Naden sis This prophecy is widespread on many refernces of the ahadeeth, in Masnad Abu Hureira 31391, particularly and many others sources all quote the same meaning, that near the Euphrates river in Iraq a mountain of gold will be the scene of a war that will claim many lives, however, this present war may only be figurative only, or it may be the real thing, time will tell. The war in Iraq thus may be the beginning of the end. The countdown of events that will follow are: (Note: The Last Event Before the End of Time Listed First below) 8. The Breeze ( wind) that will take the soul of all believers, to leave behind only the unbelievers. 7 . The Smoke: For fourty days, smoke will fill the world, believers will feel like common cold, while it will bloat the unblelievers. A sign of the end. 6. The Beast. will appear. 5. The Sun rises from the west 4. God and Magog ( Yajuj wa Majuj) A massive miratory people who will invade the world and use up all of the planets resources ( are they Americanswho are already using 80% yet hungry for the other 20% or the Chinese ?). 3. Jesus will decend. 2. Appearance of antichrist ( Dajjal) 1. Aramagaddon and the Mahdi a decisive war. Today: Iraq War. As for the water wars, dont take it seriously, its a camuflage, the earth is covered two thirds water, one third Somali refugees, and they can not possible drink it all, I think we have the technology to squeeze drinkable water from the vast oceans, the energy to enable us harness it comes from the sun and planetary movements (Solar, Wind turbines and wave energy), all of them in constant development and improvement, while our minds are degrading at a faster pace, which predicts why the world is ruled by foolish superpower. Nur

Khalaf bro. We only judge the ( Dhaahir) actions and words that can be heard or seen. The Niyah and the ghaib is with Allah alone, and its not the sphere of our influence nor judgement, we judge the apparent only, Anyone who says or does an action that is deemed to be Kufr or Shirk is said to be a Mushrik or kaafir, Allah tells us that Mushrik or Kaafir goes to hell, so believing that fact is in itself a condition of Shahaada, what Allah will do evenually with these people is not our business, however we can not be wishy washy on pivotal aqeedah issues in which Ahlul sunnah agree upon, the best we can do for our loved ones is to advice them not to oppose Allahs deen by siding with the TFG who've openly declared that they are allies with the Ethiopians and even brothers in speeches by the Prime Minister and President. ( We all know that the TFG are also stooges for them and have no will nor power of their own, they are slaves for the devil, they will be overrun in a day if left alone without the misguided American Airforce and Ethiopian artillery) You say "I think a poor Somali youngster who enlisted with this TFG to make a little change aint dat bad." Brother these men are mercenaries ( Soldiers of Fortune) at work, ( a person who would kills others for money), I hope that your words are a misprint, because its shocking, wallahi, I am shocked, because justifying cold blooded murder by a mercenary who leads enemy to his own homeland to kill his own people is a major crime, never did I think a devout Muslim to be sympathetic to such a crime, my advice is to make tawbah from that stateement. Allah SWT says, " Wa man yatawallahum minkum fa innahum minhum" He who sided with them ( enemies of Allah), is counted one of them, both in judgement and in hellfire in te day of judgement. With no breath in between, you contradict yourself again, by saying: "There are actions which make one kufar no doubt, deeds and faith go hand and hand in the Quran, however in the Quran Allah says that He forgives Whom He Wills and Punishes Whom He Wills, except for shirk" Allah can also forgive Pharoah, Jenkhis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, and Bush. Thes men have one thing in common, they slaughtered millions of innocent people as superpowers. They are all dead facing their crime, Bush is waiting his day in Allah's court, I pray for his poor Zionist possessed soul, may Allah guide him to Islam, while he still has a chance. What is more disturbing is that your writing shows that you are well versed on Tawheed, walaa and baraa, how can you then justify actions of the TFG by equating them with the the actions of other Arab states? Do we follow the Sunnah or the example of Arab states? Khalaf bro. I am not worried for the little mercennary boy hired to kill for foreign intersts in Somalia, I am really woried for you now, let us get the aqeedhah issues straight first before we talk about stark facts on the ground. Sharia law, in its most perfect way, will not be served on a silver platter, its through toil and struggle, errors and mistakes, that this deen will be established, the chinese say: " Man keep mouth open for long time, before fried duck fly in his mouth" Nur

Accodring to a Hadeeth that was reported, the end of time will witness savage wars for black Gold, read the article to increase your faith in Allah. Operation Iraq Forever By Manuel Valenzuela Catastrophic Success 05/16/07 "ICH" -- --- The occupation of Iraq, still illegal and immoral by any sense of human understanding, has now run into its fourth bloody and horrific year, becoming a quagmire for America and a vast killing field for Iraqis. Indeed, for Iraqis, America’s invasion and subsequent occupation has been and will continue to be one massive war crime, an onslaught of criminality against humanity not seen since World War Two. It is they, the Iraqi people, who have undergone tremendous hardship, and it is they who will continue to suffer in horrific ways, due to the lunacy and delusions of America’s miscreant leaders. Indeed, hell on Earth has been imported into Iraq without so much as a care, concern or bother from the American people, without so much as a protest or two by the world entire. For America and her people, on the other hand, to say that the Iraq debacle is the greatest strategic disaster in American foreign policy history is an understatement, for the implications of America’s defeat at the hands of Iraqis have only now begun to be seen, with its reverberations to be felt for years to come. What was once considered a cakewalk by an arrogant nation, basking in the glory of exceptionalism and ignorance, blinded to reality by addictions to materialism and televised charades, instead turned into an inextricable sand trap that threatens to turn a New American Century into the Last American Decade. For unlike Vietnam, a backwater nation at the outer periphery of world affairs, where America’s defeat did not disturb the grand chess match of Cold War geostrategy or cause worldwide geopolitical earthquakes, Iraq is at the epicenter of the world, sitting atop vast oil fields, possessing two fresh water rivers in a region where water is scarce, situated in the middle of vitally strategic lands sought by rising powers and dwindling empires. A defeat in Iraq, as is already apparent, and had long since been predicted by many, would thus severely damage the interests of America, thereby altering a global balance of power where one superpower dominates the rest of the world. Inside her shores, a defeat would, similar to what happened after Vietnam, alienate her people away from further wars of conquest, thus making it harder to implement the plans for a New American Century, thus destroying the once great controlling power engendered by the New Pearl Harbor. The occupation of Iraq has and will continue to severely cripple America, both in treasure and blood, bogging it down in a grueling guerilla war of attrition for years to come. Already the war and occupation has lasted longer than America’s involvement in World War II. Already it has cost, in only four years, over one trillion dollars. Already, America’s military is overstretched, overstressed, overburdened and overworked. So far, close to 3,500 troops have died, with up to 30,000 maimed and injured; tens of thousands of personnel have been forced to serve more than two tours of duty. The psychological costs to thousands of soldiers will never be quantified, as will the societal damage done by people returning home with different minds, different lives and altered circumstances. Yet in spite of the apparent defeat, the apparent debacle taking place in Iraq, the American leviathan, that corporatist element within the parameters of the state, that elitist cabal embedded in predatory capitalist markets, will not allow itself or the nation to be extricated from Iraq, for the price of such a calamity would be disastrous. For the Iraq War was first and foremost a war for control of oil, that most important of natural resources, that devil’s excrement needed to run the engine called modern human civilization. The subsequent occupation of Iraq, beyond the obvious lies of WMD, bringing democracy and freedom, ridding Iraqis of tyranny and Saddam, and fighting al-Qaeda in the “war on terror,” was built on the necessity of pacifying and controlling the Iraqi populace so that the rape and pillage of Iraq’s oil could commence. For this war has always been and will always be about black blood, that dark substance that condemns and curses all who live above it, and empowers and enriches those who extract it. He who controls the oil controls the world, after all, and he who controls the world controls humankind’s destiny. It is the devil’s excrement that sustains modern civilization; its births Empire and makes overlords of those that control it. It is also a truism that those who seek the power of modern empire must make a deal with the devil to drink blood from its veins. It is this deal with the devil that invariably resurrects violence, destruction, suffering and the worst in human wickedness. Empire’s Gas Station As such, to purposefully give up such a prize as the oil fields of Iraq, along with its perfect strategic location, would be tantamount to giving up on a burgeoning empire, something the elite and the corporatists of the nation are not yet ready to do. Controlling the oil markets of the world, along with the spigots, pipelines and oil fields of Iraq, dictating supply and demand to the globe, possessing the power to control the amount of oil a rival or rising superpower is allowed to have, and establishing a beachhead for further attempts at acquiring yet more oil and gas, this time in Iran and Central Asia, is too tempting a proposition for America’s elite to extricate their armies from Mesopotamia. In truth, to leave Iraq would be to leave behind all delusions of a New American Century. It would be akin to declaring defeat to Russia and China, in essence granting these rising powers Iraq’s oil fields on a silver platter and cementing the precipitous fall of the American Empire itself. Iraq is too valuable, in the minds of America’s elite and her corporatists, to simply walk away from. For all intents and purposes, therefore, Iraq has become America’s 51st state, a colony that will act as America’s gas station for decades to come. Iraq is destined to become the grease that provides the lubrication needed to run the great American engine. It will act as America’s aircraft carrier, the easier to patrol the world’s most strategic region. In time, Iraq will be used to invade, threaten, hold hostage and/or conquer the oil fields of Iran and those of the central Asian basin. From Iraq America’s new national security infrastructure, such as pipelines and refineries, can best be defended from any barbarian horde. Iraq is today the gateway towards attaining the Empire the elite and the delusional have always envisioned. It is the gateway towards power, control and untold wealth. Of course the sacrifice of American treasure and blood is and will continue to be of no significance to those possessing the delusional blueprints of a New American Century. After all, it is not their children sent off to war, becoming cannon fodder, returning in a body bag, with missing appendages, burned bodies or psychologically maimed minds. It is not their wages being taxed in order to pay for the ever-expanding corporatist army. It is not their hard earned money being expropriated so that energy giants can further enrich themselves to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in profits every year. To the elite way of thinking, the sacrifice of 3,500 dead soldiers, most poor and working class, from rural cesspools or urban jungles, is a minor and inconsequential inconvenience, along with the injury of 30,000 more, in the pursuit of Empire. These brave and oftentimes naïve and brainwashed soldiers are simply the expendable tools of wealth accumulation and empire building, the robots needed to pull the levers and push the buttons of the vast arsenal of killing machines developed by the military industrial complex. They are cannon fodder used not for defending freedom and democracy, but for defending the corporate bottom line and its shareholder wealth. In a nation of 300 million people, the death in Iraq of 3,500 soldiers, or 30,000 for that matter, is of little importance to the elite who see poor men and women as a means to an end. They are the collateral damage sacrificed in the name of predatory and debauched capitalism. They are the catalysts for corporatism to thrive. Sadly, America will remain in Iraq for decades to come, occupying sand and dune, living behind massive concrete walls, inside enormous embassies and bases, all built to protect the ultimate prize of the 21st century: oil. Iraq is now a giant American forward operating base, a geostrategic prize from where the delusional elite can amplify their presence both in the Middle East and the Caspian basin. From Iraq the oil and natural gas