It is absolutely confounding how liberals have repeatedly fallen for this president. He has thrived off of vague pronouncements and innuendo, only making concrete political promises on issues with overwhelming popular support, at which point he generally manufactures some semblance of fight before rolling over dead in quick order. How many years of this before the Michael Moores of the world get it? The problem is not that the president’s hands are tied by an overzealous Republican establishment; rather, he is confined to a contrived role in a rigged political act designed to mimic representative democracy. The script goes like this: he postures as the people’s president, while the opposition scolds him as being a liberal elitist. Then, they bicker about all things innocuous, while carrying on unabated with the core business of shredding the constitution, stifling dissent, and maintaining the Empire. Obama’s new vaguely populist rhetoric and seemingly forceful tone is all a bad rerun. The Washington Post declared this to be the emergence of “Obama 2.0,” , but they got it wrong. It’s all the same Hope and Change Pony Show.

With each year of Obama’s successful duping of the liberal establishment, the center-point of accepted political opinion gets driven further to the right. In this address, he bills his two greatest accomplishments as getting Bin Laden and saving GM: an extrajudicial murder and a bailout conditioned with wage and benefit reductions for future employees. He blithely touted his circumvention of international law and due process in the bin Laden killing. Meanwhile, he goes on to trumpet his saber rattling vis-à-vis Iran, and his illegal use of drones in Pakistan and Yemen, while speaking of an “ironclad – and I mean Ironclad” relationship to the contemptible regime in Israel. It is quite disconcerting to know that respected “liberal” commentators could characterize a speech as “populist” despite all of this dastardly retrograde rhetoric.

The praise did not stop with Michael Moore. David Corn from the once respectable Mother Jones had this to say: “Obama is pitching a patriotic, quasi-populist progressivism (while conceding the need for deficit reduction and government cost-efficiencies).:  Either he doesn’t quite get the concept of “quasi” or we can count him in the ranks of the duped. In his coverage on Twitter he said: “Progressives can get too bogged down in critique. Obama showed how to criticize while reaching higher.” While it is difficult to discern from a 140-letter tweet, the thrust of this statement seems to be that far-reaching critiques are not acceptable. His reasoning goes that ideologues are archaic and inherently divisive. Anyone who breaks with the theme of unity is a party pooper. In taking this line, the president and his supporters conflate reasoned dissent with the knee-jerk rejectionist posture of the outrageous Republican establishment. Those that demand “too much” of the president are viewed with equal contempt by the increasingly base liberal establishment.

What these candy-ass liberals fail to understand is that we cannot be united with a 1% whose recklessness and avidity knows no bounds. The super-rich have unequivocally demonstrated that their interests lie elsewhere. They have spent decades lobbying for deregulation and trade “liberalization” that has allowed them to displace millions of American jobs while reducing the quality of millions of others. Meanwhile, they preyed on working Americans with their sub-prime and Adjustable Rate Mortgages, and then shook the whole house of cards by repackaging those lousy investments into fancy financial instruments, thus provoking a recession that is ongoing for most of the 99% of us. The Occupy Movement grew out of rage against these monsters, not out of any desire to move in with them. A responsive and thoughtful president would be railing against them, not tidily talking about a “togetherness” that the 1% has incessantly rejected.

Nonetheless, liberals will argue that the president adequately addressed inequality with his token references to economic fairness and his advocacy of a Buffet Tax. The latter proposal is quite clearly a ploy on his part, as he knows the Republican congress would never seriously consider it. He gets to posture as a liberal without ever having to actually enact a progressive measure, per the norm. If he really had any desire to equalize the tax code, he could have done it during his first two years, when he had a strong party majority in both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, if he had the determination, he could ram through such legislation in the current climate of populist upheaval, despite the current Congress of stooges and charlatans. However, it would be extremely naïve to expect the president to suddenly cease being the servile sort that he is.

One could reasonably argue that the proposal to establish a “Financial Crimes Unit” amounts to a progressive initiative that is praiseworthy. Indeed, one cannot imagine a Republican president bothering with such a measure. However, Obama is merely building on what has been a very minimal response to the financial crisis thus far. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill barely began to scratch the surface: its primary purpose so far being that it provides government with alternative avenues to taxpayer bailouts should banks face liquidity issues in the future. The more far-reaching and prescient reforms, such as resurrection of Glass-Steagall and breaking up the monolithic corporate banks, have not been serious policy considerations by this administration.

That makes two progressive-leaning proposals, delivered in the president’s typically vague form, all set for future abandonment. Meanwhile, you can add his support for fracking and “school choice” to the list of regressive positions in this State of the Union. On the former issue, he calls for an ambitious increase in the refinement of natural gas. Despite widespread documentation of the hazards  posed to drinking water and the preponderance of disease in and around gas fields, Obama decided to tell the nation:

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.

On “school choice,” a moniker for school privatization via charters or vouchers, he elicits inspiration from his home-state’s treasured political icon: “I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States.” Here, he is merely repeating talking points directly from corporate lobbyists that have used school choice as cover for their efforts to attack public schools, break up teachers unions, and to maliciously profit from the newly burgeoning education “industry.” Obama does suggest willingness to “stop teaching to the test,” though this is probably more of his vacuous pandering to common progressive causes.  He might make a half-hearted effort at some aesthetic change, but will do nothing to stave off the ongoing looting of the public schools. With Arne Duncan, the old Chicago Charter School champion, still serving as Secretary of Education, it is tough to imagine any diversion from the current privatization thrust.

The only rational conclusion from this year’s speech is that this is, indeed, the same old Obama. This is the same unrepentant militarist that was elected in 2008, the same prosecutor of illegal wars in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen; the same authoritarian that signed the NDAA, thus codifying his immoral and unconstitutional detention powers; the same murderer of American civilians: the president who has dutifully played his role as supervisor of this descendant and morally decaying power. As this has yet to become a full-fledged dictatorship, the president must appeal to his subjects’ finer sensibilities on occasion. In this, he excels. Even after three years of the same old dog and pony show, he is still proving adept at duping the diffident liberal mainstream.

It’s best not to think about politics up there. Last time I went up, there were three black vultures preening on the serpent’s head not ten feet from where I sat. They were so quiet, it took minutes before I saw them looking at me. Makes a strong impression when you’re all alone up there.

What a great way to manifest yourself, if you’re the devil, as black vultures. Carrion birds won’t hurt you. They only eat what’s dead, like cast-off faith and trust and admiration. Nice touch, being triune, too, as father, son and who knows what, in the jokey way the devil has of parodying sacred absurdities.

This was no portentous sermon. The big one hissed and the little one screeched a bit. Demonic possession is great – no voices or intrusive thoughts, you just enjoy a brainstorm and take credit.

So, sitting there like Goodman Brown, when he calms down and thinks it through. Everybody comes here. What could all these humans have in common that’s so awful? What’s this unspeakable secret that everyone keeps?  I had one of those inspirations of horrid blasphemy: it’s rights and rule of law, universal to mankind yet utterly secret. Here in America, public life must never be defiled by universal law and rights. Law and rights show our patriotic exploits through the victims’ eyes. That takes our sacred things and makes them dirty, with all the power of the old oath, Bloody Mary.

The election was everywhere below, an inescapable miasma. It’s said to be important in America. It’s called democracy, the thing that makes us good, and it’s imaginary, just like god. How to desecrate that sacred thing? Just stop pretending. Hold our pointless choices to the standards of the outside world, with rights and rule of law. Obtrude the secrets that Americans aren’t allowed to know.

Let the sacrilege begin. To the candidates let’s apply the minimal standards of the civilized world. They fail spectacularly, bloviating in swinish contempt for the commitments America has made supreme in its own law. Most ordinary voters are less ignorant of presidential duties and commitments. Who cares which candidate is better, if none of them make the cut?

And what about the man who’s now doing the job, and wants to keep it? Job evaluation means a checklist, and none of this nonsense about character and greatness, only work rules. Does the incumbent president measure up? But perhaps it demeans the dignity of office to treat him like other any working stiff. Let’s hope so.

What happens when we vet a presidential candidate in the commonest, most fundamental ways? First, we make sure he’s not a criminal. Before they would let me play angel of mercy in Africa they took my fingerprints, to be sure that I was not the sort of person that would molest needy children or rape powerless women. Fair enough. We’ll do a background check on the incumbent. We’ll set the bar as low as we can, and look only at peremptory norms. Peremptory norms are the bedrock expectations of the civilized world, the law of intolerable, inexcusable transgressions.

Let’s begin our background check with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution, signed by President Reagan and ratified October 27, 1990. CAT Article 12 requires:

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

On January 11, 2009, President Obama said, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” As a matter of policy, the incumbent president does not want his subordinates to “spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” Breaking Article 12 makes Obama Torturer in Chief.

Now in America we’re encouraged to pound our chests and cheer torture of helpless captives as a badge of patriotic courage. In our generally censorious culture, we’ve been inoculated with ambivalence to view torturers as athletes with chalk in their cleats, heroically toeing the line as they pitch out of bounds. You don’t see the sort of hysteria that attaches to, say, sex offenses, where some simpleton pees out of doors or gets a crush, and he’s judicially branded for life, hounded from place to place by mobs of frantic parents. Makes you wonder what it would take to make outrage trump cruelty. Which atavistic impulse would prevail if the President of the United States were presiding over sexual torture?

Well, we’re going to find out. It seems that something adverse has turned up in the incumbent’s background check.   A compromising photo.

Rape. We don’t tolerate that. That’s why we had to bomb Serbia and Libya. Under Article 1 of the Torture Convention, official acquiescence to torture is an essential element of the crime. Executive acquiescence goes beyond obstruction of justice: it makes the president an outlaw everywhere, subject to universal-jurisdiction law with no statute of limitations. President Obama is Rapist in Chief, ensuring impunity for the rank-and-file of torture, who hold the captive women down and squeeze their breasts and fuck them. And not only women but boys.  President Obama oversees the gingerly don’t-ask-don’t-tell for soldiers whose orientation is to anal rape.

In extenuation it is said that President Obama is afraid of his subordinates. Dean Christopher Edley of U.C. Berkeley Law School recounted a meeting that ruled out prosecution for fear of a revolt by the government’s torture bureaus.

However, that cuts no ice under Torture Convention Article 2, paragraph 2:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

The US government wished this clause away in its 2006 report to the UN Committee against Torture – all’s fair in war, America maintained – but the Committee affirmed the consensus of the world that nothing can justify torture.

The Committee pointedly cited sexual humiliation as a breach of US obligations under the CAT. The world knows what our government did. The world has seen the photographic fact of that woman bent over for rape. The world has seen the photographic fact of a naked shackled captive with an object thrust up his anus.

The Committee wrote:

The State party should ensure, in accordance with the Convention, that mechanisms to obtain full redress, compensation and rehabilitation are accessible to all victims of acts of torture or abuse, including sexual violence, perpetrated by its officials.

The Committee remarked that the US is hiding from the Special Rapporteur on Torture. Our state has kept the Special Rapporteur at bay, but the Committee against Torture was not so easy to escape – we agreed to its oversight in signing the Convention Against Torture. The international experts confronted the United States with the chapter and verse of its obligations, in stark contrast with its conduct. Merely reading our commitments aloud to us paints a mortifying picture of the United States as a barbarous throwback state.

The United States of America is an enclave where jus cogens, the essential rudiment of civilization, does not apply. The United States signed the CAT with reservations that unlawfully undermine its purpose, and with meaningless declarations meant to hedge its restrictions on the state. Americans lack federal torture statutes that afford us the protections of the Convention. Our laws hem torture round with qualifiers that make much torment officially OK. We don’t enforce the laws on torture when we delegate it to servile satellite states or secret dungeons. We illegally exempt our high officials from the law.

The better to torture its victims in peace, the United States government refused to sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance – but the Committee pointed out that every prisoner we disappeared is a per se breach of the Torture Convention.

In breach of Article 10, America ensures that its troops and police wallow in brutish ignorance of the universal law on torture. In defiance of Article 14, America denies redress to torture victims: our state refuses torture victims’ recourse to the Committee against Torture, and drowns their appeals in bureaucratic mire at home.

America institutionalizes torture in Supermax isolation. For the public at large, in insouciant contempt of the historic horrors of electrical torture – the archetypal symbol of totalitarian crime – our state issues instruments of electrical torture to civilian police nationwide, who use them with impunity for punishment and restraint.

The US government has not yet released its fifth Periodic Report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, due November 19, 2011. It promises lively controversy on the campaign trail as the US reports to the Committee, answers its questions, and publishes the conclusions of the independent international experts.¹ Or so one would think. Surely voters will be anxious to learn if their most urgent concern has been addressed: at the outset of the Obama administration, the question voted highest on change.gov was,

Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.

Clearly the answer is no. We shall see if the electorate takes no for an answer.

President Obama is self-evidently in violation of Torture Convention Article 12. But at least he stopped the torture, right?

Ask Gulet Mohamed,  tortured in Kuwait on President Obama’s watch, with US officials on the spot to take away his rights, under threat of worse to come.

It’s only getting worse. With the knowledge and approval of the President’s federal security bureaucracy, local police departments are institutionalizing Israeli techniques for CAT-illegal torture and degradation with a nationwide program of “law enforcement education.”  The non-violent dissenters of the occupy movement have already been subjected to the signature abuses of Zionist repression: nerve damage from hours in tight restraints; the arbitrary violence of Shamir’s infamous “force, might, beatings;” use of tear gas canisters as lethal projectiles.

All right, then. Inarguably, President Obama is a criminal: hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind. But perhaps we ought to look at the whole person. Maybe he behaves a little better with respect to aggression. After all, aggression is the highest of all high crimes, and a hanging offense, for the Nazis we caught – America hallowed the principle at Nuremberg. As UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) stated:

No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression. A war of aggression is a crime against international peace.

Oh dear, tsk, tsk. Our little background check turns up a problem here too. President Obama waged illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq. His continuing war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the relevant UNSC Resolution, 1368 (2001). Use of force in this case breaches Articles 46, 48 and 51 of the United Nations Charter, supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution. The now-covert war he commands in Iraq similarly flouts UNSC Resolution 1441, which authorized no use of force. The UN Secretary General termed our war on Iraq illegal.

The wars Obama started are no better. US use of force in Yemen and Somalia is undertaken without UN supervision, in direct breach of UN Charter Chapter VII. Pakistan publicly denounced the US for a ‘deliberate act of aggression’ when President Obama commanded an armed attack on defense forces inside Pakistan.

In Libya, President Obama overstepped the objectives of UNSCR 1973 (2011). The objectives are crucial because use of force is illegal when not under UN supervision. Disregarding the scope of the no-fly zone, President Obama destroyed civilian infrastructure and defensive emplacements in Sirte and elsewhere in support of one combatant faction, interfering with national self-determination in breach of UN Charter Article 2.4. In using, force President Obama aborted African Union efforts at pacific settlement of disputes, required by the supreme law of our land: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and UN Charter Chapter VI.

Illegal use of force against Iran will be laid to President Obama’s account as well. His common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, the precedent of Count 1 at Nuremberg, is deniable for now, plausibly or not, but evident in partial execution, and complete.

The last time the United States went to war with Iran, in the largest naval battle since World War II, our leaders ran afoul of the law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) called the US attack disproportionate and unjustified by necessity. We ran to the UN and cried self-defense, but the ICJ rejected that claim.  Our first war on Iran has been ruled an act of aggression. Our new war, with its unsolved murders and mysterious explosions, raises sticky issues in the evolving doctrine of state responsibility for intentionally wrongful acts. President Obama has put the poisoned chalice to his lips. We’ll see if he drinks.

So Obama’s an aggressor too. Well, perhaps he keeps his nose clean once he gets into an illegal war. Let’s apply humanitarian law. While America has run from the accountability of the Rome Statute, its provisions merely institutionalize universal-jurisdiction humanitarian law. So President Obama may get off scot-free on Rome Statute Article 8.2.c.iv, for the extra-judicial execution of Osama bin Laden when rendered hors de combat by detention. But he’s still on the hook for the equivalent crime under universal jurisdiction. The prohibitions come from the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, to which our state is party. In fact, the Hague Convention relaxed American law a bit, as murder of prisoners was a capital offense under Military Order 100. In the case at hand the evidence is clear – we took that woozy mugshot of the captured invalid Osama right before we shot him. Then there’s Rome Statute Article 8.2.a.i, which criminalizes the willful killing of civilians Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, along with 90 per cent of our Pakistani drone-war casualties.

Crime goes to the applicant’s character, you might say. With a position of trust in a criminal state, crime is a purely notional embarrassment, and easy to suppress, in America’s cult of personality – but soon legal exposure may be more than an annoyance for elder statesmen craving society’s esteem. Late last year, in ICC-02/05-01/09, the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court denied immunity to heads of state.  The decision leaves plenty of wiggle room for executive lips and shysters like Gonzales and Koh, but it reflects the world’s resolve to end impunity.

For peaceful little countries, it’s great sport to shoo our criminal elder statesmen with the law. Mischievous Swiss lawmaker Dominique Baettig chased George Bush away with public recognition of torture charges. Fortunately for our diminutive warlord, planned protests afforded a face-saving security pretext for his flight from justice.  Lawyers Against the War gave it a whirl in Canada.  Naturally the charges sank without a ripple in America’s servile snowbound hinterlands, but the meticulously documented charges promise lots more fun. They’ll throw the same book at ex-president Obama. CAT Article 12 makes it his crime, too.

When his turn comes, the charges are likely to be lurid. President Obama doesn’t merely fail to investigate torture, he has his diplomats obstruct independent efforts to redress it. When Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon took up the case of one of Spain’s own torture victims, as the law requires, the US government “fought tooth and nail” to obstruct Garzon’s investigations. To keep official torturers out of reach of the law, the Obama administration disappears charges as well as human beings, perverting justice at home and abroad.

Torturer, aggressor, war criminal. Clearly, rule of law is not Obama’s strong suit. But, as legal wizard Johnny Cochran said, let’s not rush to judgment. What has he done for me lately? That is how we’re taught to think.

Let’s stick with what we are entitled to demand, that the candidate honor the commitments and obligations essential to a sovereign state: our universal human rights. Take minimal civil and political rights, as guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), supreme law of the land.

Patriotic brainwashing keeps that legal fact repressed deep in Americans’ subconscious. No one in America holds presidential aspirants to the standards of the civilized world. What does sometimes happen is wistful evocation of a less demanding standard, our quaint old long-gone Bill of Rights.

Still it’s easy to pile up annals of despotic overreach. Conor Friedersdorf reels off 14 outrages. Collectively they make a mockery of CCPR Articles 9, 6, 17, 19, 12, 14, 10, and 16. There are many hapless victims beyond Friedersdorf’s myopic view – Gulf States inhabitants, Occupy dissidents, debtors, and people of color – and they might add Articles 1, 7, 11, and 21 to the civil and political rights that have gone through President Obama’s shredder.

Partisan dead-enders maintain that despite the President’s high crimes and overt contempt for civil and political rights, the Democratic alternative offers certain social and material advantages. At this point it would be a waste of time to take the pathetic scraps on offer and systematically compare them to the minimal requirements of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR).  That test reveals the piteous and terrible failure of a puffed-up corporate puppet. He shrinks shyly from state duties to respect core rights, and fails utterly to protect our human rights from corporate depredations. But in search of some indicative examples, let’s measure the pleadings of a random Democratic loyalist against the relevant human rights standards.

Achievement: “Obama has overhauled the food safety system.”

Well, that is certainly worth doing. Article 11 of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:

(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources.

Our ruling class won’t ratify that covenant, so technically, the President is not on the hook for his gross derelictions: lip service to government duties respecting freedom from hunger, and servile negligence that allows corporate interests to destroy fisheries and foodstocks. With America’s Gulf Coast fisheries poisoned by corporate malfeasance, the FDA underestimates the toxicity of Gulf Coast shrimp by four orders of magnitude.  The US government permits Monsanto to impose the “substantial equivalence” doctrine, muzzling scientific inquiry into food safety. To test the food that patent monopolists force-feed us, Americans have to depend on Chinese research. And in fact, the Chinese have found an insidious taint. The Obama administration is colluding with pesticide producers to forestall independent pesticide research. As the censorship continues, commercial interests exterminate bees and the plants that they pollinate worldwide.

Achievement:  “Advanced women’s rights in the work place. Ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in our military. Stopped defending DOMA in court. Passed the Hate Crimes bill. Appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court.”

More insulting scraps of rights. At the outset of his term the president had the majority to sign and ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), codifying comprehensive rights and impelling them with an international framework of independent review. He did not. The president shares the US Government’s provincial compulsion to reinvent all wheels and agonize over bad imitations of the world-standard protections accepted everywhere else. It’s more than stubborn ignorance – it’s fear of any world consensus that our rulers can’t control.

“Expanded access to medical care and provided subsidies for people who can’t afford it. Expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Fixed the preexisting conditions travesty [and rescissions] in health insurance.”

Let’s look at what our president’s job is, if he claims to head a sovereign state: CESCR Article 12:

1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for:

(a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;

(b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;

(c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases;

(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

The President’s medical tinkering seems to be a feckless stab at paragraph 2(d). In the event, the President undermined the proven approach of monopsony health-care procurement and delivered a captive market to predatory corporate middlemen. Here again, we have lip service to government duties and utter failure to protect.

Achievement: “Invested in clean energy. Overhauled the credit card industry, making it much more consumer-friendly. While Dodd-Frank bill was weak in many respects, it was still an extremely worthwhile start at re-regulating the financial sector.  He created a Elizabeth Warren’s dream agency: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s done a lot for veterans. He got help for people whose health was injured during the clean-up after the 9/11 attacks.”

A motley ragbag that falls apart under cursory examination. Not a hint of the duties of the state. You can sell rubbish like this with a straight face if you can keep Americans ignorant of world standards. Civil law is historically more cognizant of state duties, and most other nations are attuned to evolving international norms, but Americans are educated as provincials. In terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the state has failed if you don’t know your rights. But to fanatical theocrat Gary North and his holy electoral vanguard, protecting humans from the overreaching powers of states is “giving equal time in society to the devil.” Americans’ backward ignorance is actually sacred.

What’s more, all that financial boasting invites review in light of the Convention Against Corruption (CAC), supreme law of the land.  CAC Articles 18 and 19 address trading in influence and abuse of functions. Our government has told international reviewers that existing federal law prohibits abuse of function and trading in influence. Our government admits that it has not reviewed the effectiveness of that law. So the blatant and ubiquitous sleaze of public life turns out to be a crime! But corruption is a vital institution here. The graft of contending lobbyists, that’s our sole remaining check and balance. It is all that’s left of our state. So when the sordid story of bank reform is told, President Obama may not even be able to say, with the hapless villain Richard Nixon, “I am not a crook.”

And they want me to go to the polls and vote for this. They actually expect my consent-of-the-governed seal of approval for a criminal despot who can’t even make the trains run on time, and for the failed state that horked him up. Let his party die off like the Whigs. No, I want what I’ve got coming: rights and rule of law. No party gives me that. Saying so desecrates everything that’s sacred to this purulent police state. It’s blasphemy to hold the state to any standards. That’s how you learn that every word they tell you is a filthy lie. It is Satan’s irresistible lure : Now are ye undeceived.

Come, devil, for to thee is this world given. Hail the New World Order. Blasphemy is powerful. Satan’s old and wise. He knows depraved institutions always have a sanctifying rite. Defile it – nothing happens, but the institution’s power is gone. The pedophile church has a solemn rite: you must eat cheap pulpy bread and make believe it’s flesh. The crucial rite of the United States is the election, a travesty of futile choice. You must make believe you’re choosing what you want. To profane it breaks the brittle spell. Stop taking the host, and the priests can’t rape your child. Stop casting your vote, and the troops can’t rape that terrified woman that they’re gripping by the hair.

1. N.B. Broken link: sometime after January 20, State took down this handy listing of recent torture and human rights reviews.

Let’s try to clear up this fogged up situation by examining who’s killing whom, and why. The US has been butchering Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistani border, and the Pashtuns are fighting back because that’s their homeland. The Pashtuns have been living between the Hindu Kush and the Indus River since at least the 3rd Century, so one can reasonably say that they belong there, at least much more so than some guy from Intercourse, PA, or Walla Walla, Washington.

