Not for sale Palestinians won’t accept a Vichy government By Khalid Amayreh 06/18/07 "ICH" -- -- - Occupied Jerusalem, 17 June 2007 -- -The vast bulk of Palestinians, at home and in the Diaspora, will not accept a quisling government in Ramallah that might be at Israel’s beck and call. This is precisely what the Bush administration and Israel expect the new government, headed by Salam Fayyad, to be. Of course, it is entirely up to Fayyad and his cabinet to prove the falseness of Israeli bedding and American expectations. Unfortunately, the new government seems to offer a little promise for a better tomorrow for the thoroughly starved, exhausted and tormented Palestinians. Indeed, the deafening silence by Abbas and Fayyad, et al, in the face of widespread thuggish behavior by well-known armed hooligans who have been vandalizing and burning down buildings, institutions and businesses throughout the West Bank, is very telling. True, the government is still a few hours’ old. However, the absence of even a verbal condemnation of the orgy of terror and vandalism against suspected Hamas supporters and their families and businesses doesn’t augur well for the future. Predictably, the US and Israel have been heaping wholesome praise on the Fayyad government. Moreover, the US and Israel have already signaled their enthusiastic willingness to lift all financial sanctions against the occupied West Bank, apparently to strengthen the Dahlan-Abbas camp against other Palestinians who refuse to be bribed or intimidated into giving in to Israeli insolence and arrogance of power. The Fayyad Government may be temporarily pleased by the American and Israeli support. However, it should understand that American and Israeli backing is like a poisoned chalice. Experience proved that in the Middle East any government or faction or organization backed by the US will be reviled by the masses. This is especially true in the occupied Palestinian territories where collaboration with Israel, which controls America’s politics and policies, is seen as ultimate treason. The Palestinian masses know very well what the US symbolize for them, their children and their enduring cause. It symbolizes oppression in its ugliest forms. It symbolizes mass murder, land theft, dispossession, deprivation and ultimate mendacity and hypocrisy. America is the enabler, sustainer and justifier of 40 years of Israeli Nazism whose ultimate goal is the obliteration of Palestinians as a nation, by arrogating their homeland for them and making their future as precarious as possible. In short, America to the Palestinians is very much like what Nazi Germany was to the Jews. Hence, any government agreeing to throw itself into the American lap will lose its legitimacy if not its very existence. This is probably the reason why Palestinians in the Gaza Strip didn’t fight for Muhammed Dahlan and his men. During the past 18 months, the US, through people like Keith Dayton, gave us a lot of money and weapons to kill each other in the service of Israel, which doesn’t really distinguish between this or that Palestinian group, as long as they reject the occupation and insist on freedom. That happened while the US and Israel (and also the hypocritical EU governments) made sure to starve and impoverish ordinary Palestinians in the hope that they would revolt against Hamas and abandon Palestinian aspirations, in return for bread and American money. Yes, America gave us weapons to kill each other, while making sure to starve and torment us, as if the Nazis of our time wanted us to kill and be killed hungry. These are not allegations or unsubstantiated claims but well-known facts. US officials and media have been openly speaking about igniting civil war in Gaza and the West Bank. Elliot Abrams, who is answerable to AIPAC, even boasted about his success in setting Palestinians against each other. Unfortunately, President Abbas never bothered to tell the Palestinian people why and for what purpose he was amassing all these American-supplied weapons? Was it because he wanted to fight the Israeli occupation? Or was it to decapitate Hamas in one full swoop when the opportunity arose? And if the latter was the reason, then can we say that Hamas was justified in its preemptive action in Gaza? Honest Palestinians knew from the very inception what was going on. The writing was on the wall for a long time, and the national apostasy on the part of certain Palestinian leaders was getting starker and starker. There is no doubt that any close identification of the new government with the Israeli occupier will invite its demise, and that could happen sooner rather than later. More to the point, it is wrong and misleading to assume that the Fatah movement in its entirety would back a government that says “yes” to Israel and the US. A government as such would be a treacherous government, a quisling entity. Therefore, the new government should watch its steps very carefully and refrain from reaching any agreement with the Zionist regime that could compromise our national rights. This is not a matter of Fatah vs. Hamas. This is a matter of Palestine and Palestine is not for sale.

Again in times of confusion, we need to go back to the basics, the fundementals of Islam to get our vision right . Reposting this dialogue to the front burner, please contribute, learn or teach. Khalaf bro. Justice is Mercy, can you imagine how life would be if criminals run our lives ( I a way the do now in Somalia)? The problem with an Agnostic is that they use awarped logic that further confuses them. When they say that Justice can not coexisit with mercy, they are looking from the point of view of the criminal, not society that pays a hefty price and suffers more than the individual, if society is a body, and an organ is sick, we either cure or amputate, which is what Justice is made for, so society survives, but not the other way around, in Somalia, we have a situation in which uncle Bush and auntie Condi are having mercy for our criminal warlords who maimed and killed children for 16 years, and now the warlords found an ally who share them special Justice and Mercy principles, kill children, save warlords. Nur

Adna sis Tell her to check out www.islamicity.com They have a bumper to bumper service, she can even get her shahaadah online! Another highly recommeded site is: www.islaam.com , very educational, so many good topics covered in an eloquect way by knowledgeable scholars. Nur

The Gaza Cage By Uri Avnery 06/17/07 "ICH" -- -- WHAT HAPPENS when one and a half million human beings are imprisoned in a tiny, arid territory, cut off from their compatriots and from any contact with the outside world, starved by an economic blockade and unable to feed their families? Some months ago, I described this situation as a sociological experiment set up by Israel, the United States and the European Union. The population of the Gaza Strip as guinea pigs. This week, the experiment showed results. They proved that human beings react exactly like other animals: when too many of them are crowded into a small area in miserable conditions, they become aggressive, and even murderous. The organizers of the experiment in Jerusalem, Washington, Berlin, Oslo, Ottawa and other capitals could rub their hands in satisfaction. The subjects of the experiment reacted as foreseen. Many of them even died in the interests of science. But the experiment is not yet over. The scientists want to know what happens if the blockade is tightened still further. WHAT HAS caused the present explosion in the Gaza Strip? The timing of Hamas' decision to take over the Strip by force was not accidental. Hamas had many good reasons to avoid it. The organization is unable to feed the population. It has no interest in provoking the Egyptian regime, which is busy fighting the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother--organization of Hamas. Also, the organization has no interest in providing Israel with a pretext for tightening the blockade. But the Hamas leaders decided that they had no alternative but to destroy the armed organizations that are tied to Fatah and take their orders from President Mahmoud Abbas. The US has ordered Israel to supply these organizations with large quantities of weapons, in order to enable them to fight Hamas. The Israeli army chiefs did not like the idea, fearing that the arms might end up in the hands of Hamas (as is actually happening now). But our government obeyed American orders, as usual. The American aim is clear. President Bush has chosen a local leader for every Muslim country, who will rule it under American protection and follow American orders. In Iraq, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, and also in Palestine. Hamas believes that the man marked for this job in Gaza is Mohammed Dahlan. For years it has looked as if he was being groomed for this position. The American and Israeli media have been singing his praises, describing him as a strong, determined leader, "moderate" (i.e. obedient to American orders) and "pragmatic" (i.e. obedient to Israeli orders). And the more the Americans and Israelis lauded Dahlan, the more they undermined his standing among the Palestinians. Especially as Dahlan was away in Cairo, as if waiting for his men to receive the promised arms. In the eyes of Hamas, the attack on the Fatah strongholds in the Gaza Strip is a preventive war. The organizations of Abbas and Dahlan melted like snow in the Palestinian sun. Hamas has easily taken over the whole Gaza Strip. How could the American and Israeli generals miscalculate so badly? They are able to think only in strictly military terms: so--and--so many soldiers, so--and--so many machine guns. But in interior struggles in particular, quantitative calculations are secondary. The morale of the fighters and public sentiment are far more important. The members of the Fatah organizations do not know what they are fighting for. The Gaza population supports Hamas, because they believe that it is fighting the Israeli occupier. Their opponents look like collaborators of the occupation. The American statements about their intention of arming them with Israeli weapons have finally condemned them. That is not a matter of Islamic fundamentalism. In this respect all nations are the same: they hate collaborators of a foreign occupier, whether they are Norwegian (Quisling), French (Petain) or Palestinian. IN WASHINGTON and Jerusalem, politicians are bemoaning the "weakness of Mahmoud Abbas". They see now that the only person who could prevent anarchy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank was Yasser Arafat. He had a natural authority. The masses adored him. Even his adversaries, like Hamas, respected him. He created several security apparatuses that competed with each other, in order to prevent any single apparatus from carrying out a coup--d'etat. Arafat was able to negotiate, sign a peace agreement and get his people to accept it. But Arafat was pilloried by Israel as a monster, imprisoned in the Mukata'ah and, in the end, murdered. The Palestinian public elected Mahmoud Abbas as his successor, hoping that he would get from the Americans and the Israelis what they had refused to give to Arafat. If the leaders in Washington and Jerusalem had indeed been interested in peace, they would have hastened to sign a peace agreement with Abbas, who had declared that he was ready to accept the same far--reaching compromise as Arafat. The Americans and the Israelis heaped on him all conceivable praise and rebuffed him on every concrete issue. They did not allow Abbas even the slightest and most miserable achievement. Ariel Sharon plucked his feathers and then sneered at him as "a featherless chicken". After the Palestinian public had patiently waited in vain for Bush to move, it voted for Hamas, in the desperate hope of achieving by violence what Abbas has been unable to achieve by diplomacy. The Israeli leaders, both military and political, were overjoyed. They were interested in undermining Abbas, because he enjoyed Bush's confidence and because his stated position made it harder to justify their refusal to enter substantive negotiations. They did everything to demolish Fatah. To ensure this, they arrested Marwan Barghouti, the only person capable of keeping Fatah together. The victory of Hamas suited their aims completely. With Hamas one does not have to talk, to offer withdrawal from the occupied territories and the dismantling of settlements. Hamas is that contemporary monster, a "terrorist" organization, and with terrorists there is nothing to discuss.SO WHY were people in Jerusalem not satisfied this week? And why did they decide "not to interfere"? True, the media and the politicians, who have helped for years to incite the Palestinian organizations against each other, showed their satisfaction and boasted "we told you so". Look how the Arabs kill each other. Ehud Barak was right, when he said years ago that our country is "a villa in the jungle". But behind the scenes, voices of embarrassment, even anxiety, could be heard. The turning of the Gaza Strip into Hamastan has created a situation for which our leaders were not ready. What to do now? To cut off Gaza altogether and let the people there starve to death? To establish contacts with Hamas? To occupy Gaza again, now that it has become one big tank trap? To ask the UN to station international troops there -- and if so, how many countries would be crazy enough to risk their soldiers in this hell? Our government has worked for years to destroy Fatah, in order to avoid the need to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to the withdrawal from the occupied territories and the settlements there. Now, when it seems that this aim has been achieved, they have no idea what to do about the Hamas victory. They comfort themselves with the thought that it cannot happen in the West Bank. There, Fatah reigns. There Hamas has no foothold. There our army has already arrested most of Hamas' political leaders. There Abbas is still in power. Thus speak the generals, with the generals' logic. But in the West Bank, too, Hamas did win a majority in the last elections. There, too, it is only a matter of time before the population loses its patience. They see the expansion of the settlements, the Wall, the incursions of our army, the targeted assassinations, the nightly arrests. They will explode. Successive Israeli governments have destroyed Fatah systematically, cut off the feet of Abbas and prepared the way for Hamas. They can't pretend to be surprised. WHAT TO DO? To go on boycotting Abbas or to provide him with arms, to enable him to fight for us against Hamas? To go on depriving him of any political achievement or to throw him some crumbs at long last? And anyway, isn't it too late? (And on the Syrian front: to go on paying lip service to peace while sabotaging all the efforts of Bashar Assad to start negotiations? To negotiate secretly, despite American objections? Or continue doing nothing at all?) At present, there is no policy, and no government which could determine a policy. So who will save us? Ehud Barak? Barak's victory in this week's Labor Party leadership run--off has turned him almost automatically into the next Minister of Defense. His strong personality and his experience as Chief of Staff and Prime Minister assure him of a dominant position in the restructured government. Olmert will deal with the area in which he is an unmatched master -- party machinations. But Barak will have a decisive influence on policy. In the government of the two Ehuds, Ehud Barak will decide on matters of war and peace. Until now, practically all his actions have had negative results. He came very close to an agreement with Assad the father and escaped at the last moment. He withdrew the Israeli army from South Lebanon, but without speaking with Hizbullah, which took over. He compelled Arafat to come to Camp David, insulted him there and declared that we have no partner for peace. This dealt a death blow to the chances of peace, a blow which still paralyzes the Israeli public. He has boasted that his real intention was to "unmask" Arafat. He was more of a failed Napoleon than an Israeli de Gaulle. Will the Ethiopian change his skin, the leopard his spots? Hard to believe. IN THE dramas of William Shakespeare, there is frequently a comic interlude at tense moments. And not only there. Shimon Peres, the person who in 55 years of political activity had never won an election, did the impossible this week: he got elected President of Israel. Many years ago, I entitled an article about him "Mr. Sisyphus", because again and again he had almost reached the threshold of success, and success had evaded him. Now he might feel like thumbing his nose at the gods after reaching the summit, but -- alas -- without the boulder. The office of the president is devoid of content and jurisdiction. A hollow politician in a hollow position. Now everybody expects a flurry of activity at the president's palace. There will certainly be peace conferences, meetings of personalities, high--sounding declarations and illustrious plans. In short -- much ado about nothing. The practical result is that Olmert's position has been strengthened. He has succeeded in installing Peres in the President's office and Barak in the Ministry of Defense. In the short term, Olmert's position is assured. And in the meantime, the experiment in Gaza continues, Hamas is taking over and the trio -- Ehud 1, Ehud 2 and Shimon Peres are shedding crocodile tears. Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom.

WOL sis Who can buy Somalia? well in a transparent auction held live on AL JAZEERAH TV. I think that the top 10 Billionnaires in the world( Worth the GNP of the poorest 135 Countries) can put a good offer on the table, they dont have to put up 100% of the price, just 5 % down and the rest to be paid as equity, plus cash payments for the next 100 years, as they invest in Somalia by manageing the country professionally like one of their successful companies., not like the Ethiopian and TFG clowns. The second option is to float an IPO, listing Somalia shares in New York, London, Tokyo markets, imagine the buying frenzy this historical IPO of a country can create, true Globalization, I think if we take this option that we dont have to sell the entire country, just 30% of the total, then we can appoint Xiin Fanin, Rahima, WOL, Ngonge, Biixi and Northerner as the Board members representing the people ( I trust these Nomads wont sell us too like the current clowns). Just imagine, in the openning day, you can sell 5% of your shares to get quick cash, in your case if the trading opens at double your eNuri Auctionneers allocated $53 Million shares, which is 1$106 Million, then you can get a quick $5.3 Million enough to build your own hospital in Moshi to cure the intellctually challenged Nomads! Nur

