In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama declared amid thunderous applause and a standing ovation from Congress, “Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”

Similar to sanctions legislation signed into law by Obama on December 31, the EU-approved measures ban imports on future and existing contracts beginning July 1 of crude oil, petrochemical products; as well, the measures forbid the export of equipment and technology to Iran’s energy sector.

The EU sanctions also hit Iran’s Central Bank, freezing its assets. Also on Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Iran’s third-largest bank, Bank Tejarat; a sign that the administration intends to further isolate Iran from the global financial system.

The New York Times claimed that the EU’s “phased” ban on oil purchases “was needed to help force a shift in policy and avert the risk of military strikes against Tehran.”

France’s Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, told reporters that in order to “avoid any military solution, which could have irreparable consequences, we have decided to go further down the path of sanctions.”

“It is a good decision that sends a strong message and which I hope will persuade Iran that it must change its position,” Juppé said, “change its line and accept the dialogue that we propose.”

Writing in Asia Times Online, Pepe Escobar rejected the foolish notion that the West is interested in defusing the crisis.

“The EU defends its strategy–or economic war–as the only way to avert ‘chaos in the Middle East.’ Yet the economic war may end up sparking the full-blown war it is theoretically trying to avert; talk about an array of unintended consequences waiting in the wings.

“The EU insists on spinning its so-called ‘dual track’ approach towards Iran,” Escobar averred. “Stripped of spin, dual track essentially translates in practice as ‘shut up, bow to our sanctions, stop enriching uranium and sit on the table to negotiate on our terms’”

“Senior EU officials,” The Guardian disclosed, “concede that the move could be risky and send oil prices rocketing at a time of extreme economic difficulty in the west.”

Reflecting the growing danger to the world economy by this stunt, “oil prices rose on Monday after the European Union agreed to ban imports of Iranian crude,” Reuters reported.

“Brent March crude rose 72 cents to settle at $110.58 a barrel, having reached $111.36 intraday but unable to threaten front-month Brent’s 200-day moving average of $112.19.” One analyst warned, “heaven knows what will happen between now and the first of July” when the EU’s date for full implementation of the embargo takes effect.

On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned “that global crude prices could rise as much as 30 percent if Iran halts oil exports as a result of U.S. and European Union sanctions,” Reuters disclosed.

Accordingly, if the Islamic Republic stops exporting oil to the EU and other countries that join the “attack Iran” coalition of the feckless, “it would likely trigger an ‘initial’ oil price jump of 20 to 30 percent, or about $20 to $30 a barrel, the IMF said in its first public comment on a possible Iranian oil supply disruption.”

“In addition the oil embargo, the EU also decided to freeze the assets of the Iranian central bank, arguing that the aim was to choke off funding for the nuclear programme,” according to The Guardian. The EU’s move against Iran’s Central Bank follow policies put in place by the United States.

“The Iranian programmes are proceeding apace and represent a strategic threat,” an unnamed “senior diplomat” The Guardian. “The aim is to have a big impact on the Iranian financial system, targeting the economic lifeline of the regime.”

The Guardian also informed us that “David Cameron, the German chancellor Angela Merkel, and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy, issued a joint statement calling on Iran to suspend its nuclear activities.”

“Our message is clear,” the statement read. “We have no quarrel with the Iranian people”–a diplomatic cliché that generally means: do what we say or else–”but the Iranian leadership has failed to restore international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme. We will not accept Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

In a day filled with joint statements by imperial shills, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (Henry Kissinger’s wunderkind in Obama’s cabinet) and Secretary of State Hillary (bomb the Libyans back to the Stone Age) Clinton said that “the measures agreed to today by the EU Foreign Affairs Council are another strong step in the international effort to dramatically increase the pressure on Iran. This new, concerted pressure will sharpen the choice for Iran’s leaders and increase their cost of defiance of basic international obligations.”

Commenting on the slow-motion apocalypse in progress, Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent: “Bring on the sanctions. Send in the Clowns.”

More Israeli Threats

How did America’s “stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East” react?

According to Debkafile, a right-wing publication privy to leaks from Israel’s intelligence and military establishment, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that a “new round of sanctions will not stop Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon … stressing that Israel’s hand was always near the trigger.”

Barak’s comments were “aimed at cooling the optimistic notes emanating from Washington, Europe and some Israeli circles Monday after the European Union foreign ministers approved an oil embargo against Iran from July 1 and froze its central bank’s assets.”

The Defense Minister said “that because Iran had not stopped developing a nuclear weapon Israel had not removed any options from the table. We say this ‘very seriously,’ he stressed.”

Barak’s noxious statements were amplified in a lengthy piece published this week in The New York Times.

Titled “Will Israel Attack Iran?,” Ronen Bergman, a political analyst with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper who, like Debkafile, has cozy ties to Israeli defense mavens, wrote: “After speaking to many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”

Speaking at the Davos economic summit on Friday, Barak warned “that a situation could be rapidly reached when even ‘surgical’ military action could not block the Tehran regime from getting the bomb. ‘We will know early enough whether the Iranians are ready to give up their nuclear weapons’,” The Independent reported.

“We are determined to prevent Iran from turning nuclear,” Barak said. “It seems to us to be urgent, because the Iranians are deliberately drifting into what we call an immunity zone where practically no surgical operation could block them.”

Barak’s message to Washington and the “international community”: “We’re ready to attack, now!”

‘Europe Will Burn in the Fire of Iran’s Oil Wells’

The new sanctions, coupled with escalating threats from Israel and the West are hardly “bridge builders” aimed at resuscitating stalled talks, but in fact are economic acts of war designed to force Iran into a corner.

Rejecting demands to “dialogue” with guns pointed at their heads, Iranian lawmaker Mohammad Kowsari, the deputy leader of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee told Press TV that “in the event of US ‘military adventurism’ in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran will respond in the shortest possible time by making the entire world unsafe for Americans.”

Kowsari reiterated Iran’s long-standing promise to “definitely” close the strategic Strait of Hormuz “if there is a disruption in the sales of the country’s crude, stressing that the “US and its allies will not be able to reopen the strategic waterway.”

Hardly fazed by Western threats, and apparently ready to take “preemptive” measures of their own, Seyyed Emad Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s parliamentary Energy Commission said on Friday that “Iran has the world’s third biggest oil reserves and cannot be eliminated from global energy equations,” Press TV reported.

Hosseini said that parliament “is considering a plan to completely stop oil exports to EU members which will initially paralyze the economies of Italy, Spain and Greece.”

“Iran is powerful [as a country] and oil sanctions imposed by European countries will only harm the European Union.” Hosseini added, “Europe will definitely lose its oil war with Iran because European countries are grappling with numerous domestic challenges and disruption of Iran oil flow will lead to the escalation of domestic pressure and crisis in EU member states.”

On Saturday, Fars News Agency reported that “members of the Iranian parliament finalized a draft bill on cutting the country’s oil exports to the European states in retaliation for the EU’s oil ban against Tehran.”

Nasser Soudani, the vice chairman of the parliamentary Energy Commission told Fars that “the bill has 4 articles, including one which states that the Islamic Republic of Iran will cut all oil exports to the European states until they end their oil sanctions against the country.”

Soudani told Fars earlier this week when the oil cut-off bill was introduced, “Europe will burn in the fire of Iran’s oil wells.” Take that, Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy!

Driving home the point, Bloomberg News reported Friday that “Fitch Ratings cut the credit ratings of Italy, Spain and three other euro-area countries, saying they lack financing flexibility in the face of the regional debt crisis.”

In addition to Italy and Spain, the ratings agency also downgraded the credit worthiness of Belgium, Slovenia and Cyprus. And with Greece currently negotiating with creditors on how to avoid a default, soaring oil prices would severely impact the ability of EU countries to climb out of the economic ditch and is a further sign that the 2008 capitalist economic crisis is accelerating.

Commenting, Asia Times Online political analyst Pepe Escobar again warned: “According to the EU sanctions package, all existing contracts will be respected only until July 1–and no new contracts are allowed. Now imagine if this preemptive Iranian legislation is voted within the next few days. Crisis-hit Club Med countries such as Spain and especially Italy and Greece will be dealt a deathblow, having no time to find a possible alternative to Iran’s light, high-quality crude.”

“Not surprisingly,” Escobar averred, “the losers lost in these Cold War tactics anachronistically applied to a global open market are the Europeans themselves.”

“Greece,” Asia Times pointed out, “already facing the abyss–has been buying heavily discounted oil from Iran. The strong possibility remains of the oil embargo precipitating a Greek government bond default–and even a catastrophic cascade effect in the eurozone (Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain–and beyond).”

Not that any of this matters to the Americans who are exacerbating the manufactured “Iran crisis,” partially as a hammer to beat down their EU competitors–under the tattered flag of Western “unity”–while gambling that war and their delusional hope for “regime change” in Iran will bring them one step closer to energy hegemony in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Eyes Wide Shut

Which brings us back to Iran’s “red line.”

“Tehran has repeatedly said that it would close Hormuz only if–and we should repeat–only if Iran is blocked from exporting its oil,” Asia Times warned.

“This would represent a deathblow to the Iranian economy–totally dependent on oil exports–not to mention the regime controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Regime change is the real agenda of Washington and its European poodles– but that cannot be spelled out to global public opinion,” Pepe Escobar noted.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told Press TV that “in the absence of Iranian supply, oil prices will go up and they (the Western states) know it. However, Iran will never allow itself to be in a situation in which it cannot sell oil but other regional states can.”

And how did the global godfather react to Tehran’s warning? Why with more bellicose rhetoric of course! The United States and their “partners” have pledged to “do what needs to done” to keep the strategic waterway open, U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder warned.

The ambassador added: “These situations, the choices are very, very difficult. I have not looked at the exact military contingency plannings that there are … But of this I am certain: the international waterways that go through the strait of Hormuz are to be sailed by international navies including ours, the British and the French and any other navy that needs to go through the Gulf; and second, we will make sure that that happens under every circumstance.”

The Defense Department announced last week that it will maintain a fleet of 11 nuclear-armed aircraft carriers despite budget constraints, as a threat to Iran but also to geopolitical rivals China and Russia.

Russia Today reported that “with Washington’s decision to deploy a second carrier strike group in the Gulf, the EU’s attempt to pressure Iran economically could greatly increase the likelihood of all-out war in the region.”

Ramping things up even further, Interfax reported Thursday that the U.S. “plans to deploy a third convoy of warships led by USS Enterprise to the Gulf in March.”

“The country’s second aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and its battle group entered the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz last Sunday, accompanied by UK and French warships.”

Last Saturday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told sailors aboard the USS Enterprise, that “the ship is heading to the Persian Gulf and will steam through the Strait of Hormuz in a direct message to Tehran,” the Associated Press reported.

While Iran reiterated its threat to close the narrow Strait, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, Tehran has done so as a defensive response to an aggressive military build-up along their borders, the assassination of scientists, terrorist bombings of defense facilities, surveillance overflights by U.S. and Israeli drones and economic sanctions by the West that could crater their economy.

“That’s what this carrier is all about,” Panetta blustered. “That’s the reason we maintain a presence in the Middle East … We want them to know that we are fully prepared to deal with any contingency and it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”

Yet despite Israeli threats to “go it alone,” they do not possess the assets capable of mounting a decisive military offensive against the Islamic Republic.

On Thursday, Time Magazine reported that an unnamed “senior security official” told Netanyahu’s cabinet last fall that the prospects for “success” were “not altogether encouraging.”

“‘I informed the cabinet we have no ability to hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way,’ the official quoted a senior commander as saying. ‘If I get the order I will do it, but we don’t have the ability to hit in a meaningful way’.”

Short of launching a preemptive nuclear first strike on Iran, the Israelis will heel when the master whistles. Only the United States has the requisite military assets capable of inflicting damage on the Islamic Republic, but they are well-aware of the risks an Iranian counterstrike would pose.

As Global Research analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya cautioned: “U.S. naval strength, which includes the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard, has primacy over all the other navies and maritime forces in the world. Its deep sea or oceanic capabilities are unparalleled and unmatched by any other naval power. Primacy does not mean invincibility. U.S. naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf are nonetheless vulnerable.”

Noting the findings of a Pentagon war game, Millennium Challenge 2002, Nazemroaya wrote that “even the small Iranian patrol boats in the Persian Gulf, which appear pitiable and insignificant against a U.S. aircraft carrier or destroyer, threaten U.S. warships. Looks can be deceiving; these Iranian patrol boats can easily launch a barrage of missiles that could significantly damage and effectively sink large U.S. warships. Iranian small patrol boats are also hardly detectable and hard to target.”

During that $250 million war game, the “scenario hypothetically pitted the Blue Team (representing US warships) against a Red Team that launched a coordinated assault using swarming boats and missiles–the kind of tactics Iran might employ,” The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Red Team commander, Lt. General Paul K. Van Riper, told The New York Times back in 2008 that “the sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack.”

“The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes,” Van Riper told the Times. “It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time,” the general cautioned.

“Iran’s strategy of asymmetric warfare recognizes that, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has little chance of winning any face-to-face military contest with powerful enemies like the United States,” the Monitor noted.

“Instead,” journalist Scott Peterson averred, “Iran aims to ‘exploit enemy vulnerabilities through the used of ‘swarming’ tactics by well-armed small boats and fast-attack craft, to mount surprise attacks at unexpected times and places’ which will ‘ultimately destroy technologically superior enemy forces,’ writes Iranian military expert Fariborz Haghshenass in a 2008 study based on published doctrines of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).”

“Part of Iran’s strategy includes decentralized decision-making.”

A “former European diplomat” told the Monitor that “the entire [IRGC] structure–if you look at how air defense is organized, the land forces, the combination of the Basij [militia] and the [IRGC]–this is all geared toward what they call the Mosaic Strategy, where you have individual military units who have a great deal of independence to decide what they can do without referring back to the center.”

“When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy’s firing of guns and missiles,” the Times grimly observed, “it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.”

Nazemroaya warned, “Iran would react to U.S. aggression by launching a massive barrage of missiles that would overwhelm the U.S. and destroy sixteen U.S. naval vessels–an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and five amphibious ships. It is estimated that if this had happened in real war theater context, more than 20,000 U.S. servicemen would have been killed in the first day following the attack.”

Undeterred by warnings from their own military experts, Washington and Tel Aviv are heading towards the edge of the cliff and seem eager to jump.

On Friday, Russia Today disclosed that the mysteriously “delayed” Austere Challenge 12 joint missile defense exercise with Israel “originally slated for this spring, will be scheduled for October 2012.”

Amid conflicting reports that first had the Obama administration, and then the Israelis, postponing the exercise, allegedly because “a series of events,” according to Inter Press Service, “impelled the Barack Obama administration to put more distance between the United States and aggressive Israeli policies toward Iran.” On the other hand however, Debkafile averred that Netanyahu called it off “as a mark of Israel’s disapproval for the administration’s apparent hesitancy.”

Well, it’s on again.

As Russia Today reported, the drill will “signal a surge of American troops to Israel by the thousands” and Iranian authorities “fear that the exercise will try out more than just the missile capabilities of the allies. Also being put to the test is Iran’s patience.”

“Now after a brief delay,” RT averred, “America will send thousands of troops and its anti-missile defense systems to Israel, albeit a few months later than planned.”

“With the exercise back in the books, it could mean that an eventual war between the US and Iran is still in the works–and now the world has a timeline to see it through.”

Indications are that Washington’s timeline is shrinking as the Pentagon accelerates plans to rush new weapons into the deployment phase.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that “Pentagon war planners have concluded that their largest conventional bomb isn’t yet capable of destroying Iran’s most heavily fortified underground facilities, and are stepping up efforts to make it more powerful.”

“The 30,000-pound ‘bunker-buster’ bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, was specifically designed to take out the hardened fortifications built by Iran and North Korea to cloak their nuclear programs.”

However, “initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, wouldn’t be capable of destroying some of Iran’s facilities, either because of their depth or because Tehran has added new fortifications to protect them.”

“The push boost the power of the MOP is part of stepped-up contingency planning for a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear program,” the Journal disclosed.

Having already spent some $300 million for 20 bombs, designed by military-industrial-complex heavyweight Boeing, the Pentagon sought an additional $82 million this month in a secret request to Congress.

Warning of the “grave consequences” of a U.S.-led attack on Iran, last week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described “the scenario Russia and the global community could face if things in the Middle East, especially in Iran, get out of hand,” Russia Today informed us.

“As for the chances that this disaster (a military attack against Iran) could occur, this question would be better addressed to those who keep mentioning this as an option that remains on the table,” Lavrov said in a comment apparently intended for Israel and the United States. “The consequences will be really grave, and we are seriously concerned about this.”

Pointedly, the Foreign Minister said “this will not be an easy walk, and it’s impossible to calculate all of the possible consequences.”

Earlier this month, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister and former NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, warned that “Iran is our close neighbor, just south of the Caucasus. Should anything happen to Iran, should Iran get drawn into any political or military hardships, this will be a direct threat to our national security.”

Braggadocio aside, unlike the Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise, American forces will not have the luxury of a “do-over” if events really do spin out of control.

In our previous article, “The Real Delusion Part I,”¹ we argued that, despite their emphases on religious skepticism and open scientific inquiry, the New Atheists² * have betrayed the spirit of the Enlightenment and have instead veered toward an obdurate and uninspiring offensive against superstition that blames most of the world’s current ills on irrational religious belief. Enlightenment thinkers assailed religious superstition because it was part and parcel of a powerful institutional framework that most found abhorrent; furthermore, most Enlightenment thinkers believed that religious toleration was a noble desideratum.³ The New Atheists, on the other hand, believe that religious toleration is potentially destructive.⁴,⁵ More importantly and dangerously, they have promulgated the idea that religious belief imperils Western society, convincing myriad people that such concerns are dire and distracting attention from other, more urgent political issues.

We also noted that human political nature could be usefully understood with the aid of two important concepts: reverse hierarchy egalitarianism and coalitional competition. Using these concepts, we traced the rise of the modern state, noting that legitimation narratives are an important component of state formation and maintenance. Although the earliest legitimation narratives were religious, growing skepticism and secularism gradually eroded the efficacy of religious narratives in the West. This led to the development of secular narratives and eventually to the neoliberal nationalist narrative that is predominant today. Finally, we argued that Harris’ contentions about the nature of Islam and its effects on believers are often erroneous, unempirical, and dangerous because they could potentially contribute to Western Islamophobia.⁶ *

In this article, we will continue our analysis of the Enlightenment and its tradition, specifically focusing on Noam Chomsky. We will first situate Chomsky historically, noting that he is profitably viewed as perhaps the most representative intellectual of the Enlightenment heritage. His radical critique of power and ideology, exposure of moral hypocrisy, and praise for intellectual integrity, represent the true spirit of the Enlightenment and will inform our criticism of modern power and the narratives it uses to cloak its machinations. This will be accomplished by focusing on three domains: the mainstream media, domestic policy, and foreign policy. We will conclude by completing our critique of the New Atheists in light of the previous analyses.

Continuing the project of the Enlightenment

According to the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, enlightenment is humankind’s emergence from a self-created cocoon of immaturity and ignorance; and the Enlightenment, the age that finally began to offer the freedom needed to thus emerge.⁷ The most important obstacles to this desired freedom were powerful institutions and the narratives they propounded; the institutions because they coerced behavior and the narratives because they encumbered and enslaved reason. An important and instructive example of this spirit is found in the works of Thomas Paine, particularly in his two major treatises: The Rights of Man (1791), ⁸ and The Age of Reason (1794-1807).⁹ In The Rights of Man, Paine excoriated corrupt and tyrannical forms of government and the narratives used to justify them. Monarchy, he asserted, was an affront to reason and human dignity, and he endlessly attacked the pomp and pageantry used to mystify it. Paine believed that illegitimate forms of government were based on either superstition or power–the former government based on priestcraft and the latter on conquerors. The only legitmate government arose from the consent and reason of the governed. The age of Reason, like The Rights of Man, was a sustained attack on power and privilege, this time aimed at the “adulterous” nexus of church and state. Paine believed that the institutions of the church were iniquitous and that priests lusted power and wealth rather than human betterment. As Paine acerbically put it, “the Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue.”¹⁰ Paine also panned the doctrines of Christianity, but it is important to remember that churches wielded a significant amount of political power at the time he was writing and that his chief concern was social justice.* This concern permeates his writings and is the fount of both his bitterness and his optimism.

The legacy of the Enlightenment, then, is a healthy skepticism of power and of the narratives propounded by the powerful. It is true that Enlightenment thinkers also sought to advance scientific thinking and to dispel various kinds of superstitions, but most were satisfied with a “non-overlapping magisteria”¹¹ arrangement: science tackled empirical problems, and religion tackled existential issues.¹² (It is useful to remember that some of the most brilliant embodiments of the Enlightenment were quite religious–Newton, for example.) Viewed from this perspective, no one better encompasses the spirit of the Enlightenment than Noam Chomsky, who has tirelessly attacked powerful and unjust institutions, intellectual hypocrisy, erroneous political narratives, and the moral laziness that leads to a passive acceptance of power no matter how grievous the consequences. Perhaps Chomsky’s most general statement of the appropriate task of intellectuals is found in his essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”¹³ The first and most obvious responsibility, Chomsky argues, is “to speak the truth and to expose the lies” of powerful institutions like corporations and governments; this burden is placed on “intellectuals” because Western democracies “provide” them “with the leisure, the facilities, and the training” to pierce the patina of distortion that cloaks the operations of power. The intellectual does not mock doctrines that have little influence on social injustice, or those held by official enemies (say, in many cases, Islam), but rather confronts, first and foremost, the image in the mirror.¹⁴ For a citizen of the United States, that means focusing on the policies of our own government rather than self-righteously lampooning the ignorance or stupidity of the beliefs of “official enemies or those designated as unworthy in the prevailing political culture.”¹⁵ These are responsibilities that Chomsky has taken seriously for more than 40 years, working indefatigably to dismantle the narratives and ideologies of the powerful. His work offers the modern activist a fruitful heuristic for combating the myths, lies, and distortions that obscure the machinations of powerful coalitions and the institutions they control. This critique, not the New Atheists’ criticisms of religious faith, represents the true spirit of the Enlightenment.

Once again with human political nature and coalitional conflict

In our previous article, we argued that humans possess a suite of behavioral propensities that interact with the environment to give rise to political systems [see reference 1]. We focused on two of these tendencies: egalitarianism and coalition formation. The first manifests itself in a hatred of despotism and in the formation of reverse hierarchies in order to thwart despotic upstarts;¹⁶ the second, in the creation of unified coalitions of people who divide the world into “us” and “them,” granting moral status to ingroup members that is denied to outgroup members. For this article, we will also focus on a third fundamental component of human political nature: the motivation to control.¹⁷ * According to cognitive and educational psychologist, David Geary, the motivation to control is “an evolved disposition and is implicitly focused on attempts to control social relationships and the behavior of other people, and to control the biological and physical resources that have historically covaried with survival and reproductive prospects in the local ecology.” [page 24] Put more colloquially, the motivation to control is a biological tendency to desire control over people and resources. Politically, this essentially reduces to a desire for power, although it does not always need to manifest in a reprehensible form. For example, an activist concerned with inequality desires the ability to implement policies that will alleviate America’s inequitable economic distribution; the activist desires, in other words, the power to control economic policy.

The combination of these propensities leads to nearly incessant conflict between coalitions over finite resources. (The conflict need not be violent. Much of it is ideological, for example, and amounts to arguing with friends, groups, and large coalitions about how resources should be distributed.) In complicated, industrialized states, human egalitarian tendencies are often no match for the power of integrated coalitions; however, the combination of egalitarian proclivities and the motivation to control leads to anger and moral outrage from people and coalitions that do no reap the benefits of the institutional and coalitional arrangements (for example, women or minorities who were/are discriminated against in the labor market or victims of the financial machinations of Wall Street.).¹⁸ This necessitates some form of population control. In more democratic societies, the bludgeon is not an effective instrument and some attention must be paid to popular sentiment.¹⁹ The control of this popular sentiment through propaganda (political narratives) is therefore vital for the power elite. It is vital because it 1) limits the domain of thinkable thoughts and 2) limits the domain of acceptable debate. In the United States, the power elite (which consists of the corporate community, the upper class, and the policy planning network),²⁰ although only a tiny fraction of the entire population, controls a staggering proportion of the country’s available resources. This inequitable distribution of resources requires justification: it will not do for the power elite to simply assert, “we are better than the rest of you and therefore we own a significant proportion of the country’s wealth.” In the United States, as we argued in part I, the current political narrative is the neoliberal nationalist narrative. Because the mainstream media are an important conduit* of this narrative, it is important for a politically conscious person to analyze and criticize the media. Probably the most powerful framework for such a task comes from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.²¹

Power nexus 1: The mainstream media (obscuring institutional analysis)

In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky offer a compelling institutional analysis of the media. Instead of tramping down the well worn and distracting trail of liberal versus conservative analysis,* Herman and Chomsky ask a simple question: what are the media? The straight forward but illuminating answer: “…the major media–particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow–are corporations ‘selling’ privileged audiences to other businesses.”²² That is, the media are enormous, profit seeking corporations that raise revenue by selling space for advertisers. They can charge more for such space if their readership includes the proper demographics–so, in essence, they are “selling” their audience to other businesses (namely, advertisers). In a certain functional sense, the “news” is simply a lure to attract audiences, which are the primary product that the media offers on the market.

Before continuing, it seems profitable to make a few remarks on institutional analysis. Perhaps one of the more impressive accomplishments of modern propaganda is effectively to eliminate this kind of straight forward analysis from mainstream consideration. In a famous scene from the documentary Manufacturing Consent, for example, the author Tom Wolfe calls Herman and Chomsky’s observations about the operations of the media “patent nonsense,” and conflates them with a conspiratorial view of the media, complete with elites in a “beige room” deciding what can and cannot be distributed. This is stunning because Herman and Chomsky explicitly assert the opposite: there are no central control stations or informational bureaus; rather, there are institutions functioning exactly as one would expect them to function. Wolfe, like most of the population, is almost certainly unfamiliar with the style of analysis Herman and Chomsky use and probably honestly confuses it with the picture he presents in the documentary–a confusion that is common and prevents such analysis, although obvious and highly informative, from becoming common place. Since we are surrounded by powerful institutions, this dearth of institutional analysis is particularly pernicious. For those not properly acclimated to our intellectual environment, it might seem risible that a number of intellectuals (the New Atheists) assail the “irrationality” of religious belief and fulsomely praise the virtues of skeptical inquiry while utterly ignoring the functions of the institutions that dominate modern society (and therefore greatly shape the lives of people on the planet), but such protestations of open skepticism have often been coupled with unquestioning acceptance of contemporary institutional structures and in this the New Atheists have ample company. Nevertheless, if one wishes to be serious about skeptical inquiry, one should extend its reach beyond relatively obvious belief structures and into domains of real power.

Herman and Chomsky’s basic institutional framework led to their propaganda model of the media. The propaganda model is a theoretical description (Chomsky calls it “virtually just an observation”²³ ) of the forces that shape the content of the media; it also describes the type of content one would expect given the structure of those forces. According to the model, there are five basic filters that affect the content of the media: ownership, sources of funding, sourcing, flak, and fear mongering (anti-communist or anti-terrorist ideologies). Of these, the first three are the most important.

–Ownership. The media are large corporations; therefore the content is owned by large, profit seeking institutions.* Through interlocking directorates, the corporations which own the major media outlets are linked to the corporate community in general. This shapes the content of the media because it is in the interest of corporations to instill a consumerist mentality and subservience to power. And it is certainly against the interests of corporations to teach institutional skepticism.

–Sources of funding. The media “sell” audiences to other businesses. It follows that the elite media wishes to attract affluent readers and to convey a consumerist message so that businesses will desire advertising space. A newspaper, for example, that is highly critical of corporations and profit seeking in general cannot attract advertisers and is at a serious funding disadvantage. In a very real sense, the function of the “news” is not to provide trenchant analysis of the political world, but rather to attract affluent audiences or distract the less affluent*; the news, in other words, is not the primary product. (This does not mean that individual journalists are conscious of this; rather, it means that the news functions as a lure for audiences.)

–Sourcing. The media require sources of information and individual reporters desire access to “privileged” insider information. This makes the media highly dependent upon official sources, like the pentagon or the central government. If a reporter writes a story critical of some aspect of foreign policy, for example, she might lose her source. Since reporters compete for sources, such a loss can be devastating. In a larger sense, each media outlet is dependent upon information from official sources because an outlet cannot possibly put reporters all over the globe. Reporters are concentrated in informational areas: the pentagon or the White House, for example.

