UN-HABITAT, an agency of the United Nations, recently published a 218-page report entitled State of the World's Cities, 2010-2011. The report is full of statistics on the status of cities around the world and their demographics. It defines slum dwellers as those living in urban centers without one of the following: durable structures to protect them from climate, sufficient living area, sufficient access to water, access to sanitation facilities, and freedom from eviction.

Almost intentionally hidden in these statistics is one shocking fact about urban Iraqi populations. For the past few decades, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the percentage of the urban population living in slums in Iraq hovered just below 20 percent. Today, that percentage has risen to 53 percent: 11 million of the 19 million total urban dwellers. In the past decade, most countries have made progress toward reducing slum dwellers. But Iraq has gone rapidly and dangerously in the opposite direction.

According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 80 percent of the 285 million people living in the United States are urban dwellers. Those living in slums are well below 5 percent. If we translate the Iraqi statistic into the U.S. context, 121 million people in the United States would be living in slums.

If the United States had an unemployment rate of 25-50 percent and 121 million people living in slums, riots would ensue, the military would take over, and democracy would evaporate. So why are people in the United States not concerned and saddened by the conditions in Iraq? Because most people in the United States do not know what happened in Iraq and what is happening there now. Our government, including the current administration, looks the other way and perpetuates the myth that life has improved in post-invasion Iraq. Our major news media reinforces this message.

I had high hopes that the new administration would tell the truth to its citizens about why we invaded Iraq and what we are doing currently in the country. President Obama promised to move forward and not look to the past. However problematic this refusal to examine on the past -- particularly for historians -- the president should at least inform the U.S. public of the current conditions in Iraq. How else can we expect our government to formulate appropriate policy?

More extensive congressional hearings on Iraq might have allowed us to learn about the myths propagated about Iraq prior to the invasion and the extent of the damage and destruction our invasion brought on Iraq. We would have learned about the tremendous increase in urban poverty and the expansion of city slums. Such facts about the current conditions of Iraq would help U.S. citizens to better understand the impact of the quick U.S. withdraw and what are our moral responsibilities in Iraq should be.

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But even poor Abbas, a kind of Palestinian "step'n'fetch it" figure if ever there was one, wanted nothing to do with such talks while Israel continued stealing land. The American administration browbeat him for months, threatening him with loss of all aid, into attending.

The only genuinely elected government in any of the territories of Palestine, Hamas in Gaza, remains under Israel's brutal blockade and imprisonment - that is, those elected representatives who were not illegally arrested by Israel or murdered in assassinations or murdered in Operation Cast Lead.

Representatives for these "direct talks" on the Israeli side are from the Netanyahu government, a group of people who have not the least interest in what any normal person would call peace. The "foreign minister" qualifies surely as a David Duke figure.

Now David Duke in the United States - former Klu Klux Klan chief and minor politician - is treated anytime in the press as a lowlife. Avigdor Lieberman is every bit the hateful racist as Duke, but he is far more poisonous, being the foreign minister he is in a position to make his hate wreck the lives of millions. Because he is an Israeli, Lieberman is treated with respect he does not deserve.

Does anyone but a madman believe anything can come out of that set of circumstances?

The only possibility is that Abbas is virtually beaten down into signing something utterly inappropriate for his people. In that case, the "agreement" won't be worth the paper on which it is written.

This entire matter is utterly meaningless as statesmanship, it is brutal political theater, intended to please the Israel Lobby in the U.S. to get the Democrats through the mid-term elections without a catastrophic loss of campaign contributions.

_________________

Response to an uninformed comment:

The Six Day War was an elaborate black operation by Israel. It prodded the Arabs over and over with many aggressive acts into hostility, and then it attacked first.

The intention was to seize the lands not seized in 1948 with the terrors of Irgun and Stern - that is, to create Greater Israel, a self-defined concept that has always motivated Israel's government.

The attack on the USS Liberty, a US spy ship on station in the Mediterranean, was intended to blind the US administration while General Dayan turned around his armor to attack in the North.

It was not a "mistake." It was a deliberate two-hour attack on a well-marked ship, one moreover that Israel had been advised would be on station to guard against its ambitions.

Dayan felt that if he had the slot of time, he could achieve all Israel's goals of conquest, and he pretty much did, presenting the world with the fait accompli whose ghastly consequences we have endured since.

It was all a neat trick, wage a lightning war of conquest while getting sympathy as little David fighting off hoards of nasty Philistines, but Israel knew from its first planning it was sure to win.

And we've learned since that the "little David" image is a sentimental fairy tale: Israel behaves the part brutal bully in its part of the world, attacking and terrorizing every neighbor that it has, even now threatening people a thousand miles away who have never attacked anyone.

See:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/was-einstein-right/

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Over the past five years, Iran has been recurrently under the threat of an imminent war which the mainstream media have overwhelmingly talked of; a war against Tehran to overthrow the Islamic Republic and bring to power a "democratic" regime which the "international community" favors.

Since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad assumed office in 2005 as the Iranian head of state, he made attempts to reverse the passive, submissive stance of Iran towards the Eastern and Western superpowers and proposed new theories for an innovative international order. He accelerated Iran's nuclear program and made remarkable advancements in nationalizing the peaceful use of nuclear energy in Iran. He put forward insightful and astute questions: "why should Israel possess nuclear weapons in violation of the international law", "why should Israel occupy the lands which don't belong to it", "why should Israel repeatedly threaten its neighbors and wage wars against them", "why should Holocaust be used as a pretext to suppress the Palestinian nation?", "why should Iran be deprived of the peaceful uses of nuclear power while the United States, Russia, France, United Kingdom and China have thousands of nuclear weapons?"

These questions were not digestible for the United States and its stalwart allies around the world; therefore, some measures should be adopted to suffocate this man and the people he represents internationally. The reason was simple. Ahmadinejad and Iran would not make concessions and thus should be silenced at any cost. So, who is going to pay the price for silencing Iran? Are the military options plausible?

The answer is simply "no". Iran is different from Iraq, Afghanistan and all of the countries which Israel attacked during its period of existence in the Middle East. The people of Iran have demonstrated that they react to the aggressive powers categorically. So, the best option would be to stage an all-out psychological operation in which the means of coercion, falsification, distortion, fabrication and intimidation might be used.

The project was set off almost five years ago, when the U.S. and European mainstream media gradually began trumpeting for an imaginative war against Iran. The first man to set in motion the project was Scott Ritter, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. He told the media on February 19, 2005 that George Bush is laying the groundwork for an all-out attack against Iran: "President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran's alleged program to develop nuclear weapons." With what was described as Ritter's "greatest skepticism", he also talked of the possibility of a regime change in Iran, pushed by the neoconservatives who were trying to persuade the ex-President Bush to broaden the extents of war to topple the Islamic Republic.

The primary threats looked so realistic and actual that even deceived the veteran investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, who wrote in a January 24, 2005 article in the New Yorker that U.S. is getting prepared to launch a military strike against Iran. He quoted a high-ranking intelligence official as telling him: Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah--we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."

In 2006, the gossips were strongly suggesting that there'll be an attack against Iran, either by Israel or the United States. In August 2006, the former chief of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Major General Hamid Gul emphatically proclaimed that Iran will be attacked by the United States. Interestingly, he also specified the exact time of the attack. Talking to the Pakistani Parliament, he predicted that "America would definitely attack Iran and Syria simultaneously in October."

Along with the previous predictions, however, General Gul's prediction about an imminent assault on Iran transpired to be futile.

The same events continued to happen in 2007; futile predictions and empty threats, either by those who were involved in the conflict with Iran or those who did not have a role.

On January 24, 2007, the Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum that there's a possibility of U.S. attacking Iran: "It's a 50/50 proposition, and we hope that it won't happen. Attacking Iran would be counterproductive.

The atmosphere created by the United States and its allies was so imposing and impressive that had influenced everyone, from the most pragmatic, down-to-earth journalists to the most adventurous, overconfident politicians. Quoting the Kuwaiti paper Arab Times, John Pilger wrote in a "New Statesman" article dated February 5, 2007 that Bush will attack Iran, and also gave the military details of the attack according to the statements of a Russian military official: "The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says that Bush will attack Iran before the end of April. One of Russia's most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov, says the U.S. will use nuclear munitions delivered by cruise missiles launched from the Mediterranean."

Untruthfulness and falsehood had pervaded the mainstream media and they had simply failed to take seriously the possibility of losing their reputation as a result of proposing unrealistic, improbable and pointless predictions. They were only after serving the interests of their governmental owners and trumpeting for a non-existing war which was about to be waged against Iran.

On March 5, 2007, the Reuters AlterNet quoted analysts that there could be a chance for a possible military strike against Iran. This time, the attacker was destined to remain unspecified: "Risk analysts say there could be an up to one-in-three chance that the United States or Israel will attack Iran by the end of this year, and markets may not be doing enough to hedge against the impact." This employment of the "United States or Israel" was the newest psychological operation tactic; spreading uncertainty and ambiguity to overawe and subdue Iran.

In 2008, the most entertaining charade of the game was initiated by John Bolton, a politician who seemed to be enormously interested in playing the role of a new Nostradamus. His prophecy was that Israel would attack Iran before the new U.S. President swears in. The magnificent foretelling by Mr. Bolton was grandiloquently featured by the Daily Telegraph in a report titled: "Israel 'will attack Iran' before new US president sworn in, John Bolton predicts".

Anyway, the new U.S. President swore in and nobody attacked Iran.

The war threats against Iran have been renewed several times since John Bolton publicized his prediction. The famous "proverb" of "all options are on the table" was uttered by the successor of George W. Bush; the same man whom we trusted in once for good and deceived all of us with his promise of change. Mr. Bolton's newest forecast has been released recently: Israel has until week's end to strike Iran's nuclear facility. The psychological warfare machinery is being activated again as each newspaper and website represents one arsenal. Jeffrey Goldberg is taking steps to become the Judith Miller of war against Iran and the world once again watches the funny advertisement of human rights by those who are terrifically massacring "humans" in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, getting prepared for a new bloodshed in Iran. The thing is not that Israel will attack Iran. The thing is that Israel won't dare attack Iran, but its unremitting propaganda won't cease. The thing is that we should hear these sentences incessantly: "Israel will attack Iran... will Israel attack Iran?"

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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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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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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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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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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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Never mind that such "evidence" relies on the thinnest of reeds: that Shahzad had recently traveled to Pakistan, was allegedly in "contact" with the TTP and had even received "training" from a sectarian, clan- and tribal-based organization wary of outsiders who nevertheless, allegedly "approved" of an ill-conceived plan to kill hundreds of New Yorkers.

Last week on NBC's "Meet the Press," U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed, "We know that they [TTP] helped facilitate it. We know that they helped direct it. And I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence which shows that they helped to finance it. They were intimately involved in this plot."

Holder's "evidence"? Why statements by former CIA torture-enabler and current Obama counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, "confirming" the administration's threadbare assertions.

The New York Times reported that Brennan "appeared to say even more definitively than Mr. Holder did that the Taliban in Pakistan had provided money as well as training and direction."

"He was trained by them," the former CEO of The Analysis Corporation (TAC) and Chairman of the security industry lobby shop, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) said. "He received funding from them. He was basically directed here to the United States to carry out this attack."

According to media reports however, Shahzad's motivation for attempting to murder citizens of his adopted country was the cold-blooded killing of his former countrymen by the United States--specifically, the CIA's escalating drone war that has killed nearly a thousand Pakistanis since 2006.

The New York Times reported May 16, that one relative told reporters that "he was always very upset about the fabrication of the W.M.D. stunt to attack Iraq and killing noncombatants such as the sons and grandson of Saddam Hussein." The torture of Guantánamo Bay and other prisoners by the former and current administration was also a source of anger; a message on a Google Groups e-mail list bearing the photos of handcuffed and crouching detainees bore the words, "Shame on you, Bush. Shame on You."

In other words, the catalyst for the aborted attack was not our "freedom" but American policies, specifically the invasion and occupation of Central Asian and Middle Eastern states to secure strategic resources that inconveniently belong to other people.

Despite a new round of drone attacks in Waziristan May 11, that killed 14 alleged militants in a barrage of 18 missiles fired by CIA Predator and Reaper drones, the third since the attempted bombing, Pakistani officials dismissed the notion that the TTP were capable of reaching the "next level."

McClatchy Washington Bureau investigative journalist Saeed Shah reported May 11, the same day of the drone barrage, that "the inept construction of the failed bomb also raised doubts over whether the Pakistani Taliban could have trained Shahzad. They have expertise in explosives and were connected to the devastating strike on a CIA base in Afghanistan at the end of last year."

In an earlier report, McClatchy disclosed that "six U.S. officials had said there was no credible evidence that Shahzad received serious terrorist training from the Pakistani Taliban or another radical Islamic group."

In all likelihood, the insular TTP would not have viewed Shahzad as a potential recruit but rather as an American or Pakistani spy and he probably would have shared the fate of former ISI officer and Taliban supporter, Khalid Khawaja, who was gunned down in May by a militant faction despite close ties to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

Even within the murky world of America's public-private secret state, not everyone is buying the administration's "TTP trained Shahzad" tale.

McClatchy reported that the private intelligence outfit, Stratfor, said that "the lack of tradecraft in Shahzad's device is compelling evidence that whatever 'contacts' or 'training' he might have received in northern Pakistan was largely confined to physical training and weapons handling, not the far more sophisticated skill set of fashioning improvised explosive devices."

But with Obama's "AfPak" adventure going off the rails, perhaps the most compelling question not being asked by the media is this: was the failed May 1 attack, like the Christmas Day plot to blow up Flight 253 over Detroit, a "product" to be exploited by the administration and their allies in Congress for wholly domestic purposes, one having very little to do with the specter of international terrorism?

Bring in the Clowns

Even before the smoke cleared in Times Square, congressional Democrats and Republicans were calling for a new round of repressive measures to "keep us safe."

Senators Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT) and former nude pin-up boy, Scott Brown (R-MA), introduced the Terrorist Expatriation Act that would allow the State Department to revoke the citizenship of people suspected of providing support to terrorist groups.

Lieberman told a May 6 press conference, "If the president can authorize the killing of a United State's citizens because he is fighting for a foreign terrorist organization, in this case Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, that is involved in attacking America and killing Americans, we can also have a law that allows the U.S. government to revoke a locked-in citizenship."

The grammar-challenged senator from Massachusetts told the press, "This isn't a knee-jerk reaction. It reflects the changing nature of war in recent events. War has moved into a new dimension. Individuals who pick up arms, this is what I believe, have effectively denounced their citizenship. This legislation simply memorializes that effort."

In keeping with the repressive tenor of the times, House Speaker Nancy "impeachment is off the table" Pelosi (D-CA), said she supported the "spirit" of the bill.

But while we may dismiss the political theatrics of these clowns, more attacks on our rights and liberties are on the way.

During last week's appearance on "Meet the Press," Holder claimed that Justice Department interrogators "needed greater flexibility" to question terrorism suspects and that the administration now seeks to "carve out a broad new exemption to the Miranda rights established in a landmark 1966 Supreme Court ruling."

According to that precedent, prosecutors are barred from using statements made by suspects before they have been warned that they have a right to remain silent and to consult with an attorney.

That ruling was based on decades of evidence that police, including federal gumshoes, had coerced false confessions from suspects and then used their tainted statements in order to secure convictions and prison sentences--whether or not the individual was actually guilty of a crime.

Investigative journalist Charlie Savage reported May 10 in The New York Times that the "change" regime, providing a new, Orwellian twist to the meaning of the word, will ask Congress to loosen Miranda requirements against a "backdrop of criticism by Republicans who have argued that terrorism suspects--including United States citizens like Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square case--should be imprisoned and interrogated as military detainees, rather than handled as ordinary criminal defendants."

In other words, far from being a proposal that will "keep us safe," the administration's tinkering with constitutional protections is a cynical political calculation by spineless Democrats, caricatured by their Republican colleagues as "soft on terrorism," to deflect criticism in an election year.

While the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) questioned Holder's move saying that "gradually dismantling the Constitution will make us less free, but it will not make us more safe," Salon columnist and constitutional law scholar Glenn Greenwald, was far less circumspect in his criticism of the administration. Greenwald wrote May 13:

What's most amazing about all of this is that even 9 years after the 9/11 attacks and even after the radical reduction of basic rights during the Bush/Cheney years, the reaction is still exactly the same to every Terrorist attack, whether a success or failure, large- or small-scale. Apparently, 8 years of the Bush assault on basic liberties was insufficient; there are still many remaining rights in need of severe abridgment. Even now, every new attempted attack causes the Government to devise a new proposal for increasing its own powers still further and reducing rights even more, while the media cheer it on. It never goes in the other direction. Apparently, as "extremist" as the Bush administration was, there are still new rights to erode each time the word Terrorism is uttered. Each new incident, no matter how minor, prompts new, exotic proposals which the "Constitution-shredding" Bush/Cheney team neglected to pursue: an assassination program aimed at U.S. citizens, formal codification of Miranda dilutions, citizenship-stripping laws, a statute to deny all legal rights to Americans arrested on U.S. soil. ...

It really is the case that every new Terrorist incident reflexively produces a single-minded focus on one question: which rights should we take away now/which new powers should we give the Government? (Glenn Greenwald, "New targets of rights erosions: U.S. citizens," Salon, May 13, 2010)

As if this weren't bad enough, the administration will soon propose new legislation to Congress "to allow the government to detain terrorism suspects longer after their arrests before presenting them to a judge for an initial hearing," The New York Times reported May 15.

"If approved," the Times disclosed, "the idea to delay hearings would be attached to broader legislation to allow interrogators to withhold Miranda warnings from terrorism suspects for lengthy periods, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. proposed last week."

It was unclear how long a "delay" the regime is seeking but in order to circumvent Supreme Court rulings barring the indefinite detention of suspects, "several legal specialists" according to the Times said that the "court might be more willing to approve modifications if lawmakers and the executive branch agreed that the changes were necessary in the fight against terrorism."

One such "specialist," Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution said that while the Miranda proposals were generating publicity, a "presentment" hearing "is even more likely to disrupt an interrogation because it involves transporting a suspect to a courtroom for a formal proceeding."

In a May 14 Washington Post op-ed, Wittes argued that "the presidency badly needs more political and legal latitude when authorities capture a suspect in an ongoing plot." All the more relevant when that "plot" is one hatched in the shadows to destroy the constitutional rights of the American people.

As a "safeguard" Wittes told the Times, "Congress could require a high-level Justice Department official to certify that delaying the suspect's initial appearance in court was necessary for national-security reasons."

But as with administration assertions of the "state secrets privilege" to derail lawsuits challenging the government's imperial right to illegally spy on their citizens, such Justice Department avowals wouldn't be worth the paper their written on.

In testimony Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee, Holder claimed that administration proposals would effect only a minute number of "terrorism" cases.

Holder told the Committee: "We now find ourselves in 2010 dealing with very complicated terrorism matters. Those are certainly the things that have occupied much of my time. And we think that with regard to that small sliver--only terrorism-related matters, not in any other way, just terrorism cases--that modernizing, clarifying, making more flexible the use of the public safety exception would be something beneficial."

Really?

Would the "public safety exception" only apply to "terrorism" cases that involved the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda?

Or, as is likely, would a more expansive reading of the statute be viewed as a splendid means by this, or future administrations, to subject domestic dissidents, rebranded as "terrorists," to citizenship-stripping administrative detention, which after all is just another day at the office for that "beacon of democracy," America's stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East, Israel?

What with preemptive policing that already targets antiwar, antiglobalization and environmental activists for "special handling" by federal, state and local "counterterrorism" agencies, fusion centers and various Pentagon spy shops, it's a sure bet that "what happens in Vegas" won't stay there.

