The Baggage Of American Extremism No Enemy, No Negotiations: Only The Dead Are Real By Gordon Duff Senior Editor December 16, 2009 "Veterans Today" -- When General Petraeus asked for the "surge" in Iraq, he also opened negotiations with top Sunni and Shiite militia leaders, opened not only "negotiations" but started passing out cash. This combined with the "hammer" of a powerful new military force was the temporary military solution he had been tasked with, one that was, within limits, successful. The lack of real diplomatic negotiations after that has bogged the US down in Iraq where it now looks like we may spend years. Now our new "surge" in Afghanistan won't even have a Taliban "buyoff." We had become addicted to the "black and white" version of Bushitism to the extent that we, as a nation, have given up thought entirely. We know we can't win. Do we expect an army of angels to come down from heaven, the ones Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld dreamed of, or are we going to start acting like a world leader again and identify the players, bring them to the table and do our best to really win where it counts? There are a couple of ways to go when discussing diplomacy. You can talk about the process and how it should end a conflict or look at the underlying reasons for never even considering it. Do we accept that abandoning diplomacy as a sign of "weakness" so we could move forward with the ill fated invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was part of a realignment of our culture? How do we recover from basing our actions on facts to basing them on belief and mythology? Eight years of bizarre "Christian Zionism," a military run by religious fanatics and a government of drugstore cowboys and phony evangelists was unprepared to guide a superpower toward policies of responsible world leadership. Now, President Obama is afraid to stop "driving over a cliff" simply because nobody wants to tell the American people the truth, how ****** and useless we have actually become, and how idiotic our policies have been. It is assumed that so many Americans are mentally defective, addicted to imaginary vaccine plots and secret UN invasions, that acting like a responsible and intelligent world leader would not seem "credible." NEGOTIATIONS: WHO AND HOW We have a couple of problems to begin with. Few understand what Afghanistan is. It certainly isn't a country, not by any stretch of the imagination. It is a product of haggling between Britain and Russia over a hundred years ago, and a bit more misguided fooling around in 1947. Afghanistan is aligned with India and hates Pakistan. Most Afghani's are Pashtun tribesmen, some are settled and many are nomadic, some of whom are extremely warlike, requiring no given enemy, they will attack each other out of boredom. Currently, the "Taliban," not the same Taliban as before, but a new "friendlier" Taliban, or so they tell us, controls 80% of Afghanistan entirely and most of the other 20% too. We keep trying to name leaders, heartless "evil doers" to get troops and money flowing but, in truth, nobody is in charge. This is the problem. With nobody in charge, President Karzai in Kabul runs nothing, the Taliban is a loose bunch of "unnamed others" who would be fighting each other if we weren't there, there is nobody we can easily negotiate with even if we weren't as crazy as they are, a fact in evidence to everyone but us. SURROGATE WAR BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN Much of the war in Afghanistan invovles India and Pakistan in ways American doesn't see. India is supplying the Taliban because they are fighting against Pakistan. India likes the United States but their weapons are used against the US. India doesn't care. Pakistan wants Afghanistan to have a small army because war between Afghanistan and Pakistan is very likely. It that happens, India is likely to invade Pakistan and the war will go nuclear. This is almost unavoidable and we are paying no attention to this. BIN LADEN AND THE TERRORISTS All "reality based" people know Osama bin Laden has been dead for years. The only people mentioning him are con men looking for someone to blame or trying to scare ******. Not only is bin Laden dead but Al Qaeda, if it existed at all, and proof of this is scarce, either moved to Africa or everyone in Al Qaeda quit and went home. We can all agree they went to Africa and we can run around there looking for them. All we find now is an occasional "leader" who we blow to kingdom come with our Predator drones. What we do agree on is that there are fewer members of Al Qaeda than would fill a bus. These are America's official estimates, the ones used by Gates and McChrystal. There is no evidence that there are any terrorist training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan where attacks on the US are being planned. This is a fantasy. Can you expect an intelligence estimate whose cover sheet is adorned with mysterious quotes from the Old Testament to be any more credible inside than outside? This was the norm in the Rumsfeld Pentagon. If the truth didn't match biblical prophesy as interpreted by TV evangelists, the military changed the truth. Reality based people call "changed truth" a form of lying. WHO ARE THE PLAYERS? Nobody wants to admit who the interested parties are in the conflict between Iran, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, the real problem. The US is involved for sure. Britain caused the problem, so they should be included. Brits like Richard North and Mike Smith are among the few who understand any of this. China has considerable interest in the region as does Russia. Without recognizing their economic spheres of influence, no lasting solution can be realized. Israel is the primary arms supplier to India and maybe others too. They also have economic interests but generally act thru their surrogate, the United States. WHERE DO WE START? A first step would be to push the Taliban to set up a Shura or leadership council and arrange for a cease fire. The threat of 30,000 new troops and expanded Predator attacks should make these discussions desirable. Accepting the fact that Afghanistan will solve their own problems and that no foreign power will do anything positive there militarily is paramount. Outlining regional problems, nuclear threats, decades old conflicts and regional economic needs should be on the table. War without purpose is what we have now. Our cover story, forcing a military solution on a nation that rejects, not only Karzai and his Kabul regime but all American involvement may sell in Washington and Tel Aviv but not in the real world. Educating Americans about the realities of our own mistakes and the depth of the idiocy of others we have walked into blind and, oh yes, deaf too, is a start. Veterans Today Senior Editor Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.

U.S. Silent About Taliban Guarantee Offer on al Qaeda By Gareth Porter WASHINGTON, Dec 15 (IPS) - The Barack Obama administration is refusing to acknowledge an offer by the leadership of the Taliban in early December to give "legal guarantees" that it will not allow Afghanistan to be used for attacks on other countries. The administration's silence on the offer, despite a public statement by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton expressing scepticism about any Taliban offer to separate itself from al Qaeda, effectively leaves the door open to negotiating a deal with the Taliban based on such a proposal. The Taliban, however, has chosen to interpret the Obama administration's position as one of rejection of its offer. The Taliban offer, included in a statement dated Dec. 4 and e-mailed to news organisations the following day, said the organisation has "no agenda of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to give legal guarantees if foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan". The statement did not mention al Qaeda by name or elaborate on what was meant by "legal guarantees" against such "meddling", but it was an obvious response to past U.S. insistence that the U.S. war in Afghanistan is necessary to prevent al Qaeda from having a safe haven in Afghanistan once again. It suggested that the Taliban is interested in negotiating an agreement with the United States involving a public Taliban renunciation of ties with al Qaeda, along with some undefined arrangements to enforce a ban al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan in return for a commitment to a timetable for withdrawal of foreign troops from the country. Despite repeated queries by IPS to the State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley and to the National Security Council's press office over the past week about whether either Secretary Clinton or President Obama had been informed about the Taliban offer, neither office has responded to the question. Anand Gopal of The Wall Street Journal, whose Dec. 5 story on the Taliban message was the only one to report that initiative, asked a U.S. official earlier that day about the offer to provide "legal guarantees". The official, who had not been aware of the Taliban offer, responded with what was evidently previously prepared policy guidance casting doubt on the willingness of the Taliban to give up its ties with al Qaeda. "This is the same group that refused to give up bin Laden, even though they could have saved their country from war," said the official. "They wouldn't break with terrorists then, so why would we take them seriously now?" The following day, asked by ABC News "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos about possible negotiations with "high level" Taliban leaders, Clinton said, "We don't know yet." But then she made the same argument the unnamed U.S. official had made to Gopal on Saturday. "[W]e asked Mullah Omar to give up bin Laden before he went into Afghanistan after 9/11," Clinton said, "and he wouldn't do it. I don't know why we think he would have changed by now." In the same ABC interview, Defence Secretary Robert Gates suggested that the Taliban would not be willing to negotiate on U.S. terms until after their "momentum" had been stopped. "I think that the likelihood of the leadership of the Taliban, or senior leaders, being willing to accept the conditions Secretary Clinton just talked about," Gates said, "depends in the first instance on reversing their momentum right now, and putting them in a position where they suddenly begin to realise that they're likely to lose." In a statement issued two days after the Clinton-Gates appearance on ABC, the Taliban leadership, which now calls itself "Mujahideen", posted another statement saying that what it called its "proposal" had been rejected by the United States. The statement said, in part, "Washington turns down the constructive proposal of the leadership of Mujahideen," and repeated its pledge to "ensure that the next government of the Muhajideen will not meddle in the internal affairs of other countries including the neighbours if the foreign troops pull out of Afghanistan." The fact that both the State Department and the NSC are now maintaining silence on the offer rather than repeating the Clinton-Gates expression of scepticism strongly suggests that the White House does not want to close the door publicly to negotiations with the Taliban linking troop withdrawal to renunciation of ties with al Qaeda, among other issues. Last month, an even more explicit link between U.S. troop withdrawal and a severing by the Taliban of its ties with al Qaeda was made by a U.S. diplomat in Kabul. In an article published Nov. 11, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin, who was then visiting Kabul, quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying, "If the Taliban made clear to us that they have broken with al Qaeda and that their own objectives were nonviolent and political - however abhorrent to us - we wouldn't be keeping 68,000-plus troops here." That statement reflected an obvious willingness to entertain a negotiated settlement under which U.S. troops would be withdrawn and the Taliban would break with al Qaeda. A significant faction within the Obama administration has sought to portray those who suggest that the Taliban might part ways with al Qaeda as deliberately deceiving the West. Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, who headed the administration's policy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan last spring, recently said, "A lot of smoke is being thrown up to confuse people." But even the hard-liner Riedel concedes that the Pakistani Taliban's attacks on the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) threaten the close relationship between the Afghan Taliban and ISI. The Pakistani Taliban continue to be closely allied with al Qaeda. The Taliban began indicating it openness to negotiations with the United States and NATO in September 2007. But it began to hint publicly at its willingness to separate itself from al Qaeda in return for a troop withdrawal only three months ago. Taliban leader Mullah Omar's message for Eid al-Fitr in mid-September assured "all countries" that a Taliban state "will not extend its hand to jeopardise others, as it itself does not allow others to jeopardise us... Our goal is to gain independence of the country and establish a just Islamic system there." But the insurgent leadership has also emphasised that negotiations will depend on the U.S. willingness to withdraw troops. In anticipation of Obama's announcement of a new U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan, Mullah Omar issued a 3,000-word statement Nov. 25 which said, "The people of Afghanistan will not agree to negotiations which prolongs and legitimises the invader's military presence in our beloved country." "The invading Americans want Mujahidin to surrender under the pretext of negotiation," it said. That implied that the Taliban would negotiate if the U.S. did not insist on the acceptance of a U.S. military presence in the country. The day after the Taliban proposal to Washington, Afghan President Hamid Karzai made a public plea to the United States to engage in direct negotiations with the Taliban leadership. In an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Karzai said there is an "urgent need" for negotiations with the Taliban, and made it clear that the Obama administration had opposed such talks. Karzai did not say explicitly that he wanted the United States to be at the table for such talks, but said, "Alone, we can't do it." Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Castro bro, thanks for the complement (isn't living in the past great? to be precise, way before 2006, like the Seventh century?). No one is without fault, but some, never seem to learn and are cursed to repeat. I am preparing a response to Norfsky and Xiin and inshAllah it will address faults and blunders by everyone. Patience. Nur

