Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he “pays” for his “heinous crime”: the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose “compassion” allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to “face justice from a higher power.” Amen.

The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as “a babbling brook of bullshit.” Such eloquence summarizes the circus of Megrahi’s release.

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of “strategic interests.”

“The endgame came down to damage limitation,” said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, “because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi’s] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice.” New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft — he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shop owner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognize him in the courtroom.

The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, “discovered” in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi’s suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was “transferred” through two airports undetected to Flight 103.

A “key secret witness” at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted) loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a “protected witness.” The defense exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans’ conviction, up to $4m as a reward.

Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in “neutral” Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a “mass of conflicting evidence” and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance.. Their 90-page “opinion”, wrote Foot, “is a remarkable document that claims an honored place in the history of British miscarriages of justice”. (Lockerbie — the Flight from Justice by Paul Foot can be downloaded from www.private-eye.co.uk for £5).

Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt canceled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the “architect” of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr. on 11 January 1990, she agreed to “low-key” the disaster after their intelligence services had reported “beyond doubt” that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship’s captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer.”

Perversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran’s support as he built a “coalition” to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. “Like lazy and overfed fish,” wrote Foot, “the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and op en warmongering against Libya.” The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US Defense Intelligence Agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be centerpiece of Megrahi’s defense.

In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s case for appeal. “The commission is of the view,” said its chairman, Dr Graham Forbes, “that based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”

The words “miscarriage of justice” are missing entirely from the current furor, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that “higher power.” What a disgrace.

In Mumbai, Hillary Clinton first had a meeting with a selective group of Indian business executives. Later she stayed at Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, one of the two hotels that had been attacked by terrorists in November 2008. At a news conference she subtly brought India’s 11/26 and US’ 9/11 together: “Just as India supported America on 9/11, these events are seared in our memory….”² The reason for this, probably, was to direct Indian public’s attention to the common perpetrator: Islamic extremism. In her op-ed in The Times of India, Clinton clearly made her point. She mentioned about security: “Our countries have experienced searing terrorist attacks. We both seek a more secure world for our citizens,” and therefore, “We should intensify our defense and law enforcement cooperation to that end.” In the same breath she identified the common enemy as the extremism that Pakistan is confronting.¹

The two events – Clinton’s meeting with Indian business executives and her stay at Taj hotel – are steeped in a powerful, but unfortunate, symbolism, as 11/26 is linked with 9/11.

US’ 9/11 and Weapons’ Trade

On September 11, 2001 there was a significant shift in security trend. For the first time since the British burned down Washington in 1814, US experienced death and destruction on its land through an enemy attack.³ Till then death and destruction have always been suffered on foreign lands. George W. Bush, then President of the US, in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003 recognized this: “In two years, America has gone from a sense of invulnerability to an awareness of peril.” This challenge to its hegemony and attack on its land, instead of leading to introspection of its foreign policy and actions on foreign lands, resulted in the US’ “war on terror.” US failed to acknowledge that the terrorist attack on its land was a blowback. In an interview on the Mike Malloy radio show, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds said that the US maintained “intimate relations” with Osama Bin Laden and Taliban “all the way until that day of September 11.”⁴ The goals of American “statesmen” using these “intimate relations” with al-Qaida included control of Central Asia’s vast energy supplies and new markets for US military-industrial complex.⁴

Recently in a very rare acknowledgement by Hillary Clinton, she confessed that the US’ present enemy in Afghanistan and Pakistan was once its friend. To a question of the Congressman Adam Shciff in a Subcommittee of the House of Appropriations Committee on April 23, 2009, Clinton explained how the militancy was linked to the US-backed proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan:

Let’s remember here…the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago…and we did it because we were locked in a struggle with the Soviet Union. They invaded Afghanistan…and we did not want to see them control Central Asia and we went to work…and it was President Reagan in partnership with Congress led by Democrats who said you know what it sounds like a pretty good idea…let’s deal with the ISI and the Pakistan military and let’s go recruit these mujahedeen…let them come from Saudi Arabia and other countries, importing their Wahabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union…they (the Soviets) retreated…they lost billions of dollars and it led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. So there is a very strong argument which is…it wasn’t a bad investment in terms of Soviet Union but let’s be careful with what we sow…because we will harvest.⁵

Therefore, the early foundations of al-Qaida were built, mainly, on relationships and weaponry that came from the billions of dollars in US support for the Afghan mujahedeen during the war to expel Soviet forces from that country. The US has long relied on weapons supplies and sales to prop up allies or enhance collective defense arrangements. According to the report titled “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations,”: “For decades, during the height of the Cold War, providing conventional weapons to friendly states was an instrument of foreign policy utilized by the United States and its allies.”⁶

The US Cold War foreign policy of supplying weapons to maintain strategic relationship continued even after 9/11. In fact, the US’ response to the terror attacks was that it was more willing than ever to sell or supply high technology weapons to countries that have pledged assistance in the global war on terror, regardless of their past behavior or current status. Under the guise of the global war on terror, George W. Bush fast-tracked weapon sales, released countries from arms embargoes, and pumped more money into foreign military aid. US sanctions were lifted on Armenia, Azerbaijan, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Yugoslavia. These countries have been identified as key allies in the global war on terror.⁷

US-India Relationship

After initial confidence building measures, on January 12, 2004 US and India signed an agreement called the “Next Steps in Strategic Partnership” (NSSP) with the aim of implementing a shared vision to expand cooperation, deepening the ties of commerce and friendship between the two nations, and increasing stability in Asia and beyond. This “strategic partnership” has grown into “global partnership” with the ratification of the US-India Agreement for Cooperation on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy in July 2005. Bush signed the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 (or “Hyde Act”) into law in December 2006 (P.L. 109-401).⁸ Commenting on the nuclear deal Nicholas Burns, then Under Secretary of State, said that it was “positive for United States national security interest because it will help us cement our strategic partnership with India, which is very important for our global interests.”⁸

In October 10, 2008 Condoleezza Rice, then US Secretary of State, and Pranab Mukherjee, then External Affairs Minister of India, signed the nuclear deal after three years of negotiations. Called the 123 Agreement after a section in the U.S. Atomic Energy Act, the pact allowed India to buy vital nuclear fuel and technology from American companies.

Right from the beginning corporate interests led by the nuclear industry and arms makers in the US lobbied for the nuclear deal. They saw the possibilities for nuclear trade, weapons sales, and selling spare parts and other services to India.⁹ According to the Washington Post, American companies saw a vast market in India for nuclear reactors and conventional weapons, after having been largely frozen out of that market for decades.¹⁰ The US-India Business Council hired the high-powered firm of Patton Boggs to work on Congress, and the Indian government a powerful US lobbying firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers LLC, for which Robert Blackwill — US ambassador to India from 2001 to 2003 — is president, as well as the law firm of Venable LLP. The Confederation of Indian Industry and the India-American Friendship Council were also involved.

US politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, overwhelmingly supported the US-India nuclear deal. Because they either have investments in or received financial contributions from the arms industry.

US’ Interests in the Deal

US has acknowledged India’s growing global economic, political, and geo-strategic clout. So it wanted to court India through US-India nuclear deal to further its global interests.

1. To Contain China

US perceives China to be the larger threat to its hegemony. According to the 2008 annual report to Congress from the Office of the Secretary of Defense on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, “China’s expanding and improving military capabilities are changing East Asian military balances; improvements in China’s strategic capabilities have implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region.”¹¹ US sees India as a new emerging power of the 21st century, one that can be an ally of the United States and help it balance and contain the rise of China. India also directly faces the Chinese military along a four thousand kilometer northern border.

There has been some speculation regarding US’ intention to create an Asian NATO. During the Cold War era, US forged the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) comprising of pro-western countries such as Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand as well as France and UK. However, this organization was dissolved in 1977.¹² The speculation about US’ intention to forge Asian NATO has been substantiated with the proposals of some American politicians such as Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain. Giuliani proposed that India, Japan, Singapore, Israel and Australia should be included in NATO. Whereas McCain suggested the establishment of US-led League of Democracies. Trabanco opines that McCain’s proposal was a euphemism for the inclusion of nonEuropean US allies in a global military coalition.¹² The reason for this seems to be the rise of China as an economic power. The US National Intelligence Council called it “the unprecedented transfer of wealth from west to east.”¹²

In order to contain China’s power and to preserve its control over strategic sea routes, US strategists have acknowledged the strategically significant geographic location of India. This could be the reason why US has forged an alliance with India in maritime cooperation.

Therefore, the US’ willingness to make nuclear deal with India is perceived, by some, to gain latter’s strategic and geopolitical loyalty.¹² “(It) would buttress (India’s) potential utility as a hedge against a rising China, encourage it to pursue economic and strategic policies aligned with U.S. interests, and shape its choices in regard to global energy stability….” said Tellis.¹³

   1. To Involve India in the “Reconstruction” of Afghanistan

There is also a talk about US’ intention to involve India in Afghan “reconstruction” and ask for Indian troops.¹¹ India, in the past, refused to send its troops to Iraq. However, the US-India “global partnership” might give the US leverage over India. As the relationship deepens, it would be difficult for India to reject US’ request for its partnership in the “reconstruction” of Afghanistan, which includes alignment of Indian troops with the NATO troops under the leadership of US.

During her three day visit to India, Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, mentioned about security cooperation: “Our countries have experienced searing terrorist attacks. We both seek a more secure world for our citizens,” and therefore, “We should intensify our defense and law enforcement cooperation to that end.” And this cooperation is against the extremism that Pakistan is tackling at present.

The US strategy seems to be to draw India (as a “partner”) into “Afghan trap”, as it did Russia (its enemy). Admitting that an American operation to infiltrate Afghanistan was launched long before Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Zbigniew Brzezenski boasted, “We actually did provide some support to the Mijahedeen before (Soviet) invasion.”¹⁴ “We did not push the Russians into invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would,” Brzezenski bragged. “That secret operation was an excellent idea. The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap.”¹⁵

   2. Market for US Military-Industrial Complex

The US-India nuclear deal not only links India more closely to US and its global interests, but also boosts US trade in a profitable sector, nuclear industry. It also creates market for US conventional weapons. Till now Russia is the largest supplier of weapons to India (second is Israel). US expects that the nuclear deal will change this scenario.

India is a huge market for weapons sales. In 2005 it was the largest buyer of arms in the developing world with purchases of $5.4 billion. US’ intention to profit from this market is evidenced by recent visits to India by US officials, including Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, in February 2008 to strengthen military ties and promote weapons sales. Lt. Gen. V.K. Kapoor, a defence analyst, said, “Other than obvious commercial interests, the US is keen to invest militarily in India….”¹⁶ At DefExpo 2008 in New Delhi in February 2008 at which major US weapons companies were well represented, William Cohen, former US Defence Secretary under Bill Clinton, declared, “The promise of deeper US-India defence co-operation is now a reality, with collaborations and joint ventures between US and India firms already under way.”¹⁶ India is projected to spend more than $30 billion by 2012 as the country seeks to modernize its military. By 2022 spending is expected to reach $80 billion.

The US-India nuclear deal has opened a huge market for the US weapons industry. For US weapons companies foreign sales mean the biggest bucks. Also, sales are often accompanied by lucrative deals for accessories, spare parts, and eventual upgrades. There is growing evidence that weapons sales are more about money for the US military-industrial complex and other major military economies. According to the congressional report “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations,”: “Where before the principal motivation for arms sales by foreign suppliers might have been to support a foreign policy objective, today that motivation may be based as much on economic considerations as those of foreign policy or national security policy.”⁶

Weapons Deals during Hillary Clinton’s Visit to India

The burgeoning “global partnership” between US and India is gradually laying bare its contents. India has dramatically increased its defence budget up over 34% alone this year. Hillary Clinton’s visit to India in July 2009 resulted in defence, space and nuclear power agreements. It is the payoff resulting from the US-India nuclear deal.

On July 20, 2009 an accord, known as an end use monitoring agreement, between India and US has been reached in New Delhi to clear the way for the sale of US weapons to India. “We have agreed on the end-use monitoring arrangement which would refer to…Indian procurement of US defence technology and equipment,” said S.M. Krishna, Indian External Affairs Minister, in a joint news conference with Clinton. India is now holding a tender for the order of 126 multi-purpose lightweight fighters for the Air Force. US company Lockheed Martin stands as the front runner to sell F-16. The other three bidders are companies from Russia, France and Sweden. According to the tender terms, a winner should launch licensed production of its aircraft in India. The Indian-assembled F-16 would be a lot cheaper than its equivalent put together in the US or Europe. There is qualified labor in India, and labor costs are low. For the first time in history the US is making such an offer to a country that is neither a NATO member state nor has it Americans troops deployed on its territory.

Hillary Clinton said that India has also approved two sites for the construction of two US nuclear reactors. She said, “I am also pleased that Prime Minister Singh told me that sites for two nuclear parks for US companies have been approved by the government.” That means, it provides about $10 billion business for the US nuclear reactor builders such as General Electric Company and Westinghouse Electric Company, a subsidiary of Japan’s Toshiba Corporation. However, what is not clear is whether India has agreed to the US’ demand for legal immunity to its companies, if there is an accident.

India has already bought $2.1 billion worth of anti-submarine planes from Boeing earlier this year, the largest US arms transfer to India to date.¹⁷ Arms deals between India and US will pull the military of the two countries together and foster interoperability.¹¹

At a May 2009 Defense Writers Group convened by the Center for Media and Security, to the question “whether the Obama administration will follow the general policy of supporting (weapons) exports?” and “do you anticipate any change in terms of where US arms will be sold?” Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy responded, “We don’t have a sort of arms sale policy as much as more a sense of commitment to building partner capacity.”⁷ Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieringa, the head of the Pentagon agency that administers weapons exports, was more candid: “We sell stuff to build relationships.”⁷

Not surprisingly, Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a consultant to Lockheed Martin, said, “Weapons could be the single biggest U.S. export item over the next 10 years.”¹⁷ Increased weapons sales will certainly help the US Military-Industrial Complex weather the current economic crisis.

Conclusion

Not surprisingly, in the “global partnership” between US and India, the people who are missing are the poor of both the countries. In the op-ed in The Times of India Hillary Clinton, former Wal-Mart Board Director, made no mention of India’s poor. According to the World Bank poverty line of $1.25 (Rs. 56.13) per day, the number of poor in India during 2004-2005 was 456 million, that is, 41.6% of the population. The official figure of number of poor in the US in 2007 was 37.3 millions.¹⁸ However, Katherine Newman, professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, says that apart from 37.3 million poor, there are over 50 million Americans, who belong to what she calls “the missing class”. In her book The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America, co-authored with Victor Tan Chen, she says that the Americans who belong to “the missing class” are those who are living on the edge — one sudden illness, one pink slip (i.e., loss of job), one divorce away from free fall.¹⁹

The impact of arms trade between US and India has on the lack of economic development among the poor in both the countries, as more and more resources are directed into production and acquisition of new deadly weapons. “We’ve put this money down a black hole of so-called security,” says David Krieger, President of the California-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. “In a more just and humane society, that money would be spent on health care, housing and the alleviation of poverty.”²⁰

Therefore, the single most pressing “security” issue of the 21st century will be assuring the essentials of a healthy, dignified life for the millions of people in India and US, who are left out of the global economy. Poverty continues to be the main human rights issue in both the countries.

What needs to be done is, try and reduce the drive for production and acquisition of more and more weapons systems, so that resources may be used for education, healthcare, and to fight against poverty.

1. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Encourage Pakistan as It Confronts Extremism,” in The Times of India (July 17, 2009).
2. Mark Landler, “Seeking Business Allies, Clinton Connects with India’s Billionaires,” in New York Times (July 18, 2009).
   
3. Chomsky, Noam, “September 11th and Its Aftermath: Where is the World Heading?” Public Lecture at the Music Academy, Chennai (Madras), India (November 10, 2001).
4. Lukery, “Bombshell: Bin Laden Worked for US until 9/11: Sibel Edmonds on the Mike Malloy Radio Show,” in Global Research (August 1, 2009).
5. Anwar Iqbal, “US Created Taliban and Abandoned Pakistan: Clinton,” in Dawn.Com (April 25, 2009) and see Youtube.
6. Bryan Bender, “US Is Top Purveyor on Weapons Sales List Shipments Grow to Unstable Areas,” in worldproutassembly.org (November 13, 2006).
7. Frida Berrigan, “Weapons: Our No#1 Export?” in Foreign Policy In Focus (July 1, 2009).
8. Michael F. Martin and K. Alan Kronstadt, CRS Report for Congress: India-U.S. Economic and Trade Relations, August 31, 2007.
9. Andrew Lichterman and M.V. Ramana, “Rushing into the Wrong Future: The U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Energy and Security,” in Dissident Voice.org (September 20, 2008).
10. Steven Mufson, “New Energy on India: Companies and Lobbyists Throw Support behind U.S. Participation in the Countries Nuclear Sector,” in Washington Post (July 18, 2006).
11. William R. Hawkins, “Bush’s Legacy in India,” in FrontPageMagazine.com (November 24, 2008).
12. Jose Miguel Alonso Trabanco, “Is an ‘Asian NATO’ Really on the US Agenda?” in Global Research (January 28, 2009).
13. Siddharth Varadarajan, “The Truth behind the Indo-U.S. Nuclear Deal,” in Global Research (July 29, 2005).
14. Noor Ali, “US-UN Conspiracy against the People of Afghanistan,” in Online Center for Afghan Studies (February 21, 1998).
15. J.W. Smith, “Simultaneously Suppressing the World’s Break for Freedom,” in Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle for the 21st Century, ed. by M.E. Sharpe (New York: Armonk, 2000). Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, “Afghanistan, the Taliban and the United States: The Role of Human Rights in Western Foreign Policy.”
16. “India and US Defence Ties Grow Stronger,” in india-defence.com (June 25, 2008).
17. “Weapons Makers Look Overseas as DoD Cuts Back,” in USAToday (June 13, 2009).
18. ”Poverty in the United States, 2007.”
19. Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen, The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007).
20. Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger, “Invest in People, Not Weapons,” in Toronto Star (March 24, 2008).

Those officials, led by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, have been arguing that Kayani is committed to ending support the Taliban and other radical Islamic movements receive from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate, but that he is not yet able to control ISI operatives.

Late last year, U.S. officials were reportedly pressing Kayani for far-reaching changes in the ISI that would end its role in support of insurgents in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) demanded that the ISI be put under civilian control and threatened to introduce legislation making military assistance to Pakistan conditional on evidence that the Pakistani military had ended such support to the Taliban.

But Kerry dropped his proposal for conditioning U.S. military assistance to Pakistan on ending the ISI-Taliban program. In February Kerry said conversations with Mullen and “other players” had persuaded him that Kayani and his choice for new ISI chief, Ahmad Shuja Pasha, had “a willingness to engage in transformation” of the ISI.

The Kerry-Lugar legislation passed by Congress in June provides 2 billion dollars in military aid as well as 4 billion dollars in economic assistance to Pakistan over five years and makes no mention of evidence of military aid to the Taliban. It merely requires the Secretary of State to certify that the “security forces of Pakistan” are making concerted efforts to prevent the Taliban and associated militant groups from using the territory of Pakistan as a sanctuary from which to launch attacks within Afghanistan.”

Obama’s national security team established a critical basis for its argument to Congress by leaking a story to the New York Times asserting that Kayani would not be able to control the activities of ISI in the short run.

The story, published March 26, acknowledged “direct support from operatives” of the ISI for the Afghan Taliban insurgency, but quoted anonymous U.S. officials saying it is “unlikely that top officials in Islamabad are directly coordinating the clandestine efforts” — a carefully chosen formula that does not deny that they are presiding over a policy of aiding the Taliban.

The story said unnamed U.S. officials “have also said that mid-level ISI operatives occasionally cultivate relationships that are not approved by their bosses.” That statement diverted attention away from whether the Pakistani military leadership has approved military assistance to the Taliban.

Mullen has been suggesting that Kayani has demonstrated good faith by purging the ISI. He told Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer in early April that the new head was “handpicked” to change the ISI.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee May 21, Mullen emphasised that Gen. Kayani had changed “almost the entire leadership of ISI” over the previous six months.

After a conversation with Mullen, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius quoted him in a June 29 article as saying that Kayani and his choice for ISI Chief “have committed very specifically to change the culture of ISI,” but that “that’s not going to happen overnight.”

Mullen has carefully avoided saying that Kayani has given assurances he intends to halt the military assistance to the Taliban, however.

The historical evidence on Kayani’s past relationship to the issue suggests that he has no intention of changing Pakistani policy toward the Taliban.

Kayani himself served as head of ISI from late 2004 to late 2007 and presided over the development of a major logistical and training program for the Taliban forces operating out of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

The ISI military assistance program was first revealed in a NATO report of a two-week battle by NATO forces against a determined Taliban offensive in Kandahar province in September 2006.

During the battle, NATO forces captured a number of Pakistani fighters who detailed the ISI role in supporting the Taliban offensive. The NATO account, reported in The Telegraph by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid on Oct. 6, 2006, described two ISI training camps for the Taliban near Quetta in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. It also documented the provision by the ISI of 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 400,000 rounds of ammunition — just for that one Taliban campaign.

The size and scope of the programme of support described in the report were hardly consistent with the idea that assistance to the Taliban is a rogue operation by ISI operatives.

Mullen and Defence Secretary Robert Gates presumably know about Kayani’s past support for the Taliban assistance program. Evidence of continuing ISI assistance to, and safe have for, Taliban forces after Kayani replaced Musharraf as the top Army general was compiled in an intelligence assessment circulated to the top national security officials of the George W. Bush administration in mid-2008, according by David Sanger’s book The Inheritance.

Kayani was also overheard in a conversation intercepted by U.S. intelligence referring to a high-ranking Taliban leader, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, as a “strategic asset,” according to Sanger’s account. Haqqani was a Taliban minister during that organisation’s brief period in power during the late 1990s, and his network has been a key target for the U.S. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan during 2008 and 2009.

Kayani is not the first Pakistani military leader to assure the U.S. that he is purging the ISI of pro-Taliban elements. President Perverz Musharraf did the same thing to ease pressure from Washington to toe the line on Afghanistan in early October 2001.

Musharraf claimed he had made far-reaching changes in the ISI by removing its director, Mahmood Ahmad — who he said had been affiliated with Islamic extremists. But Musharraf never changed his pro-Taliban policy; despite his pledge to do so immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks.

The March 26 Times story reported Pakistani officials as portraying their Taliban policy as “part of a strategy to maintain influence in Afghanistan for the day when American forces would withdraw” leaving “a power vacuum to be filled by India.”

After the Times story, Gates began arguing that the U.S. must convince Pakistani leaders that it will not abandon the war in Afghanistan.

In a March 29 interview with Fox News, Gates said the Pakistanis had ties with the Taliban “partly as a hedge against what might happen in Afghanistan if we were to walk away or whatever.” The U.S. has to convince the Pakistanis that “they can count on us and that they don’t need that hedge,” Gates said.

Mullen and other U.S. military leaders have an interest other than Afghanistan — which appears to driving their willingness to overlook Kayani’s past and present support for the Taliban. They once had close ties with the Pakistani military, which they touted for decades as a basis for U.S. influence in the country, despite persistent and sharp divergences in U.S. and Pakistani strategic interests.

Those ties were cut off in the 1990s because of legislation requiring an end to military cooperation over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Mullen and other military leaders now argue that close relations must be a top U.S. priority.

As Mullen told the Inquirer’s Rubin, “One of my strategic objectives is to close this gap in the relationship with the Pakistani military.”

Sri Lanka, considered a banana republic and economically far worse than its prosperous but tiny neighbour Singapore, has chosen to challenge a country listed on the top of the lists of the Human Development Index by the United Nations. Canadians armed with Canadian passports sail through any immigration desk around the world with ease and respect. Even the Cubans who hate Americans love Canadian passports.

Canadian passport holders can enter anywhere in the world while the majority of the countries around the world need visas from Canadian consular offices in their home countries and those, too, are not easy to get because the Canadian immigration system is very strict. But, Canadians do not face such hardships in getting visas to any other country.

Canada reaps

Recently Canadian Minister for Immigration denied entry to the maverick British parliamentarian George Galloway. His application for a Canadian visa was rejected in March 2009. Canada claimed that he was a threat to national security as he was an advocate for stopping the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and donated money to the Hamas-led government of the Palestinian territories.

Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, justifying Canada’s decision, said “I don’t see why we should make exceptions and override the decision of our professional border security agents in making a judgment about the inadmissibility of someone who provides funding and resources to an illegal terrorist organization.”

There is a saying in Tamil – “Vithai Vithaithavan Aruvadai Seivaan” (One who sowed the seed will reap the harvest). So it is poetic justice for Canada which labels even a British parliamentarian with terrorist tag to see one of her top parliamentarians booted out for the same reason! Unlike Canada, Sri Lanka is world’s most politically unstable and financially bankrupt Third World country begging for loans from IMF.

Sri Lanka tagged Canada’s much respected politician as a threat to national security. He has more than three-decades of public service experience and was the premier of Canada’s largest populated province, Ontario. Currently, he is Canada’s main Opposition Liberal Party’s foreign affairs critic. Sri Lanka has simply thumbed its nose at Canada and that too in the most uncivilized way. Canadians consider this as a great insult to their country, but the million dollar question is whether Canada will take sweet diplomatic revenge or just remain mute?

