As I was reading some old articles, I found this interesting article unexpectedly validating my claim "Theory" that Climate Change, or Global Warming, may cause more unrest in the world due to migration which will bring people too close for comfort. Here is what I wrote above: " You see Nomad paesano, today, technology is drawing peoples of different background too close for comfort, while warlord politicians and bad economic and political decisions they make are forcing many Somalis to leave their native towns like Kurtunwaarrey, to seek a safer havens in the west, which is already devastated by financial crisis in addition to a global warming hovering over our heads caused by deforstation, mass production and urbanization. In such a scenario, temperatures will rise as well as emotions, when your host country neighbour finds herself living next door to you, a funny looking neighbor who cooks aromatic foods that cause heartburn." Here is the article that partially validates some of my insights whose logic is based on the following inferences: 1. Islam represents a strategic obstacle to Nato's vision of world order structure which they approve as a good and just order. 2. When few Muslims act in desparation to this "Just World Order", causing human tragedy, this is seen as utmost threat and its not differentiatied from Islam, a faith that is more concerned about preservation of human life, property, intellect, and family. Imagine if the Holocaust was seen as a Christian attrocity on Jews? Al Qaeda are accused with deaths of fews thousands, Germans are accused to have killed six million Jews. 3. The NATO generals believe that if the planet overheats, that the international war on terror will become very uncomfortable, every soldier will need to carry his own portable airconditioning, while airfoce and navy will find more flooding and tornadoes make their pursuit of Elvis Presley in the rugged hot mountains of Afghanistan very difficult due to the 50+ heat. 4. Its reasoned that the temperature rise of one degree C, will correspond with a ten fold increase in terror attacks against western forces in Muslim countries, due to increasing poverty and joblessnes ( which casues people to stay home more often, producing more babies who throw stones at occupation forces). Enjoy The Article. Climate change 'a threat to security' By Mark Turner at the United Nations and Fiona Harvey in London Published: April 17 2007 03:00 | Last updated: April 17 2007 03:00 Climate change threatens to prolong the war on terrorism and foster political instability that governments will be unable to cope with, an influential panel of 11 retired US generals has warned. Their urgent message comes on the eve of a special United Nations Security Council meeting on the security implications of climate change, convened by the UK in an attempt to bring home the wider impact of global warming. The new US military report, commissioned by the government-financed Center for Naval Analyses, lays out strong support for a link between climate change and terrorism. Admiral T. Joseph Lopez, the former commander-in-chief of US Naval Forces Europe and of Allied Forces, Southern Europe and a member of the panel, said: "Climate change can provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror. In the long term, we want to address the underlying conditions that terrorists seek to exploit, but climate change will prolong those conditions. It makes them worse." The report describes climate change as "a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world", which will "seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states". To make matters worse, the military experts warned climate change offered a challenge much more complex than conventional security threats because ofits potential to create "multiple chronic conditions, occurring globally within the same time frame". As governments failed, they said, the US mightbe drawn more frequently into unstable situations abroad, and at home could experience "mounting pressure to accept large numbers of immigrant and refugee populations". Jonathan Pershing, a director at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think-tank in Washington, said the report marked a "major shift in thinking". Douglas Johnson, research professor of national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute, said: "A few years ago no one gave a flip . . . Now, [climate change] is becoming a serious possibility, so we ought to have a plan for it." "We will pay for this one way or another," said Anthony C. Zinni, former commander of US forcesin the Middle East. "We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take aneconomic hit of some kind. Or, we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll." One of the recommendations of the military advisory panel was that "the US must commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilise climate change at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability". Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 2008

The Five Dancing Israelis Arrested On 9-11 As the world watched in disbelief and asked the question... ...Mossad operatives were seen dancing with joy. A Mossad surveillance team made quite a public spectacle of themselves on 9-11. The New York Times reported Thursday that a group of five men had set up video cameras aimed at the Twin Towers prior to the attack on Tuesday, and were seen congratulating one another afterwards. (1) Police received several calls from angry New Jersey residents claiming "middle-eastern" men with a white van were videotaping the disaster with shouts of joy and mockery. (2) "They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me" said a witness. (3) [T]hey were seen by New Jersey residents on Sept. 11 making fun of the World Trade Center ruins and going to extreme lengths to photograph themselves in front of the wreckage. (4) Witnesses saw them jumping for joy in Liberty State Park after the initial impact (5). Later on, other witnesses saw them celebrating on a roof in Weehawken, and still more witnesses later saw them celebrating with high fives in a Jersey City parking lot. (6) "It looked like they're hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park." (7) One anonymous phone call to the authorities actually led them to close down all of New York's bridges and tunnels. The mystery caller told the 9-1-1 dispatcher that a group of Palestinians were mixing a bomb inside of a white van headed for the Holland Tunnel. Here's the transcript from NBC News: Dispatcher: Jersey City police. Caller: Yes, we have a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there, they look like Palestinians and going around a building. Caller: There's a minivan heading toward the Holland tunnel, I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh uniform. Dispatcher: He has what? Caller: He's dressed like an Arab. (8) (*Writer's note: Why would this mystery caller specifically say that these "Arabs" were Palestinians? How would he know that? Palestinians usually dress in western style clothes, not "sheikh uniforms") Based on that phone call, police then issued a "Be-on-the-Lookout" alert for a white mini-van heading for the city's bridges and tunnels from New Jersey. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with 'Urban Moving Systems' sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals. (9) When a van fitting that exact description was stopped just before crossing into New York, the suspicious "middle-easterners" were apprehended. Imagine the surprise of the police officers when these terror suspects turned out to be Israelis! According to ABC’s 20/20, when the van belonging to the cheering Israelis was stopped by the police, the driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers: "We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem." (10) Why did he feel that Palestinians were a problem for the NYPD? The police and FBI field agents became very suspicious when they found maps of the city with certain places highlighted, box cutters (the same items that the hijackers supposedly used), $4700 cash stuffed in a sock, and foreign passports. Police also told the Bergen Record that bomb sniffing dogs were brought to the van and that they reacted as if they had smelled explosives. (11) The FBI seized and developed their photos, one of which shows Sivan Kurzberg flicking a cigarette lighter in front of the smouldering ruins in an apparently celebratory gesture. (12) The Jerusalem Post later reported that a white van with a bomb was stopped as it approached the George Washington Bridge, but the ethnicity of the suspects was not revealed. Here's what the Jerusalem Post reported on September 12, 2001: American security services overnight stopped a car bomb on the George Washington Bridge. The van, packed with explosives, was stopped on an approach ramp to the bridge. Authorities suspect the terrorists intended to blow up the main crossing between New Jersey and New York, Army Radio reported. (13) "...two suspects are in FBI custody after a truckload of explosives was discovered around the George Washington Bridge ... The FBI ... says enough explosives were in the truck to do great damage to the George Washington Bridge." WMV video download (545kB) It was reported the van contained tonnes of explosives (14). What's really intriguing is that ABC's 20/20 (15), the New York Post (16), and the New Jersey Bergen Record (17) all clearly and unambiguously reported that a white van with Israelis was intercepted on a ramp near Route 3, which leads directly to the Lincoln Tunnel. But the Jerusalem Post, Israeli National News (Arutz Sheva) (18), and Yediot America, (19) all reported, just as clearly and unambiguously, that a white van with Israelis was stopped on a ramp leading to the George Washington Bridge, which is several miles north of the Lincoln Tunnel. It appears as if there may actually have been two white vans involved, one stopped on each crossing. This would not only explain the conflicting reports as to the actual location of the arrests, but would also explain how so many credible eye-witnesses all saw celebrating "middle-easterners" in a white van in so many different locations. It also explains why the New York Post and Steve Gordon (lawyer for the 5 Israelis) originally described how three Israelis were arrested but later increased the total to five. Perhaps one van was meant to drop off a bomb while the other was meant to pick up the first set of drivers while re-crossing back into New Jersey? If a van was to be used as a parked time-bomb on the GW Bridge, then certainly the drivers would need to have a "get-away van" to pick them up and escape. And notice how the van (or vans) stayed away from the third major crossing -the Holland Tunnel- which was where the police had originally been directed to by that anti-Palestinian 9-1-1 "mystery caller". A classic misdirection play. From there, the story gets becomes even more suspicious. The Israelis worked for a Weehawken moving company known as Urban Moving Systems. The name of the company actually contains the word MOSSAD embedded inside - MOving SyStems IncorporAteD ... MOSSAD. An American employee of Urban Moving Systems told the The Record of New Jersey that a majority of his co-workers were Israelis and they were joking about the attacks. The employee, who declined to give his name said: "I was in tears. These guys were joking and that bothered me." These guys were like, "Now America knows what we go through." (20) A few days after the attacks, Urban Moving System's Israeli owner, Dominick Suter, dropped his business and fled the country for Israel. He was in such a hurry to flee America that some of Urban Moving System's customers were left with their furniture stranded in storage facilities (21). Suter's departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt Suter may have known something about the attacks. (22) The Jewish weekly The Forward reported that the FBI finally concluded that at least two of the detained Israelis were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation. This was confirmed by two former CIA officers, and they noted that movers' vans are a common intelligence cover. (23). The Israelis were held in custody for 71 days before being quietly released. (24) "There was no question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11." (25) Several of the detainees discussed their experience in America on an Israeli talk show after their return home. Said one of the men, denying that they were laughing or happy on the morning of Sept. 11, "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event." (26) How did they know there would be an event to document on 9/11? It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to connect the dots of the dancing Israeli Mossad agents - here's the most logical scenario: 1. The Israeli "movers" cheered the 9-11 attacks to celebrate the successful accomplishment of the greatest spy operation ever pulled off in history. 2. One of them, or an accomplice, then calls a 9-1-1 police dispatcher to report Palestinian bomb-makers in a white van headed for the Holland Tunnel. 3. Having thus pre-framed the Palestinians with this phone call, the Israeli bombers then head for the George Washington Bridge instead, where they will drop off their time-bomb van and escape with Urban Moving accomplices. 4. But the police react very wisely and proactively by closing off ALL bridges and tunnels instead of just the Holland Tunnel. This move inadvertently foils the Israelis' misdirection play and leads to their own capture and 40 day torture. 5. To cover up this story, the U.S. Justice Department rounds up over 1000 Arabs for minor immigration violations and places them in New York area jails. The Israelis therefore become less conspicuous as the government and media can now claim that the Israelis were just immigration violators caught in the same dragnet as many other Arabs. 6. After several months, FBI and Justice Department "higher-ups" are able to gradually push aside the local FBI agents and free the Israelis quietly. Osama bin Laden was immediately blamed for the 9/11 attacks even though he had no previous record of doing anything on this scale. Immediately after the Flight 11 hit World Trade Center 1 CIA Director George Tenet said "You know, this has bin Laden's fingerprints all over it." (27) The compliant mainstream media completely ignored the Israeli connection. Immediately following the 9-11 attacks the media was filled with stories linking the attacks to bin Laden. TV talking-heads, "experts", and scribblers of every stripe spoon-fed a gullible American public a steady diet of the most outrageous propaganda imaginable. We were told that the reason bin Laden attacked the USA was because he hates our "freedom" and "democracy". The Muslims were "medieval" and they wanted to destroy us because they envied our wealth, were still bitter about the Crusades, and were offended by Britney Spears shaking her tits and *** all over the place! But bin Laden strongly denied any role in the attacks and suggested that Zionists orchestrated the 9-11 attacks. The BBC published bin Laden's statement of denial in which he said: "I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government within the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; to the people who want to make the present century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity. That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. ... The American system is totally in control of the Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States." (28) You never heard that quote on your nightly newscast did you? [A] number of intelligence officials have raised questions about Osama bin Laden's capabilities. "This guy sits in a cave in Afghanistan and he's running this operation?" one C.I.A. official asked. "It's so huge. He couldn't have done it alone." A senior military officer told me that because of the visas and other documentation needed to infiltrate team members into the United States a major foreign intelligence service might also have been involved. (29) Bin Laden is not named as the perpetrator of 9/11 by the FBI: When asked why there is no mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden’s Most Wanted web page (30), [Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI] said, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.” (31) "So we've never made the case, or argued the case that somehow Osama bin Laden [sic] was directly involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been forthcoming" - Dick Cheney. [whitehouse.gov] To date, the only shred of “evidence” to be uncovered against bin Laden is a barely audible fuzzy amateur video that the Pentagon just happened to find "lying around" in Afghanistan. How very convenient, and how very fake. (32) There is no evidence, be it hard or circumstantial, to link the Al Qaeda "terrorist network" to these acts of terror, but there is a mountain of evidence, both hard and circumstantial, which suggests that Zionists have been very busy framing Arabs for terror plots against America. "I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing -- although that was part of it -- by a sovereign foreign government ... It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now" - Senator Bob Graham. (33) If the sovereign foreign government mentioned by Senator Graham was an enemy of the United States the "compelling evidence" would not be kept secret for 20+ years. One final point; at 09:40 on 9-11 it was reported that the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attacks (31). This claim was immediately denied by the DFLP leader Qais abu Leila who said it had always opposed "terror attacks on civilian targets, especially outside the occupied territories." (34) Why would a Palestinian organisation comprising of less than 500 people (35) make the suicidal move of immediately claiming responsibility for the attacks? Sharon and the other Israeli leaders aspire to fulfil what the goals of the political Zionist movement have been since its origin a century ago: to turn all of historic Palestine into an exclusively Jewish state. A central tenet of the Zionist ideology is expressed in the racist slogan, "A land without people for a people without a land." (36) The implication of Palestinians in the 9/11 attacks would have handed Zionists a golden opportunity to achieve the above because all Palestinians would have been labelled terrorists. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information." US official quoted in Carl Cameron's Fox News report on the Israeli spy ring. http://whatreallyhappened.com/WR*****CLES/fiveisraelis.html