fields of Iran are but a stone’s throw away. From Iraq and Afghanistan Central Asia becomes easier to threaten and control, easier for its energy resources to be exploited and defended against potential adversaries. From Iraq it is easier for the rising empire to contain, control and check the advancements of Russia, China and India. The future death of thousands of American soldiers, and the maiming of tens of thousands more, is a reality that will inevitably come in the years ahead, will be but the price of doing business, of maximizing profit and power, of controlling the black blood necessary for empire to rise and breathe. Thousands dead and tens of thousands maimed is of little consequence or importance to those whose vision of delusion includes an empire greeted by the world as liberator, with flowers and candy thrown at its feet. Sacrifices need to be made for the sake of consumerism and materialism, for gluttony and greed, after all. Just not for the elite that steer the American ship. The trillions of dollars that have already been spent, and those trillions that will invariably be needed in the future will of course be taken from the American people, their treasure pillaged, their wages raped in the pursuit of empire. It will be us, the common peasant, that will be forced to absorb the present and future costs of delusions of grandeur and self-aggrandizing hubris. It will be our children who will have to sacrifice freedom, rights and blood. The added benefit to the elite of this robbery of the American taxpayer is that for every dollar that goes to the Iraq War, to the military-industrial complex, to the bank accounts of the war profiteers and the energy corporatists, one less dollar is allocated for social services, education, healthcare, infrastructure and the general welfare of the American people. One more dollar taken out through taxes equals one less dollar in the pocket of the people, thereby eviscerating the middle class and shifting the burden of war from the wealthy to the middle and working classes. By gutting the middle class, by putting severe pressure on its ability to subsist on already diminishing wages, the elite further separate themselves from the rest of us, increasing the wealth gap, and by consequence, increasing their power and control over us as well. When the rich get richer and the poor poorer, only a nation of fools fails to see who wins and who loses. As such, the Iraq War is also a war against the American people, for it is designed to make us anemic creatures dependent on the decisions of the elite. It is engineered in part to increase injustice, inequality, exploitation and dominion over us, robbing us of our power to mobilize and seek change. By redistributing America’s treasure away from the people and to the few elite and the corporations, using war as pretext and fear as a conditioning element, government is being rewired to stop acting in the interest of the masses. Meanwhile, it is being made to serve the interests of the corporate world, which have been getting enormously powerful through the looting of our treasure, under the rubric of fighting the fictional war on terror and under the illusion of destroying a nation only to later rebuild it. The shifting of resources away from what helps the people to what empowers the corporate world is but one more sign that the age of American corporatism is upon us. The belief that the Iraq War will end once the Bush administration leaves office, and that American soldiers will return home, is an illusion and a mirage, a concoction of wishful thinking that has no basis in reality. America has cemented its presence, firmly planting the foundations for a long and prolonged occupation. Permanent military bases have been erected, as has the largest embassy the world has ever seen. It has manipulated elections so that its puppets are elevated to the highest echelons of Iraqi power. It has written oil laws favorable to its interests that it then demands be passed by so called sovereign Iraqi lawmakers, in essence writing the same laws it needs to make legal the exploitation and robbery of Iraq’s oil fields. The Middle East is the most vital region in the world in terms of energy allocation and its subsequent strategic control, and is therefore of tremendous national importance to a nation desiring to elevate itself to full-fledged empire status. It has controlled the region for decades now, either by military force, destruction of democracy and through its large cadre of puppets, and by occupying Iraq with a large military force, it now possesses a stranglehold on the world’s second largest energy reserves. And, by making colonies of Afghanistan and Iraq, by supporting the tyrants of Central Asia, it now surrounds the third largest oil reserves in the world, namely those of Iran. Its rich oil and gas fields, now targeted for conquest, are located just across the Iraq border, within invading distance for American forces, far away from Tehran, close enough to smell the fumes. Iraq, therefore, is a prize that will never be relinquished, and is the reason America will never extricate herself from the debacle it has created. No amount of pre-invasion ignorance, occupying incompetence and blinding arrogance will force America to abandon her cherished possession. No continued bleeding through a thousand cuts will force it to return home in defeat. To the architects of empire, there is more than enough cannon fodder, more than enough treasure from which to maintain control of Iraq’s oil fields. There is too much invested already, too much left to gain, too many fragile egos to appease, too many insecure men to protect, to simply abandon a prize that has been cherished by the elite for decades. We are in Iraq, and though broken by our hands, though destroyed by our military, she is now ours, for our greed and our love of comfort and consumerism demands that she be pillaged of her oil and raped of her sovereignty. Our addiction to her black blood demands that we care nothing for the plight of her people or for the decimation of her society. It demands that we cast a blind eye to the holocaust now taking place there and the ethnic cleansing destroying families and neighborhoods. It demands that we see Iraqis as subhuman brown skinned aliens, their plight and suffering ignored, their decimation at the hands of our military and our government lost in hollow memory banks. It is because of oil, after all, that we can share in the privileges of living in the wealthiest nation the world has ever known. And so to continue living in comfort and consumerism, the beast must be fed, it must gorge upon the dark liquid of the third world, and the deal with the devil must, invariably, continue well into the future. As such, no matter which member of the political duopoly is in the White House, no matter how loudly the citizenry demands a pullout, the United States will not leave Iraq in the foreseeable future. The two headed hydra is, after all, attached to the same body, obeying the same master. No amount of lies or spin or promises will alter this reality. We live in the New American Century, after all, where reality is the domain of those in power. As the will of the people no longer matters or counts, our voices will be silenced, our growing anger suppressed. Sure the illusion of troops returning home will be created, with scenes of families reuniting and hero’s coming home gracing the airwaves, yet in the real world, back in the land of permanent bases and rich oil fields, back where enormous and modern embassies rise on the banks of ancient rivers, tens of thousands of troops will remain, guarding America’s ultimate prize, the blood that sustains Empire, comfort and the military-industrial-energy complex. The mirage of American troops returning from Iraq with their heads held high, as always marching triumphantly, as always having defeated evil, will captivate millions of ignorant but otherwise well-intentioned Americans. To millions more, however, this charade will be seen for the fiction that it is, for Iraq will remain a very dangerous place, especially for energy exploiters and oil conglomerates eager to further enrich themselves by pillaging a nation blind. Tens of thousands of American soldiers will remain, we will be told, to secure democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people, to ensure security in the cities, to make sure the “democratically” elected puppet is protected from al-Qaeda. We will be made to think our soldiers need to remain to protect Iraqis from themselves. In truth, tens of thousands of soldiers will establish a permanent presence in Iraq because the Anglo-American energy consortium will need protection while it pillages and rapes Iraq of her natural resources. America’s military will be needed to defend from the targeted sabotage and rebellion of freedom fighters, from the expected assassinations and kidnappings of energy workers. It will ask to protect pipelines, oil fields and their infrastructure; it will be told to suppress strikes and the rage of Iraqi oil workers. The safety and freedom of Iraqis will mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of greed and gluttony and American empire. To the empire, oil trumps blood just as much as profit trumps people. Brand Marketing Of course to hear the Iraq War apologists tell it, and there are many of these individuals in government and the corporatist media, America is in Iraq because we are fighting al-Qaeda, and nobody else. To the dwindling delusionists and supporters of this illegal war who are somehow inexplicably still given a voice in the media and in print, the illusion must be made that America is at war, given this war on terror, with the dreaded bogeymen from al-Qaeda, those same evildoers who attacked us on 9/11. This is the only way to keep the charade going in the minds of millions that America must remain in Iraq, staying the course, as always knowing that the deeply embedded myth of America being the epitome of good and always triumphing over evil, epitomized by whatever convenient scapegoat is needed, will again capture the minds of the naïve and gullible. This fantasy, of course, is the last refuge of scoundrels, for it has been proven over and over again that only two to five percent of fighters in Iraq are foreign. But this does not preclude scoundrels from preaching lies to the congregation nonetheless. A convenient enemy is needed to validate the Iraq occupation, however, one that has already been conditioned into the American mind as being nefarious and monstrous. Indeed, what America confronts is guerilla warfare in an urban setting. Her soldiers, sent to protect the interests of the elite and those of the military-industrial-energy complex, are engaged in a battle against freedom fighters, the vast majority from Iraq, most common peasants once living ordinary lives who want nothing more than to rid their land of the occupying forces. From the beginning of time resistance fighters have waged war against the more powerful invading and occupying force, as always using their skills and talents to bleed their rivals to death. Like American Revolutionaries, Iraq’s freedom fighters fight for independence and freedom, for nationality and to expel foreign forces from their country. If America or any other nation were invaded and occupied, resistance fighters would immediately spring up as well, forming an army of brave patriots using the tactics of the poor to try and contain the weapons of the much more powerful and wealthier military. Unfortunately, it is the poor of both countries waging war against each other, killing and maiming one another, for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Such is war that the poor are always made to fight each other when it is the elite that is their common enemy. Yet the truth of who and what America’s army is fighting can never be mentioned, for a myth has been embedded into the average American mind that America is in Iraq to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq, not to fight their freedom fighters or rape their women. Since an occupying power cannot fully dehumanize a legitimate resistance movement, given that its cause is nobler than that of the occupying force itself, it must resort to the realm of fiction and propaganda, concocting lies and distortions to smear the resistance. Only by making freedom fighters seem subhuman or evil in the eyes of its people can the occupying force thereby make it acceptable to mass murder, dehumanize, torture and illegally detain Iraqis. Indeed, resistance movements such as those fighting the American military in Iraq are allowed under international law. When such an invasion and subsequent occupation has been proven to be based on lies and deceit, becoming immoral and illegal, a crime against humanity, any resistance movement would find broad support among the peoples of the world. Indeed, these movements are romanticized and applauded, for they become brave patriots and freedom fighters against criminality, illegality and immorality. Such was the case with the French resistance against the Nazis, the Jewish resistance in the ghettos, the plight of blacks in apartheid South Africa and the struggle of Palestinians against the oppressive and apartheid methods of the Israelis. As such, in order to marginalize and vilify the resistance, in order for the American populace to accept wanton destruction and killing, in order to transform individuals fighting for independence and for an end to occupation, the impression must be made by the creators of reality that the Iraqi mujahedeen are really al-Qaeda in Iraq, thereby becoming the central myth of why America is in Iraq and why it must continue to remain there. This