I Was Ordered to Cover Up President Karzai Election Fraud, Sacked UN Envoy Says By Tom Coghlan October 05, 2009 "The Times" --- The head of the UN mission in Afghanistan has been accused by his former deputy of ordering a systematic cover-up to conceal the extent of electoral fraud by President Karzai. In an attack on the role of the UN in the elections on August 20, Peter Galbraith, who was sacked as Deputy Special Representative to the UN mission in Kabul last week, says that Kai Eide ordered him not to reveal evidence of fraud or to pass it to the authorities. As a result, he said, the elections had handed the Taleban “its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners”. He says that the UN collected evidence that a third of Mr Karzai’s votes were fraudulent. If the claim was found to be true it would push Mr Karzai below the 54 per cent that the preliminary election results give him, necessitating a second round of voting. The attack by Mr Galbraith seems timed to counter indications that the US Government and international community have accepted the official verdict of the Afghan authorities and, with it, a Karzai Administration. Mr Galbraith said that Mr Eide ordered him not to pursue concerns that he expressed before the elections that the Afghan President would use polling stations in unstable areas to conduct fraud. “At other critical stages in the election process,” he wrote in The Washington Post, “I was similarly ordered not to pursue the issue of fraud. “My staff collected evidence on hundreds of cases of fraud around the country and, more important, gathered information on turnout in key southern provinces where few voters showed up but large numbers of votes were being reported. Eide ordered us not to share this data with anyone, including the Electoral Complaints Commission, a UN-backed Afghan institution legally mandated to investigate fraud.” Since Mr Galbraith was dismissed at least five of his colleagues at the UN Afghan mission have resigned. Mr Galbraith challenged claims made by Mr Eide that the UN was not mandated to interfere in the Afghan electoral process. He wrote: “The UN Security Council directed the UN mission to support Afghanistan’s electoral institutions in holding a ‘free, fair and transparent’ vote, not a fraudulent one. “And with so much at stake — and with more than 100,000 US and coalition troops deployed in the country — the international community had an obvious interest in ensuring that Afghanistan’s election did not make the situation worse.” He also warned of renewed inter-ethnic division because of anger over the failure to deal with the alleged fraud. A spokesman for the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) denied the claims. Dan McNorton said: “UNAMA has not, does not and will not turn a blind eye to fraud. Throughout this election the UN has insisted on a rigorous adherence to the election processes. Our neutrality will be paramount at all stages.”

Let me add few more qualifying criteria in addition to agreeing on what is Xaq; What are the issues dividing the TFG and the opposing groups? Where does each one stand on these issues? Is your source of information on where each party stands neutral? or is it main Media news, Somali Websites and hearsay? Summing it all up, we need to agree on: 1. What constitutes Xaqq? 2. Where is each of the opposing opponents stand on the Xaqq.? Logically then, we will both know if: 1. Any party is on Xaq. 2. Neither is On Xaq Nur

Truth in Arabic is translated as SIDQ, akhil faadil, let me clarify that SIDQ is a subset of Xaq, but Xaq is absolute and far more encompassing than mere truth. The Quraan differentiates between the term Xaq and the term Sidq. The way of Allah is also a subset of Xaq Now, coming back to my question once more, what is XAQ since you have posed the term first? a thorough understanding of this term will address your subsequent question. Nur

Oz Girl This thread may also be useful. Nur

Oz Girl This old post of mine is another perspective, have a look, it just might be useful. My prayers for your guidance and mine. Amin Nur

JZK Bint Hamid Positive Change To Continue..... At the beach, kids build sand castles that reflect their world view, but it takes a single wave to destroy their vision. Somalia has the second longest coastline in Africa, second only to South Africa, in addition of being one of the most biologically diverse coastlines in the World ( According to an American Marine Biologist I met), swathes of our coastline are blessed with best crystalline sands, making them ideal virgin beaches complete with coconut tree background. As a child, I recall playing on the beach in Mogadishu ( Lido), and the most memorable fun on the sand used to be digging holes to bury ourselves in or building of sand castles, the first fun has visited us as a bad omen as we have buried ourselves many times over in holes we dug out for ourselves. My intention in this thread is to realize the second good omen, Building Castles of hope. As kids when we were busy building these sandcastles, some of us where passionately keen on building the perfect castle with creative details an ornaments that can amaze any adult, while others were on the lookout for approaching waves that break off nearby at varying intensities, so, from time to time, the castle had to be dismantled and rebuilt again just out of the reach of the waves. To see a complete castle dismantled on the beach and to be rebuilt again few meters away from wave breaks is fun, and kids never consider it as a problem, but, what about of the castle is real, and the waves are foreign threats on our nation? Here, we come back to the issue of Positive Gradual Change that I've previously discussed with Brother Xiinfaniin a while back. The building of the Somali nation state is finding itself in a major predicament, every Stakeholder, Somali or Foreign, having his own vision of how the future Somali state should be shaped, like we say in Somali " Nin Buka Boqol U Talisay" ( Meaning, a sick person has many Doctors). As a result of this awkward situation, we have a sandcastle on the beach surrounded by many stakeholders, whether rightfully or wrongfully, who all claim that they should have a say on how this Somali Castle should be reconstructed. Stakeholders surrounding Somalia have different motivations. Some are motivated by Threat USA, EU and Ethiopia Some are motivated by Greed Warlords, Somali Politicians, US ( Oil, future Bases), EU( Nuclear Waste Dumping ground), African Union, and Ethiopia While some are motivated by faith. Resistance groups. The first two stakeholders are in part responsible for the dismantling of the last Somali Castle, and remain staunchly adamant in not allowing the idea of a Sovereign Somalia to emerge from its rubble, standing proudly alone on its own feet among Sovereign nations, thus, they've collectively conspired to influence the future shape of this nation by supporting and installing the decision makers of their choice. These paid politicians have effectively sold Somalia's National interests to fulfill the strategic security demands of their donors. After 16 years of warlord driven civil war to install a Nation-By-Foreign-Design, and their continuous disruption of the revival of the ailing Sovereign Somali state, their final intention being to break the will of the nation to make Somalis bow for foreign pressure to acccept humiliating conditions of a slave state coming out of their Genie Bottle as a panacea for all of Somalia's ills. Suddenly a miracle happened, the very threat that the western donors feared for so long, and for which they have spent billions to destabilize Somalia, Emergence of a Sovereign Somali State, and Islamic at that, came out from their own Genie bottle with vengeance. The Islamic Courts Union was not only a freak accident in the western political barometers, but also a migraine headache for the US and Europe in the ICU' structure and legitimacy in the eyes of the world as a Court of Law driving a timely positive change to bring stability to Somalia in contrast with the apparent wishes and ruthless crimes against humanity perpetrated by the American supported and equipped Somali Warlord buffoons. For short six months, Somalia was at peace with itself and with the world, please read Chatham House Report on Islamic Courts Union's brief rule of Somalia. Ethiopia, a client Dictatorship serving USA interests in East Africa, invaded Somalia with a tacit US approval and financial support to end a brief peace movement brought by the Islamic Courts of Somalia, which the USA policy makers saw that if not stopped at its heels, it will prove the western media's Islamophobia wrong, that Islam is always violent, and that a good governance model of an Islamic state managed by the rule of law can not exist on the planet to compete with the Western Model of governance for thought consumers. This Miracle of the Islamic Courts Union would later spawn a myriad of resistance groups all vying to liberate Somalia from foreign occupation who have since coalesced as two main groups, who have succeeded as allies in driving Ethiopia out of Somalia against the wishes of the US and its allies. The two resistance groups agree on Somalia's Sovereignty but disagree on leadership and strategy toward an Islamophobic World Order. To Be continued......... 2009 eNuri Inspirationals eNuri Non-Violent Advocacy (eNoVA)

Disclaimer: The following answer is meant for intellectual discussion ONLY, Do not discuss it at work or at school! it can be very dangerous to your wealth, only experienced TFG officials and opposing militias are expected to understand the concepts in depth, eNuri, SOL or Nur, are in no way responsible for any misuse of the following philosophical content by novices. Hatu Welcome to SOL Islam page, and thanks for a fresh look at controversial issue such as what is known ( depending on which side of the conflict you happen to be) either a Fidaa'ee (one who sacrifices his life for a cause) or A suicide bomber (a crazy blood thirsty terrorist). Its said that the first casualty of a conflict is TRUTH, and when truth dies, with it dies objectivity in reporting by news media, specially when the news media happen to belong to the other side of the conflict. For illustration, every nation in history has honored those who gave their lives as a sacrifice to protect their people from harms way, while at the same time despising the other sides heroes sacrifices for their people. Therefore, the issue is relative. To your enemies you are the bad guy no matter how much good you do, to your friends, your are the good guy no matter the bad things you do. From the political perspective, the questions to ask therefore are: What are the ethics of a war? are these ethics agreed upon universally? is everyone playing on a plain field? which one is bad, homicide bombing or suicide bombing? why aren't we worried by homicide bombings that kill much more civilians than suicide bombing? From the Sharia perspective, the questions to ask are: What constitutes a legitimate resistance in Islam or by the UN? what drives a man so desperate to take his own life to harm others? could it be a sign of our failure as a society to provide justice for all? if money buys power for the rich people's cause, what would a poor man spend to gain power for his cause? his own life? As for your second question on Xaq and Baatil of Shabab and TFG, it is important that we first agree on what Xaqq means, so that we can apply it on the right group, if we disagree on what constitutes Xaqq, then it becomes a futile attempt. So, let me ask you, what is Xaqq as you understand it? Nur

Similar to what Israel is doing to Palestinians, the AMISOM is doing it to Somalis in Mogadishu, I mean the COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT, whenever they are attacked by the resistance groups, they simple target civilian shopping area at the Bakara Market killing hundreds with the same Israeli excuse, "that they are defending themselves against rockets!" The African Union Troops should be investigated for crimes against humanity too. Somalis should document and take pictures of these violations and present it to the progressive media. Nur