This institutional arrangement leads to the propagation of a corporate friendly narrative in the same way that the institutional arrangement of ESPN leads to the propagation of a sports friendly narrative. Doubtless, many journalists within the framework earnestly feel that they are “free” to publish and discuss what they desire, and visible evidence of censorship is kept to a minimum (although it is certainly not non-existent²⁴ ). Overt censorship is rare precisely because it is not necessary. Individual journalists and reporters who succeed within the establishment do so because they have either 1) internalized the neoliberal nationalist narrative or 2) have not desired to directly confront it in any meaningful way. Those who challenge the framework, like Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Jack Rasmus, et cetera, are weeded out well before they reach elite centers of news distribution.

Perhaps one of the most pernicious effects of the mainstream media is the creation of an illusory boundary of reasonable debate. Subjugating thought to a manufactured framework with narrow limits, this boundary determines what can and cannot be discussed, even contemplated, in the United States. If one does transcend the boundary and attempt to criticize institutional structures, one is reduced to speaking an incomprehensible language. For example, asserting that the United States is the largest purveyor of terrorism in the world is not just considered erroneous, it is considered insane–it is virtually a meaningless sentence in the English language (at least in the U.S.). Most people would react to that and other similar statements in the same manner they would react to a person asserting that the home sports’ team should pull its best player so that it can lose as many games as possible–with bemused indignation. Let us consider a concrete example.

While “cool” and “rational” pundits like Jon Stewart* bemoan the increasing polarization of media outlets in America, the real polarization between the rich and the poor continues at an alarming rate.²⁵ This was shockingly evinced in the media’s coverage of the budget battles of 2011. Representative Paul Ryan, a self-styled votary of the mythological Reagan, unveiled his budget plan on April 5 to a prodigious amount of media hype. Many fulsomely praised the unflinching “seriousness” of Ryan’s plan, which managed to manhandle reality “with both hands” and forced “everybody else to do the same.”²⁶ Meanwhile, the progressive congressional caucus also forwarded a budget (April 13) that would balance the budget while leaving in place the legacy of the New Deal. While the “People’s Budget” received praise from some notable economists, including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who called the plan “genuinely courageous,”²⁷ it was not widely discussed in the mainstream media,²⁸* apparently lacking the “seriousness” of the Ryan plan, despite the fact that it managed to balance the federal budget within a decade (the People’s Budget projected a $30.7 billion dollar surplus in 2021²⁹ ) without eviscerating important social programs. What condemns the media more forcefully than this disparity in coverage, however, is their utter disregard for the opinions and desires of the majority of the United States’ population. While David Brooks and others continue to praise the boldness, seriousness, and courageousness of robbing the poor to fund the rich (for example, while the Ryan plan cuts $4.3 trillion dollars in spending, it offset this with $4.2 trillion in tax cuts, at least two thirds of which come from programs for those of moderate means. See analyses of the Ryan plan³⁰,³¹ ) the majority of the population believes that income should be more equally distributed (on the level of Sweden) and, in fact, believes that it is already much more evenly distributed than it is–a great success of the propaganda system no doubt.³²

It is important to note that the Ryan plan, the People’s Budget, and other proposed fiscal policies have enormous concrete effects on normal citizens. While the New Atheists deploy witty one liners about the follies of faith, write books about why god is not great, and lament the irrationality of religious belief, millions of people are unable to perceive the reality of important political policies that will, to a significant degree, determine the future state of our society. The first and most salient reason is the shameful content of the mainstream media, something that those who desire a more “rational” world should focus their energy on combating and correcting.

Power nexus 2: Domestic policy and power (in praise of mythical markets)

The media are, in a very real sense, an extension of the centers of domestic power; therefore, it is important to understand and criticize these domestic power centers. Significantly, domestic power and policy has shifted dramatically since the 1960’s, leading from the Keynesian era to the triumph of neoliberalism (or, what has been aptly dubbed ‘the Age of Greed’ by Jeff Madrick.³³ This shift has profoundly impacted society, drastically increasing inequality (see figure 1²⁵ ), while concomitantly decreasing investment in social programs and infrastructure. In other words, an increasingly small fraction of society (a small coalition) has appropriated more of the resources. Noam Chomsky has been a leading critic of this trend, consistently pointing out the astonishing disconnect between the narratives used to justify this pattern of appropriation (“free markets dispassionately distributing resources”) and the reality behind it. In a society where narratives often serve the function of the bludgeon, it is important to escape one’s voluntary servitude by increasing one’s knowledge of 1) economic and political reality and 2) the content of the narratives used to justify the underlying reality.

Domestically, neoliberalism can be conceptualized as a set of policies aimed at increasing profitability while stripping away the foundations of the New Deal settlement (e.g., constraining upper class incomes, pursuing full employment, increasing labor’s share of the national income, etc.³⁴ That is, these policies are designed to enrich the oligarchical power elite, who are, in Chomsky’s words, “vulgar Marxists, with values and commitments reversed.”³⁵,³⁶ These policies include liberalizing trade and finance while promoting macroeconmic stability, privatization, and deregulation.³⁷* The monetary outcome of these policies, as indicated by a plethora of data, is continually increasing inequality and economic insecurity;³⁸ psychologically, there are plausible but still controversial interpretations of data that claim these policies have led to increases in antisocial behavior, including narcissism, and in potentially serious mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.³⁹ If our general outline on human political nature is correct, the increasing prevalence of these conditions is entirely understandable. Humans desire control and some form of egalitarianism. Just as a dearth of food leads to predictable physiological responses and pain, so a dearth of control leads to predictable psychological ailments.⁴⁰,⁴¹ However, because of the power of the neoliberal nationalist narrative and the increasing popularity of libertarian philosophies, many people are ignorant of the causes of inequitable resource distribution and the many troubling symptoms it causes. It may turn out that many of us are suffering from a curable disease but are unable to discern its cause. Furthermore, there is good evidence that inequality promotes religiosity where as religiosity does not promote inequality–in other words, there is good evidence that inequality causes increases in religious belief (at least in the United States).⁴² Those who desire that religion disappear might want to pay some attention to such recalcitrant facts as they recommend a strategy much different from the currently fashionable activity of denigrating the beliefs of religious adherents.

Because the policies of neoliberalism would be repugnant to most citizens, they are justified with narratives about the efficiency and fairness of free markets.⁴³,⁴⁴ In fact, it would be difficult to find another mythical entity that provokes such effusive praise and elicits such unthinking devotion. As Chomsky points out, many miracles are imputed to the creative efficiency of free markets that were actually the result of careful social planning and federal investment: the internet, aeronautics, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, the high tech industry in general,… the list is nearly inexhaustible. In fact, one of the vital roles of the pentagon in the United States’ economy is to fund high tech industry, a simple fact that should be known by every citizen but is safely hidden by the propaganda system. The basic argument that “free market fundamentalists” (a truly scary form of fundamentalism) make thus rests upon a false premise. Consider one representative example. In a 20/20 episode on free market health care,⁴⁵ John Stossel argues against Michael Moore’s concerns about the free market, noting that free markets have created all kinds of brilliant things like cell phones, computers, and helpful medicines. Unfortunately, Stossel does not bother to note the incredible amount of federal funding that went into creating these technologies, the patent monopolies that drug companies use to boost profits and thwart competition, or the direct investment line from the enormous corporations that produce these goods into politicians who doubtlessly return the favor with friendly policies. (Corporations aren’t investing in politicians so that they will increase competition and lower profits.)

Like most fundamentalists, free market votaries almost invariably misrepresent the ideas of their supposed ancestors. A particularly illustrative example is Adam Smith, the nearly flawless and peerless demigod who begat the notion of the ‘invisible hand,’ and supposedly showed how a laissez faire system could, as if through some form of economic alchemy, change the base metal of selfishishness into the gold of economic prosperity for all. As Chomsky has noted numerous times,⁴⁶ the phrase “invisible hand” appears exactly once in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (it appears one other time in his other works⁴⁷), and Smith does not use it to describe how selfish humans behaving for profit unknowingly but ineluctably bring prosperity to others; rather, Smith uses it to assuage fears of capital flight, arguing that people will prefer to invest in domestic markets rather than foreign markets.⁴⁸ Smith’s arguments were subtle and sophisticated, but he generally favored market policies because he believed that they would produce economic equality. He had nothing but scorn for the “masters of the mankind,” who lived by the “vile maxim” of “all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.”⁴⁹ Like most enlightenment thinkers, he assailed the established powers of his time: the merchants and the policies that favored them. Had he lived to see the modern corporate revolution, he undoubtedly would have execrated the corporations that eventually supplanted the merchants that he so effectively attacked.

In a country with a reasonable educational system and tolerable media content, the above would be recognized for what it is: a series of facts and truisms. Since the myths that disguise these truisms actively promote the interests of the “masters of mankind,” however, they are eagerly promulgated and the truths that they hide are relegated to the margins of scholarship. Again, those who desire to liberate the mind from the shackles of irrational mythologies, especially when those mythologies have serious repercussions, should actively attack and encourage others to attack the neoliberal nationalist narrative and the myths it promotes. To consider just one example of the seriousness of the repercussions of neoliberal policies concretely, it is worth contemplating the following: the September 11 attacks (of which more below) tragically killed 3,000 individuals. However, an estimated 45,000 Americans die every year due to a lack of health insurance.⁵⁰ This is an astonishing number that is absolutely preventable, unlike the deaths that result from the actions of official enemies. It may comfort us to focus on those crimes while ignoring our own, but it does not improve our society. Although, as Noam Chomsky notes in a related context, it is not surprising that we often choose to ignore these inconvenient facts “given our principled exemption from moral truisms.”⁵¹

Power nexus 3: Foreign policy and power (noble intentions)

The neoliberal nationalist narrative promotes a consistent picture of American foreign policy: it stems from “benevolent” intentions and “clear moral purpose.”⁵² Sometimes, in fact, the intentions become so altruistic that it is appropriate to assert that “America is going through a noble phase” in foreign policy, one shrouded in a “saintly glow,” and committed to ideals that might actually be injurious to American interests because of their utter beneficence.⁵³ Although the language here might be a bit hyperbolic, it is not anomalous. In a 2002 article by Dinesh D’Souza, for example, we learn that America is “the most magnanimous imperial power ever,” an “abstaining superpower” that could “conquer” the world but has not interests in doing so.⁵⁴ In fact, the idea that the United States is the single greatest force “for peace and freedom, for democracy and security and prosperity” is a virtual truism.⁵⁵ Attempting to find assertions to the contrary in the mainstream commentary poses an enormous challenge. If one veers to the extreme left of mainstream debate, one might find arguments that American intervention across the globe is wrong, not because it is criminal, but because it is too costly or because America is not “winning.” More often the focus is turned toward our “kindergarten” allies and their inability to cooperate.⁵⁶ The function of the narrative is clear. It dissuades criticism, refuting counterarguments not with logic but with a simple tautology algorithm: if America intervened, it did so from noble intentions. Statements to the contrary are simply not allowed to register in the minds of most citizens; therefore, even on the rare occasions that such arguments are broadcast, they are nearly incomprehensible. A hypothetical Martian might be forgiven for wondering why a group of “free thinkers”* finds it so necessary to demolish the relics of irrational religions, while sedulously ignoring (or underplaying) the horrific brutality of American foreign policy and leaving the basic narratives that support it untouched. Again, to find a trenchant analysis of the exercise of institutional power (this time, in the realm of foreign policy) that preserves the spirit of the enlightenment, one should turn to Noam Chomsky.

According to Chomsky, the basics of inter-state relations are simple and are captured to a first approximation by the maxim of Thucydides: “the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must.”⁵⁷ Because the United States has been the most powerful country on the planet since World War II, it has done what it wishes, and its victims have suffered as they must.* The important thing, then, is to understand what America wishes; or, in other words, to understand its goals and how they lead to the particular interventions it has engaged in. The most basic goal “is to ensure a favorable global environment for U.S. based industry, commerce, agribusiness and finance.”⁵⁸ Countries that do not cooperate with this motive are punished through the two basic weapons America has at its disposal: military might and economic leverage. The examples of Chili and Indonesia are highly informative in this respect.

In 1970, Chile (democratically) elected Salvador Allende, a nationalist and Marxist, president. American policy planners were horrified. According to a 1975 Church Commission Report,⁵⁹ Washington had spent millions of dollars campaigning against Allende in prior elections even carrying out “spoiling operations” to prevent an Allende victory.⁶⁰ In 1970, however, he won by a narrow margin and policy planners immediately scrambled to undermine his regime. Nixon feared that Allende might become another “Castro,” meaning someone who refused to take orders from Washington, an overwhelming fear of policy elites. Two basic plans were designed: a Track I strategy that relied on political sabotage and economic warfare (making the “economy scream” according to the notes of DCI Helms.⁶¹ Nixon believed this would have “one hell of an effect.”⁶² ); and a Track II strategy that involved the CIA initiating a coup to prevent Allende from taking office. Both strategies failed to prevent Allende from taking over, but the economic warfare did have a serious, deleterious effect on the country. Eventually, General Augusto Pinochet was able to organize a bloody coup and overthrew Allende on September 11th, 1973 (now sometimes called “the first 9-11.”⁶³ ). Although there is no evidence that the CIA was directly involved in this coup, they were quite aware of it, and the Nixon administration was privately delighted (this was somewhat disguised in public).The death toll of the coup was over 3,000, and the horrors of the tortures implemented during Pinochet’s regime are ghastly.⁶⁴,⁶⁵ Not unsurprisingly, little time was wasted by policy elites ruing these tragedies. Today, the Pinochet regime is often remembered for being “tough,”⁶⁶ but for creating an “economic miracle”–one orchestrated by the “Chicago Boys,” who were “inspired” votaries of Milton Friedman’s “free market” principles. As Chomsky notes, this “miracle” is more mirage than substance, as the economy under Pinochet actually floundered, and the state had to take over much of the banking system to save the falling fragments of a failing economy. This is sometimes sardonically called “the Chicago road to socialism”–an apt phrase, although one not ordinarily encountered in mainstream literature on the topic.

In Indonesia in the 50’s and 60’s, after briefly expressing tepid support for him, America worried that president Sukarno was a dangerous “neutralist” and decided to take covert action to oust him. This attempt failed, so America decided to build up the Indonesian military, hoping for a coup. In 1965, there was a bloody coup and a subsequent “purging” of “communists” in the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI).⁶⁷ Suharto ascended to power and an estimated half a million people were killed.⁶⁸ While America was not directly involved in the coup, policy elites supported it, desiring to extirpate the PKI.⁶⁹ This support went as far as providing lists of thousands of “communists” to the Indonesian military.⁷⁰ In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and overthrew the Fretilin headed government. They continued to occupy the island until 1999, when Clinton finally noticed that some bad things had happened and “informed the Indonesian military that Washington would no longer directly support their crimes.”⁷¹ Although the exact number of dead in East Timor is unknown, it is estimated that at minimum 102,800 East Timorese perished; while a higher end “speculation” of the number dead due to “conflict related hunger and illness” reached 183,000 (the CAVR report, from which these numbers are taken, did not issue a maximum estimate).⁷² Staggering numbers made even more heinous because they could have been easily prevented: Without direct support from Washington, as is clear from later events, the massacres would not have happened.⁷³ * As noted by Chomsky, what is astonishing about all of this is that it has been converted into a proof that America had entered a “noble” phase of foreign policy.⁷⁴ Meanwhile, most citizens remain unaware of the horrific tragedy, another impressive achievement of the propaganda system.

What the examples in Chili and Indonesia (the cases could be multiplied ad nauseam) incontestably illustrate is that American foreign policy is not about high moral values, benevolence, altruism, or other idealistic phantasms; rather, it is about the exercise and continuation of power. In Latin America, the U.S wanted to guarantee itself access to important resources while concomitantly allowing for a continued corporate presence in the region. Allende threatened these goals; consequently, the people of Chile had to suffer while their economy “screamed.” In Southeast Asia, the goals were the same, and the people of Indonesia, regrettably, were just some of the hapless victims. The horrific invasion of South Vietnam, saving it from “internal aggression” (against U.S. military and an U.S. supported regime), and near destruction of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, follows the same pattern. Importantly, U.S. foreign policy is not the manifestation of a “national interest,” unless one conflates the small coterie of elites who control foreign policy with the American population. Indeed, foreign policy follows the same basic pattern as domestic policy: a group of elites controls and benefits from the policies, while the vast majority of the population either suffers or reaps marginal rewards (and massive consequences from “blowback.”⁷⁵ It should be sobering to recognize that these terrible crimes, with prodigious and horrendous body counts, occur with the implicit consent of American intellectuals who, although granted unknown luxury and freedom, seldom rise from the comfort of their positions in academic institutions or branches of the government to protest against them.

Terrorism: Theirs and ours (intentional ignorance)

The events of 9-11 were, in many ways, the catalyst for the development of the New Atheism. Prior to 9-11, America had enjoyed almost absolute immunity from the kind of horrifying crimes it regularly doles out around the world. On 9-11, that changed. Understandably, many people were confused and emotionally disturbed by the tragedy and looked for answers to George W. Bush’s poignant question “why do they hate us”⁷⁶ * (Although, as Chomsky notes, the question is improperly phrased. “They” do not hate “us.” They hate the crimes that are perpetrated by the government, which should not be confused with the population of America.⁷¹ ) As Chalmers Johnson notes, this is a part of the blowback phenomenon.⁷⁵ Civilians, unaware of their government’s machinations in the affairs of other countries, suffer the consequences without knowledge of the reasons. Into this vacuum, a number of intellectuals provided a simple answer: they hate us because they are “simply evil” adherents of a “kind of death cult” religion,⁷⁷ a religion of a failed civilization that despises Western freedoms and values. And the attacks, so Richard Dawkins informs us, were made possible by the alluring image of 72 virgins in a paradisaical afterworld.⁷⁸ This, Dawkins also notes, is the source of the “underlying divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated” the attacks in the first place. In light of the grisly consequences of the 9-11 attacks, these intellectuals asseverated that it was no longer morally proper or decent to remain taciturn in the face of irrational belief systems, supposedly sacred or not. A number of subsequent bestsellers were penned and published, including Harris’s The End of Faith, Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Hitchens’ God is not Great, that assailed religion and the supposedly heinous crimes it can compel believers to commit.⁷⁹,⁸⁰,⁸¹ One of the consistent themes of these books is that religion, at least the Abrahamic religions, is a barbaric relic of the middle ages and should be eschewed by rational and enlightened adults in an enlightened society (“the delusions of our ignorant ancestors,” according to Harris⁸² ). It is also implied, both implicitly and explicitly, that without religion, the horrific 9-11 attacks would not have occurred. (This is spelled out quite clearly in the rather unfortunate posters that read “Imagine a world without religion” and show the twin towers standing in front of a glistening sun.)

The New Atheists, then, systematically ignore or downplay the importance of politics. Specifically, they ignore the legitimate rage that many around the world feel because of years of suffering from American atrocities and cast blame at a more palpable (because easily known) target: religion. Harris, for example, goes so far as to say that we are at war “with precisely the vision of life prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.”⁸³ (It is hard to tell if Harris is aware of the last 60 plus years of Middle Eastern history.) This trajectory of thought is often presented (in tone and rhetoric) as a continuation of the Enlightenment, a desire to use reason to slay the bogeyman of superstition and promote the values of skepticism and science. We have no disagreement with the second part of this desire. However, the most noble traditions of the Enlightenment would recommend a rather different course of action: acutely analyze political reality–the nature of the institutions and power structures that dominate the world today, the effects of foreign policy interventions, past and present, and the struggles of those who have not benefited from the “values” and “freedoms” of the West–and contextualize the behaviors of others in light of this analysis. Moral decency also offers another simple recommendation: look in the mirror before excoriating official enemies. In the political arena, this is often called “liberal masochism,” but in everyday life it is recognized as a noble virtue.

There were edifying responses to the events of 9-11, responses that followed the better spirit of the Enlightenment. Of the responses, Chomsky’s stands out for its lucidity and moral integrity*. Instead of using the tragedy to foment hatred, attack religion, or clamor for revenge, Chomsky sought to contextualize the event, noting that “we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.”⁸⁴ That is, we may imitate Nietzsche’s portrait of the powerful and ignorantly persevere, paying no attention to the myriad legitimate grievances of those we regularly victimize, or we may behave like enlightened citizens and attempt understand the causes of the almost global antipathy against the U.S., antipathy that does not justify senseless murder, but that remains, in itself, reasonable given the history of U.S. foreign policy. Germane to the topic of terrorism are many polls, pointed out by Chomsky in his initial responses, that demonstrated that the majority of Muslims were (and still are) angered by U.S. policies, especially toward Iraq and Israel/Palestine. Further concerns included the U.S. role in propping up oppressive regimes and appropriating the great wealth of the region.⁸⁵ This is a view shared by Supervisory Special Agent James Fitzgerald, who, in testimony before the 9-11 commission, asserted that “[Al Qaeda and other ‘terrorist’ groups] identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with the people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”⁸⁶ This is a conclusion that stems back to the Eisenhower presidency. Eisenhower was concerned about a “campaign of hatred” against the United States–a concern apparently elicited by NSC explanations that majority of Arabs believe that the U.S. is concerned with protecting its oil interests by supporting the status quo, a status quo that stultifies economic and social progress.⁸⁷ Recent psychological research supports this general outline, and indicates that coalitional commitment, not religious belief, is a strong predictor of support for suicide attacks.⁸⁸,⁸⁹, ⁹⁰ If one is committed to a coalition that is regularly victimized, it is not difficult to understand why one might desire some form of violent revenge. Suicide bombers, then, are not psychologically different from average humans nor are they “misguided missiles” who are mindlessly infected by extremist religious memes.* Rather, they are committed members of a coalition they feel is existentially threatened by the actions of the U.S.. Although their actions may be barbaric, their motivations, contra Hitchens, are not. It might not be palatable, but it is true that the same basic psychological forces that lead to suicide terrorism also lead to some of the most noble behaviors humans are capable of. The goal is to guide humans to the noble path and away from the destructive.

Conclusion

The general desideratum of the Enlightenment was, we believe, a noble one. Skeptical thinking and science are undeniable virtues. It is tragic, then, that the New Atheists actually betray these virtues by expending their cognitive resources in an obstinate battle against religion–without citing or apparently consulting important scientific research on the topic–while ignoring the more powerful institutional structures and narratives that shape and will continue to shape the social life of humans on this planet for years to come. We believe that the motivation to control provides the “best guess” at the puzzle of human (political) nature and that, combined with the other sources of human political nature we covered (reverse hierarchy formation, and ingroup/outgroup propensities), it should provide a starting point for a basic analysis of political phenomena. These (psychological propensities) interact in important ways with institutional structures and political narratives and give rise to the multifarious political behavior manifested in the world. In order to create a just, moral, and decent society, one should focus on the effects of these institutions and narratives on human well-being. There is good evidence that the current structure of society does not promote human flourishing; and there is incontrovertible evidence that the current structure leads to terrible consequences across the globe. The responsibility of intellectuals, to rephrase Chomsky, is to remain as impervious as possible to the propaganda of power and to criticize the shortcomings of institutional structures. This was a consistent theme of Enlightenment authors and we should honor their legacy by continuing that task. To this end, the New Atheists represent a betrayal of the Enlightenment and Chomsky, one of its most productive offspring. The planet will remain replete with apologists for power, no matter how grievous its crimes; we should honor the few who resist this all-too-human propensity and fight to promote the always precarious inheritance of skeptical inquiry.

* “New Atheists”: The term was first used in Wired magazine⁹¹ to refer to people who are not just atheists but who believe that irrational religious belief should not be tolerated and should be impugned by science and reason. Wired specifically cited Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett as examples of New Atheists. More recent members of the informal group include Victor J. Stenger and Christopher Hitchens. Whether or not there is anything “new” about the New Atheism is debatable. Frederich Nietzsche, to name one example, had nearly endless scorn for religion (although for different reasons than the New Atheists adduce) and did not believe “tolerance” was an appropriate reaction. It is perhaps unfortunate to lump a number of intelligent people into one group; however, for the purposes of our articles, the lumping is not terribly unfair and makes exposition much easier. Where appropriate, we attempt to single out particular scholars. At times, we are also more interested in the cultural idea of “New Atheism” than the actual people referred to by the term.

* “Islamophobia”: Sam Harris has argued that “Islamophobia” is a concocted “psychological disorder” used by “apologists” of Islam to protect it from legitimate criticism.⁹² We do not believe–and in fact, few people who use the term do believe–that Islamophobia is a disorder. It is, rather, the result of an ugly but “natural” proclivity toward demonizing the beliefs of outgroup members. Harris also argues that it is not possible to be “Islamophobic” because Islam is a set of ideas and practices that one can attack like any other set of ideas. This ignores two important facts. First, religion is not just a set of beliefs or practices; it is, rather, a system of sacred values that is often essential to a person’s sense of identity. Attack the beliefs and practices too vitriolically and you inevitably attack “the person.” This is not always illegitimate–but it should be approached with caution and civility. (We can see a person legitimately attacking Nazism, for example, or the ideas of Jihadis–and many Muslims do.) And second, what is objectionable in Harris’ writings (what contributes to Islamophobia) is not his abstract criticism of Islam, but rather his insistence, often absent of evidence, on blaming Islam for everything from terrorism to genital mutilation. We note that the great theologian, Hans Kung, offers pointed criticisms of specific aspects of Islam while presenting a historically grounded and balanced appraisal and no reasonable scholar would accuse Kung of Islamophobia.⁹³ John Esposito has written an excellent article on Islamophobia and contends that it consists of these beliefs:

1. Islam, not just a small minority of extremists and terrorists, is the problem and threat to the West
2. The religion of Islam has no common values with the West
3. Islam and Muslims are inferior to Judaism and Christianity
4. Islam is an inherently violent religion and political ideology rather than a source of faith and spirituality
5. Muslims cannot integrate and become loyal citizens
6. Most mosques should be monitored for embedded cells
7. Islam encourages its followers to launch a global jihad against all non-Muslims but in particular against the West.⁹⁴

As with any term that can be misused (e.g., anti-Semite, racist, misogynist), one should be careful when using it.

* “…was social justice.”: We have not and do not wish to argue that it is inappropriate to pen a book about the silliness of certain religious doctrines. What we object to, instead, is the strident tone, the unempirical assertions, the intolerance, and the unfair and inflammatory attacks against a specific religion (Islam), found in the books of the New Atheists (particularly in Sam Harris’ books). The rest of our objections–the main substance of our argument–is found in part I and the end of this article.

* “motivation to control.”: This was assumed but never explicitly articulated in our previous article.

* “Because the mainstream media is an important conduit…”: We note that the mainstream media is only one part of a larger “opinion-shaping network” that includes public relations/affairs institutions, think tanks, academia, etc.

* “…liberal versus conservative analysis…”: Debates about political bias in the media are not only a complete distraction but are often astonishingly removed from empirical reality. For example, self proclaimed media watchdog and president of the Media Research Center, Brent Bozell, in a review of the media’s performance in assessing Barak Obama’s first 100 days, plaintively asserts the following: “None of the three broadcast networks aired a single story on whether the new president’s economic policies were driving America towards European-style socialism. Not a single network news reporter used the term “socialist” to describe how his policies are shifting economic authority to the federal government. On only four occasions was the word “socialist” used on-camera at all – all by outside sources.”⁹⁵ We have yet to confirm if Bozell’s spaceship is set to return from his long sojourn on Neptune.

* “…owned by large, profit seeking institutions.”: As of 2009 there were six major media corporations: General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corp., TimeWarner, Viacom, and CBS. These massive corporations own and control output in the television, publishing, film, and internet industries.⁹⁶

* “…but rather to attract affluent audiences or distract the less affluent”: Chomsky, for example, makes a distinction between the elite “agenda setting” media which attract the most privileged audiences (business managers, professors, political managers, etc.) and the “mass media” proper which attract the rest of the population. As Chomsky puts it: “The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. ‘We’ take care of that.”⁹⁷ Since 1997, when these lines were written, the awesome ability of the mass media to distract the population has substantially increased.

* “…pundits like Jon Stewart”: Despite Stewart’s facility with humor, his analysis of the media is unenlightening. The “rally to restore sanity” and other subsequent interviews illustrate the virulence of the neoliberal nationalist virus.

* “…it was not widely discussed in the mainstream media”: A google search of the terms “the Ryan plan” and “The People’s Budget” brings up 224 million and 69 million hits respectively. Thus, the Ryan plan has received 3.24 times as many linked pages as the People’s Budget. This is obviously not a a scientific survey but it is telling.

* “…and deregulation.”: We note that the precise causes of these policies are hotly debated, complex, and would take a great deal of space to explicate. See the referenced sources for more thorough analyses.

