Killing “Everything That Moves” The Johnny Procedure By Uri Avnery July 20, 2009 "ICH" -- - LIKE THE ghost of Hamlet’s father, the evil spirit of the Gaza War refuses to leave us in peace. This week it came back to disturb the tranquility of the chiefs of the state and the army. “Breaking the Silence”, a group of courageous former combat soldiers, published a report comprising the testimonies of 30 Gaza War fighters. A hard-hitting report about actions that may be considered war crimes. The generals went automatically into denial mode. Why don’t the soldiers disclose their identity, they asked innocently. Why do they obscure their faces in the video testimonies? Why do they hide their names and units? How can we be sure that they are not actors reading a text prepared for them by the enemies of Israel? How do we know that this organization is not manipulated by foreigners, who finance their actions? And anyhow, how do we know that they are not lying out of spite? One can answer with a Hebrew adage: “It has the feel of Truth”. Anyone who has ever been a combat soldier in war, whatever war, recognizes at once the truth in these reports. Each of them has met a soldier who is not ready to return home without an X on his gun showing that he killed at least one enemy. (One such person appears in my book “The Other Side of the Coin”, which was written 60 years ago and published in English last year as the second part of “1948: A soldier’s Tale”.) We have been there. The testimonies about the use of phosphorus, about massive bombardment of buildings, about “the neighbor procedure” (using civilians as human shields), about killing “everything that moves”, about the use of all methods to avoid casualties on our side – all these corroborate earlier testimonies about the Gaza War, there can be no reasonable doubt about their authenticity. I learned from the report that the “neighbor procedure” is now called “Johnny procedure”, God knows why Johnny and not Ahmad. The height of hypocrisy is reached by the generals with their demand that the soldiers come forward and lodge their complaints with their commanders, so that the army can investigate them through the proper channels. First of all, we have already seen the farce of the army investigating itself. Second, and this is the main point: only a person intent on becoming a martyr would do so. A solder in a combat unit is a part of a tightly knit group whose highest principle is loyalty to comrades and whose commandment is “Thou shalt not squeal!” If he discloses questionable acts he has witnessed, he will be considered a traitor and ostracized. His life will become hell. He knows that all his superiors, from squad leader right up to division commander, will persecute him. This call to go through “official channels” is a vile method of the generals – members of the General Staff, Army Spokesmen, Army Lawyers – to divert the discussion from the accusations themselves to the identity of the witnesses. No less despicable are the tin soldiers called “military correspondents”, who collaborate with them. BUT BEFORE accusing the soldiers who committed the acts described in the testimonies, one has to ask whether the decision to start the war did not itself lead inevitably to the crimes. Professor Assa Kasher, the father of the army “Code of Ethics” and one of the most ardent supporters of the Gaza War, asserted in an essay on this subject that a state has the right to go to war only in self defense, and only if the war constitutes “a last resort”. “All alternative courses” to attain the rightful aim “must have been exhausted”. The official cause of the war was the launching from the Gaza Strip of rockets against Southern Israeli towns and villages. It goes without saying that it is the duty of the state to defend its citizens against missiles. But had all the means to achieve this aim without war really been exhausted? Kasher answers with a resounding “yes”. His key argument is that “there is no justification for demanding that Israel negotiate directly with a terrorist organization that does not recognize it and denies its very right to exist.” This does not pass the test of logic. The aim of the negotiations was not supposed to be the recognition by Hamas of the State of Israel and its right to exist (who needs this anyway?) but getting them to stop launching missiles at Israeli citizens. In such negotiations, the other side would understandably have demanded the lifting of the blockade against the population of the Gaza Strip and the opening of the supply passages. It is reasonable to assume that it was possible to reach – with Egyptian help - an agreement that would also have included the exchange of prisoners. No only was this course not exhausted – it was not even tried. The Israeli government has consistently refused to negotiate with a “terrorist organization” and even with the Palestinian Unity Government that was in existence for some time and in which Hamas was represented. Therefore, the decision to start the War on Gaza, with a civilian population of a million and a half, was unjustified even according to the criteria of Kasher himself. “All the alternative courses” had not been exhausted, or even attempted. But we all know that, apart from the official reason, there was also an unofficial one: to topple the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. In the course of the war, official spokesmen stated that there was a need to attach a “price tag” – in other words, to cause death and destruction not in order to hurt the “terrorists” themselves (which would have been almost impossible) but to turn the life of the civilian population into hell, so they would rise up and overthrow Hamas. The immorality of this strategy is matched by its inefficacy: our own experience has taught us that such methods only serve to harden the resolve of the population and unite them around their courageous leadership. WAS IT at all possible to conduct this war without committing war crimes? When a government decides to hurl its regular armed forces at a guerrilla organization, which by its very nature fights from within the civilian population, it is perfectly clear that terrible suffering will be caused to that population. The argument that the harm caused to the population, and the killing of over a thousand men, women and children was inevitable should, by itself, have led to the conclusion that the decision to start this was a terrible act right from the beginning. The Defense Establishment takes the easy way out. The ministers and generals simply assert that they do not believe the Palestinian and international reports about the death and destruction, stating that they are, again in Kasher’s words, “mistaken and false”. Just to be sure, they decided to boycott the UN commission that is currently investigating the war, headed by a respected South African judge who is both a Jew and a Zionist. Assa Kasher is adopting a similar attitude when he says: “Somebody who does not know all the details of an action cannot assess it in a serious, professional and responsible way, and therefore should not do so, in spite of all emotional or political temptations.” He demands that we wait until the Israeli army completes its investigations, before we even discuss the matter. Really? Every organization that investigates itself lacks credibility, not to mention a hierarchical body like the army. Moreover, the army does not – and cannot – obtain testimony from the main eye-witnesses: the inhabitants of Gaza. An investigation based only on the testimony of the perpetrators, but not of the victims, is ridiculous. Now even the testimonies of the soldiers of Breaking the Silence are discounted, because they cannot disclose their identity. IN A war between a mighty army, equipped with the most sophisticated weaponry in the world, and a guerrilla organization, some basic ethical questions arise. How should the soldiers behave when faced with a structure in which there are not only enemy fighters, which they are “allowed” to hit, but also unarmed civilians, which they are “forbidden” to hit? Kasher cites several such situations. For example: a building in which there are both “terrorists” and non-fighters. Should it be hit by aircraft or artillery fire that will kill everybody, or should soldiers be sent in who will risk their lives and kill only the fighters? His answer: there is no justification for the risking of the lives of our soldiers in order to save the lives of enemy civilians. An aerial or artillery attack must be preferred. That does not answer the question about the use of the Air Force to destroy hundreds of houses far enough from our soldiers that there was no danger emanating from them, nor about the killing of scores of recruits of the Palestinian civilian police on parade, nor about the killing of UN personnel in food supply convoys. Nor about the illegal use of white phosphorus against civilians, as described in the soldiers’ testimonies gathered by Breaking the Silence, and the use of depleted uranium and other carcinogenic substances. The entire country experienced on live TV how a shell hit the apartment of a doctor and wiped out almost all of his family. According to the testimony of Palestinian civilians and international observers, many such incidents took place. The Israeli army took great pride in its method of warning the inhabitants by means of leaflets, phone calls and such, so as to induce them to flee. But everyone – and first of all the warners themselves - knew that the civilians had nowhere secure to escape to and that there were no clear and safe escape routes. Indeed, many civilians were shot while trying to flee. WE SHALL not evade the hardest moral question of all: is it permissible to risk the lives of our soldiers in order to save the old people, women and children of the “enemy”? The answer of Assa Kasher, the ideologue of the “Most Moral Army in the World”, is unequivocal: it is absolutely forbidden to risk the lives of the soldiers. The most telling sentence in his entire essay is: “Therefore…the state must give preference to the lives of its soldiers above the lives of the (unarmed) neighbors of a terrorist.” These words should be read twice and three times, in order to grasp their full implications. What is actually being said here is: if necessary to avoid casualties among our soldiers, it is better to kill enemy civilians without any limit. In retrospect, one can only be glad that the British soldiers, who fought against the Irgun and the Stern Group, did not have an ethical guide like Kasher. This is the principle that guided the Israeli army in the Gaza War, and, as far as I know, this is a new doctrine: in order to avoid the loss of one single soldier of ours, it is permissible to kill 10, 100 and even 1000 enemy civilians. War without casualties on our side. The numerical result bears witness: more than 1000 people killed in Gaza, a third or two thirds of them (depending on who you ask) civilians, women and children, as against 6 (six) Israeli soldiers killed by enemy fire. (Four more were killed by “friendly” fire.) Kasher states explicitly that it is justified to kill a Palestinian child who is in the company of a hundred “terrorists”, because the “terrorists” might kill children in Sderot. But in reality, it was a case of killing a hundred children who were in the company of one “terrorist”. If we strip this doctrine of all ornaments, what remains is a simple principle: the state must protect the lives of its soldiers at any price, without any limit or law. A war of zero casualties. That leads necessarily to a tactic of killing every person and destroying every building that could represent a danger to the soldiers, creating an empty space in front of the advancing troops. Only one conclusion can be drawn from this: from now on, any Israeli decision to start a war in a built-up area is a war crime, and the soldiers who rise up against this crime should be honored. May they be blessed. Uri Avnery is a journalist, peace activist, former member of the Knesset, and leader of Gush Shalom

Naden sis Where in Kurtunwaarrey are you? I am waiting for your response since last October? Nur

Fabregas bro. In the Holy Quraan, when Prophet Moses may peace be upon him led the oppressed Children of Prophet Yacquub ( Jacob), most of them were against him, they preferred slavery to freedom. Today, some of our people display the same qualities, they blame their liberators for their problems, these are the people the verses are addressing. When the Islamic uprising against the criminal warlords chased the warlords, everyone was jubilant, but today, as the tide began to change, they forgot everything, they blame the resistance for intransigence. Nur

