeled data more efficiently than any existing technologies."

Though top-heavy with nerd factor, Katie Drummond at Wired reports that IPTO is hungering after a system that "can spot activities, like running, jumping or getting out of a car." Ultimately, the "final version will operate unsupervised, by being programmed to hold itself accountable for errors--and then auto-correct them at each algorithmic layer."

DARPA's solicitation envisages Deep Learning as an exemplary means for America's robo-warfighters to autonomously sort out those petabytes of data and then provide CIA and Pentagon drone "pilots" or JSOC kill squads, a more efficient way to snuff out shadowy practitioners of "asymmetric warfare," women, children, the elderly, journalists, etc., you know, the usual suspects.

I can't help but wonder whether its "auto-correcting" algorithms and capacity for holding itself "accountable for errors" means it will deliver itself--or its human masters--to The Hague for the commission of war crimes. A syrupy sweet synth-voice purring "sorry" to splattered human remains of a Hellfire missile strike gone awry just won't cut it in the liability department.

SMITEing America's Enemies

But before one can "kill 'em all, and let God sort them out," bulletproof target sets require corroboration. What better way to name that enemy then by ginning-up yet another sophisticated computer algorithm to delivers the goods!

The indefatigable Lewis Page of Britain's gadfly tech-zine, The Register, reported May 19 that "Pentagon boffins want nothing less than some kind of automated witch-finder technology able to finger 'increasingly sophisticated malicious insider behavior' in the USA."

And why not? After all, the U.S. National Counterintelligence Strategy (NCIS) has proclaimed that "Trusted insiders ... are targeting the U.S. information infrastructure for exploitation, disruption, and potential destruction." Or leaking documents that might prove embarrassing to the secret state such as the Collateral Murder video posted in April by Wikileaks.

Accordingly, DARPA is hatching a project, the sinisterly titled Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination, or SMITE, to detect those who might not want us kept safe. DARPAcrats "define [an] insider threat as malevolent (or possibly inadvertent) actions by an already trusted person with access to sensitive information and information systems and sources."

The RFI posted online declares that "Information systems security personnel are drowning in ever expanding oceans of observational data from heterogeneous sources and sensors from which they must extract indicators of increasingly sophisticated malicious insider behavior."

Heavens! With a new panic on the horizon, call it a much-dreaded ISR and "malicious insider behavior analysis gap," the IPTO gang must surely be working overtime!

Since the "fundamental challenge" (aside from discovering new ways to line the pockets of America's security grifters) "is one of finding a poorly understood, subtle, or hidden signal (indicators of malicious behavior) buried in enormous amounts of noise (observational data of no immediate relevance) under the constraint that the measures of significance are themselves moving targets (based on dynamic context) that must be continually monitored and updated."

Doubtless, there's always a danger some pissed-off contractor at any of the 16 alphabet soup agencies that comprise the U.S. "Intelligence Community," forced to cancel a night on the town with that hot babe over in data mining, just might "go rogue" and become a "malign insider." Fear not, if DARPA has its way (and enough cash can be discretely passed in plain brown envelopes to trusted insiders!) "the challenge" of "detecting deceptive behavior" can be mastered.

Since "deceptive behavior is characteristic of malicious intent which leads to the problem of assigning intent to observed behaviors," better observe and analyze everything!

What better means then, to separate the "insider threat" wheat from the chaff then to "(a) derive information about the relationship between deductions, the likely intent of inferred actions, and suggestions about what evidence might mean and (b) dynamically forecast context-dependent behaviors--both malicious and non-malicious."

Or, as Donald Rumsfeld blithely put it on that halcyon day when the Twin Towers fell: "Need to move swiftly - Near term target needs - go massive - sweep it all up. Things related and not."

And who would blame DARPA for lusting after "on-line and off-line algorithms for feature extraction and detection in enormous graphs (as in billions of nodes) as well as hybrid engines where deduction and feature detection mutually inform one another"?

After all, what with "missed signals" and various failures to "connect the dots" before 9/11 or intelligence "gaps" that drove the Bush administration kicking and screaming into an invasion and occupation of Iraq it didn't want, "security is often difficult because the defenses must be perfect, while the attacker needs to find only one flaw."