As Patrick Martin pointed out May 10 on the World Socialist Web Site, "In practical terms, the Obama administration no longer distinguishes between citizens and non-citizens in its counterterrorism policies. Both alike can be targeted for surveillance, arrest, indefinite detention, even assassination."

Martin writes that the introduction of an expanded "public safety exemption" when coupled with the administration's indefinite detention proposal "would go far beyond the Bush administration, translating what were measures to be taken on executive authority, supposedly in emergency conditions, into the standard operating procedures of the US government and police agencies at every level."

What was it again the terrorists hated us for?



Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press , Uncommon Thought Journal, CJO's Avenger212, and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.
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In a May 9 piece, Times columnist Thomas Friedman denounces workers in the US and Western Europe for believing in the "tooth fairy" and expecting government services without paying for them. In America, Friedman says, the baby-boom generation, which supposedly had inherited the prosperity of the post-war years, had "eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts."

"After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving things away to voters, it's now going to be, mostly, about taking things away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics."

Describing what he has in mind, two days later Friedman wrote about his meeting with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou in a rooftop restaurant in Athens. Praising Papandreou for defying mass protests, the Times columnist hails the government for carrying out a "revolution," including raising the retirement age and slashing wages and pensions for public sector workers, imposing regressive consumption taxes and wiping out two-thirds of the country's publicly owned companies.

Another May 11 article, appearing on the front page of the Times, is entitled, "In Greek Debt Crisis, Some See Parallels to U.S." Its author, David Leonhardt, led the newspaper's campaign to promote Obama's health care overhaul, explicitly supporting limits on medical treatments ordinary people could receive. ("In truth, rationing is an inescapable part of economic life").

"It's easy to look at the protesters and the politicians in Greece--and at the other European countries with huge debts--and wonder why they don't get it," Leonhardt writes. "They have been enjoying more generous government benefits than they can afford...

"Yet in the back of your mind comes a nagging question: how different, really, is the United States?... Both countries have a bigger government than they're paying for. And politicians, spendthrift as some may be, are not the main source of the problem.

We, the people, are."

It is rich to hear demands for sacrifices and lectures about "the people" living beyond their means, particularly from the likes of Leonhardt and Friedman. The latter, who is paid $50,000 per speaking engagement, is married to the heir of a multi-billion dollar real estate fortune. According to the Washingtonian magazine, the couple owns "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house" in suburban Washington, DC, valued in 2006 at $9.3 million.

In these circles it is taken for granted that massive cuts must be imposed on the living standards of the working class, but not a word is said about the hundreds of billions that are funneled into the personal fortunes of the financial aristocracy and the subordination of the entire economy to increasing their piles of wealth.

The events of the last several years have revealed to the world that the greatest burden on society is not ordinary working people but the anti-social activities of an unproductive and parasitic financial elite. The grotesque consumption and appropriation of social wealth by this oligarchy is not a minor factor in the crisis of the global capitalist system itself.

The bankrupting of whole countries--chiefly through the transferring of the bad debts of the financial speculators onto the books of various governments--is being used to demand austerity from workers and ever-greater riches for the elite.

The four biggest US financial firms--Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase--made money from trading every single day during the first quarter of the year, according to their financial filings. The banks, which all benefited from the Wall Street bailout, reaped hundreds of millions in profits from betting on the movement of currency, commodity and sovereign debt markets, including in relation to Greece.

At the same time, the value of corporate shares has risen, chiefly through a campaign of job cutting, wage and benefit concessions and a staggering 3.8 percent increase in worker productivity in 2009. As a result, corporate CEOs, who took stock options in lieu of pay increases when profits were down, are now cashing in, according to an Associated Press report, entitled, "America's top CEOs are set for a once-in-a-lifetime pay bonanza." Yahoo's Carol Bartz, for example, received a $47.2 million package during her first year on the job, 90 percent of which came from stock awards and options.

While these vast personal fortunes have been made, there has been no recovery in the wages and benefits workers have lost during the recession. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that real wages fell last year by 2.7 percent in Japan and Ireland, 1.1 per cent in Germany and 0.8 percent in the US.

The unbridled greed of America's ruling elite--and the complete subservience of the political establishment, from Obama on down, to its needs--can only be compared to the ancien régime in France. The parasitism and extravagance of the aristocracy became a major factor in the country's breakdown, and ultimately the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789.

Workers must reject the demand for austerity. The working class did not create this crisis and must not pay for it. Instead, the ill-gotten gains of the ruling elite must be confiscated and used to meet the interests of society as a whole, instead of gutting social programs and destroying jobs.

This must include a multi-trillion dollar program of public works to put the unemployed to work--at decent wages and full medical care--to rebuild the cities and suburbs, repair the nation's infrastructure and provide high quality housing, medical care and education for all.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the founder of the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky, argued in the Transitional Program that it is "impossible to take a single serious step in the struggle against monopolistic despotism and capitalistic anarchy--which supplement one another in their work of destruction--if the commanding posts of the banks are left in the hands of predatory capitalists. In order to create a unified system of investment and credits, along a rational plan corresponding to the interests of the entire people, it is necessary to merge all the banks into a single national institution. Only the expropriation of the private banks and the concentration of the entire credit system in the hands of the state will provide the latter with the necessary actual, i.e., material, resources--and not merely paper and bureaucratic resources--for economic planning."

The nationalization of the banks, however, will produce positive results, Trotsky explained, "only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers."

For this to be realized the working class must build its own mass political party, independent of and irreconcilably opposed to the two parties of big business, and dedicated to the fight for a workers' government to replace capitalism with socialism.

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Though this scribe had said as much just two days after Ms Bhutto's assassination, along with many other writers, when it comes from the highest human forum on planet earth, its connotation is far different.

Let us see how.

The report defines the Pakistani "Establishment" as follows;

"The "Establishment" is the de facto power structure that has as its permanent core the military high command and intelligence agencies, in particular, the powerful, military-run the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as well as Military Intelligence (MI) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB)."

It goes on to list a lot of lapses and deliberate acts of the "Establishment". It then notes;

"The autonomy, pervasive reach and clandestine role of intelligence agencies in Pakistani life underlie many of the problems, omissions and commissions set out in this report." The report proceeds to give a brief background introduction to the Establishment-Taliban/Jihadi love affair before stating;

"Some of the positions taken by Ms Bhutto that touched Establishment concerns included her publicly stated position on the need to eliminate all remnants of the military-militant nexus. Her proposal was to eliminate the military and intelligence ties to the Taliban and jihadis, although many in those institutions still publicly regarded these groups as important foreign policy tools to advance national interests against India in the sub-region."

The testimony concludes by saying;

"The commission hopes that this report will shed light on the truth behind this heinous crime and support steps toward ending impunity. It is solely up to the competent authorities to make this happen."

And herein lies the rub. While it is not difficult to see how and why the Commission reached the conclusion that it did, it is in its recommendation that it puts the competent authority, the ruling political party whose leader the departed Ms Bhutto was, in the mother of all quandaries. Who in 'the land of the pure' will now have the gall, guts or gumption to approach the holy cow with unholy intentions?

Perhaps a folk tale from Sierra Leone will make this situation clear.

A hunter went into the jungle to kill a monkey. Not very much later, he sighted one. The monkey was sitting comfortably on a high branch of a tree munching away at his food with a not a care in the world. The hunter raised his rifle and aimed. Just then the monkey spoke, "If you shoot me your mother will die, and if you don't, your father will die." The monkey then resumed chewing his food, every so often scratching his head or his belly.

The President started on the hunt with his request to the UN to inquire into his wife's killing. As a result, the monkey is now in range and visible in site. We will wait to see whether the Prez himself takes the shot or hands over the gun to his son, who incidentally has already lost his mother. In the meanwhile, however, it will be worth everyone's while to remember Yossarian's golden words in that ever green book, 'Catch-22':

"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live."

From Liaquat Ali Khan to Nawab Akbar Bugty, there is a rather long list of prominent people in this country who either did not know or forgot Yossarian's historic words and are no more.

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One of the more interesting discussions was on OpEd News from two articles by Josh Stieber, a soldier who was with the same company/unit but did not go on the mission having recently adopted conscientious objector status. [1] The arguments ranged from outright condemnation through acceptance of Josh's position without accepting the overall military effort, to those supporting the soldiers with their own apologetics. Overall it was an interesting discussion that appears to have generally taken the middle course, and hopefully the author's realizations about the inhumanity of war will provide effective discussion points that can help other soldiers wake up to the reality that war is not the answer (to what question, if any?), that war has an international criminality beyond the propaganda of empire couched in the terms of patriotism, democracy, freedom, and peace.

Rules of engagement

An article in al-Jazeera [2] took the stronger position of the apologetics side, to the point of essentially saying, really, look, its not our fault, it's the rules of engagements fault, and, hey, we're just doing our job. Robert Grenier, former CIA chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan does his best " to try to explain US behaviour as honestly as possible" while hoping it "will make sense to those who typically look at the world and individual events from a different perspective to that of most Americans." He is trying to explain "why the US government, and the people who represent it, behave as they do." Grenier tries to speak calmly through his self-righteous indignation over people finding fault with his beloved country's mission, one he should know well as a CIA employee.

Not an easy task and he does not succeed, except perhaps for the members of the choir who are already converted to this perspective.

His main rationale is that what you see is not really what is happening - that it needs more information about how the mission was organized and operated. I won't go into his details here, mostly about the technicalities of "risk management," because basically this mission, the Iraqi mission, and the whole U.S. Middle East mission is based on lies and international crimes. Towards the end of the discussion Grenier tries to make it even more acceptable by relating incidents in which the U.S. military accidentally targeted their own people, from two main factors:

The propensity of people to see what they expect, or want, to see and the inability of people who lack understanding of the environment in which they are operating to understand what they are seeing at all.

Some of the clearest examples I have witnessed of both these tendencies have come in instances where Americans were the actual, or near, victims.

Well gosh, if we can kill our own people accidentally, or mistakenly target them, then its understandable that we can kill other people as well without feeling guilty about it - it's all about those darned rules of engagement, not too mention we did not really understand the situation.

Except it isn't about rules of engagement.

Murder, straight and simple.

It is about murder, as witnessed by the video and regardless of the mission imperatives, it is still murder. Not even collateral murder, murder straight and simple. And it is murder brought on by an invading and occupying force that is there illegally under international law and thus becomes a crime under international law.

Iraq was invaded on several pretexts, all false. The first pretext was that there were nuclear weapons, in spite of information from elBaradei of the Atomic Energy Agency that they did not exist. Secondly, that Iraq was working with al-Queda and thus responsible for 9/11, for which there is absolutely no evidence, partly because Hussein had a distinct dislike for al-Queda and Muslim fundamentalists. The third pretext was that of bringing peace, democracy and freedom to a country ruled by a despot. Hussein may have been a despot, but he was one initially supported by the U.S., and there are many other U.S. supported non-democratic regimes ("moderates" is the term used by the apologists) in the Middle East that have yet to be invaded.

The invasion was not sanctioned, it was a pre-emptive offensive attack, illegal under international law treaties and charters that the U.S. is signatory to. The occupation has not protected the civilians and the civil infrastructure of the occupied territory, and is establishing permanent garrisons - settlements if you will - in the occupied territory - again against the Geneva conventions. Torture has occurred and arguably still occurs, along with renditions to territories where the authorities are not quite as exposed and touchy on the issue, areas like Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean and command central for the Middle East.

In the broader mission view, in the global context, international criminality given, the real reason has everything to do with empire and oil.

Rules of Empire...and oil

More correctly the acronym ROE should stand for Rules of Empire, rules that are significantly different than what the empire expects of its "subjects." The reasons for being in Iraq arrive from geo-strategies thought up in Washington over the last several decades (with a nudge and a wink from the Israelis). Oil, and more oil, with some gas, is the main reason, as the world nears peak supply about now, and the U.S. homeland supplies reached their peak decades ago. Containment, and more containment, is another significant reason as the U.S. fears not the terrorists so much as the rising power of China economically and militarily and the resurgence of Russia, the latter not so much as a power globally, but certainly as a regional spoiler. Iran is a diversion, a thorn in the side of the overall containment plan; the terrorists an ephemeral ghost, the fear created for public consumption.

Caught up in all this are the citizens of Iraq.

What about the victims?

When I quoted Grenier above, I did so partly because the first statement is so true, so true of the overall U.S. military-political strategy in the Middle East, "the inability of people who lack understanding of the environment in which they are operating to understand what they are seeing at all." The mission is based on lies and ignorance, at least as presented to the willing cooperative media and the apparently pacified and gullible citizens of the U.S. Following that, it is interesting that the "clearest examples I have witnessed" occurred where "where Americans were the actual, or near, victims."

My, how noble and patriotic to say that yes we suffer too, in our illegal invasion and occupation of this country, and if we kill a few of "those bastards" it's okay because we have or almost have done the same to ourselves.

One thing missing from all these discussions was a statement from the Iraqis, unfortunately all who appeared to have died in the "heat" of the "battle", the only heat coming from the gunship and the sun, and the only battle being gunship versus a group of Iraqis "armed" with two cameras. The whole story of imperial ambition, of military strategy is to deny the humanness of the other, to deny that they have any rational thinking, or any human emotions, or families to go home to, loved ones to grieve their murder, families now even more destitute than before...

...and a population more hostile than before against the occupiers.

A different perspective

Yes, Mr. Grenier, the world does view itself from a different perspective than the U.S., one that sees the U.S. as an arrogant, ignorant empire.

Does your explanation make sense? No.

Were you as honest as possible? Perhaps, but that only would underline the extent of your own ignorance on your country's geopolitical strategies, something I find hard to believe from a former CIA employee.

Can you really explain why the U.S. government and its people behave as they do? Not in the simplistic manner that you attempted under the narrow confines and artificial suppositions of rules of engagement, ignoring completely the international criminality of the whole operation in Iraq.

Yes, we need different perspectives, and hopefully with people such as Josh Stieber speaking out against the inhumanity of war, that different perspective will gain ground.

[1] Josh Stieber. "Lessons from Collateral Murder," OpEd News. Sunday, April 11, 2010. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Lessons-from-Collateral-Mu-by-Josh-Stieber-100411-889.html

and

Josh Stieber. "Collateral Murder? Wikileaks soldier speaks," OpEd News. Friday, April 09 2010.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Collateral-Murder-Wikilea-by-Josh-Stieber-100409-170.html

[2] Robert Grenier "Follow the chain of command," al-Jazeera. Monday, April 12, 2010. http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/04/201041173452920826.html

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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Netanyahu was addressing the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The 'powerful' lobby group encompasses a large conglomerate of rightwing Zionist politicians and lobbyists and is seen by many as the most instrumental platform that influences - and, to a large degree, controls - US foreign policy regarding Palestine, Israel and the entire Middle East.

AIPAC is dangerous for many reasons. For one, it's not a lobby group in the conventional sense - meaning a group of well-paid lobbyists harassing US Congressmen with telephone calls with the hope of advancing the agenda of their benefactors (in this case, the state of Israel). The pro-Israel lobby has actually grown and morphed into a political body that is embedded within all branches of the US government, as well as the media, academia and elsewhere. It is no secret that the neo-conservative cliques of politicians who engineered, steered and to an extent continue to influence US war policy are in fact a mere component of the same 'lobby'.

While Jewish communities in the US may not be united in their support of the largely rightwing and hawkish Zionist lobby groups, both major political parties in the US and all branches of the government stand in complete support of Israel. The AIPAC annual conference is almost mandatory for them. Sadly, Netanyahu's speech before AIPAC is of equal, if not of greater import to some of them than the State of the Union address. Following Obama's address in 2010, many US politicians openly voiced criticism of his take on many issues. But few dare challenge Netanyahu on much of the malice he spewed on March 22.

Americans need to realize that this is no longer about Palestine and Israel. It is now about their own country, their own sovereignty and the future of their own democracy. They must ask hard questions and refuse to settle for sentimental answers. How could America be so divided on so many issues, yet so united on the 'cause of Israel'? Where does a feeble politician like Netanyahu find the courage to defy the president of the very country that supplied his own with many billions of taxpayer dollars? Of course, we know that much of the fund was used to occupy, torment and wage war on Palestinians for many years. This is the atrocious fact that Americans need to understand fully: Israeli war crimes were made possible because of American funds, weapons and political cover. America is not an outside party to the conflict. It has done more than its fair share in the ongoing Palestinian tragedy.

Even if one is somehow convinced by the most recent and unusually strong stance taken by the Obama administration regarding Israel's settlement policy in East Jerusalem, there still remains the question of what comes next. When the President of the United States articulates a seemingly unmovable US position that rejects the building of more illegal settlements that would preclude any possible peace talks, and yet he fails to weaken Israel's resolve even by an iota, some questions must be asked. Will the US use its leverage to twist Israel's arm to respect international law? Will it at least hold on to some of the billions of dollars of funds that it continues to pour into Israel - especially as the US undergoes an unprecedented financial crisis, resulting in growing poverty and homelessness?

The answer might be in the UPI report on March 26, citing Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz:

"Despite the sharpest rift in decades between Israel and the United States, the Pentagon is reported to have given the green light to the $250 million sale of C-130J transport aircraft to Israel...The deal...involves three 'Super Hercules' aircraft manufactured especially to the Israeli air force's requirements. (The report) indicates that despite the belief among the United States' top military commanders that Israel's failure to reach a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians is undermining U.S. influence and standing in the Muslim world and thus endangering its forces, the Pentagon is prepared to maintain Israel's military superiority in the Middle East."

The timing and the nature of the 'sale' signify the following: first, if the US government was ready to actively back up its supposed disagreement with Israel, it would have stopped this unwarranted sale. Second, considering that the deal was made through the Pentagon, the very platform used to express concern and call for at least a reconsideration of US policy in the region, the sale is both a slap on the face of the US military, and a veiled apology to Israel. Third, if the failure to reexamine this absence relationship continues, then there is absolutely no doubt left that US foreign policy in the Middle East is indeed held hostage to Israeli, not American priorities, misguided at times as they maybe.

Those individuals in the US government, military and media that have the courage and the platform to confront Israel must take the opportunity. They should not succumb to intimidation or fear, nor should they be swayed by Netanyahu's lies. The fact is, Netanyahu will continue to lie; it's what he does best. The onus is on those US politicians who readily and barefacedly continue to give the professional liar a standing ovation following every statement he utters. And it is only really they who give any power to the 'powerful' lobby.

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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But rather than being deterred by government threats or overt acts of violence, including the murder of two human rights attorneys in Nairobi last March, who provided the whistleblowers with reports on extrajudicial killings by Kenyan police, WikiLeaks have turned the tables on the CIA.

On March 26, the group published a remarkable document that lays out the Agency's strategy to manipulate European public opinion over waning support for the Afghanistan war.

Classified "Confidential/NOFORN" (No Foreign Nationals) the 11 March 2010 document is titled, "Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission--Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough."

Prepared by the CIA Red Cell, the entity is described in the text as an Agency subunit "charged by the Director of Intelligence with taking a pronounced 'out-of-the-box' approach that will provoke thought and offer an alternative viewpoint on the full range of analytic issues."

According to WikiLeaks staff, "The proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it is the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as for Germany's standing in the NATO. The memo is an recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA."

Curiously, in an echo of capitalism's real and not imagined, living social content, the CIA evokes Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. After all, it was Debord who, commenting on the ability of contemporary societies to produce and reproduce a monstrous world "mediated by images," first identified the media as a central locus for managing reality itself.

Langley's best and brightest now counsel America's political masters that although "apathy" may be their strongest ally in waging the endless "war on terror," it cannot be counted upon indefinitely to sustain the imperial project.