Americans Unready to Revolt, Despite Revolting Conditions By Joel S. Hirschhorn 06/16/07 "ICH" -- -- The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll results vividly show a population incredibly dissatisfied with their nation’s political system. In other countries in other times such a depressing level of confidence in government would send a signal to those running the government that a major upheaval is imminent. But not here in the USA. Why? First, here are the highlights of the poll that surveyed 1,008 adults from June 8-11, with a margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points. A whopping 68 percent think the country is on the wrong track. Just 19 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction - the lowest number on that question in nearly 15 years. And most of those with the positive view are probably in the Upper Class. Bush’s approval rating is at just 29 percent, his lowest mark ever in the survey. Only 62 percent of Republicans approve, versus 32 percent who disapprove. Take Republicans out of the picture and a fifth or less of Americans have a positive view of Bush. Even worse, only 23 percent approve of the job that Congress is doing. So much for that wonderful new Democratic control of Congress. Bipartisan incompetence is alive and well. On the economic front, nearly twice as many people think the U.S. is more hurt than helped by the global economy (48 to 25 percent). Globalization does not spread wealth; it channels it to the wealthy, making billionaires out of millionaires. I have long asserted that Americans live in a delusional democracy with delusional prosperity and these and loads of other data support this view. There is a super wealthy and politically powerful Upper Class that is literally raping the nation. Meanwhile, the huge Lower Class continues to lose economic ground while their elected representatives sell them out to benefit the Upper Class. Yet no rational person thinks that a large fraction of the population is ready to rise up in revolt against the evil status quo political-economic system that so clearly is not serving the interests of the overwhelming majority of Americans. Why not? For a nation that was built on a revolt against oppressive governance by the British, something has been lost from our political DNA. We apparently no longer have the gene for political rebellion. It has been bred out of most of us. And those of us that urge a Second American Revolution are seen as fringe, nutty subversives. Part of the genius of our contemporary ruling class elites is that they have engineering a state of political and economic oppression that paradoxically is still embraced by the Lower Class. The rational way to understand this is that ordinary, oppressed Americans are in a deep psychological state of self-delusion. Despite all the empirical, objective evidence of a failed government, they fail to see rebellion opportunities. Many still believe they live in the world’s best democracy. But across all elections considerably less than half the citizens even bother to vote anymore. Yet, as the new NBC/Journal poll results show, people are cognitively aware of just how awful the political-economic system is. Yet they are not feeling enough pain to seriously consider rebellion. And it is visceral pain that must drive people to the daring act of rebellion. Why is there insufficient pain for revolution? This is a deadly serious issue. What is historically unique about America is that even the most oppressed and unfairly treated people are distracted by affordable materialism, entertainment, sports, gambling, and myriad other aspects of our frivolous, self-absorbed culture. Even failed school and health care systems do not drive people, paying enormous sums to fill up their SUVs, to rebellion. So, Americans are aware of their oppression, but the power elites have successfully drugged them with a plethora of pleasure-producing distractions sufficient to keep them under control. We are free to *****, but too weak to revolt. The Internet has provided a release valve for some pent up anger and frustration. But it too has mostly become another source of distraction, rather than an effective tool for rebellion. Though these new poll statistics make news, those in control of the political-economic system are not afraid that the population is on the verge of retaking their constitutionally guaranteed sovereign power and take back their nation. Thousands of people like me keep writing books and articles and creating protest groups and events. Those in power just find new, ingenious ways to keep the population distracted – if not through pleasure, then certainly through fear of terrorism. Growing economic insecurity also contributes to self-paralysis, as do never-ending political lies. What a system. Even as the population has growing awareness of the dire condition of their nation, the move by the politically powerful on the right and left continues to seek a new immigration law that will solidify the selling out of America. Business interests want more of those fleeing Mexico and other nations to keep wages low. Instead of Mexicans rising up in rebellion against their oppressive government and economic system they escape to the USA. But Americans have no such viable escape solution. Though global warming will certainly make Canada increasingly attractive. So what do Americans have – other than a terribly bleak future? Where is hope in our dismal world? In a bizarre twist of history that further illustrates just how impotent Americans have become, virtually all citizens are either unaware of or unreceptive to the ultimate escape route that the Framers of our Constitution gave us. They anticipated that Americans could become quite dissatisfied with the federal government. They feared that the political system could become incredibly corrupted by moneyed interests. They were right. So here we sit over 200 years after our nation was created unwilling to use what is explicitly given to us in Article V of the Constitution – the option to have a convention outside the control of Congress, the President and the Supreme Court to make proposals for constitutional amendments. Do we really believe in the rule of law? If so, then we should understand that the supreme law of the land – what is in our Constitution – is the ultimate way to obtain the deep political and government reforms to restore true democracy and economic fairness to our society. Make no mistake: an Article V convention has been stubbornly opposed by virtually all groups with political and economic power. This is most evidenced by the blatant refusal of Congress to obey the Constitution and give us an Article V convention, even though the single explicit requirement for a convention has been met. This fact alone should tell rational people that they are being screwed and oppressed. The rule of law is trumped by the rule of delusion. Our lawmakers are lawbreakers. Come learn more about the effort to get an Article V convention at www.foavc.org and become a member. Do not keep witnessing the unraveling of American society, voting for lesser evil candidates, and believing the propaganda that putting different Democrats or Republicans in office will actually improve things for most of us. Choose peaceful rebellion by using what our Constitution gives us. Fight self-delusion. [Joel S. Hirschhorn is the author of Delusional Democracy ( www.delusionaldemocracy.com ); and a founder of Friends of the Article V Convention ( www.foavc.org ).]

The One and Only bro. I google my way around, you know back home in Somalia, there was a trivia game that went by " Googaa? which means ready to be tested on your knowledge base? and you would answer " Cadale" the name of town I guess, which means that contestant is ready for difficult questions. Now politicians to do what they do best need citizens who know so much about their country, law, and international affairs, like those in the link below who vote them to office. Enjoy the clip; http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19aqw_americans-are-not-****** Nur

Nomads Qoraalkan waan soo gaba-gabeeyay, wixii qoraalkeyga waafaqsan muraadka Allah iyo Sunnada Rasuulkiisa SAWS, waa wax uu Allah i fahamsiiyay oo isaga oo qudha uu abaalm ku leeyahay, wixii aan waafqsaneynna waa gaf ula jeedda la'aan ah oon Allah ka baryayo inuu iga cafiyo oon ku muteysan karo cadaab haduusan Allah ii naxariisan. Allah ayaan ka baryayaa inuu ka yeelo qoraalkan mid khaalis u ah wajigiisa deeqsiga ah, kuwuu hanuun la doonana uu ku hanuunsho, anigana iga dhaxalsiiyo iimaan iyo dambi dhaaf. aamin. Nur