Quote: Al Dacwah al siyaasiyah, waa tan hadba meesha ay dadka u bataan daaba orodda, sal ma laha, waa laan geed ka soo gooday, wey engegtaa Nur

Castro bro. lol @ Paranoid! made me laugh today saaxib, did'nt know you have such a funny lines! I found happiness long time ago, and Alhamdulillah, I never looked back saaxib, except for fighting off Satan and his soldiers in these pages. An Interview with Ms. Happiness! Happiness was once asked, "Where do you reside?" She said, " In the hearts of those who are satisfied with Allah's Qadaa ( Disposition)" "And what do you live on?" she said: " Oh, I live on the strength of their faith. And how are you sustained? she said, "By their positive attitude about Allah SWT" And what makes you so steadfast and firm? She said " For a soul to to know that no harm will befall on her except that which Allah has decreed." Nur

Akhi Al Ghaali Norfsky Jazakallahu Kheiran for this response, the gap of understanding seems to be bigger than I initially imagined, based on my past experience on your write ups. However, if our sincere intention is to close this gap between us, inshaaAllah our effort will reduce Somalia's problems by two people. Therefore, I humbly request from you to be objective, and to focus on settling the misunderstanding by referring to true facts that will show us where the problem lies, its scope and how we can resolve this problem. The intellectual level on which we are now engaged can help the political decisions and hence actions on the ground, on which we disagree. InshAllah, I will address the important issues you have raised objectively, hoping that you will likewise do the same with a sincere intention to close the gap of misunderstanding, so that we can work together for our people on a constructive way, because, the parties are now involved in destruction as we speak. We need to rise above that futile level. Nur

Baarkallahu feek akhi al kareem Xiin. I really enjoyed reading your response, and it was indeed thought provoking for me as well as for many readers the way you have approached the topic, and your insinuation of one party's guilt while by omission, you have washed the other party's well documented crimes from their hands. What really interested me immensely was your selective theological reference to drivers of your assumed culpability of one party as well as the political drivers of decisions made by this particular group in the current conflict in Somalia. This is the kind of debate I was looking for brother xiin for a long time, inshAllah, I shall respond, meanwhile, don't forget to pray for all te victims of violence in Somalia, and for Xaq to surface from the rubble of deceit and baatil to be crushed. Nur

Mercenaries and Assassins: The Real Face of Obama’s “Good War” By Bill Van Auken December 13, 2009 "WSWS" -- Reports that mercenaries employed by the notorious Blackwater-Xe military contracting firm participated in CIA assassinations in Iraq and Afghanistan have further exposed the real character of so-called “good war” that is being escalated by the Obama administration. Citing former employees of the firm and US intelligence agents, the New York Times reported Friday that Blackwater gunmen, ostensibly contracted as security guards, “participated in some of the CIA’s most sensitive activities—clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees.” These “snatch and grab” operations—many of them involving killings of individuals suspected of participating in the resistance to US occupation—“occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater employees playing central roles,” the Times reports. Both the Times and the Washington Post quoted unnamed intelligence officials and ex-Blackwater operatives as asserting that the involvement of the company’s mercenaries in assassinations and abductions was not planned. Rather, they claimed, it was a matter of the division of labor between CIA operatives and private guards supposedly hired for the purpose of protecting them becoming “blurred.” According to the Times, the Blackwater guards “were supposed to only provide perimeter security during raids, leaving it up to CIA officers and Special Operations military personnel to capture or kill suspected insurgents.” The newspaper added, “But in the chaos of operations, the roles of Blackwater, CIA and military personnel sometimes merged.” The pretense that armed Blackwater contractors, most of them former US Special Operations troops themselves, would be used merely as security guards for CIA personnel is absurd on its face. Whatever justification was given for the contract, the “skill set” that Blackwater offered was precisely that of highly trained assassins. A spokesman for Blackwater-Xe responded to the press reports by insisting that there was never any contract for the firm to participate in raids with CIA or Special Forces troops “in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else.” He added: “Any allegation to the contrary by any news organization would be false.” The absence of a contract spelling out Blackwater’s role in assassination missions is hardly surprising, given that the mercenary outfit’s chief attraction for the CIA is precisely its ability to act without regard to any government oversight or regard for civil or military law. As the Post put it, citing a retired intelligence officer, “For government employees, working with contractors offered ways to circumvent red tape.” Blackwater’s role as an extra-legal extension of the Central Intelligence Agency tasked with dirty operations with which the CIA did not want its employees directly associated is more than evident. An article published in the current (January) edition of Vanity Fair, written by Adam Ciralsky, a former CIA attorney, cites intelligence sources in reporting that Eric Prince, the multi-millionaire Republican founder-owner of Blackwater, was not merely a private contractor, but a “full-blown asset” recruited by the agency precisely for such operations. The central role played by Blackwater in the CIA’s activities became increasingly clear as key agency officials left the CIA and took up positions in Blackwater’s management. These included J. Cofer Black, the former head of the agency’s Counter Terrorism Center, Enrique Prado, the center’s former chief of operations, and Rob Richer, formerly the second-in-command of the CIA’s clandestine service. In Iraq, Blackwater’s employees acted with complete impunity, killing large numbers of civilians without being held to account by either the Iraqi regime or US military commanders. The scope of this violence came to public attention in September 2007, when a convoy of Blackwater operatives stopped in Baghdad’s Nisour Square and without provocation opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing 17 Iraqis. Six of the Blackwater mercenaries have been charged by federal prosecutors with voluntary manslaughter over the killings. One of them has pled guilty and is expected to testify against the others in a trial starting in February. Meanwhile, the company is being sued in separate civil cases brought on behalf of 70 Iraqis over killings by the firm’s employees in Iraq. Two ex-employees of Blackwater have filed affidavits in these cases charging that company head Prince may have either murdered or ordered the murders of individuals cooperating with the Justice Department’s investigation of the firm. Friday’s report in the Times follows a series of revelations that have surfaced since last June, when CIA Director Leon Panetta briefed Congressional intelligence committees about a covert assassination program involving Blackwater, which he claimed to have only just discovered and terminated. Panetta asserted that the program had never been implemented. Until then, it had been kept secret from Congress, reportedly on the orders of former vice president Dick Cheney. It was subsequently revealed that employees of Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services in an attempt to shed the firm’s infamous reputation, were actively involved in an ongoing assassination program on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, carried out by means of Predator drones. The Blackwater mercenaries were assembling and loading the 500 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles used to carry out so-called “targeted killings,” which have taken the lives of hundreds of civilians. In addition, they provided security for the drone bases and according to some reports, participated in intelligence operations that determined the targets for the attacks. There have been at least 65 such aerial assassination strikes in Pakistan since August 2008, with a reported death toll of over 625 people. Some estimates put the number killed at over 1,000, many of them women and children. Most of these attacks have taken place since the Obama administration took office. In addition to the more than 30,000 additional US troops being sent into Afghanistan, Obama has authorized the CIA to dramatically escalate the drone attacks. US officials have also warned the Pakistani government that these attacks are to be extended beyond the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan into Baluchistan, and potentially against the crowded city of Quetta, where Afghan Taliban leaders have reportedly taken refuge. It is far from clear, based on the Times report, to what extent Blackwater’s role in targeted assassinations, both from the air and on the ground, is continuing. Since 2001, the firm has netted over $1.5 billion in government contracts, providing armed mercenaries for the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon. One thing is certain, assassinations of the kind involving Blackwater mercenaries are going to be carried out on a far greater scale as part of Obama’s escalation of the US war in Afghanistan. These plans were hinted at by Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. “There’s no question you’ve got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable,” Petraeus told the senators. “And we are intending to do that.” The general continued, “In fact, we actually will be increasing our counterterrorist component of the overall strategy.” He said that additional “national mission force elements” will be arriving in Afghanistan by next spring. The “elements” cited by Petraeus include Special Operations units like the Army’s classified Delta Force, as well as CIA hit squads and, in all probability, mercenary forces like those fielded by Blackwater. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, tapped by Obama to direct the Afghan war, was previously the head of the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command, which consists of such special forces troops and assassination squads. Petraeus said that McChrystal could brief members of the Senate committee on this element of the Obama surge in a closed session. It is noteworthy that the controversy in the major media is centered on whether the use of Blackwater mercenaries to hunt down and murder individuals suspected of opposing the US occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan represented an illegitimate use of private contractors in carrying out a core government function. The murders themselves are not an issue. In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order barring the CIA from directly carrying out assassinations or contracting them out to others. The decision followed a wave of public outrage over a series of revelations of CIA assassination plots around the globe that earned the agency the epithet “Murder, Inc.” In 2001, President George W. Bush overturned Ford’s ruling, issuing his own intelligence finding that such restrictions no longer applied in the “global war on terrorism.” The Democrats offered no objections, and the media has treated it entirely as a matter of course, while blacking out any serious reporting on the resulting carnage and victims. As with every other essential question, President Barack Obama has adopted Bush’s policy. “Targeted assassinations,” extraordinary rendition, the use of mercenaries, all of the sordid crimes carried out under the Bush administration continue. These brutal methods are about to be unleashed with redoubled force against the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan as Obama oversees new war crimes.