Contrast the CIA's evocation of "apathy" as a "warfighting" tool with Debord's insight that "the spectacle ... expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep." One might add that the Agency's proposed media assault on Western public opinion is being prepared precisely to guarantee that the masses continue to slumber.

France and Germany: Heading Towards the Exits?

Last month's fall of the neoliberal Dutch government over their continued support for the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan was a wake-up call for Washington.

The news was greeted with dismay by partisans of the Afghan intervention and their media sycophants. The New York Times reported February 21, that when a "last-ditch effort" to keep Dutch troops in Afghanistan failed, it immediately raised "fears that the Western military coalition fighting the war was increasingly at risk."

As U.S. and British forces step-up operations across the entire "AfPak" theatre, launching murderous and indiscriminate drone strikes in Pakistan and "targeted killings" and massacres in Afghanistan, the spectre of a significant climb-down by the French and German governments set alarm bells ringing in the Pentagon.

The planned withdrawal by December of some 2,000 Dutch troops from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), would undoubtedly throw a spanner in the works. The Dutch are currently operating in the restive southern province of Oruzgan, north of the Taliban strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces where major military operations are underway; their imminent departure will significantly alter NATO plans.

While the cover-story for stepped-up operations in Afghanistan by Washington is ostensibly to destroy the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, and halt the avalanche of drugs from reaching Western consumers, this is, and always has been, a ludicrous fairy-tale.

As we know through countless investigations and exposés across the decades, from Vietnam through Watergate and from Iran-Contra to the endless "War on Terror," the international drugs trade is the handmaiden of Pentagon counterinsurgency campaigns, CIA operations and elite violence world-wide.

The New York Times reported March 21 that Afghanistan's lucrative opium crop is no longer a target of military operations. According to the Times, "the military's position is clear: 'U.S. forces no longer eradicate,' as one NATO official put it. Opium is the main livelihood of 60 to 70 percent of the farmers in Marja, which was seized from Taliban rebels in a major offensive last month. American Marines occupying the area are under orders to leave the farmers' fields alone."

But with the biggest players in Afghanistan's drug rackets linked to America's close allies in the corrupt Karzai government, the subtext is clear; as analysts Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Dale Scott have long argued, American interventions tend to manage, not eliminate, global drug flows, favoring narcotraffickers who play ball whilst targeting for destruction those who don't.

As Scott reported in January for Global Research, none other than Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, claimed that "drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the [2008] global crisis." Indeed, Costa told The Observer last December that he has seen evidence that "the proceeds of organised crime were 'the only liquid investment capital' available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year."

And as Chossudovsky revealed back in 2005, according to a U.S. Senate report "some $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through United States banks."

Above all else, the CIA's strategy is meant to head-off any attempt by Europe's citizens to corral their governments and force an end to their participation in U.S.-led efforts to recolonize Central- and South Asia.

One wag, Julian Lindley-French, a professor of defense strategy at the Netherlands Defense Academy in Breda told the New York Times, "If the Dutch go, which is the implication of all this, that could open the floodgates for other Europeans to say, 'The Dutch are going, we can go, too'."

Given these sentiments, the CIA and Pentagon will turn to "other means" to stop their NATO partners heading towards the exits.

A Cynical Media Operation

CIA media operations are fully consonant with the aims and methods employed by U.S. war planners; indeed, the manipulation of public opinion by battalions of public relations specialists, pollsters and former high-ranking military officers, often employed by giant defense and security corporations with "dogs in the hunt," are part of the secret state's army of "message force multipliers."

That such operations have disastrous consequences for functioning democracies, not to mention the victims of NATO's tender mercies, cannot be stressed often enough. To ensure that the bombs continue falling and Western control over access to vital Central Asian gas and petroleum reserves continue, public opinion, treated as an essential front of the imperial "battlespace," must be "softened up."

Accordingly, the CIA found that "Afghanistan mission's low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Berlin and Paris currently maintain the third and fourth highest ISAF troop levels, despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments, according to INR polling in fall 2009."

State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) pollsters found:

• Only a fraction (0.1-1.3 percent) of French and German respondents identified "Afghanistan" as the most urgent issue facing their nation in an open-ended question, according to the same polling. These publics ranked "stabilizing Afghanistan" as among the lowest priorities for US and European leaders, according to polls by the German Marshall Fund (GMF) over the past two years.

• According to INR polling in the fall of 2009, the view that the Afghanistan mission is a waste of resources and "not our problem" was cited as the most common reason for opposing ISAF by German respondents and was the second most common reason by French respondents. But the "not our problem" sentiment also suggests that, so for, sending troops to Afghanistan is not yet on most voters' radar. (CIA Red Cell, Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission--Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough, 11 March 2010)

"If some forecasts of a bloody summer in Afghanistan come to pass," CIA planners write, "passive French and German dislike of their troop presence could turn into active and politically potent hostility. The tone of previous debate suggests that a spike in French or German casualties or in Afghan civilian casualties could become a tipping point in converting passive opposition into active calls for immediate withdrawal."

This must be avoided at all costs. Cynically, CIA analysts conclude that "tailoring messaging could forestall or at least contain backlash."

From the looks of things on the ground, the CIA will have much "tailoring" to do in order to stitch-up NATO's fraying pretext for the Afghanistan intervention.

As an investigation by journalist Jerome Starkey revealed in The Times on March 13, "a night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials in an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up."

According to Starkey, when details of the botched raid came to light, NATO officials claimed the force had found the women's bodies "tied up, gagged and killed" in a room, implying the gruesome murders were the work of insurgents.

"A Times investigation" Starkey writes, "suggests that Nato's claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were US and Afghan gunmen. The identity and status of the soldiers is unknown."

As with the roll-out of any new product line, or moves to increase flagging interest in an existing commodity, niche consumers, French and German public opinion in the case of the Afghan intervention, are now subjects of a targeted marketing strategy by the CIA.

Accordingly, since INR surveys have found that the "French [are] focused on civilians and refugees," CIA analysts aver that "citing examples of concrete gains could limit and perhaps even reverse opposition to the mission. Such tailored messages could tap into acute French concern for civilians and refugees." Indeed, "contradicting the 'ISAF does more harm than good' perception is clearly important, particularly for France's Muslim minority."

Such cynical constructs are all the more remarkable considering that "France's Muslim minority" are cast by the French state, its far-right supporters and American secret warriors as a veritable "fifth column" to be closely surveilled and when necessary, repressed, lest an alleged "Islamist contagion" take root in the heart of Europe itself!

In this respect, "messaging that dramatizes the potential adverse consequences of an ISAF defeat for Afghan civilians could leverage French (and other European) guilt for abandoning them. The prospect of the Taliban rolling back hard-won progress on girls' education could provoke French indignation, become a rallying point for France's largely secular public, and give voters a reason to support a good and necessary cause despite casualties."

Never mind, that the warlord and Islamist/Mafia-backed coalition that comprises the Karzai government, as documented by innumerable human rights' organizations and Afghan women themselves, such as ousted parliamentarian Malalai Joya, have found that the same brutal conditions persist for women today as under the retrograde U.S./Pakistan-backed Taliban regime of the 1990s.

For Germans however, xenophobic and nationalist cards will be played. "Messages that dramatize the consequences of a NATO defeat for specific German interests could counter the widely held perception that Afghanistan is not Germany's problem. For example, messages that illustrate how a defeat in Afghanistan could heighten Germany's exposure to terrorism, opium, and refugees might help to make the war more salient to skeptics."

Additionally, CIA analysts stress that "emphasis on the mission's multilateral and humanitarian aspects could help ease Germans' concerns about waging any kind of war while appealing to their desire to support multilateral efforts. Despite their allergy to armed conflict, Germans were willing to break precedent and use force in the Balkans in the 1990s to show commitment to their NATO allies. German respondents cited helping their allies as one of the most compelling reasons for supporting ISAF, according to an INR poll in the fall of 2009."

Considering that U.S./NATO allies jumped into the Balkans only when it became clear that German imperialism under the bankrupt government of Helmut Kohl, was intent on destroying the multicultural Yugoslav socialist state, and did so only not to be left in the dust by a resurgent unified German state with eyes clearly focused on lucrative East European markets, is a remarkable rewriting of history!

Another card which the CIA clearly intends to play is the alleged "confidence of the French and German publics in President Obama's ability to handle foreign affairs in general and Afghanistan in particular."

Indeed, appeals from America's new capo tutti capo "suggest that they would be receptive to his direct affirmation of their importance to the ISAF mission--and sensitive to direct expressions of disappointment in allies who do not help." Such direct appeals from the global Godfather "might provide at least some leverage for sustaining contributions to ISAF."

GMF polling data cited by the CIA found that "when respondents were reminded that President Obama himself had asked for increased deployments to Afghanistan, their support for granting this request increased dramatically, from 4 to 15 percent among French respondents and from 7 to 13 percent among Germans. The total percentages may be small but they suggest significant sensitivity to disappointing a president seen as broadly in sync with European concerns."

Another exploitable bullet point cited by the CIA are Afghan women. Accordingly, "Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women's ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory."

However, as I pointed out above, only some "Afghan women" would be viewed as "ideal messengers" in these media operations. Leftist, feminist or other internal critics of the Karzai Warlord-Mafia-Islamist regime would, by definition, be excluded from such forums. For the chosen few who pass muster, "outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission."

Conclusion

The United States and their NATO allies are encountering stiff resistance in Afghanistan. In order to buttress political support from skeptical North American and European citizens, the CIA and their "friends" amongst the giant media conglomerates are pulling out all the stops.

The publication of the CIA's analytical document by Wikileaks, provides the antiwar movement with insight into how imperialism intends to sell the wretched Afghan war to the public.

Counterstrategies that leverage this knowledge can potentially provide critics with ammunition that directly challenge American propaganda, disarm academic, media and political sycophants and more importantly, derail the policy of waging aggressive, "preemptive" wars well into the future.

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 most followers of the news are aware, the Israelis announced plans to construct another 1600 settlement units in the Jerusalem area. They did this in the face of Biden who at the time was meeting with Netanyahu concerning the rebooting of the "peace process." The main purpose of the "peace process" - at least for the Israelis - is to be able to establish communities - "facts" - on the ground so that if they ever did finally get to some form of settlement, imposed or negotiated, the inarguable facts would severely limit what could be negotiated as far as independent, sovereign, and contiguous territory for Palestine is concerned.

Biden, Clinton, and Obama all "condemned" these statements, acting as any affronted president should [1] in their pretended outrage against Israeli actions. The real message arrives with the comments from the Quartet: the UN, the U.S., Russia, and the EU. Ban Ki-moon,
the UN secretary-general, acting as head of this group said he "urges the government of Israel to freeze all settlement activities," adding they "condemned...the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem".[2]

The comments continued emphatically,
"The Quartet has sent a clear and strong message: we are strongly supporting your efforts to establish an independent and viable Palestinian state." Later he added, "Let us be clear, all settlement activity is illegal anywhere in occupied territory and this must stop."[3]

Others in the region however were not as fooled as perhaps the rest of the world is, having dealt with this issue for the last forty and more years. As reported on al-Jazeera,
"The Palestinian Authority will need the UN's support in these confrontations." And that is the crux of the matter - taking the issue to the UN.

International Law

Why does the U.S. not introduce this topic to the Security Council at the UN? Why did Ban not do the same? Why are they all sitting back saying the UN needs to do something when nobody is willing to take it to the UN? The answer is really quite simple: taking the issue to the UN Security Council would address the issue for what it is, a crime against international law of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter of Rights.

If the UN Security Council dealt with the matter and supported the "condemnation" as strongly as the (ineffective) quartet, it would then be a matter of international law, and it would then have to be recognized that both Israel and the U.S. are constantly in contradiction of many international laws concerning occupation, war, and the humane treatment of prisoners. Following the U.S. lead, with the EU and the Russians in support, there would be unanimous approval from the Security Council for such a condemnation and establishment of the "facts" in international law. They obviously want to avoid this.

International war

Another factor that struck me as singularly ignorant and arrogant is the pronouncement from the U.S. General Patraeus,
"The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [CENTCOM area of responsibility] AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world." Biden stepped in again saying, "What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace."

NO! Really? Do you think it is a perception of Israeli favouritism, or perhaps do you think, in the deep darker corners of your mind, refusing to come out into the arena of awareness, that it is true, you do favour the Israelis? And further, in those same dark recesses of the arrogant U.S. mind, lurks the thought that perhaps what is occurring is against all international law, both the events inside Israel/Palestine and the events occurring in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan? And who are the moderate Arab regimes? Are they the ones that refuse to do anything except mutter a few politically correct phrases directed to the Palestinians, while they continue to kowtow to the U.S. presence in the region and accept all the favours that are offered the elites of these supposedly moderate countries?

And why are you there in the first place? Biden's ignorance and arrogance in considering that the U.S. is supporting regional peace is nothing but....pardon the language...crap. Put it all in context. The U.S. is interested in the oil in the region, always has been except that the British made it there first. The U.S. has always supported Israel, maybe not without contention and not always overtly, but the political mechanisms in the U.S. have always been favourable to Israel. The U.S. has always wished to contain the Soviet Union and now is doing the same with Russian interests in the region. China becomes a new added factor, with its increasing demand and increasing economic and military power throughout East Asia, and the U.S. is obviously trying to limit its growth in the area.

Peace? What arrogance! What ignorance! What culpability!

No, the U.S. is not there for peace. The U.S. is there for war, a war to control all the elements that might hinder their access to soon to be rapidly depleting oil resources, other natural resources, and to contain Russia and China from encroaching on "their" territory. It is a war of terror, creating the very terror they presume to eliminate. The ephemeral disappearing terrorist, creating an ongoing situation of contingencies that the U.S. then allows themselves, a unilateral self-justification, their invasions and encroachments on the sovereign territory of many nations in the Middle East and Asia (and indeed around the world).

The U.S. was quite happy to create a coup to eliminate the democratically elected Mossadegh government of Iran and then support the Shah of Iran when he ruled the country with the aid of his secret police (SAVAK). The U.S. supported Hussein of Iraq until it became necessary to take pressure of the Saudi government and find a new base for their military establishments. The U.S. was quite happy to stand by as the Israelis captured all the remaining Palestinian territory in the 1967 war, with no complaints when the USS Liberty was destroyed, and stood by again as they attacked Lebanon in 2006, hoping to see a new puppet government established there, and then stood by while the Israeli military pummelled the Gaza territory, in full contradiction of all international law (thus making them complicit), hoping for the elimination of those pesky Gazans who did not like living in an Israeli ghetto or prison.

Take it to the UN

The U.S. and Israel are locked in a macabre dance. The U.S. congress shuffles meekly along to the orchestration of the AIPAC group. And now the U.S. is excited because the Israelis say they are going to build some more settlement buildings. Get real. They really do not care, other than for their own deluded "perceptions" of peace.

Take it to the UN gentlemen (and I use the term sarcastically), and allow the world to see the truth of the situation in relation to international law.

[1] and has, see:

Alexander Cockburn,
"My Fellow Americans, Tonight I'm Going to Talk Frankly About a Pesky Little Nation Called Israel ... ", Counterpunch, March 20-21, 2010. http://www.counterpunch.org/

[2] "Quartet calls for settlement freeze," al-Jazerra, Saturday, March 20, 2010.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/03/20103198524314112.html

[3] "UN chief visits West Bank," al-Jazeera, Saturday, March 20, 2010
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/03/2010320113956764437.html

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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Never mind that churlish congressional Democrats, like their corporatist Republican colleagues across the aisle, would crush each other in a stampede to see who'd be first in handing the Executive Branch whatever it wants.

Under the proposed bills (S. 1494 and H.R. 2701), the White House would have to inform all members of both House and Senate intelligence committees of the "main features" of covert operations disclosed to the all-too-pliable "Gang of Eight." Whether this would include specific disclosure to Congress of CIA or Pentagon "black programs," identified in budget authorizations only by code words or cryptonyms, is unknown.

Comprised of the Speaker and minority leader of the House, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, and the chairman and ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, this "Gang"--torture and aggressive war enablers all--have earned a place in the dock alongside Executive Branch criminals--for their facilitation of every law-breaking, constitution-shredding practice of the Bush and now, Obama governments.

According to the Post and other published reports, in a letter sent to "senior members" of the intelligence panels March 15, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag affirmed that "Gang of Eight notifications are made in only 'the most limited of circumstances' affecting 'vital interests' of the United States, arguing that the new requirement would 'undermine the president's authority and responsibility to protect sensitive national security information'."

"Sensitive" as in criminal operations designed to advance the geopolitical agenda of America's multinational corporations, particularly the giant energy, weapons and financial conglomerates who rule the roost.

Orszag is a close confidant of Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary and CEO at the criminal financial enterprise known as Citigroup. In a series of extraordinary reports, Narco News investigative journalist Al Giordano described how Citigroup "has been caught time and time again in narco-money laundering trails in our América and across the globe."

In December 2008, Reuters reported that a group of investors filed a lawsuit against the firm, charging Citigroup executives, including Rubin, with selling shares at inflated prices whilst concealing the firm's risks. Both Orszag and Rubin were "senior fellows" at the neoliberal Brookings Institution where Orszag directed The Hamilton Project before joining the "change" regime as OMB Director.

The deal killer according to Orszag comprise several items "of serious concern to the Intelligence Community (IC)." If implemented by Congress "the President's senior advisors" would then recommend the bill be vetoed. These include: "the Congressional notification provisions, GAO provisions, and provisions regarding the amounts authorized for the National Intelligence Program."

According to Secrecy News security analyst Steven Aftergood, the "dispute over an increased role for GAO in intelligence oversight is particularly illustrative of the disparate and conflicting interests of the legislative and executive branches."

The answer to Aftergood's rhetorical question, whether the "status quo is good enough?" when it comes to increased oversight, given Executive Branch malfeasance in crafting make believe intelligence during the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, would inevitably be "no."

Recall the oft-quoted statement by the former Director of the British intelligence agency MI6, Richard Dearlove, who infamously told the Blair regime in the leaked Downing Street Memo that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed (by the U.S.) around the policy."

A million dead Iraqis later, Dearlove's grim assessment still stands.

Indeed, following a script written by Bushist war and torture enablers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and David Addington, Orszag alleges that "allowing GAO to conduct intelligence oversight ... would fundamentally change the statutory framework for oversight of the IC through the intelligence oversight committees and alter the long-standing relationship and information flow between the IC and intelligence committee members and staff."

In other words, despite fundamentally restrictive and opaque methods deployed by the Executive Branch to conceal covert operations, including blatantly illegal programs barred by U.S. and international law, Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes that so-called "Gang of Eight" briefings are a "sham process."

According to Greenwald, the current rigged game "allowed the administration to claim that it 'briefed' select Congressional leaders on illegal conduct, but did so in a way that ensured there could be no meaningful action or oversight, because those individuals were barred from taking notes or even consulting their staff and, worse, because the full Intelligence Committees were kept in the dark and thus could do nothing even in the face of clear abuses."

As readily apparent, particularly where Bush's torture and warrantless wiretapping programs were concerned, the former, and now current, administration can claim they had "informed" congressional leaders of secret administration policies. Never mind that the allegedly "co-equal" branch of government, Congress, can do nothing to stop these dubious programs; not to worry, our "representatives" are "in the loop"!

Regardless of whether or not these programs violated the law--under international treaty obligations and U.S. law in the case of torture or the protection of Americans' First and Fourth Amendment rights with respect to illegal spying--the administration has simply declared that abiding by any statutory requirements vis-à-vis Congress's lawful oversight of the Executive Branch are simply null and void.

"Team B" Nation

The Obama administration, like their Bushist predecessors, have also declared that Federal Courts are also off-limits when it comes to reeling in abuses by the "unitary executive," a novel constitutional theory promulgated by the ultrarightist Federalist Society and wholly embraced by the current government.