Therefore, IPTO's enterprising specialists will place a premium on "forensics" that "could reverse the burden by requiring the attacker and his tools to be perfect, while the defender needs only a few clues to recognize an intrusion is underway."

With such tools in hand perhaps the secret state, laboring like proverbial bees in the geopolitical gardens of the Middle East to efface the looming Iran "threat," will have the means to sequester some potential whistleblower before they'd even think about leaking compromising documents that might throw a spanner in the works.

"It will no doubt be a comfort for anyone in a position of trust within the U.S. information infrastructure," Page points out, "to know that mighty military algorithms and hybrid engines will soon sniff your every move so as to forecast any context-dependent malice on your part--and then in some unspecified way (remember what the E in SMITE stands for) eliminate you as a threat."

And should DARPA's info-warriors fail, there's always a black hood, a silent room and a waterboard to do the trick!



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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After a light lunch of cookies, cheese and fruit, Alice just sprawled there on the grass and plunged into her thoughts. Oh, how she loved these long and lazy summer days.

She never knew when she dozed off.

'Stop!!!!' Alice heard someone shout. The crowd enclosing upon her stopped dead in their tracks. 'Let the girl be', Alice heard another command. When the crowd dispersed sheathing their long knives, Alice saw that it was the kind faced Talib who was giving the orders.

'Well! that was close', thought Alice. She was grateful to the kind faced Talib for saving her life.

As she was getting up, the Talib came close to her and said, 'Look here girl, I can see some merit in your questions but I am not well versed in all the branches of knowledge in my religion to be able to answer every one of them. Why don't I take you to our Imam? He is God's chosen one and is wise and learned. He will be able to satisfy your curiosity.'

Alice readily agreed and bounced along with the Talib in lead. She had forgotten all her recent troubles.

Soon they came upon one of the biggest rooms in the underground cave system. Hand woven mats were spread upon the floor. A bunch of Taliban were sitting in front of the Imam who himself was sitting on a slightly raised platform facing them.

The kind faced Talib bowed and approached the Imam respectfully leaving Alice behind. The two had a rather long dialogue in a hushed tone. The Imam had his gaze fixed on Alice all this while. Presently, he waved to Alice to come nearer. At the same time, he dismissed all the rest in attendance with an imperious gesture of his hand.

'You have questions about our religion I am told?' asked the Imam in a surprisingly calm voice. When Alice nodded her head in affirmative, the Imam said, 'start asking then but please be respectful of our beliefs whether or not you choose to convert to these in the end. Is that understood?' 'Yes', mumbled Alice.

After a brief pause she asked her first question, 'perhaps, sir, you will agree that today we look back with amusement, even ridicule, at the Greek, Roman and Mayan Gods and the belief systems of the time. What is the guarantee that a future civilization won't treat your Gods and beliefs similarly?'

The Imam and the Talib exchanged a quick glance before the Imam answered, 'God does not send down the ultimate message to mankind until they are ready for it. Those earlier gods were false and so were their religions because human thought had not yet reached its maturity to absorb the final message. When it did about 1500 years back, this one final, truest message, our religion, was given to us by God. Do you understand?'

'Yes, perhaps I do but like I told the Mad Hater out there that someone once said, 'religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next'. Is that someone wrong? If yes, how is he wrong?', Alice asked.

'That someone is most definitely wrong because before our holy scripture God never took responsibility for preserving his word. Only in our case did he do that. There can't be any better guarantee than God's own word, can there?', responded the Imam.

Alice was stumped by the circular logic but decided not to press the point. 'Alright, my next question is, why an omnipotent and omniscient God has to battle evil all the time and yet never succeed in fully eradicating it? Or is it that he doesn't intend to actually end evil for all times? If so, why?', Alice asked instead.

The Imam's face changed to a shade redder but he controlled his emotions and answered in the same serene voice, 'First of all, if there was no evil, how would you know what is good? How would you know the taste of sugar if only salt was all that you ever ate? If you had only known nights, how could you appreciate days? The two must exist side by side. That is why God allows evil to exist. Understand?'

