That duplicity was on display when U.S. lawmakers were induced to invade Iraq in response to the mass murder of 9-11. That crisis alone, however, was insufficient. Military mobilization required a “consensus” belief in Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons, Iraqi meetings in Prague, and so forth. Though all were false, those “facts” proved sufficient to induce an invasion of Iraq.

Such agent provocateur operations typically include collateral incidents as pre-staging for the intended main event. Ongoing incidents suggest a follow-on operation is underway. Recent history suggests we’ll see an orgy of evidence that plausibly indicts a pre-staged Evil Doer. Though Iran is an obvious candidate, Pakistan is also a possibility where outside forces have been destabilizing this nuclear Islamic nation with a series of violent incidents.

Will it be coincidence if the next war—like the last—is consistent with the expansive goals of Jewish nationalists?

The Indo-Israel Alliance

December 2007 saw the murder of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Mark Siegel, her Ashkenazim biographer and lobbyist, assured U.S. diplomats that her return was “the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact.”

President Pervez Musharraf had announced that resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict was essential to the resolution of conflicts in Iraq and neighboring Afghanistan. That comment made him a target for Tel Aviv.

During Bhutto’s two terms as prime minister, Pakistani support for the Taliban—then celebrated as the freedom-fighting Mujahadin—enabled her to wield influence in Afghanistan while also catalyzing conflicts in Kashmir. By fueling tension with India, she also fueled an Indo-Israel alliance as Tel Aviv provided New Delhi an emergency shipment of artillery shells during a conflict over the Kirpal region of Kashmir.

In January 2009, Israel delivered to India the first of three Phalcon Airborne Warning & Control Systems (AWACS) shifting the balance of conventional weapons in the region. That sale confirmed what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier announced: “Our ties with India don’t have any limitation….” That became apparent in April when Israel signed a $1.1 billion agreement to provide India an advanced tactical air defense system developed by Raytheon, a U.S. defense contractor.

In August 2008, Ashkenazim General David Kezerashvili returned to Georgia from Tel Aviv to lead an assault on separatists in South Ossetia with the support of Israeli arms and training. That crisis ignited Cold War tensions between the U.S. and Russia, key members of the Quartet (along with the EU and the UN) pledged to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Little was said about the Israeli interest in a pipeline across Georgia meant to move Caspian oil through Turkey and on to Eurasia, using Israel as an intermediary while undermining Russia’s oil industry.

More Game Theory Warfare?

Bhutto’s murder ensured a crisis that replaced Musharaff with Asif Ali Zardari, her notoriously corrupt husband. By Washington’s alliance with Zardari, the U.S. could be portrayed as extending its corrupting influence in the region.

On August 7, 2008, the Zadari-led ruling coalition called for a no-confidence vote in Parliament against Musharraf just as he was departing for the Summer Olympics in Beijing. On August 8, heavy fighting erupted overnight in South Ossetia. As with many of the recent incidents in Pakistan, this violent event involved armed separatists.

But for pro-Israeli influence inside the U.S. government, would our State Department have installed in office the corrupt Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, leading to record-level poppy production? Is the heroin epidemic presently eroding Russian society traceable to Israel’s infamous game theory war-planners? (See “How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare” and “Israel and 9-11.”)

In late November 2008, a terrorist attack in Mumbai, India’s financial center, renewed fears of nuclear tension between India and Pakistan. When the attackers struck a hostel managed by Chabad Lubavitch, an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect from New York, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced from Tel Aviv: “Our world is under attack.” By early December, Israeli journalists urged that we “fortify the security of Jewish institutions worldwide.”

Soon after “India’s 9-11” was found to include operatives from Pakistan’s western tribal region, Zardari announced an agreement with the Taliban to allow Sharia law to govern a swath of the North West Frontier Province where Al Qaeda members reportedly reside.

Pakistani cooperation with “Islamic extremists” created the impression of enhanced insecurity and vulnerability for the U.S. and its allies. That perceived threat was marketed by mainstream media as proof of the perils of “militant Islam.”

With the Taliban and Al Qaeda portrayed as operating freely in a nuclear-armed Islamic state, Tel Aviv gained traction for its claim that a nuclear Tehran posed an “existential threat” to the Jewish state. Meanwhile Israel’s election of an ultra-nationalist/ultra-orthodox coalition further delayed resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

More delay is destined to evoke more extremism and gain more traction for those marketing the “global war on terrorism.” Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni argued after the assault in Mumbai: “Israel, India and the rest of the free world are positioned in the forefront of the battle against terrorists and extremism.”

In announcing that list, Islamabad was indicted by its exclusion even though Pakistan is dominantly Sunni and, unlike Iran’s Shi’a, abhors theocratic rule. The fact patterns suggest that Pakistan, not India, was the target of the murderous terrorism in Mumbai.

Advised by legions of Ashkenazim, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent mission to Islamabad was a diplomatic disaster. Abrasive and arrogant, America’s top diplomat reinforced Pakistani concerns that it is surrounded by hostile forces and that the nation is being set up to fail by Jewish nationalist advisers to a nation it considered an ally.

In a climate of heightened tensions, Clinton undermined U.S. interests, boosted the Israeli case for a global war on “Islamo-fascism” and lent credence to the Clash of Civilizations.

Destabilization as a Prequel to Domination

As Afghanistan and Pakistan join other nations being destabilized by outside forces, key questions must be answered:

· Was India’s 9-11 a form of geopolitical misdirection meant to serve both the tactical goals of Muslim extremists and the strategic goals of Jewish nationalists? Who benefits—within Pakistan—from humiliation at the hands of India and the U.S.?

· With Bhutto’s murder and Musharraf’s departure, the crisis in Mumbai drew Pakistani forces to the Indian border and away from the western tribal region. Was that the geostrategic goal of these well-timed crises? What role, if any, did Israel play?

· Is delay in ending the occupation of Palestine part of an agent provocateur strategy? Was the latest assault on Gaza part of this strategy?

Each of these crises incrementally advanced the expansionist agenda of Colonial Zionists. Do these collateral incidents trace their origin to a common source? Is that source again using serial events to pre-stage a main event?

The public has an intuitive grasp of the source of this oft-recurring behavior. An October 2003 poll of 7,500 respondents in member nations of the European Union found that Israel was considered the greatest threat to world peace.

Is terrorism limited to “Islamo-fascists”? Are mass murders also deployed—from the shadows—as a strategy of geopolitical manipulation by those who Ashkenazim philosopher Hannah Arendt described as “Jewish fascists”?

Despite that DoD officials removed the offensive section from their educational resources at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance is still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many government departments and agencies. Indeed the participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960’s by peaceable Quakers and FOR members after having discussed Gandhi’s Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza. (My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both were in attendance. When the film crew focused on us, she stood tall, faced the agents with their telephoto lens, glared in disdainful defiance and, simultaneously, throw the corner of her coat over my face. Afterwards, she muttered, “How dare they try to intimidate us!”)

This sort of happening in mind, the treatment of Nobel Peace Award winner Aung San Sui Kyi in Myanmar is not necessarily all that different than the response that she’d receive in the USA and, while it’s commendable that American spokespersons publicly object to her most recent arrest, they, certainly, might seem to be a bunch of hypocrites. This is due to the fact that a number of Nobel Peace Award recipients, such as American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), have had difficulties of their own on American soil.

For example, “AFSC’s work, always open and resolutely nonviolent, has been under government surveillance for decades. The Service Committee secured nearly 1,700 pages of files from the FBI under a Freedom of Information request in 1976. These files show that the FBI kept files on AFSC that dated back to 1921. Ten other federal agencies kept files on AFSC, including the CIA, Air Force, Navy, Internal Revenue Service, Secret Service, and the State Department. The CIA has intercepted overseas mail and cables in the 1950s, and some AFSC offices (and even its staff’s homes) have been infiltrated and burglarized in the late 1960s into the 1970s.”

In relation, AFSC associate general secretary for justice and human rights, Joyce Miller, asked, “How can we speak of spreading democracy in Iraq while dismantling it here at home?” She further remarked, “Political dissent is fundamental to a free and democratic society. It should not be equated with crime.”

Add to the AFSC problems, those pertaining to Nobel Peace Award recipient Nelson Mandela, who only a year ago had the designation “terrorist” removed from his name, under protest by the State Department, so that he no longer suffered travel restrictions from the US government. Yet his travel curtailment was not nearly as awful as was Ramzy Baroud’s blockage. He, the editor of Palestine Chronicle, had his US passport seized by a consular officer at an overseas American Embassy. [3] Similarly, Senator Edward Kennedy was, also, flagged by the US no-fly list.

Then again, Ted Kennedy received much less harassment than did Nobel Peace Award winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire after her flight from Guatemala had been directed to Ireland through Houston:

She was probably tired and ready to get back to Belfast, where her attempts to bring about an end to The Troubles in 1976 made her at 32 the youngest Nobel Peace Prize-winner ever. Since then, she’s been given the Pacem in Terris Award by Pope John Paul II, and the United Nations selected her (along with the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Jordan’s Queen Noor and a dozen or so other fellow Nobel Laureates) as an honorary board member of the International Coalition for the Decade.

Unfortunately for Maguire, her flight back home to Northern Ireland was routed through Houston, where none of that meant diddly. Federal Customs officials were far less interested in any of that than they were in a box on the back of the transit form she filled out on her flight.

“They questioned me about my nonviolent protests in USA against the Afghanistan invasion and Iraqi war,” Maguire said later in a statement. ‘They insisted I must tick the box in the Immigration form admitting to criminal activities.

Maguire was detained for two hours — grilled once, fingerprinted, photographed, and grilled again. She missed her flight home. She was only released after an organization she helped found — the Nobel Women’s Initiative — started kicking up a fuss.

On can add to her troubles countless other ones wherein human rights and environmental supporters have been repeatedly hassled for no other reason than that they’re holding views that don’t jive with positions at any number of U.S. government institutions. One needn’t return in time to the McCarthy Era to find many individuals who have been investigated and persecuted for holding vilified opinions. For example, Stephen Lendman, a peace advocate and writer in his seventies with a permanent knee injury that delimits travel, has been repeatedly investigated by the FBI.

At the same time, he is joined by myriad others such as assorted activists in Maryland whose names were put on federal terrorist lists by state police who infiltrated their groups. As such, their perfectly legal activities, freedom of speech and right to unhindered assembly have been criminalized.

Simultaneously, there’s a certain inescapable irony and disingenuous quality presented by the Western government heads who are harshly critical of the Iran crackdown on dissenting citizens while they, themselves, condone similar ironfisted policies in their own lands. Their two-faced position is barely hidden beneath the surface of their mock concern for the well-being of Iranian protesters as they urge their own and allied troops into battle, show little (if any) sincere remorse over the slaughter of masses of civilians that happen in the process and make sure that demonstrators at home are disregarded, denigrated or preemptively rounded up as happened at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Then again, one might find himself in pretty good company if he were singled out as unpatriotic and treacherous for holding viewpoints or undertaking actions that go contrary to the perspectives that a certain hawkish and totalitarian segment of society holds. All the same, every method conceivable might be used to hunt down the offenders and, when taken to the extreme, render their seemingly provocative positions ineffectual by any means possible, including imprisonment and murder.

Anyone who doubts this to be the case needs only to remember about what happened to people like Howard Fast, the slain Freedom Riders Andy Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, the thirteen shot students at Kent State University at which Ohio National Guardsman fired sixty-seven rounds over a thirteen second period, and scores of others who have stood against mainstream policies.

Meanwhile, stigmatizing dissidents is a fairly common practice. As such, “There are 1.1 million people on the [U.S.] Terrorist Watch List and there is a 35 percent error rate, minimum, for that list,” according to ACLU’s Michael German. [6] Furthermore, the overzealous and aggressive surveillance tactics used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to check the public’s e-mails, telephone calls and other communications are the same ones as were in use during George W. Bush’s administration. Likewise, the amount of spying on personal exchanges is as high as it ever was.

In relation to recent claims by Justice Department and national security officials that the overcollection was unintentional, House representative, Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey and Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, commented, “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental.” Additionally, the act of tracking e-mailed transmissions and other interactions has seemed in violation of federal law according to lawyers at the Justice Department. Regardless, the practice continues.

At the same time, the decision to designate social activists as troublemakers, while singling them out for intimidation, threats and investigations, carries serious legal and political implications in democratic societies. The further measure of subjecting them to the sorts of difficulties that Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ramzy Baroud, AFSC members and innumerable others have endured is clearly based in xenophobic, paranoid and despotic thinking. It embodies the kind of authoritarian mentality and oppressive activities that one finds in the worst types of tyrannical regimes.

As Harry S. Truman suggested, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” Due to this fear, are we, then, to all conform with lock step in perverse obedience to the State’s dictates, outlooks and agendas in an increasingly Orwellian milieu? If not, then we must constantly remind ourselves and each other of US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s vision: “Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”

Over the past two months, right-wing extremists have assassinated an abortion doctor in Wichita, Kansas, murdered three policemen in Pittsburgh, and killed a security guard while attempting to shoot up the U.S. National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

While all of these incidents appear to have been carried out by so-called “lone wolves” — right-wing extremists steep in movement politics but acting on their own initiative — all three killers have ties to, or have been involved with, radical right-wing organizations.

Scott Roeder, the alleged killer of Dr. George Tiller, has been identified with the right-wing Freeman movement, and was apparently related to the Army of God, one of the 1990s most radical anti-abortion groups.

According to friends of Richard Poplawski, the man accused of ambushing and murdering three Pittsburgh policemen, the killer was worried that the Obama Administration was poised to ban guns, a charge that has been repeatedly made by right-wing columnists and conservative hosts of talk radio programs. “If a total collapse is what it takes to wake our brethren and guarantee future generations of white children walk this continent, if that is what it takes to restore our freedoms and recapture our land: Let it begin this very second and not a moment later,” Poplawski wrote on a white supremacist Web site under the name Braced for Fate, the Anti-Defamation League recently noted. James W. von Brunn, the 88-year-old white supremacist who allegedly took a rifle into the museum and killed security guard Stephen T. Johns, an African American, was steeped in anti-Jewish, anti-Black and anti-immigrant hatred, was a Holocaust denier who had deep roots in the white nationalist movement.

The Wichita assassination and the Holocaust Museum attack occurred a month or so after the release of a report prepared by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which warned of the possibility of an uptick in violent activities by right-wing extremist groups.

The report pointed out that the election of America’s first African American president, the sharp economic downturn, rising unemployment, and unfounded rumors that the administration of Barack Obama would be pushing for stricter gun control regulations, could fuel a resurgence of “right-wing extremist groups,” bringing with it a spate of homegrown terrorist activities.

The DHS assessment, titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” — originally ordered up by the Bush Administration — pointed out that “Right-wing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda, but they have not yet turned to attack planning.”

“The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s [during the Clinton administration] when right-wing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers,” the assessment read.

“Proposed imposition of firearms restrictions and weapons bans likely would attract new members into the ranks of right-wing extremist groups . . . The high volume of purchases and stockpiling of weapons and ammunition by right-wing extremists in anticipation of restrictions and bans in some parts of the country continue to be a primary concern to law enforcement,” the report stated.

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Sara Kuban said the assessment was one in an ongoing series published by DHS “to facilitate a greater understanding of radicalization in the United States.” An earlier report had focused on possible violence by left-wing activists.

“DHS has no specific information that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but right-wing extremists may be gaining new recruitments by playing on their fears about several emerging issues,” Kuban pointed out.

Release of the DHS assessment incurred the immediate wrath of a number of right-wing talk show hosts, commentators, and columnists. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson pointed out that “some conservative commentators tried mightily to paint the memo as an underhanded attempt by the Obama administration to smear its honorable critics by equating ‘right wing’ with ‘terrorism.’”

A group spearheaded by some of America’s largest Religious Right groups — acting under the name No Political Profiling — released an ad that claimed the DHS report, “declared law-abiding citizens who express their First Amendment Rights as: ‘the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.’”

Jeffrey Mazzella of the Alexandria, Virginia-based Center for Individual Freedom was among the first who called for the firing of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Mat Staver, the founder of the Orlando, FL.-based Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian legal operation, decided to “match fire with fire.” In a move both political and entrepreneurial, Staver invited supporters to get an official laminated, wallet-sized (”personalized with your name”) complimentary “Right-wing Extremist” card, “and Take a Stand against the New Administration’s Attack Machine.”

While originally pointing out that the card would be sent free (he now is apparently asking for a specific donation), Staver noted that “there are expenses associated with this national campaign, so any financial support you provide will be greatly appreciated and put to immediate use in advancing and protecting our precious liberties.”

In response to the criticism, the DHS pulled its report, promising to come up with a revised edition. Thus far, there has been no revised edition.

In a recent piece posted at PolitickerNY.com, Joe Conason pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that “authorities have discovered more than five dozen terror conspiracies by far-right groups, including militia outfits, neo-Nazi gangs and others claiming that their cause is above the law,” over the past fifteen or so years. “The Oklahoma City bombing was only the most notorious and tragic of those plots, which have cost lives, damaged property and infringed on our safety and freedom,” Conason noted. “The late Dr. Tiller, who was shot on an earlier occasion, was the eighth U.S. abortion provider murdered since 1977. At least 17 others have been targets for attempted murder.”

In its spring 2009 report, the SPLC, an Alabama-based watchdog group tracking hate groups for 30 years, found more than 900 hate groups — including the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, and Black separatists — currently operating in the U.S., an all-time high.

“Right across the board, extremist groups are thriving right now,” says Mark Potok, Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. Potok, who attributed the rise in the number of hate groups to a number of reasons including the election of Obama and unresolved immigration issues, pointed out that “We’re looking at a kind of perfect storm of factors that really favor the continued growth of these groups.”