In the wake of 1970s revelations of widespread spying and other abuses against the American people by successive administrations--COINTELPRO (FBI), Operation CHAOS (CIA), Project MINARET (NSA)--Congress briefly asserted its prerogatives to rein-in the Executive Branch by creating the FISA court (a rubber-stamp to be sure) that on paper at least if not in practice, would oversee the surveillance activities of the secret state.

Push-back wasn't long in coming, however. With the rise of the Reagan administration, neoconservative corporate toadies such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others asserted that the hypermilitarized American capitalist state was "under siege" by a "resurgent" Soviet Union (already in the throes of collapse) and that the intelligence agencies had been "gutted" by "overzealous" civil liberties "extremists."

As investigative journalist Robert Parry has pointed out, under former CIA Director and future President George H.W. Bush, the "Team B" concept for ginning-up intelligence gained favor in the corridors of power.

Scary assessments of Soviet power and U.S. weakness also fueled Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980, and after his election, the Team B hard-liners had the keys to power. As Reagan and his vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush, prepared to take office, the hard-liners wrote Reagan's transition team report, which suggested that the CIA analytical division was not simply obtuse in its supposed failure to perceive Soviet ascendancy, but treasonous. (Robert Parry, "Why U.S. Intelligence Failed," Consortium News, October 22, 2003)

Gone were the secret, though brutally frank assessments, made by security and intelligence analysts across government as revealed by Daniel Ellsberg's 1971 leaking of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Such appraisals as Parry averred were now considered "treasonous," indeed, were grounds for witchhunts and purges of intelligence officials who didn't toe the neocon party line during the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

With the lies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations exposed by Ellsberg and his colleagues, and the basis for the American invasion of Southeast Asia revealed for what it was, a monumental fraud, elite managers were thrown into crisis.

As a transcript of President Nixon's June 14, 1971 Oval Office tape disclosed, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman described the situation thusly: "To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong."

Haldeman's bleak assessment has now become the basis for the capitalist state's descent into presidential dictatorship; after all, as the "democratically elected" leader of the "free world," one must enforce, by all means necessary "the implicit infallibility of presidents."

A decade after Pentagon Papers' revelations, the ascendance of Reagan regime neocons laid the ideological foundations for the assault on America's republican form of governance, by many of the same players who are now permanent embeds, in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

Presidential Dictatorship

Subverting the long-standing notion of "judicial supremacy" articulated by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803, that the Court is the "final arbiter" of what is and what is not the law, Bushist doctrine (firmly embraced by Obama "change" mavens) asserts that the "unitary executive" has full license to overrule, indeed bypass Congress and the Courts, based on the thinnest of reeds: that the President can interpret the Constitution and even violate long-established laws and treaties in his role as "Commander-in-Chief."

This was made clear most recently when the Federal District Court in San Francisco dismissed the Electronic Frontier Foundation's landmark Hepting v. AT&T and Jewel v. NSA lawsuits.

Currently, the Obama administration is challenging the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals April 2009 ruling that the ACLU's lawsuit against the CIA's illegal torture flights, facilitated by a Boeing Corporation subsidiary, in Mohamed et. al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. can go forward. Like Bush's Justice Department, the Obama administration is arguing that the suit cannot go to court, thereby denying CIA torture victims a measure of justice, on grounds that privileged "state secrets" would be disclosed.

EFF filed an appeal with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco March 19, citing the dangerous precedent set by U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled in January that "that because so many people have been impacted by the widespread surveillance, no individual person has a 'particularized injury'."

In other words, precisely because illegal driftnet spying, data mining and national security indexing of "U.S. persons" are so pervasive, mere background noise as the secret state's noose tightens around all our necks, citizens and legal residents alike will no longer be afforded a legal remedy to challenge specious national security claims made by Executive Branch repressors.

EFF's Legal Director Cindy Cohn writes: "This ruling is not only wrong--the NSA's interception of your private emails with your doctor, spouse or child is an individual harm to you regardless of whether it also happened to other people too--but also extremely dangerous because it would have the courts blind themselves to massive violations of the law and the Constitution on the grounds that they impact too many people."

Not that congressional grifters in either capitalist political party, "liberal" Democrats or "conservative" Republicans give a damn about our rights, as they amply demonstrated when they passed the scurrilous FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA).

That onerous piece of legislative flotsam legalized Bush regime warrantless wiretapping whilst providing the giant telecommunications firms and Internet service providers with retroactive immunity for their profitable role as partners alongside America's secret state.

Recall that feckless Senator and now President, Barack Obama, who might have said he "opposed FAA before he supported it," has embraced, indeed expanded every single illegal maneuver--from aggressive war to wholesale spying--as his Bushist counterparts. One might even say, if "only Nixon could go to China," then only an Obama (covered by his "progressive" acolytes) could enlarge the repressive writ of the intelligence agencies!

As Federal Computer Week reported March 17, the public-private enterprise fueling domestic repression known as "fusion centers" are expanding rapidly as a result of cold, hard cash pumped into the system by the federal government.

According to FCW journalist Patrick Marshall, "DHS and the Justice Department have driven the development of fusion centers." Both departments have provided a "variety of resources, including personnel and grants" that have seen such data mining centers balloon from 38 in 2006 to some 72 currently in operation nationwide, with more on the horizon.

But as the ACLU revealed in two incisive reports in 2007 and 2008, the "types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector."

According to the civil liberties' watchdog, their proliferation "raise very serious privacy issues at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the 'war on terrorism' are combining to threaten Americans' privacy at an unprecedented level." Indeed, the ACLU reported in September 2009 that fusion centers have been caught spying on antiwar, environmental and religious groups and will, under Obama, now receive access to classified military intelligence.

That Congress will roll-over and accede to administration demands over the issue of intelligence oversight is a foregone conclusion. One would expect nothing less from the best Congress money can buy! But these legislative vampires are now planning to take things a step further.

Arizona Senator and failed presidential candidate, John McCain, introduced the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010 (S. 3081) in the Senate on March 4.

McCain, and co-sponsors Scott Brown (R-MA), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), James Inhofe (R-OK), George LeMieux (R-FL), Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), John Thune (R-SD), David Vitter (R-LA), and Roger Wicker (R-MS) are crafting legislation that Glenn Greenwald has described as "the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act."

Greenwald writes that the bill literally "empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect--including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil."

The bill mandates that all such individuals "be placed in military custody," and explicitly states that they "may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."

As The Atlantic's national security correspondent Marc Ambinder writes, although the bill is being treated by the "national security community" as a "standard proposal" and a simple response "to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt," a closer reading reveals that it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on "suspected activity."

Welcome to the Orwellian world of Precrime. It can't happen here? It already has.


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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Putting it another way, as the late, great Situationist malcontent, Guy Debord did decades ago in his relentless call for revolt, The Society of the Spectacle:

"The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender 'lonely crowds.' With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions."

And when those "presuppositions" reproduce ever-more wretched clichés promulgated by true believers or rank opportunists, take your pick, market "democracy," the "freedom to choose" (the length of one's chains), or even quaint notions of national "sovereignty" (a sure fire way to get, and keep, the masses at each others' throats!) we're left with a fraud, a gigantic swindle, a "postmodern" refinement of tried and true methods that would do Orwell proud!

Ponder Debord's rigorous theorem and substitute "cell phone" and "GPS" for "automobile," and "Internet" for "television" and you're soon left with the nauseating sense that the old "infobahn" isn't all its cracked up to be. As a seamless means for effecting control on the other hand, of our thoughts, our actions, even our whereabouts; well, that's another story entirely!

In this light, a new report published by Cryptohippie, The Electronic Police State: 2010 National Rankings, delivers the goods and rips away the veil from the smirking visage of well-heeled corporate crooks and media apologists of America's burgeoning police state.

"When we produced our first Electronic Police State report" Cryptohippie's analysts write, "the top ten nations were of two types:

1. Those that had the will to spy on every citizen, but lacked ability.
2. Those who had the ability, but were restrained in will.

But as they reveal in new national rankings, "This is changing: The able have become willing and their traditional restraints have failed." The key developments driving the global panopticon forward are the following:

● The USA has negated their Constitution's fourth amendment in the name of protection and in the name of "wars" against terror, drugs and cyber attacks.
● The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of stopping "anti-social" activities. Their populace seems unable or unwilling to restrain the government.
● France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic control.

In France, the German newsmagazine Spiegel reported that a new law passed by the lower house of Parliament in February "conjures up the specter of Big Brother and the surveillance state."

Similar to legislation signed into law by German president Horst Köhler last month, police and security forces in France would be granted authority to surreptitiously install malware known as a "Trojan horse" to spy on private computers. Remote access to a user's personal data would be made possible under a judge's supervision.

While French parliamentarians aligned with right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy insist the measure is intended to filter and block web sites with criminal content or to halt allegedly "illegal" file sharing, civil libertarians have denounced the legislation.

Sandrine Béllier, a member of the European Parliament for the Green Party, said that "when it comes to restrictions, this text is preparing us for hell."

Additionally, the new law will include measures that will further integrate police files and private data kept by banks and other financial institutions. French securocrats cynically insist this is a wholly innocent move to "maintain the level and quality of service provided by domestic security forces," Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux told Spiegel.

Generalized political measures such as these that hinder free speech and expression, whilst enhancing the surveillance capabilities of the state, also indicate that so-called "Western democracies" are not far behind beacons of freedom such as China, North Korea, Belarus and Russia when it comes to repressive police measures. Indeed, Cryptohippie's rankings place the United States a mere 2/100ths of a point behind Russia when it comes to Internet and other forms of electronic spying.

The top ten scofflaws in 2010 are: 1. North Korea; 2. China; 3. Belarus; 4. Russia; 5. United States; 6. United Kingdom; 7. France; 8. Israel; 9. Singapore and, 10. Germany.

A Profit-Driven Panopticon

In a capitalist "democracy" such as ours where the business of government is always business and individual liberties be damned, grifting North American and European telecommunications and security firms, with much encouragement and great fanfare from their national security establishments and a lap-dog media blaze the path for Western versions of the sinister "Golden Shield."

Recently in the United States, whistleblowing web sites such as Cryptome and Slight Paranoia have come under attack. Both sites have been hit by take down notices under the onerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act for posting documents and files that exposed the close, and very profitable arrangements, made by giant telecommunications firms and ISPs with the American secret state.

In Cryptome's case, administrator John Young had his site shuttered for a day when the giant software firm, Microsoft, demanded that its so-called "lawful spying guide" be removed by Young. All five files are currently back on-line as Zipped files at Cryptome and make for a very enlightening read.

But the harassment didn't stop there. When Young published PayPal's "lawful spying guide," the firm froze Cryptome's account, in all likelihood at the behest of America's spy agencies, allegedly for "illegal activities," i.e., offering Cryptome's entire archive for sale on two DVDs!

Why would the secret state's corporate partners target Young? Perhaps because since 1996, "Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance--open, secret and classified documents--but not limited to those. Documents are removed from this site only by order served directly by a US court having jurisdiction. No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here--or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if comical but otherwise ignored."

In previous reports, Cryptohippie characterized an electronic police state thusly:

1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.
2. It is gathered universally ("preventively") and only later organized for use in prosecutions.

Silent and seamless, our political minders have every intention of deploying such formidable technological resources as a preeminent--and preemptive--means for effecting social control. Indeed, what has been characterized by corporate and media elites as an "acceptable," i.e. managed political discourse, respect neither national boundaries, the laws and customs of nations, nor a population's right to abolish institutions, indeed entire social systems when the governed are reduced to the level of a pauperized herd ripe for plunder.

How then, does this repressive metasystem work? What are the essential characteristics that differentiate an Electronic Police State from previous forms of oppressive governance? Cryptohippie avers:

"In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases. The individual can be prosecuted whenever the government wishes."

"Long term" Cryptohippie writes, the secret state (definitionally expanded here to encompass "private" matters such as workplace surveillance, union busting, persecution of whistleblowers, corporate political blacklisting, etc.), "the Electronic Police State destroys free speech, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and other liberties. Worse, it does so in a way that is difficult to identify."

As Antifascist Calling and others have pointed out, beside the usual ruses deployed by ruling class elites to suppress general knowledge of driftnet spying and wholesale database indexing of entire populations, e.g., "national security" exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, outright subversion of the rule of law through the expansion of "state secrets" exceptions that prohibit Courts from examining a state's specious claims, one can add the opaque, bureaucratic violence of corporations who guard, by any means necessary, what have euphemistically been christened "proprietary business information."

In a state such as ours characterized by wholesale corruption, e.g., generalized financial swindles, insider trading, sweetheart deals brokered with suborned politicians, dangerous pharmaceuticals or other commodities "tested" and then certified "safe" by the marketeers themselves, the protection of trade secrets, formulas, production processes and marketing plans are jealously guarded by judicial pit bulls.

Those who spill the beans and have the temerity to reveal that various products are harmful to the public health or have deleterious effects on the environment (off-loaded onto the public who foot the bill as so-called "external" costs of production) are hounded, slandered or otherwise persecuted, if not imprisoned, by the legal lackeys who serve the corporatist state.

How does this play out in the real world? According to Cryptohippie, the objective signs that an electronic net has closed in to ensure working class compliance with our wretched order of things, are the following:

Daily Documents: Requirement of state-issued identity documents and registration.

Border Issues: Inspections at borders, searching computers, demanding decryption of data.

Financial Tracking: State's ability to search and record all financial transactions: Checks, credit card use, wires, etc.

Gag Orders: Criminal penalties if you tell someone the state is searching their records.

Anti-Crypto Laws: Outlawing or restricting cryptography.

Constitutional Protection: A lack of constitutional protections for the individual, or the overriding of such protections.

Data Storage Ability: The ability of the state to store the data they gather.

Data Search Ability: The ability to search the data they gather.

ISP Data Retention: States forcing Internet Service Providers to save detailed records of all their customers' Internet usage.

Telephone Data Retention: States forcing telephone companies to record and save records of all their customers' telephone usage.

Cell Phone Records: States forcing cellular telephone companies to record and save records of all their customers' usage, including location.

Medical records: States demanding records from all medical service providers and retaining the same.

Enforcement Ability: The state's ability to use overwhelming force (exemplified by SWAT Teams) to seize anyone they want, whenever they want.

Habeas Corpus: Lack of habeas corpus, which is the right not to be held in jail without prompt due process. Or, the overriding of such protections.

Police-Intel Barrier: The lack of a barrier between police organizations and intelligence organizations. Or, the overriding of such barriers.

Covert Hacking: State operatives copying digital evidence from private computers covertly. Covert hacking can make anyone appear as any kind of criminal desired, if combined with the removing and/or adding of digital evidence.

Loose Warrants: Warrants issued without careful examination of police statements and other justifications by a truly independent judge.

Sound familiar? It should, since this is the warped reality manufactured for us, or, as Debord would have it: "The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective."

That such a state of affairs is monstrous is of course, an understatement. Yet despite America's preeminent position as a militarist "hyperpower," the realization that it is a collapsing Empire is a cliché only for those who ignore history's episodic convulsions.

If, as bourgeois historian Niall Ferguson suggests in the March/April 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs, the American Empire may "quite abruptly ... collapse," and that this "complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability," what does this say about the efficacy of an Electronic Police State to keep the lid on?

Despite the state's overwhelming firepower, at the level of ideology as much as on the social battlefield where truncheons meet flesh and bullets fly, Marx's "old mole" is returning with a vengeance, the "specter" once again haunting "rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations," as Churchill described the West's system of organized plunder.

Against this loss of "faith" in the system's "viability," Debord points out, although the working class "has lost its ability to assert its own independent perspective," in a more fundamental sense "it has also lost its illusions." In this regard, "no quantitative amelioration of its impoverishment, no illusory participation in a hierarchized system, can provide a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction."

Forty years on from Debord, sooner rather later, an historical settling of accounts with the system of global piracy called capitalism will confront the working class with the prospect of "righting the absolute wrong of being excluded from any real life."

As that process accelerates and deepens, it will then be the "watchers" who tremble...


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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The announcement was made by former Microsoft executive Howard A. Schmidt, appointed cybersecurity coordinator by President Obama in December. The partial unveiling came during the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, an annual industry conference for security professionals.

CNCI's 2008 launch was shrouded in secrecy by the Bush administration. Authority for the program is derived from a classified order issued by President Bush. However, the contents of National Security Presidential Directive 54, also known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54/HSPD 23) have never been released for public scrutiny.

"Virtually everything about the initiative is highly classified," the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote in a 2008 report, "and most of the information that is not classified is categorized as 'For Official Use Only.'"

The Armed Services Committee joined their colleagues on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and urged that CNCI "should be scaled back because policy and legal reviews are not complete, and because the technology is not mature."

The Senate questioned the wisdom of a highly-secretive program that "preclude public education, awareness and debate about the policy and legal issues, real or imagined, that the initiative poses in the areas of privacy and civil liberties. ... The Committee strongly urges the [Bush] Administration to reconsider the necessity and wisdom of the blanket, indiscriminate classification levels established for the initiative."

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed suit against the government in federal court after EPIC's Freedom of Information Act request to the National Security Agency was rejected by NSA.

According to EPIC's complaint, CNCI has been described as "a multi-agency, multi-year plan that lays out twelve steps to securing the federal government's cyber networks." The agency refused to release the documents, stating that they "have been withheld in their entirety" because they are "exempt from release" on grounds of "national security."

Tuesday's summary provided no additional information on NSPD 54/HSPD 23, nor did the Obama administration release information on the Pentagon's strategy for waging offensive cyberwarfare.

The declassified portion of CNCI published March 2 discussed previously acknowledged intrusion protection programs, specifically Einstein 2 and Einstein 3, designed to inspect internet traffic entering government systems to detect potential threats.

As Antifascist Calling disclosed last July, the Einstein program in all probability is related to the much larger, ongoing and illegal NSA communications intercept program known as Stellar Wind, first exposed in 2005 by The New York Times.

And Stellar Wind, as I reported in another piece last July, is intimately related to what has come to be known as the "President's Surveillance Program," or PSP.

According to a 38-page declassified report by inspectors general of the CIA, NSA, Department of Justice, Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, presidential authorization for the secret state's driftnet surveillance program was derived by an Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Memorandum penned November 2, 2001, by torture-enabler John C. Yoo.

Despite long-standing prohibitions on military and CIA involvement in civilian law enforcement activities, Yoo wrote that electronic surveillance in "direct support of military operations" did not trigger constitutional rights against illegal searches and seizures, because the Fourth Amendment "is primarily aimed at curbing law enforcement abuses."

Yoo's tortured reading of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) claimed that the law "cannot restrict the President's ability to engage in warrantless searches that protect the national security."

While this particular memorandum was withdrawn, Congress granted the Executive Branch carte blanche for illegal spying under provisions of the despicable FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), supported by then-candidate and now president, Barack Obama.

Indeed, the administration has yet to lay out for the American people current guidelines that would guarantee such abuses are not continuing. Why? Because the PSP is ongoing and now, under the rubric of "cybersecurity," illegal spying by NSA and other secret state agencies continues apace.

As it now stands according to CNCI, Einstein will be tied directly into giant NSA data bases that contain the trace signatures of previous cyberattacks. The agency's immense electronic warehouses will continue to be fed information streamed to the agency by the nation's telecommunications providers.

Under FAA, telecommunications and internet firms are not liable for past or future violations of Americans' constitutional guarantees; indeed, these firms are partners in state-sanctioned surveillance operations.

Like their predecessors in the Oval Office, the Obama administration has obstructed the federal courts from examining the nature of the PSP, or lawbreaking by high government officials. In case after case brought by civil libertarians and privacy advocates, Obama's Justice Department has successfully argued that citizen lawsuits cannot be heard or Executive Branch programs reviewed by any court on grounds that sensitive "state secrets" would be disclosed.