Go to most borders worldwide and, surprise, surprise, you’ll find more or less the same people living on both sides, often speaking the same language. This is also true in the US. In 2006, I drove 100 miles on route Farm to Market 170 in Texas, hugging the Rio Grande, and I didn’t see a single Anglo face in three hours. (Granted, there weren’t that many faces to be seen.) At Candelaria, population 75, I crossed a brief foot bridge into Mexico, then returned. Everybody else was doing it. Here, Rio Bravo was barely a trickle, so people on either side saw each other as neighbors, with the border an irrelevant fiction. To a Pashtun, then, the Durand Line, named after a British Foreign Secretary, is even more absurd.

Of course, I’m not advocating the abolishment of international borders, since large and subtle differences between populations require that they organize their societies differently, with demarcations between them, but it is ironic that the United States is chafing at the Pashtuns for crossing an arbitrary line, when America is the world’s most persistent and violent violator of international borders. As in many other cases, the only one who doesn’t belong on the map is you, Uncle Sam! Uncle Sam doesn’t know how to spell or pronounce sovereignty, at least when not talking about Israel. Sovranty. Sofarenty. Sufferenty.

Any Pashtun killed by American bombs or drones is a Pashtun wrongly murdered, be him a “militant,” as the Pentagon consistently charge, or more likely just a farmer or even a child. Imagine drones hovering over your hometown and zapping people at will, with the murdered victims being branded “insurgents.” If a Pashtun fights back, it’s because he has too. Wouldn’t you? If he dies fighting, at least he dies with honor, fighting for a just cause. The same cannot be said for American soldiers in Afghanistan. Pat Tillman realized this, but one of his own wasted him before he could tell the world about his awakening.

As a client state of America, Pakistan is being asked to kill its own citizens, Pashtuns and others, as a contribution to the petroleum fueled, natural gaseous, opium hazy and totally fogged up War on Terror. Doing Washington’s bidding, Pakistan has lost nearly 4,000 soldiers, but these needless deaths aren’t enough to appease the Washington masters of war. For brownnosing, Pakistan gets no pat on the head, but is being demonized as an “ally from hell,” to quote from the Atlantic.

With the notable exceptions of Israel and England, American allies are often betrayed. Pakistan’s being blamed for America’s ongoing troubles in Afghanistan, and for harboring Bin Laden until that much ballyhooed yet substanceless assassination, but all of the acrimonies and needless deaths could have been avoided had America never planted its XXXL rump on that corner of the world.

Using Bin Laden as a pretext, America invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and a decade later, it is still there, though its bogeyman is long gone. America never runs out of enemies, however, for it can always generate them anew, with either its bombs and guns, or through its jingoistic media. Along with Iran and Syria, Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has become a target.

Washington will always find new wars to fight and more people to kill, since that is the only task it is good at anymore. It does not know how to do anything else. Peace is not in its vocabulary, since war is how Washington and Wall Street make their money.

— September 1, 1939, W.H. Auden, 1907-1973

What a murderous, infanticidal, appalling, shameful, ignorant – and arguable decade-long war crime.

“Operation Enduring Freedom” turned “Operation Enduring Slaughter.”

Announcing the assault on Afghanistan on 7th October 2001, George W. Bush said, citing “Enduring Freedom”, that it defended “… the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear.”

And that: “If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves, (a) lonely path …”

Further: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we’ll also drop food, medicine and supplies, to the starving and suffering men, women and children of Afghanistan.”

“We’re a peaceful nation”, the President assured the world.

In London, “ally”, the then Prime Minister Blair, was reading from the same script: “We are peaceful people. But we know that sometimes to safeguard peace, we have to fight … We only do it if the cause is just. This cause is just.”

In pursuit of justness, between 7th October and 10th December 2001, 12,000 bombs were dropped in 4,710 sorties, on a population of just 28 million people (Globe and Mail, 19th January 2002) with 42% of the population aged 0-14; children being thus raised in unimaginable terror rather then “free from fear.”

With the bombs, aid parcels were indeed dropped. They were the identical colouring to the accompanying cluster bombs, resultantly those who rushed to collect brightly coloured yellow packages in anticipation – so often children – had limbs blown off at best, or life blown away. Excited anticipation turned terminal. The US belatedly issued warnings.

Between October 2001 and early 2002, United States aircraft dropped 1,228 cluster bombs, containing 248,056 bomblets, in 232 strikes on locations throughout the country, according to Cluster Munitions Monitor.

It is unclear whether they have been further used though Coalition forces have confirmed deploying cluster munitions for possible use.

Lest the indiscriminate carnage of the early days be obscured by that of the subsequent years mass graves and ongoing frenetic destruction by “The United States of America, a friend to the Afghan people, and of almost a billion worldwide who practice the Islamic faith”, as also declared by Bush in his 7th October address.

On 11th October, Khorum, a village of mud huts, 29 kilometres west of Jalalabad, was “systematically bombed” by US warplanes. As many as 200 people were killed, with whole families wiped out.

“Survivors accounts were consistent. Just after early morning prayers, two US warplanes circled, then attacked the village.”

On the first run, only a few were injured, but as people came out, they returned twice, killing men, women and children, including refugees from Jalalabad, who had fled to the isolated dwellings feeling they would be safer there. “There was no military or Taliban presence nearby”, wrote Norman Dixon at the time, in his carefully researched article “Bush’s war threatens millions with starvation”.

Donald Rumsfeld’s denials, first as “ridiculous”, then “lies”, then declaring “certain knowledge” of a nearby military installation (statements now so familiar in mass murders across Afghanistan, Iraq and since March, Libya) were soon found to be baseless.

A reporter in the village showed Nightline “extensive footage” of the destruction, confirming: “that the village had been completely obliterated estimating at least 100 people had been killed. Giant craters were where houses once stood. Dead animal carcasses littered the area. Survivors angrily denied that there were military installations or al Qaeda ‘training camps’ anywhere near Khorum.”

The Dixon article continues:

Having run out of targets within days of the start of the bombing campaign, Washington has authorised pilots to seek ‘emerging targets’, meaning that they can blast just about anything they like.

Four workers employed by a United Nations mine-clearing operation died while they slept, when a US cruise missile demolished their Kabul building in early hours of October 9th.

On October 12th, a 900-kilogram satellite-guided US ‘smart’ bomb, hit houses almost two kilometres from Kabul airport, destroying four houses, killing at least four people.

On October 13th, a bomb landed in a busy market in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, killing five people.

A refugee (stated) that 160 people were taken to hospital when US bombs hit Khushkam Bhat, near Jalalabad airport, on October 13th. An unknown number may have died. More than 100 houses were‘damaged or flattened’.

On October 16th, at least two US bombs hit Red Cross warehouses near Kabul, wounding an employee, and setting them on fire. Wheat, medicines and supplies were destroyed. The roofs of the buildings were emblazoned with vast Red Cross insignia.  The Pentagon confirmed the strike.

A day earlier, a US missile exploded 150 metres from a World Food Program warehouse in Kabul as trucks were being loaded. A worker was injured.

Later on the same day that US warplanes had bombed the Red Cross warehouses, President Bush was visiting the headquarters of the American Red Cross in Washington to promote his appeal for US kids to give a dollar each for the children of Afghanistan.  “Winter arrives early in Afghanistan. It’s cold, really cold. The children need warm clothing, they need food, they need medicines. And thanks to the American children, fewer children in Afghanistan will suffer this winter”, Bush told an assembled group of children.

He didn’t mention the bombs.

Lying and destroying food stocks, medicines and essential services are tried and tested (illegal) tactics. In Iraq the UK and US repeatedly did the same in 1991, and then between 1993 and the 2003 invasion – even dropping lighted flares on harvested wheat and crops (a crime still, allegedly, ongoing.)

In Libya, the same is happening – the vocabulary has changed, they call it bombing “command and control posts.”

If the above carnage is a tiny snap shot of several very small areas, and that wrought in little over three months, what is the true cost of Afghanistan, in human terms, little over 3,650 days later?

In June 2004, with “President” Hamid Karzai, in the White House, Bush declared Afghanistan a success, indeed, a model for Iraq. Womens’ rights and education had “risen from the ashes”, Iraq would follow in the same mould. (China Daily, 16th June 2004.) Iraq is now estimated to have an upper estimate of approaching two million excess, invasion-related deaths since 2003.

Just before last year’s marking of the ninth anniversary of the onslaught on Afghanistan, of which George W. Bush had predicted in his invasion speech:  “We will win this conflict by the patient accumulation of successes”, Professor Marc Herold wrote an encyclopaedic, searing summary of these “successes.”

Included was: “In Afghanistan, according to the United Nations’ Childrens Fund, about 600 under-five children perish every day from preventable diseases such as diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, parasitic worms and pneumonia.”

Dr Gideon Polya, author of “Body Count – Global Avoidable Mortality Deaths since 1950”, cites the death rate for under 5 Afghan infants, as higher in percentage than their Polish counterparts in Nazi occupied Poland, or French-Jewish children in Nazi occupied France.

Afghanistan’s child mortality is the second highest child mortality on earth.  Life expectancy for men and women is just 44 years old. Further, according to the Afghan Human Rights Monitor, in 2010, an average of 7 civilians were killed by occupying forces, every day. Given the remoteness of so much of the country, an underestimate almost certainly.

In Blair’s near carbon copy of Bush’s onslaught-day speech, he said: “It is now nearly a month since the atrocity occurred (9/11.) It is more than two weeks since an ultimatum was delivered to the Taliban to yield up the terrorists or face the consequences… They were given the chance of siding with justice (or) terror. They chose terror.”

Well, no, as Iraq’s non existent “WMD’s” were a fabrication for war, so was this. On the same day, CNN reported:

“The White House on Sunday rejected an offer from Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban to try suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan under Islamic law.”

The offer came as the United States massed forces in southwest Asia for a possible strike against Afghanistan if the Taliban refused to surrender bin Laden. A Bush administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, rejected the Taliban offer and repeated U.S. demands that bin Laden be turned over unconditionally.

The Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, made the offer at a news conference in Islamabad. Zaeef said “the Taliban would detain bin Laden and try him under Islamic law if the United States makes a formal request and presents them with evidence.” Emphasis mine. (CNN, October 7th, 72001)

On 7th October this year, General Stanley McCrystal, who commanded coalition forces in Afghanistan 2009-2010, told the US Foreign Relations Committee that the US had gone in to Afghanistan with a “frighteningly simplistic view.” After ten years they still lack knowledge, were little better than 50% towards reaching their war goals. (That gas pipeline through the country still not built, then?)

“We didn’t know enough and we still don’t know enough,” he said. “Most of us, me included, had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years.” Can they not read? Did they truly know nothing of this “graveyard of Empires”?

In 330 BC., even Alexander the Great met his match, nearly being killed by an arrow to his leg and with one of his soldiers writing:  “Here the foe does not meet us in pitched battle, as other armies we have dueled in the past. . . . Even when we defeat him, he will not accept our dominion. He comes back again and again. He hates us with a passion whose depth is exceeded only by his patience and his capacity for suffering.”

Little has changed. Seemingly, US Generals  and military planners ignore the lessons of history.

They did not make enough effort, said the General, to understand the culture; forces made little effort to learn the languages.There  are forty nine listed languages in Afghanistan, General. And here is just one of many history reading lists, with, at a quick count, about three hundred titles.

Going in to Iraq under two years later, whinged the General, didn’t make things any easier. It didn’t make them any easier for the Iraqis  in their mass graves since, either. The culture and language was also not understood there. Remember the countless shootings at road blocks, where culturally ignorant troops stood with arm up, palm out? Uncounted car loads of families, individuals, ended blown to pieces as they resultantly drove through. It means “Welcome.”

“The headlines of the past decade in Afghanistan have been written in blood”, wrote Declan Welsh this week, in the Guardian, adding: “the greatest failures have been political.”

Indeed, and towering arrogance and pig ignorance of not even the desire to learn and understand the ways of ancient lands, McDonald-free civilizations. Simply to kill, smash, grab – and then blame the invaded.

To return to George W. Bush’s words, Britain and America, have seemingly  become: “government sponsors, the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves, (a) lonely path …”

As The Washington Post reported last month, the “commingling” of CIA officers, JSOC paramilitary troops and contractors “occupy an expanding netherworld between intelligence and military operations” where “congressional intelligence and armed services committees rarely get a comprehensive view.”

Or any “view” at all, which is precisely what the CIA and Pentagon have long desired; an oversight-free zone where American policymakers operate, as Dick Cheney infamously put it, on the “dark side,” a position fully-embraced by the “hope and change” administration of Barack Obama.

Awlaki’s state-sponsored killing, like the May 2 murder of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, resurfaces many unanswered questions concerning the 9/11 attacks, the so-called trigger for America’s global “War on Terror.”

But before turning to those issues, it is necessary to take a detour and examine administration actions; specifically the deliberations undertaken by Obama’s national security team which culminated in Awlaki’s death.

White House “Death Panel”

Unlike the fantasies of the corporate-controlled Tea Party who charged during the run-up to the White House sell-out of health care reform that the administration would create “death panels” to deny care to the elderly, it has since emerged that Team Obama has stood-up the authentic article.

According to The Washington Post, President Obama’s Justice Department “wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting” of Awlaki. The Post reports that the memorandum “was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi.”

That memorandum, according to The New York Times, was drafted in June 2010, some six months after Awlaki had been placed on the White House hit list, by Office of Legal Counsel attorneys “David Barron and Martin Lederman.”

Both former OLC lawyers are prominent “liberals” from prestigious universities; Barron at Harvard and Lederman at Georgetown University.

Ironically enough, in several scholarly articles they had railed against the previous administration’s adaptation of the “Unitary Executive Theory” promulgated by “torture memo” authors Jay Bybee and John Yoo.

Under Bush, OLC opinions were used to justify everything from warrantless wiretapping, the domestic deployment of the military to arrest Americans, to the torture and indefinite detention of “terrorist” suspects at the Guantánamo Bay prison gulag and CIA “black sites.”

This, of course, begs the question: if Awlaki’s murder was “legal,” why then was the authorization to do so reached in camera by officials following a deliberative process which can’t be shared with the public because of “national security”?

The answer should be chilling and shocking to all Americans: because the nucleus of a death squad state recalling those stood up in Chile and Argentina during the “dirty war” period of the 1970s may now exist.

Reuters disclosed that Americans “are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.”

“There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel,” reporter Mark Hosenball wrote, “which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council. … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.”

According to Reuters, “targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC ‘principals,’ meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval.”

A “former official” told Hosenball that “one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to ‘protect’ the president,” i.e., provide Obama legal cover under the thin veneer afforded by “plausible deniability.”

McClatchy News reported that “broadly speaking” White House orders to kill Awlaki were based on claims that “the nation’s inherent right of self-defense [is] recognized under international law.” However, “international law also imposes limits: Targeted killing is banned except to protect against ‘concrete, specific and imminent’ danger.”

And although the administration now claims that Awlaki was targeted for death because “his role in AQAP had gone ‘from inspirational to operational’,” Reuters disclosed that “officials acknowledge that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki’s hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.”

In fact, the White House has failed to provide any proof whatsoever that Awlaki posed an “imminent danger” to the United States, although there is considerable evidence that he was on the radar of U.S. and allied secret state intelligence agencies for more than a decade, had close ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers and could have been picked up and indicted at any time.

Instead, federal law enforcement officials gave Awlaki a green light to leave the United States, unlike thousands of innocent Muslim-Americans swept-up and detained by the FBI in the post-9/11 hysteria that followed the attacks.

A “former military intelligence officer who worked with special operations troops to hunt down high-value terrorism targets,” told the right-wing Washington Times: “I think it’s pretty easy to understand why they didn’t take him alive. Would you want to deal with the hassle of trying to put him on trial, an American citizen that has gotten so much press for being the target of a CIA kill order? That would be a nightmare. The ACLU would be crawling all over the Justice Department for due process in an American court.”

That about sums up the dominant mindset of an Empire in sharp decline: the rule of law and due process for criminal suspects reduced to a “hassle.”

Slouching Towards Dictatorship

Obama’s national security team justified whacking Awlaki, as with their earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, by referencing the Bush-era Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), hastily passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“A decade later,” McClatchy reported, “the Obama administration contends that this wartime authority remains even if it’s evolved for reasons the administration won’t fully elucidate.”

The relevant section of AUFM reads: “IN GENERAL — That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” (emphasis added)

Readers will undoubtedly note that in passing the resolution, Congress not only ceded its authority to declare war to the Executive Branch but also planted the seeds of the administration’s preemptive war doctrines along with an unprecedented expansion of its domestic surveillance powers.

More pertinently is the reason why the administration “won’t fully elucidate” how the Bush-era AUMF “evolved” chiefly due to the fact that secret annexes now exist which authorize the killing of Americans, not only in Yemen or other “War on Terror” fronts, but right here in the United States itself?

After all, it’s not beyond the Obama administration to play fast and loose with the truth or hide repressive policies under layers of top secret presidential “findings” or a multitude of CIA and Pentagon black programs, as did the previous Bush government.

Recall that during the run-up to the reauthorization of three expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act, civil libertarians decried the use of secret legal memos justifying everything from unchecked access to internet and telephone records to the deployment of government-sanctioned malware on private computers during “national security” investigations.

Recall too, that the Obama administration, as The New York Times disclosed in June, handed the FBI “significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.”

These “news rules,” the Times averred, will give agents “more latitude” to investigate citizens even when there is no evidence they have exhibited “signs of criminal or terrorist activity.”

It gets worse.

Last month, The New York Times revealed that the FBI “is permitted to include people on the government’s terrorist watch list even if they have been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are dropped.”

Under these new standards, the Bureau may deem someone a “known or suspected terrorist,” not based on evidence gathered through a criminal investigation, but solely if officials have “particularized derogatory information,” including that derived from First Amendment protected activities, to support to support an individuals’ watch listing or placement on a “no-fly” list.

One administration wag, speaking on condition of anonymity because to do otherwise would reveal “closely held deliberations within the administration,” but did so anyway because this was clearly a sanctioned leak to stenographer Peter Finn, told The Washington Post that “what constitutes due process in [the Awlaki case] is a due process in war.”

“The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi,” Finn wrote, “or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

We now know, thanks to Reuters, that authorization came from a White House death panel, an extra-constitutional committee of anonymous officials operating outside the rule of law.

As we have seen since Barack Obama took office, as under the previous Bush government, the Constitution is a meaningless scrap of paper with some words on it, duly trotted out on national holidays only to be cast aside in practice; that is, when it isn’t used as a rhetorical hammer against assorted “new Hitlers” or geopolitical rivals whose resources corporate America seek to “liberate.”

Dead Men Tell No Tales

As toxic to democratic norms and the rule of law as the Awlaki affair clearly is, there are underlying parapolitical themes surrounding his murder which strengthen suspicions that what took place in Yemen on September 30 is more than just another story about an overt power grab by the Executive Branch.

While the government and media continue to cover-up the role played by the CIA and other secret state agencies in alleged intelligence “failures” leading up to the 9/11 attacks, evidence suggests that the Awlaki killing, as with last May’s murder of former bête noire and on-again, off-again ally, Osama Bin Laden, may have been a “clean-up” operation designed to remove inconvenient witnesses with knowledge of Agency involvement in the plot.

As Antifascist Calling reported nearly two years ago in the wake of the aborted 2009 bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day over Detroit, a plot for which Awlaki was accused of orchestrating, though evidence can’t be supplied because it’s “secret,” The Washington Post disclosed that Awlaki had extensive contacts with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar and Hani Hanjour who “had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls Church.”

In a series of 2010 articles (here, here, here and here), I reported on the stark parallels between September 11 and the Flight 253 affair.

And as with the 2001 attacks we were told “changed everything,” far from being a failure to “connect the dots,” intelligence and law enforcement officials possessed sufficient information that should have prevented accused bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding that plane and placing the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk.

And while Awlaki wasn’t given a free pass by the administration in that botched attack, earlier government failures to apprehend him certainly set the stage.

According to History Commons, “shortly before the [FBI] investigation [into Awlaki's alleged ties to the now-shuttered Holy Land Foundation] is closed,” in 2000, Awlaki “is beginning to associate with hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar shortly before the investigation ends.”

“For instance,” History Commons avers, “on February 4, one month before the FBI investigation is closed, al-Awlaki talks on the telephone four times with hijacker associate [and suspected Saudi intelligence agent] Omar al-Bayoumi.”

“The 9/11 Commission will later speculate that these calls are related to Alhazmi and Almihdhar, since al-Bayoumi is helping them that day, and that Alhazmi or Almihdhar may even have been using al-Bayoumi’s phone at the time. Al-Bayoumi had also been the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation in 1999.”

Keep in mind that at least two of the hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, figure prominently in recent revelations by researcher Kevin Fenton, the author of Disconnecting the Dots.

In a recent conversation with Boiling Frogs Post’s Sibel Edmonds and Peter B. Collins, Fenton said that during the course of his investigation, drawn from the Congressional 9/11 Joint Inquiry, the 9/11 Commission, the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report, and the CIA’s still-redacted Inspector General’s report, he discovered that the CIA had deliberately withheld information from the FBI that the future hijackers had entered the United States with multiple entry visas issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Even though the Agency had identified the pair as international terrorists who attended a 2000 Al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia where they and others, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Khallad Bin Attash, one of the principle architects of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, planned the assault on the USS Cole and the 9/11 attacks, they kept this from the FBI, information that could have led straight to the heart of Al-Qaeda’s “planes operation.”

Fenton provides substantial evidence that the CIA’s Alec Station Director Richard Blee and deputy, Tom Wilshire, concealed intelligence from investigators, concluding this “information was intentionally omitted in order to allow an al-Qaeda attack to go forward against the United States.”

As part of this continuing cover-up, Awlaki’s ties to the 9/11 hijackers were far more extensive than secret state officials have led us to believe.

In fact, although the Obama administration has justified killing Awlaki with false claims that he was AQAP’s “external operations” chief, his role before 9/11 was substantially more significant from an investigatory perspective: that of a “fixer,” first in San Diego where he assisted Saudi spook Omar al-Bayoumi in “settling” Alhazmi and Almihdhar, and later in Falls Church, Virginia, where he did the same for Hani Hanjour.

In 2002, Newsweek revealed that “some federal investigators suspect that al-Bayoumi could have been an advance man for the 9-11 hijackers, sent by Al Qaeda to assist the plot that ultimately claimed 3,000 lives.”

“Two months after al-Bayoumi began aiding Alhazmi and Almihdhar,” Newsweek disclosed, “al-Bayoumi’s wife began receiving regular stipends, often monthly and usually around $2,000, totaling tens of thousands of dollars.

Payments arrived “in the form of cashier’s checks, purchased from Washington’s Riggs Bank by Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of the late King Faisal and wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi envoy who is a prominent Washington figure and personal friend of the Bush family.”

With startling similarities to the Awlaki case, ten days after the attacks, al-Bayoumi is picked up by British authorities in London, where he had relocated in July 2001, at the request of the FBI. Although his phone calls, bank accounts and associations are scrutinized, the Bureau claim they found no connections to terrorism.

The Washington Post will report that by 2002 the FBI had concluded, the same year Awlaki leaves the U.S., “that no evidence could be found of any organized domestic effort to aid the hijackers.”

Recall that new information linking some members of the Saudi royal family and its intelligence apparatus to the attacks has recently surfaced. Last month, The Miami Herald revealed that two weeks before the kamikaze assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a Saudi family “abruptly vacated their luxury home near Sarasota, leaving a brand new car in the driveway, a refrigerator full of food, fruit on the counter–and an open safe in a master bedroom.”

Investigative reporters Anthony Summers and Dan Christensen learned that “law enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between the home and those who carried out the death flights–including leader Mohamed Atta–in discoveries never before revealed to the public.”