Norfsky writes: ^Saxib, you and I know full well that there is a very good chance last week's bombing was the work of AS and/or it's affiliates. That leaves a chance for the warlord government to have pulled this one? am I correct? If that turns out to be the case, what would you make out of this incident? Besides, why would the AS deny the incidence altogether knowing from their operating methods that they are not after popularity contest and care less of what the media says? also why would they risk an internal division in this incident by denying, because if it was indeed their work, regardless of what anybody says, they would have taken full credit for it since they believe that only Allah should be pleased an no one else. Finally, what makes the warlord government which is full of Ethiopian informants immune to your accusations, are they more credible than the AS? have they killed less Somalis in your opinion? is your allegation reflecting justice saxib? Allah SWT says, " Wa Idaa Qultum facdiluu" " When you say something, be impartially just" You Write: How does fighting a fellow Muslim(s) and refusing to sit down and negotiate peace make them mujaahiduun? Once more, you are bypassing the justice. Was it the AS who disrupted the brief peace in Somalia after the Islamic Courts Union chased away the thugs in the TFG government? Who led the Ethiopians to occupy Somalia? wasn't that Mr. Shareef calling for Jihad and then running away? only to come back aboard a UN luxury plane? and now part of the strange bedfellows, Islamist Warlord parliament? Are these strange bedfellow Muslims you are talking about Sovereign and free to make their own decision according to Somalia's best interest if the AS decides to sit with them?, or are they simply a Somali mask on an Ethiopian face bent on dividing Somalis further to keep them always weak, dependent and slaves of Ethiopia? Nur

Norfsky bro. Here is the logic of the Somali 911 The Israelis are the "Anti Terror Advisers" of the US. The US is the "Anti Terror Advisers" of Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the "Anti Terror Advisers" of the Somali Warlord Government. If the Iraq war was based on lies. If 911 was based on lies. If Consent was manufactured by the monopolized media to kill 1.5 Million civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, how can we believe in the "Official Story" that anti warlord government terrorist have committed this crime? Nur

Norfsky Bro. It was indeed a gruesome and a horrible crime against all of the Ummah, and it was NEITHER committed by the Al Shabaab Al Mujahiduun NOR by the Xizb al Islam resistance groups who have both sacrificed their lives for Somalia's liberation against the Ethiopian supported war criminals who have a history of mass murder, assassinations, rape, who have guided the Ethiopian mercenaries to occupy Somalia which in turn caused the death of hundreds of thousands. This crime was an inside job, The Somali version of 911 which only benefited warlords and their handlers, the rest of us, we have lost valuable people, Noteworthy, Brother Ibrahim Addow, a humble man who made Hijra to Somalia for the sake of Allah to give hope to the thousands of Somali kids who have fallen through the cracks during the uncivil war. As for the justifications, Not all of those who support the Mujaahiduun agree with this crime, and I pray Allah to guide those who justify that carnage, it beats the very cause that they believe in, the Education and health care of the people is not a party in the conflict. The fact that these Ministers have chosen to join the warlord government if their intention was to help their people the best way they know how, and to take the risk that comes with the job is debatable, but only a person who lacks wisdom can support such senseless action. Nur

Norfsky Bro. You write: ^ Looking forward to hearing the justification for this one. Sounds like you are dismayed by other justifications of past killings in Somalia. What is not clear in your question is WHO has justified WHAT in the past for you to pose this follow up question in order to allow readers to contribute their couple of cents. Nur

Jazakallahy kheriran BOB, a very inspring story. Rayyan bro, "Wa ashraqatil ardu bi nuuri Rabbihaa" (This will take place in the day of Judgment, but here in this present lifetime, its is a silent speech of the planet every morning, I hardly miss it, after fajr prayer I usually wait for this quiet message, and its uplifting, literally). Nur

A great Topic Purple sis. Least discussed but most needed for Muslims worldwide specially in these wireless days. Here was one of my attempts few years back (2002), but most nomads shy away and i dropped the topic. Here is the piece. Asalamu Calaykum wa raxmatullah wa barakaatuh The Following is the light side of my Dawa Work, I published it on Somalinet a while back, it is targeted to appeal to a segment of readers of Nur posts, so be careful when you read. DISCLAIMER The information in the following Post and ideas delivered with it is intended only for the sole purpose of Islamic Edutainment ( combination of entertainment and education), Ideas presented in this post should be discussed cautiously at home with your grandmother as it may contain hilarious material as well as useful knowledge. Any injury, physical, emotional or being possessed by Jinn, resulting from reading this post is the sole responsibility of the reader. Nur, Nurtel, Nutty Professors, Cag Biciid, or any personality appearing in Nur posts can not be sued for more than 500 Somali schillings ( Kaaraan , Puntland and Kismayo currency) which will settle all damages that will include, injuries suffered when laughing out loud. Resending this Post to your friends may pose a health threat if they can crack up easily. If you have read this post by mistake, please contact Moderators for emotional consolation and comfort, and inquire about the character of the writer and his mental condition at the time of writing and immediately drink a cup of Caano Geel to gain back your sanity. If you think that you are not the intended audience of this post, you are given the right to copy, distribute, disclose or to take any action, no mater how funny, or sick including but not confined to body language, throwing up or fainting.. Statements and opinions expressed in this post are those of the the fictional Cag Biciid personality alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of Somaliaonline nor of Nur, Nurtel Communications or its subsidiaries. Breaking News! Love bugs identified at NURTERL Labs As SARS bug spreads in Asia and now in Canada and Europe, NURTEL Scientists are struggling with yet another potentially dangerous bug. The scientists at Nurtel Social Engineering Labs at the Naaso Hablood Research Complex, Hargeisa, have identified two love bug strains that go around stealthy attacking young people who have no idea what this bug can do to them, a bug that is so subtle, it can attack it's non suspecting victims in a split of second, and as a result, it has the potential to change their lives for ever as it may tie victims together forever as spouses. Nurtell scientists are warning its audience that this bug is mostly transmitted in spring time, and as most of you are aware, Spring time is a season of flowers and roses, so beautiful and breathtaking that nature begins to talk to your love bug receptors to receive love signals, just like it talks to the honey bee to collect flower nectar to make honey. The saying goes that you are no bunny, till some bunny loves you. The famous Contemporary Egyptian Poet Sings: " Ataaka arrabiicu talqu yakhtaalu daaxikan, minal xusni xataa kaada an yatakallamaa" Upon you is the open laughing season of spring, it is beauty just stops short of speaking" In that sense, Allah's nature speaks to your imbedded Fitra to respond, causing your heart to miss beats, and for some, ( Qalbi Jileyc) people, the love bug sufferers' stomach lining can be so stressed that they lose appetite of food altogether ( Except for Basra, nothing can come between her and her honey dipped triple layered ice cream) So, in this season, something within you is talking to you, just like it talks to all other creatures on earth after the season of snow and death. A true message that says: "he who manifested the regeneration of life after a season of gloom and winter, will resurrect mankind to a new reality after death". Nurtel scientists always working for the well-being of Somalinet audience are busy identifying the concerns of the Nur posts readers from Tasmania, to Tennessee, and as a result of their painstaking research, the ( Nutty Professors @ Nurtel), Yicib Perfessers have Identified two strains of love bugs. 1. The I-Contact love bug 2. E- Contact love bug First, the I- Contact ( Eye Contact) love bug, which is as common as the common cold can be retracted mostly in open parks, shopping malls, schools, family functions, Reer Qansax get-together parties, but the safest love bug of this strain is the love bug caught right after Friday Prayers at the Masjid's parking lots and the Shish-kebab and sandwich stands attended by attractive Sisters and handsome brothers. Some Nur posts readers may have even caught the bug at the unlikeliest of places, like Tacsiyah Funeral functions, which is a deadly mistake that our scientists do not recommend. Most victims of this strain have reported that they got infected after exchanging eye contact with a person of the opposite sex and immediately felt strange ticklish feeling like heart murmur, shortness of breath, and sudden interest to be around the love bug carrying person. The problem of this type of love bug is that the bug temporarily takes control of the victims reasoning faculties, intelligence and in serious cases, the victims faith. Once the Love bug immobilizes the intelligence of the victim, the victim becomes a slave for the love bug, which can lead to complications beyond this posts objectives. The second Love Bug Strain, the E- Contact, the Email version is transmitted through the Internet, specially Somalinet forums. This bug is quite the opposite of the Eye Contact Bug, for starters, the victim usually reads posts of Somalinet and suddenly finds a writer who makes a lot of sense and who shares with the victim a lot in their views of life and faith. E-Contact Love Bug victims are not attracted by looks alone, they are after substance, they begin getting hooked to the writer's posts. This class of lovelorn victims usually have a high IQ, are doing well in their career or school, have faith and are selective of who they want to spend their life with. Nurtel Scientists, feel that the E-Contact Love bug to be like the good cholesterol. To be successful, viewers of Nur posts are advised to manage their exposure of the two strains of love bugs, Nurtel scientists although preferring the E-Contact love bug for the first time ( Love at first log on), they strongly recommend a lively exchange of eye- to- eye sessions to cement stronger relationships that last. In this thread, our Love Bug clinic will attempt to treat both types of victims, our scientists will do their best to take your case seriously, even if it takes to inviting you to the Love Bug Treatment facility, just outside Hargeisa township, where you will be offered strong Solution of Camel Milk and Honey before Mapping your heart with our High-tech ( DRI) Dhiker Resonating Imaging Machine. After which you will discover the Ultimate form of Love, and the highest form of pleasure on earth, The Love Of Allah SWT. You will stop singing " Illinta indhaheyga aan baranee,..... adey awadaa ilmeyaanee" and will begin a love journey to a different dimension, toward Allah SWT, a love experience you have to feel deep inside to soar above it all. Please share with us your Love Bug bouts of late. No more crying' after today! 2003 eNuri(Formerly NURTEL)Communications Social Services Research Institute