The Washington Post disclosed last July, that under a classified Bush administration program "NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the plan called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block computer codes designed to penetrate or otherwise compromise networks."

Despite President Obama's pledge in May 2009 announcing White House cybersecurity policy, that his administration will not continue Bush-era surveillance practices under the PSP, Tuesday's partial release of CNCI signals just the opposite.

Indeed, Einstein 3 is based on technology developed for a NSA program called Tutelage that detects and halts security breaches. However, its filtering software can read the content of email and other electronic communications.

While the White House claims that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the lead agency overseeing government efforts to protect state networks and critical infrastructure--the electrical grid, telecommunications networks, internet service providers, and the banking and financial sectors from malicious attacks--NSA's role has raised red flags amongst privacy and civil liberties advocates.

As EPIC pointed out in their lawsuit, in March 2009 Rod Beckstrom resigned from his position as DHS National Cybersecurity Center director, citing the secretive role that NSA will play in these efforts, stating that "NSA currently dominates most national cyber efforts."

This is a critical point. As a Defense Department agency, NSA's primary role is the interception of Communications- and Signals Intelligence (COMINT/SIGINT). As an Executive Branch agency answerable not to Congress but to the Secretary of Defense and the President, the near nonexistent democratic oversight of NSA will be further undermined by CNCI.

This is made clear in the document released Tuesday by the White House: "The EINSTEIN 3 system will also support enhanced information sharing by US-CERT with Federal Departments and Agencies by giving DHS the ability to automate alerting of detected network intrusion attempts and, when deemed necessary by DHS, to send alerts that do not contain the content of communications to the National Security Agency (NSA) so that DHS efforts may be supported by NSA exercising its lawfully authorized missions."

DHS claims are undermined by Einstein 3's ability to perform deep packet inspections that "read the content of email and other communications" as The Wall Street Journal reported last summer.

The document claims that "Information sharing on cyber intrusions will be conducted in accordance with the laws and oversight for activities related to homeland security, intelligence, and defense in order to protect the privacy and rights of U.S. citizens."

This assertion is undercut however, when the White House states that "DHS will be able to adapt threat signatures determined by NSA in the course of its foreign intelligence and DoD information assurance missions for use in the EINSTEIN 3 system in support of DHS's federal system security mission." (emphasis added)

In practice, the same sources and methods deployed by NSA to conduct foreign intelligence, unrestricted by the agency's charter or U.S. law, will most certainly continue to target communications by U.S. citizens.

Although White House cybersecurity coordinator Schmidt states that "transparency is particularly vital in areas, such as the CNCI, where there have been legitimate questions about sensitive topics like the role of the intelligence community in cybersecurity," as Secrecy News points out "without a clear delineation of legal authorities and implementation mechanisms, the scope for meaningful public discussion seems limited."

Despite the fact that Congress stood up the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board as an independent agency in 2007 "to monitor and defend civil liberties in information sharing and counterterrorism activities," Secrecy News' Steven Aftergood disclosed that the Board "has remained vacant since that time" and thus, is "unable to fulfill its assigned task;" a telling commentary on the administration's largely rhetorical promise of "openness"!

Cybersecurity: Another Day, Another Endless "War"

As long time readers of Antifascist Calling are well aware, while hacking, online thievery and sociopathic behavior by criminals is a troubling by-product of the "information superhighway," state officials and shadowy security corporations have framed the debate in terms of yet another in a series of endless "wars."

Mike McConnell, a former NSA Director, Bush regime Director of National Intelligence and currently an executive vice president with the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton corporation (a post he held for a decade before signing-on for the "War on Terror") penned an alarmist screed for The Washington Post February 28.

McConnell, whose firm stands to reap billions of dollars in taxpayer largesse under CNCI, claimed that "The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing."

Drawing a spurious and half-baked (though self-serving) parallel between the Cold World nuclear stand-off with the former Soviet Union and today's cybercriminals, McConnell declared that a "credible" cyber-deterrent analogous to the doctrine of Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) would serve the United States "well."

Ever the Cold warrior, McConnell avers that the U.S. needs to "develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options."

"More specifically," McConnell writes, "we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment--who did it, from where, why and what was the result--more manageable."

In other words, the secret state's role in monitoring each and every electronic communication, email, text message, web search, phone conversation or financial transaction must be subject to a pervasive and all-encompassing surveillance by securocrats or we won't be "safe."

Indeed, as McConnell and his shadowy firm are well aware since they helped develop them, "the technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same."

Reckless advocacy such as this is the kiss of death for any notion of privacy, let alone the constitutional right to dissent. As Wired investigative journalist Ryan Singel wrote last week, "The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it's Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence."

Why? Singel insists, "McConnell's not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering." And during his stint as DNI, "scared President Bush with visions of e-doom, prompting the president to sign a comprehensive secret order that unleashed tens of billions of dollars into the military's black budget so they could start making firewalls and building malware into military equipment."

Self-serving rhetoric by the likes of McConnell about an alleged "cyber-armageddon" are not only absurd but the height of corporatist venality.

As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock revealed in his essential book Spies for Hire and for CorpWatch, Booz Allen Hamilton, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the shadowy private equity firm, The Carlyle Group, "is involved in virtually every aspect of the modern intelligence enterprise, from advising top officials on how to integrate the 16 agencies within the Intelligence Community (IC), to detailed analysis of signals intelligence, imagery and other critical collections technologies."

Clocking-in at No. 10 on Washington Technology's "Top 100" list of Federal Prime Contractors, Booz Allen pulled down some $2,779,421,015 in contracts in 2009.

According to Shorrock, "BAH is one of the NSA's most important contractors, and owes its strategic role there in part to Mike McConnell, who was Bush's director of national intelligence." During an earlier stretch with BAH, "McConnell and Booz Allen were involved in some of the Bush administration's most sensitive intelligence operations, including the infamous Total Information Awareness (TIA) program run by former Navy Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame."

In his Washington Post op-ed, McConnell wrote that "we must hammer out a consensus on how to best harness the capabilities of the National Security Agency," and that the "challenge" is to shape "an effective partnership with the private sector so information can move quickly back and forth from public to private--and classified to unclassified--to protect the nation's critical infrastructure."

Super spook McConnell claims this will be accomplished by handing "key private-sector leaders (from the transportation, utility and financial arenas) access to information on emerging threats so they can take countermeasures." However, the "private" portion of the "public-private" surveillance "partnership" must have a quid pro quo so that private sector sharing of privileged, highly personal, network information with the secret state doesn't invite "lawsuits from shareholders and others."

In other words, privacy and civil liberties be damned!

As Ryan Singel points out, "the contractor he works for has massive, secret contracts with the NSA" and McConnell now proposes that NSA "take the lead in guarding all government and private networks."

But McConnell, and Booz Allen's advocacy goes far further than simple advocacy in developing a defensive cyber strategy. Indeed, BAH, and a host of other giant defense and security firms such as Lockheed Martin, are actively developing offensive cyber weapons for the Pentagon.

According to Washington Technology, Lockheed Martin will continue to work with the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) in that Pentagon agency's development of a National Cyber Range under CNCI.

That program is suspected of being part of Pentagon research to develop and field-test offensive cyber weapons. According to DARPA, "the NCR will provide a revolutionary, safe, fully automated and instrumented environment for U.S. cybersecurity research organizations to evaluate leap-ahead research, accelerate technology transition, and enable a place for experimentation of iterative and new research directions."

"Now the problem with developing cyberweapons--say a virus, or a massive botnet for denial-of-service attacks," Singel writes, "is that you need to know where to point them."

"That's why," the Wired journalist avers, "McConnell and others want to change the internet. The military needs targets."

Add to the mix a Senate bill that would hand the president "emergency" powers over the Internet and a clear pattern of where things are headed begins to emerge.

With giant ISP's such as Google already partnering-up with the NSA and other secret state agencies, the question is how long will it be before an American version of China's Golden Shield enfolds the heimat within its oppressive tentacles?

Described by privacy advocates as a massive, ubiquitous spying architecture, the aim of the Golden Shield is to integrate a gigantic online data base with an all-encompassing surveillance network, one that incorporates speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records, and Internet surveillance technologies.

And considering that the Empire has reportedly stood-up a giant data base of dissidents called "Main Core," whose roots lie in programs begun during the Reagan administration, assurances by the Obama administration that Americans' privacy rights will be protected as CNCI is rolled-out ring hollow. According to exposés by investigative journalists Christopher Ketchum and Tim Shorrock, writing respectively in Radar Magazine and Salon, Main Core is a meta data base that contains personal and financial data on millions of U.S. citizens believed to be threats to national security.

The data, which comes from the NSA, FBI, CIA, and other secret state sources, is collected and stored with neither warrants nor court orders. The name is derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community," according to Salon.

While the total cost of CNCI is classified, rest assured it will be the American people who foot the bill for the destruction of our democratic rights.

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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When products fail due to a systemic design, materials or manufacturing flaw, large and statistically significant levels of problems emerge fairly rapidly. This is definitely not the case with the Toyota problem. With many millions of Toyota models on which even more millions of miles have been driven, if there had been an inherent materials or manufacturing design defect, then we would have seen untold thousands of cases of sudden acceleration. It literally would have been virtually a daily event happening all over the country in many Toyota models. But, in fact, little more than 1,000 Toyota and Lexus owners have reported since 2001 that their vehicles suddenly accelerated on their own. This is a tiny, minuscule percentage of Toyotas.

This infrequent runaway car problem is not analogous to a serious case of bacterial contamination of a major food product causing many thousands of cases of food poisoning in a relatively short period. It is even more difficult to find the cause of.

Understanding this nature of defects also means that the so-called solutions of replacing floor mats and gas pedals are sheer nonsense. Indeed, it did not surprise me to read today that there have already been cases of sudden acceleration in cars that had received fixes by Toyota. More than 60 Toyota owners have complained to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about cars already repaired under the two major Toyota recalls, saying they aren't fixed and their throttles can still race out of control.

While recognizing the agony and suffering of sudden acceleration accidents and deaths it is also necessary to appreciate the statistically rare occurrences of this problem. Only by doing so is it possible to understand that the ultimate explanation - and solution - to the sudden acceleration problem will be a non-systemic flaw or defect in a critical component. In other words, either a random defect in a material or some unusual and infrequent deviation in a manufacturing process of some critical component. Only such a situation can logically explain so few sudden acceleration problems in so many millions of cars being operated for many more millions of hours and miles.

In my professional opinion, the likely scenario is a defect in a semiconductor chip used in the electronic control system. A defect that was caused by some infrequent flaw in a raw material or manufacturing process that would not show up in routine quality control testing of raw materials or components. That so many different Toyota models over many years have been found defective signifies the likelihood of a particular problem component made in a specific factory that has been used for quite a while. Moreover, the defect obviously does not ordinarily impair vehicle performance but only manifests itself under some infrequent conditions, as yet undetermined.

Rita Taylor of Fort Worth, Texas experienced runaway acceleration, took her car to a Toyota dealer, and had the floor mats removed. A few months later she had another frightening runaway episode. Ditto for Eric Weiss in California, who also had a second episode months after the first one and after removing the mats. Others who have not died and kept using their Toyotas have also had repeat events. Thus, perfectly normal vehicle performance is possible between runaway events.

Make no mistake, the precise cause of such a sporadic event is incredibly difficult to pin down and even more difficult to remedy. An extremely intense and costly investigation is necessary. It is the classic needle-in-the-haystack problem.

If my thinking is correct, then it is sheer folly to believe that replacing floor mats or gas pedals can solve the sudden acceleration problem. However, there is one aspect to the sudden acceleration problem that also is crystal clear and, in some ways, even more aggravating than the acceleration problem. This is the absence of an override system that absolutely prevents fuel being fed to the engine when brakes are employed while a car is accelerating. It is gratifying that the federal government is seriously considering requiring such an override system in all vehicles. An effective override system might, in the long run, be a faster and more cost-effective solution than chasing-the-defect strategy, especially for retrofitting many millions of vehicles.

Alternatively, finding the cause of the sudden acceleration problem requires a standard failure analysis methodology, namely to obtain absolutely every Toyota vehicle that has experienced sudden acceleration. Then meticulously examine through microscopic and other types of analysis and testing all critical components of the electronic system (called by Toyota the Electronic Throttle Control System with intelligence). Think of it like an autopsy.

This does not appear to have been done. To the contrary, the firm hired by Toyota tested several ordinary vehicles and components. One of the primary authors of the Exponent report said they did not examine any vehicles or components that had the unintended accelerations. This makes no sense whatsoever if the defect is rare and, therefore, its finding that there was nothing wrong was meaningless. Worse, it was a deception and distraction.

[The author has a Ph.D. in Materials Engineering and was formerly a full professor of metallurgical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a consultant for many corporations, such as IBM, Texas Instruments, Polaroid, and RayOVac, and has served as an expert witness in many legal proceedings. He was a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association and is the author of several nonfiction books and hundreds of articles.]

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Enter the newest fiasco, that sweetly named diabetes drug Avandia, so heavenly sounding, yet now revealed to be just another in a long history of drugs that get government approval but turn out to be lethal. According to Bloomberg News: "Safety reviewers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration urged the agency to take GlaxoSmithKline Plc's diabetes drug Avandia off the market in 2008 because they said it was causing 500 additional heart attacks per month." A month! The drug was linked to 304 deaths during the third quarter of 2009, which implies many thousands of deaths to date.

Consider these depressing developments. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have committed acts that forced them to pay the largest criminal fines in American history. In cases involving Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb and four other drug companies, these fines and penalties have totaled over $7 billion since May 2004. That is an amazing number, but in comparison to drug industry profits, merely a pittance.

In particular, Pfizer has been fined multiple times in the past 6 years for illegal off-label promotion of their drugs. In its latest plea agreement, which took place last September, Pfizer paid $2.3 billion in fines and penalties for off-label promotion of Bextra. This settlement was the largest criminal fine in US history. Clearly, this kind of corporate behavior requires diligent oversight by the Food and Drug Administration to protect Americans and to ensure the safety of American medicine. Yet this newest Avandia outrage proves, yet again, that the federal government is failing people.

The Senate Finance Committee has just released a report and a letter to the FDA. They have revealed that the FDA itself estimated that the drug caused approximately 83,000 excess heart attacks between 1999 and 2007. "Americans have a right to know there are serious health risks associated with Avandia and GlaxoSmithKline had a responsibility to tell them. Patients trust drug companies with their health and their lives and GlaxoSmithKline abused that trust," said Senator Max Baucus.

The Senate committee started their investigation after the New England Journal of Medicine published a study in May 2007 warning of the possible cardiovascular risk of Avandia. Avandia entered the market in 1999 and reached annual revenue of $3 billion by 2006, including sales of a combination drug that includes Avandia. Sales plummeted to $1.2 billion in 2009, two years after that study was published which linked Avandia to a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack. Before that the drug was the company's second best selling drug, and they did everything to protect sales, rather than users of the drug.

The Senate report provides incredible details on how the drug company pursued countless awful tactics to thwart many efforts to reveal to the public and the medical community just how unsafe Avandia is. The report notes: "The totality of evidence suggests that GSK was aware of the possible cardiac risks associated with Avandia years before such evidence became public.... Based on this knowledge, GSK had a duty to sufficiently warn patients and the FDA of its concerns in a timely manner. Instead, GSK executives intimidated independent physicians, focused on strategies to minimize findings that Avandia may increase cardiovascular risk, and sought ways to downplay findings that the rival drug ACTOS (pioglitazone) might reduce cardiovascular risk."

The company continues to fight to keep its drug in the market. You can imagine the army of lobbyists being used to safeguard the interests of drug companies. Other industries exhibit the same behavior, giving us widespread corporate pillage.

I and millions of other owners of Toyota vehicles cringe because, like so many other companies, it lost the capacity for telling the truth and protecting their consumers, and the federal government failed its oversight function. With 31 lobbyists in Washington last year, Toyota has spent nearly $25 million on federal regulatory and legislative lobbying matters in the last five years, much more than any other foreign automaker. Toyota's registered lobbyists include at least eight former officials from Congress and the executive branch and it employs former engineers and officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the regulatory agency that failed to detect a pattern of safety problems at Toyota.

Put aside the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement. The critical need is not for less government but for better government that really works in the public interest, especially protecting consumers from dastardly corporate powers. Until that happens it is not surprising that the recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans are dissatisfied or angry about the federal government. Nearly 75 percent of independents feel this way. If you think that electing either Democrats or Republicans will fix broken government, think again. Both major parties are corrupted by corporate interests.

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

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In fact, trial balloons have already been sent out bearing supposedly unrehearsed comments by former Israeli Army general and current Minister Yossi Peled, suggesting that another war is on its way. More recently, Israel's ultra-right and unabashedly racist Foreign Minister Avigador Lieberman threatened to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad in case of a war.

And so it begins.

Historically, Israel has, with one understandable exception, determined the time and place of all of its wars with the Arabs. The only time Israeli forces were attacked in 1973 involved an Arab attempt to regain territories that were captured by Israel in 1967.

When Lieberman uttered his "message that should go out to the ruler of Syria from Israel" to an audience at Bar Ilan University, he was effectively saying that Israel will topple the Syrian government when it decides the time was ripe for war. And considering Peled's earlier statement that war was imminent, the only possible conclusion would be that a "regime change" in Syria is high on the Israeli agenda. It also perhaps represents the last chance of fulfilling the US neoconservative vision - that of "A New Strategy for Securing the Realm".

This inference should have been evident and thus sent shockwaves throughout the world, and especially through the US media which now know fully the price of the Israeli-neocon folly.

So why do Western mainstream media, especially in the US, continue to guard Israel's image so protectively, at times even devotedly, when the country's belligerence is so blatant? And if some in the media are indeed well intentioned in their coverage, why do they continually miss the many clear signs pointing to Israeli criminality and aggression?

A growing reference that is once again floating among political and media analysts is that Israel has greater mastery than the Arabs over fighting media wars. Often cited, for example, is the National Information Directorate, an Israeli propaganda center that was established a few months prior to the devastating war on Gaza last year. Ironically, the center was established after recommendations made by an Israeli inquiry into the equally bloody Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006 - ironically because independent war inquiries often chastise the army for violation of human rights, as opposed to recommending the establishment of a "hasbara" - more like propaganda - body to justify the crimes committed against civilians.

Still, even such "hasbara" should have had little impact on the Western media's depiction of Israeli crimes and hostilities toward its neighbors.

One could possibly consider the claim that Israel's media success story is the brainchild of Israel's own media expertise under very specific circumstances: That Israeli spokespersons are icons of articulation and charm; that Palestinian retaliations to Israeli crimes in Gaza were vile and gruesome; that the Israeli media blackout was so successful that Western journalists had no other way of finding any credible, decipherable facts; that there are no Arab spokespersons who are well-informed and articulate enough to present even a semblance of a coherent narrative to challenge the one offered by Israel.

But none of these scenarios are convincing. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak is as faltering in English as he is in his mother tongue. The Palestinian resistance merely killed 13 Israelis, 10 of whom were soldiers - and recently "regretted" the killing of the three civilians - while Israel killed over 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and remains unmoved. The Israeli media blackout of Gaza during the war - which continues even now - hardly prevented footage and reports from beaming to all corners of the earth, thanks to the valiant efforts of Arab media and independent reporters, photographers and cameramen from all over the world, supplemented by the United Nations and other independent groups' findings. All of this made the scope of the tragedy known to all. And finally, the most eloquent and involved Palestinian and Arab academics, diplomats and activists can be found in every major Western city and reputable university or research institute.