A Fundamental Jewish Value. Interview with Judge Richard Goldstone By Rabbi Michael Lerner October 02, 2009 "Tikkun" -- This interview was given to Tikkun magazine by Judge Goldstone (herein referred to as RG) and conducted by Rabbi Michael Lerner (ML below), editor of Tikkun magazine and chair of the interfaith organzation The Network of Spiritual Progressives and by Rabbi Brain Walt (BW below), founding chair person of Rabbis for Human Rights (North America) and chair of Ta'anit Tzedeck. ML: I really appreciate you for taking the time to be with us. RG: Well thank you for making the contact, I really appreciate it. ML: Was and is the blockade of Gaza a war crime? RG: It was a violation of international law, it was not a war crime because there was no war. It was a violation of the 4th Geneva convention. There has to be an actual military armed conflict for it to be a war crime. It is also a violation of international human rights law. ML: What are the specific steps that Israel could have taken to stop the shelling of southern Israel before commencing an attack on Gaza? RG: Well, it could have used greater pressure by diplomatic means. They could have used the security council for that purpose. Israel could have put the security council on notice and said "if you don't stop this, if you don't do something to stop it, we will have to resort as a last resort to military means." But in our report we didn't question the right of Israel to use military force. ML: So you are saying that the attack on Gaza was, by your estimation, not a violation of any international laws or agreements? RG: I'm not sure I want to comment on it, it was not something we looked into. We were looking at war crimes, which are crimes committed during military operation. We didn't look at the justification for using military force. ML: Do you think Israel could have succeeded in stopping the bombing of Sderot had it gone to the Security Council? RG: Well, I don't know. If it didn't work, then I have got no doubt that Israel was entitled to take a strong action to put a stop to the firing of rockets and mortars and has a duty to its own population to protect them. Military force should be the very last resort. I think it is arguable here that other diplomatic means could have worked. If they didn't work then the last resort is to use force, and whether it is military or policing action force, Israel was entitled to take active steps. ML: Hamas and supporters of the Palestinian cause have always said that Israel could have taken the step of ending the blockade of Gaza, and that would have been a condition for ending the attacks by Hamas. RG: That is getting into the politics of the situation, which I don't wish to do. What I hear you say is why peace is so crucial in the Middle East. There is a sort of spiral, the blockade, the refusal to respect the right of self-determination for the Palestinians. ML: So once deciding to attack, the question gets raised: Is there any way to fight a war against terrorists that would not result in deaths and casualties of civilians, assuming that urban terrorists have located themselves in the midst of the population? RG: You know, commando actions could have been taken. But in any event, even though Israel might have been entitled to use force, the real point of the report was that it was disproportionate force. Look at the thousands of homes destroyed, the factories, the agricultural land, this is almost impossible to justify militarily. BW: Also in your view, in the view of your report, it was deliberate? RG: I don't think there is any dispute about it. The Israeli army has very sophisticated weaponry, and I don't think they make many mistakes as to what they target. BW: But I think that is the one piece where your critics are very upset about the report: the whole question of intention. And they do deny that there is intention, they claim that the civilians died accidentally RG: I think we are talking at two different levels. When it comes to the destruction of infrastructure, they haven't really responded at all to that, and that was part of what the report addressed. None of the Israeli responses have even said a word about the property destruction, the bulldozing of agricultural fields, the bombing of water wells, the bombing of sewage works that caused a huge spill over a huge area. There has been no attempt to justify that. When it comes to the actual killing of civilians in urban areas, that is where the big dispute comes in. I think all I can do is refer to the 36 incidents that we report on. And with almost all of them, we found the Israeli response to be disproportionate. BW: As regard to wells and the factories, one can make a reasonable argument, not a pleasant argument, why Israel would want to do it? RG: There was a political reason, and that was collective punishment and an effort to weaken the support for Hamas. ML: Is that a violation of international human rights, destruction of infrastructure? RG: It is a war crime. It is an attack on civilian objects, as opposed to military objects. ML: Is that the kind of attack that is serious enough to warrant reprimand through the ICC? RG: It would certainly be something that falls within the jurisdiction of the ICC. BW: Let's jump to civilians. Do you follow that same logic with regard to civilians? i.e. in regard to the water, electrical, and food, they wanted to go after the infrastructure, in regards to civilians, was that disregard for human rights, or was it intentional killing? RG: Certainly some of the incidents appear to be intentional. What we didn't do, because it wasn't our mandate to do, was to investigate who bore responsibility. Whether this was policy at a high level, or policy at a battalion level, or specific soldiers who acted on their own. That is the sort of investigation that we suggested should be taken by Israel itself. BW: If I remember correctly, in the report, you quote Israeli officials who say "we are going after the infrastructure, we want to cause them hurt," and so on and so forth, but I don't remember any references to Israeli officials indicating their intention to kill civilians. RG: No, we didn't make any allegation that there was a policy to kill civilians. ML: That is an issue that has to be investigated. RG: Yep. BW: Like you, I was raised in the South African Jewish community. I know exactly the community you have come from, I was raised in the same community, with similar values around Israel and so on. And it seems to me that when I read the statement that you made yesterday just before the council ... it felt to me very courageous because I admire immensely what you did. It was so moving to me to read that statement. ML: You made a statement in response to a woman who was attacking you for betraying your own people? RG: I said I wasn't going to dignify her remarks with a response, but they call to mind the attacks made on me as a white South African for going against the interests of whites during the Apartheid era. And I said I thought having regard to the terrible history of the Jewish people, of over 2000 years of persecution, I found it difficult to understand how Jews wouldn't respond in protecting the human rights of others. And I talked about that as being a fundamental Jewish value. BW: Rabbi Lerner and I are involved in an organization, Ta'anit Tzedeck, that is calling for the lifting of the blockade because of the material deprivation it causes, and we are calling upon people to fast the 3rd Thursday of each month in solidarity with this demand. I wondered for you as a South African Jew who cares about Israel, how is it to face the incredible wall that Israel has placed in your way about this, and seeming disregard, like they aren't really interested in your findings and substantive things. It is a position of arrogance. RG: When I went into this, I didn't know any of the details we were going to find. I obviously watched the TV and knew there was tremendous destruction, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw on the ground. BW: What happened when you saw what you saw on the ground? RG: I was shocked at the number of buildings that had been razed. Particularly private homes. And I wasn't prepared for the stories that were told by witnesses we considered to be credible. As to the way the Israeli Army treated them. I felt a great deal of shame and embarrassment particularly as a Jew, but also as a human being. ML: Maybe you could cite one such story? RG: Well, the one that really upset me was the shelling of a full Mosque during the afternoon service. And we didn't look at other Mosques. We accepted the idea that maybe some Mosques were used to give shelter to fighters and militants. They may also have been used to store weapons, but even if that was true (and we found that it wasn't in respect to this particular Mosque), but even if it was, it is completely unacceptable and a warcrime to shell the Mosque during a service. There were hundreds of people in that Mosque, and 15 people were killed and many more were injured. It is that sort of conduct that is absolutely unacceptable. That was one of the incidents that caught me in particular. And it is a particular concern because of the reaction of people who were there. I put myself in the position how Jews would feel if they were attacked in a synagogue when it was full of worshipers. ML: Israeli Prime Minister said "The Israeli public will not be willing to take risks for peace if stripped of its right to self-defense." And the article said, Netanyahu referred to the Goldstone report written by the fact-finding UN mission that investigated IDF operations, stating that the peace process would be brought to a halt if the report was submitted to the international court in The Hague. A democratic state's right to defend its population has been crushed by the UN body. RG: Well, it is absolutely incorrect. Our report doesn't bear on the question of self-defense at all. It is not a relevant remark to make. There is not a word in the report that questions the right to self-defense. ML: Netanyahu, however, is saying that de facto, you can't conduct defense in a war against terrorists without engaging in operations against civilians, and your response is, there is a way to conduct those. RG: Yes, it is a question of what is proportionate. ML: Your report suggested that Israel has to conduct a further investigation, and the question is, is there any point in a government-led investigation? RG: It depends who they appoint. If they appoint someone who is transparent and public about it, then I think that would certainly be exactly what we had in mind. ML: Do you think you could state any minimum requirements? Those who are critical of Israeli policy think that the investigation would be a way of avoiding taking any responsibility and would get the public's eye away from the Goldstone report and would drown the impact of the Goldstone report and would probably come up with a much more equivocal finding than your report. I am wondering if you could state any minimum criteria for what it would take for people outside to take a government report where the government is investigating itself. RG: I think the investigation must be conducted by people who are independent and are perceived to be independent like former Israeli Chief Justice Aharon Barak. And it must be done with openness and transparency. And it certainly must take into account evidence from all sides. One of the problems I've got with these military investigations is, as far as I know, there's only one which I've read about where the military investigations even spoke to any of the victims, spoke to any of the people from Gaza who obviously are the best people to speak to. ML: In other words you're saying that the first criterion is that the people be independent, and second... RG: that the investigation is a transparent one. ML: The second is transparent and the third is that they speak to the victim. RG: Right. ML: The victims of the assault, not just to the military people to explain what they were intending to do. RG: Correct. ML: Are there any other criteria? RG: No, I think those are the major criteria. And Israel has done it. I think the Israel's investigation into Sabra and Shatilla is a very good example. And that was accepted absolutely by the international community as being appropriate. ML: You say people are independent but there were some people in the peace movement in Israel who say that Aharon Barak himself led a Supreme Court that never challenged the Israeli military's denial of human rights to Palestinians RG: It's a difficult one. I've known Aharon Barak for many years and I absolutely respect his independence and integrity. In my book he'd be a very appropriate person. ML: OK. Let me give you one of the frequent criticisms of the Goldstone report that I've heard and that I'd like to put to you. Not that it's inaccurate but that it's a reflection of a prejudice because of selective prosecution. The UN gives this attention to the sins of little countries or powerless countries, relatively powerless countries, while never daring to do a comparable report on big guys like the human rights violations of the United States in Iraq, of Russia in Chechnya, China in Tibet. The argument goes that when one picks on historically oppressed groups like Jews for their sins while ignoring the far greater sins of the more powerful, the UN participates in a kind of double standard that in other contexts would be seen transparently as racist or illegitimate. So that even though you, Judge Goldstone, were perfectly fine in what you did, the actual investigation itself by virtue of selecting this target by a body that doesn't target the more powerful is a reflection of prejudice. RG: Generally I agree with the criticism. I think the powerful are protected because of their power. But it's not prejudice it's politics. It's a political world. There's no question of not investigating countries because of who they are for religious reasons or cultural reasons, it's because of their power. They use their power to protect themselves. It doesn't mean that investigations [in countries] where politically they can be held are in any way necessarily flawed or shouldn't take place. The same argument was raised by Serbia in particular. They said, "Why was the international criminal tribunal set up for us? It wasn't set up for Pol Pot, it wasn't set up for Saddam Hussein, it was set up for Milosevic." And my response at the time when it was put to me by the Serb minister of justice, as I remember very well, was if this is the first of the lot, then I agree with you, it's an act of discrimination, but if it's the first of others to come then you can't complain, you have no right to complain because you're the first. And if crimes are being committed then at least, to go after those that one can go after politically is better than doing nothing. ML: For example, there haven't been any comparable investigations of human rights violations by Syria, by Saudi Arabia, by Egypt -- admittedly these are against their own populations. RG: I think that what distinguishes this from that is that these war crimes are committed in a situation of international armed conflict. It's not going to be a civil war situation. ML: And you don't think there is something inconsistent or one-sided and prejudicial in investigating this type of crime but not internal crime? RG: I think it's a double-standard more than prejudice. ML: So you would agree that there's a double-standard. RG: Absolutely. ML: And that it should be changed, but that doesn't invalidate what you do. RG: This is why. The best way of changing it is for every nation to join the International Criminal Court. ML: About that. Do you have any theory of why the Obama Administration has not embraced your report. RG: I really don't know. No reasons have been given. I'm happy that it supports the recommendation of internal investigation. ML: What do you think about those who'd say that pushing accountability on these kinds of crimes will be destructive to the process of peace, because Israel once facing this kind of international pressure will not be willing to submit itself to any other pressure for actual peace and that consequently the Obama Administration's refusal to take your human rights violations seriously is a reflection of their desire to make the peace process work. RG: I don't know that but if that's correct I would strongly disagree with their reasoning. It's been my experience that there can be no peace without justice. There can be no peace if victims are not acknowledged. [Editor's note: This view, of course, has been the underpinning of the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa that did in fact yield peace between the white and black populations, an outcome that has frequently been attributed to this process of requiring both the African National Council and other freedom fighters as well as the supporters of the apartheid regime to fully describe what they did and when they violated the human rights of others. The Goldstone report calls for both Hamas and for Israel to conduct investigations.] ML: Can you say another sentence about what gives you that feeling. What's the historical basis for thinking that? RG: Well you know you're not going to get peace when a society has a deeply imbedded call for revenge. And the way to avoid that, and a way to avoid collective guilt is through justice. The crimes that we've identified that were committed by the Israeli Defense Force are not in my view crimes committed by the people of Israel. There are many people in Israel who would oppose them. ML: I'll look at that then. Do you think there's anything in the speculation of some in the United States that the reason why it wants to distance from the Goldstone report is because by the similar criteria the United States might be brought to a similar accounting for what it has done in Iraq or Afghanistan? RG: I don't. I absolutely don't, I haven't read or heard of the U.S. intentionally attacking civilians. if innocent civilians have been killed or injured by the United States in Afghanistan or Iraq it's been by negligence. It hasn't been by intention. And when it's happened it's usually been followed by apology. ML: What do you think Americans can do now to push our government to take seriously the recommendations of the Goldstone report? RG: My first choice would be to put added pressure on Israeli to have the sort of investigation we've been talking about. I don't know, maybe I'm a naive optimist, but I thought the statement by Netanyahu that the cabinet is going to consider an investigation is a positive shift. ML: And do you have any views on the larger conflict itself, about what you think would be the most wise path that would come to settlement between the two sides? RG: It seems to me its a question of leadership. I think we're lucky in South Africa to have leaders of the caliber of DeClerk and Mandela. Leadership could deliver what they promised. And it seems to me that that's what missing at the moment in the Middle East. Particularly on the Palestinian side. As long as they're going to be fighting against each other who's going to represent them meaningfully at the peace negotiations? ML: Your daughter Nicole is alleged to have told the international media that you are a proud Jew and one who loves the State of Israel and if not for your efforts the outcome of the report would've been even more damaging. RG: That's her opinion, and I really don't want to comment on it. The first part is absolutely correct. I don't think it's possible to say whether the report would've been more or less damaging if I hadn't been involved. ML: Could you say one last sentence about what your feelings are about Israel and Zionism. I wanted to hear from you. RG: I've worked for Israel all of my adult life. I've been involved with the governor of the Hebrew University for what must be thirty years. And I've worked in World ORT since 1966. I've been involved in working for Israel and I'm a firm believer in the absolute right of the Jewish people to have their home there in Israel. ML: That's a strong and clear statement. I want to thank you for this work. It's a Kadush Hashem from my standpoint and the standpoint of many many Jews. I know that Israel will be much stronger when its embodying Jewish values of generosity or love of a stranger RG: Thank you very much for reaching out to me. I much appreciate it and certainly it's really crucially important for Jews particularly to stand up for Jewish values. I don't think this is what's happening sufficiently. To read the full Goldstone report, go to: http://www2.ohchr.or g/english/bodies/hrc ouncil/specialsessio n/9/FactFindingMissi on.htm This interview was conducted on October 1st, 2009, with Judge Richard Goldstone, the chair of the UN commission investigating the War in Gaza in 2008 and 2009. In the latter years of Apartheid in South Africa, Goldstone served as chairperson of the South African Standing Commission of Inquiry Regarding Public Violence and Intimidation, later known as the Goldstone Commission. The Commission played a critical role in uncovering and publicizing allegations of grave wrongdoing by the Apartheid-era South African security forces and bringing home to "White" South Africans the extensive violence that was being done in their name. The Commission concluded that most of the violence of those years was being orchestrated by shadowy figures within the Apartheid regime, often through the use of a so-called "third force." The Commission thus provided a first road map for the investigations into security force wrongdoing that, after democratization, were taken up by the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After South Africa's first democratic election in April 1994, Goldstone served as a judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, from July 1994 to October 2003. The Court was entrusted with the task of interpreting the new South African Constitution and supervising the country's transition into democracy. He also served as national president of the National Institute of Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of In August 1994, Goldstone was named as the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was established by a resolution of the UN Security Council in 1993. When the Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in late 1994, he became its chief prosecutor, too. He was a member of the International Panel of the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina (CEANA) which was established in 1997 to identify Nazi war criminals who had emigrated to Argentina, and transferred victim assets (Nazi gold) there. Goldstone was chairperson of the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo from August 1999 until December 2001. Goldstone serves on the Board of Directors of several nonprofit organizations that promote justice, including Physicians for Human Rights, the International Center for Transitional Justice, the South African Legal Services Foundation, the Brandeis University Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life, Human Rights Watch, and the Center for Economic and Social Rights. He is a trustee of Hebrew University. Subsequent to the release of his UN report which criticizes human rights abuses and violations of international law by both Hamas and Israel, and calls for each to conduct an independent and objective investigation, he has been assaulted by various leaders in the Jewish world and described as being anti-Semitic.