* “…group of ‘free thinkers.’”: Christopher Hitchens certainly addresses foreign policy issues, but a conversation about his political beliefs would require another article. Harris and Dawkins generally stick to more parochial concerns about the deleterious effects of religion on foreign policy (theirs, not ours). Dennet, so far as we can tell, does not bother much with politics. Many campus groups, inspired by “free thought” movements, exist and few, to our knowledge, seriously challenge current political narratives save for when they are directly related to religious issues.

* “…and its victims have suffered as they must.”: For an extensive, though partial, list of the victims one can do no better than read William Blum’s Killing Hope.⁹⁸

* “…massacres would not have happened.”: Kissinger noted somewhat cryptically that these events had taken place not willingly but “illegaly and beautifully.”⁹⁹ It is unclear which “events” in particular Kissinger is referring to. However, the illegal component rings true enough.

* “…George W. Bush’s poignant question ‘why do they hate us.’”: These plaintive questions and the jejune answers, which almost invariably support elite interests, are reminiscent of debates about Spanish policy toward the native inhabitants of the New World. Bartolome de las Casas described the treatment of the indigenous peoples of Hispanolia in graphic detail:

“The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention’d, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher’d and harass’d with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred.”¹⁰⁰

It is not difficult to understand why the indigenous people were angered by such brutal treatment–allowing for the fact that de las Casas utilized hyperbole for effect. However, rather than comprehend the obvious, apologists for the colonialists and landowning elite, such as Jaun Gines de Sepulveda, argued that the Spaniards were simply superior to the “Indians” and had no option but to declare war against them, enslave them, and, ultimately, Christianize them.¹⁰¹ If the native Hispanolians had succeeded in a stunning and brutal attack against innocent Spaniards, Sepulveda could certainly have been counted on to explain that the indigenous people practiced a barbarous type of paganism that instructed them to eat human flesh and that this superstition was both the necessary and sufficient cause of the attack. If de las Casas mentioned the brutality of the colonial project as a contributing factor, he could be dismissed as an “apologist for terror” and Sepulveda could wax about Spanish freedom and benevolence. He could even dub the attack “simply evil” and attempt an hermeneutic of the “Indian mind” to better explain their hatred of freedom. While we rightly scoff at the notion of books explicating the “Indian mind,” it is worth noting that there are many books about the “Arab mind.”¹⁰²,¹⁰³,¹⁰⁴

This is not to say that the events of 9-11 were not a terrible atrocity. They certainly were. It is only to underscore the point, using a detached, historical example, that it is important to understand the grievances that lead to terrorism rather than bloviate about how “good” we are and how “evil” they are.

* “…lucidity and moral integrity.”: This is not to compare the value of the responses, but to note that Chomsky’s response was particularly compelling and worth contemplation.

* “…mindlessly infected by extremist religious memes.”: While studies on the motivations of suicide bombers can elucidate and potentially have salubrious purposes, there is something rather distasteful in the obsessive quest for fundamental motivations. As Chomsky notes, “[e]veryone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s an easy way: Stop participating in it.”¹⁰⁵ That is, as American citizens, we have a responsibility to stop the terrorism perpetrated by our government. In other words, instead of attempting to penetrate the supposedly unfathomable depths of the “terrorist mind,” perhaps we should worry about our own global atrocities. We have yet to see a book on the “Depraved soul of the American: Explaining global terrorism that emanates from Washington.” To paraphrase G.W. Bush’s favorite philosopher, we should examine the log in our own eye before we criticize the sliver in another’s.

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2. Several concerns were raised with the first article about definitions. To address those concerns, we have included an appendix that defines and/or elaborates potentially confusing terms or arguments.
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10. Ibid. Pg. 53.
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27. Paul Krugman (April 24, 2011). Let’s Take a Hike. New York Times.
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In the most general sense, it could be truth that scares elite the most; however, listed above are four things offering simpler and more specific details—and let’s save hemp for last since its prohibition cuts so deeply into the other three.

Democracy

Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest. But that was simply elite window dressing from a long line of strategic liars.

The term democracy has become an American pacifier, a cozy inaccuracy, idiom that even people who know better are forced to use just to be heard. Democracy sounds nice, power to the people, consent of the governed and all that. How many times this week have you heard official bluster about “spreading freedom and democracy”? But elections have been so corrupted throughout that democracy seems irrelevant; as a term used by federal officials or wannabes its most important function appears to be its demonstration of what suckers and chumps officials think we Americans are.

W.C. Fields said, “Never smarten up a chump, and never give a sucker an even break.” Sounds right out of the feds’ playbook.

And please excuse my mention of this hackneyed old saw—it just seems one of those immortal truisms: How do you know when a politician is lying? Their lips move….

America’s Founding Fathers rejected democracy, or, “tyranny of the majority”, and their reasoning is highly defensible.

John Adams warned that Democracy would soon degenerate into anarchy. He also said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” And, “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

James Madison said that democracies are always a spectacle of turbulence and contention.

Benjamin Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

Liberty, and property rights were most important to the Founding Fathers, so they gave us a constitutional republic with elected leaders—and further insulated us from democracy with the electoral vote system.

Frankly, current abundant abuse and misuse use of the term democracy by elected officials is insulting…it’s just not clear who should feel the most insulted, abusers or their targets.

Freedom

Many languages draw no distinction between “freedom”, and “liberty”. Where distinctions do exist, freedom is the more general term, implying simple exemption from control or influence by another person or agency; whereas liberty implies laws, behavior within a system of order and restraint, its character solidly political.

Governments tend to use fear to increase their power. Keep the fear pressure on citizens with threats via color-coded terrorist alerts and such—then scare the scat of them with things like 9/11 and wha-la! More powerful government. More war. Americans have been duped into cowering for protection from mysterious, crazed foreigners hating us for our “freedom and democracy”; hating us for something we don’t even have. Weird? You know, there might be something a little deeper… something about “blowback”?

But we do still have liberty, though terminally threatened from within. And our constitutional republic is well-defended from democracy—especially now by various means such as e-voting and unlimited corporate cash controlling elections…many means that surely would make our Founding Fathers squirm.

Sweet talk about freedom—politicians emit it like camels emit methane. Despite that, freedom (they mean liberty) is an endangered species. Benjamin Franklin had such a knack: “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” He must have said it before our freedom had been institutionalized into liberties?

Peace

Remember Woodstock, 1969? People took many liberties, even enjoyed shocking freedom, entwining music, mud, sacrifice, camaraderie, joy and peace together with eternity. There were plenty of problems, but so much sharing and caring…and plenty of peace.

Today’s police state would never allow Woodstock to happen again, but if it did, 500,000 people under similar circumstances… would peace play such a part? Cell phones alone could power widespread antagonism and conflict, and the police presence.

Might American imperial war profiteering seem any less disgraceful if war mongers publicly crusaded about there being no money in peace—that war is what grows fortunes? They have an enormous amount of disgrace to conceal, not even considering the humanitarian euphemisms they use as cover for killing citizens, mangling their countries, installing tyrants beholden to Washington, and stealing their resources.

Civil War Union general Tecumseh Sherman, said, “War is all Hell.”

For anyone directly exposed to war, that has to be precisely true. But for the war profiteers, who cultivate the bravery of being out of range, more truth might be found in: “War is all Gravy.”

When Smedley Butler died a retired Major General in 1940, he was the most decorated Marine in history. He’d written scathingly about the military industrial complex in his book, War is a Racket. This passage is from an issue of Common Sense magazine in 1935:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

In George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984, the three slogans of The Party led by Big Brother are:

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Perpetual war gripped the world in 1984. Now we have “perpetual war for perpetual peace” (from American historian Charles Beard [1874–1948], famous for his outspoken criticisms of American interventionism abroad).

War has become America’s number one export. We spend nearly as much on war as the rest of the world combined, while selling over half of the world’s implements of war. We have armed forces deployed in 130 countries, and more than 1000 overseas military bases that have nothing to do with “peace”.

America is far and away the world’s preeminent war profiteer, annually spending more than $1 trillion (vastly more when “black budget spending” is considered), while cutting to the bone any spending that directly benefits Americans. It’s conceivable that nobody really knows how much we spend on war…bottom line is it’s simply shameful.

And to soften up the idea of war, to make “…all Hell” more publicly palatable, we declare war on all kinds of things: war on drugs; war on terror; war on poverty; war on …

Meanwhile, in the “land of the free and home of the brave”, for 73 years and counting it has been a federal crime to farm the most useful crop in the history of the world.

Hemp

Oligarchy, follow the money, protection of power and profit explain how hemp was effectively banned in 1937, and why industrial hemp farming remains smothered today.

In 1992, George H.W. Bush characterized the fundamental ideology of America this way: “The continuous consolidation of money and power into higher, tighter, and righter hands.”

Perpetual war and globalization are main engines powering this ideology from hell. Hemp is the premiere antidote for globalization, the ideal means of spreading the wealth where it belongs by empowering self-sustaining regional economies. That is why hemp remains an illegal crop—hemp prohibition has never realistically had anything to do with “reefer madness”.

Destroying the competition, that’s what American hemp prohibition is all about; hemp is too great of a competitor, it’s wondrous record spanning nearly 120 centuries.

Benefits of hemp farming are actually difficult to overstate. Food, fuel, fiber, paper, textiles, plastics, an estimated 50,000 superior products that, totally unlike entrenched petrochemical products (with gravy-train patents—that’s huge), have a place in a living system. And as far as hemp reflecting exactly how and why America has gone so wrong, could there be a better reflector—or anything even close? Hemp could power a breakout, perhaps even an epidemic, of peace. Instead of pirating so many other nations’ resources, America could grow her own! But …

Elite families in America’s oligarchy have become obscenely wealthy and powerful via enforcement of a global fossil-energy economy, and myriad synthetic products of petrochemical alchemy. To say the world runs on oil is largely a rude truth—the human world anyway, civilization. It certainly does not have to be that way, should not be that way regarding a viable future of humanity and Earth’s biosphere. The reason it is that way points to the very heart of darkness.

Widespread belief that there is no alternative to our destructive, suicidal, biocidal status quo has long been cultivated by those our terminal status quo enriches most (Screw the Future could serve as their motto). The elite not only own the government, they own mainstream media, along with …frankly, it’s getting difficult to point out what they don’t own, ultimately. Such concentration of “…money and power into higher, tighter, and righter hands” is chiefly perpetuated via the elite destroying any and all competition beyond their control. With hemp they’ve come as close as they can by making it an illegal crop, then hammering into the American psyche that hemp, farmers—even educated people (as opposed to indoctrinated) might, somehow, be dangerous.

To go with the class war boiling in America, the elite have cooked up a crass war. Evidence of who is winning gets more frightening every day. Multi-billionaire Koch brothers and their “tea party”, Michele Bachmann …our Founding Fathers wouldn’t just squirm, they would be almost as mortified as if they knew that in America, hemp farming has been a federal crime for 73 years.

So what about “states’ rights”? Twenty-eight states have introduced legislation, and sixteen of them now have pro-hemp laws on the books. North Dakota is suing the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) for the RIGHT! to grow hemp—have even been selling state licenses to grow hemp since 2007. However, farmers in North Dakota know that if they plant hemp, feds will arrest them, fine them, seize their property and throw them in prison. If this sounds insane, that’s because it is insane.

North Dakota is doing a number of things correctly or, against the grain as it were. After nearly 100 years of public banking (Bank of North Dakota), the state has the nation’s lowest unemployment (about 4%), and not only has no debt to service, but is the lone state to avoid a budget deficit over the last two years (they actually have a billion-dollar surplus).

Any talk of freedom, democracy, liberty and justice for all, government by the consent of the governed—generally, all the platitudes politicians and officials croon about being handed down to us by our Founding Fathers, it tends to ring rather hollow in a nation that for 73 years has criminalized the growing of the most valuable crop handed down to us by Mother Nature.

America, and Americans: we need jobs that can’t be offshored, now.

We need Mother Nature on our side: need to work with, not against, her.

We need peace, liberty, and a brighter future involving the creation of value. Hemp is ready to go back to work for us. The US hemp industry is currently ringing up $400 million in annual retail sales—all of it with imported raw materials!

Hemp will never be given back to the people, we must take it back, now.

The letter claimed that the signers were all “loyal citizens” who recognized that “Our country faces a choice—we can pay our debts and build for the future, or we can shirk our financial responsibilities and cripple our nation’s potential.” The signers recognized, “Our country has been good to us. It provided a foundation through which we could succeed.” And in recognizing that their success was not just a result of their personal attributes, they added that “we want to do our part to keep that foundation strong so that others can succeed as we have.”

They concluded: “Please do the right thing for our country. Raise our taxes.”

Ostensibly, these individuals are deserving of praise, for they not only realize (seemingly) that the society they live in has provided them with opportunities that they have simply taken advantage of. In addition, they express appreciation for those opportunities—and want (or so they say) to do their part in ensuring that “others can succeed as we have

I suppose that one should be heartened by this letter. But for several reasons, I find it difficult to generate much enthusiasm regarding this gesture on their part.

First, I question whether they are motivated solely (or at all?!) by the principle of fairness—regarding taxation specifically. I suspect that these individuals are knowledgeable enough to recognize that our economy is teetering on the brink, and also know that the federal government likely won’t act to prevent economic collapse. Thus, they know that if they don’t act, it’s likely the economy will collapse. In acting to prevent this from occurring, they will be making a societal contribution, true, but also acting in their own interests. For if the economy collapses, they may cease being millionaires in consequence.

In justifying their proposal they give the impression that their primary interest is the country and its “potential” —and that they are altruistic besides. For they claim an interest in seeing “others … succeed as we have.” But these justifications strike me as phony—as simply diverting attention from their self-interest in not having the economy collapse—an event which would affect them adversely. We ordinary folk would be affected even more, of course, but I doubt that these millionaires have much concern for that fact.

Second, if these individuals are such “good citizens,” the question arises: Why do they focus on taxation-revenue to the exclusion of how the federal government spends the money it takes in? Are they not concerned with the fact that our imperial adventurism, with its huge military budget, is (among other things) a tremendous drag on our economy? Are they not aware that that adventurism has resulted in “blowback” that not only is used to justify further military expenditures, but also to justify “security” measures in this country that have curtailed our freedoms? Are they unable to see that we are moving ever more in a fascistic direction? Do they even care?

The question, relative to this, that I would like to see answered regarding these individuals is: How many of them are “feeding from the government’s trough”? I possess no evidence that any of them are, but I have my suspicions—based, in part, on their apparent lack of concern regarding expenditures being made by the federal government. The apparent fact that their interest seems to be merely on keeping the economy going suggests to me that their focus is just on the immediate future—and the maintenance of their wealth.

I would have more enthusiasm for the request made by these individuals if it were combined with some recognition that attention needs to be given to more than just the short run. These individuals seem to perceive the future as simply a succession of todays—so that a phenomenon such as “global warming” is simply not on their “mental maps.” That being the case, they are either unaware of the fact that, e.g., James Lovelock predicts that few members of our species will be alive by the end of this century, or are aware of his prediction, but choose to ignore it.¹

Which is unfortunate—and even somewhat surprising. For given that these individuals are aware (ostensibly) that their wealth has a societal basis, one would think that they would have more vision. The title of Ralph Nader’s 2009 novel Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us may very well be correct—insofar as we can be “saved.” However, I see no evidence that members of the “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength” group are interested in anything but the short run. True, their letter makes reference to “the future,” but these individuals seem to view “the future” as merely a continuation of the present, not something drastically different. The “givens” that they tacit accept regarding the future, seemingly, are highly questionable, given the science of “climate change.”

If they have even a minimum of “liberal education,” they will recognize that economic activities, because they involve energy usage, and the energy involved is derived primarily from “fossil fuels” (e.g., coal, petroleum, natural gas), those activities contribute to “global warming.” To reduce that “contribution,” it would therefore be necessary for individuals to use (directly and indirectly) less energy on a per capita basis and/or use just energy derived from “safe” sources. Either of those options would involve significant changes in the economy; and these millionaires are surely knowledgeable enough to realize that progress in making those changes will not result from a change in the tax code—will not even result from governmental actions, for that matter. Progress might, however, result if these individuals recognized “whither we are tending” (to quote from Abraham Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech) and their potential role in changing our society’s direction.

What should they do instead of lobbying for tax reform? That’s for them to determine. My only advice is: Decide how you can help your fellow citizens adapt to the inevitable societal changes that lie ahead, and then act on those ideas. Those actions will not prevent “runaway” from occurring, with the subsequent loss of most of the world’s population. They may, however, result in at least some members of our species adapting to the inevitable changes that will be occurring.

1. The latter would not be surprising, given the abundance of “deniers” in our society. For an explanation.

The Indochinese died before their time in far greater number (to say the least) than the American invaders. The Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations killed at least 3 million in Vietnam, Laos , and Cambodia. Much of Vietnam and its not-so sovereign neighboring territory were bombed and burned “back to the stone age” by the American “liberators.”

“War” is a curious term for such one-sided imperial slaughter, which turned Vietnam into a lethal “basket case” (the Pentagon’s own language) while many Americans enjoyed lives of historically unprecedented mass affluence in relative freedom at home.

Not long after the full and direct attack receded, the Christian U.S. president Jimmy Carter proclaimed at a news conference that we owed no debt to Vietnam because “the destruction was mutual.” It was a remarkable comment, thoroughly uncontroversial in the dominant U.S. political and media culture, which renders invisible and officially unworthy the victims of American and U.S.-allied violence. The 3 million prematurely dead Indochinese met their demise on the wrong side of the imperial guns and the wrong side of the imperial cameras. They did not and do not officially exist or matter according to the Orwellian rules of the dominant national and mass media culture.

Flash forward to the aftermath of the death of the former U.S. Cold War terror tool Osama bin Laden. Over the last two days, we have been fed images of al Qaeda’s criminal act of 9/11/2001, when bin Laden’s extremist warriors killed 3000 Americans on U.S. soil. The wounds of what the evil others from the Middle East did to us have been re-opened for public viewing like no time in recent years. There’s nothing said in the dominant mass media and politics culture about the vastly larger number of Arabs and Muslim killed on their soil by the U.S. and its aliens and clients (including the CIA-backed Osama back in the 1980s) before and since 9/11.

Last Monday night on the “Public” Broadcasting System’s News Hour, Madeline Albright applauded the death of a terrorist who had “killed not only Americans but a lot of other people.” The end of the already irrelevant criminal bin Laden should occasion no tears, of course, but a reasonably civilized culture would be more than a little skeptical about righteous expressions of concern for innocent victims from a woman who as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State said the following on national television about the killing of more than half a million Iraqi children by U.S.-led economic sanctions: “this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” The standard statistic for the number of Iraqis killed by the sanctions (1991-2003) is 1 million, considerably more than the 3000 Americans who died in September of 2001. Never mind: the Iraqis died on the wrong side of the imperial culture and are thus invisible. Along with other and related aspects of U.S. policy in the Middle East (chiefly America’s sponsorship and protection of Israeli oppression and bloody dictatorships across the region’s arc of U.S.-backed despotism), those officially unworthy casualties were part of why a major Islamo-terrorist attack on the U.S. seemed likely well before 2001. The Islamist “blowback” (a CIA term that the left author Chalmers Johnson turned into a book title and prediction in 2000) was all too predictable.

Also unsurprising was Washington ’s exploitation of the predicted “blowback” as a pretext to launch an ambitious military campaign in the oil-rich Middle East and particularly in Iraq (second only to Saudi Arabia in petroleum reserves). The morning the Twin Towers fell in lower Manhattan, I sat mesmerized in front of my television, thinking that a large number of innocent people would be losing their lives in the Arab and Muslim worlds at the hands of a vengeful Empire (an empire that no longer seemed to face any relevant deterrent on the global scale) in coming months and years. I had no idea how big the body count would be. The brilliant British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk estimates “up to half a million Muslims dead in Iraq and Afghanistan ” thanks to U.S. wars since 9/11. It’s a reasonable guess. Many, perhaps most of that half million have died indirectly, through health problems created by the American invasions’ terrible impact on daily life. But many –far more than the American death count of 9/11 – have been directly slaughtered by U.S. forces, both uniformed and contracted-out.

The American petro-imperial revenge machine reached its mass-murderous apex, perhaps, in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in April of 2004. That’s when the Marines responded to the killing of four Blackwater mercenaries with a quasi-genocidal assault that included the criminal bombing (including hyper-lethal cluster-bombing), mortaring, napalming, gassing, and shooting of civilians, the destruction of hospitals and clinics, and the targeting of ambulances. U.S. snipers boasted of killing anyone they could get in their sites and U.S. soldiers tossed grenades into civilian homes. The assault considerably out-did al Qaeda’s 9/11 death count. An American video game (“Fallujah – Operation al-Fajr”) was subsequently released to celebrate and profit from the Fallujah slaughter. The game’s players join U.S. Marines and Army soldiers in their attack on the Jolan district in Fallujah. Kuma Reality Games used detailed satellite imagery of Jolan in making the popular game. Publicity material for the game enticed purchasers with the opportunity to “dodge sniper fire and protect civilians.”

Along the way we have seen well-documented mass torture and rape in the imperial American charnel houses of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force Base, not to mention the capture and sending of often innocent accused terrorists to torture chambers in Egypt and other U.S.-allied states.

U.S. military personnel have routinely and preposterously justified disgraceful actions in the Middle East and Southwest Asia as “revenge for 9/11” – a frequent motivational theme in the preparation of U.S. troops to kill “Hajis” during the basic training that precedes deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. American troops, officers, intelligence operatives, and pilots have been conditioned to take out their hatred for Osama bin Laden on innocent men, women, and children in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Ethiopia .

The indiscriminate killing of civilians in the name of 9/11 retribution has continued into the age of Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, who refused to apologize for the deadly bombing of dozens of women and children in the Afghan village of Bola Boluk even as he offered a formal apology to New Yorkers for an ill-advised Air Force One flyover that reminded some city residents of 9/11.

It is well understood in elite circles that the lethal, mass-murderous (dare we say “monstrous”?) U.S response to 9/11 has increased the Islamist terror threat to Americans and others by deepening the Arab and Muslim worlds’ alienation from the U.S. and the West. The Wall Street Journal reported last Monday that Al Qaeda had 200 members on the eve of 9/11. Today the group is larger and “more far-reaching than before the U.S. sought to take it down.” Independent offshoots have emerged in Yemen , Somalia and elsewhere. “New terrorist leaders,” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera writes, “include Nasir al-Wahishi, who leads Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who has been involved in several terrorist plots, including the attempt to blow up a plane on Christmas Day in 2009.”

This makes perfect sense in light of U.S. Middle East policy, which continues under Obama to rest on alliance with military despotism and Israel and on the related threat and use of direct military force. The increase of the terror threat by the U.S. “war on terror” (now speaking of its greatest victory) might seem paradoxical and dysfunctional from America’s perspective but it keeps alive the threat of future Islamist attacks that can be used again to fuel and the military-media industrial complex’s seemingly insatiable thirst for the profits and diversions of endless war.

More recent developments on Mubarak’s “dignified” exit reveal even more cynical contempt for Egypt’s long suffering people on the part of the Obama administration as Egypt’s recently appointed VP Omar Suleiman, the CIA’s ‘go to guy’ for its offshore torture enterprises has reportedly been installed as Mubarak’s successor.

What better illustrates Obama’s flailing and ineffectual leadership style than a comparison of his rhetoric in Cairo shortly after taking office with his current posture regarding developments in Egypt? In his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama affirmed his “unyielding belief” in the universality of democratic struggle, and the “yearning” of all people to live “under the rule of law and the equal administration of justice, towards government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people”. Words that in retrospect reveal the insincerity behind them as his administration attempts to downplay the “government by the people, of the people . . . ” stuff as it applies to the Arab world, and push forward a more moderate and “realistic” solution to what they consider an unfolding ”crisis” in Egypt and beyond: Millions of people peacefully united in a struggle to break free from a brutal, authoritarian regime headed by a corrupt tyrant.

His audience at the time could be forgiven if they chose to ignore the dramatic, chest-puffing pauses, the Il Duce tilt of the chin and the somewhat condescending tone as he hectored his Muslim non-brethren about that silly tendency of theirs to view the US as a “self-interested Empire”. His reassurances that “government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power” struck just the right note after eight years of his predecessor’s gaffe-ridden and tone deaf rhetoric. In hindsight, “Democracy”, like the ill-fated “Mission Accomplished”, has a similar slip of the tongue quality. American politicians and pundits remain entwined in an intimate spooning position on their shared bed, perfecting the necessary linguistic contortions to condemn the violence Mubarak’s paid goons are inflicting upon demonstrators and journalists, without implicating themselves for their enduring support for Egypt’s state-sponsored terrorism.

“Democracy” was Obama’s theme when Mubarak was apparently secure, cashing America’s yearly $1.3 billion hush money check with its boot heel firmly set on the neck of the Egyptian people. Now, however, when those people are in the streets demanding that political realities be reshaped according to Obama’s rhetoric, the offending word has disappeared from the President’s vocabulary. Instead we hear the familiar refrains centered around “stability,” and “reform”. His calls for a “peaceful transition” of power are merely a stalling tactic meant to buy time until a neoliberal carpetbagger is eventually installed to carry out the IMF’s failed policies, and to pre-empt any future resistance outside Israeli-controlled territory to these externally imposed measures of poverty and oppression. That Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt hinges on the regime’s complicit support for Israel’s permanent occupation of Palestinian land does not factor in to the official argument that this “strategic alliance” is somehow “vital” to US interests. Instead Mubarak, the much vaunted “strategic ally” is trotted out whenever his complicit cohorts in Washington need to justify their feet dragging.

An especially comic moment was barely mentioned in the American media that involved the dispatch of former ambassador Frank Wisner as Obama’s “envoy” to read the riot act to his good friend Mubarak once it became clear that the dictator’s exit was inevitable. Is it possible that Hillary Clinton didn’t know that Wisner is a partner at the Washington law firm of Patton Boggs, which for years has proudly represented Egypt’s political and economic elite? According to the firm’s website:

Patton Boggs has been active in Egypt for 20 years. We have advised the Egyptian military, the Egyptian Economic Development Agency, and have handled arbitrations and litigation on the government’s behalf in Europe and the US. Our attorneys also represent some of the leading Egyptian commercial families and their companies, and we have been involved in oil and gas and telecommunications infrastructure projects on their behalf. One of our partners also served as the Chairman of the US-Egyptian Chamber of Commerce, promoting foreign direct investment into targeted sectors of the Egyptian economy. We have also handled negotiation of offset agreements and managed contractor disputes in military sales agreements arising under the US Foreign Military Sales Act.

Patton Boggs maintains a correspondent affiliate relationship with one of Egypt’s most prominent firm of lawyers in Cairo, the law firm of Zaki Hashem.

Could Wisner realistically be expected to violate the rules of legal ethics by strong-arming his own client? No. Wisner proceeded to further embarrass his already confused boss by going “off message” and announcing in Munich that Mubarak’s “continued leadership is critical; it’s his opportunity to write his own legacy …” This prompted a spasm of clumsy backtracking by the Secretary of State, who immediately informed the groveling press that “He does not speak for the administration … So you would have to ask him what he meant, and how it fits into his view of what’s going on.” However, Wisner’s statement was perfectly consistent with Joe Biden’s assertion a few weeks ago that Mubarak is “not a dictator”, and the Vice President certainly spoke for the Obama administration. But that was then – before it became obvious that Mubarak’s days were numbered – and this is now, when the administration is supposed to be forcing Mubarak out in favor of his freshly appointed stand-in, CIA asset and torturer Omar Suleiman. Someone forgot to tell Wisner to update his file.

Recent statements coming from the Israeli leadership warning the world of the dangers of a democratized Middle East and how threatens Israel’s apartheid state reveal Netanyahu’s fingerprints in glaring relief all over the rhetorical playbook US politicians and pundits refer to when “condemning” their man in Cairo. The US (firmly under the boot of its largest recipient of military aid) remains convinced that its “strategic interests” lie in preventing the imprisoned segment of Israel’s population funny ideas about self-determination, even if this failed policy is at the heart of anti-American sentiments in the region. The failure of the US to adequately gauge the level of anger Egyptians felt over the their government’s betrayal of the stateless Palestinian people, including Mubarak’s active role in enforcing the Israeli blockade of Gaza before and after Israel’s 2008 blitzkrieg, remains a still unacknowledged factor leading to the present uprising. As Obama Inc. is forced to confront this swelling human tsunami of discontent, one thing has become disturbingly clear: US leadership is a wholly illusory facade that masks a rudderless system of entrenched interests, all profiting from endless armed conflict, and all seeking to maintain the political and economic imbalances necessary to procure the cheap resources to sustain it.