Yet somehow it was Israel that "claim(ed) success in PR war", according to Anshel Pfeffer in the Jewish Chronicle, days after the initial Israel attack on Gaza. Pfeffer quoted Avi Pazner, Israel's former ambassador to Italy and France, and "one of the officials drafted in to present Israel's case to the world media," as claiming that "whenever Israel is bombing, it is hard to explain our position to the world ... but at least this time everything was ready and in place."

Utter nonsense. As someone who has been grilled and challenged in the media for making such outrageous statements as "Israel must learn to respect international human rights," I cannot take seriously the media's claims to "objectivity". If this were the norm, no Israeli hasbara campaign would have even dented public perceptions of the criminal war. No unfeeling Israeli Army spokesperson could possibly explain the logic of the wanton destruction of Gaza, as hungry civilians were chased in an open-air prison with nowhere to escape and no one to come to their rescue.

Israeli officials continue to congratulate themselves on a job well done, and must be preparing yet another marvelous hasbara campaign to justify the killings that are yet to follow. However, there are some things that are becoming increasingly obvious, at least to the rest of us. First, the secret of Israeli "success", if any, was not its own doing, but rather stemmed from the media's decision, made years ago, to protect Israel's image. Second, despite the fanfare and self-congratulating commentary, Israel has now largely lost the media war, and the tide since the Gaza war has been turning, thanks to the underfunded, but solid and increasingly determined efforts of independent media groups, intellectuals, citizen journalists, civil society activists, artists, poets, bloggers, ordinary people and those in the media who possess the courage to challenge Israeli hasbara and its devotees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abdulmutallab on the CIA and NCTC's Radar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really?

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

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

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

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

How's that for an inconvenient truth!

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

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

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

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

Burying the Evidence, "Moving On"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press , Uncommon Thought Journal, CJO's Avenger212, and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.
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Unnamed sources who spoke to Newsweek magazine said the Obama Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has concluded that John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who penned the infamous memos, used "poor judgment" but will not be subject to disciplinary action. Yoo and Bybee worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, along with Steven Bradbury, who is also named in the report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second, such policies continue under the current administration.

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

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

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

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

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

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Along with new reports, evidence suggests that the administration's cover-up of the affair has very little to do with a failure by the intelligence apparatus to "connect the dots" and may have far more serious political implications for the Obama administration, and what little remains of a functioning democracy in the United States, than a botched bombing.

What the White House and security officials have previously described only as "vague" intercepts regarding "a Nigerian" has now morphed into a clear picture of the suspect--and the plot.

The New York Times revealed January 18 that the National Security Agency "learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named "Umar Farouk"--the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab--had volunteered for a coming operation."

According to Times' journalists Eric Lipton, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti, "the American intelligence network was clearly listening in Yemen and sharing that information." Indeed, additional NSA intercepts in December "mentioned the date of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were 'looking for ways to get somebody out' or 'for ways to move people to the West,' one senior administration official said."

Clearly, the administration was "worried about possible terrorist attacks over the Christmas holiday." These concerns led President Obama to meet December 22 "with top officials of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them," the Times reports.

"In a separate White House meeting that day" the Times disclosed, "Mr. Obama's homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day."

In mid-January, Newsweek reported that the "White House report on the foiled Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing provided only the sketchiest of details about what may have been the most politically sensitive of its findings: how the White House itself was repeatedly warned about the prospect of an attack on the U.S.," Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff disclosed.

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

However, the real bombshell came last Wednesday during hearings before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee when Bushist embed, and current Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Michael E. Leiter, made a startling admission.

CongressDaily reported on January 22 that intelligence officials "have acknowledged the government knowingly allows foreigners whose names are on terrorist watch lists to enter the country in order to track their movement and activities."

Leiter told the Committee: "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."

CongressDaily reporter Chris Strohm, citing an unnamed "intelligence official" confirmed that Leiter's statement reflected government policy and told the publication, "in certain situations it's to our advantage to be able to track individuals who might be on a terrorist watch list because you can learn something from their activities and their contacts."

An alternative explanation fully in line with well-documented inaction, or worse, by U.S. security agencies prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and now, Christmas Day's aborted airline bombing, offer clear evidence that a ruthless "choice" which facilitates the murder of American citizens are cynical pretexts in a wider game: advancing imperialism's geostrategic goals abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home.

Leiter's revelation in an of itself should demolish continued government claims that the accused terror suspect succeeded in boarding NW Flight 253 due to a failure to "connect the dots."

However, as far as Antifascist Calling can determine, no other media outlet has either reported or followed-up CongressDaily's disclosure; a clear sign that its explosive nature, and where a further investigation might lead, are strictly off-limits.

Taking into account testimony by a high-level national security official that terrorists are allowed to enter the country for intelligence purposes, one can only conclude that the alleged "failure" to stop Abdulmutallab was neither a casual omission nor the result of bureaucratic incompetence but rather, a highly-charged political calculation.

Bushist Embeds: Destabilizing the Obama Administration?

One subject barely explored by corporate media throughout the Flight 253 affair, is the unsettling notion that the aborted Christmas day bombing may have been a move by rightist elements within the security apparatus to destabilize the Obama administration, a course of action facilitated by the Obama government itself as we will explore below.

This is not as implausible as it might appear at first blush. When one takes into account the meteoric rise to power by the 40-year-old former Navy pilot and federal prosecutor, Michael Leiter's ascent tracks closely with his previous service as a cover-up specialist for the Bush-Cheney regime.

"In 2004, while working as a federal prosecutor," a New York Times puff piece informs us, "Mr. Leiter joined the staff of a commission, appointed by President George W. Bush, to examine intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq. That led to a series of jobs in the intelligence world, and in 2008, Mr. Bush appointed him director of the counterterrorism center."

A rather curious appointment, if Leiter were simply an ingénue with no prior experience in the murky world of intelligence and covert operations. However the former Navy pilot, who participated in the U.S. wars of aggression against the former Yugoslavia and Iraq seemed to have the requisite qualifications for work as an intelligence "specialist."

While attending Harvard Law School, Leiter served as a "human rights fellow" with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the U.S.-sponsored kangaroo court that has prosecuted America's official enemies in the Balkans whilst covering-up the crimes of their partners.

Amongst America's more dubious "allies" in the decade-long campaign to destabilize socialist Yugoslavia were al-Qaeda's Islamist brigade, responsible for carrying-out hideous massacres in Bosnia and Kosovo, with NATO approval and logistical support, as Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky, and others, have thoroughly documented.

As Deputy General Counsel and Assistant Director of the President's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States, the so-called "Robb-Silberman" cover-up commission, Leiter focused on what are euphemistically described in the media as "reforms" with the U.S. "Intelligence Community," including the stand-up of the FBI's repressive National Security Branch.

Prior to joining NCTC, Leiter was the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under former NSA Director and ten-year senior vice president of the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton security firm, John "Mike" McConnell.

From his perch in ODNI, Leiter coordinated all internal and external operations for the Office, including relations with the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA.

Leiter's résumé, and his role in concealing Bush administration war crimes, predicated on ginned-up "intelligence" invented by Dick Cheney's minions in the Defense Department and the CIA, should have sent alarm bells ringing inside the incoming Obama administration.

As we have seen since Obama's inauguration however, rather than cleaning house--and settling accounts--with the crimes, and criminals, of the previous regime, the "change" administration chose to retain senior- and mid-level bureaucrats in the security apparatus; employing officials who share the antidemocratic ideology, penchant for secrecy and ruthlessness of the Bush administration.

While the Times claims his "unblemished résumé" has taken a hit over the Flight 253 plot, an interview with National Public Radio shortly before the Abdulmutallab affair, provides chilling insight into Leiter's agenda, particularly in light of his January 20 statement to the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Presciently perhaps, the NCTC chief told NPR: "We're not going to stop every attack. Americans have to very much understand that it is impossible to stop every terrorist event. But we have to do our best, and we have to adjust, based on, again, how the enemy changes their tactics."

It becomes a painfully simple matter for "the enemy" to gain advantage and "change their tactics" when those charged with protecting the public actually facilitate their entrée into the country "for some reason or another"!

According to the Times, the White House has kept Leiter at the helm and that it came as "no surprise to Bush officials" because, get this, "Michael wasn't political," if we're to believe the carefully-constructed legend of former Bushist Deputy National Security Adviser Juan Zarate.

If the Bush-Cheney years tell us anything it's that appointments by the previous regime were ruthlessly political. As The Washington Post reported shortly after Obama's election, these appointments were made permanent across a multitude of federal agencies and departments, including the security apparat, in a cynical maneuver designed to reward Bush loyalists.

"The transfer of political appointees into permanent federal positions" the Post disclosed, "called 'burrowing' by career officials, creates security for those employees, and at least initially will deprive the incoming Obama administration of the chance to install its preferred appointees in some key jobs."

The Times reports that the White House has publicly defended Leiter "and aides to the president said Mr. Obama called to convey his support." Perhaps not so curiously, the allegedly "nonpolitical" NCTC Director "has been mentioned as a possible future head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and how he performs might help determine whether he remains on the fast track."

One can only wonder, how many other counterterrorist officials have "burrowed" their way into, and hold key positions in the current administration, ticking political time-bombs inside America's permanent shadow government.

Senate Whitewash Fuel Attacks on Democratic Rights

During Wednesday's Senate hearings, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, in keeping with the former Bush administration's assault on democratic rights, assailed the decision by the Justice Department to try the suspect in a court of law.

This is fully in line with the rhetoric of ultra-right Republicans and so-called "centrist Democrats" such as arch neocon Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Newsweek reports that new details "surrounding the Christmas Day interrogation of the bombing suspect aboard Northwest Flight 253 raise questions about the accuracy of testimony provided Wednesday by senior U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security officials."

Last week, the newsmagazine reported that "Obama administration officials were flabbergasted Wednesday when Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair testified that an alleged Qaeda operative who tried to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day should have been questioned by a special interrogation unit that doesn't exist, rather than the FBI."

This theme was quickly picked-up by Senate Republicans.

The overarching sentiments expressed by this gaggle of war criminals and corporate toadies was not to demand accountability from the responsible parties, but to call for further attacks on Americans' democratic rights.

Republicans on the committee lambasted Obama's Justice Department for its decision to try Abdulmutallab in a civilian court. John McCain (R-AZ), the Republican party's failed candidate in the 2008 presidential election, said the decision was "a terrible, terrible mistake," while the execrable Jeff Sessions (R-AL) claimed that the hapless suspect should have been delivered to the U.S. military as an "enemy combatant."

Ranking Republicans on the committee, Susan Collins (R-ME) and John Ensign (R-NV) went so far as to imply that Abdulmutallab should have been tortured. Collins inquired: "how can we uncover plots" if accused criminal suspects are allowed to "lawyer up and stop answering questions?" Ensign, a staunch supporter of policies articulated by the Bush administration, particularly former Vice President and war criminal, Dick Cheney, argued that "limiting" CIA interrogators to the methods laid out in the Army Field Manual would allow terrorists to "train" in advance of interrogations.

But the harshest criticism of the administration came in the form of a stealth attack by Obama's own Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair.

The Wall Street Journal reported January 21 that "nation's intelligence chief said the man accused of trying to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day should have been questioned by a special interrogation team instead of being handled as an ordinary criminal suspect."

Rather than coming to terms and halting the Bush regime's practice of torturing so-called terrorist suspects, the Obama administration has compounded the crime by creating a secretive group of interrogators called the High-Value Interrogation Group or HIG.

Blair told the Senate that the administration had "botched" the handling of suspect Abdulmutallab, by, wait, not handing him over to a group that as of this writing, exists only on paper, a salient fact of which Blair was certainly knowledgeable!

In his testimony however, the DNI told the Homeland Security Committee that the HIG "was created exactly for this purpose--to make a decision on whether a certain person who's detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution or for some of the other means."

Blair implicitly criticized the Justice Department's decision to uphold constitutional protections that guarantee a suspect a right to a trial in a court of law and not a one-way ticket to an American gulag. Blair said, "we did not invoke the HIG in this case; we should have. Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people and, duh, you know, we didn't put it [in action] then."

Mendaciously, the DNI claimed "I was not consulted. The decision was made on the scene, [and] seemed logical to the people there, but it should have been taken using this HIG format, at a higher level."

Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff disclosed January 20 that "senior administration officials" told him that Blair was "misinformed on multiple levels" and that the DNI's assertions were "all the more damaging because they immediately fueled Republican criticism that the administration mishandled the Christmas Day incident in its treatment of the accused Qaeda operative as a criminal suspect rather than an enemy combatant."

Isikoff reported January 22 that Blair, Leiter and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were asked about the decision to try Abdulmutallab and all gave the same answer when queried by right-wing Senator Susan Collins, the Committee's ranking Republican: "Were you consulted regarding the decision to file criminal charges against [suspect Umar Farouk] Abdulmutallab in civilian court?"

Leiter and Napolitano both replied: "I was not." According to Newsweek, Blair also said he was "not consulted" and claims that the government "should have" brought in the yet-to-be activated HIG "to conduct the questioning of the suspect."

As with every aspect of this strange affair, Newsweek reports, these statements are riddled with lies and mischaracterizations.

Isikoff writes that "all the relevant national-security agencies, including top aides to Blair and Napolitano, were fully informed about the plans to charge the suspect in federal court hours before he was read his Miranda rights and stopped cooperating."

Newsweek further reveals that a "key event" was a secure videoconference on Christmas Day "that included Leiter" and Jane Lute, DHS' No. 2 official and that "neither Leiter nor any of the other participants, including representatives from the FBI and the CIA, raised any questions about the Justice Department's plans to charge the suspect in federal court, the officials said."

"If you participate in a conference call and you don't raise any objections, that suggests you were consulted," said one senior law-enforcement official. Another added that "nobody at any point" raised any objections, either during the meeting or during a four-hour period afterward when Abdulmutallab was informed of his Miranda rights to be represented by a lawyer," according to Newsweek.

Ultra-right Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a witting accomplice to the previous regime's high crimes and misdemeanors against the American people said, "That this administration chose to shut out our top intelligence officials and forgo collecting potentially life-saving intelligence is a dangerous sign."

It's a "dangerous sign" to be sure, for America's battered democracy.

An On-Going Cover-Up

As events continue to unfold and new information shreds the official story, is Leiter's chilling testimony that suspected terrorists are allowed to enter the United States "because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another," merely a banal slip or something far more sinister that betrays the real order of things in post-democratic America?

Relevant questions begging for answers include: Who made the decision not to "connect the dots"? Are right-wing elements and holdovers from the previous administration actively conspiring to destabilize the Obama government? Was the attempted bombing a planned provocation meant to incite new conflicts in the Middle East and restrict democratic rights at home?

As with the 9/11 attacks, these questions go unasked by corporate media. Indeed, such lines of inquiry are entirely off the table and are further signs that a cover-up is in full-swing, not a hard-hitting investigation.

In truth, what we are dealing with here as we stagger into the second decade of the 21st century, is not a "conspiracy" per se but a modus operandi as the World Socialist Web Site has argued, rooted in a bankrupt system quickly reaching the end of the line.


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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Following is a concise list of LOP(PPP);

First law of Politicianary Motion

The orbit of every politician is an ellipse with the power centre i.e. the king, the ruler or the president at its focus.

Law of Conservation of Political Corruption

It states that the total amount of corruption in a political system remains constant over time. A consequence of this law is that corruption can neither be created nor destroyed. It is always present in exploitable forms in any political system. The only thing that can happen to corruption in a political system is that it can change form, for instance power hunger can become nepotism that can in turn change into a buying and selling activity, a la the stock exchange, over a period of time.

Law of Buoyancy

Any politician, wholly or partially immersed in four letter gooey substances, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the four letter gooey substance displaced by the politician. In other words, the more voluminous an immersed politician is, the larger will be the mass of four letter gooey substance displaced by him.

Law of Heat Conduction

The law of Heat Conduction states that the time rate of heat transfer through a politician is proportional to the thickness of his skin, its temperature and to the nature of the organ the skin is covering and through which the heat is flowing.

The Uncertainty Principle

The Uncertainty Principle states that certain pairs of character virtues in a politician, like honesty and honor, cannot both be known to random exactness. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. In other words, an accurate measure of a politician's honesty cannot guarantee an honorable stand on important national issues and vice versa.

Law of Pressure

In a politician of given volume at constant temperature, pressure and volume are inversely proportional (while one increases, the other decreases). Or in other words, in politicians of ever expanding volumes, pressure points on their bodies continue to reduce.

Law of Political Entropy

Entropy, a measure of disorder, continues to increase in a political system. Or, alternately, the more improvements that are promised to have been delivered by the politicians, the higher the rate of breakdown in other subsystems they oversee.

Physical Laws of Political Motion

Then are the three physical laws of political motion that form the basis for classical politics. These are:

1. In the absence of a proper stimulus, a politician at rest continues to remain at rest and one in motion continues to remain in motion with constant speed.

2. A politician experiencing a stimulus S experiences an acceleration a related to S by S = ma, where m is the mass of the politician. In other words, for a politician of given mass, the larger the stimulus S, the larger will be the acceleration a.

3. Whenever one politician exerts a force F on a second politician, the second politician exerts a force −F on the first politician. F and −F are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. The equilibrium continues till the introduction of a stimulus S at which time the −F becomes +F and the 2Fs continue in the same direction with combined force.

The scribe ends this piece with two quotes;

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. ~Ernest Benn

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel. ~John Quinton

The reader may contribute a quote or add to LOP(PPP) if he/she so wishes.

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Create pressure on governments to keep the assistance flowing? Perhaps, but there is no shortage of assistance being sent to Haiti. There is however a huge problem in Haiti's limited ability to absorb the assistance.

Whether it's small and inefficient sea ports, one small and inefficient airport, a lack of decent roads, and a lack of government direction - all aspects of any place as poor as Haiti - it takes time for outsiders to come in, unload their cargoes, and organize a distribution network from scratch.

Certainly the disturbing reports and pictures are useless from the point of view of prevention. It was a natural disaster, not to be predicted, not to be prevented. One could argue that post-disaster investments could ameliorate events the next time there is an earthquake. But the kinds of images and reports being broadcast will be long forgotten if and when the world's governments get around to re-building.

So the question for me remains, what are we to do with such information?

I am reminded of another disaster, one that happened in the last few years. It was not a "natural" disaster but the deliberate work of the immensely powerful.

In this other disaster, roughly a million people died, about five times the current estimate of death in Haiti. I don't know how many were crippled, but it must have been a great number. This other disaster created more than two million refugees fleeing for their lives. Most of them fled to poor but generous countries, not being welcome by the rich and powerful, and especially not by the country responsible for the mayhem.

As far as pictures and reports, most of them seen in North America were sanitized. Many if not most of the reports were dishonest, clearly not informing people of the magnitude of the horror as it happened. There was a brave group of reporters who produced images every bit as terrible as those we see from Haiti, including scores of hideously mangled children.

But those pictures were not broadcast in North America, were not published in The New York Times or other newspapers "of record." Indeed, the reporters taking these images and writing tough reports actually became targets of the forces causing all the horror.

I'm referring, of course, to the invasion of Iraq, an event whose toll of killing and damage easily compared to the dropping of a thermonuclear bomb on a good-size city.

Of course, the great and bitter irony is that that disaster was both preventable and could even have been stopped once it had started. One could almost guarantee that publication and broadcast of pictures and reports comparable to what's now coming from Haiti would have stopped that demonic brutality. Here indeed gruesome, truthful press coverage could have made a difference, but not in Haiti.

And there was another, smaller disaster recently, smaller but still terrible, and it was completely preventable. In this one about 1,400 people died, including 400 children, and a great deal of the infrastructure of a relatively poor people was destroyed. The damage cannot even be repaired because those responsible for the horror maintain a siege on the victims, allowing no material assistance to be delivered.