Nomad This old eNuri Softwaano topic is what pulled many Nomads from their seats to participate, I apologize for neglecting these direly needed beneficial series of soul healing topics, due to the fast paced political events affecting our faith in monumental ways, inshAllah I shall try to revive the series and share with you some of my spiritual experiences, so you can also share yours. If a Nomad can volunteer to cover the political aspect of the current events in Somalia with objectivity, Justice and wisdom, I want to get my old job back, eNuri Softwaano Series. Nur

US Mercenaries Murder "Militants" For CIA Private Guards ‘Took Part in Raids on al-Qaeda Militants’ Giles Whittell and Tim Reid in Washington December 11, 2009 "The Times" -- Mercenaries have been taking part in American raids on al-Qaeda militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to newspaper reports that will intensify pressure on Congress to curtail the use of private security guards in war zones. The disclosure that former Navy Seals and other US special forces soldiers employed by Blackwater Worldwide took part in CIA raids may also prompt fresh scrutiny of General Stanley McChrystal. The senior Nato commander in Afghanistan was head of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command between 2003 and 2008, when he directed covert attacks on al-Qaeda’s leadership in Iraq. According to former Blackwater staff, sent to protect CIA officers in the field, they helped to kill militants targeted in “snatch and grab” raids. It was “highly unlikely” that General McChrystal did not know about the company’s involvement, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, told The Times yesterday. Blackwater has become a byword for excessive force wielded beyond the control of US military hierarchies since the Iraqi Government accused five of its staff of killing seventeen unarmed civilians in Nisoor Square, Baghdad, two years ago. Its lucrative contract with the State Department was cancelled after the claims. The company, which has since been renamed Xe Services by its controversial founder, Erik Prince, a billionaire former Navy Seal, denies that its staff have ever been under contract to take part in raids with special forces or the CIA, but a former Blackwater manager told The New York Times that the company’s participation was “widely known” with “hundreds of guys involved”. Former company staff quoted yesterday said that guards assigned to protect CIA officers on raids were often armed with sawn-off M4 automatic weapons with silencers — a potent combination banned under US regulations.

An eNuri Satire ( 2003 Editions ) Breaking News from: East Leigh, Nairobi. SADDAM CAPTURED. An urgent Letter from Somali Anarchists. Dear President Bush. Congratulations for capturing Santa Claus who was hiding in Iraq all these months disguising himself as Saddamn Hussein. In this ( Fadhi Ku Dirir) Armchair Generals coffee shop in Nairobi, most of the anarchists watching the CNN and NBCMSN networks with me were stunned, of how skillfully you caught SANTA in Baghdad while he actually lived in the North Pole where a sizable Somali Community lives herding Reindeer for Santa near Helsinki, Finland. For the first time in history, Americans will enjoy a dark skinned Santa SADDAM being pulled in a camels chariot, giving away free oil to the American people. World anarchy wouldn't have been complete without this stunt of yours that you've pulled just before Christmas, a Christmas with Santa SADDAM bringing all the goodies to conservative American homes on Christmas eve would be a picture perfect holiday, and according to the (AIDDEED) Agency for the International Dissemination of Deception of Euphoric Euthanasia Democracy, the person captured was indeed a Sad Damn guy who was caught seven months ago and kept in the north pole with Santa Clause as a room mate, so that your presidential prayers can be accepted at will, HO HO HO, ( pronounced as OIL, OIL, OIL,) SADDAM coming out of your Texas ranch chimney delivering happiness to the Bush Clan, giving a new meaning to the famous story of Bushladin and the forty Baghdad thieves. The American Professional Liars Association has even confirmed that, Bushladen, I meant Bin Laden, is also at the North Pole, waiting to be released next thanksgiving just in time for the November elections in a similar ceremony in which he is expected to renounce terrorism as a means of opposing freedom by eating in public a McDonald's Big Mac Burger and washing it down with the real thing, Coca Cola, after which he will be appointed to be the new CEO of Halliburton in Iraq for a jubilant Iraqi crowd. Halliburton, Coca Cola and Big Mac being cornerstones of American values, which makes the Somali Anarchists worry and shiver for their safety as America is running out of artificial enemies. But as we have previously offered, we Somali anarchists are very supportive of world chaos, so the more chaos that you can plan and execute, the longer we can operate in east Africa, what are friends for if they are not covering for each other? Dear President Bush, We also want you to know that the Somali Anarchists prayed with you for Santa to come to your home in your Texas ranch, to deliver Saddamn , " Mamma, all I want is Saddam for Chrismas, please..." was your Christmas wish to Mrs. Barbara, and " I just want to pull SADDAMS mustaches and not get hurt" being your last wish. Now you can do it from the comfort of your living room, thanks to the remote controlled mustache puller and shaver developed by NASA to civilize world leaders who have too much facial hair and little understanding of Democracy. But your mom , who agreed to pray for your wish if you behaved like a good Baptist kid for one year, is happy that you deserve this present since you have been a good christian boy this past year by turning your other cheek when the Japanese threatened trade war spear headed by the sushi embargo, if you did not allow their cheap steel to be sold in America thereby threatening the already fragile American Government subsidized steel industry. Waddayaknow, you get two blessings for the price of one prayer, Santa dressed as Saddaamn. Anyway, we the Somali Anarchists would like to pay for his costs from the Khat revenues if you would allow him to set up the International University of Anarchy in Somalia with the honorary chairmanship of Coffe Anan, the Deanship of Condi Rice and the Presidency of Powell, three black people who are helping anarchy in our world and proving the notion the Republicans always held that if you let black people rule the world, with the help of a Texan Cowboy, that you would have an ideal anarchist world, our common goal which is progressing just fine. Wishing you a happy Christmas, save some Turkey for Saddamn. Cag Biciid For Unregulated World Without a Government. 2003 Nurtel Network News No Noose is a good news

Naxar bro. Watch out for the BRIC countries who will combine their human capital wealth and their natural resources to not only wear the shoes of this ailing Super Power, but possibly make life on earth a bit more responsible, cleaner and cheaper. Brazil is rich in natural resources, India and China are rich in cheap skilled human resources, Russia is rich in both human and natural resources. The gifted students in China alone are more than all of American students, yet, when they graduate, they are willing to work for 5 dollars an hour thereby producing better products at cheaper prices. When you combine the production capacities of China ( hardware) and India ( Software) in addition to untapped natural resources of Brazil and Russia (including the Advanced Theoretical work in Russia that will find in China the feasible production environment ), and compare that side of the equation to the American side and it's 14 trillion debt owed to communist China and other sovereign funds and the decaying American industrial base and it's outsourcing of all the basic industries to China and India, its no brainer to see where the trend is heading. Nur