Responding to the murder of Dr. George Tiller, Attorney General Eric Holder sent federal marshals to protect doctors, nurses and abortion clinics from possible attack. But that may not be enough. And, in the aftermath of the attack at the Holocaust Museum, it remains to be seen how many people will be applying for Mat Staver’s “Right-Wing Extremist” card!

Meanwhile, as a guest on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC program recently pointed out, protesters in front of health clinics across the country have been emboldened by Dr. Tiller’s assassination, and have been cranking up the rhetoric and violent threats. And, the announcement on Tuesday, June 9, by the Tiller family that the Wichita clinic would be closed permanently, is an indication that homegrown terrorists have won another round.

We do not starve, we are not arbitrarily imprisoned, we may vote, travel and read and write what we wish only because of the political activism of previous generations. Almost all MPs, when pushed, will acknowledge this. Were it not for public protest they wouldn’t be MPs.

Yet, though the people of this country remain as mild and as peaceful as they have ever been, our MPs have introduced a wider range of repressive measures than at any time since the Second World War. A long list of laws — the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act, Terrorism Act 2000, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the 2005 Serious Crime and Police Act and many others — treat peaceful protesters as if they are stalkers, vandals, thugs and terrorists. Thousands of harmless, public-spirited people now possess criminal records. This legislation has been enforced by policing which becomes more aggressive and intrusive by the month. The police attacks on the G20 protests (which are about to be challenged by a judicial review launched by Climate Camp) are just the latest expression of this rising state violence. Why is it happening?

Before I try to answer this, let me give you an idea of just how weird policing in Britain has become. A few weeks ago, like everyone in mid-Wales, I received a local policing summary from the Dyfed-Powys force. It contained a section headed Terrorism and Domestic Extremism. “Work undertaken is not solely focused on the threat from international terrorists. Attention has also been paid to the potential threat that domestic extremists and campaigners can pose.” I lodged a freedom of information request to try to discover what this meant. What threat do campaigners pose?

I’ve just been told by the police that they don’t intend to reply within the statutory period, or to tell me when they will.¹ I’ll complain of course, and (in 2019 or so) I’ll let you know the result. But Paul Mobbs of the Free Range Network has found what appears to be an explanation. Under the heading “Protect[ing] the country from both terrorism and domestic extremism”, the Dyfed-Powys Police website repeats the line about domestic extremists and campaigners. “In this context, the Force was praised for its management of the slaughter of what was felt to be a sacred animal from the Skanda Vale religious community in Carmarthenshire.” You might remember it: this Hindu community tried to prevent Shambo the bull from being culled by the government after he tested positive for TB. His defenders sought a judicial review and launched a petition. When that failed, they sang and prayed. That’s all.

Mobbs has also found a bulletin circulated among Welsh forces at the end of last year, identifying the “new challenges and changes” the police now face. Under “Environmental” just two are listed: congestion charging and “eco-terrorism”. Eco-terrorism is a charge repeatedly leveled against the environment movement, mostly by fossil fuel lobbyists. But, as far as I can discover, there has not been a single recorded instance of a planned attempt to harm people in the cause of environmental protection in the United Kingdom over the past 30 years or more. So what do the police mean by eco-terrorism? It appears to refer to any environmental action more radical than writing letters to your MP.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) now runs three units whose purpose is to tackle another phenomenon it has never defined: domestic extremism. These are the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU), the Welsh Extremism and Counter-Terrorism Unit and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. Because ACPO is not a public body but a private limited company, the three bodies are exempt from freedom of information laws and other kinds of public accountability, even though they are funded by the Home Office and deploy police officers from regional forces. So it’s hard to work out exactly what they do, apart from libeling peaceful protesters. I wrote a column in December about the smears published by NETCU, which described villagers in Oxfordshire peacefully seeking to prevent a power company from filling their local lake with fly ash as a “domestic extremist campaign.” It also sought to smear peace campaigners, Greenpeace and Climate Camp with the same charge. NETCU’s site went down on the day my column was published and hasn’t been restored since. But we have only patchy evidence of what else these three unaccountable bodies have been up to.

They appear to have adopted the role once filled by Special Branch’s counter-subversion campaign, which spied on Labour activists, including Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson (sadly the spooks failed to bump them off while there was still time). But as Paul Mobbs points out in his new report on Britain’s secretive police forces, today the police appear to be motivated not by party political bias, but by hostility towards all views which do not reflect the official consensus.

Mobbs proposes that mainstream politics in Britain cannot respond to realities such as global and national inequality, economic collapse, resource depletion and climate change. Any politics that does not endorse the liberal economic consensus, which challenges the concentration of wealth or power, or which doesn’t accept that growth and consumerism can be sustained indefinitely, is off-limits. Just as the suffragettes were repressed because their ideas — not their actions — presented a threat to the state, the government and the police must suppress a new set of dangerous truths. By treating protesters as domestic extremists, the state marginalizes their concerns: if people are extremists, their views must be extreme. Repression, in a nominal democracy, cannot operate accountably, so the state uses police units, which are exempt from public scrutiny.

I am sure Mobbs is right. There is no place for dissenting views in mainstream politics. I was told recently by a Labour back-bencher — a respected MP untainted by the expenses scandal – that “if the door was open just an inch to new ideas, I would stay on. But it has been slammed shut, so I’m resigning at the next election.” Our grossly unfair electoral system, which responds to the concerns of just a few thousand floating voters and shuts out the minor parties; the vicious crackdown on dissent within parliament by whips and spin doctors; the neoliberalism forced upon governments by corporate power and the Washington Consensus; the terror of the tabloid press: all combine to create a political culture which cannot respond to altered realities without collapsing. What cannot be accommodated must be suppressed.

The police respond as all police forces do; protecting the incasts from the outcasts, keeping the barbarians from the gate. The philosophy of policing has not changed; they just become more violent as the citadel collapses.

1. E-mail received on 6th May 2009. FOI REF: 263/2009.

The policing of the G20 protests at the beginning of this month was routine. Policemen hiding their identification numbers and beating up peaceful protesters is as much a part of British life as grey skies and red buses. Across 20 years of protests, I have seen policemen swapping their jackets to avoid identification, hurling people against vans and into walls and whomping old ladies over the head with batons. A friend had his head repeatedly bashed against the bonnet of a police van; he was then charged with criminal damage to the van. I have seen an entire line of police turn round to face the other way when private security guards have started beating people up. I have seen them refuse — until Amnesty International got involved — to investigate my own case when I was hospitalized by these licensed thugs (the guards had impaled my foot on a metal spike, smashing the middle bone).

But none of this featured in the conservative press. The story was always the same: we would stagger home after our peaceful protests were attacked by uniformed skinheads to discover that we were “Anarchist Thugs on the Rampage” whose attempt to destroy civilization had been thwarted only by the calm professionalism of the police. Violent police action mutated into violent protests. The papers believed everything the police told them.

This began to change when the police foolishly attacked a Countryside Alliance march in 2004. In the spirit of impartial policing, the cops gave these reactionaries the treatment they had been doling out to generations of progressives. It was grotesque, disproportionate and entirely familiar policing, but there’s a world of difference between bloodstained hemp ponchos and bloodstained tweeds. The exposure of the lies the police then told about the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and the shooting of Mohammed Abdul Kahar made the newspapers — which had reproduced the official version — feel stung.

In other circumstances, Ian Tomlinson, the passer-by who died after being thrown to the ground by police, would have been treated by the press as a violent anarchist who had assaulted the road with his body. But video footage and disillusionment has changed that — for a few days at least. On Friday the front page of the Daily Express carried lurid pictures of the injuries sustained by a woman at the G20 protests, under the headline “Police Did This to Me: It was just like being whipped by the Taliban.”

Yesterday the Daily Mail posted up a film made by climate camp activists. Its columnist Melanie Phillips, who is yet to be celebrated for her support of radical causes, opined that, “there are always elements in the ranks [of the police] who want to give people a good kicking.” A column in the Telegraph explained that, “there are individuals who join the police just because they like hitting people,” while the Spectator lamented the “disgraceful actions of a few Met officers.” Today’s Guardian poll suggests that the police are losing the wider battle for public opinion too.

The papers maintain that a few rogue officers got out of control. But as testimonies collected by Climate Camp’s legal team show, police violence at the G20 demos was organized and systematic. It is true that the police appear to have been carried away by testeria (a useful word which describes testosterone-fuelled male rampages). But this keeps happening, and senior officers make no attempt to prevent it.

Before the protests, the police fed stories to the media about terrorist plots hatched by G20 demonstrators. “We’re up for it and we’re up to it,” Commander Simon O’Brien told the press. Organizers from Climate Camp asked if they could attend police briefings to journalists in order to put their side of the story. They were rebuffed. The police initially refused to meet them even to discuss the protesters’ intentions. The police plan was called Operation Glencoe: it was named after the site of a notorious massacre.

If the police at the G20 protests were pumped-up, testerical, itching for a fight, it was partly because their commanding officers have spent years blurring the distinction between peaceful campaigners and terrorists. Until recently, this strategy worked well: by turning quiet protests into angry confrontations, the police could show the public that unless they received ever greater powers and resources, the country would be overrun by violent mobs. Now it has backfired.

Don’t expect this momentary backlash to change anything. The police appear impervious to criticism. Just eight days before the G20 protests, the parliamentary select committee on human rights published a report on the policing of protests. It recommended that “counter-terrorism powers should never be used against peaceful protestors”; and that “the presumption should be in favour of protests taking place without state interference”. The police ignored it. They used counter-terrorism powers to stop and search climate campers having supper at an Indian restaurant; they sought to prevent peaceful actions from taking place. Interestingly, they also appeared to allow a group of genuine rioters to break into a branch of RBS. This too is a familiar pattern: the police beat up peaceful protesters and stand by when vandals create some easy headlines for the tabloids.

The public revulsion towards the police lies about Mr. de Menezes didn’t prevent them from attempting a similar cover-up over the death of Ian Tomlinson. Just as the furor over Mr. Tomlinson reached its peak, the police again curtailed the right to protest when they pre-emptively arrested 114 people close to a power station. Their purpose was to impose sweeping bail conditions on the protesters, which will come in very handy when the decision to build a new coal-burning power station at Kingsnorth in Kent is announced. Yesterday the Guardian published evidence of collusion between the police and Kingsnorth’s operator, E.On.

The police behave like this, despite the opprobrium of left and right, because they know they will get away with it. They know that the government won’t rein them in; that the Independent Police Complaints Commission eats out of their hands; that the sternest sanction an officer can expect for beating or killing a passer-by is some extended gardening leave. They know that in a few days’ time the rightwing press will revert to publishing stories about the anarchist baby-eaters seeking to turn Britain into a bloodbath.

But something else has changed in this country: the resolution of the protesters. Despite repeated assaults, they appear to become better organized and less afraid. That, so soon after Operation Glencoe, 114 people were prepared to risk arrest and another beating testifies to the resilience of this movement. These people know that protest is not a threat to democracy but its cornerstone. They know that the issues they contest outweigh any harm they may suffer. They know that getting beaten up is a sign that state has lost the argument.

However, as the US President, Obama inherits a bloody legacy that is still very much alive in today’s Latin America. Just weeks before the Presidents met in Trinidad, thousands of Argentines marched once again to demand justice for 30,000 people disappeared in a US-backed military dictatorship.

On March 24, 1976 a military junta took power in Argentina, and until 1981, General Jorge Rafael Videla presided over the country in a reign of terror, torture, surveillance and murder.

On March 24, 2009, in Mendoza, Argentina, colorful marches filled the central streets of the city in remembrance of the coup, and to demand justice. The various banners and placards waving above the crowd were a testament to Argentina’s healthy political diversity in activism and politics — from Maoists selling their newspapers to Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo giving teary hugs to supporters and friends.

Though the march was organized around one central theme — justice, truth and memory regarding the dictatorship – other themes arose in the crowd as well, including the negative impact of soy production, rising bus fares and political corruption.

The march was a time to remember when Henry Kissinger gave his blessing to the Argentine military junta in 1976, saying, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly” and reassuring the torturing, bloody leaders when he said, “I don’t want to give the sense that they’re harassed by the United States.”

Marches and protests in Buenos Aires on the same day were attended by the famous Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a powerful human rights movement that for decades has been demanding the truth regarding the whereabouts of their disappeared children. One document read by some of the Mothers explained that still, after all these years, “the slowness of justice generates impunity and impunity only creates more impunity.”

A column by one leading Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, Hebe Bonafini, explained that her movement is also doing more than just marching and lobbying for justice. Their reach has expanded into all kinds of media and walks of life. They have opened a literary café and publishing house, and hold seminars which 2,800 different students attend. Their “Shared Dreams” project provides housing in poor neighborhoods, as well as soup kitchens and daycare centers. Their radio station reaches into neighboring Uruguay and as far away as Brazil.

During the Buenos Aires mobilizations, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo spoke of the fact that “today there have still only been 44 sentences” for the authors of “a plan of systematic extermination” during the dictatorship. Therefore, the Mothers said, “we have to keep on fighting for truth and justice,” as there are still 526 criminals of the dictatorship that still need to be tried. They demanded an “opening of the all of the archives of the Armed Forces and security to know to the truth.” They also called for the appearance of Julio López, the main testifier in a case against Miguel Etchecolatz, a repressor under the dictatorship.

Julio Lopez, a political prisoner during the dictatorship, was disappeared in 2006 a few hours before he was scheduled to testify against Etchecolatz. Lopez was last seen on September 18th, 2006. Journalist Marie Trigona reported that Nilda Eloy, another survivor of the dictatorship who testified with Lopez to convict Etchecolatz, said that, “Most of the evidence suggests that Julio Lopez was kidnapped by the gangsters from the Greater Buenos Aires police force and rightwing fascists…”

Outside Buenos Aires other cities remembered these harsh times that still cast shadows over generations upon generations. But this March 24 was also a time of hope and reconstruction. In Cordoba, Argentina, La Perla (The Pearl), a detention and torture center run by the military dictatorship was transformed into a “Space for Memory” and opened to the public. Emiliano Fessia, a member of the HIJOS human rights organization, said of the space, “This will now be a place of life, after being a place of death.”

Although it is difficult to separate the RAF’s theory from their actions–actions which included murder–if one does so they find an application of left theory that perceived the anti-imperialist resistance in the advanced industrial nations (First World, if you will) as just another part of the worldwide anti-imperialist movement. It was this conclusion that the RAF used to rationalize their attacks on US military installations in 1972 during their anti-imperialist offensive.. They did not believe the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to be in a revolutionary situation, but justified their attacks via the argument that the US and other imperial forces (German and British) should be attacked wherever they were, not just in Vietnam or another country where they were engaged in overt warfare. This approach echoed the slogan popularized by the Weatherman organization in the US-Bring the War Home.

I lived in Frankfurt am Main, Germany during the period described in this book. I attended protests against the Vietnam War, in support of the burgeoning squatters movement (and against property speculation) in Frankfurt, against the Shah of Iran, in support of Gastarbeiter rights and against the repressive regimes in Turkey and Greece. I also attended concerts and street festivals where the German counterculture mingled flamboyantly with the US servicemen and adolescents that abounded in the country then. When the IG Farben building and Officer’s Club in Frankfurt am Main were attacked by the RAF, a serious security effort became part of our daily lives. School buses taking us to the American High School in Frankfurt were boarded by military police who checked our bags while other GIs used long-handled mirrors to check underneath the buses for explosive devices. German police and military set up shop at airports and train stations, holding automatic weapons. Autobahn exits were the site of roadblocks. Wanted posters featuring the faces of the RAF members appeared everywhere. The Goethe University in Frankfurt came under increased police surveillance, especially after the playing of a tape-recorded message from RAF member Ulrike Meinhof at a national conference there. A protest held against the US mining of northern Vietnamese harbors and intensified bombing of the Vietnamese people was patrolled by police armed with automatic weapons. Nonetheless, many of the protesters chanted “Für den Sieg des VietCong, Bomben auf das Pentagon!” (For the victory of the NLF, bomb the Pentagon). The following day, the Pentagon was bombed by the Weather Underground.

Recently, PM Press in California published the book The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles For The People. This voluminous work includes virtually all of the communiques and theoretical pamphlets published by the RAF from 1970 to 1977. This period is considered the first period of the RAF–an organization that saw its original leadership imprisoned after the aforementioned bombing offensive against US military installations in Germany. These members were followed by another set of individuals drawn to the RAF mostly through support organizations that developed to protest the conditions of the RAF’s imprisonment and their eventual deaths that many still believe were state-sanctioned murders. Over the next two decades , hundreds of others would join the organization to replace those imprisoned and killed. Besides the text written by the RAF, the editors have written an accompanying text that provides a take on the history of post World War Two West Germany that has been mostly unavailable to English readers.

The RAF was an intensely sectarian organization. They saw most of the rest of the German Left as revisionist or opportunist, unwilling to make the commitment armed struggle required. Besides invalidating the gains won by the autonomist squatters’ movement and other independent groupings, this analysis ignored the fact that other approaches might have been more effective in the long term. By positioning itself to the left of all other leftist groups in Germany, the RAF insured its limited effectiveness. Once the State was able to capture its primary membership and literally isolate them in prisons, the RAF’s purpose moved away from challenging the imperialists to one of staying alive inside a draconian and psychologically debilitating prison environment.