Here too you likely will not have seen the kind of pictures or read the kind of stories coming out of Haiti. Some were available - I recall one of poor people trying to avoid stepping in a stream of blood flowing down a narrow street - again the work of amazingly brave reporters, but their work could only be found at not-widely known sites on the Internet. None were published or broadcast by the establishment press in North America. These events occurred in a place called Gaza.

If you think the press is objective, if you think the press does not slavishly serve the interests of the powerful, you just might want to think again.

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The US continues to see the world as its own business. It gives itself and its allies, most notably Israel, the right to geopolitical maneuverability. Iran, on the other hand, is censured, derided and punished for even its own internal policies, within its own borders. Thus, an Iranian move into Latin America is naturally viewed as unwarranted, uncalled for and most definitely dangerous as far as the US is concerned.

But Iran is not invading America geopolitical space per se. It is neither financing a terrorist group, nor involved in the ongoing narcotic war. More, there is no historical connection between an interventionist Iran and the bloody past of Latin America, including its former dictators and brutal juntas. In fact, Iran's 'cozying up' to Latin American merely began in 2005. Since then, Iran has opened embassies in several Latin American countries and launched important joint projects that provided funds and work opportunities for thousands of ordinary people. There is no Iranian equivalent to the School of the Americas.

So why the alarm?

Paul McLeary of Aviation Week gives us a clue. Iran's move "has set off a proxy conflict between Iran and Israel in South America, with the presidents of both countries logging frequent-flier miles to win friends in the region. One cause for concern among many analysts is the weekly flight between Caracas and Tehran (with a stop in Damascus) that Iran Air has flown for two years."

He quotes Frida Ghitis: "Flight manifests are kept secret, so neither cargo nor passenger information is well known ...one Israeli report suggested that Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying uranium to Iran."

Two questions emerge. One, is it required of Caracas and Tehran to provide a detailed report of the cargo and passengers to the US and Israel, and perhaps also cc-ed to a list of their friends and allies?

The second pertains to Israel itself. Why is the media most concerned by Iran's 'suspicious' behavior in Latin America, despite the fact that its presence is welcomed by various countries in the hemisphere, while Israel - whose bloody involvement has wrought much chaos to South America - is simply unquestioned, and even cited as a credible source? There is no evidence to link Iran to death squads, or any Iranian firm with "an archive and computer file on journalists, students, leaders, leftists, politicians and so on" to be hunted down, killed or simply made to 'disappear' under brutal regimes. Israel's own history in Latin America seems to inspire little commentary by the ever-vigilant 'many analysts'. McLeary, Ghitis and others need to do their homework before leveling accusations against others. The book Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship may be a good place to start.

Back to the lurking Ayatollahs in America's backyard, Susan Kaufman Purcell is also raising questions, this time about Brazil. In Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva welcomed his Iranian counterpart, president Ahmadinejad late November 2009. In the January 7 Wall Street Journal, Purcell claimed: "Until recently, the Obama administration assumed that Brazil and the United States were natural allies who shared many foreign policy interests, particularly in Latin America. Brazil, after all, is a friendly democracy with a growing market economy and Western cultural values." Purcell suggests that Brazil's various achievements - largely beneficial to the US - qualified the country to become "more like us".

The article infers, however, that Brazil is actually "not like us". The fact that it dares to be different - by pursuing a Brazilian-centered foreign policy - shows the audacity of the deceivingly loveable Lula. The Brazilian president is apparently going rouge simply by deviating from Washington's regional and international priorities. Amongst his many crimes: "Instead of expressing concern over Iran's activities in Latin America, Brazil is drawing closer to Tehran and hopes to expand its $2 billion bilateral trade to $10 billion in the near future."

Another: "He reiterated his support for Iran's right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful uses, while insisting that there is no evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons." And of course, Purcell doesn't fail to remind us of "the weekly flights between Caracas and Tehran that bring passengers and cargo into Venezuela."

Western media is indeed rife with all sorts of unfounded accusations, baseless speculations and superfluous insinuations. They evoke in the reader and viewer a dread and fear, based in this case on the doomsday scenario whereby fanatical Latin Americans and radical Muslims gang up on America, and ultimately Israel.

Now consider these appalling insinuations by the Economist. First it claims that the Brazilian President "offered support for Iran's work on nuclear technology for (supposedly) peaceful use." Note the word "supposedly".

Then: One of the "instruments" of destabilizing Latin America is Iran's production of "news programmes and documentaries for Bolivian television, no doubt to give a fair and balanced view of the Great Satan." Note the writer's insertion of the little irrelevant term "Great Satan" to convert the act of TV production that challenges Western mainstream media's narrative into a menacing endeavor.

More: Brazil president talked "about Israel's right to stay just where it is on the map." Of course, Lula didn't phrase it that way. This is the writer's attempt to remind us of the claim that Iran has threatened to wipe Israel off the map.

Still, more: "...protesters waved banners reminding Mr Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust had indeed taken place". This provides the big climax - the claim that Iran's president has denied the Holocaust.

But why the charged, exaggerated commentary?

A seemingly random Economist 'advertisement' box embedded with the article, and another long side column at the magazine's website reminds readers of "The Economist Debate Series - January 11-18." The topic of the week, presented with an image of a warplane radar zooming in on the Iranian map, asks the question: "Is It Time to Strike Iran?"

After reading such unsubstantiated, yet disquieting analyses, how would most readers respond?

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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Talk about validating that old Wobbly slogan: Direct action gets the goods!

And yet, the closer one looks at the available evidence surrounding the strange case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the more sinister alleged "intelligence failures" become. As this story unfolds it is becoming abundantly clear that U.S. security officials had far more information on the would-be lap bomber than we've been told.

The Observer revealed January 3 that the British secret state had Abdulmutallab on their radar for several years and that he had become "politically involved" with "extremist networks" while a student at University College London, where he served as president of the Islamic Society.

Examining "e-mail and text traffic," security officers claim to have belatedly discovered that "he has been in contact with jihadists from across the world since 2007."

Indeed, The Sunday Times disclosed that the 23-year-old terrorism suspect was "'reaching out' to extremists whom MI5 had under surveillance." The officials said that Abdulmutallab was "'starting out on a journey' in Britain" that culminated with last week's attempt to destroy Flight 253.

It is claimed by unnamed "British officials" that "none of this information was passed" to their American counterparts; on the face of it, this appears to be a rank mendacity.

The Sunday Times further reported that security officials have "now passed a file" to American counterterrorism officers that show "his repeated contacts with MI5 targets who were subject to phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance."

None of this should surprise anyone, however. In light of multiple prior warnings which preceded past terrorist atrocities, the selective leaking of information to the British media in its own way, buttresses the official story that the near-tragedy aboard Flight 253 was simply the result of ubiquitous "intelligence failures."

But as we have seen with Mohamed Atta, Richard Reid and Mohammad Sidique Khan, Abdulmutallab's "journey" was one undertaken by many before, often with a wink-and-a-nod by British and American security officials when it served the geostrategic ambitions of their political masters.

As security researcher and analyst Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed wrote in New Internationalist in October: "Islamist terrorism cannot be understood without acknowledging the extent to which its networks are being used by Western military intelligence services, both to control strategic energy resources and to counter their geopolitical rivals. Even now, nearly a decade after 9/11, covert sponsorship of al-Qaeda networks continues."

Networks which Ahmed and other analysts such as Michel Chossudovsky, Peter Dale Scott and Richard Labévière have painstakingly documented, enjoy the closest ties with Western intelligence agencies stretching back decades.

That intelligence officers, including those at the highest levels of the secret state's security apparat, did nothing to hamper an alleged al-Qaeda operative from getting on that plane--in a chilling echo of the 9/11 attacks--calls into question the thin tissue of lies outlined in the official narrative.

An Intelligence "Failure," or a Wild "Success" for Security Corporations?

Charged December 26 with attempting to blow up a U.S. airliner, according to The Washington Post Abdulmutallab "was listed in a U.S. terrorism database."

The Post reported that the suspect's name "was added in November to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE." It is further described as a "catch-all list" which "contains about 550,000 individuals" and is maintained by "the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at the National Counterterrorism Center."

However, The New York Times revealed December 31 that the "National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack."

Times' reporters Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lipton, citing unnamed "government officials," disclosed that "the electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks" months before Abdulmutallab boarded Flight 253 in Amsterdam.

But when the NSA intercepts landed at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), analysts there "did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November" when Abdulmutallab's father provided the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria crucial information on his son's involvement with the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets, also known as al-Qaeda.

Seeking comment from NCTC proved to be a daunting task. As the Times delicately put it, "officials at the counterterrorist center ... maintained a stoic silence on Wednesday, noting that the review ordered by President Obama was still under way."

Despite revelations in the British press, the White House maintains that U.S. intelligence agencies "did not miss a 'smoking gun'" that could have prevented the botched attack, the Associated Press reported January 3.

White House aide John Brennan, citing "lapses" and "errors" in sharing intelligence said, "There was no single piece of intelligence that said, 'this guy is going to get on a plane.'"

As we will soon see, Mr. Brennan has every reason to hide behind such mendacities.

Investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, the author of the essential book Spies For Hire, reported in CorpWatch, that NCTC is an outsourced counterterrorist agency chock-a-block with security contractors in the heavily-leveraged homeland security market.

Indeed, The Analysis Corporation (TAC), a wholly-owned subsidiary of defense and intelligence contractor Global Strategies Group/North America, "specializes in providing counterterrorism analysis and watchlists to U.S. government agencies."

"It is best known" according to Shorrock, "for its connection to John O. Brennan, its former CEO, a 35-year veteran of the CIA and currently President Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser. Brennan, the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), retired from government in November 2005 and immediately joined TAC."

Shorrock reports that "much of TAC's business is with the NCTC itself. In fact, the NCTC is one of the company's largest customers, and TAC provides counterterrorism (CT) support to 'most of the agencies within the intelligence community,' according to a company press release. One of its biggest customers is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which manages the NCTC."

"During the 1990s" Shorrock relates, "TAC developed the U.S. government's first terrorist database, 'Tipoff,' on behalf of the State Department."

Shorrock chronicles how "the database was initially conceived as a tool to help U.S. consular officials and customs inspectors determine if foreigners trying to enter the United States were known or suspected terrorists."

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and subsequent reorganization of the U.S. security bureaucracy, the investigative journalist tells us that "in 2003, management of the database--which received information collected by a large number of agencies including the CIA, NSA, and FBI--was transferred to the CIA's Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) and, later, to the National Counterterrorism Center."

"In 2005" Shorrock discloses, "Tipoff was expanded and renamed the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, and fingerprint and facial recognition software was added to help identify suspects as they crossed U.S. borders."

Despite the utter worthlessness of a bloated database containing more than 1.3 million names according to the American Civil Liberties Union, and not the grossly undercounted figure of 550,000 cited by corporate media, TIDE has been a boon for TAC.

"In the five years after 9/11" Shorrock reveals, "its income quintupled, from less than $5 million in 2001 to $24 million in 2006. In 2006, TAC increased its visibility in the intelligence community by creating a 'senior advisory board' that included three heavy hitters from the CIA: former Director George J. Tenet, former Chief Information Officer Alan Wade, and former senior analyst John P. Young."

And what have the American people gained from inflating the corporatist bottom line? In light of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, not much.

As investigative journalists Susan and Joseph Trento revealed in their overlooked but highly-disturbing 2006 book, Unsafe At Any Altitude, most of the 9/11 hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, Hani Hanjour, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Majed Moqed "were flagged by CAPPS (Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System)."

But because of CIA and FBI monkey-business that rendered watch-list information useless to stop suspected terrorists from boarding an airliner, "the only thing that was done as a result was that the baggage of several members of the Al Qaeda team was held on the ground until the cabin crew confirmed they had boarded as passengers."

And when you consider that Abdulmutallab didn't even have any baggage to check, alleged security "lapses" are even more glaring.

According to the Trentos, "the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Department of Homeland Security refuse to give the airlines an accurate no fly list, thereby allowing the most threatening terrorists to continue to fly." Is there a pattern here? You bet there is!

An unnamed "counterterrorist official" told The Wall Street Journal December 31: "'If you look back to these audit reports, there are significant issues raised with the accuracy and omissions to the watchlisting process that haven't been fixed, clearly,' as of Dec. 25. 'Essentially you're screening blindly, and that's not effective'."

However, we can be sure there will be very little in the way of a hard-hitting investigation into this alleged security breach. The New York Times reported that TAC's former CEO John O. Brennan, has been "granted a special ethics waiver ... to conduct a review of the intelligence and screening breakdown that preceded the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt on an American passenger plane over Detroit."

Enter the CIA, Stage (Far) Right

What "other government agency" may have suppressed intelligence on the would-be bomber?

The CBS Evening News revealed December 29 that "as early as August of 2009," tracking closely with the time-frame of NSA intercepts, "the Central Intelligence Agency was picking up information on a person of interest dubbed 'The Nigerian,' suspected of meeting with 'terrorist elements' in Yemen."

Unnamed "intelligence sources" told CBS, "'The Nigerian' has now turned out to be Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab." But that connection "was not made when Abdulmutallab's father went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria three months later, on November 19, 2009. It was then he expressed deep concerns to a CIA officer about his son's ties to extremists in Yemen, a hotbed of al Qaeda activity." CBS claims "this information was not connected until after the attempted Christmas Day bombing."

Earlier reports have alleged that Umar's father, a wealthy Nigerian banker and former high state official, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had only provided Embassy officials with a vague concern that his son's estrangement "may have" something to do with his growing "religious fervor." This too, turns out to be a lie.

The Times reported that a "family cousin quoted the father as warning officials from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency in Nigeria: 'Look at the texts he's sending. He's a security threat'."

Nothing vague in this disclosure, but rather more concrete evidence in the form of "texts" which we now know were shortstopped by British security and included "phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance" by MI5 that led an anguished father to express well-placed fears about his son to U.S officials.

But as the Times were told by their source, "They promised to look into it. They didn't take him seriously."

And here's where things take a decidedly malevolent turn. According to the Times, "C.I.A. officials in Nigeria also prepared a separate report compiling biographical information about Mr. Abdulmutallab, including his educational background and the fact that he was considering pursuing academic studies in Islamic law in Yemen."

"That cable was sent to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va.," Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lipton disclosed, "but not disseminated to other intelligence agencies, government officials said on Wednesday."

Then again, perhaps they knew all-too-well of Abdulmutallab's glide path and chose instead to turn a blind eye. Coming on the heels of disclosures in the British media, the evidence suggests that CIA intelligence provided by NSA intercepts, their own on-the-ground operatives in Yemen and MI5 surveillance reports were scrupulously ignored by factions within the secret state who sat on critical information that withheld, would disarm and paralyze normal security procedures in the face of an attack they knew was imminent.

We were told by corporate media, infamously serving as an echo chamber for grifting politicians, Bushist officials and the 9/11 Commission's 2004 whitewash, that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks resulted from "a failure of imagination" by counterterrorism officials to "connect the dots."

Seems there were plenty of "dots" in Abdulmutallab's case and yet, inexplicably, if you buy the official story, and sinisterly, if you don't, not a single one was "connected" prior to the time he took his seat on Flight 253.

Despite the fact that Abdulmutallab was denied re-entry into Britain, paid $2,800 in cash for his "ticket to Paradise," and had no luggage that normally would accompany a person holding a 2-year entry visa into the U.S., the erstwhile lap bomber scored a goal each time and eluded every intrusive "profile" presumably in place to keep us "safe." Talk about a hat trick!

Available evidence suggests that Abdulmutallab should have landed on TSA's hush-hush "Selectee list" for additional screening, or the agency's "No-fly list." And given NSA intercepts and a CIA biographical report on the suspect, this alone should have barred him from entering the country if "normal" security procedures were followed. They weren't.

As The Independent on Sunday reported last week, "the revelation of Abdulmutallab's background has confounded terror experts." One such "expert," Dr Magnus Ranstorp of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, told IoS that "the attempted bombing 'didn't square'."

"On the one hand" Ranstorp said, "it seems he's been on the terror watch list but not on the no-fly list."

"That doesn't square" Ranstorp elaborated, "because the American Department for Homeland Security has pretty stringent data-mining capability. I don't understand how he had a valid visa if he was known on the terror watch list."

Good question, Dr. Ranstorp. Perhaps because someone wanted him on that plane. The question is, who?

One would have thought, given the "special treatment" afforded antiwar activists by TSA at airports, that a warning about Abdulmutallab's possible involvement with terrorists, by his own father no less, a former top official in a government friendly to Washington, numerous NSA intercepts, a CIA dossier and MI5 reports would have raised at least one red flag!

In the suspect's case, there were so many red flags flying you'd have thought the Red Army was parading through Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport!

Then again, perhaps Abdulmutallab was on that plane because, as journalist Daniel Hopsicker was told by a former aviation executive during his investigation of the 9/11 attacks: "Sometimes when things don't make business sense ... its because they do make sense...just in some other way."

As the World Socialist Web Site points out: Collapse

We have been attacking Yemen both directly and indirectly. Most notably, we have been attacking indirectly via the Saudis, and directly with our own drone operations. The United States has also been providing support to the Yemeni government to fight alleged terrorists.

According to a NY Times report on December 18, 2009:

The United States provided firepower, intelligence and other support to the government of Yemen as it carried out raids this week to strike at suspected hide-outs of Al Qaeda within its borders, according to officials familiar with the operations.

The officials said that the American support was approved by President Obama and came at the request of the Yemeni government.

It is important to know that more than al Qaeda is happening inside of Yemen.

Internally, southern Yemen has been trying to secede. Southern Yemen is the location of what oil Yemen has, and primary sea access. However, the unification with northern Yemen has not brought an improvement in life for the south. Meanwhile, the primary ethnic group - Houthi - in the north have also been engaged in active fighting that has both sectarian and historical roots. The short story is that Yemen is one of the poorest nations in the world and internal conflicts are ripping it apart.

While the U.S. wants the Yemeni government to focus its efforts on al Qaeda, it is more concerned with its own internal struggles. Its poverty, and the conflicts, have made it a primary area for a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran - which tangentially means the United States and Iran. This is particularly true given the oil-arms relationship between the Saudis and the United States.

However, undiscussed but central to Yemen's internal problems is not oil, or even poverty, but lack of another resource - water:

Yemen is running out of water - fast.

But the water crisis and the rise of militancy are not unrelated perils said Abdulrahman Al Eryani, Yemen's minister of Water and Environment, in an interview. Much of the country's rising militancy, he argues, is a conflict over resources.

"They manifest themselves in very different ways: tribal conflicts, sectarian conflicts, political conflicts. Really they are all about sharing and participating in the resources of the country, either oil, or water and land," said Minister Eryani. "Some researchers from Sanaa University had very alarming figures. They said that between 70-80 percent of all rural conflicts in Yemen are related to water."

A big part of the water problem is tied to the cultivation of one plant - qat. Yemen is in a drought (dare we say an impact of global warming?). However, the only money making crop is qat - a mildly narcotic plant which is chewed (endlessly) by the Yemeni population. This is similar to the farmers in Afghanistan focusing on their (narcotic) cash crop - poppies. However, the lack of water, and water deliveries, across Yemen have led to water wars, illegal wells (draining the aquifers), and conflicts which frame themselves through various lenses.

Poverty, hardship, and failed government coordination (failed state) make Yemen a primary recruiting area for all comers who can demonstrably ease the hardship - namely Iran, sectarian interests, and al Qaeda. And the U.S. takes the now familiar militaristic path to decimate the reputed enemy. Silly us as al Qaeda (and other forces of "insurgency") are providing goods and money to the people. This is exactly the same (successful) strategy of the Iraq insurgency, and the Taliban and al Qaeda insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. No number of bombs or high tech (hackable) drones, or arms sales is going to "win" such a conflict. They make more desperation - not less - and drive more people into the conflict de jure.