Our real task... is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity [u.S. military- economic supremacy]... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming... We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization... we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. George Kennan, Director of Policy Planning. U.S. State Department. 1948. U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study #23, 1948: America's National Strategy of Global Intervention By William Pfaff October 18, 2008 ICH -- Paris, October 15, 2008 – Last June the U.S. Department of Defense unexpectedly issued a new version of its National Defense Strategy. It was unexpected because there will be a new administration in Washington in January which might be expected to issue a statement of its own ideas about military strategy. Some in Washington speculated that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, only recently named to that office, a man who gets along with Democrats as well as Republications, might be bidding to keep his job under a new administration. The new statement lacks the Bush administration’s unilateralism and triumphalism (as if there were anything left to be triumphal about), but it foresees a “Long War” of “promoting freedom, justice and human dignity by working to end tyranny, promote effective democracies and extend prosperity; and confronting the challenges of our time by leading a growing community of democracies.” All that is straight Bush doctrine, drawn from his second inaugural address and Condoleezza Rice’s policy statement last summer predicting decades of a “new American realism” of “nation-building” to conquer “extremism.” By now the “Long War,” realistic or not, will have become orthodoxy for most of the Washington defense and strategic studies community. The noteworthy thing about this National Defense Strategy statement is that it says nothing directly about American national defense. It is a strategy for intervening in other countries, and preventing others from blocking or resisting American interventions. It states the responsibilities of America’s armed forces (summarizing the document’s introduction) as follows: § Conduct a global struggle against a violent extremist ideology that seeks to overturn the international system. § Deal with the threats of rogue-nation quests for nuclear weapons. § Confront the rising military power of other states. These duties “[will require] the orchestration of national and international power over years or decades to come” to accomplish the following: § Long-term innovative approaches to counter al-Qaeda’s rejection of state sovereignty, violation of borders, and attempts to deny self-determination and human dignity. § Deal “with the inability of many states to police themselves effectively or work with their neighbors to ensure regional security.” Armed sub-national groups must be dealt with, “including but not limited to those inspired by violent extremism” which if left unchecked will threaten the stability and legitimacy of key states, and allow instability to spread “and threaten regions of interest to the United States, its allies and friends.” § Form local partnerships and creative approaches to deny extremists the opportunity to gain footholds in “ungoverned, under-governed, misgoverned, and contested areas” affecting local stability and regional stability. § Counter Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology and enrichment capabilities, and deal with the ability of rogue states such as Iran and North Korea to threaten international order, sponsor terrorism, and disrupt fledgling democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. § Meet possible challenges from (a) “more powerful states [that] might actively seek to counter the United States in some or all domains of traditional warfare or to gain an advantage in developing capabilities that offset our own,” as well as (b) nations that might “choose niche areas of military capability and competition in which they believe they can develop a strategic or operational advantage [even though] some of these potential competitors [may also be partners of the U.S. in] diplomatic, commercial or security efforts...” § For the foreseeable future, “hedge against China’s growing military modernization and the impact of its strategic choices on international security....The objective of this effort is to mitigate near-term challenges while preserving and enhancing U.S. national advantages over time.” § Recognize that Russia’s [pre-Georgian crisis] “retreat from openness and democracy,” “bullying of its neighbors,” and “more active military stance... and signaled increase in reliance on nuclear weapons as a foundation for its security ...[are warnings of] a Russia exploring renewed influence” and a greater international role. § Prevent prospective adversaries, especially non-state actors and their state sponsors, from adopting “anti-access technology and weaponry [that can] restrict our future freedom of action,” and also from “making adversary use of traditional means of influence” such as by “manipulating global opinion using mass communications venues and exploiting international commitments and legal avenues.” § The global “commons [space, international waters, aerospace and cyberspace] must be secured and with them access to world markets and resources,” using military capabilities and alliances and coalitions, participating in international security and economic institutions, and employing “diplomacy and soft power to shape the behavior of individual states and the international system, using force when necessary.” The principal preoccupation of the document is to protect American forces operating in foreign countries: to block measures by foreign states to “deny” American efforts to intervene in their countries, or to develop measures and technology to resist American intervention (or to send Americans to international criminal courts). As for the United States itself, the document quotes the constitutional obligation of the government “to provide for the common defense,” but says that today, after more than 230 years, the U.S. “shoulders additional responsibilities on behalf of the world,...a beacon of light for those in dark places.” Yet the fear of those dark places that permeates the document compels the recommendation that American troops remain at home, where they will be safe from enemies and untrustworthy allies, and defend their own country. William Pfaff is the author of eight books on American foreign policy, international relations, and contemporary history, including books on utopian thought, romanticism and violence, nationalism, and the impact of the West on the non-Western world. His newspaper column, featured in The International Herald Tribune for more than a quarter-century, and his globally syndicated articles, have given him the widest international influence of any American commentator. © Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved

Civilian Dead are a Trade-off in Nato's War of Barbarity The killing of innocent Afghans by US bombs is the result of a calculation, not just a mistake. And it is fuelling resistance By Seumas Milne October 18, 2008 " -- -"The Guardia" -- Thursday October 16 2008 -- While the eyes of the western world have been fixed on the global financial crisis, the military campaign that launched the war on terror has been spinning out of control. Seven years after the US and Britain began their onslaught on Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden, the Taliban surround the capital, al-Qaida is flourishing in Pakistan and the war's sponsors have publicly fallen out about whether it has already been lost. As the US joint chiefs of staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen concedes that the country is locked into a "downward spiral" of corruption, lawlessness and insurgency, Britain's ambassador in Kabul, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, is quoted in a leaked briefing as declaring that "American strategy is destined to fail". The same diplomat who told us last year that British forces would be in Afghanistan for decades now believes foreign troops are "part of the problem, not the solution". The British commander Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith was last week even blunter. "We're not going to win this war," he said, adding that if the Taliban were prepared to "talk about a political settlement", that was "precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this". The double-barrelled duo were duly slapped down by US defence secretary Robert Gates for defeatism. But even Gates now publicly backs talks with the Taliban, which are in fact already taking place under Saudi sponsorship. This is the conflict western politicians and media continue to urge their reluctant populations to support as a war for civilisation. In reality, it is a war of barbarity, whose contempt for the value of Afghan life has fuelled the very resistance that western military and political leaders are now unable to contain. In this year alone, for every occupation soldier killed, at least three Afghan civilians have died at the hands of occupation forces. They include the 95 people, 60 of them children, killed by a US air assault in Azizabad in August; the 47 wedding guests dismembered by US bombardment in Nangarhar in July - US forces have a particular habit of attacking weddings; and the four women and children killed in a British rocket barrage six weeks ago in Sangin. By far the most comprehensive research into Afghan casualties over the past seven years has been carried out by Marc Herold, a US professor at the University of New Hampshire. In his latest findings, Herold estimates that the number of civilians directly killed by the US and other Nato forces since 2006, up to 3,273, is already higher than the toll exacted by the devastating three-month bombardment that ousted the Taliban regime in 2001. And over the past year civilian deaths at the hands of Nato forces have tripled, despite changes in rules of engagement. But most telling is the political and military calculation that underlies the Afghan civilian bloodletting. "Close air support" bomb attacks called in by ground forces - which rose from 176 in 2005 to 2,926 in 2007 and are now the US tactic of choice - are between four and 10 times as deadly for Afghan civilians as ground attacks, the figures show, and air strikes now account for 80% of those killed by the occupation forces. But while 242 US and Nato ground troops have died in the war with the Taliban this year, not a single pilot has been killed in action. The trade-off could not be clearer. With troops thin on the ground and the US military up to their necks in Iraq and elsewhere, US and Nato reliance on air attacks minimises their own casualties while guaranteeing that Afghan civilians will die in far larger numbers. It is that equation that makes a nonsense of US and British claims that their civilian victims are accidental "collateral damage", while the Taliban's use of roadside bombs, suicide attacks and classic guerrilla operations from civilian areas are a sign of their moral depravity. In real life, the escalating civilian death toll is not a mistake, but the result of a clear decision to put the lives of occupation troops before civilians; westerners before Afghans. Dependence on air power is also a reflection of US imperial overstretch and the reluctance of Nato states to put more boots on the ground. But however much the nominal Afghan president Hamid Karzai rails against Nato's recklessness with Afghan blood, the indiscriminate air war carries on regardless. Given that the US government spent 10 times more on every sea otter affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill than it does in "condolence payments" to Afghans for the killing of a family member, perhaps that shouldn't come as a surprise. But nor should it be that the occupation's cruelty is a recruiting sergeant for the Taliban. As Aga Lalai, who lost both grandparents, his wife, father, three brothers and four sisters in a US bombing in Helmand last summer, put it: "So long as there is just one 40-day-old boy remaining alive, Afghans will fight against the people who do this to us." That doesn't just go for Afghanistan. Gordon Brown recently told British troops in Helmand: "What you are doing here prevents terrorism coming to the streets of Britain." The opposite is the case. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq - and the atrocities carried out against their people - are a crucial motivation for those planning terror attacks in Britain, as case after case has shown. Now the US is launching attacks inside Pakistan, the risks of further terror and destabilisation can only grow. Senior Pakistani officials are convinced Nato is preparing to throw in the towel in Afghanistan. Both Bush and the two US presidential candidates are committed to an Iraq-style surge, though the number of troops being talked about cannot possibly make a decisive difference to the conflict - and in Barack Obama's case may be as much about providing political cover for his plans for Iraq. But the strategic importance of Afghanistan doesn't suggest any early US withdrawal: more likely an attempt to co-opt sections of the Taliban as part of a messy and protracted attempt to rearrange the occupation. It will fail. The US and its allies cannot pacify Afghanistan nor seal the border with the Taliban's Pakistani sanctuary. Eventually there is bound to be some sort of negotiated withdrawal as part of a wider regional and domestic settlement. But many thousands of Afghans - as well as occupying troops - look certain to be sacrificed in the meantime. s.milne@guardian.co.uk This article appeared in the Guardian on Thursday October 16 2008 on p29 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00.11 on October 16 2008. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

U.S.-Made Mess in Somalia By Ivan Eland 04/10/07 "Consortium News" -- - - The media often report overseas developments, but don’t always explore their underlying causes, which, in many cases, conveniently lets the U.S. government off the hook. The recent internecine violence in Somalia provides a classic example. The U.S. media have focused to date almost exclusively on the rising Islamist movement in Somalia and U.S. “covert” assistance to the Ethiopian invasion that supported Somalia’s transitional government against the stronger Islamists. The media should be focusing on one of the major causes of the Somali mess: U.S. government meddling. After 9/11, the Bush administration feared that the absence of a strong government in the “failed state” of Somalia could turn the small east–African country—slightly smaller than Texas—into a haven for terrorists. The administration ignored the fact that other states with weak governments have not become sanctuaries for terrorists. Even if Somalia had become a terrorist enclave, the terrorists, absent some U.S. provocation, probably would not have attacked the faraway United States. As a result of the administration’s unfounded fear, the United States began supporting unpopular warlords in the strife-torn nation. That’s when the real trouble began. The radical Islamists in Somalia never had much following until the Somali people became aware that an outside power was supporting the corrupt and thuggish military chieftains. The popularity of the Islamist movement then surged, allowing the Islamists to take over much of the country. In sum, where no problem with radical Islamists previously existed, the U.S. government helped create one. In many respects, the Somali episode is a replay of other horribly counterproductive past U.S. interventions. In the 1980s, for example, the U.S. government supported the radical Islamist Mujahadeen—then fighting the non–Muslim Soviet occupiers in Muslim Afghanistan—that metamorphosed into al Qaeda, which is now attacking the United States for its non–Muslim military presence in the Persian Gulf. History followed a similar pattern in Iraq. The Bush administration justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq in part by al Qaeda’s alleged link to Saddam Hussein—a thug, to be sure, but one who had been wise enough, in reality, to support groups who didn’t focus their attacks on the United States. Now, in Iraq, where there were no anti–U.S. Islamic terrorists before, we have plenty to fight. Somalia is the third example of the United States creating a potentially anti–U.S. Islamist threat where none previously existed. The U.S.–supported Ethiopian invasion weakened the Somali Islamists, but they are still fighting fiercely for control of Mogadishu, the capital. Like those in Iraq, all the Somali Islamists have to do is hang on until the foreign occupier gets exhausted and leaves. When that happens, the Islamists could very well become the dominant political force in the country, capitalizing on their “patriotic” resistance to the hated Ethiopian occupiers and their U.S. benefactors. The U.S.–backed Ethiopians, already unpopular, have become even more despised as a result of their alleged indiscriminate shelling of Mogadishu’s civilian areas, which human rights groups are calling a war crime. Unlike the period when the Islamists controlled Mogadishu, the transitional government has been unable to keep order, undermining both its credibility and public support. As a result, many in Somalia see the period of Islamic rule as good days, and now long for its return. And that’s probably what will happen. Like the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, whose recent good fortunes were brought about by continued foreign occupation of that country, we will likely see the Somali Islamists make a comeback. U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia should teach foreign policy experts and the American public that U.S. meddling abroad is often counterproductive and dangerous. Yet the U.S. media help the U.S. government disguise these policy failures by failing to expose the underlying causes of violence, enabling the U.S. government to make the same mistakes over and over again. Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute and Assistant Editor of The Independent Review. Dr. Eland has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office, and Investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The Little Lie, and How It Grew By David Benjamin October 18, 2008 "Common Dreams" -- GREAT NECK, N.Y. - Last week, Gayle Quinnell, a septuagenarian reactionary from Shakopee, Minnesota, confessed - on TV - to G.O.P. candidate John McCain that she fears Democratic candidate Barack Obama because "he's an Arab." McCain replied that, no, Obama's no Arab at all, but a "decent family man" (implying that the two depictions are mutually exclusive). To me, the more intriguing element of this bizarre exchange was the word "Arab," rather than the more common Obama epithets, "Muslim," "terrorist" and "Osama." Mrs. Quinnell's "Arab" formulation was just enough off-key to make me wonder where she picked it up. In a subsequent YouTube video, Mrs. Quinnell helpfully elaborated, explaining that she possesses pages and pages of corroboration, plumbed from the Shakopee Public Library. Since it's unlikely that there's much info on Obama's ethnicity in the Shakopee stacks, I figured what Gayle had done was surf the Web. So I decided to try tracing her steps. It wasn't hard. No matter where I landed after Googling "obama, arab," I inevitably returned to the same damning quote. It goes: "Mr. Obama is 50% Caucasian from his mother's side. He is 43.75% Arabic, and 6.25% African Negro from his father's side." Also: "Obama is not legally African-American. It is impossible for him to be, in truth, America's first African-American president." Holy Leopold's ghost, Batman! As I continued searching, I unearthed this shocker, verbatim, on a dozen websites, including Yahoo!Answers. I found it cited by conservative superstars Rush Limbaugh, Monica Crowley and Laura Ingraham. Every repetition of this statistical proof that Barack Obama is "legally" Arab-American circles back to a Web blogger named Kenneth E. Lamb, a self-described journalist who claims a career of "writing and researching" for such august media outlets as the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Pentecostal Herald and the Jewish Information Network. Lamb's indictment of Obama the Mock-Negro is threefold. First, Lamb notes, Barack Hussein Obama must be an Arab because his full name is Arabic. Second, "Kenyan government" records, according to Lamb, have listed Obama's father, Barack Obama, Sr., as "Arab-African." Third, Lamb states that Barack is "descended from Arab slave traders" who resided in southern Sudan (an Arab-dominated state) until at least the 19th century, before emigrating to Kenya. Lamb says that he discovered this "devastating truth" in research for "... a NY daily of international reputation. It wasn't what I thought I'd find. I documented it, presented it to the Washington Bureau Chief, but was hardly surprised that it never saw ink..." The above statement represents the sum total of Lamb's documentation. There are no footnotes, no genealogical lists, no weblink to the "Kenyan government." There is no proof of Lamb's assertion that every male ancestor of Barack Obama has an Arabic name. For all this "information," the only Web source - for poor gullible Gayle Quinnell, as well as Limbaugh, Crowley and Ingraham - is Ken Lamb. However, by delving into the Web beyond the point where Mrs. Quinnell hung up her mouse, I learned a few things about Obama's lineage. First, yes, his mom was white. Second, according to Wikipedia and Britannica, Barack Obama's African half originates in the Luo tribe, who fled their roots in Sudan, bound for Kenya, in roughly 1500 A.D. The Luo - who are black as the ace of spades - have no blood connection to the Arabs who invaded Sudan about 500 years ago. Until the early 20th century, Luos got by with only one name. Under British colonial rule, they were forced to take a family name. So Barack Obama's grandfather, Onyango, simply combined his name with his father's, relabeling himself Onyango Obama. Both names, by the way - according to Ethnologue.com - are Luo, not Arabic. Obama means "slightly bent." The point where Ken Lamb probably got lost was where Onyango moved to Zanzibar for while, and was lured away from Christianity by some unknown Muslim spellbinder. According to several sources, the Obama clan was Christian - as are 90 percent of Luos - until Barack's grandddad went all Islamic and added another name! According to About.com, the Chicago Sun-Times and Barack's autobiography, Onyango not only decided to call himself Hussein ("the good") Onyango Obama, he decided to hang an Arabic name on his son, Barack Hussein Obama ("blessings on the good, slightly bent"). This Arabic-naming tradition among the Obamas didn't last long. The current Barack Obama named his daughters Malia (a Hawaiian word meaning "maybe," according to Think Baby Names.com) and Natasha (see "Rocky and Bullwinkle"). For the record, according to the Sun-Times, prior generations of Barack Obama's male forebears (the Luos, until recently, never kept track of mothers' names) were named Mwiru, Sigoma, Owiny, Kisodhi, Ogelo, Otondi, Obongo and Obiyo. His great grandmother was Nyaoke. His step-grandmother, the family genealogist, was named Sarah. Sarah, by the way, is a non-Luo name. It's Arabic (and Hebrew), according to Wikipedia, meaning "woman of high rank, " or "lady governor." So, what's the difference? Who cares if Barack Obama's forebears were Negro - as they appear to be - or Arab? For sane people, it's all the same. Most of us live side-by-side, in harmony, with Arab-Americans like Dr. Michael DeBakey, Jerry Seinfeld, Ralph Nader, Donna Shalala, Paula Abdul and Frank Zappa. But Kenneth Lamb's point is that by lying about his Arabicity, Barack Obama is concealing his very identity. Hence, we cannot trust any word that comes out of his lying mouth. Lamb writes that if Obama were to admit that Mwiru, Owiny, Obiyo and Nyaoke were ALL Arab slave-traders, "Mr. Obama will have to admit that which he has never been forced to admit before, even in the face of the massive lies of his autobiography: Mr. Obama's entire projection of who he is, and what he is, is a lie." Yeah, well, trouble is, according to the record, Obama is actually what he says he is - a half-caste darkie with a weird-*** name. So, how can we explain a growing posse of Web cadets out there - Gayle, Rush and Laura among them - who take Kenneth Lamb's dippy confection about Arabobama the Slave Prince of Wau at face value? Perhaps all we need to do is scroll back to a simpler, more analog era... One of the Third Reich's lasting contributions to Western culture was the articulation by Nazi propaganda guru Joseph Paul Goebbels of a strategy he called the Big Lie - a whopper told so often, so brazenly and with such conviction that it morphs magically into Gospel in the minds of the masses. Today, the Big Lie remains alive and well, but - judging by Ken Lamb's blog, the Drudge Report and other Internet travesties - it's evident that the Web has spun a 21st-century subspecies of Goebbels' brainstorm: the Little Lie. The Little Lie, ideally, is uttered but once - weakly - and released like a plankton speck into the Internet's vast soup of words. A typical Little Lie is credible, at first, to only a handful of its author's co-religionists. These believers might be crazier than the aunt in the attic. But they also have the Web. They echo the Little Lie until it loses all contact with its source. Ken Lamb disappears. Second- and third-circulation consumers have no idea that the author's assertions are both groundless and easily debunked. The Little Lie takes on the cast of verisimilitude. It swells effulgently; it makes its debut on Talk Radio. Pretty soon, it's on national TV, spouted by a cocksure bigot from just south of Lake Riley. Fed by YouTube, it grows, from a once-tiny microorganism, into a myth so smug that it ends up, finally, mocking the very words of its originator, Kenneth E. Lamb, who has said, "Racist presumptions coupled with sloppy vetting don't turn a lie into the truth." David Benjamin is a novelist and journalist, originally from Madison, Wisconsin, who now divides his time between New York and Paris. His latest book is The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked

Walaal Xiin. Baarakallahu feek. Hordhac ( Introduction to discussion) Su'aalaha aad noo soo jeedisay xaqiiqa ahaan waa kuwo Allah ku waafajiyey xikmaddeeda, maxaa yeelay, jawaabaha su'aalahaas wexey nagu caawinayaan inan marka hore fahamno Mushkiladda taagan nooceeda, si markaas aan u adeegsanno daawada munaasibka ah, annagoon, ku xadgudbin ( Overdose) ama, aan ka gaabinin. Haddii qof loogu yeero inuu dad is khilaafsan ama is heysta uu heshiisiiyo, waa inuu marka hore wareystaa: 1. " yaa is heysta" 2. " Maxaa la isku heystaa" Labadaas suaal markii laga jawaabo, waxaa caddaanaya: a. Qolooyinka is heysta, iyo kuwa daba jooga oo taageersan.( ama kuwa ayaga u taliya oy daba joogaan) b. Mushkiladda intay le'egtahay. c. Qaddarka Dhibka ay Mushkiladdan noo keeni karto haddaan la xallinin. d. Nooca dhibka ay keeni karto. ( Diin, nafta, maalka, sii aan u kala hormarinno talooyinka) e. Bandhig talooyin lagu xalliyo mushkiladda. f. In la doorto talada ugu fiican, markii si qoto dheer looga fiirsaday nooca mushkiladda iyo qaddarka dhibka ay keensan karto. g. Si hadaba xallinta Mushkiladda loo guda galo, waa in la helaa hal xeer ay labada qolo is heysta ay ixtiraamayaan, ooy u wada hoggansan yihiin. Mushkiladda taagan maanta wexey ku saleysan tahay, in la lay'yahay hal Xeer oo darafyada is heystaa ay wada oggolyihiin iney u wada hoggansamaan. Sidaa darteed Mushkiladdu wexey yeelatay gees kale, oo ah in qolooyin shisheeye ah ay dantoodii soo gashay mushkiladda ka dhex taagan Somalida, oo dhalisay kala qaybsanaanta iyo isnacidda iyo qabyaaladda. Qolyaha Shisheeye isla markaas wexey cabsi weyn ka qabaan midnimada Madax Bannaanida Somalida, sidaa darteed taladooda oo dhan wexey ku saleysan tahay iney hor istaagaan midnimmada Somalida oo ka dhalan karta iney hal Xeer isku xukumaan oo ah ISLAM. Hadaba, Waxaa isweydiin leh: 1. Mushkiladda taagan, ma mid ay shisheeye abaabuleen oy dhalieeyn baa? Haddey jawaabtu haa noqoto, waa in qolyahaas xisaabta lagu daraa. 2. Haddey Mushkiladdu tahay mid ay dadkeenna oo xukunka isku diriraya ay dhaliyeenna, oo dabadeed , shisheeyaha ayaga meesha soo geliyeenna, ooy islamarkaas taladoodana u madax bannan yihiin, waa in qolyahaas lala xaajoodaa. InshaAllah, waxaan si tafaq tiran u kala dhig dhigi doonnaa qodobbada dusha ku xusan maalmaha soo socda si aan aragtideenna u kulminno. Nur

Walaal Xiin. Waxaad qortay: Waan aqriyey qoraalkaaga. Aad baan kuu fahmay. Waxaad ku nuux-nuuxsatay iyo sida wax kuugu muuqdaan nathiriyya cusub maaha! Waxaadse ogaattaa Allah wuxuu leeyahay baaxad iyo xikmad ka ballaaran tan yarta ah een ku fekeraynu anagu." Jawaab: Walaal, ma moogi xikmadda Allah iyo naxariistiisa baallaran, xisaabta aakhiro, waa mid Allah u taalla, tan adduunkana waxaa naloo soo dajiyey Kitaab iyo sunnadii Rasuulkeenna oo haddan raacno aannaan lumeyn. Waxaa habboon inaan taladeenna ku dhisno muraadka Allah, oo ah in diinta la oogo oon aan lagu kala tagin ( an aqiimuu addeena walaa tatafarraquu fiih, kabura calal mushrikiina maa tadcuuhum ileyh!) Waxaad qortay: Ma aha (subxaanahu cazza wajalla) mid sideenoo kale u caraysan. "" Jawaab. Walaal, hadaalkaas waa ila qaldan yahay, Allah wuu xanaaqaa markii awliyadiisa la cadaadiyo, weerarna wuu u ballan qaaday, waxaa laga soo wariyey, suubbanihii inu yidhi, " man caadaa lii waliyan faqad aadantuhu bil xarb" , waxaa kaloo la soo wariyey in nin caalima ahaa loo cadaabay inuusan wajigiisu uusan u kaduudin cadho oo u cadhooday Allah dartii, oo malaaaigta la amray in caalimkaas ay ka bilaabaan cadaabta. Waxaa kaloo la soo wariyey in iimaanku inuusan dhameyn haddan Allah dartii loo nicin cadowga Allah SWT. Xikmadda ugu sarreysa, waa cabsida Allah " Raasul xikmah, makhafatullah. Waxaad Qortay: Allah wuxuu naga rabaa inaan nafteenna u hiilinno. Oo anagu is badbaadinno!" Jawaab: Waa runtaa, Allah wuxuu yidhi, " naftiinna iyo ehelkiinna naar ka badbaadiya, oo shidaalkeedu yahay dadka iyo dhagaxda" Badbaadada runta ah waa tan laga badbaado naarta, maxaa yeelay asxaabul ukhduud wexey ka doorteen in dab adduun ay galaan, intey tii aakhiro gali lahaayeen. Waxaad qortay: "Waxaa fiqhul waaqica aad ugu boodsan kolba aniga aragtidayda in maanta ummad 18 yrs dhimmanaysay cadowga loo sii nugleeyyo." Jawaab: Walaal, Allah wuxuu leeyahay " Ha addeecin midaan qalbigiisa ka xidhnay xasuusteenna, oo hawadiisa racay, taladiisuna ay noqotay fara ka bax" Waxaad qortay: "Anigu waxaan aad ugu bogsanahay fikirka Sheekh Bashir Salaad. Aakhirka waxaan aaminsanahay inay taa tageyso." Jawaab: Anuguna waxaan aad ugu bogsanahay hadyigii Rasuulkeena SAWS iyo Kitaabka Allah oo na faray inaan diintiisa u hiillino, asagoo leh, " kuwii Allah rumeeyayow, haddaad Allah u hiillisaan, wuu iddiiin hiillin, dambigiinnana wuu dhaafi", in quluubta muminiinta ay ka bogsooto cadhada Allah dartiisna waa cibaado, " Wa yashfi suduura qawmin muminiin" Waxaad qortay: " Cunfiga iyo tadarrufku inkastoo lagu ciil baxo haddana xikmad ummad lagu hoggaamiyyo malaha." Jawaab: Walaal, waa runtaa, haseyeeshee Dawlad aan awood xoog ah leheyn, oon is difaaci karinna dawlad ma aha, mana dhsinaan karto. Waxaad qortay: " Waa hooyada fashilka marka qofku diido inuu waaqaca la falgalo, wax ka baarandego, tixgeliyyo taariikhda dalku soo maray dhowr iyo tobonkii sano ee lasoo dhaafay." Jawaab: Walaal, eedda ah in ummadda 18 sano laga dhex dhaliyay dagaal sokeeye, si loo kala qaybiyio, loo daciifiyo, oo markaas ay xabashidu nagu dhiirrimaato, waxaa ka dambeeyay argagixisada ka amar qaadanayay xabashida, ay qolo walba u hubeyneysay si si ay qoloda kale u lesyo. Haatan oo Allah noo gargaaray, in jeceyl adduun, iyo jagooyin, aan doorbidno, taasaa halaagga runta ah. Waxaad qortay: " Qolodii dalka qasaysay intii dagaalka sokkeeye socday in lala ficiltamaa waa talo, waxaase ka habboon in makriga shisheeyaha si qorshaysan looga badbaado ummadana looga samata bixiyyo." Jawaab: Walaal, makri arrinta wa soo dhaaftay, labo talo ayaa ummaddeenna hor taalla. 1. Ama annaga ayaa is leyneyna, 2. Ama ayagaa na leynaya. Ayaga waxaa u qarash yar inaan annaga is leyno, sidaan ku soconnay 18 sano oo la soo dhaafay. Waxaad qortay: " Intaas markaan eegay, mawqifkayguna kaa yahay, waxaan aad ugu faraxsanahay in Sh. Bashiir uu maanta ku dhiiradday inuu taxliil taa ku salaysan uu amaama jamaahiir soo dhigo." Jawaab: Walaal, Allah wuxuu na leeyahay ".. haddaad wax isku qabsataan, (talada) u celiya Allah ( Quraanka), iyo Rasuulkiisa( Sunnada), iyo kuwa taladiinna ( kuwiinna muminiinta ah) idiin haya. Sidaa darteed, waxaan anigu ku farxi lahaa, hadduu Sheikh Bashir taxlilkiisa ku dhisi laha Kitaabka Allah iyo Sunnada Rasuulkiisa, iyo Culimada diinta badankooda aragtidooda, saa ummaddu iskuma raacdo lunsanaanee. Waxaad qortay: " Mar haddaad ka doodaysid in dadka masaajidyada ku jiraa islaanimadooda yaa Nur aad baa fahamkeennu ukal duwanyahay! Anigu ummadan umad fitno ku dhacday oo badbaado u baahan baan u arkaa." Jawaab: Walaal, sida hadalkaaga ka muuqata, seddex ayaa midkood lagu fasiri karaa hadalkaaga, 1. In cilmi yaraan ay ku heyso, 2. Inaad qalad u bareereyso. 3. Inaan anigu qaldanahay, oon xaq kugu leeyahay inaad i saxdid, saa diintu waa naseexee. Haddaad aamin san tahay in masaajid lagu tukado oo qudha ay ku ansaxeyso Islaannimadeenna, xataa hadduu qofkaas hor istaago diinta Allah iyo shareecadiisa in uunkiisa lagu xukumo, waxaan kaa codsanayaa inaad daliilkaaga sharciga ah aad noo sheegtid si aan kaaga faa'iiddeysanno, aniga iyo dhammaan inta aqrisaneysa qoraalkan, adigoo og inuu cilmigu amaano yahay, xaaraan ay tahay in cilmiga la qariyo, xataa cabsi awgeed, saa hadii kuwa cilmiga leh ay cabsadaan, goormay wax fahmi jaahiliintu? Waxaad qortay; " Kifaaxa keliyya ee maanta horyaalla waa in la middeeyo oo laga gudbiyyo qabyaalada iyo jahliga haysta." Jawaab: Qolada kaliya oo ka baxday qabyaaladda, wa qolada isku baheysatay Allah diintiisa iney u hiilliyaan, inta soo hartay, Qabyallad ka marna. Waxaad qortay: "Kifaaxa keliyya ee maanta horyaalla waa in la middeeyo oo laga gudbiyyo qabyaalada iyo jahliga haysta. Wasiilada keliyya ee ii muuqattaana waa in loo dhimriyyo oo loo tanaazulo, la wacyi geliyyo cadowgooda runta ah loo sheego, lana tilmaamo waddo suurtagal ah oo ay kusoo kaban karaan. " Su'aal Haddaan la fadhiisanno qolyihii (4.5), oon la heshiinno, sidee baan qabyaalad uga baxeynaa waligeen? Waxaad qortay: "Soomalidu inay is disho wax cusub maaha. Waxaa cusub in colaaduudu gaarto in shisheeyye ka faaideysto ilaa xadka uu maanta ka faaideystay. Ma la isku deyey, waa su'aasha Sh. Bashiire, in colaada soomalida dhextaalla la daweeyyyo si shisheeyahay meesha looga saaro? " Jawaab: Walaal, arrintu ma taagna shisheeye iyo sokeeye, arrintu ma aha qabyaalad ama Nationalism, arrinta taagan waa diinta Allah ma ku dhaqannaa, mise waxaan daawannaa riwaayadda naloo dhigayo si inta yaroo diinta ah oon heysanno nalaga tirtiro, si cilmiyeysan. Nur