way, the dreaded evildoer extraordinaire, that entity that continuously haunts the American mind, that bogeyman that in the original conspiracy theory was said to have brought down World Trade Center towers 1,2 and 7 through controlled demolitions and at freefall speed, killing 3,000 innocent Americans in the process, can continue to spread fear and insecurity in the belief structure of millions of Americans who, like Pavlovian dogs, cower in fear at the sound of the word al-Qaeda. It is al-Qaeda, after all, and not Iraq freedom fighters, who attacked us on 9/11. It is al-Qaeda, after all, that planned war games on the day of 9/11 and ordered fighter planes to stand down, not Iraqi resistance fighters. Thus, by using the concocted scapegoat of al-Qaeda, having escaped the caves and mud huts of Afghanistan, this time festering and planning to take over Iraq if we let them, and hiding the reality of whom exactly the American military is fighting in Iraq, millions of Americans readily accept the continued occupation as being beneficial to their own safety and security. For, as the scoundrels and the liars love to tell us, we are fighting them there so we do not have to fight them here. If we leave, we are told, they, being al-Qaeda, will follow us back, undoubtedly to wage holy jihad in the little towns of Indiana and Nebraska. This way, the creators of the new reality hide the true rival in Iraq while at the same time manipulating the American public into allowing the continued debacle taking place. As long as the term al-Qaeda is used in symphony with Iraq, as long as Iraq and the so-called war on terror are similarly correlated, millions of Americans will continue to support an occupation that is illegal and immoral. As such, the Iraqi resistance movement will continue to gain strength, it will continue to engage the American military, and a war of attrition will continue to kill and maim both Americans and Iraqis. This way, a vicious cycle of violence will not cease, for Americans will continue to associate the need to wage war in Iraq, believing, albeit mistakenly, that America fights al-Qaeda in the fictional war on terror, not knowing or understanding the true nature of the rival. With violence begetting violence, more resistance fighters will join the movement, as naturally occurs in a guerilla war against an occupation. With manipulations and lies, the American people will be made to believe that al-Qaeda in Iraq is growing more dangerous, that it is expanding, that it will indeed follow us home if we leave, that it presents a clear and present danger that must be defeated. Thus, the ingredients for the endless war the elite have dreamt about for decades, and the key to staying permanently in Iraq, have managed to rise out of one nation’s desire to be free of occupation and another’s systematically damaged and manipulated psyche, born on 9/11, that freezes in horror and loses all ability to reason and think logically at the mention of the words al-Qaeda and war on terror. As long as the term al-Qaeda is used over the airwaves, as long as it retains its corroding effect, the American people will allow the fictional war on terror to continue. Such is the damage done by the masters of reality. Quite conveniently, then, Iraq’s freedom fighters are morphed by the state and the corporatist media into al-Qaeda, thereby validating America’s presence and continued occupation of a nation, and a people, fighting for her freedom. The liberty and ease by which the apologists of the war grant al-Qaeda franchises throughout Iraq, indeed, wherever America seems to pick fights, without even a hint at investigation by the corporatist media, underlies the fallacy of this myth. Along with the purported death of probably 100 al-Qaeda’s number two’s, it also demonstrates the level of propaganda and manipulation the Pentagon and its lackeys fill the media, and thus our minds with. Truth is the first casualty of war, after all. Therefore, under the auspices of fighting terrorism, America can stay and focus on the real and most important task at hand, namely the complete control, rape and pillage of Iraq’s oil fields and pipelines. The Curse of Black Gold And so America will continue fighting in Iraq because the state says we are fighting al-Qaeda, because it blames Iraq’s puppet government for its own incompetence and ignorance, because it says through its stenographers and talking heads that the war on terror must be fought, even if it takes decades to win, and because America is good and exceptional and she must defeat evil, just as she has always done. Along with our permanent occupation, we will continue mass murdering, torturing, dehumanizing and falsely imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose only crime, whose only curse, is living atop the devil’s excrement, that dark liquid waiting to be gorged on by a most greedy, ignorant and arrogant drug addict. For when it comes to dominating that black gold called oil, easily available for conquest in various third world nations, either through puppets, market colonialism or military might, no dark skinned, non-European looking human is safe from the tentacles of modern empire, for soon subhuman you will be called, seen as primitive, as an animal, needing the “enlightened” hand of Western intervention for salvation. When the aim of categorizing you as alien, evil and below the parameters of being human is achieved your family will be murdered, your people displaced, your life forever altered, your plight ignored. Your death will never equal that of an American or a British citizen, for you are a third worlder, a person of the southern globe, bred to be exploited and oppressed, your lands becoming the feudal estates of corporatism, your blood, sweat and tears falling only after you have slaved yourself for the north’s comfort and wealth. The death of your son will not be counted, the rape of your daughter will be dismissed as lies, the dehumanization of your father and the torture of your brother will never see light of day, for your country has been targeted as the next petrol station that will invariably be forced to pay tribute to the purple robe of empire. Whether you live in Nigeria, Venezuela, the Caspian Sea basin or Iran, it does not matter, for you live where black gold abounds, where the drug of oil can be found. As such your lands will become toxic, your air and water filled with poison. All the while, even as your natural resources are pillaged, your nation raped, your nation collapsing, you will never see a dime from the corporations of the empire. For poverty is your destiny, even as vast wealth lies below your feet. Subsisting on garbage, living in shacks, your national wealth stolen and embezzled, you thus realize that the black gold you were told would transform your nation has been nothing but a terrible curse you wish never existed. Of course if you live where the devil’s excrement is bountiful you cannot help but notice the addiction of the empire, and how maddened it becomes if its fix is not satiated. You realize that death, destruction and suffering are the only realities and expectations for nations not willing to pay tribute to the empire. Thus, if you are not careful, if you are not ready, the next knock on your door might very well be that of a most immoral and criminal addict, ready to kill you and destroy your nation for its next much needed fix. And then you will automatically become the Empire’s next enemy, its next terrorist scapegoat, becoming the evildoer chosen to strike fear in the American populace. Inevitably, your face, your people and your culture will become the poster children in the next marketing campaign and psychological war against the American citizenry, designed, as always, by fascism’s public relations experts, its army of little Goebbels. Deal With the Devil America cannot exorcise itself from its addiction to oil that, like a demon inside our body, possesses us day and night, demanding that we satisfy our insatiable thirst for black blood. In this deal with the devil that we long ago made, we became dependent on a natural resource that, while not plentiful inside our own shores, is readily abundant in the Middle East, Central Asia, West Africa and Venezuela. For this reason the Middle East has become a militarized region, a vast feudal estate owned by the masters and lords of energy, protected by the Empire itself. For this reason it has become the world’s most volatile and sought after region. Inside its borders puppets and despots and proctors overlook America’s oil fields, proclaiming themselves princes, kings and presidents, as always oppressing and exploiting their people, as always overseeing the empire’s interests. In our deal with the devil, the more we taste the more we want; the more we continue to grow the bigger we want to get. The more powerful we are the greedier and more gluttonous we become, expanding the size of everything we own, including our stomachs. Millions of us believe oil is abundant, as if it grows yearly in some global breadbasket. Millions of us fail to understand that hundreds of thousands of human beings are killed and maimed, and tens of millions live in perpetual indigence and oftentimes are forced to confront armed conflict because of our insatiable addiction to oil. Millions of us fail to see that it is our standards of living, our greed and gluttony, that contributes to so much misery and destruction worldwide. Yet year after year our greed compels us toward ever larger vehicles and homes, bigger toys and an exponentially growing consumption habit. Through our actions it seems that we care nothing for the planet or its inhabitants, instead filling our minds with the arrogance and apathy of a spoiled child, transforming ourselves into a most insecure schoolyard bully. We behave as if we are entitled to what does not belong to us, in essence forcing the school’s other kids to give us their lunch money, threatening with violence those that decline or stand up for themselves. Our greed and gluttony, our indifference and arrogance, our insistence on maintaining and even expanding our standards of living, all at the expense of the planet and its people, is the reason we invade, occupy and exploit weaker nations. It is the reason Iraq is in chaos, why Nigeria is on the verge of full rebellion, why Central Asia is full of despotic leaders and why Venezuela is vilified. It will be the reason why Russia and China will in the years ahead become rivals and enemies, why more and more people around the globe hate America and why we spend more on military equipment and weapons than the entire world put together. It is when we look in the mirror that the devil’s excrement can be seen, acting like an aura around our head, smearing our face with the darkness of wickedness and the madness of addiction. We can continue believing the exceptionalism of America, the grandeur of her virtues, that of her leaders and her people, yet reality and truth are altogether different, presenting circumstances too uncomfortable for us to contemplate yet important enough to try and understand. We can continue living the delusion of myth and the charade of the American Dream. We can continue being brainwashed and conditioned that our way of life is the only way of life, that the world entire must conform to this way of life, and that bogeymen hate us for said way of life. Yet to confront the evil’s done in our name by the government we elect or fail to stop, we must realize that in many ways, we are to be blamed, we are guilty in failing to act, in putting a stop to an unsustainable standard of living. Until we realize the damage we do around the planet so that we may live in comfort, so that we may enjoy the highest standards of living humans have ever had, so that we may drive giant SUVs and live in expansive, heated and air-conditioned homes, America will remain in Iraq indefinitely, her military garrisoned inside bases clustered around oil fields, facilities and pipelines. Until we confront the predatory capitalism that is turning America into a corporatist state and the world into a giant sweatshop Iraq and others like it will continue. Until we look ourselves in the mirror and realize that it is our failure to act and alter a doomed course, that it is our indifference to the damage our lifestyles cause Earth, we will finally grasp that it is ourselves, more than anything else, that are the reason we will remain in Iraq long into the future, for our way of life must be maintained and fed through the world’s last remaining petroleum reserves. Until we realize our gluttony and greed, until we decide to put a stop to our addiction and arrogance, a new version of Iraq will metastasize every decade or so, popping up somewhere around the globe where black gold exists, every time new oil fields are needed to expand our economy or our comfort level, causing untold suffering and destruction in the process, resulting in resistance, conflict and a ever-growing hatred of America. To feed itself the empire thus needs to increase its military, it thus needs to maintain over 750 bases worldwide. To feed its peoples’ ever-growing greed and gluttony, its ever expanding waistline, Iraq must remain within the empire’s violent and voracious claws, becoming a colony of imperialism, to be exploited and raped. No amount of propaganda or brainwashing or delusion or denial can make extinct this truth. We are thus stuck in Iraq for the long term, for her resources and land is needed to sustain and maintain the America we live in. To believe the empire will ever leave voluntarily is to live in delusion and fall prey to the myths of our conditioning. We have made a deal with the devil, and now we must pay its consequences.