Public Power in the Age of Empire The text of "Public Power in the Age of Empire" is based on a public address that Arundhati Roy delivered to an overflow crowd at the American Sociological Association's 99th Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, on August 16, 2004. The theme of the conference was "Public Sociologies." By Arundhati Roy 06/15/07---- (First published 08/17/04) -- - "ICH" -- -- WHEN language has been butchered and bled of meaning, how do we understand "public power"? When freedom means occupation, when democracy means neoliberal capitalism, when reform means repression, when words like "empowerment" and "peacekeeping" make your blood run cold - why, then, "public power" could mean whatever you want it to mean. A biceps building machine, or a Community Power Shower. So, I'll just have to define "public power" as I go along, in my own self-serving sort of way. In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In Hindi, we have sarkar and public, the government and the people. Inherent in this use is the underlying assumption that the government is quite separate from "the people." This distinction has to do with the fact that India's freedom struggle, though magnificent, was by no means revolutionary. The Indian elite stepped easily and elegantly into the shoes of the British imperialists. A deeply impoverished, essentially feudal society became a modern, independent nation state. Even today, fifty-seven years on to the day, the truly vanquished still look upon the government as mai-baap, the parent and provider. The somewhat more radical, those who still have fire in their bellies, see it as chor, the thief, the snatcher-away of all things. Either way, for most Indians, sarkar is very separate from public. However, as you make your way up India's complex social ladder, the distinction between sarkar and public gets blurred. The Indian elite, like the elite anywhere in the world, finds it hard to separate itself from the state. It sees like the state, thinks like the state, speaks like the state. In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of the distinction between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into society. This could be a sign of a robust democracy, but unfortunately, it's a little more complicated and less pretty than that. Among other things, it has to do with the elaborate web of paranoia generated by the U.S. sarkar and spun out by the corporate media and Hollywood. Ordinary people in the United States have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's Al Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba, it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the most powerful nation in the world - with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its history of having waged and sponsored endless wars, and the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear bombs - is peopled by a terrified citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear. This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the U.S. government's Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia, turquoise, salmon pink. To outside observers, this merging of sarkar and public in the United States sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the government from the people. It is this confusion that fuels anti-Americanism in the world. Anti-Americanism is then seized upon and amplified by the U.S. government and its faithful media outlets. You know the routine: "Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms," et cetera. This enhances the sense of isolation among people in the United States and makes the embrace between sarkar and public even more intimate. Like Red Riding Hood looking for a cuddle in the wolf's bed. Two thousand and one was not the first year that the U.S. government declared a "war on terrorism." As Noam Chomsky reminds us, the first "war on terrorism" was declared by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s during the U.S.-sponsored terrorist wars across Central America, the Middle East, and Africa. The Reagan administration called terrorism a "plague spread by depraved opponents of civilisation itself." In keeping with this sentiment, in 1987, the United Nations General Assembly proposed a strongly worded condemnation of terrorism. One hundred and fifty-three countries voted for it. Only the United States and Israel voted against it. They objected to a passage that referred to "the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence... of people forcibly deprived of that right... particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation." Remember that in 1987, the United States was a staunch ally of apartheid South Africa. The African National Congress and Nelson Mandela were listed as "terrorists." The term "foreign occupation" was taken to mean Israel's occupation of Palestine. Over the last few years, the "war on terrorism" has mutated into the more generic "war on terror." Using the threat of an external enemy to rally people behind you is a tired old horse that politicians have ridden into power for centuries. But could it be that ordinary people are fed up with that poor old horse and are looking for something different? There's an old Hindi film song that goes yeh public hai, yeh sab jaanti hai (the public, she knows it all). Wouldn't it be lovely if the song were right and the politicians wrong? Before Washington's illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International poll showed that in no European country was the support for a unilateral war higher than 11 per cent. On February 15, 2003, weeks before the invasion, more than 10 million people marched against the war on different continents, including North America. And yet the governments of many supposedly democratic countries still went to war. The question is: is "democracy" still democratic? Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected them? And, critically, is the public in democratic countries responsible for the actions of its sarkar? If you think about it, the logic that underlies the war on terrorism and the logic that underlies terrorism are exactly the same. Both make ordinary citizens pay for the actions of their government. Al Qaeda made the people of the United States pay with their lives for the actions of their government in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The U.S. government has made the people of Afghanistan pay in the thousands for the actions of the Taliban and the people of Iraq pay in the hundreds of thousands for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The crucial difference is that nobody really elected Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or Saddam Hussein. But the President of the United States was elected (well... in a manner of speaking). The Prime Ministers of Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom were elected. Could it then be argued that citizens of these countries are more responsible for the actions of their government than Iraqis were for the actions of Saddam Hussein or Afghans for the Taliban? Whose God decides which is a "just war" and which isn't? George Bush senior once said: "I will never apologise for the United States. I don't care what the facts are." When the President of the most powerful country in the world doesn't need to care what the facts are, then we can at least be sure we have entered the Age of Empire. So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean anything at all? Does it actually exist? In these allegedly democratic times, conventional political thought holds that public power is exercised through the ballot. Scores of countries in the world will go to the polls this year. Most (not all) of them will get the governments they vote for. But will they get the governments they want? In India this year, we voted the Hindu nationalists out of office. But even as we celebrated, we knew that on nuclear bombs, neoliberalism, privatisation, censorship, big dams - on every major issue other than overt Hindu nationalism - the Congress and the BJP have no major ideological differences. We know that it is the fifty-year legacy of the Congress party that prepared the ground culturally and politically for the Far Right. It was also the Congress party that first opened India's markets to corporate globalisation. It passed legislation that encouraged the privatisation of water and power, the dismantling of the public sector, and the denationalisation of public companies. It enforced cutbacks in government spending on education and health, and weakened labour laws that protected workers' rights. The BJP took this process forward with pitiless abandon. In its election campaign, the Congress party indicated that it was prepared to rethink some of its earlier economic policies. Millions of India's poorest people came out in strength to vote in the elections. The spectacle of the great Indian democracy was telecast live - the poor farmers, the old and infirm, the veiled women with their beautiful silver jewellery, making quaint journeys to election booths on elephants and camels and bullock carts. Contrary to the predictions of all India's experts and pollsters, the Congress won more votes than any other party. India's Communist parties won the largest share of the vote in their history. India's poor had clearly voted against neoliberalism's economic "reforms" and growing fascism. As soon as the votes were counted, the corporate media dispatched them like badly paid extras on a film set. Television channels featured split screens. Half the screen showed the chaos outside the home of Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress party, as the coalition government was cobbled together. The other half showed frenzied stockbrokers outside the Bombay Stock Exchange, panicking at the thought that the Congress party might actually honour its promises and implement its electoral mandate. We saw the Sensex stock index move up and down and sideways. The media, whose own publicly listed stocks were plummeting, reported the stock market crash as though Pakistan had launched ICBMs on New Delhi. Even before the new government was formally sworn in, senior Congress politicians made public statements reassuring investors and the media that privatisation of public utilities would continue. Meanwhile the BJP, now in Opposition, has cynically, and comically, begun to oppose foreign direct investment and the further opening of Indian markets. This is the spurious, evolving dialectic of electoral democracy. As for the Indian poor, once they've provided the votes, they are expected to bugger off home. Policy will be decided despite them. AND what of the U.S. elections? Do U.S. voters have a real choice? It's true that if John Kerry becomes President, some of the oil tycoons and Christian fundamentalists in the White House will change. Few will be sorry to see the backs of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or John Ashcroft or an end to their blatant thuggery. But the real concern is that in the new administration their policies will continue. That we will have Bushism without Bush. Those positions of real power - the bankers, the CEOs - are not vulnerable to the vote (and in any case, they fund both sides). Unfortunately, the U.S. elections have deteriorated into a sort of personality contest, a squabble over who would do a better job of overseeing Empire. John Kerry believes in the idea of Empire as fervently as George Bush does. The U.S. political system has been carefully crafted to ensure that no one who questions the natural goodness of the military-industrial-corporate structure will be allowed through the portals of power. Given this, it's no surprise that in this election you have two Yale University graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the same secret society, both millionaires, both playing at soldier-soldier, both talking up war, and arguing almost childishly about who will lead the war on terror more effectively. Like President Bill Clinton before him, Kerry will continue the expansion of U.S. economic and military penetration into the world. He says he would have voted to authorise Bush to go to war in Iraq even if he had known that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. He promises to commit more troops to Iraq. He said recently that he supports Bush's policies toward Israel and Ariel Sharon "completely." He says he'll retain 98 per cent of Bush's tax cuts. So, underneath the shrill exchange of insults, there is almost absolute consensus. It looks as though even if people in the United States vote for Kerry, they'll still get Bush. President John Kerbush or President George Berry. It's not a real choice. It's an apparent choice. Like choosing a brand of detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide, they're both owned by Proctor & Gamble. This doesn't mean that one takes a position that is without nuance, that the Congress and the BJP, New Labour and the Tories, the Democrats and Republicans are the same. Of course, they're not. Neither are Tide and Ivory Snow. Tide has oxy-boosting and Ivory Snow is a gentle cleanser. In India, there is a difference between an overtly fascist party (the BJP) and a party that slyly pits one community against another (Congress), and sows the seeds of communalism that are then so ably harvested by the BJP. There are differences in the I.Qs and levels of ruthlessness between this year's U.S. presidential candidates. The anti-war movement in the United States has done a phenomenal job of exposing the lies and venality that led to the invasion of Iraq, despite the propaganda and intimidation it faced. This was a service not just to people here, but to the whole world. But why is it that the Democrats do not even have to pretend to be against the invasion and occupation of Iraq? If the anti-war movement openly campaigns for Kerry, the rest of the world will think that it approves of his policies of "sensitive" imperialism. Is U.S. imperialism preferable if it is supported by the United Nations and European countries? Is it preferable if the U.N. asks Indian and Pakistani soldiers to do the killing and dying in Iraq instead of U.S. soldiers? Is the only change that Iraqis can hope for that French, German, and Russian companies will share in the spoils of the occupation of their country? Is this actually better or worse for those of us who live in subject nations? Is it better for the world to have a smarter emperor in power or a stupider one? Is that our only choice? I'm sorry, I know that these are uncomfortable, even brutal questions, but they must be asked. The fact is that electoral democracy has become a process of cynical manipulation. It offers us a very reduced political space today. To believe that this space constitutes real choice would be naive. The crisis in modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder. On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign governments, international instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex web of multilateral laws and agreements that have entrenched a system of appropriation that puts colonialism to shame. This system allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative capital - hot money - into and out of Third World countries, which then effectively dictates their economic policy. Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these economies. Giant transnational corporations are taking control of their essential infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their water, their electricity. The World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other financial institutions like the Asian Development Bank, virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies, and devastate them. All this goes under the fluttering banner of "reform." As a consequence of this reform, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, thousands of small enterprises and industries have closed down, millions of workers and farmers have lost their jobs and land. Anyone who criticises this process is mocked for being "anti-reform," anti-progress, anti-development. Somehow a Luddite. The Spectator newspaper in London assures us that "[w]e live in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history." Billions wonder: who's "we"? Where does he live? What's his Christian name? Once the economies of Third World countries are controlled by the free market, they are enmeshed in an elaborate, carefully calibrated system of economic inequality. For example, Western countries that together spend more than a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidised electricity. Then they flood the markets of poor countries with their subsidised agricultural goods and other products with which local producers cannot possibly compete. Countries that have been plundered by colonising regimes are steeped in debt to these same powers, and have to repay them at the rate of about $382 billion a year. Ergo, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - not accidentally, but by design. By intention. To put a vulgar point on all of this - the truth is getting more vulgar by the minute - the combined wealth of the world's billionaires in 2004 (587 "individuals and family units"), according to Forbes magazine, is $1.9 trillion. This is more than the gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries combined. The good news is that there are 111 more billionaires this year than there were in 2003. Isn't that fun? The thing to understand is that modern democracy is safely premised on an almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate globalisation is not. Liquid capital is not. So, even though capital needs the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts in the servants' quarters, this set-up ensures that no individual nation can oppose corporate globalisation on its own. Time and again we have seen the heroes of our times, giants in opposition, suddenly diminished. President Lula of Brazil was the hero of the World Social Forum in January 2002. Now he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party. Lula has a worthy predecessor in the former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, who instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment that has left thousands of people homeless, jobless, and without water and electricity. When Harry Oppenheimer died in August 2000, Mandela called him "one of the great South Africans of our time." Oppenheimer was the head of Anglo-American, one of South Africa's largest mining companies, which made its money exploiting cheap black labour made available by the repressive apartheid regime. Why does this happen? It is neither true nor useful to dismiss Mandela or Lula as weak or treacherous people. It's important to understand the nature of the beast they were up against. The moment they crossed the floor from the opposition into government they became hostage to a spectrum of threats - most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader's personal charisma and history of struggle will dent the corporate cartel is to have no understanding of how capitalism works, or for that matter, how power works. Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link hands across national borders. So when we speak of public power in the Age of Empire, I hope it's not presumptuous to assume that the only thing that is worth discussing seriously is the power of a dissenting public. A public that disagrees with the very concept of Empire. A public that has set itself against incumbent power - international, national, regional, or provincial governments and institutions that support and service Empire. Of course those of us who live in Empire's subject nations are aware that in the great cities of Europe and the United States, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, there is now open talk about the benefits of imperialism and the need for a strong empire to police an unruly world. It wasn't long ago that colonialism also sanctified itself as a "civilising mission". So we can't give these pundits high marks for originality. We are aware that New Imperialism is being marketed as a "lesser evil" in a less-than-perfect world. Occasionally some of us are invited to "debate" the merits of imperialism on "neutral" platforms provided by the corporate media. It's like debating slavery. It isn't a subject that deserves the dignity of a debate. What are the avenues of protest available to people who wish to resist Empire? By resist I don't mean only to express dissent, but to effectively force change. Empire has a range of calling cards. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross hairs of the U.S. cruise missile and the IMF checkbook. Argentina is the model if you want to be the poster boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep. For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in the form of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. It appears in their lives in very local avatars - losing their jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills, having their water supply cut, being evicted from their homes and uprooted from their land. All this overseen by the repressive machinery of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary. It is a process of relentless impoverishment with which the poor are historically familiar. What Empire does is to further entrench and exacerbate already existing inequalities. Even until quite recently, it was sometimes difficult for people to see themselves as victims of Empire. But now local struggles have begun to see their role with increasing clarity. However grand it might sound, the fact is, they are confronting Empire in their own, very different ways. Differently in Iraq, in South Africa, in India, in Argentina, and differently, for that matter, on the streets of Europe and the United States. Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists, artists, and filmmakers have come together to strip Empire of its sheen. They have connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and boardroom speeches into real stories about real people and real despair. They have shown how the neoliberal project has cost people their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity. They have made the intangible tangible. The once seemingly incorporeal enemy is now corporeal. This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate political groups, with a variety of strategies. But they all recognised that the target of their anger, their activism, and their doggedness is the same. This was the beginning of real globalisation. The globalisation of dissent. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of mass resistance movements in Third World countries today. The landless people's movement in Brazil, the anti-dam movement in India, the Zapatistas' in Mexico, the Anti-Privatisation Forum in South Africa, and hundreds of others, are fighting their own sovereign governments, which have become agents of the neoliberal project. Most of these are radical struggles, fighting to change the structure and chosen model of "development" of their own societies. Then there are those fighting formal and brutal neocolonial occupations in contested territories whose boundaries and fault lines were often arbitrarily drawn last century by the imperialist powers. In Palestine, Tibet, Chechnya, Kashmir, and several States in India's northeastern provinces, people are waging struggles for self-determination. Several of these struggles might have been radical, even revolutionary when they began, but often the brutality of the repression they face pushes them into conservative, even retrogressive spaces where they use the same violent strategies and the same language of religious and cultural nationalism used by the states they seek to replace. Many of the foot soldiers in these struggles will find, like those who fought apartheid in South Africa, that once they overcome overt occupation, they will be left with another battle on their hands - a battle against covert economic colonialism. Meanwhile, the rift between rich and poor is being driven deeper and the battle to control the world's resources intensifies. Economic colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback. Iraq today is a tragic illustration of this process. An illegal invasion. A brutal occupation in the name of liberation. The rewriting of laws that allow the shameless appropriation of the country's wealth and resources by corporations allied to the occupation, and now the charade of a local "Iraqi government." For these reasons, it is absurd to condemn the resistance to the U.S. occupation in Iraq as being masterminded by terrorists or insurgents or supporters of Saddam Hussein. After all, if the United States were invaded and occupied, would everybody who fought to liberate it be a terrorist or an insurgent or a Bushite? The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle. Like most resistance movements, it combines a motley range of assorted factions. Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists, fed up collaborationists, communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled with opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery, and criminality. But if we are only going to support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity. A whole industry of development experts, academics, and consultants have built an industry on the back of global social movements in which they are not direct participants. Many of these "experts," who earn their livings studying the struggles of the world's poor, are funded by groups like the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, and wealthy universities such Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell. From a safe distance, they offer us their insightful critiques. But the same people who tell us that we can reform the World Bank from within, that we change the IMF by working inside it, would not themselves seek to reform a resistance movement by working within it. This is not to say that we should never criticise resistance movements. Many of them suffer from a lack of democracy, from the iconisation of their "leaders," a lack of transparency, a lack of vision and direction. But most of all they suffer from vilification, repression, and lack of resources. Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct a secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. government and its allies to withdraw from Iraq. THE first militant confrontation in the United States between the global justice movement and the neoliberal junta took place famously at the WTO conference in Seattle in December 1999. To many mass movements in developing countries that had long been fighting lonely, isolated battles, Seattle was the first delightful sign that their anger and their vision of another kind of world was shared by people in the imperialist countries. In January 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 20,000 activists, students, filmmakers - some of the best minds in the world - came together to share their experiences and exchange ideas about confronting Empire. That was the birth of the now historic World Social Forum. It was the first formal coming together of an exciting, anarchic, unindoctrinated, energetic, new kind of "public power." The rallying cry of the WSF is "Another World is Possible." The forum has become a platform where hundreds of conversations, debates, and seminars have helped to hone and refine a vision of what kind of world it should be. By January 2004, when the fourth WSF was held in Mumbai, India, it attracted 200,000 delegates. I have never been part of a more electrifying gathering. It was a sign of the social forum's success that the mainstream media in India ignored it completely. But now the WSF is threatened by its own success. The safe, open, festive atmosphere of the forum has allowed politicians and non-governmental organisations that are imbricated in the political and economic systems that the forum opposes to participate and make themselves heard. Another danger is that the WSF, which has played such a vital role in the movement for global justice, runs the risk of becoming an end unto itself. Just organising it every year consumes the energies of some of the best activists. If conversations about resistance replace real civil disobedience, then the WSF could become an asset to those whom it was created to oppose. The forum must be held and must grow, but we have to find ways to channel our conversations there back into concrete action. As resistance movements have begun to reach out across national borders and pose a real threat, governments have developed their own strategies of how to deal with them. They range from cooptation to repression. I'm going to speak about three of the contemporary dangers that confront resistance movements: the difficult meeting point between mass movements and the mass media, the hazards of the NGO-isation of resistance, and the confrontation between resistance movements and increasingly repressive states. The place in which the mass media meets mass movements is a complicated one. Governments have learned that a crisis-driven media cannot afford to hang about in the same place for too long. Like a business needs cash turnover, the media need crises turnover. Whole countries become old news. They cease to exist, and the darkness becomes deeper than before the light was briefly shone on them. We saw it happen in Afghanistan when the Soviets withdrew. And now, after Operation Enduring Freedom put the CIA's Hamid Karzai in place, Afghanistan has been thrown to its warlords once more. Another CIA operative, Iyad Allawi, has been installed in Iraq, so perhaps it's time for the media to move on from there, too. While governments hone the art of waiting out crises, resistance movements are increasingly being ensnared in a vortex of crisis production, seeking to find ways of manufacturing them in easily consumable, spectator-friendly formats. Every self-respecting people's movement, every "issue," is expected to have its own hot air balloon in the sky advertising its brand and purpose. For this reason, starvation deaths are more effective advertisements for impoverishment than millions of malnourished people, who don't quite make the cut. Dams are not newsworthy until the devastation they wreak makes good television. (And by then, it's too late.) Standing in the rising water of a reservoir for days on end, watching your home and belongings float away to protest against a big dam used to be an effective strategy, but isn't any more. The media is dead bored of that one. So the hundreds of thousands of people being displaced by dams are expected to either conjure new tricks or give up the struggle. Resistance as spectacle, as political theatre, has a history. Gandhi's salt march in 1931 to Dandi is among the most exhilarating examples. But the salt march wasn't theatre alone. It was the symbolic part of a larger act of real civil disobedience. When Gandhi and an army of freedom fighters marched to Gujarat's coast and made salt from seawater, thousands of Indians across the country began to make their own salt, openly defying imperial Britain's salt tax laws, which banned local salt production in favour of British salt imports. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. The disturbing thing nowadays is that resistance as spectacle has cut loose from its origins in genuine civil disobedience and is beginning to become more symbolic than real. Colourful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. If we want to reclaim the space for civil disobedience, we will have to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of crisis reportage and its fear of the mundane. We have to use our experience, our imagination, and our art to interrogate those instruments of state that ensure that "normality" remains what it is: cruel, unjust, unacceptable. We have to expose the policies and processes that make ordinary things - food, water, shelter and dignity - such a distant dream for ordinary people. The real pre-emptive strike is to understand that wars are the end result of a flawed and unjust peace. As far as mass resistance movements are concerned, the fact is that no amount of media coverage can make up for mass strength on the ground. There is no option, really, to old-fashioned, back-breaking political mobilisation. Corporate globalisation has increased the distance between those who make decisions and those who have to suffer the effects of those decisions. Forums like the WSF enable local resistance movements to reduce that distance and to link up with their counterparts in rich countries. That alliance is a formidable one. For example, when India's first private dam, the Maheshwar Dam, was being built, alliances between the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the NBA), the German organisation Urgewald, the Berne Declaration in Switzerland, and the International Rivers Network in Berkeley worked together to push a series of international banks and corporations out of the project. This would not have been possible had there not been a rock solid resistance movement on the ground. The voice of that local movement was amplified by supporters on the global stage, embarrassing investors and forcing them to withdraw. An infinite number of similar alliances, targeting specific projects and specific corporations would help to make another world possible. We should begin with the corporations who did business with Saddam Hussein and now profit from the devastation and occupation of Iraq. A second hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-isation of resistance. It will be easy to twist what I'm about to say into an indictment of all NGOs. That would be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up to siphon off grant money or as tax dodges (in States like Bihar, they are given as dowry), of course there are NGOs doing valuable work. But it's important to turn our attention away from the positive work being done by some individual NGOs, and consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context. In India, for instance, the funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s and 1990s. It coincided with the opening of India's markets to neoliberalism. At the time, the Indian state, in keeping with the requirements of structural adjustment, was withdrawing funding from rural development, agriculture, energy, transport, and public health. As the state abdicated its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in these very areas. The difference, of course, is that the funds available to them are a minuscule fraction of the actual cut in public spending. Most large well-funded NGOs are financed and patronised by aid and development agencies, which are in turn funded by Western governments, the World Bank, the U.N., and some multinational corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are certainly part of the same loose, political formation that oversees the neoliberal project and demands the slash in government spending in the first place. Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal? Guilt? It's a little more than that. NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators of the discourse. They play out the role of the "reasonable man" in an unfair, unreasonable war. In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. They're what botanists would call an indicator species. It's almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the U.S. preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation. In order to make sure their funding is not jeopardised and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work - whether it's in a country devastated by war, poverty or an epidemic of disease - within a shallow framework more or less shorn of a political or historical context. At any rate, an inconvenient historical or political context. It's not for nothing that the "NGO perspective" is becoming increasingly respected. Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress reports from poor countries and war zones eventually make the (dark) people of those (dark) countries seem like pathological victims. Another malnourished Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another Afghan refugee camp, another maimed Sudanese... in need of the white man's help. They unwittingly reinforce racist stereotypes and re-affirm the achievements, the comforts, and the compassion (the tough love) of Western civilisation, minus the guilt of the history of genocide, colonialism, and slavery. They're the secular missionaries of the modern world. Eventually - on a smaller scale, but more insidiously - the capital available to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the speculative capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor countries. It begins to dictate the agenda. It turns confrontation into negotiation. It depoliticises resistance. It interferes with local people's movements that have traditionally been self-reliant. NGOs have funds that can employ local people who might otherwise be activists in resistance movements, but now can feel they are doing some immediate, creative good (and earning a living while they're at it). Charity offers instant gratification to the giver, as well as the receiver, but its side effects can be dangerous. Real political resistance offers no such short cuts. The NGO-isation of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary. This brings us to a third danger I want to speak about tonight: the deadly nature of the actual confrontation between resistance movements and increasingly repressive states. Between public power and the agents of Empire. Whenever civil resistance has shown the slightest signs of evolving from symbolic action into anything remotely threatening, the crackdown is merciless. We've seen what happened in the demonstrations in Seattle, in Miami, in Gothenburg, in Genoa. In the United States, you have the USA PATRIOT Act, which has become a blueprint for anti-terrorism laws passed by governments around the world. Freedoms are being curbed in the name of protecting freedom. And once we surrender our freedoms, to win them back will take a revolution. Some governments have vast experience in the business of curbing freedoms and still smelling sweet. The government of India, an old hand at the game, lights the path. Over the years the Indian government has passed a plethora of laws that allow it to call almost anyone a terrorist, an insurgent, a militant. We have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Public Security Act, the Special Areas Security Act, the Gangster Act, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (which has formally lapsed, but under which people are still facing trial), and, most recently, POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act), the broad-spectrum antibiotic for the disease of dissent. There are other steps that are being taken, such as court judgments that in effect curtail free speech, the right of government workers to go on strike, the right to life and livelihood. Courts have begun to micro-manage our lives in India. And criticising the courts is a criminal offence. But coming back to the counterterrorism initiatives, over the last decade the number of people who have been killed by the police and security forces runs into the tens of thousands. In the state of Andhra Pradesh (the pin-up girl of corporate globalisation in India), an average of about 200 "extremists" are killed in what are called "encounters" every year. The Mumbai police boast of how many "gangsters" they have killed in "shoot outs." In Kashmir, in a situation that almost amounts to war, an estimated 80,000 people have been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply "disappeared." In the northeastern provinces, the situation is similar. In recent years, the Indian police have opened fire on unarmed people at peaceful demonstrations, mostly Dalit and Adivasi. The preferred method is to kill them and then call them terrorists. India is not alone, though. We have seen similar things happen in countries such Bolivia and Chile. In the era of neoliberalism, poverty is a crime and protesting against it is more and more being defined as terrorism. In India, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) is often called the Production of Terrorism Act. It's a versatile, hold-all law that could apply to anyone from an Al Qaeda operative to a disgruntled bus conductor. As with all anti-terrorism laws, the genius of POTA is that it can be whatever the government wants. For example, in Tamil Nadu, it has been used to imprison and silence critics of the State government. In Jharkhand 3,200 people, mostly poor Adivasis accused of being Maoists, have been named in criminal complaints under POTA. In Gujarat and Mumbai, the Act is used almost exclusively against Muslims. After the 2002 state-assisted pogrom in Gujarat, in which an estimated 2,000 Muslims were savagely killed by Hindu mobs and 150,000 driven from their homes, 287 people have been accused under POTA. Of these, 286 are Muslim and one is a Sikh. POTA allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as judicial evidence. In effect, torture tends to replace investigation. The South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre reports that India has the highest number of torture and custodial deaths in the world. Government records show that there were 1,307 deaths in judicial custody in 2002 alone. A few months ago, I was a member of a people's tribunal on POTA. Over a period of two days, we listened to harrowing testimonies of what is happening in our wonderful democracy. It's everything - from people being forced to drink urine, being stripped, humiliated, given electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts, having iron rods put up their anuses, to people being beaten and kicked to death. The new government has promised to repeal POTA. I'd be surprised if that happens before similar legislation under a different name is put in place. When every avenue of nonviolent dissent is closed down, and everyone who protests against the violation of their human rights is called a terrorist, should we really be surprised if vast parts of the country are overrun by those who believe in armed struggle and are more or less beyond the control of the state: in Kashmir, the northeastern provinces, large parts of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Andhra Pradesh. Ordinary people in these regions are trapped between the violence of the militants and the state. In Kashmir, the Indian Army estimates that 3,000 to 4,000 militants are operating at any given time. To control them, the Indian government deploys about 500,000 soldiers. Clearly, it isn't just the militants the Army seeks to control, but a whole population of humiliated, unhappy people who see the Indian Army as an occupation force. The primary purpose of laws like POTA is not to target real terrorists or militants, who are usually simply shot. Anti-terrorism laws are used to intimidate civil society. Inevitably, such repression has the effect of fuelling discontent and anger. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows not just officers, but even junior commissioned officers and non-commissioned officers of the army, to use force and even kill any person on suspicion of disturbing public order. It was first imposed on a few districts in the State of Manipur in 1958. Today, it applies to virtually all of the northeast and Kashmir. The documentation of instances of torture, disappearances, custodial deaths, rape, and summary execution by security forces is enough to turn your stomach. In Andhra Pradesh, in India's heartland, the militant Marxist-Leninist People's War Group - which for years has been engaged in a violent armed struggle and has been the principal target of many of the Andhra police's fake "encounters" - held its first public meeting in years on July 28, 2004, in the town of Warangal. The former Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, N. Chandrababu Naidu, liked to call himself the CEO of the State. In return for his enthusiasm in implementing structural adjustment, Andhra Pradesh received millions of dollars of aid from the World Bank and development agencies such as Britain's Department for International Development. As a result of structural adjustment, Andhra Pradesh is now best known for two things: the hundreds of suicides by farmers who were steeped in debt and the spreading influence and growing militancy of the People's War Group. During Naidu's term in office, the PWG were not arrested, or captured, they were summarily shot. In response, the PWG campaigned actively, and let it be said, violently, against Naidu. In May, the Congress won the State elections. The Naidu government didn't just lose, it was humiliated in the polls. When the PWG called a public meeting, it was attended by hundreds of thousands of people. Under POTA, all of them are considered terrorists. Are they all going to be detained in some Indian equivalent of Guantanamo Bay? The whole of the northeast and the Kashmir Valley is in ferment. What will the government do with these millions of people? One does not endorse the violence of these militant groups. Neither morally nor strategically. But to condemn it without first denouncing the much greater violence perpetrated by the state would be to deny the people of these regions not just their basic human rights, but even the right to a fair hearing. People who have lived in situations of conflict are in no doubt that militancy and armed struggle provokes a massive escalation of violence from the state. But living as they do, in situations of unbearable injustice, can they remain silent forever? THERE is no discussion taking place in the world today that is more crucial than the debate about strategies of resistance. And the choice of strategy is not entirely in the hands of the public. It is also in the hands of sarkar. After all, when the U.S. invades and occupies Iraq in the way it has done, with such overwhelming military force, can the resistance be expected to be a conventional military one? (Of course, even if it were conventional, it would still be called terrorist.) In a strange sense, the U.S. government's arsenal of weapons and unrivalled air and fire power makes terrorism an all-but-inescapable response. What people lack in wealth and power, they will make up for with stealth and strategy. In the twenty-first century, the connection between corporate globalisation, religious fundamentalism, nuclear nationalism, and the pauperisation of whole populations is becoming impossible to ignore. The unrest has myriad manifestations: terrorism, armed struggle, nonviolent mass resistance, and common crime. In this restive, despairing time, if governments do not do all they can to honour nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege those who turn to violence. No government's condemnation of terrorism is credible if it cannot show itself to be open to change by nonviolent dissent. But instead nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed. Any kind of mass political mobilisation or organisation is being bought off, broken, or simply ignored. Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media, and let's not forget the film industry, lavish their time, attention, funds, technology, research, and admiration on war and terrorism. Violence has been deified. The message this sends is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air a public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence. As the rift between the rich and poor grows, as the need to appropriate and control the world's resources to feed the great capitalist machine becomes more urgent, the unrest will only escalate. For those of us who are on the wrong side of Empire, the humiliation is becoming unbearable. Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighbourhoods - are victims, just as much as the Iraqis, of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs. The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the politicians, the judges and generals look down on us from on high and shake their heads sternly. "There's no alternative," they say, and let slip the dogs of war. Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and Chechnya, from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of Kashmir, from the hills and plains of Colombia, and the forests of Andhra Pradesh and Assam, comes the chilling reply: "There's no alternative but terrorism." Terrorism. Armed struggle. Insurgency. Call it what you want. Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanising for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is war. You could say that terrorism is the privatisation of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war. They are people who don't believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Human society is journeying to a terrible place. Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It's called justice. It's time to recognise that no amount of nuclear weapons, or full-spectrum dominance, or "daisy cutters," or spurious governing councils and loya jirgas, can buy peace at the cost of justice. The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with greater intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others. Exactly what form that battle takes, whether it is beautiful or bloodthirsty, depends on us. Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel, The God of Small Things, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997. She has also published four essay collections: An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, War Talk, Power Politics, and The Cost of Living, and is the subject of The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Interviews with Arundhati Roy, edited by David Barsamian. Roy received the 2002 Lannan Award for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation. Trained as an architect, Roy lives in New Delhi, India. © 2004 Arundhati Roy