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency By Mahmood Mamdani 03/10/07 "LRB" -- -- The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make? The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’. A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for ‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’ What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq. The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both were driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment defined by the War on Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west (following those in the south and in the east) calling for reform at the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split inside Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the drought that set in towards the late 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources. As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjawiid – that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiralling violence would have to bring about power-sharing at the state level and resource-sharing at the community level, land being the key resource. Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the violence, the first from the US, the second from the UN. The American verdict was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to Washington’s proclamation began with ‘a genocide alert’ from the Management Committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum; according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert was ‘the first ever of its kind, issued by the US Holocaust Museum’. The House of Representatives followed unanimously on 24 June 2004. The last to join the chorus was Colin Powell. The UN Commission on Darfur was created in the aftermath of the American verdict and in response to American pressure. It was more ambiguous. In September 2004, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, then the chair of the African Union, visited UN headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal point of discussion in the African Union. All concerned were alert to the extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference at the UN on 23 September Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear: Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence. By October, the Security Council had established a five-person commission of inquiry on Darfur and asked it to report within three months on ‘violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur by all parties’, and specifically to determine ‘whether or not acts of genocide have occurred’. Among the members of the commission was the chief prosecutor of South Africa’s TRC, Dumisa Ntsebeza. In its report, submitted on 25 January 2005, the commission concluded that ‘the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide . . . directly or through the militias under its control.’ But the commission did find that the government’s violence was ‘deliberately and indiscriminately directed against civilians’. Indeed, ‘even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.’ These acts, the commission concluded, ‘were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity’ (my emphasis). Yet, the commission insisted, they did not amount to acts of genocide: ‘The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing . . . it would seem that those who planned and organised attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.’ At the same time, the commission assigned secondary responsibility to rebel forces – namely, members of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement – which it held ‘responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes’ (my emphasis). If the government stood accused of ‘crimes against humanity’, rebel movements were accused of ‘war crimes’. Finally, the commission identified individual perpetrators and presented the UN secretary-general with a sealed list that included ‘officials of the government of Sudan, members of militia forces, members of rebel groups and certain foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’. The list named 51 individuals. The commission’s findings highlighted three violations of international law: disproportionate response, conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, targeting entire groups (as opposed to identifiable individuals) but without the intention to eliminate them as groups. It is for this last reason that the commission ruled out the finding of genocide. Its less grave findings of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ are not unique to Darfur, but fit several other situations of extreme violence: in particular, the US occupation of Iraq, the Hema-Lendu violence in eastern Congo and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Among those in the counter-insurgency accused of war crimes were the ‘foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’, i.e. mercenaries, presumably recruited from armed forces outside Sudan. The involvement of mercenaries in perpetrating gross violence also fits the occupation in Iraq, where some of them go by the name of ‘contractors’. The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention. Kristof made six highly publicised trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it as a case of ‘ethnic cleansing’: ‘Sudan’s Arab rulers’ had ‘forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages’ (24 March 2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing, but genocide. ‘Right now,’ he wrote on 27 March, ‘the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region.’ He continued: ‘The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government’ and ‘the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet and Fur tribes.’ He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week. Two months later, on 29 May, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards, citing predictions from the US Agency for International Development to the effect that ‘at best, “only” 100,000 people will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease’ but ‘if things go badly, half a million will die.’ The UN commission’s report was released on 25 February 2005. It confirmed ‘massive displacement’ of persons (‘more than a million’ internally displaced and ‘more than 200,000’ refugees in Chad) and the destruction of ‘several hundred’ villages and hamlets as ‘irrefutable facts’; but it gave no confirmed numbers for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces had ‘allegedly killed over 70,000 persons’. Following the publication of the report, Kristof began to scale down his estimates. For the first time, on 23 February 2005, he admitted that ‘the numbers are fuzzy.’ Rather than the usual single total, he went on to give a range of figures, from a low of 70,000, which he dismissed as ‘a UN estimate’, to ‘independent estimates [that] exceed 220,000’. A warning followed: ‘and the number is rising by about ten thousand a month.’ The publication of the commission’s report had considerable effect. Internationally, it raised doubts about whether what was going on in Darfur could be termed genocide. Even US officials were unwilling to go along with the high estimates propagated by the broad alliance of organisations that subscribe to the Save Darfur campaign. The effect on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months later, on 3 May, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had ‘Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration’s past judgment that the killings amount to genocide’: he had ‘also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000’. As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest estimate of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as ‘nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day’. In three months, Kristof’s estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months later, on 27 November, Kristof warned that ‘if aid groups pull out . . . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.’ Anyone keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (16 June 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (23 February 2005). The number began once more to climb to ‘nearly 400,000’ (3 May 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (23 April 2006). Each time figures were given with equal confidence but with no attempt to explain their basis. Did the numbers reflect an actual decline in the scale of killing in Darfur or was Kristof simply making an adjustment to the changing mood internationally? In the 23 April column, Kristof expanded the list of perpetrators to include an external power: ‘China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan’s pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47s have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far and China has protected Sudan in the UN Security Council.’ In the Kristof columns, there is one area of deafening silence, to do with the fact that what is happening in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly a word is said about the insurgency, about the civilian deaths insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission characterised as ‘war crimes’. Would the logic of his 23 April column not lead one to think that those with connections to the insurgency, some of them active in the international campaign to declare Darfur the site of genocide, were also guilty of ‘underwriting’ war crimes in Darfur? Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer. Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages. The conflict in Darfur is highly politicised, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign’s constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: ‘Arabs’ are trying to eliminate ‘Africans’. But both ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of ‘Arab’. Locally, ‘Arab’ was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become ‘Arab’ over time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on the East African coast. The third meaning of ‘Arab’ was ‘privileged and exclusive’; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabisation with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent. ‘African’, in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – ‘African’ as Bantu and ‘African’ as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign’s characterisation of the violence as ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and, ultimately, demonisation of the notion ‘Arab’, as against ‘African’, has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign. The depoliticisation of the conflict gave campaigners three advantages. First, they were able to occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives. Second, only a single-issue campaign could bring together in a unified chorus forces that are otherwise ranged as adversaries on most important issues of the day: at one end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the other, a mainly school and university-based peace movement. Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice wrote of the Save Darfur Coalition as ‘an alliance of more than 515 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organisations’; among the organisers of their Rally to Stop the Genocide in Washington last year were groups as diverse as the American Jewish World Service, the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the National Association of Evangelicals, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Anti-Slavery Group, Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity International, Physicians for Human Rights and the National Black Church Initiative. Surely, such a wide coalition would cease to hold together if the issue shifted to, say, Iraq. To understand the third advantage, we have to return to the question I asked earlier: how could it be that many of those calling for an end to the American and British intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur? It’s tempting to think that the advantage of Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway place where those who drive the War on Terror do not have a vested interest. That this is hardly the case is evident if one compares the American response to Darfur to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions of the conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the numbers killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done by paramilitaries trained, organised and armed by neighbouring governments; and the victims on both sides – Hema and Lendu – are framed in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that one influential version defines both as racial identities and the conflict between the two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given all this, how does one explain the fact that the focus of the most widespread and ambitious humanitarian movement in the US is on Darfur and not on Kivu? Nicholas Kristof was asked this very question by a university audience: ‘When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur. It’s a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000. In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War Two.’ But instead of answering the question, Kristof – now writing his column rather than facing the questioner at Cornell – moved on: ‘And malaria annually kills one million to three million people – meaning that three years’ deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria.’ And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo: ‘We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide special – not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria.’ That did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason be that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias – many of them no more than child soldiers – were trained by America’s allies in the region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in Darfur – but not the violence in Kivu – is named as a genocide? It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. In Kristof’s words, the point is not so much ‘human suffering’ as ‘human evil’. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonise an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This was the third and most valuable advantage that Save Darfur gained from depoliticising the conflict. The more thoroughly Darfur was integrated into the War on Terror, the more the depoliticised violence in Darfur acquired a racial description, as a genocide of ‘Arabs’ killing ‘Africans’. Racial difference purportedly constituted the motive force behind the mass killings. The irony of Kristof’s columns is that they mirror the ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan by demonising entire communities.[*] Kristof chides Arab peoples and the Arab press for not having the moral fibre to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because it is a violence inflicted by Arab Muslims on African Muslims. In one of his early columns in 2004, he was outraged by the silence of Muslim leaders: ‘Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?’ Two years later he asked: ‘And where is the Arab press? Isn’t the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?’ Six months later, Kristof pursued this line on NBC’s Today Show. Elaborating on the ‘real blind spot’ in the Muslim world, he said: ‘You are beginning to get some voices in the Muslim world . . . saying it’s appalling that you have evangelical Christians and American Jews leading an effort to protect Muslims in Sudan and in Chad.’ If many of the leading lights in the Darfur campaign are fired by moral indignation, this derives from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. After all, the seeds of the Save Darfur campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor for senseless violence in politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before. Most writing on the Rwandan genocide in the US was also done by journalists. In We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, the most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter between evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about Darfur have Rwanda very much in the back of their minds. In December 2004, Kristof recalled the lessons of Rwanda: ‘Early in his presidency, Mr Bush read a report about Bill Clinton’s paralysis during the Rwandan genocide and scrawled in the margin: “Not on my watch.” But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I find that heartbreaking and baffling.’ With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong lesson. The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil war which intensified when the settlement to contain it broke down. The settlement, reached at the Arusha Conference, broke down because neither the Hutu Power tendency nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest in observing the power-sharing arrangement at the core of the settlement: the former because it was excluded from the settlement and the latter because it was unwilling to share power in any meaningful way. What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to see is that the US did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy. That proxy was the RPF, backed up by entire units from the Uganda Army. The green light was given to the RPF, whose commanding officer, Paul Kagame, had recently returned from training in the US, just as it was lately given to the Ethiopian army in Somalia. Instead of using its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to the civil war, and then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the parties that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda. Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising that Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes a Rwanda. Strengthening those on both sides who stand for a political settlement to the civil war is the only realistic approach. Solidarity, not intervention, is what will bring peace to Darfur. The dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny ‘Arabised’ elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalised populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power. The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organised negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which favours parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur. The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror. Footnotes * Contrast this with the UN commission’s painstaking effort to make sense of the identities ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. The commission’s report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur conflict pitted ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ was facile. ‘In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army.’ Second, it has never been easy to sort different tribes into the categories ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: ‘The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them’ (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward the view that political developments are driving the rapidly growing distinction between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. On the one hand, ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ seem to have become political identities: ‘Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African” and those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.’ Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent book is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.

Walaal Xiin Alxamdulillah, wa salla Allah calaa sayidinaa Muxammad, wa calaa aalih wa saxbih wa man tabicahum bi ixsaanin ilaa yowmil qiyaamah. Allaha kaa abaal mariyo, abaal wanaagsan, qoraalkan qiimaha badan ee Sheeikh Bashir aad noo soo gudbisay. Allaha ka aqbalo Sheikh Bashir waanadiisa, miisaanka xasanaatkiisana ha ku culeysiyo maalin uusan qiimo laheyn waxaanan xaq aheyn, ( Wal Waznu yowma idinil Xaq) , Allaha annana naga yeelo kuwa maqla waanada, dabadeedna raaca inteeda wanaagsan. Amin. Walaal, Qoraalkan Sheikh Bashir waxaan ka fahmay waxaan ku soo koobayaa intan soo socota: 1. Dhibaatada ina soo food saarty ummad ahaan, si gaar aahaanna, ummadda Somaliyeed. 2. Weynaanta awoodda, iyo badnaanta tirada cadowga ummadda usoo dhacay oo dhex taagan. 3. Somali noqotay shisheeye kalkaal, u gargaareysa cadowgeeda, tuseysa cadwoga ummadda Somaliyeed boogisheeda, loona adeegsanayo sidii ummadda loo hoos keeni lahaa maamulka cadowga. 4. Is caabbinta dhallin yarada oo aan fiiro dheer laheyn, oo u aragta jahaadka oo qudha in lagu gaadhi karo danaha ummadda oo ah in la xaqiijiyo diinta Allah lana raaco shareecadiisa. 5. In aan loo baahneyn caqli mushkiladda looga baxo oo qudha, hase yeeshee loo baahan yahay caqli looga hor tago. 6. Markii labo kooxood oo ummaddeena Somalida ah ay is qabato, in aan la kooxna badin, iney gaalo gargaar ka doonaan, oo la heshiiyo , maxaa yeelay Ujeeddada Shareecadu waa in la badbaadiyo ummadda. 7. In loo baahan yaha caqlaaniyad, ah in taarikhda laga faaideysto, oon lagi dhicin qaladkii kuwii hore ku dheceen, oo ay u keentay jaahilnimo awooddooda, iyo tan cadowgooda. 8. In waddankeena uu ka duwan yahay waddamada kale dhinaca topologiga, taaso ka dhigaysa kuwa cadowgooda aan ka qarsoomin. 9. In kooxda jinsigeenna ah oo cadowgu uu kensaday, oo nagu dhex nool aan la gaaleysiinin, oon la leynin, gaar ahaan haddey masaajidkeenna nagula tukadeen, oon la ugaadhsan. 10. Waddankii wuxuu noqday bahllo galeen ay gacmo badan ka adeeganayaan si sumcadda looga dilo Islamka, hadaba, inta Lillaahiga ahi may dhinac isu raacdo, so inta kale u muuqdaan? Jawaab: Bismillaahi, wa bihi nastaciin. Walaal, Xiin, Mushkilad markey dhacdo wexey leedahay hab looga baxo, cidhidhi walbana waxaa ka dambeeya faraj, dhacdo walbana waxey ku saleysan tahay murti iyo duruus, dadka qaarkoodna ka faaideystaan. Markey mushkilad na soo foodsaarto, si looga baxao waxaa loo baahan yahay manhajiyad ( Process), oo dhowr tallabo ka sameysan: 1. In marka hore mushkiladda taagan la caddeeyo ( Defined). Tallabadan waa tii aragtida ummadda lagu kulminayay, haddaanan ummadda isku aragti ahayn, isku meel u ma soconayaan. Haddaaney ummaddu isku meel u soconin, isku dariiq ma raaceyso, haadeyn ummaddu isku dariiq marinna, wexey ku kula biirayaan ummadaha kale. Sidaa darteedna, qof waliba oo Somali ah wuxuu walaal la noqonayaa qofkuu aragtidiisa ku qanacsanyahay, haba noqdaanee Axmaarada iyo Ameerikaanka, ama Taalibaanka. Haddii la waayo hal aragti oo qudha, isku meel lagama soo wada jeedsan doono, haddaan isku meel laga soo wada jeedsanna, waxaa lumaya midnimadii ummadda. Qodobkaas kowaad, waa meesha lagu kala baxayo, ee qolo walba ah sababta ay qolo walba u yeelaneyso mushkilad ka duwan qolada kale. Qolada dooratay iney Allah diintiisa ku hoos nooladaan, waxaa ay u arkaan mushkiladda ugu weyn ee ummadda heysata in ay tahay in bilowga nabad waarta, horumar dhaqaaleed, iyo kheyr oo dhan u ka bilaabmayo in marka hore lagu hoos noolaado shareecadana Islaamka, la iskuna xukumo Kitaabka Allah iyo Sunnada Carfoon ee Rasuulkiisa, una arkaan qofkii labadaas tiir oo waaweyn diida oon raalli ku aheyn in la wada raaco inuusan Muslim ahayn xataa hadduu sheegto oo uu masjidka dadka kula tukado. Hadduusan Muslim ahaynna, wexey arkaan in qofkaas aan wax lawada qaybsan karin. Dhallin yaradaasi Wexey doorbideen geeri daacadda Allah dartii, intey ku noolaan lahaayeen nolol caasinnimo Allah iyo dullinimada in ay hoos imaadaan addoon la addoonsaday. Qolada kale, oo nacay wuxuu Allah soo dajiyay, jeclaaday in cilmaaniyadda lagu hoos noolaado si loo dar yeelo waddamada gaalada aha, lana qaato nadaamka Dimoqraadiyada ah, wexey arkeen in Mushkiladda ummaddeena ay tahay iney dib u socoto, iney u baahan tahay horumar dhaqaaleed, waddanka oo la dhiso, dadkii oo la dajiyo, baansiinka oo la qodo, si sharkadaha maraykanka aha ay lacag badan waddanka u keenaan, taasna in lagu gaari karo oo qudha in nadaamka caalamiga ah, Qurummada Midoobay, iyo Isticmaarka Axmaarada in lala shaqeeyo. Aragtida guud ee mushkiladda waxaa ka gabyay Sayyid Muxammad Cabdalle Xassan: Dariiqeygii sow taan ka dhigay diinta Nabi raacee Dannigeygii sow taan is iri aakiraa darane Doqonta iyo (cilmaaniyiintaa) is yiri kani damiinoowyee. Wuxuu kaloo Sayyid ku gabyay: Naakhuudayaal iyo kufraad Nabiyo mooddeenee, Nacalluhu kuwuu fuulay baad nacam tiraahdeenee Naagow tihiin gaaladii nalashka weeyneydee Nasab hadaad tihiin gaaladaad nici laheydeenee. Annagoo tix raaceyaa qoraalka Sheikh Bashir iyo kala qeexiidda aragtida labada kooxood oo ku dagaallamaya waddankeenna iyo into wareersan oo u dhaxeys, bal aan qodobbada uu Sheikha ka hadlay aan ku fiirinno aragtida aan ka hadlay. 1. Dhibaatada ina soo food saarty ummad ahaan, si gaar aahaanna, ummadda Somaliyeed. Allah wuxuu leeyahay, " Wixii musiibo ah oo idinku dhaca wexey ka mid yihiin waxaad gacmihiinna ku galabsateen, qaar badanna waa la idinka cafiyay" 2. Weynaanta awoodda, iyo badnaanta tirada cadowga ummadda usoo dhacay oo dhex taagan. Allah wuxuu leeyahy: " Hana is liidina, hana calool xumaanina, saa idinkaa gacan sarreeya haddaad muminiin tihiinee" 3. Somali noqotay shisheeye kalkaal, u gargaareysa cadowgeeda, tuseysa cadwoga boogaha ummadda si uu jarjaro, una kala qaybiyo, islamarkaasna loo adeegsanayo sidii ummadda sandulle loo hoos keeni lahaa maamul cadow. Allah wuxuu leeyahay " Allah aragtidiisa, Uunka ( Dawaab)waxaa ugu shar badan kuwa dhagaha la' (oon xaqa maqlin), indhaha la' (xaqa arkin), oo bukm ah ( kheyr sheegin), kuwaa aan wax fahmin" 4. Is caabbinta dhallin yarada oo aan fiiro dheer laheyn, oo u aragta jahaadka oo qudha in lagu gaadhi karo danaha ummadda oo ah in la xaqiijiyo diinta Allah lana raaco shareecadiisa. Allah wuxuu leeyahay: " Qofkii naarta laga weeciyo, oo jannada la galiyo ayaa guuleystay, (guushii runta aheyd), saa nolosha dunidana ma aha waxaan aheyn raaxo gaaban oo dadka dageysa (sireysa)" 5. In aan loo baahneyn caqli mushkiladda looga baxo oo qudha, hase yeeshee sidaasoo kale loo baahan yahay caqli looga hor tago. Wa xaqiiqo arrinkaas. Waxaa loo baahan yahy Caqli ku hubeysneyn cabsi Allah, kitaabkiisa iyo Sunnada carfoon ee Rasuulkiisa SAWS. Allah wuxuu leeyahay " Wat Taquu Allah, wa yucallimukum Allah" 6. Markii labo kooxood oo ummaddeena Somalida ah ay is qabato, in aan kooxna la badin, iney gaalo gargaar ka doonaan, oo la heshiiyo, maxaa yeelay Ujeeddada Shareecadu waa in la badbaadiyo ummadda. Ujeeddooyinka Shareecada wey kala hoorreyaan, waxaa ugu muhimsan tan ugu horreysa oo ah in la xafido Diinta iyo Shareecada: 1. Dhowridda Diinta ( Haddii Diin/Shareeco la waayo, wax la ilaaliyo ma harin, " Wal Fitnatu ashaddu minal qatl" 2. Dhowridda Nafta ( waa in loo dhowraa qasadka hore, oo ah cibaadada Allah oo kaliya) 3. Dhowridda Caqliga ( Waa in laga dowraa qamrada iyo jaadka, iyo wax walboo caqliga kharribaya si Allah qofku u caabudo) 4. Dhowridda Dhallaanka ( waa in loo dhowraa, in ay camiraan dunida Allahna ku caabudaan) 5. Dhowridda Hantida ( laga dhowro xaaraanta, loo dhowro in lagu nafaqeeyo kheyrka, masaakiinta, iyo mashaariicda dadka anfacaya) 7. In loo baahan yaha caqlaaniyad, ah in taarikhda laga faaideysto, oon lagi dhicin qaladkii kuwii hore ku dheceen, oo ay u keentay jaahilnimo awooddooda, iyo tan cadowgooda. Allah wuxuu leeyahay " A tawaasow bih, bal hum qowmun taaaghuun" gaaladu ma isu dardaarmeen sidii diintaan ay ula dagaallami lahaayeen? sunanka Allah isma baddalayaan, ha noqoto dhinaca gaalada ama dhinaca Muslimiinta, ilaa saacaddu istaagto, waa la is hor taagnaan siduu Suubbanihii sheegay in ay mar walba jiri doonto xeyn ka mid ah ummaddiisa oo u taagnaan doonta xaqa, oo aan marna ayan niyad jabi karin kuwa aan kaalmeynin, ama kuwa la dagaalamaya, ilaa qiyaamaha istaago" 8. In waddankeena uu ka duwan yahay waddamada kale dhinaca topologiga, taaso ka dhigaysa kuwa cadowgooda aan ka qarsoomin. Ninbaa nin wuxuu ku handaday, "Cirkaan kugu soo dumin!", ninkii kale wuxuu ku jawaabay, "Meeshaad ka gashaan ka galayaa". Wax la hoos galo waxaa ugu xoog badan Allah, meel lagu dhuuntana waxaa u qaawan guriga caarada, qofkaan Allah ku gaashaaman, siuu rabo xoog ha u yeesho, waa qof hoos galay guriga caarada. 9. In kooxda jinsigeenna ah oo cadowgu uu kensaday, oo nagu dhex nool aan la gaaleysiinin, oon la leynin, gaar ahaan haddey masaajidkeenna nagula tukadeen, oon la ugaadhsan. Waxaa is weydiin leh, qofkii diida sharciga Allah in ummadda lagu xukumo ma Muslim baa? Dabadeed, hadduu qofkaas u gargaaro cadowga dad iyo duunyo laayey, haweenkennii kufsaday, waddankeenni qabsaday, qofkaas salaadda uu tukado ma ku soo dareysaa diinta? bal arrintaas culimadeenna sharafta leh hala weydiiyo fatwo. 10. Waddankii wuxuu noqday bahllo galeen ay gacmo badan ka adeeganayaan si sumcadda looga dilo Islamka, hadaba, inta Lillaahiga ahi may dhinac isu raacdo, so inta kale u muuqdaan? Allah wuxuu leeyahay" Allah ma aheyn mid ku daafa dadka xaalkaad ku sugan tihiin( isku qasnaasho) ilaa aad kala soocantaan oo kiinna khabiithka ah( danta cadowga ka shaqeeynaya) uu ku soocmo kan wanaagsan ( Shareecada Allah iyo xoreynta waddanka raadinaya) Nur