Rae’s testimony

Soon after Bob Rae spent 12 hours at the Bandaranaike International Airport in Katunayake, he was bundled out on a plane to England where he issued a statement. He said: “In the evening of Tuesday, June 9, 2009, I arrived on a flight from Delhi to Colombo, Sri Lanka. I had successfully applied to the Sri Lankan High Commission for a visa and had discussed my visit with the Sri Lankan Commissioner, the Canadian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, and with officials from DFAIT.”

He stated: When I arrived at immigration in the company of two Canadian High Commission officials, I was, after some delay, told that I was being refused entry on the grounds of national intelligence. Since that time I have spent over twelve hours at the airport trying to find a reason for this decision. I have had the full support of officials here and in Ottawa. The Government of Sri Lanka is sticking to its position, and I am being put on a plane to London at 1:15 p.m. Sri Lankan time.

Further, he said: “The Sri Lankan government has made this decision because they have apparently reached some ill-conceived and defamatory conclusions about me. But, after thirty years of public service at home and abroad, I have to say this decision reflects on them, and not on me. I have fought against violence and extremism all my life. Everyone knows that, and the record of my actions, speeches and reports is there for all to see. What they now also know is that the government of Sri Lanka is afraid of dialogue, afraid of discussion, afraid of engagement. All I can say is shame on them. If this is how they treat me, imagine how they treat people who can’t speak out and who can’t make public statements.”

The personal statement released by Bob Rae leads us to believe that he is really fed up with the Sri Lankan government’s decision and he, too, indicates that the decision made by Sri Lanka was actually a shameful act inflicted upon Canadians, not personally against him. Sri Lanka’s stance is quite understandable when it has ignored respect for humanitarian law and calls for a political process. Instead, Sri Lanka lambasted western political and diplomatic representatives as “White Tigers” on the payroll of the LTTE. We have seen similar tendencies elsewhere—Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma—but possibly nowhere as systematic and blatant as in Sri Lanka.

Canadian Tamils don’t trust Rae

Though Tamils in Canada think Bob Rae is an opportunistic and a wily politician. When he contested the election in Toronto Centre, where a sizeable number were ethnic Tamils, he promised that he would speak in support of right to self-determination for Tamils in Sri Lanka and he would support Eelam Tamils in Canadian parliament. However, after he got elected, his promises turned out to be empty rhetoric.

He often described Sri Lanka as a “Model Democracy” and decried LTTE’s terrorism. He was quick to decry LTTE’s “extremism and violence” but was slow to condemn state terrorism unleashed against Tamils. Bob Rae will, at least now, realize the real face of Sri Lanka.

During his frequent visits to Sri Lanka since 1999, as Chairman of Ottawa-based Forum of Federations, he met the leaders of Sri Lankan political, religious, and community organizations. He took part in the peace talks held in Oslo, Geneva, Tokyo and other cities. He dined with the LTTE leadership during his visits to the LTTE’s former strong-hold and its political headquarters, Kilinochchi. He participated in all the seminars and meetings organized by anti-LTTE movements in Sri Lanka, Canada, and England.

When this writer asked Bob Rae to comment on the present plight of Internally displaced persons in Sri Lanka and other questions about Sri Lanka, he said he would not be able to answer any questions yet, except to say, “I really do believe that they are less important than ensuring better conditions in camps and a better future for all the people living in Sri Lanka.”

Another liberal party parliamentarian from Scarborough, Agincourt Jim Karygiannis, said he, too, applied for a visa at the Sri Lanka’s High Commission in Ottawa to travel to Sri Lanka. The officials told him that they would not have any problem issuing the visa, but they are not responsible once he arrived at the airport because the Sri Lankan defense ministry may or may not permit him to enter the country. He then decided not to travel to Sri Lanka.

Upon assuming power, the right wing conservative government led by Stephen Harper banned the LTTE as a terrorist organization and followed two years later placing the community based World Tamil Movement (WTM) on the terrorist list. However, the Sri Lankan government did not show gratitude to the Conservatives. When Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Conservative MP Deepak Obhrai applied for visa to Sri Lankan High Commission in Ottawa, the High Commissioner denied him a visa. Obhrai said he wanted to visit Sri Lanka in early June 2009 to see conditions in the internment camps. The time is now ripe for Liberals and Conservatives to become cognizant of the ultra-chauvinist Sri Lankan state and its oppression of the Tamil people. For behind Colombo’s public parade of bodies of dead rebels and tasteless celebrations of ‘victory’ over the Tamil Tigers, there hides today a horror list of unspeakable war crimes committed by the Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime.

The time is ripe for Canada to review its diplomatic and political relationship vis-à-vis the failed state of Sri Lanka.

And of course, “collateral damage”: As was reported in The News in Pakistan May 19:

Several persons, including women and children, were killed and a number of others sustained injuries when families fleeing the military operation in Swat’s Matta town were shelled while crossing a mountainous path to reach Karo Darra in Dir Upper on Monday, eyewitnesses and official sources said. Eyewitnesses, who escaped the attack or were able to reach Wari town of Dir Upper in injured condition, said they were targeted by gunship helicopters. However, police officials said they might have been hit by a stray shell. Local people said they saw some 12 to 14 bodies on a mountain on the Swat side but could not go near to retrieve them or help the injured for fear of another aerial attack.

What a nightmare scenario for Pakistan.

We’re talking about the Pakistani Army sometimes fighting over the last year to retake towns from Taliban forces in the Buner region of the North-West Frontier Province that are closer to the capital of Islamabad than the Afghan border. And while the Talibs apparently lack popular support, even among the Pashtuns (who are 15 % of the Pakistani population—26 million and 42% of the Afghan population—14 million) they have been able to inflict embarrassing defeats on the army.

Tehreek-i-Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud, head of the militant forces in South Waziristan, established his credentials when his forces captured 300 Pakistani soldiers and traded them for about 30 imprisoned militants in the fall of 2007. Time and again, the several (sometimes rival) “Taliban” forces, which did not exist before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan created them, have forced the government to negotiate terms. Most recently in February, Islamabad agreed to the implementation of the Sharia in the Swat Valley in exchange for peace. The Taliban broke the agreement in April, or so the story goes, and the army claims it’s killed 1,100 militants since.

But curiously, as of Sunday it claimed to have killed only 10 Taliban, while boasting of seizing (according to AP) “a spot nicknamed ‘bloody intersection’ because militants routinely dumped the mutilated bodies of their victims there.” On Monday, I read of another four dead militants but the Taliban announced through a spokesman that they would maintain “aides” in place in the city, cease fire, and advise civilians to return. It appears most have retreated to other towns, including Buner and Daggar where fighting goes on now. This they can do under cover of the masses of refugees of course.

Now think of what has happened here. Whether or not this was Osama bin Laden’s conscious plan, the local, ethnically-based, ideological movement most receptive to his own (i.e., the Taliban, or more precisely, multiple talibans on the Pakistan side of the border) has flourished since the U.S. attack upon Afghanistan in response to the 9-11 attacks. The imperialist response to 9-11 inflamed Pashtunistan. The toppling of the Taliban itself aroused indignation among many Pakistani as well as Afghan Pashtuns. Some militants fleeing east met with the traditional Pasthtunwali welcome, as they would under less stressful circumstances, and beyond that political sympathy.

The drone missile attacks, the civilian deaths, the contemptuous official denials, the repeated insults to national sovereignty, the connivance of the regime in power, have angered many, perhaps most, Pakistanis. While the Taliban has undergone a quiet resurgence in southern Afghanistan, leading U.S. generals to conclude that a military solution to the war is impossible, bands of religious “students” gathering around tribal leaders and warlords in Pakistan forming the umbrella “Movement of the Taliban” or Tehreek-e-Taliban under Mahsud have been able to generate this kind of chaos.

The Army had been deployed before against Indian forces. But the disproportionately Pashtun force had never confronted or been trained to confront fanatical Pashtun jihadis–particularly when the issue was the implementation of the Sharia. Not surprisingly it performed badly and Islamabad wound up cutting a deal in February to implement Islamic law in the Swat Valley. U.S. Defense Secretary Gates can criticize that judgment in stating, “We want to support [the Pakistanis]. We want to help them in any way we can. But it is important that they recognize the real threats to their country.” And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can tell Congress, “I think the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists [by making a peace deal in Swat]. Changing paradigms and mindsets is not easy, but I do believe there is an increasing awareness of not just the Pakistani government but the Pakistani people that this insurgency coming closer and closer to major cities does pose such a threat.”

It’s easy to lecture about such things, to judge the actions of another government facing a crisis. But isn’t it obvious that (what Clinton has, since at least April, been calling) Pakistan’s “existential threat” wouldn’t be closing in on the cities of that country had the U.S. not responded to 9-11 with the knee-jerk bombing of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban? President Pervez Musharraf recalled that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told him soon after 9-11 to “prepare to go back to the Stone Age” if he didn’t cooperate with the U.S. in the war on terrorism. The existential threat to Pakistan was the Bush administration!

The Bush administration pressured Musharraf to deploy the Pakistan Army in border provinces where it had never been deployed and where its very presence was perceived as a provocation. The result was the September 2005 “peace agreement” in which the government agreed to halt military operations along the border and dismantle checkpoints in return for tribal leaders’ commitment to end support for militancy and prevent cross-border incursions into Afghanistan. It was a face-saving defeat for the regime that drew U.S. criticism, as have all subsequent deals with the militants, which have in any case broken down, like the February deal in Swat.

The 2005 agreement followed the notorious Lal Masjid episode in Islamabad when the security forces stormed an important seminary and hotbed of Islamist activism. The khatib (prayer-leader) had been dismissed for issuing a fatwa stating no Pakistani Army officer could be given an Islamic burial if died fighting the Taliban, and then the mosque had risen up in general rebellion, sparking solidarity attacks on government forces by militants in North Waziristan and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The government was forced to back down.

That’s been the pattern ever sense. Get tough on the “insurgents,” with U.S. prodding, funding, and threats of funding reduction and direct intervention. Then negotiate with tribal and religious leaders, recognizing locals’ mistrust of outsiders, the Pakistani state, and its international backers, which the mullahs may identify as U.S. imperialism and Zionism. And watch both carrot and stick policies fail as Pakistan’s own homegrown Taliban insurgency swells alongside the recrudescent original next door.

Now, while the Pakistani Army is still struggling to take control of Mingora and the Taliban is regrouping, the insurgents have pulled off a brazen attack on the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) office compound in Lahore, in eastern Pakistan, on the border with India, killing about 30 and injuring 250. The irony here of course is that the Taliban was nurtured by the ISI in the 1990s and the attackers may well have known the location of ISI offices for that very reason.

Such terror has Bush’s war on terror visited on Pakistan, with no end in sight. And Obama’s war in “Af-Pak,” reliant on a troop surge, more Predator drone attacks, and maybe some “divide and conquer” tactics, hold out little promise for relief. U.S. officials screw up their faces as if genuinely puzzled about while the Pakistanis aren’t doing more–as if puzzled about why they don’t understand that their existence is at stake. The fact is that they are the ones on the outside looking in, who do not understand that the interests of U.S. imperialism do not cause religious and national and ethnic sensibilities to disappear or make it possible for local leaders, even those on the imperialist payroll, to snap their fingers, crush local resistance and produce social peace. The interests of U.S. imperialism in this case, in the form of regime change in Afghanistan, and the way it was done, have antagonized much of the Pakistani population.

This is Washington’s unwanted gift to Islamabad, for which Islamabad keeps getting paid and keeps paying.

The games were greeted by Georgian troops with a coup attempt against their beleaguered President Mikheil Saakashvili, though there is speculation that this was something dreamed up by the Georgian president himself (he has done stranger things, like declaring war on Russia). This latest bizarre twist, the argument goes, gives him ammunition in his battle with protesters — they have been demanding his resignation for over a month and vow to keep protesting till he’s gone. Lucky for Saak, riot police are still loyal to him and broke up an anti-NATO rally by thousands converging on parliament on the eve of the games.

According to Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin, Saakashvili “has long been aiming to bring Georgia’s domestic conflict to the international level. It’s for this reason that he shot down our military — to draw us into the August war. It’s for this reason that he wanted American marines to come to Georgia, to draw Americans into that war. This man is dangerous for the world,” Rogozin said. In support of the US darling, Democratic Senator John Kerry and Republican Congressman David Dreier (note the bipartisan unity) are calling for a free trade agreement with Georgia.

NATO is busy as a bee these days. Apart from its centerpiece, Afghanistan, where deaths of both Afghans and occupiers are increasing daily, and practicing for God-knows-what in Georgia, it was recently flexing its naval muscle in neighboring Turkey, where delegates from 27 countries just wrapped up NATO’s annual Maritime Commanders Meeting (MARCOMET 2009). Its theme this year was “The Future Security Environment — Implications for Navies” and was focused on terrorism, piracy and conflicts deriving from energy and resources issues. No doubt it will be deploying forces on the Horn of Africa soon pursuing those pesky pirates.

Prague is also a hive of activity these days. It hosted a meeting of the Eastern Partnership (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova) 7 May, followed by a summit dubbed “Southern Corridor — New Silk Road of European and Central Asian countries,” seeking a non-Russian route for gas imports from Central Asia. The summit participants included Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iraq and Turkey. The Czech EU official said that after years of wavering, Europe had no time to lose in securing alternatives to Russian gas.

If the intent in all this is to make Russia mad, it is working. On the first day of the Georgian military exercise, Russia expelled two NATO envoys. Rogozin stated that his country would not attend a NATO military meeting planned for this week. Russian lawmaker Sergei Abeltsev has floated the idea of a response to the NATO move that would entail Cuba and Venezuela taking part in “large-scale drills” in the Caribbean Sea on 2 July. Nicaragua intends to buy Russian aircraft and helicopters for its armed forces, and will be sure to join in.

The battleground between East and West these days thus includes not only Georgia, but the Czech Republic, Poland and the Baltics. Not only is US President Barack Obama continuing Bush’s policy of provoking Russia in Georgia, but he made no indication in his first 100 days that he would reverse the planned Star Wars missile bases in the Czech Republic and Poland. Fortunately grassroots Czech opposition to the proposed base resulted in the defeat of the conservative government and it looks like the Czech base will not go ahead. Strong opposition in Poland has so far not managed to make a similar political inroad.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the US of using the Iran issue as a pretext to set up its missile shield in Russia ’s backyard. “The way it is designed has nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear program. It is aimed at Russian strategic forces, deployed in the European part of the Russian Federation,” Lavrov told Euronews. “We are being very frank about this with our American colleagues and hope that our arguments are heard. Iran’s nuclear program is a separate issue. We approach it according to a key principal — preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.”

As if the Czech government’s anti-Russian conferences and the war games aren’t enough, the Czech air force are now “protecting” the airspace of the three Baltic NATO members, the first time that the Czech military’s tactical air force has been deployed in a foreign operation since the end of WWII. The Czech aircraft will be ready to take action in case of a military threat to the Baltic countries and to provide them with help.

But what “threat” is there in the Baltics, other than one invented by trigger-happy NATO planners playing yet more war “games” with Russia?

This scheming has not gone unnoticed by Moscow. “We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new Cold War, but we don’t want one,” Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said recently. In The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted that the only countries Russia could convince to join a defense pact might be Belarus and Tajikistan. But the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) founded in 2002 in reaction to NATO expansion eastward now includes not only Belarus and Tajikistan, but Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia.

It, along with the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), the Russia-Belarus Union State and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are natural developments by countries concerned about what the US and NATO are really up to. Russian General Leonid Ivashov, vice-president of the Academy of Geopolitical Science, says there is a need “to neutralize the spread of NATO’s influence not only to Central Asia but also to East and Southeast Asia,” adding that this “won’t be of an aggressive or offensive nature; it will be a deterrent.”

Relations with the SCO are developing, and just a few months ago, it was reported that the CSTO will have its own Joint Rapid Reaction Force which could be used to protect its members from military aggression, defend critical infrastructure and fight terrorism and organized crime. Russia and Kazakhstan are the key movers in the CSTO and managed to obtain a 25 per cent growth in this year’s budget.

There are problems. First, the standoff between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with the latter inching towards NATO membership in reaction to Russian support for the former. And then there’s Uzbekistan. President Islam Karimov was initially very pro-US and anti-Russian, but after being spurned by the West over the brutal suppression of demonstrations in 2005, he quickly made up with Russia and even joined the CSTO in 2006. However, human rights have never interfered with US strategic thinking in the past, and there are signs that Karimov is flirting with the West once again. He has also signed a military cooperation agreement with Azerbaijan, and is withdrawing from EurAsEC, adding to the confusion.

What Moscow would really like is for Ukraine to join the CSTO. And why not? If such pacts are truly defensive, then this makes perfect sense. What conceivable role does NATO play so far from the Atlantic, except as a forward base for the US ? Ukraine in the CSTO would give it clout where it counts — with its big and vital neighbor. Ukraine in NATO can only be a serious cause of tension with Russia. As Egyptians say, “Your neighbor is closer than your mother.”

While things look grim these days from Moscow, the EU/NATO machinations are far from yielding results. Euro “partners” Armenia and Azerbaijan are in a state of war; Belarus and Moldova leaders have no illusions about Euro intentions and did not attend the EP fest in Prague, despite the 600 million euros being thrown around. And signs of reaction to NATO’s nosiness are setting in. In a poll by the US government funded International Republican Institute (IRI) only 63 percent of Georgian respondents back NATO accession, down from the 87 percent the IRI recorded last September. Keep in mind the bias of an organization like the IRI and imagine likely statistics if such a poll were carried out by a real NGO like, say, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or StopNATO. What is telling in the IRI poll is the massive shift away from NATO membership in the past six months.

And then there’s Ukraine. The district council of its second largest city, Kharkov, has just called for a ban on all NATO-related organizations and activities pending a nationwide referendum on Kiev’s membership in the alliance. A statement circulated by the council last week denounced any violations of Ukraine’s bloc-free status. The protest by the deputies followed the opening in April this year of a Euro-Atlantic cooperation (read: NATO) centre at Economics and Law University in Kharkov.

Obama has yet to make any of the hard choices he faces. He caved in to the bankers, and his health plan is being vetted by the health insurance industry to prevent the single-payer system, by far the cheapest and most comprehensive. He appears to be letting the Bush torturers off the hook and continuing their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he can’t finesse Russia so easily. Russia will not cooperate on Afghanistan or arms treaties if he continues the foolish and dangerous meddling in Eastern Europe under the pretense of supporting “democracy and freedom.” The current games can only be interpreted by Moscow as a replay — hopefully farcical — of the Nazis in Georgia in WWII, which will strengthen their resolve to keep the enemy at bay.

The people do indeed look at Washington and know that this city is ‘badly’ broken, Senator Kerry. The public confidence in our Congress has been declining drastically. Recent poll results highlight how the American people’s trust in their congress has hit rock bottom. A survey of progressive blogs easily confirms the rage rightfully directed at our congress for abdicating its role of oversight and accountability. Activists scream about promised hearings that never took place — without explanation. They express outrage when investigations are dropped without any justification. And they genuinely wonder out loud why, especially after they helped secure a major victory for the Democrats. The same Democrats who had for years pointed fingers at their big bad Republican majority colleagues as the main impediment preventing them from fulfilling what was expected of them.

The recent stunning but not unexpected revelations regarding Jane Harman by the Congressional Quarterly provide us with a little glimpse into one of the main reasons behind the steady decline in congress’s integrity. But the story is almost dead — ready to bite the dust, thanks to our mainstream media’s insistence on burying ‘real’ issues or stories that delve deep into the causes of our nation’s continuous downward slide. In this particular case, the ‘thank you’ should also be extended to certain blogosphere propagandists who, blinded by their partisanship, myopic in their assessments, and ignorant in their knowledge of the inner workings of our late congress and intelligence agencies, helped in the post-burial cremation of this case.

Ironically but understandably, the Harman case has become one of rare unequivocal bipartisanship, when no one from either side of the partisan isle utters a word. How many House or Senate Republicans have you heard screaming, or even better, calling for an investigation? The right wing remains silent. Some may have their hand, directly or indirectly, in the same AIPAC cookie jar. Others may still feel the heavy baggage of their own party’s tainted colleagues; after all, they have had their share of Abramoffs, Hasterts and the like, silently lurking in the background, albeit dimmer every day. Some on the left, after an initial silence that easily could have been mistaken for shock, are jumping from one foot to the other, like a cat on a hot tin roof, making one excuse after another; playing the ‘victims of Executive Branch eavesdropping’ card, the same very ‘evil doing’ they happened to support vehemently. Some have been dialing their trusted guardian angels within the mainstream media and certain fairly visible alternative outlets. They need no longer worry, since these guardian angels seem to have blacked out the story, and have done so without much arm twisting.

Hastert Redux

I am going to rewind and take you back to September 2005, when Vanity Fair published an article, which in addition to my case and the plight of National Security Whistleblowers, exposed the dark side of the then Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and the corroborated allegations of his illegal activities involving foreign agents and interests.

Vanity Fair printed the story only after they made certain they were on sure footing in the face of any possible libel by lining up more than five credible sources, and after triple pit bull style fact-checking. They were vindicated; Hastert did not dare go after them, nor did he ever issue any true denial. Moreover, further vindication occurred only a month ago. On April 10, 2009, The Hill reported that the Former Speaker of the House was contracted to lobby for Turkey. The Justice Department record on this deal indicates that Hastert will now be “principally involved” on a $35,000-a-month contract providing representation for Turkish interests. That seems to be the current arrangement for those serving foreign interests while on the job in congress — to be paid at a later date, collecting on their IOU’s when they secure their positions with ‘the foreign lobby.’

In a recent article for the American Conservative Magazine, Philip Giraldi, Former CIA Officer stationed in Turkey, made the following point:” Edmonds’s claims have never been pursued, presumably because there are so many skeletons in both parties’ closets. She has been served with a state-secrets gag order to make sure that what she knows is never revealed, a restriction that the new regime in Washington has not lifted.” He hits the nail on the head:” In Hastert’s case, it certainly should be a matter of public concern that a senior elected representative who may have received money from a foreign country is now officially lobbying on its behalf. How many other congressmen might have similar relationships with foreign countries and lobbying groups, providing them with golden parachutes for their retirement?”

The congress went mum on my case after the Vanity Fair story, with, of course, the mainstream media making it very easy for them. They turned bipartisan in not pursuing the case, just as with the Harman case, and similarly, the mainstream media happily let it disappear. At the time I was not aware that during the publication of the Hastert story, Jane Harman’s AIPAC case was already brewing in the background. Moreover, one of the very few people in congress who was notified about Harman was none other than Hastert, the man himself. The same Hastert, who in addition to being one of several officials targeted by the FBI counterintelligence and counterespionage investigations, was also known to be directly involved in several other high profile scandals: from his intimate involvement in the Abramoff scandal, to the Representative William Jefferson scandal ; from his ‘Land Deal’ scandal — where he cashed in millions off his position while “serving”, to the 2006 House Page scandal.

All for One, One for All

How does it work? How do these people escape accountability, the consequences? Are we talking about the possible use of blackmail by the Executive Branch against congressional representatives, as if Hoover’s days were never over? Cases such as NSA illegal eavesdropping come to mind, when congressional members were briefed long before it became public, yet none took any action or even uttered a word; members of both parties. Or is it more likely to be a case of secondhand blackmail, where members of congress keep tabs on each other? Or, is it a combination of the above? Regardless, we see this ‘one for all, all for one’ kind of solidarity in congress when it comes to criminal conduct and scandals such as those of Hastert and Harman.

Although at an initial glance, based on the wiretapping angle, the Harman case may appear to involve blackmailing, or a milder version, exploitation, of congress by the Executive Branch, deeper analysis would suggest even further implications, where congressional members themselves use the incriminating information against each other to prevent pursuit or investigation of cases that they may be directly or indirectly involved in. Let me give you an example based on the Hastert case mentioned earlier:

In 2004 and 2005 I had several meetings with Representative Henry Waxman’s investigative and legal staff. Two of these meetings took place inside a SCIF, where details and classified information pertaining to my case and those involved could be discussed. I was told, and at the time I believed it to be the case, that the Republican majority was preventing further action — such as holding a public hearing. Once the Democrats took over in 2006, that barrier was removed, or so I thought. In March 2007, I was contacted by one of Representative Waxman’s staff people who felt responsible and conscientious enough to at least let me know that there would never be a hearing into my case by their office, or for that matter, any Democratic office in the House. Based on his/her account, in February 2007 Waxman’s office was preparing the necessary ingredients for their promised hearing, but in mid March the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, called Waxman into a meeting on the case, and after Waxman came out of that twenty minute meeting, he told his staff ‘we are no longer involved in Edmonds’ case.’ And so they became ‘uninvolved.’