The Empire is at the stage when corporal decomposition briefly mimics life-like functions before dissolving into an unsalvageable heap of toxic waste, eventually collapsing in on itself. From this worm ridden detritus we continue to mold Golem-esque monsters like Mubarak, imposing, larger-than-life clay figures programmed to carry out Israel’s vengeance-seeking imperatives and crushing domestic and regional resistance to its land grabbing ambitions. Like Golem, the obedient, brute stupid clay automatons of Jewish mythology, created in the primitive laboratories of holy men to protect the Jewish ghetto from torch bearing mobs, Mubarak and his cohorts were similarly dreamt up in squalid think tanks in DC suburbs and unleashed upon the world with the same unintended consequences. According to one telling of this hubris-themed legend, the monster was only deactivated when the rabbi removed the first letter of the Hebrew word “emet” (truth or reality) from the creature’s forehead, leaving the word “met,” meaning dead. In a similar attempt to defang a useful-idiot-turned-liability, Washington and Tel Aviv are hoping to defuse a genuine democratic movement with similar sleight of hand techniques, removing trace evidence of their handiwork on Egypt’s internal affairs as they select Mubarak’s remodeled clay replica as his successor.

The timing of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt could hardly be more propitious. They occur just now as if to confirm the basic message of the leaked Palestine Papers several weeks ago, which is that the US-sponsored “peace process” is a fraudulent charade and the United States, along its European allies are irrelevant to resolution of the conflict in Palestine — the subtext for the dissolution of proxy dictatorships in the Middle East. Whatever else they may represent, these uprisings offer a rumbling signal to the feckless “international community” that this conflict, will ultimately be solved not by bureaucrats in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin, but by the people who must bear the burden of its irresolution, and the hopelessness and indignity it spawns, every day of their lives.

The US’s duck-and-cover response to Egypt’s spontaneous regime combustion reveals a woeful lack of preparedness and foresight on the part of its policy makers. It is obvious that Obama has spent the larger part of his presidency inhaling the sulfurous ‘dutch oven’ fumes within the fetid, airtight think tanks where the overlapping emissions of policy wonks, strategists and drab Generals mingle with the clean banknote scent of Wall Street money launderers. His administration’s failure to anticipate the inevitable blowback from its continuation of decades of failed foreign policy is evident in their floundering attempts to evoke a “clash of civilizations” scenario to justify its hypocritical about-face on the subject of a democratized Middle East. In an attempt to further distance himself from his own rhetoric, Obama has left the more brutal assessments of the situation unfolding in Egypt to his Republican cohorts to deliver the message that “stability” under a tyrant’s boot is the best case scenario for the people of the Middle East – a view that is echoed across the political spectrum on both sides of the Atlantic in varying degrees of overt racism by politicians, pundits and “experts” alike. Consensus opinion among the people who are paid handsomely to get it wrong every time insists that Egyptians are only incapable of filling the political vacuum left in Mubarak’s wake with a bomb laden Mullah intent on draining the Suez Canal. Notice how little has been made of the sewer monsters that have emerged from the political vacuum of Obama’s flailing leadership at home.

To the chagrin of the mob-fearing, democracy-thwarting leaders of the ‘free’ world, the Egyptian people are overwhelmingly unwilling to settle for an interim government led by a defanged and temporarily hobbled ruling party bureaucrat, even if it means sacrificing the the meagre, short-term benefits a return to “stability” would bring. Enter the Muslim Brotherhood whose gains in Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary elections posed a genuine democratic challenge to Mubarak’s authoritarian ‘secular’ regime and not the hoped for theological “threat”, without which Israel and its allies in the west remain hamstrung in their attempts to summon the specter of Bin Laden to hover ominously over Tahrir square where tens of thousands of demonstrators remain steadfast in their demands for Mubarak’s removal. Despite the Brotherhood’s deliberately low profile presence in the ongoing demonstrations and their stated willingness to work within a legitimately elected government, Washington and Tel Aviv’s official storytellers are spinning a Crusade-era yarn with the requisite, turban wearing villains on a suicide mission from God to illustrate the Brotherhood’s moderate aims to reform Egypt’s political institutions.

Thinking back to all the bellicose rhetoric of war in recent years, combined with the vacuous windbaggery of Obama’s preening oratory, you realize those ominous rumblings of fighter jets and unmanned aircraft audible over his finely pitched spoken anthems are just the sound a corpse emits as accumulated gases seek release. As events unfold in Egypt, with millions of its citizens publicly unshackling themselves from a brutal and ruinous status-quo, we are not only witness to a spontaneous irruption of emboldened citizens demanding an end to decades of tyrannical rule, but an insurrection on a global scale that promises to upend Empire and the corrupt institutions that sustain it.

How fitting that the Egyptian people once condemned to eke out a meagre existence among the monuments and relics of another dead Empire have risen en masse from the ruins, bringing down not only a stooge Pharaoh, but revealing American power as little more than a gold-plated hologram carcass signifying the brief reign of its last little emperor.

Of course, it is also about other scars – the scar of the land:

Now, that ancient village with its walls made of secrets and trees planted in blood, looked inanimate. Around Jerusalem and in the West Bank, settlements on every hilltop – with their manicured green lawns and red roofs metastasizing into the valleys like an earth rash – contrasted cruelty to the crumbling Arab homes where sewage from these settlements drained and where settlers often dumped their garbage.

And it is about the scar that is Zionism itself, with its ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, an ethnic cleansing that consisted of massacres in about 30 Arab villages, with two to three thousand massacred, and the subsequent bulldozing and destruction of more than 500 such villages. And it is about the scaring of Palestine and of its people. And it is about the scaring of humanity with Zionism’s brutality and of its ongoing destruction – genocide really – of another people’s identity and culture. Israel has trouble accepting that Palestine is the home of the Palestinian people and simultaneously claiming legitimacy for itself, as well it should, as the claims are incompatible.

The author says of the Israelis what she claims the Israelis already know:

… that their history is contrived from the bones and traditions of Palestinians. The Europeans who came knew neither hummus not falafel but later proclaimed them “authentic Jewish cuisine.” They claimed the villas of Qatamon as “old Jewish homes” even though, hard as they tried, they could not duplicate the Arab architecture that arched every which way in the ceilings, staircases, windows, and doors. They had no old photographs or ancient drawings of their ancestry living on the land, loving it, and planting it. They arrived from foreign nations and uncovered coins in Palestine’s earth from the Canaanites, the Romans, the Ottomans, and then sold them as their own “ancient Jewish artifacts.” They came to Jaffa and found oranges the size of watermelons and said, “behold! The Jews are known for their oranges.” But those oranges were the culmination of centuries of Palestinian farmers perfecting the art of citrus-growing.

We follow Amal from childhood as her life intersects the major events of Palestinian history since 1948 and simultaneously we empathize with her suffering in the loss of her ancestral home in the village of Ein Hod and the loss, one by one of the members of her family to Israeli bullets and Israeli aerial bombardments, or in the case of David, her baby brother, his disappearance into the hands of an Israeli soldier who wants him as a gift to his childless wife. We experience Amal’s loss of her mother to insanity resulting from the death of her husband who resisted the advance of the Jewish forces toward their village and the disappearance of her baby boy, to where, she never knows.

Palestinian history is projected onto to the family of Amal as it is, in reality, projected onto so many Palestinian families.

At what price, Israel? What price does the world pay for Israel’s existence?

Ms Abuldawa takes us through the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinian villagers from Ein Hod as we hide with the child, Amal, underneath her home which is destroyed over her. And we watch the villagers in long lines carrying their life possessions away from their village. Pictures of these processions from 1948 have survived, one is displayed on the cover of Benny Morris’s book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. Another on the cover of Ilan Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. And another, on the cover of Nur Masalha’s book, The Expulsion of the Palestinians.

We may read from historian, Benny Morris (Operation Dani):

About noon on 13 July, Operation Dani HQ informed IDF General Staff/Operations: Lydda police fort has been captured. [The troops] are busy expelling the inhabitants. … Lydda’s inhabitants were forced to walk eastward to the Arab legion lines; many of Ramle’s inhabitants were ferried in trucks or buses. Clogging the roads … tens of thousands of refugees marched, gradually shedding their worldly goods along the way. It was a hot summer day. The Arab chroniclers, such as Sheikh Muhammed Nimr al Khatib, claimed that hundreds of children died in the march, from dehydration and disease. One Israeli witness described the spoor: the refugee column ‘to begin with [jettisoned] utensils and furniture and, in the end, bodies of men, women, and children.

Now in the Jenin refugee camp, she recounts the brief surge of optimism upon reading in the press of the arrival to Palestine of UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, who was sent to Palestine by the Secretary General in order to produce a recommendation as an alternative to the partition resolution with which the UN was then having second thoughts. And days later she read in the same press of his assassination by the Jewish terrorist group, Stern Gang, on the orders of its head, Yitzhak Shamir who later was to become Israel’s Prime Minister. Count Folke Bernadotte had in previous years negotiated the release of 25,000 Jewish prisoners from Nazi concentrations camps in Germany. Murder at the hands of Jewish terrorists was his reward.

The author relates the 1967 War – Israel’s takeover of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and its further wave of ethnic cleansing, consisting of another 300,000 refugees, and, of her brother, Yousef, she says:

As the conquest in 1948 did for Hasan [her father], Israel’s attack in 1967 and subsequent occupation of the West Bank left his son Yousef with a tentative destiny. The grip of Israeli occupation wrapped around his throat and would not let up. Soldiers ruled their lives arbitrarily. Who could or could not pass was up to them, and not according to any protocol. Who was slapped or not was decided on a whim. Who was forced to strip and who was not – the decision was made on the spot. …

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. … They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. …

But the heart must grieve. Sometimes pain emerged as joy. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference. …

Of the days leading up to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, the author tells us that Israel had been striking Lebanon to provoke the PLO into retaliating with Israeli defense minister, Ariel Sharon vowing to wipe out the resistance once and for all, and in July 1981, Israeli jets killed two hundred civilians in a single raid on Beirut. By April 1982, we are told, the UN had recorded 2,125 Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace and 625 violations of Lebanese territorial waters.

I recall, and recorded, the bombardment of Beirut in the summer of 1982. It lasted two months, day after day, with, what looked to me of about 250 dead per day with hospitals, schools and apartment buildings destroyed and with people being killed inside of hospitals from the bombardment.

The author tells us that by August, there were 17, 500 civilians killed, 40,000 wounded, 400,000 homeless (10% of Lebanon’s population), and 100,000 without shelter. “Prostrate Lebanon lay devastated and raped without an infrastructure for food or water.”

The Israelis said, “We are here for peace. This is a peace mission.”

The author quotes from veteran Middle East journalist, Robert Fisk, in Pity the Nation, describing Israeli’s use of phosphorus artillery shells, one more Israeli violation of international humanitarian law:

Dr Shammaa’s story was s dreadful one and her voice broke and she told it. ‘I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames,’ she said. ‘When I took them out half and hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours.’ Next morning, Amal Shammaa took the tiny corpses out of the mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into flames.

The Israeli invasion and occupation of the Arab capital, Beirut, was capped by the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in central west Beirut.

The author says:

The PLO withdrew from Lebanon only after an explicit guarantee from US envoy Phillip Habib and Alexander Haig that the United States of America, with the authority and promise of it President, Ronald Reagan, would ensure the safety of the women and children left defenseless in the refugee camps. Phillip Habib personally signed the document.

Thus the PLO was exiled to Tunisia carrying the written promise of the United States. The fate of those I loved lay in the folds of that Ronald Reagan promise.

She continues:

On September 16, in defiance of the ceasefire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the refugee camp of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen [the wife and daughter of Amal’s brother, Yousef] slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints, barring the exist of the refugees and allowed their Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through binoculars during the day and lit the night sky with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later the first western journalist entered the camp and bore witness.

Possibly, as many as 2000 people were either killed in the refugee camps or were taken away in trucks never to be seen again.

She quotes again from Robert Fisk:

They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses – women, young men, babies and grandparents –lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machined-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves.

Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses, the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the Washington Post] immediately realized that the Israeli defense minister would have to bear some of the responsibility for this horror. ‘Sharon!’ he shouted. ‘That fucker Sharon! This is Deir Yassin all over again.’

What we found inside the Palestinian Shatila camp at ten o’clock on the morning of 18 September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to retell in the cold prose of a medical examination. … these people, hundreds of them, had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an incident – how easily we used the word ‘incident’ in Lebanon – that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist atrocity. It was a war crime.

… these were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies – blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition – tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment, and empty bottles of whisky.

Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines. The eyes of these young men were open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old.

On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair, her eyes were starring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead. Someone had slit open the woman’s stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.

Ms Abulhawa weaves this historical material of the last paragraph into the story. The woman and child become Amal’s sister-in-law and niece causing her brother, Joseph, to blow himself up along with the 63 persons, including many CIA operatives, at the US Embassy in Beirut. Blowback?

Forgive me, Amal. It is time they taste a small dose of the heaps they have fed us all of our lives.

–Yousef

It is actually unlikely that the suicide bomber who hit the US Embassy was a Palestinian from the occupied territories. Though no one took responsibility for the attack, a new group at the time calling itself Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack some months later of the Marine barracks near the Beirut airport killing 247 US Marines. Calling themselves, ‘soldiers of God yearning for martyrdom’ the caller said that their goal was an Islamic Republic for Lebanon and the expulsion of the Israelis and their supporters. The Palestinian struggle has been largely secular for most of its history.

In addition to the US broken promises to prevent Israel from invading West Beirut and to protect the refugee camps, which also included Shiite Muslims from southern Lebanon who had taken refuge there after the Israeli invasion, the US had abandoned its neutral stance when the battleship, Virginia, anchored off the coast, shelled Muslim-leftish coalition forces whom it claimed were threatening Lebanese army positions. The destruction of the embassy and its personnel also had the effect of scuttling the signing of a US and Israeli sponsored Lebanese-Israeli peace treaty, likely the main purpose of the bombing.

The State Department, who concluded that the bombing was the work of Hezbollah, was probably right in its conclusion that the bombing sprang from the fermenting soil of the southern Lebanese Shiites but was most likely wrong in the belief that it was Hezbollah which was not even fully formed until 1985.

But ‘blowback’ still. Such a massacre cannot go unanswered, not in the maelstrom of an Israeli invasion which left Lebanon raped with as many as 20,000 killed thanks the American acquiescence to the invasion.

There is the children-instigated Intifada begun in 1988, in which her lifelong friend’s son looses the ability to speak and can no longer look anyone in the eye after arrest and presumably torture under Prime Minister Rabin’s policy of “might, force and beatings.”

The book concludes with Israel’s 2002 massacre at the Jenin refugee camp which was part of the invasion and trashing of West Bank cities during that spring. It does not, however, capture the barbarity and devastation that occurred, and which is comparable to a highly mechanized modern army equipped with Apache and Cobra US made helicopters equipped with air to surface missiles and F16 jet fighters destroying a housing project of largely impoverished people with a handful of defenders armed with only rifles.

A book coming closer to capturing the reality of the massacre is Ramzy Baroud’s book, Searching Jenin. That book consists of personal interviews with about 100 residents of the refugee camp who endured the invasion plus the testimonies of twenty of so international who managed to enter and view there camp some days afterward. Together they describe massive shelling and bulldozing of buildings, men, women, and children being shot by snipers, men being executed with their hands tied behind their backs. One of the internationals whose testimony appears is that of Susan Abulhawa herself.

I found it somewhat improbable that Amal would return to Jenin with her teenage daughter on the eve of Israel’s invasion of West Bank cities and thus put her own life as well as her daughter’s in peril.

I found the style fresh and sometime lyrical and sometimes dreamy as befits an author who also writes poetry.

An interesting and enjoyable book grounded in facts which are a part of the history of the Palestinian people. Perhaps it will reach readers who would not otherwise read through the scholarly historical works.

Ms Abulhawa says in the book Searching Jenin:

Though the heroism of Jenin’s fighters may be perverted by propaganda, history will bow to these lightly armed men who fought until their last breath with an indomitable will and held off a mighty foe for ten days – four days longer than five armies were able to do in the past They are the true sons of the land. Having walked in the wake of what they died trying to prevent, I am changed.

The Yahoo page leading to the article read:

Topping the list is a nation so unethical that piracy is actually considered a legitimate trade. No. 1 worst country

Can a nation be unethical? Of course not. And calling a country “No. 1 worst” is just demonization.

The people that govern a country can lead it in an unethical direction, but that does not make the country unethical. Is piracy legitimate or not? It depends. Is resistance against oppression unethical?² Resistance is a right. It is not unethical; in fact, it may be the most ethical response to oppression and injustice.

In Somalia’s case, I submit that the “piracy” is a form of resistance to the piracy of western and other nations: that is nations trespassing, illegally exploiting Somalia’s fishing grounds, and dumping waste in Somalia’s waters.³

The Forbes article begins with quintessential Schadenfreude: “Upset with the failings of the U.S. government these days? Take a breath. At least we’re not Somalia.”¹

Forbes does not identify the source of the corruption. I do not grant that the nation of Somalia is corrupt. However, I will address the premise that Somalia is corrupt. This provokes many questions. For example, has Somalia always been corrupt? Why is it corrupt now? Who overthrew the former government?⁴ What caused the corruption? Was it internal or external? That is, did Somalia become corrupt from intrinsic factors or did outside forces cause, or contribute to, Somalia’s corruption?

Forbes reports that Somalia “long racked by civil war, has become a capital for piracy and terrorism with little capacity for any government at all, let alone an honest one.”

Capital for terrorism? This is assertion and hyperbole. Is Somalia responsible for the destruction of other states, like the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan? Has Somalia invaded Ethiopia or was it invaded by Ethiopia – at the behest of the US? Is Uganda an innocent neighbor of Somalia?

A 2008 Human Rights Watch report said the US is making the situation in Somalia worse: “The United States, treating Somalia primarily as a battlefield in the global war on terror, has pursued a policy of uncritical support for transitional government and Ethiopian actions, and the resulting lack of accountability has fueled the worst abuses.”⁵

Demonizing the Victims of US Aggression

Heaping further abuse, Forbes continues by naming Myanmar and Afghanistan to its list of notorious countries, “each tremendously corrupt in its own way.” I am not going to defend Myanmar.

Turning to Afghanistan, however, Forbes writes:

Afghanistan, meanwhile, is a nominal U.S. ally burdened with the corrupt government of Hamid Karzai, who’s admitted to taking “bags of money” from U.S. enemy Iran in addition to the huge sums of U.S. aid and persuasion money floating around the war-ravaged nation. It doesn’t help that Karzai’s brother is widely reputed to be involved in the opium trade.

What is wrong with this reporting? Why is Hamid Karzai in power? Who put him there? Which country oversaw the elections in occupied Afghanistan that led to the installment of Karzai as leader? How credible were the elections, and which country prevented scrutinizing of the fairness of the elections? As for Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali is on the payroll of the CIA.⁶ Why would Ahmed Wali Karzai be paid by the CIA? Who gains from the opium trade?⁷

Further questions are begged. Why was Afghanistan devastated? Why did warlords gain so much power? Which country backed the warlords? Which country continually bombards Afghanistan and has lethally wiped out many wedding celebrations?

Turning to the number four “worst country” on the Forbes list:

Another war-torn nation, Iraq, came in fourth on the corruption index. Squabbling between the Shiite majority and Sunni minority, still unused to being out of power, has delayed the formation of a government but corruption among the country’s administrators and judiciary is rampant.

Which country invaded Iraq illegally, killed over a million people (not including the over one million that UN-US-maintained sanctions killed prior to the US-led aggression)? Which country killed and arrested members of the Iraqi government and then dismantled it? Which country fostered internecine violence between Sunni and Shia? Which country set up the elections to produce the present, allegedly corrupt, government?

Since when is an election under occupation at all synonymous with anything remotely resembling democracy? If a government formed under occupation is corrupt, who is to blame: the party which set up the conditions or the party in power as a result of the manipulated conditions?

Failed State Somalia

Earlier in the year, Foreign Policy listed Somalia first on The Failed States Index 2010.

Somalia saw yet another year plagued by lawlessness and chaos, with pirates plying the coast while radical Islamist militias tightened their grip on the streets of Mogadishu. Across the Gulf of Aden, long-ignored Yemen leapt into the news when a would-be suicide bomber who had trained there tried to blow up a commercial flight bound for Detroit. Afghanistan and Iraq traded places on the index as both states contemplated the exit of U.S. combat troops, while already isolated Sudan saw its dictator, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, defy an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court and the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo once again proved itself a country in little more than name.⁸

Each of the cited failed states (Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and Democratic Republic of Congo) is a state targeted by the US for violence and exploitation.

This violence often provokes violent resistance. Violence against a state, killing of its people, denial of self-determination creates enemies and spurs resistance. It is called blowback.

On 11 July, Uganda was rocked by explosions killing 76 people. Al-Shabab, the Somali resistance movement stated that the operation was in response to the killing of civilians by the African Union Mission (AMISON) peacekeeping forces, largely composed of troops from Uganda and Burundi, in Somalia.

Bronwyn Bruton of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) called for “constructive disengagement”: “The idea is to watch the situation carefully for signs of real global terrorism — which so far are limited. Al-Shabab’s ‘links’ with al-Qaeda seem to be mostly rhetoric on both sides.” Bruton said, “We [the US] have a limited capacity to influence events in Somalia, to influence them positively. But we have an almost unlimited capacity to make a mess of things.”⁹,¹⁰

Acting through the US-aligned Ugandan government, it has been claimed that “the entire [African] continent’s attention [has been turned] toward implementing Washington’s foreign policy objectives in Somalia.”

US imperialism in Somalia has not just driven Somalia to be called a failed state, it has shifted much of the burden on a subaltern African continent.¹¹

So who is really the “worst state”? The failed states or the state destroying and creating failed states?

1. Daniel Fisher, “The Most Corrupt Countries,” Forbes, 1 November 2010.
2. See my Dissident Voice articles: “Progressivist Principles and Resistance,” 27 September 2010; “Ending Violent Resistance,” 23 October 2010.
3. Agustín Velloso, “Somalia: When Is a Pirate Not a Pirate?,” Dissident Voice, 3 November 2009.
4. James Petras, “The Imperial System: Hierarchy, Networks and Clients — The Case of Somalia,” Dissident Voice, 18 February 2007.
5. “So Much to Fear,” Human Rights Watch, 8 December 2008.
6. Dexter Filkins, Maerk Mazzetti, and James Risen, “Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A.,” New York Times, 27 October 2009.
7. Michel Chossudovsky, “Who benefits from the Afghan Opium Trade?,” Global Research, 21 September 2006.
8. “The Failed States Index 2010,” FP, 21 June 2010.
9. Quoted in Fareed Zakaria, “The failed-state conundrum,” Washington Post, 19 July 2010.
10. US media, with memories of the botched US so-called humanitarian intervention launched by George Bush Sr have the CFR caution on deeper involvement in Somalia. See Jeremy Sapienza, “Uganda bombings: Obama mustn’t meddle in Somalia,” CSMonitor.com, 13 July 2010.
11. Abayomi Azikiwe, “African Union summit burdened with U.S. imperialism’s role in Somalia,” Pan-African News Wire, 1 August 2010.

Universal outrage has been drummed up over the case of an Iranian woman about to be stoned to death for adultery. She’s also implicated in the murder of her husband, for which she may be hanged. This second, more serious crime has been left out of many news stories. America also executes, but it doesn’t stone, especially for a bit of ticklish fun on the side. We inject, electrocute, gas, hang and shoot our condemned. We’re more humane that way. Forever bureaucratic, we pay attention to procedural niceties.

Our objection, then, is not to capital punishment, but to certain methods. Stoning is barbaric. We don’t stone, period, except during one of our serial wars, where we will stone entire communities back to the Stone Age. But that’s war, buddy. We also use phosphorous and cluster bombs, plant landmines that will last generations. To rectify and avenge the stoning of one woman, someone we don’t really care about, whose name we can’t even pronounce, we’ll flatten Iran, maybe by Thanksgiving.

The United States is concerned about women worldwide. It is touched and outraged by one Afghan woman, Aisha, whose nose was sliced off by her Taliban husband. To defend her honor, it has killed hundreds of thousands of her brothers and sisters. To protect her, it has destroyed her country. It’s the principle that matters. We care about the individual, at least those who are useful to our agendas. It’s the masses we don’t give a flying whoopee about. How can we not raise our voices, for example, when an imprisoned prostitute — hardly a criminal, really, even less so than adulterer — is left in a cage, to be baked to death for at least four hours in 107-degree heat? Her captors ignored her pleas for water. They wouldn’t even allow her to use the bathroom, so she soiled herself before passing out. She was still alive, however, when finally taken to the hospital, where doctors allowed her to die. Incredibly, no charges have been filed. Such barbarity and judicial callousness deserve our fullest condemnations, except that hardly anyone has heard of Marcia Powell, 48, who died in an Arizona prison in May of 2009. The mainstream media ignore her, because her abject death cannot be exploited for political purposes. We’re not trying to bomb Arizona.

Needing to kill, a government will lie before, during and after splattering blood. Eschewing subtlety, it prefers to speak in slogans and clipped, cartoonish sentences. They hate us for who we are. We must fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here. We’re trying to root out the bad guys. Adopting this lingo, many Americans are dubbing the community center and mosque near Ground Zero a “jihad mosque” or a “victory mosque.” In Lower Manhattan last week, I saw a man carrying a sign, “EVERYTHING I EVER NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT ISLAM I LEARNED ON 9/11.” Another displayed a caricature of “IMAM OBAMA.” There was an effigy of a tied up Palestinian, complete with keffiyeh, with this placard, “OBAMA: With a name like HUSSAIN we understand. Bloomberg: what the f@&k is your excuse?”

Totalitarianism always breeds idiocy. Lies that go unchallenged lead to more preposterous lies. Idiocy is also the manure from which totalitarianism rises. On September 11, 2001, the entire world saw America symbolically imploded, but our actual collapse is ongoing. It is relatively gradual, unlike the three, yes, three, World Trade Center buildings that tumbled onto their own foot prints. For the last nine years, we have endured an unending stream of lies and idiocy, none more grotesque than the official explanation to what happened that tragic day.

Despite being lied to repeatedly, almost daily, Americans are strangely gullible to incoherent, even ridiculous narratives dished up by their government. Brainwashed by the bromide that their nation is always a force for good, anywhere, worldwide, Americans can’t imagine that Washington could be complicit in the murder of its own citizens. Ignored is the fact that it has done so many times before, and since, 9/11. Using false pretexts to invade Iraq, our government has caused the death of over four thousand Americans, more than the number who perished on 9/11.

I don’t know what happened that day, but it makes no sense to me that World Trade Center #7 fell down without being hit by anything. It makes no sense to me that it collapsed exactly the same way as the twin towers, as if imploding. It makes no sense that the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged hijackers, could be found on the ground, when entire skyscrapers were being pulverized. I also don’t understand how no military jets could intercept any of the three planes that hit their targets that day. The first tower was struck at 8:46AM, the Pentagon at 9:40AM, nearly an hour later, with no effective response from our vaunted military. I used to take buses to and from the Pentagon Transit Center. I knew the building wasn’t very tall, so it struck me as weird how an airliner could hit it from the side. Why fly parallel to the ground, nearly shaving it, to strike such a low target? Why not just dive into it? There are red flags all over this incident, yet many sane, reasonable people will become completely unhinged at the slightest suggestion that the official version doesn’t add up. Our government lies all the time, but when it comes to this one incident, we shouldn’t question anything? Even National Review, of all places, pointed out visa irregularities among the alleged hijackers, how they could enter the U.S. without the proper paperwork.

After Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, his family refused to believe the official explanation. They fought and fought until an assassination conspiracy trial was scheduled in 1999. Presented with extensive evidences, a jury concluded that, yes, the federal, state and local governments all had a hand in Dr. King’s murder, and that James Earl Ray was not the shooter. The King family did what any sane, loving family would do. Coretta Scott King explained, “We had to get involved because the system did not work. Those who are responsible for the assassination were not held to account for their involvement […] It has been a difficult and painful experience to revisit this tragedy, but we felt we had an obligation to do everything in our power to seek the truth.”

On September 11, 2001, someone stabbed America. She’s being murdered right now. As Americans, we need to get to the heart of this, because this madness and deceit are perpetuating themselves. If we don’t have the courage and clarity to confront this evil, we won’t regain our sanity or move forward. We might as well be dead. We’re dying. As with the King murder and so much else, you cannot expect the system to convict itself. It will lie and lie until the truth hardly matters.

But the real wave of book burning started in the fourth century. Then, in the course of one person’s lifetime, Christianity was legalized (by the Edict of Milan in 312), its doctrine standardized by state order at the Council of Nicaea in 325, and under Theodosius I the faith was made virtually compulsory for Roman subjects ca. 390. (Jews were accorded a special exemption.) Believers in Jupiter and the other Greco-Roman gods had a brief reprieve under the rule of Emperor Julian (“the Apostate”) who reigned from 355 to 363. But then came the era of violent Christian intolerance. Temples to the pagan gods were shuttered, destroyed or converted to Christian churches. Manichaeism, the faith from Persia popular in some parts of the empire, was harshly suppressed, along with all pagan cults. Eventually Plato’s Academy in Athens was shut down–all in the name of the Christian God.