Top Secret The Speech Barack Obama Won’t Deliver As dictated to Daniel Simpson December 08, 2009 "ICH" -- Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Dear Friends around the world, My fellow Americans. I stand here today humbled, more than ever, by the task before us, grateful for the honour you’ve bestowed, and mindful of the sacrifices we must make to do it justice. Twenty Americans before me have lent their names to this most eminent of prizes, among them three presidents, two sitting. Though challenged by the upheavals of fractious eras, their skill and vision hewed faithfully to the spirit of our forebears, who travelled across an ocean to seek sanctuary, and declared all who made their home there to have been created equal. Where possible, they worked to stem those tides in humankind that would drown us in the storms of violent conflict. And so we recall these efforts, and their fruits, praising Theodore Roosevelt for brokering peace, not chiding him for wielding his trademark stick to subjugate Cuba and the Philippines. Others were inspired by a higher calling, rising above themselves to speak truths we shirk from hearing. Of these trans-formative figures, none was more righteous, more perspicacious, than Dr Martin Luther King, who accepted this award 45 years ago. I was surprised to be asked to follow him, and shared with you my doubts that I deserved to be doing so. But I’ve come here on the understanding that this ceremony is a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century, and for America to lead. Putting America first should not require us to put the lives of other peoples second. When our nation became mired in Vietnam, sacrificing millions to its quest to contain Communism, Dr King called us “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. A year to the day after speaking those words, he was murdered. As I was raised in his shadow, whirlpools of destructive logic sucked Americans ever deeper into worldwide battles. From Vietnam, the fog of war spread. We laid waste to Cambodia from the skies, before Pol Pot’s brutal forces tilled its killing fields. And for the sake of defeating the Soviet Union, we armed Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, spawning a terrorist menace that defined the first decade of this century. I do not seek to defend these actions here, or those of an earlier September 11th, when a coup hatched in Washington robbed Chile of its elected president, because he was a Marxist. Thousands “disappeared” under the market-friendly despot we supported, like so many other enemies of freedom, before and since, from the Congo to Cairo, Central Asia to Latin America, always in the name of a greater good. Ours. Whatever thwarts those who might challenge us, we can live with. We armed Saddam Hussein to fight the Islamic Republic of Iran, ignoring his use of poison gas while it suited us. But once he’d threatened our interests by invading Kuwait, this became grounds for deposing him, though the weapons we claimed to fear no longer existed. As the last head of the Federal Reserve said, “it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Whether we control it, or prevent others from doing so, this is why we care about the Middle East. Since the British Empire fell, we’ve guarded what our State Department called “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” As every Iranian schoolchild knows, but Americans rarely recall, we once overthrew their government, to ensure it kept pumping oil to our satisfaction. So hated was the regime we installed in Tehran, and so vicious its secret police, that we helped to foment an Islamic Revolution. And so we conjured enemies anew. Rather than remain trapped in the past, I want to move forward. We are not alone to blame for the world’s problems; and for all that’s wrong with America, much is right. But our delusions make us a menace to ourselves, and even the civilised order we say we’re defending. Americans aren’t alone in being hypocrites. Nor are we by any measure the worst. Our reference points for wickedness are the tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler. However, when senior Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, it was the American chief prosecutor who said: “While this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn, aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.” For much of this past American century, as in others bestridden by Empires that came before ours, the morals guiding relations between states have been those of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. To quote the murderer Raskolnikov: “he who can spit on what is greatest will be their lawgiver, and he who does the most will be rightest of all.” It’s ugly, so we prefer to cover it up and tell ourselves stories, most often about our benevolence, or “the shining city upon a hill” we call our homeland. When the Spanish-American war brought us to primacy, Mark Twain surveyed our impact on the Pacific. “We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors,” he observed. “And so, by these Providences of God – and the phrase is the government’s, not mine – we are a World Power.” But without our cherished myths, or the lies that led us into Iraq and Vietnam, there’d be fewer conflicts. No one welcomes war, and Americans aren’t by nature belligerent people. Even our “Greatest Generation”, among them my grandfather, was reluctant to join World War II until Pearl Harbour. And their fight in the name of a larger freedom has served us since as a rallying call. There’s always an axis of evil that needs vanquishing. And as Hermann Goering chillingly warned: “the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.” It’s easy, he explained: “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” I don’t need to remind you that we were attacked, on American soil, eight years ago. At that moment we faced a fateful choice: whether to seek justice, or debase it. The armchair warriors won. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died, in the name of avenging three thousand of our own. We don’t even count how many we’ve killed. I’ve said before I don’t oppose all wars. I supported the pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance. But can we do that by killing more innocents? Where would we need to send troops? Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Somalia? And how many corpses might convince a hostile horde to change its thinking? Before we rained destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans firebombed dozens of Japanese cities. Up to half a million were slain, and millions more lost their homes before surrender was so much as discussed. As I said at the start of the decade, let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and shutting down the financial networks that support terrorism. It’s work for policemen, not soldiers; our armed forces should defend us, not attack. War by the one percent doctrine of pre-emption is aggression. To repeat, I’m not here to look backwards. We’re here to remember the urgency of now. This is no time to indulge in the narcissism of self-flagellation, or to take the tranquilising drug of mass denial. A nation that believes its hype is heading for disaster. Now is the time to rise from the valley of hubris, to walk the sunlit path of accepting limits. Now is the time to obey the same rules we impose. Now is the time to admit that our actions have consequences, that we’ve been al Qaeda’s top recruiter. Our pursuit of “full spectrum dominance”, our ambition “to hold unquestioned power”, has not made the world any safer. We started a nuclear arms race, and doused it in gasoline. We helped Pakistan get the bomb, and looked away while it ran a weapons hypermarket. Now we’re helping India break the rules, just as Israel has for decades while it stockpiled warheads. Exactly how many isn’t clear, because Israel denies access to foreign inspectors. Iran is the only oil-rich state in the Middle East that’s beyond our influence. Together with Israel, we keep threatening to attack it. But while we talk up “the Iranian threat”, our intelligence agencies say Iran halted its weapons programme years ago, and wants nothing more than the option to reactivate it. The idea it could wipe Israel off the map is absurd. The Israeli nuclear arsenal guarantees that. Israel’s prime minister calls Iran an “apocalyptic cult” that “glorifies blood and death, including its own”. But for years the two countries were allies, and Israel accepted the rhetoric was mostly for show. Its priorities only changed when Iran became the region’s number two power. And that only happened when we invaded Iraq, and installed a pro-Iranian government. So what do we do now to solve these problems? Bombing Iran would not bring us closer to a world without nuclear weapons. It also wouldn’t make Israel more secure. I rule it out categorically, and withdraw all plans for a nuclear first strike on Iranian bunkers. Destructive power can only be tempered by restraint. There’s no longer a technological difference between the process that generates fuel and the process for building bombs. Once you can enrich uranium for reactors, it just takes time and investment to enrich it for missiles. If we’re serious about disarmament, we also need to restrict enrichment by everyone, outsourcing it to an international agency. This alone makes nuclear power no answer to climate change. It’s no less misguided to pretend we can clean up coal. Plans to bury carbon dioxide are unproven, and they won’t work any time soon. The global demand for energy will be hard to meet without making radical changes. If we carry on insisting that “the American way of life is not negotiable“, we can hardly expect others to think differently. But we all have to, immediately, or there won’t be a future to get rich in. If everyone consumed like Americans, we’d need another half dozen planets. And if the one we live on heats up as scientists forecast, much of it will be uninhabitable this century. Ice caps and glaciers will melt, seas will rise and crops will fail. Billions of people will struggle to find food and water, and the world will be full of refugees. We’re almost past the point of no return. Long-term targets are irrelevant. The gases we’ve emitted already will heat up the atmosphere for a century. Unless we stop adding to them quickly, we’re committing ourselves to a runaway warming process, unlike any this Earth has seen for millions of years. Faced with that prospect, and the deadlocked talks on a climate treaty, there’s no alternative left but to act unilaterally. I’ve signed up to a British initiative called 10:10, and promised to reduce my personal emissions by ten percent in 2010. I’m also committing to bolder executive action. I pledge the United States will cut output of carbon dioxide, and other heat-trapping gases, by a tenth next year from current levels. The year after, we’ll cut another tenth, and again, and again, for ten straight years, until we’re free of fossil fuels by 2020. To achieve this, we need to transform our economy, on a scale unseen since the start of World War II. Converting our factories to rearmament was what finally dragged us out of the Great Depression. To support our transition to a less destructive paradigm, America will turn itself over to sustainable energy. Trillions of dollars will be spent on a new Manhattan Project; only this one won’t build an atom bomb. Instead it will share clean technology through the United Nations. There can be no solution to climate change that doesn’t include such partners as India and China. Even if they burn coal, we should stop, and help them cut their carbon output however we can. Domestically, we won’t just scrap subsidies for fossil fuels. We plan to nationalise and liquidate our oil companies, and switch the nation’s cars to electric power. They’ll be charged from a network of wind and solar farms, hooked up to a direct-current smart grid. And we will pay for this by ceasing to arm the world. America spends almost as much on weapons as every other nation combined. The Pentagon gets more money today than at any time since World War II. And our exports dwarf those of our rivals, creating the opponents of tomorrow. As President Eisenhower warned: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.” It is time to start changing priorities. Next year, we will cut military spending in half, and shrink it as we scale back our presence. Over the coming decade, this will free up trillions of dollars. So far we’ve been tentative, scrapping a few costly weapons while increasing the total we spend. But an overhaul of energy policy will enable us to shut down bases overseas. No longer will we need hundreds of foreign outposts to protect resources, or the shipping lanes and pipelines that ferry them. We can leave that work to regional powers, and resume our rightful place in our own backyard. Every last soldier will leave Iraq next year, and our bases there will be bulldozed. We will also withdraw at once from Afghanistan. A generation ago, Mikhail Gorbachev said he wanted to do the same, but he first raised troop levels above 100,000. As a result, 1985 was the deadliest year of the Soviet occupation. We will not repeat the same mistake. I’m reversing last week’s announcement of escalation, and our draw down will begin from tomorrow. We can’t just arm warlords and pay off the Taliban. All the money and blood we spill achieves nothing. We can only destabilise Pakistan, and the government there won’t help us do that. The only constructive way forward is to face our impotence. We cannot provide security without peace, and we cannot impose that by will, or force of arms. We cannot build abstractions like good governance. We can only pay reparations and send aid. Afghans have to shape their own future. We cannot defend against terrorism by bombing civilians. And even the most surgical air strikes can’t stop terrorists plotting in Europe, or training in Florida. We cannot privatise war by funnelling taxpayer dollars to mercenary contractors. Our suicide pact with militarism has to end before it bankrupts us, strategically, financially and morally. We cannot keep stalking the world creating new enemies. No, we cannot. Half a century ago, Eisenhower warned us what was happening. To win World War II, he said, we created “a permanent arms industry of vast proportions”, and “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals.” This is a challenge we’ve ducked until today. And make no mistake: it will not be easy. The military-industrial complex has no fixed address. Arms companies spread production nationwide, so Congressmen and women defend their business, for fear lost jobs will cost them votes. Other lobbies complicate things further, like those pressing Israel’s case in Washington. To underline our resolve to curb the arms trade, all military assistance to Israel will be scrapped, and no sales allowed until it retreats within its 1967 borders, and dismantles illegal settlements on Palestinian land. Capitalism has been at war with democracy, and winning. We’ve blown trillions in the banking casino, privatising its gains and socialising the cost. Not for nothing is Goldman Sachs called “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” For a more sustainable world, we have to dismantle the structures that shape it. I can’t achieve that alone. We all have obligations to prevent our national priorities being perverted, as Martin Luther King understood. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social uplift,” he said, “is approaching spiritual death.” The day after Dr King was killed, Robert F. Kennedy spoke of “another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions, indifference and inaction and slow decay.” In words as relevant now as then, Kennedy said we “tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilisation alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they require.” Weeks later, he was assassinated too, campaigning for the presidency, and an early retreat from Vietnam. Instead, the war dragged on, and Cambodia was mercilessly bombed. For that, and other crimes, a previous winner of this prize should face prosecution. But if Henry Kissinger stands trial some day, he shouldn’t be alone in the dock. Cases can be made against presidents too, and I plead no special immunity ahead of time. I should be held to account like anyone else. The press should never become the president’s men, and the public need to organise against him, to force his hand like Martin Luther King, to collectively make change we can believe in. Together we’ll enact these commitments. In themselves, they won’t end violence, they won’t end lawlessness and they won’t end disorder either. But they’d warrant the faith you’ve placed in my work, and they’d leave our children a legacy of justice. And for that small measure alone, we can be thankful. God bless us all. Thank you. Daniel Simpson has worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and The New York Times. He lives in London.