What was discussed during that meeting? The facts regarding the FBI’s pursuit of Hastert and certain other representatives were bound to come out in any congressional hearing into my case. Now we know that Hastert and Pelosi were both informed of Harman’s role in a related case involving counterespionage investigation of AIPAC. Is it possible that Pelosi asked Waxman to lay off my case in order to protect a few of their own in an equally scandalous case? Was there a deal made between the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House to keep this and other related scandals hushed? Will we ever know the answer to these questions? Most likely not, considering the current state of our mainstream media. And the victims remain the same: The American people who have entrusted the role of ensuring oversight and accountability with their congress. This kind of infestation touches everyone in congress; one need not have a skeleton of his own to get sucked into the swamp of those infested. Does Waxman have to be a sinner to take part in the sin committed by the Hasterts and Harmans of congress? Certainly not. On the other hand, he and others like him will abide by the un-pledged oath of ‘solidarity with your party members’ and ‘loyalty to your dear colleagues.’

Back to the enablers: How can we explain the continued blackout by the mainstream media, and/or, logic-less defenses of the Harmans and Hasterts alike by the apologist spinners — some of whom pass as the ‘alternative’ media? Some are committing what they rightfully accused the previous administration and their pawns of doing: cherry picking the facts, then, spin, spin, and spin until the real issue becomes blurry and unrecognizable. The conspiracy angle aimed at the timing; Porter Goss’ possible beef with Jane Harman; accusing the truth divulgers, CQ sources, of being ‘conspirators’ with ulterior motives; portraying Harman as an outspoken vigilante on torture. And if those sound too lame to swallow, they throw in a few evil names from the foggy past of Dusty the Foggo man! If the issue and its implications weren’t so serious, these spins of reality would certainly make a Pulitzer worthy satire.

Let’s take the issue of timing. First of all, the story was reported, albeit not comprehensively, by Time Magazine years ago. It took a tenacious journalist, more importantly a journalist that could have been trusted by the Intel sources to give it real coverage. It is also possible that the sources for the Harman case got fed up and disillusioned by the absence of a real investigation and decided to ‘really’ talk. After all, the AIPAC court case was dropped by the Justice Department’s prosecutors within two weeks of the Harman revelations. Same could be said about the Hastert story. At the time, many asked why the story was not told during the earlier stages of my case. It took three years for me and other FBI and DOJ sources to exhaust all channels; congressional inquiry, IG investigation, and the courts. Those who initially were not willing to come forward and corroborate the details opened up to the Vanity Fair journalist, David Rose, in 2005.

Now let’s look at the ‘blackmail’ and ‘Goss’ Plot’ angles. Of course the ‘blackmail’ scenario is possible; in fact, highly possible. We all can picture one of the President’s men in the White House pulling an opposing congressional member aside and whispering ‘if I were you, congressman, I’d stop pushing. I understand, as we speak, my Justice Department is looking into certain activities you’ve been engaged in . . . .’ We all can imagine, easily, a head of the Justice Department, having a ‘discreet’ meeting with a representative who’s been pushing for a certain investigation of certain department officials for criminal deeds, and saying, ‘dear congresswoman, we are aware of your role in a certain scandal, and are still pondering whether we should turn this into a direct investigation of you and appoint a special prosecutor…’ But, let’s not forget, the misuse of incriminating information to blackmail does not make the practitioner of the wrong deed a victim, nor does it make the wrong or criminal deed less wrong. Instead of spinning the story, taking away attention from the facts in hand, and making Harman a victim, we must focus on this case, on Harman, as an example of a very serious disease that has infected our congress for way too long. Those who have been entrusted with the oversight and accountability of our government cannot do so if they are vulnerable to such blackmails from the very same people they are overseeing . . . Period. Those who have been elected to represent the people and their interests cannot pursue their own greed and ambitions by engaging in criminal or unethical activities against the interests of the same people they’ve sworn to represent, and be given a pass.

As for far-reaching ties such as Harman’s stand on torture, or specific beef with Porter Goss, or wild shooting from the hip by bringing up mafia-like characters such as Dusty Foggo; please don’t make us laugh! Are we talking about the same Hawkish Pro Secrecy Jane Harman here?! Harman’s staunch support of NSA Wiretapping of Americans, the FISA Amendment of 2008, the Patriot ACT, the war with Iraq, and many other activities on the Civil Liberties’ No No-list, is known by everyone. But, apparently not by the authors of these recent spins! And, let’s not forget to add her long-term cozy relationship with AIPAC, and the large donations she’s received from various AIPAC-related pro Israeli PACs. To these certain ‘wannabe’ journalists driven by far from pure agenda(s), shame on you; as for honor-worthy vigilant activists out there: watch out for these impostors with their newly gained popularity among those tainted in Washington, and take a hard look at whose agendas they are a mouthpiece for.

Despite a certain degree of exposure cases such as Harman and Hastert, involving corruption of public officials, seem to meet the same dead-end, literally dead. Powerful foreign entities’ criminal conduct against our national interest is given a pass as was recently proven by the AIPAC case. The absence of real investigative journalism and the pattern of blackout by our mainstream media are known universally and seem to have been accepted as a fact of life. Pursuit of cases such as mine via cosmetically available channels has been and continues to be proven futile for whistleblowers. Then, you may want to ask, why in the world am I writing this piece? Because more and more people, although not nearly enough, are coming to the realization that our system is rotten at it’s core; that in many cases we have been trying to deal with the symptoms rather than the cause. I, like many others, believed that changing the congressional majority in 2006 was going to bring about some of the needed changes; the pursuit of accountability being one. We were proven wrong. In 2008, many genuinely bought in to the promise of change, and thus far, they’ve been let down. These experiences are disheartening, surely, but they are also eye-opening. I do see many vigilant activists who continue the fight, and as long as that’s the case, there is hope. More people realize that real change will require not replacing one or two or three, but many more. More people are coming to understand that the road to achieving government of the people passes through a congress, but not the one currently occupied by the many crusty charlatans who represent only self-interest — achieved by representing the interests of those other than the majority of the people of this nation. And so I write.

Here I go again, rather than ending this in a long paragraph or two, I will let another long-gone man do it shortly and effectively “If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can’t protect themselves against the evil temptations of lobbyists, we don’t need to change our lobbies, we need to change our representatives.” — Will Rogers

The idea that a stateless organization such as Al-Qaeda can be defeated by occupying those regions of the world where it is supposedly headquartered seems foolish. The idea that killing people who live in those regions will further the first idea is equally foolish, of questionable strategic sense, and morally wrong. The predominant argument given by George Bush when US forces attacked Afghanistan in 2001 was that the Taliban government provided a haven to Al-Qaeda. Therefore, the entire nation of Afghanistan and its people deserved whatever death Washington rained down on them. This simplistic logic never allowed for the fact that it was quite likely that many Afghans did not support the Taliban. Nor did it acknowledge the obvious question of how bombing villages and cities would cause the capture of the Al-Qaeda leadership. Furthermore, the plan to launch an invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by belligerent foreign forces ignored the resentment such an action would bring.

Now, seven and a half years later, the occupying troops and Afghan people live with the results of Washington’s response. Occupying troops get killed regularly by villagers, Afghan policemen, Taliban forces, and Afghans aligned with other militias. Afghans face a daily struggle negotiating the ins and outs of life in an occupied country where any element of the armed forces around them–occupying troops, mercenaries, Taliban, members of the US-installed Afghan security forces, or criminals–can make their lives even more miserable. On top of this, the majority of Afghans live in impoverished conditions made worse by years of war. Given these conditions, it is no surprise that Afghan militias opposed to the occupiers are gaining ground. They provide security to ordinary Afghans while appealing to their desire to see the occupying troops leave. It’s not that Afghans necessarily accept the fundamentalist doctrines of these militias (Taliban and others) as much as it is that they share a common understanding as Afghans. A somewhat appropriate metaphor regarding Afghans’ support of these militias might be found in the situation vis-a-vis Hamas in Gaza. Many Palestinians do not support Hamas’ religious agenda, but see them as the only political organization that shares their desire to end the Israeli domination of Palestine and is willing to fight for that end. Obviously, there are great differences between the two sets of circumstances, but I believe the analogy holds up in a very basic way.

Likewise, the people in the so-called tribal regions of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) resent the presence of foreign troops and unmanned rockets in their neighborhood. Consequently, they have opposed their presence, often with armed force. In addition, they have decided to align themselves with the Taliban and others in the region that oppose the foreign presence as well. Unlike Afghanistan, where the Karzai government in Kabul serves at the pleasure of Washington, the government in Islamabad has occasionally been more vocal than Mr. Karzai (who has expressed his own displeasure on occasion) in its opposition to the US forays across its border into the NWFP. This has not prevented Washington from launching its unmanned rockets into the region, but it may have prevented more helicopter and ground forays like the one in fall 2008. It remains safe to assume, however, that the Pakistani government will accede to Obama’s plans for the region and allow US forces to operate when and where they want to.

According to Obama, “Washington has a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” Now, Al-Qaeda may or may not be planning to attack targets in the United States, like Mr. Obama claimed in his speech. The fact that this possibility continues to be used as justification for not only occupying Afghanistan, but for escalating the military operation there (and expanding it deeper into Pakistan), proves the fallacy of this strategy, if the true intent is what Obama says it is. No matter how much Mr. Obama and his advisors wish it to be otherwise, continuing the current strategy of occupation and escalation will not cause those Afghans opposed to the presence of US troops to end their opposition. Therefore, it is unlikely to cause the end of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, no matter how badly many of us wish that it would. The likelihood that Washington’s strategy will not accomplish the goals elucidated by Mr. Obama (and by George Bush in 2001) points to the possibility that those goals are not the true intention of Washington in the region. Could it be that the goals Mr. Obama explicitly denied (and I quote) — “We are not in Afghanistan to control that country or to dictate its future” — are the true ones? Only then does his escalation of the battle there begin to make sense.

The covert and overt interventionist actions of the U.S. to overthrow democratically elected governments, to crush national liberation struggles, and to prop-up brutal despotic regimes across the world exposes the complete bankruptcy of the U.S. claim that it is an ardent champion of “freedom” and “democracy”. The U.S. exploits in this regard have been well documented by veteran journalist William Blum in his books titled Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Common Courage Press, Monroe, USA, 2003 & 2005). Allusions to “freedom” and “democracy” provide a convenient cover for vested interests in the U.S. to corner USA’s national wealth and for advancing the imperialistic goals of the same sections abroad!

Since WW-II alone, the U.S. has time and again covertly or militarily intervened and unlawfully overthrown democratically elected governments in Iran (1953); Guatemala (1954, 1963 and 1968); Congo (1960); Dominican Republic (1965); Indonesia (1965); Ghana (1966); Chile (1973); Granada (1983); and in Haiti (2004). The U.S. (with or without its British/Zionist ally) has also time and again attempted to crush national liberation struggles and progressive movements in Greece (1947-49), Palestine (1948-2009), Philippines (1948-54), Malaysia (1948-55), Puerto Rico (1950), Korea (1950-53), Kenya (1952-59), Egypt (1956 and 1967), Lebanon (1958, 1982 and 2006), Vietnam (1960-75), Cuba (1961), Cambodia (1969-75), Laos (1971-73), Angola (1976-92), Afghanistan (1978-1990), Nicaragua (1981-90), Venezuela (2004), and in several other countries at various times.

Furthermore, the US has consistently backed and aided the world’s most brutal dictatorships: Gen. Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930-61), Salazar in Portugal (1932-68), the monarchy in Saudi Arabia (1932-2009), Gen. Franco in Spain (1936-75), the Samozas in Nicaragua (1937-79), the racists in South Africa (1948-1990), the Zionists in Israel (1948-2009), the junta in South Korea (1948-87), Gen. Batista in Cuba (1952-1959), the Shah in Iran (1953-79), Gen. Rojas Pinilla in Colombia (1954-58), Gen. Stroessner in Paraguay (1954-1989), the junta in South Vietnam (1954-75), the Duvaliers in Haiti (1957-86), Gen. Suharto in Indonesia (1965-1998), Marcos in the Philippines (1966-86), the junta in Greece (1967-1973), Gen. Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990), and several other despotic regimes.

The defeat suffered by the U.S. military in Vietnam in 1975 and the collapse of Portuguese imperialism the same year, drove the U.S. to complete desperation; they could not conceive of anything else but of adopting terror as a strategy to contain national liberation movements. This strategy for furthering U.S. imperialist interests, which did not entail loss of American lives, has been well described by Prof. Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University, New York, in his book titled Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon, New York, 2004). Summarising the points he has made in his book, Prof. Mamdani in an interview to New York based e-journal AsiaSource on 05 May 2004 stated as follows:

Terror emerges as a strategy of the US after defeat in Vietnam, when it is on the verge of losing the Cold War. The strategy comes to a head with the Reagan administration, which throws overboard the language of “peaceful coexistence”, now demanding an agenda to “rollback” the Soviet Union…. Ronald Reagan ideologized proxy war in a religious idiom. Reagan ideologized the Cold War as a war against “evil”, against the “Evil Empire.”…. you cannot convert evil, you have to eliminate evil. In that titanic battle, any alliance is justified…. It was under the American protective umbrella that apartheid South Africa created Africa’s first genuine terrorist movement: Renamo in Mozambique, which was genuinely terrorist in the sense that it was not interested in fighting the military, its focus was on targeting civilians as a way of demonstrating that an independent African government was incapable of protecting its citizens.

The U.S. adopted the same strategy in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. According to Prof. Mamdani:

Whereas the US was an understudy in Mozambique, its embrace of terror became direct and brazen after the Sandinista Revolution of 1979. In Nicaragua, the US created a terrorist movement called Contras, more or less as apartheid South Africa had created Renamo in Mozambique, also from scratch. The lessons it learnt from southern Africa and Central America were put into practice in Afghanistan in the concluding phase of the Cold War.

There was also a direct link between undeclared/proxy wars and the drug trade. As Prof. Mamdani puts it:

The reason was simple: if you don’t declare war, you don’t have access to public funds to wage it. The search for funds to wage an undeclared war time and again led the CIA into an embrace of the underworld, particularly the drug lords. The Afghan war exemplified the extreme development of two tendencies: one, the ideologization of war in a religious idiom, and two, its privatization.

As a result, as Prof. Mamdani points out:

The war in Afghanistan was justified as a global jihad. To wage it, the CIA recruited volunteers globally; Muslims everywhere, in the US, in Britain, all over the world, were invited to participate in this global war. The CIA was busy creating cells everywhere, the nuclei of the same cells they are busy trying to smash today as a network of terror…. The Islamist network was both global and private. What we are reaping today is the whirlwind.¹

Under the guise of spreading “freedom” and “democracy,” the U.S. establishment consciously chose to arm and fund in Afghanistan the most anti-democratic, anti-women, and ultra-conservative elements of society, who were projected as “jihadies” fighting for a just cause, in order to contain what the U.S. called “Soviet expansionism.” With the demise of the Soviet Union, which committed hara-kiri, the U.S. establishment has found a readymade “enemy” in the “jihadies” who have now chosen to bite the hand that fed them. Thus, the very forces, which are instrumental in aiding and abetting terrorism the world over, are today purportedly waging war against those very same terrorist networks. It is so obvious that without an omnipresent and everlasting “enemy”, the U.S. leadership will be hard put to divert attention away from the social crises at home and to justify the existence of a huge military establishment with its worldwide network of military bases and a questionable military alliance in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Curiously enough, while seemingly waging the never-ending war against terror abroad, there has been a concurrent curtailment of “freedom” and “democratic rights” at home.

Onslaught on Civil Rights

When universal suffrage was beginning to become a reality and the moment it appeared that all hindrances to the exercise of democratic rights by all U.S. citizens were being practically removed, the 9/11 attack and its aftermath provided the requisite justification for enacting the USA PATRIOT Act. The “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001″ is anything but a “patriotic” initiative as it was being made out. Incidentally, the PATRIOT Act was already in the pipeline before 9/11, which raises questions regarding the real motives behind its enactment!

The adverse impact of the PATRIOT Act across the U.S. has been well documented and analysed by Dr. Walter M. Brasch, professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, in his book titled America’s Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government’s Violation Of Constitutional And Civil Rights. In the preface to the book, Dr. Brasch points out that:

In the Bush–Cheney era, dissent is not tolerated; jingoism is encouraged…. In Columbia, South Carolina, a fifty-four-year-old man was arrested for carrying a sign, “No More War for Oil”…. On Independence Day, 2004, at an official presidential appearance, two people were arrested when they refused to turn their T-shirts inside out so an anti-Bush message didn’t appear. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, a woman was ordered to remove a small metal peace button from her lapel. In Hamilton, New Jersey, where Laura Bush was rallying the faithful to support the war in Iraq, a mother whose son was killed in Iraq was escorted out because she wore a T-shirt that declared, “President Bush You Killed My Son,” and had the audacity to ask what the Republicans believed was a hostile question. Outside the auditorium, while talking with a reporter, she was ordered to leave, didn’t do so, and then was handcuffed and arrested on defiant trespass charges. In Medford, Oregon, three peaceful women were thrown out of a campaign rally, and then threatened with arrests. Their offense? They wore T-shirts that said, “Protect Our Civil Liberties.” Their cases are just a few of thousands throughout the country.

Furthermore, according to Dr. Brasch:

Throughout the country, libraries have put up signs warning that the FBI, under authority of the PATRIOT Act, may seize library records to determine reading habits of patrons. The congressional authority extends to bookstores, physicians’ offices, grocery stores, Internet service providers, and virtually any business or organization that has personal data of customers.

Essentially, what this meant was that:

Enforcement of the PATRIOT Act butts against the protections of six amendments to the Constitution: the First (freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances), Fourth (freedom from unreasonable searches), Fifth (right against self-incrimination and due process), Sixth (due process, the right to counsel, a speedy trial, and the right to a fair and public trial by an impartial jury), Eighth (reasonable bail and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment), and Fourteenth (equal protection guarantee for both citizens and non-citizens).²

Later, in an interview to Monthly Review on 22 July 2005, Dr. Brasch stated that:

…this administration has repeatedly used 9/11 to justify even greater restrictions upon Constitutional rights, while making it appear it is doing its best to protect Americans from terrorists…. Under the way the current administration can enforce the PATRIOT Act, Americans are all considered guilty until proven innocent.

According to Dr. Brasch, among dozens of national organizations that uncover abuses and fight for the preservation of U.S. constitutional and civil rights are the following: American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; American Civil Liberties Union; American Library Association; Bill of Rights Defense Committee; Center for Constitutional Rights; Center for Democracy and Technology; Electronic Frontier Foundation; Electronic Privacy Information Center; Free Congress Foundation; Free Expression Policy Project; National Coalition to Repeal the Patriot Act; Open the Government, and People for the American Way; all of which have challenged how the PATRIOT Act is being enforced.

Immediately after the enactment of the PATRIOT Act, President Bush, on 13 November 2001, issued what is known as Military Order No.1. In response to this Order, Michael Ratner, a human rights attorney and the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in an article titled “November 13, 2001: Coup D’etat in America” stated that:

…it is a day, as they say, that should live in infamy. On that date in 2001, two months after 9/11, President Bush issued Military Order Number 1. … the President claimed the authority to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest any non-citizen (it was later extended to citizens) anywhere in the world including the United States whom the President believed was involved in international terrorism and hold them forever without any charges, proceedings or trial…. This order embodies within it the violations of fundamental rights we are facing today: indefinite detention without trial, Guantanamo, secret sites, special trials and disappearances…. Let’s also repeat: this was a military order in a society and country that was still or purported to be under civilian rule. This order more then any other single document embodies our lost liberties.³

Gregory T. Nojeim, a Senior Counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology (Washington D.C.) brought these disturbing developments to the notice of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution on 01 October 2008. In a deposition titled “Restoring the Rule of Law”, he expressed his concern that:

Privacy, one of our most fundamental rights, recently has been dramatically eroded as a result not only of policy failures stemming from the response to September 11, but also because our privacy laws and policies have not kept pace with advances in technology…. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, laws and policies have been adopted that unnecessarily weaken privacy rights and other constitutional liberties. The government has adopted data mining techniques, expanded electronic surveillance, and launched new identification programs without adequate safeguards for the rights of Americans.

Towards a Police State

Already several concerned individuals have been expressing the fear that attempts were being made to slowly turn the U.S. into a police state. Certain foreign observers too have commented on the unexpected turn of events. One of the first foreigners to make an adverse comment about the disturbing development that was taking place in the U.S. was a German diplomat, Jürgen Chrobog, who was the German Ambassador to the U.S. from 1995 to 2001 and later State Secretary in the Federal Foreign Office. According to a news report titled “Envoy dubs US a police state,” which was published in The Times (London) on 06 May 2003, Mr. Chrobog “was reported to have told Foreign Ministry colleagues that America was turning into a ‘police state.’”

Among the first in the U.S. to raise the question “Is America Becoming a Police State?” was Ron Paul a conservative Congressman from Texas, who later became the fourth placed candidate in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries. In his column “Texas Straight Talk” on 20 December 2004, Mr. Paul pointed out that:

The question is no longer rhetorical. We are not yet living in a total police state, but it is fast approaching…. The atmosphere since 2001 has permitted Congress to create whole new departments and agencies that purport to make us safer – always at the expense of our liberty…. Unfortunately, the new intelligence bill passed by Congress two weeks ago moves us closer to an encroaching police state…. Those who believe a police state can’t happen here are poor students of history.

An overview of the major legislations that have been enacted post 9/11 and which impinge on the democratic rights of U.S. citizens was brought out in 2007 in an article by Stephen Lendman titled “Police State America.” According to Lendman, a research associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (Montreal):

’Police state America’ has been in the works a long time, and it now may be near the boiling point…. The nation is at war and laws are in place that end constitutional protections, militarize the country, repress dissent, and our government is empowered to crush freedom and defend privilege from beneficial social change it won’t tolerate. It’s the price of imperial arrogance we the people are paying, and that won’t end until the spirit of resistance gets aroused enough to stop it in our own self-defense.

While few articles of this kind ever get published in the mainstream print media or are referred to in the audio-visual media, a whole lot of such articles are circulating over the Internet. Numerous books have also been written regarding the unprecedented growth of authoritarianism under the Bush Administration. These include the following:

Elaine Cassel, (Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, 2004). It has been reviewed as follows: “Offering sharp critiques of the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts, Cassel argues that Bush and Ashcroft have dangerously curtailed Americans’ freedom of speech and religion, their right to a fair trial, and their protection from torture and unreasonable search and seizure. She astutely criticizes the “continued expansion of the word terrorism,” which now encompasses, she says, “any opponent of government policy.” –Publishers Weekly, New York.

C. William Michaels, No Greater Threat: America After September 11 and the Rise of a National Security State (Algora, New York, 2005), which has been reviewed as follows: “In this very important study, C. W. Michaels gives us a unique guide and commentary, based on meticulous research, to the ominous growth of the national security state. His analysis of the USA PATRIOT Act is immensely useful and a wake up call for all Americans concerned with defending our civil liberties.” –Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States.

Joe Conason, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 2007), which has been reviewed as follows: according to Conason: “…fascism can indeed take root and blossom in the U.S. if Americans aren’t more vigilant about freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Although we are not facing full-blown fascism, Conason sees a “gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule” for the first time since the Nixon administration. He explores how and why… an increasingly secretive Bush administration usurp the power of the legislature and disregard provisions of the Constitution by stoking fear of terrorism.” –BOOKLIST, the review journal of the American Library Association.

Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont, USA, 2007), which has been reviewed as follows: “You will be shocked and disturbed by this book. Most Americans reject outright any comparison of post 9/11 America with the fascism and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany or Pinochet’s Chile. Sadly, the parallels and similarities, what Wolf calls the ‘echoes’ between those societies and America today, are all too compelling.” –Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York.

Naomi Wolf is a noted feminist writer and lately a supporter of President Barak Obama. In an article titled “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps,” which was published in the Guardian (London) on 24 April 2007, Naomi Wolf wrote:

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable – as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise. Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

These ominous changes have taken place in the U.S., especially in the last eight years. At the beginning of this essay, a reference was made to the unsavoury incident that Bela Malik et al. had to endure. However, it is now evident that the manner in which pressure was brought to bear on Bela Malik and her friends on 02 March 2006 in New Delhi in order to prevent them from expressing their anger at the ongoing war in Iraq during the visit of Laura Bush to a South Delhi Orphanage was nothing unique. Ever since 9/11, Bela Malik’s counterparts in the U.S. have had to endure far worse abuses due to the enactment of a series of legislations, which intrude into privacy in an unprecedented manner and thereby considerably interfere with exercise of constitutional rights. In the light of the realities of the situation as explained above, tall claims of the U.S. being the “world’s oldest democracy” and about its purported commitment to promotion of “freedom” and “human rights” are not only rather farfetched but also are an indication of the extent to which the Bush Administration had indulged in doublespeak. However, the myths created by the establishment tended to get credence because the mainstream print and audio-visual media, which are controlled by a few media conglomerates, widely propagate such myths as truths.