Fighting Back By Monica Benderman “These are the times that try men’s souls: the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly…” - - (Thomas Paine, The American Crisis. Dec. 19, 1776.) 06/10/07 "ICH" -- --- In the 1700’s a group of angry patriots dared to sparked a revolution. They did all they could by diplomatic standards - going so far as to leave the “civilized” country they were born and raised in, simply wanting to live in peace unencumbered by the insecurities of a ruling class who sought to restrain their dreams. Willing to migrate across treacherous seas, to trade the “comforts of home” for a wilderness setting filled with unknowns, these rebels had a cause; a desire for freedom from tyranny, taxation and the oppressive rule of a king who cared little for his subjects and all for his capital gains. Freedom doesn’t come easily, nor can it be given. The early American revolutionaries did not rely on the efforts of others; they did not wait for a savior to rescue them from their plight. They saw the futility of holding out for the empty promises of the ruling parties in their fatherland and took matters in their own hands knowing the standards and principles on which they based their actions were worthy of the sacrifice. Fear struck the hearts of the sophisticated gentry who had been left behind as they came to realize they might have to learn to fend for themselves; to make their beds, clean their yards, tend their children - give up the “good life” for the reality of Life. As red coated aristocrats stepped across open fields with arrogance befitting the ignorance of those highly pampered elitists who believed their money left them invincible and able to conquer and manipulate a world which must have been created for their pleasure, the carefully laid rebellion began in earnest; lessons of survival adding to the strength of will of those who had tasted freedom for themselves and understood what was needed to remain free. What the leaders of the lords of London failed to recognize were the character and strength of the rebels whose disrespect to the “king” they had hoped to quell. They could not understand the drive and commitment these rebels held for preserving their individual freedoms. They had little respect for the meaning of those freedoms; their sense of freedom having been bought, not earned. Yet the fear they held for the strength of men they did not understand caused them to raise their weapons to destroy what they feared, and freedom loving revolutionaries were left with no other option but to defend themselves in kind, even as they continued to hope for peace. “It is easy to perceive that individuals by agreeing to erect forms of government, (for the better security of themselves) must give up some part of their liberty for that purpose; and it is the particular business of a Constitution to mark out how much they shall give up. - (Paine, Letter IV, Four Letters of Interesting Subjects, 1776.) It was not an ill-conceived love of country or nationalist pride that gave these revolutionaries the right to be called patriots. They were patriots for having laid a foundation for the way of life they envisioned, and believed in it enough to be willing to defend it with a commitment only others like them could understand. They worked tirelessly to create a set of laws which would serve as a guideline for their vision, Laws of Humanity incorporated into a Constitution which they believed to be just and fair to all even as the authors admitted to flaws which would only be tempered by time. Each was willing to give up something so that all could live in the greatest freedom possible. They were patriots because they stood their ground for the right to live with their own high standards and principles, and their individual sacrifices were deserving of their expectation that those standards be maintained in the actions of all who chose to live in the new nation founded on their blood. Where have all the patriots gone? We have hired defenders for every action under the sun; lobbyists in Congress, advocates in business, in school, in healthcare, and soldiers at war. What was once a new country formed by the vision of independent thinkers is now a nation of followers passing the buck to anyone who craves publicity - although today’s “buck” barely scratches the surface of the price followers pay for someone else to be their voice of “truth.” The patriots of 1776 were willing to fight with all they had for the freedoms defined in their newly penned Constitution simply because it had been their hands which had done the work to establish the nation whose laws were represented by that constitution; they were their own voice of Truth. They did the work and earned the right to declare their freedom. Now, with every day that passes United States citizens lose a little more of their freedom, at least on paper. But did they have that freedom to begin with? Certainly not the freedom they demanded, nor had they earned; not as a nation and not in recent history. United States citizens have been living with the illusion of freedom for generations now. With nothing much more than a slap on the wrist, they allow the administration’s actions of corruption and deception to continue; “sunshine patriots” and “summer soldiers” giving lip-service to the words of the Constitution but little attention to their meaning, willingly conceding more of their freedom to avoid the hard work required to deserve what freedom really means. Freedom is not free - and United States citizens are losing more of their freedom every day as they freely choose to allow others to make their decisions for them; justifying their actions from the safety of their living rooms saying “it’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we don’t know what else to do.” What else to do? STAND UP AND FIGHT!!!!!! Fight back with a willingness to sacrifice comfort for the principles of law which give us all our freedom. Fight for what you have earned. Wait. What has been earned? This freedom you speak of has no meaning, no value; it remains illusion - words spoken from the podiums of a thousand different protests and a hundred different congressional caucuses as if giving a dramatic soliloquy from the center of a spotlight on an otherwise dimly lit stage - freedom earned by the sweat of those on the frontlines is only real to those willing to sweat. Oh, how Americans seem to be so afraid to sweat. Our soldiers are dying, our veterans have suffered the lasting effects of fighting for an unjust, undefined cause. Our country is fading from a once proud new nation of rebels with revolutionary ideas, willing to sacrifice their luxuries for the right to live in freedom, to a land of elitists willing to sacrifice their freedoms for the right to live in luxury. Where are the revolutionaries? We do not need more self-proclaimed “patriots” re-enacting pages from a history book—we need revolutionaries. Revolutionaries are determined to maintain high standards, strength of character and demonstrate their respect for others as our Constitution demands, even as they stand for change in a corrupt, increasingly immoral shadow of a country once founded on standards, strength of character and respect for others. Revolutionaries know they must be, within themselves, all the changes they want to see. Revolutionaries are willing to fight for their freedom with everything they have, giving up nothing of themselves in the process, earning the right for that freedom by living the cost. Where are these rebels who understand the depth of the cause? “Every man who acts beyond the line of private life must expect to pass through two severe examinations. First, as to his motives, secondly, as to his conduct.” - (Paine, Letter I, Four Letters of Interesting Subjects, 1776.) The conduct of United States citizens clearly defines their commitment to the cause - it is past time for a revolution - the final exam is scheduled to begin. Will our conduct reflect the high standards true freedom demands? Or are our motives simply a cover to hide the fact that we have not yet learned what freedom really means? Monica is the wife of Sgt. Kevin Benderman, a ten-year Army veteran who served a combat tour in Iraq and a year in prison for his public protest of war and the destruction it causes to civilians and to American military personnel. Please visit their websites, www.BendermanDefense.org and www.BendermansBridge.org to learn more. Monica and Kevin may be reached at info@bendermansbridge.org

Bixi bro. Your suggestion is exactly what has taken us to this point of anarchy, each clan is jockeying to control as much resources as possible before a settlement. Somalis are a nomadic people, unfortunately despite of the education some of them have received, clan loyalty and fighting over resources is the main driver of our anarchy. If each clan leader is bought cheaply by an outsider, they will sell the nation cheap, however if we colectively auction Somalia, we can either sell the nation and share the wealth, or we can decide to keep our nation but get rid of the warlords-turned-government monkeys, who are responsible for the death of thousands of our people for the past 16 years. My article was only to highlight the value of transparency if each clan agrees to follow a local loser of their kind. Clan members should know that by supporting their local loser, that he is laughing all the way to the bank selling his own clan and the nation for his personal glory and financial gain. Rahima sis. How would you invest your $2 Million national gain? Nur

Islam teaches fairness and transparency in all of our dealings , unfortunately our country is being sold out in a quasi daylight robbery style by Warlord bandits to American Neocons for peanuts. This serious thought inspired me to look into the possibility of an actual sale of Somalia in a public auction to benefit Somali people, here are my thoughts. Somalia is a failed nation, ( According To International Media Definition ) . Like any bankrupt company, if the company can not be restructured to be saved, the next best option is to sell it publicly to the highest bidder in a transparent way. The case in Somalia is that the failure of the nation was criminally intentional, carefully planned and played out by local warlords and politicians on behalf of potential super power buyers at the cheapest possible price. (Payable in cash to the Somali politicians and Warlords via Addis Ababa Banks overseen by ( CIA)Council for International Acquisitions) I think if we are going to sell our Country to foreign interests such as the USA, we should at least bargain for the best cash return for our people, so that every Somali can live comfortably ever after from the auction proceeds. If we consider all Somalians as stake holders of their country's stocks ( Livestock, Oil, Real Estate, Agriproducts, Mining, Tourism, and Hosting of Military warships), due to the fact that the owners of Somalia are in permanent disagreement, then the best thing to do is ( NOT TO KILL EACH OTHER ) instead, we should conduct a professional valuation of the Country's inventory of valuable resources, then sell it to the best bidder so that all Somalis can share the wealth that Abdullahi Yusuf and Geddi are selling for peanuts ( literally American Aid in the form of overproduced peanuts ).( Ethiopians are buying our beaches and sea ports for Qat narcotic weeds to warlords ) Now, let us begin a raw valuation exercise. 1. Livestock : A. Camels ( 9 Million heads @ $300/head ) = $2.7 Billion B. Goats and sheep (60 Million at $25/head) = $1.5 Billion C. Cattle ( 20 Million @ 150/Head) =$3 Billion d. Fish and seafood (According to UN stats, 1% of Somalis fisheries yearly catch of stolen fish by foreign trawlers is $ I Billion, let us assume 10% for ten years = $100 Billion. e. Wild Animals, Anarchists and Warlords: $ 20 Billion ( Buyer: Los Angels Zoo). 2. Real Estate ( Without Mining / Agricultural/ Telecoms spectrum/Tourist Rights): Area of Country (627337 Sq KM @ $5/km = 627,337,000,000* $5 = 3,136,685,000,000 Three Trillions, one hundred thirty six Billion. 3. Natural Gas: ( Very speculative) = 6.7 Trillion Cubic Meters of Gas @ $12/1000 Cubic Meters = $ 80 Trillion. 4. Oil: ( Speculative) 350 Billion Barrels @ $50/Barrel = $17.5 Trillion 5. Mining Rights: Uranium and largely unexploited reserves of iron ore, tin, gypsum, bauxite, copper, salt, Gold, Silver, Titanium, and all other precious metals mining rights to be sold @ 2 trillion Dollars. 6. Agricultural Rights: 14 Million of Ten meters deep super fertile topsoil along banks of Jubba and Shabelle @ $30 Billion 7. Telecoms / Media Spectral Rights: 3 Billion 8. Tourism : 3,000,000. Sq.Km of crystal sands beaches @ $1 Million/Sq Km = $ 3 Trillions 9. Airspace rights for Strategic NATO, China or Russia Military use ( Minimum bid $ 10 Billion) 10. Kyoto Pollution Quota Trading CER: ( sale of Certified Emissions Reduction of Billions tons of CO2 to the environment) Free with Military bases rights Only to the Annex 1 countries, signatories of Kyoto Protocol) , we can also sell CAR (Certified Anarchy Reductions Credits only to USA ) to the architects of International Anarchy themselves, George Bush, Condi Rice's creative Chaos For World Robbery) 12. Military Uses and Strategic Bases Free with purchase of Real Estate and Airspace. Grand Total after Bulk Discount: U$83 Trillion ( Eighty Three Trillions ), ( Better deal than price Russians sold Alaska to USA!) Somali population are estimated are approximately @ 15 Million worldwide. Every Somali, man woman and child will be paid $5.3 Million Dollars for such a sale. Imagine how much money a Somali family of eight can get? Over 40 Million US Dollars! That is right, that is what Geeddi and Abdullahi Yusuf are selling to the Client regime in Addis Ababa the buying agent for a hungry superpower! Now that looks like a Fair Deal ! 2007 eNuri Auctioneers We don't sell our country for cheap!