The making of Somalia's 911 tragedy. The well planned and executed assassination of three Public figures who were the most reasonable and valuable for the people in the TFG government along with innocent Medical Graduate Students, signaled a new bloody chapter in the long standoff between the secret handlers of the shaky coalition of the Ethiopian Clients and "Islamists" in the TFG. The Somali 911 tragedy is going to be short lived, as most Somalis who were too quick to believe the western media narrative and its Somali hosting website mouthpieces, will realize the inconsistencies in the official story and the unexplained power struggle brewing within the embattled TFG government. The assassination was a double wammy; getting rid of valuable persons in the Warlord government, and framing of the Somali resistance of an unthinkable crime to erode what is left of its credibility orchestrated by Media blitz. Keep up with the news, Addow is not dead! وَلَا تَحْسَبَنَّ الَّذِينَ قُتِلُوا فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ أَمْوَاتًا بَلْ أَحْيَاءٌ عِنْدَ رَبِّهِمْ يُرْزَقُونَ "Walaa taxsabanna alladiina qutiluu fii sabiili Allahi amwaataa, bal axyaa-un cinda Rabbihim yurzaquun" Nur

Going South Militaristic, corrupt America increasingly resembles a Third World state. By Ximena Ortiz December 08, 2009 "American Conservative" -- Despite a change of presidents, America remains mired in economic, institutional, and cultural purgatory, with Obama’s exalted oratory circling the stratosphere like a taunt. Angry nationalism shouts down prudence. Disproportionate military spending threatens economic wellbeing. Industry has its hand so deep in the government’s purse that private enterprise is becoming public property. The currency falters, the infrastructure crumbles. And a supine media, once a watchdog of the powerful, happily licks the strongman’s hand. If the picture looks familiar, that’s because we’ve seen it many times before, from Argentina to Chile to Russia. The U.S. is third worlding. That statement may smack of hyperbole. It may also understate the phenomenon, for many of the countries that the United States increasingly resembles are not only Third World—they are authoritarian, even rogue. This is not to say the U.S. will be indistinguishable from a Third World country any time soon. We’re clearly nowhere near Sudanese levels of violence or Bangladeshi depths of poverty. But in terms of institutional structure, financial stability, and even national spirit, the U.S. looks little like the country it was a generation ago and more like nations it has long condemned. The turning point came on 9/11. Terrorism is now a weary concern: other issues dominate the headlines—stimulus, healthcare, climate change. Yet the attacks were a pretext for a host of foreign and domestic policies that promised to secure America against its hell-bent enemies but have instead dragged the country down, eroding the qualities that distinguished it from the rest of the world. Honor Killing As George W. Bush was fond of doing, Barack Obama looks penetratingly into the camera, addressing all the South Asian terrorists watching CNN from their burrows. He vows to defeat them—using other people’s lives. With demagogic mastery, he, too, has tapped America’s proud warrior culture, a latent force before the age of terror. This emphasis on offended honor—particularly male honor—is an integral part of life in the Third World. Where the rule of law is weak, men learn to fend for their own charges, and humiliation must be quickly avenged to uphold street cred. This cultural strain exists even among educated elites, who dress and sound much like their American counterparts, but harbor ingrained machismo. A repressive leader quickly realizes that the best way to unite his countrymen is to rally them against an outside threat—actual or invented. When Evo Morales became president of Bolivia, he stoked hostility with Chile, blocking the construction of a pipeline to export Bolivian natural gas, at significant cost to his own nation, because it would pass through Chile. In North Korea, a tradition of defiance and nationalistic self-reliance, known as juche, is a cultural imperative. If the regime abandoned its bellicose posturing, its power mystique would shatter. Across the Muslim world, the pursuit of honor is a crucial driver in jihadi recruitment. As Akbar Ahmed puts it in Islam Under Siege, a sense of grievance motivates extremism, but even “those societies that economists call ‘developed’ fall back to notions of honor and revenge in times of crisis.” Sept. 11 proved his point. The fact that 19 misfits with boxcutters scarcely constituted an invading army was of little consequence—that anyone could touch us so shocked the American system that we lashed out with disproportionate fury. When wounded ego drives policy, force becomes the default. Far from being a passing spasm, this honor impulse has become a way of life. It rules our international conduct and makes our wars nearly impossible to quit. Andrew Bacevich, a former U.S. Army colonel and author of The New American Militarism, writes, “There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. stoops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared.” As the martial spirit rises, soldiers are necessarily heroes, even though they are treated as expendable. Patriotism is defined in militaristic terms. And it’s not unusual for an American president to wear a jacket with “Commander in Chief” emblazoned across the chest—an only slightly subtler version of Chavez and Castro couture. From the Shadows In countries with a history of authoritarianism, it is not uncommon for the practiced agitators who presided over a crisis to hold sway long after they appear to exit power. In Russia, former president Vladimir Putin rules extra-officially. In Chile, for years after the transition to democracy, the military was guaranteed seats in the legislature. In Argentina after the Dirty War, the army staged rebellions to compel the executive to limit the scope of prosecutions. Even after a crisis subsides, much of the population remains in panic mode and supports the bare-knuckled approach of the previous government. America is similarly afflicted. Dick Cheney wields such clout that even after his term ended he gave the order and previously classified information on “enhanced interrogation” was made public. His contention that the disclosure proves the value of those interrogations remains inconclusive, but he demonstrated his reach. Barack Obama, for all his pledges of transparency, has upheld government secrecy to shield the previous administration and the former vice president in particular. He blocked the release of the FBI’s interview of Cheney in the Valerie Plame case, though a federal judge recently rejected arguments for keeping the file sealed. The Obama administration has promoted, through its actions and its rhetoric, the fiction that post-9/11 abuses were committed by “bad apple” agents rather than condoned by high-ranking officials. The Obama and Bush administrations have both sought to block the release of detainee abuse information. Obama has also declined to release new pictures of prisoner mistreatment, breaking his earlier pledge. His Justice Department’s investigation of CIA excesses will be circumscribed to lower-ranking, “rogue” agents. And Cheney has already de facto immunized those who transgressed the Bush administration’s abusive guidelines. In August, Chris Wallace asked him, “So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re OK with it?” Cheney, unhindered by such quaint constraints as the rule of law, responded with a succinct “I am.” Here the Third World shames us. There, when prosecution has been problematic, post-crisis justice has included truth commissions, which rigorously document abuses (as in Chile after the transition to democracy) or complement prosecutions targeting those on the very top (as in Argentina after the Dirty War). Interestingly, Cheney appears to have cribbed from the Argentine junta’s self-aggrandizing farewell statements. He claims abusive interrogators risked their lives and “deserve our gratitude”—as he surely does, too. Our current president may make pious pronouncements about America’s founding principles, but his actions belie his luminous words. In a May speech, Obama professed, “I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.” He then pledged that he would continue imprisoning detainees who “cannot be prosecuted” for lack of evidence. And the administration is mounting a legal challenge to transfer, in effect, Guantanamo to Bagram, making the latter prison America’s primary human warehouse for detainees that the government holds without charges. In 30 of the 38 Guantanamo-related habeas corpus cases lower courts have heard since the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision in 2008, judges have found that the government lacked credible evidence—the lowest evidentiary burden—to continue incarceration of detainees. Do indefinite imprisonments, immunity for favored agents, and rule by executive diktat sound like best democratic practice? Crisis-rocked Third World countries eventually move on, setting up truth commissions and holding trials. But the United States remains very much in the grip of a 9/11 emergency mentality. The War on TV Writing about the Argentine media during the Falklands War, Rodolfo Braceli recalled, “The majority of the media and many notable journalists, more than being submissive and saving their skin, had a good time. They were not victims. Nor were they innocents. To say they were not innocents is the gentlest of ways of saying that they were, also, particularly culpable. … And there is more to reexamine: submission out of fear is one thing, and quite another is the genuflection, sugar-coated and gleeful, of complicity. Of the latter there was too much.” We are not much better today. Reporter Ashley Banfield described coverage of the Iraq War by embedded reporters: “It was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful, terrific endeavor.” The U.S. media has long enjoyed an independence that even its European counterparts, with their strict defamation laws, don’t have. In terms of objectivity and freedom, Third World media has always been the weaker cousin of America’s Fourth Estate. Journalists do not come from the moneyed class and are routinely bullied by high-ranking officials who have accrued generations of privilege. That independence eroded dramatically after Sept. 11. Americans tuning in to the evening news saw flags undulating in the background of war reports, often coupled with a subtle, flapping sound-effect tying war to patriotism. State TV it was not—not yet anyway. But just when the media’s role became most critical, it turned uncharacteristically compliant. Recall May 1, 2003, the “Mission Accomplished” moment, when coverage sounded more like unmodified PR than impartial reporting. An equal participant in the pageantry, CNN informed viewers that Bush had made a “picture-perfect landing,” was greeted by the roar of the seamen’s approval, and had underwater survival training to prepare for his flight. All that was missing was a reverential bow to “Dear Leader.” Long before the Pentagon discovered embedding, the Argentine junta selected the journalists allowed into the Falklands to cover the conflict and checked all news content. As Stars and Stripes reported in a recent series, the Defense Department has been following a similar strategy, hiring the Rendon Group to prepare graded reports