Pulling teeth? well, this particular task is done at dentist clinics for removing bad teeth, not by any group that I know of in Somalia. Chopping hands is an Allah ordained chastisement, if you have any problem with this punishment for thieves you don't have a problem with any group, you may have a problem with Allah. If your argument is that its not its time, that is a plausible argument and different opinions are respected in Islam including yours. Islamic groups are no angels, they can go wrong at times, it happened between the companions after the death of the Prophet SAWS, and it was over, only Munafiqs have rejoiced by that incident, like the one in Kismayo, and Islam survived after that incident as a state for the next 1400 years spanning from Moroccco to Indonesia. The Democratic west are not crying to change their system although much bitter wars had taken between them that caused the death of millions of innocent souls in two world wars, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Africa, Latin America, Palestine, they have also committed heinous crimes against humanity by burning humans in the holocaust, and as recent as Abu Ghreib and Guantanamo, and that is not even in their books, yet, its seen as acceptable to many since the media which bottle feeds the public presents it on different scale. So, its no wonder when someone unwittingly echoes its venom without realizing of being a mouth piece to the opponents of Islam You have a point in that, not all those who oppose the TFG are free from taints, we all have taints, to different degrees, different opponents are responsible of some of the overall problem, but most of the taints can be cleaned, except for major stains, the TFG has a permanent stain of treason against our faith and hence our nation, with a little pressure from you know who and a little pleasure drawn from worldly gains, its guilty of selling out the country to its age old enemy, Ethiopia. Another point you've scored is that there are more than two colors to it in Somalia, we have gray color, or the Hypocrite politicians masquerading as normal people who are skilfully represneting those who are responsible of our 20 year old Civil war. One Question for you though; gray is a color shade that lies between black and white, Munafiq is person who displays Islam but conceals kufr, can you explain what lies between Xaq and Baatil? Such is Allah, your Lord in truth. So after the truth, what else can there be, save error? How then are you turned away? Surah Yunus, Verse 32. Nur