“Ten years after the deadliest attack of terrorism on U.S. soil,” Summers and Christensen wrote, “new information has emerged that shows the FBI found troubling ties between the hijackers and residents in the upscale community in southwest Florida, but the investigation wasn’t reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.”

In a follow-up piece that significantly advanced the story, researcher Russ Baker reported on the WhoWhatWhy web site “that those alleged confederates were closely tied to influential members of the Saudi ruling elite.”

Building on information first disclosed by the Herald, Baker, the author of Family of Secrets, reports that this “now-revealed link” between those who consorted with the hijackers in Florida “and the highest ranks of the Saudi establishment, reopens questions about the White House’s controversial approval for multiple charter flights allowing Saudi nationals to depart the U.S., beginning about 48 hours after the attacks, without the passengers being interviewed by law enforcement–despite the identification of the majority of the hijackers as Saudis.”

Is there a pattern between the hands-off treatment afforded well-connected Saudis and Anwar al-Awlaki’s casual, and inexplicable, flight from the United States?

“After 9/11″ History Commons points out, “the FBI will question al-Awlaki, and he will admit to meeting with Alhazmi several times, but say he does not remember what they discussed. He will not claim to remember Almihdhar at all.” Other accounts suggest that the relationship was much closer.

“The 9/11 Congressional Inquiry,” History Commons avers, “claim that Alhazmi and Almihdhar ‘were closely affiliated with [al-Awlaki] who reportedly served as their spiritual adviser during their time in San Diego. … Several persons informed the FBI after September 11 that this imam had closed-door meetings in San Diego with Almihdhar, Alhazmi, and another individual, whom al-Bayoumi had asked to help the hijackers’.”

“Around August 2000,” History Commons reports, “al-Awlaki resigns as imam and travels to unknown ‘various countries.’ In early 2001, he will be appointed the imam to a much larger mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. During this time frame, Alhazmi, Almihdhar, and fellow hijacker Hani Hanjour will move to Virginia and attend al-Awlaki’s mosque there.”

Anecdotally, in 2003 Newsweek reports: “Lincoln Higgie, an antiques dealer who lived across the street from the mosque where Aulaqi used to lead prayer, told Newsweek that he distinctly recalls the imam knocking on his door in the first week of August 2001 to tell him he was leaving for Kuwait. ‘He came over before he left and told me that something very big was going to happen, and that he had to be out of the country when it happened,’ recalls Higgie.”

The antiques dealer later told The New York Times, that when he learned that Awlaki would be permanently leaving San Diego, “he told the imam to stop by if he was ever in the area–and got a strange response.” Higgie said, “‘I don’t think you’ll be seeing me. I won’t be coming back to San Diego again. Later on you’ll find out why’.”

Although the FBI suspected Awlaki “had some connection with the 9/11 plot,” authorities claim there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him, nor can he be deported because he’s an American citizen. And when the Bureau hatched an ill-conceived plan to arrest him on an obscure charge of “transporting prostitutes across state lines,” that plan collapsed when Awlaki left the U.S. in March 2002.

“But on October 10, 2002,” History Commons reports, “he makes a surprise return to the U.S.” Although his name is on a terrorist watch list and he is detained by Customs’ officials when he lands in New York, they are informed by the FBI that “his name was taken off the watch list just the day before. He is released after only three hours.”

“Throughout 2002,” History Commons informs us, Awlaki is the “subject of an active Customs investigation into money laundering called Operation Greenquest, but he is not arrested for this either, or for the earlier contemplated prostitution charges. At the time, the FBI is fighting Greenquest, and Customs officials will later accuse the FBI of sabotaging Greenquest investigations.”

Awlaki again leaves the U.S., this time for good. Although the FBI admits they were “very interested” in Awlaki, they fail to stop him leaving the country. One FBI source told U.S. News and World Report, “We don’t know how he got out.”

Inexplicably however, it was not until 2008 that secret state officials concluded that Awlaki was an Al-Qaeda operative! This beggars belief, and raises the question as to why he was allowed to leave in the first place. It certainly can’t be for lack of evidence or that when Awlaki set-up shop, first in London and finally in Yemen, he is continually under surveillance by British, Yemeni and American intelligence agencies.

Although interviewed four times by the FBI after September 11, the Bureau concluded, according to The New York Times, that Awlaki’s “contacts with the hijackers and other radicals were random.”

Other investigators, however, disagreed. “One detective,” the Times reported, whose name has been scrubbed from 9/11 Commission files, told staff that he believed Awlaki “was at the center of the 9/11 story.” At the time of the Flight 253 affair, I wrote that “despite, or possibly because of these dubious connections he was allowed to leave the country.”

In fact, the curious disinterest exhibited by authorities in bringing Awlaki to ground following September 11, were neither “errors in judgement” nor “mistakes” by overtaxed investigators but are rather, a modus operandi which suggests that Awlaki and others were part of a CIA domestic operation which allowed the 9/11 plot to go forward.

Nothing in what I have written above should be construed as justification for the extrajudicial assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. In fact, the opposite conclusion can be drawn. The available evidence indicates that Awlaki could have been arrested multiple times. At the least serious end of the criminal justice spectrum he could have been charged with providing “material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” to whit, Al-Qaeda, and legally taken out of circulation.

That he wasn’t and continued to operate freely as a propagandist, despite substantial corroboration from multiple law enforcement sources that he was a key figure in the pre-9/11 domestic support network, suggests that Awlaki may have been a double agent, albeit one who had decidedly gone “off the reservation.”

Awlaki’s handling by authorities raise serious questions about just how extensive U.S. support for Al-Qaeda was prior to, and possibly even after the September 11 attacks, particularly in resource-rich global hot-spots.

As numerous journalists and researchers have painstakingly documented, Al-Qaeda, allied terrorist outfits and international narco-trafficking networks have a long, sordid history of supporting U.S. covert operations that targeted America’s geopolitical rivals even as Bin Laden’s far-flung organization plotted to attack the United States itself.

In this light, Awlaki’s “targeted killing” as with the earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, may be part of a larger CIA/Pentagon operation to remove inconvenient participants and witnesses from the scene who might have a thing or two to say about the crimes and intrigues hatched by the imperialist Empire.

After all, dead men tell no tales…

For an empire, then, whose crimes are myriad, for it takes so much violence to maintain worldwide dominion, this assault against the mind is relentless, a blanket of nonsense that suffocates night and day, a miasma of photo ops and jive that poisons the conscience.

Thus, a chirpy CNN reporter talked about “terrorists” attacking the US Embassy in Afghanistan. She didn’t even called them “insurgents,” but simply and unequivocally “terrorists,” “terrorists,” “terrorists,” like a mantra, as she excitedly recounted how they had disguised themselves as women before overwhelming Afghan cops guarding a unfinished high-rise, killing them. Their aim was to gain a vantage point to rain rockets onto the US Embassy.

Of course, the CNN reporter could not point out that these men were classic nationalists, for a nationalist is one willing to defend his homeland against a foreign invader. Also, this paid-for mouth piece could not admit that these men were courageous and bold, as well as noble and selfless, for they had no escape plan. They were trapped inside that building. They knew that as they attacked, they would be surrounded by American soldiers, yet to do what was just and laudable to their own people, these brave individuals were willing to be killed by their hated enemy. They chose death and honor before subjugation and humiliation. Patrick Henry should be proud of them.

After this incident, US officials accused Pakistan of being the mastermind. Besides justifying continued drone and missile strikes against Pakistan itself, this charge also discredited the attackers as foreign agents and mercenaries, but let’s think about this for a second. A mercenary fights for money. He doesn’t choose certain death. Any Afghan willing to die battling foreign invaders, be they Americans or Soviets, is a nationalist — period.

Similarly, a Libyan is a nationalist if he’s fighting the vast American-led coalition, this oil-soaked crusade of mostly white, Christian countries that’s been attacking Libya for over six months now, but, no, the American media is calling him a “Gaddafi loyalist.”

Such deformation of facts also affects American victims of empire. When Pat Tillman was shot at close range by an American soldier, he was presented as a hero killed in action, a victim of the Taliban. A death loses its meaning and dignity when it’s perverted to serve someone else’s interest, and when a corpse is used to glorify the murderer, you have one of the worst of possible crimes, something akin to necrophilia. The empire will kill you, then screw you. It will derive pleasure from your cadaver.

Likewise, though it has been proven in court that the US government was behind the killing of Martin Luther King, he now has a huge statue on the National Mall, the very Mall where he organized Resurrection City, a poor people’s protest which hastened his assassination. With typical cynicism, our government is celebrating and appropriating a man it exterminated in cold blood.

Likewise, 9/11. It was nauseating for me to watch the ten-year commemoration of that tragedy without any airtime given to those who desperately wanted to probe deeper into exactly what happened. The many architects, engineers, pilots, first responders and relatives of victims who doubted the official version of 9/11 were shunted aside so a self-justifying and congratulatory narrative from this criminal government could proceed without interruptions. This was the moment for sinister butchers like Bush and Obama to appear caring and statesmanlike, as father figures consoling us in our moment of grief, when they are, in fact, the authors of so much past and ongoing grief.

The truths about many key events in this nation’s history, Pearl Harbor attack, Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Martin Luther King’s, John’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, etc., have never fully come out, or only came out decades after the fact, so Americans should have learnt to suspect, by now, routine duplicity from Washington, yet many of us continue to believe. Such is the power of brainwashing. As they kill and lie in our names, we keep nodding and nodding.

We are not expected to ask questions, but merely to swallow whole the spoon-fed kitsch and bullshit. Recently, Americans were shown a photo of a dog that refused to leave the coffin of his master, a dead SEAL member, one of those “heroes” who supposedly killed Bin Laden. Though there was no physical proof whatsoever, no corpse, film or photo, we were told that a successful raid had occurred, and though an American helicopter tail was left behind, no American had died, incredibly, then we were told, three months later, that 22 of the SEALs involved, i.e., potential witnesses who could contradict the official narrative, were conveniently killed in an unprecedented attack by the Taliban.

These fairy tales are so bizarre but, before you can pause to parse one, if you’re so inclined, and most of us are no longer inclined or capable, another one comes down the chute, then another, then another. When one commits as many killings, lootings and rapes as this government does, one must lie constantly.

A program of endless war, destruction of nations, loss of life far beyond that day’s tragedy and a political economic dementia that threatens to consume humanity in its madness.

The mass murdering over-reaction to a murderous criminal attack has been used to bring about what the terrorists of 911 wanted; an over extension of the empire in costly wars that would ultimately sap its strength. But the fundamentalist attackers were minor in their impact compared to the fundamentalist rulers of corporate capital and Zion. They have sent the nation and much of the world spiraling into wars and a debt crisis that threatens further international calamities worse than any conceived by terrorists.

The past ten years of trillion dollar warfare  has seen the slaughter of more than twice the number of Americans who died on 911 but more than three hundred times the number of foreigners, almost none of them even remotely related to the events of that day. Devastated nations, massive death tolls and millions of refugees among people who never did anything to harm America are beginning to impact in ever more dangerous ways. In the words of Malcolm X, the chickens  are indeed coming home to roost.

As a direct result of paying for homicidal madness, the economic inequality gap among Americans and other citizens in the west is growing at a faster pace than ever. Recent figures show that more than 15%  of Americans – 46 million people – are living in poverty. There are more poor people with less money than ever before as upper income groups greatly expand their wealth while actually decreasing in number. We are becoming a nation of a few billionaires, quite a few millionaires,  more members of an upper middle class, and a shrinking group formerly called the middle class which is actually a fast growing majority of working and poor people who once had jobs and security but are rapidly losing both. This is inherent in the system  of private profit at public loss no matter how many speeches a president makes or how little they mean, and the path of global capital would be the same with or without the events of 911. But that system has grown much worse since then and Osama bin Laden would be happy to see things going exactly as he wished.

The 911 terrorists were driven by hatred of American power for its support of  tyrants in the Arab world, and especially for its treatment of the Palestinian people. That has been almost unmentioned in all the hypocritical bigotry around 911, and we suffer to this moment from the control of American politics by fundamentalists of capital and their joined-at-the-wallet Zionist compatriots. Their zealous protection of the apartheid Israeli Jewish state, against all logic and morality, is under new stress including an attempt to give Palestine a seat at the U.N.

While that body’s Security Council is a relic of the western dominated past, its General Assembly may offer some hope for the future. But whatever the short term brings, a vetoed attempt to realize the morally bankrupt two state solution will make it more possible for a long term one state democracy of all the people of Palestine. Fanatics who see a pogrom or holocaust in such a democratic outcome are too crazed to notice that a less than four percent Jewish population has led to enormous Jewish/Zionist power in America and Europe, even without support from many Jews in those places. How can they possibly think that a Jewish majority in Palestine, or even a “minority” of forty percent -  with financial and business control – can suddenly vanish in some fabled overnight slaughter? But whatever the ridiculous old nightmares may portend, the newer dreams of democracy will be realized or there may be no homeland for anyone at all in Palestine. Or many other places as well.

The present attempted destruction of Libya is a last gasp effort by the west to stifle the emerging movements toward democracy by retaking overt control of Africa . This euro-controlled attempt at recolonization has killed thousands already and caused another sectarian un-civil war, with a puppet regime of “rebels” composed of groups having no more in common than opposing the former regime. But while the Libyan people will suffer more pain, in the long run the western powers, whether masked as NATO – financed almost totally by the USA – or being forced to bring in U.S. troops in a final death wish, will further weaken the empire.

Along with the material poverty that grows as private banking and minority wealth attempts to grasp even more power, there is a poverty of spirit at the core of a crumbling western system of public domination that benefits minorities at the ultimate cost of most of civilization and the natural environment itself.

The economics of  seemingly endless recession, the politics of  seemingly endless colonial wars and the anti-democratic rule of minorities are actually nearing an end. Whether humanity can bring about a democratic solution to our problems through organization that crosses national, ethnic and religious lines is a question not for the future but for this moment. If the global democratic urge doesn’t continue and succeed soon, there may not be much of a future for anyone, including those currently feasting on the profits of waste and warfare.

Days after the attacks, Condoleeza Rice spoke vaguely about the “opportunities” they might provide. She might have said more clearly: “We can use the fear these attacks have produced among our people to get them to accept an ongoing war against Muslim countries, whom we can somehow link to the Muslims who attacked us. We can use the people’s fear to shred the Constitution, to pursuade them that losses of personal liberty are necessary for national security. We can thus augment the power of the state. We can use our new-found national unity behind an unpopular president who stole an election to bully our allies into supporting our new aggressions.” Because this is what the Bush administration proceeded to do.

Hours after 9/11 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scrawled a note, “Gotta go big, sweep it all in, things related and unrelated, Iraq, too?” Translation: “Let’s use these attacks to effect regime change throughout the Greater Middle East. Let’s link 9/11 to Iraq and fulfill President Bush’s dream of toppling Saddam Hussein.” In a meeting of top officials on Sept. 12, Rumsfeld, according to Richard Clarke, then Bush’s counter-terrorism advisor, “said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq.” That is to say: “We don’t need any evidence of any connection between the Afghan-based bin Laden operation and Iraq. We can strike at Iraq now, and get away with it.”

At the same meeting, according to Clarke, Bush took him aside and demanded to know whether Iraq was involved in the attacks. When Clarke explained that the professional intelligence community found no connection between the secularist Iraqi regime despised by al-Qaeda as “communist,” and the fundamentalist Sunni group feared and despised by Saddam Hussein, Bush “came back at me and said: ‘Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way.”

We all (should) recall what happened after that. In October Congress passed, with minimal debate, the USA PATRIOT Act. The very title (“Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) was designed to put a patriotic face on a massive legal text, which few legislators had bothered to read, that authorized indefinite detentions of immigrants, searches of homes and offices without owners’ or the occupants’ knowledge or permission, and searches of telephone, e-mail, and financial records without a court order. The act was renewed in 2005 and remains in effect, endorsed by the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, from late September government officials and journalists began receiving anthrax letters. Many, including John McCain and the editors of the Wall Street Journal, hinted or insisted that these must have been sent by Iraqi agents. By February 2002 the FBI had ascertained that the anthrax had been produced in a U.S. lab, and it is now clear that Iraq had no anthrax as of 2001. We do not know who was responsible for those letters. What we do know is that they were used to build fear of Iraq, and paved the way for Bush’s attack, in his State of the Union address in January 2002, on the “Axis of Evil” including Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

It was a deliberate ploy to conflate in the minds of the people of this country vastly dissimilar Muslim targets with al-Qaeda; North Korea was no doubt thrown in to indicate that “terror” rather than Islam was the U.S. target, and to reduce Muslim objections. From that point the administration relentlessly prepared U.S. public opinion for war with Iraq.

That meant sidelining the intelligence community represented by empiricists like Clarke and establishing (in mid-2002) a super-secretive “Office of Special Plans” in the Pentagon which cherry-picked intelligence, procured through such one-time CIA assets such as Ahmad Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, and “Curveball” in Germany, to build the case for war. Vice President and chief neocon patron Dick Cheney, along with his chief of staff “Scooter” Libby (subsequently convicted in the “Plame Affair”), repeatedly visited CIA headquarters to insist that implausible evidence for Iraqi WMD and al-Qaeda links be included in intelligence reports sent to the inattentive, un-inquisitive President Bush.

Juicy pieces of this disinformation campaign (notably the sensationalistic story, almost surely produced by U.S. sources in Italy, that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger) were disseminated by collaborators in the press (most notably, Judith Miller of the New York Times) by administration officials, then cited by top officials on the weekend interview programs to promote the war cause. (The Niger documents were cited by Bush in a speech in January 2003 but immediately exposed as forgeries by Mohamed ElBaradei and the IAEA. Earlier former diplomat Joseph Wilson, sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate, had ascertained that Niger had never sold uranium to the Iraqis.) The administration backed off, but never apologized or explained, and indeed Cheney’s office sought to discredit Wilson when he went public with his story in 2003. Congress has never investigated, or determined, who forged the letters, and why.

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush regime tested the willingness of the people to accept drastic curbs on privacy rights. From January 2002 to August 2003, Adm. John Poindexter, who had been implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, was Director of the “Information Awareness Office” of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. With its logo depicting a pyramid topped by an all-seeing eye, this office sought to obtain unprecedented rights to violate rights to privacy. It was dissolved due to popular protest but what former Soviet KGB chief Yevgeny Primakov called the “Sovietization” of the U.S. continued. (Primakov stated in 2004 that Homeland Security had hired former Markus Wolf, former head of East Germany’s Stasi surveillance apparatus, as a consultant.)

For the Bush administration, 9/11 was a license to expand surveillance of U.S. citizens, to kill, and to lie on a colossal scale to justify the killing. There was (and is) a coherent philosophy behind all this. First of all, a rejection of rational objective thinking.

An unnamed Bush aide (probably Karl Rove) told the New York Times’ Ron Suskind in October 2004 that people like Suskind were “in what we call the reality-based community,” by which he meant “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This celebration of myth, reminiscent of the Nazi attack on rationalism and cultivation of Big Lies to attain goals — this positive advocacy of irrationality in order to manipulate a gullible public — found a ready audience. Studies of self-defined conservatives, Bush’s base, find that they’re uncomfortable with nuance. They prefer simplicity to complexity, particularly when it comes to the understanding of science, history, and politics. They are most comfortable with “us vs. them” paradigms, whether it’s them against liberal academia, the “lamestream (non-Fox) press,” scientists warning of global warming and explicating biological evolution, abortion and gay-rights advocates, or Muslims.

Neoconservatives in the Bush administration, with Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz most conscipuous among them, knew they could exploit both fear and ignorance in pursuing their project: the transformation of the Middle East to enhance the position of Israel.

Step 1: Announce (as Bush did, in a well-received speech to Congress on September 20, 2001) that “the U.S. will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” That justified the attack on the Taliban, that xenophobic Afghan Pashtun operation that (however vile) showed no interest in a global jihad, sought cordial relations with the U.S. (and was, in fact, receiving U.S. aid to eradicate opium production and being praised by Colin Powell for its success in this connection as of early 2001). No matter that the Taliban was not operationally connected to bin Laden, tolerated according to the Pashtunwali code as a guest, had probably been unaware of al-Qaeda’s plans for a U.S. attack, and was actually negotiating as Bush spoke about deporting bin Laden.

This statement was a signal that the U.S. would deliberately blur any distinctions among its widening set of targets, from the Palestinian Authority’s Yasser Arafat to the Iranian president Ahmad Rafsanjani (then cautiously pursuing a rapprochement with the U.S. that had been welcomed by Colin Powell’s State Department) to the secular/Baathist Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The message to the masses was: all these Muslims are the same. The fact that Bush was simultaneously insisting that the U.S. was not anti-Muslim did not reduce the efficacy of this campaign to tar widely dissimilar forces in the Muslim world with the same brush.

The fact is the only thing these disparate targets had in common was a hostility to Israeli occupation of Arab land and the U.S’s slavishly pro-Israel policies.

Step 2: Declare, to the the entire world, in the same September 20 speech: ”Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Clearly echoing the words of Jesus in Matthew 12:30, this statement was designed to rally people in this country around an extreme nationalist pole and to strike fear into the hearts of anyone hesitant to accept U.S. leadership after 9/11. Embattled Yemeni President Saleh has said frankly that his government’s decision to accept U.S. and advisors was determined by this threatening declaration. Just like Pakistani president Musharraf’s decision to capitulate to all U.S. demands in September 2001, including those egregiously violating his nation’s sovereignty, came after Richard Armitage of the State Department threatened to “bomb you back to the Stone Age” if Pakistan was uncooperative.

European commentators began with some alarm to describe U.S. policy and statements as “Manichaean,” that is, simplistically positing the U.S. as the force of “good” in the world versus ambient “evil.” At a European security conference in 2002, Paul Wolfowitz was asked what the administration meant by the strange term “Axis of Evil.” (Obviously Iraq, its long-time foe Iran, and North Korea did not form any sort of geopolitical or military axis!) His cryptic response: “You’re either for or against us.” The French and Germans soon decided they were not for a U.S. assault on Iraq, correctly reasoning that it was based on lies and opportunism. Hence the temporary vilification of France by the U.S. Congress and press.

9/11 did change the U.S. But not because it allowed (even in the face of demonstrations on a scale unseen since the Vietnam War) it to follow up the invasion of Afghanistan with the disastrous invasion of Iraq, resulting in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. This is all quite normal in U.S. history. U.S. administrations have lied their way into wars from at least 1898 to the present; from the USS Maine incident to the Tonkin Gulf Incident to the threat against U.S. medical students in Grenada in 1983, use of disinformation against the U.S. public to acquire support for has been the norm.

And war, itself, is the norm. In my lifetime, the Vietnam War, the invasions of the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama, the first Gulf War, the attack on Serbia, the Afghan and Iraq wars. Even the presidents who haven’t drawn the country into all-out war have felt free to deploy military force anywhere to obtain their objective (Gerald Ford attacked Cambodians in the Mayaquez Incident; Jimmy Carter attempted a raid on Iran). As H. Rap Brown once put it, “Violence is American as cherry pie.”

9/11 didn’t change this country because it produced a (continuing) wave of repression. This too is par for the course. The systematic harassment, round-up and deportation of certain immigrant and minority communities is in the tradition of the Palmer Raids during World War I and the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II. There is no qualitative change here.

But the magnitude of change — the sudden, sweeping alteration of law; the proliferation of illegal activities by government symbolized by the massive horde of documents amassed by the Vice President’s office (which Cheney has continued to refuse to submit to the National Archives in accordance with law); the expansion of the “war on terror” to include fronts in undeclared wars from the Philippines to Yemen and Somalia — this was unprecedented. It was unprecedented for a vice-president of the U.S., whose citizens have tended to prefer their wars short and successful and who ultimately rebel against indefinite commitments, to declare that the war beginning in 2001 would not end in “our lifetimes” –that is, to commit the next generation in this country to a vaguely conceived war against “terrorists” (who include, according to the State Department, anyone from radical Irish nationalists to Nepalese Maoists, to anyone using violence opposed by the world’s “greatest purveyor of violence”).

I don’t recall the weeks and months after 9/11 as a period of “America transformed,” of unity in the face of grief. For me it was a time of deepening dread.