Indeed, as this book clearly demarcates, the bulk of the work of the RAF in the 1970s centered around the nature of their existence in prison. In what would become a harbinger of the future we live in, the German prison authority and its departmental ally the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) developed an architecture and series of mechanisms designed to destroy the minds of the RAF prisoners. Isolation cells painted completely in white where the neon light never went off. No contact with any human for months at a time. The use of informers and ultimately a trial held in a specially designed prison courthouse that took place without the defendants or their attorneys. In addition, laws were passed that criminalized not only the act taken by the attorneys to defend their clients but also the acts of any individuals who opposed the actions taken by the State against the RAF prisoners. Of course, this enabled the RAF to point out the unity of purpose between the right wing CDU-CSU West German government and the SPD (with obvious comparisons to the role played by the German Social Democrats after World War I when they used the right-wing militia known as the Freikorps to kill members of the revolutionary Spartacists). The special laws enacted against the RAF and its supporters contained many elements of laws now in existence in the US, realized most fully in the Patriot Act.

While the RAF was certainly successful in exposing the fundamental authoritarianism of the modern capitalist state through their hunger strikes and other actions, they did nothing towards rebuilding the anti-imperialist movement that the 1972 actions were conceived in. This created a situation where their developing analysis of imperialism and the struggle against it became essentially moribund. In other words, the repression by the German government and its allies was successful.

The editors of this work, J. Smith and André Moncourt, have created an intelligently political work that honestly discusses the politics of the Red Army Fraktion during its early years. Their commentary explains the theoretical writings of the RAF from a left perspective and puts their politics and actions in the context of the situation present in Germany and the world at the time. It is an extended work that is worth the commitment required to read and digest it. More than a historical document, The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles For The People provides us with the ability to comprehend the phenomenon that was the RAF in ways not possible thirty years ago.

The vile display was carried out by thugs allied with Baitullah Mehsud’s Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

Dawn reports that the video, apparently shot by a mobile phone “shows the girl, wearing a blue burqa, lying on the ground face down. Her legs, hands and head are held by two men and a third, bearded man wearing a turban is shown whipping her repeatedly.”

The hideous scene continues for several minutes until the girl, allegedly “guilty” of the “crime” of adultery is dragged off by armed fighters. Dawn avers:

After the first couple of lashes, the girl starts to scream loudly, but no one moves to help her. “Please, please,” she shouts in Pushto. “Stop it, please. For God’s sake, stop it, I am dying.”

A man off-camera is giving orders to his companions. “Hold her feet tightly. Lift her burqa a bit.” (”Flogging in Swat outrages nation,” Dawn, April 4, 2009)

In February, the “secular” Awami National Party (ANP) that controls the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) government, signed a peace deal pledging to impose Sharia law on Swat residents.

The pact, which halted murderous and largely ineffective artillery barrages on residents by the Army, was negotiated by ANP leaders and Maulana Sufi Mohammed, the leader of the Tehrik-Nifaz-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, TNSM) in NWFP’s Malakand district where Swat is located.

The Guardian reported April 3 Sufi Mohammed, “In a rare interview with any media outlet, domestic or foreign…told the Guardian that the new courts would formalise penalties including flogging, chopping off hands and stoning to death.”

TTP “emir” Maulana Fazlullah, the sociopathic son-in-law of Sufi Mohammed has promised to expand the Taliban’s writ throughout Pakistan. Indeed Muslim Khan, a key commander and spokesperson for the group told The Guardian by telephone that sharia would be implemented “whether the government likes it or not.”

Aftab Alam, president of the Swat Lawyers Association, said that the creaking colonial-era legal system needed to be speeded up, not replaced.

“They [the Taliban] want to establish a complete autonomous state, that’s the real agenda,” said Alam. “A utopian empire, a Taliban empire. Sometimes utopias become real.” …

Khan added: “Swat is a test case. After this, it [sharia] should be brought in in the whole of Pakistan. How can we have British law here? It is the task of the Taliban to make them agree. It is our right, 95% of the population is Muslim.” (Saeed Shah, “Pakistan region in grip of fear as leader begins to implement sharia law,” The Guardian, April 3, 2009)

And if the Taliban’s pornographic display in Swat is any indication of the future direction affairs might take, the prospects for tackling Pakistan’s overwhelming poverty, endemic corruption by capitalist elites and military repressors are indeed grim.

As if to drive home the point, Reuters reported that “two female Pakistani teachers, a female aid worker and their driver were found shot dead on Monday, police and a doctor said, in an area where Islamists have attacked aid groups.”

The attack took place about 40 miles north of the capital, Islamabad. The bodies had been dumped in a heavily forested area.

When the agreement was signed in mid-February, it was condemned by human rights’ and left-wing groups as a capitulation by the state to jihadi terrorists and their friends in the Army and Pakistan’s shadowy Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

As outrage over the girls’ flogging spread, human rights’ and leftist groups staged protests Sunday. In Lahore, a coalition of women’s organizations, socialist parties and trade unions organized a 2,000 strong march denouncing the state’s sell-out to the Taliban. The Labour Party Pakistan reported on their website Monday that,

Speakers condemned the flogging of women in Swat and acts of terrorism by religious fundamentalists. They also condemned the Drone attacks by Americans as well. They announced the launch of a national movement against Talbanisation of the society. Taliban are not anti-imperialist, they are neo-fascist and forces of suppression, we have to fight them. Terrorism can not be defeated by more terrorism. “We have to mobilize people to fight them both” was the main theme of the speakers. (”Lahore Rally Against Talibanisation and Terrorism,” Labour Party Pakistan, April 6, 2009)

In a further sign that strains between America and Pakistan threaten to derail the Obama administration’s plan to expand CIA drone attacks, The New York Times reported that “two senior American officials came under withering public criticism from Pakistan on Tuesday, with the Pakistani foreign minister saying that ‘trust’ between the countries was in question, particularly over the issue of American missile attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas.”

During meetings in Islamabad, the Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi told the Times he informed Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and Obama’s regional envoy Richard Holbrooke, “there is a gap between us” regarding the issue of drone attacks.

There are indications that gap has widened into a chasm. ISI director, Lt. General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, refused to meet separately with Holbrooke and Mullen who had requested a private meeting. Pasha is apparently miffed over reports that elements within ISI continue to provide logistical and material aid to the Taliban even as the imperialists shower “carpets of bombs” as well as a “carpet of gold” on the Army.

Meanwhile, Daily Times reported in Thursday’s edition that “Al Qaeda, Taliban and other militants have been relocating from the Tribal Areas to Pakistan’s overcrowded and impoverished cities, which is likely to make it harder to find and stop them from staging terrorist attacks, officials say.”

Cynically, an unnamed “senior U.S. defence official” told the Lahore-based newspaper, “putting these guys on the run forces a lot of good things to happen. It gives you more targeting opportunities.”

“Opportunities” in the form of dead civilians caught in the cross hairs of a Hellfire missile blast. “The downside,” the official continues, “is that you get a much more dispersed target set and they go to places where we are not operating.” As the World Socialist Web Site reported April 8,

Since 2004, the Pakistani military has repeatedly mounted anti-insurgency operations in the historically autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), suffering some 1,500 fatalities, provoking widespread popular anger over its wanton indifference to civilian casualties, and triggering a growing humanitarian crisis. More than half a million FATA residents have been rendered refugees. (Keith Jones, “U.S. expands war into Pakistan,” World Socialist Web Site, April 8, 2009)

Even as the TTP and their allies threaten to mount two suicide bombings a week until the Americans cease their drone attacks, the U.S. response–other than rank indifference to the suffering of the Pakistani people–is to demand more, in the form of total capitulation to the Global Godfather by Pakistan’s mercenary elite.

Flogging Video: “It’s all a Conspiracy”

In the wake of the incident for which TTP spokesperson Muslim Khan claimed responsibility, The News reports that NWFP’s Minister for Information, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, called the video release by electronic and print media “a conspiracy against the peace deal in Malakand.”

While Hussain insisted that the outrage occurred before the Taliban’s deal with the provincial government, the man who actually shot the video told Dawn that the girls’ humiliating torture took place two weeks ago, and not in January as ANP and TTP leaders allege.

Rejecting the mendacious fairy-tale concocted by the Taliban and NWFP’s “secular” government, the girl was mercilessly beaten not for some presumed “immoral” breech, but because she had rejected the marriage proposal made by a local Taliban thug, allegedly the son of none other than Muslim Khan himself!

Implying the monstrous punishment was actually “merciful,” Khan told Dawn ”the girl should have been stoned to death, but the Taliban had only flogged her because qazi courts had not been set up at the time.”

Asma Jahangir, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, denounced the incident and accused the federal and provincial governments of giving the neofascists “a free hand to attack people and disgrace women.” Jahangir told Dawn,

“The government has handed over Swat to those who have played with the lives of people. If they are really popular, why this was not reflected in the last general elections?” she wondered.

Ms Jahangir criticised the leaders who were claiming that peace had been restored in Swat. “Why don’t they take their families there and stay just for one week?” In reply to a question about recent terrorist attacks, she said cricket players and police had nothing to with drone attacks. (”Flogging in Swat outrages nation,” Dawn, April 4, 2009)

On Monday, Pakistan’s Supreme Court Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, assailed the government for “not taking up the case until it became a national scandal” The New York Times reports.

The head of the Peshawar Bar Association, Abdul Latif Afridi, told the High Court, “the most fundamental rights are violated every second of every day. People are being ejected from their houses, courts are closed, 300 schools have been demolished.”

After listening to Afridi’s grim assessment, Chaudhry demanded to know what the attorney general was doing about it. Apparently, not much.

And when a Musharraf-appointed secretary of the Interior Ministry, Kemal Shah, refused to answer the chief justice when he demanded to know why the official had not been to Swat, Chaudhry ordered: “You go to Swat yourself. You must be very bright. You go yourself. We command you do it and report to us what is happening.”

While embarrassing the pack of thieves who rule the roost is well and good as far as it goes, might there be other, less seemly motives, behind the reign of terror in Swat Valley? Let’s take a look.

Looting Swat’s Resources

As is so often the case, religion serves as the handmaid of organized crime. This observation is no different in Pakistan than it is the U.S. heimat, or for that matter, aboard America’s stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East, Israel, where the dispossession of the Palestinian people by a coterie of settler loons similarly, is backed-up by the armed fist of the capitalist state.

While proclaiming the purest motives for their crimes, TTP “emirs” are enriching themselves on various illegal schemes to loot the region’s natural resources.

Toss in narcotrafficking, kidnapping and extortion and these self-proclaimed “saviors of the Nation” bear a striking resemblance to their erstwhile “adversaries,” America’s own gang of murderous Tony Sopranos. In this context, the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper, The National, revealed April 3 that,

Militants are funding a campaign of violence with profits made from the illegal mining of emeralds and felling of timber in the volatile valley of Swat in northern Pakistan.

Swat, which holds one of Asia’s two largest known deposits of high-quality emeralds, has been brought under the control of militants following a peace deal struck between the Pakistani Taliban and the government last month. (Ashfaq Yusufzai and Isambard Wilkinson, “Militants stripping Swat of resources,” The National, April 3, 2009)

According to investigative reporters on the ground in Mingora, Swat’s largest city, “the gemstones are sold as quickly as possible at rates sometimes as low as US$50 (Dh184) per carat, far below their market price.”

Citing anonymous officials too terrified to speak publicly, after looting the collective wealth of Swat’s citizens, the gems “are then smuggled to Jaipur, India, before being transported to Bangkok, Switzerland and Israel.”

As we have seen, Muslim Khan, who believes that flogging a 17-year-old girl is “merciful” told The National, “We know that all the minerals have been created by Allah, the Mighty, and the Merciful for the benefit of his creatures. We should avail the opportunity.”

While the newspaper claims that the government has not challenged “the Taliban’s control of the valuable emerald mines,” more likely bigwigs in Peshawar and Islamabad are sharing the “opportunity” afforded by their so-called “peace” by profiting handsomely from the cosy arrangement to despoil Swat of its mineral wealth.

But wait, there’s more!

Another lucrative source of income for the bandits are “Swat’s once thick forests, which are already on the verge of extinction.”

Abdul Jamil, a local timber trader who can expect swift punishment for spilling the beans, told The National: “The Taliban are mercilessly cutting the forest, applying the same [primitive] mechanisms as they do in the case of emeralds.”

One government official speaking anonymously said that “the losses suffered by forests in the last one year were more than the losses of the last two decades.”

Who, pray tell, would have the “means, motive and opportunity” to assist the TTP’s smuggling precious gems to India and Israel? Why, none other than ISI asset and organized crime kingpin, Dawood Ibrahim that’s who!

The mafia don, whose D-Company reportedly assisted Lashkar-e-Toiba’s terrorist siege in Mumbai last November, has for decades run sophisticated smuggling operations that traffic in everything from gold, nuclear materials, arms and drugs. As investigative journalist Misha Glenny points out, Ibrahim,

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

With extensive smuggling networks operating across South Asia and into the Gulf states, D-Company operatives would be the perfect facilitators for the illicit and very profitable trade in blood emeralds. Needless to say, the illegal trade in gemstones would prove a boon not only for unscrupulous local officials and gangsters but as an additional source of black funds for enterprising intelligence agencies and their terrorist proxies.

Is this one reason why, as Daily Times reported April 5, that despite the flogging outrage and murder of citizens “the government freed three more Taliban from Mingora on Saturday, as part of its peace accord with Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi. The total number of released Taliban has reached 47.”

While the United States plans new atrocities in Central and South Asia, and as the imperialists search for “moderate Taliban” with whom they can share the spoils, it would do us well to heed the impassioned words of Pakistani writer Shandana Minhas:

From an extremist movement behind heinous attacks and punishments against anyone and everyone–suicide bombings, burning music and books, banning education, impeding access to healthcare, flogging women for leaving their homes, throwing acid on girls faces, public executions without trial, archive footage of most of which exists in digital libraries across the country–an effort has been made to market it as a romanticized movement of idealistic men with guns who fight injustice when the state doesn’t and really just want to bring the world closer to God you know? (”Lashes to lashes, dust to dust,” The News, April 5, 2009)

As is so often the case, the “enemy of my enemy” more often than not is still an enemy.

“The Knesset shall be elected by general, national, direct, equal, secret and proportional elections, in accordance with the Knesset Elections Law.”

Every Israeli citizen 18 or older may vote, including Arabs who are nominally enfranchised, may serve in the parliament, but can’t govern or in any way influence policy.

Knesset seats are assigned proportionally to each party’s percentage of the total vote. A minimum total is required to win any seats. Jewish parties alone are empowered. Arab parliamentarians have no decision-making authority. They’re also constrained by the 1992 Law of Political Parties and section 7A(1) of the Basic Law that prohibits candidates from denying “the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.”

Under the law for Arabs and Jews, no candidate may challenge Israel’s fundamental Jewish character or demand equal rights, privileges, and justice. The essential Zionist identity is inviolable. The law works only for Jews. Israeli Arabs have no rights. They’re denied equal treatment and justice, even those elected to public office. Israel calls this democracy. South Africa called it apartheid. Nazi Germany called it fascism.

On January 12, the Central Elections Committee (CEC) banned two Arab parties from participating in the February elections on grounds of incitement, racism, supporting terrorist groups, and refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Two extremist right wing parties requested it: Yisrael Beiteinu and National Union. Named were United Arab List-Ta’al and Balad. All charges were bogus and hateful.

On January 21, Israel’s High Court unanimously reversed the ban after Arab politicians appealed, but this behavior shows what Arab citizens face in a country affording rights only to Jews. Nonetheless, election law states that all votes are of equal weight, without saying only Jewish ones matter, not those of Arabs or members of other faiths. Israel is a Jewish state. Others are outsiders, unwelcome, unwanted, disadvantaged, without rights, and criminally abused at the whim of the government.

Israeli Election Results

Given the number of Israeli parties, coalitions are needed to govern as no single party ever won enough Knesset seats to do it on its own.

Below are the results of the February 10 elections:

Kadima:

– 28 seats, one less than previously. Founded by Ariel Sharon and 13 other Likud members in November 2005, Kadima (meaning “forward” or “in-front”), calls itself “a broad popular movement which works to ensure the future of Israel as a Jewish democratic state.” It’s now Israel’s largest political party. Its ideology is center-right and very militant.

Likud:

– 27 seats compared to 12 in the previous Knesset. It was founded in 1973 as a right wing union of the revisionist Herut party with the Gahal and center Zionist parties. Its former prime ministers include Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu again leads it. Its ideology is hard right and like Kadima is very militant.

Yisrael Beiteinu (or Israel is Our Home):

– 15 seats, four more than the previous Knesset. It was founded in 1999 by Avigdor Lieberman, an ultranationalist and revisionist Zionist. In its January/February 2007 issue, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs said his rise “makes (the) US-Israel alliance more dangerous,” given his extremist views.

On Israeli Radio in November 2006, he called for the assassination of “militant” Palestinian leaders (meaning from Hamas and other resistance groups) and added: “They have to disappear, to go to Paradise, all of them and there can’t be any compromise.” He also wants all peace agreements (like Camp David and Oslo) abandoned, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas ignored, and earlier urged that Israeli Arabs be deported and Arab Knesset members who met with Hezbollah or Hamas executed.

Haaretz called him an “unrestrained and irresponsible man…a threat (to Israel for) his lack of restraint and his unbridled tongue (that may) bring disaster (to) the whole region.” Confrontation with Iran is one of his top priorities as well as continued illegal settlement expansions. Lieberman is hard-line and uncompromising. His party surpassed Labor to rank third in popularity.

Labor:

–13 seats compared to 19 in the previous Knesset. Founded in 1968 by the union of the Mapai, Ahdut HaAvoda, and Rafi parties. Its ideology is Zionist, neoliberal, and militant like the above three parties. Former prime ministers include David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ehud Barak. Barak is its current leader.