Scholars dispute the popular story that a Christian mob burned down the great Library in Alexandria, Egypt in 391. But after the Council of Nicaea, Christians publicly burned the works of Arius, a priest from Alexandria who maintained that Jesus was not God but rather a “creation” of God. (A famous ninth century Italian picture shows Emperor Constantine blessing the incineration.) You weren’t allowed to publish that opinion at that time.

In 364 the Christian emperor Jovian ordered the burning of the great library of Antioch, in the third largest city in the empire. It had been richly patronized by his predecessor Julian. Many if not most Christians–there were deep divisions among them–regarded the destruction of “heretical” or pagan material as eminently justified. (Why not burn what you know–via your religious faith–is false?)

Whenever you read that a text by Sophocles, or Aristophanes, or some other ancient author, or perhaps one of the many “gospels” composed by “heretical” Christians is “lost” (known only by title and some extracts in another test), think: Christian book burning. We know that there were many forms of early Christian belief because second and third century “heresiologists” like Irenaeus and Hippolytus summarized their views, selectively and tendentiously quoting texts in order to explain why they were ridiculous or wrong.

(Examples include the well-known Gospel of Thomas and the recently rediscovered Gospel of Judas.) They lived before the church was merged with the state. They were concerned with merely refuting and discrediting the texts they disliked, since they weren’t in a strong position to destroy them. But from the fourth century, as the bishops acquired political power, the offending texts were systematically torched.

There are innumerable medieval examples of Christian book burning; the philosopher Peter Abelard was forced by a synod council to burn his own book (offering a rationalistic explanation of the doctrine of the trinity) in 1121. In France the works of the heretical Cathars were burned in the thirteenth century, along with the works of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and the Talmud. During the Reformation, works of opposing Christian movements burned one another’s’ books with glee, including Bibles translated into vernacular languages, without some church’s official permission.

Even during the Enlightenment the “Imperial Book Commission” of the Holy Roman Empire could order the burning of the writings of the German Deist, Johann Christian Edelmann. Frankfurt’s entire municipal government as well as a large crowd turned out to watch a thousand copies of his works set to the torch in 1750. (Edelmann had dared to declare that Jesus was a man, not a god.)

Thus if violence is, as H. Rap Brown once declared, “as American as cherry pie,” book burning is as Christian as the bread and wine of the Eucharist. There are modern Christians who uphold this long tradition. The Amazing Grace Baptist Church of Canton, North Carolina, planned a book burning on Halloween 2009. The pastor wanted to incinerate modern English translations of the Bible, since his church believes only the King James Version (of 1611) is God’s Word and all the other versions are “heretical.” The plan was stymied by torrential rain but the righteous ones did indeed trash the offending Bibles.

Those particular burners have the ”faith-based” conviction that somehow God in his wisdom called upon these translators in the early 17th century, with their limited knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, to render scripture definitively into English for all time. And that any subsequent translations must be the devil’s work. The inability of such people to understand that developments in such fields as archeology and linguistics are constantly producing better translations of texts never ceases to amaze me. What do they think are the “true” French, German, Spanish or Chinese versions of what they think is “God’s word”? Do they believe that the Creator of the universe first spoke through prophets in Hebrew and Greek, then decisively through the holy language of English, in a translation by 47 English linguists assembled by Hampton Court by the Anglican son of Mary Stuart, the Roman Catholic “Queen of Scots” as of 1611?

A hilarious parody of these believing types can be found here.

The (fictitious) “Landover Baptist Church” declares: “Unlike the sissy ‘Jesus is Love’ fake-Christians (whom both the Lord Jesus and we loathe) we have running around today, the early followers of Christ were never ashamed to burn books. In fact, if you ever find yourself being grateful for the destruction of most of the works of pagan nincompoops like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, you have a Christian to thank!”

It’s satire. But (just like Tina Fey’s parodies of Sarah Palin actually reflect Palin’s views) the satire reflects the genuine beliefs of some U.S. Christians. (Recall that Palin once tried to get the Wasilla City Librarian to remove certain books, but when called to account as a political candidate later told the press, ”Sweet Lord, no! I would never ask the librarian to burn books!”)

There are many fundamentalist Christians who fear to allow their children to attend public school precisely because they fear philosophical discussion, openness, dialectic, nuance, Socratic doubt. And many see college professors, in general, as nefarious if not demonic.

The widely publicized plans of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, to burn Qur’ans on Sept. 11 thus continues a long tradition of ignorance and intolerance. This intolerance is not normative in modern Christianity in the U.S.; ecumenism has long been the more mainstream tradition. But when you have someone of the stature of the Rev. Franklin Graham opining that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion,” does he not encourage the book burners?

It needs to be said: since the seventh century, the Islamic world has been generally more tolerant towards books than the Christian world. There have been some egregious departures from tolerance; the destruction of the library in the Nalanda (Buddhist) monastery in northern India by a Muslim army from Central Asia in the 12th century, for example. (Reports of the sacking of the Library of Alexandria by an Arab army in 642 are generally now discounted.)

But rather than burning the books of Jews and Christians, Muslims recognized these communities precisely because they were “Peoples of the Book” entitled to their texts! In South Asia they tended to also recognize Hindus and Buddhists as “Peoples of the Book” with their own sutras and sophisticated ideas derived from them. While Christians were burning books (to eradicate what they thought were evil influences and establish their own monopoly on thought), Muslims were preserving books and contemplating varied interpretations of reality. Muslims have never had a formulaic creed (like the Nicene creed) establishing doctrine, or a papacy to enforce belief. The Qur’an states “There should be no coercion in religion” (surah 2: 256). And while there are contradictory passages in the Qur’an (an historical text written by human beings over a certain amount of time) this message of tolerance has generally prevailed over the last thousand three hundred years.

The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 764-809), a contemporary of Charlemagne (whom he sent an elephant as a present) presided over a diverse court that included Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and probably Buddhists and Brahmins. Born in Tehran, Persia, he enjoyed presiding over debates between thinkers of different religions. (Charlemagne tolerated the Jews in his empire and began the “Carolingian Renaissance.” But he was probably less religiously tolerant than al-Rashid who sought his friendship.)

The first Abbasid caliphs founded the “House of Wisdom” library in Baghdad, which also served as a center for the translation of ancient Greek texts into Syriac or Arabic throughout the eighth and ninth centuries. Christians and Jews under Muslim rule played important roles in preserving these books. Some had been burned and lost in Christendom but were only re-introduced due to the fact that Muslims conquered the Iberian peninsula and established centers of intercultural dialogue in places like Cordoba. (Yes, that’s Cordoba, as in the New York City Islamic center, Cordoba House, that bigoted fools demanded change its name so as not to “offend” “Americans”…)

Everyone who’s received a decent primary education should realize it was interaction between Christians and Muslims in Muslim Spain that allowed for the revival of much classical learning lost to Christendom during the Dark Ages. It’s from Cordoba that we acquired algebra (which by the way, is a word derived from Arabic).

In some countries it’s against the law to deny the Holocaust (or its extent or nature). It’s considered a hate crime. What about burning a book which is the heart and soul of a community, denouncing it as the work of the devil? (Yes I know the Florida pastor plans to torch the Talmud too, just like his medieval forebears, making it plain to his flock and the world that he doesn’t just hate Muslims. But it seems an afterthought, a way of saying “I’m not just hostile to Muslims but to Jews too.”)

What about setting fuel and match to a text handled reverentially as a matter of course by a fifth of the world? Isn’t that even more provocative than challenging any historical record? Whether or not it’s a hate crime according to somebody’s legal definition, it’s a moral crime that Christians and all of us should deplore. Book burning’s part of an historical pattern, but Christians can question and renounce that heritage.

The world itself is burning. People are blowing themselves up in Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan. People are being fried by missile strikes on wedding parties in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Stinger and Griffin missiles burn bad . Everywhere the U.S. flag is getting torched precisely because of the crazy behavior and political influence of some U.S. Christians desperate to see the Apocalypse, after which they imagine the Beast and False Prophet will be thrown into a lake of fire (“to burn forever,” Rev 20:15). The latter (even those burning the Talmud) are eager to cheer on Zionist Jews including those with the most grotesque racist, Islamophobic inclinations, ‘I’m on God’s side,” they think, holding his His holy fire in their hands—stupid kids playing with fireworks.

After the rally in Kabul on Tuesday by Afghans denouncing not just the Florida church but Obama and the whole U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, Gen. Petraeus in urged the Rev. Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach to step back. The general knows he can’t change the people’s religion. He’s just charged with the task of bringing Afghanistan under the control of the U.S. military-industrial complex, and as a rational man sees a contradiction between the overall objectives of U.S. imperialism and the objectives of the Islamophobes in the U.S. fired up by cable news airheads. But the U.S. ruling elite–have despite all the talk about tolerance–deployed tools of bigotry from square one. (Think of Bush’s reference to a “Crusade” after 9-11.)

Malcolm X (a U.S. Muslim of significance) once said, “The chickens are coming home to roost.” After quoting that, right after 9-11, a very decent U.S. academic got ferociously attacked in a sort of book burning frenzy. But now even the top brass is alarmed at those chickens coming home to roost. It’s not like they really care about burning books in principle; they shred documents detailing their crimes, they attack WikiLeaks and demand it remove documents from the web.

But they suddenly care about anti-Muslim book burning “blowback” impeding their efforts in Southwest Asia. That blowback is their bad karma. And the inevitable decline of an immorally constituted empire is (in my humble opinion) fine. The main issue is the welfare of humanity. During the Spanish Inquisition, the Qur’an was burned in Spain. The German writer Heinrich Heine in his 1821 play Almanso, observed, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen. (“Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.”)

If the crazies in Gainesville do their thing this Saturday they will burn more than books. They will perhaps draw down fire on all of us, contented that whatever happens is part of what they think is their god’s plan. Those among us, religious or irreligious, believers or atheists, with a sense of compassion for humanity and capacity for reason ought to protest such provocative actions.

There are plans for a rally this September 11 to defend the right of New York City Muslims to build a mosque or Islamic center—wherever they want, wherever is legal and approved by local authorities. On that day, as the idiots do their ugly thing in Florida, I hope there’s a good turnout in New York (especially of non-Muslims) to oppose bigotry.

2009: A Muslim organization having arranged to purchase an abandoned Burlington Coat factory on Park Place in Lower Manhattan plans to build a 13-story Islamic community center. It will feature a culinary school, conference hall, basketball court, swimming pool, and place of worship among other things and while principally servicing the Muslim community be open to all. It is to be called the Cordoba House, an apparent allusion to Muslim Spain in which Islam flourished alongside Christianity and Judaism from the eighth century up to the “Reconquest.”

In its mission statement the group says the center “will be dedicated to pluralism, service, arts and culture, education and empowerment, appreciation for our city and a deep respect for our planet. [It] will join New York to the world, offering a welcoming community center with multiple points of entry. With world-class facilities, a global scope and strong local roots, [the center] will offer a friendly and accessible platform for conversations across our identities.”

It will be four big city blocks away from where the World Trade Center once stood (“Ground Zero”). But since there are already about eight mosques in Manhattan, and a significant Muslim population in that highly diverse section of New York City, there is nothing remarkable about the group’s application to tear down the old factory building and construct the center.

The key organizer, Kuwait-born Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an imam of the Sufi school of Islam, generally described as “moderate” and mystical. He holds a degree in physics from Columbia University, had been hired by the FBI to conduct sensitivity training among their agents, and had worked with the U.S. State Department. He has met New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, who strongly supports the plan for the center.

In December 2009 the New York Times runs an article on the project. It is generally positive, citing two Jewish leaders and the mother of a 9-11 victim in support. In the same month conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, guest-hosting FOX News’ The O’Reilly Factor, interviews Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan. The interview is as Salon’s Justin Elliot later notes “remarkable for its cordiality.” “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with [the project], declares Ingraham. “I like what you’re trying to do.”

On May 6, 2010, after a public hearing in which New Yorkers express strong feelings pro and con, the New York City community board committee unanimously votes to approve the project. Enter Pamela Geller, who maintains a blog called Atlas Shrugs. She has written a book about Barack Obama in which she alleges his real father was Malcolm X. She leads an apparently tiny wacko group called Stop the Islamization of America. Seeing the opportunity to have her moment in the sun (and she is soon interviewed by FOX News and CNN), she lashes out at Cordoba House. She declares on her blog, “this is not about religious liberty. No one has suggested abridging the First Amendment to stop the mosque, and to oppose the Ground Zero mosque is not to oppose the First Amendment. There are hundreds of mosques in New York, thousands in America. This is not a religious issue. This is an issue of national dignity and respect for those who were murdered at that site in the name of Islam.” She begins to organize a protest at the Park Place site.

Soon New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser references Geller’s group, falsely describing it as a “human rights group.” This brings the movement against the “Ground Zero mosque” out of the blogosphere and into the mainstream press. She sensationalizes the issue, falsely reporting that the center is to open on Sept. 11, 2011. A “controversy” erupts.

On July 16 Sarah Palin weighs in. Addressing not Muslims specifically but “Peaceful New Yorkers,” Sarah Palin twitters: “ pls refudiate [sic] the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real.” She adds two days later (after amending “refudiate” to “refute”), “Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts…” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich expresses outrage in multiple statements over the next month: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” “It’s not about religion,” he insists, “and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.” He says the center will be a symbol of Muslim “triumphalism,” and that building the mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks “would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”

He writes, “‘Cordoba House’ is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain–the capital of Muslim conquerors, who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex… every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest.” In response to this absurd allegation the center organizers change the name to “Park51.”

(Gingrich who postures as an historian and scholar might have noted the Visigothic church was purchased by the conquering emir after 718 and that the Arabs during their rule in Spain pursued a policy of far greater religious tolerance than the Christians had before them. They allowed churches and synagogues to operate freely. When the Christians regained power, they expelled all Jews and Muslims, or forced them to convert, and conducted the Spanish Inquisition.)

Republican politicians smelling blood and opportunity continue to lash out. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty says, “I think it’s inappropriate… From a patriotic standpoint, it’s hallowed ground, it’s sacred ground, and we should respect that. We shouldn’t have images or activities that degrade or disrespect that in any way.” Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee asks on his FOX program August 4, “Even if the Muslims have the right to build it, don’t they do more to serve the public interest by exercising the responsible judgment to not build it?” “The fact that someone has the right to do something doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing to do,” echoed Ohio Rep. John Boehner.

Former Massachusetts Mitt Romney’s spokesman adds: “Governor Romney opposes the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero. The wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda compel rejection of this site.”

On August 13 President Obama hosts representatives of the Muslim community at the White House. “As a citizen,” he tells them, “and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

A Republican running for Congress in Maryland, Andrew Harris, denounces the statement: “He is thinking like a lawyer and not an American, making declarations without America’s best interest in mind.” Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., also responds immediately: “President Obama is wrong. It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero.”

Bob Schieffer, CBS News’ chief Washington correspondent observes that Obama’s attention to the mosque issue “elevates it to a national issue. Clearly, Republicans are trying to take every advantage of this they can… every single Democratic candidate now running for office is going to be asked about it.”

Democratic Party leaders quickly distance themselves from the president’s remarks. “The First Amendment protects freedom of religion,” says a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid adding that the senator “respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else.”

Obama himself, startled by the response to his comments, has to elaborate almost immediately. “I was not commenting, and I will not comment,” he says, “on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.”

A CNN poll published in August 11 shows 68% of Americans opposed to the center, and a FOX poll published August 13 shows that 61% of U.S. residents support the legal right to construct Park 51 but 64% don’t want the Muslim group to construct it. This becomes the mandatory position of all politicians: they’ve got a right to do it, but they shouldn’t. It would not be politically wise to suggest a general ban on mosques or Islamic community centers. But everyone has to say, this particular project is wrong because it shows insensitivity to the feelings of “Americans” particularly family members of the 9-11 victims. Justin Quinn, who maintains the U.S. Conservative Politics Blog for example, justifies his disapproval by suggesting the building will hurt “thousands of people who continue to mourn the loss of loved ones who were turned to dust in the attacks.”

But there is another issue as well. New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio, Gingrich, and Quinn all call for an investigation of the center’s funding, suggesting that some of it might come from “Islamic terrorists.” Lazio speaks ominously about the “the questionable backers of the Cordoba Mosque at Ground Zero” and calls for a public investigation. Quinn says, “let’s at least find out where the money is coming from to pay for this thing.” Soon House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on board the program, although, alarmed at the backlash from Obama’s remarks, she suggests the “anti-mosque” movement should also be investigated.

By innuendo they assert that Rauf is linked to international terrorism. That seems unlikely since he’s been hired by the FBI since 2001 to offer sensitivity training to agents and has also just been asked by the State Department recently to tour the Middle East to “foster greater understanding” about the U.S. and its Muslims. The charge seems based solely on the fact that in a June 2010 interview with Aaron Klein of New York’s WABC Radio, he declined to say whether he agreed with the listing of Hamas as a “terrorist organization.”

He’d simply replied: “I’m not a politician. I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question…. I’m a bridge builder. I define my work as a bridge builder. I do not want to be placed, nor do I accept to be placed in a position of being put in a position where I am the target of one side or another.”

(I see nothing damning here. Hamas, initially promoted by Israel as an alternative to secular Palestinian nationalism, has resisted Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. It maintained long-term ceasefires with Israel ended due to Israeli action. It won a fair election in 2006. The U.S. State Department has considered it a “terrorist organization” since at least 1994 but the European Union only added it to its blacklist in 2003 under U.S. pressure. Many people including former President Jimmy Carter have asked that it be removed from that list, which is highly political and arbitrary and under no meaningful Congressional oversight. A U.S. Appeals Court recently ruled that the State Department must review its decision to list the People’s Mujahadeen Organization of Iran as “terrorist.” These things are very political, and no one should demand that Rauf endorse the listing. Certainly not those opposed to “Big Government” and its expectations of passive obedience from the citizenry.)

There are also wild accusations (aside from Gingrich’s cited above) that the center is designed to rub 9-11 in our noses. “The mosque at Ground Zero,” Quinn insists, “is being pursued to prove a simple political point — that Islamic fundamentalists can knock our buildings down, murder our citizens and then use our own laws against us so they can laugh in our faces.”

There are also hateful, provocative comments. Tea Party Express leader and “radio personality” Mark Williams blogs his followers: “The monument would consist of a Mosque for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god (repeat: ‘the terrorists’ monkey-god.” if you feel that fits a description of Allah then that is your own deep-seated emotional baggage not mine, talk to the terrorists who use Allah as their excuse and the Muslims who apologize for and rationalize them) and a ‘cultural center’ to propagandize for the extermination of all things not approved by their cult. It is a project of American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative, essentially the same group of apologists (but under 2 different names) for terrorists and the animals who use it as a terrorist ideology. They cloak their evil with new age gibberish that suggests Islam is just misunderstood.”

Even though this fascist has been expelled from the “mainstream” National Tea Party Federation for his racist comments about the NAACP, he and they speak for a significant number in spewing out their anti-Muslim vitriol. Hasn’t the widely loved Billy Graham’s son Franklin called Islam the “religion of the Devil?”

Thus by mid-August a modest project by a mainstream U.S. Muslim group backed by the New York City mayor and unanimously approved by the New York City community committee has been transformed into a general attack on Muslim rights in this country. The scary thing is that disapproval is so widespread, bipartisan, and driven by irrational fear if not hatred.

What does this tell us about this country? It tells us that nine years after 9-11 (and nice centuries after the First Crusade), Islamophobia is rampant and politically useful. Even though U.S. troops are supposedly fighting to help Muslims in two countries and both Bush and Obama have officially (for whatever reasons) emphasized that the U.S. is not against Islam, Islam is a religion of peace, we value our Muslim citizens, etc. the “us vs. them” mentality remains strong.

The prevalent argument against the center–that it may hurt people’s feelings–is an argument that people should be hurt by the mere existence of an Islamic site near “Ground Zero.” That they should feel hurt at the site of a Muslim establishment as they walk around Lower Manhattan, associating it with the 9-11 hijackers. That they should conflate Mohamed Atta and Rauf, or that at least if they do, their feelings should be respected. Of course Rauf’s hope is to counter precisely such feels by encouraging understanding and dialogue.

The fact in any case is that according to an August 10 Marist poll only 31% of Manhattan residents oppose the center! And only a slim majority of New York City residents find fault with it—that due no doubt to this faux “controversy”!

What about the feelings of U.S. Muslims, including those who had family members perish in the 9-11 bombing? They read about the plans of the “Dove World Outreach Center” in Gainesville, Florida—a “New Testament church, based on the Bible”—to promote an “International Burn a Quran Day” this September 11. They read about anti-mosque campaigns in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Temecula, California; Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The Tea Party movement and mainstream politicians enthusiastically embrace the anti-mosque lynchmob.

I imagine there are some hurt feelings among people unfairly associated with terrorism just because a handful of Saudis attacked the U.S. nine years ago. To be told “this sacred ground–our American ground” so we don’t want your Muslim center here “degrading” and “disrespecting” it (Pawlenty’s terms) is to be told you’re not really a full citizen and your religion (as opposed to, say, Catholicism) isn’t an American one. It must be insulting and frustrating at least.

The notion that “they attacked us”–that the whole Muslim world attacked “us”–is so preposterous that only the simplest minds can believe it and the most devious exploit their ignorance for political gain. The U.S. has attacked Muslim countries, or intervened to impose regime change, repeatedly in the post-war period. Since 1967 it has provided nearly unconditional support to Israel, inevitably endorsing or accepting its grotesque mistreatment of the Palestinians. It cruelly maintained sanctions against Iraq throughout the 1990s, resulting in at least half a million children’s deaths. It provides massive aid to hated dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak.

U.S. forces have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in its latest attack on Iraq, based entirely on lies that only resonated among the people because they were shell-shocked by 9-11 and willing to believe a secularist like Saddam was deeply involved. It maintains an increasingly unpopular occupation of Afghanistan and by its drone attacks on Pakistan has thoroughly alienated the Pakistani people. It is natural for Muslims globally to see themselves under U.S. attack. That a few have responded with terrorist attacks is unsurprising; the CIA calls it “blowback.” It is also natural for most, like Rauf, to want to respond to all this defensively with peaceful education and dialogue.

The problem isn’t limited to the U.S. Other western countries are also manifesting Islamophobia, placing Muslims on the defensive. In March 2005 the French parliament voted to ban Islamic head scarves in public schools. This has forced French Muslim schoolgirls to choose between following rules set down in the Qur’an and receiving public education. In 2005 the Danish right-wing newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten “invited members of the Danish editorial cartoonists union to draw Muhammad as they see him.” Since Muslim teaching forbids depiction of the prophet, and since it was assumed many cartoons would depict him a terrorist, this was a deliberate provocation. In December 2009 Swiss voters voted in a referendum to ban further construction of minarets in the country. (There are only four.)

There are a lot of hurt feelings about violent attacks, and Muslims in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere frankly have more cause for them than the people of New York City. The loss of 2976 people in New York on 9-11 was tragic. But more than that number of civilians were killed by U.S. bombing between October 2001 and March 2002, and the ongoing bombing has caused Afghans initially willing to cooperate with US/NATO to explode in indignation. Members of Parliament walk out, the streets of Kabul fill with anti-U.S. demonstrators, not because they’re Muslim, but because their sense of outrage that most non-Muslims in the world share, is provoked by arrogant imperialism.

The loss of life in Iraq, the displacement of millions, the massive increase in children born with deformities or suffering from leukemia due to US use of depleted uranium and agent orange, has been catastrophic. And aside from hurt feelings resulting from these wars, there are lots of hurt feelings over discrimination, experienced throughout the western world.

The controversy over the Islamic center and the results of the opinion polls suggest that neither the politicians nor pundits nor people in general understand any of this, and so seem hell-bent on generating more Muslim resentment. Nothing good can come out of that. But good could come out of Park51. Non-believer that I am, I hope the imam and his group stand strong and refuse to be intimidated by demagogues and fools.

I think the answer is obvious: movies are actually capable of reflecting at us, projected to a mythic dimension, our often unspoken understandings of the forces shaping our existence. The current delivery system would like us to believe that those forces are exclusively personal psychological ones: desire and fear primarily, Freud’s old eros and thanatos. Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays is responsible for masterminding the triumph of personal psychology in the socio-political realm: we call it PR. You can see it at work every day in the mainstream media. The excellent documentary The Century of the Self is still the unparalleled description of this historical phenomenon. It also points out that when peoples’ collective experience contrasts too strongly with the projections of the PR machine, they can begin to see other forces at work beyond their own personal desires and fears. The Matrix definitely kept its bread buttered on both sides with ample projections of personal power (all that kickboxing). But it also projected a legitimate collective sense that we had all become raw material to be extracted by a system that hid its predatory nature from us through a totalizing illusion.

Dystopia is not an ideologically fixed form: the enormously popular (at least in the US) Christian fundamentalist Left Behind series fits the bill as well. In Ecology of Fear, eco-sociologist Mike Davis has a whole chapter devoted to looking at how dystopian visions can turn into simple revenge fantasies: a convenient way to eradicate a cultural enemy: effete liberals, the working class, the Chinese: all have been dystopian straw men in one work or another. But the resonance of the corporation as predator paradigm in this century, like the paradigm of Mutually Assured Destruction in the last, ripples across the political spectrum. Whatever catastrophe-du-jour is used to metaphorize it, the dystopian mythos is usually in some way about enormous imbalances of power and the small collectives that form to try to redress them.

Well, zeitgeist-wise, then, let’s take a look at this scenario for a dystopian sci-fi blockbuster: on a near-future earth, an endgame has begun. In the previous century the only potential counterforce to a rapacious world system designed to extract the planet’s wealth at any cost and place it in the hands of a tiny elite has utterly failed. A new century begins with a spectacular series of terrorist attacks by a reactionary organization that was wholly created by the oligarchic empire it purports to destroy: blowback. But it’s a final rearguard action against the system by a group that offers no plausible alternative to it, only a hate-filled return to an hallucinated past.

While a declining but still powerful mega-state wastes its substance on an endless series of wars against this self-inflicted and misidentified foe, the processes of accelerated wealth extraction set in motion decades before continue to unfold, at an ever faster pace. But predictably, and yet somehow unexpectedly, these processes begin to slip out of the control even of those who had recently obtained the most apparently unlimited power because of them. Like a brakeless semi on a 7% grade, or maybe more like that subway train in The Taking of Pelham, 1-2-3, the overheated system roars toward a seemingly inevitable, and final, crash. Bits and pieces of its machinery begin to fail, more and more passengers are thrown under the wheels, even ones who’d been sitting comfortably just moments before. Panic and despair begin to spread.

Okay, it seems a thriller plot has hijacked our science fiction film (elevator pitch: It’s Speed meets Gattaca!). So let’s go with the thriller for now. The twist is that it’s not a lunatic terrorist at the helm of the runaway train, it’s the owners of the train itself. The speed-maddened owners and their drivers, even though they’ve now all become merely front seat passengers, are themselves the ones who sabotage all efforts by other passengers to slow or change the vehicle’s course. It’s actually dawning on them that a train-wreck is becoming inevitable (since they are helping make it so), but they have an endgame strategy: grab everything that’s left inside of any value and use it to position themselves not merely to survive the wreck but to come out of it with their power and possessions intact. (Technical advice for this portion of the script will be credited to investment counselors at the Wall Street Journal.)

This is a fantasy that even the oligarchs themselves don’t entirely believe—they know at least some of the currently well-positioned will be sacrificed too, along with the great masses of powerless and thus expendable humanity, if there’s a system-wide smash. But they are gamblers, and their gambling ability has utterly rewarded them up to this point (although admittedly they’d always gambled only with other peoples’ lives and money before).

So they press on, using the panic they’ve created as a successful distraction, setting passengers against one another as each blames the others for their predicament, while the owners systematically loot the remaining supplies: food, water, metals, energy. (Technical advice for this section can be credited to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.)

One has to ask here: once it reaches this endgame stage, what kind of resistance force could possibly succeed against the sheer mad logic of such a system, a runaway train whose drivers were the ones who destroyed the brakes? It would seem none. There would be skirmishes breaking out here and there—heroic last stands in one railway car or another, but on a system-wide scale, it’s TINA-time: There Is No Alternative. Was this what you meant, Margaret Thatcher?