Assassinations Anyone? CIA Claims of Cancelled Campaign are Hogwash By Eric Margolis July 20, 2009 "Toronto Sun" --- CIA director Leon Panetta just told Congress he cancelled a secret operation to assassinate al-Qaida leaders. The CIA campaign, authorized in 2001, had not yet become operational, claimed Panetta. I respect Panetta, but his claim is humbug. The U.S. has been trying to kill al-Qaida personnel (real and imagined) since the Clinton administration. These efforts continue under President Barack Obama. Claims by Congress it was never informed are hogwash. The CIA and Pentagon have been in the assassination business since the early 1950s, using American hit teams or third parties. For example, a CIA-organized attempt to assassinate Lebanon's leading Shia cleric, Muhammad Fadlallah, using a truck bomb, failed, but killed 83 civilians and wounded 240. In 1975, I was approached to join the Church Committee of the U.S. Congress investigating CIA's attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, Congo's Patrice Lumumba, Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem, and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. Add to America's hit list Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan's Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Indonesia's Sukarno, Chile's Marxist leaders and, very likely, Yasser Arafat. Libya's Moammar Khadaffy led me by the hand through the ruins of his private quarters, showing me where a 2,000-pound U.S. bomb hit his bedroom, killing his infant daughter. Most Pakistanis believe, rightly or wrongly, the U.S. played a role in the assassination of President Zia ul-Haq. To quote Josef Stalin's favourite saying, "No man. No problem." Assassination was outlawed in the U.S. in 1976, but that did not stop attempts by its last three administrations to emulate Israel's Mossad in the "targeted killing" of enemies. The George W. Bush administration, and now the Obama White House, sidestepped American law by saying the U.S. was at war, and thus legally killing "enemy combatants." But Congress never declared war. CHENEY'S SQUAD Washington is buzzing about a secret death squad run by Dick Cheney when he was vice-president and his protege, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. This gung-ho general led the Pentagon's super secret Special Operations Command, which has become a major rival to the CIA in the business of "wet affairs" (as the KGB used to call assassinations) and covert raids. Democrats are all over Cheney on the death squad issue, as are some Republicans -- in order to shield Bush. But the orders likely came from Bush, who bears ultimate responsibility. Americans are now being deluged by sordid scandals from the Bush years about torture, kidnapping, brutal secret prisons, brainwashing, mass surveillance of American's phones, e-mail, and banking. In 2001, as this column previously reported, U.S. Special Forces oversaw the murder at Dasht-e-Leili, Afghanistan, of thousands of captured Taliban fighters by Uzbek forces of the Communist warlord, Rashid Dostum. CIA was paying Dostum, a notorious war criminal from the 1980s, millions to fight Taliban. Dostum is poised to become vice-president of the U.S.-installed government of President Hamid Karzai. Bush hushed up this major war crime. America is hardly alone in trying to rub out enemies or those who thwart its designs. Britain's MI-6 and France's SDECE were notorious for sending out assassins. The late chief of SDECE told me how he had been ordered by then-president Francois Mitterrand to kill Libya's Khadaffy. Israel's hit teams are feared around the globe. DISGRACE History shows that state-directed murder is more often than not counterproductive and inevitably runs out of control, disgracing nations and organizations that practise it. But U.S. assassins are still at work. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. drones are killing tribesmen almost daily. Over 90% are civilians. Americans have a curious notion that killing people from the air is not murder or even a crime, but somehow clean. U.S. Predator attacks are illegal and violate U.S. and international law. Pakistan's government, against which no war has been declared, is not even asked permission or warned of the attacks. Dropping 2,000-pound bombs on apartment buildings in Gaza or Predator raids on Pakistan's tribal territory are as much murder as exploding car bombs or suicide bombers. © 2009 Toronto Sun