Satan has finally dominated the last hope of freedom of thought in America, Now, from Harvard, the beacon of knowledge and wisdom, comes a new Fatwa, that TORTURE of Prisoners is KOSHER! "A Brilliant Turn of events" Cag Bakayle, the Somali Anarchist Declaration ( SAD) Harvard’s Kangaroo Law School The School for Torturers By Francis A. Boyle 05/16/07 "ICH" -- -- Not surprisingly, the newly released January 2007 issue of the American Journal of Imperial Law — otherwise known as the self-styled American Journal of International Law but founded and still operated by U. S. State and War Departments’ apparatchiks and their professorial fellow-travelers — just published an article by Harvard Law School’s recently retired Bemis Professor of International Law Detlev Vagts (who only taught me the required course on Legal Accounting) arguing in favor of the Pentagon’s Kangaroo Courts System on Guantanamo despite the fact that they have been soundly condemned by every human rights organization and every human rights official and leader in the entire world as well as by the United States Supreme Court itself in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006). I am not going to bother to recite here all the grievous deficiencies of the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts under International Law and U.S. Constitutional Law. But suffice it to say that the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts constitute war crimes under the Laws of War, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and even the U. S. Army’s own Field Manual 27-10, The Law of Land Warfare (1956). Field Manual 27-10 was drafted for the Pentagon by my Laws of War teacher Richard R. Baxter, who was generally recognized as the world’s leading expert on that subject, which is precisely why I voluntarily chose to study International Law with him and his long-time collaborator Louis B. Sohn, and not with the bean-counter Vagts. For the entire post-World War II generation of international law students at Harvard Law School, Louis Sohn shall always be our real Bemis Professor of International Law and never the False Pretender to that Throne known as Detlev Vagts. Since those student days I have personally appeared pro bono publico in five U.S. military courts-martial proceedings involving warfare that were organized in accordance with the Pentagon’s Uniform Code of Military Justice (U.C.M.J.) — which still does not apply to the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts despite the ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court in Hamdan that the U.C.M.J. should be applied in Guantanamo — on behalf of five U. S. military personnel who each acted as matters of courage, integrity, principle, and conscience at great risk to their freedom: 1. U. S. Marine Corps Lance Corporal Jeff Paterson, the first U. S. military resister to President Bush Sr.’s genocidal war against Iraq; 2. Army Captain Doctor Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, the highest ranking U.S. commissioned officer to be court-martialed for refusing to participate in President Bush Sr.’s genocidal war against Iraq; 3. Captain Lawrence Rockwood, who was court-martialed by the U.S. Army for trying to stop torture in Haiti after the Clinton administration had illegally invaded that country in 1994; 4. Army Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, the first U.S. military resister to be court-martialed for refusing to participate in President Bush Jr.’s war of aggression against Iraq; and 5. Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, the first U.S. commissioned officer to be court-martialed for his refusal to participate in President Bush Jr.’s war of aggression against Iraq. As I can attest from my direct personal involvement, each and every one of these five courts-martial under the U.C.M.J. were Stalinist show-trials produced and directed by the Pentagon that predictably and readily degenerated into travesties of justice. These five U.C.M.J. courts-martial involving warfare each proved correct the old adage attributed to Groucho Marx that military justice is to justice as military music is to music. By comparison, the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts will not even be run in accordance with the U.C.M.J. despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan that they should be. Whenever they are up and running the Gitmo Courts will constitute Stalinist Show Trials as well as Kangaroo Courts, and their preliminary proceedings have already proven them to be Travesties of Justice. Even worse yet, fully-functioning Stalinist Gitmo Kangaroo Courts will quickly become conveyor-belts of death for alleged and already tortured terrorist suspects along the lines of the Texas execution chamber operated by George Bush Jr. when he was the “governor” of that state and tortured to death 152 victims by means of lethal injection. But today under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, executing persons detained as a result of armed conflict without a fair trial before a regularly constituted court constitutes a grave war crime. To be sure, under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution Professor Vagts has the freedom to advocate war crimes so long as he does not participate in their commission, or incite them, or aid and abet them. But precisely where is that line to be drawn for law professors? In this regard, the Harvard Law School Faculty currently has at least five professors who have advocated torture and war crimes: 1. Vagts himself, who supported abusing the then recently captured President of Iraq Saddam Hussein despite his being publicly acknowledged to be a Prisoner of War by the Bush Jr. administration itself and thus absolutely protected by the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Convention against Torture; 2. the infamous Alan Dershowitz, a self-incriminated war criminal in his own right. Dersh publicly acknowledged being a member of a Mossad Committee for approving the murder and assassination of Palestinians, which violates the Geneva Conventions and is thus a grave war crime; 3. the Con Law non-entity known as Richard Parker; 4. Another one of my teachers, Waco Phil Heymann. Previously Waco Phil had been Deputy to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, the Butcheress of Waco. Reno ordered the Waco Massacre, while Heymann orchestrated its cover-up and thus earned his well-deserved sobriquet of Waco Phil. All those incinerated women and children! 5. The war criminal Jack Goldsmith who while working as a lawyer for the Bush Jr. administration at both the Pentagon and later its Department of In-Justice did much of the legal spade-work designing, justifying and approving the hideous human rights atrocities that the Bush Jr. administration has inflicted on everyone after 9/11. Goldsmith and his co-felon legal colleague from the Bush Jr. administration Professor John Yoo — now desecrating Berkeley’s Law School where my friend and colleague the late, great Dean Frank Newman had taught Human Rights — are functionally analogous to Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt, who justified every hideous atrocity that Hitler and the Nazis inflicted on anyone. Despite my best efforts to prevent it, the Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans hired the war criminal Goldsmith right out of the Bush Jr. administration knowing full well that he was up to his eyeballs in the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts, torture, war crimes, enforced disappearances, murder, kidnapping, and crimes against humanity, at a minimum. And when Goldsmith’s proverbial “smoking-gun” Department of In-Justice Memorandum was published by the Washington Post, Harvard Law School’s Dean Elena Kagan contemptuously boasted in response about how “proud” she was to have hired this notorious war criminal. Previously Kagan had also publicly bragged that the future of International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School would be in the “good hands” of their resident war criminal Goldsmith. How tragically true! The Neo-Conservative Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans deliberately set out to hire this Neo-Nazi legal architect of the Bush Jr. administration’s bogus and nefarious “war against terrorism” because they fully support it together with all its essential accouterments of torture, kangaroo courts, war crimes, murder, kidnapping, enforced disappearances, crimes against humanity, and Nuremberg crimes against peace. By contrast, after the terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in alleged revenge for the Waco Massacre and Cover-up by Janet Reno and Waco Phil Heymann, to the best of my recollection I do not remember that the Neo-Conservative Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans advocated kangaroo courts, torture, war crimes, and racist profiling for America’s White Judeo-Christian Males. Yet after 9/11 the fundamentally White Racist Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans have no problem with inflicting torture, kangaroo courts, war crimes, and racist profiling upon Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color, which is exactly why they hired the war criminal Goldsmith to teach such criminal practices to their own law students and thus someday turn them into racist U.S. governmental war criminals in their own right. This is because for the most part the Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans have always been viscerally bigoted and racist against Muslims/Arabs/Asians and other People of Color since at least when I first matriculated there in September of 1971. The Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans are no longer fit to educate Lawyers, Members of the Bar, and Officers of the Court. They are a sick joke and a demented fraud. Groucho Marx would have had a field day with them: Harvard is to Law School as Torture is to Law. The Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans torture the Law. Do not send your children or students to Harvard Law School where they will grow up to become racist war criminals! Harvard Law School is a Neo-Con cesspool. Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois, is author of Foundations of World Order, Duke University Press, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, by Clarity Press. He can be reached at: FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU

Nomads eNuri, back in 2003 predicted te content of an article that was published today, the eNuri Satirical article suggested that America is going down hill by spreading itself too thin, like empires of old, globe trotting (without the skills of the Haarlem Basket ball players), below is my light hearted article, followed by a serious article expanding on that notion, enjoy. Somali Anarchists Letter to George Bush Dear President Bush On behalf of the Anarchist Association of Somalia I congratulate you for the quick win in Iraq that you badly needed to justify for your upcoming reelection. This letter is coming to you as an inspiration from your friends in the area, friends who believe that the world should be united under a new world government that will establish a new world order ( or disorder) as predicted by your Dad a decade ago. The idea of uniting diverse people, with diverse backgrounds under one world government has eluded the Somali Anarchist Association for the past decade. But, watching the fireworks in Iraq and Afghanistan has reassured your Anarchist Allies in Somalia and the world over that might is indeed right and since you represent the mightiest nation on earth, Somali Anarchists have unanimously decided to be loyal to your world government in order to further the common ideals we share of power brokering. We also support your decision to ignore the UN and all those silly French and German politicians who have no idea of the enormous job that is awaiting you of establishing some sort of a new world order. As I am not capable of writing, this letter was prepared by my secretary his name is Carrabey , meaning he mispronounces and misspells words frequently, so in case some words do make a different sense, you can decide what it means for yourself, just like how you deal with the world bodies such as Human Rights and International War criminals court. The Anarchist Association of Somalia (aka War Lords)is commending you for acting locally and sinking globally , sorry ( Carrabey misspelled this one, I meant Thinking Globally). The question that forces itself in light of current world affairs is how can America sink globally when it is acting so well locally.? The answer according to the Somali Anarchist Sinkers and the Somali Chaotic Sink Tank, is that great empires sink big when they spread themselves too sin (thin) and after a while implode after all the resources they have stole all those years are used up in adventures far from home and when their moral high ground of " Justice for All" becomes meaningless at home and overseas, which affects the productivity mindset of the citizenry and even increases contempt for the Emperor's power, triggering an avalanche of mishaps that brings the empire down, just like it did to Empires of old, which in effect gives a new meaning to the negative of Descartes famous argument " I Sink, therefore I do NOT Exist" As an anarchist, I share with you the notion that there is no need for the United Nations, I believe that Coffee Anan Salary can feed 200,000 Somalis per day, so, by disbanding these gangs who live on poor peoples misery cycle, we believe that your highness as the new Emperor of the New World Order, that