Shas:

– 11 seats, one less than the previous Knesset. Founded in 1984 by rabbis Ovadia Yosef and Elazar Shach, it’s an extremist right wing religious party led by Eli Yishai, Israel’s deputy prime minister in its 17th Knesset.

The National Union Party:

– 4 seats. Founded in 1999 by Rehavam Ze’evi and Avigdor Lieberman. Now led by Ya’akov Katz, it’s extremely militant, supports settlements in all the Land of Israel (as biblically defined), and advocates expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank, preferably on a voluntary basis.

Jewish Home Party:

– 3 seats. It was founded in 2008 by a merger of the National Religious Party, Moledet, and Tkuma. Modelet then broke away, and half of Tkuma rejoined National Union. Now led by Daniel Hershkovitz, it’s a moderate right wing, pro-settler, religious Zionist party.

Hadash-Democratic Front for Peace and Equality:

– 4 seats, a gain of one. Founded in 1977, it’s a Jewish-Arab party led by Mohammad Barakeh. Its ideology counters the above right wing bloc with little public support. It’s anti-Zionist, favors dismantling Israeli settlements, ending the occupation, and backs the right of return, full equality for Israeli Arabs, and a comprehensive stable peace.

New Movement Meretz:

– 3 seats compared to 5 in the previous Knesset. Founded in 1992, it’s a labor Zionist, social democratic party led by Haim Oron.

United Torah Judaism:

– 5 seats, one less than previously. Founded in 1992, its ideology is strict adherence to the laws of the Torah. Its current leader is Yaakov Litzman.

Balad:

– 3 seats compared to none in the previous Knesset. Founded in 1995, its ideology is Arab nationalism and democratic socialism. Its current leader is Jamal Zahalka.

United Arab List-Ta’al:

– 4 seats, up from none in the previous Knesset. Founded in 1996, it represents Israeli Arabs under its current leader Ibrahim Sarsur.

Israel has about 20 other minor parties. None got enough votes to win seats. The big loser was Gil. It had seven previously. Now it has none. Led by Rafi Eitan, it’s ideology is social welfare and pro-elder care.

Israel Shifts to the Right

On January 15, a Haaretz-Dialog poll showed widespread support for the Gaza war with less than 10% of Israelis calling it a “failure.” Despite mass slaughter, destruction, and human suffering, 82% of respondents believed the IDF hadn’t “gone too far.”

It played out strongly in the February elections with center to far right parties winning decisively — 104 of the 120 seats or 86.6% of the Knesset. In spite of mass global condemnation, Israelis stood firm on hard-line militarism, candidates favoring conflict over conciliation, and continued occupation of Palestine in lieu of peace.

Negotiations continue for a new government, but policy is clear whoever becomes prime minister. Under Tzipi Livni or Benjamin Netanyahu, Gaza’s siege will continue. So will West Bank oppression, conflict over peace, leaders affirming it in rhetoric and policy, and international community support will back them. Grim times persist for Palestinians, isolated and on their own after decades of occupation and abuse.

On February 11, Juan Cole’s web site headlined: “Right Wing Sweeps Israel” in an election that “sounded the death knell for the two-state solution.” One never existed, of course, because separation accelerates land annexation, and equity demands one democratic state for members of all faiths equally.

After the February 10 elections, that possibility is more remote than ever with figures like Avigdor Lieberman emerging as “kingmaker.” He rose in prominence on a racist platform against 20% of the population and now wants them “executed,” expelled, or at least forced to sign loyalty oaths.

Under a hard-line Netanyahu or Livni government, Cole sees one of three possibilities:

• a hardened apartheid giving Palestinians fewer rights than ever and no control over their land, borders, water and air; Palestinians won’t accept it, so conflict ahead is assured;
• a violent expulsion policy affecting all Palestinians, including Israeli Arabs to purify Greater Israel for Jews; Cole believes that “This option would almost certainly end the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan” because a population outflow this great would create tensions in both countries and they’d react; they and other Arab states might also ally with Iran and create a new problem for America and Israel.
• a single-state solution; impossible now but over time economic, technological, and political boycotts may force one.

As for Obama reviving the peace process and a viable two-state solution, both prospects aren’t possible given Israel’s shift to the right and the Israeli Lobby’s influence against it.

In a February 10 Nation magazine article, Neve Gordon disagrees. Headlined: “Few Peacemakers in Israel’s Knesset,” he believes it’s for “the world, and particularly the Obama administration, to respond,” unmindful of his one-sided Israeli support and reluctance to counter its policy.

Nonetheless, Gordon hopes that Obama “will make good on his promise for change and introduce a courageous initiative that will finally bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians” under a two-state solution “to resolve this bloody conflict once and for all.”

“With determination and political boldness he can do just that.” Perhaps so but he won’t. Obama is timid, not bold. He “crossed the River Jordan,” according to James Petras. His administration is filled with Zionist zealots professing unconditional support for Israel. With that team in place, Israeli interests matter. Palestinian ones don’t. Change awaits a new day in Israel and Washington, and given Tel Aviv’s likely government, it’s more in the future than ever.

Prospects are grim with Israeli Arab Knesset member (MK) Ahmed Tibi calling Livni “90% Lieberman and 10% Netanyahu.” For his part, Netanyahu is 100% hard-line, and won’t give an inch on compromise. As head of state, he promises to destroy Hamas. As 1996-1999 prime minister, his agenda was three “nos:”

• no Golan Heights withdrawal;
• no discussion, division, or relinquishing of Jerusalem, and
• no precondition negotiations with Arafat, meaning Palestinian relations depend on full compliance with Israel demands.

Today he’s more hard-line than ever, vows as prime minister to “thwart the Iranian threat,” and sabotage Tehran’s nuclear program once and for all by any means necessary. He also opposes the peace process, wants expanded illegal West Bank settlements, and, like Lieberman, called for “mass deportations of Arabs from the Territories.”

For her part, Livni is no less hard-line in vowing to overthrow Hamas if elected and finish subduing Gaza. As kingmaker, Lieberman won’t join any government that will “agree directly or indirectly to Hamas staying in power.” He opposed last month’s ceasefire that “prevented the IDF from finishing the job” and stops just short of demanding renewal.

As a result, AP reported on February 11 that Arabs see little chance for peace under any new government and fear the emergence of Israel’s far right. It cited Middle East newspapers decrying Lieberman’s rise, denouncing him as racist with Syria’s Al-Thawra saying: “The Israelis are electing war and extremism…so long as the Israel street is extremist and racist, the government would be like it.”

In Iran, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi called it “regretful” that all sides were hard-line in their campaigns. “Each party tried to show a more brutal, aggressive and pro-occupation face…” He added that Iran has no official position on the election as it doesn’t recognize any Israeli government.

Oraib al-Rentawi, head of the Al Quds Center for Political Studies, said a Livni government may market an illusory peace process, but under Netanyahu, “the mission will be far more difficult.” Others think it impossible no matter who’s prime minister given that 61 years of oppression prevented any from emerging thus far. With Israel’s far right shift, it’s less likely now than ever.

Forming A New Government

Under Israel’s Basic Law, the president (a symbolic, ceremonial post), lets one Knesset member form a new government and head it as prime minister.

The law reads as follows:

“When a new government has to be constituted, the President of the State shall, after consultation with representatives of party groups in the Knesset, assign the task of forming a Government to a Knesset Member (MK) who notified him that he is prepared to accept the task.”

Time constraints are imposed: a maximum 28 days but the President may extend it for an additional 14. If a government can’t be formed or if the Knesset rejects the one proposed, “the President may assign the task…to another Knesset Member who has notified him that he is prepared to accept the task…” No mention of a “she.”

“When the Knesset Member has formed a Government, he shall notify the President of the State and Speaker of the Knesset” within a designated period. The MK who “formed a Government shall head it.”

On February 16, Haaretz reported that Netanyahu “said earlier that he would begin forging a coalition with his party’s ‘natural partners’ as soon as possible” even though Kadima bettered Likud by one seat.

Livni said she’d only join a Netanyahu coalition on a rotating prime ministerial basis. Jockeying for position continues amid conciliatory and hostile rhetoric with one Likud MK (Silvan Shalom) accusing Livni of “shtick, tricks, (and) scheming (that could) sabotage the standard political process.” He added that election results affirmed Netanyahu as the rightful prime minister so allow him to “form a government as soon as possible.”

Prime minister Olmert mentioned post-election uncertainty and suggested that Livni join a Likud coalition “with Kadima as a central factor.” At the same time, Olmert advised Livni to head the opposition to ensure a clear victory next time.

On February 17, Labor’s Housing and Construction Minister, Isaac Herzog, told Haaretz that neither Livni or Netanyahu can form a new government that will hold. “At this rate, (he suggested) we will find ourselves in the midst of new elections within a few months” because Livni agreed to ally with Yisrael Beitenu.

Labor whip, Eitan Cabel was even more strident saying: “The scam that is Kadima has now been exposed before all. If the leftist voters who gave their ballot to Livni would have known (they’d be) in bed with Lieberman, they would have demanded their votes back.”

President Peres spoke about the complicated task he faces:

“On Wednesday (February 11) at 6PM, I will get the official results,” and will then try to form a unity government. “The nation told me to consider the election results honestly and as the law prescribes, so I will make my decision after I hear out all the parties.”

On February 15, the Jerusalem Post reported new developments in a story headlined: “Police have evidence of money laundering against Lieberman.” Quoting former National Fraud Unit’s Boaz Guttman, writer Yaakov Lappin said “Police amassed sufficient evidence to link…Lieberman” with these charges. It’s believed that he used Cypriot bank accounts under his daughter’s name – for money laundering and possible fraud and bribes. “The police source said there was no doubt about money laundering,” but that prosecution could be a long way off given complex hurdles to be overcome before charges lead to a trial.

Guttman added that fallout affecting Lieberman could be considerable since he’s now damaged goods. Forming a new government is more complicated and important positions for Lieberman are off-limits — including finance and public security.

On the same day, Tehran’s Press TV reported that “An Israeli defense strategy report for 2009 has tasked the military with making preliminary preparations for launching a war against Iran.” It calls the country “the No. 1 threat the IDF is now preparing for,” and cites Tehran as “a threat to Israel’s existence” without any evidence to prove it. There is none because Iran threatens no other country but is prepared to defend itself if targeted.

Nonetheless, “Israeli officials argue that a military attack is a legitimate option for taking out Iran’s nuclear infrastructure” even though the IAEA says it complies with NPT provisions. Israel is a nuclear outlaw non-signatory.

Earlier, Tel Aviv asked the Bush administration for bunker-buster bombs, green light permission to attack, and overflight and refueling rights over Iraq. It was rebuffed in favor of covert sabotage efforts.

For its part, Iran is seeking sophisticated Russian S-300 long-range surface-to-air missiles. They can intercept aircraft, cruise and ballistic missiles so pose a formidable defense against attack. Lexington Institute vice-president and Pentagon advisor Dan Goure said “If Tehran obtained the S-300, it would be a game-changer in military thinking for (targeting) Iran.” It might also prevent a Middle East holocaust if Washington and/or Israel seriously consider one, something even the Bush administration didn’t pursue.

On February 16, the UK Telegraph headlined: “Israel launches covert war against Iran” with writer Philip Sherwell calling it “an alternative to direct military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear programme, US intelligence sources have revealed.”

It includes planned assassinations of “top figures involved in Iran’s atomic operations” as well as “sabotage, front companies and double agents to disrupt the regime’s ‘illicit’ weapons project, the experts say.”

According to a former (unnamed) CIA officer, the idea is to slow progress without Iran knowing what’s happening. “The goal is delay, delay, delay until you can come up with some other solution” because the Obama administration may prefer non-military efforts for now.

Rumors are that Mossad was behind the mysterious 2007 “gas poisoning” death of Ardeshire Hassanpour, Iran’s top nuclear scientist at its Isfahan uranium plant. Other suspicious deaths were also reported, and according to an unnamed European intelligence official, “Israel (doesn’t hesitate) assassinating weapons scientists” or anyone else for that matter.

Israeli security and intelligence journalist, Yossi Melman, said that “Without military strikes, there is still considerable scope for disrupting and damaging the Iranian program, and this has been done with some success.” Tehran is alerted to the threat and has measures in place to counteract it.

Observers are following the rhetoric and watching as events unfold. In the meantime, jockeying and deal-making continue as Netanyahu and Livni try outmaneuvering each other to form a new government. Whoever wins, Palestinians, Israelis, and most others will be losers.

On February 19, AP reported that Lieberman endorsed Netanyahu, “all but guaranteeing that (he’ll) be the country’s next leader.” Haaretz went further saying that “65 MKs announced (for) Netanyahu (so) it appears that his path to the premiership is (now) paved.” Livni called it “the foundation…for an extreme right-wing government.” Lieberman wants Kadima in it. Likud said it would try to forge a broad coalition, and Peres may shortly announce Netanyahu will lead it.

The UK Telegraph’s economics editor Edmund Conway sums it up like this:

A “second wave” of countries will fall victim to the economic crisis and face being bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, its chief warned at the G7 summit in Rome. . . . But with some countries’ economies effectively dwarfed by the size of their banking sector and its financial liabilities, there are fears they could fall victim to balance of payments and currency crises, much as Iceland did before receiving emergency assistance from the IMF last year.

Foreign capital is fleeing at an alarming rate. Nearly two-thirds gone in matter of months. Deflation is pushing down asset prices, increasing unemployment, and compounding the debt-burden of financial institutions. It’s the same everywhere. The economies are being hollowed out and stripped of capital. Ukraine is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary have all slipped into a low-grade depression. The countries that followed Washington’s economic regimen have suffered the most. They bet that debt-fueled growth and exports would lead to prosperity. That dream has been shattered. They haven’t developed their consumer markets, so demand is weak. Capital is scarce and businesses are being forced to deleverage to avoid default. All of Eastern Europe has gotten a margin call. They need extra funds to cover the falling value of their equity. They need a lifeline from the IMF or their economies will continue to crumble.

The UK Telegraph’s economics correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has written a series of articles about Eastern Europe. In “Failure to Save East Europe Will Lead to Worldwide Meltdown” he says:

“Austria’s finance minister Josef Pröll made frantic efforts last week to put together a €150bn rescue for the ex-Soviet bloc. Well he might. His banks have lent €230bn to the region, equal to 70pc of Austria’s GDP.

“A failure rate of 10pc would lead to the collapse of the Austrian financial sector,” reported Der Standard in Vienna. Unfortunately, that is about to happen.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) says bad debts will top 10pc and may reach 20pc . . . .

Stephen Jen, currency chief at Morgan Stanley, said Eastern Europe has borrowed $1.7 trillion abroad, much on short-term maturities. It must repay — or roll over — $400bn this year, equal to a third of the region’s GDP. Good luck. The credit window has slammed shut.

Almost all East bloc debts are owed to West Europe, especially Austrian, Swedish, Greek, Italian, and Belgian banks. Plus, Europeans account for an astonishing 74pc of the entire $4.9 trillion portfolio of loans to emerging markets. They are five times more exposed to this latest bust than American or Japanese banks, and they are 50pc more leveraged (IMF data).

An economic crisis is quickly turning into a political crisis. Riots have broken out in capitals across Eastern Europe. Mr. Geithner had better be paying attention. The prospects for political upheaval are growing. Public anxiety can spill out onto the streets at a moments notice. Governments must act quickly and with resolve. These countries need hard currency and guarantees of support. If they don’t get help, the simmering public fury will turn into something much more lethal.

UK Telegraph’s economics correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

“Global banks have so far written down half the $2,200bn losses estimated by the IMF. On top of this, EU banks have $1,600bn of exposure to Eastern Europe — increasingly viewed as Europe’s subprime debacle, and EU corporate debts are 95pc of GDP compared to 50pc in the US, a mounting concern as default rates surge.

“It is essential that government support through asset relief should not be on a scale that raises concern about over-indebtedness or financing problems. Such considerations are particularly important in the current context of widening budget deficits, rising public debt levels and challenges in sovereign bond issuance.”

It’s the same wherever banks merged their commercial and investment branches. Debt has skyrocketed to unsustainable levels destabilizing the entire economy. The banks have been operating like hedge funds, concealing their activities on off-balance sheets operations and maximizing their leverage through opaque debt-instruments. Now the global economy is caught in the downdraft of a collapsing speculative bubble. East Europe has been hit hard, but it’s just the first of many bowling pins that will fall. All of Europe has been infected by the same virus that originated on Wall Street. Monday’s New York Times summarizes developments in the EU:

Europe sank even deeper into recession than the United States in the closing months of last year, according to figures published Friday . . . The economy of the 16 countries sharing the euro currency declined by 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter, (an annualized drop of roughly 6 percent) according to the European Union’s statistics office. That is even worse than the 1 percent decline in the United States economy during that period, compared with the previous quarter.

Today’s data wipes out any illusion that the euro zone is getting off lightly in this global downturn,” said Jörg Radeke, an economist at the Center for Economics and Business Research in London. (“Europe Slump Deeper than Expected”)

The “liquidationists” would like to see governments cut off the flow of funds to ailing financial institutions and let them fail by themselves. It’s Darwinian madness, like waiting out a heart attack on the kitchen floor instead of rushing to the hospital for emergency care. The global economy is decelerating at the fastest pace on record. 40 percent of global wealth has been wiped out. The banking system is insolvent, unemployment is soaring, tax revenues are falling, the markets are in shock, housing is crashing, deficits are soaring, and consumer confidence is at its lowest point in history. This is no time to cling to half-baked ideology. The global economy is undergoing a massive system-wide contraction that could spin out of control and plunge us into another world war. Political leaders need to grasp the urgency of the moment and keep the vehicle from careening into the ditch.