Bush's Hit Teams By Robert Parry July 16, 2009 Consortiumnews" -- July 15, 2009 -- Despite the new controversy over whether a global CIA “hit team” ever went operational, there has been public evidence for years that the Bush administration approved “rules of engagement” that permitted executions and targeted killings of suspected insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. In effect, President George W. Bush transformed elite units of the U.S. military – including Special Forces and highly trained sniper teams – into “death squads” with a license to kill unarmed targets on suspicion that they might be a threat to American occupying forces. In the recent public debate over whether Bush also authorized the CIA to assemble teams of assassins to roam the world hunting al-Qaeda suspects, the U.S. news media has cited the distinction between such face-to-face executions and the CIA's use of remote-controlled Predator drones firing missiles to kill groups of suspected insurgents in or near the war zones. However, the evidence is that the Bush administration also permitted U.S. military units to engage in close-quarter executions when encountering alleged insurgents, even if they were unarmed and presented no immediate threat to American or allied troops. This reality surfaced in 2007 with the attempted prosecutions of several U.S. soldiers whose defense attorneys cited “rules of engagement” that permitted killing suspected insurgents. One case involved Army sniper Jorge G. Sandoval Jr., who was acquitted by a U.S. military court in Baghdad on Sept. 28, 2007, in the murders of two unarmed Iraqi men – one on April 27, 2007, and the other on May 11, 2007 – because the jury accepted defense arguments that the killings were within the approved rules. (Sandoval was convicted of lesser charges relating to planting evidence on a victim to obscure the facts of the homicide.) The Sandoval case also revealed a classified program in which the Pentagon’s Asymmetric Warfare Group encouraged U.S. military snipers in Iraq to drop “bait” – such as electrical cords and ammunition – and then shoot Iraqis who picked up the items, according to evidence in the Sandoval case. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2007] Afghan Execution Another case of authorized murder of an insurgent suspect surfaced at a military court hearing at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in mid-September 2007. Two U.S. Special Forces soldiers took part in the execution of an Afghani who was suspected of leading an insurgent group. Though the Afghani, identified as Nawab Buntangyar, responded to questions and offered no resistance when encountered on Oct. 13, 2006, he was shot dead by Master Sgt. Troy Anderson on orders from his superior officer, Capt. Dave Staffel. According to evidence at the Fort Bragg proceedings, an earlier Army investigation had cleared the two soldiers because they had been operating under “rules of engagement” that empowered them to kill individuals who had been designated “enemy combatants,” even if the targets were unarmed and presented no visible threat. The troubling picture was that the U.S. chain of command, presumably up to President Bush, authorized loose “rules of engagement” that allowed targeted killings – as well as other objectionable tactics including arbitrary arrests and indefinite detentions, “enhanced interrogations” otherwise known as torture, kidnappings in third countries with “extraordinary renditions” to countries that torture, secret CIA prisons, and “reeducation camps” for younger detainees. Typical of Washington politics, however, the loudest arguments have been over whether the Bush administration adequately notified Congress of covert aspects of these operations, including the reported CIA-assassination plan which allegedly was ordered kept hidden from the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees by Vice President Dick Cheney. Some Republicans have said Democrats proved that they don’t have the toughness to defend U.S. national security by raising questions about the hit team, while pro-Democratic pundits note that the Bush administration apparently demonstrated its incompetence by failing to get the assassination program off the ground. In other words, the debate is centered on peripheral issues, not on the substance of extrajudicial murders. Similarly, Attorney General Eric Holder is said to be leaning toward appointing a special prosecutor to investigate some CIA personnel for torturing detainees, but only if they went beyond the parameters of torture that had been spelled out by Bush administration lawyers. In other words, senior government officials who sanctioned limited waterboarding and other torture techniques would not be held to account, only overzealous interrogators who went even further. A Sordid History Like torture, assassinations and the use of other lethal force against unarmed suspects and civilians violates a variety of laws and has a notorious history in irregular warfare, both regarding cross-border murders and violent repression of an indigenous resistance in which guerrillas and their political supporters blend in with the local population. And, at least inside and near the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush’s “global war on terror” appears to have recreated what was known during the Vietnam War as Operation Phoenix, a program that assassinated Vietcong cadre, including suspected communist backers. Through a classified Pentagon training program known as “Project X,” the lessons of Operation Phoenix from the 1960s were passed on to Third World armies, especially in Latin America, giving a green light to some of the “dirty wars” that swept the region, causing tens of thousands of political murders, widespread use of torture, and secret detentions. Bush’s alleged plan for global hit teams also has similarities to “Operation Condor” in which South American right-wing military regimes in the 1970s sent assassins on cross-border operations to eliminate “subversives.” Despite quiet support and encouragement for Latin American “death squads” through much of the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. government presented itself as the standard-bearer for human rights and criticized American adversaries that engaged in extrajudicial killings, torture and arbitrary detentions. That gap between American rhetoric and reality widened after 9/11 as Bush announced his “global war on terror,” while continuing to impress the American news media with pretty words about his commitment to human rights – as occurred in his address to the United Nations on Sept. 25, 2007. Under Bush’s double standards, he took the position that he could override both international law and the U.S. Constitution in deciding who would get basic human rights and who wouldn’t. He saw himself as the final judge of whether people he deemed “bad guys” should live or die, or possibly face indefinite imprisonment and torture. Yet, whatever Bush and other higher-ups approved as “rules of engagement,” the practice of murdering unarmed suspects – especially after they’ve been detained – violated the law of war and could have opened up the offending country’s chain of command to war-crimes charges. However, while such actions by leaders of, say, Serbia or Sudan would provoke demands for war-crimes tribunals, other rules apply when the offending nation is the United States. Given its “superpower” status, the United States and its senior leadership appear to be effectively beyond the reach of international law – and in the case of Bush, beyond domestic accountability. Downplaying a Slaughter By and large, the U.S. military also has failed to impose serious punishments on American troops implicated in extrajudicial killings and massacres, even high-profile ones like the killing of two dozen Iraqis in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005, after one Marine died from an improvised explosive device. According to published accounts of U.S. military investigations, the dead Marine’s comrades retaliated by pulling five men from a cab and shooting them, and clearing two homes where civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered. The Marines then tried to cover up the killings by claiming that the civilian deaths were caused by the original explosion or a subsequent firefight, according to investigations by the U.S. military and human rights groups. One of the accused Marines, Sgt. Frank Wuterich, gave his account of the Haditha killings in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” including an admission that his squad tossed a grenade into one of the residences without knowing who was inside. “Frank, help me understand,” asked interviewer Scott Pelley. “You’re in a residence, how do you crack a door open and roll a grenade into a room?” “At that point, you can’t hesitate to make a decision,” Wuterich answered. “Hesitation equals being killed, either yourself or your men.” “But when you roll a grenade in a room through the crack in the door, that’s not positive identification, that’s taking a chance on anything that could be behind that door,” Pelley said. “Well, that’s what we do. That’s how our training goes,” Wuterich said. Eight Marines were initially charged in the Haditha case, but six cases were dropped, one Marine was acquitted, and Wuterich’s case has been delayed by legal skirmishing. As in earlier cases, such as the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, courts martial have mostly focused on rank-and-file soldiers. The lack of high-level accountability appears to stem from the fact that the key instigators of both the illegal invasion of Iraq and the harsh tactics employed in the “global war on terror” were former President Bush, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials. President Barack Obama has made clear he doesn’t want Bush and his top aides punished. Yet, not only did Bush order an aggressive war – what World War II’s Nuremberg Tribunal called “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” – but Bush pumped U.S. troops full of false propaganda by linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks. Bush’s subliminal connections between the Iraq War and 9/11 continued years after U.S. intelligence dismissed any linkage. For instance, on June 18, 2005, more than two years into the Iraq War, Bush justified the invasion by telling the American people that “we went to war because we were attacked” on 9/11. Little wonder that a poll of 944 U.S. military personnel in Iraq – taken in January and February 2006 – found that 85 percent believed the U.S. mission in Iraq was mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.” Seventy-seven percent said a chief war goal was “to stop Saddam from protecting al-Qaeda in Iraq.” Bush’s rhetorical excesses had the predictable effect of turning loose a revenge-seeking and heavily armed U.S. military force on the Iraqi population. ‘Salvador Option’ By early 2005, with the Iraqi insurgency growing, an increasingly frustrated Bush administration also debated a “Salvador option” for Iraq, an apparent reference to the “death squad” operations that decimated the ranks of perceived leftists who were opposed to El Salvador’s right-wing military junta in the early 1980s. According to Newsweek magazine, President Bush was contemplating the adoption of that brutal “still-secret strategy” of the Reagan administration as a way to get a handle on the spiraling violence in Iraq. “Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy [in El Salvador] to have been a success – despite the deaths of innocent civilians,” Newsweek wrote. The magazine also noted that many of Bush’s advisers were leading figures in the Central American operations of the 1980s, such as Elliott Abrams, who became an architect of Middle East policy on the National Security Council. In the Iraqi-sniper case, Army sniper Sandoval admitted killing an Iraqi man near the town of Iskandariya on April 27, 2007, after a skirmish with insurgents. Sandoval testified that his team leader, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley, ordered him to kill a man cutting grass with a rusty scythe because he was suspected of being an insurgent posing as a farmer. The second killing occurred on May 11, 2007, when a man walked into a concealed location where Sandoval, Hensley and other snipers were hiding. After the Iraqi was detained, another sniper, Sgt. Evan Vela, was ordered to shoot the man in the head by Hensley and did so, according to Vela’s testimony at Sandoval’s court martial. Sandoval and Hensley were acquitted of murder charges because a military jury concluded that their actions were within the rules of engagement. (Like Sandoval, Hensley was convicted of lesser charges relating to planting evidence.) But Vela was convicted of killing an unarmed Iraqi civilian and planting evidence on the body, leading to a 10-year prison sentence. Regarding the Afghanistan case, Special Forces Capt. Staffel and Sgt. Anderson were leading a team of Afghan soldiers when an informant told them where a suspected insurgent leader was hiding. The U.S.-led contingent found a man believed to be Nawab Buntangyar walking outside his compound near the village of Hasan Kheyl. While the Americans kept their distance out of fear the suspect might be wearing a suicide vest, the Afghanis questioned the man about his name and the Americans checked his description against a list from the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan, known as “the kill-or-capture list.” Concluding that the man was insurgent leader Nawab Buntangyar, Staffel gave the order to shoot, and Anderson – from a distance of about 100 yards away – fired a bullet through the man’s head, killing him instantly. The soldiers viewed the killing as “a textbook example of a classified mission completed in accordance with the American rules of engagement,” the International Herald Tribune reported. “The men said such rules allowed them to kill Buntangyar, whom the American military had designated a terrorist cell leader, once they positively identified him.” Staffel’s civilian lawyer Mark Waple said the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command concluded that the shooting was “justifiable homicide,” but a two-star general in Afghanistan instigated a murder charge against the two men. That case, however, floundered over accusations that the charge was improperly filed. [iHT, Sept. 17, 2007] The U.S. news media has given the Fort Bragg case only minor coverage concentrating mostly on the legal sparring. The New York Times’ inside-the-paper, below-the-fold headline on Sept. 19, 2007, was “Green Beret Hearing Focuses on How Charges Came About.” The Washington Post did publish a front-page story on the “bait” aspect of the Sandoval case – when family members of U.S. soldiers implicated in the killings came forward with evidence of high-level encouragement of the snipers – but the U.S. news media treated the story mostly as a minor event and drew no larger implications. The greater significance of the cases is that they confirm the long-whispered allegations that the U.S. chain of command had approved standing orders giving the U.S. military broad discretion to kill suspected militants on sight. Whatever the full story about President Bush’s CIA hit team, the facts are already clear that his “global war on terror” had morphed into an international “dirty war” with Bush now having passed off command to President Obama. Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Into the Inferno Hollow Language and Hollow Democracies What can we do, now that democracy and the free market are one? By Arundhati Roy July 17, 2009 "New Statesman" --- While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By democracy I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are. So, is there life after democracy? Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia . . . is that what you would prefer?” Whether democracy should be the utopia that all “developing” societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy – too much representation, too little democracy – needs some structural adjustment. The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly – our nearsightedness? Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do) combined with our inability to see very far into the future makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend that my new book of essays, Listening to Grasshoppers, provides answers to these questions. It only demonstrates, in some detail, the fact that it looks as though the beacon could be failing and that democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would. All the essays were written as urgent, public interventions at critical moments in India – during the state-backed genocide of Muslims in Gujarat; just before the date set for the hanging of Mohammad Afzal, the accused in the 13 December 2001 parliament attack; during US President George Bush’s visit to India; during the mass uprising in Kashmir in the summer of 2008; and after the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks. Often they were not just responses to events, they were responses to the responses. Though many of them were written in anger, at moments when keeping quiet became harder than saying something, the essays do have a common thread. They’re not about unfortunate anomalies or aberrations in the democratic pro­cess. They’re about the consequences of and the corollaries to democracy and the ways in which it is practised in the world’s largest democracy. (Or the world’s largest “demon-crazy”, as a Kashmiri protester on the streets of Srinagar once put it. His placard said: “Democracy without Justice = Demon Crazy.”) In January 2008, on the first anniversary of the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, I gave a lecture in Istanbul. Dink was shot down on the street outside his office for daring to raise a subject that is forbidden in Turkey – the 1915 genocide of Armenians, in which more than one million people were killed. My lecture was about the history of genocide and genocide denial, and the old, almost organic relationship between “progress” and genocide. I have always been struck by the fact that the political party in Turkey that carried out the Armenian genocide was called the Committee for Union and Progress. Most of the essays in Listening to Grasshoppers are, in fact, about the contemporary correlation between union and progress, or, in today’s idiom, between nationalism and development – those unimpeachable twin towers of modern, free-market democracy. Both of these in their extreme form are, as we now know, encrypted with the potential of bringing about ultimate, apocalyptic destruction (nuclear war, climate change). Though the essays were written between 2002 and 2008, the invisible marker, the starting gun, is the year 1989, when in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan capitalism won its long jihad against Soviet communism. (Of course, the wheel’s in spin again. Could it be that those same mountains are now in the process of burying capitalism? It’s too early to tell.) Within months of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Indian government, once a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, performed a high-speed somersault and aligned itself with the United States, monarch of the new unipolar world. The rules of the game changed suddenly and completely. Millions of people who lived in remote villages and deep in the heart of untouched forests, some of whom had never heard of Berlin or the Soviet Union, could not have imagined how events that occurred in those faraway places would affect their lives. The process of their dispossession and displacement had already begun in the early 1950s, when India opted for the Soviet-style development model in which huge steel plants and thousands of large dams would occupy the “commanding heights” of the economy. The era of privatisation and structural adjustment accelerated that process at a mind-numbing speed. Today, words like “progress” and “development” have become interchangeable with economic “reforms”, deregulation and privatisation. “Freedom” has come to mean “choice”. It has less to do with the human spirit than it does with different brands of deodorant. “Market” no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The “market” is a de-territorialised space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling “futures”. “Justice” has come to mean “human rights” (and of those, as they say, “a few will do”). This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalise their detractors, deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and dismiss them as being “anti-progress”, “anti-development”, “anti-reform” and of course “anti-national” – negativists of the worst sort. Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, “Don’t you believe in progress?” To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs and whose homes are being bulldozed they say, “Do you have an alternative development model?” To those who believe that a government is duty-bound to provide people with basic education, health care and social security, they say, “You’re against the market.” And who except a cretin could be against a market? This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing. Two decades of this kind of “progress” in India have created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it – and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering – the massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines and Special Economic Zones. All of them promoted in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy. The battle for land lies at the heart of the “development” debate. Before he became India’s finance minister, P Chidambaram was Enron’s lawyer and member of the board of directors of Vedanta, a multinational mining corporation that is currently devastating the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa. Perhaps his career graph informed his world-view. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In an interview a year ago, he said that his vision was to get 85 per cent of India’s population to live in cities. Realising this “vision” would require social engineering on an unimaginable scale. It would mean inducing, or forcing, about 500 million people to migrate from the countryside into cities. That process is well under way and is quickly turning India into a police state in which people who refuse to surrender their land are being made to do so at gunpoint. Perhaps this is what makes it so easy for P Chidambaram to move so seamlessly from being finance minister to being home minister. The portfolios are separated only by an osmotic membrane. Underlying this nightmare masquerading as “vision” is the plan to free up vast tracts of land and all of India’s natural resources, leaving them ripe for corporate plunder. Already forests, mountains and water systems are being ravaged by marauding multinational corporations, backed by a state that has lost its moorings and is committing what can only be called “ecocide”. In eastern India, bauxite and iron ore mining is destroying whole eco­systems, turning fertile land into desert. In the Himalayas, hundreds of high dams are being planned, the consequences of which can only be catastrophic. In the plains, embankments built along rivers, ostensibly to control floods, have led to rising riverbeds, causing even more flooding, more waterlogging, more salinisation of agricultural land and the destruction of livelihoods of millions of people. Most of India’s holy rivers, including the Ganga and the Yamuna, have been turned into unholy drains that carry more sewage and industrial effluent than water. Hardly a single river runs its course and meets the ocean. Sustainable food crops, suitable to local soil conditions and microclimates, have been replaced by water-guzzling hybrid and genetically modified “cash” crops which, apart from being wholly dependent on the market, are also heavily dependent on chemical fertilisers, pesticides, canal irrigation and the indiscriminate mining of groundwater. As abused farmland, saturated with chemicals, gradually becomes exhausted and infertile, agricultural input costs rise, ensnaring small farmers in a debt trap. Over the past few years, more than 180,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide. While state granaries are bursting with food that eventually rots, starvation and malnutrition approaching the same levels as in sub-Saharan Africa stalk the land. It’s as though an ancient society, decaying under the weight of feudalism and caste, was churned in a great machine. The churning has ripped through the mesh of old inequalities, recalibrating some of them but reinforcing most. Now the old society has curdled and separated into a thin layer of thick cream – and a lot of water. The cream is India’s “market” of many million consumers (of cars, cellphones, com­puters, Valentine’s Day greeting cards), the envy of international business. The water is of little consequence. It can be sloshed around, stored in holding ponds, and eventually drained away. Or so they think, the men in suits. They didn’t bargain for the violent civil war that has broken out in India’s heartland: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal. As if to illustrate the connection between “union” and “progress”, in 1989, at exactly the same time that the Congress government was opening up India’s markets to international finance, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in the opposition, began its virulent campaign of Hindu nationalism (popularly known as “Hindutva”). In 1990, its leader, L K Advani, travelled across the country whipping up hatred against Muslims and demanding that the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque that stood on a disputed site in Ayodhya, be demolished and a Ram temple built in its place. In 1992 a mob, egged on by Advani, demolished the mosque. In early 1993, a mob rampaged through Mumbai attacking Muslims, killing almost 1,000 people. As revenge, a series of bomb blasts ripped through the city, killing about 250 people. Feeding off the communal frenzy it had generated, the BJP defeated the Congress in 1998 and came to power at the Centre. It’s not a coincidence that the rise of Hindutva corresponded with the historical moment when America substituted communism with Islam as its great enemy. The radical Islamist mujahedin – whom President Reagan once entertained in the White House and compared to America’s Founding Fathers – suddenly began to be called terrorists. The Indian government, once a staunch friend of the Palestinians, turned into Israel’s “natural ally”. Now India and Israel do joint military exercises, share intelligence and probably exchange notes on how best to administer occupied territories. By 1998, when the BJP took office, the “pro­gress” project of privatisation and liberalisation was about eight years old. Though it had campaigned vigorously against the economic reforms, saying they were a process of “looting through liberalisation”, once it came to power the BJP embraced the free market enthusiastically and threw its weight behind huge corporations like Enron. (In representative democracies, once they are elected, the people’s representatives are free to break their promises and change their minds.) Within weeks of taking office, the BJP conducted a series of thermonuclear tests. Though India had thrown its hat into the nuclear ring in 1975, politically, the 1998 nuclear tests were of a different order altogether. The orgy of triumphant nationalism with which the tests were greeted introduced a chilling new language of aggression and hatred into mainstream public discourse. None of what was being said was new, only that what was once considered unacceptable was suddenly being celebrated. Since then, Hindu communalism and nuclear nationalism, like corporate globalisation, have vaulted over the stated ideologies of political parties. The venom has been injected straight into our bloodstream. In February 2002, following the armed raid on a train coach in which 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were burned alive, the BJP government in Gujarat, led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, presided over a carefully planned genocide of Muslims in the state. The Islamophobia generated all over the world by the 11 September 2001 attacks put the wind in their sails. The machinery of the state of Gujarat stood by and watched while more than 2,000 people were massacred. Gujarat has always been a state rife with tension between Hindus and Muslims. There had been riots before. But this was not a riot. It was a genocidal massacre, and though the number of victims was insignificant compared to the horror of, say, Rwanda, Sudan or the Congo, the Gujarat carnage was designed as a public spectacle whose aims were unmistakable. It was a public warning to Muslim citizens from the government of the world’s favourite democracy. After the carnage, Narendra Modi pressed for early elections. He was returned to power with a decisive mandate from the people of Gujarat. Five years later he even repeated this success: he is now serving a third term as chief minister, widely appreciated by business houses for his faith in the free market, illustrating the organic relationship between “union” and “progress”. Or, if you like, between fascism and the free market. In January 2009, that relationship was sealed with a kiss at a public function. The CEOs of two of India’s biggest corporations, Ratan Tata (of the Tata Group) and Mukesh Ambani (of Reliance Industries), celebrated the development policies of Narendra Modi and warmly endorsed him as a future candidate for prime minister. Only two months ago, the nearly $2bn 2009 general election was concluded. That’s a lot more than the budget of the US elections. According to some media reports, the actual amount that was spent is closer to $10bn. Where, might one ask, does that kind of money come from? The Congress and its allies, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), have won a comfortable majority. Interestingly, more than 90 per cent of the independent candidates who stood for elections lost. Clearly, without sponsorship, it’s hard to win an election. And independent candidates cannot promise subsidised rice, free TVs and cash-for-votes, those demeaning acts of vulgar charity that elections have been reduced to. When you take a closer look at the calculus that underlies election results, words like “comfortable” and “majority” turn out to be deceptive, if not outright inaccurate. For instance, the actual share of votes polled by the UPA in these elections works out at only 10.3 per cent of the country’s population. It’s interesting how the cleverly layered mathematics of electoral democracy can turn a tiny minority into a thumping mandate. In the run-up to the polls, there was absolute consensus across party lines about the economic “reforms”. Several people have sarcastically suggested that the Congress and BJP form a coalition. In some states they already have. In Chhattisgarh, for example, the BJP runs the government and Congress politicians run the Salwa Judum, a vicious, government-backed “people’s” militia. The Judum and the government have formed a joint front against the Maoists in the forests, who are engaged in a brutal and often deadly armed struggle. Among other things, this has become a fight to the finish, against displacement and against land acquisition by corporations waiting to begin mining iron ore, tin and all the other wealth stashed below the forest floor. So, in Chhattisgarh, we have the remarkable spectacle of the two biggest political parties of India in an alliance against the Adivasis of Dantewara, India’s poorest, most vulnerable people. Already 644 villages have been emptied. Fifty thousand people have moved into Salwa Judum camps. Three hundred thousand are on the run, and are being called Maoist terrorists or sympathisers. The battle is raging, and the corporations are waiting. It is significant that India is one of the countries that blocked a European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes that may have been committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the Tamil Tigers. Governments in this part of the world have taken note of Israel’s Gaza blueprint as a good way of dealing with “terrorism”: keep the media out and close in for the kill. That way they don’t have to worry too much about who’s a “terrorist” and who isn’t. There may be a little flurry of international outrage, but it goes away pretty quickly. Things do not augur well for the forest-dwelling people of India. Reassured by this “constructive” collaboration, this consensus between political parties, few were more enthusiastic about the recent general elections than major corporate houses. They seem to have realised that a democratic mandate can legitimise their pillaging in a way that nothing else can. Several corporations ran extravagant advertising campaigns on TV – some featuring Bollywood film stars – urging people, young and old, rich and poor, to go out and vote. Shops and restaurants in Khan Market, Delhi’s most tony market, offered discounts to those whose index (voting) fingers were marked with indelible ink. Democracy suddenly became the cool new way to be. You know how it is: the Chinese do sport, so they had the Olympics; India does democracy, so we had an election. Both are heavily sponsored, TV-friendly spectator sports. Even the BBC commissioned the India Election Special – a coach on a train – that took journalists from all over the world on a sightseeing tour to witness the miracle of Indian elections. The train coach had a slogan painted on it: “Will India’s voters revive the World’s Fortunes?” BBC (Hindi) had a poster up in a café near my home. It featured a $100 bill (with Ben Franklin) morphing into a 500 rupee note (with Gandhi). It said: Kya India ka vote bachayega duniya ka note? (Will India’s votes rescue the world’s currency notes?) In these flagrant and unabashed ways, an electorate has been turned into a market, voters are seen as consumers, and democracy is being welded to the free market. Ergo: those who cannot consume do not matter. For better or for worse, the 2009 elections seem to have ensured that the “progress” project is up and running. However, it would be a serious mistake to believe that the “union” project has fallen by the wayside. As the 2009 election campaign unrolled, two things got saturation coverage in the media. One was the 100,000-rupee ($2,000) “people’s car”, the Tata Nano – the wagon for the volks – rolling out of Modi’s Gujarat. (The sops and subsidies Modi gave the Tatas had a lot to do with Ratan Tata’s warm endorsement of him.) The other is the hate speech of the BJP’s monstrous new debutant, Varun Gandhi (another descendant of the Nehru dynasty), who makes even Narendra Modi sound moderate and retiring. In a public speech Varun Gandhi called for Muslims to be forcibly sterilised. “This will be known as a Hindu bastion, no ***** Muslim dare raise his head here,” he said, using a derogatory word for someone who has been circumcised. “I don’t want a single Muslim vote.” Varun Gandhi won his election by a colossal margin. It makes you wonder – are “the people” always right? The BJP still remains by far the second largest political party, with a powerful national presence, the only real challenge to the Congress. It will certainly live to fight another day. The hoary institutions of Indian democracy – the judiciary, the police, the “free” press and, of course, elections – far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of union and progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colourful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus. Speaking of consensus, there’s the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir, the consensus in India is hardcore. It cuts across every section of the Establishment – including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia and even Bollywood. The war in the Kashmir Valley is almost 20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have “disappeared”, women have been raped and many thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir Valley, making it the most militarised zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that’s true. But does military domination mean victory? Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India’s 150 million Muslims who have been brutalised, humiliated and marginalised. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008. India’s temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun) have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers. Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40° Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the cold – from frostbite and sunburn. The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war, thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice-axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly. While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military stand-off than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They’re good people who believe in peace, free speech and human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the UN Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan . . . it’s a long list.) The glacial melt will cause severe floods in the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We’ll need more weapons. Who knows, that sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life – and the glaciers will melt even faster. Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives, and has worked as a film designer, actor, and screenplay writer in India. Her latest book, Listening to Grasshoppers: Fields Notes on Democracy, is a collection of recent essays. A tenth anniversary edition of her novel, The God of Small Things (Random House), for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, was recently released. She is also the author of numerous nonfiction titles, including An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.