Don't Trust Government By Charley Reese 06/08/07 "Lew Rockwell" -- -- In reading an excellent book, Satanic Purses: Money, Myth and Misinformation, by R.T. Naylor (publisher is McGill-Queen's University Press), I suddenly realized why Adolf Hitler was so popular during the first years of his administration. The funny thing is that the book is not about Hitler or Germany, but about the U.S. and the bogus war on terror. It is an outstanding book, carefully researched and footnoted, and written in a reasonable manner, though with delicious dollops of sarcasm. It's the carefully detailed accounts of injustices committed by the U.S. government against American Muslims that gave me the insight about Hitler. In the early days of the Third Reich, if you weren't a criminal, a communist or a Jew, you never saw the dark side of the Nazi government. You saw an economy being revitalized, superhighways being built, Germans being put back to work, the disgraceful Versailles Treaty being scrapped. It must have looked a lot like morning in Germany to the people who had suffered through runaway inflation, economic depression and street riots. Similarly, if you are not a Muslim or an Arab-American who has been a victim of the Patriot Act and other laws carelessly passed in the hysteria following the attacks in 2001, then the Bush administration probably looks perfectly normal. You probably even believe that it is really protecting you from terrorists, just as many Germans believed Hitler was protecting them from the "bad guys." What Taylor's book demonstrates is how often this is pure nonsense, and at the same time what terrible damage is being done to the rule of law and America's traditional respect for human rights. Typically, the government will swoop down and seize an organization's records and computers, while making public accusations of the people being "involved" with terrorists. The important point is that this is done before any determination of guilt or innocence has even begun. By the time a defendant gets to court, if he ever does, he's ruined. Quite often then, the fearless feds will say, "Well, never mind about this terrorist business, just plead guilty to a minor immigration violation." Often defendants are bullied into admitting guilt they don't deserve by threats of being declared an enemy combatant, which means indefinite imprisonment, probably for life. You can see the process going on with the four men charged with planning to blow up the fuel lines to JFK International Airport in New York. In the first place, it is common knowledge that if you blow up a fuel line, you will get an explosion and fire at one point. The claim that the whole pipeline would blow up for miles is nonsense, and the government knows that, but it threw that out to claim the plot endangered "thousands" of lives. The real question is, Did these guys actually plan it, or were they set up by the government's federal informant? The federal government has a terrible record of using informants to entrap people. The whole tragedy of Ruby Ridge, which cost the lives of Randy Weaver's wife and son, resulted from a federal informant who nagged Weaver into sawing off the barrels of a shotgun, something any kid can do with a vice and a hacksaw. The feds then arrested Weaver with the intention of forcing him to become an informant, and the tragic farce ensued. So even though you haven't felt the arbitrary and unjust power of the government, you should read this book and find out just how much deception is involved in this war on terror. You'll discover how often oil, diamonds and big business play behind-the-scenes roles in this current so-called war. As the German people discovered, once a government has unlimited power, it will eventually use that power against everyone. Charley Rees has been a journalist for 49 years.

gavin Like Cara said, you are the right place, Anarchy is US! ( Read YOO ES) please proceed and read past eNuri Anarchist publications to understand Somali Anarchy's background, befor you take it serious. http://www.somaliaonline.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=001365 Nur

Nomads Due to fast breaking political events surrounding the Muslim world, I have dedicated many threads for awareness by digging useful and reliable information about the current madness, overlooking the spiritual side of Islam, which is the core of the faith, without a sound soul, our minds may not comprehend the political dangers to our faith and way of life, thus I revive this old post (last visited a year ago), to highlight the spiritual dimension to of our purpose. Nur