Yet again Alice felt she was being taken for a ride. If evil must exist side by side with good, why must it be battled all the time? But then she knew better than to press her point.

Next she asked, 'if God exists, why does he allow scientists and atheists to dispute his existence and create confusions in the mind of us common folks? Why our loving, merciful, all-powerful and all-knowing God leaves us in such doubt as to his very existence, forcing us to turn to vague experiences, uncertain evidence, and foggy arguments? Why doesn't he give us a clear assurance of his love and a definitive explanation of the miseries of the world?'

The Imam starting rising up from his reclining posture. He looked meaningfully at the other Talib and answered her with a rising sense of alarm, 'only God knows God's ways. It is not for us mortals to try and inquire about those. There must be good reasons for doing what he does. You are just a little girl. Don't try to be wiser than your parents.'

Having forgotten all about her predicament, typical of her, Alice once again started getting animated. 'If God has good reasons for what he does or does not do, why do his vice regents on earth, people like your good self sir, forbid us, on threat to our lives, from exploring God's ways beyond a certain point?', she shot back.

'Careful girl', the kind faced Talib hissed. The Imam too sat bolt upright. Though Alice had sensed that she had either crossed another boundary or was approaching it fast, she once again lost control. She continued, 'Let me ask something different. God is supposed to be the ultimate creator of the entire universe, of unimaginable expanse, and whatever is contained in it. That also means he created the super computers, the internet, the space lab and all the cutting edge technologies that abound today on just one planet. If so then why is he so concerned about, let's say, the growth of hair on someone's face, head or other bodily places? These are such minor issues really.'

'The scriptures', Alice continued with a sense of foreboding, 'tell us that there are sins that if committed the sinner will rot in hell forever. We are also told we will not be reborn. If the idea of punishment is correction, then how can the sinner, having learnt his lesson, lead a better life when he stays in hell forever and cannot be reborn? And if the idea is vengeance not correction, because the sin was so grave, what is the fun in burning someone forever when that someone knows it will never end and there is neither another death nor another birth for him? If the idea is for others to take heed from the sinner's example, then all the 'others' too are dead and will not be reborn even if they see for themselves the horrors of punishment for such grave sins and learn from it.'

'The Mad Hater, the Mad Hater', the Imam shouted. The kind faced Talib lunged towards the door. But Alice once again experienced a brakes failure on her emotions.

Unmindful, she continued, 'why does God call for the annihilation of disbelievers in all Abrahamic religions? If the unbelievers are to be indeed slaughtered, why did God create them first? Why must we do the killing on his behalf? Why doesn't he kill them himself by, for example, striking them with lightening or deluging them with another Noah's flood?'

There was shuffling of the feet outside and Alice heard a clang of iron as if long knives were being unsheathed yet again. But she was by then out of control. She raised her voice above the din and continued, 'if good and evil can exist side by side in all other matters, as you just suggested, why belief and disbelief can't co-exist? Why is belief good and disbelief evil? Which one is the one true belief system and why?'

Though none were forth coming, Alice wasn't even stopping for an answer now. 'The Mad Hater, the Mad Hater', the Imam, on the other hand, continued to shout with all his patience gone. His eyes had narrowed down to mere slits. Foam has started to form at the corners of his mouth.

But Alice was now totally out of control even though she saw the Mad Hater enter the room with his men with their long knives drawn. 'God says that the one sin He won't forgive is for us to equate some other Gods with him. Are there other Gods then? If so, why did God create such challengers to his own self? And why would he not forgive this one sin but forgive a murderer who has slaughtered a child upon a mother's knee or a people who have butchered millions? Why?'

That was the moment when Mad Hater yanked her viciously by her hair from behind. Alice could only manage to utter a weak sound.

There was darkness after that.

x-x-x-x

Must-Reads with this;

1. Alice in Talibland-1
2. Alice in Talibland-2

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The well-choreographed and clearly-rehearsed visit seemed set on giving the impression that the relationship between Karzai and these men was that of an independent, confident leader seeking the support of a benevolent superpower.

But what were Karazai's real reasons for visiting Washington?