Israel Will Implode. By Gilad Atzmon http://www.youtube.c om/watch?v=ljLEPjaF3 S0

Israel Trains US Assassination Squads in Iraq By Julian Borger in Washington December 09, 2009 "The Guardian" -- Israeli advisers are helping train US special forces in aggressive counter-insurgency operations in Iraq, including the use of assassination squads against guerrilla leaders, US intelligence and military sources said yesterday. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has sent urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the home of US special forces, and according to two sources, Israeli military "consultants" have also visited Iraq. US forces in Iraq's Sunni triangle have already begun to use tactics that echo Israeli operations in the occupied territories, sealing off centres of resistance with razor wire and razing buildings from where attacks have been launched against US troops. But the secret war in Iraq is about to get much tougher, in the hope of suppressing the Ba'athist-led insurgency ahead of next November's presidential elections. US special forces teams are already behind the lines inside Syria attempting to kill foreign jihadists before they cross the border, and a group focused on the "neutralisation" of guerrilla leaders is being set up, according to sources familiar with the operations. "This is basically an assassination programme. That is what is being conceptualized here. This is a hunter-killer team," said a former senior US intelligence official, who added that he feared the new tactics and enhanced cooperation with Israel would only inflame a volatile situation in the Middle East. "It is bonkers, insane. Here we are - we're already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world, and we've just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams." "They are being trained by Israelis in Fort Bragg," a well-informed intelligence source in Washington said. "Some Israelis went to Iraq as well, not to do training, but for providing consultations." The consultants' visit to Iraq was confirmed by another US source who was in contact with American officials there. The Pentagon did not return calls seeking comment, but a military planner, Brigadier General Michael Vane, mentioned the cooperation with Israel in a letter to Army magazine in July about the Iraq counter-insurgency campaign. "We recently travelled to Israel to glean lessons learned from their counterterrorist operations in urban areas," wrote General Vane, deputy chief of staff at the army's training and doctrine command. An Israeli official said the IDF regularly shared its experience in the West Bank and Gaza with the US armed forces, but said he could not comment about cooperation in Iraq. "When we do activities, the US military attaches in Tel Aviv are interested. I assume it's the same as the British. That's the way allies work. The special forces come to our people and say, do debrief on an operation we have done," the official said. "Does it affect Iraq? It's not in our interest or the American interest or in anyone's interest to go into that. It would just fit in with jihadist prejudices." Colonel Ralph Peters, a former army intelligence officer and a critic of Pentagon policy in Iraq, said yesterday there was nothing wrong with learning lessons wherever possible. "When we turn to anyone for insights, it doesn't mean we blindly accept it," Col Peters said. "But I think what you're seeing is a new realism. The American tendency is to try to win all the hearts and minds. In Iraq, there are just some hearts and minds you can't win. Within the bounds of human rights, if you do make an example of certain villages it gets the attention of the others, and attacks have gone down in the area." The new counter-insurgency unit made up of elite troops being put together in the Pentagon is called Task Force 121, New Yorker magazine reported in yesterday's edition. One of the planners behind the offensive is a highly controversial figure, whose role is likely to inflame Muslim opinion: Lieutenant General William "Jerry" Boykin. In October, there were calls for his resignation after he told a church congregation in Oregon that the US was at war with Satan, who "wants to destroy us as a Christian army". "He's been promoted a rank above his abilities," he said. "Some generals are pretty good on battlefield but are disastrous nearer the source of power." © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

The following articles shows parallels of the Western Strategy for Somalia which is to Clear the country of any resistances to its strategic plans, hold it by way of local , and then build the country to serve its long term interests. The following plan for Afghanistan may be a blue print for Somalia too. So many countries to invade, so little money left over to continue. Nur Afghanistan: Marines' Mission Doomed to Failure NAM Editor’s Note: Just two weeks into July, the month is already the deadliest for NATO troops in Afghanistan. The high casualty count is at least partially the result of Operation Khanjar, the largest U.S. Marine Corps ground offensive in years. But NAM contributor Sonali Kolhatkar writes that NATO's modus operandi are doomed to failure. By Sonali Kolhatkar July 17, 2009 "New America Media" -- The United States’ new offensive into Afghanistan’s troubled Helmand province provides a test case for achieving President Obama’s stated goal: “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” It is the first major push of its kind, relying on a massive ground presence of thousands of Marines rather than air strikes, which American strategists acknowledge have killed far too many civilians over the past two years. But while Operation Khanjar realizes Washington’s increased desire to divert more “resources” into Afghanistan, it is unclear what, if anything, can be accomplished by this kind of brute force. At the launch of the offensive, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal gave only the following explanation: that his intention is to “clear, hold and build” in Taliban strongholds like Helmand. But what exactly does “clear” mean? If it means to kill, the U.S. Marines will have to distinguish between Taliban and non-Taliban Afghans to avoid more civilian casualties. This is a near-impossible task. The Taliban do not wear a uniform or carry membership cards. They carry weapons, but so do Afghan civilians, who do so to protect their families. In an effort to lower the embarrassing count of civilians killed (often greater than the numbers killed by the Taliban), McChrystal has ordered troops to cut short any pursuit of Taliban fighters if civilians are at risk. The U.S. troops have to play cautious -- they have everything to lose: their own lives and the diminishing goodwill of the Afghan people. Unfortunately for the troops, Afghan civilian resentment, built up over the past several years, has not vaporized just because the U.S. military’s rules of engagement have officially changed. The Marines are facing a Taliban force bolstered by the survivors of U.S. bombs and the loved ones of those killed. The Taliban’s greatest advantage is their ability to move through a population increasingly sick of “death-by-occupation ,” leaving the U.S. troops with only two options: risk letting the Taliban escape, or kill the Taliban even if it means killing civilians in the process and violating the new rules. Both scenarios lead to a Taliban victory. Perhaps by “clear,” McChrystal means capture. But that raises more difficult questions: Where will they put the prisoners, and what sort of justice will be offered? Will the United States turn Bagram into a greater gulag than Guantanamo? Will they turn over those who survive their torture and interrogation to secret military tribunals? In releasing 90 percent of those imprisoned at Guantanamo without charge, the United States has already proved inept at distinguishing al Qaeda and Taliban members from ordinary civilians over the past eight years. Imprisoning and torturing innocent civilians has the same obvious effect as killing them: increased hostility and resentment toward the occupation. Perhaps by “clear,” McChrystal simply means pushing the Taliban out of the areas where they are operating into surrounding areas. Already there are reports that the Taliban have escaped the current offensive, simply retreating to the western and northern parts of the country and launching their own counter-operation: Iron Net, intended to trap the U.S. forces. They have killed dozens of troops and civilians through roadside and suicide bombs in the past week alone. In response, the United States has reportedly fallen back on the discredited strategy of air raids to kill dozens of people they claim are “militants,” but likely include civilians. If the current strategy does result, intentionally or not, in displacing the problem into new areas, presumably more Marines will have to be deployed to those areas to repeat the cat-and-mouse game, and push the Taliban up against borders that they cannot infiltrate. But Afghanistan is not a small country (it is comparable in size to Iraq) and by this logic, the United States is looking at a long-term blanket occupation of the country, something that ordinary Afghans have increasingly declared they do not want. A BBC-ABC News poll conducted prior to the current ground offensive revealed that less than 50 percent of Afghans have a favorable opinion of the United States, down from 68 percent in 2005. (The poll also revealed an even greater dislike of the Taliban, meaning that Afghans tolerate the U.S. military only because they have no other options. The likelihood of American success in Afghanistan is at best dim and, at worst, heading inevitably toward a lose-lose situation. Given the impossibility of surgically identifying and killing a moving and elusive target, there are only two possible outcomes: killing a lot of civilians, or pushing the insurgency to the rest of the country, or both. After the Iraq debacle, are Americans ready for yet another unpopular occupation, protracted war and thousands of U.S. casualties? Perhaps the name is apt: the United States' Operation Khanjar is named for an Arabic (not Afghan) dagger widely used in past centuries by fighters in the Gulf Arab region, in countries like Oman. But today, the Khanjar is largely a ceremonial weapon, a decorative objet d’art used to adorn walls but useless in a real fight. Like the Khanjar, the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, out-of-touch with reality, is more symbolic than practical. © 2009 New America Media

InshaAllah ukhti, I will soon share my insights about Surah Al Caadiyaat as well as the terms Mudkhala Sidqin wa Mukhraja Sidqin. Nur

Nomads A good measure of our faith is how much of what we know is reflected in our beliefs, and in turn, how much of our beliefs we translate to an actionable habit that stays with us forever until we meet Allah SWT. Early Dusk prayers, Fajr Prayer, among many other measurable performances, is such a good criteria of our devotion to Allah SWT. Devotion to Allah does not come easily. First: We need to KNOW Allah SWT very well, (To Know Allah SWT, is to Love Him) Second: We need to know what Allah values in people most. Third: We need to align our priorities with those Allah SWT told us in Quraan and through the teachings of His Messenger Muhammad SAWS, so that our daily to-do-list reflects the order of importance that Allah values in our actions both inwardly niyah and ikhlaas and outwardly actions. Our earthly day begins at Dusk. The day break is a special time in many ways, for me, its everything, if I miss my Fajr prayer in Jamaacah, it usually turns out to be a miserable day on all perspectives, spiritually, mentally, emotionally. Because, there is a lots of Barakah in getting up for fajr prayers, and if we miss the prayers in Jamaacah, we miss out on the following areas too: 1. We miss the equivalent hasanaat Credit of nightly Qiyaamul Leil prayers. 2. We miss Allah's Protection fi dhimmatillah for that whole day. 3. We miss the Complete Wholesome Enlightenment (Atmim lanaa Nuuranaa) of our path in the day of judgment, which we earn by walking in the darkness of Dusk to pray at the Masjid in Jamaacah. 4. We miss the opportunity to be classified in the category of those who pray ( Al Bardayn) , Fajr and Asr in Jamaaca, who are protected from Jahannam, and are promised Jannah. The bardayn, are two periods in which the angels on our shoulders who record our actions (Not Homeland Security) change shifts. Allah asks the relieved angels "How did you leave my servants?" the angels will respond, " O Allah, we left them in Fajr Prayers". 5. We miss to claim our share/allotment of the distributed Rizq ( Wealth, Health, Happiness, Offspring etc.) because short term Rizq is distributed at day break. Also Barakah is not assigned to all of our efforts in that day, because the Messenger of Allah SAWS said ( O Allah, Baarik li ummaatii fii bukuurihaa) Barakah is a factor that makes everything better, right and plentiful. 6. We can miss the opportunity to pray the two valuable Sunnah Rakcats before the Fajr Prayers. The Prophet SAWS said that they are better in value than life on earth and all of its contents. If that is the value of the Sunnah prayer of Fajr, just can you guess how much value we lose by missing Fajr Prayer? 7. We also miss the file uploading ceremony of our deeds, Fajr and Asr Prayers, so if we are sleeping when we were supposed to be uploading our daily deeds files, how can we ever win? 8. After praying Fajr prayers in Jamaacha, if we sit in the same spot and make dhiker until sunrise, then pray two or four Rakcah, we get the Ajar of a complete HAJJ and UMRAH, ( Taammah, Taammah, Taammah) meaning; Complete,Complete, complete. 9. Now, after we have performed Hajj and Umrah pilgrimmage, if you are like me, you'd put on your running gear and hit the tracks for your daily run to supplement the spiritual "high" with a mental and physical "high" with a heavy dose of soothing Endorphin drug( aka runners high ). 10. At the end, you come home and quench your thirst with a liter of fresh water, take a shower, drink an Aroma filled Somali Tea with your breakfast, then seek Allah's Rizq and Barakah. Nur