The article is about a book written by non-anarchists, specifically a chapter written by Alan Bock, a libertarian. Berlet claims editors Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair in their Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland book encourage an alliance between left- and right-wing activists. Neither of these people are anarchists.

Berlet spends most of his article attacking the chapter in the book written by Alan Bock. What does Bock’s chapter have to do with “brownshirt anarchism”? Absolutely nothing. Berlet primarily counters the perspective and challenges a few “facts” Bock presents in the chapter regarding Ruby Ridge and the Weaver family. The entire chapter has absolutely zilch to do with anarchism.

Where are Berlet’s “brownshirt anarchists”? They are nowhere to be seen in this article. Regarding the second half of the title, it’s hard to tell who Z Magazine’s editors believe is engaging in “bogus journalism,” given how the article has nothing to do with the title. Is Z referring to the “pedestrian writing” found in a few of the chapters to Red State Rebels or are they referring to how Berlet constructed his article, in which the opening two paragraphs have no relation to the rest of the article?

Perhaps Z Magazine’s editors were expecting Berlet to submit an article similar to the one by Spencer Sunshine that ran in the winter 2008 issue of Public Eye Magazine, a publication of Somerville, Mass.-based Political Research Associates where Berlet serves as a senior analyst. If so, then perhaps Z Magazine’s editors forgot to change the placeholder headline when the article arrived and it wasn’t about “brownshirts” or “anarchism.”

Sunshine’s article, titled “Rebranding Fascism: National-Anarchists,” chronicles the small phenomenon of neo-fascist groups adopting selected symbols, slogans and stances of left anarchists. In his own article, Berlet appears to be headed down the same path as Sunshine but then gets sidetracked in the third paragraph by reliving the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho between the Weaver family and federal police agents.

The title of Berlet’s piece is a misrepresentation of what’s in the article and also serves to discredit anarchists by tying them with fascists. Genuine anarchists oppose nationalism and explicitly reject so-called “national anarchists” as frauds. And the article itself does a disservice to Frank and St. Clair by suggesting they are encouraging alliances between left-wing activists and fascists.

Published in September 2008, the 248-page document though unclassified, is restricted “to U.S. Government agencies and their contractors only to protect technical or operational information from automatic dissemination under the International Exchange Program or by other means.” The Department of the Army urges recipients to “destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document.” Wikileaks has guaranteed that the disappearance of this critical primary source into the bowels of the Pentagon will not occur.

Special Warfare’s Nazi Provenance

Since the end of World War II, the United States has acted through proxies either to defeat leftist insurgencies or to subvert “hostile” governments, e.g. those states viewed by Washington and the multinational corporations they serve as ideological competitors.

Historically, U.S. unconventional warfare (UW) doctrine was derived from Nazi experiences in countering “partisan warfare” across Europe during World War II. As analyst and scholar Michael McClintock detailed in his essential study on the topic,

American special warfare doctrine would draw considerably on Wehrmacht and SS methods of terrorizing civilian populations and, perhaps more importantly, of co-opting local factions to combat partisan resistance. The Department of the Army’s A Study of Special and Subversive Operations (November 1947) was an early assessment of the lessons learned from World War II in the context of Cold War imperatives. (Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Counterterrorism, 1940-1990, New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, p. 59)

But the United States did more than translate captured Wehrmacht and SS documents: they recruited many Waffen SS veterans, often with an assist from high Vatican officials. Tens of thousands of war criminals were spirited out of Europe along “ratlines” into U.S. hands for clandestine war against the new enemy: the Soviet Union and the international left.

Pathological killers such as SS veteran Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, was instrumental when the CIA and the Argentine death-squad generals launched their 1980 “cocaine coup” in Bolivia. Barbie, along with operatives linked to the CIA, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and preexisting Nazi networks, “reorganized” Bolivia’s intelligence services to reflect the Southern Cone’s “changing realities.” (For background, see Robert Parry’s excellent series, Dark Side of Rev. Moon, The Consortium for Independent Journalism)

Even when the “competition” was peaceful and confined to the political-economic spheres, once the U.S. intervened, violence, civil war and chaos followed. This scenario was played out in Chile during the 1970s, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and El Salvador throughout the 1980s, in Yugoslavia and the Balkans generally during the 1990s, today in Bolivia and Venezuela and on a planetary scale under the rubric of the “global war on terrorism” (GWOT). The lesson for those who buck the global hegemon? U.S. political subversion and state terror will wreck havoc and halt independent development in its tracks.

And when the global Godfather’s military forces directly intervene? Although the U.S. was defeated in Southeast Asia, target countries such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were destroyed by the United States in the process. Devastated economically and socially, decades later these nations have yet to fully recover from the depredations wrought by their American “liberators.” However, the U.S. military did learn certain unique skills, not least of which was the application of selective violence against the communist National Liberation Front’s civilian infrastructure.

The Phoenix Program, meticulously analyzed in researcher Douglas Valentine’s definitive account, was launched in 1967 by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces as a means to win “hearts and minds.” But from its inception, Phoenix operators worked in tandem with drug-linked South Vietnamese and Laotian “allies” and morphed into an assassination and torture program that killed thousands. Long after the U.S. withdrew from Southeast Asia, lessons learned through Phoenix and related programs such as Condor and Gladio, were “refined” during the 1970s-1980s in Afghanistan, Italy, Turkey and Central America, and now constitute the bedrock on which the Pentagon’s unconventional warfare doctrine operates today.

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. power in proxy states was exercised through repressive police, intelligence agencies and by far-right civilian allies (referred to as “foreign internal defense,” FID). Such forces, trained and funded by the U.S., combined a neofascist political outlook with organized criminal activities generally, though certainly not limited to, the international narcotics trade.

NATO’s infamous “stay-behind” Operation Gladio networks in Italy and Turkey for example, worked directly with international narcotics syndicates and pro-fascist political parties such as the Italian Avanguardia Nazionale (National Vanguard) founded by the terrorist drug trafficker Stefano delle Chiaie and the Turkish Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (National Action Party, MHP) and the drug-linked terror gang, the Grey Wolves, founded by Alparslan Türkeş, a German sympathizer during World War II.

With links to those nations’ intelligence services, the CIA and the Pentagon, these organizations waged a relentless war against the left through terrorist bombings, murders and assassinations in a bid to destabilize their governments and spark a full-fledged military takeover. Along with the CIA, the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) have been instrumental in organizing and waging unconventional warfare with the express purpose of maintaining the economic-political status quo in target countries.

As long-time readers of Antifascist Calling are aware, among the more critical issues explored here are those relating to the intersection of corporate and military power and how those interactions play out on the contemporary political plane to subvert democracy and movements for social justice.

Indeed, reference is frequently made to what I have identified, following Peter Dale Scott and other analysts, as the corporatist deep state: that is, the objective interface amongst political elites, multinational corporations, the military, intelligence agencies and organized crime. Unlike Scott however, I contend these linkages do not “transcend” the left-right continuum, but rather are part and parcel of Washington’s decades-long war against the left, social justice movements generally and in particular, democratic socialist movements from below.

As we will see in my analysis of FM 3-05.130, USSOCOM make these links explicit, arguing that “UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces.”

As I averred, proxy forces, often aligned with far-right groups and organized crime-linked assets (for the most part interchangeable players) are the preferred “irregular forces” employed by Washington. USSOCOM states that this definition “is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW” and goes on to cite its “support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power, such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan.” It doesn’t get any more explicit than this!

Ideologically Coherent

The authors of FM 3-05.130, far from being militarist troglodytes are knowledgeable and erudite, presenting a broad and ideologically coherent narrative that is both informative and historically intriguing in its transparency and methodological purpose. In other words, unlike their political masters, they don’t pull any punches.

Right up front they inform the reader that UW establishes a “litmus test” which is warfare conducted “by, with or through surrogates” and that their preferred assets are irregular forces:

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

While “conventional warfare” is viewed as a conflict between states, Irregular Warfare (IW) and UW according to FM 3-05.130 is “about people not platforms.” Irregular and unconventional warfare “does not depend on military prowess alone.”

It also relies on the understanding of such social dynamics as tribal politics, social networks, religious influences, and cultural mores. Although IW is a violent struggle, not all participating irregulars or irregular forces are necessarily armed. People, more so than weaponry, platforms, and advanced technology, will be the key to success in IW. Successful IW relies on building relationships and partnerships at the local level. It takes patient, persistent, and culturally savvy people within the joint force to execute IW. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-5)

Indeed, FM 3-05.130 explicitly states that its “strategic purpose [is] to gain or maintain control or influence over the population and to support that population through political, psychological, and economic methods.” While both IW and UW seek to influence “relevant populations,” UW in contrast to IW, “is always conducted by, with, or through irregular forces.” In other words, local surrogates drawn from relevant far-right and/or organized crime-linked assets are the means of eliciting “influence” over “relevant populations.”

In Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s, “irregular forces” deployed during U.S./NATO destabilization operations in the former Yugoslavia included elements of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable intelligence assets, e.g. al-Qaeda, which have been linked to the CIA, Britain’s MI6, Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as well as long-established drug, arms and human trafficking networks aligned with the Albanian and Turkish Mafias. Indeed, “irregular forces” such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) demonstrated all of these relationships in spades.

According to FM 3-05.130, the constituent elements of contemporary IW theory include: Insurgency; COIN (counterinsurgency); UW; Terrorism; CT (counterterrorism); FID (foreign internal defense); Stability, security, transition, and reconstruction (SSTR) operations; Strategic communication (SC); PSYOP; Civil-military operations (CMO); Information operations (IO); Intelligence and counterintelligence (CI) activities; Transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms dealing, and illegal financial transactions that support or sustain IW; and Law enforcement activities focused on countering irregular adversaries. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-5)

Its but a short step as far as it goes, from citing the elements of UW to deploying the most dubious players as strategic assets in planetary-wide U.S. destabilization operations.

The Media’s Role

Explicitly stated is the media’s role in advancing the goals of United States national power. As recent exposés in The New York Times and elsewhere have documented, “message force multipliers” such as retired Pentagon officials and former high-ranking officers, often linked to corporate defense firms that rely heavily on Pentagon largesse, have leveraged their expertise and conducted illegal domestic psychological operations (PSYOPS) and information warfare, with the complicity and full knowledge of the giant media firms.

It is important for the official agencies of government, including the armed forces, to recognize the fundamental role of the media as a conduit of information. The USG uses SC to provide top-down guidance for using the informational instrument of national power through coordinated information, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the other instruments of national power. The armed forces support SC themes and messages through IO, public affairs (PA), and defense support to public diplomacy (DSPD). The armed forces must assure media access consistent with classification requirements, operations security, legal restrictions, and individual privacy. The armed forces must also provide timely and accurate information to the public. Success in military operations depends on acquiring and integrating essential information and denying it to the adversary. The armed forces are responsible for conducting IO, protecting what should not be disclosed, and aggressively attacking adversary information systems. IO may involve complex legal and policy issues that require approval, review, and coordination at the national level. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-2)

Indeed, as the authors aver, since UW consists of operations conducted “by, with or through irregular forces,” engagement with the “human terrain” is “fundamentally a conflict of ideas”! In a nutshell, the “human terrain” explicitly includes the American public who are also the targets of Pentagon propagandistic “information operations.” This is stated explicitly:

By contrast, USG-controlled specific instruments of informational power, while narrower in scope, can achieve specific and measurable results useful to prosecuting UW. ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] can work with DOS [Department of State] counterparts to identify and engage select TAs [target audiences] that are able to influence behavior within a UWOA [unconventional warfare operating area]. Such TAs may be inside the UWOA itself or outside but able to influence the UWOA. The USG can then subject these TAs, directly or indirectly, to a DOS public diplomacy (PD) campaign coordinated to support the UW effort. Similarly, since UW may be a long-duration or politically sensitive effort, ARSOF and its DOS partner, the Bureau of Public Affairs, can craft a PA campaign intended to keep the U.S. domestic audience informed of the truth in a manner supportive of USG goals and the effective prosecution of UW. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-3)

Economic Subversion

For the authors of FM 3-05.130, “properly integrated manipulation of economic power can and should be a component of UW.” Never mind that such “manipulation” can and did result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings in Iraq prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation as well as in a score of other nations that have defied the U.S.

The cases of Chile and Nicaragua are instructive in this regard, where the disgraced president, Richard Nixon, vowed to “make the economy scream,” prior to the 1973 coup, or the crippling sanctions and economic embargo imposed on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Various sanctions regimes unambiguously “can build and sustain international coalitions waging or supporting U.S. UW campaigns.” A similar methodology is being applied today against Iran as “punishment” for its legal development of civilian nuclear power.

Like all other instruments of U.S. national power, the use and effects of economic “weapons” are interrelated and they must be coordinated carefully. Once again, ARSOF must work carefully with the DOS and intelligence community (IC) to determine which elements of the human terrain in the UWOA are most susceptible to economic engagement and what second- and third-order effects are likely from such engagement. The United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) placement abroad and its mission to engage human groups provide one channel for leveraging economic incentives. The DOC’s can similarly leverage its routine influence with U.S. corporations active abroad. Moreover, the IO effects of economic promises kept (or ignored) can prove critical to the legitimacy of U.S. UW efforts. UW practitioners must plan for these effects. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-7)

Indeed, ARSOF plans for waging UW take an integrated approach and assert that they “can and should exploit the active and analytical capabilities existing in the financial instruments of U.S. power.” The application of financial warfare however, including the “persuasive influence” of state and nonstate “actors” regarding the availability and terms “of loans, grants, or other financial assistance” is predicated on towing the U.S. line. The authors aver that “such application of financial power must be part of a circumspect, integrated, and consistent UW plan.” In other words, threats, bribery and economic subversion generally can work wonders in getting the attention of recalcitrant states not “on board” with the U.S.

Narcotrafficking Networks and the “Global War on Terror”

For decades, investigative journalists, researchers and analysts have noted the symbiotic relationship amongst international narcotrafficking syndicates, neofascist political groups, U.S. intelligence agencies and U.S. Special Forces in the war against leftist adversaries.

Dozens of books and hundreds of articles by journalists and writers such as Alfred W. McCoy, Peter Dale Scott, Henrik Krüger, Robert Parry, Gary Webb, Jonathan Marshall, Douglas Valentine, Daniel Hopsicker, Bill Conroy as well as exposés by former DEA investigators such as Michael Levine and Celerino Castillo III, have documented the long and bloody history of U.S. complicity in the global drugs trade.

While the United States has pumped billions of dollars into so-called drug eradication programs in target countries such as Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Afghanistan and Mexico through ill-conceived projects such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, also know as Plan Mexico, recent reports, most notably by The Narco News Bulletin, have documented the close interrelationships amongst narcotraffickers, rightist extremists, political elites and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Indeed, investigative journalist Bill Conroy recently documented how a U.S. trained and equipped special operations group within the Mexican army (the Zetas) “is now assisting the Mexican military in its narco-trafficking operations along the border.”

None of this however, phases the authors of Unconventional Warfare. And why should it. As they themselves describe the doctrine, unconventional warfare is “conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces,” the next logical step in the equation is the utilization of transnational criminal networks to advance U.S. national power. The section, “Law Enforcement Instrument of United States National Power and Unconventional Warfare,” states this explicitly: no tinfoil hat needed here!

Actors engaged in supporting elements in the UWOA may rely on criminal activities, such as smuggling, narcotics, or human trafficking. Political and military adversaries in the UWOA will exhibit the same sensitivity to official exposure and engagement because criminal entities routinely seek to avoid law enforcement. Sometimes, political and military adversaries are simultaneously criminal adversaries, which ARSOF UW planners must consider a threat. At other times, the methods and networks of real or perceived criminal entities can be useful as supporting elements of a U.S.-sponsored UW effort. In either case, ARSOF understand the importance of coordinating military intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) for specific UW campaigns with the routine intelligence activities conducted by U.S. law enforcement agencies. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-7)

During subversive operations by U.S. ARSOF soldiers in target areas, indigenous networks, many of whom are linked to far-right and narcotrafficking groups (Nicaragua, Bosnia, Kosovo), including “former” allies such as al-Qaeda, are referred to as “The Underground” and “The Auxiliary” in FM 3-05.130. Details however, are few and far between and the authors state unambiguously:

There is more SF participation in developing and advising underground [and auxiliary] elements than is widely understood or acknowledged. Most such participation is classified and inappropriate for inclusion in this manual. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 5-5)

Preparing the ground for U.S. attacks and/or subversive operations by proxy forces aligned with American goals are a key component of UW theory. Whether a population is “on-board” with U.S. geostrategic goals or the tactical modalities employed in such campaigns is irrelevant to the new cold warriors of the GWOT. When “persuasion” fails the muscle moves in to get the attention on the “natives.”

Organization of the larger indigenous population from which the irregular forces are drawn–the mass base–must likewise be conducted primarily by the irregular organization itself under indirect guidance of SF. The primary value of the mass base to UW operations is less a matter of formal organization than of marshaling population groups to act in specific ways that support the overall UW campaign. The mass base, or general population and society at large, is recognized as an operational rather than a structural effort for ARSOF in UW. Elements of the mass base are divided into three distinct groups in relation to the cause or movement–pro, anti/con, and those who are uncommitted, undecided, or ambivalent. ARSOF, the underground, and the auxiliary then conduct irregular activities to influence or leverage these groups. These groups may be witting or unwitting of the UW nature of the operations or activities in which they are utilized. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 5-5)

In Colombia for example, U.S. “counterdrug” assistance to the corrupt Uribe government flowed directly to the narcotrafficking far-right death squad, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC. Though designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department, the Uribe government’s military high command, directly advised by the Pentagon, funneled weapons and intelligence that was used by the narcofascists to murder union organizers, often after payment by U.S. multinational corporations such as Chiquita Brands International, of anyone the group identified as a “guerrilla.”