The Terrorism Industry Terrorism Defined By STEPHEN LENDMAN Probably no word better defines or underscores the Bush presidency than "terrorism" even though his administration wasn't the first to exploit this highly charged term. We use to explain what "they do to us" to justify what we "do to them," or plan to, always deceitfully couched in terms of humanitarian intervention, promoting democracy, or bringing other people the benefits of western civilization Gandhi thought would be a good idea when asked once what he thought about it. Ronald Reagan exploited it in the 1980s to declare "war on international terrorism" referring to it as the "scourge of terrorism" and "the plague of the modern age." It was clear he had in mind launching his planned Contra proxy war of terrorism against the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua and FMLN opposition resistance to the US-backed El Salvador fascist regime the same way George Bush did it waging his wars of aggression post-9/11. It's a simple scheme to pull off, and governments keep using it because it always works. Scare the public enough, and they'll go along with almost anything thinking it's to protect their safety when, in fact, waging wars of aggression and state-sponsored violence have the opposite effect. The current Bush wars united practically the entire world against us including an active resistance increasingly targeting anything American. George Orwell knew about the power of language before the age of television and the internet enhanced it exponentially. He explained how easy "doublethink" and "newspeak" can convince us "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength." He also wrote "All war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from (chicken hawk) people who are not fighting (and) Big Brother is watching...." us to be sure we get the message and obey it. In 1946, Orwell wrote about "Politics and the English Language" saying "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible" to hide what its user has in mind. So "defenseless villages are bombarded from the air (and) this is called 'pacification'." And the president declares a "war on terrorism" that's, in fact, a "war of terrorism" against designated targets, always defenseless against it, because with adversaries able to put up a good fight, bullies, like the US, opt for diplomacy or other political and economic means, short of open conflict. The term "terrorism" has a long history, and reference to a "war on terrorism" goes back a 100 years or more. Noted historian Howard Zinn observed how the phrase is a contradiction in terms as "How can you make war on terrorism, if war is terrorism (and if) you respond to terrorism with (more) terrorism....you multiply (the amount of) terrorism in the world." Zinn explains that "Governments are terrorists on an enormously large scale," and when they wage war the damage caused infinitely exceeds anything individuals or groups can inflict. It's also clear that individual or group "terrorist" acts are crimes, not declarations or acts of war. So a proper response to the 9/11 perpetrators was a police one, not an excuse for the Pentagon to attack other nations having nothing to do with it. George Bush's "war on terrorism" began on that fateful September day when his administration didn't miss a beat stoking the flames of fear with a nation in shock ready to believe almost anything - true, false or in between. And he did it thanks to the hyped enormity of the 9/11 event manipulated for maximum political effect for the long-planned aggressive imperial adventurism his hard line administration had in mind only needing "a catastrophic and catalyzing (enough) event - like a new Pearl Harbor" to lauch. With plans drawn and ready, the president and key administration officials terrified the public with visions of terrorism branded and rebranded as needed from the war on it, to the global war on it (GLOT), to the long war on it, to a new name coming soon to re-ignite a flagging public interest in and growing disillusionment over two foreign wars gone sour and lost. Many writers, past and present, have written on terrorism with their definitions and analyses of it. The views of four noted political and social critics are reviewed below, but first an official definition to frame what follows. How the US Code Defines Terrorism Under the US Code, "international terrorism" includes activities involving: (A) "violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;" (B) are intended to - (i) "intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and © occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States...." The US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism (TRADOC Pamphlet No. 525-37, 1984) shortens the above definition to be "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature....through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear." Eqbal Ahmad On Terrorism Before his untimely death, Indian activist and scholar Eqbal Ahmad spoke on the subject of terrorism in one of his last public talks at the University of Colorado in October, 1998. Seven Stories Press then published his presentation in one of its Open Media Series short books titled "Terrorism, Theirs and Ours." The talk when delivered was prophetic in light of the September 11 event making his comments especially relevant. He began quoting a 1984 Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz speech calling terrorism "modern barbarism, a form of political violence, a threat to Western civilization, a menace to Western moral values" and more, all the while never defining it because that would "involve a commitment to analysis, comprehension and adherence to some norms of consistency" not consistent with how this country exploits it for political purposes. It would also expose Washington's long record of supporting the worst kinds of terrorist regimes worldwide in Indonesia, Iran under the Shah, Central America, the South American fascist generals, Marcos in the Philippines, Pol Pot and Saddam at their worst, the current Saudi and Egyptian regimes, Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and for the people of Greece, who paid an enormous price, the Greek colonels the US brought to power in the late 1960s for which people there now with long memories still haven't forgiven us. Ahmad continued saying "What (then) is terrorism? Our first job is to define the damn thing, name it, give it a description of some kind, other than (the) "moral equivalent of (our) founding fathers (or) a moral outrage to Western civilization." He cited Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as a source saying "Terrorism is an intense, overpowering fear....the use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government." It's simple, to the point, fair, and Ahmad calls it a definition of "great virtue. It focuses on the use of coercive violence....that is used illegally, extra-constitutionally, to coerce" saying this is true because it's what terrorism is whether committed by governments, groups, or individuals. This definition omits what Ahmad feels doesn't apply - motivation, whether or not the cause is just or not because "motives differ (yet) make no difference." Ahmad identifies the following types of terrorism: * State terrorism committed by nations against anyone - other states, groups or individuals, including state-sponsored assassination targets; * Religious terrorism like Christians and Muslims slaughtering each other during Papal crusades; many instances of Catholics killing Protestants and the reverse like in Northern Ireland; Christians and Jews butchering each other; Sunnis killing Shiites and the reverse; and any other kind of terror violence inspired or justified by religion carrying out God's will as in the Old Testament preaching it as an ethical code for a higher purpose; * Crime (organized or otherwise) terrorism as "all kinds of crime commit terror." * Pathology terrorism by those who are sick, may "want the attention of the world (and decide to do it by) kill(ing) a president" or anyone else. * Political terrorism by a private group Ahmad calls "oppositional terror" explaining further that at times these five types "converge on each other starting out in one form, then converging into one or more others. Nation states, like the US, focus only on one kind of terrorism - political terrorism that's "the least important in terms of cost to human lives and human property (with the highest cost type being) state terrorism." The current wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine underscore what Ahmad means. Never mentioned, though, is that political or retail terrorism is a natural response by oppressed or desperate groups when they're victims of far more grievous acts of state terrorism. Also unmentioned is how to prevent terrorist acts Noam Chomsky explains saying the way to get "them" to stop attacking "us" is stop attacking "them." Ahmad responded to a question in the book version of his speech with more thoughts on the subject. Asked to define terrorism the way he did in an article he wrote a year earlier titled "Comprehending Terror," he called it "the illegal use of violence for the purposes of influencing somebody's behavior, inflicting punishment, or taking revenge (adding) it has been practiced on a larger scale, globally, both by governments and by private groups." When committed against a state, never asked is what produces it. Further, official and even academic definitions of state terrorism exclude what Ahmad calls "illegal violence:" torture, burning of villages, destruction of entire peoples, (and) genocide." These definitions are biased against individuals and groups favoring governments committing terrorist acts. Our saying it's for self-defense, protecting the "national security," or "promoting democracy" is subterfuge baloney disguising our passion for state-sponsored violence practiced like it our national pastime. Ahmad also observed that modern-day "third-world....fascist governments (in countries like) Indonesia (under Suharto), Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo - DRC), Iran (under the Shah), South Korea (under its generals), and elsewhere - were fully supported by one or the other of the superpowers," and for all the aforementioned ones and most others that was the US. Further, Ahmad notes "religious zealotry has been a major source of terror" but nearly always associated in the West with Islamic groups. In fact, it's a global problem with "Jewish terrorists....terrorizing an entire people in the Middle East (the Palestinians, supported by) Israel which is supported by the government of the United States." Crimes against humanity in the name of religion are also carried out by radical Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and others, not just extremist Muslims that are the only ones reported in the West. In August, 1998 in the Dawn English-language Pakistani newspaper, Ahmad wrote about the power of the US in a unipolar world saying: "Who will define the parameters of terrorism, or decide where terrorists lurk? Why, none other than the United States, which can from the rooftops of the world set out its claim to be sheriff, judge and hangman, all at one and the same time." So while publicly supporting justice, the US spurns international law to be the sole decider acting by the rules of what we say goes, and the law is what we say it is. Further, before the age of George Bush, Ahmad sounded a note of hope saying nothing is "historically permanent (and) I don't think American power is permanent. It itself is very temporary, and therefore its excesses have to be, by definition, impermanent." In addition, he added, "America is a troubled country" for many reasons. It's "economic capabilities do not harmonize with its military (ones and) its ruling class' will to dominate is not quite shared by" what its people want. For now, however, the struggle will continue because the US "sowed in the Middle East (after the Gulf war but before George Bush became president) and South Asia (signaling Pakistan and Afghanistan) very poisonous seeds. Some have ripened and others are ripening. An examination of why they were sown, what has grown, and how they should be reaped is needed (but isn't being done). Missiles won't solve the problem" as is plain as day in mid-2007, with the Bush administration hanging on for dear life in the face of two calamitous wars the president can't acknowledge are hopeless and already lost. Edward S. Herman On Terrorism Herman wrote a lot on terrorism including his important 1982 book as relevant today as it was then, "The Real Terror Network." It's comprised of US-sponsored authoritarian states following what Herman calls a free market "development model" for corporate gain gotten through a reign of terror unleashed on any homegrown resistance against it and a corrupted dominant media championing it with language Orwell would love. Back then, justification given was the need to protect the "free world" from the evils of communism and a supposedly worldwide threat it posed. It was classic "Red Scare" baloney, but it worked to traumatize the public enough to think the Russians would come unless we headed them off, never mind, in fact, the Russians had good reason to fear we'd come because "bombing them back to the stone age" was seriously considered, might have happened, and once almost did. Herman reviews examples of "lesser and mythical terror networks" before discussing the real ones. First though, he defines the language beginning with how Orwell characterized political speech already explained above. He then gives a dictionary definition of terrorism as "a mode of governing, or of opposing government, by intimidation" but notes right off a problem for "western propaganda." Defining terrorism this way includes repressive regimes we support, so it's necessary finding "word adaptations (redefining them to) exclude (our) state terrorism (and only) capture the petty (retail) terror of small dissident groups or individuals" or the trumped up "evil empire" kind manufactured out of whole cloth but made to seem real and threatening. Herman then explains how the CIA finessed terrorism by referring to "Patterns of International Terrorism" defining it as follows: "Terrorism conducted with the support of a foreign government or organization and/or directed against foreign nationals, institutions, or governments." By this definition, internal death squads killing thousands are excluded because they're not "international" unless a foreign government supports them. That's easy to hide, though, when we're the government and as easy to reveal or fake when it serves our purpose saying it was communist-inspired in the 1980s or "Islamofascist al Qaeda"-conducted or supported now. Saying it makes it so even when it isn't because the power of the message can make us believe Santa Claus is the grinch who stole Christmas. Herman also explains how harsh terms like totalitarianism and authoritarianism only apply to adversary regimes while those as bad or worse allied to us are more benignly referred to with terms like "moderate autocrats" or some other corrupted manipulation of language able to make the most beastly tyrants look like enlightened tolerant leaders. In fact, these brutes and their governments comprise the "real terror network," and what they did and still do, with considerable US help, contributed to the rise of the "National Security State" (NSS) post-WW II and the growth of terrorism worldwide supporting it. In a word, it rules by "intimidation and violence or the threat of violence." Does the name Augusto Pinochet ring a bell? What about the repressive Shah of Iran even a harsh theocratic state brought relief from? Herman explained "the economics of the NSS" that's just as relevant today as then with some updating of events in the age of George Bush. He notes NSS leaders imposed a free market "development model" creating a "favorable investment climate (including) subsidies and tax concessions to business (while excluding) any largess to the non-propertied classes...." It means human welfare be damned, social benefits and democracy are incompatible with the needs of business, unions aren't allowed, a large "reserve army" of workers can easily replace present ones, and those complaining get their heads knocked off with terror tactics being the weapon of choice, and woe to those on the receiving end. The Godfather in Washington makes it work with considerable help from the corrupted dominant media selling "free market" misery like it's paradise. Their message praises the dogma, turning a blind eye to the ill effects on real people and the terror needed to keep them in line when they resist characterized as protecting "national security" and "promoting democracy," as already explained. All the while, the US is portrayed as a benevolent innocent bystander, when, if fact, behind the scenes, we pull the strings and tinpot third-world despots dance to them. But don't expect to learn that from the pages of the New York Times always in the lead supporting the worst US-directed policies characterized only as the best and most enlightened. At the end of his account, Herman offers solutions worlds apart from the way the Bush administration rules. They include opposing "martial law governments" and demanding the US end funding, arming and training repressive regimes. Also condemned are "harsh prison sentences, internments and killings," especially against labor leaders. Finally, he cites "the right to self-determination" for all countries free from foreign interference, that usually means Washington, that must be held to account and compelled to "stop bullying and manipulating....tiny states" and end the notion they must be client ones, or else. Referring to the Reagan administration in the 1980s, Herman says what applies even more under George Bush. If allowed to get away with it, Washington "will continue to escalate the violence (anywhere in the world it chooses) to preserve military mafia/oligarch control" meaning we're boss, and what we say goes. Leaders not getting the message will be taught the hard way, meaning state-sponsored terrorism portrayed as benign intervention. Herman revisited terrorism with co-author Gerry O'Sullivan in 1989 in their book "The Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror." The authors focus on what kinds of victims are important ("worthy" ones) while others (the "unworthy") go unmentioned or are characterized as victimizers with the corrupted media playing their usual role trumpeting whatever policies serve the interests of power. The authors state "....the West's experts and media have engaged in a process of 'role reversal' in....handling....terrorism... focus(ing) on selected, relatively small-scale terrorists and rebels including....genuine national liberation movements" victimized by state-sponsored terror. Whenever they strike back in self-defense they're portrayed as victimizers. Examples, then and now, are legion, and the authors draw on them over that earlier period the book covers. They also explain the main reason individuals and groups attack us is payback for our attacking or oppressing them far more grievously. As already noted, the very nature of wholesale state-directed terror is infinitely more harmful than the retail kind with the order of magnitude being something like comparing massive corporate fraud cheating shareholders and employees to a day's take by a local neighborhood pickpocket. "The Terrorism Industry" shows the West needs enemies. Before 1991, the "evil empire" Soviet Union was the lead villain with others in supporting roles like Libya's Gaddafi, the PLO under Arafat (before the Oslo Accords co-opted him), the Sandinistas under Ortega laughably threatening Texas we were told, and other designees portrayed as arch enemies of freedom because they won't sell out their sovereignty to rules made in Washington. Spewing this baloney takes lots of chutzpah and manufactured demonizing generously served up by "state-sponsored propaganda campaigns" dutifully trumpeted by the dominant media stenographers for power. Their message is powerful enough to convince people western states and nuclear-powered Israel can't match ragtag marauding "terrorist" bands coming to neighborhoods near us unless we flatten countries they may be coming from. People believe it, and it's why state-sponsored terrorism can be portrayed as self-defense even though it's pure scare tactic baloney. The authors stress the western politicization process decides who qualifies as targeted, and "The basic rule has been: if connected with leftists, violence may be called terrorist," but when it comes from rightist groups it's always self-defense. Again, it's classic Orwell who'd be smiling saying I told you so if he were still here. He also understood terrorism serves a "larger service." Overall, it's to get the public terrified enough to go along with any agenda governments have in mind like wars of aggression, huge increases in military spending at the expense of social services getting less, and the loss of civil liberties by repressive policies engineered on the phony pretext of increasing our safety, in fact, being harmed. The authors also note different forms of "manufactured terrorism" such as inflating or inventing a menace out of whole cloth. It's also used in the private sector to weaken or destroy "union leaders, activists, and political enemies, sometimes in collusion with agents of the state." The authors call all of the above "The Terrorism Industry of institutes and experts who formulate and channel analysis and information on terrorism in accordance with Western demands" often in cahoots with "Western governments, intelligence agencies, and corporate/conservative foundations and funders." It's a "closed system" designed to "reinforce state propaganda" to program the public mind to go along with any agenda the institutions of power have in mind, never beneficial to our own. Yet, their message is so potent they're able to convince us it is. It's an astonishing achievement going on every day able to make us believe almost anything, and the best way to beat it is don't listen. Noam Chomsky On Terrorism In his book "Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy," co-authored with Gilbert Achcar, Chomsky defines terrorism saying he's been writing about it since 1981 around the time Ronald Reagan first declared war on "international terrorism" to justify all he had in mind mentioned above. Chomsky explained "You don't declare a war on terrorism unless you're planning yourself to undertake massive international terrorism," and calling it self-defense is pure baloney. Chomsky revisits the subject in many of his books, and in at least two earlier ones addressed terrorism or international terrorism as those volumes' core issue discussed further below. In "Perilous Power," it's the first issue discussed right out of the gate, and he starts off defining it. He does it using the official US Code definition given above calling it a commonsense one. But there's a problem in that by this definition the US qualifies as a terrorist state, and the Reagan administration in the 1980s practiced it, so it had to change it to avoid an obvious conflict. Other problems arose as well when the UN passed resolutions on terrorism, the first major one being in December, 1987 condemning terrorism as a crime in the harshest terms. It passed in the General Assembly overwhelmingly but not unanimously, 153 - 2, with the two opposed being the US and Israel so although the US vote wasn't a veto it served as one twice over. When Washington disapproves, it's an actual veto in the Security Council or a de facto one in the General Assembly meaning it's blocked either way, and it's erased from history as well. Case closed. Disguising what Martin Luther King called "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," referring to this country, a new definition had to be found excluding the terror we carry out against "them," including only what they do to "us." It's not easy, but, in practical terms, this is the definition we use - what you do to "us," while what we do to you is "benign humanitarian intervention." Repeated enough in the mainstream, the message sinks in even though it's baloney. Chomsky then explains what other honest observers understand in a post-NAFTA world US planners knew would devastate ordinary people on the receiving end of so-called free trade policies designed to throttle them for corporate gain. He cites National Intelligence Council projections that globalization "will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide....Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it." Pentagon projections agree with plans set to savagely suppress expected retaliatory responses. How to stop the cycle of violence? End all types of exploitation including so-called one-way "free trade," adopting instead a fair trade model like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's government follows that's equitable to all trading partners and their people. The antidote to bad policy, brutal repression, wars and the terrorism they generate is equity and justice for all. However, the US won't adopt the one solution sure to work because it hurts profits that come ahead of people needs. Chomsky wrote about terrorism at length much earlier as well in his 1988 book "The Culture of Terrorism." In it he cites "the Fifth Freedom" meaning "the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate society, to undertake any course of action to insure that existing privilege is protected and advanced." This "freedom" is incompatible with the other four Franklin Roosevelt once announced - freedom of speech, worship, want and fear all harmed by this interloper. To get the home population to go along with policies designed to hurt them, "the state must spin an elaborate web of illusion and deceit (to keep people) inert and limited in the capacity to develop independent modes of thought and perception." It's called "manufacturing consent" to keep the rabble in line, using hard line tactics when needed. "The Cultural of Terrorism" covers the Reagan years in the 1980s and its agenda of state terror in the post-Vietnam climate of public resistance to direct intervention that didn't hamper Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. So unable to send in the Marines, Reagan resorted to state terror proxy wars with key battlegrounds being Central America and Afghanistan. The book focuses on the former, the scandals erupting from it, and damage control manipulation so this country can continue pursuing policies dedicated to rule by force whenever persuasion alone won't work. A "new urgency" emerged in June, 1986 when the World Court condemned the US for attacking Nicaragua using the Contras in a proxy war of aggression against a democratically elected government unwilling to operate by rules made in Washington. In a post-Vietnam climate opposed to this sort of thing, policies then were made to work by making state terror look like humanitarian intervention with local proxies on the ground doing our killing for us and deceiving the public to go along by scaring it to death. So with lots of dominant media help, Reagan pursued his terror wars in Central America with devastating results people at home heard little about if they read the New York Times or watched the evening news suppressing the toll Chomsky reveals as have others: -- over 50,000 slaughtered in El Salvador, -- over 100,000 corpses in Guatemala just in the 1980s and over 200,000 including those killed earlier and since, -- a mere 11,000 in Nicaragua that got off relatively easy because the people had an army to fight back while in El Salvador and Guatemala the army was the enemy. The tally shows Ronald Reagan gets credit for over 160,000 Central American deaths alone, but not ordinary ones. They came "Pol Pot-style....with extensive torture, rape, mutilation, disappearance," and political assassinations against members of the clergy including El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero gunned down by an assassin while celebrating mass inside San Salvador's Hospital de la Divina Frovidencia. His "voice for the voiceless" concern for the poor and oppressed and courageous opposition to death squad mass-killing couldn't be tolerated in a part of the world ruled by wealthy elites getting plenty of support from some of the same names in Washington now ravaging Iraq and Afghanistan. Chomsky cites the Reagan Doctrine's commitment to opposing leftist resistance movements throughout the 1980s, conducting state-sponsored terror to "construct an international terrorist network of impressive sophistication, without parallel in history....and used it" clandestinely fighting communism. With lots of help from Congress and the dominant media, the administration contained the damage that erupted in late 1986 from what was known as the Iran-Contra scandal over illegally selling arms to Iran to fund the Contras. Just like the farcical Watergate investigations, the worst crimes and abuses got swept under the rug, and in the end no one in the 1980s even paid a price for the lesser ones. So a huge scandal greater than Watergate, that should have toppled a president, ended up being little more than a tempest in a teapot after the dust settled. It makes it easy understanding how George Bush gets away with mass-murder, torture and much more almost making Reagan's years seem tame by comparison. Chomsky continued discussing our "culture of terrorism" with the Pentagon practically boasting over its Central American successes directing terrorist proxy force attacks against "soft targets" including health centers, medical workers and schools, farms and more, all considered legitimate military targets despite international law banning these actions. Latin America is always crucial to US policy makers referring to it dismissively as "America's backyard" giving us more right to rule here than practically any place else. It's because of the region's strategic importance historian Greg Grandin recognizes calling it the "Empire's Workshop" that's the title of his 2006 book subtitled "Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism." In it, he shows how the region serves as a laboratory honing our techniques for imperial rule that worked in the 1980s but now face growing rebellion providing added incentive to people in the Middle East inspiring them to do by force what leaders like Hugo Chavez do constitutionally with great public support. But Washington's international terror network never quits or sleeps operating freely worldwide and touching down anywhere policy makers feel they need to play global enforcer seeing to it outliers remember who's boss, and no one forgets the rules of imperial management. Things went as planned for Reagan until the 1986 scandals necessitated a heavy dose of damage control. They've now become industrial strength trying to bail George Bush out his quagmire conflagrations making Reagan's troubles seem like minor brush fires. It worked for Reagan by following "overriding principles (keeping) crucial issues....off the agenda" applicable for George Bush, including: -- "the (ugly) historical and documentary record reveal(ing)" US policy guidelines; -- "the international setting within which policy develops;" -- application of similar policies in other nations in Latin America or elsewhere; -- "the normal conditions of life (in Latin America or elsewhere long dominated by) US influence and control (and) what these teach us about the goals and character of US government policy over many years; -- similar matters (anywhere helping explain) the origins and nature of the problems that must be addressed." It was true in the 1980s and now so these issues "are not fit topics for reporting, commentary and debate" beyond what policy makers disagree on and are willing to discuss openly. The book concludes considering the "perils of diplomacy" with Washington resorting to state terror enforcing its will through violence when other means don't work. But the US public has to be convinced through guile and stealth it's all being done for our own good. It never is, of course, but most people never catch on till it's too late to matter. They should read more Chomsky, Herman, Ahmad, and Michel Chossudovsky discussed below, but too few do so leaders like Reagan and Bush get away with mass-murder and much more. Chomsky wrote another book on terrorism titled "Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World." It was first published in 1986 with new material added in more recent editions up to 2001. The book begins with a memorable story St. Augustine tells about a pirate Alexander the Great captured asking him "how he dares molest the sea." Pirates aren't known to be timid, and this one responds saying "How dare you molest the whole world? ....I do it with a little ship only (and) am called a thief (while you do) it with a great navy (and) are called an Emperor." It's a wonderful way to capture the relationship between minor rogue states or resistance movements matched off against the lord and master of the universe with unchallengeable military power unleashing it freely to stay dominant. The newest edition of "Pirates and Emperors, Old and New" explores what constitutes terrorism while mainly discussing how Washington waged it in the Middle East in the 1980s, also then in Central America, and more recently post-9/11. As he often does, Chomsky also shows how dominant media manipulation shapes public perceptions to justify our actions called defensible against states we target as enemies when they resist - meaning their wish to remain free and independent makes them a threat to western civilization. Washington never tolerates outlier regimes placing their sovereignty above ours or internal resistance movements hitting back for what we do to them. Those doing it are called terrorists and are targeted for removal by economic, political and/or military state terror. In the case of Nicaragua, the weapon of choice was a Contra proxy force, in El Salvador, the CIA-backed fascist government did the job, and in both cases tactics used involved mass murder and incarceration, torture, and a whole further menu of repressive and economic barbarism designed to crush resistance paving the way for unchallengeable US dominance. The centerpiece of US Middle East policy has been its full and unconditional support for Israel's quest for regional dominance by weakening or removing regimes considered hostile and its near-six decade offensive to repress and ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinians from all land Israelis want for a greater Israel. Toward that end, Israel gets unheard of amounts of aid including billions annually in grants and loans, billions more as needed, multi-billions in debt waved, billions more in military aid, and state-of-the-art weapons and technology amounting in total to more than all other countries in the world combined for a nation of six million people with lots of important friends in Washington, on Wall Street, and in all other centers of power that count. It all goes down smoothly at home by portraying justifiable resistance to Israeli abuse as terrorism with the dominant media playing their usual role calling US and Israeli-targeted victims the victimizers to justify the harshest state terror crackdowns against them. For Palestinians, it's meant nearly six decades of repression and 40 years of occupation by a foreign power able to reign state terror on defenseless people helpless against it. For Iraq, it meant removing a leader posing no threat to Israel or his neighbors but portrayed as a monster who did with Iranian leaders and Hugo Chavez now topping the regime change queue in that order or maybe in quick succession or tandem. It's all about power and perception with corrupted language, as Orwell explained, able to make reality seem the way those controlling it wish. It lets power and ideology triumph over people freely using state terror as a means of social control. Chomsky quoted Churchill's notion that "the rich and powerful have every right to....enjoy what they have gained, often by violence and terror; the rest can be ignored as long as they suffer in silence, but if they interfere with....those who rule the world by right, the 'terrors of the earth' will be visited upon them with righteous wrath, unless power is constrained from within." One day, the meek may inherit the earth and Churchill's words no longer will apply, but not as long as the US rules it and media manipulation clouds reality enough to make harsh state terror look like humanitarian intervention or self-defense by helpless victims look like they're the victimizers. Michel Chossudovsky on "The War on Terrorism" No one has been more prominent or outspoken since the 9/11 attacks in the US than scholar/author/activist and Global Research web site editor Michel Chossudovsky. He began writing that evening publishing an article the next day titled "Who Is Osama Bin Laden," perhaps being the first Bush administration critic to courageously challenge the official account of what took place that day. He then updated his earlier account September 10, 2006 in an article titled "The Truth behind 9/11: Who is Osama Bin Ladin." Chossudovsky is a thorough, relentless researcher making an extraordinary effort to get at the truth no matter how ugly or disturbing. Here's a summary of what he wrote that was included in his 2005 book titled "America's War on Terrorism (In the Wake of 9/11)" he calls a complete fabrication "based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden (from a cave in Afghanistan and hospital bed in Pakistan), outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus." He called it instead what it is, in fact - a pretext for permanent "New World Order" wars of conquest serving the interests of Wall Street, the US military-industrial complex, and all other corporate interests profiting hugely from a massive scheme harming the public interest in the near-term and potentially all humanity unless it's stopped in time. On the morning of 9/11, the Bush administration didn't miss a beat telling the world Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center (WTC) and Pentagon meaning Osama bin Laden was the main culprit - case closed without even the benefit of a forensic and intelligence analysis piecing together all potential helpful information. There was no need to because, as Chossudovsky explained, "That same (9/11) evening at 9:30 pm, a 'War Cabinet' was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. At 11:00PM, at the end of that historic (White House) meeting, the 'War on Terrorism' was officially launched," and the rest is history. Chossudovsky continued "The decision was announced (straightaway) to wage war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in retribution for the 9/11 attacks" with news headlines the next day asserting, with certainty, "state sponsorship" responsibility for the attacks connected to them. The dominant media, in lockstep, called for military retaliation against Afghanistan even though no evidence proved the Taliban government responsible, because, in fact, it was not and we knew it. Four weeks later on October 7, a long-planned war of illegal aggression began, Afghanistan was bombed and then invaded by US forces working in partnership with their new allies - the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan or so-called Northern Alliance "warlords." Their earlier repressive rule was so extreme, it gave rise to the Taliban in the first place and has now made them resurgent. Chossudovsky further explained that the public doesn't "realize that a large scale theater war is never planned and executed in a matter of weeks." This one, like all others, was months in the making needing only what CentCom Commander General Tommy Franks called a "terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event" to arouse enough public anger for the Bush administration to launch it after declaring their "war on terrorism." Chossudovsky, through thorough and exhausting research, exposed it as a fraud. He's been on top of the story ever since uncovering the "myth of an 'outside enemy' and the threat of 'Islamic terrorists' (that became) the cornerstone (and core justification) of the Bush administration's military doctrine." It allowed Washington to wage permanent aggressive wars beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq, to ignore international law, and to "repeal civil liberties and constitutional government" through repression laws like the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts. A key objective throughout has, and continues to be, Washington's quest to control the world's energy supplies, primarily oil, starting in the Middle East where two-thirds of known reserves are located. Toward that end, the Bush administration created a fictitious "outside enemy" threat without which no "war on terrorism" could exist, and no foreign wars could be waged. Chossudovsky exposed the linchpin of the whole scheme. He uncovered evidence that Al Queda "was a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet-Afghan war" era, and that in the 1990s Washington "consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at the same time placing him on the FBI's 'most wanted list' as the World's foremost terrorist." He explained that the CIA (since the 1980s and earlier) actively supports international terrorism covertly, and that on September 10, 2001 "Enemy Number One" bin Laden was in a Rawalpindi, Pakistan military hospital confirmed on CBS News by Dan Rather. He easily could have been arrested but wasn't because we had a "better purpose" in mind for "America's best known fugitive (to) give a (public) face to the 'war on terrorism' " that meant keeping bin Laden free to do it. If he didn't exist, we'd have had to invent him, but that could have been arranged as well. The Bush administration's national security doctrine needs enemies, the way all empires on the march do. Today "Enemy Number One" rests on the fiction of bin Laden-led Islamic terrorists threatening the survival of western civilization. In fact, however, Washington uses Islamic organizations like Islamic jihad as a "key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union" while, at the same time, blaming them for the 9/11 attacks calling them "a threat to America." September 11, 2001 was, indeed, a threat to America, but one coming from within from real enemies. They want to undermine democracy and our freedoms, not preserve them, in pursuit of their own imperial interests for world domination by force through endless foreign wars and establishment of a locked down national "Homeland Security (police) State." They're well along toward it, and if they succeed, America, as we envision it, no longer will exist. Only by exposing the truth and resisting what's planned and already happening will there be any hope once again to make this nation a "land of the free and home of the brave" with "a new birth of freedom" run by a "government of the people, by the people, for the people" the way at least one former president thought it should be