on journalists seeking embed positions, assessing how favorable their coverage has been. (That the Pentagon continued to use Rendon at all is highly suspect given the group’s disreputable history. Prior to the Iraq War, Rendon promoted million-dollar contracts to Ahmad Chalabi, who, in turn, forwarded fraudulent intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons to the Pentagon.) In September, after the Associated Press distributed a photo of a dying Marine, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attempted to block publication, claiming it would mark an “unconscionable departure from the restraint most journalists and publications have shown covering the military since Sept. 11.” He was uncharacteristically correct: AP did break from common practice by showing the reality of the war. Gates’s public rebuke highlights the degree to which the U.S. government is willing to interfere with journalistic prerogatives—and how little space remains between us and the Third World nations we condemn for restricting freedom of press. After eight years of lost life, money, and credibility in Afghanistan, the new administration now promotes the war in a more subdued way. President Obama and General McCrystal acknowledge steep challenges, but argue there is a “newness” to the campaign in Afghanistan. It cannot be put into historical context of any kind. The media and commentariat nod obediently. The Good War The armed forces of states such as Russia and Pakistan enjoy considerable clout and resources, but that often benefits only the upper tiers, which deploy foot soldiers with little planning or consideration of risk. In 1996, during Russia’s war with Chechnya, national security adviser Alexander Lebed admitted that Russian soldiers were “hungry, lice-infested and underclothed.” Despite the lip service paid to U.S. troops, they face similar, often life-threatening shortfalls. Recall the haphazard, bring-your-own-armor approach to the early phase of the Iraq War. Gen. Anthony Zinni echoed some of Lebed’s concerns when he said of the preparations for the Iraq War, “I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence, and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence, and corruption.” In September, a former Air Force staff sergeant working for a private contractor was found dead in a shower in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Adam Vernon Hermanson had served three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Uzbekistan. A military medical examiner concluded that he was killed by low-voltage electrocution. Earlier this year, an electrical expert for the Army Corps of Engineers, Jim Childs, testified that roughly 90 percent of contractor KBR’s new construction in Iraq was not properly wired. Yet KBR was paid more than $80 million in bonuses for its electrical work. To this day, it has not been held accountable for the injuries and deaths of troops who guarded a toxin-polluted facility that provided treated water. According to whistleblowers and memos, KBR knew the facility was contaminated with sodium dichromate, which is linked to cancer, long before the company informed U.S. officials. Nearly 1,200 troops were exposed to the substance, and the Army is refusing to provide most of the injured veterans with health benefits. But again, KBR received bonuses. How smoothly our leaders speak of supporting the troops—only to command them carelessly and forbid them from leaving when their tours end. To fill its quotas, top brass persists in the institutional sleight of hand known as “stop loss,” forcing troops to serve prolonged and serial deployments. Many who return home scarred will struggle to get care: 37 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer mental-health issues. The Marine Corps Times reports that 915,000 unprocessed claims are waiting at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Once we followed the Third World into the strategic cul de sac of relying on force to solve problems, we needed a deep supply of cannon fodder. And when the democratic will waned, mercenaries were brought in to make up the difference. In Afghanistan, they outnumber U.S. troops, with 68,197 contractors in the theater, 67 percent of the total force. In Iraq, there is one KBR worker for every three U.S. soldiers. In tone, President Obama departs from the Third World approach to problem solving. He outlines a decorous AfPak policy, calling for development funding, declaring America’s “great respect for the Pakistani people,” and stating that “a campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone”—all while ratcheting up violent confrontation and employing the bluntest instruments of warfare. He has escalated drone attacks, which have caused significant civilian deaths, and has requested an increase in funding for unmanned aircraft. During his campaign, Obama promised to raise military spending—as did every other major candidate. He has kept his word, even though the United States spends more than all other countries combined on defense. In the CIA’s ranking of military spending as a percentage of GDP, Third World countries dominate the first 50-plus slots, with the United States in the middle of the heap at number 28, flanked by Chad and Libya—hardly flattering company. This disproportionate devotion to military spending has had profound costs, hastening the country’s economic meltdown. Bailout of Necessity In the Third World, crises often beget ill-considered policies that result in economic blowback—which in turn breeds further crises. Leaders try to rush their initiatives before legislatures (where they exist) and the media (where it is allowed to operate) have a chance to air drawbacks or propose more moderate alternatives. This became America’s modus operandi after the banking crisis morphed into a global economic catastrophe. The U.S. government found itself in an unenviable position: the treasury had been depleted by two wars, and the American people had already been called upon to show their patriotic conviction by shopping. So it resorted to calling for emergency measures with a huge price tag and, in Third World-style, courted considerable moral hazard. Like America today, Argentina in the 1980s had not recovered economically from its war and the profligacy of the junta when crisis struck. President Carlos Menem responded by invoking 472 Decrees of Urgency and Necessity from 1989 to 1998, refining the Third-World art of crony capitalism and state-power centralization. He used privatization as a form of political patronage, doling out the country’s assets at below-market prices, with no bidding, or vetting. Now the U.S. government has passed its own bipartisan policies of urgency and necessity. In a letter to congressional leaders shortly before Obama’s inauguration, Larry Summers made the appeal for the second round of TARP funds, claiming that the need for billions of dollars was “imminent and urgent.” Obama promised to improve TARP’s transparency: “Many of us have been disappointed with the absence of clarity, the failure to track how the money’s been spent.” But his Treasury Department has done the opposite. Moreover, TARP has overwhelmingly aided the big banks; homeowners have seen scant relief. The rhetoric is populist, the practice elitist. It is not only the opacity with which TARP spoils have been divided that suggests crony capitalism; the banking sector itself is becoming an oligopoly, less removed from the Third World’s skewed, non-competitive structures than U.S. citizens would like to admit. TARP, after all, amounts to small change when compared to the arcane government programs benefiting the big banks—TLGP, TALF, PPIP: a stew of acronyms incomprehensible to the citizens who write checks. Banks with more than $100 billion in assets are borrowing at interest rates 0.34 percentage points lower than the rest of the industry. In 2007, that difference was only 0.08 percentage points. In his book Latin America at the End of Politics, Forrest Colburn argues that economic turmoil shocked Third World citizens into accepting a strain of so-called liberalization that is heavily weighted toward monopolies and maintains chasmic inequalities in exchange for relative stability. America’s bank rescues have taken on similar dimensions. As in Menem’s Argentina, the Obama administration has chosen winners and losers. And as the market-distorting impact of his programs becomes evident and public anger grows, our president has taken to the bully pulpit to showcase his talent for economic demagoguery, another well-worn tactic of Third World leaders. Obama singles out unpopular market actors for scorn, much like former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, who at the end of the ’90s blamed George Soros and other “speculators” for the collapse of his country’s currency. A decade later, the American president would fault “a small group of speculators” who endangered “Chrysler’s future.” Hector E. Schamis wrote of Menem’s maneuvers, in a passage that now seems prophetic of what would happen in the U.S., “by colluding with the largest segments of Argentina’s business groups, Menem cemented a minimum winning coalition that benefited from the economic reform program and provided key political support. By distributing selective incentives among potential opponents, he divided and disarticulated rivals.” As in so many collapsed countries, an increasingly large portion of American wealth goes toward debt. Infrastructure sags. Only industries favored by the government thrive. The middle class shrinks as it is squeezed to fund programs that keep the wealthy comfortable and the poor from rioting. The only difference is that the U.S. has an ability to continue borrowing—for now. Decline and Fall? The Third Worlding of America is less cinematic but more serious than empire-in-decline analogies suggest. After all, Britain no longer wields global supremacy, but it is still firmly in the First World, its political class scrutinized by an independent, assertive media. And even after its post-World War II penury, it did not backpedal on political reforms at home. This is not to excuse the colonizer’s brutality abroad but rather to distinguish Britain’s imperial decline from America’s homeland decay. The United States has transgressed her traditions in the fog of war before, only to redeem herself later. But we are now engaged in a war without borders against a self-multiplying enemy. There is no army to trounce, so no clear end to the bloodletting or bankrupting. The patchouli-scented youth, who protest in the streets of D.C. with their towering papier-mâché effigies, may have been correct after all in highlighting the breadth of America’s all-encompassing problems—if not their remedies. Crisis has pushed the U.S. toward Third World policies with alarming swiftness. But the risk is not that Americans will bring out the pitchforks and join the protestors. Rather, citizens seem as disaffected and resigned as their Third World brethren, only occasionally roused from reality TV by their favorite pundit peddling the outrage du jour. The far Right wallows in paranoia with its dreams of overturning an election by discovering a Kenyan birth certificate. Most on the Left seem too mesmerized by the president to hold him accountable. The media ranges from insipid to hysterical. This country may never see the reasons for—and the parallels to—its disintegration. Ximena Ortiz is a former executive editor of The National Interest and bureau chief for Associated Press-Dow Jones in Santiago, Chile.