Media and Democracy

Largely due to the self-cultivated image, there is a popular misconception that news and views purveyed by the mass media is based on independent, objective and enlightened reportage. As one journalist recalls:

For more than a century, objectivity has been the dominant professional norm of the news media. It has at its heart the noble aim of presenting indisputable facts upon which everyone in society can agree, and build upon towards the goal of a better society… The uncorrupted ideal of objectivity, in the sense of reporters driving to dig out verified facts and present them fully and fairly, is indispensable in journalism…. During the 20th century, the ideal of objectivity in news coverage went from strength to strength… We think of objectivity as meaning neutral. But also balanced. Impartial. Non-partisan. Neutral. Accurate. Verified. Fair. Factual. Unemotional. Detached. Scientific. Reasoned. Unbiased.⁴

With such an exalted image of the media, at least at subconscious level, many people often form their opinions based on reports that appear in the print and audio-visual media. However, in reality, many a time the mainstream media tends to peddle partial truths, or even outright falsehood, as the whole truth – especially such news and views that are politically and socially sensitive. This is primarily because, as the saying goes, ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’! The fact is that a handful of media conglomerates control much of the global mass media; the exercise of monopoly control in the U.S. is even greater. The media oligarchs, who in turn hold definite political and social biases, invariably decide the content and form of the news and views that are broadcast. Propagation of politically and socially biased news and views, thus, have adverse impact on the collective consciousness.

Strong reaction against this negative trend arose in the 1970s. As Ulla Carlsson, Director, NORDICOM (The Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research, Göteborg University, Sweden) has pointed out:

Global flows of news and information were the subject of intense debate in international fora in the 1970s. News gathering and reporting has been controversial, both within nations and between nations…. The United Nations, and UNESCO in particular, were the prime arenas where these issues were thrashed out…. The issue of a new international information order is bound up with ideas about the role of communication in the development of societies, on the one hand, and the relations between developed and developing countries, on the other.⁵

Therefore, acceding to the demand of the non-aligned countries for a new international information order, UNESCO appointed a commission known as The International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems in 1977 to study all manner of problems of communication in the world. Sean MacBride, former Minister for External Affairs of Ireland and the then Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, officiated as Chair of the 16-member Commission. The Commission’s final report titled “Many Voices, One World. Communication and Society, Today and Tomorrow. Towards a New, More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order,” was submitted to UNESCO in 1980. The Report is popularly known as the MacBride Report.

According to Dr. Carlsson:

The Commission report stresses that it is not only about developing countries, but about the whole of humanity, because unless the necessary changes are made in all parts of the world, it will not be possible to attain freedom, reciprocity or independence in the exchange of information worldwide. The Commission confirmed the persistence of imbalances in news and information flows between countries and marked inequalities in the distribution of communication resources…. For the first time ever, a UNESCO document plainly stated that a few transnational companies controlled the international information system and that their control posed a threat to the cultural integrity and national independence of many countries.

Dr. Carlsson further added that:

The commercialization of information is harshly criticized, as is the expansion of advertising markets. The Commission stressed the importance of the social function of information. An important theme in the report throughout is, for that matter, an emphasis on the societal roles of information and the need for democratization of communication flows…. These demands [for the 4 Ds – Development, Democratization, Decolonization and Demonopolization] call for measures not only in the developing countries but, perhaps even more so, in the developed countries…. A lot of emphasis is put on the right to communicate, defined as ‘the right to be informed, the right to inform, the right to privacy, the right to participate in public communication’ at all levels – ‘international, national, local and individual’…. There was also a hint of the idea that the causes of underdevelopment might be found in the developed and the developing countries alike.⁵

The governments of USA and UK were furious with the MacBride Report. This was because the attack on media monopoly was construed as a direct attack on the interests of the wealthy classes.

One of the first to expose the extent of corporate control over the mass media in the U.S. was Ben Haig Bagdikian, who taught journalism and subsequently served as Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. His book titled The Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, Boston, 1983) warned about the adverse effects of corporate ownership in the media. The work has been updated six times (through 2000) before being rewritten and renamed The New Media Monopoly in 2004. During this period, according to the publishers, “the number of corporations controlling most of America’s daily newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, book publishers, and movie companies has dwindled from fifty to ten to five.”

In Ben Bagdikian’s analysis:

It is a handful of large media conglomerates that create the daily and nightly news world for a majority of Americans…. Our picture of reality does not burst upon us in one splendid revelation. It accumulates day by day and year by year in mostly unspectacular fragments from the world scene, produced mainly by the mass media. Our view of the real world is dynamic, cumulative, and self-correcting as long as there is a pattern of even-handedness in deciding which fragments are important. But when one important category of the fragments is filtered out, or included only vaguely, our view of the social-political world is deficient.

Another important publication on the subject was by Edward S. Herman (Professor Emeritus of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) & Noam Chomsky (Professor, Department of Linguistics & Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) titled Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon Books, New York, 1988). This seminal work is an attempt to show that:

contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order…. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

Prof. Noam Chomsky followed it up with a work titled Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Seven Stories Press, New York, 1997 & 2003). In this book, Prof. Chomsky

…reveals how falsification of history, suppression of information, and the promotion of vapid, empty concepts have become standard operating procedure for the leaders of the United States–both Democrats and Republicans–in their efforts to prevent citizens from raising awkward questions about U.S. policy.

Robert W. McChesney (Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois) is also a major contributor to the debate with his work titled Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (Seven Stories Press, New York, 1997). As Prof. McChesney points out:

… private control over media and communication is not a neutral or necessarily a benevolent proposition. The commercial basis of U.S. media has negative implications for the exercise of political democracy: it encourages a weak political culture that makes depoliticization, apathy and selfishness rational choices for the citizenry, and it permits the business and commercial interests that actually rule U.S. society to have inordinate influence over media content…. The right-wing assault on journalism and public broadcasting is not an isolated or exceptional phenomenon. It is part and parcel of a wholesale attack on all those institutions that possess some autonomy from the market and the rule of capital.

Thus, according to Prof. McChesney:

… so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible, across the board. The biggest problem facing all who challenge the prerogatives of corporate rule is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are never exposed to anything remotely close to a reasoned, coherent, consistent, democratic socialist, pro-labor, or even old-fashioned New Deal Democratic perspective. This is why, in the end, media reform is inexorably intertwined with broader social and political reform. They rise or fall together.

The present challenges facing the media were discussed at the third National Media Reform Conference in Minneapolis during 06-08 June 2008, “an event that brought together thousands of people dedicated to making America’s media system more democratic, diverse and accountable”. One of the keynote addresses were delivered by veteran journalist, Bill Moyers, a former White House Press Secretary in the Johnson Administration from 1965-67, a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award in 2006, and currently the host of a weekly public affairs series entitled Bill Moyers Journal on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). In a scathing attack on corporate media he noted that:

…our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders…

Referring to the war in Iraq he said:

…this Administration – with the complicity of the dominant media – conducted a political propaganda campaign, using erroneous and misleading intelligence to deceive Americans into supporting an unprovoked attack on another country… Sadly, the Fourth Estate became the Fifth Column of democracy, colluding with the powers-that-be in a “culture of deception”… that subverts the thing most necessary to freedom – the truth.

Moyers was equally appalled by the continued existence of poverty in the midst of plenty in the U.S. Expressing his concern in this regard, he said:

Extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a truly just society. Capitalism will breed great inequality that is destructive unless tempered by an intuition for equality which is the heart of democracy. When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people who have neither power nor privilege, you can no longer claim to have a representative government.

In Moyers view, many such critical issues escape the attention of the larger public because of media consolidation. According to him:

As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and broadcast outlets, news organizations are folded into entertainment divisions. The “news hole” in the print media shrinks to make room for ads, celebrities, nonsense, and propaganda, and the news we need to know slips from sight.

In short, the powerful role being played by the media in shaping public opinion cannot be overstated; the more and more it goes under monopoly control, the public is likely to have less and less access to the truth!

Conclusion

The analysis of the claim that the U.S. is the “world’s oldest democracy” has necessitated examination of various historical aspects from the formation of USA to the role of slavery, to the fate of American Indians, to the abolition movement, to the expansion of franchise, to the disenfranchising laws, to the civil rights movement, and to the voting rights act. It also necessitated analyses of the nature of the U.S. Constitution, the iniquitous development, the role of U.S. imperialism, the onslaught on civil rights, the threat of emergence of a police state, and the nature & role of the media in the U.S. All the evidences from the analyses negate the dubious claims of the U.S. establishment regarding its commitment to “freedom” and “democracy.”

As far as the current state of electoral laws and processes are concerned, the inferences drawn by Alexander Keysser from his analysis of the history of voting rights in the U.S. are especially noteworthy. According to him:

At the opening of the twenty-first century (and the new millennium), nearly all adult citizens of the United States are legally entitled to vote…. That it took so long for universal suffrage to be achieved reflects elements of our history that fit uneasily into the official portrait of the United States as the standard bearer of democracy and representative institutions. One such element…is that the right to vote has never been formally enshrined in our nation’s constitutional order.⁶

The range of choices offered to the public has been kept narrow, in part through the increasing institutionalization of the two-party system: rules governing ballot access limit the ability of dissident parties to mount national campaigns…. As a result, the voices of the more privileged are heard more loudly in the halls of governance, and the ideal of democracy – that all voices be heard equally – is consistently undermined.⁷

In addition, the role of money in elections is enormous. Campaigns, waged largely on television, have become extraordinarily expensive, and candidates who cannot raise larger war chests are doomed to failure…. Indeed, if current trends continue, the actual casting of ballots may be in danger of becoming a pro forma ritual designed to ratify the selection of candidates who have already won the fund raising contests…. No political system can claim to be democratic without universal suffrage, but a broad franchise alone cannot guarantee to each citizen an equal voice in politics and governance. The arrangements and institutions that surround the conduct of election… all can promote or vitiate the equality of political rights…. The current debate over campaign financing and the use of soft money can be viewed as the latest battle in the two-centuries war over the democratization of politics in the United States; at the movement, antidemocratic forces are winning that battle, and in so doing, are undercutting the achievements of universal suffrage.⁸

Keyssar’s warning eight years ago, that “antidemocratic forces are … undercutting the achievements of universal suffrage,” appears to be almost prophetic! Ever since the ascendancy of George W. Bush as the U.S. President in January 2001, through the highly disputed and controversial presidential election of 2000,⁹ there has been systematic erosion of civil rights in the U.S. The concerted attempt to curtail civil rights of U.S. citizens is an indication of the panic reaction from the side of the U.S. establishment, which is scared of the broadening of franchise and of the likely increased participation of the citizens at large in the decision-making processes. The spectre of “terrorism” is a convenient excuse to clampdown on all anti-establishment protests and to ensure that the restrictions neatly remain in place throughout the never-ending war against “terror”! At the same time, the U.S. establishment is compelled to repeatedly proclaim its adherence to laudatory precepts of “freedom” and “democracy” in order to conceal not only its authoritarian pursuits but also the fact about the widening economic disparities between the elite and the mass of U.S. citizens. There was also a forlorn hope that the self-proclamation of being the “world’s oldest democracy” would somehow cover-up the sins the U.S. committed in the past and is committing in the present both at home and abroad.

The real nature of democracy in the U.S. cannot be understood without reference to the observations made by those like:

(a) Prof. Charles Beard regarding the elitist nature of the U.S. Constitution;
(b) Prof. Alexander Keyssar regarding the history of the right to vote;
(c) Prof. Henry Call, Prof. Gar Alperovitz, and the Working Group on Extreme Inequality regarding the iniquitous economic system;
(d) Journalist William Blum and Prof. Mahmood Mamdani, who have documented the misdeeds of U.S. imperialism and debunked the U.S. claim of spreading “freedom” and “democracy” abroad;
(e) Dr.Gordon Lafer regarding absence of democratic rights for nearly 88 per cent of the 138 million workforce at their work place;
(f) Prof. Walter M. Brasch and attorneys Michael Ratner & Gregory T. Nojeim, who have raised concerns about erosion of civil rights;
(g) Congressman Ron Paul, researcher Stephen Lendman, Prof. Elaine Cassel, attorney C. William Michaels, journalist Joe Conason, and writer Naomi Wolf, who had raised alarm about the dangerous drift towards a police state; and
(h) Journalist Ben Bagdikian, Prof. Edward S. Herman, Prof. Noam Chomsky, Prof. Robert W. McChesney, and journalist Bill Moyers, who have exposed the disastrous effects of media monopoly that has resulted in the discarding of objectivity, accuracy and fairness in the dissemination of information.

It is a disturbing sign that despite the Bush Administration’s frightening legacy, nearly 60 million voters, or over 45 per cent of those who cast their ballot in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, voted for the Republican Party! While the bulk of the 69 million voters, or nearly 53 per cent, who voted for Barak Obama may have cast their ballots with the ardent hope that President Bush’s authoritarian legacy would be dismantled, it is not very clear whether the Democratic Party is predisposed towards fulfilling that earnest expectation. It also remains to be seen whether Barak Obama, in his new role as President of the U.S., has the will to uphold the cause of civil rights (to which he was purportedly committed) and world peace or he would succumb to pressure and end up remaining a prisoner of his circumstances.

Hopefully, the various democratic institutions that were arduously built with determination to seek justice for all – during the long period of the abolitionist movement, the suffragette movement, the working-class movement and the civil rights movement – should be able to withstand the onslaught and succeed in dismantling the authoritarian and iniquitous structures erected before and during the hideous Bush era. Democratic right is not merely a right to vote once every few years. Fair access to nation’s material wealth; right to education, information, communication and association (including at the work place); and non-discrimination of any kind – by way of creed, language, colour, caste, region, ethnicity or gender – are all integral for nurturing a democratic society and in giving meaning to the notion of freedom.

1. Also see: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, (Lawrence Hill Books, New York, 2003); & Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott, Professor of English, University of California, & Jonathan Marshall, Economics Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991).
2. Walter M. Brasch, America’s Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government’s Violation Of Constitutional And Civil Rights (Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2005).
3. 13 November 2007 [CCR is the lead attorneys for those imprisoned without rights at Guantánamo for the last seven years.]
4. Doug McGill, “The Fading Mystique of An Objective Press,” The McGill Report, 24 October 2004.
5. Ulla Carlsson, “The Rise and Fall of NWICO [New World Information and Communication Order] – and Then?” EURICOM Colloquium, Venice, 5-7 May 2003.
6. Alexander Keysser, The Right to Vote – The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, Basic Books, New York, 2000, p. 316-317.
7. Keyssar, p. 320-322.
8. Keyssar, p. 322-323.
9. The 2004 presidential election too was disputed; in fact, there have been outright accusations of electoral fraud both during the 2000 as well as the 2004 elections. Mark Crispin Miller (Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University), in his books titled Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election (Basic Books, New York, 2005) and Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 (Ig Publishing, Brooklyn, 2008), has analysed the issue in detail. Despite attempts by sections of the judiciary, the Democratic Party and as well as the mainstream print and audio-visual media to underplay the magnitude and ramifications of the electoral fraud committed by the Republican Party, concerned citizens have tried to expose the fraud through other available means. [The need for reforms in electoral laws and electoral processes are concerns, which are still hotly debated in the U.S. One such issue is the disenfranchisement of detainees awaiting trial and ex-felons. This problem has both racial and class dimensions as well since those in the said categories are disproportionately non-whites and from the working class and the poor. The magnitude of the problem is huge considering that there are over 2 million ex-felons and nearly 1.5 felons on probation, apart from another 2 million, who are currently in prisons and jails.]

Although the recently departed Bush administration made the approach described above into a diplomatic art form that drew more from television wrestling than any treatise on statecraft, they did not invent this approach. Nor will they be the last US administration to utilize it. Already, Obama’s Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has made comments regarding Iran that are equivalent to any threat made under George Bush’s watch. Furthermore, the men and women doing Obama’s work in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world are following the same trail already worn down by Bush’s people. Despite the hopes of millions who voted for Barack Obama, very little seems to have changed in the way Washington deals with its enemies. Into this impasse comes commentator and Mideast scholar Juan Cole and his new book titled Engaging the Muslim World.

Nothing less than a call to use some common sense in dealing with that part of the world Washington defines as the Muslim World, Cole takes a sweeping look at the history of the region from Egypt to Iran; from Pakistan to Gaza; and asks what it is that causes Washington to deal with the peoples of these nations in a manner often quite different from the manner in which it deals with other nations. Cole ends each chapter with a brief series of suggestions as to how Washington might better approach the problems it believes exists with regard to the issues of Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, and the various Islamic popular movements that have all recently been placed on Washington’s enemies list. He asks questions that need to be asked yet seem to not even be considered. Why are US troops still in Iraq? Why does a nation (the US) that has the notion of religious freedom encoded into its constitution insist on making the religious beliefs of these nations a cause for enmity? If Washington won’t negotiate with its enemies, than who will it negotiate with? If Tel Aviv and Washington support democracy, why do they refuse to acknowledge the democratic victory of Hamas?

Despite bringing up these issues, the real strength of Cole’s book is in the history he provides. Written for a western audience, the history surveyed here covers the genesis of the Islamist movements, their interaction with governments both local and internationally, yet it does not dwell on the religious aspects of those movements. instead, it discusses the political and economic role these movements have played and continue to play in the overall history of the nations involved. The anti-imperialist nature of the movements is discussed as is their popularity among the Muslim world precisely for their anti-imperialism. Underlying the historical narrative herein is a sincere and usually successful discussion of the complexities involved in that history. Unlike the dichotomous version of the world presented by the Bush administration and its allies, where Washington leads the good guys against the bad guys of Islam, Cole’s nuanced presentation of the history and current situation of US dealings with the Muslim world provide the reader with a clearer understanding of not only what is at stake, but also what is really going on. His perspective removes the often overwrought fears that have predominated mainstream US discourse on the subject at hand.

If we are to have a future world where peace prevails, it will require Washington and its allied governments to coexist with the the part of the world we know as the “Muslim world.” The approach that demanded its subjugation to Washington’s whims has been shown to be bankrupt. To achieve coexistence, one must have understanding. Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World is the ideal primer.

Here’s the problem. Many of these projects will come about with temporary start-up funds provided by the Obama Administration’s anti-recession stimulus plans, which will dry up in a year or two. And funding for the annual national budgets, assuming congressional approval, is simply not going to be enough to sustain these initiatives to successful a conclusion without another major source of funding. Part of the reason is that the anticipated tax hikes on the rich are far too low. Another part is that other sources of income are not being tapped, principally by slashing the mammoth military budget.

How about adding a $500 billion program of progressive social services and major projects to benefit the American people and the nation in Washington’s post-recession annual budgets from now on? Some exclaim, “but there’s no money!” No? Read on.

Congress approved the Obama Administration’s $787 billion emergency economic stimulus plan Feb. 13, and President Barack Obama signed the measure into law four days later. Republicans in the Senate and House sought to scuttle the measure — titled the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act — even after they had won major concessions from the Democrats. The legislation passed the Senate 60-38 with only three Republican votes, and was approved by the House 246-183 with not one GOP vote. Senate Republicans actually wanted to replace Obama’s plan with $3 trillion in tax cuts over the decade!

Petulant Congressional Republicans are largely playing the role of obstructionists at a time when their own party is primarily responsible for creating the swamp into which the economy is sinking. And even though most GOP governors welcome the state aid contained in the stimulus, several of them are making a phony show rejecting help, even though their residents of their state face serious cutbacks in social services.

Clearly, the mantra President Obama has repeated in numerous incantations since the 2004 Democratic Convention — “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America” — has not produced the collegial results he sought despite an evident willingness to “split the difference” with the right wing. At last report Obama was still “reaching across the aisle” to cohabit with a reactionary political opposition that views his overtures with contempt.

The antics of Republican politicians seem to be helping Obama, however. According to the New York Times/CBS News poll published Feb. 24. Almost 80% of respondents agreed Republicans should “work in a bipartisan way” with Democrats, and 63% approved of Obama’s job performance against 22% who disapproved.

The purpose of the Reinvestment and Recovery program — which is not to be confused with the Treasury Department’s impending second giveaway bailout plan for the banks and financial markets, mainly to reconstitute the shattered loan market as the expense of taxpayers — is to stimulate demand in a stagnant, sinking economy with a massive infusion of government deficit financing.

Despite the unprecedented size and scope of the stimulus, several progressive economists suggest it is far less than required to achieve its entire objective and will likely require an expensive booster shot in a year or two. They also question the hundreds of millions of dollars in the $787 billion stimulus plan devoted to tax cuts, and to the elimination of several important populist programs demanded by the Republicans, who then turned their backs on the entire legislation. Said liberal Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa: “I think our side gave in too much in order to appease a few people …. I think the people are getting shortchanged.”

Dedicated Democrat Paul Krugman, last year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, has been critical of the Obama Administration on several recent occasions in his regular column in the New York Times. On Feb. 9 he wrote:

[M]any people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate. Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s post-partisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan. And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach.

Minus the short-term individual and business tax relief aspects, the two-year stimulus plan will invest $500 billion in meeting needs of the people and country in the name of enhancing the economy. It seems a pity that all this needed spending on education, health, infrastructure, science, the environment, jobs and jobless benefits, poverty, transportation and other worthy investments should just be a one-shot temporary pump-priming program to prevent the latest of capitalism’s periodic recessions from turning into a dreaded depression.

Is it pie in sky to suggest that when the economy starts growing again an annual version of the economic stimulus plan should be included in future U.S. budgets, not as a stimulus but as a progressive social benefit for the American people?

“We can’t afford it,” Washington will reply whenever social programs are advocated, but the money is there. Remember last September, when the Bush Administration’s Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve suddenly discovered that U.S. capitalism was about to implode in few weeks, a deus ex machina abruptly materialized in the White House offering trillions of dollars in cash and guarantees to save the sacred system?

But we’re not recommending that the Treasury Department simply print more money to finance greatly expanded benefits for the people in future annual budgets, as Washington is doing now to finance the bailout and stimulus — leaving it to our grandchildren to pay the piper.

There is no need for a mechanized deity or high-speed printing press to finance $500 billion a year in additional social service and national projects for the common good. The money to finance progressive programs already exists in two locations:

• First, it is in the budget for militarism and the military-industrial complex, which has increased 74% since George W. Bush entered the White House. In total, military spending now amounts to over $1 trillion a year. This is several hundred billion more than Washington admits but we shall explain the discrepancy below. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) has been calling for a 25% cut in the “official” Defense Dept. budget, which is about half the real military budget. We think a 50% reduction in the real budget is more appropriate, for starters.

A lot more jobs can be created by investing in labor intensive peacetime pursuits instead of financing a high-tech war industry, computerized battlefields, nuclear submarines and remote-controlled wars. (Speaking of modern American warfare, guess how much it costs to send a single U.S. soldier to fight in Afghanistan for one year? According to the Dec. 26 Time magazine, the cost “is about $775,000, three times more than in other recent wars.” Multiply by 17,000 — and you must know where that number comes from — and it’s $13.2 billion, not counting the other 35,000 U.S. troops already in Afghanistan, or the 140,000 in Iraq.) Such monies could rebuild America, develop alternative energy resources, reduce global warming, and provide better lives for America’s working people.

• Second, the funding for enhanced social programs is in the vaults of big corporations, giant financial houses, stock market profiteers and the wealthy 5% of American families who possess 58.9% of all assets and wealth in our country. These companies and individuals do not pay a fair share of taxes due to decades of government policy favoring a regressive redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom to the top.

Given that 44% of American workers live from paycheck to paycheck with low wages and few benefits, mandating higher taxes from those sectors of society abundantly able to pay their share of national expenses is simple justice in a genuine democracy.

Now we will discuss the real cost of “defense” expenditures, which are much higher than official statistics acknowledge, followed by an examination of the real taxes on business and wealth, which frequently are lower than the rates suggest.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) states that the fiscal 2009 Pentagon budget that began in October amounts to $518.3 billion, not counting the war appropriations. Actually, the Defense Dept. spent a great deal more, but that’s routinely concealed from the public.

According to the annual computation by the War Resister’s League (WRL) titled, “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes,” real military expenditures for fiscal 2009 will total $1,449 trillion.¹ This is composed of current military expenses of $965 billion combined with past but not yet paid military expenses of $484 billion.

The current Pentagon payment costs, which WRL itemizes, include many billions in military monies concealed in non-Pentagon budgets, such as those of the State Dept., NASA, Homeland Security, intelligence services, and elsewhere. The 2009 Pentagon budget estimates the allotment for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will amount to about $60 billion this year, a gross understatement. The WRL anticipates the two wars will cost $200 billion this fiscal year.

Expenditures for past wars are not included in the Pentagon budget. They amount to $94 billion in veterans’ benefits and $390 billion in interest on the national debt (80% of which is for past wars).

Chalmers Johnson, an author we have quoted many times before (he wrote the trilogy Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis), calculated the fiscal 2008 military budget as amounting to $1.1 trillion.² A splendid and well researched article in the October 2008 Monthly Review (MR) titled “The Military, Industrial, Media Triangle”³ argues that the real fiscal 2007 war budget was just over $1 trillion. The figures from the WRL, Johnson and MR are between two and three times higher than the “official” figures, and we believe them far closer to the truth than misleading government estimates.

There are three reasons why the Defense Department and related budgets are considered sacrosanct.

First, despite America’s rapidly declining international stature, or because of it, a rate of military spending larger than the rest of the world combined is perceived to be necessary to retain America’s unipolar and hegemonic global leadership. Second, investment in the military-industrial complex and its resulting arms sales abroad and wars is viewed as a major boost for the domestic capitalist economy. This is known as Military Keynesianism.⁴ Third, Washington has consistently cultivated fear, jingoism and hyper-patriotism among the people in order to maintain excessive military spending.