The syrupy patriotic music played at regular intervals on cable news channels, the repeated images of the smoldering Twin Towers didn’t move me towards nationalist self-pity. I knew too much about why people around the world hate U.S. policies, aggressive wars, sanctions, support for dictators such as those deposed recently in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. The ubiquitous U.S. flags, fluttering continuously in the background of our TV screens as if by edict, didn’t cause me to revise my assessment of the global meaning of that symbol. Indeed I thought it terrifying.

Local governments everywhere were competing to saturate neighborhoods with the flag. A type of warped patriotism, like the Nazi German variety, was being deployed perhaps as never before to drum up support for war. Most people, I suppose, had no problem with this, reasoning that it merely expressed love of country and national unity in a time of crisis. I felt differently. I kept remembering Grace Slick’s comment, in the notes to the Jefferson Airplane’s 1969 Volunteers album: “Don’t point that flag at me.”

As we drove through a Boston neighborhood, I asked a colleague of mine who had grown up in Shanghai whether she had ever seen anything like this. “Not even during the height of the Cultural Revolution,” she replied, had she ever seen such a massive propaganda campaign. Because that was what it was. When Bush in 2002 led the nation’s school children in the Pledge of Allegiance (stating, in a context of round-ups and deportations, that they believed they lived in a nation “with liberty and justice for all”) he was joining in a well-coordinated effort to inflict a certain form of aggressive nationalism on these innocents. I thought it nauseating (and was proud to later learn that my daughter in high school had refused to participate but sat quietly in her chair in protest).

Inevitably the wave of extreme chauvinism receded. When it became clear that there were no WMD in Iraq, nor any appreciable al-Qaeda ties, Bush’s ratings dropped. When what the neocons had depicted as a “cakewalk” turned into a bloody, protracted war, they dipped further. Still, he won a second term. And while an electorate weary of two wars and seeking change brought Barack Obama to power, largely due to his putative opposition to the Iraq War, it found more of the same.

The legacy of 9/11 includes the ongoing cowardice of the entire political class. Obama said he’d shut down the torture camps; he hasn’t. He said he’d end “special renditions.” He hasn’t. He claims to have withdrawn all combat troops from Iraq (pursuant to the Bush-era agreement with Baghdad). He hasn’t. He has vastly expanded the Afghan War, repeatedly attacked Pakistan, and gone to war without congressional authorization but legislators’ approval and complicity with Libya, a nation that had under Gaddafi maintained cordial ties with U.S. intelligence and corporations.

There is no glory, heroism or honor in the U.S. response to 9/11, that “day that changed America.” Only shameful opportunism, cowardly use of lethal power, and effective Goebbels-like deployment of fear.

During this never ending public spectacle, they’ve introduced us to a cast of rather outlandish characters: a stuttering Texas idiot; a fist bumping, long range shooting and Harvard educated Muslim Commie; a blow job-loving burger clown. Splitting into opposing camps, they’ve climbed into a ring to perform for the whole world. In the front row, a mob of rightish and leftish pundits. These ad-peddling charlatans have parsed each choke slamming and brain busting move as if it was real. Thus, Obama tapped out on canvas. Thus, Obama steam rolled by Republicans. Thus, Obama’s bad bargain. Obama caved in. He no criminal, he weak. Thus, Obama surrendered.

Those who don’t swallow entirely these farcical blow by blows are branded nutcases and conspiracy theorists. Whether it’s about 9/11, Bin Laden, Iraq, Afghanistan, War on Terror, Iran, Underwear Bomber, BP oil spill, Corexit, Libya, death of Bin Laden, on and on and on, the official narrative is always, and I mean always, nonsense, yet repeated often enough, from all angles, left, right and center, these clumsy fairy tales will coalesce in the brainpans of the inattentive or stupid as uncontestable truths and history.

In spite of all the recent bombast about fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice, the wasteful wars continue, though few Americans can tell you why or even where we’re unleashing horror, hatred and sorrow. America must kill because wars are so lucrative. No other country has been fighting so continuously, for so long. Anham, a Northern Virginia company, has just been busted for charging the Pentagon $900 for a $7 control switch, $3,000 for a $100 circuit breaker, and $80 for a $1.41 piece of plumbing equipment. Blah, blah, blah. Tell me something new, why don’t you? And Lockheed Martin has just been given a $72 million contract to install those universally despised, irradiating scanners at 300 U.S. airports.

Meanwhile, one in six Americans is on food stamps, and more and more Americans are losing jobs, including teachers, firemen and cops, as unemployed and deranged teens run wild in “flash mobs” to beat up random strangers. It has happened repeatedly in Philadelphia, my neck of the woods, as well as Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Boston, Brooklyn, South Orange and Greensboro. There are racial and class components to this phenomenon, as these wilding youngsters are invariably poor blacks converging on white shopping districts. In the latest episode, an 11-year-old Philly kid was arrested for assaulting a stranger.

With these mobs, all the pathologies of a post-industrial, post productive society, with its dead-end jobs, bad schools and a nonstop, stupefying media, are on full display. Another factor not often cited is the phenomenon of children being raised almost exclusively by strangers, practically right after birth, and the poorer the kids, the crappier the quality of daycare and subsequent schooling. How many times have you seen black women push strollers with well dressed white children, so the rich kids are pampered by their parents and nannies, while the poor ones are left alone in nightmarish neighborhoods. Also, when your government is so openly corrupt, anger is inevitable, although punching a stranger in the face is certainly not a solution. The biggest criminals are out of sight, leaving us bottom feeders to inflict pain on each other.

In any struggle, it’s important to know the nature of your enemy. Is he a klutz, prone to a goofy mistake now and then, or does he have murder on his mind? Again, we are being lorded over by a gang of criminals. War criminals.

For two years, there was a military entertainment complex inside a Philadelphia area shopping mall. At the Army Experience Center, young teens could play shoot them up, blood splattering video games for free, while those over 18 could climb into a realistic mockup of a tank or chopper to massacre bad guys in desert settings, also for free. An advertisement: SHOP FOR SOCKS. GRAB A BITE. PILOT AN AH-64 ATTACK HELICOPTER. After receiving 40,000 visitors and enlisting 236 recruits, the Army decided to shut down this 13-million dollar facility on July of 2010, “It’s been a great success. Basically it’s mission accomplished.”

Though it had planned on opening more of these centers, the Army soon realized there was no longer a need. Thanks to the Mother of All Depressions and rapidly increasing unemployment, desperate Americans are flocking to recruitment stations even without the promise of a free video game. It’s a win, win situation for our military industrial complex: destroy the economy, and Americans will enlist. They will beg to be blown up.

This is what unfolded in the 9/11 attacks that led us into the matrix of wars and conflicts, present (Afghanistan and Iraq), planned (Iran and Syria) and projected (Jordan and Egypt), that benefit Israel and no other country — although I concede that many private contractors and politicians are doing very well for themselves out of the death and misery of others.

I am also absolutely certain as a strategic analyst that 9/11 itself, from which all else flows, was a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation. But Mossad did not do it alone. They needed local help within America (and perhaps elsewhere) and they had it, principally from some alumni of PNAC (the misnamed Project for a New American Century) and their affiliates within and outside of the US Government (USG), who in the 9/11 attacks got the “catalytic event” they needed and craved to take the US to war on Israel’s behalf, only eight months after coming into office.

Genesis of the Deception

That was not how it seemed at first, of course. Lists of names and associations of the alleged hijackers quickly surfaced in official US accounts and mainstream media (MSM) reports, pointing to Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda group, then largely in Afghanistan. Bin Laden denied responsibility, saying in effect that while he thanked Allah that the attacks had occurred, he had not done it, but the US demanded that the Taliban governing Afghanistan turn him over to the US. The Taliban response was reasonable: “Show us the evidence he did it and we’ll give him to you.” But the US brushed it off and attacked. Why? Because it had no convincing evidence, and never would — even on the eve of his public death in 2011, the FBI did not include 9/11 on his internet-based “Most Wanted” charge sheet.

As the war in Afghanistan for very dubious reasons extended into a war in Iraq for even more specious ones, the essential USG view of 9/11 became embedded in the public ethos. The 9/11 Commission Report, despite being handicapped when it was prepared and later revealed to have been deeply flawed, still appeared as the basic reference work on the attacks. Details may have been compromised, but the prevailing view was that 19 Arab hijackers had flown four planes into three buildings and one crash site, and that was the end of it. This was the position taken by the Bush Administration in 2001, and reaffirmed a decade later by the Obama Administration. Politicians of every stripe, most pundits and rafts of mainly Protestant pastors and evangelists added their endorsements.

Neither I nor most Americans had any particular reason to doubt the veracity of these claims, then or later. Nonetheless, I had strong suspicions that something was very wrong with the official US account of the tragedy only weeks after the incident, while responding to a request from a local journalist for background information. Too much made no sense whatsoever: warnings after the fact when there should have been no warnings, bizarre misbehavior by the alleged hijackers that ran counter to both the mission and their faith, skills required that far exceeded any skills the named hijackers themselves could ever have possessed for the mission, and especially the total absence of any recognition for what they had done from anyone except their supposed victims – something without precedent for actions of the sort that supposedly happened on 9/11. These and similar discontinuities reinforced my suspicion that something in the entire exercise was rotten to the core.

Potentially far more significant than individual musings was the gradual appearance of dissent that eventually crystallized in the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement, which rapidly proliferated into scores of major and many minor organizations and websites dissecting the attacks, the Commission report, the motivations and agendas of assorted elected and appointed officials, and alternatives to the orthodox view. But “9/11 Truthers” have been doing their version of the Maoist “Hundred Flowers” Campaign, throwing out so many different assessments of so many different aspects of so many different issues that the core message has been lost. Nor is it a matter of too little evidence invalidating the USG position on 9/11 being available, but too much to permit a clear focus on what happened (so many trees no one can really see the forest).

Mind you, it isn’t that what has been presented is irrelevant or even necessarily wrong, although some pretty bizarre theses have been tossed around along with a good deal of thoughtful and balanced work. A substantial segment also have resisted closure under any circumstances – especially when Israel came into the equation in any way – thus keeping the rhetorical pot boiling inconclusively, more than a few for reasons that could not withstand close scrutiny as to their affiliation and motivation.

Critiquing the 9/11 Critique

The real difficulty with much, but not all, of the effort to critique and question the official US position on 9/11 is that the “9/11 Truth” proponents have been unable to communicate their concerns – much less any conclusions – to the general public in any significant way. So much of the discussion is only partially comprehensible to some within the movement, largely unknown to the general US public, and so complicated in all its dimensions to those who do become aware of it that they fail to follow up on the arguments. It is as if critics of the official position on 9/11 have been attempting to try the case in court before they have even gotten an indictment – the analytical equivalent of putting the argumentative cart before the public horse of the need to rethink the issue, thereby creating an evidentiary Gordian Knot of sorts.

This analogy has long struck me as an appropriate way of rethinking our approach to the 9/11 controversy. It is not that the issue isn’t complex – it is, in ever so many ways, and that complexity would have to be addressed at some point, but there is no need to confuse the public with its complexity at the very beginning.

Remember that at least in the US, the evidence and voting requirements are very different in a grand jury which can issue an indictment, than they are in a petit jury that actually tries the case. The latter needs proof of guilt; but the former only needs sufficient indication that a specific crime may have been committed, and that the accused may have done it. That is where we need to go, and where I will take this argument: to focus on those essentials necessary for an indictment in a way that will be understandable and credible to a reasonably intelligent person without requiring them to have the skills of (e.g.) a civil engineer or an aviator.

Peeling Away the Layered Details

There are so many flaws in the official US Government’s position on 9/11 that it is sometimes difficult to know just where to start. For example, the miraculous survival of a passport, used to identify one of the hijackers, which somehow worked its way through the aircraft’s impact, explosion, fire, and an 800-plus foot free-fall to be found by a well-dressed man and given to a New York City police detective at the base of the twin towers is a standout. The superstar-like ability of named pilots to go from the controls of a single-engine propeller-driven light plane to the cockpit of a passenger airliner and do anything except put it into the ground within a minute of turning off the autopilot is another – who would ever have thought that the Microsoft Flight Simulator program was so superlative? And the explanations given for the multiple failures of NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command) to have fighters on all four planes within minutes of their straying off course are individually dubious and collectively preposterous – only in Hollywood would they have any credence, perhaps because that is where they originated.

The debate on these and many other points, and the implications thereof, has been extensive and sometimes ferocious, even if not particularly effective. What is not open to debate, however, is that WTC-7 — the third tower to collapse that day, and the only one not hit by a plane — absolutely was brought down by a controlled demolition, as anyone not trying to shield the attackers knows from a real-time video of its collapse. That is, WTC-7 went straight down into its own footprint in seconds without any visible catastrophic external trauma, which means only some catastrophic internal trauma could have brought it down. And if it had been wired for a controlled demolition, then so were the other towers (WTC-1 and WTC-2) that collapsed. That gives the plane impacts a gruesome cosmetic role, designed explicitly to conceal the true cause of the collapse of the buildings, while shocking the public into something akin to numbness.

The case of WTC-7 has long been known to critics of the US government position on 9/11. What does not seem to have been fully appreciated, at least at first (this is changing somewhat now), is that it is not merely “an” issue, but the single issue that can be used simply, directly to the American public, and effectively to discredit the US Government’s case, and thus its rationale for so many fallacies and misdeeds: not only needless foreign wars (Afghanistan being a “pump-priming” conflict to get the US into war in the region, and to lay the groundwork for later wars), but a substantial infringement of American civil liberties under the misbegotten “Patriot Act,” the unbelievably widespread acceptance of torture (including a technique openly named “Palestinian Hanging,” which assuredly did not originate in Boston and says something about Israeli habits), and the creation of known and secret prisons and detention centers in various countries.

Second only to the actual controlled demolition of WTC-7, and supplementing the thesis that with or without impacting aircraft the buildings were brought down by other means, is extensive audio-visual evidence on 9/11 while the Twin Towers were still standing from what became “Ground Zero.” This evidence includes real-time clips of secondary explosions at ground level in both WTC-1 and WTC-2 (you can hear the detonations and see smoke and debris billowing out), reports on many networks of those explosions and of strange vans inside and around those buildings prior to the secondary explosions, reports from EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) of the same thing and of people inside and around the lobbies of those buildings who were not emergency personal and were not fleeing the disaster – all of this on 9/11 and widely reported as it happened that same day.

And a third element, building on the above and adding its own dimension, is the presence of a number of (mostly white) vans owned – as far as can be determined, given the extent to which information on them and the people with them has disappeared from the public record – by an Israeli company (or rather a company owned by an Israeli, to be precise) in New Jersey. Some of these vans were regularly around the World Trade Center itself. But two stand out, and need to be examined in some detail for their significance to be appreciated.

First, Bergen, NJ residents saw five people on a white van filming the attacks and visibly celebrating. They had set up their cameras before the first plane hit. Police arrested them. All were Israelis (now referred to as the “dancing Israelis”). Bomb-sniffing dogs reacted as if they had detected explosives, although officers were unable to find anything. The FBI seized the van for further testing. All five were later released at the instigation of Israeli & American Jewish leaders, some in the US Government. Details are still classified. This incident quickly disappeared from the mainstream media, following a brief mention in the New York Times three days after the attacks, that was not followed up.

A second van was stopped on the approaches to the George Washington Bridge. As CBS’s Dan Rather said in his live report:

Two suspects are in FBI custody after a truckload of explosives were discovered around the George Washington Bridge. That bridge links New York to New Jersey over the Hudson River. Whether the discovery of those explosives had anything to do with other events today is unclear, but the FBI, has two suspects in hand, said the truckload of explosives, enough explosives were in the truck to do great damage to the George Washington Bridge…

Those suspects –also Israelis — and the incident then seem to have disappeared from the public record and mainstream media “examinations” <sic.> of 9/11, just like discussions of the first van, the secondary explosions at ground level within WTC-1 and WTC-2, and the precipitous collapse into its own footprint of WTC-7.

The combined impact of these and many other factors is both chilling and compelling. Think of it: Secondary explosions at ground level where there should be no secondary explosions. The catastrophic collapse of the 47-story WTC-7 into its own footprint in seconds, without any significant external trauma, where by rights there should have been no collapse. Vans with targeting maps, explosives or traces thereof, cameras pre-positioned to film the World Trade Center, and especially Israelis with those vans where there should have been no Israelis present with any of those things in those places at that time.

Any of these matters ought to have been sufficient to stimulate a searching re-examination of the official USG interpretation of 9/11, and especially of the actual or putative role of Al-Qaeda in it. The vans alone pointed away from Al-Qaeda, unless one assumed that Al-Qaeda was an Israeli front, or that Mossad at a minimum had run a parallel and more murderous operation to whatever Al-Qaeda may have done. What is fascinating is how little impact it has had on public awareness of the details of 9/11, much less official US policy based on it. A “cloak of silence” had descended over any official or mainstream media discussions of 9/11 that did not conform to the official interpretation, thereby keeping such dissonance from the general public.

The Cloak of Silence Over 9/11

There have been three elements to the “cloak of silence” covering efforts to expose the failings of the official US position on 9/11 to the public. One is within the Executive Branch. Another is within the Congress. And the third is the mainstream media (MSM).

The first is not at all surprising, as so many of its key members (and especially its so-called “neo-conservatives”) were the authors of the “19 named Arabs in 4 planes” thesis, and its de facto apologists on the professional staff of the 9/11 Commission. Indeed, many of them had a vested personal and professional interest in maintaining the validity of the official position.

A surprising number had been on the strongly pro-Israel Project for a New American Century (PNAC) when it published a report asserting that some “catalytic event” akin to the Pearl Harbor would be needed to move the US in the direction they desired (and which would be of enormous benefit to Israel). The 9/11 attacks gave them their catalytic event, and they visibly capitalized on  that opportunity. Many were Jewish, often with dual US-Israeli citizenship and a controlling commitment to Israel. All were Israeli partisans. And it took no great inferential leap to understand that a US consumed with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rage would inevitably and inexorably do things that would directly or indirectly benefit Israel – which, of course, is precisely what has happened over the past decade.

Overtly more surprising was Congressional acceptance of the official explanation, or rather the lack of searching inquiries into it and the events of 9/11, at least by the Democrats. But, in reality, that wasn’t at all surprising. It was not just that Administration officials were essentially “speaking with one voice” on this issue, or that the Republicans in the Senate at least could have kept Democrats from holding hearings, at least in the beginning. It is that while many (especially Democrats) came to question later the war in Iraq, and some more belatedly the war in Afghanistan, there was, and remains, no discernable legislative effort to delve into the details of 9/11 – and especially the numerous contradictions, inconsistencies and unbelievable aspects in the official explanation. This is a predictable outcome of a substantial lobbying effort by AIPAC (the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) here, “encouraging” Senators and Representatives of both parties to do in this matter what they do best – nothing – and punishing the handful who balked by marginalizing their efforts while in office, and working successfully for their electoral defeat later.

Overlapping these two branches, and a critical element in the Zionist control of the US Government that is sometimes overlooked, is their domination of the political appointment and confirmation process. The White House Personnel Office has been largely dominated by them at least since 1980, and perhaps before, thereby reducing the likelihood that people unfriendly to Israel or unsupportive of its “ways and means” will be nominated in the first place. The vetting of nominees by key organized Jewish groups in the US before they go before the US Senate for their confirmation hearings has also been a fixture of this process for decades, as Ha’aretz (an Israeli newspaper) among many others has pointed out, and forces otherwise excellent nominees to withdraw if said Jewish groups find them to be unsuitable. And the leverage of AIPAC in the US Senate is in this respect crucial: anyone AIPAC wants confirmed will be confirmed, and anyone who manages to reach that point and is not acceptable to AIPAC doesn’t stand a chance.

This is why under both Republicans and Democrats, the staffs in and around the President and the Vice-President, the National Security Council, the State Department and the Defense Department (among others) look the way they do. Many are Jewish and actively Zionist, often with dual US-Israeli citizenship (not that the absence of an Israeli passport matters all that much to the others). Some are Christian Zionists who need no persuading to take the pro-Israel positions they do – I can only shudder to think of the type of a staff and appointments that would come from a president like Michele Bachmann or Mike Huckabee. Others are what the communists used to call “useful idiots,” frequently intelligent people like Condoleeza Rice or John Bolton who have made their own Faustian bargain in the furtherance of their own careers. And the rest of us live with the consequences of all of them, not least of which was 9/11 and the ensuing wars.

But it is the role of the largely Zionist-owned mainstream media (MSM) in allowing the official US government view of 9/11 to go virtually unchallenged that is most fascinating, and has been most effective in letting any possible public debate on 9/11 largely lie fallow. This was contrary to its entire post-Vietnam (and especially post-Pentagon Papers/post-Watergate) ethos, which put investigative journalism on a pedestal and made a fetish of investigating and exposing corporate and government wrong-doing, both for profits and for professional advancement. Remember, that at least since the publication of the so-called “Pentagon Papers” during the Vietnam War, the normal instinct of the MSM is to investigate and to reveal, unless that discloses Israeli misconduct or reflects negatively on Israel, in which case its virtually primeval instinct is to conceal and to protect.

The MSM’s normal inquisitorial impulse was not in evidence in the case of 9/11. This is because critical inquiries into 9/11 have been largely ignored or repressed by the MSM — which would not do that if its largely Zionist ownership did not know, suspect or fear that an exposed evidentiary trail would lead, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly to Israel. Indeed, if the evidentiary trail had seemed to lead to (e.g.) Iran instead of Israel, or if its provenance was even moderately uncertain, the MSM would have vociferously shredded the USG case long ago, and the “9/11 Truth” movement would find its views presented on the front pages of major newspapers and highlighted in favorable TV/radio broadcasts.

That this did not happen quickly becomes clear as one examines the MSM’s approach to 9/11. Its role has been threefold: : (a) disinformation – to affirm, or at least not openly question, the USG case; (b) distraction – to direct attention away from Israel and the PNAC/neo-cons; and (c) doubt – to ignore or ridicule those who question the official US case. What people choose to conceal speaks volumes about the dynamics of the situation, and the end result of MSM actions has been the fabrication of an aura of disbelief and doubt where there should be none.

This process began almost immediately. Dramatic and revealing real-time reports about the details of the attacks appeared on 9/11, including many that did not directly involve the hijacked airliners. Over the next few days, some local papers and stations in the area still were reporting dissonant events (e.g., the van with the “dancing Israelis”). But within a week, most dissonance was gone or relegated to inside pages and their electronic equivalents, especially anything pertaining to WTC-7, whose collapse became a non-event, or the presence of Israelis in the vans and elsewhere, as the US Government’s propaganda machine – aided actively by most of the MSM – went into high gear first against Al-Qaeda and then in support of the invasion of Afghanistan.

The Path to 9/11

The provenance of the 9/11 attacks becomes even clearer once they are examined as a classic exercise in covert operations. Generally speaking, there are three requirements for evaluating the origin and prospects for success of all covert intelligence operations: (a) motivation,  (b) expertise, and (c) local support for access to the target and post-attack evasion and escape.

Let us look first at motivation. It is a bitter commentary on how far the US has gone from its strategic requirements and its own principles that so many movements and governments around the world not only dislike and distrust the US, but hate it with a passion and with better cause than I care to think about. I recently came across a remark by a Jesuit priest to the effect that “Every time I hear that Israel is America’s only friend in the Middle East, I remember that before Israel, America had no enemies in the Middle East” – a point well worth remembering.

But the interesting thing about the assorted movements and governments that might have an actual or perceived reason to do harm to the US, is that all but one has had a negative incentive to do that: to punish the US for some actual or assumed failings or misdeeds. The one exception is Israel. It has no negative incentives at all (I exclude some real fringe fanatics), simply because without US aid and diplomatic support, it would find itself in even worse straits than did apartheid-era South Africa, and with better cause. But it is the one state with a positive incentive, if it believed it could get away with it, which is to enrage the American public against Muslims generally and Arabs in particular, and to make the US an active belligerent in the region – spending American lives and treasure in the service of Israel’s interests.