Iraqi cab driver was source for Iraq WMD claim, British MP says By John Byrne December 08, 2009 "Raw Story' -- A British parliamentarian claimed in an report published Tuesday that an Iraqi cab driver was the source of an infamous claim made by Prime Minister Tony Blair that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The member of Parliament, a member of the conservative British Tory Party, claims that he was told by a British intelligence official that the claim actually came from an Iraqi taxi driver, and that it was considered highly unreliable but was tacitly backed by Blair's government in public statements anyway. According to the report, the taxi driver worked near Iraq's border with Jordan. The cab driver is said to have made the comments while transporting two British intelligence officers. "Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, [british intelligence services] were squeezing their agents in Iraq for anything at all," MP Adam Holloway wrote in his report, leaked to the British Daily Mail. "One agent did come up with something - the [claim that chemical weapons could be launched on British forces in Cyprus in] '45 minutes,' allegedly discussed in a high-level Iraqi political meeting." British intelligence officers "were running a senior Iraqi army officer who had a source of his own, a cab driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border. He apparently overheard two Iraqi army officers two years before who had spoken about weapons with the range to hit targets elsewhere in the Middle East." But in a "footnote to their report," sent to Blair, "it flagged up that part of the report describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. The missiles verifiably did not exist. "The footnote said it in black and white," Holloway continued. "Despite this the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks of the dodgy dossier." Former British intelligence chief John Scarlett will face an inquiry from an investigatory committee Tuesday, where he will likely be asked questions about Holloway's report. The Guardian noted Tuesday that the original intelligence dossier cited by the Blair government didn't specifically say that Hussein had chemical weapons; officials later acknowledged that it was intended to refer to conventional weapons "But, when it was published, some British papers interpreted the dossier as meaning that British troops based in Cyprus would be vulnerable to an Iraqi attack," the paper said. "At the time the government did not do anything to correct this error."

Ha'aretz says U.S. officials face 'pro-Israel' background check By Stephen M. Walt December 09, 2009 "FP" Dec. 02, 2009 -- There is an amazing story in Ha'aretz today on the "pro-Israel" litmus test that determines who is permitted to serve in the United States government. Here's the sort of lede you're not likely to read in the New York Times or Washington Post: Every appointee to the American government must endure a thorough background check by the American Jewish community. In the case of Obama's government in particular, every criticism against Israel made by a potential government appointee has become a catalyst for debate about whether appointing "another leftist" offers proof that Obama does not truly support Israel." The story goes on to rehearse what happened to Chas Freeman (whose appointment was derailed by the Israel lobby because he voiced a few mild criticisms of Israel's behavior) and reports that similar complaints are now being raised against the appointment of former Senator Chuck Hagel. Even more bizarrely, the Zionist Organization of America and other rightwing Jewish groups are complaining about the appointment of Hannah Rosenthal to direct the Office to Combat and Monitor Anti-Semitism. Why? Apparently she's been involved with J Street and other "leftwing" organizations that ZOA et al deem insufficiently ardent in their support for the Jewish state, and has suggested that progressive forces need to be more vocal in advancing the peace process. One has to feel a certain sympathy for Ms. Rosenthal, who is forced to defend her own appointment by telling an interviewer: I love Israel. I have lived in Israel. I go back and visit every chance I can. I consider it part of my heart. And because I love it so much, I want to see it safe and secure and free and democratic and living safely." These are fine sentiments, but isn't it odd that she has to defend her qualifications for a position in the U.S. government by saying how much she "loves" a foreign country? For an American official in her position, what matters is that she loves America, and that she believes anti-semitism is a hateful philosophy that should be opposed vigorously. Whether she loves Israel or France or Thailand or Namibia, etc., is irrelevant. (And yes, it's entirely possible to loathe anti-Semitism and not love Israel). But the real lesson of all these episodes is the effect of this litmus test on the foreign policy community more broadly. Groups in the lobby target public servants like Freeman, Hagel, and Rosenthal because they want to make sure that no one with even a mildly independent view on Middle East affairs gets appointed. By making an example of them, they seek to discourage independent-minded people from expressing their views openly, lest doing so derail their own career prospects later on. And it works. Even if the lobby doesn't manage to block every single appointment, they can make any administration think twice about a potentially "controversial" choice and use the threat to stifle open discourse among virtually all members of the mainstream foreign policy community (and certainly anyone who aspires to public service in Washington). The result, of course, is the U.S. Middle East policy (and U.S. foreign policy more generally) is reserved for those who are either steadfastly devoted to the "special relationship" or who have been intimidated into silence. The result? U.S. policy remains in the hands of the same set of "experts" whose policies for the past seventeen years (or more) have been a steady recipe for failure. If a few more Americans read Ha'aretz, they might start to figure this out. Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard University.

Nomads Time to dig for old, but highly useful eNuri topics Nur

Walaal Nomad Waxaan mareynaa saman Xaqii loo arkay baatil, cadowna loo arkay saaxib. Runtii loo arkay been, beentiina la rumeeyay, dadkiina la lunshay lana indho tiray. Sidaad ogtihiin waxaa wax lagu arkaa quluubta ku jirta laabteenna, taasoo haddey indho beesho,la hubo inaan lumeyno. (.... Fa innahaa laa tacmil absaar, walaakin tacmil quluub allatii fissuduurQuraan. Hadaba, waxaan is xasuusineynaa in aan hadwalba dhandhansanno macaanka iimaanka, si aan uga dhaxallo, ku sabarka dariiqa toosan, iyo ka sabirka dariiqyada faraha badan ee Allah naga reebay. Nur