As predicted in this thread, Somalia may never go back to secularism, Islam became so ingrained in the Somali psych in the past 20 years that any government not sugarcoated with Islam is doomed, but, if attempts by dormant clannish fervor succeeds, which is remotely possible if majority Somalis choose so, I am afraid that we may revert back to the old gutter of clan politics with an Islamic branding that defines the current so called " TFG Government" I hope Confucius was wrong when he said " The Superior know what is right, the Inferior know what sells" Nur

Nomads Ilaa iyo inta qiyaamha ka istaago, waxaan shaki ku jirin in Xaqa iyo baadilka is-hortaagnaan doonaan. Haseyeeshee kuwa sheeganaya inay xaqa doonayaan iney suuro geliyaan, wexey u baahan yihiin iney xasuustaan qodobada aan soo xusay gaar ahaan: 4. Waxaad wax u qaban kartaa Islaamka haddad ka hormariso Islaamka danihiisa, danahaaga gaarka ah. Kuwa isu xilsaaraey diintan iney soo nooleeyaan, haddey ayaga hagradaan diinta ujeeddooyinkeeda sare, waxaa loo wakiilan doonaa xilkaas kuwo kale oo kaga habboon, diintan waa xaq, wexeyna leedahay cadow dibadda ah, iyo mid gudaha ahba, iyo kuwa jecel diintan laakin xikmadda toosan ay ka maqantahay, kulligoodna ma joojin karaan nuurka islaamka inuu ku fido waddankeenna, Alle idinkiisa. Ilaahayow, qofkii diintan gargaara, u gargaar, una hiilli, qofkii diintan ka doortay dan adduunna, ilaahayow haddad kheyr ku ogtahay soo hanuuni, haddad shar ku ogtahayna ilaahayow fadeeexee, oo dadka uu lunshay tusi ceebtiisa Wallahul Mustacaan calaa ma tasifuun. Nur