In ARSOF parlance, AUC “influence”–dragging unsuspecting citizens off a bus and beheading them in front of their children, for example–is what is meant when corporate- or drug-linked death squads “conduct irregular activities” to “leverage these groups.” But the international community has another term to describe these activities: state terrorism.

In 2004, as part of broad U.S. efforts to unseat Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan authorities arrested some 100 AUC fighters who were planning to attack specially-selected targets in Caracas. According to published reports, several high-ranking American and Colombian military officers were implicated in the operation.

The parapolitical scandal which continues to rock Bogotá, revealed high-level involvement by Colombia’s political and military elite with the narcofascist AUC. But the scandal also revealed the involvement of the U.S. 7th Special Forces Group and the 1st Psychological Operations Battalion in directly training and advising Colombian military units responsible for the worst human rights abuses.

Numerous reports have emerged that detail these linkages, including the 2007 disclosure by the National Security Archive that Colombian Army commander General Mario Montoya “engaged in a joint operation with a Medellín-based paramilitary group. ‘Operation Orion’ was part of a larger military offensive in the city during 2002-03 to attack urban guerrilla networks. The sweep resulted in at least 14 deaths and dozens of disappearances. The classified intelligence report confirmed ‘information provided by a proven source,’ according to comments from the U.S. defense attaché included in the document.”

This is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however.

In Afghanistan, the world’s number one producer and processor of opium and its finished “product” heroin, bound for European and U.S. markets, drug trafficking according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) in their 2008 World Drug Report, is “out of control.” According to UNDOC, drug money is used as “a lubricant for corruption, and a source of terrorist financing: in turn, corrupt officials and terrorists make drug production and trafficking easier.”

Indeed, since the 2001 U.S. invasion and occupation, opium production has skyrocketed some 1,000% and accounts for a large percentage of the country’s gross domestic product. Tellingly, some of the staunchest U.S. allies in the area are directly tied to international narcotics organizations. According to UNDOC, the global increase in opium production “was almost entirely due to the 17% expansion of cultivation in Afghanistan, which is now 193,000 ha [hectares]” reaching 8,700 metric tons in 2007, accounting for a staggering 92% of global opium production!

Despite these horrendous statistics, the authors of FM 3-05.130 can asset that “the methods and networks of real or perceived criminal entities can be useful”! Indeed they can, as a seemingly limitless source of black funds earmarked for U.S. planetary subversion in the interest of expanding American corporate power.

According to a June 2008 report by The Times, after last year’s bumper crop sent the price of opium spiraling downwards, the Taliban and U.S.-connected drug lords linked to Hamid Karzai’s government, are stockpiling vast quantities of opium in order to induce a rise in world prices. And Time Magazine reported in October that the value of hoarded opium may be as much as $3.2 billion.

Celebrated by the Pentagon and the U.S. media as a “splendid victory,” the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan quickly spiraled out of control and the country now faces a resurgent Taliban, a new base of operations for al-Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan and evidence of Pakistani ISI involvement in aiding the fundamentalist insurgents and the global drugs trade. But for American unconventional warriors, a full accounting of war crimes that ARSOF supervised and their Northern Alliance “allies” carried out have yet to be answered.

As Peter Dale Scott noted in 2002,

It’s a bitter irony: The largely successful U.S. campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan is resulting in an increase of funds for terrorists around the globe.

It is true, as President Bush has insisted, that global terrorism is financed by the flow of illicit drugs. Yet by installing and rewarding a coalition of drug-financed warlords in Kabul, the United States has itself helped restore the flow of Afghan heroin to terrorist groups, from the Balkans and Chechnya to Tajikistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. (”Poppy Paradox: U.S. War in Afghanistan Boosts Terror Funds,” Dissident Voice, August 3, 2002)

Indeed, among the staunchest U.S. allies in the region, characters such as Hazrat Ali and Gul Agha, “have been ‘bought off’ with millions in deals brokered by U.S. and British intelligence.” But while America was happy to endorse a drug-linked status quo that relied on its so-called “warlord strategy” to “stabilize” Afghanistan, part of the blowback from these dubious alliances included allowing bin Laden to escape into Pakistan in 2001 after the “battle” of Tora Bora.

But for Pentagon proponents of unconventional warfare, the “price is always right” when it comes to strategic and tactical alliances with narcotraffickers and international terrorists. After all, since “UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces,” everything is permitted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Destabilization and Covert Ops in South Asia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mumbai: “Round Up the Usual Suspects!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Normally such a move would provoke all the derision this writer can muster. Live at Shea is an exception, however, for two reasons. One: this is The Clash! This is the band that politicized punk rock from its very inception, and brought rebellion back to rock ‘n’ roll in a way that still inspires to this very day.

Two: the album is a glimpse into a period in the band’s history that was simultaneously exalting and tragic — between things begun and ended, between the power of great music and ideas and the power of right-wing fear and reaction.

The Clash’s decision to open up for the Who on the mega-stars’ “farewell” tour of American stadiums in the fall of ‘82 was itself an ideological quandary. The Clash was the biggest they had ever been, and were arguably one of the biggest groups in the world. Combat Rock was proving to be their most successful release to date, and was fast on its way to platinum status.

It seemed that the band’s incendiary message was reaching more people than ever before. For a group poised to take over the world, a stadium tour seemed the logical next step. For a group that had always taken an unflinching radical stance, though, stadium tours represented all that was wrong with rock ‘n’ roll. Everything from the flashy stage shows to the overpriced tickets smacked of how capitalism was ruining music.

Furthermore, as biographer Pat Gilbert puts it, “The group had always preferred the intimacy of medium-size venues. It was this philosophy of being able to see and communicate with their audience that lay behind their week-long residencies at modest venues . . .” In other words, stadiums were where all the democracy and solidarity of music was crushed by piles of cash and elitism.

The Clash justified the move by figuring (and rightly so) that the tour was a way to reach even more people. Sound logic, no doubt. The America that The Clash was returning to had entered a new and scary era. The rightward drift of official politics in the US mirrored the same in Britain. A year and a half into his presidency, Reagan had already crushed the air traffic controllers’ strike and signaled that he had more of the same in store for women, Blacks, and anyone who dared defy the new Washington consensus.

Combat Rock was filled with impassioned calls-to-arms, urging young people to dig their heels in and resist the upcoming onslaught. In an interview years later, Joe Strummer would recall his thoughts on the advent of Reagan/Thatcher: “[When] Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of England and Ronald Reagan became President of the U.S. . . . it was hard to tell who would be worse, but we knew that a tremendous struggle was ahead . . . their tendencies leaned to the far-right if not fascism.”

* * * * *

When The Clash took the stage at Shea on October 13th, rain was coming down in sheets. The prospect of playing in front of 50,000 screaming fans was indeed daunting. Bass player Paul Simonon recalls that “it felt a bit like miming because there were so many people there.”

Yet listening to the album today, one would never guess that the group was so nervous. Footage of the gig shot by documentarian Don Letts shows the four members throwing themselves around the massive stage with the same swagger and confidence that they brought to the countless club dates they had performed in previous years. Strummer even jokes with the audience at one point: “Will you stop talking at the back, please? It’s too loud. It’s putting us off the song, here! We’re trying to concentrate so stop yakking!”

The moments of raw power and vitality are numerous on Live at Shea. The opening notes of “London Calling” are punched out so forcefully they could shatter concrete. “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” possesses a rolling raucousness that can’t even be heard in the studio recording. And “Career Opportunities” — the only song from their first album played that night — carries all the immediacy it had when it was first performed by four unemployed punks in North London five years previously.

By the time the group finish off their set with a blistering version of “I Fought the Law,” they are holding the audience in the palm of their hand.

And yet, it’s also apparent that this is a band not too far from disintegration. Just prior to the tour the group had sacked drummer Topper Headon due to his growing heroin addiction, thus putting an end to the “classic” Clash lineup. Terry Chimes, drummer for The Clash on their first album, had been brought in as a last minute replacement.

The sudden change in personnel is evident on some tracks. While Headon had a background in myriad musical styles, Chimes was much more of a straight rock drummer. While he pulls-off the rap and dub beats during the group’s medley of “Magnificent Seven” and “Armagideon Time,” his playing is hollow and often sluggish.

Other more prominent schisms within the group are evident too. Those familiar with the group’s version of Eddy Grant’s “Police On My Back” will notice a section of the song when Mick Jones’ lead guitar part is strangely missing. The story here is that Strummer had walked up to Jones and physically grabbed the neck of his guitar to prevent him from playing.

The rift between Jones and the rest of the group had been growing for quite some time. He had disagreed with bringing original manager Bernie Rhodes back on board. He claims to have merely “gone along” with Topper’s sacking. And his original mix of Combat Rock had been shelved in favor of bringing Glynn Johns in to produce the final version.

Chimes was privy to how this bitterness was affecting the daily workings of The Clash: “By then Joe and Mick obviously had a difference of opinions on a range of things . . . They had devised a system where they didn’t have to confront each other all the time — there was an avoidance going on, which covered up the fact there were deeper issues there.”

* * * * *

Less than a year after the concert at Shea, Jones was kicked out of The Clash. That a founding member whose songwriting and virtuosity on the guitar had been an indispensable part of the group could be kicked out was evidence that their existence had become increasingly rudderless.

Combat Rock’s defiant protest hadn’t been enough to stave off the consolidation of Reagan/Thatcherism. As the heated struggles of the ’70s were pushed into bitter defeat, anyone with The Clash’s firebrand left-wing politics was forced into either abject obscurity or milquetoast compromise.

Compromise was never something The Clash was good at, and they continued to soldier on sans Jones. But with the movements that had long inspired The Clash — from the anti-racist forces to the Sandinistas — fighting for their very survival, the ground on which they stood became shakier by the day. It didn’t take long for one of rock’s most relevant groups to become a caricature, a music industry parody of what a “left-wing” band is supposed to look like.

“The worst moment was realizing that there was no way forward,” said Strummer some years later, “like the gap between rhetoric and the actuality. For example, talking about all the issues that The Clash raised and what your daily life would have been like if we’d have stayed together. . . You know, you’d never really have a life that would be real and yet you’d be expected to say something real about life to real people and make some real sense.”

Not long after the release of their universally panned follow-up to Combat Rock, the group would call it a day. The concert at Shea would simultaneously be their apex and the beginning of the end for The Clash.

One can’t help but listen to Live at Shea Stadium without remembering Strummer’s quip that “rock ‘n’ roll is played on enemy ground.” If a group like the Clash can walk into the belly of the beast and bring the same verve and immediacy that they delivered to anyone who ever listened to them is a testament to the power of truly great music. Knowing that they would be among the many brilliant political acts that imploded in the Reagan ‘80s makes these fleeting and final moments of greatness all the more prescient.

On October 13, communities participating in the indigenous protest blocked a portion of the Pan American Highway that connects the cities of Popayán and Santander de Quilichao, in the department of Cauca, in an act of civil disobedience meant to force the government to meet with them to discuss some of their demands. Instead of talks, what resulted was serious confrontations between special police units and the assembled communities.

These unfolding developments come just days after two other Nasa Indians — Nicolás Valencia Lemus and Celestino Rivera — were assassinated by unidentified gunmen early Sunday morning, a few hours before the start of the mobilization. Eyewitnesses say the assassins of Lemus and Rivera were members of the Aguilas Negras, or Black Eagles, one of the newly-formed paramilitary groups that have emerged throughout Colombia in recent months. Their killings bring the total number of indigenous activists murdered in the last three weeks throughout Colombia to 11.

The 39-year-old Lemus, the brother of two well-known Nasa activists, was driving his car on the road from the town of El Palo to the indigenous reserve of Toribio, in the mountainous region of northern Cauca. His wife and son accompanied him. According to eyewitnesses, Lemus was ordered to stop and get out of his car by two hooded gunmen, who proceeded to drill him with bullets in front of his family. The assassins, before leaving the site of the attack, wrote “Aguilas Negras” on the window of Valencia Lemus’ vehicle. Meanwhile, the current governor of Cauca, Guillermo Alberto Gonzalez, denies there are any new paramilitary groups operating in the department. Despite his denials, it appears that a “dirty war” against the indigenous and popular movement in Colombia is well underway, and it is emanating from many different sources.

On October 11, the Council of Chiefs of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) received a call from the office of Cauca’s governor, informing them of intelligence reports that provide evidence that the Teófilo Forero column of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) intended to assassinate the well-known indigenous leader and member of the CRIC’s Council of Chiefs, Feliciano Valencia. On Friday, the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN) received a faxed letter from the FARC warning of a campaign of extermination against alleged government collaborators within the indigenous cabildos of Toribio and Jambaló.

It is no coincidence that while government officials repeatedly accuse the indigenous leadership of being manipulated by FARC guerrillas in their protests and mobilizations, the FARC is quick to return the favor, unilaterally targeting so-called sapos, or collaborators, from within the indigenous communities. For the indigenous communities, the results are tragically the same, despite years of declaring their autonomy from all armed actors in the conflict.

Indeed, since receiving a seven-page email threat from a group that described itself as Angry Peasants of Cauca (CEC) on August 11, five indigenous people in Nariño, three in Caldas, and now three in Cauca have been assassinated. The governor of the indigenous cabildo of Canoas, also in Cauca, was saved only by the courageous act of a member of his community, who refused to provide details of his whereabouts to armed gunmen who were looking for him two weeks ago. It should be pointed out that indigenous activists are not the only victims of this latest wave of political violence. Along with the above-mentioned murders, an Afro-Colombian leader in Tumaco, two non-indigenous peasant activists in Cauca, and Olga Luz Vergara, a woman’s rights leader from the organization Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres in Medellín, have also been assassinated in the last month.

Before the October 12 mobilization began, indigenous leaders both in Cauca and on the national level warned about the potential for a repressive backlash against the indigenous movement on the part of the state security forces, as well as other armed actors in their territory. That fact that President Uribe declared a “state of internal commotion” on the eve of the protests gave the indigenous leadership considerable reason to be alarmed, despite the president’s assurances that the extraordinary measure was invoked to address the growing crisis in the judicial system, crippled by a four-week strike of judicial workers throughout the country.

As stipulated in the 1991 Constitution, the “state of internal commotion,” allows the president to govern without the oversight of the legislature, giving the president unprecedented powers, particularly in the area of security and “public order.” In announcing his decision to invoke this measure, Uribe pointed to the 2,600 “delinquents” who have been released as a result of the 42-day judicial workers strike, saying that something needed to be done to reign them in and resolve the crisis facing the country’s legal system. The “state of internal commotion” and Uribe’s increasingly authoritative approach to domestic affairs, therefore, was once again justified in the name of security.

Now that the government and the judicial workers union, ASONAL, seemed to have reached a tentative deal on a new contract on Tuesday, the big question is whether or not the president will deactivate the measure, criticized by many constitutional scholars as unnecessary, if not altogether undemocratic. We will probably find our answer to this question in the way the government is confronting the indigenous mobilization in La Maria, Cauca, where helicopters and heavily-armed riot police of the so-called Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squad (ESMA) are surrounding the communities. In earlier, similar mobilizations organized by the indigenous movement, the government refused to negotiate with the leadership until they lifted their blockade of the Pan American highway. Even then, excessive use of force was applied against the communities in November 2005 and October 2006. To this day, the movement’s demands regarding the return of lands promised to the indigenous groups by previous governments — the essence of their earlier actions — have fallen on deaf ears.

In the face of the unfolding crisis, ACIN, along with regional and national indigenous organizations, have communicated directly to Santiago Cantón, the Secretary General of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights of the Organization of American States, calling on the commission to directly monitor the situation in Cauca. Making matters worse for ACIN, by early Tuesday afternoon, their website was shut down and made unavailable, further complicating its ability to communicate information about the mobilization and subsequent crackdown to the outside world.

The ongoing protests in Cauca are a continuation of the movement’s “Liberation of Mother Earth” campaign, initiated by the indigenous communities in 2005. This land recuperation and resistance effort was organized by the leadership in response to the government’s failure to fulfill its obligations to the victims of the December 16, 1991 massacre of 20 indigenous people from the Huellas community, including five women and four children, who were murdered as they met to discuss a struggle over land rights in the El Nilo estate.

The 1991 massacre had followed a pattern of harassment and threats against the Nasa community by gunmen loyal to local landowners who were disputing the community’s claim to ownership of the land. The Special Investigations Unit of the Office of the Attorney General, which handled the first stages of the investigation, uncovered evidence of the involvement of members of the National Police, both before and during the execution of the massacre.

As a result of these findings, the Colombian government agreed to return 15,600 hectares of land to the community that had been targeted by the assassins. As was widely reported at the time, in 1998, then-President Ernesto Samper publicly apologized for the role the state played in this atrocity and promised to compensate the victims. Yet Samper’s public apologies contrasted considerably with the attitude of President Alvaro Uribe, who stated publicly upon taking office four years later that there were simply no resources to provide any more lands to the indigenous communities affected by the massacre. The president’s stance marked the beginning of a very rocky relationship.

In his six years in office, Uribe has followed a strategy of outright defiance against the indigenous community’s demands, not only in Cauca, but also throughout the country. He has made it a practice to accuse ACIN, CRIC, and even indigenous members of the Colombian Congress, of being accessories to delinquency and criminality. This week’s mobilizations are part of the movement’s ongoing response to what they perceive to be the government’s intransigence towards indigenous people.

It is ironic that on this, the same day that government forces are directly confronting indigenous protesters who are demanding, among other things, compensation for the massacre of 20 Nasa people in Huellas in 1991, Colombia’s State Council ordered the government to pay $3-million in compensation to 82 family members of at least 40 indigenous Colombians that were massacred by paramilitary forces in Naya, Cauca in 2001.