The Obama administration has called for an increase in military spending in the upcoming 2010 Pentagon budget, but it is possible in time there will be reductions in spending for some extremely expensive but redundant pet projects— primarily to convey the illusion of “austerity” during the Great Recession and secondarily to preempt possible demands for greater cuts because war spending is so obviously over the top. In the recent words of Frida Berrigan, a well known peace activist, writer and researcher: “Obama is not about to go toe-to-toe with the military-industrial complex.”

Another reason to doubt the powerful military-industrial complex will lose much business is the Obama Administration’s choice of William J. Lynn as Deputy Defense Secretary, the number two Pentagon official after Secretary Gates. Lynn was the senior VP for government operations (i.e., chief lobbyist) for Raytheon Co., the big defense contractor, until a few months ago.

Now we turn to the matter of increasing taxes on the wealthy sector of society, about which an article in the Feb. 24 Christian Science Monitor pointed out: “The amount of money that goes into executive pockets is staggering. So is the amount that comes out of those pockets in taxes: precious little. America’s super-rich are paying far less of their incomes in taxes than average Americans who punch time clocks.” Authors Chuck Collins and Sam Pizzigati also noted that ” Back in 1955, America’s top 400 paid more than 50% of their incomes in federal tax, almost triple the rate of today’s top 400.”

During the election campaign President Obama pledged to cancel the Bush Administration’s regressive millionaire tax cuts upon taking office, but now he will continue them for nearly two years, allowing the legislation to expire at the end of 2010. The White House suggests that ending reductions now would depress economic activity, but this is not convincing. Writing in the New York Times, Dec. 7, economist Robert H. Frank stated that “we’d get a lot more stimulus for any given budget deficit if we scrapped the Bush tax cuts immediately and steered the resulting revenue to people who would spend it. … Higher tax rates for top earners wouldn’t appreciably reduce their spending.”

Details of the fiscal 2010 budget (beginning in October) won’t be released until April, but the New York Times disclosed Feb. 22 that the White House will propose “to tax the investment income of hedge fund and private equity partners at ordinary income tax rates, which are now as high as 35% and could return to 39.6% under his plans, instead of at the capital gains rate, which is 15 percent at most.” While this is a step forward, it is a very small step, on par with the Pentagon’s spigot closing.

Progressives have long argued that the big corporations are paying too little in taxes considering the enormous profits they have enjoyed in the last couple of decades, often at the expense of stagnant wages for U.S. workers and substandard wages in their foreign factories. But Big Business always points to the 35% statutory tax rate on large corporations (taxes get smaller as the corporations decrease in size), which the Wall St. Journal notes is the second highest in the developed, industrialized capitalist world.

But “second highest” is the official tax rate, not the “effective” rate (i.e., what’s really paid). According to an Oct. 27 report from Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a liberal think-tank:

“The U.S. corporate tax burden is smaller than average for developed countries. Corporations in the 19 member states of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development paid 16.1% of their profits in taxes between 2000 and 2005, on average, while corporations in the United States paid 13.4%…. Because the U.S. tax code offers so many deductions, credits, and other mechanisms [i.e., loopholes] by which corporations can reduce their taxes, the actual percentage of profits that U.S. corporations pay in taxes — or what analysts refer to as their effective tax rate — is not high, compared to other developed countries.”

To give you an idea of how corporate taxes have been declining in the U.S., consider this: In 1943, during World War II, corporations accounted for just under 40% of all the tax money collected by the U.S. government. Last year, during the Iraq, Afghanistan and Terrorism wars, it was 7.4%, a drop from the second half of the 1990s when receipts amounted to 10-11%.

In a report Aug. 12, the Government Accountability Office revealed that 57% of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005, and 42% were in this category for two or more years. Foreign companies doing business in the U.S. compiled an even worse record. In 2005, the report noted, a quarter of the largest American corporations paid no taxes on gross sales of $1.2 trillion.

The GAO report resulted from a request by two Democratic senators, Michigan’s Carl Levin and North Dakota’s Brian Dorgan. Levin said it showed “too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States.” Dorgan termed it “a shocking indictment of the current tax system.”

Tax loopholes, exemptions, depreciation allowances, credits and the ability of corporations to shift income to lower tax countries are all factors in the declining percentage big business pays to the U.S. government. These tax concessions, even during down times, are a major factor in lower tax receipts. (Of course, a number of companies have taken big losses because of the recession, a factor in lower tax collections this year.)

The CBPP report noted that “the Treasury Department estimates that various corporate tax breaks will cost the federal government more than $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years (2008-2017), a period during which total corporate revenues are projected to equal $3.4 trillion.” Imagine what could be obtained for the social good with $1.2 trillion. And we won’t even go into the $2 to $3 trillion that the Iraq war will cost when the final accounting is taken years from now.

It seems to us that progressives should call upon the Obama Administration and Democratic Congress to immediately end the Bush tax cuts for the rich; substantially increase taxes on high incomes, including on the estate tax; eliminate tax loopholes for wealthy individuals and for the big corporations; and impose a hefty financial transactions tax on the transfer of stock and similar assets.

Through increases in taxes for the rich and corporations coupled with sharp reductions in military spending it seems quite possible for the U.S. government to invest $500 billion a year above its present obligations on significant permanent social programs similar to —but going beyond — those now temporarily receiving support from President Obama’s anti-recession economic stimulus program.

Given the current economic crisis, coming on top of decades of economic stagnation for many millions of workers, now may be the time when the American people — long misled by conservative and centrist politicians — will welcome a major increase in government spending on progressive social programs, and progressive leadership from Washington, over the next years.

But where are the politicians in Washington who will demand huge reductions in military spending, which will mean a serious change in U.S. foreign policy, far fewer or no more wars, and an end to the quest for global domination? Who in the White House and Congress will demand big increases in the taxation of wealth and tight government regulation of corporations, markets and banks, which means greatly weakening the power of the monied oligarchy and transferring some power to the people for a change.

The key to transforming this situation depends on the pressure exerted by the progressive forces, the political left, the trade unions, the various movements for social change, and the masses of people influenced by these various agencies. True, these are still conservative times in America, and the forces of social change are neither strong nor united. But a serious, prolonged economic crisis has ways of educating people politically, of sparking extensive demands not heretofore deemed practical, and of inspiring unity and a desire to fight back.

Read Part 1.

1. The War Resisters League pie chart detailing the 2009 U.S. military budget.
2. The Pentagon Strangles Our Economy by Chalmers Johnson.
3. The October 2008 Monthly Review article (”The Military/Industrial/Media Triangle“) is an important analysis of why the U.S. spends so much on the military.
4. Military Keynesianism, which is a distortion of Keynes’ thesis (see part 1), has been described as “a government economic policy to devote large amounts of spending to the military in an effort to increase economic growth.” C. Johnson calls the U.S. government’s attachment to Military Keynesianism a “mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.” The U.S. has been following this policy since World War II for economic growth but mainly to pursue the objective of “world leadership” through expanding hegemony based on superior military and economic power.

On January 23, twenty-two people, including 8 to 10 alleged members of al-Qaeda, the rest civilians, were killed when CIA Predator drones slammed into houses in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

In the last six months of 2008, the CIA mounted some 30 such attacks. Inevitably, civilian casualties were high while American officials predictably reported that the strikes failed to kill “senior al-Qaeda commanders.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates informed the Senate Armed Services Committee January 27 that “both President Bush and President Obama have made clear that we will go after al-Qaida wherever al-Qaida is, and we will continue to pursue them,” the Associated Press reported.

Fueled by vast economic disparities, organized crime, widespread corruption and near economic meltdown, options are limited as ruling elites in Islamabad, Kabul and Washington stagger from crisis to crisis.

But as in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, Central America during the 1980s and the Middle East today, America’s militarist architects are planning to greatly escalate regional violence through proxy forces and the imperialist army itself as a means to “secure” corporate control over the resource-rich Eurasian heartland.

Welcome to South Asia’s “Salvador Option.”

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), since 2002 the United States has provided Pakistan with some $11.9 billion in aid, the bulk of the funds in the form of overt assistance to the Pakistani military.

With $6.67 billion in what the CRS terms Coalition Support Funds (CSF), drawn directly from the Pentagon budget and $1.56 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF), the beleaguered Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government of President Asif Ali Zadari, the husband of assassinated PPP leader Benazir Bhutto, finds itself no more capable of defending the Pakistani people from a resurgent Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) than the bankrupt Musharraf regime.

And with the Obama administration poised to ramp-up the “war on terror” by doubling the size of the U.S. troop contingent in Afghanistan, “reconstruction” will take a back seat to overt military and “counternarcotics” operations. However, a glance at the CRS’ “Direct Overt U.S. Aid and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan” tells the sorry tale of American hypocrisy.

While showering the Army and the corrupt, drug-tainted intelligence services with billions of dollars, including $267 million for what the Pentagon terms International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE)–that’s worked out well, hasn’t it!–the Pentagon has provided a scandalous $17 million for Human Rights and Democracy funding (HRDF) and an equally paltry $42 million for what Washington terms Migration and Refugee Assistance (MRA).

With the Taliban and America’s “former” partners, al-Qaeda, advancing on all fronts, the state’s writ is shrinking by the day.

Taliban Terror in Swat Valley

Since 2007 the TTP have spread out from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), and are now within reach of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and the capital, Islamabad.

With little support amongst the Pakistani people, but with powerful backers within sections of the shadowy Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and the Army, the TTP are solidifying their grip in the NWFP. As investigative journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad documents in a recent report from NWFP’s capital, Peshawar, a city of several million people,

Restive North-West Frontier Province is not the destination of choice these days. Those who travel there go for business or family reasons, and the flight I took from the southern port city of Karachi to Peshawar was half empty; clearly, the region is no longer on the tourist map.

After touring the city for an afternoon and speaking to a variety of people, I was struck by its eerie similarity to Baghdad when I visited that capital soon after the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003–it has the distinct atmosphere of impending chaos.

That evening I chatted with a senior al-Qaeda member who told me that the group considered NWFP and southwestern Balochistan province as already wiped off the map of Pakistan as they were now militant country. Although not entirely accurate, it portends a chilling turn in the “war on terror” in which Washington will be more concerned over the stability and security of Pakistan rather than that of Afghanistan.

The indications are that a major battle will be fought in Pakistan before the annual spring offensive even begins in Afghanistan this year. (”On the Militant Trail, Part 1: A battle before a battle,” Asia Times Online, January 29, 2009)

In the Swat Valley, the TTP have created a virtual state within a state, imposing a reign of terror under the guise of “Islamization.” As The New York Times reports,

Every night around 8 o’clock, the terrified residents of Swat, a lush and picturesque valley a hundred miles from three of Pakistan’s most important cities, crowd around their radios. They know that failure to listen and learn might lead to a lashing–or a beheading. (Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Pir Zubair Shah, “In Pakistan, Radio Amplifies Terror of Taliban,” The New York Times, January 25, 2009)

The situation grows more dire with each passing day. The Lahore-based Daily Times reported Monday,

Swat Taliban have released a list of 43 people–including former and incumbent ministers–who they have declared “wanted” and liable to punishment under the Taliban sharia.

The “wanted” men also include former and current members of the national and provincial assemblies, district and local nazims, officials of political parties, local elders and other influential residents of the restive valley. (Daud Khattak, “Swat Taliban Summon Politicians to Sharia Court,” Daily Times, January 26, 2009)

TTP head honcho Maulana Fazlullah declared the 43 leaders targeted for liquidation were “enemies” who would be arrested or killed by his men for their alleged “crimes”–opposing the Taliban. Eight bullet-ridden bodies were recovered Wednesday in Mingora, Swat’s largest city.

Incapable of winning “hearts and minds,” and hunkered down in secure bunkers, the Pakistan Army rarely venture out from their fortresses. Cut-off from the population, Asia Times reports that “the manner in which the militants have established themselves in the Swat Valley is surprising as 65% of the local population–mostly from secular schools–is literate, yet the central government has failed to muster mass support against the militants.”

In a bid to shore-up support, on Friday Fazlullah announced a “relaxation” in the ban on girls’ education “up to the fourth grade,” The News International reported.

In an interview with the BBC Urdu Service, Fazlullah declared: “We are not against girls’ education. We are against obscenity and anti-Islamic practices. We want to create the right conditions so that girls could receive proper education.” That’s rich considering that since 2008 more than 180 girls’ schools have been torched and some 900 remain indefinitely closed.

As a grim warning, the TTP leader defended the practice of beheading opponents and argued such practices were “in accordance with Islamic teachings,” aping his more extreme theocratic-minded “crusader” colleagues in America who advocate the death penalty for “adulterers, homosexuals and disobedient children.”

Asia Times journalist Shahzad reveals that the Army “does not have a ground presence in the valley.” Aside from a few “manned checkpoints in the mountains and garrisons,” the Army’s “offensive” consists primarily of haphazard attacks that “rain from the skies.”

From redoubts high in the mountains, the military point their artillery and “fire indiscriminately at villages many kilometers away,” greatly increasing civilian casualties while driving terrified residents from their homes or into the arms of the TTP. This is not a strategy with any prospect for success.

Shahzad reports the Army’s top brass have come up with the ludicrous claim that the insurgency is “controlled by India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)”!

Loathe to admit–as does Washington–that their former “allies,” the jihadist Frankenstein have turned on their masters and now seek to dispense with Pakistan’s corrupt ruling elites altogether (the better to install a new and equally corrupt, Islamist elite, drawn from the same landlord and comprador class that currently rules the roost) the Army has resorted to playing a mendacious “blame the Hindu” game.

Shahzad writes: “This has even been repeated by one of the biggest supporters of the Taliban, retired Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, a former head of the Inter-Services Intelligence, who has said he has no doubt that RAW is behind the unrest.”

Perhaps however, there are other reasons that Gul would level charges against perennial enemy India. Could it be the good general is now looking over his shoulder as the United Nations prepares a brief charging him with support for various terrorist outfits, including al-Qaeda, the Taliban and ISI proxy, Lashkar-e-Toiba, the operational asset responsible for last November’s murderous attacks in Mumbai?

But as I reported January 25, local residents aren’t buying the Army’s tale that India is fueling the TTP insurgency or that the military is “stepping-up” actions against the militants. Outraged residents and local politicians forced to flee the area told The Independent on Sunday that “elements of the military and the militants appear to be acting together.”

Far-fetched? On November 18, Major-General Faisal Alavi, a former head of Pakistan’s Special Forces–sacked under mysterious circumstances–was assassinated in Rawalpindi “after threatening to expose Pakistani army generals who had made deals with Taliban militants,” according to The Sunday Times.

In a letter that Alavi shared with The Sunday Times and mailed to Pakistani Army Chief of Staff, General Ashfaq Kayani shortly before being murdered, the former officer named generals he accused of collaborating with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, including one with Baitullah Mehsud, a top al-Qaeda commander.

Mehsud, the main suspect in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto late last year, is also believed to have been behind a plot to bomb transport networks in several European countries including Britain, which came to light earlier this year when 14 alleged conspirators were arrested in Barcelona.

Yet, according to Alavi, a senior Pakistani general came to an arrangement with Mehsud “whereby–in return for a large sum of money–Mehsud’s 3,000 armed fighters would not attack the army”. (Carey Schofield, “UK May Help Find Pakistani General’s Killers,” The Sunday Times, December 14, 2008)

Meanwhile, Daily Times reported Thursday that “25 projects operated by USAID in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and settled areas of the NWFP have been temporarily closed over security concerns.”

According to Daily Times USAID, once a front for CIA covert operations in Asia and Latin America, were working on projects to enhance “the government’s legitimacy and writ in FATA” as well as projects meant to improve “economic and social conditions for local communities, and supporting sustainable development.” Due to the deteriorating political conditions in the area, “health and educational services” and infrastructure development projects have been forced to shut down.

Ominously, part of the money doled out to “Military Inc.” by the Pentagon is for what United States Special Operations Command (USSOC) calls Foreign Internal Defense (FID) a key pillar of Special Forces’ Unconventional Warfare doctrine. As I reported December 19, UW establishes a “litmus test” for waging irregular warfare which is conducted “by, with, or through surrogates.” Indeed, as revealed in a document published by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks,

Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political “undesirables.” (Unconventional Warfare, FM 3-05.130, Headquarters, Department of the Army, September 2008, p. 1-3)

According to a new document published by Wikileaks, Foreign Internal Defense is described thusly:

FID is a joint, multinational, and interagency effort. SOF, particularly SF and Psychological Operations (PSYOP) and Civil Affairs (CA) forces are well suited to conduct or support FID operations because these forces have unique functional skills and cultural and language training. FID is a legislatively directed activity for SOF (although it is not exclusively a SOF mission) under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act. SOF may conduct FID unilaterally in the absence of any other military effort, support other ongoing military or civilian assistance efforts, or support the employment of conventional forces. (Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Operations, FM 3-05.202, Headquarters, Department of the Army, February 2007, p. 1-1, hereafter “FID”)

Significantly, as in El Salvador, Colombia and a score of other global “hot spots” tagged for resource extraction or geopolitical control by America’s corporatist masters, the USSOC manual calls for the direct training of paramilitary forces, often allied with far-right political parties and international narcotics syndicates in the “Host Nation” (HN).

But to gauge the effectiveness of FID “unilateral” operations by U.S. Special Forces, one need only look over the Pakistani border into southern Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s “Salvador Option”

Vying with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) for an “Oscar” for lack of discipline, utter disregard for the lives of civilians as well as those of their reputed allies, U.S. Special Forces and CIA paramilitary operatives are veritable assassination squads on a par with their Taliban and al-Qaeda adversaries in terms of sheer brutality and callousness.

In Laghman Province, Special Operations Forces conducted a series of raids on January 7 and 16 in Masamat, in which 32 people were killed, described by military spokespeople predictably as “Taliban insurgents.”

Without warning, commandos broke down doors and “unleashed dogs” on unsuspecting villagers asleep at the time. The January 7 raid killed 13 civilians and wounded nine others. Local residents were so enraged by the assault that they threatened to march on the American military base in the district capital, Mehtarlam. The New York Times reports,

The outrage over civilian deaths swelled again over the weekend. Hundreds of angry villagers demonstrated here in Mehtarlam, the capital of Laghman Province, on Sunday after an American raid on a village in the province on Friday night. The raid killed at least 16 villagers, including 2 women and 3 children, according to a statement from President Hamid Karzai. (Carlotta Gall, “From Hospital, Afghans Rebut U.S. Account,” The New York Times, January 26, 2009)

One of the victims of the January 7 raid was a man named Qasem Khan, a member of the U.S.-allied Afghan Border Police who was home on leave. Some allies.

His brother, Wazarat Khan, said the man was killed as soon as he looked out his front door in response to “shots fired.” He told Gall, “We did not think they were Americans; we thought they were thieves,” he said. “They killed my brother right in the doorway.”

Another victim of marauders allegedly occupying Afghanistan in order to “liberate” Afghanis from vicious Taliban killers, Darwaish Muhammad, 18, was hospitalized with shrapnel wounds after coming to the assistance of a neighbor calling for help. Gall reports,

Mr. Muhammad said he and two others rushed to help carry the woman’s son on a rope bed down a slope outside the village to get help. They were 10 minutes from the village when a helicopter fired a rocket at them, killing the wounded man and two of the bearers. He and the mother were badly wounded, he said. (NYT, op. cit.)

Operating as a law unto themselves, Special Operations Forces, part of a continuing legacy of the criminal Bush regime, do not coordinate their actions with either their NATO partners or the Afghan government. But while SOF plan and carry out tactical operations on their own, they do have one critical Afghan constituency: narcotrafficking warlords. As investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid documented,

When CIA-U.S. SOF teams set up bases along the Pakistan border to gather intelligence about al-Qaeda, they hired Pashtun tribesmen, paying them up to two hundred dollars a month, plus bonuses to their commanders, when a top monthly salary in Kabul was only fifty dollars. These mercenaries–called the Afghan Militia Force, or AMF–were still being hired as late as 2006. SOF officers had the authority to employ up to one hundred AMF to guard their camps and act as drivers and interpreters. The AMF’s Afghan commanders received cash, weapons, uniforms, communications equipment, and their pick of unearthed Taliban weapons caches, which they then sold on the black market–and which were invariably bought by the Taliban. These commanders became an enormously destabilizing factor in the country, as they considered themselves as unaccountable as their American commanders. The irony was not lost on the Afghan people. Although the Americans had liberated them from the evil of the Taliban, they had brought back another evil: the warlords. (Descent into Chaos, New York: Viking, 2008, p. 131)

In 2008 alone, some 4,000 civilian deaths were reported. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission “warned that the lack of accountability of those conducting such raids, and the lack of redress for civilian victims, was stoking resentment,” Gall writes. In a December report, the commission concluded, “The degree of backlash and community outrage that they provoke suggests they may often not be an advisable tactic within the Afghan context.”

No matter! According to the FID document,

The strategic end state is an HN capable of successfully integrating military force with other instruments of national power to eradicate lawlessness, insurgency, subversion, and terrorism. Ultimately, FID efforts are successful if they preclude the need to deploy large numbers of U.S. military personnel and equipment. Types of military operations related to FID are nation assistance (NA) and/or support to counterinsurgency (COIN); counterterrorism (CT); peace operations (PO); DOS support to counterdrug (CD) operations; and foreign humanitarian assistance (FHA). These categories may, to some degree, include FID operations as an integral component in supporting the fight against subversion, lawlessness, insurgency, and terrorism. FID programs are distinct and will vary from country to country to support that country’s IDAD [Internal Defense and Development] program. (FID, op. cit. p. 1-2)

But what happens when FID actually leads to an increase of “lawlessness, insurgency, subversion, and terrorism,” the direct result of USSOC’s undisciplined actions in the field? Well then, its time to administer a strong dose of perception management! Citing the requirement for a robust “informational instrument,” FM 3-05.202 avers:

Effective use of public diplomacy, public affairs activities and PSYOPS are essential to a FID program. Accurate portrayal of U.S. FID efforts through positive information programs can influence worldwide perceptions of the U.S. FID programs and the HN’s desire to embrace changes and improvements necessary to correct its problems. (FID, op. cit. p. 1-3)

Under the rubric of Psychological Operations, USSOC planners describe a process whose goal is to defeat insurgency and that PSYOP “can be used to gain the support of the people.”

PSYOP can support the mission by discrediting the insurgent forces to neutral groups, creating dissension among the insurgents themselves, and supporting defector programs. Divisive programs create dissension, disorganization, low morale, subversion, and defection within the insurgent forces. Also important are national programs to win insurgents over to the government side with offers of amnesty and rewards. Motives for surrendering can range from personal rivalries and bitterness to disillusionment and discouragement. Pressure from the security forces has persuasive power. (FID, op. cit., p. 4-10)

With an Orwellian sense of humor that would be amusing were it not deadly to those who have the misfortune of encountering SOF teams hell bent on winning their “hearts and minds” even if it means blowing them to smithereens, FID theoreticians declare without a trace of irony:

Each SF unit operation integrates planned PSYOP activities to establish a favorable U.S. image in the HN and further the success of the SF unit mission. SF units coordinate with trained PSYOP assets to capitalize on positive mission successes. SF units can sometimes use HN and commercial media assets effectively to influence public opinion and pass information. (FID, op. cit., p. 4-12)

Try selling that to the citizens of Masamat!

But wait, there’s more! USSOC touts the “success” of their “mission” in El Salvador as an applicable model for countering South Asian insurgencies.

For 12 years, beginning in 1979, the United States assisted the El Salvador military in becoming a more professional and effective fighting force against the Communist-backed Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. A U.S. military group assisted the El Salvadoran army by establishing a facility for basic and advanced military training. SF advisors, primarily from the 7th Special Forces Group, served with El Salvadoran units to support small-unit training and logistics. The advisors helped the El Salvadoran military become more professional and better organized, while advising in the conduct of pacification and counterguerrilla operations. Advisors were also present at the brigade levels assisting in operations and intelligence activities. From 1985 to 1992, just over 140 SF officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) served as advisors to a 40-battalion army. From a poorly staffed and led force of 8,000 soldiers in 1980, SF trainers created a hard-hitting COIN force of 54,000 by 1986. U.S. forces supported U.S. interests by creating an effective COIN force that fought the guerrillas to a standstill and established the groundwork for a negotiated settlement by 1991. (FID, op. cit., p. A-6)

Translation: between 1980-1991 SOF “assistance” to the brutal Salvadoran military produced 75,000 civilian deaths, by and large the result of Army massacres carried out in tandem with far-right narcotrafficking death squads who ruled the roost with an iron fist.

The “hard-hitting COIN force,” while shying away from battles with tough FMLN guerrillas, kidnapped and “disappeared” peasants, labor organizers, students, Catholic priests and nuns, or just plain folks caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, often subjecting them to hideous torture before lining the roads with their brutalized corpses as an “object lesson” in the fabulous workings of Reaganite democracy.