Expertise is different and more diffuse. There are many intelligence and special operations forces in the world with the expertise to wire large urban structures for a controlled demolition. There are many combat engineer units in many countries that could do the same thing. And there are many private firms that specialize in them as well. Yet neither Al-Qaeda as an organization, nor any of its known affiliates – much less the 19 named Arabs supposedly on those four planes – possessed that expertise, or anything even remotely close to it; had they done so, the Green Zone in Baghdad would have been a pile of rubble.

But it is local support that is the crucial determinant. All well-crafted covert operations require some measure of local support, official or unofficial, unless the target area is so irredeemably hostile that none is available. Any domestic or foreign intelligence agency targeting the WTC would absolutely have required it, and Mossad would be better placed than any other to access such support for entry, access, execution and escape.

This is especially true, given the security company overseeing the WTC. CIA and/or Defense Department personnel (which is not the same as the CIA or the Defense Department as organizations) could have had access, but only if that had Israeli endorsement – one does not casually cut open walls, implant explosives, run cables and wire everything together in buildings with state-of-the-art electronic surveillance and 24/7 on-site security. Mossad would have no such need for those niceties, given the ownership of the WTC and the management of the company overseeing its security. Remember that we are not talking about large numbers of people in any case: given time to prepare the three buildings and protection from detection, as few as a dozen could have sufficed, a number small enough to be effectively unnoticed in a large organization.

Retrospect and Prospect

So let us recapitulate the basic conclusions of this analysis. First, the core official US Government position on 9/11 is that any and all aspects of it are directly attributable to 19 named Arabs on 4 planes, conducting a terrorist operation planned and executed by Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. This position is at best incomplete, and at worst a complete fabrication engineered by those directly or indirectly responsible for what happened on 9/11, and the wars afterward.

Second, Al-Qaeda and many different countries and groups had negative reasons, real or contrived, to want to harm the US. But only Israel and its neoconservative wing in the US had a positive incentive to do so, which was to enrage Americans and make the US an active belligerent against Muslim countries, thereby cementing its bonding to Israel and Israel’s interests.

Third, there is no doubt that fully-loaded civilian airliners, especially with nearly-full fuel loads, impacting the Twin Towers (WTC-1 and WTC-2) would do great damage to those buildings, and might under a chain of extraordinary circumstances precipitate a chain of events leading to their collapse. But there is absolutely no way that those airliners impacting 800-1000 feet above the ground could have produced visible and audible secondary explosions in those buildings at ground level, nor precipitated the collapse of a third building (WTC-7)which was not hit by any aircraft and had no massive external trauma from debris produced by the Twin Towers.

Fourth, Al-Qaeda – and perhaps other groups as well – had the theoretical capability to carry out a simultaneous four-plane hijacking, perhaps flying the aircraft to Cuba (the four 9/11 aircraft should have been able to make a one-way flight there at the beginning of their operational day without difficulty, depending on their actual loads), which would have been spectacular in itself. But neither Al-Qaeda nor any of their affiliates had the expertise and local support necessary to allow them the needed access to any of the buildings at the World Trade Center, cut open the walls and wire them for controlled demolition, and then to escape and evade afterward.

Fifth and finally, in addition to being unique in having a positive incentive to make the 9/11 attacks, only Israel had the essential expertise and local support required to bring down the three World Trade Center buildings with controlled demolitions, and the leverage within and around the US Government to let their operatives evade detection, to be released without fanfare if apprehended unexpectedly, and to cloak their actions from public scrutiny – all of which happened on and after 9/11.

People often ask about some new evidence or proof tying 9/11, in whole or in part, to Israel. Now I understand that there can never be absolute proof for some people barring a public confession from one of the Israeli planners or their American supporters, and that, I suspect, we will never obtain – although some of the statements made later in Israel by three of the Israelis arrested in Bergen, NJ filming the burning Twin Towers comes very close to that: One stated categorically that “our purpose was to document the event,” which should leave little doubt that they knew in advance of the attacks, whether or not they themselves personally had any further role in them.

But it is not necessary to have such a confession, any more than it is necessary to have a confession in a criminal court to convict a person of murder, if the other evidence is sufficiently compelling. Here there is a mountain of physical, technical, analytical and circumstantial evidence, far more than any unprejudiced person needs to understand far beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever, that (1) the USG case is fatally flawed, and (2) this was a Mossad-directed operation orchestrated at the highest levels of the Israeli government (because of the target) with local support within the US and elements of the US Government itself.

Given the pervasiveness of Zionist influence in the US government and its intelligence and security agencies (including, of course, the Defense Department), two broad scenarios are possible. One is that the neo-cons and their cohorts were in the driver’s seat with Israel in the passenger seat with a map and the baggage. The second sees Israel driving with the neo-cons and others handling the map and baggage. But they were both in the same car on the road to and from 9/11. Both were embedded in aspects of the planning and execution of the catastrophe, the wars it spawned and the wars its architects now want us to wage in Israel’s name, linking treason and treachery in tandem no matter where the emphasis is placed.

Unraveling that issue is something to be left for a future investigation, interrogations and trials, followed by punishments appropriate to the magnitude of the crimes for all of the participants. Bringing an awareness of these events to the American public and others abroad in a practical and actionable way is the subject of the final piece in this series: Riposte Against Zionism: Go Tell It To The People.

Lord Rothschild held court at another dinner, in Vienna. He didn’t issue sinister capitalist marching orders. His main concern was to debunk persistent uncharitable gossip about the family patriarch’s bets on Waterloo in 1815. Lots of spooks, too, behind every tree. Somewhere in their dusty archives is a photo of a military aircraft, the West’s first sighting ever. That’s me there, putting on an imbecilic grin of tourist innocence. That’s my crotch blocking your view of a crucial detail of the engine nacelle. Oops. I was just doing a favor for a pal. I did good turns for them all, American or not, they’re all alike. Lots of backscratching, poop for you and me. State secrets got traded like baseball cards. That’s what happens when discredited hegemons expire and decompose: everyone can smell the stink.

The stink can gag a maggot now again but it is not polite to say so. Everyone in power is resolutely breathing through their mouth. Nothing I care about comes up in public discourse, except as grotesque funhouse-mirror distortions. No party represents me. Nobody cares what I think in the cabals that run the world. It’s not just me. Unless you’re actively engaged in influence peddling, abuse of function, or looting, you don’t count.

Our state rots and blackens inside with some deep gangrene. Our disgust is now a crime against the state.  The only option is to euthanize this state, induce collapse. The Constitution’s gone. It’s not coming back. US institutions and protections bear no relation to the document that spawned them long ago.

The Congressional power of the purse is gone, washed away by trillions in government obligations unlawfully imposed by the bankers’ factotums at the Fed.  The war powers of Congress? Our Commander in Chief holds them in contempt. He sentences Libya to war in backroom deals at the Security Council, then breaches the authorizing authority, toppling rulers and propping them up, destroying vital public services, and dismembering the country.  The sole remaining power of the House is trading in influence, with leadership positions based on annual monetary goals for taking corporate graft.  The Senate now serves only to avert public consideration of questions forbidden by the state.  The Supreme Court is a cesspool of corruption and repressive caprice, with justices on the take debasing law to a tissue of absurdities.

If the Constitution is a dead letter, your Bill of Rights is a joke. The President has the power to kill citizens without charge or trial; to detain them arbitrarily for life; to torture them with impunity; to criminalize association, speech, and assembly; and to search persons or seize personal records and effects wholesale, on secret grounds. Torturer Brett Kavanagh preens in judicial robes, revoking the rule of law to hide his crimes. With corporate crime off limits, Federal law enforcement has degenerated into Israeli firms Narus and Verint conducting NKVD-style mass surveillance to blackmail and recruit informers.

Your vote gives this parasitic state a fishy sheen of popular consent but changes nothing. Aggression, repression and exaction proceed as privately agreed by agents of America’s proprietors. Two and only two parties coact to silence unauthorized expressions of the popular will. Electoral politics is pointless, sustained only by threats to vestigial state protections. Voters are driven down the party cattle chutes by attacks on their security in sickness or old age, or by fabricated threats to their livelihood or means – immigrants, socialists, unions, deficits, tax. Scripted competition for your futile vote chops up your rights and makes you fight the other faction for scraps.

But what’s the alternative? Reform proposals cluster at opposite poles of loony philosophy or scatter-shot technical adjustments. Corruption and repression outrun proposed reforms, but stronger responses are limited to wistful daydreams of resolute marches. A nation of dissidents gropes for overarching principles to focus its discontent.

A broader view shows that we are not alone in this. Our state is not the first state to go bad. States go off the rails all the time, and the world knows what to do. The international community has built and tested scaffolding to shore up rotten states and replace the ones that fail. The crucial principles needed to renew a state, painstakingly constructed by a line of thinkers from Rousseau to Kant and Mill and Rawls, have been codified and written into law. Our state bears duties. It is bound by obligations and commitments.

By international consensus, any sovereign state must meet world standards for governance. Our state is enmeshed in these standards abroad, and the international community continually confronts our government with its duties and derelictions. The US government defies the outside world with its armaments and wealth and populous heft. Advanced by weak and peaceful states, the standards are no threat. But if the US population took them up, these standards could demolish our criminal state. The American people would gain independent authority and institutional support for freedom, security, and peace.

Revolutions in the Moslem world coalesced around peoples’ demand for dignity, a term with objective legal meaning and accumulating case law under human rights compacts and the Convention Against Torture. Latin American democracy movements invoked self-determination, another fundamental principle of human rights treaty law. The words unfold to objective standards and concrete requirements. What Rousseau did for the French revolution, treaty law did for modern popular democracy movements: giving parallel government a clear source of legitimacy, uniting disparate groups with overarching principles, and mobilizing peoples in other oppressive states.

US government policy revolves around efforts to avoid the contagion of world standards. The state keeps Americans in the dark about its duties by a last-ditch campaign of suppression. Officials at home ward off legally binding instruments with glittering generalities stripped of content, such as liberty and freedom and justice. At the same time state officials fight to keep specific standards out of reach of the American people. Statist propaganda tars human rights law by association with foreign enemies such as demonized ‘dictators’ or ‘communist’ oppressors. Meticulously-nurtured folklore attacks the state’s obligations as an alien, despotic New World Order. Americans who apply universal standards for criminal aggression or willful killing “should have their head examined,” so our current President says. And what of Americans who cite evidence that our forces shot bin Laden when he had been rendered hors de combat by detention, at the President’s direction? What of Americans who question the legality of our classified assassination force? Let’s all examine their heads.

State indoctrination aims to keep us clinging to the toothless boilerplate of the Constitution. For all the good it does us in this sty of rancid institutions, we might as well be citing The Code of Hammurabi. Our Constitution, as interpreted by an out-of-control autocrat and nine sneering clowns, permits state terror and torture, enshrines corruption, and negates human rights.

So what’s our grievance, then, in fifty words or less? Our State is derelict in its duties. It has failed to meet its obligations and commitments. Our government doesn’t measure up. These are grounds for recourse to rebellion.

Duties, obligations and commitments: the world knows what that means. If Americans ever learn, the jig is up. The standards are written to be clear to everybody everywhere. They strip a failing state of its authority.

It’s not like waving signs in a tricorn hat. In this mode of discourse, claims of right must reference the authority by article and paragraph. Treaty law chapter and verse cuts the crap. Human rights bodies examine America’s state with a rigor never seen at home. Humanitarian law cuts through patriotic barbarity with X-Ray acuity. Just to know your rights is subversive. Citing state duties? That’s the next best thing to treason.

State secrets though they seem to be at home, the basic instruments are not hard to find:

- The UN Charter.  Supreme law of the land by Article VI of the US Constitution. The Charter defines peace. Invoked by citizens, the Charter would subject our war machine to independent legal authority.

- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Adopted by international consensus and binding on the US government as customary international law. The most-translated document on earth, the UDHR sets the standard of achievement for all states. It entitles Americans to know their rights through education. It specifies the duties of the state, including our right to the means of life. Invoked by citizens, it would loosen state controls that put our subsistence and our peace in the power of corporations.

- The Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR). Supreme law of the land. It provides objective standards for freedom from state repression. As binding treaty law it subjects our government to international review by independent experts. It defines democracy in terms that lay our corrupt elections bare. It expands our freedoms well beyond the Bill of Rights. Invoked by citizens, it requires compensation for government abuses.

- The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR). The US is a signatory and must not act to defeat the object and purpose of the treaty. As binding treaty law it would hold government accountable for deficiencies in our living standards. The covenant defines self-determination to include environmental health; cultural integrity; and economic security including health, housing, livelihood, and education. Invoked by citizens, the covenant would hold our state to account for corporate predation such as mass illegal evictions, predatory denial of health care, adulteration and tainting of food, or usury and fraud in education.

- The Convention Against Torture (CAT).  Supreme Law of the Land. Enforces the right to dignity with criminal penalties for inhuman or degrading treatment. Invoked by citizens, the Convention grants universal-jurisdiction legal redress for US government brutality.

- The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. [16] In force, with jurisdiction over US officials subject to Security Council referral. The US was briefly a signatory, but withdrew its signature and has failed to ratify the treaty. Invoked by citizens, the Rome Statute challenges the impunity of US officials for unlawful brutality and war.

Everything everyone wants is there. There’s an article for every public good bad states withhold. Democracy, that’s CCPR Article 25. Environmental stewardship, that’s CESCR Article 12(2b). Labor rights, that’s CESCR Article 8. Food security, that’s CESCR Article 11(2). Privacy – not just freedom from search and seizure but broader protection from personal attacks by the state – that’s CCPR Article 17. Religious freedom, that’s CCPR Article 27. Are your gun rights fundamental? CCPR Article 5(2) protects them.

There is seldom any question what these documents mean. The basic compacts are defined by an evolving body of explicit agreements and case law. Humanitarian law – the UN Charter and Rome Statute – builds on the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles, and the laws of war. The core human rights instruments – the UDHR, CCPR, and CESCR – are applied by UN agencies and regional or national tribunals. Other documents bind the standards into unifying precepts. The Declaration on the Right to Development applies human rights and humanitarian law to formally subordinate the state to its peoples. The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect makes a state’s sovereignty contingent on  human rights, humanitarian law, and inclusion. The Paris Principles specify the functions of a domestic human rights body.

But why wouldn’t these standards be ignored, as the Constitution is? The standards need teeth. To assert them takes push and pull: push by civil society from within states, and pull by principled blocs acting from outside. The documents are meant to work that way: they seem to summon all the foreign devils and possessing demons most feared by our state.

Civil society means Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs): voluntary nonprofit associations with a formal institutional existence, independent of public authorities and commercial entities, and not in pursuit of members’ commercial or professional interests. In some countries civil society includes the media, though not in the United States, where dominant media advance state doctrine (the New York Times and Washington Post,) partisan objectives (Fox News, for example,) or commercial interests of firms that own them (NBC and ABC, for example.) Civil society shames states. In an international order dictated by a domineering power, associations can accomplish things that subaltern governments cannot.

A civil-society coalition led 156 countries to ban landmine production and use. The coalition is applying the same approach to ban cluster munitions. The process that produced these treaties has become a promising approach for reforms that world powers might suppress. Private associations and like-minded governments are tackling small-arms proliferation both internationally and domestically – the Philippine Action Network on Small Arms is resisting the spread of gun culture there.

Each specialized disarmament campaign draws on the accumulated experience of the others. Campaigns amass evidence to shift the focus from gee-whiz military tricks to human suffering. In the seminal Montreux Meeting, the International Committee of the Red Cross brought military staff together with clearance experts, compelling recognition of the cost to noncombatants. Civil-society education and pressure is crucial, helping elective officials go over the generals’ heads with popular support. Civilian mutilées get a voice, personalizing facts that get suppressed in the ritual and argot of public military briefings. Campaigners can divert the state’s theater of threat from Why did they do it? to Where did they get that weapon? Weapons that are best at killing noncombatants come to light, and the focus subtly shifts from laundry lists of weapons to human security. The war machine feeds on enemies. These campaigns poison the war machine with victims.

The United Nations Association pushed for an international criminal court, assembled organizations worldwide when the idea gained momentum, and shaped the court’s  statute with technical assistance. The European Forum for Restorative Justice is nudging criminal justice practice from punishment toward redress and restitution. Restorative justice has legal recognition in at least sixteen European countries and pilot projects in another dozen. It has spread to the anglophone world and even gained a furtive toehold in the United States.  In France, civil society pressured parliament to convene the Quilès Commission to investigate the French government’s role in Rwandan genocide.

The World Social Forum is pure ferment, by design. It puts social justice activists and groups in contact worldwide. Like a funnel in reverse, the forums accentuate variety. Shoestring groups vie with established NGOs in a proliferating series of assemblies. It strengthens ties, that’s all – but ties may be the fundamental threat to statist domination.

One gauge of civil society’s importance is the US government’s hostility. At a UN Conference on Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, the United States’ UN ambassador listed measures unacceptable to the US government. Among the short and comprehensive list: no promotion of NGO advocacy – not even by NGOs. The US opposed civil-society advocacy not just within the United States but internationally. Our government will withhold cooperation on all agreed measures to silence voices it can’t control. That is a testament to the power of NGOs.  Domestic NGOs without international support are isolated and destroyed at home: bipartisan attacks on ACORN and Planned Parenthood fit a longstanding pattern of state conduct. The state tightened its grip on electoral politics by pushing the League of Women Voters aside for two-party debates with collusive rules.

NGOs are not our rulers’ only problem. The US government is increasingly beset by an axis that might be described as a rule-of-law bloc. Their name is Legion, you might say, for they are many. Americans are trained to see Iran as an outcast desperado among nations, terrorizing all decent people, dangerous, unreasoning, a cornered beast. So it’s jarring to come upon them presiding in elective honor over a bloc of nations comprising eighty per cent of all the people in the world.  The bloc is called the G-77. Unlike US diplomats, “trained as warriors” to “take a situation up to the brink of having to call in the military,” Iran’s representative, a former UN envoy, mediated and listened. In a cheeky rejoinder to our quasi-official “clash of civilizations” slogan, Iran initiated a year of Dialogue Among Civilizations.

The majority’s secretariat resides, invisibly and inaudibly, to Americans, in New York. The majority – the overwhelming preponderance of mankind – is setting divergent interests aside so they can act in concert. And it isn’t just little poor powerless states: our chief creditor China is part of this bloc. Most of OPEC belongs to this bloc. The G-77 actually numbers 133 countries. If we mean it when we talk about democracy worldwide, Iran was the legitimate leader of the world as our state tore up the UN Charter to wage illegal war in Iraq. Nothing shows our rulers up as liars more than this: if they brought about democracy as promised, this majority would have its way.

So what do they want? The vox populi of the world has been echoing for more than a decade, since Nigeria conveyed the Declaration of the South to the democratic sandbox of the General Assembly. Of it we Americans heard not a peep – perhaps because the document was drawn up in Havana, in Cuba, that fearsome dagger pointed at the heart of Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, the maddening fly that still stampedes our ruling class after fifty years.

What do they want? Compliance with the UN Charter. Human rights for all…

Let’s stop right there and examine this from the viewpoint of America, a state that routinely contravenes the UN Charter, most recently with the highest crime, illegal aggression in Iraq and Libya. Let’s consider such state duties from the viewpoint of a state like America that denies its citizens’ core civil and political rights with obstructive reservations in breach of treaty law, and with emergency powers exercised in breach of treaty law and the supreme law of the land. Let us look at obligations from the viewpoint of our state, which refuses to acknowledge economic, social, and cultural rights binding in customary international law. Clearly, the G-77′s demands for rule of law must be put aside as an unacceptable infringement on US state sovereignty. To put the people first is beyond the pale for our state.

The G-77 pledges transparent, effective and accountable governance. They seek democratic decision-making within and among states. This is an overt threat to a state like ours, in which two approved parties carry out policies opposed by overwhelming popular majorities and coercively suppress electoral participation by unauthorized groups. In a country like America, with its institutionalized trading in influence and abuse of function, transparency is foreign subversion.

In its Teheran Consensus the G-77 pledges tighter ties among the global south, ties that are to bind at all levels of society: not just among ruling elites in ferociously-guarded secrecy, as in America’s sphere, but among civil society institutions and associations of all sorts – even including the people at large.

With the public will effectively negated by meticulous state control of the electoral process, civil society is a destabilizing threat to our state. America prefers to channel all public participation through state-controlled parties. Our state is not comfortable when foreign countries encourage too much freedom of association, or presume to give it voice. A UN debate on civil society shows our state’s approach to free association. The US delegation proposed to restrict NGO participation to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). ECOSOC has no role in the US because the US government refuses to ratify the core economic and social rights covenant. Our delegate also played the traditional American trick of attacking NGO outreach funding while reiterating US support.

Perhaps it’s hard for our government to sympathize with the G-77. Some of their concerns are poor man’s problems. The G-77 stands for eradication of hunger, illiteracy, disease, and poverty. No one of consequence suffers from those things here at home. The bloc stands for national self-determination against exploitative resource extraction. But if some of their concerns sound like special third-world pleading, others hit uncomfortably close to home. With brutal candor, the G-77 majority shreds American self-deception about shared indignities.

The world majority speaks candidly of disparities between rich and poor, and pledges to reverse them. Here at home inequality is handled by a committee of bankers, the Fed. The committee of bankers forces down interest rates, punishing powerless savers to prop up bankrupt banks. It pays public money for worthless bank assets, and permits falsified accounting to lure more of people’s savings into bankrupt banks. Bankers take the various subsidies home in annual bonuses that would be a lifetime endowment for any of this country’s poor. We call them unemployed, not poor. Ejected from housing, or poised in stores at midnight waiting for their food allowance to be disbursed, or letting their diseases go untreated, they are no less desperate than their African peers. African governments in the G-77 hold themselves to the standard of their peoples’ well-being. In America we are induced to fixate on an abstraction we call the economy, which is defined to exclude all the arrangements that take from the masses to gorge a tiny ruling class.

Perhaps it takes a wholly different civilization to make the obvious point that corporate profit maximization has nothing to do with decent jobs or human well-being. The G-77 outsiders watched a tiny minority rig the rules to free capital for unrestricted global movement while penning most labor into national markets. They are not surprised to see capital pit fragmented labor pools against each other to drive down wages and standards. However much your country has developed, this trap works equally well, and it’s as evident here as abroad. But it takes a fantasy culture like America to attribute the result of this purposive predation to lack of skills or discipline.

For a derelict state, our rulers have exceptional faith in merit. Someday, when time has obscured America’s pervasive misery, we might see the humor in our fawning idolatry of a fatuous Magoo who refracted every datum through the portentous doorstop novels of Ayn Rand. Or the slapstick devastation of Alan Greenspan falling for a giant Ponzi scheme, our objectivist superman gypped by hackneyed D.P. tricks from the old country, and in housing, of all things, that most petit-bourgeois of assets. We have come to accept people with all sorts of ridiculous occupations who manage to identify with that fictional titan of industry, John Galt – but Alan Greenspan might be the most bathetic case of all. For now, though, amid the widespread ruin of blameless lives, it is best to be grave.

The G-77 knows all about debt. It probably takes someone with the gimlet eye of the destitute to see the two faces of debt for what they are. For the victims, debt palliates a mendicant life and persists as a means of control. For the victimizers, debt, retooled as ‘leverage,’ upends economies and makes hostages of populations. It works the same way here and abroad, but only less-developed peoples see it clearly. We have our peons just as they do. We call them homeowners. They are all part of the same meek and compliant working class. The world’s majority likely casts an empathetic eye on our bustling “entrepreneurs” and “professional staff” chained to their treadmill of debt. For most, their subsistence depends strictly on fealty and obedience to their employers. A few of them will be anointed as intelligentsia, in Lenin’s contemptuous term, taught to revere the new ways imposed, and allowed to vaunt distinction and taste privilege, if they keep in line.

We Americans are the naive ones. Elsewhere in the world, they’ve seen it all before. Through bitter experience, the world’s majority is not surprised to see emergency relief aid turn into armed repression, summary execution, and detention camps. They would not be shocked to see the murderous militarized helping hand put out to Hurricane Katrina’s victims. As services and infrastructure suffer more neglect, more Americans will get to know the third-world treatment.