James Bamford: “ The Shadow Factory : The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America” By Democracy Now! 14/10/08 --- The Bush administration’s wiretapping program has come under new scrutiny this week. Two influential congressional committees have opened probes into allegations US intelligence spied on the phone calls of American military personnel, journalists and aid workers in Iraq. We speak to James Bamford about the NSA’s spying on Americans, the agency’s failings pre-9/11 and the ties between NSA and the nation’s telecommunications companies. AMY GOODMAN: The Bush administration’s wiretapping program has come under new scrutiny this week. Two influential congressional committees have opened probes into allegations US intelligence spied on the phone calls of American military personnel, journalists and aid workers in Iraq. Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator Arlen Specter of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senator Jay Rockefeller, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, say they want Congress to look into allegations from two former military intelligence officials. The two whistleblowers—Adrienne Kinne, an Army reservist, and David Murfee Faulk, a Navy linguist—spoke last Thursday to ABC News. While the network claimed that marked the first time the two whistleblowers had come forward, they had both spoken out well before last week. Blogger David Swanson wrote about them as early as July 2007, and in her first broadcast interview five months ago, former Military Intelligence Sergeant Adrienne Kinne, detailed the spying on Democracy Now! back in May. ADRIENNE KINNE: I was stationed at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and I was actually mobilized shortly after 9/11 with a group of reservists who were eventually sent to Fort Gordon to work a mission, that it was actually a brand new mission. It was something not like anything I had done in military intelligence previously. And this new mission involved the intercept of satellite phone communications in Iraq and Afghanistan and basically a huge swath of the region around those two countries. It was really brand new, and basically there were about twenty of us who were put in charge of this new mission, to stand it up. In the very beginning, basically what we did was that we would have a front end, which intercepted satellite phone communications in that region, and then it would transmit the satellite phone conversations back to the United States, where it would just fill up this queue in our computer, and we would just go through. And all the numbers were unidentified. So, at the beginning, it was just a matter of sifting through thousands upon thousands of unidentified satellite phone communications, as we kind of tried to sort out what phone number belonged to who and kind of go through the process of identifying phone numbers in the search for intelligence that might be related to operations in Afghanistan and, later on, Iraq. AMY GOODMAN: And when were you listening to Iraq? ADRIENNE KINNE: We started listening to the entire region pretty much immediately. I think this was December of 2001. And I was mobilized from October 2001 through August of 2003. So I was working that mission pretty much from December through August of 2003. And over the course of my time, as we slowly began to identify phone numbers and who belonged to what, one thing that gave me grave concern was that as we identified phone numbers, we started to find more and more and more numbers that belonged not to any organizations affiliated with terrorism or with military—with militaries of Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere, but with humanitarian aid organizations, non-governmental organizations, who include the International Red Cross, Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, a whole host of humanitarian aid organizations. And it also included journalists. AMY GOODMAN: Former Military Intelligence Sergeant Adrienne Kinne, speaking on Democracy Now! in May. She and Navy linguist, David Murfee Faulk, were also interviewed for a new book on the National Security Agency by James Bamford, an investigative journalist and author of two earlier books on the agency. Bamford is among the plaintiffs in a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of journalists, academics, aid workers and lawyers who feared they were targeted by government spying. A federal appeals court dismissed the case last year after ruling the plaintiffs can’t prove they were monitored. The ACLU might reopen the suit to include the new revelations by Kinne and Faulk. James Bamford has been covering the National Security Agency for the last three decades. He came close to standing trial after revealing the NSA’s operations in his explosive 1982 book The Puzzle Palace. His latest book, which comes out today, is the third in his trilogy on the NSA. It’s called The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Today, we spend the hour with James Bamford. He joins us from Washington, D.C. Welcome to Democracy Now! JAMES BAMFORD: Thanks, Amy. I appreciate it. AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, let’s talk about Adrienne Kinne’s allegations, spying on Americans and international aid workers in Iraq. What’s wrong with this? JAMES BAMFORD: Well, there’s a lot of things wrong with it. First of all, they’re wasting their time, when they should be spying on or trying to intercept communications to and from terrorists. That was one of the complaints that Adrienne had and also Murfee Faulk had, that they didn’t join the military to listen to Americans doing pillow talk, because a lot of this was intimate conversations between Americans and their spouses back in the United States. They’ve been separated a long time, and you can imagine what a lot of those conversations dealt with. They were very personal matters dealing with finance, affection, and so forth. So they felt that they were morally wrong by eavesdropping on these people and then just wasting government money and wasting their time by listening to things that had nothing to do with the war on terrorism. AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting. One of the things Adrienne Kinne told us was that she was spying on journalists at the Palestine Hotel. She knew they were journalists. She heard what they were saying over time. Here she was in Georgia, but spying on those people, those journalists, in Iraq. And she said she saw a document, she saw an email that put the Palestine Hotel on a—as a bombing target, and she immediately went to her superiors, because she was spying on them, she knew that they were journalists. She said, “But there are journalists in that hotel.” She learned a lot in this spying. Is this illegal? JAMES BAMFORD: Well, you know, it would have been illegal under the old original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The way they’ve sort of contorted the new amendments to the act, it’s hard to tell what’s legal and what isn’t, because they’ve taken the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court largely out of the mix. And so, much of what is being done is governed by secret rules known as USSID 18, United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, which is above top-secret. It’s top-secret code words. So what is legal, what isn’t legal, it’s very hard to tell. And I think that’s why you really need a congressional committee to really take a look at this. What really needs to happen is a very in-depth examination of NSA post/11—actually, pre-9/11 and post-9/11, the kind that was done in the mid-1970s by Senator Frank Church, the Church Committee. I think that’s really the only way to get to the bottom of whether NSA messed up before the attacks on 9/11 and whether they’re doing things that are illegal or improper after 9/11. AMY GOODMAN: What other allegations did the Navy linguist David Murfee Faulk make about what he was listening to in Iraq? JAMES BAMFORD: Well, he confirmed a lot of what Adrienne was saying. And it’s interesting, because they cover such different times there. Adrienne was there from 2001 to August of 2003. David Faulk was there from November of 2003 until November of 2007. So you have this time period covered from 2001 to 2007. And they were both doing similar things. They had never met each other. So these are very independent views of what was going on over there. And so, you have this continuum from 2001 to 2007 of eavesdropping on Americans. One of the things that David Murfee Faulk brought up was the fact that not only were they eavesdropping on a lot of these conversations, some of which were very intimate, but they would have sort of locker room chats about what they were hearing, and they would post—or they would notify their co-workers that you should listen to this, what they call “cut,” their conversations. You should listen to this conversation or that conversation. They’d laugh about it. And, you know, I don’t really think that’s what the soldiers over there that are fighting really appreciate, the fact that you have Americans back in the state of Georgia laughing over their intimate conversations. So, the other thing that David Murfee Faulk brought up that I thought was very important and really gave a good insight into what—how some of this activity that’s taking place in Iraq comes about, you know, when they’re dropping bombs on houses and neighborhoods and busting down doors and putting people into Abu Ghraib and so forth, how does that come about? Why do they bust down this door or drop a bomb on that house? And the insight he gave, I thought was very interesting. He was saying how it’s these people here that are sitting in this windowless room in the state of Georgia, near Augusta, Georgia, that are listening to these conversations in Iraq, in Baghdad, and they’re making instantaneous decisions on whether somebody is telling the truth or not. So they’re writing out these—they’re doing these transcripts, and then they’re writing these little comments saying this person here, Ali, is saying he’s going to deliver a load of melons to his cousin Mohammed tomorrow. And then you have somebody making a decision: is he telling the truth, or isn’t he? Are these melons, or possibly could they be IEDs? And if a person says, “You know, I don’t think he’s telling the truth,” there’s a good chance that that house could be blown up or that person could be put in Abu Ghraib, or whatever. And the point that David Mufee Faulk was making was that the people that are making these decisions, these sometimes life-and-death decisions, don’t have the proper training. They’re trained for sixty-three weeks in Monterey, California in standard Arabic. And what they’re listening to a lot of times is dialects that they don’t really understand, and they’re listening for nuances that they don’t really get, and idioms and so forth. And I think it’s very dangerous, and what the point he was making was it was very dangerous for—you know, sometimes these are just people right out of high school to—that have never been out of the country, and certainly never been over to the Middle East, to make these sort of life-and-death decisions based on just hearing one conversation out of context. AMY GOODMAN: And they’re doing this from Fort Gordon, Georgia. Are they working for the NSA, the National Security Agency? JAMES BAMFORD: Yes. The way this works—a lot of people don’t really understand how this whole system works—the NSA is sort of two organizations in one; the director of NSA wears two hats. If you ever get a letter from NSA or whatever, it says—the letterhead says, “National Security Agency/Central Security Service.” And the director always signs his name “Director NSA/Chief CSS.” The National Security Agency is largely civilians, and they’re mostly the analysts and the people who design the sophisticated satellites and do a lot of the technical development work and break a lot of the codes and so forth. And the people on the front lines, the intercept operators, are almost all military, and some civilians who transition from the military into a private contractor, for example. So, most of those are the military, but they all come under the same organization. The military is technically the Central Security Service, which reports to the director of NSA, and the civilians are largely NSA analysts and so forth. So it’s the same organization. Adrienne Kinne, for example, she showed me her certificate that she received when she was there. In a big print at the top, it said “National Security Agency,” and it was an award of achievement for the good work she did while she was there on this NSA mission called Operation Highlander. AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to James Bamford, investigative journalist, author of three books now on the National Security Agency, his last out today, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. We’re spending the hour with him. When we come back from break, just what is the NSA? And then we’ll talk about what happened in the lead-up to 9/11 and beyond. Stay with us. AMY GOODMAN: James Bamford is our guest for the hour, investigative reporter and author of three books on the National Security Agency, his newest book just out today, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Jim Bamford, explain exactly what the NSA is. I don’t think most people realize that it is many times larger than, for example, the CIA. JAMES BAMFORD: And many times more secret. That’s why there’s been hundreds of books on the CIA, and there’s only been three books on NSA, and I wrote all three. So it’s an agency that’s very, very, very secret. And the distinction between NSA and the CIA is that the CIA specializes in the type of espionage that most people are familiar with from reading James Bond books and so forth, the human spy, where the agent goes out and hides documents under a tree or tries to develop sources in a foreign country. That’s human intelligence, known in the trade as HUMINT. NSA specializes in SIGINT, which is signals intelligence. And what that is is eavesdropping. And that’s actually where the US gets most of its intelligence. It doesn’t really get most of its intelligence from human spies, because they’re fairly unreliable and they’re very rare to find. But it gets most of its intelligence from eavesdropping on communications, whether it’s telephone calls or email or faxes, computer transfers of information between computers, any kind of information like that, instant messages. It intercepts it. So NSA is the big ear. And the way it works is, it picks up communications from satellites, it taps undersea and underground fiber-optic cables, it gets information any way it can, and then some of the information is encrypted, and it’s responsible for breaking those codes and then sending the information that it gets from these intercepts to other agencies. And that’s what Adrienne and David Murfee Faulk did. They were the actual front lines in this sort of electronic war. They were the intercept operators. AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, can you talk about how the NSA picked up the very first clues about the 9/11 attacks well before the 9/11 attacks? JAMES BAMFORD: Well, the very first clue to the 9/11 attack occurred in late December 1999, when the NSA picked up a message from a house in Yemen. The house was being used by bin Laden as his operations center. He didn’t have much capability to operate out of Afghanistan, so all the phone calls, all the messages, email and all that would go to this house in the city of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. NSA had been eavesdropping on that house for a number of years, and in late December 1999, it picked up a particular intercept, picked up a particular phone conversation. And the phone conversation said that—send Khalid and Nawaf to Kuala Lumpur for a meeting. So, NSA picked that up, and they—first of all, they figured that Nawaf and Khalid had to be very important potential terrorists, because they were being assigned by bin Laden out in Afghanistan to go to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. That seemed like a terrorist summit meeting. NSA gave that information to the other intelligence agencies, and the CIA set up a surveillance in Kuala Lumpur, and then they lost them in Kuala Lumpur. After they lost them, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi went to California. They got in without any problem. NSA, even though they had the last name of Nawaf al-Hazmi in their computers, they never bothered to check, so they both got in without any problem into the United States. They went down, and they lived in San Diego. And they began calling back and forth to that house in Yemen, the house that NSA was eavesdropping on. So NSA is picking up their conversations to the house in Yemen, translating them and then sending out the conversations to—or summaries of the conversations to the CIA without ever telling anybody that they were in the United States. And they were in the United States for almost two years. Al-Hazmi was there from January 2000 to September 2001. And again, they’re communicating back and forth; NSA is picking up but not telling anybody that they’re in the US. AMY GOODMAN: Explain, Jim Bamford— JAMES BAMFORD: And it got so bad— AMY GOODMAN: You say that they set up their final base of operations almost next door to the NSA headquarters in Laurel, Maryland? JAMES BAMFORD: Well, that’s the ultimate irony, was they eventually travel across country from San Diego, and they set up their final base of operations—these are the—this is the crew that was about to attack the Pentagon—about a month before, they set up their base of operations in Laurel, Maryland, of all places, that happens to be the same city that NSA is headquartered. So they set up their base of operations in this Valencia Motel, and almost across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway is NSA headquarters. The director’s office is on the eighth floor, and, except for some trees, he could almost see the motel where they’re staying. So, NSA is over there trying to find terrorists, and here is the 9/11 terrorists sitting right opposite the NSA on the other side of the parkway making their final plans. Mohamed Atta flew there for summit meetings. And they had to take three hotels at one point to put all the people there. So, as NSA is looking for them, they’re having their final summit meetings there, and they’re walking around the Safeway, they’re exercising in Gold’s Gym, they’re eating in the restaurants there, they’re mingling with NSA employees. That’s NSA’s company town. It’s just the ultimate irony that here you have the terrorists and the eavesdroppers living side by side in the month before the final attack. AMY GOODMAN: You then say, after the attacks, the White House expanded massively surveillance, turning it inward on Americans right here. Can you talk about how they did it? JAMES BAMFORD: Well, first of all, looking back on the pre-attack, it was clear right after the attack that General Hayden, the Director of NSA, realized the big mistake he had made, that these guys not only were in the US, and he never told anybody they were communicating from the other side of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and he never let anybody know. So, obviously, he was very chagrined at the fact that, you know, his actions were contributing factors to the whole 9/11 attack by not being more aggressive in going after their communications and telling people where they were. So, after 9/11, to some degree to make up for it, he decided to not protest when the Bush administration, particularly Dick Cheney, began putting pressure on him to begin doing warrantless domestic eavesdropping or warrantless eavesdropping of Americans. And that was a big mistake. It would have been much better if he stood up like Jim Comey at the Justice Department did. He stood up, as well as the director of the FBI. And even Attorney General John Ashcroft stood up and threatened to resign over parts of this warrantless eavesdropping. But General Hayden decided to go along with it, and as a result, the NSA began this very intrusive program of warrantless eavesdropping on US citizens, both intrusive and largely useless. AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about this documentary that you’re making for PBS on NOVA and the news that was reported in the Washington Post a few days ago. FBI special agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency. It’s your documentary. The FBI has denied them permission, on grounds the FBI doesn’t want to stir up old conflicts. Talk about what they have to say. JAMES BAMFORD: Well, the documentary I’m doing is—it’s going to be very interesting. It’s going to air January 13th. And what it does is it sort of takes a large part of the book and translates it into imagery, into video. So we actually go to that house in Yemen. We actually located that house in Yemen and did video there. It was fairly hazardous, but we got video of the house. And we traced the path of these 9/11 hijackers from basically the moment the message came in to the time when they were living opposite NSA in Laurel, Maryland. As part of this program, we’re looking at what happened when they were in Kuala Lumpur. And what happened was, in their flight from Yemen to Kuala Lumpur, the CIA was able to get a copy of the passport, of Khalid al-Mihdhar’s passport, and the passport had a visa in there for the United States. It showed that they weren’t just going to Kuala Lumpur; they were going to Kuala Lumpur and then to the United States. Well, that was very important information for the FBI. And at the time, the CIA had this very small unit within its Counterterrorism Center; it was called Alex Station. And that was the bin Laden unit. Those were the people whose sole responsibility was trying to find Osama bin Laden. And the center was made up mostly of CIA officials, but there were also two FBI agents there that were assigned to that unit. When that message came in indicating that Mihdhar had a visa to the United States, the two FBI agents protested that they should send a message to the FBI headquarters and notify them. Mark Rossini was one of the FBI agents, and Doug Miller was the other. Doug Miller actually wrote up a memo to FBI headquarters saying, we’ve got to notify FBI that these guys are probably headed towards the United States; they’ve got a US visa. And Mark Rossini also said, we should send this message to the FBI headquarters. And I interviewed Rossini, Mark Rossini, on—for my book, and I quote him in the book as saying that he was told by the two people in charge of Alex Station at the CIA that he couldn’t send the message to FBI headquarters. He was forbidden to send it to them. And at one time, when he protested, the deputy—I think it was the deputy head of that station—I couldn’t reveal her name in the book, because she’s still at the CIA, but she put her hands on her hips and said, “Look, the next attack is going to take place in Southeast Asia, not the United States. So when we want the FBI to know about it, we’ll tell the FBI about it.” And under the rules that existed, they weren’t allowed to notify the FBI headquarters without CIA permission, since that was a CIA document that contained the information on the visa, on Mihdhar’s visa. So, I interviewed Mark Rossini, and he was very angry that he was never allowed to send that message. Had that message been sent to FBI headquarters— AMY GOODMAN: And the story goes beyond that. JAMES BAMFORD: —the FBI would have put a—I’m sorry? AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to say, the story goes beyond that. I was saying this was in the Washington Post; it was actually in the Congressional Quarterly, that they were prepared to say publicly that under pressure from the CIA, they kept the full truth from the Justice Department’s inspector general, which looked into the FBI’s handling of the pre-9/11 intelligence in 2004. JAMES BAMFORD: Well, not only that, the 9/11 Commission, which did a pretty poor job on a lot of this, they never looked at any of the information that I’m reporting on the National Security Agency, and they also never interviewed either Rossini or Doug Miller, the two FBI agents in there. I mean, it seems incredible to me that the 9/11 Commission never interviewed the two FBI agents who were assigned to the bin Laden unit. So that’s part of the story that’s never been told, that the American public just has no idea of some of these things that took place leading up to 9/11. AMY GOODMAN: James Bamford, we have to break, then we’re going to come back to this discussion. Investigative reporter, his third book in a trilogy on the NSA, out today, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Back in a minute. AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of the telecoms’ role in domestic spying, I want to turn to Mark Klein. He’s the former AT&T technician who blew the whistle on the involvement of phone companies in the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. Klein was with AT&T for twenty-two years. In 2006, he leaked internal documents revealing the company had set up a secret room in its San Francisco office to give the NSA access to its fiber-optic internet cables. MARK KLEIN: We were told one day in late 2002 that an NSA representative was coming to the office to speak to a certain management technician about a special job. And this turned out to be installing a secret room in the next office I was going to be in the following year. And that secret room involved a lot of spying equipment. Only this one management technician could go in there, and the regular union technicians were not allowed to go in there. But when—in 2003 I was assigned to that office, and I got hold of the documents which were available—they’re not classified—and the documents showed what they were doing. They were basically copying the entire data stream going across critical internet cables and copying the entire data stream to this secret room, so the NSA was getting everything. AMY GOODMAN: That’s Mark Klein, the former AT&T technician who blew the whistle on the involvement of phone companies in the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. Jim Bamford, with us for the hour, author of The Shadow Factory, out today, can you talk about how the CIA or the NSA is now working out secret and potentially illegal agreements with the telecom industry in order to access US telecommunications and what exactly Mark Klein is talking about, not just potentially illegal, what they’ve done? JAMES BAMFORD: Sure. And just before I do that, I’d just like to thank these people for speaking out. Having been writing on this topic for twenty-five years, I know how difficult it is for anybody to come out and speak about what’s going on at NSA; it’s a very difficult thing. So, Mark Klein and Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk, Mark Rossini, these people, you know, I look at as heroes, because they’ve come out and pointed a finger at what’s been going wrong without—you know, there’s no compensation. They’re risking their—the rest of their career or possibly risking the US government by coming out and pointing these fingers. So, you know, I just have a lot of admiration for these people. And what Mark Klein was talking about, he was a supervisor for twenty-two years over at AT&T, and he discovered this secret room in this facility in San Francisco, this very tall, ten-, twelve-story building out in San Francisco, which is basically the switch, AT&T’s switch for their communications in that part of the country, the sort of western part of the country. And what happened is that during the 1990s and early in the ’80s and the ’70s, the NSA used to collect information by putting out big dishes and collecting satellite communications that would come down. It was very easy. They put the dishes out; satellite transmits the telephone calls and messages, emails and so forth down to earth; and the satellite picks it up. And then NSA collects it. NSA didn’t have to deal with the telecommunication companies at all, because they could get the information independent of the telecom companies. Then, in the late ’90s, things began to change, and fiber optics became a big thing for telecommunications. Fiber optics are cables in which the communications are transmitted, not electronically, but by photons, light signals. And that made life very difficult for NSA. It meant the communications, instead of being able to pick them up in a big dish, they were now being transmitted under the ocean in these cables. And the only way to get access to it would be to put a submarine down and try to tap into those cables. But that, from the people I’ve talked to, has not been very successful with fiber-optic cables. So the only other way to really do this is by making some kind of agreement with the telecom companies, so that NSA could actually basically cohabitate some of the telecom companies’ locations. And that’s what happened. NSA began making these agreements with AT&T and other companies, and that in order to get access to the actual cables, they had to build these secret rooms in these buildings. So what would happen would be the communications on the cables would come into the building, and then the cable would go to this thing called a splitter box, which was a box that had something that was similar to a prism, a glass prism. And the prism was shaped like a prism, and the light signals would come in, and they’d be split by the prism. And one copy of the light signal would go off to where it was supposed to be going in the telecom system, and the other half, this new cloned copy of the cables, would actually go one floor below to NSA’s secret room. So you had one copy of everything coming in and going to NSA’s secret room. And in the secret room was equipment by a private company called Narus, the very small company hardly anybody has ever heard of that created the hardware and the software to analyze these cables and then pick out the targets NSA is looking for and then forward the targeted communications onto NSA headquarters. AMY GOODMAN: So you have these companies, AT&T and Verizon, that are secretly working with the NSA and tapping Americans’ phone lines, and these companies actually outsource the actual tapping to some little-known foreign companies? JAMES BAMFORD: Yeah. There’s two major—or not major, they’re small companies, but they service the two major telecom companies. This company, Narus, which was founded in Israel and has large Israel connections, does the—basically the tapping of the communications on AT&T. And Verizon chose another company, ironically also founded in Israel and largely controlled by and developed by people in Israel called Verint. So these two companies specialize in what’s known as mass surveillance. Their literature—I read this literature from Verint, for example—is supposed to only go to intelligence agencies and so forth, and it says, “We specialize in mass surveillance,” and that’s what they do. They put these mass surveillance equipment in these facilities. So you have AT&T, for example, that, you know, considers it’s their job to get messages from one person to another, not tapping into messages, and you get the NSA that says, we want, you know, copies of all this. So that’s where these companies come in. These companies act as the intermediary basically between the telecom companies and the NSA. AMY GOODMAN: Now, Jim Bamford, take this a step further, because you say the founder and former CEO of one of these companies is now a fugitive from the United States somewhere in Africa? JAMES BAMFORD: Well, you know, this is a company that the US government is getting all its tapped information from. It’s a company that Verizon uses as its tapping company, its eavesdropping company. And very little is known about these companies. Congress has never looked into any of this. I don’t know—I don’t think they even know that there is—that these companies exist. But the company that Verizon uses, Verint, the founder of the company, the former head of the company, is now a fugitive in—hiding out in Africa in the country of Namibia, because he’s wanted on a number of felony warrants for fraud and other charges. And then, two other top executives of the company, the general counsel and another top official of the parent company, have also pled guilty to these charges. So, you know, you’ve got companies—these companies have foreign connections with potential ties to foreign intelligence agencies, and you have problems of credibility, problems of honesty and all that. And these companies—through these two companies pass probably 80 percent or more of all US communications at one point or another. And it’s even—gets even worse in the fact that these companies also supply their equipment all around the world to other countries, to countries that don’t have a lot of respect for individual rights—Vietnam, China, Libya, other countries like that. And so, these countries use this equipment to filter out dissident communications and people trying to protest the government. It gives them the ability to eavesdrop on communications and monitor dissident email communications. And as a result of that, people are put in jail, and so forth. So— AMY GOODMAN: And despite all of this— JAMES BAMFORD: —this is a whole area—I’m sorry? AMY GOODMAN: Despite all of this, these telecom companies still have access to the most private communications of people all over America and actually, it ends up, around the world. And at the beginning of the summer, the Democrats and Republicans joined together in granting retroactive immunity to these companies for spying on American citizens. JAMES BAMFORD: Yes. It looked like they were going to have a fight earlier in February, when the temporary law ran out and came time to either pass a new law or keep the old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the way it used to be, with all the protections. And they did resist for a number of months. They resisted from February until August. But in August, the Congress, seeing the election is coming, most of them caved in and decided to just join in the administration’s bill. And as a result, you have this fairly open-ended bill that came out that gives a lot of permissions to the NSA to do a lot of this eavesdropping without much accountability. I mean, it basically neutered the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took a lot of powers away from them, and put the powers back at NSA. So the ultimate problem is when you have NSA as both—as judge, jury and executioner on the eavesdropping. AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, we only have a few minutes, and I want to get to-– JAMES BAMFORD: Sure. AMY GOODMAN: —Bridgetown, Missouri, the AT&T hub there. What is the NSA’s role in spying there? JAMES BAMFORD: Well, Bridgetown, New Jersey—I’m sorry, Bridgetown, Missouri is one of the centers for AT&T, because it’s the—it’s sort of central in the country, and they could control much of the network of AT&T from there. And it was there that AT&T actually developed a system by which they could get into fiber-optic communications. And just like they built this secret—the NSA built this secret room in San Francisco, and Mark Klein said that he had heard that they had built these secret rooms in other places around the country, there was also a secret room built in Bridgetown. And the worrisome part of that is Bridgeton controls the whole network. So you have the problem of these secret rooms not just being in San Francisco, they’re throughout the network, and they’re in other parts of the country. And the American public really has no idea what’s going on, in terms of who has access to their communications, what’s being done with it. And is there somebody sitting there—as David Murfee Faulk talked about, in the NSA listening post in Georgia, are there people just sitting there listening to people’s private conversations and laughing about them? AMY GOODMAN: And the building in— JAMES BAMFORD: One final thing— AMY GOODMAN: Yes, go ahead, Jim. JAMES BAMFORD: Yeah, I was just going to mention that it isn’t just the picking up of these conversations and listening to them and laughing about them. These conversations are transcribed. They’re—and then they’re recorded, and they’re kept forever. There’s a big building in Texas that’s being built in San Antonio that’s going to be used to house a lot of these conversations. NSA is running out of space at Fort Meade, their headquarters, so they had to expand, and they’re building this very big building. It’s reportedly going to be about the size of the Alamodome down there, to store all these—this huge amount of data communications. And when you think how much information two gigabytes could be put on a small thumb drive, you can imagine how much of information could be stored in a data warehouse the size of—almost the size of the Alamodome. AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute, less than a minute, but— JAMES BAMFORD: Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead. AMY GOODMAN: —the building in Miami where all communications from Latin America are stored and then a single switch for communications, much of Africa’s communications? And finally, where they can’t get cooperation of companies, a specially built submarine designed to sit on the bottom of the ocean floor to tap foreign cables? JAMES BAMFORD: A lot of communications are consolidated. A lot of the international communications in South America all pass through one obscure building in Miami. And according to the landing rights that the company had to sign, which I read, they basically have to turn over everything that they get to the NSA if the NSA asks for it. So, you have a problem here today. I mean, the overall big problem is that there is a tremendous amount of eavesdropping going on. It’s all being stored, it’s all being analyzed, either electronically or by a human. And the public really doesn’t have much of—knowledge of all this that’s going on right now. AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, I want to thank you very much for being with us, investigative journalist, author of three books, his latest on the National Security Agency out today, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