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The Formation of the Committee
The British Parliament approved the forming of a non-political, non-government, inquiry group which was publicly launched by this report from the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee. The reasons for launching a public inquiry are instructive - particularly for the United States. The following quotes are from the Select Committee's report as the reasons for having an inquiry.

From "Conclusions and Recommendations" (Pg 7) 3. The need for effective accountability and public confidence demands that the inquiry be conducted as openly and publicly as possible. We recommend that the Government reconsiders its decision to conduct the Iraq inquiry in private. There needs instead to be a presumption in favour of the inquiry proceeding in an open and public manner. There should be only very limited exceptions to this general rule, which would be best decided by the members of the inquiry itself, not by the Government. (Paragraph 16)

So one reason to perform a public inquiry into Iraq is to restore public confidence in the openness and integrity of their duly elected government.

From "Purpose of the Iraq Inquiry" (Pg 10) 4. The scope of the Iraq inquiry, as announced by the Prime Minister, covers an eight year period that encompasses the circumstances leading up to the decision to go to war, the military conflict itself, and the post-conflict administration of Iraq. The inquiry will focus on the lessons to be learned from Britain's involvement in Iraq. We share the Government's belief that the inquiry should be constructive and that it should seek to identify the policy lessons to be learned from Iraq, particularly if there are lessons that could be applied to the UK's involvement in other conflicts (such as Afghanistan).

Another reason to engage in a thorough investigation is because it may impact on other conflicts such as Afghanistan - where both the United States and the UK are still embroiled.

From "Purpose of the Iraq Inquiry" (Pg 10) 5. There is, however, another fundamental reason for holding an Iraq inquiry. In the words of one of our seminar participants, an inquiry needs to "get at the truth" and to be seen to be getting at the truth. This is vital to restoring the loss of public confidence in governing processes and institutions that has resulted from the UK's involvement in Iraq. There is also a justified expectation--demanded in particular by the relatives of British soldiers who have died in Iraq--that the inquiry will enable the executive to be held to account for its decisions and conduct.

This is a stronger reiteration of 3 above. There is an admission that the Iraq war, and the events surrounding it, have damage the people's confidence in both the government and the institutions thereof. The confidence of the people of the United States has also been damaged, and there is a demand for accountability.

The Iraq Inquiry
Out of this came The Iraq Inquiry which is still ongoing. However, this is not the path that has been taken in the United States. Despite broad public demands for investigations, the Obama administration has repeatedly made clear its reluctance to pursue any such inquiry. Obama wants to "move forward." In fact, efforts that had been made to identify the various issues surrounding th invasion of Iraq, and notorious events surrounding it, have been quietly moved from public view. Perhaps you remember Representative Henry Waxman's dogged efforts to address various aspects of the Iraq adventure - such as his this link, or search the Guardian site for "Chilcot Inquiry."

Many of the things that have come up in the inquiry thus far should be making big news in the United States, and definitely should provide impetus for investigations in the United States.

Guardian report of Sir Peter Ricketts testimony

- In 2000, the new Bush administration was already talking about "regime change" in Iraq.

- That after 9/11/2001, the Bush administration was pushing a link between Hussein and bin Laden even though there was no evidence of any such connection.

SIr John Scarlett testified that Blair's claim of WMDs in Iraq, and the 45 minute launch capability, was overtly political. This is confirmed to some extent by Blair's own admission that he would have supported the invasion of Iraq even had he known there were no WMDs. However, as the Downing Street Memos and Scarlett's testimony show - it was known (or at least not proven).

As reported by David Stringer of the AP, the UK Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock, testified that Bush was "hell bent" on invading Iraq, and felt the UN approval was a waste of time.

While Britain was the primary U.S. ally in the invasion of Iraq, Bush chose to go it alone by keeping Britain out of the information loop according to MI6 chief Sir John Sawyers.

Why Britain and not the U.S.?

The question has to be asked why it is that Britain keeps pursuing the truth of the Iraq invasion, but the United States does not. While it is no surprise that the Bush administration would not investigate itself, it is stunning that the Obama administration continues to pursue a "let by-gones be by-gones" approach. For all the much smaller involvement of the UK, they have much more concern for the effects on the people and their government. What happened in the United States poses a much more significant challenge to the very structure of our government and the way that it operates.

The Bush administration rewrote the balance of powers and transformed Constitutional protections. Those changes still largely stand under the Obama administration. This is not a partisan issue. What Bush crafted, and which is largely unchallenged and considered "water under the bridge" by Obama, ensures that those changes remain in effect. There remains the unchallenged policy of the Bush administration that the President can do anything he wants. I felt that was a threat to our rights and government under Bush, and it remains so under Obama.

Wrongs have to be righted. Failure to do so condemns future citizens to an ever eroding situation in terms of our government and our protections under the Constitution. Where Bush pushed the Unitary Executive to, is where the Obama administration starts. To leave the abuses of power unchallenged creates a new starting line of Executive Branch power into the future.

Instead, here in the U.S. we are largely "protected" from the public inquiries in the UK. Of course they directly impinge on and implicate the U.S., but if nobody knows who is hurt? We are - as are all future generations of the people of the United States.

---
Note: The Iraq Inquiry Digest does an excellent job of keeping up with the testimony from the Inquiry.

The Iraq Inquiry web site

After Downing Street - Complete text of the Downing Street memo

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The 9/11 bunch were mainly Saudis, almost certainly on a secret CIA training program in the U.S. that went very sour (they had valid American visas, and they were being followed closely by Mossad).

Osama bin Laden has been dead since the horrific bombing of Tora Bora. The extent of that bombing has been kept secret, but it was earth-shattering by first-hand accounts.

Al Qaeda, as a former British Foreign Secretary admitted a few years ago, does not exist. It is a Pentagon nickname to cover a group of disparate fundamentalist Muslims who hate American policy. The word means toilet.

America has worked to keep alive the idea of both bin Laden and Al Qaeda because they serve as focuses for the lunatic "war on terror."

You cannot have a war on a technique or a set of attitudes: it's a pure nonsense, rather like Israel's mantra about there being no such thing as a Palestinian people.

America went to Afghanistan, dragging others along, for vengeance, which it got in spades. Now, it does not know what to do.

In a sense, it is the victim of its own propaganda. As well, there are now huge entrenched interests in the Afghanistan effort, everything from Blackwater Corporation to the manufacturers of Hellfire missiles. America's Israel apologists, too, never saw a war against Muslims they didn't like: put them in their place, so to speak.

A very great assembly of forces for a newcomer like Obama to oppose, and, truth be told, he has already buckled.

But he cannot win his war. Absolutely, he cannot hold down a huge country of 30 million people, a land of mountains and deserts and sweltering heat and hardscrabble poverty; moreover, a place where millions deeply resent America's arrogance and brutality.

One hopes that Obama intends only to make a show and to reach a compromise with the Taleban from a position of increased strength and then get out with a shred of dignity. It is starting a system of payoffs - successful short-term in Iraq - hundreds of millions for opponents to lay down their arms temporarily.

But I am not optimistic. The Afghans are some of the toughest, hardest people on earth, largely because they live in an extreme part of the world with almost no wealth.

___________________________

America's "Drone Attacks" on Pakistan

It truly is dishonest to always write about "drone attacks."

Drones don't attack anyone. Gum-chewing thugs sitting in an office chair at a computer terminal do.

These drones are armed with American Hellfire missiles, the same ones Israel uses when it typically kills a dozen innocent people in a bloody horror trying to get one target, some man who has never been charged or tried or condemned.

The guy at the terminal somewhere in a locked room in the Pentagon basement undoubtedly pumps his arm as the missile explodes, killing God knows who.

Then he goes out for some lunch in Georgetown.

Disgusting.

An absolute lack of ethics, only praised by the apologists for Israel's bloody excesses.

Misery likes company, and the same goes for miserable criminal behavior.

___________________________

Secretary of State Clinton's Announcement of An Average of 290 Troops from Each of Two Dozen Nations

Clinton is simply out of her mind.

Two dozen countries sending seven thousand troops?

And many or most not for combat?

That's an average of about 290 troops per country.

290 cooks, guards, and orderlies each.

Some world crisis.

Everyone clearly sees what a mistake Afghanistan is, except the government of the United States.

Of course those eager not to offend American sensibilities, or those whose assistance or favors from America are under threat, send their token contingent.

This whole matter is like one of those slightly absurd British comedies of four or five decades ago.

World crisis, civilization in peril, so we better send 290 troops.

The press should be embarrassed to even report such press-release fantasy as an event.

Clinton should be embarrassed to utter a word about these 24 mice roaring, but this woman is long ago beyond any possible embarrassment, having said countless absurd things in recent years or quickly backtracking what she has previously said, making absolutely no sense in most of what she says.

Were a major business run the way America runs wars and foreign policy, the economy would collapse.

NOTE TO READERS: This is an assembly of several extensive comments, slightly edited by the author, recently posted to some of the world's leading English language newspapers.

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In between these two peculiar events, the targeting of Muslims in Western countries and the subjugation of entire Muslim nations all over the world has never ceased. Not for a day.

Moreover, the collective targeting of small or large Muslim communities in Western countries, and the deliberate abuse and degradation of Muslim individuals and Islamic symbols (from the Holy Koran to the Prophet Mohammed) has also never ceased.

Bizarrely, most of these actions have been done through "democratic" channels and justified in the name of democracy, on the basis of upholding the principles of secularism and Western values.

Many thoughts come to mind here; all unreservedly angry.

I remember when the word "democracy" used to resonate so loudly among Arabs and Muslims around the world. The more they were denied it, the more they yearned for it. University campuses in Cairo, Gaza and Karachi took their student union elections so very seriously. Innocent blood was spilled in clashes around campuses as students desperately tried to express their right to vote, to speak out and to assemble.

Those were the days, when al-demoqratia, Arabic for democracy, was the buzzword in the Middle East and beyond. Even Palestinian political prisoners held their elections, ever so faithfully, surrounded by highly fortified towers and under the deriding gaze of armed men in the unforgiving heat of the Naqab desert.

Arab and Muslim masses were keen on democracy to the extent that there was a near consensus that democracy, although a Western conception, could be distinguished from the many ills invited by Western interventions, imperialism and wars that scarred and continued to impair the collective Muslim psyche.

An entire school of Muslim thought was in fact established around the concept that democracy and Islam are very much compatible. Such a notion goes back to Egypt's Azharite scholar Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that the principles of European modernity were compatible with Islam.

"Al-Tahtawi's work influenced the philosopher Muhammad Abduh [1849-1905], another Azharite who is often described as the founder of Islamic modernism, which is captured in his statement that in Europe he found Islam without Muslims, while in Egypt he found Muslims without Islam," wrote German anthropologist, Frank Fanselow.

If one sets his prejudices aside to ponder this for a moment, one would realize the intellectual valor it takes to consider and even embrace commonalities with the very powers that have instilled so much harm and fear.

Even in their darkest, least proud moments, Muslim intellectuals and nations displayed impressive open-mindedness. They are hardly ever credited for that.

More recently, in Egypt, people tried hard to vote, in the face of beatings, public humiliation and imprisonment. In Palestine in 2006 the price was even higher - starvation. Gaza continues to endure under a medieval Israeli siege, ultimately because of an election.

Muslim communities in the West have long been considered the luckiest; after all, they live in the abodes of democracy. They drink from the fountain of rights and freedoms that never runs dry.

However, these idealized assumptions missed the fact that Western democracy was conditional. And unconditional democracy can only be a farce.

Much has been said to explain the West's faltering on its own commitment to democracy. No, the tragedy of September 11, 2001, is hardly the defining moment that created the growing chasm that made the West fearful of Islam. Despite all that has taken place since then - the constant spewing out of right-wing hatred, evangelical fanatic preaching and all the rest - America is still more tolerant than Europe. Nor was the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe a response in solidarity to America's woes.

Honestly, the French are not fond of Americans, nor are the Germans necessarily that passionate about the Swiss. But this didn't stop a German Christian Democratic state interior minister, Volker Bouffier, from making a "recommendation" to Muslim communities in his own country: "Naturally the Muslims in Germany have a right to build mosques. But they should make sure not to overwhelm the German population with them."

How do you overwhelm people with minarets? Is this a post-post-post-modernistic logic that we are yet to be informed of?

There are only four minarets in the entire country of Switzerland, a country with a population of approximately 7.6 million people. How overwhelming can that be? And aren't religious freedom and the freedom of collective and individual expression basic rights guaranteed by democratic values?

But this is hardly about a 4.8-meter tall minaret in the northern Swiss town of Langenthal. It's about the fact that the one who suggested the structure is a Muslim furniture salesman by the name of Mutalip Karaademi. He didn't know, of course, that his modest idea of adding a minaret to the community's mosque would generate a nationwide referendum, and an international "controversy".

Karaademi was not trying to "Islamificate" the Swiss. He just wanted his community to have a place for worship (as opposed to the unused paint factory it currently uses for prayer), to be able to express its collective identity without fear. Ironically enough, the Muslim community in Langenthal is mostly Albanians, refugees who fled Kosovo seeking escape and deliverance.

What a strange paradox: Muslims escaping to the West, physically and figuratively, only to find double standards, self-negation and, at times, pure hypocrisy.

For now, however, a new consensus is forming: democracy can be invoked and used against Muslims only, and not for Muslims. It can be manipulated to deny them their identity in Europe and their freedom in Palestine, to ensure their subjugation in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and to meddle in their internal affairs everywhere else.

Al-demoqratia, indeed.

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The author of the article is Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research In International Affairs and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs, both rather impressive sounding names, as all names of think tanks should sound. What was not mentioned is that Rubin is also
professor at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel. While checking this out on the internet, I discovered that the IDC had recently held a conference on victims of terror and how to help them: "...the first advanced academic conference focusing on the victims of terror and their families. The conference dealt with the impact of terror attacks on society and the individual and presented theoretical approaches and practical methods of helping the victims."

Even though it is a side issue to what I initially set out discuss, it only emphasizes the pro-Israeli slant of Rubin's connections as all the terror victims discussed in the precis were Israeli, soldiers, or U.S. victims of the Twin Towers. Absolutely no mention, as one might expect, of the terror suffered by the Palestinians. Although the Israeli press is often quite open about its operations within Palestine, the IDC is a private for profit institution and obviously considers the Palestinians to be the source of the terror and not the occupation of Palestine by the IDF.

My initial point was that the Vancouver Sun did not mention this association, perhaps through ignorance, but just as likely through not wanting to bias the readers interpretations of their own pro-Israeli slant. The appearance of neutrality is important even if that is not the case.

"Abbas isn't going anywhere"

Arguing against Rubin is difficult mainly because he does not present logically sequenced rational arguments, but starts off establishing his own emotional mind-set of Palestinian culpability for their problems with Israel. Following that, to support his argument he essentially lies about the factual support to his argument while disingenuously stating that all his ideas are "clear in any accurate factual account of what has happened."

The article itself is titled "Abbas isn't going anywhere" with the subtitle, "There's no peace deal in the Middle East because Palestinian leadership doesn't want one." He starts by saying that "Abbas never had any intention of resigning or calling elections...because the PA fears it would lose them and Hamas, which rules Gaza Strip, won't let them be held there." That could all be well and true, but until events actually unfold - or don't unfold in this case, it is speculation.

Rubin argues emotionally that the "Palestinians are always presented as victims, passive observers, people who have nothing to do with their fate." That of course is intended to play the 'reverse sympathy card' for Israel, but it is a statement that carries no truth. Most importantly in denying this is the obvious high degree of activism from civil disobedience, from civil protest, through quasi-legal formulations (think the Israeli created Palestinian Authority), to the much more aggressive and assertive militant insurgencies of the two intifada's and the suicide attackers. There is absolutely nothing passive about that.

Somehow he twists that first illogical statement into a much broader one in which "...everything must always be the fault of Israel or America or the West" with Rubin's "fact is" saying the problem is that of the Palestinians "...seeking Israeli's destruction over a compromise peace that would mean the conflict's end in a permanent two-state solution."

Both statements are falsehoods. Most Palestinian sources that I am familiar with recognize that their history, their leadership has its own faults. There is also plenty of material indicating that the Palestinians are capable of compromise in their search for peace, to the point of recognizing Israel's existence.

What is true is that, yes, the Palestinians are victims of military occupation, harassment, and torture, and yes they are victims of military rule that contravenes several international sources of law. What is also true is that they are not passive (a significantly incomprehensible statement for anyone following all the protests and violence in the region).

Rubin's statements about the passivity of the Palestinians is a somewhat clever reversal of the Israeli's inculcated doctrine that they are the innocent victims of Palestinian and Islamist terror, and are incapable of acting and reflecting on perhaps why the Palestinians are acting this way - or in his own words, Israelis "...are always presented as victims, passive observers, people who have nothing to do with their own fate." When his words are reversed in intention, they carry a similar falsehood.

Israel plays the victim role, yet it is the occupier, the aggressor, the perpetrator who wished from the inception of the Eretz Israel dream to ethnically cleanse all of the area of Palestinians. Because the Palestinians did not just passively move out of the way, and with fluctuating levels of belligerence and insurrection, the Israelis play to the world's sympathies as victims of their own culpability.

Camp David

Rubin's 'factual' support begins with Camp David. He says Arafat and the Palestinian leadership "were offered a Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem and billions of dollars in start-up funding twice in the year 2000...." This "offer" had nothing on paper, there is no record of anything written down so that outside observers could examine what was said or truly offered. Unless something is in writing, especially in political agreements, it is worthless.

What was offered was offered verbally (if at all, see below), and by best accounts was not a state but a truncated series of bantustan like cantons surrounded by areas of Israeli control, with the Jordan valley remaining under Israel Defence Forces military control. There was no sovereignty offered, no sovereign rule over a contiguous piece of sovereign territory. In reality there was not even an offer made, as Robert Malley, Clinton's Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs and his advisor at Camp David. Malley indicated, "It is hard to state with confidence how far Barak was actually prepared to go....His strategy was predicated on the belief that Israel ought not reveal its final position - not even to the United States - until the endgame was in sight." [1] That endgame of course is the continued settlement of the West Bank until Israeli control is absolute.

Rubin follows the generally accepted Israeli obfuscation concerning Jerusalem and reiterates it as fact. The verbal tricks around the description of a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem indicates that the capital in East Jerusalem should more correctly have been labelled as 'east of' Jerusalem in Abu-Dis, as "It is only through this deceptive use of definitions that Israel can claim that it proposes that the city be divided into the Jewish part "Jerusalem" and the Palestinian part, "Al-Quds." [2]

The end result of all this is the Israeli statement about having no partner in peace, a cultural icon now prevalent within Israel and the U.S. but not supported elsewhere. It is the Israelis not wanting 'peace' as that would necessarily constrain there initial ambition to control all of Eretz Israel.

Partners in crime - the settlements

The article continues arguing about the settlement deal reached between the United States and Israel. The overwhelming obvious lack here (or at least it should be obvious) is that this agreement was between partners in crime and not with the Palestinians. As usual with these settlement agreements, the reality on the ground is that the settlements would continue to be built as the Israelis continued their verbal charade of complying with the agreement.

Rubin argues that the settlement deal was a "huge concession" even though it did not apply to Jerusalem. I would have to ask how a "huge concession" can be envisioned when it does not include the huge settlements that are being built in Jerusalem with the direct intent of eliminating the Palestinian population - but above all, how can it be a concession of any kind when settlements in occupied territories are illegal under international law? Of course, Israel, with the support of the U.S., has continually flaunted international law and disregards it completely.

Laughable solution (tragically)

Rubin's rather laughable solution in a tragic-comic farcical sense is "If the Palestinian leadership wanted to e