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World How Somalia's legendary 'Mad Mullah' prefigured the rise of Osama bin Laden—and the 'forever war' between Islam and the West. By Jeffrey Bartholet | NEWSWEEK Published Oct 1, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Oct 12, 2009 At Dul Madoba, which means Black Hill in Somali, a jihadist known to his enemies as the Mad Mullah enjoyed a great victory in 1913. It is a place and a moment of legend in these parts, but the site remains as it was, a wilderness of thorn bushes and termite mounds. No heroic memorial marks the spot. No restored ruin, no sturdy plinth holding up a statue. The place is venerated in other ways. Every Somali with an education knows what happened here, back when the area was a protectorate ruled by British authorities. Some have memorized verses of a classic Somali poem written by the mullah. The gruesome ode is addressed to Richard Corfield, a British political officer who commanded troops on this dusty edge of the empire. The mullah instructs Corfield, who was slain in battle, on what he should tell God's helpers on his way to hell. "Say: 'In fury they fell upon us.'/Report how savagely their swords tore you." The mullah urges Corfield to explain how he pleaded for mercy, and how his eyes "stiffened" with horror as spear butts hit his mouth, silencing his "soft words." "Say: 'When pain racked me everywhere/Men lay sleepless at my shrieks.' " Hyenas eat Corfield's flesh, and crows pluck at his veins and tendons. The poem ends with a demand that Corfield tell God's servants that the mullah's militants "are like the advancing thunderbolts of a storm, rumbling and roaring." They rumbled and roared for two full decades. The British launched five military expeditions in the Horn of Africa to capture or kill Muhammad Abdille Hassan, and never succeeded (though they came close). British officers had superior firepower, including the first self-loading machine gun, the Maxim. But the charismatic mullah knew his people and knew the land: he hid in caves, and crossed deserts by drinking water from the bellies of dead camels. "I warn you of this," he wrote in one of many messages to his British foes. "I wish to fight with you. I like war, but you do not." The sentiment would be echoed almost a century later, in Osama bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war against the Americans: "These [Muslim] youths love death as you love life." History doesn't really repeat itself, but it can feed on itself, particularly in this part of the world. Sagas of past jihads become inspirations for new wars, new vengeance, until the continuum of violence can seem interminable. In the Malakand region of northwest Pakistan, where the Taliban today has been challenging state power, jihadists fought the British at the end of the 19th century. In Waziristan, a favored Qaeda hideout, the Faqir of Ipi waged jihad against the British in the 1930s and '40s. Among the first to take on the British in Africa was Muhammad Ahmad, the self-styled "Mahdi," or redeemer, whose forces killed and beheaded Gen. Charles George Gordon at Khartoum. But no tale more closely tracks today's headlines, and shows the uneven progress of the last century, than that of Muhammad Abdille Hassan. His story sheds light on what is now called the "forever war," the ongoing battle of wills and ideologies between governments of the West and Islamic extremists. There's no simple lesson here, no easy formula to bend history in a new direction. It's clear, even to many Somalis, that the mullah was brutal and despotic, and that his most searing legacy is a land of hunger and ruin. But he's also admired—for his audacity, his fierce eloquence, his stubborn defiance in the face of a superior power. Among Somalis, the mullah's sins are often forgiven because he was fighting an occupier, a foreign power that was in his land imposing foreign values. It is a sentiment that is shared today by those Muslims who give support to militants and terrorists, and one the West would do well to better understand. The Rise of the Mullah Muhammad Abdille Hassan was slightly over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and intense eyes. Somalis called him Sayyid, or "Master." (They still do.) He got much of his religious training in what is now Saudi Arabia, where he studied a fundamentalist brand of Islam related to the Wahhabi teachings that have inspired Al Qaeda. Stories abound about how he came to be called the Mad Mullah. According to one popular version, when he returned to the Somali port of Berbera in 1895, a British officer demanded customs duty. The Sayyid brusquely asked why he should be paying a foreigner to enter his own country. Other Somalis asked the Brit to pay the man no mind—he was just a crazy mullah. The name stuck. Many Somalis would come to think him mad in another sense—that he was touched by God. "He was very charismatic," says historian Aw Jama Omer Issa, who is 85 years old and interviewed many of the Sayyid's followers before they died off. "Whenever you came to him, he would overwhelm you. You would lose your senses…To whomever he hated, he was very cruel. To those he liked, he was very kind." His forces wore distinctive white turbans and called themselves Dervishes. The first British officer to hunt the mullah and attempt to crush his insurgency was Lt. Col. Eric Swayne, a dashing fellow who had previously been on safari to Somaliland, hunting for elephant and rhino, kudu and buffalo. He was dispatched from India, and brought with him an enterprising Somali who had once worked as a bootblack polishing British footwear. Musa Farah would serve one British overlord after another. He would gain power, wealth, and influence beyond anything he could have imagined, including a sword of honor from King Edward VII. Swayne's orders were to accept nothing short of unconditional surrender. For intelligence he relied on Dervish prisoners, who sometimes gave him false information. "We were in extremely dense bush, so I decided to move on very slowly, hoping to find a clearing, which was confidently reported by prisoners," Swayne wrote in one after-action report. But the bush only became thicker. Soon the Dervishes were advancing from all sides. Men and beasts fell all around, as great shouts of "Allah! Allah!" rang out. Somali "friendlies" panicked and fell back. Pack animals stampeded—"a thousand camels with water tins and ammunition boxes jammed against each other…scattering their loads everywhere." The British faced an enemy "who offered no target for attack, no city, no fort, no land…in short, there was no tangible military objective," wrote Douglas Jardine, who served in the Somaliland Protectorate from 1916 to 1921 and later wrote a history of the conflict. One defeat was so humiliating that some British soldiers imagined they had seen a "white man" among the Dervishes—how else could these "natives" be inflicting so much pain? At times, the British coordinated with forces from Christian Ethiopia in an attempt to trap the mullah. The Dervishes were able to avoid capture by crossing the border into Italy's colonial territory to the south. A Mouthful of Spit Somali jihadists engage in a similar type of war today. The Qaeda-connected group Al-Shabab, based in the area that was once colonized by Italy, targets Somali land to the north. On Oct. 29 of last year, six suicide bombers hit the Ethiopian trade mission, a United Nations office, and the presidential headquarters in Hargeisa, killing at least 25 people. A few of the plotters were later captured and are being held at a 19th-century prison in Berbera, along with others convicted of terrorist attacks. When I visited the Berbera prison recently, the warden told me the militants wouldn't see visitors. The guards didn't want trouble. "These men are serving life sentences and have nothing to lose," said one. "They don't give a damn." Finally the warden agreed to let a Somali colleague and me walk past the barred cell, which housed all 11 of the men. It was part of a decrepit free-standing building that stood in the center of a dirt compound. We could see figures in the shadows behind the bars. I asked from a distance if anyone spoke Arabic. One bearded man emerged and said with a smile (in Arabic), "Accept God's word, and you'll be safe." Another prisoner, older and larger, told him to shut up, then shouted in our direction: "Get lost, dog," and blew a mouthful of spit. Our guards hurried us away. My Somali interpreter said later that the spitting prisoner was known as Indho Cade, or "White Eyes," and was serving life for shooting an Italian aid worker in the head. The Islamist radicals see parallels between their struggle and the war waged by the Sayyid. Osama bin Laden's "enemies may call him a terrorist," one top Shabab militant told a NEWSWEEK reporter in 2006, defending the Qaeda leader. It is "something that exists in the world"—a form of infidel propaganda—"to name someone a terrorist, [just] as the British colonialists called the Somali hero Muhammad Abdille Hassan the Mad Mullah." The militants have sometimes used the mullah's words as a rallying cry. During the American intervention in Mogadishu in the early 1990s, pamphlets appeared in the city with a copy of the Sayyid's poem to Richard Corfield. "Say: 'My eyes stiffened as I watched with horror;/The mercy I implored was not granted.' " It's impossible to gauge the impact the poem had on the thinking of Somali fighters. What is known is that sometime later, militants dragged the nearly naked bodies of American soldiers through the streets, images that were captured on camera and beamed back to the United States. In an age before television, the Internet, and streaming video, the mullah used poetry as a propaganda tool, both to gain sympathy and to terrify his foes. Today poetry is also written and recited by bin Laden and just about every other Qaeda leader with a following. The poems proliferate on jihadi Web sites. The Final Campaign As the mullah gained strength and power, some British politicians argued for a more aggressive stance—a "surge," in today's parlance. Others thought the whole enterprise was a waste of re-sources. Among the latter was Winston Churchill, who briefly visited Somali-land in 1907 when he was undersecretary of state for the colonies. Churchill had already engaged other "mad mullahs." As a young man, he served as a military correspondent in the North-West Frontier province of what is now Pakistan, where he battled jihadists and wrote about it in his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Then he fought the followers of the Mahdi at Omdurman, in Sudan. He disparaged Islam. "Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities…but the influence of [this] religion paralyses the social developement [sic] of those who follow it," he wrote in The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan. "No stronger retrograde force exists in the world." (In the same passage, he also noted that the "civilization of modern Europe" had been able to survive largely because Christianity "is sheltered in the strong arms of science.") After seeing the Somaliland port of Berbera, Churchill wrote a tough-minded report. "The policy of making small forts, in the heart of wild countries…is nearly always to be condemned," he wrote. Britain should withdraw from the interior and defend only the port of Berbera. After much debate, London ordered a policy of "coastal concentration." Officers in Somaliland could further arm the "friendlies," but were not to engage the mullah themselves. Chaos ensued, as clans battled each other for ascendancy and loot. Tens of thousands of Somalis were killed. This was the dilemma that Corfield faced in 1913. The son of a church rector, he had a moralistic streak. But he'd also served in the Boer War and was "made of stuff that does not thrive in offices," wrote biographer H. F. Prevost Battersby. When the Dervishes began marauding against friendly clans, Corfield rashly defied orders and went in pursuit. A Dervish soldier shot him dead 25 minutes after the battle at Dul Madoba began. Some of the mullah's fighters later took Corfield's severed arm as a war trophy to present to their master. "It was a great morale booster for the Dervishes, no doubt about it," says the Somali-born Rutgers historian Said Samatar. "Corfield was a symbol—the British colonial man. In a sense it was a blow against colonialism." To some in Britain, Corfield was a fool who damaged national prestige by disobeying orders. To others, he was a man of principle—he was "the straightest, whitest, most honorable man I have ever met," said one colleague, displaying the casual racism of the time. The prevailing view was that Corfield's death had occurred, in part, because the British had encouraged the mullah by withdrawing to the coast and seeming reluctant to fight. It "had been proved once more that 'there is nothing so warlike as inactivity,' " wrote Jardine. The decisive turn in the conflict came only years later. In 1920 a decision was taken to send warplanes—one of the early uses of air power to put down an insurgency. Churchill, by now the minister of war and air, had become convinced that air power could do what ground forces had never been able to accomplish. He was instrumental in getting backing for the mission. The Z Unit arrived in Somaliland disguised as geologists, and assembled the de Havilland 9A planes on site. By this time, the mullah had grown tired of running around the bush and had built many stone forts. On Jan. 21, 1920, he awoke at his fort in Medishe expecting nothing out of the ordinary. He was sitting on a balcony with his uncle, other Somalis, and a Turkish adviser. According to Jardine's account, Somali aides suggested the spectral objects coming out of the sky might be the chariots of God coming to escort the Sayyid to heaven. But five minutes after a first pass, the pilots returned and dropped bombs. "This first raid almost finished the war, as it was afterwards learned that a bomb dropped on Medishe Fort killed one of the mullah's amirs on whom he was leaning at the time, and the mullah's own clothing was singed," wrote Flight Lt. F. A. Skoulding, who took part in the raid. For two weeks the planes provided air support to ground forces—including some organized by the mullah's Somali nemesis, Musa Farah. But the mullah, hiding in caves and outwitting his pursuers, again managed to escape. The British made a peace offering; the mullah responded by listing conditions of his own, including a payment of gold coins, diamonds, cash, pearls, feathers of 900 ostriches, two pieces of ivory, and books, all of which he said had been taken from him. Somali allies of the British chased him farther into the bush, where he aimed to rebuild his forces once more. But the mullah succumbed to flu later that year. With his death, his Dervish movement died out. Jardine didn't gloat. "Intensely as the Somalis feared and loathed the man whose followers had looted their stock, robbed them of their all, raped their wives, and murdered their children, they could not but admire and respect one who, being the embodiment of their idea of Freedom and Liberty, never admitted allegiance to any man, Moslem or Infidel," he wrote. Up the Black Hill In the mullah's old battlegrounds, the tensions of the past are alive and the divisions are complex. Ever since the overthrow of the Somali government in the early 1990s, southern Somalia has been a Mad Max landscape of warlords, terrorists, and pirates. (The mullah's statue once stood in Mogadishu, but looters long ago tore it down and sold it for scrap.) The northern territory of Somaliland, however, is relatively stable. The region, dominated by a clan that generally aligned itself with the British during the protectorate, declared its independence from the rest of Somalia in 1991. Somaliland has held free elections and maintained a very fragile stability, while the rest of Somalia has become a void on the political map. Somalilanders are pleading for diplomatic recognition—as an autonomous region if not a full-fledged state—so the area can attract foreign investment and be a part of the world. As it is, So-ma-li-land's public schools lack books and other supplies, and the number of private madrassas is growing. Young people with no opportunities smuggle themselves across deserts to Libya, hoping to board a creaky vessel to Europe, or they jump aboard a dhow to Yemen. Others join Al-Shabab. "The whole nation is a big prison," says Abdillahi Duale, Somaliland's foreign minister. "We are nurturing an infant democracy under trying circumstances in a tough neighborhood…and all we're getting is a slap on the back." Many Somalis, not surprisingly, are ambivalent about the mullah. Rashid Abdi, who follows current wars and abuses in the region for the International Crisis Group, recalls learning the Sayyid's poetry as a child, and can still recite some of his verses by heart. He's also aware that the mullah was a warlord who committed abuses very similar to those that Abdi chronicles today. "There is nobody who can claim to be a Somali historian who can whitewash the atrocities of Muhammad Abdille Hassan," Abdi told me on a phone call from Nairobi, Kenya, where he's stationed. "He wanted to unify the Somalis, and if he had to break a few clans to do that, he would. In the evening he might craft a poem about his dying horse, and the same day he might have burned down whole villages, killing hundreds of people. It's the nature and the tragedy of how Somalis have existed all through the years and centuries." Hadraawi, a renowned Somali poet who goes by a single name, has mixed feelings about the Sayyid. "He was a power maniac…a dictator," he says. Still, Hadraawi admires the man for his unequaled talent as a Somali poet and the leadership he showed in the struggle against colonial powers. "He was the light I was following in my youth—my guide," says Hadraawi, who was a teenager during the heady days of Somali in-de-pend-ence in 1960. "It was later on that I realized his mistakes." Hadraawi still rejects the name Mad Mullah—mostly, he suggests, because it's a simplistic caricature. Hadraawi is my companion on a trek to the Black Hill. The journey from the capital, Hargeisa, is long, but not as difficult as it was in Corfield's time. To get there, a foreigner is required to fill out an "escort-authorizatio n form" for the "Special Protection Unit" of the police and hire two armed guards for $20 a day. The area is much safer than the chaotic mess to the south, or the pirate-infested coastline of Puntland to the east. But ever since terrorists killed the Italian aid worker and two British teachers in 2003, the government has required foreigners to travel with armed guards. Hadraawi, who has spent time in London, has found a way to honor Hassan without admiring all that he was. Rather than dwelling on his more violent and divisive poems, he has focused more recently on the mullah's astonishing knowledge of the natural world. "The poems I like are not political," he says. "He writes about trees and stars, the rivers and rains and seasons…He'll tell you about the camel, and he'll capture the innermost nature of the camel." When Hadraawi and I trek up the Black Hill, we know there is no victory monument to the Sayyid there. But we've heard of another memorial, a marker for Richard Corfield. One source has suggested that it's a pillar three meters high; another believes it's made of white stone. Perhaps it has some writing on it. Nobody really knows: it's out there in the bush. At the tiny village of Dul Madoba, we pick up a guide who thinks he can find the place. Then we travel on a road more populated by goats than by vehicles, until we turn off the tarmac between thorn bushes and drive a short distance till we can go no farther. With guards in tow, we get out and hike. We pass termite mounds that stand like giant sentries. A neon-yellow grasshopper flits by, and a wild hare dodges among some brush. Up the Black Hill we march. As the sun is near to setting, we come to a giant pile of large brown rocks. It's a burial place, and the guide insists this is Corfield's tomb, but his tone doesn't inspire confidence. The rock pile looks more like a tomb from the Cushitic period, before the advent of Islam. We scout around a bit more, but the monument can't be found. Soon we spy another giant pile of rocks on another small ridge. It seems there are several tombs up here of uncertain origin. But none of these are likely for Corfield. Nor are they Dervish graves. The Sayyid's soldiers, anxious to make off with their lives and their loot, left their dead as they fell on the field. They believed the souls of their Dervish brothers were already enjoying the pleasures of paradise. Verses from the poem "The Death of Richard Corfield" come from a translation by B. W. Andrzejewski and I. M. Lewis.