Guantanamo prosecutor accuses Pentagon of ethical misconduct in terrorist trials A military prosecutor quit his job after concluding that the trial system at the US detainment facility Guantanamo Bay amounted to a "creeping rot" of injustice. by Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent Last Updated: 4:15PM BST 13 Oct 2008 Army reservist Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld approached a Jesuit priest over the internet to discuss his doubts over his role in prosecuting Mohammad Jawad, an Afghan who was detained as juvenile. He even asked Jawad's defence lawyer for advice on how to abandon his role. Lt Col Vandeveld's concerns centred on attempts to withhold evidence from Mr Jawad defence. Much of the special Military Commissions system set up to try detainees at Guantanamo has been dominated by battles by defence teams to obtain information from the Pentagon. After resigning his reservist commission, Lt Col Vandeveld said prosecutors were so determined to deny the accused a fair trial that its role amounted to "ethical misconduct". The Pentagon prosecutors have attempted to secure a very narrow definition of evidence that defence teams can view and use to defend the detainees. Jawad's military lawyer, Air Force Major David Frakt has aggressively challenged the government's attempts to withhold evidence. Lt Col Vandeveld said he quit after reading material that suggested Jawad was underage when detained, was under the influence of drugs at the time of his alleged crime and had been abused by US forces after he was captured. Father John Dear, a Roman Catholic peace activist, advised the devout military lawyer that he could "save lives" if he resigned and spoke out against the behaviour of the Penatagon. "I don't know how else the creeping rot of the commissions and the politics that fostered and continued to surround them could be exposed to the curative powers of the sunlight," said Lt Col Vandeveld. "I care not for myself; our enemies deserve nothing less than what we would expect from them were the situations reversed. More than anything, I hope we can rediscover some of our American values." The US military was last month forced to reassign the head of the prosecutor's office, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann after he was disqualified from the Jawad case by the military judge. Maj Frakt said Brig Hartmann had tried to force Lt Col Vandeveld to undergo psychiatric tests after he expressed disquiet with the system.