According to the State Council in a ground-breaking ruling issued on Tuesday, just as the government was complicit in the 1991 attack, the Colombian state neglected to prevent the incursion of paramilitary groups that led to the murder of at least 40 people—some reports say the number was closer to 100—and the forced displacement of another 3,000 in Naya ten years later. At the time of the Naya massacre, the government of President Andres Pastrana had ignored repeated warnings by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights about a possible upcoming paramilitary incursion in the area.

In the infamous 2001 attack, 500 men of the Calima Bloc of the paramilitary organization Self –Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) murdered people with chainsaws in several villages in the Naya area of western Cauca. This is the same Calima Bloc whose founder, the jailed paramilitary commander Ever Veloza, alias H.H., now claims to be responsible for influencing the gubernatorial elections that brought Uribe-ally and anti-indigenous politician Juan Jose Chaux to power in Cauca in 2003. Chaux recently resigned as Uribe’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic when it was revealed that he had close ties to paramilitary groups in Cauca. As governor of Cauca, Chaux developed the well-deserved reputation of being one of the most racist, anti-indigenous politicians in the country, regularly employing derogatory language to describe the indigenous movement and its leaders. On August 11, 2008, that same language was contained in the previously mentioned email threat sent to ACIN and CRIC. The thousands of indigenous protesters in La Maria currently facing government forces understand very well that they should take such threats lightly.

Recognizing the uncanny ability of Uribe to get his message across to the Colombian people through its powerful public relations machine, organizers of the current popular mobilization have been putting out statements of their own for weeks about the nature of their protest. In essence, the indigenous movement, in alliance with other popular sectors, has a comprehensive program that it is promoting within the context of the current political crisis, maintaining an extremely critical view of the Uribe government, while stating unequivocally its independence from the guerrillas or any other armed group.

For weeks, members of ACIN’s communication team have been carrying out an education campaign throughout northern Cauca, speaking directly with locals about the current threats facing the indigenous movement in assemblies, workshops and town hall-style meetings, held all over the region everyday leading up to Sunday’s mobilization. In these so-called barridos, as well as in their many communiqués, the organization consistently says “no to free trade agreements like the ones negotiated behind closed doors with the United States, Canada, the European Union,” trade deals that look “to displace us of our rights, our culture, our knowledge and our territory.” Tied to this is their vehement opposition to the many constitutional counter-reforms and legislative measures that have been implemented under the current government that have chipped away at the territorial rights of the country’s 85 indigenous communities.

They are also demanding that the government comply with a series of agreements, accords and conventions that have been signed with the indigenous communities over the past 16 years, but that up to now have been systematically ignored, including the ones relating to the Nilo massacre. And they are calling for an end to the militarization of their territories, whether it is manifest in the widespread presence of state security forces in the area, FARC guerillas or paramilitary groups working under the auspices of powerful local interests. CRIC and ACIN and all the other indigenous organizations in the country are simply making sure history does not repeat itself on their territories and that the blood of their people is not spilled once again with complete impunity.

Economics is about those processes and designs that distribute resources. It is also about the accumulation of, movement of and motivations created by value added in exchange. And it is also about the protecting and the unprotecting of any resource or accumulation.

Economics has a natural history comprising 3 major stages: (1) distributing the personal excess from hunting and gathering among family/group members, fully commingled with the natural economy of an ecosystem; (2) exchanging locally abundant resources among related, extended groups on a break-even model; (3) trading “valuable” resources among potential enemies on an a trade-advantage model.

The first maximizes the benefits of a resource, strengthens group ties and increases the health and wealth of the whole group. The second makes available to a coalition of family groups the benefits of a larger region and creates ties of mutuality among larger groups of people covering larger geographic regions. The third makes trading a substitute activity to taking, creates the abstract notion of value added and creates new forms of relationship among human groups that because of distance and difference would be potential enemies, i.e., competitors at the margins of their physical and cultural territories. It is based on a balance between the power to protect ‘our’ wealth and the power to unprotect the wealth of others. Our present economic models, from communism to capitalism, are all forms of this last; capitalism is just taking economic steroids.

Human biology and consciousness order have properties that give design to how we do everything, and so give properties to our economic behavior. The functions of mathematical economics are attempts to describe how these behaviors work so that they can be predicted, but most economists have made the natural mistake of thinking that economics is somehow separate from the human substrate the way gravity is independent of the exact nature of the matter of its origin, only a product of the total mass. Economics is not like that, it is completely a product of human design – at least it was until some decisions began to be made by computerized algorithms. All that is needed to undo much of the mathematical work is a change in attitude or expectation in a population, thus the great energy devoted to controlling these very things.

While the predictions of economic models have been often unreliable, there are some general ways of looking at economic behavior that will continue to make sense so long as we operate on the principle of maximizing the accumulation of added value, i.e., the principle of trading with enmity.

After teeth brushing and putting on clean underwear most of our present lives are devoted to protecting our wealth and unprotecting the wealth of others (actually teeth brushing falls into both categories). My boss has a volume of wealth. I do the things he asks to pry loose some agreed on amount, that is, my actions unprotect his wealth for a moment. My labor, in turn, as been unprotected to a measured degree. He protects his wealth by not letting me just go his pile and take some; rather he has devised a system so that exact amounts can be delivered to me and others. I look for ways to unprotect as much as I can in the normal course of my activities (who knows how many pencils he has bought me) and my boss looks for ways to both protect his own and to unprotect mine. Every action in our economic lives and, many actions in parts of our days that we do not specifically recognize as economic, can be put clearly into two lists; actions that protect our wealth and actions that unprotect the wealth of others.

Our present economic fright is so transparently the result of a group of wealthy people trying to get more by creating and discovering a way to unprotect the little bits of wealth held by millions of average people! There are two basic ways to do that: control and offer a product that a great many people can be convinced that they need (Microsoft, food) or use the taxing system to get the many to pay your debts when you default on paying back money that you “borrow” (S&L defaults in the 1980s). Microsoft requires a product, infrastructure and a lot of work. “Mismanaging” vast sums, skimming off millions and then getting the tax system to bill the people requires the right contacts and political power. Mismanagement and stealing is by far the easier and the spare millions can purchase a lot of help.

Of the 300 million people in the US there are only a few tens of thousands who really understand the opportunities of the money system, really know how to unprotect wealth on a large scale; and of those who know how only a few have the connections to do it. The wealthy are very good at protecting theirs; it is a lot of work to unprotect their wealth and seldom worth it except for the random freelancer. The masses have a lot of wealth, but it is in tiny chunks. The infrastructure to unprotect and gather from them has to be huge (thus the neoconservative growth of government). Therefore, it is necessary to use the banking system and the government’s taxing powers to do the job right.

Oh yes, and where are those people who know how the money system works? They are drawn disproportionally to the banking/investment infrastructure. And where is the power and opportunity to develop political connections that can help protect these people and make available the tools to unprotect the wealth of others? Right there in the same banking, investment and regulatory community.

The way it looks to me is that we have a case of a 7-11 bandit; you know, some petty thieves specialize in convenience store robberies, unprotecting wealth with a cheap revolver. Some mega-crime families might very well specialize in banking/tax system robberies: getting a lot of money moving, ‘losing” a bunch of it on paper and getting the ‘government’ to cover the losses. The last big heist was when GHWB was vice president and president and now this one when GWB is president. The boy is good! Out did his dad in the destruction of Iraq and now has out done him with a banking scandal.

I’m not suggesting that the Bush boys put a bandana around their faces and used a Saturday night special (although Neil is still a mystery), but I am saying that the forces to unprotect wealth are like the water behind a dam; when you make a crack it just flows right on through. When the power of government taxation is made available by allowing, even pushing for, institutions that are too big to fail and oversight is so weakened that the regulators (sic) and the thieves can plan heists together, then the responsibility is that of accessory before the fact; a crime as serious as that of the actual perpetrators. A man was just executed in Texas on such a charge.

Was this an accident of the financial system? Not bloody likely. If you think that there is not a group of people with their funnels all built and ready to collect the shakings of the money tree into their coffers, then you probably are still looking to buy stock in Lehman brothers. Could this have been a swindle that got out of hand? Possible, but not likely; I think the plastic was put down wide enough to catch all the dead bodies.

The normal protections for the wealth of the middle class was lock-picked by the banking/investment system and the complicit taxing infrastructure is being used to collect the booty. In the 80s and early 90s taxpayers paid 125 billion to have money stolen from them (estimates of the true total cost are as high as 1.4 trillion dollars). This time we will pay a thousand billion (we cannot even speculate on true total cost) for the privilege of being robbed. The rhetoric of “saving the economy” is just so much boilerplate to cover a huge transfer of wealth to the economic elite made possible by Bush administration policies. And you count on it: every “correction” of the system will be analyzed for its potential use to further unprotect the wealth of all possible targets.

That is the way unprotecting wealth works. All wealth (capital, labor, debt, real estate, invention), any place that money moves or wealth is stored, can be skimmed from, secreted away, nibbled at, relabeled and otherwise have its protections momentarily weakened or removed. Smashing the window of a car unprotects the purse inside, getting a no-bid open ended contract without enforced performance conditions is still a smash and grab job, albeit more complex.

The argument that government needs to be run like a business does not remind us that the business of business is unprotecting the wealth of the consuming public. It is in the mindset of those in business: “How to I get a potential clientele to trade their wealth for my product or service?” Innovation, niche hunting, “marketing”, planned obsolescence, deceptive pricing and sizing, deceptive advertising, finessing safety and environmental regulation and many more actions, “good” and bad, are devoted to the primary event, when the wallet opens and the wealth is exposed. When business and government combine, business naturally sees the potential of government functions and powers for unprotecting the wealth of the masses. This has a name. It is fascism in democracy’s clothing.

While the Bolivian government has used state repression against peasant squatters and striking miners, it remained a passive, impotent spectator to the right-wing seizure of the Constitutional Assembly, the major airfields in Santa Cruz (forcing the President to flee back to his palace), suspending all public transportation, federal tax collection and public investment and projects. Worse still, paramilitary fascist gangs have repeatedly insulted, beaten, stripped and paraded ethnic Indian peasant supporters of President Morales through the main streets and plazas of the capital cities of the provinces they control.

Despite winning nearly 70% of the national vote in the recall election of August 10, 2008, Morales has not taken a single measure to counter the fascist seizure of regional power – continuing to plead for dialogue and compromise, as the far right gathers strength and prepares to engage in violent civil warfare against the poor and indigenous Bolivians. The Bolivian government expelled the US Ambassador, Phillip Goldberg, only after the US Embassy actively backed the far right’s regional power grab after almost 3 years of open financing and public collaboration with the secessionists. Since the Morales regime did not break relations with Washington, it is likely that a new Ambassadorial appointee will soon arrive to continue Goldberg’s active plotting with the far right.

The contrast between the ignominious passivity of the President and the aggressive violent political putsch of the fascist right is striking. The centerpiece of the violent uprising and the successful seizure of fascist power is located in five regional departments: Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni, Tarija and Chuquisaca, which are grouped in a regional mass organization, the National Democratic Council (CONALDE). This includes local prefects, mayors, business leaders and heads of landowner organizations backed by gangs of armed right-wing street thugs in a variety of organizations, the most important being the Cruceño Youth Union, which specializes in degrading, beating and even killing unarmed Indian supporters of Morales.

Prelude to the Civil War and Seizure of Power

The civil war and the rightist seizure of power in the five departments follows a sequence of events resulting in a gradual recovery of political and social power and the subsequent launching of a multiplicity of offensive moves from within the governmental institutions and increasingly through extra-parliamentary direct action. This has resulted in an escalation from sporadic assaults to systematic violence against individuals, organizations, public institutions and strategic economic resources. In this most recent phase, the opposition has shed its ‘legalistic’ institutional cover and embraced the violent seizure of state institutions and openly declared their secession from the central government, challenging the authority of the government to govern and to exercise its legal monopoly on police power.

From Popular Power to Neo-Fascist Seizure of Power

The starting point of the secessionist-neo-fascist uprising begin in 2005 when, to all intents and purposes, a mass worker-peasant-Indian-miner uprising overthrew the incumbent neo-liberal regime and dominated the streets, presenting all the ingredients for a new revolutionary government.
Under the leadership of Evo Morales and the former NGO organizer, Garcia Linera and their electoral party, the Movement to Socialism (MAS), the mass movement was turned from the streets, autonomous activity and social revolution toward electoral politics. Evo Morales was elected President in December 2005 and proceded to sign political pacts with the right-wing parties to share institutional power in pursuit of a centrist political-economic program. This involved joint ventures with all mineral-extracting multinational corporations (excluding expropriations and nationalization) minimalist token land reform programs (never implemented) and tight fiscal policies (excluding income redistribution and limiting wage and salary increases to the rate of inflation).

By the middle of 2006, the far Right had recovered from its electoral defeat and through its presence in the newly elected Constitutional Assembly effectively maneuvered to block the passage of the new Constitution. The government focused exclusively on its political reform agenda, consolidated its joint ventures with all the major gas and oil multinationals, renewed unfavorable gas contracts with Brazil (paying Bolivia well below world market prices) and demobilized the mass movements through the MAS party’s control over urban and rural leaders (with the exception of the miners).

Beginning in late 2006 and increasingly throughout 2007, the neo-fascist right relied on its extra-parliamentary shock troops to assault pro-government representatives in the Constitutional Assembly, to organize road blockages and to assert their independence (‘autonomy’) from the national government. The Bolivian government rejected any resort to popular mobilization demanded by the more radicalized sectors of the miners in Oruro and Potosi. Instead it retreated in the face of the institutional pressure of the neo-fascist right, offering concessions on the write-up of the Constitution. Morales made a series of strategic concessions on the size of land-holdings exempt from land reform, ceding judicial and fiscal powers to the fascist regional rulers and conceded control of the roads, highways and plazas to gangs of well armed neo-fascists.

Throughout 2008, the neo-fascist right continued its ‘march through the institutions’ consolidating its control over local and regional government and claims over revenues from strategic economic sectors – all of which are located in the contested regions. By the middle of 2008, the right openly asserted their secessionist claims and proceeded to create parallel police, custom, fiscal and other agencies of government. The secessionist regime gave license to the business, landlord and urban middle class elite. Through their leadership of the self-styled ‘civic organizations’ and their armed enforcers, they proceeded to intimidate and assault thousands of government supporters, peasants, Indian activists, officials and pro-government business owners, street venders, school teachers, health workers and other public employees. The neo-fascist strategy for seizing state power was based on accumulating forces through public demonstrations of power, massive meetings, and lockouts to shut down urban businesses. Any supporters of the national government who did not abide by their strike calls suffered cruel public punishment including beatings and the public humiliation of Indian and peasant Morales supporters in the urban plazas where they were stripped and whipped to the jeers of mostly white, European crowds.

From Protest to Seizure of Power

Having experienced only repeated anemic and inconsequential protests from the Morales-Garcia regime, in August 2008 the neo-fascists launched a full-scale blitz, giving free rein and financial and political backing to a large-scale assault on all major federal installations and agencies and trade union and peasant association offices in the five departments which they controlled. They seized control of the airfields denying landing rights to any government or government-related official, including President Morales and Vice President Garcia and any visiting dignitaries.

The trigger event for the launch of the neo-fascist ‘civil war’ from the top and the violent seizure of power was the electoral victory of Morales-Garcia in the August 8 referendum – where Morales got 67% of the national vote. The result made it clear that the right could not return to national power via elections when their only electoral majority was to be found in the departments they ruled. But even in the 5 right-wing controlled departments, Morales received approximately 40% of the vote, a strong minority in the cities and a majority in many rural areas among the peasantry.

The capitalist class, as elsewhere throughout history, when faced with even some moderate property reforms, but especially in the face of a cowardly, retreating and conciliatory regime, has discarded constitutional methods of opposition. They attached themselves to the neo-fascist local officials, ‘civic’ leaders and even the violent gangs of wealthy youth in Santa Cruz. Morales refused to order the police and military to defend public buildings in the face of arsonist and violent assaults, which destroyed public utilities, telecommunications, customs, accounting, land survey offices, official files and state records. On the contrary, Morales forced them to withdraw.

In Pando and Tarifa the oil and gas pipelines were blown up, causing extensive damage and costing millions of dollars in lost state revenues. Finally on September 11, 2008 over a hundred pro-Morales peasants were killed or wounded in Pando in an ambush organized by armed vigilantes supported by the department prefect Leopoldo Fernandez and his followers in the ‘civic’ organizations.

The systematic destruction of all signs and symbols of Federal government authority and the killing and intimidation of peasant-worker supporters of Morales ushered in the final stage of this 3-year process of secession, ethnic-racial repression and the imposition of a new fascist political order.

While the neo-fascist-led civil war proceeded without national government opposition throughout the 5 provinces, Morales’ ministers adopted bizarre postures: Garcia-Linera rationalized the regime’s impotence by dismissing the seizure of power by the neo-fascist apparatus of the 5 departments as ‘acts of vandals by a gang of 500 thugs’. As Bolivia burned, the Interior Minister Alfredo Rada and the ‘Defense’ Minister Walker San Miguel vainly tried to minimize the illegal neo-fascist takeover of almost half of the country with 80% of the national income by reducing the impending civil war to acts of ‘violent delinquent vandalism in different regions of the east and south of the country’.