Today, Pentagon planners and their cheerleaders in the corporate media are touting these tactics as a “fresh approach” to beat back the fundamentalists. In Afghanistan and Pakistan today, to ensure that effective measures of “populace and resource control” (PRC) are brought to bear to stem the insurgent tide, FID theorists recommend widespread political repression and panoptic methods of surveilling the “target” population. The authors’ aver:

Rights on the legality of detention or imprisonment of personnel (for example, habeas corpus) may be temporarily suspended. This measure must be taken as a last resort since it may provide the insurgents with an effective propaganda theme. PRC measures can also include the following:

• Curfews or blackouts.
• Travel restrictions.
• Restricted residential areas, such as protected villages or resettlement areas.
• Registration and pass systems.
• Control of sensitive items (resources control) of critical supplies, such as weapons, food, and fuel.
• Checkpoints, searches, and roadblocks.
• Surveillance, censorship, and press control.
• Restriction of activity that applies to selected groups (labor unions, political groups, and so on). (FID, op. cit. p. A-12)

Not exactly a recipe for building a democratic society based on the rule of law and human rights!

It isn’t as if the Pentagon and the CIA hadn’t tried this before. It should be recalled, “the Salvador option” (before it was known as such) was employed in Central Asia during the anti-Soviet Afghan “jihad” of the 1980s. CIA and SOF paramilitary “specialists” showered billions of dollars in training and other forms of assistance–in league with the corrupt Saudi monarchy, Gulf State fat cats, and a gaggle of European and Israeli intelligence operatives and arms dealers who shared their expertise and matched American largess dollar for dollar.

But when the smoke cleared, like marauding Borg the Yankee Empire left nothing but a wide swathe of death and destruction in its wake whilst spawning al-Qaeda, a nexus of disparate jihadists for whom “Islamism” is a cover for Western destabilization operations, organized crime and nihilistic violence under the cynical banner of “monotheism and combat.”

By filing this order, the government surrendered forever its ability to prosecute Lindauer as an “Iraqi foreign agent” and for lesser charges contained in the indictment, including a one week trip to Baghdad in March, 2002.

Lindauer made the following statement today, Jan 16, 2009: “I am disgusted by this case. They think that they have defeated me by denying my day in court. It could not be more wrong. If we can’t have a criminal trial, we’re going to have a civil trial for damages.”

Lindauer was arrested in March, 2004 shortly after offering to testify before a Bush appointed blue ribbon commission evaluating U.S. pre-war intelligence on Iraq. In late February, she informed the offices of two commission members, Sen. McCain (R-AZ) and Trent Lott (R-MS), that she could testify that U.S. pre-war intelligence was proactive and effective, not a popular view at that time.

Lindauer has adamantly maintained her innocence of all charges since her arrest. In addition to the “unregistered agent” charge, the government alleged that she had taken an unauthorized trip to Baghdad, and attended meetings with Iraqi intelligence agents at the Iraqi Embassy at the United Nations. Lindauer planned an aggressive defense with evidence that showed both government knowledge and authorization of her activities plus a history of activity on behalf of U.S. intelligence.

Lindauer offered an affidavit concerning the Lockerbie bombing in 1998. Her statement was based on her discussions with Dr. Richard Fuisz, whom she named as her CIA handler. Dr. Fuisz was said to be “a major operative in the Middle East in the 1980s.” Since then the Scottish Criminal Cases Justice Commission has since uncovered irregularities in the evidence against the two Libyans convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

The initial indictment charged Lindauer with trying to influence United States policy by sending this letter to her second cousin, then Bush chief of staff Andrew Card. From 2000 until her arrest in 2003, Lindauer provided Card with 11 letters detailing the progress of talks to resume the U.N. weapons inspections and anti-terrorist cooperation offered with the United States by Iraq. The last of this series of letters to Card was the sole basis of the charge that Lindauer attempted to influence U.S. government policies, while acting as an “unregistered agent” for pre war Iraq.

The Card letter was the “high water mark” of the government’s charge of acting as a foreign agent according to former chief judge of the Southern District, Manhattan federal court, now Attorney General, Michael B. Mukasey. In that letter, Lindauer urged the Bush administration to stop plans to invade Iraq and to seek engagement through negotiation. Lindauer wrote that U.S. soldiers would face stiff opposition based on Iraqi hostility resulting from a lethal ten year embargo and daily bombing during the 1990’s.

She also advised Card that an invasion would create a new wave of terrorists threatening the security of the United States. This letter was hand delivered to Card with a copy, also hand delivered, provided to then Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“Above all, you must realize that if you go ahead with this invasion, Osama bin Laden will triumph, rising from his grave or seclusion. His network will be swollen with fresh recruits, and other charismatic individuals will seek to build upon his model, multiplying those networks. And the United States will have delivered the death blow to itself. Using your own act of war, Osama and his cohort will irrevocably divide the hearts and minds of the Arab Street from moderate governments in Islamic countries that have been holding back the tide. Power to the people, what we call ‘democracy,’ will secure the rise of fundamentalists.” (Susan Lindauer to Andrew Card, January 6, 2003)*

Lindauer has consistently maintained that she had been acting as a United States intelligence asset from the mid 1990’s until the invasion, supervised by handlers for the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.

In the only open hearing on the case, award winning investigative reporter and former Congressional chief of staff, Kelly O’Meara, testified that she observed Lindauer meeting with Paul Hoven on a weekly basis over a period of 16 months. Lindauer maintains that Hoven was her second handler for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Investigative reporter Leslie Cockburn wrote that Hoven had “an enormous range of contacts in the murky world of special – i.e., clandestine – operations.”

At the same hearing, Parke Godfrey, PhD, an associate professor of computer science at York University, Toronto, testified that Lindauer had warned him on several occasions that a major attack would take place in Southern Manhattan in the fall of 2001. Dr. Godfrey claimed her warnings specified that the attack would most likely involve airplane hijackings and a reprise of the 1993 World Trade Center attack. She came to this conclusion based on work she describes with Richard Fuisz.

The Department of Justice argued that Lindauer was “delusional” for claiming a role as a U.S. asset. Lindauer described this as “guilt by pleading innocent.” In October, 2005, former Judge Mukasey ordered Lindauer to a federal prison facility at Carswell Air Force Base in Ft. Worth Texas for psychiatric evaluation to see if she would be competent to stand trial. Lindauer was confined for seven months, and then formally declared incompetent without a hearing, over her strongest objections. The allowable period for such evaluations is four months according to U.S. Federal Code.

Carswell staff acknowledged that there were no external symptoms of mental illness. However, they proposed that Lindauer should be detained indefinitely and drugged with Haldol until whatever time she could be “cured” of claiming that she had worked as a U.S. asset in counter-terrorism. Lindauer refused, and a lengthy court battle ensued. She was transferred to Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

After four months confinement in Manhattan, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward O’Callaghan sought an order from Mukasey to incarcerate her for another four months and the use physical force to administer doses of Haldol or similar medications. This was despite an internal staff report by Carswell that there was no reason to justify forcible drugging since Lindauer was not a threat to herself or anyone else. Mukasey denied the prosecution request and ordered Lindauer to be released on bond on June 6, 2006.

Lindauer hired former prosecutor and Washington DC criminal attorney Brian W. Shaughnessy as counsel in mid 2008. Shaughnessy filed a motion to overturn the governments finding that she was incompetent to stand trial. Shaughnessy argued that Lindauer’s record of doing well on her own before and after her arrest and her direct involvement in her defense made the government’s continual claim of an inability to stand trial moot.

Bush appointee, Judge Loretta Preska ruled to uphold the government’s position on Lindauer’s competence on Sept. 15, 2008. Preska had been nominated for the federal appellate bench on Sept. 9, 2008.

Just a few weeks after Dr. Godfrey testified about Lindauer’s warnings on the 9/11 attack, Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward O’Callaghan left the District Attorney’s office to join the McCain presidential campaign. He began assisting Sarah Palin’s legal team in Alaska. Dr. Godfrey testified that he had told the FBI her claims were truthful a full year before the Justice Department detained her at Carswell.

Ms. Lindauer’s Attorney, Brian W. Shaughnessy pointed out that he could find no other instance where federal, state or local prosecutors have ever argued for a defendant’s incompetence to stand trial over the objections of the defendant and defendant’s Counsel, when that defendant was a successfully functioning member of the community and a full participant in her defense.

Lindauer lives in the DC metropolitan area where she is rebuilding her career and undertaking some writing projects.

The most glaring evidence contradicting the Israeli casus belli is the six-month ceasefire between Hamas and Israel that preceded the invasion. True, Hamas began firing its rockets as soon as the truce came to an end on 19 December, but Israel had offered plenty of provocation. Not least it broke the ceasefire by staging a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas members. Even more significantly, it maintained and tightened a blockade during the ceasefire period that was starving Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants of food, medicine and fuel. Hamas had expected the blockade lifted in return for an end to the rockets.

A few days before Israel’s attack on Gaza, Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s domestic security service, the Shin Bet, noted Hamas’ commitment to the ceasefire and its motives in restarting the rocket fire. “Make no mistake, Hamas is interested in maintaining the truce,” he told the cabinet. “It seeks to improve its conditions – a removal of the blockade, receiving a commitment from Israel that it won’t attack and extending the lull to the Judea and Samaria area [the West Bank].” In other words, had Israel wanted calm, it could have avoided invading Gaza simply by renegotiating the truce on more reasonable terms.

Israel, however, had little interest in avoiding a confrontation with Hamas, as events since the Islamic group’s takeover of Gaza in early 2006 show.

It is widely agreed among the Israeli leadership that Hamas represents a severe threat to Israel’s ambition to crush the Palestinians’ long-standing demands for a state in the West Bank and Gaza. Unike Fatah, its chief Palestinian political rival, Hamas has refused to collude with the Israeli occupation and has instead continued its resistance operations. Although Hamas officially wants the return of all the lands the Palestinians were dispossessed of in 1948, at the establishment of Israel, it has shown signs of increasing pragmatism since its election victory, as Diskin’s comments above highlight. Hamas leaders have repeatedly suggested that a long-term, possibly indefinite, truce with Israel is possible. Such a truce would amount to recognition of Israel and remove most of the obstacles to the partition of historic Palestine into two states: a Jewish state and a Palestinian one.

Rather than engaging with Hamas and cultivating its moderate wing, Israel has been preparing for an “all-out war”, as Ehud Barak, the defence minister, has referred to the current offensive. In fact, Barak began preparing the attack on Gaza at least six months ago, as he has admitted, and probably much earlier.

Barak and the military stayed their hand in Gaza chiefly while other strategies were tested. The most significant was an approach espoused in the immediate wake of Hamas’ victory in 2006. Dov Weisglass, former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s fixer in Washington, gave it clearest expression. Israel’s policy, he said, would be “like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won’t die.”

John Wolfensohn, envoy to the Quartet of the United States, the United Nations, Europe and Russia through most of 2005, has pointed out that the US and Israel reneged on understandings controlling the border crossings into Gaza from the moment of Israel’s disengagement in summer 2005. In an interview with the Israeli media, he attributed the rapid destruction of the Gazan economy to this policy. However, although the blockade began when Fatah was still in charge of the tiny enclave, the goal of Weisglass’ “diet” was to intensify the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. The rationale was that, by starving them, they could be both reduced to abject poverty and encouraged to rise up and overthrow Hamas.

But it seems the Israeli army was far from convinced a “diet” would produce the desired result and started devising a more aggressive strategy. It was voiced last year by Israel’s deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai. He observed that, if Hamas continued firing rockets into Israel (in an attempt, though he failed to mention it, to break the blockade), the Palestinians “will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” The Hebrew word Shoah has come to refer exclusively to the Holocaust.

Though his disturbing comment was quickly disowned, Vilnai is no maverick. He is a former major general in the army who maintains close ties to the senior command. He is also a friend of his boss, Ehud Barak, the Labor leader and Israel’s most decorated soldier. The reference to the shoah offered a brief insight into the reasoning behind a series of policies he and Barak began unveiling from summer 2007.

It was then that hopes of engineering an uprising against Hamas faded. The diet regime had patently failed, as had a Fatah coup attempt underwritten by the United States. Hamas struck a pre-emptive blow against Fatah, forcing its leaders to flee to the West Bank. In retaliation the Israeli government declared Gaza a “hostile entity”. Barak and Vilnai used Gaza’s new status as the pretext for expanding the blockade of food and medicines to include electricity, a policy that was progressively tightened. At the same time they argued that Israel should consider cutting off “all responsibility” for Gaza. The intenton of Barak’s blockade, however, was different from the Weisglass version. It was designed to soften up Gazan society, including Hamas fighters, for Israel’s coming invasion.

Far from being threatened by the intensifying blockade, Hamas turned it to its advantage. Although Israel controls two of the land borders and patrols the coast, there is fourth short land border shared with Egypt, close by the town of Rafah. There, Gaza’s entrepreneurs developed a network of smuggling tunnels that were soon commandeered by Hamas. The tunnels ensured both that basic supplies continued to get through, and that Hamas armed itself for the attack it expected from Israel.

From March 2008, Barak and Vilnai began pushing their military strategy harder. New political formulations agreed by the government suggested the whole population of Gaza were to be considered complicit in Hamas actions, and therefore liable for retaliatory military action. In the words of the daily Jerusalem Post newspaper, Israeli policymakers took the view that “it would be pointless for Israel to topple Hamas because the population [of Gaza] is Hamas”.

At this point, Barak and Vilnai announced they were working on a way to justify in law the army directing artillery fire and air strikes at civilian neighbourhoods of Gaza, as has been occurring throughout the current Gaza campaign. Vilnai, meanwhile, proposed declaring areas of the tiny enclave “combat zones” in which the army would have free rein and from which civilians would be expected to flee – again a tactic that has been implemented over the past three weeks.

Although Israel is determined to crush Hamas politically and militarily, so far it has been loathe to topple it. Israel withdrew from Gaza precisely because the demographic, military and economic costs of directly policing its refugee camps were considered too high. It will not be easily dragged back in.

Other options are either unpalatable or unfeasible. A Fatah government riding in on the back of Israeli tanks would lack legitimacy, and no regime at all – anarchy – risks loosing forces more implacably opposed to a Jewish state than Hamas, including al-Qaeda. Placing Gaza under a peacekeeping force faces other hurdles: not least, the question of which countries would be prepared to take on such a dangerous burden.

Instead Israel is planning to resort to its favourite diplomatic manoeuvre: unilateralism. It wants a solution that passes over the heads of Hamas and the Palestinians. Or as Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, put it: “There is no intention here of creating a diplomatic agreement with Hamas. We need diplomatic agreements against Hamas.” The formula currently being sought for a ceasefire will face opposition from Israel unless it helps achieve several goals.

Israel’s first is to seal off Gaza properly this time. Egypt, although profoundly uncomfortable at having an Islamic group ruling next door, is under too much domestic pressure to crack down on the tunnelling. Israel therefore wants to bring in American and European experts to do the job. They will ensure that the blockade cannot be broken and that Hamas cannot rearm with the the help of outside actors like Iran. At best, Hamas can hope to limp on as nominal ruler of Gaza, on Israeli sufferance.

The second goal has been well articulated by the Harvard scholar Sara Roy, who has been arguing for some time that Israel is, in her words, “de-developing” Gaza. The blockade has been integral to achieving that objective, and is the reason Israel wants it strengthened. In the longer term, she believes, Gazans will come to be “seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims.”

In addition, Gazans living close to the enclave’s northern and southern borders may be progressively “herded” into central Gaza – as envisioned in Vilnai’s plan last year. That process may already be under way, with Israeli leafletting campaigns warning inhabitants of these areas to flee. Israel wants to empty both the Rafah area, so that it can monitor more easily any attempts at tunnelling, and the northern part because this is the location of the rocket launches that are hitting major Israeli cities such as Ashkelon and Ashdod and may one day reach Tel Aviv.

The third and related goal, as Barak and Vilnai proposed more than a year ago, is to cut off all Israeli responsibility for Gaza — though not oversight of what is allowed in. Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian analyst, believes that in this scenario Israel will insist that humanitarian supplies into Gaza pass only through the Egyptian crossing, thereby also undercutting Hamas’ role. Already Israel is preparing to hand over responsibility for supplying Gaza’s electricity to Egypt – a special plant is under construction close by in the Sinai.

Slowly, the hope is, Gaza’s physical and political separation from the West Bank will be cemented, with the enclave effectively being seen as a province of Egypt. Its inhabitants will lose their connection to the wider Palestinian people and eventually Cairo may grow bold enough to crack down on Hamas as brutally as it does its own Islamists.

The regime of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, meanwhile, will be further isolated and weakened, improving Israel’s chances of forcing it to sign a deal annexing East Jerusalem and large swaths of the West Bank on which the Jewish settlements sit.

The fourth goal relates to wider regional issues. The chief obstacle to the implementation of Israel’s plan is the growing power of Iran and its possible pursuit of nuclear weapons. Israel’s official concern – that Tehran wants to attack Israel – is simple mischief-making. Rather Israel is worried that, if Iran becomes a regional superpower, Israeli diktats in the Middle East and in Washington will not go unchallenged.

In particular, a strong Iran will be able to aid Hizbullah and Hamas, and further fan the flames of popular Muslim sentiment in favour of a just settlement for the Palestinians. That could threaten Israel’s plans for the annexation of much of the West Bank, and possibly win the Palestinians statehood. None of this can be allowed to pass by Israel.

It is therefore seeking to isolate Tehran, severing all ties between it and Hamas, just as it earlier tried – and failed – to do the same between Iran and Hizbullah. It wants the Palestinians beholden instead to the “moderate” block in the Arab world, meaning the Sunni dictatorships like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia that in turn depend on Washington for their security.

The prospects of Israel achieving all or even some of these goals seems improbable. Too often Israeli meddling in its neighbours affairs has ended in unintended consequences, or “blowback”. It is a lesson Israel has been all too slow to learn.

Hundreds of supply vehicles headed for Afghanistan were recently torched, and the NATO supply depot in Peshawar ransacked, forcing Pakistani authorities to close the vital Khyber Pass. The main supply routes are no longer secure and Pakistani truck drivers are refusing to transport military supplies. Nato and US officials insist this has had no effect on military operations in Afghanistan despite the fact that attacks happen daily.

In a truly bizarre development NATO is now paying the Taleban to guarantee the security of these supply routes. “We estimate that approximately 25 per cent of the money we pay for security to get the fuel in goes into the pockets of the Taleban,” said one fuel importer. Another boss whose company is subcontracted to supply to Western military bases said that as much as a quarter of the value of a lorry’s cargo was paid to Taleban commanders. “The Taleban come and move with the convoy. They sit in the front vehicle of the convoy to ensure security.”

Raising the prospect of an even wider threat to the convoys, Jamaat-e-Islami staged a rally last week in Peshawar, turning out thousands to condemn NATO missile strikes on Pakistan. The marchers demanded that Pakistan end the NATO convoys, and vowed to cut the supply lines themselves.

2008 saw British deaths there surpass 100, soon followed by Canadian deaths, and US deaths now surpass their total in that other criminal enterprise – Iraq – with the US poised to double troop numbers, despite the fact that popular opinion polls in all the occupying countries regularly show 60 per cent of citizens want their troops home immediately, apparently unfazed by talk of bring democracy and freedom to the grateful locals. A report by the independent US-based Pakistan Policy Working Group claims that at least some of these deaths are at the hands of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, as it is “no longer certain the coalition forces will prevail in Afghanistan and is using militants groups in an attempt to expand its own influence.”

But as Stalin told Churchill, while the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. More disturbing than any of these statistics are the words of Russell Higgins of Nova Scotia, Canada, whose nephew Tom died there recently and who was preparing to say goodbye to his son Peter, headed for the killing fields. “I don’t figure our boys should be over there to start with. You can’t win a war against people that don’t mind dying. My son is getting ready to go over. What can be said? You can only do what you can do.”

As president-elect Barack Obama prepares to double troops levels, US President George W Bush made a parting visit to Kabul, and cautioned that the war would be a long one. Already Defence Secretary Gates is calling on Canada to extend its commitment of troops beyond 2011, despite the agreement to withdraw them by then. No freedom and democracy for citizens of the West or Afghanistan, it seems.

Predictions are now that the violence will subside as the US builds up its military presence. Apparently the unremitting violence of NATO troops against Afghans is not counted. To counter the “violence” of the insurgents – which might be better called partisan warfare against an illegal occupation – Canadian forces have turned to their Israeli allies for help, buying their deadly unmanned drones that are so effective at murdering Palestinians. This is hardly news that will convince Afghans of the occupiers’ good intentions – Israel effectively attacking and killing them along with their Palestinian brothers. How long will it be before the Mumbai tragedy is repeated in the heart of peaceful Ottawa? How can anyone possibly think that Israel will find peace by spreading its criminal activity farther and farther afield?

Perhaps even more bizarre than paying the Taleban while killing them with Israeli bombs, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just appointed Canadian Tooryalai Wesa governor of Kandahar. He is a close friend of Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai who just happens to be chairman of the Kandahar provincial council. The last governor lasted only four months, but Tooryalai promises to bring order and prosperity. It’s as if Kandahar has become Canada’s 11th province, bristling with 2,500 Canadian troops, and now even governed by a Canadian.

There is a sense of foreboding about the planned push by Obama, with no enthusiasm or hope for success apparent among anyone involved. In an unprecedented breach of protocol, General Hans-Christoph Ammon, head of the German army’s elite special commando unit, branded his own country’s efforts a “miserable failure”, singling out its poor record in training the Afghan police and allocating development aid. The ruling coalition of Christian and Social Democrats face elections next year, with the anti-war Die Linke party making huge gains.

The occupiers and Karzai try to convince Taleban to switch sides, but just the opposite is happening. After fighting the Taleban for the past seven years, many working for the Afghan security forces are joing them. Afghan policeman Sulieman Ameri, now a Taleban commander, used to patrol the border with Iran. Ameri told Al-Jazeera he and his 16 men joined the Taleban because of anti-Muslim behaviour by international soldiers. “I have seen everything with my own eyes, I have seen prostitution, I have seen them drinking alcohol. We are Muslim and therefore jihad is our obligation,” Ameri said in the mountains south of Herat. “Our soil is occupied by Americans and I want them to leave this country. That is my only goal,” he added.

“When Russia came it was only one country, today we have 24 foreign infidel countries on our soil. All our men and women should come and join the jihad,” Fida Mohammad, a new Taliban recruit, told Al-Jazeera. Abdul Rahim, another new recruit, said he received training from Blackwater for 45 days. “I can use the training to save my life in these mountains and I can also use it to fight them,” he said. NATO spokesman Brigadier-General Richard Blanchette dismissed such talk: “The Taliban and other insurgents are conducting a propaganda campaign against us.”

Kai Eide, head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, recently told the UN Security Council that Taliban attacks — at an all-time high — would probably grow in the coming weeks instead of easing, as they have in previous winters. “We should be prepared for a situation where the insurgency will not experience the same winter lull, the same reduction in hostilities we have experienced in past winters,” he said. Eide added that attacks against humanitarian workers had also increased.

NATO’s response to its failure to build a reliable Afghan army and police is to set up local militias. The plan is causing deep unease among many Afghans, who fear that Pashtun-dominated militias could get out of control, terrorise locals and turn against the government. “There will be fighting between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns,” said Salih Mohammad Registani, a member of the Afghan Parliament and an ethnic Tajik. Registani recalled the Arbaki, a Pashtun-dominated militia in the early 20th century. “A civil war will start very soon,” he said.

As Afghanistan prepares for its own election cycle — presidential elections are scheduled for 2009, with parliamentary elections to follow in 2010 — it is likely that the resentment fueled by the presence of troops from the 24 infidel countries and the treatment of Afghans as second-class citizens by the foreign NGOs and military will become a rallying point for politicians. There have been growing indications of this even from Karzai’s administration, notably his agreement to sign the anti-cluster bomb treaty earlier this month despite US disapproval.

The Taleban are not to be treated lightly. They were feared, but respected too, when they ruled. With no help from anyone, they disarmed the entire nation and proceeded to wipe out opium production before the US invaded (after which rape became endemic, warlords amassed arms and opium production soared to record levels). There was virtually no crime, as “we all had nightmares of them cutting off your hand if you stole,” Afghan Canadian Abdul told Al-Ahram Weekly after returning from this year’s Hajj.

“We hated the Russians but we knew they didn’t want to be there. The Afghan communists took power in 1978 and then the US flooded the country with weapons to fight them. I remember this well. The last communist leader, (Mohammad) Najibullah, was actually a good leader, but the US insisted on backing Bin Laden and the other terrorists against him. The US could solve the whole problem in a week if they wanted to. There is no Bin Laden now. Even though I don’t like them, the Taleban should be allowed to take power. They would be better than what my family in Kabul are living through now,” said Abdul.

The current US occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq, the refusal to allow the Somali Taleban — the Islamic Courts and the Shabab — to come to power there, and the unremitting vilification of Syria and Iran can only be explained as the US trying to force the Muslim world into submission. It is no coincidence that these holdouts are the focus of US hostility.

This is all eerily familiar. In the 20th century, the communists were the enemy. The Cold War was the vehicle for keeping alive the enemy myth so necessary to holding together the imperial order. Communism was supposedly destroyed, with no positive effect for anyone, it turns out. But conventional wisdom still celebrates the “victory over Communism” at the same time as it exhorts us to hold firm against the new enemy, recalcitrant Islam, as embodied in Afghanistan’s resistance fighters.