Is Obama Continuing the Bush/Cheney Assassination Program? Congress is outraged that Cheney concealed a CIA program to assassinate al Qaeda leaders, but they should also be investigating why Obama is continuing—and expanding—U.S. assassinations. By Jeremy Scahill July 14, 2009 "RebelReports" -- In June, CIA Director Leon Panetta allegedly informed members of the House Intelligence Committee of the existence of a secret Bush era program implemented in the days after 9-11 that, until last month, had been hidden from lawmakers. The concealment of the plan, Panetta alleged, happened at the orders of then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Now, The New York Times is reporting that this secret program that had "been hidden from lawmakers" by Cheney was a plan "to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists." The Wall Street Journal, which originally reported on the plan, reported that the paramilitary teams were to implement a "2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts." The plan, the Times says, never was carried out because "Officials at the spy agency over the years ran into myriad logistical, legal and diplomatic obstacles." Instead, the Bush administration "sought an alternative to killing terror suspects with missiles fired from drone aircraft or seizing them overseas and imprisoning them in secret C.I.A. jails." The House Intelligence Committee is now reportedly preparing an investigation into this program and the Senate may follow suit. "We were kept in the dark. That's something that should never, ever happen again," said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein. Withholding this information from Congress "is a big problem, because the law is very clear." There are several important issues raised by this unfolding story. First, while the Times claims the program was never implemented, the program sounds very similar to what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sy Hersh described in March as an "executive assassination ring" run by Dick Cheney that operated throughout the Bush years: "Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths. "Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us. Hersh's description sounds remarkably similar to that offered by the Times and the Wall Street Journal. While the House and Senate should certainly investigate this program-and lying to Congress, misleading it or concealing from it such programs is likely illegal-it is also important to guarantee that it has actually stopped. But another pressing issue for the Congress is investigating the Obama administration's adoption of this secret program's central components. As the Times noted, the major reason-beyond logistical hurdles-that the program was not implemented (if that is even true) was that the Bush administration began increasing its use of weaponized drones to conduct Israeli-style targeted assassinations (often, these drones kill many more civilians than so-called "targets"). These drone attacks, coupled with the use of extraordinary rendition and secret prisons, became the official program for "eliminating" specific individuals labeled "high value" targets by the administration. The Obama administration has not only continued the Bush policy of using drones to carry out targeted assassinations, but has also continued the use of prisons where people are held indefinitely without charge or access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Under Obama, Bagram air base in Afghanistan is expanding and, at present, hundreds of prisoners are held there without charges. In essence, the Obama administration is doing exactly what this secret CIA program sought to do, albeit out in the open. Beyond the Cheney assassination program, what is really worthy of Congressional investigation right now is the legality of Obama's current policy of assassination. In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination," states Executive Order 11905. White House lawyers--with their seemingly infinite legal creativity--would likely say that the drone strikes are not assassinations, but rather part of war. That putting poison in a cigar of a foreign leader is different than launching missiles at a funeral where an "enemy" is believed to be among the mourners. While the implications of the U.S. assassinating heads of state or foreign officials are grave, it could be argued that, on some levels, the drone attacks are worse in the sense that they kill many more civilians. Moreover, these drone attacks largely take place is Pakistan, which is a sovereign nation. There is no legal or Congressional declaration of war against Pakistan. It is long past due that the Congress investigate this U.S. government assassination program. The politically inconvenient truth, however, is this: An actual investigation would require the Democrats pounding Cheney over his concealment of an assassination program (that allegedly was not implemented) to focus their investigation on how President Obama actually implemented and expanded that very program. © 2009 Jeremy Scahill

Cheney's Secret CIA Program Worse Than Foreign Assassinations? By Digby July 14, 2009 "Hullabaloo" --- Pretty much every news outlet has confirmed that the secret CIA program held from Congress by Dick Cheney concerned targeted assassinations of Al Qaeda members abroad, basically the "executive assassination ring" discussed by Sy Hersh earlier this year. Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials. Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel's Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable. The CIA apparently did not put the plan in to operation but the US military did, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the programme. I'd like to know more about that Kenya incident. Put it this way, when 15 year-old kids who committed no crime other than being valuable to an Afghan warlord seeking a bounty ended up at Guantanamo, I can only imagine what the fever dreams of Dick Cheney led to out in the world. But something's not right here. Targeted assassinations of heads of state are illegal, President Ford signed that in 1975. But Peter Bergen explains that we have had assassination policies on Al Qaeda since before 9-11 and after. Peter Bergen, a senior security analyst at the New America Foundation, said that the secret operation must have gone further than that to have created such a backlash in Congress: "If it's an assassination programme of al-Qaida leaders that is hardly surprising. Clinton had an assassination programme against bin Laden. There have been 27 drone missile strikes against al-Qaida alone this year." It could be the case that Congress is merely upset about not being properly informed, also a crime under the National Security Act of 1947, and not the contents of the program. But two things stick out. It's completely unclear why this action, out of all the others, would be hid by the Bush Administration from Congress. Most terror policies were justified under the concept that we were at war with Al Qaeda, and the executive has broad discretion to carry out the policies he sees fit to protect the nation. I don't agree with the expansiveness of that view, but this kind of assassination ring would fall squarely inside that construct, no? Why would the Bush White House not be afraid to argue that we can torture suspects in the war on terror but terrified to explain that we can take out Al Qaeda safe houses with targeted strikes, the way that the Clinton Administration clearly did in the past? Why would it be so radioactive that Leon Panetta couldn't hear about it for six months after being made CIA Director? The second thing that bothers me about this is the lightning quickness with which the program has been explained to the press, mostly through unnamed sources. You'd almost think that some members of the Bush Administration wanted to convince the public that their secret program only dealt with killing bad guys. And when I say some members, I mean Dick Cheney. Bobby Ghosh at TIME has some different information: But two former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there's another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA's purview -– it's usually the FBI's job – and it's easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress. Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they're only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations. “People may want this to be about hit squads bumping off shady Saudis in Geneva, but that's very unlikely,” says one official. “More likely, it was a plan to spy on some suspicious American citizens or organizations, without telling the FBI.” A third CIA official who is familiar with details of the program says it was deemed unworkable and cancelled in 2004. It is not clear when or why the program was revived as a possibility, but it never got very far from the drawing board, as Republican Congressmen who received a confidential briefing about it by CIA Director Leon Panetta said. The Cheney Administration ran so many secret programs that only him and David Addington, in all likelihood, know which program corresponds to which set of briefings or lack of disclosure from Congress. In fact the Inspector General report stated that the wiretapping program had little effectiveness precisely because of all the secrecy. So when every newspaper in the world reports about targeted assassinations within a day of the disclosure of some secret program hid by Cheney, I'm immediately dubious of the information, or rather the disinformation. One thing is clear - there are potentially tons of unturned out there, unbeknownst to the President and his staff, and these landmines can detonate at really any time, throwing the White House off track. They might want to send in a special prosecutor simply to defuse them. Digby is the proprietor of Hullabaloo.

THE CIA Assassination Program By Adam Serwer July 13, 2009 "American Prospect" --- Siobhan Gorman reports in the Wall Street Journal that the CIA program recently disclosed to Congress by Leon Panetta was designed to target high-level Al Qaeda leaders for assassination--somet hing the CIA has been explicitly barred from doing since the Ford administration. It's worth noting however, that the CIA has attempted assassinations in the past--most infamously numerous attempts to kill Fidel Castro, at the behest of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, who played a prominent role in intelligence affairs in his brother's administration. According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn't become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it. In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn't clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped. Spencer Ackerman argues that this proves Panetta wasn't merely trying to curry favor with Congress but may have been obligated to by law, writing "If he discovered the effort and didn’t tell Congress, it would be cause for the oversight committees to rake him over the coals, even if he scuttled the program." I would also second Ackerman's defense of the CIA, which I think is even more relevant in this context. The CIA has only ever done what the executive in charge has asked it to do--its most infamous abuses do not originate with the CIA, they usually originate with policymakers, not the agency. I'm also going to wait to jump into the ethics of this--in a time when CIA drone missile attacks are one of the primary offensive tools against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, it's not clear to me where the line is in terms of unethical behavior of this nature. Lying to Congress is one thing, and the CIA isn't legally allowed to conduct assassinations--but if they were, how different would it be from what we're currently already doing? Also, it looks like Seymour Hersh knew exactly what he was talking about.