The G-77 majority wants more democracy in economic decision-making. The world at large sees the UN’s economic agencies pushed aside for weighted voting in the Bretton Woods Institutions. They see firms consolidating assets and power, and dominating institutions as well as markets. For the underdeveloped eighty per cent here at home, the analog is more assured and blatant. Financial institutions install cadres in the White House and bankroll agents in Congress. Administrations of both parties host closed-door industry conferences to dictate industrial policy. The vote is weighted by money at home and abroad. The franchise is increasingly restricted to the owners, of the country and of the world. However rich you think you are, you don’t own enough to have a vote: you’re not a corporate person but a human.

America’s majority is much like the world’s. For the placemen, the retainers of the dominant firms, the populace is part of les damnés de la terre, an object of pity, or scorn. At most they are a threat, if they articulate their interests, in which case they’re brutally put down. Here at home the masses cling to a derisory dream of advancement and parrot mottoes of merit and hard work. They strive against others of their caste, and most importantly, comply. Abroad, with no delusory hope of redress, the masses act in concert. Here and abroad, helpless or united, they are the same degraded class, the wretched of the earth.

The Biblical Legion of devils was actually Gadarene resistance to Roman rule. Walpurgisnacht is May Day’s eve. The peoples are the most feared of all demons. There is good reason why the wretched are les damnés de la terre – they’re a threat. It is dangerous to invoke demons. That is what treaty law does at home and abroad, with human rights and rule of law. And sometimes America’s possessing demons, the ACLU, mass in legions with foreign devils – even with Europe, once safely bottled up – to expose the crimes of our state to the public at large worldwide.  The state wants the masses dispersed and unseen but now we’ve all been evoked. We’ll see if they can cast us out again with their patriotic spells.

The evidence of the Taliban peace initiatives comes from a new paper drawn from the first book-length study of Taliban- al Qaeda relations thus far, as well as an account in another recent study on the Taliban in Kandahar province by journalist Anand Gopal.

In a paper published Monday by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn recount the decision by the Taliban leadership in 2002 to offer political reconciliation with the U.S.-backed Afghan administration.

Citing an unidentified former Taliban official who participated in the decision, they report that the entire senior Taliban political leadership met in Pakistan in November 2002 to consider an offer of reconciliation with the new Afghan government in which they would “join the political process” in Afghanistan.

“We discussed whether to join the political process in Afghanistan or not and we took a decision that, yes, we should go and join the process,” the former Taliban leader told the co-authors.

They cite an interlocutor who was then in contact with the Taliban leadership as recalling that they would have returned to Afghanistan to participate in the political system if they had been given an assurance they would not be arrested.

But the Karzai government and the United States refused to offer such an assurance, the interlocutor recalled. They considered the Taliban a “spent force”, he told Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn.

Gopal, who has covered Afghanistan for the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal, provided a similar account of the Taliban attempt to reconcile with the Karzai government in a lengthy study published by the New America Foundation last November, based on his interviews with present and former Taliban as well as with officials in the office of President Karzai.

The entire senior Taliban leadership, meeting in Karachi, “agreed in principle to find a way for them to return to Afghanistan and abandon the fight”, Gopal wrote, but the initiative was frustrated by the unwillingness of the United States and the Afghan government to provide any assurance that they would not arrested and detained.

The Taliban continued to pursue the possibility of reconciliation in subsequent years, with apparent interest on the part of the Karzai government, according to Gopal. Delegations “representing large sections of the Taliban leadership” traveled to Kabul in both 2003 and 2004 to meet with senior government officials, according to his account.

But the George W. Bush administration remained uninterested in offering assurances of security to the Taliban.

Robert Grenier, then the CIA station chief in Islamabad, revealed in an article in al Jazeera January 31, 2010 that former Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, had been serving as an intermediary with the Taliban on their possible return to Afghanistan in 2002 when he was “arrested and imprisoned for his pains”.

The CIA sought to persuade the U.S. Defence Department to release Muttawakil, according to Grenier. But Muttawakil remained in detention at Bagram Airbase, where he was physically abused, until October 2003.

The new evidence undermines the Barack Obama administration’s claim that Taliban-ruled areas of Afghanistan would become a “sanctuary” for al Qaeda.

Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn suggest that the proposed reintegration of the Taliban into a political system that had been set up by the United States and its allies was “totally alien to al-Qaeda ideology but logical for the Taliban”.

They acknowledge that the Taliban have welcomed the support and assistance of al Qaeda cadres in the war. But they argue in the new paper that the relationship is a “marriage of convenience” imposed by the foreign military presence, not an expression of an ideological alliance.

They also cite evidence that the Taliban leadership recognise that they will have to provide guarantees that a Taliban-influenced regime in Afghanistan would not allow al Qaeda to have a sanctuary.

They note in particular a Taliban public statement released before the London Conference of January 2010 that pledged, “We will not allow our soil to be used against any other country.”

An earlier Taliban statement, distributed to news media December 4, 2009, said the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” – the term used by the insurgent leadership to refer to the organisation – had “no agenda of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to give legal guarantees if foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan”.

Independent specialists on the history of the relationship have long questioned that assumption, and have emphasised that the Taliban leadership was never very close to al Qaeda.

Leah Farrell, senior counter-terrorism intelligence analyst with the Australian Federal Police from 2002 to 2008, wrote in her blog that the relationship “is not a marriage, it’s friends with benefits”. Farrell has also said that jihadi accounts of the late 1990s have shown bin Laden was not that close to Taliban spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, before the 9/11 attacks.

The new paper, based on both Taliban and jihadist documents and from interviews with Taliban and former Taliban officials, points to basic differences of ideology and interest between the Taliban and al Qaeda throughout the history of their relations.

Relations between Taliban and al Qaeda leaders during the second half of the 1990s were “complicated and often tense”, according to Strick von Linschoten and Kuehn, even though they were both Sunni Muslims and shared a common enemy.

They recall that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s plotting against the United States was done in direct violation of Mullah Omar’s directives to him.

An e-mail from two leading Arab jihadists in Afghanistan to bin Laden in July 1999, which Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison later found in a laptop that had once belonged to al Qaeda, referred to a “crisis” in relations between bin Laden and Mullah Omar that threatened the future of al Qaeda-sponsored training camps in Afghanistan. The message expressed fear that the Taliban regime might “kick them out” of Afghanistan.

Mullah Omar nevertheless regarded bin Laden as an “important connector” to the Muslim world, according to Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn. And the Taliban leadership faction that was pushing hard to force bin Laden out of the country was weakened by the death of its leading figure, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, in April 2001.

Contrary to the suggestion that the Taliban were complicit with the September 11, 2001 attacks, however, Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn assert that Mullah Omar and other leaders refused to hand over bin Laden to the United States mainly because of the fear of losing the few allies they had in the Muslim world.

They suggest that a primary reason for the Taliban decision not to give in to U.S. pressure on bin Laden both before and after 9/11 was to maintain the support of Pakistan, which was encouraging them to hold out against those pressures.

Other published sources have confirmed that even in October 2001, Pakistani intelligence officials were advising the Taliban to avoid handing over bin Laden, in the hope that the Taliban-al Qaeda resistance to the U.S.-led military offensive would continue.

There is no outcry. We must kill them over there so we don’t have to kill them over here. It doesn’t matter who we kill, as long as the ratings go up, corporations cash in and the masses get some bonus thrills before returning to the regularly scheduled programming.

Initial responses to the Tucson tragedy have tried to shoehorn Loughner into being a Tea Party, Sarah Palin zombie, but this grinning dude is even more messed up than that. A high school drop out, aimless and living with his parents, he was also kicked out of the community college. Loughner tried to join the US Army although he considered as war crimes our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Among his favorite books are Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto. He dismisses others as illiterate and ungrammatical, yet barely makes sense in his own writing.

Let’s face it, sanity and coherence are no longer our strong suits. From President to busboy, we babble in slogans and sound bites. For over a century, the mass media have corroded our syllogistic chops. Browsing some crime story, one is distracted by a shoe add. A genocide photo may be juxtaposed with a new, improved laundry detergent. On sale too, no less. All become spectacles and life is a meaningless collage. With jump cuts and commercials, television accelerates our derangement. The mind is not supposed to blink that fast for decades on end without deadly consequences. Speed kills, period. With remote control, five hundred channels, ipod in one ear, cell phone in other and laptop a humming, we can hardly remember who got wiped out yesterday, or even a minute ago. We no longer have reality, only reality shows.

With a national decline in articulation, is there a surprise that there’s a vertiginous drop in the literacy of our mass murderers and assassins? A man used to be able to hold a gun or knife in one hand, pen in the other. Not no more. Charles Guteau, who shot President Garfield in 1881, could wax, “I weave the discourse out of my brain as cotton is woven into a fabric. When I compose my brain is in white heat, and my mind works like lightning. This accounts for the short epigrammatic style of my sentences. I write so rapidly I can hardly read it,” and, “Life is a fleeting dream, and it matters little where one goes. A human life is of small value. During the war thousands of brave boys went down without a tear.”

Fast forward to Seung-Hui Cho. From his play Richard McBeef, Sue kvetches, “What are you doing to my son! You said you would have a nice chat to get on terms with him. And this is what I catch you do! What kind of step-father are you? Pretending to be nice to him with a fake smile on your chubby face!”

Is it possible to be more tone deaf? Oh, the bathos of atonal youth! Granted, Cho had problems with speaking and socializing his entire life, but he was also an English major in a well regarded writing program. He even took advanced fiction. As poet Richard Hugo observed, “A writing class may be the first and last place where many young people are taken seriously,” so inside they duck, though it may cost them a pretty penny, payable in infinite installments. Anything to get out of the suburbs, I suppose. In any case, count Cho as another young, inarticulate American with a hazy beef against nearly everything. Impotent, many look up to the military. Loughner tried to enlist, Cho dressed up as a Marine.

They like to flash that hard, reliable tool of lethal discharge, rat, tat, tat, tat! Extending the body’s reach, it feels agreeably snug in the hand.

Military culture provides a subtext to the Tucson shooting. Giffords’ opponent in the last election, Jesse Kelly, ex Marine and Iraq war vet, staged a fund raising event advertised as “Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.” (If Loughner was so disturbed by bad grammar, why he didn’t target Kelly for this punctuation-free snippet?) Shot through the head, Giffords was then treated by Peter Rhee, among others. Rhee served for 24 years in the Navy, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Discharged, he worked for five years in Los Angeles, where he dealt with around 30 gunshot wounds a day. Improved emergency care has helped to hold down our murder rates. To get at the real index of violence, one should look at murder attempts.

Responding to the Tucson shooting, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik cited “vitriolic rhetoric” in the media as a poisoning influence. “This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in.” How nice it ever was for how many is debatable, but it’s undeniable that our culture has turned more savage. We haven’t always enjoyed caged fighting, people eating maggots on TV or popular music that openly advocates murder.

Mammie Smith recorded the first blues record in 1920. It contained this passage:

Now I’ve got the crazy blues
Since my baby went away
I ain’t had no time to lose
I must find him today
I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop
Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop

So yes, drugs, guns and cop killing are not entirely new in pop music, but this song was an aberration. More typical of that era was a cheese wagon like “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover.” Can you imagine Eminem singing, “One leaf is sunshine, the second is rain / Third is the roses that grow in the lane”? The current top hit is “Grenade” by Bruno Mars. A love ballad, it features these sweet lines: “I would go through all this pain, / Take a bullet straight through my brain, / Yes, I would die for ya baby.”

Looking tough has become de rigueur and even pre-teens now strut around like gangstas. America also leads the world in the adoption of military fatigues as casual wear, where T-shirt slogans such as “Kill ‘Em All” and “Made in America, Tested in Japan,” over a mushroom cloud, are deemed witty. Our soccer moms steer military trucks. Rush Limbaugh used to open his show with a sustained salvo of automatic weapons.

Interviewed by M. Thomas Inge, Truman Capote spoke of the prevalence of tattoos among murderers, “I have seldom met a murderer who wasn’t tattooed. Of course, the reason is rather clear; most murderers are extremely weak men who are sexually undecided and quite frequently impotent. Thus the tattoo, with all its obvious masculine symbolism. Another common denominator is that murderers almost always laugh when they’re discussing their crimes.” Well, Americans have become the most elaborately tattooed people on earth. Not all of us are murderers, of course, we just want to look like we’re always ready to bust a cap. By flexing our masculinity so insistently, so insanely, we’re distorting both the male and female aspects of our nature.

I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

— Bradley Manning

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

—  George Bernard Shaw

Ever since WikiLeaks became a household name this past summer, following the release of 77,000 secret U.S. documents relating to the ongoing occupation and destruction of Afghanistan, many American politicians and pundits have been calling for blood. Despite then-top military commander General Stanley McCrystal’s own admission in March of this year, the U.S. military in Afghanistan has “shot an amazing number of people” even though “none has ever proven to be a threat,” the ire resulting from the activities of WikiLeaks is directed at the whistle-blowers themselves, rather than at those actually implicated in war crimes as shown by the leaked documents.

In their eternal allegiance to government secrecy, aggressive imperialism, and American exceptionalism, numerous WikiLeaks’ critics have been outraged over the publication of U.S. government documents. While accusing WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, of everything from espionage to terrorism to treason (Assange isn’t a U.S. citizen), they hold him responsible for the deaths of both soldiers and civilians and have even publicly suggested and supported threats to assassinate him.

The U.S. State Department claimed that the release of classified cables would “at a minimum…place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals” and Attorney General Eric Holder stated his belief that “national security of the United States has been put at risk. The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has described these hysterical reactions to WikiLeaks release as “fairly significantly overwrought” due to the continuing slow and calculated release of over 251,000 previously secret and classified U.S. diplomatic cables (fewer than 1,500 cables have been released so far). Still, there are increasing calls not only for Assange’s indictment, but also explicitly for his murder.

On November 29, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly declared on air that those responsible for the leaked documents are “traitors in America” and that they “should be executed,” adding “or put in prison for life,” as a dismissive afterthought.

The next day, Bill Kristol, in a The Weekly Standard article entitled “Whack WikiLeaks,” urged the United States government to “neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are” and hoped for a glorious, unified bipartisan effort “to degrade, defeat, and destroy WikiLeaks.” One need only recall what Senator Lindsey Graham said in early November about “neutering” the Iranian government to get an idea of what Kristol is talking about.

Sarah Palin chimed in on Facebook, writing that Assange “is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” who should be “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.” This very urgency was mentioned in a presidential debate in October 2008 by Palin campaign opponent, Barack Obama, who made the following promise to Americans: “We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.” One can assume that Palin meant that the WikiLeaks founder should be hunted with a similar kind of lethal force and not that he should simply be left alone to die peacefully from kidney failure in the mountains of Tora Bora nine years ago while his family is quickly placed under the protection of the FBI and flown to a secure location. But, then again, it’s Sarah Palin.

On the same day, another 2012 Republican presidential hopeful wished for the assassination of Assange. Former Arkansas governor and Fox News host, Mike Huckabee, speaking at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library, told reporters, “Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.”

Huckabee, who was signing copies of his new children’s book, “Can’t Wait Till Christmas!” at the time, was presumably referring to U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing WikiLeaks with the classified documents and is currently being held in intense solitary confinement in the brig at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. Manning has been locked up in Quantico or five months now, after spending two months detained in a military jail in Kuwait. Manning, like Assange, has not been convicted of any crime. Kids, Christmas, and Capital Punishment. Thanks, Mike!

Fox News national security analyst, Kathleen McFarland, urged the United States to declare WikiLeaks a terrorist organization, kidnap Assange, and try him in a military tribunal for espionage. Furthermore, McFarland, who served in the Pentagon under the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and is currently a “Distinguished Adviser” at the Iran-hating/Israel-advocating think tank The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, agreed with Huckabee that Manning should be charged and tried as a traitor for exposing American war crimes, criminal negligence, and diplomatic duplicity. “If he’s found guilty,” she wrote, “he should be executed.”

Also on November 30, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) — whose contradictory motto reads “Securing America, Strengthening Israel” — addressed the WikiLeaks release by musing whether the U.S. government would “try to hang Manning from the nearest tree?”

In a post on the right-wing website Red State on December 1, a commenter by the moniker “lexington_concord” fantasized about Julian Assange receiving the Abe Lincoln treatment. “Under the traditional rules of engagement he is thus subject to summary execution” he writes, “and my preferred course of action would be for Assange to find a small caliber round in the back of his head.”

The following day, Washington Times columnist, Jeffrey Kuhner, published a vitriolic attack on Assange, whom he accused of being “an anti-American radical who wants to see the United States defeated by its Islamic fascist enemies.” Other goals Kuhner ascribed to Assange included the humiliation of America “on the world stage, to drain it of all moral and legal legitimacy – especially regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Kuhner wrote that Assange “is aiding and abetting terrorists in their war against America,” and suggested that the Obama administration “take care of the problem – effectively and permanently” by treating Assange as an “enemy combatant” and “the same way as other high-value terrorist targets.” It is no surprise, therefore, that Kuhner’s column was entitled “Assassinate Assange.”

Though it may seem strange that a Montreal native like Kuhner is disappointed that “America is no longer feared or respected,” he is not the only Canadian to harbor such violent visions of Assange’s murder. Tom Flanagan, a senior adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said plainly on the Canadian TV station CBC, “I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.”

Speaking with Chris Wallace on Fox News, former House Speaker and paid Fox News contributor, Newt Gingrich, said on December 5 that “Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed is terrorism. And Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism.” As such, Gingrich suggested, “He should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.” If recent history is any indication, as an enemy combatant Assange would most likely be either murdered in his own country by U.S. soldiers and air strikes or kidnapped, tortured, and indefinitely imprisoned in inhumane conditions without charge or trial.

On December 6, Fox News commentators, Bob Beckel and Bo Dietl, followed suit. Speaking on the Fox Business show “Follow The Money,” Beckel, who was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter administration and Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign manager, angrily wished for U.S. Special Ops forces to kill Assange, declaring, “A dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s a traitor, a treasonist [sic], and he has broken every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty, so…there’s only one way to do it: Illegally shoot the son of a bitch.” Dietl, former NYPD detective and current Chairman of the New York State Security Guard Advisory Council, concurred with Beckel, saying, “this guy’s gotta go.” He then coined a brand new euphemism for assassination by suggesting that the United States should “immune him,” before making a finger gun and childlike shooting sound.

But the public advocacy, even if merely rhetorical, for the assassination of Assange is by no means new.

This past summer, after the Afghanistan memos were released, neoconservative jingoist, Marc Thiessen, wrote in The Washington Post that “WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise” which is responsible for “getting people killed.” Thiessen continued,

Assange is a non-U.S. citizen operating outside the territory of the United States. This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.

Intelligence and military assets don’t sound too judicial. Thiessen also urged the government to “disable the system [Assange] has built to illegally disseminate classified information,” apparently insinuating that The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel should all be shut down and the internet turned off. If that’s not what he meant, it doesn’t make any sense.

On July 29, Right Wing News’, John Hawkins, posted an article subtly entitled “The CIA Should Kill Julian Assange,” in which he wrote:

In Assange’s case, he’s not an American and so he has no constitutional protection. Moreover, he’s going to get a lot of people killed. Can we do anything legally about someone from another country leaking this information? Maybe not. Can we have a CIA agent with a sniper rifle rattle a bullet around his skull the next time he appears in public as a warning? You bet we can — and we should. If that’s too garish for people, then the CIA can kill him and make it look like an accident.

Either way, Julian Assange deserves to die for what he’s done and he should be killed to send a message loud enough to convince other people not to publish documents like this in the future.

Hawkins couldn’t be more wrong. Not only are American citizens protected by the U.S. Constitution, non-citizens are protected as well. The Fourteenth Amendment holds that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Moreover, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the principle that the Constitution applies both to Americans and to foreigners, was upheld and affirmed in an 1886 ruling by the Supreme Court on the case Yick Wo v. Hopkins. The Court’s decision read:

The fourteenth amendment to the constitution is not confined to the protection of citizens. It says: ‘Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ These provisions are universal in their application, to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality; and the equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws…The questions we have to consider and decide in these cases, therefore, are to be treated as involving the rights of every citizen of the United States equally with those of the strangers and aliens who now invoke the jurisdiction of the court.

Nevertheless, after this most recent WikiLeaks disclosure of secret diplomatic cables, Hawkins posted a follow-up on Townhall called “5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange,” in which he repeated his claim that because “Julian Assange is not an American citizen…he has no constitutional rights,” concluding that “there’s no reason that the CIA can’t kill him.”

Hawkins added that, even though Assange “may not be in Osama Bin Laden’s league, nor is he using the same methods,” WikiLeaks and Al Qaeda’s motivations are the same; namely, “to do as much damage to the United States as humanly possible.” Hawkins then suggested that “Assange is an enemy of the American people,” presumably not taking into account those Americans who may not want to be lied to about its own government’s war crimes authorized by its leaders and committed by its soldiers and intelligence agencies, in addition to the espionage emanating from its hundreds of embassies and consulates worldwide. Hawkins, blissfully ignorant about his own government’s actions, declares that “our country will be safer when he’s dead,” as “the first step towards convincing other nations that they can trust us again would be make this a better world by removing Julian Assange from it.”

After the WikiLeaks release of nearly 400,000 documents relating to the U.S. occupation of Iraq this October, former State Department senior adviser and Fox News contributor, Christian Whiton, urged Barack Obama to “designate WikiLeaks and its officers as enemy combatants, paving the way for non-judicial actions against them,” while warmonger extraordinaire, Jonah Goldberg, wrote an OpEd in the Chicago Tribune entitled “Why Is Assange Still Alive?” After opening with “a simple question: Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?,” Goldberg suggests that WikiLeaks “is going to get people killed” and “is easily among the most significant and well-publicized breaches of American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb.”

As such, from the comfort of his computer keyboard, Goldberg once again courageously wonders, “Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?” lamenting that Assange was not “a greasy stain on the Autobahn already.”

This violent talk of extrajudicial murder should come as no surprise to American audiences. Pundits and politicians have long looked to assassination as a legitimate tactic in dealing with undesirable or frustrating persons who either disobey imperial diktat or openly oppose American hegemony.

Back in 2006, Republican congresswoman, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who will chair the House Committee on Foreign Affairs come January, was caught on camera saying, “I welcome the opportunity of having anyone assassinate Fidel Castro and any leader who is oppressing the people.”

This past August, journalist, Gary Baumgarten, ruminated on what would happen in Iran if President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been assassinated. Two months later, far-right Knesset minister, Aryeh Eldad, called for such an assassination while Ahmadinejad was visiting Lebanon.

These are no idle threats. In early 2007, law professor, Glenn Reynolds, posited in a post on the right-wing website Instapundit that, with regard to alleged Iranian involvement in resistance activity in Iraq, the United States “should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian [sic] atomic scientists, [and] supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran.” Reynolds continued,

[T]o be clear, I think it’s perfectly fine to kill people who are working on atomic bombs for countries — like Iran — that have already said that they want to use those bombs against America and its allies, and I think that those who feel otherwise are idiots, and in absolutely no position to strike moral poses.

The fact that not a single Iranian official in recent memory has ever threatened to build nuclear weapons, let alone use them “against America and its allies,” is beside the point. So is the fact that the United States has explicit laws against political assassination. The point is that Reynolds, a law professor, was calling for the willful murder of Iranians – government officials, religious leaders, scientists and academics – who have never been charged with or found guilty of any crime and who pose absolutely no threat to the United States or its citizens.

Less than a month earlier, in January 2007, a senior Iranian nuclear physicist and professor at Shiraz University working at the uranium enrichment facility at Isfahan, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, was found dead in his apartment. While some publications attributed his death to an explosion in his laboratory, other reports claimed he was assassinated by the Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy agency, using “radioactive poisoning.”

In addition, the day after Reynolds posted his assassination wish list, a bomb explosion killed at least 18 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the southeastern Iranian city of Zahedan. Responsibility for the bombing was subsequently claimed by the Iranian separatist group, Jundallah, which has carried out numerous terrorist attacks in the region and has financial ties to the United States. Since then, at least 164 Iranians have been murdered in similar actions undertaken by Jundallah, the most recent occurring just today, December 15, when at least 38 worshippers celebrating the holiday Ashura were killed, and over 50 wounded, in a suicide bombing outside a mosque in the city of Chabahar.