One can, of course, understand why few in the West want the orthodox view of the Cold War overturned, or want to see the withdrawal of US/NATO forces from the Middle East. If that were to happen, the whole edifice of postwar politics would begin to crumble. People would realize the heavy burden of postwar rearmament was for naught. Israel would quickly have to make peace with the Palestinians, ending their criminal occupation. People everywhere would wake up to the reality that the war against Communism — and now Islam — actually imperiled rather than saved us, and they would see the real enemy. Is there time? Can the Afghan resistance prevail against the mightiest death machine in world history? The war in Afghanistan is now a race to the finish – for us all.

When Lashkar-e-Taiba (”Army of the Pure”–LET) militants slaughtered nearly 200 people in Mumbai during the November 26 siege in India’s financial capital, one name stood out among a list of 20 fugitives the Indian government has demanded Pakistan extradite as a key suspect responsible for providing funds and logistical support to the Kashmir-based terrorist outfit.

Enter Dawood Ibrahim, the enigmatic Mafia don of Mumbai’s D-Company whose far-flung organized crime empire stretches from Dubai through Pakistan to India and beyond. If anyone knows where the proverbial “bodies are buried,” that man may very well be Ibrahim. Wanted by Interpol and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Ibrahim commutes between palatial homes in Dubai and Karachi where he enjoys the protection afforded by “friends in high places.”

According to a report in Asia Times Online, “Ibrahim is…suspected of orchestrating the November 26 Mumbai terrorist strikes through a businessman in Saudi Arabia said to be his frontman.” The Indian-born drug kingpin has been identified by journalists and investigators as a long-time asset of both the CIA and Pakistan’s notorious Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Asia Times Online investigative journalist Raja Murthy was told by Lahore-based journalist Amir Mir that “Dawood’s underworld connects and business ventures are extensive. And he sublets his name in Pakistan, Thailand, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries, to franchises in the fields of drug trafficking and gambling dens.”

Karachi-based reporter Ghulam Hasnain described to Murthy why Ibrahim was amongst ISI’s most valued assets: “Dawood is Pakistan’s number one espionage operative. His men in Mumbai help him get whatever information he needs for Pakistan. Rumor has it that sometimes his men in Karachi accompany Pakistani intelligence agents to the airports to scan arriving passengers and identify RAW [Indian Research and Analysis Wing] agents.”

And what does this “number one espionage operative” get in return? According to Hasnain, “His home is a palatial house spread over 6,000 square yards, boasting a pool, tennis courts, snooker room and a private, hi-tech gym. He wears designer clothes, drives top-of-the-line Mercedes and luxurious four-wheel drives, sports a half-a-million rupee Patek Phillipe wristwatch, and showers money on starlets and prostitutes.”

Pakistan’s shadowy military intelligence bureau, with organizational and operational linkages to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 has long been suspected of funding planetary-wide terrorist operations and nuclear smuggling in part, through “black money” derived from the drugs trade and other rackets. Despite this sordid history, the ISI and their organized crime-linked assets have long been viewed by Washington as allies in America’s so-called “war on terror.”

While American “counterterrorism officials” are now calling for the heads of Ibrahim, his associate Tiger Memon and former ISI Director, retired Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, described by the usual unnamed sources as–what else!–”rogue elements,” the United States and their NATO partners have made liberal use of these jokers in a score of destabilization ops that span continents.

Indeed, after the Afghanistan operation during the 1980s, the CIA and ISI worked together in a score of global hot spots. From Bosnia to Chechnya and beyond, wherever the dirty work needed doing, a wide pool of disposable intelligence assets under cover of “Islamic fundamentalism” were ready, willing an able to fill the breech.

It should be noted that characters such as Dawood Ibrahim and others of his ilk have as much in common with Islam as former New York crime boss, the late, though unlamented, John Gotti did with Christianity.

Destabilization and Covert Ops in South Asia

Before his execution at the hands of the Taliban, Najibullah, Afghanistan’s last socialist president told an American reporter:

We have a common task–Afghanistan, the USA and the civilised world–to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism. If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a centre of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a centre for terrorism. (Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: Afghanistan, Al Qa’ida and the Holy War, London: Pluto Press, 2003, p. 4)

Little did the former president know, this was precisely the fate chosen for his country by the ISI and their American partners in crime over at Langley.

Though now on the outs with Washington, Hamid Gul was a staunch U.S. ally during the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad when the CIA made liberal use of billions of taxpayer dollars to fund the so-called mujahedin or “holy warriors” in a successful bid to bring down Kabul’s socialist government.

During the war, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence assets linked to organized crime gangs and various smuggling rackets quickly learned the value of Afghanistan’s number one cash crop, poppy. By the time the first phase of the war ended in 1989 with the withdrawal of Soviet combat troops, heroin production had morphed into a multibillion dollar industry along Asia’s Golden Crescent, one that provided a limitless source of black funds–and hardened combat veterans–to enterprising intelligence agencies.

Occupying a prominent place in the spider’s web, the D-Company certainly fit the bill. India’s 1990s economic “reforms” bit hard into Ibrahim’s former “cash crop”–gold smuggling. As the globalized market, rather than bureaucratic Indian regulations gobbled-up D-Company profits, Ibrahim’s gang turned to another profitable source of income: the global drugs trade. As investigative journalist Misha Glenny points out, Ibrahim,

took the obvious plunge and started trafficking in drugs, chiefly in heroin bound for the European market and mandrax for South Africa. And in Dawood’s part of the world, if you want to guarantee the success of a narcotics business, there is only one organization you need to cozy up to–the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Pakistan’s secret service. (McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 135)

Ibrahim followed in the footsteps of a long line of CIA-ISI “best friends forever.” As Alfred W. McCoy documented in his landmark study, The Politics of Heroin, another darling of dodgy intelligence agencies, the pathological killer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who made his mark in the 1970s by throwing acid into the faces of Afghan university women, became the chief beneficiary of CIA largesse. McCoy writes,

…over the next decade, [the CIA] gave more than half its covert aid to Hekmatyar’s guerrillas. It was, as the U.S. Congress would find a decade later, a dismal decision. Unlike the later resistance leaders who commanded strong popular followings inside Afghanistan, Hekmatyar led a guerrilla force that was a creature of the Pakistan military. After the CIA built his Hezbi-i Islami into the largest guerrilla force, Hekmatyar would prove himself brutal and corrupt. Not only did he command the largest guerrilla army, but Hekmatyar would use it–with the full support of ISI and the tacit tolerance of the CIA–to become Afghanistan’s leading drug lord. (The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991, pp. 449-450)

It would be a travesty however, to claim that Pakistan alone was responsible for launching Ibrahim along the path of international terrorism. India’s own neofascist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Organization–RSS), aligned with the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are intent on constructing a “pure” Hindu state purged of “alien” Muslims. As Indian socialist analysts point out,

It is no coincidence that the flourishing of fascism has accompanied the establishment of the neoliberal regime at the centre. The India to which neoliberalism has given birth, with one-fifth engaged in consumer excess as never before and four-fifths in deep misery, can only with difficulty persist alongside the maintenance of civil rights, democracy and periodic elections. If the fundamental social question, imperialist capitalism vs. socialism, were ever to be put at the centre of things, the continued existence of the landlord-big business regime that has ruled since independence would be in danger, and a truly explosive situation result. (”The Christian Pogrom in Orissa and the Growing Threat of Hindutva Fascism,” Analytical Monthly Review, February 22, 2008)

This was tragically driven-home with a vengeance in the early 1990s. Indeed, the rise of Indian fascism coincides precisely with the rise of neoliberal globalization. As “market reforms” plunged tens of millions into abject poverty, the ruling elite cast about for scapegoats and, like European Jews in prewar Germany, the Muslim community became targets of religious intolerance and communalist fanaticism.

In 1992, during a 150,000 strong demonstration organized by Indian fascists, rampaging gangs destroyed the Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya. In the rioting that followed in a score of cities some 2,000 largely Muslim Indian citizens were murdered by Hindu supremacist mobs. Ibrahim, though nominally a Muslim, was greatly angered by the Mumbai pogrom and vowed revenge. It wasn’t long in coming.

On March 12, 1993, a series of explosions wracked Mumbai in coordinated attacks believed to have been organized by the D-Company working in tandem with ISI who, like their nominal enemies in New Delhi, had their own communalist agenda. The largest blast occurred at the Mumbai Stock Exchange when a half-ton of military grade RDX was detonated in the underground parking garage and killed more than 50 people. By the time the smoke cleared, nearly 300 people lay dead and hundreds more wounded.

According to a 2002 report in India Abroad, Ibrahim organized the blasts “under pressure from the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan.”

The ISI, which controlled the shipping routes from the Gulf to India’s west coast, demanded that the mafia transport weapons and explosives into India in return for the use of Pakistani waters, the sources said quoting official information.

The Mumbai underworld’s financial interests were under pressure as gold prices had crashed and the smuggling routes between the Gulf nations and the western coast of India had come under ISI control. (”ISI pressured Dawood to carry out Mumbai blasts,” India Abroad, December 22, 2002)

It wouldn’t be the first time nor the last that the dapper Mafia don would do ISI’s bidding.

ISI: the Enforcement Arm of Pakistan’s “Military Inc.”

Hamid Gul’s history as a beneficiary of state largesse in the form of plum contracts and other dodgy schemes that benefitted his family goes back decades. Nor is his hostility to civilian rule. As Pakistani scholar and investigative journalist Ayesha Siddiqa writes, Gul’s maneuvering against Benazir Bhutto’s first government, led to her ouster in 1990 through a “soft coup” engineered by the general and other top army officials.

Benazir Bhutto…replaced the head of the ISI, Lt. General Hameed Gul, with a general of her choice, Major-General Shamsul Rehman Kallu. This did not make her popular with the army, and hence the organization retaliated. Reportedly, the higher echelons of the army, who were extremely unhappy with her attempts to curb their power by interfering in internal matters, used the ISI to remove her from power. The army chief, General Aslam Beg, and the head of the ISI, Lt. General Asad Durrani, obtained a slush fund of approximately Rs 60 million (US$1.03 million) from a private bank, and used to execute the plan for Bhutto’s removal. The money was given to the ISI to destabilize the civilian government. (Military, Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007, p. 91)

And what “private bank” pray tell, did the coup plotters reach out to in order to remove Bhutto from power? Why none other than Agha Hasan Abedi’s Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) of course! BCCI, a corrupt financial institution that stole billions from their depositors was a long time “friend” of both ISI and CIA in their dirty dealings–from drug money laundering to arms trafficking–that spanned continents, from the covert war in Afghanistan to the Iran-Contra affair.

Days after the 2007 Karachi bombings that greeted her return to Pakistan, and just two months before her assassination in Rawalpindi, Benazir Bhutto accused Gul and Intelligence Bureau (IB) Chief Ijaz Shah, among others, as the masterminds behind the savage attacks that left more than 140 people dead and 450 injured. After her assassination, although al-Qaeda commander Mustafa Abu al-Yazid claimed responsibility for her murder, reportedly on orders from al-Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bhutto’s followers believe the plans for her assassination came from senior ISI officials formerly in the retinue of America’s “friend,” the dictator General Zia ul-Haq.

Since his 1989 “retirement” from ISI, Gul has been an outspoken proponent of utilizing proxies such as LET as witting or unwitting assets in Pakistan’s conflict with India over Kashmir–and as a supporter of the Taliban and another “former” group of U.S. intelligence assets, al-Qaeda. According to The Washington Post,

Gul, 71, has acknowledged that he once was a member of a group of retired ISI officers, Pakistani scientists and others that was suspected by the United States of giving material support to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Gul said the organization, Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, was formed by a group of Pakistani businessmen to aid war-ravaged industries in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Treasury Department declared Ummah Tameer-e-Nau a terrorist group after a search of the group’s offices in the Afghan capital, Kabul, unearthed documents referencing plans to kidnap a U.S. diplomat and outlining basic physics related to nuclear weapons. (Candace Rondeaux, “Former Pakistani Official Denies Links to Lashkar,” The Washington Post, December 9, 2008, A12)

But what Gul (and The Washington Post) will not, cannot, reveal is that Ummah Tameer-e-Nau was also intimately connected–as was Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company–to the illicit nuclear smuggling ring of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan. Allegedly run to ground after overwhelming evidence surfaced linking Khan and Pakistan’s military government to the underground trade in nuclear technology and know-how, nuclear smuggling is the proverbial third rail of the Pakistani–and American–defense establishments.

Operating for decades with a wink and a nod from Washington and London, Khan was quietly released from house arrest in April according to a report by the McClatchy Washington Bureau. This despite the fact that international investigators found electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers belonging to Khan’s smuggling network. According to The New York Times,

the latest design found on Khan network computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities around the world is half the size and twice the power of the Chinese weapon, with far more modern electronics, the investigators say. The design is in electronic form, they said, making it easy to copy–and they have no idea how many copies of it are now in circulation. (David E. Sanger, “Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Weapon Design,” The New York Times, June 15, 2008)

This closely tracks allegations made by whistleblower Sibel Edmonds earlier this year to The Sunday Times that a U.S. government official “warned a Turkish member of the [Khan] network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause celebre in the US.”

Gul however, has a different take on Washington’s newly-minted animus towards him and told the press on Monday, “I was quite a darling of theirs at the time. I don’t know what this is about. It looks like they have a habit of betraying their friends.”

While true as far it goes, Gul’s disingenuousness is a cynical façade meant to conceal ISI’s murderous policies. In an obvious appeal to dubious Western constituencies Gul declared, “I simply fail to understand what all the hullabaloo is about. It’s simply because I speak loudly about the fact that 9/11 was a bloody hoax,” he told the Post. “It was an inside job.”

Mumbai: “Round Up the Usual Suspects!”

Though there is convincing evidence linking the D-Company to the Mumbai attacks, each new “revelation” by Indian and American authorities tend to erase Ibrahim from the picture. This subtle though noticeable reframing of the equation follows a predictable and well-known pattern. Independent press outlets such as Asia Times Online however, apparently haven’t gotten the memo. According to investigative journalist Raja Murthy:

The Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists set sail from Karachi to Mumbai in the ship MV Alpha, allegedly an Ibrahim-owned vessel. After being warned of Indian navy patrols along the Indian coast, the LET terrorists hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, Kuber, and murdered its crew except for the navigator, Amarsinh Solanki.

The terrorists slit Solanki’s throat five nautical miles off the Indian coast–the Indian Navy found his body aboard the abandoned trawler with his hands tied behind his back. Later, they linked up with an Ibrahim gang member in Mumbai who provided them motorized inflatable rubber dinghies in which they landed ashore after 9pm on November 26. Within 30 minutes, they struck pre-determined targets in South Mumbai starting with the Leopold Cafe in Colaba. (”India Wants its ‘Osama’ Back,” Asia Times Online, December 9, 2008)

These attacks however, didn’t come out of the blue. According to numerous reports, Mumbai police were given “solid information” from India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) that Mumbai was on a list of cities to be targeted by terrorists. India Abroad reports that

The first alert was sounded in February 2008 following the interrogation of a terrorist arrested in connection with the fidayeen (suicide) attack at the Central Reserve Police Force camp at Rampur, Uttar Pradesh. During the interrogation, the arrested terrorist had confessed that the Lashkar-e-Tayiba had planned on attacking Mumbai. He had specifically mentioned the Taj Mahal hotel during his interrogation.

Then came the various intercepts by both the IB and RAW, which both agencies claim had passed on to the Mumbai police. The first intercept of a satellite phone conversation was three months before the Mumbai attack. The conversation suggested that the next attack would be a hotel at Mumbai. The conversation also suggested that it would be better to take the sea route as it was safer. The final intercept was made on November 18, which was eight days before the attack. (Vicky Nanjappa, “Time & again, Mumbai cops had been warned: IB,” India Abroad, December 4, 2008)

This report was echoed by The New York Times, which claimed,

Two senior American officials said Tuesday that the United States had warned India in mid-October of possible terrorist attacks against “touristy areas frequented by Westerners” in Mumbai, but that the information was not specific. Nonetheless, the officials said, the warning echoed other general alerts this year by India’s intelligence agency, raising questions about the adequacy of India’s counterterrorism measures. (Eric Schmitt, Somini Sengupta and Jane Perlez, “U.S. and India See Link to Militants in Pakistan, The New York Times, December 3, 2008)

Despite these suspicions, Indian authorities insist that the terrorists had no “local support” in carrying out the attacks. According to a report in the Economic Times however, “the don is ensconced safely in his plush bungalow in Karachi. Sources in security agencies told TOI [Times of India] on Wednesday that it is business as usual for Dawood. … Mohammed Ali, who is the king of the docks and a key person of the Dawood gang, is continuing his operations with impunity. Even after the November 26 terror attacks his smuggling racket remains unchecked.”

And Express India reported November 29 that “Ajmal Amin, the only militant arrested during the operation, told interrogators that the dozen ultras who sailed from Karachi had come to Sasool dock from where they were taken first to Cuff Parade and later to Gateway of India in boats arranged by a front man of Dawood, who runs several custom clearing houses in Mumbai, the sources claimed.”

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported December 9, that the head of Russia’s federal anti-narcotics agency, Viktor Ivanov, said that Ibrahim had helped the gunmen. “The information that has been received indicates that the well-known drug trafficker Dawood Ibrahim provided his logistics network for the preparation and implementation of the attacks.”

But Ibrahim wasn’t always the bête noire of U.S. intelligence agencies. According to Yoichi Shimatsu, a former editor of The Japan Times, during the CIA’s Afghan campaign of the 1980s, Ibrahim “personally assisted” U.S. deep cover operations by diverting money from U.S.-owned gambling casinos operating in Kathmandu, Nepal. Shimatsu, commenting on India’s demand for Ibrahim’s extradition for his role in the Mumbai attacks wrote,

Washington and London both agreed with India’s legal claim and removed the longstanding “official protection” accorded for his past services to Western intelligence agencies. U.S. diplomats, however, could never allow Dawood’s return. He simply knows too much about America’s darker secrets in South Asia and the Gulf, disclosure of which could scuttle U.S.-India relations. Dawood was whisked away in late June to a safe house in Quetta, near the tribal area of Waziristan, and then he disappeared, probably back to the Middle East. (”Did a Criminal Mastermind Stage the Mumbai Nightmare?,” AlterNet, November 28, 2008)

But as time passes both India and the United States are downplaying Ibrahim’s role while elevating that of alleged LET commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, reportedly captured by Pakistani authorities during a raid on a training camp and now in custody. Allegations of an international whitewash of the affair are now being leveled by journalists. Jeffrey R. Hammond comments, “The recent promotion of Lakhvi to ‘mastermind’ of the attacks while Ibrahim’s name disappears from media reports would seem to lend credence to Shimatsu’s assertion.”

On Friday, according to a New York Times report, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of LET, was detained in Lahore on Thursday by “Pakistani authorities.”

Despite the appearance of Pakistani resolve, the detention of Mr. Saeed was orchestrated by the government in a way to minimize what many here expect to be an angry reaction from the public, and from a broad spectrum of Islamic militant groups sympathetic to Lashkar-e-Taiba. (Jane Perlez and Salman Masood, “Pakistan Detains Founder of Group Suspected in Mumbai Attacks,” The New York Times, December 11, 2008)

Saeed, briefly detained in 2002 after an earlier “crackdown” on militant outfits, became the leader of the Islamic charity, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which is a recruiting arm for the LET.

Meanwhile, according to the Times, “There was still uncertainty on Thursday about whether Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of Jaish-e-Muhammad, another militant group, had been placed under house arrest, and whether the Lashkar commander suspected of running the Mumbai operation, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, had been arrested.”

So much for arresting Mumbai’s alleged “masterminds.” Sounds more like Captain Renaud’s quip in Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects!”

Indeed, a deal earlier this year to have Pakistan hand Ibrahim over to Indian authorities was scotched by the CIA. The Agency, fearful that too many dirty little secrets would come to light, including the criminal activities of high-level CIA personnel, nixed the proposal. According to this reading, the Mumbai attacks were a backlash for the proposed double-cross of Ibrahim and that any future arrangements along these lines would have serious consequences.

Why would India seek to downgrade Ibrahim’s role? Hammond comments,

But while Lakhvi, Muzammil, and Hafiz Saeed have continued to be named in connection with last month’s attacks in Mumbai, the name of Dawood Ibrahim seems to be either disappearing altogether or his originally designated role as the accused mastermind of the attacks being credited now instead to Lakhvi in media accounts.

Whether this is a deliberate effort to downplay Ibrahim’s role in the attacks so as not to have to force Pakistan to turn him over because of embarrassing revelations pertaining to the CIA’s involvement with known terrorists and drug traffickers that development could possibly produce isn’t certain. But what is certain is that the CIA has had a long history of involvement with such characters and that the US has a track record of attempting to keep information about the nature of such involvement in the dark or to cover it up once it reaches the light of public scrutiny. (Jeffrey R. Hammond, “Role of Alleged CIA Asset in Mumbai Attacks Being Downplayed,” Foreign Policy Journal, December 10, 2008)

And so it goes, on and on… Meanwhile, business as usual will continue and the bodies pile up. Which just goes to show, as investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker has reminded us on more than one occasion: “Being connected means never having to say your sorry.”

The attackers specifically targeted American and British citizens in the two luxury hotels that were under assault. They also killed residents of a Jewish center. The continued occupation of Iraq, which was spearheaded by the United States and the United Kingdom, continues after five long years and will last at least another three. Israel’s occupation of Palestine and theft of its land also continues unchecked with the full support of western nations. India’s Muslim population has been victimized by orchestrated mob violence. Relations between mostly Hindu India and mostly Muslim Pakistan are always strained.

So we know why the terrorists are mad and with whom. The need to ask “Why?” is understandable but ultimately useless and dishonest. Terror is usually the result of unacknowledged grievance. Muslims are mad at the United States, Great Britain and the Indian government, and those who are angry enough to commit acts of violence would obviously choose India’s financial capital to inflict maximum damage and gain world wide attention in the process.

The scenes of dead bodies and bloody streets were painful but necessary to see. In five years of the Iraq occupation American television networks have not seen fit to broadcast images of dead and maimed Iraqis. That absence of vital information is shameful and keeps the country in a state of blissful ignorance. It makes already incurious and uninformed Americans more susceptible to propaganda from the government and the media.

The reaction to the Mumbai terror attacks is all too predictable. People are shocked at first, then saddened and frightened. Muslims feel compelled to apologize for their violent coreligionists. Christians and Jews are exempt from guilt by association, however. They are even permitted and encouraged to embrace the violent acts committed by individuals among them.

As always, Americans never see a connection between themselves, the acts of terror committed by their own government and anger directed at them around the globe. Empathy for terror victims in Mumbai is sadly not extended to the victims of the American government.

Warfare is the ultimate act of terror. It kills not just scores of people, but many thousands, or in the case of the Congo, millions. War is given a pass by religious groups, by politicians and by the media. It is considered an acceptable form of murder. The victims in Mumbai will be mourned by Americans, as they should be. The victims of the United States government in Iraq and Afghanistan are not.

They are considered “collateral damage” of worthy acts. Americans are told that some good will come from the deaths committed in their names. The dead victims of our government are even said to be helped by America’s aggression. We have to save Iraqis from Saddam and Afghans from the Taliban. If they are killed by America’s helpfulness so be it. If survivors complain they are called ungrateful and stupid or crazed fanatics who don’t know a good thing when they see it.

As Americans watch the news coverage from Mumbai and feel revulsion at the sight of so much suffering, they ought to ask themselves about their own involvement in bringing suffering to the rest of the world. Victims of violence should be mourned and killers should be condemned. The terrorists who attacked Mumbai should be condemned along with soldiers from many countries who kill in even larger numbers. The Mumbai toll is shocking but less than that created by bombs that fall from airplanes or missiles and rockets that come from tanks.

It is especially important now to remember how our country creates so much suffering. The new president will have a honeymoon, a pass to start his own evil doing. It won’t even be called evil doing. After all, change has come. George W. Bush, the wicked witch, is dead. All must be right with the country, even if it continues to do wrong.

Don’t even get me started on your vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

I cast a ballot for you in November, but I just can’t share in this moment of collective euphoria over your election.

So, if your transition team really wants feedback on “where President-Elect Obama should lead this country,” here’s a Top Five list:

1. Dump the Bush Doctrine and don’t start more wars

You’ve made it clear that the US has to “take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights” and you’ve argued for “more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11.”

What exactly does that mean?

Take troops out of Iraq and shove them into Afghanistan? Further destabilize Pakistan?

The whole idea of preemptive war (a.k.a. the Bush Doctrine) has no place in a civilized society and must be laid to rest, along with those sacrificed in Bush’s military adventurism these past eight years.

Yet your approach to preemptive war, Mr. Obama, is nuanced at best.

During the January 2008 Democratic presidential debate, you said that if the US had “actionable intelligence” and Pakistan didn’t “take on Al Qaida in their territory,” then “I would strike.” You added, “And that’s the flaw of the Bush doctrine. It wasn’t that he went after those who attacked America. It was that he went after those who didn’t.”

No, the flaw of the Bush Doctrine is that it’s just plain wrong. We’ve learned that the hard way.

2. Ditch the warmongers

What’s with all of the hawks in your new administration?

You presented yourself as a peace candidate and then chose Joe Biden as your VP. Yes, he brought in the white male vote, but he also backed the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Just last month Biden warned that if you were elected, there would be “an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.” He said that you would make some “incredibly tough decisions” that could alienate the Democratic base, because if decisions are “popular, they’re probably not sound.”