Somalia: Al Shabaab Puts Mogadishu's Rapists And Robbers On Notice Charles Onyango-Obbo 6 July 2009 Nairobi — A few days ago Somalia's radical al Shabaab insurgents, who control large parts of the country and might well overrun the fragile government in Mogadishu, made an example of four teenage thieves. The rebels, who follow a strict form of Islamic law, cut a hand and a leg each off the teenagers as punishment for robbery. Earlier, they stoned a rapist to death. To the human rights community, and to the East African middle class, this is barbarism. But, I suspect, in the crime-riddled slums, working class quarters, and countrysides in many parts of the region, not to mention Africa, these bloody measures are winning al Shabaab many brownie points. Abhorrable as al Shabaab's extreme actions might be, and their alleged links to al-Qaeda notwithstanding, they would probably win elections against many sitting governments in several African countries if the contest was based on the single issue of crime. In Kenya, in parts of the country like central Kenya where citizens are besieged by criminals and extortion gangs, highly lethal vigilantes have been formed to fight back. The methods they are using against suspected members of the outlawed Mungiki sect, for example, make al Shabaab's amputations look like a sweet scent-filled massage. In South Africa, another country whose towns have been all but taken over by vicious criminals and rapists, not too long ago a popular people's vigilante group, People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD), emerged to clean up the streets. The reason vigilantism is finding appeal, is that people know that rogue elements in the security services are keepers of the law by day, but at night they are leaders of criminal gangs. The appeal of citizen action against crime can thus only grow. For example, though I am a pacifist and oppose the death penalty, I am extremely conflicted where rapists and mass murderers are involved because I think the level of these and other crimes in Africa has reached levels that could destroy our societies If al Shabaab had asked me whether the rapist who was stoned to death should be spared and given a life sentence instead, I probably would have offered an ambiguous answer that gave them the impression that I favoured the stoning. The greatest "instability" that an al Shabaab regime would cause, therefore, might not be through spreading the al Qaeda menace in East Africa, but in showing up the other governments. So Al Shabaab takes power: It beheads hundreds of thieves, chops off a hand and leg from every Mogadishu pickpocket, hangs rapists in the market squares, blinds all bribe-taking policemen, and drowns the pirates who have become a menace in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, and clears khat off the streets. Mogadishu could become a mini-paradise where people don't have to lock their doors, and little girls can walk from their grandparents' house two streets away back home at 7:30 pm without fear of being molested. Pressure would grow in other fear-ruled East African capitals for al Shabaab-style crackdowns on crime. That would be tricky for some governments, because they need crime and corruption to survive. Charles Onyango-Obbo is executive editor for the Nation Media Group's Africa Media Division Copyright © 2009 The East African. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.co

Naxar Saaxib This thread may help answer your questions about the difference of the Salafi groups. Nur

Innaa Lillah wa inaa ileyhi Raajicuun! I have only known Sheikh Jibreen through his writings, he was one of the few scholars who have inspired me a great deal, judging him by his writings, he was very selfless and sincere scholar who stood by what is right, even if it was not popular ( Naxsabuhu Kadhaalika ) Allahumma ighfir lah wa taqabbal minhu, wa ajmacnaa wa iyyaahu fii fasiixi jannatik maca alladiina ancamta caleyhim, mina alnabiyiin, wal siddiiqiina , wal shuhaadaa, wal saalixiin, wa xasuna ulaa'ika rafiiqaa. Amiin. Nur

The Left and Islam Thinking Outside of the Secular Box By Gilad Atzmon “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” -- Karl Marx 1843 July 13, 2009 "Counterpunch" -- Before I launch into a disclosure of liberal and leftist delusional treatment of religions, Islam and Palestine in particular, I would like to share with you a bad racist joke. Beware; you may not want to share this short tale with your feminist friends. An American female activist who visited Afghanistan in the late 1990s was devastated to find out that women were marching 15 ft behind their men. She soon learned from her local translator that this was due to some religious guidelines that ruled [this is the way we show] respect for the ‘head of the family’. Once back in America the devastated activist launched campaigns after campaigns for women's rights in Afghanistan. As it happened, the same devoted activist visited Kabul last month. This time she was amazed to find a totally different reality. Women were actually marching 30 ft ahead of their husbands. The activist was quick to report to her headquarters in America: “The Women rights revolution is a great success here in Afghanistan. While in the past it was the man who marched in the front, now it is the women who takes the lead.” Her Afghani translator, who overheard her report, took the activist aside and advised her that her interpretation was totally wrong. “The women” he said, “are walking in front because of the landmines.…” As tragic as it may sound to some, we are not as free as we believe ourselves to be. We are not exactly the author of most of our thoughts and realizations. Our human conditions are imposed on us; we are a product of our culture, language ideological indoctrination and in many cases, victims of our intellectual laziness. Like the semi-fictional American female activist above, in most cases we are trapped within our preconceived ideas and that stops us from seeing things for what they really are. Accordingly, we tend to interpret and in most cases misinterpret remote cultures employing our own value system and moral code. This tendency has some grave consequences. For some reason ‘we’ (the Westerners) tend to believe that ‘our’ technological superiority together with our beloved ‘enlightenment’ equips us with a ‘rational secularist anthropocentric, absolutist ethical system’ of the very highest moral stand. The Lib-Left In the West we can detect two ideological components that compete for our hearts and minds; Both claim to know what is ‘wrong’ and who is ‘right’. The Liberal would insist on praising individual liberty and civil equality; the Leftist would tend to believe to possess a ‘social scientific’ tool helping to identify who is ‘progressive’ and who is ‘reactionary’. As things stand, it is these two modernist secularist precepts that act as our Western political ethical guard. But in fact, they have achieved the opposite. Each ideology in its own peculiar way has led us to a state of moral blindness. It is these two so-called ‘humanist’ calls, that either consciously prepare the ground for criminal interventionalist colonial wars (the Liberal), or failed to oppose them while employing wrong ideologies and faulty arguments (the Left). Both Liberal and Left, in their apparent banal Western forms suggest that secularism is the answer for the world's ailments. Without a doubt, Western secularism may be a remedy for some Western social malaise. However, Western Liberal and Left ideologies, in most cases, fail to understand that secularism is in itself a natural outcome of Christian culture, i.e., a direct product of Christian tradition and openness towards an independent civic existence. In the West, the spiritual and the civil sphere are largely separated . It is this very division that enabled the rise of secularity and the discourse of rationality. It is this very division that also led to the birth of a secular ethical value system in the spirit of enlightenment and modernism. But this very division led also to the rise of some blunt forms of fundamental-seculari sm that matured into crude anti religious worldviews that are no different from bigotry. It is actually that very misleading fundamental secularism that brought the West to a total dismissal of a billion human beings out there just because they wear the wrong scarf or happen to believe in something we fail to grasp. Progressive vs Regressive Islam and Judaism, unlike Christianity, are tribally orientated belief systems. Rather than ‘enlightened individualism’ it is actually the survival of the extended family that is at the core interest of those two belief systems. The Taliban that is regarded by most Westerners as the ultimate possible darkest political setting, is simply not concerned at all with issues to do with personal liberties or personal rights. It is the safety of the tribe together with the maintenance of family values in the light of the Qur’an that stands at its core. Rabbinical Judaism is not different at all. It is basically there to preserve the Jewish tribe by maintaining Judaism as a ‘way of life’. In both Islam and Judaism there is hardly a separation between the spiritual and the civil. Both religions stand as systems that provide thorough answers in terms of spiritual, civil, cultural and day to day matters. Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah) was largely a process of Jewish assimilation through secularization and emancipation, and spawning various modern forms of Jewish identities, Zionism included. Yet Enlightenment values of universalism have never been incorporated into the body of Jewish orthodoxy. Like in the case of Rabbinical Judaism, that is totally foreign to the spirit of Enlightenment, Islam is largely estranged to those values of Euro centric Modernism and rationality. If anything, due to the interpretation of the Scriptures (hermeneutic), both Islam and Judaism are actually closer to the spirit of post modernity. Neither the Left ideology nor Liberalism engage intellectually or politically with these two religions. This fact is disastrous, for the biggest current threat to world peace is posed by the Israeli-Arab conflict; a conflict rapidly becoming a war between a Jewish expansionist state and Islamic resistance. And yet, both the Liberal and the Left ideologies are lacking the necessary theoretical means to understand the complexities of Islam and Judaism. The Liberal would dismiss Islam as sinister for its take on human rights and women in particular. The Left would fall into the trap of denouncing religion in general as ‘reactionary’. Maybe without realizing it, both Lib and Left are falling here into a clear supremacist argument. Since both Islam and Judaism are more than just religions, they convey a ‘way of life’ and stand as a totally thorough answer to questions regarding being in the world, the Western Lib-Left are at danger of a complete dismissal of a large chunk of humanity. I have recently accused a genuine Leftist and good activist of being an Islamophobe for blaming Hamas for being ‘reactionary’. The activist, who is evidently a true supporter of Palestinian resistance was quick to defend himself claiming that it wasn’t only ‘Islamism’ that he didn’t like, he actually equally hated Christianity and Judaism. For some reason he was sure that hating every religion equally was a proper humanist qualification. Accordingly, the fact that an Islamophobe is also a Judeophobe and Christiano-phobe is not necessarily a sign of a humanist commitment. I kept challenging that good man; he then argued that it was actually Islamism (i.e., political Islam) which he didn’t approve of. I challenged him again and brought to his attention the fact that in Islam there is no real separation between the spiritual and the political. The notion of political Islam (Islamism) may as well be a Western delusional reading of Islam. I pointed out that Political Islam, and even the rare implementation of ‘armed jihad’, are merely Islam in practice. Sadly enough, this was more or less the end of the discussion. The Palestinian solidarity campaigner found it too difficult to cope with the Islamic unity of body and soul. The Left in general is doomed to fail here unless it elaborates by means of listening to the organic Islamic bond between the ‘material’ and the so called ‘opium of the masses’. For the Leftist to do so, it is no less than a major intellectual shift. Such a shift was suggested recently by Hisham Bustani, an independent Jordanian Marxist, stating: “The European left must make a serious critical assessment of this ‘we know better’ attitude and the ways it tends to deal with popular forces in the south as ideologically and politically inferior.” Palestine Solidarity with Palestine is a very good opportunity to review the gravity of the situation. As it happens, in spite of the murderous Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, solidarity with Palestinians has yet to become a mass movement. It may well never make it as such a movement. Given the West's failure to uphold the rights of the oppressed, Palestinians seem to have learned their lesson, they democratically elected an Islamic party that promised them resistance. Interestingly enough, very few leftists were there to support the Palestinian people and their democratic choice. Within the current template of conditional political solidarity, we are losing campaigners on each turn of this bumpy road. The reasons are as follows. 1. The Palestinian liberation movement is basically a national liberation movement. This acknowledgment is where we lose all the Left cosmopolitans, those who oppose nationalism. 2. Due to the political rise of Hamas, Palestinian resistance is now regarded as Islamic resistance. This is where we are losing the secularists and rabid atheists who oppose religion, catapulting them to being PEP (progressive except on Palestine). In fact the PEP are divided largely into two groups. PEP1. Those who oppose Hamas for being ‘reactionary’, yet approve Hamas for their operational success as a Resistance movement. Those activists are basically waiting for the Palestinians to change their mind and revert to a secular society. But they are willing to conditionally support the Palestinians as an oppressed people. PEP2. Those who are against Hamas for being a ‘reactionary’ force; and dismiss its operational success. These are waiting for the world revolution. They prefer to let the Palestinians wait for the time being, as if Gaza were a seashore holiday resort With these rapidly evaporating solidarity forces we are left with a miniature Palestinian solidarity movement with an embarrassingly limited (Western) intellectual power and even less positive performance on the grass roots level. This tragic situation was disclosed recently by Nadine Rosa-Rosso, a Brussels-based independent Marxist. She states: "The vast majority of the Left, including communists, agrees in supporting the people of Gaza against Israeli aggression, but refuses to support its political expressions such as Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon.” This leads Rossa-Rosso to wonder “why do the Left and far Left mobilize such small numbers? And indeed, to be clear, are the Left and far Left still able to mobilize on these issues?” Where next? “If the left’s support for human rights in Palestine is conditional and dependent on the Palestinians denouncing their religion and ideological beliefs, cultural heritage, and social traditions and adopting a new set of beliefs, alien values and social behaviors that matches what its culture deems acceptable; that means the world is denying them a most basic human right, the right to think, and to live within a chosen ethical code.” Nahida Izzat The current left discourse of solidarity is futile. It estranges itself from its subject, it achieves very little and it seems to go nowhere. If we want to help the Palestinians, the Iraqis and the other millions of victims of Western imperialism we really must stop for a second, take a big breath and start again from scratch. We must learn to listen. Rather than imposing our belief on others we better learn to listen to what others believe in. Can we follow Bustani’s and Rossa-Rosso’s suggestions and revise our entire notion of Islam, its spiritual roots, its structure, its unified balance between the civil and the spirit, its vision of itself as a ‘way of living’? Whether we can do so or not is a good question. Another option is to reassess our blindness and to encounter humanist issues from a humanist perspective (as opposed to political). Rather than loving ourselves through the suffering of others, which is the ultimate form of self-loving, we better for the first time, exercise the notion of real empathy. We put ourselves in the place of the other accepting that we may never fully understand that very other. Rather than loving ourselves through the Palestinians and at their expense, we need to accept Palestinians for what they are and support them for who they are regardless of our own views on things. This is the only real form of solidarity. It aims at ethical rather than ideological conformity. It puts humanity at its very centre. It reflects on Marx’s deep understanding of religion as the “sigh of the oppressed”. If we claim to be compassionate about people we better learn to love them for what they are rather than what we expect them to be. Gilad Aztmon is a writer and jazz musician living in London.