In November of this year, the U.S. State Department finally designated Jundallah as a terrorist organization.

On September 22, 2010, twelve people were killed and at least 80 injured in a bombing at a military parade in the West Azerbaijani city of Mahabad in northwest Iran. The Kurdish separatist group, Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), which also has connections to the United States and Israel, may have been behind the attack.

Early this year, on January 12, 2010, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a 50-year-old Iranian nuclear physicist and professor at Tehran University, was killed outside his home “when a bomb-rigged motorcycle exploded as he left for work.” The blast, which shattered nearby windows in northern Tehran’s Qeytariyeh neighborhood, was activated by a remote trigger.

Ali Mohammadi was a lecturer and researcher with “no prominent political voice, no published work with military relevance and no declared links to Iran’s nuclear program.” The New York Times reported that Ali Mohammadi taught neutron physics and “was the author of several articles on quantum and theoretical physics in scientific journals.” Experts agree the victim “was not involved in the country’s nuclear program,” that his writing, given its highly abstract nature, has “virtually no military applications and that “nuclear physicists interested in bomb-making would have no interest in these papers.”

But calls for the assassination of Iranian scientists didn’t stop there. This past July, former CIA operative, death squad and genocide enthusiast, and current neocon blowhard, Reuel Marc Gerecht, penned an article for The Weekly Standard entitled “Should Israel Bomb Iran? Better safe than sorry.” In addition to advocating the illegal and immoral murder of thousands of Iranians because of their country’s defiance of U.S. and Israeli demands to relinquish its inalienable rights, Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Zionist Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, kvetched, “If the Israelis (or, better, the Americans under President Bush) had struck Iran’s principal nuclear facilities in 2003 and killed many of the scientists and technical support staff, Khamenei’s nuclear program likely would have taken years, even decades, to recover.”

On November 29, 2010, as American pundits and politicians were busy calling for the murder of Julian Assange, two separate but connected incidents occurred. Two of Iran’s top nuclear scientists were attacked on their way to work by “men on motorbikes who attached bombs to the windows of their cars” and then detonated them from a distance. One of the scientists, Dr. Majid Shahriari, a member of the nuclear engineering department of Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, was killed. Shahriari had published dozens of esoteric conference reports and peer-reviewed articles on nuclear research and is said to have managed a “major project” for the country’s Atomic Energy Organization. The Guardian reported that “Shahriari had no known links to banned nuclear work, but was highly regarded in his field.” His wife was injured in the attack. The other scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, and his wife were also wounded.

“They’re bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb,” an anonymous U.S. official who assesses scientific intelligence told The New York Times. “They’re both top scientists.”

Both Dr. Mohammadi, who was assassinated in January, and Dr. Shahriari were associated with a non-nuclear scientific research unit known as Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) which is based in Jordan and operating under United Nations auspices.

The day after the attacks on Shahriari and Abbasi, Yossi Melman, the senior terrorism and intelligence commentator for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, reported on the connection between the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable release, the assassination of Iranian scientists, and the appointment of a new head of the Mossad, all of which occurred the same day. Melman wrote:

They are part of the endless efforts by the Israeli intelligence community, together with its Western counterparts including Britain’s MI6 and America’s CIA, to sabotage, delay and if possible, to stop Iran from reaching its goal [sic] of having its first nuclear bomb.

Melman, who publicized the mysterious death of Hosseinpour in 2007, stated that, regarding the new attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, “it is obvious…that Israel was behind it.”

Less than two weeks later, on December 12, the Washington Post’s new neoconservative, warmongering columnist, Jennifer Rubin, made a number of suggestions about how the United States should “deal” with Iran’s nuclear program. In addition to supporting Iran’s small opposition movement and beginning to “make the case and agree on a feasible plan for the use of force,” Rubin wrote, in back-to-back bullet points:

Second, we should continue and enhance espionage and sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program. Every nuclear scientist who has a ‘car accident’ and every computer virus buys us time, setting back the timeline for Iran’s nuclear capability, while exacting a price for those who cooperate with the nuclear program. Think of it as the ultimate targeted sanction.

Third, we need to make human rights a central theme in our bilateral and multilateral diplomacy regarding Iran.

As Salon’s, Justin Elliott, summarized, “Rubin wants the United States to make human rights a central theme in its Iran policy — and to indiscriminately assassinate civilian scientists,” continuing that “even the U.S. State Department referred to these attacks as acts of terrorism, which would make them antithetical to any serious concept of human rights.”

This is certainly not the first time Rubin, who has written that “nearly all wisdom” can be found in the Torah (and the first two Godfather movies), has contradicted herself within the span of a sentence or two. In her very first Washington Post blog, Rubin declared her ideological belief in “American exceptionalism, limited government, free markets, a secure and thriving Jewish state, defense of freedom and human rights around the world, enforced borders with a generous legal immigration policy, calling things by their proper names (e.g. Islamic fundamentalism), and recapturing vocabulary (a “feminist” is not the same as a pro-choice activist).”

How one can believe simultaneously in “freedom and human rights” and a “secure and thriving” heavily-militarized and inherently discriminatory ethnocracy is unclear, unless, of course, the “world” doesn’t include Palestinians. Also, so long as things are being “called by their proper names” and vocabulary is being “recaptured,” writers like Rubin, Reynolds and Gerecht should undoubtedly be labeled as what they are: Zionist apologists who advocate the murder of innocent people to advance their own political and ideological agendas; in other words, they are proponents of terrorism.

Perhaps the single most striking aspect of these public death threats – whether clandestine assassination or carpet-bombing air strikes – leveled by notable American analysts and officials is that the United States currently has a specific program in place dedicated to extrajudicially murder U.S. citizens who do this exact thing.

The Obama administration has authorized the targeted killing of Muslim cleric and American national, Anwar al-Awlaki. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Awlaki “was the imam at a Virginia mosque attended by U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, the suspect in the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting spree in November, and said in an interview in the fall that he counseled Maj. Hasan before the attack. Investigators say he also had incidental contact with two of the 9/11 hijackers.” Nevertheless, the paper continued, “There is no indication Mr. Awlaki played a direct role in any of the attacks, and he has never been indicted in the U.S.”

The Times (UK) reported in April that following “the Christmas Day airliner plot, US and Yemeni officials said that Mr al-Awlaki had met the suspected bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to ignite explosives sewn into his underwear.” Even though absolutely no evidence has ever been presented in a court of law to substantively link Awlaki with terrorist acts, an unnamed U.S. official has told the press, “Al-Awlaki is a proven threat. He’s been targeted.”

So far, the only “proof” given are the words of the U.S. government. On December 7, Reuters reported that “U.S. officials have described al-Awlaki as having a leadership role in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula…he has urged attacks on the United States in Internet videos and writings.”

Urging attacks in Internet videos and writings? Most of the staunch advocates of assassinating both Awlaki and Assange, not to mention encouraging an unprovoked American or Israeli assault on Iran, have strong connections – and career histories – with U.S. government foreign policy and the military establishment. Their influence of public and official discourse cannot be taken lightly, nor can it be passed off as inconsequential or merely rhetorical. After all, this is exactly what proceeded the invasion and occupation of Iraq – with many of the same cheerleaders we hear today.

So if that’s all it takes to condemn people to death without a trial and authorize drones to bomb their alleged whereabouts, how should North Korea react to the call of the aforementioned Instapundit blogger, Glenn Reynolds to “nuke ‘em. And not with just a few bombs,” in response to the current escalation of hostilities between North and South Korea? By this standard, at what point should the Washington punditry start watching the skies over the Potomac for signs of Iran’s newly-acquired UAV, the Karrar?

Yet, wishful thinking or even vocal advocacy of violence, however abhorrent and appalling, is protected under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court, in 1969, addressed this exact issue in the case Brandenburg v. Ohio when it concluded:

…the mere abstract teaching…of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action…A statute which fails to draw this distinction impermissibly intrudes upon the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It sweeps within its condemnation speech which our Constitution has immunized from governmental control.

Recently, however, the United States hasn’t worried much about due process and proof of criminal action or direct involvement in terrorist activities before issuing death warrants. For instance, according to the FBI itself, Osama bin Laden is still not accused of participating in, or planning, the 9/11 attacks, yet he is still wanted “dead or alive” by our government in connection with that terrible act.

Back in October, Jonah Goldberg expressed some doubts about the efficacy of assassinating Julian Assange:

Assange is essentially hiding behind his celebrity and the fact that it wouldn’t do any good to kill him, given the nature of the Web. Even if the CIA wanted to take him out, they couldn’t without massive controversy. That’s because assassinating a hipster Australian Web guru as opposed to a Muslim terrorist is the kind of controversy no official dares invite.

That’s fine. And it’s the law. I don’t expect the U.S. government to kill Assange, but I do expect them to try to stop him.

According to Goldberg, the difference between killing Assange and Awlaki is not just that it is illegal for the U.S. government to assassinate people; rather, the difference is that one is an obnoxious white Australian while the other is a scary brown Muslim. While both damage the reputation and oppose the hegemonic domination of the United States using the power of words and the internet, the same rules don’t apply to both of them. The murder of one (the U.S. citizen, no less) is a no-brainer, while the murder of the other would be controversial. Still, in response to a FOIA request, the CIA recently refused to “confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence” of “current or previous plans to assassinate Julian Assange.”

Land of the free, home of the brave.

During the 2008 campaign, presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, stated, “Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.”

It is unlikely that, back then, Obama anticipated that in a mere two years, “those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms” would included himself, senior officials in his administration, and the bloodthirsty Beltway.

Last Wednesday, December 10, marked the 30th anniversary of the tragic assassination of John Lennon. As always, his words ring as true today as they did when he wrote them:

I’m sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted
narrow-minded hypocritics
All I want is the truth
Just give me some truth

I’ve had enough of reading things
by neurotic, psychotic
pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth
Just give me some truth

— Gimme Some Truth, 1971

Thanks to the courageous efforts of people like Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, we now all have a little more truth.

All bizarre and nonsensical conspiracy theory of course.

— response to a column by Richard Spencer in The Telegraph

It is not at all clear why you should say that. The “of course” only emphasizes the lack of analytical basis for your total dismissal.

Especially when one considers that in the end you, yourself, suggest a theme to the material.

Ultimately, they put the onus on Middle Eastern countries to explain themselves. The cables are America’s own explanations. Neither Iran nor many of its Arab friends and enemies like being held to account overmuch.

In our own lifetimes, we have learned of many dark operations more impressive than the selected release of some not-all-that-secret documents, many of them having release dates of not too many years in the future. The term “conspiracy theory” is now consistently used to disparage those who are genuinely puzzled about the official explanations of certain big events.

Yes, we have the paranoid extreme, but that extends into the mainstream too, even into politics.

In the end you must judge major news events by the standards of the late I.F. Stone. You must read different versions and explanations and make comparisons and weightings. You must judge the purport of the material itself, what it is intended to say or not say.

We live in a shadow world as never before in human history with vast intelligence establishments working day and night and a press now reduced to a small number of owners who have their own reasons for giving slants to affairs or even completely misrepresenting them.

Truth is perceived infrequently, but there are immensely well-financed establishments busy “getting out the story” and even creating it in some cases. To say otherwise is to admit to extreme naiveté or perhaps dishonesty.

When was the last time a paper like your Telegraph or even the New York Times did some serious investigative journalism for readers? Especially where the earth-shaking matters are concerned, rather than mother’s milk stuff like the abuse of parliamentary expenses. Almost never.

Where were you with Blair’s countless lies? Bush’s lies and absurdities? We lived through a set of events in which, after the greatest peace march in history, Blair managed to twist the truth and lie his way into doing something against the overwhelming sense of the British people. And the press pretty well let it happen.

We only have a few genuine investigative journalists in the world, and they include notably Seymour Hersh and Robert Fisk. But even their work must be subject to evaluation. They can have things planted on them, and they make mistakes.

The WikiLeaks material is undoubtedly authentic, but that does not at all exclude an underlying purpose in its release.

It is a well-known practice of intelligence agencies to give large bits of genuine material, none of it too compromising, in order to get either an important piece of intelligence in return or to “bury” some damaging deception like a fish hook planted in a minnow.

The CIA used to brag of having a huge house organ whose keys could be played to create the sense of a Bach fugue of seeming news. It was talking about all the publications, both compliant and duped, in which it could plant a story and have it reverberate ultimately as a convincing event.

I’m not sure whether WikiLeaks, itself, falls into the compliant or duped category, but the nature of the material, the main themes plus the many important things undoubtedly missing, say something important to those listening carefully.

I am completely underwhelmed by the content of the military WikiLeaks, both this time and previously.

Very little there that well-informed people did not already know. Yes, of course, the juicy tidbits about so-and-so said are fun, and so they are meant to be, but they are not all that informative.

I am sure there are countless lies and atrocities contained in the universe covered so far by WikiLeaks, but they are not in the material released.

The idea that no one knows where Assange is also strikes me as slightly ridiculous in this age of massive intelligence operations and the trampling of individual rights in the name of fighting terror.

If you think otherwise because of Osama bin Laden, you are rather late in learning he has been dead since the bombing of Tora Bora. The United States has kept him alive, as it were, for a focus in its insane War on Terror.

Cui bono?

The US looks like an innocent victim, just guilty of some unpleasant gossip here and there. Who wouldn’t know that? Israel gains support for an attack on Iran.

The leaks serve Israeli-Pentagon interests.

And do so in a convincing, seemingly disinterested way.

These leaks also serve America’s now cancerously-swollen intelligence apparatus in seeking more repression and secrecy within American society.

Your off-hand dismissal is unfair and unwarranted.

92% of respondents in the Pashtun-dominated south are unaware of 9/11 events or their relationship to the presence of foreign troops.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the 92% figure. After all, Afghanistan is one of the least literate societies on earth, and  a 2005 report indicated that any “press is scarce in rural areas.”  The radio is the most widely used method of communication in Afghanistan, but there are fewer radios per capita than in any other country on earth.  There are only 5.6 radios per 1000 people in the country. (Bhutan ranks immediately ahead of Afghanistan on a list of 212 nations. There there are three times as many radios — 16.5 — per 1000 people. In Haiti and Somalia there are more than 50 radios per 1000 people.) The Afghans are not just benighted in their illiteracy, but terribly lacking in access to basic communications technology.

As we will see the illiteracy problem, and general lack of education, has become a major headache for the invaders who arrogantly toppled the old regime and imposed an occupation seeking to remake Afghan society.

In 1978 literacy throughout Afghanistan was estimated at 11.4 % (18.7 % male; 2.8 female). By 1993 the overall literacy rate had risen to 29.8 % (45.2 % males; 13.5 % females), reflecting the influence of the Soviet presence and the secular government’s education policy.

Under the regime of the warlords and mujahadeen that toppled the secular government, literacy fell slightly to 28.1% (43.1% males; 12.6% females) in 2000. This placed Afghanistan at the rank of 199th lowest out of 201 countries, with only Chad and Burkino Faso scoring lower. The CIA Factbook cites the 2000 figure.  UNICEF estimates a 28% literacy rate between 2003 and 2008.

An April 2008 report by the Afghan Ministry of Education gives a slightly more optimistic picture, indicating total literacy may have risen 6% between 2000 and 2005. “With no current census, accurate literacy statistics for Afghanistan are not available. According to Afghanistan’s Millennium Development Goals Report (2005), the estimated literacy rate of those aged 15 and above was 34% in 2004 (50% for men and 18% for women). In rural areas where 74% of all Afghans live, however, an estimated 90 % of women and 63% of men cannot read, write and do a simple math computation… The rates are only somewhat better in urban areas.” But UNESCO reported in September 2010 that the literacy rate among Afghans over 15 was down to 26% (12% among women).

In other words, there has been no significant progress since the U.S. and its allies invaded and occupied Afghanistan nine years ago.

In 2006 the Ministry of Education announced a “Five Year Strategic Plan” to reach a goal of 50% literacy by 2010. (It had a target budget of $ 125 million, but only $ 15 million available at that time.)

But, as the UNESCO report noted, the government now plans to meets its goal five years later than announced in 2006 — the target year is now 2015.

There are no end to rosy reports about this or that NGO-staffed literacy project. One called Help the Afghan Children (HTAC) provides education to 23,000, and its associates collect school supplies for Afghanistan in the U.S., establishes sister-school relationships between U.S. and Afghan institutions, etc. A Japanese NGO is teaching 180 women and girls.

The U.S. military, to build good will, also educates some children. Members of the Combined Joint Task Force 101 Human Terrain Analysis Team in Bagram teach children and women who visit an Army-run hospital two days a week.

One wonders what language they’re teaching them.

Anyway it’s all a drop in the bucket. The only period in recent Afghan history when there was an appreciable, rapid increase in literacy was during the pro-Soviet  “Democratic Republic” era, when as the figures cited above show, total literacy increased by 62% (from 11.4 to 29.8%). For males it increased 59%, for females 79%.

The Soviets — however wrong they were to intervene as they did in Afghanistan — were always concerned about education. Aside from establishing schools in areas firmly under their control (in Kabul, particularly, which was relatively peaceful throughout the 1980s) they accepted tens of thousands of students into schools in the USSR. There were an estimated 15,000 Afghans studying in the Soviet Union in 1986.  (I wonder if there are that many in the U.S. in 2010; I haven’t been able to find any cumulative figures.)

One has only to look at the literacy figures in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan (99.3%), Tajikistan (99.5%), Kyrgyzstan (99%), Kazakhstan (99.5%) and Turkmenistan (98.8) and compare them with those of Afghanistan (and of Pakistan, which has an adult literacy rate estimated at between 50 and 57%, the female figure at between 36 and 45%) to realize that the basis for backwardness isn’t cultural or ethnic. There have been past eras in which the region was anything but “backward.” The Hellenistic kingdom of Bactria, with its capital at Balkh, was among the most advanced in the ancient world. Balkh was a key city on the Silk Road through the seventh century, a hub of trade connecting that leg of the route that led west all the way to Antioch, and the leg that led through Central Asia to the Chinese capital. It was a center of both Buddhist and Zoroastrian learning, hardly a backwater.

Why did Afghanistan plunge into the nations of lowest literacy rank? I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with multiple invasions over centuries (Arabs, Mongols, Turks, British, etc.) and the cultivation of a particularly anti-intellectual Islam as a defense mechanism. In any case, why has the U.S.-led occupation force and the regime it placed in power been unable to dent the illiteracy figure in an interval as long as the Soviet occupation that produced fairly dramatic results?

In the 1980s the drive to educate girls and women was ferociously resisted by the jihadis bankrolled by the CIA and U.S. ally Saudi Arabia. (The Saudi mujahadeen were of course led by then-U.S. ally Osama bin Laden.) Such people want to confine women and girls to the home, in non-threatening ignorance. The concept of coeducation is abhorrent to them, as is the prospect of a male doctor even handling the wrist of a Muslim female to measure her pulse. The U.S. was comfortable with all this anti-intellectualism and misogyny so long as its proponents were willing to cooperate to “defeat communism.” Ironically the illiteracy they positively promoted then by backing the most extreme Islamists has come back to haunt them now.

The invasion from October 2001 toppled the Taliban, one faction that had emerged from the anti-Soviet holy warriors with Pakistani support. But that has not eliminated their capacity to discourage school attendance. More than 3,500 schools were built between 2002 and 2008, according to the Ministry of Education, but in the latter year over 600 had been closed due to Taliban attacks and threats. In Helmand province, only 54 of the 223 schools (mostly for boys only) that had operated in 2002 were open, and in Kandahar, Zabul and Urozgan, up to 80% of the schools were closed. Thus over 300,000 students were being deprived of an education.  How can U.S. troops boast of their good work in building schools when no one can attend them, or students are terrified to do so?

But it’s not just the Talibs who are hostile to education. There are attacks on female students even in the capital of Kabul, from people who basically support the new regime. They too put pressure on girls reaching puberty to quit school in order to marry and serve their families, sometimes attacking them violently when they refuse.  The conflation of the Taliban and fundamentalist Islam in Afghanistan was always simplistic. The Taliban never had a monopoly on conservative Islamist thinking, and just as the occupation has not eliminated the wearing of the burqa, it has not changed the way that most Afghans think.

So on the one hand you have the invading, occupying soldiers, trained to think the “Hajjis” they’re killing somehow deserve it because they “attacked us.”  Some of these guys have posters on their barracks walls showing bin Laden and Hussein next to one another. They’ve  been encouraged all along to link al-Qaeda with Iraq. How much more reason to link it with Afghanistan where bin Laden operated training camps? Never mind that those were established with assistance from the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, that bin Laden was there before the Taliban took power, and that the Taliban leadership, to say nothing of the rank and file, may have been clueless about the 9/11 plot. Neocon strategy has always been to conflate disparate Muslim targets, exploiting ignorance and encouraging hatred and fear to obtain geo-strategic goals.

Despite the pro forma cautionary remarks the troops may hear from their commanders about respecting Islam, some conclude that Islam is indeed the problem. Haven’t some of the top brass encouraged them to do so? And hasn’t such cultural and moral illiteracy produced (in the minds of some) a lust for collective punishment, including random killings for sport? 

On the other hand you have uneducated Afghans who, while accustomed to the presence of foreign invaders (a near-constant in Afghan history), don’t quite understand the present invader’s justification for his own presence. 40% of those polled think the foreigners are occupying Afghanistan as part of a campaign to destroy Islam.

So the GI filled with a sense of revenge and self-righteousness busts into a home and terrorizes the residents, while the latter have no clear idea why he’s killing, binding, arresting, and humiliating them. They don’t know that he (thinks he) is seeking out bad guys who, if they take over the Afghan state, will sponsor terrorists who will strike the U.S. again. They might find that whole story beyond imagining. Their country, their village, a threat to this powerfully armed intruder from seven thousand miles away? It doesn’t make any sense. The natural default understanding is that he and his comrades are hostile to their religion.

Many years ago I read The Horseman, a moving novel by the French writer Joseph Kessel (first published as Le Chevalier in 1967).  It was later made into a movie directed by Dalton Trumbo and starring Omar Sharif. Its hero is Uraz, a young Uzbek from Maimana in the northwest of Afghanistan, who travels to Kabul to participate in a game of buzkashi, an ancient equestrian sport related to polo. He’s bitterly embarrassed by losing the game, breaking his leg in the process. Taken to the new Soviet-built hospital, he has a plaster cast applied to the injured limb. (The story takes place in the 1960s, before the Soviet invasion, but even then the neighboring USSR was providing the neutral country with most of its foreign aid.)

Uraz is frightened and disturbed by the gleaming white walls of the hospital, the manners of the foreign doctors, and the sense of confinement. He is puzzled about the nature of the cast (“the evil box”). To escape he leaps from the window to mount his magnificent horse waiting below, then makes the long trek back to Maimana. After he cuts  away the evil cast, his leg atrophies and eventually has to be sawed off.  But he eventually makes it back home, only to head off for another adventure. In 1971 film critic Vincent Canby of the New York Times panned the film based on the book as “fiction designed to glorify machismo of the most ignorant, savage sort, the cult of manliness that has, I suspect, its closest civilized equivalent in the totalitarian political movements of the 1930’s, which put so much stress on style and very little on content.”

I think that Canby was a little off base. (For one thing, “totalitarianism’ requires deployment of propaganda through modern mass media that doesn’t exist in Afghanistan.) Kessel was plausibly depicting the mindset of  proud, fiercely independent tribesmen little concerned with,  and largely ignorant of , the outside world. Uraz probably wouldn’t have known about things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, just as so many today are clueless about 9/11. (44% of the Afghan population is under 15 and many don’t remember much that happened in 2001.) Uraz isn’t a warlord, Islamist militant, or evil man. He’s just an unsophisticated guy reflecting his culture.