Why I am Ashamed to be an American By Doug Soderstrom 06/01/07 "Thomas Paine's Corner" -- - Having grown up in a small town in Central Kansas I was taught to believe that my country, the United States of America, was a land committed to justice and peace, a nation that one could count on to do the right thing, a country of civilized folks who had but one thing in mind…….. that of doing the will of God. I also began to realize that there is nothing wrong with feeling ashamed for having done something wrong, that such a response is a rather natural consequence of having violated one’s conscience, a voice from deep within that is no doubt a reliable guide for how a man (or woman) of true integrity ought to live his (or her) life. However, for those who seem to lack the capacity to feel ashamed, one can only wonder what must be wrong with them. As I began to emerge into manhood there was an ever, ongoing flow of hints, subtle suggestions that things were not as I had been told. However, it wasn’t until our country vented its awful wrath upon a post 9-11 world that I began to realize that I had been misled. At that point I had no choice but to take a long, hard look at the history of our country, a thorough examination of what turned out to be a past drenched in the blood of our foes, foreign lands raped of their natural resources, democratically elected governments overthrown, an outrageous succession of egregious arrangements with tyrants and dictators from around the world, along with the fact that our nation is the only developed country in the world that utilizes the death penalty to kill its own people, and that we imprison more of our own people than any other nation in the world…… all of such having enabled me to gain a better understanding of why there are so many folks around the world who have become upset by our nation’s apparent willingness to abuse and exploit our fellow man. As a result of what I found, I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of the American public is out of touch with reality, that such folks have unwittingly allowed themselves to have become mercilessly entangled in a world of fabrication and make-believe, a nation dominated by sheepish yes-men unwilling to face the fact that we, as a nation, are, and for some time have been, caught in a downward spiral of moral decline. I have found it rather common for folks to become a bit upset with people like myself who occasionally pass judgment upon our country. In fact some have even told me that if I don’t like my country then perhaps I ought to consider leaving it. Such folks seem to believe that criticizing one’s country (one that has attained such a high standard of living…… as if such a thing should make a difference) is somehow unpatriotic. However, the last time I checked there seemed to be no relationship whatsoever between a nation’s quality of life and that of its moral standards. I have also found that individuals that tend to equate criticism of one’s country with that of being unpatriotic either do not understand the postulates upon which democracy is based or that their identity is so terribly intertwined with that of their nation that they have seemingly lost the capacity to reason in an objective manner. Finally, based upon my experience of having debated with such folks, it has become rather clear to me that most of these quislings have little or no education as well as being relatively uninformed as to what is going on in the world. Now, if you don’t mind, allow me to take a look at a few things that tend to bother me regarding the country in which I just happen to have been born……. the United States of America. I never cease to be amazed at how terribly ethnocentric the typical American tends to be. It is almost as if having been born in the United States confers upon one the right to think of himself as a privileged person, a contrived sense of status that no doubt lies at the very heart of everything that I will discuss in this paper. For example, consider religion…… the fact that the majority of Americans look upon Christianity as the one and only road that leads to salvation, every other faith a blind alley leading to the unending fires of Hell. Next is that of capitalism, a system having apparently received the blessing of God as the universally correct way of doing business. And then democracy, a political system that apparently no one in their right mind has a right to question. Of course there can be no doubt that democracy is certainly a stellar way of running a country, but must everyone in the world agree? Besides if the religious right (just as Moslems in Iraq) were to seize control, don’t you think that they (as fundamentalists) might be tempted to set up Christianity as the official religion in our country rather than that of running a democracy based upon the separation of church and state? Think about it……. fundamentalists are no doubt fundamentalists regardless of the color of “their stripes!” On the other hand, one must ask what right we (as citizens of a nation that is a mere 231 years from its own inception) have to tell folks living in countries not more than a hop, skip, and a jump from the “Garden of Eden” how they ought to live their lives. Ethnocentrism yes, but perhaps even worse than this is that which such narrow-mindedness almost always brings to pass; an unreasoning sense of arrogance generally referred to as that of the arrogance of ignorance! Due to what appears to have been a rather serious lapse of judgment on the part of tens of millions of Americans, the voters, for whatever reason (perhaps it was a matter of fear), chose to place into power a President (a presidential administration) that: may well have laid the groundwork for 9-11 (the “new Pearl Harbor”) that, according to PNAC (Project for the New American Century) was needed in order to pave the way for our country’s military/economic takeover of the world; is in the preparatory stages of going to war with Iran (a conflict that will no doubt reign havoc upon our nation as well as that of the world); lied to the American people in regards to why we went to war with Iraq; lied to citizens in that our government has no intention of leaving Iraq given the fact that it is in the process of building as many as fourteen “Enduring Military Bases” (enough to house at least 100,000 soldiers) along with that of having built the world’s largest Foreign Embassy located in Baghdad (a 592 million dollar, 104-acre, 21-building complex); committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, as well as high crimes and misdemeanors for which several of our leaders should be impeached; condoned the systematic use of torture against prisoners; violated the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution by intentionally choosing to interfere with the free flow of information to the American people; enacted laws (such as that of the Patriot Act) that are seriously eroding our freedoms; through the use of the Military Commissions Act, granted the President the right to arbitrarily detain, imprison, and torture U.S. citizens at that of his own discretion (and without the right of Habeas Corpus!); allowed the President to disobey more than 750 U.S. laws through the use of so-called “signing statements”; through the passage of the Defense Authorization Act of 2007 set the stage for, essentially creating the likelihood that, our country might one day become a military dictatorship; allowed the United State’s military to develop an extremely sophisticated, website-based video game (America’s Army) to be used as a recruitment device that is teaching millions (perhaps as many as nine million) of our children to kill human beings with an increased degree of efficiency, all of such having desensitized our teenagers to kill others with little, or no, psychological pain; has enabled politicians to profit immensely from funds awarded to corporate enterprises associated with the military-industrial complex; bankrupted the nation by allowing the national debt to rise to nine trillion dollars in spite of the fact that the nation’s actual debt is a little over 59 trillion dollars due to the government’s use of unorthodox (essentially unethical if not illegal) accounting practices that intentionally disregard (essentially misinforming the American people with respect to) unfunded promises to reimburse (that is to repay) Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and an assortment of federal retirement programs; and has been absolutely unwilling to take responsibility for the fact that we, as a nation, have done more to destroy the ecosystem of our planet than anyone else on Earth. For anyone who has taken the time to study the history of the human race, there can be no doubt that one of the primary, if not the primary, cause of harm is that of people taking up arms in the name of God. No one in their right mind can deny that Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammad, Confucius, or Lao Tse were men of good will. However, over the centuries the simple yet profound truths taught by these wonderfully wise men have been perverted beyond recognition. And, as far as the West is concerned, the greatest perversion has been that of the religious right’s willingness to accommodate the needs of neoconservatives in Washington D.C., a well-thought-out, although no doubt surreptitious, plan to allow the Bush-Cheney presidential administration to utilize their faith (a plan of salvation that rather conveniently ignores the teachings of Jesus, the fact that we should love rather than kill others) as a theologically-based (no doubt divinely inspired) justification for a cadre of militants all to ready to go to war in order that they might one day rule the world……. and all of such in exchange for political presence, an increased opportunity for the religious right to publicize a gospel of family values (a rather fabricated attempt to “sugarcoatedly-disguise” an undoubtedly well-documented ideology of out-and-out social-political conservatism). Looking back at history, there can be little doubt that much the same occurred in the 1980’s when Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority decided to align itself with Ronald Reagan’s tenure as President, and, before that, when Germanically-oriented Christians decided to go along with, and therefore to support, Adolph Hitler’s Nazi inspired efforts to rule the world. Concerning the education (or shall I say the mis-education) of our children it is high time that we do the right thing, that we stop lying to our kids and begin telling them the truth. The school’s job is not to make “good citizens” of our children, for in doing such a thing our children end up being duped, conditioned, slowly but surely brainwashed, into becoming truckling sycophants, bootlicking followers of the status quo. As one who has taught college students for the past 41 years, the only task worthy of a teacher is that of teaching our kids how to think for themselves, critical thinking skills that might perhaps enable them to counter the outrageous mendacity of those in power, chauvinistic jingoes who would, through the use of propaganda, have our children believe a lie rather than that which is true. Regarding our economy, a capitalistic enterprise focused upon one, and only one, thing (the enrichment of the rich euphemistically referred to as that of “the American Dream”), we, as Americans (those of us who are rather well-to-do), should be ashamed of ourselves, ashamed of having become an island of enormous wealth stationed in the midst of a poverty-ridden world (not to mention an ever-expanding proportion of our own people who are poor) in that we go to bed every night with a willingness to anesthetize ourselves to the needs of billions of folks whose lives are inextricably mired in an absolutely desperate attempt to simply survive. And then due to what appears to be a rather natural correlate of capitalism (activities that no doubt follow capitalism wherever it goes), the American people (folks so terribly possessed by that which they possess) have developed an apparently insatiable appetite to be rich (the capacity to consume anything and everything they want), the need to be constantly entertained, a near addictive fascination with sex, drugs, gambling, pleasure, power, and violence, and all of such no doubt nullifying any legitimate interest in the “finer things of life” such as that of developing a meaningful philosophy of life, a desire to understand what it means to be a human being, and that which might perhaps be worthy of our time here on Earth. And then based upon the laws of our nation, lobbyists (highly paid representatives of the corporate world) have been granted the right to converge upon our elected officials for no other reason than to coerce them into conducting business in a manner that more often than not benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. We, as a people, have been led to believe that our votes count when in fact our ballots far too often elect congressmen, the majority of which, wait in hiding for a handout (a bribe) that will serve to fill their “electoral coffers,” and all of such in exchange for a simple promise to use their congressional powers to expedite the needs of their benefactors who in turn are far too likely to reward their compatriots with a well-paid, “post-retirement” position the purpose of which is to use their “congressional knowledge” to bribe those who have now taken their place; a revolving door of immense corruption that is no doubt destroying the foundations of a once democratic republic! The final, and perhaps most important, reason why I am ashamed to be an American is due to the fact that we, more than any other people, have used our accumulated wealth (part of which comes from money earned from having sold more weapons of war to the rest of the world than the rest of the world combined) along with having developed the largest, most destructive military force (larger than the accumulated defense budgets of the rest of the world combined) since the beginning of time (next year’s defense budget will be nearly 700 billion dollars!), all the while realizing that if we had proven our love for God by using such funds to feed the hungry, medicate the sick, clothe the poor, house the homeless, and liberate the oppressed, we would have become a nation loved and revered by all…… rather than, as things have turned out, having become a land hated by nearly everyone in the world. In conclusion, in order that you might understand where I am coming from, you need to realize that I do in fact have a bit of respect for my country, or at least for that which was envisioned by our forefathers, the founders of, what has turned out to be, a once great nation. However, just as we would with someone we love, we have no choice but to call attention to weakness, since in doing such a thing we give our loved ones an opportunity to address the problem. It is, and must be, the same with that of the land in which we have been born. If we truly care about our country, if we really do want our nation to flourish, then we should realize that we have not only the right, but, much more importantly, the responsibility, perhaps even, one might say, a moral responsibility to point out its deficiencies in order that it might once again be revived. For we must remember, as our nation goes, so do we……. in its flourishing we, as a people, will no doubt thrive, but in passing away, we, as a collective society, might well cease to exist.