Alright then, back to our science fiction scenario: in the chaos of permanent war, financial crisis and mass impoverishment that this unfettered system has unleashed, the distracted populace at first pays only momentary attention to a new series of devastating, random strikes taking place around the world. A tidal wave kills hundreds of thousands of people in a single day. A giant storm depopulates a major city, exposing a criminally deficient infrastructure. A series of earthquakes kill tens of thousands and reveals that corrupt governments and developers have colluded to construct shoddy buildings that result in disproportionately large numbers of children, the old and infirm being killed. One single quake reduces an entire nation to a refugee camp. Massive floods displace hundreds of thousands around the world. A volcano erupts, and a wealthy continent’s commerce is disrupted for weeks.

Then, a master-stroke: a negligently maintained oil well explodes deep under water, and an entire sea is poisoned. Like the reactionary terrorists on their suicide missions, the agent of this strike is able to bear the consequences of self-inflicted damage without fear, without concern. And the strike is an unprecedented blow to the industry that powers the whole train.

The victims of all these events are not specifically targeted, and those who are killed or seriously injured are overwhelmingly the poor; i.e., not those most responsible for the system’s violence and suicidal tendencies. The disruptions largely affect civilian installations and personnel, not military ones. It is the very definition of terrorism, except for one thing: there is no human agent behind these acts, no will, no intent to terrorize. Because the perpetrator is the planet itself.

But it is blowback, because the scale of the destruction wrought is ultimately a result of humanity’s own heedless growth, stratification, and hubris towards the natural world. The planet is simply the only agent still powerful enough to weaken the totalizing system that humanity has failed to transform.

The planet is not a vigilante or a rebel army, it doesn’t seek anything like justice, vengeance, a new world order, any of that. It’s just doing what it does. This makes its destructiveness all the more terrifying. A slow awareness dawns, among almost everyone but the power-mad elites and a shrinking number of hangers-on: if humanity forces a final conflict between its own survival and the planet’s — the planet will win. The idea of a special destiny for man, whose survival, alone among species, had supposedly become dependent solely on his own skill and intellect, or was guaranteed because of his purported descendency from a supernatural being who conveniently looked just like him, is revealed to be, well, can you say “pathetic fallacy?”

But wait, it’s only a movie, right? And as thoughtful people are fond of saying, life isn’t like the movies. To which I respond: actually, that’s really only true of the endings.

And, of course, the ending of capitalism’s story, if that’s what this is, hasn’t been written yet. A typically thoughtful and erudite piece by John Michael Greer in his blog The Archdruid Report mentions the failure of imagination that results in many of those who view contemporary events critically (particularly in the Peak Oil crowd he belongs to) being unable to envision the future in other terms than “doomer porn” like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s catastrophists vs. cornucopians, those boosters who believe capitalism will pull a bright-green better mousetrap out of its hat right at the crucial last moment, and we’ll all be able to keep on driving to the multiplex (to watch Avatar II, III, IV…) for generations to come. And they’ll all get clean water in Africa, and solar-powered TVs in China, and electric trains in Latin America too.

Greer himself has another scenario, one I’ve heard increasingly among many of our Bay Area greens: it may be harsh, the post-abundance future, but in the formerly rich world, anyway, we’ll all get to know one another better, life will “re-localize,” people will be forced to collaborate to survive, a multiplicity of creative strategies for living will emerge amid the hardship and we will ultimately have fuller and better lives.

This is obviously appealing, and circumspectly non-utopian, but one has to remark that such abundance as there is, much of which is what the situationists called “pseudo-abundance” anyway, is extremely unevenly distributed. I live in a city where day-release prisoners sweep the streets in upscale neighborhoods so the residents don’t have to be wakened by those nasty loud trucks or move their Lexus every Monday. Where purebred Lhasa Apsos have better diets than children in public school. Where the impoverished and insane who dare to be visible are routinely demonized as “scum” on newspaper commentary pages. I just have this nagging doubt because I don’t see any limits to the lengths to which privileged people will go when their privilege is threatened, and inequity and privilege will not simply vanish when oil hits $200 a barrel, or whatever. Concentrations of power and power’s savvy ability to divide and conquer could still put a serious crimp in any efforts to obtain more real control over our own lives, just as they did even before capitalism’s shadow was cast over the quiet earth, or a single oil well was drilled. I’m just saying: if your analysis doesn’t include extreme inequality, and your proposed solution doesn’t address it (and a lot of alt-green thinking still does not), then you really are just fantasizing. Pitch it to Hollywood.

I don’t know how the movie comes out either, but I do know that the system that delivers food, water, energy and goods to us is radically unstable, and its instability increases every time more of those necessities are placed in fewer hands. I also know that while the systems of control we erect are perpetually tumbling, the human species is resilient. But that’s all I know right now. Has capitalism’s endgame really begun? Is there still a viable counterforce or a white (or green) rabbit, and I’ve just missed them? In either case, how will pushback from the planet alter the scenario?

I know I don’t see  (or even want to see) John Wayne or Bruce Willis or Kevin Costner or Mel Gibson (!) on the horizon coming to redeem our gargantuan social and ecological failures with a well-placed kick to the groin. I do see a lot of good people, known and unknown, scrambling frantically on the wheel of social activism during the long day, trying to make a dollar out of the fifteen cents the system has left them to work with. But at night I just see all of us, activists, fellow travelers or baffled bystanders, sitting quietly, waiting in the dark. And wondering what’s going to happen next.

Maybe that’s okay. Right now, I trust the people who admit they don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t trust the people who say they do.

Faisal Sharzad — AKA The Times Square Fizzler — reportedly was trained by the “Pakistan Taliban” for a deadly deed that went horribly wrong.

Not only did he lock his keys in the car, including his apartment key, his Rube Goldberg contraption of alarm clocks, Walmart propane tanks and firecrackers failed to explode.

Apparently he was also expertly trained to purchase fertilizer that could not possibly explode.

Happily, Pakistani Evil Doers did not train him to drive. He could have ended up in New Jersey.

Somehow he found his way to one of the busiest streets in midtown Manhattan just as the United Nations — in midtown Manhattan — was preparing to debate a treaty to create a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.

Was that part of the story missing from the Fox News coverage you saw of this incident? In truth, for non-coverage any mainstream source would suffice.

That U.N. treaty, first proposed in 1995, would force Israel to forfeit its nuclear weapons, a goal first sought by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963. We know how that worked out.

What’s become of this Muslim Evil Doer after he miraculously found his way to Times Square — after miraculously eluding airport security during his 16 trips abroad to train with the Pakistan Taliban? Did he come and go through the same airports where security was provided by ICTS, the Israeli firm that played host to the dreaded “Christmas Day Bomber“?

Though Faisal refreshed a flagging storyline — The Global War on Terrorism — the Fizzler’s storyline has since become problematic. Let’s take a closer look.

News You Can Trust

CNN briefly showed a photo of Apollo Management, Sharzad’s employer. That photo appeared on CNN for about a second. End of story and no mention since. Why?

Here’s the online Newsweek account of where the Fizzler worked from 2006-2009:

May 4 (Bloomberg) — Faisal Shahzad, charged with attempting to bomb New York’s Times Square, worked for three years at a company controlled by Leon Black’s private-equity firm, Apollo Management LP.

Who is Leon Black? What is Apollo? And why isn’t his three years of employment there newsworthy?

Remember Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood Shooter? His job history provided key clues to his bizarre behavior. Is that why Hasan too has disappeared from the news?

Are the Clues Hidden in Plain Sight?

Imagine this: what if the intelligence that induced the U.S. to war in Iraq was “fixed” around a preset goal. What if the common source of that treachery is poised to become transparent?

If you were complicit in a deception of that magnitude — a clear act of treason — how would you obscure the facts? What measures would you take to sustain the storyline?

If you are the Evil Doer, how would you maintain a Muslim Evil Doer narrative? What would be required to advance a storyline built on a belief in the threat of Islamo fascism?

What happens to the storyline if the pre-war intelligence is proven a fiction traceable to a common source? What then for the storytellers?

For those marketing The Clash of Civilizations, Major Hasan’s psychotic break at Fort Hood in Texas was a well-timed blessing. Likewise for the Christmas Day Bomber and the Times Square Terrorist.

See if you can detect a common thread in this marketing of the Hasan threat by Family Security Matters:

• President Carol Taber described this incident as “the Ft. Hood terrorist attack” by an “Islamist gunman.”
• Editor Pam Meister promoted “the shocking TRUTH (sic) behind these attacks so that we might ward off those yet to come.”
• Executive Vice-President Linda Cohen, a trustee of the Anti-Defamation League, offered this advice: “No one is safe now. Not you, not the military, not your children, not office workers nor subway riders, nor anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Why was the Times Square Fizzler at just the right place at just the right time?

Advancing the Narrative

Is there a precedent for combining aberrant personal behavior and “terrorism” to advance a preset agenda? Do you recall the sniper attacks around Washington, D.C. in October 2002?

That murder spree began one day before debate commenced on Senate Resolution 46 proposed by Senator Joe Lieberman to authorize the use of U.S. forces in Iraq.

In the immediate aftermath of  911, Lieberman and Arizona Senator John McCain urged that the U.S. focus its forces not on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan but on regime change in Iraq.

Meanwhile the nation’s capital became a city under siege as those random attacks created widespread insecurity and heightened anxiety as serial murders left ten dead and three wounded over a 10-day period.

Those murders quickly transformed the emotionally wrenching terror of 911 into a personal reality for Washington residents, including U.S. lawmakers pondering whether to invade Iraq.

Meanwhile Lieberman and McCain — citing phony intelligence — promoted a U.S. military invasion of a nation that had no hand in that mass murder.

Assets and Transnational Treason

Was Faisal Sharzad a Pakistani patsy? In the psy-ops parlance, was he an “asset”?

An asset is a term from psy-ops used to describe someone whose personality has been profiled in great depth. A reliable asset can be catalyzed to act out known personality traits in ways that advance an agenda based on the time, place and circumstances of that catalyst. While an asset’s behavior is never 100% foreseeable, it is reliable within an acceptable range of probabilities.

Walk Monica Lewinsky in front of Bill Clinton, what was the probability of his response? If a U.S. official orders that an American Muslim be held for 18 months in solitary confinement in a jail in Yemen, what’s the probability that Anwar al-Aswlaki would emerge radicalized and bearing a grudge against the U.S.?

The facts suggest that Army psychiatrist, Nidal Hasan, was such an asset. Don’t expect to find this analysis on the Rupert Murdoch-controlled Fox News or in his many newspapers. Or on CNN despite its branding as “News You Can Trust.”

Assets are typically profiled and developed over lengthy periods of time. Their potential to act out a known personality disorder is held in reserve in much the same way that a military commander holds troops in reserve for deployment at an opportune time.

How is an asset developed in plain sight and “tasked” at the opportune time? Only a careful investigation can identify those influences particular to Dr. Hasan. Or to Faisal Sharzad. A good faith investigation would include the decisions that led to Dr. Hasan’s transfer to Ft. Hood and the circumstances there that triggered his behavior.

That’s also true for The Times Square Fizzler. While obviously not the brightest light in the shed, he was sufficiently competent to drive a car. And apparently he was bright enough to do financial analysis for Leon Black even though he apparently bought the wrong fertilizer at Wal-mart.

God only knows where he bought the fireworks. Perhaps in New Jersey.

A similar history of befuddled behavior surrounds the comically inept Christmas Day Bomber, a young Nigerian whose failed “terrorist incident” mirrors that of Sharzad. An unidentified Indian gentleman led The Crotch Bomber through Amsterdam airport security without a passport where he boards a flight to the U.S.

Here’s an experiment. Try entering Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport without a passport. Then try boarding an international flight. Did it help that airport security was managed by ICTS, an Israeli firm. What’s the common component in each of these well-timed “incidents?”

Who had the means, motive, opportunity and insider intelligence to perpetrate this “terrorist” act in midtown Manhattan? What role was played by Leon Black and Apollo management?

Is The New York Times correct in its May 22nd editorial: “As the aborted Times Square and Christmas Day bombings proved, militant groups are determined to strike here again.” Is that what these incidents “proved”? Really?

Is it sufficient to report that this latest incident is traceable to the “Pakistan Taliban”? Does that alone — and in isolation — explain how such operations are pre-staged and orchestrated?

As a combat-stress psychiatrist, Dr. Hasan dealt daily with injured and mentally troubled veterans at Walter Reed Hospital where the most grievously wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan are sent for treatment. Many of them are amputees, burned, disfigured, brain-damaged or otherwise handicapped for life. Their care — or lack thereof — is a national scandal.

While coping with that vicarious trauma, Dr. Hasan was taunted for his Muslim beliefs. He was also harassed and ridiculed for his Middle Eastern heritage even though he was born, raised and educated in the U.S.

What happened to Faisal Sharzad during his three years at Apollo? Did he encounter an experience similar to Hasan? Is that why the Leon Black connection disappeared so quickly?

To answer that question required a look at the curious history of Mr. Black, his investment banking firm and a deeper inquiry into the question of what is “proven” by this latest in a series of well-timed, high profile ‘terrorist incidents.’

The Mental Environment

The National Crime Syndicate convened its first nationwide conference in Atlantic City in 1929. That’s where the U.S. component of transnational organized crime divided the U.S. into 24 exclusive markets in order to put an end to the political problems that accompanied murderous disputes over territory.

Those territories were finalized in 1931 at a Jews-only conclave at the Franconia Hotel in Manhattan. Five of the 24 markets were established in and around New York City.

The Outfit has long been a source of pop culture narratives, including The Godfather movies starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and The Sopranos, a popular television series. Those storylines branded organized crime as Italian or Sicilian with Jews playing only a minor role.

This is Hollywood after all, home of the skilled storyteller and the master myth-maker.

To say Sicilian or Italian organized crime will not unleash the hounds. To say “Jewish” organized crime assures a snarling charge of anti-Semitism — unless you’re Jewish. In that case, the offense is downgraded to “self-hating Jew.” Those remain the only two alternatives for anyone willing speaking candidly — and factually — about organized crime.

Estonian Kalle Lasn saw firsthand how myth could displace facts in plain sight by psy-ops specialists skilled at targeting the mental environment. In March 2004, he published an article in Adbusters, a Vancouver-based magazine that he founded. First he cited key facts: less than three percent of Americans are Jewish (1.7% according to most sources). Yet when you examine a list of the top 50 neoconservatives advocating war in Iraq, 26 are Jewish (52%).

Noting the wildly disproportionate numbers, he titled the article: “Why Won’t Anyone Say They’re Jewish?” He soon found out. He was attacked as an “anti-Semite” for asking the question.

Don’t ask. Don’t tell.

Yet the facts remain indisputable — both for the Neocons and for those who dominate transnational organized crime. The bulk of those who “fixed” U.S. intelligence to invade Iraq were either Jewish or “assets” whose careers were nurtured by pro-Israelis.

Lasn’s subtitle for Adbusters: The Journal of the Mental Environment. Could that environment be the target of this series of well-timed “terrorist” incidents? Were these incidents staged to advance, reinvigorate a faltering storyline with “incidents” that could plausibly be blamed on Muslim Evil Doers? Is Faisal the Fizzler part of an ongoing psy-ops? What about Fox News? CNN?

Only a good faith investigation can answer that question. The answer may require a closer look at Leon Black and a glimpse into the “fields within fields…within fields” of relationships through which organized crime operates across time and distance.

Discrediting and Disabling the U.S.

Leon Black first appeared on the national scene in 1975 when his father “fell” to his death from the 44th floor of Manhattan’s Pan Am Building. Two years later, the son emerged as head of mergers and acquisitions and co-head of corporate finance at Drexel Burnham Lambert where he worked closely with Michael Milken, the firm’s “junk bond” specialist in Beverly Hills.

In the 1970s, Cincinnati’s Carl Lindner and his American Financial Group began investing in United Fruit. To escape the firm’s notorious past, its name was changed to United Brands and then Chiquita Brands International. After the death of CEO Eli Black, Lindner assumed control.

United Fruit became a key conduit for moving Israeli arms into covert wars throughout Latin America, culminating in the Iran-Contra scandal of 1987. That scandal discredited the presidency of Ronald Reagan when he was forced to concede that his administration sold arms to Iran, an avowed enemy, and used the funds to arm Nicaraguan rebels despite a Congressional ban.

The term “Banana Republic” traces to the corrupting influence of United Fruit. The U.S. was discredited throughout Latin America and the Caribbean by the firm’s multi-decade bribery of foreign officials and its use of force to control and impoverish indigenous peoples.

Lindner’s American Financial Group was an early investor in Drexel’s high-yield (“junk”) securities packaged by Milken in deals coordinated with Leon Black in midtown Manhattan. Other early junk bond investors included insurance firms owned by Saul Steinberg and Meshulam Riklis.

Riklis’ Rapid-American Corp. became an acquisition vehicle for Lerner Shops, Playtex and RKO film studios, previously owned in part by bootlegger and stock swindler, Joseph P. Kennedy, the politically ambitious father of John F. Kennedy. JFK was murdered five months after he sought to end Israel’s nuclear weapons program to preclude a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

In 1967, in one of the first junk bond-financed leveraged buyouts (Michael Milken was still an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley) Riklis acquired Lewis Rosenstiel’s shares in Schenley Industries based in Cincinnati, Lindner’s hometown.

The Istanbul-born Riklis paid for Schenley with junk bonds issued by Rapid-American, a firm partly owned by Lindner. Under Lindner’s leadership, United Fruit’s purchase of 40% of Rapid-American reportedly provided majority owner Riklis and his colleagues with resources to purchase for Israeli General Ariel Sharon his ranch in Israel’s Negev Desert where the Jewish state’s nuclear arsenal was developed at the Dimona reactor facility.

Fields within Fields

Rosenstiel’s wife, Leonore, left him to marry Walter Annenberg, Ronald Reagan’s “best friend for 50 years” according to Nancy Reagan. Annenberg also served as Richard Nixon’s ambassador to Great Britain. Son of Chicago mobster Moses “Moe” Annenberg, Walter laundered profits from the family’s racing-wire service through Triangle Publications, publisher of T.V. Guide andSeventeen.

As the National Crime Syndicate was being formed, 1929-31, the Annenberg-inspired racing wire service provided the sinew that bound together organized crime’s gambling operations dispersed across the U.S. and Canada and into Mexico and Cuba. As Walter Annenberg steadily distanced himself from organized crime beginning in the late 1940s, he steadily gained legitimacy and influence in Republican Party politics through his ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Leonore Annenberg was raised by her uncle, Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. First married to Belden Kattleman, a Las Vegas businessman, she then married Rosenstiel. During Prohibition, Rosenstiel bootlegged liquor from England, Europe, and Canada via Saint Pierre and then by truck into Cincinnati, building what became Schenley Distillers.

One of Rosenstiel’s closest colleagues (and competitors) was Canadian, Sam Bronfman, whose Distillers Corporation made a fortune in bootlegging during Prohibition in collaboration with organized crime, including Chicago’s fabled Al “Scarface” Capone. Bronfman (Yiddish for “liquor man”) acquired in 1928 what became Seagram Co. Ltd. From that fortune emerged the World Jewish Congress.

Prohibition and gambling capitalized organized crime. The combination of the Annenberg racing wire and high-profit bootlegging created a nationwide distribution network with those 24 territories still operating as key nodes in this network. The political corruption from that era identified pliable and reliable assets whose careers could be nurtured along with their successors, a key role assumed by the Israel lobby as the syndicate became more sophisticated and its operations moved more deeply into government operations.

Johnny Lazio was a key participant in the 1929 Atlantic City conference as the representative of the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City that was then nurturing the political career of Harry Truman. Two decades later, this asset was persuaded to extend state recognition to this syndicate when its operatives established a post-WWII beachhead in the oil-rich Middle East.

Enabling the Networks

In 1989, Annenberg liquidated $3 billion of his wealth, including The Racing Form, in a sale to Rupert Murdoch. With those proceeds, he donated $150 million to Annenberg communication schools at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California.

Annenberg’s friend, Ronald Reagan, traces his political career to Chicago when Annenberg, Chicagoan Jules Stein and Cleveland’s Lew Wasserman helped “brand” him in the early days of television as the friendly face of General Electric Theater. It was during his presidency of the Screen Actor’s Guild (and with Nancy on the board) that the Guild extended a “special exemption” to the Stein/Wasserman-run Music Corporation of America, providing MCA a competitive advantage that gained them disproportionate influence in music, television and film-making.

While president, Ronnie and Nancy routinely spent their New Year’s vacation at Sunnylands, Annenberg’s extensive estate in Rancho Mirage, California near Palm Springs. Walter’s father also gravitated to sunnier climes. After double-crossing a partner in Chicago, Moe fled to south Florida to seek the protection of National Crime Syndicate “Chairman” Meyer Lansky until he and his son relocated to Pennsylvania.

The Annenberg political savvy found its way back to Chicago to nurture the political prospects of an articulate young political activist whose work there with the Annenberg Education Challenge gained him statewide and then nationwide political exposure. When elected president in 2008, Barack Obama appointed Eric Holder as his Attorney General, former counsel to Carl Lindner.

As the Holder-led Department of Justice began to brand Faisal the Fizzler as evidence of Pakistani Evil Doing, Senator Kit Bond, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee complained that Holder had “executed a hostile takeover of the intelligence community.”

Fields Within Fields…within Fields

Why take you down this circuitous route in an account of the “Times Square Terrorist”? Read on to close the circle.

In the mid-1950s, former Phoenix mobster Gus Greenbaum managed and then sold the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, one of the premier properties controlled by the Chicago Outfit. The buyer was Cincinnatian Riklis, a former member of the Haganah, a paramilitary outfit active in terrorizing Palestinians from 1920 to 1948 when it became the Israel Defense Forces.

Riklis tutored Milken, then a young bond broker, and reportedly was Milken’s first customer as Milken morphed into a major figure in the boom of leveraged buyouts that emerged during the Reagan era. Fellow Cincinnatian Carl Lindner emerged as a father figure to Milken who oversaw a massive  ”control fraud” at Lincoln Savings and Loan in Phoenix, Arizona.

The face on this fraud was Charles Keating who previously served as general counsel to the Linder-controlled, Cincinnati-based American Financial Group.

Arizona Senator John McCain led a group of five Senators known as “the Keating Five” whose delay of needed reforms raised the taxpayer cost of that nationwide fraud by an additional $50 billion, to exceed $150 billion.

Lindner boasts on the firm’s website that he is the “largest non-Jewish contributor to Jewish causes in the U.S.” Alan Greenspan, then working for J.P. Morgan, was retained by Keating to help recruit the Keating Five.

To succeed with that task, Greenspan deployed the goodwill and political capital he amassed as chairman of a the Social Security Commission (“the Greenspan Commission”). Its 1983 recommendation: Americans should work longer and pay higher payroll taxes.

A confidante of radical free market theorist Ayn Rand (Russian Alisa Rosenbaum), Greenspan re-emerged as the Reagan-appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve where over the next 18 years he enabled the subprime mortgage fraud with sustained low interest rates and enthusiastic support for what this Rand disciple described as “financial innovation.”

John McCain wrote to Keating in 1983 after his first Congressional victory: “Of the many things to be grateful for in this world, the friendship of the Keating family is certainly among the most meaningful.” McCain’s top supporters included Keating and father-in-law, Jim Hensley.

Here begins the closing of the circle connecting the savings and loan fraud of the 1980s and the subprime mortgage fraud two decades later. And, the facts suggest, the role of misdirection aided by this latest in an ongoing series of well-timed “terrorist” incidents by Muslim Evil Doers.

Murder Inc.

Notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel is widely credited with founding Las Vegas as a National Crime Syndicate haven for gambling and prostitution when he built The Flamingo, an early casino named after Virginia Hill, his mob courier girlfriend from Alabama who used Flamingo as her showgirl name.

The syndicate maintained discipline through Murder, Inc., a cadre of hit men. When Siegel was discovered stealing from the mob, his murder in 1947 required that the syndicate relocate Gus Greenbaum to Las Vegas from Phoenix, leaving Kemper Marley in charge of statewide corruption in Arizona. Marley hired Jim and Gene Hensley.

After two close scrapes with federal liquor violations for which the Hensley brothers reportedly took the heat, Jim Hensley emerged with a beer distributorship that has since grown to the fifth largest in the nation — owned by Cindy Hensley McCain. Hensley’s Arizona lawyer, William Rehnquist, was appointed by Reagan as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

McCain met Hensley, then 24, when he was the married 42-year old U.S. Navy liaison to the U.S. Senate. Soon divorced, remarried and relocated to Arizona, he worked on public relations for his father-in-law while the Marley machine positioned this classic asset for election to the Congress — four years before Arizonan Barry Goldwater’s pending retirement from the Senate

After 911, Republican Senator McCain emerged alongside Democrat Joe Lieberman as the most insistent high-profile voices for the invasion of Iraq—selling that war with intelligence now known to be false. Lieberman was soon chair of the Senate Committee handling Homeland Security. In that position, he collaborated with Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania and a product of the Annenberg political machine.

Ridge stepped in when New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, the initial appointee of G.W. Bush, withdrew after reports were leaked of his close ties to organized crime. Ridge was succeeded by Michael Chertoff, a rabbi’s son and a former senior official in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department on 911. With the election of Chicagoan Obama, who former Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva described as our “first Jewish president,” the Secretary of Homeland Security became Janet Napolitano, a former governor from mobbed-up Arizona.

Are these complex webs of relationships coincidental? Or is this typical of the overlapping links common to syndicate operations? Is this how organized crime is sustained through fields-within-fields of relationships that stretch across time, distance and, as here, both major political parties?

What does this have to do with the Fort Hood Shooter, the Crotch Bomb Sizzler and the Faisal the Fizzler? Are such “terrorist incidents” typical of how war is waged in the mental environment by creating — and constantly refreshing — a narrative? If so, who would have the motivation to do so?

Does a renewed fear of terrorism help divert attention away from the latest massive financial fraud? And from the need for reforms that are not yet forthcoming — from either party? Meanwhile our financial institutions remain “too big to fail.”

Are these insecurity-inducing “incidents” a form of marketing? Are they akin to selling us a product?

Do they ensure defense spending is sustained while social services are sliced? Is it coincidental that Israel is the world’s third largest arms exporter?

Are these “incidents” clues to how we are persuaded to assume more debt to wage more wars with no end in sight? Are these incidents just business-as-usual for transnational organized crime?

Was the same criminal syndicate involved in the S&L fraud also active in the Enron fraud? The Dotcom crash? The subprime fraud? The half-a-loaf “financial reform” legislation?

Did these massive financial “incidents” just happen? Or were they stage-managed from the shadows in an alliance between policy-making assets and transnational organized crime?

As counsel to the Senate Finance Committee (1980-87), I witnessed firsthand the embrace of debt-financed “supply-side economics” during the first year of the Reagan presidency. Its primary financial result was to dramatically increase the “free cash flow” essential to LBOs (leverage buyouts). At a time when the securitized debt of the U.S. hovered around $900 billion, this “fiscal conservative” championed a bill that authorized us to borrow $872 billion.

While those deficit-funded subsidies were cut back slightly in future years, their impact was certain to concentrate wealth and income and thereby undermine both democracy and markets — all in the name of enhancing our freedom. As a colleague rightly concluded, we got the mortgage (the deficits) while they got the house, the assets financed with that “free cash flow.”

Is it coincidence that private equity/LBO firms most enriched by this debt-financed change in policy are also best positioned to recapitalize the banks most devastated by this latest round of debt-financed excess? Throughout history, debt has always been the prize for those adept at inducing nations to war. Is this all too familiar? Are these firms our Wall Street Dons?

Whose Agenda?

In 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned Harry Truman against granting sovereign recognition to an extremist enclave that was already using ethnic cleansing to terrorize the indigenous population and occupy lands adjoining the Muslim-dominant Middle East.

Their rationale: Palestinian land was rightly theirs as The Chosen because it was long ago given to them — by a God of their own choosing.

Truman was warned by U.S. military leaders about the “fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders” and their plans for “Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East.” Truman chose not to follow their advice nor that of his Secretary of State, former WWII General George C. Marshall who viewed recognition as a geopolitical disaster.

Did our military leaders fail to grasp the scope and scale of the threat posed by these extremists? Did these “fanatical concepts” include a plan to deceive the U.S. so that we would deploy ourmilitary to pursue their agenda for dominance in the region? Is that why a Democratic president’s policy in the Middle East is little changed from that of Republican G.W. Bush?

Working as a transnational criminal syndicate, did these extremists collaborate to damage the U.S. economy with disabling debt and discredit the U.S. abroad with an endless war? Could the presence of this syndicate help explain why the U.S. continues to dig itself deeper into debt regardless which political party is in power?

Could the criminal roots of this operation explain why we hear nothing about Leon Black’s employment of the Times Square Fizzler?

Is the sound of silence speaking to us with an eloquence we do not yet understand?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bring in the Clowns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really?