The U.S. invaded Uraz’s Afghanistan, “graveyard of empires,’ and quickly got itself into a bloody morass. The Taliban it thought was defeated proved to be remarkably resilient. It competes effectively for hearts and minds with the corrupt Karzai client-regime that has disappointed, frustrated and sometimes infuriated its own creators. U.S. public opinion has turned, perhaps decisively, against the war as the polls now show 50% opposed, 44% supportive. The war in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history! Longer than the Vietnam War that tore this country apart…

Recall that U.S. public opinion was once solidly in favor of this war. To suggest that it was anything other than the obvious, natural, legitimate response to 9/11 was once enough to invite fisticuffs in some circles. They attacked us! We have to respond! (And to respond, as Rumsfeld put it, to “things related and unrelated” — al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Iraq, Syria, Iran… To “make no distinction” as Bush put it “between terrorists and states who harbor them.”)  This just goes to show that there’s a lot of bull-headed ignorance to go around in this world, and that people in the U.S. can be as ferociously tribal and inclined to exact blood vengeance as any illiterate villager in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama threw in his lot with the pro-war crowd early on in his presidential campaign, displaying his machismo (one’s tempted to say, “of the most ignorant, savage sort”) by coupling his limp criticism of Bush’s war in Iraq with a passionate embrace of the Afghan campaign. And then, hoping to at some point disengage himself from what could be the graveyard of his presidency, he announced his intention to turn over the war to trained Afghan forces. The problem is, these Uraz-types aren’t picking up the baton very capably.  They can’t read. They’re not aware of, or concerned about, the outside world, or about fighting the west’s battles. They just want to be left alone.

One might say that the very ignorance of the people they strive to control militates against the ignorant invaders. The troops despair at the fact that the Afghans they’re obliged to work with can’t read training manuals or written instructions. According to one report, only 18 % of the 243,000 ANA and Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) “have more than a Kindergarten-level ability to read.”  “Fucking worthless,” says an unnamed U.S. soldier quoted in the Washington Post November 18. “They’re a joke.”

“Illiteracy is a problem we have to tackle if we intend to turn the ANSF into a modern military and police force,” says Mike Faughnan, head of education for the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan’s Combined Security Transition Command. “The impact of illiteracy that we see is an inability to perform the missions and duties of the army and police, limitations in the types of training we can provide — everything has to be hands-on — and limitations in the levels of training. We can’t do anything more than train at the very basic level in any of the fields that we work with.”

Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, head of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, told reporters, “Unless we take on literacy, we truly will never professionalize this force. We’re not talking about making them high school graduates. We’re talking about giving them anywhere from between a first grade-level education to about a third grade-level education. For many back in America, that’s really hard to comprehend. And I understand that.  It was for me, too.”

Thus U.S. forces on the ground are burdened with the impossible task of detaching themselves from the quagmire Bush and Obama have created by teaching Afghan recruits to read and write, transform their world outlook, master sophisticated equipment, and then kill their countrymen to produce a political system that many, if not most, find alien and puzzling.  (According to the ICOS report, 43% of respondents in Helmand and Kandahar were “unable to name the good things about democracy.”)

The boys the invaders are supposed to train — many under 12 years old when the 9/11 attacks occurred — can’t read Pashto or Dari much less English. These boys are as sympathetic to the Taliban as they are to NATO and the U.S. and will, according to Gen. Caldwell, receive a third grade education at most. And they’re supposed to take over in 2014 (or some other point) so the invaders can go home, “mission accomplished.”

That’s an unlikely scenario. They know they cannot win militarily, and so must ultimately withdraw.  Some anticipate a bloodbath when that happens. A repeat of Iraq is quite likely: a limited withdrawal leaving lots of troops within a context of ongoing civil war sparked by the U.S. invasion. Endless Afghan-on-Afghan bloodletting (Rumsfeld might call it “creative chaos”) contained just sufficiently to allow for gas pipeline construction.

Top NATO envoy Mark Sedwill (from the U.K.) acknowledges that after the eventual withdrawal, “Our expectation is that there still would be a certain level of violence, probably levels of violence that are by Western standards pretty eye-watering, around parts of the country.”

Eye-watering — by Western standards! So there are different “standards” of grief when children are killed? Are people in the U.S. and Britain spilling tears over the routine missile strikes wiping out families in Afghanistan, showing exemplary, high standards of compassion? Sedwill’s comment reminds me of Gen. Westmoreland’s famous remark at the height of the Vietnam War:  “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” Here is ignorance plus racism plus indifference to human suffering, all in the service of imperialism. The ignorance of the illiterate Afghan is by comparison benign and innocent.

Appearing on the political talk show Freedom Watch, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and the author of Operation Dark Heart, a much-hyped new book on the war in Afghanistan, spoke about his mid-October 2003 encounter with Dr. Philip Zelikow, then executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States.

During a fact-finding mission to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Zelikow’s team was briefed by Shaffer on Able Danger, a DIA data mining project that had allegedly identified Mohammed Atta as a threat to the U.S. a year before 9/11.

Parenthetically, the “Mohammed Atta” identified by Able Danger may have been an imposter operating under a stolen identity, as occurred in the assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai. In an interview with a German newspaper, reported by the Guardian, Mohammed Atta’s father claimed that his son had nothing to do with the attacks and was still alive a year after 9/11.

Whichever Mohammed Atta was referred to by Shaffer in Bagram, Zelikow reportedly “fell silent with shock at the news.”

According to Shaffer, Zelikow came to him at the end of the meeting, gave him his card, and said: “What you said today is critically important, very important. Please come see me when you return to Washington D.C.”

On his return to Washington in January 2004, Shaffer immediately contacted Zelikow’s office and was told to “stand by.” After a week passed, Shaffer called again, and this time was told by Zelikow’s staff: “We don’t need you to come in. We have all the information on Able Danger we need. Thank you anyway.”

None of the information provided by Shaffer appeared in the 9/11 Commission’s 585-page report, however.

In September 2005, more than a year after the publication of the 9/11 report, Shaffer said he met with one of the 9/11 commissioners in Philadelphia. Over lunch, he told the commissioner what he had told Zelikow in Afghanistan. The commissioner said that “he had never heard any of this,” adding that, “had he heard of it, it would have been something that was very much of interest to he [sic] and the commission.”

“So there’s a lot of things that never made it in that 9/11 report?” asked Judge Andrew Napolitano, the host of Freedom Watch.

“Things were either by negligence left out, or, and I believe, by purpose left out,” Shaffer replied.

Another guest on the show, Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, spoke of a similarly frustrating experience with the 9/11 Commission staff director.

Describing the 9/11 Commission Report as “a whitewash, and a lie from top to bottom,” Scheuer said he provided Zelikow with over 400 pages of official government documents detailing intelligence failures before 9/11.

“I never heard one word back from Zelikow,” he said.

“They all seemed very interested in what you had to say,” the former CIA officer added, referring to meetings he had with Zelikow and his staff, “but at the end of the day, it didn’t make it into the report.”

This is not the first time that questions have been raised about Zelikow’s handling of the 9/11 Commission.

In his 2009 book, The Commission, Philip Shenon, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, wrote about “how tightly Zelikow was able to control the flow of information on the commission,” and that “everything” was “run through” him.

While Zelikow’s tight control of the commission excluded disturbing evidence from national security experts like Shaffer and Scheuer, a dubious scholar like Laurie Mylroie was afforded ample opportunity to promote the most spurious justification for the Iraq war. Mylroie, whose major booster in government was Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, argued that Iraq had been involved in every major terrorist attack against the United States since the early 1990s, including 9/11. During commission hearings on al-Qaeda, Zelikow, writes Shenon, “made sure that she had a prominent place at the witness table.”

And why wouldn’t he? After all, Zelikow had an important role in, as Shenon puts it, “developing the scholarly underpinnings for the Iraq war.” It was Zelikow who had authored a thirty-one-page “preemptive war” doctrine which George W. Bush announced to the world in 2002 as “The National Security Strategy of the United States.”

“Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?” Zelikow asked an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. In a rare moment of candour, Zelikow proceeded to explain that the real reason for preemptive war against Iraq was “the threat against Israel.”

Judge Napolitano asked Lt. Col. Shaffer if the commissioner in Philadelphia had said whether anyone on the 9/11 Commission “had an agenda, or was covering up for somebody, or was protecting somebody.” The commissioner’s reply was, according to Shaffer: “Everybody on the commission was covering for someone.”

Given the fatal career implications of broaching such a taboo subject, not to mention Rupert Murdoch’s well-known devotion to the State of Israel, it’s hardly surprising that the Fox presenter didn’t probe too deeply into who Philip Zelikow might have been covering for.

A flying car will soon be available for $194,000. Its Italianate name, Terrafugia, translates to Fleeing the Earth, so our Jetsons future is still on, many hope, even as more Americans are sleeping in their cars, and many more are struggling to fuel their lugubrious lemons. The Motor City, Detroit, has been in full collapse mode for decades, to be slowly reincarnated as an urban agrarian zone. Instead of the clanking of heavy machinery, one will soon hear cockcrows among gunshots.

We will not flee this earth. On a finite planet, growth is also finite, and we’ve already reached all limits. There will be no economic recovery, because economic growth is no longer possible. The cheapest labor has been found, and demand for all resources, primarily oil, is outstripping supply. Nearly a billion people are already starving, and a billion lack clean water. The average Mozambican uses a gallon of water a day, less than a third of what you and I flush down the toilet each time. By contrast, the average American consumes 151 gallons of water daily.

We use more of everything. With five percent of the world’s population, we engorge on 24 percent of its resources. Got a problem with that? If we can pay for it, we’re entitled, aren’t we? But there’s the problem. We’re the world’s biggest debtor nation. We haven’t been paying for squat. As a starving planet looks on, we’re like the biggest pig who refuses to leave the all day, all night, all-you-can-eat buffet, with our moment of reckoning willed and deferred to our distant progeny. It’s a farce, really. As we slobber, no one dares to nudge us from the trough because, well, we’re so well-armed. We’ll kick your ass! Got a problem with that?

To maintain our position as the biggest loser, we have troops in 130 countries. With the American attention span reduced to a nano second or less, no real pretext is needed when we invade and occupy a sovereign nation. Why are we still in Afghanistan? It’s not to catch Bin Laden, that’s for sure. His name hasn’t been mentioned with any urgency for years. Though blamed for two bankrupting wars, he was invisible during our last presidential election. The Washington Post did reveal, however, that the CIA had made a video of a fake Bin Laden sitting around the fire, talking about gay sex. Though our spooks couldn’t stop terrorists from boarding four different planes on September 11, 2001, they were certainly creative, in an Animal House sort of way. Even if this video was never released, no one bothered to ask if those tapes that had circulated were real. Who cares? Have you seen Britney’s latest outfit? Likewise, whenever anyone challenges any aspect of the official version of 9/11, he’s labeled as a kook, but why should we trust Washington on anything, when it has proven, over and over again, to be incapable of telling the truths?!

Our leaders are unctuous crooks, and the country seems aimless. That’s why your average American just wants to be left alone, to resume his shopping spree when the economy does revive. Else, anticipating the worst, he stocks up on ammo, beans and tuna. What’s missing is any collective purpose or vision. With each man, woman and child hooked to his own ipod and laptop, we are alienated and alone. Thus, Gary Faulkner, armed with just a Chicom pistol, sword and knife, headed to Pakistan to capture Bin Laden. He took baby Bush’s promise to “smoke him out” at face value, not knowing that this threat was no more real than O.J.’s vow to capture Nicole’s “real killer.”

Though many still don’t know it yet, we are a poor nation. As this Mother of all Depressions becomes more undeniable, Americans will have no choice but to endure, tolerate and, yes, even enjoy and appreciate each other on a much more intimate level. Our towns and cities will become more compact, and each home will have to accommodate more bodies, from returning adult children to close, then distant relatives, to boarders. More Americans will have to share their kitchen and bathrooms with strangers. Bedrooms will be partitioned. Destitution and proximity will breed conflicts, certainly, but they will also force people to cooperate and compromise. We will become dirtier, even bloodier, but at least we will have real lives, and not virtual ones spent in front of a screen, as we stuff our faces with endless poison.

The creators of the Jetsons also brought us the Flintstones, likely a more accurate portrayal of our future, but in that cartoon, there is also the personal automobile. Spoiled by a century of cheap oil, the American mind seems incapable of imagining life without a nice set of wheels at its center. Made of stones and sticks, Fred’s appears to run on nothing. We won’t be so lucky.

As the oil age recedes in the mind’s rear view mirror, science fiction will become a genre about the past. Pondering those who needed machines to do just about everything, from brushing their teeth, to writing, to self pleasure, future readers will be amused, disgusted and only seldom envious. Imagine a world where music was a nuisance because it had become repetitive and could not be silenced! Imagine people who could barely walk, yet flew!

As expected, the stories told by the detainees recapitulated the outlines of the Shi’a plot that had already been described by the Saudis two years earlier. Now there were even more tantalizing details of direct Iranian involvement.

One of the detainees said Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Ahmad Sherifi had personally selected the Khobar barracks as a target. Another said the Saudi Hezbollah members had been not only trained but paid by the Iranians.

“We came away with solid evidence that Iran was behind it,” says a former FBI agent.

There was one problem with the evidence the FBI team collected: the Saudi secret police had already had two and half years to coach the Saudi Hezbollah detainees on what to say about the case, with the ever-present threat of more torture to provide the incentive.

But Freeh was not about to let the torture issue interfere with his mission. “For Louis, if they would let us in the room, that was the important thing,” one former high-ranking FBI official told Inter Press Service (IPS). “We would have gone over there and gotten the answers even if they had been propped up.”

When Freeh took the accounts from the Shi’a detainees in interrogations witnessed by the FBI team, however, the Justice Department didn’t buy them as valid testimony. The department refused to go ahead with an indictment as Freeh had desired, evidently based on the same objection that had been raised two years earlier: the Shi’a had been subject to torture.

But in January 2001, President George W. Bush kept Freeh on as FBI director. Freeh told the new president that Iran had masterminded the Khobar bombing, according to his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, and the Justice Department then began collaborating with Freeh on an indictment of the Saudi Hezbollah which implicated Iran in the Khobar bombing.

The indictment was announced on Jun. 21, 2001 — Freeh’s last day as FBI director.

Highly credible evidence soon showed, however, that the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police, did indeed use torture and coercion to get detainees to tell the stories demanded by the Saudi regime — even in front of foreign observers — and that they did so to protect al Qaeda from investigation by the United States.

Three car bombings in Riyadh in November 2000 that had resulted in the death of a British citizen were generally believed to have been the work of al Qaeda. But four British citizens, one Canadian and one Belgian had confessed to the bombings, and their confessions had been broadcast on Saudi television.

After being released in 2003, however, the Canadian citizen, William Sampson, made public his dramatic account of beatings administered by the Mabahith while being hung upside down, including blows that made his testicles swell to the size of oranges. Sampson said the Saudis told him from the beginning what they wanted him to confess to, repeating it over and over while the beatings continued, and refined the story over time, constantly adding new details.

Six weeks into the interrogation, after Sampson began to tell them what they wanted, they started videotaping his confession, using a wall chart to help him remember in detail the movements he was supposed to have made.

The Saudis even coached Sampson on what to say when he was visited by Canadian embassy personnel, threatening him with further torture if he told the embassy officials the truth. When the embassy personnel came to talk with him, Sampson’s two torturers were present for the entire interview, just as they were presumably present at the questioning of the Shi’a detainees observed by the FBI team.

The other foreigners told similar stories of coerced confessions under torture. Sampson and the five foreigners were released only after a May 2003 suicide bombing by al Qaeda on a Riyadh compound housing 900 expatriates forced Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef to acknowledge al Qaeda as a terrorist threat in Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, once out of office, Freeh became virtually a defense lawyer for the Saudi regime on the Khobar Towers bombing.

Testifying before a joint hearing of the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees on Oct. 9, 2002, he whitewashed the Saudi policy toward the FBI investigation. Omitting any mention of the Saudi deception over the explosives smuggling incident and refusal to allow the FBI to pursue essential investigatory tasks, Freeh suggested that the Saudis had done everything that could be expected of them.

“Fortunately, the FBI was able to forge an effective working relationship with the Saudi police and interior ministry,” he said. Any “roadblock or legal obstacle” that “would occur,” Freeh asserted, was because of the “marked difference between our legal and procedural systems.”

Freeh paid tribute to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, as “critical in achieving the FBI’s investigative objectives in the Khobar case” and suggested that any such temporary problems “were always solved” by Bandar’s “personal intervention.”

Freeh misrepresented the arrangement under which the FBI team had observed the interrogation as “making these witnesses directly available.”

In an interview for a fawning biography of Prince Bandar, Freeh even went so far as to call the Saudi beheading of four jihadists who confessed to the OPM SANG bombing after refusing to allow the FBI to question them as “swift justice” on a “Saudi domestic matter.”

The final chapter of Freeh’s connection with Bandar and the Saudis, however, was still to come. In April 2009, Freeh appeared as Bandar’s defense lawyer in a British court case in which Bandar is accused of illegally taking two billion dollars in graft on a Saudi-British arms deal.

In the context of Freeh’s straightened financial situation and his very close relationship with Prince Bandar, this sequence of developments in Freeh’s relationship with the Saudis, culminating in being put on Bandar’s payroll, should have raised eyebrows in Washington.

With a wife and six children to support, Freeh had been far more vulnerable to Saudi blandishments than most senior administration officials. And Bandar had made no secret that he was willing to use the promise of financial benefits to influence U.S. officials while they were still in office.

He once told an associate, according to a February 2002 article by Robert G. Kaiser and David Ottaway of the Washington Post, “If the reputation . . . builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office.”

Freeh declined to be interview for this series.

In light of the history of Freeh’s relations with Bandar, his conduct of the investigation of Khobar Towers deserves new scrutiny. Freeh effectively shut down a probe of a terror bombing in which bin Laden was clearly implicated when the Saudis had refused to cooperate; he refused to pursue any investigation of a bin Laden role in the bombing; and he pushed a seriously flawed Saudi account of the bombing despite the fact that it was tainted by the likelihood of torture.

The result of Freeh’s blatant pro-Saudi bias was that Osama bin Laden was allowed more years of unhindered freedom in which to plan terrorist actions against the United States. Had Freeh not become an advocate of the interests of the regime whose representative in Washington eventually put him on his payroll, U.S. policy would presumably have been focused like a laser on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda two years earlier.

And perhaps the disinterest of the George W. Bush administration’s national security team toward al Qaeda before 9/11 would have been impossible.

* (This is the final installment of a five-part series, “Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden.” The work on this series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.)

On Jul. 11, 1995, he had written an “Open Letter” to King Fahd advocating a campaign of guerilla attacks to drive U.S. military forces out of the Kingdom.

Bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization began carrying out that campaign later that same year. On Nov. 13, 1995 a car bomb destroyed the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard (OPM SANG) in Riyadh, killing five U.S. airmen and wounding 34.

The confessions of the four jihadists from the Afghan War to the bombing, which were broadcast on Saudi television, said they had been inspired by Osama bin Laden, and one of them referred to a camp in Afghanistan that was associated with bin Laden.

“It was a backhanded reference to bin Laden,” says veteran FBI agent Dan Coleman.

The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh immediately requested that the FBI be allowed to interrogate the suspects as soon as their arrests were announced in April. But the Saudis never responded to the request, and on May 31, the embassy was informed only an hour and half before that the four suspects would be beheaded.

When the bomb exploded at Khobar Towers on Jun. 25, 1996, Scott Erskine, the agent in charge of the Riyadh bombing investigation, was about to return to the United States after another frustrating meeting in which Saudi officials were not forthcoming about whom they were going to prosecute. When FBI Director Louis Freeh visited Khobar a few days after the bombing, he was told not to expect any more information on the Riyadh bombing.

Instead of insisting that the Clinton administration put more pressure on the Saudis to cooperate on the possibility of links between the two bombings, Freeh quietly decided to drop the investigation of the Riyadh bombing entirely. The case was put on “inactive” status, according to two former FBI officials, meaning that no more actions were to be taken, even though it had not been formally closed.

Bin Laden made it more difficult to ignore his role, however, by publicly claiming responsibility for both the Riyadh and Khobar bombings. In October 1996, after having issued yet another fatwa calling on Muslims to drive U.S. soldiers out of the Kingdom, bin Laden was quoted in al Quds al Arabi, the Palestinian daily published in London, as saying, “The crusader army was shattered when we bombed Khobar.”

And in an interview published in the same newspaper Nov. 29, 1996, he was asked why there had been no further operations along the lines of the Khobar operation. “The military are aware that preparations for major operations require time, in contrast with small operations,” said bin Laden.

He then linked the two bombings in Saudi Arabia explicitly as signals to the United States from his organization: “We had thought that the Riyadh and Khobar blasts were a sufficient signal to sensible U.S. decision-makers to avert a real battle between the Islamic nation and U.S. forces,” said bin Laden, “but it seems that they did not understand the signal.”

According to Coleman, one of the FBI’s top investigators on al Qaeda, bin Laden always took credit for terrorist actions he had planned but not for those he had not planned. For example, bin Laden issued no claim about the World Trade Centre bombing and told his former business agent turned FBI informer, Jamal al-Fadl, that he had nothing to do with it, Coleman says.

The Riyadh and Khobar bombings even had a common operational feature. As noted by the head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA, Michael Scheuer, in both cases, the vehicle was not parked so as to bring the entire building down. If the team executing the Khobar bombing had parked parallel to the security fence rather than backing up to it, says Scheuer, it would have destroyed the entire building. The same thing had happened in the OPM SANG bombing.

The bin Laden unit of the CIA had collected concrete intelligence on bin Laden’s role in planning the Khobar Towers bombing. In mid-January, 1996, according to the intelligence compiled by the unit, bin Laden traveled to Doha, Qatar, where plans were discussed for attacks in eastern Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden arranged for 20 tons of high explosive C-4 to be shipped from Poland to Qatar, two tons of which were to be sent to Saudi Arabia, the report said.

Bin Laden specifically referred to operations targeting U.S. interests in the triangle of cities of Dammam, Dhahran and Khobar in Eastern Province, using clandestine al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia, according to the intelligence reporting.

FBI agents working on the Khobar case simply rejected any evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in Khobar, however, because the decision had already been made that the Shi’as were responsible.

David Williams, then the FBI agent in charge of counter-terrorism for the Bureau, recalls that he had read intelligence reports suggesting bin Laden’s involvement in the bombing, but says he had done so “with a suspicious eye”.

The FBI investigators dismissed the relevance of the evidence linking bin Laden to the Riyadh bombing. As one former FBI official explained the logic of that position to Inter Press Service (IPS), the Khobar Towers bombing was completely different from the Riyadh bombing seven months earlier: it was in an area of Eastern Province where Shi’a oppositionists were predominant and where al Qaeda had no known cell.

The facts, however, told a different story. The city of Khobar itself was predominantly Sunni, not Shi’a, and the triangular area of the three cities had a large population of veterans of the Afghan War who were followers of bin Laden. As the London-based Palestinian publication reported in August 1996, the six jihadis who confessed to the bombing were all from an area called Al Thoqba near Khobar.

One of the veteran jihadis detained after the bombing, Yusuf al-Ayayri, who was then the actual head of al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, was from Dammam and knew the jihadi community in that region very well, according to Norwegian specialist on al Qaeda Thomas Hegghammer.

The FBI and CIA knew nothing about bin Laden’s movement in that part of Saudi Arabia, however, because they were completely dependent on Saudi intelligence for such information. A CIA memorandum dated Jul. 1, 1996 said the Agency had “little information” about the “location, size, composition or activities” of opposition cells in Saudi Arabia.

Interviews with FBI officials involved in the investigation make it clear that they were not interested in evidence linking bin Laden to the bombing, because they understood their task to be limited to getting whatever information they could from Saudi officials.

Williams says he didn’t question the Saudi account of the Khobar plot, because, “You start to believe the people who are your interlocutors.”

Asked about the evidence that bin Laden was behind the plot, another FBI official with substantive responsibility for the investigation told IPS, “I didn’t get involved in that aspect. That wasn’t my job.”

(*This is the fourth of a five-part series, “Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden.” The work on this series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.)