Ground Zero illnesses come back to haunt Giuliani By Jerry Mazza Online Journal Associate Editor 06/01/07 "Online Journal" -- -- Alas, the man who is billed as 9/11’s hero, America’s sheriff, the man who would be President, is being faced today with thousands of people who worked selflessly at Ground Zero and have become ill, and are now suing the city for health damages. I wrote about their plight in a Dec, 20, 2006, Online Journal article: No money to treat 9/11 workers, $3 billion to fight Iraq? I quoted the New York Times which said that previously “roughly $40 million that was set aside by the federal government to treat rescue workers, volunteers and firefighters who became ill after helping with the 9/11 cleanup and recovery will run out in months, physicians and federal officials said yesterday.” The amount necessary to keep care ongoing beyond that was “$256.6 million, including $163.6 million in direct medical expenses for 19,200: $91.2 million for 9,6000 patients with respiratory or digestive disorders, $58 million for 8,000 patients with 9/11 related mental illnesses and $14.4 million for 1,600 patients with musculoskeletal conditions. Medications account for more than half of the treatment cost.” And now we find out that the major reason for the extent of harmed responders was no less than Hizzoner Rudy Giuliani himself. According to the Times’ Ground Zero Illnesses Clouding Giuliani’s Legacy, “The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns.” This is their quote from David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group. The Times adds “City officials and a range of medical experts are now convinced that the dust and toxic materials in the air around the site were a menace.” No kidding. Two 500,000-ton Towers were pulverized, vaporized into that mist. “More than 2,000 New York City firefighters have been treated for serious respiratory problems. Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing. City officials estimate that health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one knows whether other illnesses, like cancers, will emerge.” Additionally, as of May 24, 2004, the New York Times reports that For the First Time, New York Links a Death to 9/11 Dust. “In a letter made public yesterday [May 24, 2007], [New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner] Dr. [Charles S.] Hirsch said that he was certain ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that dust from the twin towers contributed to the death of Felicia Dunn-Junes, 42, a civil rights lawyer who was engulfed on Sept 11 as she ran from her office a block away from the trade center. She later developed a serious cough and had trouble breathing, and she died five months after the terrorist attack. Her name will be added to the official list of World Trade Center victims, and the official number of people who died as a result of the attack on the twin towers will be increased to 2,750. . . .” A mayor out of control The first Times’ piece tells us that while “the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators.” It seems Hizzoner was obsessed with getting the job done post haste at any cost. One official from the Army Corps said, “Mr. Giuliani acted like a ‘benevolent dictator.”“ I would strike the benevolent from the dictator. He never let FEMA or the Army Corps take over the clean-up operation. “The clean-up was expected to last 30 months,” according to the Times, but “the pit was cleared by June 2002, nine months after the attack.” This is not just speed. It’s the elimination of the biggest most important crime scene in American history, a crime itself, committed with a criminal intent by someone who knew better, a former US attorney, Rudy Giuliani. And what possible reason could he have had for that miscarriage of justice? Aside from getting Wall Street’s lights back on, could Giuliani have been aiding and abetting the cover-up of how and who and why the Towers went down? Of course most of us who are reading more than the Times know it wasn’t two airliners piloted by wild-eyed Muslim terrorists that brought those buildings down. First of all none of the terrorists’ names were on the manifests. And FBI director Robert Mueller, who at first magically produced the terrorists’ names and pix, later said they could not be definitively proven to have been there, at least not like the passport of Mohamed Atta that was found in pristine condition in the massive smoldering ruin of Ground Zero. It is highly probable those planes were piloted by remote control systems that kicked in as the transponders went down. Secondly, the ten thousand gallons of jet fuel in each plane burned up brightly and swiftly in the open air of the cool September morning. It could not and did not produce the temperatures necessary to melt the redundant steel foundations of the towers. In fact it was the rocking explosions from the very tops, down through, and from the basements of the Towers that brought the towers down. There was no pancaking of floors to slow the towers’ freefall at the speed of gravity. Thus, each massive tower went down some 1,300 feet in about 10 seconds. Ironically, the South Tower that was hit second went down first, after burning less than half an hour. The North Tower, which was hit first, burned close to an hour and a half, and went down last. And so, could it be that the mayor’s rush to clean up was a cover-up? Did he have some foreknowledge of these strange and bizarre events? Did Hizzoner want all evidence gone of aerosolized metals, and explosive materials like thermite, that created this carcinogenic mixture of “dust,” more like a gray sky-soup of atomized concrete, iron, plastics, wood, rubber, wire, flesh, blended into particulates, that would settle and calcify in the lungs and other body tissue? The concrete’s 200,000 gallons of water was literally vaporized. Thus, in order to understand the enormity of these explosions, read what Dr. Ed Ward, MD, reports at The Price of Liberty.org concerning The US Government’s Usage of Atomic Bombs- Domestic- WTC- . . . “The spectrum and percentages of cancer are massive. There are at least 4 classifications of blood-cell cancers: leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s and myeloma. There are many more classifications of soft tissue cancers. There is brain cancer. There is breast cancer. For most of these there are subclassifications of many different types of specific cancer in each, so far not publicly disclosed. There are huge percentages of respiratory distress and loss of function. Multiple reports of ‘irregular cycles’ (miscarriages?). Most likely there will be several more types of cancer to follow. In particular, responders should be checked for thyroid cancer and function. There has been no noting of birth defects which also needs to be done. There is one thing and only one thing that can cause all these cancers and problems - RADIATION.” Dr. Ward contends that “the factual evidence indicates that our government is using and has used 3rd or possibly 4th generation hydrogen bombs domestically and internationally. The evidence for international usage is not quite as strong as the domestic usage, but when domestic usage is considered, the international usage seems inescapable. The process of exclusion based on the known facts leaves only one viable option for the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings—a relatively pure hydrogen bomb.” Take a look also at Dr. Ward’s Update on thermal imaging post the WTC event. It’s an eye-opener. Did Hizzoner have foreknowledge of 9/11? Perhaps his Hizzoner had no idea of the punch that was to be packed. Yet, somehow he knew to evacuate his headquarters on the 23rd floor of Tower Seven at 9:15 AM. He said that he was told the building was going down. Seven did not go down with the first two towers. But its owner. Lucky Larry Silverstein, had it “pulled” eight hours later by internal demolition, and it went down neatly into its footprint, and Mr. Silverstein made an instant $500 million profit on the original cost of the old Tower 7 versus the new one. As you may know, an internal demolition for a building that size takes weeks to create, not eight hours. Also, both Giuliani and Silverstein had foreknowledge of the fact that the Twin Trade Towers were asbestos “bombs,” that is they were loaded with the lethal insulating material when they were built in the early 70s. The towers were not permitted to be leveled by internal demolition because they were part of a public trust, The Port of Authority of New York and New Jersey, established by the Rockefeller family. Nevertheless, the towers had to come down by law by about 2007. Unfortunately, they would have had to be disassembled piece by piece at a cost of some $10 billion dollars plus. Mr. Giuliani knew all this. Mr. Silverstein knew this when he leased the buildings less than two months before 9/11. Perhaps that’s why Silverstein upped the insurance to $3.5 billion, with provision for coverage from “terror attacks.” He later tried to collect for each hit separately, which would have given him more than $7 billion. As of, March 24, 2003, the Times reports on the final settlement in Insurers Agree to Pay Billions at Ground Zero. A second contract, which provided for the double payment had not been fully completed when the acts occurred, and thus triggered the six years of litigation. Yet consider how prescient it was of Mr. Silverstein to ask for it in the first place. This last Times article also tells us that New York’s Governor Eliot Spitzer brokered the deal for the remaining seven (out of two dozen insurers) who had not already settled. Allianz Global Risks, Travelers Companies, Zurich, Swiss Re, Employers, Insurance, Industrial Risk Insurers and Royal Indemnity, agreed to pay a total of $2 billion dollars. The other insurers had already kicked in $2.55 billion, bringing the total to $4.55 billion, which will be awarded to Silverstein and the Port Authority after millions in litigation were spent. Of this award, Silverstein will get $1.13 billion for three large office towers (Towers 2, 3, and 4), to be built on Church Street, between Vesey and Liberty Streets, on the east side of the WTC complex. The remaining $870 million will go the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which actually owns the land at ground zero and is the original builder of the WTC. The new money will go towards the building of both the $3 billion Freedom Tower, tallest and of the buildings planned to be built, and Tower 5. The insurance money will cover half of the $9 billion cost of erecting five towers, retail space and conceivably a hotel. Remember, the original down payment made by Silverstein and partners to secure the original 99 year lease of the WTC @ $120 million a year was $125 million. Of this, Silverstein’s silent partner, Lloyd Goldman put up $80 million and Lucky Larry a mere $14 million in the deal. Not a bad deal for Larry. It is also interesting that Governor Spitzer jumped in to settle the financial morass of 9/11 insurance coverage, while he has completely ignored all the information presented to him several years ago by 9/11 scholars and scientists that prove 9/11 was an inside job. One wonders why he did not apply his formidable talents to cutting through the morass of government disinformation to get to the truth that 9/11 was an inside job, a false flag op, to go at the Muslim world. Could it be that Eliot Spitzer, the ex-lawyer/partner of the Skadden Arps corporate law firm, which was also Larry Silverstein’s firm pre-9/11 firm, as well as Hank Greenberg’s (Chairman of AIG) corporate law firm; could it be that crusader Spitzer might be unwilling to tackle some bad people? Given these facts, plus the fact that Giuliani knew that FEMA was in town on the night of 9/10/2001, supposedly for a series of terror-hijack drills, as stated in Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson’s Prisonplanet.com article Wargames Were Cover For the Operational Execution of 9/11, Rudy might have had a more nefarious reason to work those deadly 24-hour shifts. That reason, as stated earlier, was clearing away evidence for any further investigation of the real perpetrators, high-ranking members of our own government, who have subsequently taken Rudy to their bosom. Commenting on the Giuliani/Times story abouy the four large construction companies working round the clock, Charles Blaich, in charge of safety for the Fire Department at the time of 9/11 said, “They should have backed off on the night shift, when a very limited amount of work could be done.” But they (Hizzoner) didn’t. It was full steam ahead regardless of the human consequences. “A conspiracy of purpose” Also, in that same Times article, Suzanne Mattei, director of the New York office of the Sierra Club and a critic of how the clean up was handled, said, “I would describe it as a conspiracy of purpose. It wasn’t people running around saying, ‘Don’t do this safely.’ But there was a unified attempt to do everything as fast as possible, to get everything up and running as fast as possible. Anything in the way of that just tended to be ignored.” I, too, would describe Giuliani’s cleanup handling as “a conspiracy of purpose,” perhaps of a much larger conspiracy with a much larger purpose: to be the Pearl Harbor of the New World Order’s hegemonic march to conquer the world, beginning with its attacks on Afghanistan and subsequently Iraq. Times writer Anthony DePalma also mentions, “Records show that the city was aware of the danger in the ground zero dust from the start. In [a] federal court deposition, Kelly R. McKinney, associate commissioner at the city’s health department in 2001, said the agency issued an advisory on the night of Sept. 11 stating that asbestos in the air made the site hazardous and that everyone should wear masks . . .” Many workers refused, given the super-hyped need for speed. They also complained that the respirators were unwieldy and made it hard for them to speak. DePalma adds “Violations of federal safety rules abounded, and no one strictly enforced them. OSHA did not play an active role during the rescue phase, which is usually the case in emergency operations.” In another place, he tells us that a Port of Authority of New York and New Jersey official, not authorized to speak for the agency, said “the focus was always on preventing accidents, not protecting workers from the toxic dust.” In other words, speed above safety. Additional errors in Giuliani judgment Wayne Barrett, a longtime critic of Giuliani along with fellow writer Dan Collins, condemned Giuliani’s oversight in their revealing 2006 book, Grand Illusion. In an interview, Barrett commented that Giuliani “said all the right things, but did all the wrong things.” Barrett also points to “a five-page memo from Jerry Hauer, who was the head of Emergency Management [under Giuliani]. He [Hauer] wanted it [the command center] to be located in Brooklyn in the Metrotech complex. That happens to be roughly where Mike Bloomberg has since put it . . .” The command center could not be put underground at the WTC. The Hudson River just a few blocks away would have flooded it. Thus, it was shoved 23 stories into the air in Building 7, right next to the Twin Towers, which already had been attacked in 1993. Not smart. But ignoring facts is a key to Rudy’s modus operandi. It’s no wonder that the Times comments that “The city’s handling of safety issues has been criticized by doctors, unions and occupational safety experts.” Let’s add to the critics Kristen Breitweiser, 9/11 widow, Jersey Girl and former Republican, whose husband perished in the North Tower. She has this to say on her website . . . “Forgive me, but Giuliani is the person responsible for deciding to locate NYC’s emergency center in the World Trade Center [23rd floor, Building 7]. . . . During the attacks, because the command center was rendered inoperable, NYC had no clear chain of command and no physical command structure in place to coordinate the emergency response. Frankly, the whole reason Giuliani was on television all day and available for interviews was because he was scrambling around the streets trying to set up a command post since the one he had designed and located [against the advice of old friend Police Chief Howard Safer and many others] was paralyzed during the attacks . . .” Breitweiser adds, “Furthermore, Giuliani is also responsible for giving the FDNY inoperable Motorola radios. This, too, cost hundreds of lives when firemen did not hear the order to evacuate the towers prior to their collapse.” By the way, those radios were still not fixed for years after 9/11. In fact, they hadn’t been fixed since the 1993 first WTC attack, when Giuliani was running for and became mayor. Obviously, the most damning issue to Rudy at this point is his criminal rushing of the cleanup. Yet, it is part of a consistent pattern of Giuliani behavior, the self-appointed “dictator” more than willing to play an illegal and/or slipshod role in accomplishing unholy business. And this is the man who stands before us today as a candidate for president. In fact, he is the current front-runner among Republican candidates. Woe to those who don’t learn more about him. Examine his personal life, especially philandering through three marriages. Examine his family’s mobster past. Examine his shady post-mayoral business dealings in this recent Washington Post article: In Private Sector, Giuliani Parlayed Fame Into Wealth. Hopefully, you’ll find out “What Makes Rudy Run.” A relentless if not ruthless will to rule, not patriotism or a concern for the common good. And too reminiscent of the present dictator’s “I am the decider” obsession.

To: Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport Director; Mr. Steve Wareham. Dear Sir, I read in the news today the problem of Muslim cabbies refusing to transport passengers who carry alcohol. As an immigrant citizen myself, I thought it would be my civic duty to contribute my opinion to help you take the best course in your decision making. America was founded on the toil of immigrants, each and everyone bringing along their heritage, culture and religion, and for the past four centuries the mix of immigrants and their hard work has benefited the union immensely, contributing to its internationl reputation as the land of opportuinty and justice for all. Most Immigrants start their American dream from the rock bottom, they come prepared to do the most undersirable jobs as long as it earns them a decent and honorable living. Some immigrants on the otherhand, live on the public handouts and usually become a burden on tax payers, while at the same time they are more prone to commit illegal activities to get rich quick. A job survey once listed taxi driving as the second to prostitution as the worst jobs among many jobs, and for a good reason as many cabbies have been attacked by drunken passengers. Clearly, every American enjoys freedom of their chosen lifestyle and belief, however, its wise that government officials handle these sensitivities in a way that suits everyone. Each side of this equation presents pros and cons, the decision of the Airport must be based on a winning formula that accomodates the maximum benefit to the Airport Service. But we all know that the best Airport Service can not be provided by a de-MORALIZED cabbies, (meaning cabbies who can not be trusted with passengers), since a devout Muslim Cabbie who refuses to carry alcohol is otherwise the safest to transport our citizens, children and women, and their valuable possesion. Because by the same token in which a cabbie observes the moral religious edict about alcohol, he will also observe the Airport Code of ethics by serving the Airport Passengers conveniently and professionally with added safety and security measures rooted in his faith, far better than that of a cabbie who is only observing the visible secular laws. Thus, my advice is as follows: Some International Airports have run into problem about smoking, some passengers claiming to have the right to smoke, while others demand freedom from second hand smoke. To solve such a problem, Some Airports have designated Smoking Area to accomodate smokers. Likewise, the Taxi Line Starter can designate a pool of cabs who are willing to transport alcohol carrying passengers and if necessary giving them preference over others in the cabbie waiting line, so that each cab driver can have a choice, this way everone can win including the passenegrs and the Airport. Nur

Nomads This weekend, why not try the following game at home, assuming that players all have mom and pop, kids and even in laws or grannies. The idea: The following qualities are bad, undesirable to be found in our Character, as a family, we need to watch out for the ealy signs of these habits, so that we root them out of our system in a fun way. A bad Character is not always genetically inherited ( Although insanity can be inherited from ones kids), its usually the result of years of oblivion and carelessness in being sensitive to others and their needs. in addition to a purpose for which one lives and if needed is willing to sacrifice all valuables. 1. Envy: A deadly character deficiency that annuls good deeds credis like fire according to hadeeth. 2. Pride: Result of insecurity, and halucination with insatible ego. According to hadeeth, " he who is proud ( Thinking to be better than others), Allah will demote him, and he who shows modesty ( to be like everyone else), Allah elevates him. 3. Backbiting others: A trait that shows weakness of character, a person who backbites others is seeking glory by putting others down. 4. Tazkiyatul Nafs ( Self Defense against mistakes and sins) : A person inflited with this defficiency will never admit mistake, nor allow others to point out his shortcoming, he/she is always right, " I would never do such a thing" is her response when responding to others mistakes. 5. Spying on others: This is a serious sin, this chatacter is constantly on the look out for a negative aspect of the victim, defamation being his ultimate objective. 6. Riyaa ( Show off): this character trait can result in discrediting of our deeds. A person who shows off their positive aspects or good deeds, is more into worldy glory than for Allah to take a notice of their deeds. Insincerity is the driver of Riyaa. 7. Over reaction in anger. How o play this game: In this weekend ( Saturday and Sunday), Family players will evaluate each others character and actions ( Evaluation of haracter does not mean spying, which is a bad character trait). Family members will fill secret evaluation cards on each other , each one will record the negative character trait on siblings or parents, fold up the cards without signing. Each person fills separate cards on each person, so if family members are seven, each person will recieve sis evaluations, and give six evaluations for example: Hassan ( Son) fills 6 folded evaluation cards on family members: 1. Mom: Envious of her friends, back bites friends, etc 2. Dad: Always right, never admits to be wrong,over reaction when angry. 3. Halima: too proud, envious, 4. Faarax: Too proud ( Mutakabbir), never accepts responsibility for own actions etc. At the end of the game: Cards will be collected and each family member self evaluates as they will count the points they have collected. The winner in this contest will be the family member with the least points. Each member will work on reducing the negative aspect of their character for the next round of the game (following weekend), up until all the negative qualities are purged out of the household members. Nur

(Z 1 & Only) bro No brother, just the intriduction line, the article as Urban has witfully pointed out was written by Manuel Valenzuela. A rule of thumb: if an article is signed Nur at the bottom, its mine, if not its not. Hope that clarifies it. Nur ( I wrote this note)

Geel Jire bro. World Court Judges will eventually stand infront of an inpartial Judge, their creator, Allah SWT, they will have to answer to the Absolute Highest Authority of the Universe. Nur

The warlords are back, naturally, we are not happy, but the night is about to raise its curtains for a bright morning, inshAllah, with all of our efforts, and prayers, criminal taritor Warlords shall face justice here on earth before meeting their maker for a final judgement. Nur

For the past sixteen years after the collapse of the Siyaad Barre Regime, Somalia lived in hell, a civil war fueled by foreign interest driven warlords, who now make up the TFG ( Transplanted Foreign Government in Somalia) headed by Abdullahi Yusuf and Geeddi, and a cabinet of warlords supported by Mels Zenawi who in turn is blessed by his spiritual leader Cardinal Bush. These men are politicians, they have collectively killed thousands, injured hundreds of thousands, and millions became refugees as a result of their political decisions. All professionals, Doctors and Lawyers are liable if they commit a crime while carrying out their duty, politicians have never been sued for a Political Malpractice. The reason is they are not covered by a professional insurance. The most a bad Doctor can kill is one person at a time, while a bad politician, if not threatened by a lawsuit, can kill millions. Time to weed out bad politicians by an avalanche of lawsuits by millions of affected political malpractice victims. Ethiopian War Crimes 1. Do you believe that these politicians have committed a crime? 2. Do you believe that a compensation is due to those affected by their wrong political decisions? 3. If yes, are you willing to sign a petition for a class action to try these men in the world court for compensation?

Akhil Habeeb, Khalaf You write: "okey, laakin do you think the Muslims in Somaliland, Puntland, everywhere in Somalia whom are indifferent, not even a protest against this TFG are opposing Allah’s Deen? What do you make of their indifference yaa Nur? And why do you think this is the case, the good fight is limited to section of Xamar, the same section that were the key power holders in the old South?" This argument fallacy is called " Fa maa baalul quruunil uulaa" its a distraction tactic from the core issue of aqeedah. Ali Radiyallahu canhu said : "Know men by virtue of Xaqq ( What is right), do not seek to know Xaqq ( What is right) by virtue of men", moral of saying, humans are not a reliable source of what is right, seek wisdom instead. Imagine, a young Somali girl being raped by an Ethiopian soldier, her feet are tied up by a fellow Somali who is making just a dollar, and the rest of us are indifferent because they have relative peace in their regions( Balaayo kaa maqan, dad kaley ku maqan tahay", can we blame the girl who is struggling against the rape for being unreasonable? Accodring to the Hadeeth, in the day of Judgement, Allah will order a pious scholar to be thrown in hell, the angels argue that he was pious, Allah will order angels to begin tormenting him first, reason : Never did his face frown for Allah's cause" " Lam yatamacar wajhuhu lillah" If the indifference shows anything, its the low level we as a nation have descended as to be indifferent of the plight of our brothers and sisters, the Prophet SAWS was reported saying. " A Muslim is a brother to a Muslim, he never commits injustice against him, gives him away to an enemy, not does he betray him. Brother, I did not take your words out of context, the context was Xukum of being an ally with invading kuffar. Many Muhammads and Khadija's will go to hell if their action is contrary to Islam, while many Johns and Mary will go to heaven if their deeds are aligned with Islam, actions speak louder than names and words. The problem that is causing a confusion for you is that you have all the pieces of the picture in your hands, yet they are torn to fragments and are not organized, hence your inconsistency on the main issues, so let me suggest a way out of this problem for you, let me help you put these pieces of the picture in your hand in sequence, that way, you will sigh in relief when all the pieces fall in their respective place, and at last I suggest we take our discussion in private messaging so that we sort out the confusion. Nur