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

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

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

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

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

What was it again the terrorists hated us for?

Again, the possibility is real, given the incident’s similarity to the Christmas 2009 airline one involving Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He was also used as a convenient dupe, his explosive device no more powerful than a firecracker.

Understand also how involved CIA operatives and assets are globally, especially in Eurasia. Pakistan’s ISI (its intelligence service) is a de facto adjunct, both working together destabilizing the region for US geopolitical interests. So-called terror incidents in America or the West are directly connected; perhaps the New York one the latest using Shahzad as a convenient dupe.

Inflammatory Political Rhetoric

On May 4, political venom spewed from New York, Washington and elsewhere, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, calling Shahzad a “homegrown terrorist with a political agenda,” and New York Governor David Paterson, the White House, and Attorney General Eric Holder calling the incident a terrorist act, Holder saying in a May 4 news conference:

We anticipate charging (Faisal Shahzad) with an act of terrorism transcending national borders, attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, use of a destructive device during the commission of another crime, and explosives… Based on what we know so far, it is clear that this was a terrorist plot aimed at murdering Americans in one of the busiest places in the country…..

Make no mistake — although this car bomb failed to properly detonate – this plot was a serious attempt. If successful, it could have been a mass casualty event. (It’s) a stark reminder of the reality we face today in this country… a constant threat from those who wish to do us harm simply because of our way of life.”

He went on to cite terrorist networks, lone agents at home and abroad, the continued threat as a result, and implication, of course, for needing stern measures, including sacrificing (more) liberty for security, mindless of Benjamin Franklin once saying that “Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither,” and won’t get them because the scheme is to deny them.

At the same news conference, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly reminded attendees of the 1993 World Trade Center incident, adding: “I think New Yorkers can rest a little easier today, and that’s due in no small measure to the investigative muscle of FBI agents and New York City police detectives (as well as JFK Airport) customs officials.”

Perhaps they had advance knowledge. Perhaps also the likelihood of more repressive laws, stepped up militarism and wars, stripping social services to pay for them, and distracting public attention from the looming Gulf disaster, Goldman Sachs, and impending financial reform to institutionalize business as usual, while claiming real change.

Provocative Media Reports

Besides inflammatory round-the-clock TV and radio reports, the New York Times, like other corporate publications, left no doubt where it stands.

In a Shahzad profile, it stressed his role in a terrorist plot, citing a criminal complaint that “militant strongholds” gave him bomb-making training in Pakistan, and that he’s been charged with conspiring to use “weapons of mass destruction” — hardly an apt description for gasoline, propane, firecrackers and fertilizer not considered by the Times.

It also said the car he “apparently” drove to the airport was found with a “Kel-Tech 9 millimeter pistol, with a folding stock and a rifle barrel, along with several spare magazines of ammunition.” How convenient to be easily found in plain sight.

Born in Pakistan, Shahzad is a naturalized US citizen with a University of Bridgeport, CT bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering as well as an MBA. Before resigning in mid-2009, he worked as a junior financial analyst for Affinion Group (a marketing services company) in Norwalk, CT. Authorities said he was unemployed at the time of his arrest. They also said he confessed and is cooperating. He’s yet to be arraigned in court.

Since the May 1 incident, the Times headlined numerous feature stories, including on May 5 by writers Mark Massetti and Scott Shane called “Evidence Mounts for Taliban Role in Car Bomb Plot,” saying: American officials said Wednesday that it is very likely that a radical group (the Taliban) once thought unable to attack the United States played a role in the bombing attempt in Times Square, elevating concerns about whether other militant groups could deliver at least a glancing blow on American soil.”

Remember that blaming bin Laden and Al Qaeda for 9/11, and the Taliban for sheltering them, became justification for attacking and invading Afghanistan, then Iraq 18 months later based on bogus weapons of mass destruction claims and suggesting Saddam’s involvement in 9/11.

Today, the Obama administration “cautions” about the Pakistani Taliban’s involvement with Shahzad, one step short of accusing them, Al Qaeda, and other so-called terrorist groups (including Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, the Haqqani Network, and Kashmiri elements) to have pretext for stepped up war and increased homeland crackdowns, for sure coming with the public being manipulated to accept them.

Pakistani Taliban spokesperson, Azam Tariq, however, claimed no involvement in the Times Square incident or information about the video claiming it. “We don’t even know (Shahzad),” he said. Pakistani (ISI) intelligence officials also expressed skepticism about the Taliban’s ability to attack America.

No matter, according to a May 9 AP report headlined, “Pakistani Taliban Behind Times Sq. Plot, Holder Says,” quoting the Attorney General claiming it was “intimately involved” in the May 1 incident. They “directed the plot,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press and ABC’s This Week.

That despite an unnamed Islamabad-based Western diplomat telling CBS News that “The Taliban have no demonstrated ability to strike distant places. Structurally, they are far from being a global organization like Al Qaeda,” that’s, in fact, a 1980s CIA creation – “Islamic brigade” (mujahideen) freedom fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Today, they’re America’s “outside enemy,” terrorists against “democratic freedoms” and the rationale for imperial wars and repressive homeland security.

Later in the day, AP reported that “Holder said changes may be needed to allow law enforcement more time to question suspected terrorists before they are told about their Miranda rights. (He) said the White House wanted to work with Congress to examine the 1966 Supreme Court” ruling to give law enforcement agents “necessary flexibility to gather information from suspects in terror cases.”

For sure, this is a dangerous slippery slope down which the end game is grim — full-blown despotism once constitutional rights are ended. Post-9/11, they’ve been incrementally stripped away.

In a May 3 editorial titled, “Luck and Vigilance,” the Times called the city “lucky this time… no one wants to bet their security on it,” so to prevent a future disaster “Officials in New York and Washington also need to take a hard look at what, if anything, might have been done to head off this earlier.” The implication is clear — more repressive laws, sweeping surveillance, and police state crackdowns against suspects to tell others what to expect.

Clear as well are the targets — Muslims and people of color. Rarely ever are white persons charged with terrorism, no matter the offense.

For example, white supremacist, Paul Schlesselman, pleaded guilty in January to conspiring to kill Barack Obama and dozens of other Blacks in 2008. He got 10 years in prison on: “one count of conspiracy, one count of threatening to kill and inflict bodily harm upon a presidential candidate, and one count of possessing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence,” not terrorism that surely would have been charged if he was black, Latino or especially Muslim, the main target of choice in the “war on terror.”

According to AP, authorities described Schlesselman and co-defendant Daniel Cowart (awaiting sentencing) as “white supremacist skinheads who hatched a plan to go on a cross-country robbery and killing spree that would end with an attack on Obama in 2008. Their plan was to kill 88 African-Americans and behead 14 others before trying to take out Obama. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist movement.”

Proposed Homeland Crackdown Measures

They’re coming so be prepared, the New York incident used as justification. On May 5, New York Times writer Scott Shane headlined, “Government Tightens No-Fly Rules,” saying: “Homeland Security officials on Wednesday ordered airlines to speed up checks of names added to the no-fly list,” and to check for updates every 24 hours. Look for an expanded list ahead, and stepped up airport security, making travel even tougher, perhaps to include interrogations, body searches, and other repressive measures against anyone officials target.

Pervasive Use of Surveillance Cameras

Post-9/11, cities began installing networks of surveillance cameras in public areas downtown, at airports, in shopping areas and elsewhere. Though experts doubt their effectiveness and studies bear this out, significant privacy and civil liberties concerns are raised, including stereotyping and racial discrimination by those in charge of monitoring.

Among global cities, London by far is the most camera-surveilled with as many as 1.4 million in place, no one saying for security reasons. They’re everywhere – on streets; in business, shopping, and government areas; in parks; schools; in hallways; on elevators, in cabs and police cars; even in public rest rooms, so there’s no place to hide.

American cities have theirs and are adding more, a 2006 ACLU report titled, “Who’s Watching?” saying post-9/11, their numbers in New York City alone “skyrocketed. And our lawmakers have failed to keep up: video surveillance cameras can be operated with almost no legal constraint or consequence,” despite scant evidence they deter crime on a cost-per-crime solved basis.

For example, for every 1,000 London cameras, less than one crime per year is solved for an average cost of $30,000. At best, other cities report mixed results, but in all cases too poor to justify installation, monitoring and other associated costs.

According to AP, Chicago is the most video-surveilled city in America, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff saying, “I don’t think there is another city in the US that has as an extensive and integrated camera network….”

Over the past decade, they’re everywhere across the city, including on streets, poles, buses, business and shopping areas, in train tunnels, schools, local landmarks, and elsewhere, in a network linking private and public entities to police. Yet a May 6 Chicago Tribune Steve Chapman article headlined, “Surveillance cameras a flop,” said that in Chicago, New York and other cities, their results are unimpressive, and “The more cameras (and) cops watching (them), the more potential for waste.”

Yet it doesn’t deter zealots like Mayor Richard Daley, planning them for “almost every block,” despite their high cost and low return.

After the New York bomb incident, expect that attitude throughout the country, in Manhattan for certain reported AFP’s Sebastian Smith on May 4 headlining “Police cameras to flood Manhattan to prevent attacks,” saying: “New York officials say they could stop attacks like (the Times Square one) by expanding a controversial surveillance system so sensitive that it will pick even suspicious behavior” without further explanation.

Mayor Bloomberg supports a high-tech system, modeled after London’s “ring of steel” in its financial district. The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative way exceeds traditional surveillance. It will constantly watch, collect license plate numbers, video pedestrians and drivers, as well as detect explosives and other weapons.

A complementary system, called Operation Sentinel, will log every vehicle entering Manhattan by scanning license plates and checking for radiation.

Analytic software will analyze raw data in real time for fast results and follow-up. Alarms would signal unattended bags or a car circling a block more times than normal or operating unconventionally. It’s a brave new world, a new level of privacy invasion and civil liberty intrusion, soon heading everywhere across America to a greater or lesser degree.

For the ACLU, it raises serious “privacy, speech, expression and association concerns. Troubling examples of that come from (NYPD) video archives.”

Headlining “Ready.Fire.Aim!?,” the ACLU highlights a growing video surveillance infrastructure with virtually no oversight or accountability, its proliferation impinging on civil liberties and personal freedom “in the most intimate, and most public, sense.”

If authorities abandon these principles, everyone’s rights are at risk, the ACLU saying its study documented “the nature and magnitude of the harm posed by the unregulated proliferation of video surveillance cameras.” Unless new legislation balances their use against civil liberty and privacy protections, democratic freedoms will be sacrificed for public safety, that, in fact, won’t be offered or gained.

Proposed Repressive Legislation and other Measures

Senator Scott Brown (R. MA) will join Senator Joe Lieberman (I. CT), Rep. Jason Altimire (D. PA), and Rep. Charlie Dent (R. PA) in proposing a Terrorist Expatriation Act to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship for having committed terrorist acts or aiding a designating foreign terrorist organization (FTO). Lieberman said persons called terrorists “should be turned over to the military” for prosecution, denying them their rights in civil courts. More on that below.

AFP reports that Senator Chuck Schumer (D. NY) signaled his support, saying: The measure “sounds like something I’d support, but I’d have to look at the legislation.” Senator John McCain (R. AZ) said Americans should lose their citizenship rights “if they’re designated an enemy combatant.”

McCain also supports denying alleged terrorists their Miranda Rights, based on the Supreme Court’s Miranda v. Arizona (1966) ruling that both inculpatory and exculpatory police-obtained statements are admissible as evidence only if defendants were informed of their right to an attorney before and during questioning, against self-incrimination, and that they understood them. Denying them is a clear violation of constitutional freedoms, being lost at an alarming rate post-9/11.

Lieberman supports McCain saying:  “The first thing you want to get from (a suspected terrorist) is information about other co-conspirators, perhaps other attacks that are planned at the same time, and then (decide) whether he should be read his Miranda rights.”

With inflammatory media reports, other lawmakers from both parties may offer support when legislation is introduced, perhaps enough to get these or similar measures passed. If so, anyone charged with terrorism or conspiracy to commit it, with or without proof, will be vulnerable.

Police State Terror since 9/11

Because of its relevance, material from a March 26 article is repeated below.

Straightaway post-9/11, George Bush signed a secret finding empowering the CIA to “Capture, Kill or Interrogate Al-Qaeda Leaders.” He also authorized establishing a covert global gulag to detain and interrogate them without guidelines on proper treatment.

Other presidential directives ordered abductions, torture and indefinite detentions. In November 2001, Military Order Number 1 empowered the Executive to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest non-citizens (and later citizens) anywhere in the world for any reason and hold them indefinitely without charge, evidence, due process or judicial fairness protections of law.

The 2006 Military Commissions Act authorized torture and sweeping unconstitutional powers to detain, interrogate and prosecute alleged suspects and collaborators (including US citizens), hold them (without evidence) indefinitely in military prisons, and deny them habeas and other legal protections.

Section 1031 of the FY 2010 Defense Authorization Act contained the 2009 Military Commissions Act, listing changes that include discarding the phrase “unlawful enemy combatant” for “unprivileged enemy belligerent.” More on that below.

Seamlessly, Obama continues Bush administration practices and added others, including:

• greater than ever surveillance;

• ruthless political persecutions;

• preventively detaining individuals ordered released – “who cannot be prosecuted,” he said, “yet who pose a clear danger to the American people;”

• a secret “hit list” authorizing CIA and Pentagon operatives to kill US citizens abroad based on unsubstantiated evidence they’re involved in alleged plots against America or US interests;

• weaker whisleblower protections;

• state secrets privilege to block lawsuits by victims of rendition, torture, abuse or warrantless wiretapping; and

• other anti-democratic measures, including continuing Patriot Act violation of First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment protections, and a more repressive than ever Homeland Security apparatus.

Then on March 4, John McCain introduced S. 3081: Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010 to interrogate and detain “enemy belligerents who commit hostile acts against the United States to establish certain limitations on the prosecution of such belligerents, and for other purposes.”

Senator Lieberman and eight Republicans co-sponsored it, a measure that if enacted will target anyone worldwide, including US citizens, on the mere suspicion that they engage in or materially support terrorism. They’ll be placed in military custody, interrogated and denied their constitutional rights if designated an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” — a political, not criminal, classification that has no judicial standing in civil proceedings, ones conducted fairly, that is.

“Unprivileged enemy belligerent” status places designees in legal limbo, denies them due process in civil proceedings, and condemns them to military prosecutorial injustice with no right of appeal, even if sentenced to death. Torture-extracted testimonies will be allowed, despite their illegality and unreliability. Henceforth, judicial fairness will be null and void, replaced by political expediency that condemns innocent victims to prison hell.

Linking incidents like New York’s to designated terrorist groups makes it more likely. So does suggesting guilt by supposition or alleged association, with or without proof, let alone entrapment — what the Lectric Law Library defines as: “Enduc(ing) or persuad(ing someone) to commit a crime that he (or she) had no previous intent to commit; and the law as a matter of policy forbids conviction in such a case.” If evidence “leaves a reasonable doubt whether the person had any intent to commit the crime except for inducement or persuasion… then the person is not guilty.” Prosecutors “must prove beyond a reasonable doubt” that entrapment didn’t occur.

On May 6, McClatchy Newspapers Jonathan Landay headlined, “US officials: No credible evidence that terrorists trained Shahzad,” saying:

Four (unnamed) intelligence and counterterrorism officials and two other US officials with knowledge of the case said ‘There is nothing that confirms that any groups have been found in this (case) for certain. It’s a lot of speculation at this point… at the most, (Shahzad may have) had incidental contact with a terrorist organization, and he may have been encouraged to act.

Yet media reports scream it, like the Wall Street Journal‘s May 5 editorial headlined, “From Peshawar to Times Square,” saying:  Shahzad’s arrest is “proof that the world’s jihadists are still targeting the US homeland…. We will no doubt learn a great deal more about Shahzad and his links to radical groups in Pakistan, where he reportedly spent several months last year, including two weeks in or around the Taliban-saturated environs of Peshawar….One regrettable part of this investigation (is that he) has been allowed to lawyer-up and told of his right to remain silent, rather than being subjected to more thorough interrogation as an enemy combatant.”

Unfortunately, accounts like the above are more commonplace than exceptional, the media pronouncing sentence before indictments. They also suggest other “jihadists” lie waiting for their chance to attack, meaning Muslims, of course, at the wrong time to be one in a nation vilifying their religion, heritage, race and ethnicity.

With that cross to bear, bills like S. 3081 may pass, Miranda and citizenship Rights may be stripped, and constitutional protections rendered null and void for targets chosen not worthy to have them. When the rule of law no longer applies, police state justice follows, the path America’s dangerously headed down, perhaps on a fast track.

Whilst most of the literature on the topic of globalization argues that, as fewer and fewer trans-national corporations compete to expand market share, once diverse cultures have fallen victim to a homogenization process, some research sees the reality differently. By arguing the case for blowback or resistance to trends of global cultural standardization, these analysts seemingly borrow from laws of physics that state for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This reaction from below is newfangled nationalisms in nations that perceive a whittling away of their national sovereignty by the vector of global governance, business, and sociality as anti-republican traditions, totally devoid of respect for common law.

In his essay, “Learning to be local in Belize,”¹ Richard Wilk puts his hand on this transpiration in Belize, where a mere two decades ago, at a time when foreign cultural influence was scarcely so pervasive as now, most Belizeans denied that such a thing as ‘Belizean culture’ existed at all. They did, after all, live where the United States considered backyard. For example, in the realm of cuisine, the honored guest from the north, Wilk, was usually treated to something from a can. Such observations by Wilk turn his paper not into further proffering of the “progressive penetration of global commodities into every crevice of daily life,” but, instead, as an account of local diversification amid global standardization.

To be sure, the global standardization remains, but there is community blossoming and counter-trends taking part that is very much important to the makeup of the dominant culture. In other words, Belizean absorption into international markets and contests has resulted in the people of the country flexing their distinctiveness and diversity apart from other nations. This process represents their entering into, what Wilk terms, the “structure of common difference.”

This Belizean expression of difference positions itself contrary to the ideologies of nonpareil professional marketing managers, who attempt to invoke a transformation in consciousness, in terms of consumer behavior, from an episteme that holds for truth the existence of a universal rationality based on the western model. Put succinctly, a basic premise of their marketing techniques holds that consumers, markets and competitors around the world will behave the same; that, when put in environments more similar than different, the differences in people will tend to blur, to fade with time.

This managerial rationality is an “undisputed instrument of knowledge.” For instance, the field of neuro-marketing helps to make a science of predicting — more to the point, dictating — global consumer habits. The foundational study that gave rise to this field analyzed how, in test subjects shown products with which they identified and, therefore, enjoyed, blood rushed to a small location at the front of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain responsible for self-identification and the formation of personality. Such knowledge of human behavior can help to globalize a certain type of commoditization, a professional marketing manager might reason. ²

For some, globalization is an ideology, a fact of life. It certainly is a reality in every person on the plants life. Moreover, its process is a political one. As George Orwell told, everything is politics. Policies of deregulation and philosophies of free trade — a euphemism for corporate expansion — abet globalization and justify not just the macro-economic axiom of comparative advantage, but, also, the micro-economic foundations of neuro-economics in the neo-classical economic model — including therein basic assumptions of inherent maximizing inclination of Homo economicus in an environment of scarcity. For historically powerful global elite financiers, internationalists and their national bureaucrats, globalization serves as a rationale for the recent history’s restructuring of states and economies; “a historically specific project of global economic management.” It is, for such entrenched power interests, “a view of ordering the world.”

Managers and experts of trans-national corporations are particularly strong advocates of globalization because they view it as offering opportunities of boundless proportions; the concept by which to judge quality, mere efficiency. For them, globalization represents the possibility of doing business without restriction; that, de facto, supply and demand does not do autonomous market making and eradication, they can and do. And will continue doing so, in their “view of ordering the world.” They ensure this progression persists.

Such a worldview stands in contraposition to the free market capitalist ideology, by its mainstream definition. The vision of TNC managers, consultants and management academics is a global one. In fact, they are referred to by many as “globalist” with “globalist” occasionally being prefaced with the qualifier “demise-of-the-state,” meaning, essentially, they hold no allegiances to any nation-state or its culture. TNC marketers built a worldview upon the maxim of globalization, thereby forming theories about consumers and competitive strategies. Although a complex abstraction, globalization daily becomes increasingly the true superstructure of our daily lives. ³

1. Wilk, Richard. (1995) “Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Systems of Common Difference.” Development: A Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Susanne Schech and Jane Haggis, Blackwell.
2. Frank, Lone. “How the Brain Reveals Why we Buy.” Scientific American, 2 November 2009.
3. Applbaum, Kalman. (May 2000). Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational Consumer Marketing, American Ethnologist.

Most importantly, Zionism created a geopolitical realignment of great importance. It brought together two strands of the Western world, previously at odds – Christians and Jews – to join their forces against the Islamicate.

At every stage in its history, Israel has ratcheted its power by unleashing forces, even negative forces, that it has then turned to its advantage. Power, intelligence and luck have played into this.

Israel’s birth radicalized important segments of the Arab world, creating anxiety among Arab Jews about their future. Israel fanned this anxiety, with help from agent provocateurs – but also aided in some cases by myopic Arab policy – to force a Jewish flight from the Arab world. As a result, Israel doubled its Jewish population – and fighting force – within a few years after its creation.

Arab nationalism – if properly harnessed and directed – could end the Jewish state and Western hegemony in the Middle East. Unafraid, Israel took steps to fan this nationalism and used it to push the US to embrace Israel, firmly and openly, as the West’s bulwark against the Arab world. The plan worked, and by the late 1950s, if not earlier, the US was on Israel’s side.

Defeating the Arab nationalists too carried a risk. By eliminating the threat of Arab nationalism, Israel risked losing its strategic value to the US. Considering the payoff, Israel was eager to defeat the Arab nationalists. As for the risk, the Jewish lobby in the US, energized by Israel’s victory, ensured that US could only draw Israel tighter to its bosom.

A weak civil society in the Arab states also helped Israel. Although the mantle of resistance passed to the Islamists after 1967, they could not displace any of the discredited Arab regimes. US and Israel too gave a boost to these regimes. With US prodding, Israel returned a demilitarized Sinai to bring Egypt on its side. In return, Egypt switched sides.

In time, most of the Arab regimes would serve as Israel’s first line of defense against the Islamists. This was a self-reinforcing arrangement. As US-friendly Arab regimes lost legitimacy and became more repressive, they could only survive by drawing closer to the US and Israel.

At this point, luck too favored Israel, as it often has in the past. In 1979, Iran, the second pillar of US hegemony in the region, fell to Islamists who openly opposed US presence in the region. Instantly, Israel began to promote itself as the rampart against the rising Islamist tide.

In the wake of the Iranian Revolution, the Zionists also made renewed efforts to resurrect the old Western animus against Islam. Next to communism, Islam was now the principal threat to ‘civilization.’ After the Soviet collapse, the Neocons began drumming a new civilizational thesis. War between the West and Islam was inevitable.

Israel’s creation and military successes energized Christian Zionists in the US. In their millennial theology, the ingathering of Jews in Palestine was a precursor to the Second Coming. This theology demanded unconditional support for Israel. Over time, the Christian Zionists became the second organized force – next only to the Jews – that firmly backed Israel.

The end of the Cold War did not dent US commitment to Israel. It should have, since Israel was seen as America’s leading ally against Soviet influence in the region. On the contrary, in the absence of the balancing Soviet presence, pro-Israeli forces tethered the US more firmly then ever to Israeli demands.

Israel now had a free hand in dealing with its foes. It used the Oslo Accords to neuter the PLO and assigned it to police the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank and Gaza. With the PLO neutered, Israel accelerated its colonization of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

This was also a signal for Israel to pursue more ambitious goals. In a 1996 document, the Neocons announced their plans to “engage” Hizbullah, Syria and Iran, “as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon.” Iraq, however, was their first target.

The 9-11 attacks offered the occasion to put these plans into action. Working in concert, Israel and its backers convinced Bush to invade Iraq. There would be more wars to redraw the map of much of Middle East. Israel would emerge from these wars as the undisputed regional hegemon, and, possibly, a world power.

Just when Israel was grasping for the moon, history took a number of ‘wrong’ turns. Iraq became a quagmire for US troops. Iran’s Shi’ite allies Iran gained control over much of Iraq, barring the Kurdish region. Soon, Iran had extended its influence into eastern Afghanistan. Israeli policy had boomeranged.

In a strange reversal, Iran now cast its shadow over much of the Middle East. It mocked Israel, stood up for the Palestinians, showed up the pro-American Arab regimes for what they are, forcing them to openly identify with Israel. In bitterness, some Arab commentators blamed the US for resurrecting the ancient Persian empire.

Now suddenly – so it appears – the US love fest with Israel has run into a spot of trouble. In a reversal of its previous policy, the US is insisting that Israel suspend new settlement construction in East Jerusalem to pave the way for ‘peace’ talks with the Palestinian Authority. For a change, the US is countering Israel’s ‘No’ with tough talk not heard in a while.

On March 9, when the US Vice President was greeted in Tel Aviv with news of new settlements in East Jerusalem, he was furious. Privately, he told Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel’s settlement activity “undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.”

This was not a message right-wing talk artists could shout down. Joe Biden was echoing the message delivered by General Petraeus, commander of US troops in the Middle East, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Armed Services Committee. Hillary Clinton too reiterated this message in her speech to AIPAC.

What has occasioned this open rift between two spouses in a heavenly marriage? There have been tiffs before between them, but never before has a US administration told Israel that its policy endangers American troops or American interests in the Middle East? This talk is serious. It belies decades of rhetoric that has boosted Israel as America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East.

It appears that the past is beginning to catch up with Israel. Adversaries it had long suppressed, forces it had harnessed for its expansionist policy, blowbacks from decisions made in hubris have now converged to limit Israel’s options. Is the Zionist logic that had brought endless successes in the past now working in the opposite direction? Is Israel running out of its fabled resourcefulness?

Israel’s stunning victory in June 1967 had produced two destabilizing results. Having solved its native problem in 1948, Israel had created it anew in 1967 by its decision to retain the West Bank and Gaza. The June War also swelled the ranks of extremist Jews who began to colonize East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza. Unable to drive out the Palestinians, this new round of colonization would turn Israel into an apartheid state.

In the 2000s, international civil society started taking notice. Movements were launched to divest from, boycott and sanction Israel. Activists began to use Western legal systems to prosecute Israelis for war crimes. Israeli leaders visiting Western campuses are now heckled routinely. Slowly, Western publics are turning away from Israel.

In 1982, in a bid to extend Israel’s northern border, Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Shi’ites responded by creating Hizbullah, a multi-layered grass-roots resistance, the most formidable adversary Israel had ever faced. In 2000, they forced Israel to withdraw unilaterally, and in July 2006 repulsed a fresh Israeli invasion, giving Israel a bloody nose.

No more was Tehran a distant threat for Tel Aviv: it was now positioned right next to Israel’s northern border. Although Hizbullah spoke to the grit and discipline of Lebanese Shi’ites, it could not have grown without Iranian support.

At about the same time, as part of its strategy to defeat the Second Intifada, Israel built the apartheid Wall cutting through the West Bank, and it pulled the Jewish settlements out of Gaza while sealing it from outside contacts. By stopping the suicide-bombers, the Wall gave Israel time to complete the creation of Gaza-like enclaves in the West Bank. In consequence, ‘peace’ talks with Palestinians lost their urgency and were shelved. This made the pro-US Arab regimes a bit nervous: they needed the charade of ‘peace’ talks to shore up what little legitimacy they had with their home audience.

The Egyptian-Israeli siege of Gaza brought Iranian influence to Israel’s southern border. The siege has stopped Hamas from becoming another Hizbullah, but their home made rockets reminded Israel that its native problem had not gone away – that it would continue to haunt them.

In the 1990s, the Zionist logic had spawned al-Qaida, a group that would use terror to lure the US to wage war against the Middle East. After the Cold War, the Zionists too – led by the Neocons – pursued the same goal. Using the absurd thesis of the ‘clash of civilizations,’ they began to promote a Western war against the Islamicate. They urged the US to take out Iran, Syria and Iraq.

This was a departure from Israel’s long-standing war strategy. Israel took US money and weapons, but fought its own wars. This had several advantages. It built Israel’s military strength and prestige; it kept the US military out of Israel’s path to hegemony over the Middle East. Also, American support for Israel might wear thin if they saw their troops dying in Israel’s wars. If Israel was ready to abandon this strategy in the 1990s, that is because it could not take on Iran, Iraq and Syria on its own.