The Secret Government By Christopher Hayes It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered. September 19, 2009 "The Nation" -- Though these words echo his famous endorsement of working "the dark side" in order to triumph in the "war on terror," they were not, in fact, written by Dick Cheney. They come from the Doolittle Report, which was commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954 to craft an intelligence strategy for winning the cold war. From a strategic perspective, the threat posed by global communism, headquartered in a massive, nuclear-armed superpower with almost 6 million men under arms, and Al Qaeda, a networked, globally distributed group of thousands of nonstate actors, could not be more different. But the national security state's understanding of each as an existential threat was, and continues to be, nearly identical. The enemy is ingenious, relentless and unencumbered by the procedural and moral niceties that hamstring the bureaucrats of a liberal democracy. Victory--indeed, survival--requires us to become more like them. And so: the CIA contracted a Mafia boss to murder Fidel Castro, sent biotoxins to the Republic of Congo with orders to poison Patrice Lumumba and tested LSD on unsuspecting citizens (one of whom jumped out of a window to his death). It fomented coups and bloodshed against democratically elected governments, while the National Security Agency, in coordination with the major telegram companies, read every single telegram coming in or going out of the country for three decades. The FBI infiltrated peaceful antiwar groups, breaking up marriages of activists with forged evidence of infidelity, while surveilling civil rights leaders with an assortment of bugs and break-ins. It even attempted to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide, shipping him tapes of him midcoitus with a mistress and a note that said, "There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." We know all this (and much more) thanks to the work of the Church Committee. Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church in 1975-76, the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities labored for sixteen months to produce a 5,000-page report that is a canonical history of the secret government. Over the past three decades the Church Committee has faded into relative obscurity. (I was somewhat surprised to discover how few people my age had heard of it.) But in the wake of further disclosures of crimes and abuses committed by the Bush administration and the escalating war of words between the CIA and Congress over just how much Congress knew about (and approved) these activities, the specter of the committee has begun to haunt Capitol Hill. Mostly, the Church Committee is invoked by conservatives as a cautionary tale, a case of liberal overreach that handicapped the nation's intelligence operations for decades. Dick Cheney bemoaned the fact that his time as President Ford's chief of staff was "the low point" of presidential authority, thanks to a feckless Congress "all too often swayed by the public opinion of the moment." But a growing chorus of voices, some of whom served on the original committee and some of whom currently occupy oversight positions in Congress, have begun to refer to the Church Committee as a model for the kind of sustained inquiry needed today. Congressman Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, has served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence since 2003. When I met him recently, his office had a table full of books and papers about intelligence oversight and the Church Committee's legacy. "The intelligence community has not undergone comprehensive examination since then," he said, "and it needs it." In a recent interview with the Washington Independent, former Senator Gary Hart, who served on the Church Committee, said there are "sufficient parallels" between the abuses of the cold war and those revealed in the past few years to "warrant a kind of sweeping investigation." Senators Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold have expressed support for a commission of inquiry. Even former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who previously criticized the post-Church intelligence community's risk-averse ways, is on board. "In a democracy with Congressional oversight...when you've had this period where there appears to have been excesses, [where] there appears to have been illegality," he told me, "you need a comprehensive checkup." The original Church Committee ushered in an era of reforms that we've come to take for granted: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts and executive orders banning assassinations. But it's hard to survey the legal and moral wreckage of the "war on terror" and conclude that those reforms have stood the test of time. When the country faced another "implacable" enemy, the reforms of the Church Committee were subverted, circumvented, rolled back and outpaced. To take just the most recent examples, press reports indicate that the CIA may have been training agents to conduct assassinations of Al Qaeda leaders during the first six months of the Obama administration, before either CIA director Leon Panetta or Congress was notified. What's more, according to reports in the New York Times and this magazine, the CIA outsourced parts of an assassination program to the private security firm Blackwater. As this article goes to press, Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed a special prosecutor, John Durham, to determine if a criminal investigation should go forward against CIA agents and contractors for torturing detainees. Durham's narrowly defined inquiry targets fewer than a dozen cases and falls far short of the "sweeping investigation" called for by Hart, Clarke and others. Once again, it seems a comprehensive accounting is long overdue. On December 22, 1974, the New York Times published an explosive front-page story by Seymour Hersh. Drawn from leaked portions of a 704-page internal CIA review of covert activities, known within the agency as "the family jewels," the article detailed the activities of a massive domestic spying program called Operation Chaos. "Huge CIA Operation Reported Against Antiwar Forces and Other Dissidents During the Nixon Years," read the headline. The article created an uproar. In the wake of Watergate and the revelations of Nixon's recklessly lawless executive branch, the public was primed to think the worst. Church, a liberal, saw an opportunity to ferret out abuses, rein in an out-of-control intelligence apparatus and give himself a prime platform from which to run for president. He advocated for a special committee to investigate the activities of the various intelligence agencies. Senate Republicans objected, and the White House sought to cut off momentum by establishing its own commission of inquiry, chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. But the press didn't let up. Hersh published more startling revelations, and CBS's Daniel Schorr began airing reports of the CIA's involvement in international assassinations. For a nation that had suffered the traumatic deaths of JFK, RFK and MLK in the past dozen years, this was the last straw. "Murder," playwright Lillian Hellman wrote in a New York Times op-ed. "We didn't think of ourselves that way once upon a time." On January 27, 1975, the Senate voted to create the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. (The committee also had a House counterpart, chaired by Otis Pike.) Each of its eleven members, six Democrats and five Republicans, appointed a staff liaison. The committee was given broad latitude, subpoena power and, crucially, a staff of 150. "We were in a huge auditorium in the new Senate office building," recalls Barbara Banoff, who joined the staff of the committee as a young attorney from New York. "They were just little cubicles with office dividers; if somebody was yelling at one place in the auditorium, everyone else could hear them." The staff was impressive. Chief counsel Frederick "Fritz" A.O. Schwarz was a top-flight litigator at a white-shoe New York firm. Other positions were filled by career intelligence officers, attorneys and academics. "I thought the committee was outstanding," says Loch Johnson, who served as Church's special assistant on the committee and now edits the journal Intelligence and National Security. "I was kind of amazed by that.... Usually in committees you get a hodgepodge.... Look at the résumés of the people: a lot of great attorneys and social scientists with well-regarded credentials." Immediately, Schwarz says, it became apparent that the magnitude of the task before them was overwhelming. "We had to pick a few subjects and look at the subjects in real depth because if we didn't do that...there were so many things that were coming in as tips that we could never get any of them well." The committee broke its staff up into task forces, each focusing on a discrete area, such as the CIA, assassinations and the FBI's domestic spying. Sensing the particularly acute outrage over revelations of the CIA's assassination plots, the committee worked hard to produce an interim report on the matter, which it released on November 20, 1975. It contained many of the more lurid examples of CIA high jinks--including plans to kill Castro with poisoned cigars--that would come to define the agency's image for an entire generation of Americans. As the staff dug deeper, they came to realize that something was very rotten indeed at the heart of the national security state. "I think we were all shocked at the extent of the abuses of power by these agencies," says Johnson. "We had, of course, read Sy Hersh's piece. Cointelpro--that was not a part of Sy Hersh's article, and that was simply shocking. Not only did it involve domestic surveillance but domestic covert action. There were a number of things that were really eye-opening." The committee's investigations had a radicalizing effect on even the top staffers like Schwarz and minority counsel Curtis Smothers. "As they were reading our reports," says Banoff, "we'd hear from Fritz, who had just read some draft report on some particularly outrageous misdeed: 'Goddamn it!' And he'd pound the desk. And then from Curtis: 'Those *******s!' Pound the desk. It was like a counterpuntal hymn." Contrary to right-wing caricature, the committee was not staffed with crusading liberals. Indeed, almost every former staff member I interviewed made a point of emphasizing that the staff was not particularly ideological and operated without fear or favor. "The best thing they did," says Banoff, was "they didn't have separate majority and minority staff. I never got asked what party I belonged to, at all. That wasn't what Fritz was looking for. The staffs were integrated; we all worked together. We really did. We didn't have any obstructionism from a senator or a senator's designee." Bill Bader, a former CIA analyst and naval intelligence officer chosen to run the committee's CIA task force, doesn't quite agree. "John Tower and Barry Goldwater [Republican senators on the committee] didn't think there should be anything at all," says Bader. "That was their whole view of the whole thing, and they made Church and [fellow committee member Walter] Mondale's life kind of miserable." That said, at the staff level Bader says his relationships inside the CIA helped a great deal. "But most of the analytical world was very happy for me to have that role because they knew me, because they knew I was fair, serious and I didn't have an ax to grind." Particularly crucial was the reluctant compliance of CIA director William Colby. Colby's predecessor, Richard Helms, was of the old school: blatantly contemptuous of oversight of any kind. According to Bader, Helms felt that "this investigation was traitorous, pure and simple; you don't do things like that." Colby, on the other hand, was committed to reforming the agency and, some say, privately feared that if he fought Congress, there was a possibility it would try to get rid of the agency altogether. Colby's attitude proved crucial to the committee's success. Though endowed with subpoena power, it had no enforcement capability to compel the Ford administration to turn over relevant documents, and at first the administration stonewalled. But the Church Committee benefited greatly from playing good cop to the House Pike Committee's bad cop, which quickly became embroiled in an escalating series of showdowns over testimony and disclosure, which Henry Kissinger also tried to stonewall. The Church Committee emerged as a kind of middle path--the sober, responsible investigators the administration could work with. "One of the reasons that the Senate committee got along well [with the White House]," says staff member Richard Betts, now a professor of political science at Columbia University, "is because [White House officials] were really pissed off at the Pike Committee, which they considered partisan and more flaky." Committee investigators ultimately read through thousands of previously unreleased files. Without this access, the Church Committee couldn't have exposed what it did. Which prompts the question: were Congress to undertake a similar inquiry today, would the White House cooperate? So far, the White House's record on disclosure has been disappointing. With the notable and admirable exception of its decision to release the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel's (OLC) memos authorizing torture, the Obama administration has largely continued to fight against disclosure of everything from photos of detainee abuse to even the most basic facts about the US detention center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. It has invoked the state secrets privilege in federal court to keep hidden details about the Bush administration's wiretapping program and what exactly happened to detainees at Guantánamo. (Full disclosure: my wife works in the White House counsel's office.) In these and other cases, however, the White House is fighting outside groups like the ACLU, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which it can try to stonewall in the courts with relatively little press attention. In the case of Congressional subpoenas, it would be impossible to replicate that strategy without provoking a serious political outcry. Indeed, the partisan incentives in such a scenario may work in favor of disclosure. As unlikely as it may seem, Republicans on such a committee might find themselves zealously pursuing more disclosure. When the White House released the notorious OLC torture memos, Dick Cheney responded with an uncharacteristic push for more disclosure, arguing that releasing other documents would show the effectiveness of torture in foiling terror plots. There was a somewhat similar dynamic in effect with the Church Committee, one that helped create momentum for greater levels of transparency. Since the committee began in the wake of Nixon's resignation and revelations about his deceptions, abuses and sociopathic pursuit of grudges, Church and many Democrats had every reason to believe they would be chiefly unmasking the full depths of Nixon's perfidy. Quickly, however, it became clear that Nixon was a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. Kennedy and Johnson had, with J. Edgar Hoover, put in place many of the illegal policies and programs. Secret documents obtained by the committee even revealed that the sainted FDR had ordered IRS audits of his political enemies. Republicans on the committee, then, had as much incentive to dig up the truth as did their Democratic counterparts. As historian Kathy Olmsted argues in her book Challenging the Secret Government, Church was never quite able to part with this conception of good Democrats/bad Republicans. Confronted with misdeeds under Kennedy and Johnson, he chose to view the CIA as a rogue agency, as opposed to one executing the president's wishes. This characterization became the fulcrum of debate within the committee. At one point Church referred to the CIA as a "rogue elephant," causing a media firestorm. But the final committee report shows that to the degree the agency and other parts of the secret government were operating with limited control from the White House, it was by design. Walter Mondale came around to the view that the problem wasn't the agencies themselves but the accretion of secret executive power: "the grant of powers to the CIA and to these other agencies," he said during a committee hearing, "is, above all, a grant of power to the president." A contemporary Church Committee would do well to follow Mondale's approach and not Church's. It must comprehensively evaluate the secret government, its activities and its relationship to Congress stretching back through several decades of Democratic and Republican administrations. Such a broad scope would insulate the committee from charges that it was simply pursuing a partisan vendetta against a discredited Republican administration, but it is also necessary to understand the systemic problems and necessary reforms. Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit and author of several books sharply critical of Bush's management of the "war on terror," says he would be "happy" to testify before such a committee to explain the rendition program he designed and supervised under Clinton. That program allowed the United States to capture wanted terrorists and send them back to other countries to face prosecution and, in some cases, likely torture and mistreatment. It was this program that would come to serve as the foundation for the Bush policy of "extraordinary rendition," which amounted to the extralegal disappearing of suspected terrorists around the world. We don't know much about what other secret programs Clinton and other former presidents implemented, but it's possible that under sustained scrutiny the sharp division between the Bush administration and its predecessors will begin to blur. The Church Committee's final report was released on April 26, 1976, in six books. Its recommendations laid the groundwork for a series of reforms that more or less constitute the current architecture of intelligence oversight. Before the Church Committee, there was no stand-alone intelligence committee overseeing the executive. Whatever communication there was between the two branches of government was decidedly one-way. "[CIA director] Allen Dulles would come up himself to the Hill," Bill Bader told me, "not to a committee room. And he would sit down with [lawmakers] out in the Congressional corridors and whisper things into their ears and say, Can't tell anyone about them. And then he would go back up to the CIA." In 1976 the Senate created the Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House followed suit with its own Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence a year later. Also in 1976 President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, which flatly stated, "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." Two years later, Congress passed and President Carter signed FISA, which provided clear procedures for covert action, surveillance and oversight. The law created the special FISA court, which grants warrants for wiretapping and surveillance of anyone on American soil as well as Americans abroad. The Church Committee's revelations also had a profound effect on the bureaucratic culture of the CIA, NSA and FBI. At all three agencies, internal legal controls were put in place requiring layers of attorneys to sign off on any possibly questionable activities. But for all these needed reforms, it's impossible to look at the past eight years and conclude they were sufficient. If cold war presidents were surreptitious and/or cavalier about the lawlessness of their actions, the Bush administration perfected a kind of perverse legalism, using sympathetic lawyers to decree legal that which was manifestly illegal. It was an ingeniously devious approach. By relying on John Yoo, a loyal ideologue inside the OLC, Cheney et al. were able to perform an end run around the extensive legal checks and restraints created precisely as a response to the Church Committee's findings. Indeed, the reason the infamous OLC memos are so garishly specific is that CIA lawyers, still operating with a memory of the Church Committee, were insistent on obtaining explicit sign-off for every action and technique that they (quite rightly) believed to be of dubious legality. Similarly, Congressional oversight proved no match for a determined executive. Many critics from across the ideological spectrum, from Clarke to Scheuer, note that this is at least partly because Congress often would rather not know what is going on behind the curtain. But the controversy over just what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about the CIA's use of torture, and when she knew it, underscores how dysfunctional the notification system has become. Created as part of the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, the so-called Gang of Eight system allows a president, under emergency circumstances, to restrict briefings on covert activities to the leader of each party in both houses and the top member of each party of the House and Senate intelligence committees. What was intended as a limited briefing to be given only temporarily during crises has emerged, instead, as the standard. Clarke explained its shortcomings to me this way: "Essentially what happens, you're a member of the Gang of Eight. You get a phone call: 'We have to come and brief you.' They ask you to go to the vault. They brief you. You can't take notes, you can't have your staff there and you can't tell anybody." In addition, each member is briefed separately and individually, so they can't even discuss the briefing and ask questions in a group setting. "That's oversight?" Clarke asks. "That's a pretense at oversight. That's a box check. The law required us to do that, and we did this." That "box check" allowed the Bush administration to claim that Democrats in Congress signed off on many of the most obviously illegal programs, from warrantless wiretapping to torture. Democrats can counter that they were barred by law from acting on whatever they knew. In other words, both sides can claim they fulfilled their legal duties. "One of the things that would be interesting for a modern version of the Church Committee," says Robert Borosage, who worked at the Center for National Security Studies to help publicize the original committee's findings, "was that they'd be forced to confront the fact that a lot of the reforms passed after the first one have failed. So the question becomes, What do we do now?" While many of the legal and institutional reforms ushered in by the Church Committee have been degraded and evaded, I believe it would be a mistake to argue that the committee failed. Its most enduring legacy is the political and cultural understanding of the relationship between secrecy and abuse; it narrated a moral fable about absolute power corrupting absolutely. Public debates over intelligence are qualitatively different from other policy discussions. In a debate over whether, say, the economic stimulus has been effective, there is a presumption that all participants are working from a common set of data--GDP growth, unemployment, government spending, etc.--but with different interpretations and emphases. Such is not the case when the issue is the effectiveness of intelligence programs or the scope of covert activities. Those debates are conducted on fundamentally unequal footing. Critics may charge that torture is counterproductive and produces bad intelligence, but defenders of the secret government can wave away such concerns by saying, more or less, You don't know what we know. What the Church Committee did was to eliminate this inequality by wrenching an entire segment of the state into the light of day. It created a universally accepted set of facts, a canonical public record that turned the secret conversations of the powerful and initiated into the material for a broad debate. It brought the world of intelligence into the public sphere, the place where self-governance ought to take place. Selling a contemporary inquiry modeled on the Church Committee won't be easy. Since the mid-1970s the right wing has crafted a deeply distorted but potent fable about its impact and legacy. The tale goes like this: the inquisition pursued by the Church Committee subjected intelligence agencies to scorn and burned the agents and analysts. "In the years that followed, it was extremely difficult to get FBI agents to volunteer for counterterrorism assignments," argued two ex-FBI officials in a March op-ed in the Washington Times. "The risk-avoidance culture and excessive restrictions on gathering intelligence that resulted from the Church hearings and other congressional attacks on the intelligence community were major factors in our failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.... [A] new Church Committee-like public inquiry might easily have a similar chilling effect on our ability to recruit good people for future counterterrorism activities." It's not hard to find lots of people within the intelligence community who will give you more or less the same line. Richard Clarke has little patience for it. "What bothers me," he says, "is the CIA's tendency whenever they're criticized to say, If you do your job, if you do oversight seriously--which Congress almost never does--then we'll pout. Some of us, many, will not just pout; we'll retire early. Our morale will be hurt." And if morale is hurt and the agencies are gutted, they argue, the country will be exposed to attack. In other words: "If you, Congress, do oversight, then we'll all die. Can you imagine FEMA or the agricultural department saying we're all going to retire if you conduct oversight?" Clarke asks in disbelief. The principle of oversight aside, the right-wing story about the committee ruining intelligence capabilities for a generation posits a golden age of über-competent intelligence-gatheri ng that simply never existed. The activities described in the committee report, more often than not, have a kind of Keystone Kops flavor to them. "From its beginning," says Clarke, "when [the CIA] does covert action as opposed to clandestine activity...it regularly ****s up. I remember sitting with [Defense Secretary] Bob Gates when he was deputy national security adviser, and he said, I don't think CIA should do covert action; CIA ought to be an intelligence collection and analysis [agency]." At the peak of its cold war powers, the American security apparatus was able to attain all kinds of information about the Russians (secret information that KGB files have subsequently shown the Russians knew we knew) but was unable to learn the most basic facts about "the enemy." We failed to anticipate the invasion of Afghanistan and routinely overestimated the strength of the Soviet economy. Indeed, the failure to understand and foresee the internal pressures on the Soviet Union may be the greatest failure of US cold war intelligence, one that had absolutely nothing to do with the Church Committee and its aftermath. In his insightful 1998 book Secrecy, neocon patron saint Daniel Patrick Moynihan argues that by cordoning off discrete pieces of information, secrecy actually impedes intelligence-gatheri ng rather than facilitates it. "Secrecy is for losers," Moynihan concludes. "For people who don't know how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late.... It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations." It's hard to imagine that the White House would be enthusiastic about such an undertaking. Obama has insisted, routinely, unwaveringly, that he is "more interested in looking forward than...in looking backwards." At one level this seems a shocking abrogation of the executive branch's chief constitutional responsibility, to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." But presumably the thinking goes something like this: the president has a limited amount of political capital, and he can spend it on major, once-in-a-generation reforms of the American social contract--universal healthcare and cap and trade--or he can spend it pursuing justice for the perpetrators of the previous administration's crimes. As morally worthy as the latter might be, it won't get anyone healthcare or stop the planet from melting; it won't provide a new foundation for progressive governance. But as self-consciously pragmatic as this posture is, it's proving wildly impractical to implement. The reason is that the White House has limited control over when and what is revealed about crimes and misdeeds of the Bush years, and every time a new revelation hits the papers, such as the recent disclosures of Blackwater's involvement with the CIA assassination unit and interrogators' use of "mock executions," it dominates the news cycle. Since the White House itself has defined such revelations as a "distraction," every time they are in the news it is, by its own definition, distracted. The benefit of a new Church Committee would be that it would corral these "distractions" into a coherent undertaking, initiated in Congress, within a fixed time period. It would also provide a framework for systematic investigation of the policies rather than selective prosecutions of those at the bottom of the hierarchy who carried them out. "Because try as Obama [may] to avoid investigations and looking backwards, he's being dragged into it over and over again," says Clarke. "It would be better for him if Congress just said, You know, Barack, we're just gonna provide these wise men, give them subpoena authority. It's not on you, Barack. There was this excess and that excess and a pattern of excesses, and you know, it clears the air.... Now you have the impression that there's a bunch of stinking turds under the rug." Perhaps the greatest argument for such an undertaking is the simplest: citizens have a right to know what crimes have been committed in their names. Many of the relevant and damning facts have already been conclusively established. We know we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, a borderline mentally ill member of the Al Qaeda entourage, eighty-three times in one month. We know the NSA spied on an untold number of Americans without warrants. We know that the CIA sent captured detainees to the custody of regimes with abysmal human rights records, with the explicit understanding they would be tortured. The Church Committee came at a time when the public was in the midst of a wrenching (and necessary) loss of innocence. But in our age, secret government crimes and plots are almost a cliché. Polling shows trust in government has returned roughly to its mid-'70s nadir. The danger now isn't naïveté but cynicism--that we just come to accept that the government will commit crimes in our name under the cover of secrecy and that such activities are more or less business as usual, about which nothing can be done. But something can be done. Something must be done. And Congress should do it. About Christopher Hayes Christopher Hayes is The Nation's Washington, DC Editor. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation,The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The Guardian and The Chicago Reader. From 2005 to 2006, Hayes was a Schumann Center Writing Fellow at In These Times. He is currently a fellow at the New America Foundation.