you can reach the end users of the US aid directly, cutting off the middle man, and you do not have to pay your hard cash, you can literally pay peanuts, (Peter Pan Brand is my favorite). Somalis would be grateful to consume the overproduced American wheat cereals and Florida Citrus ( frozen Concentrates before they expire) which in economic terms can create the dependence of the Somali economy on American aid, thus making them obedient while at the same time stabilizing commodity prices in the USA ( Do not worry, in case Somalis get sick, you can send expired medicines, and you are the Judge and the Policeman) The UN is a waste of resources, and as the Thief executive officer of the World, ( I mean Chief Executive, Carrabey, my secretary misspells frequently) you should invade the UN building, since the UN office is in New York, a US property, and then disband them. If anyone disagrees with you, remind them that there should be only one world Power, and one United Nations. How can they forget that there are more Germans in Wyoming than Bavaria's Black Forest and more Gadabursi in Ohio than in Borama. So, the new United Nations should be declared as The United States of America, a nation of nations in a melting pot not a salad bowl like Soviet union. I know that you like to compensate Chairman Coffe Anan once you disband the UN. The ( EDCO) Entrepreneurial Development Cooperative Office of The Somali Anarchist Association will closely work with Coffee Anan to trade mark his name in all Somali tribal Jurisdictions as a Café for the Armchair Veteran Generals of The Somali Civil War ( Fadhi Ku Dirir), We would even consider to nominate him the Honorary Visiting Anarchist of the year, to thank him for all the anarchy that his organization helped create and maintain in Somalia and the world. Mr. Carrabey, signing for Mr. Cag Biciid of Nurtel Nairobi, Kenya 2003 Nurtel Network News No Noose is Good News Evil Empire Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America? By Chalmers Johnson 05/17/07 "ICH" -- -- In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be. The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain. If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them." George W. Bush has, of course, flagrantly violated his oath of office, which requires him "to protect and defend the constitution," and the opposition party has been remarkably reluctant to hold him to account. Among the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that, under other political circumstances, would surely constitute the Constitutional grounds for impeachment are these: the President and his top officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false NIE to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally reinterpreted international and domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret locations around the world. Nothing in the Constitution, least of all the commander-in-chief clause, allows the president to commit felonies. Nonetheless, within days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush had signed a secret executive order authorizing a new policy of "extraordinary rendition," in which the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects anywhere on Earth and transfer them to prisons in countries like Egypt, Syria, or Uzbekistan, where torture is a normal practice, or to secret CIA prisons outside the United States where Agency operatives themselves do the torturing. On the home front, despite the post-9/11 congressional authorization of new surveillance powers to the administration, its officials chose to ignore these and, on its own initiative, undertook extensive spying on American citizens without obtaining the necessary judicial warrants and without reporting to Congress on this program. These actions are prima-facie violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (and subsequent revisions) and of Amendment IV of the Constitution. These alone constitute more than adequate grounds for impeachment, while hardly scratching the surface. And yet, on the eve of the national elections of November 2006, then House Minority Leader, now Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), pledged on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that "impeachment is off the table." She called it "a waste of time." And six months after the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight. Promoting Lies, Demoting Democracy Without question, the administration's catastrophic war in Iraq is the single overarching issue that has convinced a large majority of Americans that the country is "heading in the wrong direction." But the war itself is the outcome of an imperial presidency and the abject failure of Congress to perform its Constitutional duty of oversight. Had the government been working as the authors of the Constitution intended, the war could not have occurred. Even now, the Democratic majority remains reluctant to use its power of the purse to cut off funding for the war, thereby ending the American occupation of Iraq and starting to curtail the ever-growing power of the military-industrial complex. One major problem of the American social and political system is the failure of the press, especially television news, to inform the public about the true breadth of the unconstitutional activities of the executive branch. As Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, the authors of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, observe, "For the public to play its proper checking role at the ballot box, citizens must know what is done by the government in their names." Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not -- and could not -- occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives -- including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment -- essentially hijacked the government. Some respected professional journalists do not see these failings as the mere result of personal turpitude but rather as deep structural and cultural problems within the American system as it exists today. In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way: "All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed… So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring…. What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives." Veteran analyst of the press (and former presidential press secretary), Bill Moyers, considering a classic moment of media failure, concluded: "The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations [on February 5, 2003] seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with 'plagiarism.'" As a result of such multiple failures (still ongoing), the executive branch easily misled the American public. A Made-in-America Human Catastrophe Of the failings mentioned by Hersh, that of the military is particularly striking, resembling as it does the failures of the Vietnam era, thirty-plus years earlier. One would have thought the high command had learned some lessons from the defeat of 1975. Instead, it once again went to war pumped up on our own propaganda -- especially the conjoined beliefs that the United States was the "indispensable nation," the "lone superpower," and the "victor" in the Cold War; and that it was a new Rome the likes of which the world had never seen, possessing as it did -- from the heavens to the remotest spot on the planet -- "full spectrum dominance." The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned military colossus athwart the world, which no power or people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense certain to get the country into deep trouble -- as it did -- and bring the U.S. Army to the point of collapse, as happened in Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and Afghanistan). Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed orders and ignored international obligations (including the obligation of an occupying power to protect the facilities and treasures of the occupied country -- especially, in this case, Baghdad's National Museum and other archaeological sites of untold historic value); and incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency against our occupation, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians. According to Andrew Bacevich, "Next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there." Our former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W. Freeman, says of President Bush's recent "surge" strategy in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province: "The reinforcement of failure is a poor substitute for its correction." Symbolically, a certain sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26th posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile -- joining up to two million of her compatriots who have left the country. In her final dispatch, she wrote: "There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends.... And to what?" Retired General Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division in the first Iraq war and a consistent cheerleader for Bush strategies in the second, recently radically changed his tune. He now says, "No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection." In a different context, Gen. McCaffrey has concluded: "The U.S. Army is rapidly unraveling." Even military failure in Iraq is still being spun into an endless web of lies and distortions by the White House, the Pentagon, military pundits, and the now-routine reporting of propagandists disguised as journalists. For example, in the first months of 2007, rising car-bomb attacks in Baghdad were making a mockery of Bush administration and Pentagon claims that the U.S. troop escalation in the capital had brought about "a dramatic drop in sectarian violence." The official response to this problem: the Pentagon simply quit including deaths from car bombings in its count of sectarian casualties. (It has never attempted to report civilian casualties publicly or accurately.) Since August 2003, there have been over 1,050 car bombings in Iraq. One study estimates that through June 2006 the death toll from these alone has been a staggering 78,000 Iraqis. The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of the direct American role in it was, for a long time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late as October 2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The Lancet, published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimating that, since March 2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war. The British and American governments at first dismissed the findings, claiming the research was based on faulty statistical methods -- and the American media ignored the study, played down its importance, or dismissed its figures. On March 27, 2007, however, it was revealed that the chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defense, Roy Anderson, had offered a more honest response. The methods used in the study were, he wrote, "close to best practice." Another British official described them as "a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones." Over 600,000 violent deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million -- that is, one in every 45 individuals -- amounts to a made-in-America human catastrophe. One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans' mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed "rag heads" or "hajis" as murder. The cult of silence on this subject began to slip only slightly in May 2007 when a report prepared by the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Based on anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of soldiers would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant, while a mere 40% of Marines would do so. Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is to ensure that, in the future, there are many fewer imperialist wars of choice sponsored by the United States. The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Many other aspects of imperialism and militarism are undermining America's Constitutional system. By now, for example, the privatization of military and intelligence functions is totally out of control, beyond the law, and beyond any form of Congressional oversight. It is also incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of so-called private military companies -- and the money to pay for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through government contracts. Any accounting of these funds, largely distributed to crony companies with insider connections, is chaotic at best. Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, estimates that there are 126,000 private military contractors in Iraq, more than enough to keep the war going, even if most official U.S. troops were withdrawn. "From the beginning," Scahill writes, "these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq." America's massive "military" budgets, still on the rise, are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy, given that its trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it the world's largest net debtor nation. Spending on the military establishment -- sometimes mislabeled "defense spending" -- has soared to the highest levels since World War II, exceeding the budgets of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as well as President Ronald Reagan's weapons-buying binge in the 1980s. According to calculations by the National Priorities Project, a non-profit research organization that examines the local impact of federal spending policies, military spending today consumes 40% of every tax dollar. Equally alarming, it is virtually impossible for a member of Congress or an ordinary citizen to obtain even a modest handle on the actual size of military spending or its impact on the structure and functioning of our economic system. Some $30 billion of the official Defense Department (DoD) appropriation in the current fiscal year is "black," meaning that it is allegedly going for highly classified projects. Even the open DoD budget receives only perfunctory scrutiny because members of Congress, seeking lucrative defense contracts for their districts, have mutually beneficial relationships with defense contractors and the Pentagon. President Dwight D. Eisenhower identified this phenomenon, in the draft version of his 1961 farewell address, as the "military-industrial-congressional complex." Forty-six years later, in a way even Eisenhower probably couldn't have imagined, the defense budget is beyond serious congressional oversight or control. The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department. For fiscal year 2006, Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute calculated national security outlays at almost a trillion dollars -- $934.9 billion to be exact -- broken down as follows (in billions of dollars): Department of Defense: $499.4 Department of Energy (atomic weapons): $16.6 Department of State (foreign military aid): $25.3 Department of Veterans Affairs (treatment of wounded soldiers): $69.8 Department of Homeland Security (actual defense): $69.1 Department of Justice (1/3rd for the FBI): $1.9 Department of the Treasury (military retirements): $38.5 NASA (satellite launches): $7.6 Interest on war debts, 1916-present: $206.7 Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security. This spending helps sustain the national economy and represents, essentially, a major jobs program. However, it is beginning to crowd out the civilian economy, causing stagnation in income levels. It also contributes to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to other countries. On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a series of estimates on "the economic impact of the Iraq war and higher military spending." Its figures show, among other things, that, after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of a significant rise in military spending (as we've experienced in recent years) turns negative around the sixth year. Sooner or later, higher military spending forces inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The non-military construction and manufacturing sectors experience the largest share of these losses. The report concludes, "Most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment." Imperial Liquidation? Imperialism and militarism have thus begun to imperil both the financial and social well-being of our republic. What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to rebuild the Constitutional system and subject the government once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither the replacement of one political party by the other, nor protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what's left of our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of our national decline. I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force. For the U.S., the decision to mount such a campaign of imperial liquidation may already come too late, given the vast and deeply entrenched interests of the military-industrial complex. To succeed, such an endeavor might virtually require a revolutionary mobilization of the American citizenry, one at least comparable to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire -- something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is simply never considered -- we must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have to do. Two cardinal decisions would have to be made. First, in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis. Second, domestically, we would have to reverse federal budget priorities. In the words of Noam Chomsky, a venerable critic of American imperialism: "Where spending is rising, as in military supplemental bills to conduct the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would sharply decline. Where spending is steady or declining (health, education, job training, the promotion of energy conservation and renewable energy sources, veterans benefits, funding for the UN and UN peacekeeping operations, and so on), it would sharply increase. Bush's tax cuts for people with incomes over $200,000 a year would be immediately rescinded." Such reforms would begin at once to reduce the malevolent influence of the military-industrial complex, but many other areas would require attention as well. As part of the process of de-garrisoning the planet and liquidating our empire, we would have to launch an orderly closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica. We should ultimately aim at closing all our imperialist enclaves, but in order to avoid isolationism and maintain a capacity to assist the United Nations in global peacekeeping operations, we should, for the time being, probably retain some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases. Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of Forces Agreements -- those American-dictated "agreements" that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the American military can think of. It must be established as a matter of principle and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of extraterritorial privilege. The American approach to diplomatic relations with the rest of the world would also require a major overhaul. We would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding international law. Our objective should be to strengthen the United Nations, including our respect for its majority, by working to end the Security Council veto system (and by stopping using our present right to veto). The United States needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms and munitions -- a lethal trade whose management should be placed under UN supervision. We should encourage the UN to begin outlawing weapons like land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted-uranium ammunition that play particularly long-term havoc with civilian populations. As part of an attempt to right the diplomatic balance, we should take some obvious steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real solution to that disastrous situation. Our goal should be a return to leading by example -- and by sound arguments -- rather than by continual resort to unilateral armed force and repeated foreign military interventions. In terms of the organization of the executive branch, we need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition, and other forms of clandestine activity. The president should be deprived of his power to order these types of operations except with the explicit advice and consent of the Senate. The CIA should basically devote itself to the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence. We should eliminate as much secrecy as possible so that neither the CIA, nor any other comparable organization ever again becomes the president's private army. In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our dependence on our trading partners, the U.S. must cap its trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must begin to guide its domestic market in accordance with a national industrial policy, just as the leading economies of the world (particularly the Japanese and Chinese ones) do as a matter of routine. Even though it may involve trampling on the vested interests of American university economics departments, there is simply no excuse for a continued reliance on an outdated doctrine of "free trade." Normally, a proposed list of reforms like this would simply be rejected as utopian. I understand this reaction. I do want to stress, however, that failure to undertake such reforms would mean condemning the United States to the fate that befell the Roman Republic and all other empires since then. That is why I gave my book Nemesis the subtitle "The Last Days of the American Republic." When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase "evil empire," he was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed with him that the USSR needed to be contained and checkmated. But today it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will "win" or -- even more improbably -- "follow us home." I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on preventive war. I also believe that unless we follow this path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter much what else we lose. In the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Chalmers Johnson is the author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). It is the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy. Copyright 2007 Chalmers Johnson

Setting the Stage for Turmoil in Caracas Washington’s New Imperial Strategy In Venezuela By Chris Carlson 05/15/07 "Venezuel Analysis" -- - First used in Serbia in 2000, Washington has now perfected a new imperial strategy to maintain their supremacy around the globe. Whereas military invasions and installing dictatorships have traditionally been the way to control foreign populations and keep them out of the way of business, the U.S. government has now developed a new strategy that is not so messy or brutal, and much more sleek; so sleek, in fact, that it’s almost invisible. It was so invisible in Serbia that no one seemed to notice in 2000 when a regime was toppled, the country was opened to massive privatization, and huge public-sector industries, businesses, and natural resources fell into the hands of U.S. and multinational corporations. Likewise, few have noticed as countries in the former Soviet-bloc have recently been victims of the same strategy, with the exact same results. Nations that do not give in to the demands of the empire and the expansion of global capitalism are targeted by an undercover, well-designed plan to change the political situation in the country, and open it up to corporate investors. U.S.-supported groups inside the country overthrow the president, making it seem like there is no outside intervention. And now, Washington has turned toward its new biggest threat: Latin America, and more specifically, Venezuela. The Rise of the New World Order During the second half of the twentieth century, capitalists in the first world began to saturate domestic opportunities for investment and growth. Big business reached a point where possibilities for expansion within national borders were mostly exhausted, and the only option for growth was to look for new opportunities abroad. Growing corporate conglomerates looked to expand their operations throughout the world, investing, privatizing, and buying up everything they could get their hands on. National capital was looking to go international, and by the end of the century, capitalism had become truly global. "Get big, or get eaten," was their new philosophy, and they decided to get big by eating whole nations. With the help of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, economies everywhere were opened up to privatization. The phone systems, electrical grids, water systems, and natural resources were bought up by wealthy capitalists in countries around the world. Free-market capitalism now ruled the day; a paradise for international capital as the world’s wealth became more and more concentrated in their hands. [1] Some nations, however, were determined to not be eaten. Privatization was an unpopular idea among populations who had developed the crazy idea that their natural resources belonged to them, and not foreign corporations. Resistance developed in several areas of the world, and some nations would not consent to the logic of global capitalism. Washington, however, was determined to open the world up to corporate expansion. They would oblige those countries that didn’t comply, either by force or by cunning. The Case of Yugoslavia: A Model for Regime Change It was in Yugoslavia, and more specifically, in Serbia, where Washington’s new strategy would really take shape for the first time. From here they would carry it on to other countries in an attempt to repeat the tremendous success of the Serbian experience. And it’s not hard to see why. After the toppling of the Milosevic regime allowed for mass privatization, all that remained of the formerly socialist country, including some of Europe’s largest reserves of natural resources, soon fell into the hands of U.S. and international investors. The strategy is a sophisticated one. With the intention of ousting an undesirable regime, the U.S. government dedicates itself to strengthening and uniting opposition to the government. This includes funding opposition political parties, and creating non-governmental organizations dedicated to toppling the regime in power. On top of this, the U.S. might contract political consultants and polling agencies to help their favored candidate win at the ballot box. But in the event they cannot win the election, fake polls cast doubt on the official electoral results, and the opposition claims fraud. Massive protests and media attention put pressure on the regime to step down, or to give in to opposition demands. [2] As implausible as it might sound, it was exactly this strategy that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. After the war in Kosovo and NATO bombing had failed to produce regime change, the United States worked to strengthen Milosevic’s internal opponents by uniting them behind one candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, and pumping about $40 million into his election campaign. [3] U.S.