CIA Torture Tactics Endorsed in Secret Memos Waterboarding got nod from White House By Joby Warrick 15/10/08 "Washington Post" -- - WASHINGTON - The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public. The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing. The memos were the first -- and, for years, the only -- tangible expressions of the administration's consent for the CIA's use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for "policy approval." Worried about lack of paper trail The repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured al-Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said. The concerns grew more pronounced after the revelations of mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and further still as tensions grew between the administration and its intelligence advisers over the conduct of the Iraq war. "It came up in the daily meetings. We heard it from our field officers," said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the events. "We were already worried that we" were going to be blamed. A. John Radsan, a lawyer in the CIA general counsel's office until 2004, remembered the discussions but did not personally view the memos the agency received in response to its concerns. "The question was whether we had enough 'top cover,' " Radsan said. Tenet first pressed the White House for written approval in June 2003, during a meeting with members of the National Security Council, including Rice, the officials said. Days later, he got what he wanted: a brief memo conveying the administration's approval for the CIA's interrogation methods, the officials said. Administration officials confirmed the existence of the memos, but neither they nor former intelligence officers would describe their contents in detail because they remain classified. The sources all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to discuss the events. The second request from Tenet, in June 2004, reflected growing worries among agency officials who had just witnessed the public outcry over the Abu Ghraib scandal. Officials who held senior posts at the time also spoke of deteriorating relations between the CIA and the White House over the war in Iraq -- a rift that prompted some to believe that the agency needed even more explicit proof of the administration's support. "The CIA by this time is using the word 'insurgency' to describe the Iraq conflict, so the White House is viewing the agency with suspicion," said a second former senior intelligence official. As recently as last month, the administration had never publicly acknowledged that its policymakers knew about the specific techniques, such as waterboarding, that the agency used against high-ranking terrorism suspects. In her unprecedented account to lawmakers last month, Rice, now secretary of state, portrayed the White House as initially uneasy about a controversial CIA plan for interrogating top al-Qaeda suspects. After learning about waterboarding and similar tactics in early 2002, several White House officials questioned whether such harsh measures were "effective and necessary . . . and lawful," Rice said. Her concerns led to an investigation by the Justice Department's criminal division into whether the techniques were legal. Misgivings apparently overcome But whatever misgivings existed that spring were apparently overcome. Former and current CIA officials say no such reservations were voiced in their presence. In interviews, the officials recounted a series of private briefings about the program with members of the administration's security team, including Rice and Cheney, followed by more formal meetings before a larger group including then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. None of the officials recalled President Bush being present at any of the discussions. Several of the key meetings have been previously described in news articles and books, but Rice last month became the first Cabinet-level official to publicly confirm the White House's awareness of the program in its earliest phases. In written responses to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rice said Tenet's description of the agency's interrogation methods prompted her to investigate further to see whether the program violated U.S. laws or international treaties, according to her written responses, dated Sept. 12 and released late last month. "I asked that . . . Ashcroft personally advise the NSC principles whether the program was lawful," Rice wrote. 'CIA had the White House boxed in' Current and former intelligence officials familiar with the briefings described Tenet as supportive of enhanced interrogation techniques, which the officials said were developed by CIA officers after the agency's first high-level captive, al-Qaeda operative Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, better known as Abu Zubaida, refused to cooperate with interrogators. "The CIA believed then, and now, that the program was useful and helped save lives," said a former senior intelligence official knowledgeable about the events. "But in the agency's view, it was like this: 'We don't want to continue unless you tell us in writing that it's not only legal but is the policy of the administration.' " One administration official familiar with the meetings said the CIA made such a convincing case that no one questioned whether the methods were necessary to prevent further terrorist attacks. "The CIA had the White House boxed in," said the official. "They were saying, 'It's the only way to get the information we needed, and -- by the way -- we think there's another attack coming up.' It left the principals in an extremely difficult position and put the decision-making on a very fast track." But others who were present said Tenet seemed more interested in protecting his subordinates than in selling the administration on a policy that administration lawyers had already authorized. "The suggestion that someone from CIA came in and browbeat everybody is ridiculous," said one former agency official familiar with the meeting. "The CIA understood that it was controversial and would be widely criticized if it became public," the official said of the interrogation program. "But given the tenor of the times and the belief that more attacks were coming, they felt they had to do what they could to stop the attack." Anxiety |The CIA's anxiety was partly fueled by the lack of explicit presidential authorization for the interrogation program. A secret White House "memorandum of notification" signed by Bush on Sept. 15, 2001, gave the agency broad authority to wage war against al-Qaeda, including killing and capturing its members. But it did not spell out how captives should be handled during interrogation. But by the time the CIA requested written approval of its policy, in June 2003, the population of its secret prisons had grown from one to nine, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged principal architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Three of the detainees had been subjected to waterboarding, which involves strapping a prisoner to a board, covering his face and pouring water over his nose and mouth to simulate drowning. By the spring of 2004, the concerns among agency officials had multiplied, in part because of shifting views among administration lawyers about what acts might constitute torture, leading Tenet to ask a second time for written confirmation from the White House. This time the reaction was far more reserved, recalled two former intelligence officials. "The Justice Department in particular was resistant," said one former intelligence official who participated in the discussions. "They said it doesn't need to be in writing." Tenet and his deputies made their case in yet another briefing before the White House national security team in June 2004. It was to be one of the last such meetings for Tenet, who had already announced plans to step down as CIA director. Author Jane Mayer, who described the briefing in her recent book, "The Dark Side," said the graphic accounts of interrogation appeared to make some participants uncomfortable. "History will not judge us kindly," Mayer quoted Ashcroft as saying. Participants in the meeting did not recall whether a vote was taken. Several weeks passed, and Tenet left the agency without receiving a formal response. Finally, in mid-July, a memo was forwarded to the CIA reaffirming the administration's backing for the interrogation program. Tenet had acquired the statement of support he sought. Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Liquidating the Empire. By Patrick j. Buchanan 14/10/08 "ICH" --- “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers.” So Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon advised Herbert Hoover in the Great Crash of ‘29. Hoover did. And the nation liquidated him — and the Republicans. In the Crash of 2008, 40 percent of stock value has vanished, almost $9 trillion. Some $5 trillion in real estate value has disappeared. A recession looms with sweeping layoffs, unemployment compensation surging, and social welfare benefits soaring. America’s first trillion-dollar deficit is at hand. In Fiscal Year 2008 the deficit was $438 billion. With tax revenue sinking, we will add to this year’s deficit the $200 to $300 billion needed to wipe the rotten paper off the books of Fannie and Freddie, the $700 billion (plus the $100 billion in add-ons and pork) for the Wall Street bailout, the $85 billion to bail out AIG, and $37 billion more now needed, the $25 billion for GM, Chrysler and Ford, and the hundreds of billions Hank Paulson will need to buy corporate paper and bail out banks to stop the panic. As Americans save nothing, where are the feds going to get the money? Is the Fed going to print it and destroy the dollar and credit rating of the United States? Because the nations whose vaults are full of dollars and U.S. debt — China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Arabs — are reluctant to lend us more. Sovereign wealth funds that plunged billions into U.S. banks have already been burned. Uncle Sam’s VISA card is about to be stamped “Canceled.” The budget is going to have to go under the knife. But what gets cut? Social Security and Medicare are surely exempt. Seniors have already taken a huge hit in their 401(k)s. And as the Democrats are crafting another $150 billion stimulus package for the working poor and middle class, Medicaid and food stamps are untouchable. Interest on the debt cannot be cut. It is going up. Will a Democratic Congress slash unemployment benefits, welfare, education, student loans, veterans benefits — in a recession? No way. Yet, that is almost the entire U.S. budget — except for defense, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and foreign aid. And this is where the axe will eventually fall. It is the American Empire that is going to be liquidated. Retrenchment has begun with Bush’s backing away from confrontations with Axis-of-Evil charter members Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs, and will likely continue with a negotiated peace in Afghanistan. Gen. Petraeus and Secretary Gates are already talking “reconciliation” with the Taliban. We no longer live in Eisenhower or Reagan’s America. Even the post-Cold War world of George H. W. Bush, where America was a global hegemonic, is history. In both relative and real terms, the U.S.A. is a diminished power. Where Ike spent 9 percent of GDP on defense, Reagan 6 percent, we spend 4 percent. Yet we have two wars bleeding us and many more nations to defend, with commitments in the Baltic, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans we did not have in the Cold War. As U.S. weapons systems are many times more expensive today, we have fewer strategic aircraft and Navy ships than Ike or Reagan commanded. Our active-duty Army and Marine Corps consist of 700,000 troops, 15 percent women, and a far higher percentage of them support rather than combat troops. With so few legions, we cannot police the world, and we cannot afford more. Yet, we have a host of newly hostile nations we did not have in 1989. U.S. interests in Latin America are being challenged not only by Cuba, but Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Honduras. Brazil, Argentina and Chile go their own way. Russia is reasserting hegemony in the Caucasus, testing new ICBMs, running bomber probes up to U.S. air space. China, growing at 10 percent as we head into recession, is bristling over U.S. military sales to Taiwan. Iran remains defiant. Pakistan is rife with anti-Americanism and al-Qaida sentiment. The American Empire has become a vast extravagance. With U.S. markets crashing and wealth vanishing, what are we doing with 750 bases and troops in over 100 countries? With a recession of unknown depth and duration looming, why keep borrowing billions from rich Arabs to defend rich Europeans, or billions from China and Japan to hand out in Millennium Challenge Grants to Tanzania and Burkina Faso? America needs a bottom-up review of all strategic commitments dating to a Cold War now over for 20 years. Is it essential to keep 30,000 troops in a South Korea with twice the population and 40 times the wealth of the North? Why are McCain and Obama offering NATO memberships, i.e., war guarantees against Russia, to a Georgia run by a hothead like Mikheil Saakashvili, and a Ukraine, millions of whose people prefer their kinship to Russia to an alliance with us? We must put “country first,” says John McCain. Right you are, Senator. Time to look out for America first This article was first published at http://buchanan.org

Steering Committee To Seek Prosecution of Bush For War Crimes By Sherwood Ross 15/10/08 "Yubanet" -- - Oct. 14, 2008 - Massachusetts law school Dean Lawrence Velvel will chair a Steering Committee to pursue the prosecution for war crimes of President Bush and culpable high-ranking aides after they leave office Jan. 20th. The Steering Committee was organized following a conference of leading legal authorities and scholars from the U.S. and abroad convened by Velvel on Sept. 13-14 in Andover, Mass., titled "The Justice Robert Jackson Conference On Planning For The Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals." "If Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and others are not prosecuted," Velvel said, "the future could be threatened by additional examples of Executive lawlessness by leaders who need fear no personal consequences for their actions, including more illegal wars such as Iraq." Besides Velvel, members of the Steering Committee include: Ben Davis, a law Professor at the University of Toledo College of Law, where he teaches Public International Law and International Business Transactions. He is the author of numerous articles on international and related domestic law. Marjorie Cohn, a law Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, Calif., and President of the National Lawyers Guild. Chris Pyle, a Professor at Mount Holyoke College, where he teaches Constitutional law, Civil Liberties, Rights of Privacy, American Politics and American Political Thought, and is the author of many books and articles. Elaine Scarry, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, and winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Peter Weiss, vice president of the Center For Constitutional Rights, of New York City, which was recently involved with war crimes complaints filed in Germany and Japan against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others. David Swanson, author, activist and founder of AfterDowningStreet.org/CensureBush.org coalition, of Charlottesville, Va. Kristina Borjesson, an award-winning print and broadcast journalist for more than twenty years and editor of two recent books on the media. Colleen Costello, Staff Attorney of Human Rights, USA, of Washington, D.C., and coordinator of its efforts involving torture by the American government. Valeria Gheorghiu, attorney for Workers' Rights Law Center. Andy Worthington of Redress, a British historian and journalist and author of books dealing with human rights violations. Initial actions considered by the Steering Committee, Velvel said, are as follows: # Seeking prosecutions of high level officials, including George Bush, for the crimes they committed. # Seeking disbarment of lawyers who were complicitous in facilitating torture. # Seeking termination from faculty positions of high officials who were complicitous in torture. # Issuing a recent statement saying any attempt by Bush to pardon himself and aides for war crimes prior to leaving office will result in efforts to obtain impeachment even after they leave office. # Convening a major conference on the state secret and executive privilege doctrines, which have been pushed to record levels during the Bush administration. # Designation of an Information Repository Coordinator to gather in one place all available information involving the Bush Administration's war crimes. # Possible impeachment of 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee for co-authoring the infamous "torture memo."