Typical media analyses have for months misrepresented the apparent chasm between Afghanistan and the US under Obama's administration. Even if this administration was genuinely discontented with Karazai's policies, at least until very recently, the resentment had little to do with the reasons offered by media 'experts'. It was not because Karazai was failing to deliver on governance, end corruption and so on. Let's face it, the US war in Afghanistan was never morally grounded, and it never could be either. Not unless the militant mindset that governs US foreign policy somehow acquires a complete overhaul.

For now, let's face up to reality. Bad days are awaiting Afghanistan. True, it is hard to imagine how Afghanistan's misfortunes could possibly get any worse. But they will, particularly for those living in Kandahar in the south. Seated next to Karazi during his Washington visit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised that her country will "not destroy Kandahar in order to save Kandahar."

The statement may sound assuring, but it is in fact ominous and very troubling. Clinton was referring to the Bush administration's policy in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, she candidly admitted this by saying, "This is not Fallujah," referring to the Iraqi city which was almost completely destroyed in 2004 by a massive US Marine assault intended to 'save' the city. "Lessons have been learned since Iraq," stated Clinton.

But if lessons were truly learned, then why the fictitious language, the silly assertion that the real intention is to in fact 'save' Kandahar? And what other strategy does the US have in store for Afghanistan, aside from the irritating debate on whether to use unmanned drones or do the killing face to face?

Was Karazai in Washington to provide a cover for what is yet to come in the Taliban's southern stronghold? It's not unlikely. Considering past and repeated claims of a growing divide between Kabul and Washington, a bloody attack on Kandahar could in fact be seen as the US acting unilaterally in Afghanistan. Add to this scenario the constant and continued calls made by Karazai himself to engage Taliban. A US escalation without public consent from Karazai himself couldn't possibly be seen as a part of a joint strategy.

At a presentation at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Karazi spoke of an extended US commitment to Afghanistan that would last "beyond the military activity right now ... into the future, long after we have retired, and perhaps into our grandsons' and great-grandsons' -- and great-granddaughters' -- generations."

"This is something the Afghan people have been seeking for a long, long time," he said.

Clinton too was concerned about the plight of the 'people'. She promised to "help the people of Kandahar to recover the entire city to be able to put it to the use and the benefit of the people of Kandahar...We're not fighting the Afghan people...We're fighting a small minority of very dedicated, ruthless extremists who unfortunately are able to enlist young men... for a variety of reasons and send them out onto the battlefield."

Although Clinton wanted us to believe that the Bush era is over, with a new dawn in US foreign policy upon us, she used almost the exact same language, phrased in almost the exact same context that the Bush administration used prior to its major military assaults aimed at 'saving the people' from some 'ruthless extremists', whether in Iraq or Afghanistan.

And a major assault there will be, for the Taliban's counter-surge is threatening the US's counterinsurgency operations.

A quick scan of an article by Marie Colvin in Marjah, Afghanistan, where the Taliban is once more making its presence very clear, highlights the challenges facing the US military throughout the country. Entitled 'Swift and bloody: the Taliban's revenge,' the May 9 article starts with the claim that "rebels have returned." Throughout, the report was dotted with similar assertions. "Marjah was supposed to be safe...All that progress is threatened by the Taliban 'surge'...There were always fears that they would re-emerge .. The strength of the Taliban's presence is gradually becoming clearer...The Taliban are growing bolder..."

The term 'surge' was once associated with General David Petraeus's strategy predicated on the deployment of 30,000 new troops in Afghanistan. That it is now being attributed to the Taliban's own strategy is ironic, to say the least. Once meant to be a 'success story, now convincing the world that things are working out in Afghanistan might not be so easy after all. "Worries are growing in the Pentagon that if thousands of marines and Afghan security forces cannot entirely defeat the Taliban in Marjah, a town of only 50,000, securing the far larger prize of Kandahar may be an even greater struggle than has been foreseen," wrote Colvin.

The challenge ahead, although bolstered with all the right (albeit predictable) language is likely to be bloody, just like the rest of this sad Afghanistan episode, which actually began much earlier than 2001.