2005 eNuri Topics Lets Change The Future, A Person At A Time. There are two types of change for the future of Somalia: 1. Negative Change. (from a desirable state, to an undesirable state) 2. Positive Change. (from an undesirable state, to a desirable state) There are two ways to bring the above changes. 1. Revolutionary. ( An abrupt and violent Way.). 2. Evolutionary. (A natural and peaceful Way.) So we have a matrix of four possibilities: 1. Evolutionary Positive Change 2. Evolutionary Negative Change 3. Revolutionary Positive Change 4. Revolutionary Negative Change There are two camps with two different visions for the future of Somalia: 1. Islamic Vision. 2. Secular Vision. Here Positive and Negative change are seen relatively different depending on the perspective. A positive change for the Islamic Vision, is seen as a negative change by the Secular Visionaries. A Positive Change for the the Secular Vision is seen as a negative Change by the Islamic visionaries. As an Islamic visionary, my objective in this thread, is the Evolutionary Positive Change Which is usually desirable: 1. When the very existence of our faith is not in danger. 2. When there are choices of legitimate peaceful venues to realize one's vision of positive change. However, when a believer feels that his faith is slowly melting in the heat of the New World Order"caused by the Hot Artificial Wars as opposed to Cold War" like the melting ice of the Antarctic glaciers, violence appeals as a necessity to revive the dying or dormant faith of the faithful, like applying an electric jolt to revive a cardiac attacked heart. In the face of the unfolding events in Somalia, the foreign intervention ( By the Way, in case the Media has confused you, "Foreign" means Ethiopians, Ugandan and Burundi Soldiers, financed by the US and EU), different people, depending on their personality and character, prefer to change the future of Somalia through Militancy or Advocacy. As a person, Advocacy appeals to my nature, not that I believe that militancy in the face of occupation is wrong, but, without effectively communicating one's legitimate grievances, in parallel with an active resistance on the ground, its possible that a great cause is painted by the prostitute media as as a rebellion without a purpose against a legitimate government when the opposite is true. Which brings us to the current topic: Advocacy: How To Change The Future Of Somalia, One Person At A Time. You see Nomad Paesano, no matter how much sympathetic you are to "Islam-Is-The-Solution" slogan, if you are not already in the trenches resisting unjust, illegal and immoral occupation and indiscriminate mass murder of civilians to enforce an implant an unpopular government dedicated to please its foreign sponsors more than Allah and the interest of its people, your sympathy will not help bring any positive change unless you supplement the volunteering sacrifices of those spending their lives for the freedom of their country with an active advocacy to show the world the plight of tyranny and oppression that befell our nation with the approval of nations who care about the welfare of cats and dogs more than the human suffering (Based on their GDP spending, due to high demand, a New Pet Airlines for dogs and Cats was recently inaugurated in the US) In my opinion, even in the absence of Militancy, advocacy can indeed be powerful and effective if its persistent and wise, people, after all, are rational, and they respond favorably to reason than to sheer force. Today, our Somalia community is divided in its vision of the nation's future and how to bring about a positive change. Great many of us have the vision of a prosperous and peaceful Somalia, but, the problem lies in how to accomplish this great vision, specially when Somalis are scattered around the world as refugees struggling to adjust to a new habitat and culture while working very hard to save every penny to help their starving relatives back home, divided up along abominable clan allegiances, while many of them also suffer from mental sickness due to continuing adversity and social drugs addiction (Khat, Qat). The final positive change for Somalia will greatly depend on the sum of gradual positive changes in its make up, its communities abroad, its cities, its villages, its tribes, its families and its individuals. So, the first step to change the future of Somalia, is to positively change every individual Somali, one Somali at a time! a monumental task, for which I humbly dedicate this thread. You see Nomad paesano, the mess we see in Somalia today is the result of cumulative individual or group mistakes committed by our forefathers and foremothers in the past. The mess in which we Somalis find ourselves, did not just happen as a coincidence, it was more like driving on a bad tire on a rough terrain, with visible worn out threads for too long, but out of laziness or sheer indifference, we wished for it to go away, or that somebody else would fix it, or , we reasoned that "its actually not our immediate problem", because we can leave shitty Somalia and get a sanctuary in clean Brisbane or Columbus. Today's predicament began long time ago at every Somali home, at every clown cafe and at every clan gathering. People who are trusted to lead the nation are so out of touch with the real problems that face us, that they themselves are the real problem and need to be replaced, but how? and with who? You see saaxib, we can't just change the buffoons who appear on TV as represneta-thieves of the people. They are here for a purpose, they are Allah's punishment and curse on Somalia for our cumulative failure in raising them right as kids, so, there they are, playing football on our nation's future with the help of foreign tag teams. So, instead of self pitying ourselves, we need to have a real plan for bringing a gradual positive change to Somalia, one person at a time. The Gradual Positive Change Approach Its long, boring and will not guarantee a TV News spot that is usually reserved for violent news to attract viewers, instead, its a slow, but sure process if we have Sabr. No government on earth can stop you from changing your own bad behavior to a good one and in turn influencing others, beginning with your own family members as an exercise. Because most of Somali men who have ever appeared in public life are either corrupt, mental loonies, or dead, we are mostly left with Somali women as a fall back plan B., and I dare say that they alone can lead this revival and the remaking of Somalia if they keep up their past good contributions and create the change we all want. Most married, divorced, widowed Somali woman and few brave Somali Mr. Moms, have an audience of around 2-5 future Somali leaders in their households. If they can make the intention of changing the future of Somalia by changing the behavior of their kids, I believe, in 20 years, say, by 2029, we will have a new wave of reasonable and a mature wise population sprouting all over the world map to rescue Somalis from the pit in which its people dug out for themselves by choice. So, my dire plea today for all Somali Women and Men, is to help change the course of events in Somalia, one little PERSON At A Time. Nur 2009 eNuri Inspirationals eNuri Non-Violent Advocacy (eNoVA) Empowering Virtuous Somali Women

Nomads This reminder is for those of you who are expecting arrivals, I hope this thread helps you prepare for the Aqeeqa rite the Sunnah way. eNuri and Company are very proud of your timely delivery and contribution to our endangered Somali species, keep up the hard work! Baarakallahu Feekunna Nur

JazaakeAllaahu khrairan WOL A timely reminder indeed. Its said that the Taabiciin used to prepare for Ramadan for six months before Ramadan, and worry about their performance and Allah's acceptance of their worship in the following six months. The earlier we get into the Ramadan mood the better our performance will be in Ramadan inshaaAllah, is just like rehearsing for an important performance. Baarkallahu Feeki Nur

Wiilo sis Markaan qoray qoraalkan, Sheikh Sharif seddex talooyin ayaan u soo jeediyey, oo aan doorbiday talada ah inuu is casilo. Maantadan Xamar dagaal weyn ba ka socda, ilaa haddana ma joogsan, waxaa la sheegayaa iney ku dhinteen dad badan uu ku jiro Nuur Xasan Cali (Nuur Daqle) oo DKMG ah ugu Qaabilsanaa Amaanka Gobolka Banaadir, ka horna ahaa qabqable dagaal ashahaado la dirirkii 2006gii lacagta ku qaatay iney laayaan wixii diinta Allah jecel. Sidaa darteed, Shiikha waxaa loo qaatay inuu meel iska fariisto, isuna dhaafo raggii hore isu yaqaannay. Nur

John Quincy Adams on U.S. Foreign Policy (1821) By John Quincy July 4, 1821 "And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to inquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... [America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice." John Quincy Adams served was U. S. Secretary of State, he delivered this speech to the U.S. House of Representatives on July 4, 1821, in celebration of American Independence Day.

Abu Salamn and Bint Hamid And all other Nomads The write-up was not about Surah Kahf, it was about the last verse of the Surah, I need your input on that specific verse. Baarkallahu Feekum Nur

Akhi Ayoub Ma aqaan in uu Sheikh Sharif akhristay waanadayda iyo in kale, laakin, dhacdooyinka waxaa ka muuqata inuusan akhrin, hadduu akhriyeyna, inuusan ku waano qaadan. Allah ayaan ka baryeynaa caafiyada dunideenna iyo diinteenna. Maalmaha no soo haya, waa kuwo si shaki la'aan ah u kala caddeyn doonaan qolooyinka is heysta meeshey kala taagan yihiin, waxaanad mooddaa markuu sii dheeraado is-horjoogga, iney sii caddaan doonto qolada garta leh iyo qolada gardaran. Nur