Naden sis. You write: "You haven’t substantiated your association of democracy with shirk, walaal. And I think you should be careful mixing concepts and ideas. The Ayah that you often recite (wala yushrik fi xukmihi…And he does not share in his rule/wisdom/commandments) does not relate directly to politics as it is seen in a society. The xukm of God does not mean the presidency of a nation or the head of a tribe" Naden. Xukum in Arabic means judgment, aka Sharia jurisprudence. For example; 1. Economic : Allah made An Economic Xukum That Ribaa, aka Usury/interest is forbidden as a means of financial transaction in Isalm, and another Financial Xukum that we should pay a portion of our yearly income (a zakat ) to the welfare of the poor. 2. Socially: Allah made Xukum that Extra-marital relationships are prohibited, or the Xukum that a woman may not marry without consent of her (Waliyy) parent, brother etc. Politics is the human activity that decides on such issues as how to collect and how to spend public wealth, as well as what societal norms should be permissible in a sciety. Politics is also the art of comprmising conflicting human interests in a Democracy. In a Democracy, politics serves the vehicle for bringing the interest of the majority to the front burner, and the minority suffers. Politics, hence is not concerned with absolute Justice, nor values, since people in a Democracy share no values, but share interests. Democracy is the flip side of Sovereignty, it gives absolute power to the people to make lawful anything the majority sees fit. In a Democracy, if the majority of people want to legislate homesexuality as acceptable, it becomes a Law, when it becomes a Law, its enforced by the executive Branch of Government, ( Presidency), the President in a Democracy represents the real Sovereign which are the People who have elected Him, thus, A President plays the role of A Sovereign on behalf of John Q. Public. Being a Sovereign means, to be of the highest authority that no one except John Q. Public can override. If the people are the Sovereign in a Democracy then, and if Allah says in Quraan that He does not share his Edicts and Xukum with His creatures, isnt that sufficient to show that in a Democracy in which people claim to be the masters of their fate to legislate, (making halal and haram anything), doesnt that show a conflict between man and his maker? Can we be Muslims, (meaning those who surrender to their maker), if we are in contempt of his Xukum on our lives, ( aka Sharia), or if we discard his Sovereign Laws altogether substituting it with secular laws imported from other nations, or by legislating our own laws as we see fit, acting totally independent of His Xukum? To make it even more clearer, please read The Hadeeth again, you seem to be avoiding to discuss the merits of the following Hadeeth: The Hadeeth: ---- Adi Ibn Hatim ( Christian convert) said: "I came to the Messenger of Allah wearing on my neck a golden cross, the (Messenger of Allah) said to me, " O Adi, take off this Idol from your neck", then I took it off, and as he read the verse in Surah Baraa'ah, "They ( Christians and Jews) have made their Priests and Rabbis, Lords other than Allah" upon hearing that verse, I said, " O Messenger of Allah, we ( Christians) do not worship them ( our Priests), He ( the Messenger of Allah) said " (Dont they legislate contrary to what Allah has legislated), making forbidden what Allah permitted, and making permitted what Allah forbade, and you ( Christians) follow them in that?" I said " Yes", ( the Messneger of Allah) said:" That is how you worship them ( your Priests and Rabbis) (instead of Allah). Which is SHIRK! Naden Sis That Hadeth alone is sufficient to show the intimate connection between Shirk and Democracy. I hope that the above attempt of mine answers your question. Conclusion: 1. I have shown the relationship between Shirk and Democracy on one hand, and the relationship of politics to Xukum in a Muslim Society on the other. We said that Democracy is flip side of Sovereignty, and Sovereignty means absolute authority of the majority of people in a Democracy. Absolute authority belongs to Allah alone, recognizing this authority to belong to any creature is Shirk. 2. Politically, The Legislative branch makes laws that conflict with the Sharia, Allah's Sovereign Law. This conflict is SHIRK, because there should be a single Sovereignty and a single authority for legislation, all based on the wish of the Sovereign, in Islam, Allah is the only Sovereign. Nur

S & D The Taraweeh nightly payers in Ramadan used to be a personal voluntary prayers duting the time of our Prophet Muhammad SAWS. Muslims sow him praying and hence it became a voluntary sunnah prayers up until the time of Omar Ibnul Khattab who saw that in the masjid everyone was praying his taraaweeh alone. Its said, that Omar Radiyallahu Canhu, institutionalized the Taraaweeh prayers as a better organized prayers instead of the scattered chaotic way in which the believers prayed each one raising his voice with the recitation of the Quraan. Taraaweh prayers are voluntary, not compulsory, but its benefits in Ramadan is the essence of the holy month, its the prayers that is meant as the training of the soul, hence the name. Qiyaam is simply any prayers after ishaa for seeking Allah mercy and worship. Tahajjud, is a type of Qiyaam its usually held after midnight until just before Dawn prayers, the sunnah in Tahajjud is longer standing, rukuuc and sujuud, and recitation of long verses of Quraan and contemplation. Taraaweeh on the otherhand is prayed right after Isha prayers and its shorter than Tahajjud in length of recitation and stannding ( Qiyaam). Nur

Awakener bro. That is what this forum is for, a two way street, please expound to your hearts content, inshAllah, I will take a back seat for the moment and respond with my views when appropriate. Nur

Troop pull-out leaves government on brink Ethiopian withdrawal marks end of disastrous intervention that sparked new violence and suffering From Steve Bloomfield in Nairobi Sunday Herald, October 12th, 2008 SOMALIA'S FRAGILE government appears to be on the brink of collapse. Islamist insurgents now controls large parts of southern and central Somalia - and are continuing to launch attacks inside the capital, Mogadishu. Ethiopia, which launched a US-backed military intervention in Somalia in December 2006 in an effort to drive out an Islamist authority in Mogadishu, is now pulling out its troops. Diplomats and analysts in neighbouring Nairobi believe the government will fall once Ethiopia completes its withdrawal, and secret plans have been made to evacuate government ministers to neighbouring Kenya. That may happen sooner rather than later. A shipment of Ethiopian weapons, including tanks, left Mogadishu port last month as part of the withdrawal. Bringing the equipment back to Ethiopia by land would have been impossible - analysts believe Ethiopian troops and their Somali government allies control just three small areas in Mogadishu and a few streets in Baidoa, the seat of parliament. There are now estimated to be just 2500 Ethiopian soldiers left inside Somalia, down from 15,000-18,000 at the height of the war. Somalia's overlapping conflicts go back, at the very least, to 1991, the year the country's last recognised government was overthrown. Men and women who were children then have since given birth to a second generation of Somalis who have known only war. But analysts believe Somalia is now in the midst of its worst ever crisis. The ongoing conflict, which has claimed the lives of at least 9000 civilians and forced more than 1.1 million to flee their homes, has combined with devastating droughts and rocketing food prices to create one of the world's worst humanitarian catastrophes. Almost half the population - 3.2m people - are in need of emergency aid (the figure has almost doubled in the last 12 months). One in six children is thought to be malnourished. "This crisis is broadening as well as deepening," said Mark Bowden, the head of the UN's humanitarian effort. "It is now the world's most complicated crisis." Violence and insecurity have made it almost impossible for aid to get through, and 24 aid workers have been killed in Somalia so far this year. A recent shipment of food aid needed a military escort to navigate Somalia's pirate-infested waters. But within hours of the food being unloaded in Mogadishu's port most of it was stolen by gun-toting gangs. Oxfam, Save The Children and 50 other aid agencies working in Somalia last week said the international community had "completely failed Somali civilians". As the crisis worsens thousands are trying to leave the country every week. Around 6000 people are now crossing the border into Kenya every month - despite the Kenyan government's decision to close the border. Some are arriving at the overcrowded Dadaab refugee camp in eastern Kenya, which is now one of the largest refugee camps in the world with nearly 250,000 people. Others try to leave by sea, travelling to the northern town of Bosasso and paying $100 to people smugglers who ram more than 100 people onto a small fishing boat and set sail for Yemen. Many do not make it. Smugglers last week forced 150 people off the boat three miles off the Yemeni coast. Only 47 made it to shore. Attempts to find a political solution have stalled. The UN claims progress has been made, citing an agreement signed in neighbouring Djibouti by the Somali government and the opposition Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia (ARS). But the deal has been signed only by the moderates on each side: Prime Minister Nur Adde and the ARS's Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. President Abdullahi Yusuf, a former warlord who controls the government's security forces, has refused to get involved. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the hardline Islamic leader of another faction of the ARS, has denounced the deal, as have the leaders of the insurgents, a group called Al Shabaab. Since the deal was struck in June, the level of violence has increased. Few Somalis will weep if the government falls. In most respects it is a government in name only. Few ministries have offices, let alone civil servants to fill them. There are no real policies - and no real way to implement any. Worst of all, this government, which is backed by the United Nations and funded by Western donors including Britain and the EU, has been accused of committing a litany of war crimes. Its police force, many of whom were trained under a UN programme part-funded by Britain, has carried out extrajudicial killings, raped women and fired indiscriminately on crowds at markets. Militias aligned to the government have killed journalists and attacked aid workers. The government's fall would mark the end of a disastrous US-backed intervention. For six months in 2006, Somalia was relatively calm. A semblance of peace and security had returned to Mogadishu. The reason was the rise of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a loose coalition of Islamist leaders who had driven out Mogadishu's warlords. Hardline elements within the UIC vowed to launch a jihad against Somalia's traditional enemy, Ethiopia. The US viewed the UIC has an "al-Qaeda cell" - a belief not shared by the majority of analysts and diplomats. Ethiopia, with the support of the US, sent thousands of troops across the border to drive out the UIC. It took just a few days to defeat them. Their leaders fled towards the border with Kenya, while many of the fighters took off their uniforms and melted into Mogadishu. Within weeks, an Iraq-style insurgency had begun, targeting Somali government and Ethiopian troops. Al Shabaab began laying roadside bombs and firing at Ethiopian troops from inside civilian areas. The Ethiopians responded by bombarding residential areas. Hundreds were killed and hundreds of thousands fled Mogadishu. Human rights groups accused Ethiopia of committing war crimes. The US must now be wondering whether it was all worth it. Western backing for the unpopular Somali government and US support for the Ethiopian intervention has created a groundswell of anti-West sentiment in Somalia. The Islamist leaders they were so keen to oust are the same ones they are now engaged in negotiations with. US officials have met both Sheikh Sharif and the more hardline Sheikh Aweys in an effort to find a peace deal. Meanwhile, in Somalia, the Islamists taking control of towns and villages across the country are considered far more extremist than Aweys. "They are real international jihadis," said one Nairobi-based diplomat. "The Americans' fear of al-Qaeda in Somalia is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy."

So My dear Brother Awakener, can I assume that you wold rather read about a write up in which I discuss in more detail the above points that you said I have started but not finished them in detail as you have expected? Please confirm if I understood your resquest, if not please clarify. The reason is, I can go tangentially in a different direction in these topics depending on the context of the ddiscussion. Nur

Allah i lehee wey ka daran tahay. Nur

America's Secret Empire Must See Video!

America’s Political Cannibalism By Chris Hedges 13/10/08 "TruthDig" -- -It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class, as the Democratic and Republican parties are exposed as craven tools of our corporate state, as savings accounts, college funds and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment skyrockets and as home values go up in smoke we must prepare for the political resurgence of a reinvigorated radical Christian right. The engine of this mass movement-as is true for all radical movements-is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities. Karl Polanyi in his book "The Great Transformation," written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences-the depressions, wars and totalitarianism-that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism-and a Mafia political system-which is a good description of the American government under George W. Bush. Polanyi wrote that a self-regulating market, the kind bequeathed to us since Ronald Reagan, turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market's belief that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity. We face an environmental meltdown as well as an economic meltdown. This would not have surprised Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University. Russia's northern coastline has begun producing huge qualities of toxic methane gas. Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008 describe what they saw along the coastline recently as "methane chimneys" reaching from the sea floor to the ocean's surface. Methane, locked in the permafrost of Arctic landmasses, is being released at an alarming rate as average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The release of millions of tons of it will dramatically accelerate the rate of global warming. Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate- controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species. The corporate con artists and criminals who have hijacked our state and rigged our financial system still speak to us in the obscure and incomprehensible language coined by specialists at elite business schools. They use terms like securitization, deleveraging, structured investment vehicles and credit default swaps. The reality, once you throw out their obnoxious jargon, is not hard to grasp. Banks lent too much money to people and financial institutions that could not pay it back. These banks are now going broke. The government is frantically giving taxpayer dollars to banks so they can be solvent and again lend money. It is not working. Bank lending remains frozen. There are ominous signs that the government may not be able to hand over enough of our money because the losses incurred by these speculators are too massive. If credit markets remain in a deep freeze, corporations such as AT&T, Ford and General Motors might go bankrupt. The downward spiral could spread like a tidal wave across the country, especially since our corporate elite, including Barack Obama, seem to have no real intention of bailing out families who can no longer pay their mortgages or credit card debts. Lenin said that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch its currency. If our financial disaster continues there will be a widespread loss of faith in the mechanisms that regulate society. If our money becomes worthless, so does our government. All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators amass millions. Look at Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld. He walks away from his bankrupt investment house after pocketing $485 million. His investors are wiped out. An economic collapse does not only mean the degradation of trade and commerce, food shortages, bankruptcies and unemployment; it means the systematic dynamiting of the foundations of a society. I watched this happen in Yugoslavia. I fear I am watching it happen here in the United States. The Patriot Act, the FISA Reform Act, the suspension of habeas corpus, the open use of torture in our offshore penal colonies, the stationing of a combat brigade on American soil, the seas of surveillance cameras, the brutal assaults against activists in Denver and St. Paul are converging to determine our future. Those dark forces arrayed against American democracy are waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will allow them in the name of national security and moral renewal to shred the Constitution. They have the tools. They will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to extinguish our democracy. And while they do it they will be waving the American flag, singing patriotic slogans and clutching the Christian cross. Fuld, I expect, will be one of many corporatists happy to contribute to the cause. This is a defining moment in American history. The next few weeks and months will see us stabilize and weather this crisis or descend into a terrifying dystopia. I place no hope in Obama or the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a pathetic example of liberal, bourgeois impotence, hypocrisy and complacency. It has been bought off. I will vote, if only as a form of protest against our corporate state and an homage to Polanyi's brilliance, for Ralph Nader. I would like to offer hope, but it is more important to be a realist. No ethic or act of resistance is worth anything if it is not based on the real. And the real, I am afraid, does not look good.

Walaal Toosiye Waxaad qortay: "Dhibaatada waxaa lagaga bixi karaa in la helo qaab aan mid ku noqon karno" Jawaab: Allah wuxuu ku leeyahay Quraanka ayad uu macnaheedu u dhow yahay : "Ku gaashaanta (islana qabsada xadhigaa Allah (Islam) kulligiin hana kala qaybsamina (qabiil iwm), xasuustana nicmadda Alla ( Islamka) uu idinku galladeystay idinkoo colaadi idinka dhexeyso, uu dabadeed iskiin jecleysiiyay ( Isalm) ood ku noqoteen nicmadissa (Islam) walaalo" Walaaltinnimadaas waxaa laga heli karaa oo qudha Isalmka. Sidaa awgeed ummaddeenna wexey u baahan tahay iney fahamto macnaha Islamka a dhabta ah. Taasna waa howl qof waliba u taalla oo Allah uu warsan doono intuu ka qabtay. Nur

Nomads These are the full moon nights we say in Somali ( CADDE ), its advisable to fast 3 days which may coincide with either Monday or Thursday which themselves are fasting days for those who observe the Sunnah. Nur