The US and Karazi (as a supposed representative of the 'Afghani people') must come across as united in the face of the extremist minority. Karazi's visit to the US was the political padding prior to the likely military storm. It was meant to assure the public that the chaos which will follow is in fact part of a counterinsurgency effort; well-planned, calculated, executed and, as always, passionately articulated.

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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Access to safe water is essential for life. People need water to drink, for cooking, for laundry, dishwashing and personal hygiene. When safe water is not readily available, life becomes extremely difficult.

While the tap water was not safe on the night of May 1 and into May 2, there was a rush on bottled water in stores all over the area. Along with the rush for safe water came reports that store chains and owners were taking advantage of the situation and overcharging customers. According to the Boston Globe, one resident of the Jamaica Plain neighborhood found a case of water being sold for more than $52 in a 7-Eleven store in her community.

Water should be a guaranteed right for all and it should be free. But under capitalism, it is a commodity sold to make a profit. Those who cannot afford the asking price must simply suffer.

Many truck drivers and grocery store workers in the Boston area were called in and forced to work on Sunday, their day off, in order to meet the city's demand for bottled water. With jobs under constant threat in our current economy, these workers likely did not feel that they could say "no" to "requests" from their bosses to work these extra hours.

On May 3, it was announced that local towns in the area would distribute water to residents for free. The locations for distribution included surrounding suburbs and towns but not a single location within the city of Boston. Working people within the city, many of whom do not have access to a car, had no way to access these free supplies.

The clamp that broke and caused the crisis was less than 10 years old, said officials of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. According to the Boston Globe, the state Water Infrastructure Finance Commission met for the first time after the crisis was over to discuss the water system, which probably needs billions of dollars in upgrades and repairs.

The recent emergency may seem like an unusual event. However, lacking access to safe tap water is not a new scenario to many working people in and around Boston. An organization called Massachusetts Global Action has found that people who live in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, which are low-income communities of color, are 10 times more likely than residents of wealthier neighborhoods to experience a water shutoff as a consequence of bill non-payment. Further, as the proportion of people of color increases in a city ward, there is a disproportionate likelihood that water will be shut off in a resident's home if a bill is not paid, according to Massachusetts Global Action. So while all 2 million people in the Greater Boston Area experienced this water crisis together, it is a constant threat for many working people in the city.

Water is a human right that should be guaranteed to all people. This "crisis" revealed that it is not guaranteed to the working people of Boston, nor is it freely available to most working people around the country. We must fight back against the system of capitalism that puts a price on a most basic and necessary resource for human survival, water.

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Essentially what Williams tells us is that the Deep Water drilling operation was under unparalleled pressure to drill faster and deeper, cutting corners and defying essential aspects of the industry's well established drilling protocol. We can argue about whether BP and other oil giants are ramping up drilling due to the end of cheap and abundant oil on this planet or simply because of greed and a voracious obsession with profits. To engage in that kind of debate, however, is to ignore the most fundamental issue at the root of this disaster. Corporate culture, media, politicians, and the misguided American public are all failing to grasp the issue, and I suggest, are behaving like enablers responding to an addict's fatal overdose, as well as failing to recognize the extent to which they themselves are addicts.

Let me clarify: The addict is the oblivious citizen of industrial civilization who delusionally demands that he/she must at all costs maintain a lifestyle made possible by cheap hydrocarbon energy. That citizen overdosed on April 20, 2010 and may have taken the planet to their grave with them.

Now let me count the ways in which this cataclysmic oil spill is very much like a fatal drug overdose. In order to fully understand the analogy, it's necessary to grasp the extent to which the culture of industrial civilization is addictive. What makes it addictive?

Quite simply, an uncompromising-yes relentless insistence on maintaining the lifestyle to which it has become addicted, and like the addict, willing to do whatever it takes to do so, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary. This includes evidence that the addiction itself will ultimately and invariably prove fatal for the addict, for the addict has little interest in rational, scientific research. He is obsessed with only one thing: lifestyle. It doesn't matter what it costs him or anyone else. Life is all about the next fix, period. The fix could be a possession, a person, or a position in life.