In other words, a popular decision, one that the majority of the people wants, is probably not a good decision. Democracy to Biden…

And then there’s Robert Gates, widely rumored to be staying on as your Defense Secretary. Questions about Gates’ role in Iran-Contra, not to mention his skewing of intelligence about Russia, still linger.

But especially disturbing is his recent push for beefing up the US nuclear arsenal: “As long as other nations have or seek nuclear weapons – and can potentially threaten us, our allies and friends – then we must have a deterrent capacity that makes it clear that challenging the United States in the nuclear arena, or with weapons of mass destruction, could result in an overwhelming, catastrophic response.”

Let’s get this straight: if other nations are even imagined to “seek” nuclear weapons, that “could result in an overwhelming, catastrophic response” from the US.

Obama, you’ve often insisted on taking “no options off the table” in dealing with Iran. How does Gates’ proposal for the preemptive use of nuclear weapons factor in there?

While we’re on the topic of warmongers in your midst… Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff? Yet another hawk, hell-bent on Iran and enamored with nuclear weapons.

And now we’ve got Clinton as Secretary of State.

Why is it that none of the 23 senators and 133 House Reps who voted against the war in Iraq are even on a short-list for these critical posts?

3. Close Guantanamo – and the whole system of secret prisons

Shutting down Gitmo is said to be a priority for your new administration. Terrific.

But what about Bagram? What about the other CIA “black site” secret prisons set up in Afghanistan, Thailand, Eastern Europe and elsewhere? What about the CIA torture flights? Will those end too?

Closing Gitmo also raises questions over how “high value” defendants will be handled. Your administration is reportedly considering setting up an alternative court system to deal with sensitive cases. But what safeguards will be in place to be sure that this new system won’t degenerate into kangaroo courts, like Bush’s military commissions?

It’s a disturbing signal that you’ve appointed John Brennan, who has supported extraordinary rendition and warrantless wiretapping, to help review intelligence agencies for your administration. As former CIA and State Department analyst Mel Goodman noted, Brennan “sat there at [former CIA Director George] Tenet’s knee when they passed judgment on torture and abuse, on extraordinary renditions, on black sites, on secret prisons. He was part of all of that decision making.”

And this is who will help lead us out of this mess?

You’ve criticized the use of torture, yet reportedly will not bring criminal charges against those who authorized or conducted torture during the Bush years. Your administration doesn’t see it as politically expedient, and Bush might give “preemptive” pardons anyway.

But can we really end this dark chapter in our nation’s history without even an investigation? A Truth Commission, perhaps? Providing blanket immunity to all low-level and senior government officials won’t prevent possible war crimes from happening again. Quite the opposite.

4. Expose Bush & Co., and ditch the national surveillance state

Speaking of war crimes, how about Bush, Cheney and the rest? You’ll soon be given access to Bush-era secret orders and opinions authorizing everything from surveillance to detention. You’ll no doubt rescind many, to great fanfare, but what about sharing this evidence of Bush-year excesses with the public?

Yes, Bush could file a lawsuit and invoke executive privilege, but it’s worth the fight. The only other option is shielding Bush & Co., similar to how you will reportedly shield those government officials involved in torture. But the public deserves to know. And if Bush administration officials violated the law, they should be prosecuted.

Now, back to your vote for both the PATRIOT Act reauthorization in 2006 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendment in 2008. These and other rollbacks in domestic civil liberties under Bush are inexcusable and must be addressed. We’ll be waiting for you to do that.

5. Choose Main Street (not Wall Street)

Just this month you promised Americans that they can “turn the page on policies that have put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street.”

Yet, as Bloomberg notes, “almost half the people” on your Transition Economic Advisory Board “have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both.”

This includes, for example, Anne Mulcahy and Richard Parsons, both of whom were Fannie Mae directors when the company fudged accounting rules. Ditto for another of your team members, William Daley.

Mulcahy and Parsons additionally held executive posts when their companies (Xerox Corp. and Time Warner Inc., respectively) got busted for accounting fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Also on your team is Robert Rubin, who as Bloomberg notes, was “chairman of Citigroup Inc.’s executive committee when the bank pushed bogus analyst research, helped Enron Corp. cook its books, and got caught baking its own. He was a director from 2000 to 2006 at Ford Motor Co., which also committed accounting fouls and now is begging Uncle Sam for Citigroup-style bailout cash.”

The list of questionable appointees to your Transitional Economic Advisory Board goes on and on, begging the question: Is this really the best you could come up with? How about Joseph Stiglitz, Sheila Bair, Nouriel Roubini or James K. Galbraith, for starters? Someone who represents labor?

Meanwhile, we’re stuck with this nasty bailout bill – which you voted for.

Others, such as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), realized the bill’s problems and voted against it. Feingold said that the Wall Street bailout legislation, “fails to reform the flawed regulatory structure that permitted this crisis to arise in the first place. And it doesn’t do enough to address the root cause of the credit market collapse, namely the housing crisis. Taxpayers deserve a plan that puts their concerns ahead of those who got us into this mess.”

Feingold was right.

In short, Mr. President-elect, you promised “Change we can believe in,” but across the board it’s looking a lot more like “Business as usual.”

One afternoon the New Yorker came. I wasn’t sure why it arrived on my doorstep, as I couldn’t remember ordering it, but I was glad to get it. I was longing for something which would engage my attention without meaning that I had to get out of bed. My extreme lethargy was appalling to me, but it literally made me sick to move about much, or even to think about moving.

As I lay in bed and leafed through the magazine, which in and out of my intellectual life had been some sort of benchmark for it for at least two decades, I was very conscious, suddenly, of entering a world that I remembered as once seeming wide and seamless as the world itself, and that I now found, in all its staid presumption, to be highly circumscribed and narrowly defined. It had almost nothing to do with what I had come to perceive as the truth of my own experience. The New Yorker, I realized, was not a magazine so much as the distillation of a very particular culture.

This in and of itself was no major revelation. But my feelings about it were contradictory and somehow related to the nature of what ailed me then, and ails me still, if not physically then psychologically, even spiritually.

What astounded me was the complete fantasy at the core of the New Yorker worldview, the unshakeable assumption of the fundamental truth of an illusion. And also, how attractive this enclosed world was to me, because it was a known quantity. It was unquestionably the world of the old “liberal elite.” Its mythology, secular humanism, is one I grew up steeped in and surrounded by. Its believers suggest, without ever overtly boasting, that within its boundaries lie all that is reasonable, elegant, insightful and just, i.e., all that is truly real. Accordingly, the impoverishment, cruelty, isolation and rage that I see grimacing out of so many exhausted faces on every street, are not the defining parameters of our society. They are not the real world.

The real world, according to the New Yorker, is the world of concepts, the struggle of the soul of man to express itself in art, or commerce—or one of the boundary worlds between the two, like fashion or cinema–or politics or science or some field of endeavor. It is a quiet, sunlit world of cottages on the Long Island shore and travel in Europe (look at the ads). It is peopled at the center by comfortable educated persons ensconced in the Western tradition but firmly believing they are possessed of open, enquiring minds. Though it prides itself on skepticism and inquiry, this mindset retains a number of unspoken preconceptions: totalitarianism (i.e. what used to be the ruling system in the former Soviet Union) is evil by nature; western civilization is flawed but basically good; other cultures are generally primitive or strange, but often have aspects of grandeur and mystery which serve primarily to enrich “our” culture and understanding. Personal income is not relevant to an individual’s ability to perform, unless it is excessively large or small. Political or socially engaged art is de facto inferior art. Class, as an institutional, structural, economic and political fundament of society does not exist, at least in this country, and is of fairly minor relevance even in more overtly stratified societies. The U.S. government functions as mediator among a variety of conflicting interests, not a mere servant of the interests of a powerful elite. Or it did when “we” were running it. Whenever that was.

I could pull an article or review out of any issue of the New Yorker at random and find examples of one or more of these ideas in it. I remember that the particular issue I received that afternoon was rich with them. I first read a long, glowing article on the life and work of James Merrill, a great American poet recently dead. I knew little of his work, and yet several poems of his encountered serendipitously have stayed with me as lovely evocations, in shimmering, opalescent language, of a particular moment or truth. As a man, he seems to have embodied the ideals of the liberal elite, to have been an example of all that it sees as noble, vibrant and great in itself. He was the son of Charles Merrill, one of the founders of Merrill Lynch (now, of course, in this moment of roosting chickens, as defunct as the Soviet Union). His family was phenomenally wealthy, but he himself was apparently not obsessed with money, though he did not reject it either. He and his male lover lived for many years in a cottage on the Long Island shore and on a hilltop in Greece; he was generous and witty and loyal to his friends and produced some of America’s best poetry. It was not once mentioned, in this long, comprehensive piece, whether James Merrill ever held a job.

I felt a great sense of longing when I read about his life, for, freed from the constraints of livelihood which continually oppress so many talented people, he dedicated himself to his art and excelled at it, and he seems not to have been perverse or cruel or tormented or isolated (stereotypical artistic “types”) but warm and happy and human. He embodied that liberal argument which says: “money is really irrelevant; it’s what’s inside that counts.” Ironically, his life was actually proof that the only circumstance in which money is truly irrelevant is when one is privileged to have enough of it (and not to want more than enough). The point is not that art cannot be created out of poverty–historically, far more art, even great art, I would venture to say, has been created by poor artists than by wealthy ones. The real point, in my view, is that James Merrill got by accident of birth what all human souls ought to have by right. His inherited affluence gave him freedom from physical hardship, from having to sell his labor for another’s benefit, freedom to live his life in pursuit of his dreams, loves and, in his case, deep insights about human nature and life itself. Not everyone has his talent. But I cannot see that creative excellence, or any particular strength of character, should be offered to justify the fact that his freedom and comfort is humanity’s exception, not its rule.

There were other representative articles in the issue: a weak defense of affirmative action (the classic liberal “it’s not great but it’s better than the alternative” argument), and a film review complaining predictably about an entertainment which weakened itself, in the reviewer’s view, by trying to convey some kind of social message.

The most striking thing about the whole experience of reading the New Yorker that day was my extreme sense of cognitive dissonance. The tolerant, liberal, economically privileged social group which even now continues, in the teeth of the last decade of reaction, to promote its views in these glossy, colorful mouthpieces as central, firmly established and omnipresent is, according to my knowledge of this society and several others, not only marginal and irrelevant to most of the beings on the planet, but actually under threat of extinction here in the U.S., the Obama campaign notwithstanding. The creepy shotgun marriage between Christian and market fundamentalisms that has been in our faces for the last eight years is so mired in its own mind-boggling contradictions right now that if U.S. liberalism—including its specious race-blindness—were not also so thoroughly and understandably discredited and on the ropes, for reasons Thomas Frank, among others, has had the insight to explain to us, the polls would be running 80%-20% in Obama’s favor.

The society we live in now is openly fragmented into economically stratified classes and dozens, if not hundreds, of culturally distinct groups that utterly distrust one another, with some good reason. These groupings have few shared interests or passions (“…how ‘bout those Red Sox?”) Our social dividedness goes still deeper, because economic classes do not unite across cultural lines, nor cultures across lines of class. The middle class where all our vaunted melting was supposed to happen has been shrinking every year for at least the last ten. Thus all illusion vanishes of an educated, sophisticated and tolerant liberal bastion being some sort of societal center of gravity.

With it, in my case, vanishes my upbringing and most of the traditions and precepts in which I was educated, in those soon-to-be-hazily remembered boom years of the 20th century. Since maturity I have lived in parts of the world where most people live as most people do everywhere, that is, bound nearly hand and foot by the political, economic and ethnic circumstances of their birth. I have seen that the true norm for the majority of the planet’s human inhabitants is not spaciousness, physical comfort and quiet ratiocination, but vibrant and desperate daily struggles with the severe, imposed limitations of their lives. My cognitive center has long vanished, that world of soi-disant reason, beauty, knowledge of human frailty but faith in human progress. It now seems a quaint, fading Victorian place, out of one of the costume dramas that are such a popular component of the bland PBS programming favored by old-style liberals. (Actually, except for their lack of local fashion and gossip, public television and radio could be seen as some kind of audiovisual equivalent of the New Yorker.)

I realized back then that my liberal birth culture had become inadequate to the times we were entering, and have been living in since. It did not provide sufficient strength for me to function, much less accomplish in the world, once its falsely optimistic unities were gone. It did not supply the conceptual tools I needed to survive outside its shrinking boundaries, in the vicious glare of the rapidly-collapsing but determined-to-take you-with-it-when-it-goes New World Order.

I’m not the first to say that liberalism’s fundamental conceptual flaw is its pretentious dismissal of class-based socio-economic analysis. Such analysis, liberalism implies, lacks any relevance to matters of the human spirit. Historically it has only produced the theoretical basis for totalitarianism. The liberal view, by refusing in this way to accept any explanation for oppression beyond flaws in the individual human character, is no match for the easy vicious demagoguery that has fueled reaction. In fact it plays right into it: the only reason for terrorism, for example, becomes the existence of evil people called terrorists, and evil people need no rights, no justification, no context. Nor does liberalism offer any balm to the spirit wounded and trapped in the enormous machineries of power. In our time, as this machinery, utterly unfettered, demands ever more resources to maintain, throwing more lives into dislocation and suffering, liberalism’s analysis is so inadequate that the situation is a fun-house mirror version of the end of socialism in Orwell’s Animal Farm: on the most fundamental issues of the day, you can look from “liberal” candidate to “conservative” candidate and find it impossible to tell which is which.

The voice of class-based analysis is one still perceived in the liberal mindset to be too shrill, too didactic, too “divisive” for the symposium of rational discourse. Certain passions are allowed to inspire meaningful action and thought in the liberal worldview; anger is not one of them. Yet a deep, abiding anger at injustice does inform much class analysis. This anger is tolerantly seen as misguided and counterproductive by liberal rationalism. This is another reason why old-style liberalism is so completely out of step with and inadequate to the times. If there is one thing characteristic of public discourse in the U.S. today, from politicians to call-in shows to “real life” television, it is anger. It is rage that rankles and simmers and explodes, and much of it is anger at injustices real or perceived. Denying this anger any real, systemic reason for existing is a serious failing of any conceptual system. In the face of verbal and physical terrorism by populist reactionaries, as in the face of radical social upheaval among marginalized groups, the liberal response is to bleat for some sort of institutional mediation, as if class warfare could be mitigated by a combination of legislation, policing and therapy. (Outside the U.S., class war is of course to be waged with troops in arms, but not in the “angry” way those right-wingers do it.)

Tarring all anger as destructive and misinformed is simply wrongheaded. It is as misguided as it would be to stigmatize all desire, all pain. These emotions carry truth, and can be creative, transformational forces, if the person who feels them has an understanding of her society’s fundamental mechanisms and her relation to them.

I have been reflecting as I look back on those rainy days in bed with the New Yorker that perhaps my unidentifiable nausea was more than just a strain of super-flu. For weeks I lay huddled under blankets in a damp, cold, disintegrating tenement, paid for during my unemployment by a companion who was never there because he was working three separate ill-paying jobs. Without the deus ex machina of a lottery win, we had little hope of ever being able to improve our economic situation beyond subsistence. I felt eerily dissociated from the society that surrounded me. I felt as if my power to shape my own destiny were being sapped, drawn from me in direct proportion to my increasing alienation. All I could hear around me was the generalized mutterings of unfocused and barely suppressed rage, as the privileged continued to raise the already impossible ante in their loaded game against the poor, and the poor fought and howled at and destroyed one another in their despair. Now, so many years later, even with market fundamentalism’s program in an utter shambles, no election contest between two equally discredited liberalisms, old-style and neo- seems likely to change that scenario.

As I put the New Yorker aside that day, it seemed bizarre to me that so much effort and money were expended to maintain so foundationless and irrelevant a world. But to this moment it remains a very necessary illusion to those (increasingly) privileged (and increasingly) few who can afford to maintain it. In that vast sphere outside its orderly little gated square, where most of life actually happens for most people, inchoate and incalculable struggles rage.

America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department’s Battle to Register the Israeli Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government
by Grant F. Smith
(Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Washington, D.C., 2008)
Hardcover ISBN: 0-9764437-2-4
Paperback ISBN: 0-9764437-5-9 (only available from Middle East Books)

Grant Smith’s latest book, America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department’s Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government, combines probing investigative journalism with newly released documents to produce a searing expose of the Israel lobby’s¹ invasive osmosis into the seams of the US government. Readers of Smith’s previous book Foreign Agents (see review) will find it segues smoothly with his new work.

Smith filed Freedom of Information Act requests with numerous government agencies and was rewarded with over 1000 pages of formerly classified documents. He has used these to produce a well referenced book and incorporated many previously unpublished documents in its rich appendix.

While Smith focuses on the genesis and development of the Lobby in the US, his account also encompasses the rise of Zionism under Theodor Herzl and its entrenchment in historical Palestine under Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion and other prominent leaders. Nonetheless, Smith only skims the surface definition of what Zionism actually is, preferring to instead reveal how it created “facts on the ground” in the Middle East and the United States. This is accomplished by relating the story of Isaiah L. “Si” Kenen, the father of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This approach allows readers to glean deeper insights into the roots of Zionism in America and what propels the Lobby today.

It is the book’s foreword by journalist Philip Weiss that drives home what Zionism entails from a human rights perspective: “[I]t is undeniable that AIPAC has played a calamitous part in American politics by guaranteeing official indifference to Palestininan suffering and by underwriting the occupation and disastrous role in fostering the occupation and colonization of the West Bank…” Insouciance toward injustice meted out to fellow human beings may not stir some consciences, but the machinations of the Lobby extend beyond inflicting suffering on Palestinians. As Smith warns, US interests are imperiled at home in many areas: democracy, commerce, rule of law, security, addressing terrorism at root causes in addition to questions of international reputation.

Smith’s history avoids stereotypes or broad brush statements about “world Jewry.” He provides references throughout America’s Defense Line that, contrary to the core proposition of the Lobby, Jews are not a monolith and questions the ongoing myth of a “Jewish vote.” The book also highlights an all but forgotten battle pitting Zionist Jews against eloquent anti-Zionist Rabbis and business leaders. One was the chairman of Sears, Roebuck and company and benefactor of the National Gallery of Art. Smith’s quotation of the American Council for Judaism ’s Lessing J. Rosenwald is telling: “We seek one thing only for Jews: a status of equality of rights and obligations throughout the world.” Nonetheless, despite ongoing productive dissension, Zionists carved out the more powerful and vocal niche of influence in US politics. The enabler was the takeover of American Jewish relief fundraising in the United States explicitly directed by David Ben-Gurion in a key meeting.

Smith delineates how campaign contributions secured an early hold on American presidential politics with the Lobby’s quiet financial backing of Harry Truman. In the 1948 presidential election, Truman was trailing the favored Republican challenger Thomas Dewey. With the backing of New York magnate Abraham Feinberg, an early “contributions bundler” who tapped into Zionist dollars, Truman became president. It was with Truman that quiet influence buying at the executive level for critical political appointees and policy formulation was firmly established in Washington. It continued into the administrations of John F Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson to steer administration policy away from questions over Israeli nuclear weapons development and peace initiatives involving compensation and repatriation of expulsed Palestinians. It remains ensconced as Democratic and Republican presidential aspirants genuflect before AIPAC conventions and vetting councils.

Cash flow has never been a purely unidirectional motivation—Feinberg personally benefited both financially and in terms of political power for his services to Israel as Smith quotes him, “My path to power was cooperation in terms of what they needed–campaign money.” Analysis of the Truman administration’s internal correspondence reveals intense Zionist lobbying and how Truman personally acceded to demands for recognition of the Jewish state in historical Palestine, despite strong opposition from relevant US government agencies.

Along with lobbying, terrorism and arms smuggling have long been major, hidden and effective tactics of Zionist operatives. Much of it is carried by US based entities claiming to be charities. Smith points to their involvement in post WWII surplus arms theft and smuggling by operatives—some posing as US military personnel in Europe—first among the many false flag operations by Israel. The use of nonprofit charitable corporations to smuggle arms and launder money continues to this day—White House lobbyist Jack Abramoff channeled sniper equipment through the tax exempt “Capitol Athletic Foundation” to West Bank “settlers” before he was convicted. Smith adds to an irrefutable and growing body of research showing how such money laundering for colonization and arms smuggling generates terrorism and blowback against the United States.

The facilitating strategy for financing and supporting Israel in the United States was and continues to be media manipulation and denying relevant venues to dissenters. Recognizing the influence of the corporate media, the Lobby executed a comprehensive public relations campaign in the 1960s funded by Israeli money involving “cultivation of editors” and public relations professionals, funding elite university professors, book publishing and grassroots local media pressure groups spread across the United States. This short but amazing 1962-1963 public relations document is reprinted in the appendix. Its many vestiges are still clearly visible in US mainstream media today.

The 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) theoretically should have brought Israel’s foreign agents and their propagandizing under the purview of domestic scrutiny and regulation. But the Lobby largely dodged and eluded in-depth examination of its records and activities. Isaiah L. Kenen, formerly in the employ of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, told the Justice Department he severed ties and stopped receiving Israeli government funding when he terminated his FARA registration in 1951. In the same year Kenen formed the nucleus of AIPAC; yet, Smith reveals, he continued to receive both funding and guidance from the Israeli government.

A large number of the declassified documents Smith references deal with the DOJ demand that AIPAC’s precursor register under FARA in 1962. Yet the lobby avoided accountability and disclosure through stalling, regime change in Washington after Kennedy’s assasination, and interminable corporate shell games and reorganizations. The lobby did finally disclose the names of a few individuals and institutions receiving Israeli money to lobby in 1965 but insisted the DOJ not make it available to the public. Smith describes one strategy document as seeming “purpose-built to violate every line of FARA disclosure laws.” The DOJ acquiesced, and the file remained classified until June of 2008.

This secrecy was a coup for Kenen and the Lobby which went on to secure and entrench massive quantities of taxpayer funded US “aid” for Israel. The irony is that Israel used the money contrary to stated US policy, such as nuclear nonproliferation and Middle East peace by not only funding “settlements” in occupied territory but also an arsenal of atomic weapons. In fact, the US taxpayer has, in essence, been paying Israel to lobby the Congress, as Israel laundered tax exempt global donations and commingled Israeli government funds back into Capitol Hill.

The lobby’s attempts to influence US electoral campaigns was not entirely invisible to politicians and has always had the potential to generate resentment. An irate John F. Kennedy is paraphrased as essentially being told by one Zionist funder: “We’re willing to pay your bills if you’ll let us control your Middle East policy.” Obviously Israeli policy would then become US policy.

There is a reason for the existence of all lobbies; simply put, lobbying works. Lobbying and propaganda of the stealth variety is particularly potent, and America’s Defense Line provides plenty of detailed supporting evidence. FARA’s core purpose was to provide domestic oversight of the activities of foreign agents active in the US, and was highly effective until its final showdown with Israel. How did the Lobby evade such oversight? While Smith writes of periods of “FARA malaise” and selective prosecution euphemized within the DOJ as “prosecutorial discretion,” it is the Lobby’s persistent influence over the executive branch that allows AIPAC to elude constitutional mandates that the laws of the land be faithfully executed.

Now AIPAC’s mantra pronounces itself free of FARA and able interface with the Israeli government and the Congress as it sees fit — it engages in precisely the types of activity the law was meant to regulate. As Smith puts it, there is a great deal of confidence “that if an assertion is repeated often and broadly enough, history will be ignored.”

Smith’s solution to severely corrupted FARA oversight is simply to enforce the handful other laws already on the books — the Logan Act, the 1917 Espionage Act, and federal election laws — that tend to improve policy formulation and governance. For people requiring deeper incentives, Smith argues that this is also in Americans’ economic self-interest. Smith cites convincing research that links a decline in governance and rule of law with a commensurate decline in the wealth of the populace. Yet generating warranted law enforcement remains the challenge.

Washington has become ever more resistant to rule of law when applied to entrenched political elites. America’s Defense Line details how certain campaign financing and off the books incentives, much of it now legal, has been used to ensnare politicians willing to sell out their independence and sometimes their political beliefs to foreign interests. This lies behind the recent spate of “executive privilege” and “State secrets” claims being used to extricate criminal wrongdoers from the purview of US courts. This is a topic largely beyond the focus of Smith’s book, but what Smith has pointed out is that stealth foreign lobbies unduly influence the system of politics in the US to the detriment of average Americans. An obvious conclusion would be that lobbying must be regulated through transparency, which is precisely what FARA was originally legislated to do in the US.

But consider the current predicament of the hypothetical politician who aspires to elected office and openly proclaims an even-handed approach to Middle East policy. A lobby essentially financed and created for the benefit of a foreign government will crush them long before election day. From a purely patriotic viewpoint, the renewed regulation of campaign financing and application of law could protect the constitution and average US citizens from this harmful influence. Yet the silence of law enforcement is deafening. This will change. For observant Americans armed with knowledge from this book, any politician’s loud unquestioning support for Israel provides irrefutable evidence of the Lobby making unwitting traitors out of would-be American patriots.

1. I submit that the designation Israel lobby is misleading, and therefore, I avoid it. To call it an Israel lobby masks that this lobby does not represent the Palestinians in Israel who constitute about 20% of the population.