On September 12, 2008, Morales apparently oblivious to the massive and sustained assault and takeover actually convoked an meeting with the neo-fascist prefects for a ‘dialogue without any pre-conditions’. In other words, Morales absolved them of the massacre and brutalization of over a hundred peasants and ignored the economic sabotage, which accompanied their seizure and destruction of oil, gas and other essential revenue-producing sectors. Needless to say the neo-fascists met with Morales without conceding a single issue. In fact the only reason they met at all is because Morales was finally forced to declare a ’state of siege’ in Pando – subsequent to the killing of 30 peasants by armed vigilantes under the control of Pando’s Prefect Leopoldo Fernandez.

The troops had to clear the airfield of right-wing thugs who had previously prevented the landing of a government transport plane. The other 4 departments under neo-fascists control were not affected by the declaration of a state of siege. In Pando, with the military presence now guarding public buildings and oil and gas installations, the government finally decided to arrest the right-wing prefect for his role in the massacres.

A Turn Toward Good Government?

President Morales finally ordered the US Ambassador Phillip Goldberg to leave the country after 2 years of direct intervention in the planning, financing and backing of the organized neo-fascist class warfare and seizure of regional power. Over $125 million in AID funds financed almost exclusively the neo-fascist ‘civic’ organizations and through them the armed racial vigilante ‘Santa Cruz Union of Youth’. Morales’ long-awaited declaration of a state of siege only came about under pressure of his restless supporters among the peasant and urban mass movements who began to organize and arm themselves independently of the impotent federal government. Morales also responded to pressure and from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and other countries to end the violence. Brazil and Argentina were affected by the disruption of vital natural gas shipments from Bolivia. Even constitutional right-wing regimes, like Bachelet of Chile and Alain Garcia of Peru, backed Morales and indirectly pressured him to act for fear of the precedent of a successful violent right-wing secessionist seizure of regional power might set for their own countries.

Conclusion

The state of siege and the expulsion of the US Ambassador can be seen as much-delayed positive moves to reassert Bolivian sovereignty and to defend the constitutional order. But what next?

The neo-fascists have seized regional governmental power. They still control 80% of Bolivia’s key economic resources. The majority of the population who live under rightist rule are without the protection of the central government. Only a few of the oil and natural gas pipelines have been temporarily secured by federal troops. Morales has relied on the military to defend his regime, sidelining, marginalizing and demobilizing the emerging popular mass self-defense movements. The reliability of the Bolivian Army is not guaranteed. By becoming key to the defense of the Morales regime against the neo-fascist right, the armed forces can assume broader powers, as arbiters of the future of the country. Morales is relatively safe, holed up in the Andes; but his followers in the 5 departments in the east continue to face the repressive rule of neo-fascists and their organized vigilante gangs. Equally important, Morales, faced with violent resistance from the far right, shows every intention of making new concessions on revenue and power sharing with the ruling elite. He is open to making even greater concessions to the one hundred big landowners, media moguls, bankers and agro-exporters who are pushing for secession.

Repeatedly, over the past 3 years, the Indians, peasants, miners, urban slum-dwellers and public employees have organized and fought for land reform, worker-controlled nationalization of the mines and oil fields and decent salaries and wages. What they have gotten from Morales is a government of fiscal austerity, economic agreements with foreign extractive multinational corporations and huge untouchable agribusiness complexes. Despite having a political mandate to rule, Morales has made a succession of failed efforts to conciliate with the irreconcilable economic and regional elites. If there is one lesson that Morales can learn from the peasants who have been degraded and horsewhipped in the streets of Santa Cruz, the trade unionists who have been burned out of their headquarters and homes in Pando and the street vendors who have been driven from the markets in Tarija, is that you cannot ‘make deals’ with fascists. You don’t defeat fascism through elections and concessions to their big property-owning paymasters.

Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Barring this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland.

Morris is a frequent lecturer and consultant to the Israeli political and military establishment and has unique access to Israeli strategic military planners. Morris’ advocacy and public support of the massive, brutal expulsion of all Palestinians is on public record. Yet his genocidal views have not precluded his receiving numerous academic awards. His writings and views are published in Israel’s leading newspapers and journals. Morris’ views are not the idle ranting of a marginal psychopath, as witnessed by the recent publication of his latest op-ed article in the New York Times.

What does the publication by the New York Times of an article, which calls for the nuclear incineration of 70 million Iranians and the contamination of the better part of a billion people in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, tell us about US politics and culture? For it is the NYT, which informs the ‘educated classes’ in the US, its Sunday supplements, literary and editorial pages and which serves as the ‘moral conscience’ of important sectors of the cultural, economic and political elite.

The New York Times provides a certain respectability to mass murder, which Morris’ views otherwise would not possess if say, they were published in the neo-conservative weeklies or monthlies. The fact that the NYT considers the prospect of an Israeli mass extermination of millions of Iranians part of the policy debate in the Middle East reveals the degree to which Zionofascism has infected the ‘higher’ cultural and journalist circles of the United States. Truth to say, this is the logical outgrowth of the Times‘ public endorsement of Israel’s economic blockade to starve 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza; the Times’ cover-up of Israeli-Zionist-AIPAC influence in launching the US invasion of Iraq leading to over one million murdered Iraqi citizens.

The Times sets the tone for the entire New York cultural scene, which privileges Israeli interests, to the point of assimilating into the US political discourse not only its routine violations of international law, but its threats, indeed promises, to scorch vast areas of the earth in pursuit of its regional supremacy. The willingness of the NYT to publish an Israeli genocide-ethnocide advocate tells us about the strength of the ties between a purportedly ‘liberal establishment’ pro-Israel publication and the totalitarian Israeli right: It is as if to say that for the liberal pro-Israel establishment, the non-Jewish Nazis are off limits, but the views and policies of Judeo-fascists need careful consideration and possible implementation.

Morris’ New York Times ‘nuclear-extermination’ article did not provoke any opposition from the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO) because, in its daily information bulletin, Daily Alert, it has frequently published articles by Israeli and US Zionists advocating an Israeli and/or US nuclear attack on Iran. In other words, Morris’ totalitarian views are part of the cultural matrix deeply embedded in the Zionist organizational networks and its extensive ‘reach’ in US cultural and political circles. What the Times did in publishing Morris’ lunacy has taken genocidal discourse out of the limited circulation of Zionist influentials and into the mainstream of millions of American readers.

Apart from a handful of writers (Gentile and Jewish) publishing in marginal web sites, there was no political or moral condemnation from the entire literary, political and journalistic world of this affront to our humanity. No attempt was made to link Morris’ totalitarian genocidal policies to Israel’s public official threats and preparations for nuclear war. There is no anti-nuclear campaign led by our most influential public intellectuals to repudiate the state (Israel) and its public intellectuals who prepare a nuclear war with the potential to exterminate more than ten times the number of Jews slaughtered by the Nazis.

A nuclear incineration of the nation of Iran is the Israeli counterpart of Hitler’s gas chambers and ovens writ large. Extermination is the last stage of Zionism: Informed by the doctrine of rule the Middle East or ruin the air and land of the world. That is the explicit message of Benny Morris (and his official Israeli sponsors), who like Hitler, issues ultimatums to the Iranians, ‘surrender or be destroyed’ and who threatens the US, join us in bombing Iran or face a world ecological and economic catastrophe.

That Morris is utterly, starkly and clinically insane is beyond question. That the New York Times in publishing his genocidal ravings provides new signs of how power and wealth has contributed to the degeneration of Jewish intellectual and cultural life in the US. To comprehend the dimensions of this decay we need only compare the brilliant tragic-romantic German-Jewish writer, Walter Benjamin, desperately fleeing the advance of totalitarian Nazi terror to the Israeli-Jewish writer Benny Morris’ criminal advocacy of Zionist nuclear terror published in the New York Times.

The question of Zionist power in America is not merely a question of a ‘lobby’ influencing Congressional and White House decisions concerning foreign aid to Israel. What is at stake today are the related questions of the advocacy of a nuclear war in which 70 million Iranians face extermination and the complicity of the US mass media in providing a platform, nay a certain political respectability for mass murder and global contamination. Unlike the Nazi past, we cannot claim, as the good Germans did, that ‘we did not know’ or ‘we weren’t notified’, because it was written by an eminent Israeli academic and was published in the New York Times.

Palestinians and foreign peace activists hold regular and mostly non-violent protests against the confiscation by Israel of private Palestinian land for the construction of the “Separation Wall,” the gigantic barrier Israel is building in the area. Vast swaths of Palestinian farms, orchards and groves have been seized by Israel under the pretext of building the wall, most of which is built deep in the West Bank far away from the so-called Green Line, the former armistice line between Israel proper and the occupied Palestinian territory.

According to a B’tselem report, Israeli occupation soldiers stopped and detained Ashraf Abu Rahma, 27, who was then blindfolded and handcuffed for about half an hour.

B’tselem quoted eyewitnesses as saying that Abu Rahma was beaten by soldiers who then dragged him to an army Jeep. There, a video clip showed one soldier aiming his rifle at the Abu Rahma’s legs from a distance of about 1.5 meters and firing a rubber-coated steel bullet at him.

Numerous Palestinians have been killed or maimed by Israeli army rubber bullets which can be quite deadly especially if fired from a short distance.

Abu Rahma told B’tselem that the bullet hit him in the left toe. He reportedly received treatment by an army medic before he was set free.

The video clips of the incident were provided by a 14-year-old Palestinian girl from Ni’ilin who filmed the incident from her house in the village. The identity of the girl has not been disclosed.

Israeli soldiers and settlers have lately escalated their abuse of mostly unprotected Palestinians.

In June, a number of masked Israeli settlers, carrying clubs, savagely attacked elderly Palestinian peasants and shepherds near the town of Yatta in the southern West Bank causing them grievous injuries.

Similarly, Jewish settlers earlier this month assaulted a Palestinian from the village of Sammou, also in the southern West Bank.

The settlers tied up the 35-year-old Palestinian teacher to a power pole and brutally beat him.

Human rights organizations operating in the West Bank have documented many cases of abuse by Israeli soldiers, especially by a notorious paramilitary brigade known as the Border Police.

Abuse cases included soldiers forcing Palestinian laborers to drink soldiers’ urine, forcing Palestinians to curse their religion, and forcing them to sing songs praising Israel and the Border policeman.

A few weeks ago, the Israeli television channel-10 revealed that Israeli soldiers manning a roadblock in the northern West Bank coerced a Palestinian worker to chant in Arabic the following refrain “Wahad Hummas, wahad fool, Allah Iyhayee Mishmar Gvul” (one dish of Hummus, one dish of beans, Allah salutes the Border Police.”

Normally, such abusive behavior on the part of Israeli soldiers goes unpunished which human rights groups contend only serves to encourage further abuse.

The orgy of lying, especially the shocking amenability of most Zionist Jews to take the obscene lies at face value caricatures a people that dreads knowing the truth, let alone coping with it. And when the truth eventually manages to penetrate the “iron wall” of Zionist lies, the custodians of the big lie, which is Zionism, resort to a whole set of defense mechanisms to protect the collective mental sanity of a state whose very existence constitutes a crime against humanity. Thus, according to this depraved and psychotic mindset, Israel doesn’t murder children and innocent civilians, It is only the victims that bring death upon themselves. And Israelis don’t steal the land and property of Palestinians, since the entire world was created for the sake of the “chosen people.” And even when Jews do commit “certain mistakes” and “abominable sins,” they are not really to blame for that since it is the victims that always force Jews to make these mistakes.

Hence, the proverbial Palestinian victim of Israeli savagery is always responsible for the demolition of his own home, the murder of his own children and the destruction of his own farm, grove and orchard by Israeli bulldozer!! Eventually, the entire Palestinian Nakba is a self-inflicted calamity which the Palestinians brought upon themselves because they refused to succumb to the will of the “chosen people.” More to the point, if the Palestinians don’t come to terms with the Nakba and the occupation, a greater Nakba, or holocaust, would be inflicted upon them.

Interestingly, the wave of self-righteous overindulgence in Israel has been led by the establishment people, figures that know too well that Israel doesn’t really represent the culture of peace, but rather the culture of war and aggression; they know that Israel is inculcated with a criminal and murderous mentality that differs very little from the Nazi mentality. Yes, they do know all of this, but like all murderers, thieves and liars, they dread facing the truth. The truth would simply make them lose their raison d’etre. This is why they always try to turn the black into white, the white into black and the big lie into a “truth” glorified by millions of “beneficiaries” at home and ignorant “fans” abroad. It may be particularly difficult to convince the “beneficiaries” of their sinfulness, namely the fact that they are living in homes that belong to other people and living on land that belongs to another people.

However, for the sake of the ignorant or naïve fans in Europe and North America as well as the rest of the world, it is imperative that they be delivered from the grip of Zionist lies. Yes, westerners must be allowed to know the naked truth about this sick and sickening state that deceptively claims to be the sole true inheritor of Judaism while its ideology, behavior and actions are antithetical to all religious and moral values that stress universal justice and human equality.

Let us remember some of the “glorious expressions” of the Zionist culture of love and self-abnegation in recent years. Chris Hedges is a prominent journalist and author specialized in American and Middle Eastern politics. He worked for a number of publications including the Christian Science Monitor, the Dallas Morning News and the New York Times where he spent 15 years. In his recent book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Hedges tells a chilling story from his trip to the Gaza Strip in the heydays of the intifada, or the second Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation. Hedges watched, ten- and eleven-year-old Palestinian children being lured to their neighborhood’s perimeter fence by taunts from a loudspeaker on the Israeli side. “Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come! The Israeli voice barked insults at the boys’ mothers. The boys responded by hurling their rocks at the jeep with the loudspeaker. The Israelis shot at them with M-16s fitted with silencers. Hedges found the victims in the hospital, children with their stomachs ripped out, and with gaping holes in their limbs. Writing for “Harper’s Magazine” (see The Nation, March 11, 2002), Hedges wrote: “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered. Death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights in Sarajevo, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

Here is another “expression of love:” In November 2001, an undercover unit of the Israeli army buried a landmine in the sand that flows around Abdullah Siyam Primary School in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. A few hours later, as Palestinian children headed to school, the mine exploded. Five school kids were instantly reduced to broken flesh. The youngest was six. All the victims came from the same extended family: Akram Naim Astal, 6, and his brother Mohammed, 13; Omar Idris Astal, 12, and his brother Anis, 10; and their cousin Muhamemd Sultan Astal, 12. Their young bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. The limbs of one child were found 50 meters away. Some of the kids could only be identified by their school bags, brightly colored and spattered with blood, still dangling from their butchered bodies.

Hasbara spin doctors in Israel might seek to extenuate the gravity or even whitewash these crimes by claiming that these were “individual acts” that didn’t reflect the overall policy of the Israeli government and army. However, this is a big lie. In 2001, the noted Israeli award-wining journalist Amira Hass interviewed an Israeli sniper in which the soldier described the commands he received from his superiors: “Twelve and up, you are allowed to shoot. That is what they tell us,” the soldier said. “So,” responded the reporter, “according to the IDF, the appropriate minimum age group at which to shoot is 12.” The soldier replied: “this is according to what the IDF says to its soldiers. I don’t know if this is what the IDF says to the media.”

A further “expression of love and humanity of Israeli culture” manifested itself, also in Gaza, in 2004, when an Israeli occupation army soldier, dubbed Captain-R, shot a Palestinian girl, Iman al Hums, who was on her way to school. However, the soldier was not sure whether the 13-year-girl died or not. Hence, he walked to the bleeding child, and instead of trying to save her life, he shot here 25 times, emptying his entire magazine of bullets into her tender body. He did what he did in order “to verify the kill,” a standard Israeli army practice in such circumstances. Now, the reader might be prompted to think that the bloodthirsty murderer was arrested and made to stand trial for his hair-raising crime. Well, the opposite happened. The soldier not only was innocent of any wrongdoing but was also awarded tens of thousands of dollars for being “hurt and libeled by unfavorable media coverage.”

In truth, it is not only Israeli army soldiers and officers who willfully indulge in such Nazi behavior. Zionist rabbis routinely issue religious edicts that would allow Israeli troops to murder non-Jewish children knowingly and deliberately without having to worry about any ramifications, moral or otherwise. In May 2007, shortly before Israeli occupation soldiers murdered two Gaza children who apparently were searching for scrap metal to sell for a few cents in order help feed their impoverished families, the former Israeli Chief rabbi, Mordechai Elyahu, petitioned the Israeli government to carry out a series of carpet bombing of Gaza population centers. Elyahu argued that a ground invasion of the world’s most crowded spot would endanger Israeli soldiers. He said “If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million, whatever it takes to make them stop.” Earlier, Elyahu, a prominent Talmudic sage, called on the Israeli occupation army not to refrain from killing Palestinian children if that means saving the lives of Israeli soldiers.

The above-mentioned are only sporadic examples of the barbarian spirit inculcated in Israelis, especially soldiers dispatched to the occupied Palestinian territories to guard the occupation and enforce apartheid. It is this barbarian mindset that makes Israeli soldiers abduct Palestinian school children and take them to nearby Jewish settlements where they are used as “training objects” by Jewish youngsters. It is this barbarian mentality that makes Jewish soldiers force helpless Palestinian laborers do certain depraved acts such as drinking soldiers’ urine and singing, individually or in unison, “wahad Hommas, wahad fool, Allah Iyhay-yee Mishmar Gvul” (one ‘dish’ hummus, one broad beans, may Allah greet the Border Police)!!!

There are of course thousands, even tens of thousands, of examples which one could easily and readily cite to underscore Israeli barbarianism. To be sure, this disgraceful reality is known to many Israelis. In 2001, Shulamit Aloni, a former minister of education, wrote in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv that “we have become a barbarian people.” So, what makes a leftist, liberal woman see in Israel what the vast bulk of Israelis, including the country’s intelligentsia, wouldn’t see, or more correctly, wouldn’t want to see.

Well, it is Israel’s collective psychosis, the denial syndrome?