So when the addict, the culture of empire, overdoses and takes everyone and everything with him, he can use the defense mechanism of blame. It wasn't my lifestyle that caused this, he says, but the corporation that pumped the oil. Furthermore, it was the administration's fault for not adopting tougher regulation. While these factors may have entered into the equation, they are not the fundamental issue. Focus on blame works beautifully for awhile to distract attention from the devastation caused by the addict. But eventually, it wears thin.

Another favorite distracting tactic of the addict is "Look how I'm trying to fix it." He mobilizes his enablers to convince the world that something is being done to reverse the repercussions of his latest shitstorm. First we'll try a dome structure to cover the oil leak and capture the oil. Or if that doesn't work, we'll blast garbage into the leak. Or if that doesn't work, we'll use a siphoning tube. In fact, even as I write this article, BP is proclaiming that it has "turned a corner" in the oil spill. This should reassure all the oil addicts, facilitating their craving and assuaging any embarrassing traces of guilt. It's all better now; this temporary nightmare is going to go away. Ya see, human ingenuity, especially of the corporate kind, will solve all problems and clean up all messes created by the addict.

Then there's my favorite addict appeasement approach: alternative energy. Don't worry, says the enabler. We'll get wind or solar or something online for you as soon as we can so that your lifestyle won't miss a beat. Yes, that may take fifty years, but meanwhile, we'll think of something to keep it going for you because this is America, and the lights never permanently go out here.

Before the addict experiences a fatal overdose and ravages everyone and everything around him, there is always the choice to end the addiction and enter treatment. Treatment involves withdrawal from the substance, then taking a long, exhaustive, meticulous look inside oneself to confront the demon of the addiction. Much support is necessary; the addict cannot make the journey alone.

The Transition Handbook frames our dependence on hydrocarbon energy in terms of an addiction. We can blame, rationalize, project, deny-we can employ whatever defense mechanism we choose from humanity's vast repertoire of them, but like the hard core addict, the human race is committing suicide. It is willing to kill every form of life in the oceans, cause the extinction of every species on earth, pollute every cubic inch of breathable air, poison every drop of water on the planet, and yes, enable an unfathomable cataclysm such as we are witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico at this moment, in order to perpetuate the lifestyle to which it feels entitled. Like all addictions, this one is both irrational and insane.

Every person who has chosen to research Peak Oil, climate change, global economic meltdown, species extinction, and population overshoot is not unlike an addict who has some moment of clarity in which he can actually choose to walk to the nearest rehab facility and fall on his face screaming for help. None of us can do that investigative work without the massive support of other "cheap energy addicts in recovery". None of us can do it without a spiritual as well as a logistical recovery program which all authentic recovery absolutely requires.

Like the recovering addict there will be moments of terror about what the future holds, and the greater the devastation we have created, such as the largest oil spill in the history of the world, the more daunting the future will feel. Like the recovery of the addict, our recovery will require rigorous honesty and a commitment to finding meaning and purpose, not in the substance, which is killing us and the planet, but in a different kind of lifestyle. This will be a lifestyle of simplicity, cooperation, and deep connection with nature and our fellow humans. It may mean alterations in our behavior that feel like sacrifices until we realize that the joy, meaning, and contentment they bring us are what we wanted all along.

Therefore, as we witness the spread of the most devastating and widespread oil slick in history; as we see the photos of oil saturated wildlife and watch frantic fisherman in despair because they have lost their livelihood; as we watch enablers blaming and scrambling to fix the un-fixable, let us do as they say in Twelve Step programs, and take a searching and fearless moral (and energy) inventory of our lives and notice where we are in our recovery from addiction to cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Richard Heinberg's book The Party's Over documents how brief in the history of the human race the party was, how much fun it was, and of course, how lethal it was and is. So while the enablers are blaming and fixing, it behooves all of us to ask of ourselves the toughest question of all: What are we doing to recover?

Collapse

Economic boycotts can be very powerful and change the world for the better. Sadly, too few Americans use their personal spending power to advance worthy goals. An immediate opportunity is for people to stop buying BP gasoline. After all, it is clear that BP acted irresponsibly and likely criminally in using offshore oil drilling technology that posed enormous risks to public and worker safety as well as our natural environment in the Gulf of Mexico and possibly far beyond.

Make BP suffer where it hurts, where it can truly harm them. Send a clear