Chubacka I second your resolution, preparing for Ramadan ahead of time can mean the difference between a loss and a great benefit from the Holy Month of Ramadan, and it only takes few minutes to focus and plan. Ms DD Yours can be a net gain if you indeed regret the loss of making full use of the nightly worship in Ramadan, its that thought of sorrow that can draw us closer to Allah, while a religiuos narcissism can make our account with Allah overdrawn. Haneefa sis Wa aleykumu Salaam sis, I have remembered my Nomad audience in my prayers, and you are included yaa ukhti, illness in the first ten days can mean extra Rahma if you show Sabr. You are right sis, we need to to switch off our Dunyaa appetite and take time off from our work, at least last ten nights of Ramadan, if not the whole month. Amin, Allaha naga wada aqbalo, soonka, iyo qiyaamka. Nur

Norfsky brother In Ramadan, our Salaf and the Fiqh imams ( Shafici and others) were reported to have made it a month dedicated for the reading Quraan extensively, when not in prayer's. But its the taraweeh and Qiyaam prayers that were meant for the slow digest, reflection, pondering etc. In short, akhi, labadaba waa la iska rabaa oo isma diiddana. Baarakallahu feek Nur

Awakener bro. You write: First the war in Somalia now is about power struggle brother. It has nothing to do with Sufis and Salafis. True, its about Allah's power represented by those who are seeking to establish Allah's law and the Sovereignty of Somalia against power hungry Criminal Warlords embedded parliament supported by foreign interventionist hegemony masquerading as a legitimate international body. You write: Neither has it do with the tenants of Islam and, in my opinion, the continuation of this war is un-Islamic in every definition of the word. Generalizations are not accurate, you can say safely that the Sufi card is invented by the warlords to keep Somalia as Ethiopia's slave, and stop the liberation movements trying to revive Somalia's Sovereignty and Establishment of Sharia. The Sufis are innocent in my opinion and have no dog in this fight, true Sufis never supported Ethiopia against their brethren, this is a first. You write: 3) If you are not considering the others as equals with equal rights the others will do the same to you. Consequently unequality causes a feeling of unjustice and invites organised and open rebellion. Brother, Allah SWT says, " A fa najcalul mujrimiina kal muslimiina, maa lakum kayfa taxkumuun Allah also says [i[ wa laa tahinuu wa laa taxzanuu wa antumul aclawna in kuntum muminiin[/i] You write: 4) If you use force to subjugate a weaker part an external stronger power/person comes, takes the power from you and subjugates you. The consequences becomes lost dreams and shattered egoes. As a genuine Sufi, you must know that dreams are only lost if they are for this world, but for those who are seeking happiness in the next life, they realize their dreams in times of test and adversity as our times. Besides, resorting to seek help from Satan does not constitute sanity, those who seek Ethiopia's blessing in killing their fellows Somalis wholesale are national traitors and war criminals, and I pray that Allah does not raise you in the day of judgement in their side, because everyone will be raised in the day of judgement with those who supported him and he supported them ( Walliyy) You write: Therefore if the islamic revivalists have been experiencing problems lately it has mainly to do with them. They just need to look deep into their actions and come up with methods that bring constructive results for all- not only for themselves. Problems experienced in Allah's cause are not problems, they are challenges, a problem is when one finds himself in the company Ethiopia and their ilk as brothers and is paid to kill his people for cash money as a cold blooded mercenary. I pray for you and your family guidance in this life and Jannah in the next Amin and Ramadan kariim ( I will not be able to respond again for a while, on the road inshAllah) Nur

Jazaakellahu Kheiran Honesita A thought provoking story, and very useful Ramadan Month advice. Let me just add one very important reminder. Ramadan is the month in which the Holy Quraan was revealed, the importance of reading Quran, understanding, teaching and sharing can not be overstated. I remind myself first, and the crowd here at SOL Islam page, to make sure that we make Quraan the most important activity in our daily schedule in this Month, all of the advice stated above can only be achieved when we live with the Quraan, simply, its that important. If you read One Juzz a day, you can complete the Quraan in Ramadan ( given that you have started on first day) - Silver If You read One Juzz after every prayer, you can complete the Quraan 4 times in Ramadan.- Gold If you read Two Juzz after after every prayer, you can complete the Quraan 8 times in Ramadan. - Platinum If you read Three Juzz after after every prayer, you can complete the Quraan 12 times in Ramadan - Diamond Nur Wa fee thaalika, Fal Yatanaafsil Mutanaafiuun

SOS brother InshaAllah I will force myself to complete the second part in this blessed month, the month of Quraan and Dhiker. Where are you brother? are you back home at Kurtunwaarrey or Garasbaalley? Nur

Jazaakallahu Kheiran Bilaal, May Allah accept the efforts of Sheikh Mustaffe, His lectures are very beneficial, and his method of delivery of ideas is awesome. Nur

Oz Girl I don't know if you came across this thread, it may address some of your issues of doubt. Nur

How about traffic violations? Nur

Raamsade Here is a summary of your logic as I understand: 1. You ask what happens to those who don't worship, yet, a definition of what constitutes WORSHIP is not needed, since we all have a rough idea of what it means ( Good enough for government work) because a proper definition as per a common dictionary is muddying the water, making the argument less clear, thus, a rough idea of the concept is better than a well defined meaning in a discussion. 2. An answer of "why Worship"?, can come either from me or from God. When I give an answer to this question, you don't accept, because you need God's answer, yet, for you, God does not Exist, so, you require an answer from someone you believe He does not exist. 3. God does not exist, because, if he did, he will not need to be worshiped, he needs to be worshiped, because he punishes those who do not worship Him, hence He does not exist. Furthermore, neither has God created you, because someone who has a need can not create you, with the exception of your parents who have a need and you believe that they have created you, with the occasional help of the Universe which is not intelligent, but intelligible ( meaning: : capable of being understood or comprehended, although it continues to baffle scientists who, the more they try to understand, the more baffled they feel about it's complexity ) , which boils down to two possibilities: that you are either created by your parents who are intelligent, or the Universe which is comprehensible but NOT in itself intelligent, since an intelligent Universe that creates complex beings like yourself, indirectly implies a God. 4. If you have lived during the Biblical times, and have seen the miracles of Moses and Jesus, you would have believed in God, but, all of the scriptures are fiction, nothing in them is true, its all human concocted stories and not true hence, there is No God. Please reconfirm these inferences before I can respond to your logic. Nur

The Somali resistance's major sin in the eyes of the sponsors of the long civil war is their redefinition of the Somali conflict from the forced clan warlordism started by Ethiopian agents back in 1991 like a forest fire, to the new redefined conflict between those who are seeking a genuine Islamic governance based on Sharia. Today, the warlords have resorted to create a pseudo-Islamic warlord faction named Ahlul Sunna, a name which is very far from their undeclared agenda of subservience to Ethiopia. Nur

Nomads Waxaan mar kale is xasuusineynaa, in aan isu duceyno, waalidkeenna, qaraabadeenna, waddankeenna, iyo inta xaqa ku taagan oo u halgamaya sidii ay kalimadda Allah ay us saremarto. Nur