And so the die was cast. When al-Qaida struck on 9-11, Israel saw opportunity. The Zionists began to press full steam for the US to invade Iraq – and succeeded. Few Israelis worried that the chickens would come home to roost. In April 2008, Netanyahu said, “We are benefiting from…the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”

Now, some ten years later, the chickens are coming home to roost. The Iraq War has achieved little for Israel. It removed a defanged Saddam Hussein, but extended Iran’s influence into Iraq and it has brought Iranian proxies to its northern and southern borders. Iran now uses Palestine to undermine pro-US Arab regimes.

More ominously, the US military has now spoken. It has warned that Israeli policy raises tensions in the Middle East and endangers US troops on the ground. It will not be easy for Israel and its backers to shout down US generals with charges of anti-Semitism. That is why so many Zionist commentators look alarmed. One Israeli commentator warns that “Obama and Netanyahu are at point of no return.” Others are saying worse.

It appear unlikely that this ‘flap’ between the US and Israel will blow over soon. If it does not, attacks by Jewish groups – inside and outside Israel – against Obama will become more frequent and nastier. The loyalty of some Americans, both inside and outside the Congress, will be tested. It is hard to predict where this will go.

However, this much should be clear. Even if US-Israeli differences over the Middle East are finessed for now, that will not be the end of it. The pressures that have persuaded the US to insist on a ‘solution’ to the Palestinian problem will persist. The realities that have produced the present ‘flap’ are not going away.

In addition to continuing and escalating the hostile policies of his predecessor, the Obama Administration has exploited several other issues in order to rally American public opinion and mobilize overseas allies behind its confrontational posture. First, the Obama Administration claims that China’s currency (the Renminbi) is artificially undervalued to give Chinese exports an unfair price advantage, thus undercutting US manufacturing exports and costing “millions of American jobs”. And secondly, the Administration claims that, after the US had opened its domestic manufacturing market to Chinese firms, the Chinese would not ‘reciprocate’ and open their financial sectors to Wall Street investment banks.

In retaliation for growing Chinese exports, Washington has raised protective tariffs on steel pipes and automobile tires, and issued Congressional threats of further protectionist measures.

The US has insists that other nations support its aggressive policy toward Iran, including imposing trade, investment and financial sanctions, supporting the provocative US naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and backing Israel’s bellicose threats to bomb Teheran. In contrast, China rejects economic sanctions, in favor of negotiations, while increasing its trade and investments in strategic sectors of the Iranian economy. In the United Nations Security Council, the US has exerted diplomatic and mass media pressure to force China to vote for a Zionist-authored proposal of wide-reaching sanctions against Iran. Obama refuses to accept China’s rejection of the US military-driven policy of regime change and the Chinese pursuit of free trade with Iran.

The US Administration’s selective definition of “self-determination” includes giving support to secessionist ethno-religious regional movements in China, while, at the same time, invading and occupying independent states, like Iraq and Afghanistan, ordering missile attacks on other states, like Pakistan and Somalia, establishing over 700 military bases world-wide with extra-territorial jurisdiction and engaging in assassinations of its opponents abroad via the CIA and Special Forces.

In contrast, China is not at war and opposes military invasions of sovereign states. China does not have overseas military bases and is menaced by the US policy of encircling China’s frontiers with American bases in client states in Northeast, Southeast and Central Asia.

While US military occupation forces brutally violate human rights of millions of citizens in occupied or targeted countries, and threaten the civil rights of critical Americans with arbitrary rulings, secret trials and the suspension of habeas corpus, the Obama regime excoriates China for its prosecution of opposition activists.

The Obama regime has latched onto a conflict between a private US corporation, Google, and Chinese hackers, which it alleges are state sponsored, turning the issue into a major struggle for “internet freedom” at the level of state to state relations. Despite the expanding presence of scores of US-owned IT companies in China, the Obama regime has raised the issue of “internet censorship” to the level of a major ideological confrontation.

Climate change is another source of aggravation between the states. At the Copenhagen summit in December 2009, Obama rejected any formal agreement on the reduction of carbon emissions while deflecting criticism and blame on to China and other developing countries, which had agreed to informal substantive targets on CO2 reductions.

Of all these points of contention, the most serious is Washington’s financial, diplomatic and political support for ethnic secessionist groups in China, threatening the security and territorial integrity of the Chinese state. This paramount issue has re-awakened painful memories of earlier imperialist carving up of China, its rich port cities and territories and has forced the Chinese authorities to consider retaliatory measures.

Imperial Policies: At What Price?

The Obama regime’s political and diplomatic provocations against China in pursuit of its military-driven empire, come at a very high real and potential price. We cannot assume that China will remain a stoic punching bag for the US, absorbing territorial threats, economic pressures and gratuitous diplomatic insults without taking counter-measures especially in the economic sphere.

China’s Crucial Role as US Creditor

Obama’s provocative militarist posturing toward China endangers major US private and public economic interests, including China’s financing of the burgeoning US debt.

China is the world’s largest and fastest growing investor in US securities. According to a detailed study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) (July 30, 2009), China holds a vast amount of long-term treasury debt, US agency debt, US corporate debt, US equities and short-term debt estimated at over $1.2 trillion. China’s investment in US Treasury securities were used to help finance the economic ‘recovery’ (such as it is). If the Obama regime persists in its provocations, China may decide to unload a large share of its US securities holdings, inducing other foreign investors to also sell off their holdings (CRS). This would lead to a sharp depreciation of the dollar and force Washington to raise interest rates, which could drive the US into a deeper recession/depression. Economists, who claim Chinese economic interests would suffer from such a sell off, overlook the fact that for Beijing, national sovereignty is more important than short-term economic losses, especially in view of US support for secessionist movements. Moreover, the Chinese have a high rates of savings, huge foreign reserves and increasingly diverse markets and suppliers of essential commodities. China is in a better position to absorb the ‘shock’ of a decline in US economic relations resulting from American bellicosity than the debt-ridden, negative-saving, military-driven North American economy.

Foreign Direct Investments

Almost all of the 400 biggest US multi-national corporations, listed in Forbes, have major profitable investments in China, which are growing. The Obama regime’s increasingly confrontational position toward China puts these investments at risk.

US foreign investments in China far exceed the latter’s investments in the US, according to a report published by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. In 2006, China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) in the US was $600 million, while US investments in China were $22.2 billion. The Report goes on to state “…the complaints by many American businesses and politicians that China can invest in US companies with relative ease while China still tightly restricts access to Chinese markets and companies appear not to be borne out by the numbers”. The US government has, in fact, blocked several large scale investments by Chinese companies, including the multi-billion dollar purchase of an oil company (UNOCAL), an appliance company (Maytag) and computer company (3Com Corp). Chinese investments in the US are not always profitable. The Sovereign Wealth Fund (a Chinese government-run investment fund) lost over 50% of its $8 billion-dollar investment in the finance groups, Blackstone Group and Morgan Stanley, in less than a year.

The Obama regime’s complaints about China’s “restrictive” treatment of US companies fly in the face of economic reality. The attacks are part of a political strategy of anti-Chinese propaganda to heighten the American public’s antagonism against China and rally domestic support for any military confrontation. Even as US companies in China reap profits a thousand times greater than Chinese investments in the US, and the leading investment houses swindle Chinese sovereign investors of billions, the White House claims foul play!.

China’s much-maligned policy of restricting financial takeovers by Wall Street firms was one of the reasons the US speculative collapse did not impact its economy. And still Washington continues to attack Beijing on the issue of “opening Chinese financial markets to Wall Street”.

US-China Trade

The Obama regime has repeatedly raised the issue of China’s ‘undervalued’ currency, conveniently ignoring the fact that China’s imports from the US are growing faster than its exports to the US. Between 2006-2008 US annual exports to China grew 32%, 18%, 9.5%, while its imports of Chinese goods grew 18.2%, 11.7%, 5.1%. Moreover top US exports included electrical machinery and equipment, power generation equipment, oil seeds and oleaginous fruits, aero-space products, optical equipment and iron and steel – a broad spectrum of American industrial products with high value-added, well-paying skilled employment and lucrative profits.

Moreover, the fact that US exports to China include a diverse array of manufacturing sectors and are competitive at the current exchange rate, suggests that the vast US trade deficit with China has less to do with China’s currency policy and more to do with US public and private investment policies and the relative strengths of the productive forces of each economy. In large part, the majority of exports from China to the US are the result of US multi-national corporate decisions to produce and sub-contract in China. In other words, the trade deficit with China is directly related to US corporate global investment strategy, which, in turn, flourished after the US government liberalized it rules and deregulated US corporate conduct. Liberal investment policies under the US government, and not Chinese “unfair trade rules”, are a major cause of the trade deficit.

The angry posture adopted by the Obama regime toward China’s “undervalued” currency is a political ploy to deflect attention from its disastrous liberal economic policies and its support for the investment conduct of large US corporations.

The US annual trade deficit with China has grown almost four fold between 1999-2008, from $68.7 billion to $266.3 billion. The growth of the trade deficit coincides with the massive shift of US investment from manufacturing to speculative financial, real estate and insurance activities. In other words, the US re-directed its investment strategies from producing useful, quality commodities for domestic consumption and export to importing manufactured goods from abroad at a greater profit for the corporations. The weakening of US productive capacity — its productive forces — was reflected in its declining competitive position and its deepening trade imbalances. Given the tight relations between the White House and Wall Street, policy makers sought to blame Chinese monetary officials for an undervalued currency, rather than confront the bubble economy stimulated by the policies of the Federal Reserve and generated by the Wall Street investment houses, whose executives go on to occupy key economic posts in the US government and who provide substantial funding for electoral campaigns.

In those economic sectors where US investment has led to increased efficiency, like agriculture, the US has competed successfully. China is the leading buyer of American soybeans and cotton — accounting for over half world sales of the former and between almost a third of the latter according to the U.S. International Trade Commission and the US Department of Commerce.

Trade, Credit, Investments versus Militarism and Speculation

China’s economic relations with the US have been extraordinarily lucrative and favorable to the big US capitalists and the American government. By purchasing low-interest US Treasury notes, China has financed US trade and budget deficits, which are the result of exorbitant military spending, multiple imperial wars and occupations, and unproductive speculative investments. The US multi-nationals have reaped high rates of profit from their investments in China, profits far in excess of what they would have gained in the US, and many times more than what a few Chinese firms earn in the more restrictive US climate. Important US economic sectors in aerospace, agro business, port facilities, transport and giant commercial retailers and importers depend on and profit from trade with China. US speculators have been able to rake in huge profits from the Chinese Sovereign Funds by pumping and dumping speculative US stocks.

As China’s dynamic growth and rate of consumer demand continue to race ahead of the US, American exports to China outpace its imports from China.

The growing political antagonism and reckless diplomatic actions against China taken by the White House and Congress serve to undermine the basic economic interests of a broad swath of US capitalist enterprises as well as the credibility of the US economy. What is even more striking is that many of the charges leveled against Beijing, including its ‘unfair treatment’ of investors and ‘closed economy’ – apply with greater force to Washington.

The Paradox of Economic Gain and Political Hostility

The key to understanding this paradox of economic gain and political hostility lies in the fundamentally different political and economic structures and global strategies of the two countries. The US economy has been driven by its financial and speculative capitalist classes, which in turn wield decisive political influence over state economic policy. At the same time, the commercial capitalist class is more attuned to importing manufactured goods, rather than in long-term investment in research, development in the American manufacturing sector. Neither commercial nor financial capital has a stake in stimulating US exports and in investing in the productive forces of the country. The design and implementation of US global strategy is controlled by the civilian militarists and imperial ideologues, (especially the Zionists) in government and their counterparts in sectors of the military high command.

In contrast to the Chinese market-driven quest for global power, US imperialism is built around military conquest and appropriation of economic wealth. The disproportionate influence exercised by the civilian militarists in the US government has resulted in a series of foreign wars, which have severely strained the US economy and led to a military definition of US global objectives. Faced with China’s growing economic relations and influence in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East and Beijing’s opposition to US military-driven imperial policies against Iran, the Washington has escalated its political provocations, diplomatic pressures and interference in Chinese internal affairs. As these external pressures increase, Chinese public opinion turns more nationalistic, which in turn serves as a basis for US mass media charges of “xenophobia” and “chauvinism” on the part of the Chinese. The irrational nature of the recent anti-China propaganda promoted by the US mass media is most evident in the shrill warnings of a Chinese military threat to Asian security, especially when the US continues to expand its chain of military bases encircling China from South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Australia, Afghanistan and Central Asia. China has neither military bases abroad nor naval fleets off the coasts of any US or allied territory.

The greater the US reliance on military force, brutal economic sanctions and outright blockades to overthrow regimes and extend its network of client regimes, the greater its hostility toward China, which is expanding its economic ties with US ‘adversaries’, such as Iran, Venezuela, Sudan, Nicaragua, etc.

The US has severely weakened its productive forces in the process of funding a global military machine. China, on the other hand, has sought to become a world power on the bases of the long-term, large-scale development of its productive forces, even in the face of US opposition. At each and every turn, Washington has passed up enormous opportunities for the US economy from China’s dynamic growth, booming market and overseas economic expansion, in favor of petty provocations.

Conclusion

Ultimately what we have is a conflict between two diametrically opposing political economic systems.

On the one hand, a United States military driven empire, which focuses on conquering Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, backs the ambitions of a militarist Israel, seeks marginal client states in Latin America and militarizes Pakistan, Colombia and Mexico.

On the other hand, China deepens its economic ties with dynamic Asian countries; increases its oil links with Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Gulf States, Venezuela, Russia and Angola; displaces the US as the leading trading partner of Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile; and increases its trade and investment links with Southern Africa in minerals and related infrastructure projects. The contrast is striking.

China’s global economic expansion is confronted by US military encirclement, diplomatic provocations, and a massive anti-Chinese propaganda campaign designed to deflect US public attention from the extreme imbalances in its domestic economy. Instead of looking inward to understand why the US is declining, the Obama regime encourages the public to blame China’s supposedly unfair trade policies, its ‘restrictive’ investment policies, its manipulated currency rate and its tough response to secessionist movements funded by the US.

In the end the US will not resolve its budget deficits and trade imbalances, not to mention its endless imperial wars, by pandering to self-described divine rulers, like the Dali Lama, and provoking a dynamic economic power such as China. Nor can Washington escape its profound economic imbalances by catering to Wall Street speculators and ignoring the decline of America’s productive forces. Drones, military surges and surrogate puppet armies engaged in endless wars are no match for the surging investments, robust developing markets and joint ventures linking China with the dynamic emerging economies of the world.

During the Cold War, the USA and USSR were arch rivals, each the antipodes of the other. For some four decades, they battled each other for ‘survival’ and global hegemony, staring down at each other with nuclear tipped missiles, ready at the push of a button to consummate mutually assured destruction. What parallels could there possibly exist between such irreconcilable antagonists?

Dismissively, the skeptic might retort that their similarities start and end with the first two letters in their names. The USA won and the USSR lost the Cold War. With all four of the letters in its name, the USSR is dead and gone. Its successor state, Russia, now ranks a distant second behind the USA in military power, a position it retains only by virtue of its nuclear arsenal. Measured in international dollars, the Russian economy ranked eighth in the world in 2009, trailing behind its former client, India.

On the other hand, the USA still believes it can ride roughshod over much of the world like a Colossus. It came close to doing this for a few years after the collapse of communism. In the years since its occupation of Iraq, that image has been deflated quite a bit. Haven’t the events of the last decade – the growing challenge to its hegemony in Latin America, the economic rise of India and China, and the recovery of Russia from its collapse of the previous decade – downsized the Colossus of the 1990s? Indeed, the near collapse of its economy in 2008 appears to have brought the Colossus down on its knees.

Coming back to the question of parallels, we can begin by pointing out that USA is in exactly the same place, quite literally, where the USSR once was. In Afghanistan. The USSR was in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989: the USA has been there since November 2001.

Isn’t this the oddest of coincidences? And a bit ominous too – since, only a year after it withdrew its 100,000 troops from Afghanistan, the USSR collapsed.

Of course, no one expects the USA to collapse, whether it leaves Afghanistan or stays there. Unlike the Soviets who left Afghanistan after ten years of a bruising occupation, the United States is not in a mood to leave anytime soon. If necessary, claim some American politicians and generals, their troops could stay there for decades.

What is it that has drawn great powers – three over the past two centuries – into Afghanistan, but makes it so hard for them to leave in dignity?

Britain, USSR and USA have gone to Afghanistan for different reasons. Britain went into Afghanistan repeatedly to create a buffer state, to distance its Indian colony from Russia. The Soviet troops entered to shore up a fraternal communist regime, but if things had gone well, they would have walked through Afghanistan into the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. It is hard to say why exactly the USA landed its troops in Afghanistan. Was it to kill or capture Osama bin Laden? Or was that only an excuse for stationing its troops in Iran’s backyard, close to the Caspian oil fields, just south of Russia and China, and looking into Pakistan with an eye to rolling back its nuclear program?

Vital questions, but answering them will take us away from the subject of this essay – the question of parallels between the USA and the USSR.

Afghanistan points us towards a more troubling parallel. Some people have argued that by ramping up the arms race, President Ronald Reagan accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union. Irresistibly, the Soviet leaders took the bait since their prestige depended on their ability to match the USA militarily. With a smaller economy, and a slowdown in growth that had started in the 1970s, the arms race made matters worse. As growth continued to decline, the ensuing stagnation in living standards bred popular discontent. When economic reforms failed to spur growth, disillusionment infected the leadership of the communist party. Collapse came quick: the system had lost its defenders.

Is it outlandish to suggest that the USA has been traveling down a similar road since 2001? For sure, no one thinks that the United States is on the road to collapse. Nevertheless, increasingly one gets the impression that its recent military adventurism is hastening its descent to the second spot – behind China – in the global hierarchy of economic and military power.

The dramatic collapse of the USSR in 1990 gave a new impetus to American ambitions. It encouraged feelings, not only on the right, that this unipolar moment in American history should be made irreversible. In particular, the neoconservatives argued more vigorously than before for a military build-up and a more muscular display of US military power everywhere, but especially in the Middle East.

Since the neoconservatives were embedded in the Republican Party, they had to cool their heels for eight years, from 1992 to 2000, during the presidency of Bill Clinton. When the Republicans returned to power in 2000, the neoconservatives quickly seized key positions in the administration of George W. Bush, especially in the office of the Vice-President and the Department of Defense.

In September 2000, the Neoconservatives had written that they would have to wait for ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’ to launch their unilateralist policies to deepen their global hegemony.¹ They did not have to wait long. On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaida, a small group of non-state actors – terrorists, in common parlance – obliged by attacking the Twin Towers and Pentagon, killing close to 3000 Americans.

At the press of a button, the well-laid neoconservative plans for endless war were put into motion. They called it the Global War On Terror.

The GWOT was insanely ambitious. It was launched with an ultimatum to all weaker non-Western nations: You are with us or against us. To execute this war, the US would mobilize, expand and use its global military forces to threaten, attack and invade ‘unfriendly’ countries. Neither international nor domestic laws would stand in its way. Various US agencies would kidnap, imprison without trial, torture and assassinate anyone resisting or suspected of resisting its policies. The goal was to immobilize resistance to American hegemony with fear – with state terror.

A comprehensive accounting of the costs to the USA of this reckless policy of unilateralism will not be available for a while, but we do have some partial and tentative estimates. At the end of 2008, the direct budgetary costs of the GWOT were expected to reach $758 billion.² In March 2008, Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the indirect budgetary costs of GWOT – of restoring depleted military hardware and materiel and support for veterans of the wars – would add up to $1.5 trillion. “All told,” they wrote, “the bill for the Iraq war is likely to top $3 trillion. And that is a conservative estimate.”³ Add to that the rapidly escalating costs of the AfPak War that is being ramped up even now, nine years after the Afghan War was declared to be a success.

The US wars in the Islamicate impose other painful costs, perhaps more debilitating than the budgetary expenses. We are referring to the human toll of these wars, the erosion of liberties it has produced inside the United States, and the manner in which it is undermining the economic leadership of the United States. The United States military has kept its military deaths low, at 5340 in January 2010, with greatly improved body armor, armor plated troop carriers, and a war fought remotely from the air, which saves American lives by sacrificing those of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.⁴ In terms of the near-sighted calculus of US politicians, the low US military deaths make these wars attractive. They forget, however, that high civilian deaths in the countries they attack or invade make their wars unwinnable by fuelling resistance.

The figures for Americans wounded and traumatized by wars are much higher. As of July 2009, according to official statistics, 34,592 American soldiers were wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.⁵ A much greater number of veterans of these wars are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder(PTSD). In November 2007, according to one official source, there were a “minimum of 300,000 psychological casualties” from the war in Iraq alone. The lifetime cost of treating them is estimated at $660 billion.⁶

The economic damage of the wars can be gauged by the speed with which China has been narrowing its lag behind, or even moving ahead of, the United States since 2001. During much of the last decade, the US has concentrated a huge portion of its resources, policy focus, and media attention on fighting multiple wars; it has borrowed from China and Saudi Arabia to finance these wars; its economy suffered a near-collapse in 2008; and it has done little to repair its infrastructure, reduce its dependence on oil, or fix its expensive health-care system. During the same years, China, free form the burden of wars, has directed its policy focus and resources to developing its infrastructure, green energy, manufactures, exports, higher education, and securing access to raw materials globally.

The damage to America’s moral standing is not less worrisome. The United States stands accused before the world of engaging in a war of aggression against Iraq, waging an undeclared war against Pakistan, and sanctioning torture, kidnappings, assassinations, and imprisonment without trial. “Fifteen years ago,” writes Kishore Mahbubani, a former diplomat from Singapore, “if anyone had suggested that Western countries would endorse or allow the use of torture, they would have been dismissed out of hand.” After 2001, torture became routine. In 2005, Irene Khan, the head of Amnesty International, said, “Guantanamo is the gulag of our times.”⁷ One year after he took office, Obama has not ended these human rights violations. Indeed, he has chosen assassinations as a major instrument of his war against the Taliban in Pakistan.

What did it cost al-Qaida to produce this avalanche of misdirected and self-damaging actions by the United States? The sum total of investments the leadership of al-Qaida made in its attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon is trifling, as these things go – the lives of 19 men and an investment of between $400,000 and $500,000 in flight training, airline tickets, lodging in Western capitals, box cutters, etc.⁸ That is roughly equal to the cost of deploying one US soldier in Iraq for one year.⁹

Had the leaders of al-Qaida anticipated this dramatic payoff from their paltry investment? Was 9-11 part of a strategy to lure the world’s most powerful military machine to place their boots on Muslim lands, where the Jihadists would successively engage and defeat them, and eventually drive the United States out of the Islamicate? Indeed, this was the strategy al-Qaida adopted towards the end of the 1990s. Challenged by their failure to defeat the ‘near enemy,’ the Egyptian and Algerian governments allied to the United States, al-Qaida decided to carry its war to the United States, the ‘far enemy,’ which they saw as the ‘head of the serpent.’¹⁰

Recently, Eric Margolis offered a succinct account of al-Qaida’s strategy. Osama bin Laden, he writes, “would oust the modern ‘Crusaders’ by luring the US and its allies into a series of small, debilitating, hugely expensive wars to bleed and slowly bankrupt the US economy, which he called America’s Achilles’ heel.”¹¹

If this had not been their strategy, al-Qaida would quickly appropriate it as its own, after watching America’s frenetic response to the attacks of 9-11. The neoconservatives had been waiting for the men with box cutters, ready to launch their well-laid plans to redraw the map of the Middle East. If the United States could so easily be provoked into invading Muslim countries, Osama bin Laden – not the US President – would decide when and where the United States would be fighting wars in the Islamicate.

Indeed, al-Qaida has provoked the United States into attacking an ever-lengthening list of Muslim countries.

Nine years after it had been ‘won,’ the United States is escalating its war in Afghanistan. Some eight years after its ‘cakewalk’ through Iraq, it is just beginning to draw down its forces there. In addition, different factions of the US military are “involved in combat operations in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, West Africa, North Africa and the Philippines. A new US base at Djibouti is launching raids into Yemen, Somalia and northern Kenya. US forces aided the failed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006.”¹¹ If indeed, it was al-Qaida strategy to lure American troops into the Islamicate, who can deny that they have done quite well. Irresistibly, the US has walked into one al-Qaida trap after another.

While the US is engaged in the “sequential destruction of Muslim nations” – to borrow a troubling phrase from Liaquat Ali Khan – China is making economic gains in the very countries that US occupies, attacks or threatens to attack.¹² Over the past decade, China has continued to make economic gains in Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, Syria and Afghanistan, while the United States occupies, sanctions or launches military attacks against these countries.

Two years back, China acquired rights to one of the world’s largest deposits of copper in Afghanistan. In a report in the New York Times in December 2009, Michael Wines writes perceptively about the symbolism of this investment, “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”¹³

A similar picture emerges from Iraq. US oil companies are not getting the oil deals they wanted, production-sharing agreements instead of service contracts. In this area too, a partnership between a British and Chinese oil company walked away with a contract to develop Rumaila, one of the world’s largest oil fields. Two US companies signed a contract for the much smaller oil field of West Qurna.¹⁴

Surely, the Chinese must be saying, al-Qaida is its best ally – although accidental and unacknowledged – in the contest to displace the United States from its leadership of the global economy. It is difficult at this stage to assess the long-term significance of al-Qaida for the Islamicate – its strategy has brought great suffering to Muslim populations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – but the gains it has brought to China are clear. The siren song of terrorism has lured the United States into one trap after another, to ramp up its military expenditure, to finance its escalating wars by borrowing from its chief economic rival, to deplete its moral capital in the international community, and to shred its own safeguards against state tyranny. China cannot acknowledge the gifts it has received from al-Qaida, but privately, perhaps, the Chinese leadership must be toasting these windfall gains.

Instead of rising up to deal with the economic challenges stemming from the rapid rise of India, China, and Brazil; instead of investing in programs to develop alternative energy; instead of developing a network of high-speed trains; instead of reversing the decline in its K-12 schooling; the Christian right and the neoconservative cabal pushed the United States into a vast quagmire, stretching from one end of the Islamicate to another. All this, while China has continued to challenge US dominance in a growing array of economic activities.

In the 1980s, the United States outspent the USSR into economic ruin. Since 2001, al-Qaida with its paltry investments in men and money has been drawing the United States into wars that are accelerating its economic decline. At least for now, China is the chief beneficiary of the perverse mechanism that forces the United States into embracing wars against the Islamicate as the panacea to its problems, when in fact they have been having the opposite effect.

It was Euripides who first wrote, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Is that what happens to the leaders of a country who doggedly follow a course – as the Soviets did during the 1980s and 1990s – that points in the direction of decline or worse, ruin. In principle, democracies have the capacity to replace such ruinous leadership. Yet, it would appear that the disastrous military policies inaugurated under President Bush are not going to be discarded under President Obama, his Democratic successor. Is it likely that both parties in the United States are captives of a political system that – at least on the question of Islam and the Islamicate – are dominated by a powerful conglomerate of pro-Israeli forces, led by Jewish Americans but with a strong following of Christian Zionists?

If Americans wish to see a reversal in their ruinous policy towards the Islamicate they will have to make some honest and courageous efforts to countervail the influence of the pro-Israeli forces in their body politic. The time for this too is running out. This will not happen by electing a candidate who dazzles them with his rhetoric of change. They will also have to elect a President and Congress with the spine to stand up to the pro-Israeli forces in the United States.

1. Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s defenses (Washington DC: Project for the New American Century, September 2000): 63.
2. Anthony Cordesman, The uncertain costs of the global war on terror (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 2007).
3. Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, The Iraq war will cost us $3 trillion, and much more, Washington Post (August 8, 2008).
4. US Department of Defense, Defense casualty report, 2010.
5. Anne Leland and Mary-Jana Oboroceanu, American war and military operations casualties: Lists and casualties (Congressional Research Service, September 2009):12.
6. Bob Roehr, High rate of PTSD in returning Iraq war veterans, Medscape Today (November 6, 2007).
7. Kishore Mahbubani, The new Asian hemisphere: The irresistible shift of global power to the East (Public Affairs Books, 2008): 165-66.
8. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: Executive Summary.
9. Tom Engelhardt, What progress in Iraq really means, The Nation (April 13, 2007).
10. Fawaz Gerges, The far enemy: Why Jihad went global (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 21, 24-26.
11. Eric Margolis, Osama: 10. The US: 0, LewRockwell.com (January 12, 2010).
12. Liaquat Ali Khan, Now Pakistan, CounterPunch.Org (October 21, 2009).
13. Michael Wines, China willing to spend big on Afghanistan commerce, New York Times (December 30, 2009).
14. Timothy Williams, Oil Companies Look to the Future in Iraq, The New York Times (November 30, 2009).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abdulmutallab on the CIA and NCTC’s Radar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really?

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

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

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

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

How’s that for an inconvenient truth!

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

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

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

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

Burying the Evidence, “Moving On”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as we enter the “political high season,” what might come next is anyone’s guess.