-funded NGO’s and electoral consultants helped create a propaganda campaign surrounding the elections, and worked behind the scenes to help organize mass resistance to the Milosevic regime. [4] U.S.-trained “election helpers” were deployed around the country on election day to monitor results. The U.S. even provided young activists with thousands of cans of spray paint and campaign stickers to cover the country with anti-Milosevic slogans. [5] According to official results of the first round elections neither candidate had won a majority of the vote, and so it would require a second round run-off. But U.S. consultants published their own “exit polls” giving Kostunica a huge victory and Milosevic refused to recognize them. [6] The opposition claimed fraud and U.S.-backed groups staged acts of non-violent resistance to put pressure on the government. Armed groups stormed the Federal Assembly and the state television headquarters. [7] Massive protests and rebellion forced Milosevic to step down. There would be no second round election, and Washington’s candidate Vojislav Kostunica took power. The strategy had worked. But why had the U.S. targeted Serbia, and, even more specifically, the small province of Kosovo? The answer goes back to the Reagan administration and a 1984 secret document on “US Policy towards Yugoslavia.” A censored version was revealed in 1990 advocating “expanded efforts to promote a ‘quiet revolution’ to overthrow Communist government and parties.” [8] The US government had worked on dismantling and dividing the socialist Yugoslavia for years, supporting any and all independence movements within the individual provinces, including the 1999 military intervention to help the province of Kosovo break away. What was once a relative economic success under the famous Josip Tito, the socialist economy, based on socially-owned, worker-controlled companies, did not allow for foreign investment or US capital. This was a mortal sin in modern global capitalism. As Michael Parenti put it: “Yugoslavia was the only country in Eastern Europe that would not dismantle its welfare state and public sector economy. It was the only one that did not beg for entry into NATO. It was - and what's left of it, still is - c*****ng an independent course not in keeping with the New World Order.” [9] Breaking up the country into smaller, dependent states and destroying their public-sector economy was the ultimate goal, and Milosevic, an admirer of socialist Tito, was the only thing standing in their way. The rewards for their work were substantial. Once Milosevic was gone, one of the first actions taken by the new government was the to repeal the 1997 privatization law and allow 70% of a company to be sold to foreign investors. [10] In 2004 the UN Mission in Kosovo announced the privatization of 500 enterprises, and U.S. corporations came out the big winners. Phillip Morris bought up a $580 million tobacco factory, U.S. Steel got a $250 million deal on a steel producer, Coca-Cola grabbed a bottled water producer for $21 million, and the list goes on. [11] In addition, western investors now had access to what the New York Times called the “war’s glittering prize,” the second largest coal reserves in Europe and large reserves of lead, zinc, gold, silver, and, even petroleum. [12] And the real gem was located in the province of Kosovo; the huge Trepca mine complex, valued at over $5 billion, now open to the highest bidder. [13] The success of the strategy in Serbia was an important lesson for the Washington policy makers. They would repeat it several more times throughout Eastern Europe in places like Georgia (2003), the Ukraine (2004) Kyrgyzstan (2005), and Belarus (unsuccessfully in 2001). In what became known as the “Color Revolutions,” each U.S.-aided movement would remove a regime in exchange for one more favorable to the “free-market” policies promoted by Washington. [14] The preferred strategy for regime change became this new sort of non-violent resistance, and now the empire turned its gaze on South America, where a new threat to global capitalism had suddenly emerged. The Problem of Venezuela If the Trepca mine in Kosovo was the jackpot of the Serbian intervention, in Venezuela it is the state-owned oil company, PDVSA. Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world, possibly passing Saudi Arabia in total reserves if all heavy crude deposits are included. And it is PDVSA that dominates in Venezuela with a total monopoly over the nation’s oil resources. With a production capacity of 4 billion barrels per day, and a $65 billion yearly revenue, the company also possesses a network of more than 15 thousand gas stations in the United States including several refineries in both the U.S. and Europe making it the second largest company in all of Latin America. [15] You can be sure that corporate investors would love to get their hands on the PDVSA company, along with other public sector companies in Venezuela. In fact, they were doing just that throughout the 1990’s. By 1998, multinational corporations had already bought up the national phone company, the largest electricity company, and PDVSA was going through what they called an “opening” to international capital; a prettier way of saying privatization. [16] But that same year, Hugo Chavez was elected president on an anti-imperialist platform, and the auctioning-off of Venezuela came to an abrupt halt. In fact, Hugo Chavez has become a real problem for the corporate imperialists and their servants in Washington. Not only has he stopped privatization, but he is reversing it by re-nationalizing all that was once privatized. The privatization of the state oil company is now prohibited by law, and his government has taken complete control of it, using it to finance the country’s development. But what is even more worrying for Washington and their corporate sponsors is how this trend is spreading through Latin America. The Chavez government has built close ties to many of his neighbors, and many are following in his footsteps. Countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are taking greater control of their huge gas and oil reserves, leaving less room for the huge corporations that hoped to one day own them. And so, just as they did in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and others, Washington has deployed its forces in Venezuela with the intention of getting rid of the Chavez menace. After trying many things over the years including a short-lived coup, electoral manipulation, and mass protests, Washington has not been able to topple the popular leader. But they haven’t given up. To the contrary, they’ve actually just continued to increase their level of involvement. Repeating the East European experience in Venezuela The new imperial strategy includes something called “American Corners.” These “corners” are small offices set up by Washington throughout the target country that basically serve as mini-embassies. It is not completely clear what exactly these “corners” do, but inside you will find an array of information about the United States, including study abroad opportunities, English classes, and pro-U.S. propaganda. On top of this, the mini-embassies also organize events, trainings, and lectures for young students. Interestingly, they seem to be very abundant in countries that Washington seeks to destabilize. The former Yugoslavian countries have a total of 22 American Corners, including 7 in Serbia. The Ukraine has 24, Belarus 11, Russia 30, even Iraq, with 11. By far the highest concentration of the “corners” is in Eastern Europe, where Washington has focused its destabilization efforts in recent years. [17] There are at least 4 “American Corners” in Venezuela, the most for any Latin American country, and the U.S. also finances literally hundreds of organizations throughout the country to the tune of more than $5 million a year. [18] Together, these U.S.-funded organizations are working to implant the Eastern European experience in Venezuela. As reported by Reuters, the Venezuelan opposition is already learning the Serbian tactics to overthrow a regime from a retired U.S. army colonel named Robert Helvey. “Helvey, who has taught young activists in Myanmar and Serbian students who helped topple the former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, is giving courses on non-violent opposition tactics this week at an east Caracas university,” said the article. “Neither Helvey nor the organizers of the Caracas seminar would give details of exactly what opposition tactics were being taught. But in his work in Serbia before Milosevic’s fall, Helvey briefed students on ways to organize a strike and on how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime,” reported Reuters. [19] And more recently, in the university city of Mérida, history professor from Texas, Neil Foley, hosted an event sponsored by the U.S. embassy and the Venezuelan-American Center (Cevam), not an official “American Corner” but serving the same purpose. Foley, who has also spoken in various “American Corners” in Serbia, gave speeches in both Bolivia and Venezuela on “American values.” [20] I attended one of Foley’s speeches and, as expected, it was a complete pro-U.S. propaganda campaign imposed upon the university students. The professor gave exactly the message that the U.S. Embassy had paid him to give, speaking wonders about American society and “American democracy.” According to Foley, the United States solves all of its problems by tolerance for others and an all-inclusive “dialogue,” between opposing parties. And sending a clear hint to the Venezuelan students, Foley implied that any government that does not live up to these standards “must be overthrown.” [21] All of these efforts come together into a nationwide campaign to unite, strengthen, and mobilize opposition to the democratically elected Chavez government. The ultimate goal, of course, is to destabilize the government by organizing and directing opposition groups to commit acts of peaceful resistance and mass protests. Just like they did in 2002, when the Venezuelan opposition groups staged massive protests that turned violent, and eventually led to the temporary overthrow of the Chavez government, the U.S.-financed campaign seeks to destabilize the government in any way they can, perhaps provoking violence for which they will later blame the government. [22] Now nearly every element of the strategy used in Serbia and other Eastern European countries has been implemented in Venezuela as Washington directs and controls the campaign of the Venezuelan opposition. The same “electoral consultants” that were used in Serbia, the Washington-based Penn, Schoen and Berland, have also been used in Venezuela to publish fake exit polls in an effort to cast doubt on Venezuelan elections. This strategy of electoral manipulation was used during the 2004 recall referendum when the U.S.-funded NGO Sumate and the Penn, Schoen and Berland firm released false exit polls claiming that Chavez had lost the referendum. They did the same thing before the 2006 elections, claiming that Chavez’ opponent “clearly has the momentum.” [23] Both in 2004 and 2006 the fake polls would give credence to the opposition’s claims of fraud with the hope of producing massive protests against the government. The strategy mostly failed, but it did cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Chavez government and weakened its image internationally. The destabilization attempts are taking form in a concrete way in the coming weeks in the form of huge anti-government protests in Caracas to reject the government’s actions against the private TV channel RCTV. Opposition groups have organized around the government decision, claiming that it steps on their “freedom of expression,” and have organized a series of large protests in the capital leading up to a massive march on May 27th, the day RCTV’s broadcast license expires. All the private media have played a role in advertising and calling on viewers to attend the march to protest against the government. All expectations are that there will be a huge turnout by both pro-government and anti-government groups, and the government has already warned of the possibility that violence could be used during the march in an attempt to blame the government and destabilize the regime. In the last few days, government intelligence found 5 sniper rifles in the hands of opposition groups as well as 144 Molotov cocktails in what appears to be evidence that there are plans for some sort of violence. [24] [25] It was exactly this kind of protest in 2002 that led to dozens of deaths, hundreds wounded, and the temporary overthrow of the Chavez government. Private media channels like RCTV manipulated video footage to blame deaths on Chavez supporters, and condemned the government for human rights abuses. So this time government officials have called on pro-government activists to monitor the opposition protests with photos and video on May 27th and May 28th in order to avoid a situation similar to the 2002 coup. If it had not been for huge pro-government protests after Chavez had been overthrown in 2002, Washington’s strategy might have already gotten rid of the popular president. But the strategy failed, and so the empire keeps trying. Just as they did in the Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia and others, the strategy requires getting a large number of people into the streets to protest against the government. Regardless of whether the government is popularly-supported or not, or democratically-elected or not, the opposition groups attempt to impose their will on the government by putting on the pressure. What most protesters probably do not know is that they are simply pawns in a larger strategy to open up the world to “free-market” global capitalism and corporate-dominated privatizations. While huge multinational corporations carve up the world among themselves, small nations like Serbia and Venezuela are simply unfortunate obstacles to their objectives. In the worldwide scramble to see who will get bigger, and who will get eaten, the fact that some countries would prefer not to be eaten simply doesn’t matter to the bureaucrats in Washington. ______________ 1. To read more about how the World Bank and IMF force privatization on poor countries, Third World Traveler has a large section devoted to the topic. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/IMF_WB/IMF_WB.html 2. Michael Barker has a 4 part series of articles on Znet that explain this strategy in further detail. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10987 3. Michael A. Cohen and Maria Figueroa Küpçü, Privatizing Foreign Policy, World Policy Journal, Volume xXII, No 3, Fall 2005 http://worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj05-3/cohen.html 4. Chulia, Sreeram. Democratisation, Colour Revolutions and the Role of the NGO’s: Catalysts or Saboteurs?, Global Research, December 25, 2005, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20051225&articleId=1638 5. Michael Dobbs, ‘US advice guided Milosevic opposition: political consultants helped Yugoslav opposition topple authoritarian leader’, The Washington Post, 11 December 2000, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A18395-2000Dec3¬Found=true 6. Ian Traynor explains how opposition “exit polls” have been strategically used to weaken or overthrow regimes in Eastern Europe in his November 2004 article in The Guardian. “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html 7. Chris Marsden, “How the West organised Milosevic's downfall,” World Socialist Web Site, 13 October 2000, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/oct2000/yugo-o13_prn.shtml 8. Finley, Brooke. “Remembering Yugoslavia: Managed News and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” from the book Censored 2005, Project Censored, Seven Stories Press, 2004. 9. Michael Parenti, The Media and Their Atrocities, You Are Being Lied To, pg. 53 , The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2001 10. Neil Clark, “The Spoils of Another War – NATO’s Kosovo Privatizations,” Znet, September 21, 2004, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6275 11. Elise Hugus, “Eight Years After NATO’s “Humanitarian War” – Serbia’s new “third way”, Z Magazine, April 2007, Volume 20 Number 4, http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Apr2007/hugus0407.html 12. Hedges, C., "Kosovo War's Glittering Prize Rests Underground," New York Times, 08/08/98 13. Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonizing Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Global Research February 19, 2002, Covert Action Quarterly, Spring 1996-06-18, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MIC20020219&articleId=370 14. Jonathan Mowat, “Coup d’État in Disguise: Washingtons’s New World Order “Democratization” Template,” Global Research, February 9, 2005, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOW502A.html 15. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petróleos_de_Venezuela 16. Steve Ellner, The Politics of Privatization, NACLA Report on the Americas, 30 April 1998, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42/170.html 17. http://veszprem.americancorner.hu/htmls/american_corners_worldwide1.html 18. Jim McIlroy & Coral Wynter, “Eva Golinger: Washington's 'three fronts of attack' on Venezuela,” Green Left Weekly, 17 November 2006, http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/691/35882 19. Pascal Fletcher, ”US democracy expert teaches Venezuelan opposition,” Reuters, April 30, 2003, http://www.burmalibrary.org/TinKyi/archives/2003-05/msg00000.html 20. On the web page of the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia it shows that Neil Foley gave a speech in La Paz, Bolivia for “U.S. Culture Week” the week before he was in Venezuela. http://www.megalink.com/USEMBLAPAZ/english/Pressrel2007En/0404-USweek-eng.pdf 21. From my personal notes of Mr. Foley’s speech at the University of the Andes in Merida, Venezuela on April 16, 2007 22. For the best, most detailed, account in English of the 2002 coup, read Gregory Wilpert’s recent article, “The 47-Hour Coup That Changed Everything,” www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=2018 23. See my previous article “Coup d’État in Venezuela: Made in the U.S.A. – The U.S.-designed Plan to Overthrow Hugo Chavez in the Days Following the Election,” Venezuelanalysis.com, November 22, 2006 www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1884 24. President Chavez announced that his intelligence had infiltrated opposition groups and found a man belonging to an opposition group with 5 sniper rifles with silencers and scopes. “Chávez anuncia incautación armas vinculadas a complot en su contra,” Milenio.com, May 6th, 2007, http://www.milenio.com/index.php/2007/05/05/65937/ 25. Police in Los Teques, near Caracas, found 144 Molotov cocktails all ready to be used to “take them out to the street next week with the intention of disturbing the public order and for direct confrontation with authorities,” Prensa Latina, May 9, 2007, http://www.prensalatina.com.mx/article.asp?ID=%7BEEAA37C7-DE27-48EB-A23B-CDC19EAD2ADA%7D)

Khalaf bro. Let us go back to your initial questions: "1. Only Allah is the Knower of the AL-GHAIB-the unseen and knows the intentions of people and knows who will enter jannah and who will enter Nar (the unseen). On what authority have ulma in this case say one side will enter jannah, the other will be in nar? Considering these verses from the Quran: Say: "No one in the heavens and the earth knows the unseen but Allah; and they do not know when they shall be raised." [27:65] Which brings me to my next question, because i hear there are two clear cut sides to the conflict, true believers vs. munafiqeen. 2. Aiit explain to me how the ICU are haaq ku dirir islamically, and by islamically can only be when its on the method of prophethood-purely for the sake of Allah Most Great Alone which would divide the people into two camps that are clear cut. Lets rewind the show back to the orgins of the ICU, tell me how they followed the method of prophethood scw since their humble beginnings in xamar to kismaayo and beyond?" My Response: Bismillah, wa bihi nastaciin. Akhii A Good question is half the answer, and your two questions are humming with deep aqeedah and political assumptions, so to unearth the hidden assumptions in your questions, allow me to put it in my own words to understand you well, once you acknowledge the assunptions, or deny, my detailed point for a point answer will follow inshAllah. Your Assumptions As I Understand: a. In Islam, anyone who says laa ilaah illaa Allah is Muslim, actions or words contrary to islam do not make a person Kafir as long as his Niyah is good, which Allah only can see, thus the two groups are the same. further, Both sides ( TFG and ICU ) remain Muslims no matter of the actions they commit, allegiances to non Muslim entities, because we go to jannah on our intentions alone and not our actions, and Allah alone knows our actions, once a Muslim, allways a Muslim, no one can declare any Somali to be kaafir as long as he says la ilaaha illaa Allah even if all of his actions are not different than the kuffar in everyway. b. Living and accepting a human made law in our lives does not contradict with our faith, as long as we pray and read Quraan. c. Establishment of Sharia law is not mandatory, and if established or even attempted, protecting it by joining a resistance movement is not an Islamic duty if it can make Fitnah and divide the "Muslims". d. The Quraan mentioned the qualities of a Munafiq, but pointing a finger at a warlord as a Munafiq if he fits the description of Munafiq can make Fitnah ( Because every clan has its own Doofaar ), thus accepting the TFG could have been better and more peaceful, most important thing is peace, even if being ruled by kuffaar ( Through TFG) who declared that they can not tolerate to see Sharia law to spread into other sleeping Somali areas they presently colonize ( Where Americans are planning to dig oil ). e. TFG and ICU Both sides are dedicated to estblish Islam as the law of the land. Because the Islamic Democracy system presented by the TFG is no different than the Islamic Sharia presented by ICU since its not 100% according to the Sunnah of the Prophet SAWS, thus the two systems are the same. f. Both sides are allies to Ethiopia and Eritrea respectively, Ethiopia and Eritea are equally guilty in their historic enemity to Somalia, their subjugation of our peoples, If ICU were sincere, they would not have sought help from Eritrea who is against our Somali interest as Ethiopia, thus the TFG and the ICU are the same. g. The ICU is wrong because, look, all other regions are peaceful, and if they have accepted Ethiopian and American subjugation, they would've also lived peaceful just like Somaliland and Puntland. Beause as long as we go to the mosques to pray, as long as we are peaceful in our regions, we are following the Sunnah of our Prophet SAWS because fighting to stop foreign domination can make fitna in which many people die, so its wiser not to make the Ethiopi and and the Americans unhappy by declaring Sharia and seeking freedom from subjugation. h. The ICU is not better than the TFG, they are not closer to Islam than the TFG, and in Islam if two "Muslims" dispute, we do not have to go back to the Quraan and the Sunnah to find a solution, as the Prophet SAWS instructed, by going back to the Ulima, we go back to the media, BBC, etc. because the Ulima from Puntland to Kismaio who say that the TFG are Murtadd for their actions against Islam are terribly wrong, they can never be right. Please let me know if you agree with any of the above assumptions before I can post a formal answer to your above questions: Peace Be Upon Those Who Follow Allah's Guidance Nur

Biixi walaal. Ereygaga doodda waa in marka hore aan isla garanno ujeddadisa ( Definition) si aan u caddeyno wexey diinta ka qabto. Af-Somaliga, kalimadda doodda macnaheedu waxaan u fahamsanahay iney tahay: ( Wada hadal la is weydaarsanayo aragti kala duwan oo ku saabsan arrin taabaneysa nolosha ama waxa ay daneeynayaan kuwa doodaya si loo helo aragti guud oo kulmisa kulligood) Macnahaaas hadduu yahay kaad ula jeeddo DOOD, Islaanku wuu banneeyay, taasna rag iyo dumar wey u siman yihiin, Suuradda kaliyah ee la magac baxday DOOD ( Mujaadila/Mujaadala) wexey ku soo degtay Khawla Bint Xakiim/Thaclaba/ Khweilid, iyo ninkeeda Aws Bin Saamit Al Ansaari oo ( La Dhashay Cubaadah Bin Saamit) oo ka dooday Xukunka Dhihaarka ( ninkii xaaskiisa ku dhaha waxaad iga tahay sida hooyaday (dhahrigeeda) oo xalaal iima tahid) oo ah nooc dalaaq ah ama kala tagid ( separation). Dooddu sidaa awgeed wey sugnaatay in haweenku doodi karaan, haba ahaatee ninkeeda meeshaanee. Waxaa kaloo sugnaatay iney la doodi karaan rag kale, sida ay haweeney saxaabiyad ah ula doodday Cumar Bin Khattaab. Sida ka soo aroortay siiradana haweenka codkooda waa la maqli jirey xuquuqdoodana ayagaa u doodi jirey ceebna loo ma raki jirin, khulafadana haweenka wey dhageysan jireen taladoodana wey qaadan jireen, gaar ahaan Cumar talada askarta jihaadka ku maqan in afar bilood ayan ka badan intay reerkooda ka maqan yihiin waxaa laheyd inanta Cumar. Cumar Bin Khattab mar uu u gar qaadayay haweeney ninkeeda ka warrantay, oo u sheegtay Cumar Bin Khattaab, wexey tiri: "Ninkeyga, Habeenkii oo dhan salaad buu u taagan yahay, maalin walbana waa soomaa" Cumar asagoo la dhacsan wanaagga ninkeed ay ka sheegtay buu yiri "wanaag badanaa ninkaaga", laakin saxaabi aan illowsanahay magaciisa oo ag fadhiyay ayaa u fasiray Cumar oo yiri haweentu ninkeeda wey ka eed sheeganyesaa, Cumar wuu fahmay eeddaa, ninkeeda waxaa la amray inuu xaqeeda siiyo, saxaabigiina waxaa laga dhigay waali meel ku taal Shaam. Meel fagaaro ah, haweenta Muslimka ah wey ka doodi kartaa haddey danteedaa ama danta diinta iyo ummadda u doodeyso, ( Sidii Cumar ay haweeney ula doodday oo uu qirtay, " Haweentu waa quman tahay, Cumarna waa gafay talada" Haweentaasna ajar badan bey ku heleysaa doodda wanaagsan u lagu guuleysto. Haddey u doodeyso waxaan Islaamka dan u aheyn, ama ayada fitno u keeni kara ama ragga , oo maa laa yacni ahna, waa laga reebay, taasna wexey soo galeysaa " Falaa takhdacna fil qowl" Hadalka carrab laalaadiska ah uu ragga qalbiga ka bukka ay haweenta qalad ka fahmi karaan" Ereyga DOODDA macnaha Afcarabiga u dhow waa: 1. Xiwaar ( Wa huwa yuxaawiruhu) 2. Mujaadala ( Tujaadilu fii zawjihaa) 3. Jidaal ( Laa jidaala fil xajj) sidoo kale Miraa ( Miraa'an dhaahiraa) 4. Khitaab ( Wa cazzanii fil khitaab) Dooddu wey ka duwan tahay MURAN, midda dambe macne xun bey siddaa oo ah hadal badan oon dan lagu gaareyn wanaag. Sidaasoo kale Jidaal wuxuu la macneyahay marna MURAN, marna DOOD, wexeyna ku xiran tahay hadba hadalka Quraanka meeshuu ku biyo shubanayo. Haweenka waxaa kale oo u bannaan iney la doodaan ahlul kitaabka, rag iyo dumarba, sida uu Allah oo faraya Muminiinta la doodaya ahlul Kitaabka wuxuu Quraanka nagu waaniyey inaan Ahlul kitaabka kula doodna hadba sida fiican oo natiiji fiican laga filayo ( Bilatii hiya axsan) Gud ahaan, Doodda haweenka wey u bannaan tahay, Xaaladaha: 1. la is hor joogo ( Haddey asturan tahay, asturka sharciga, nafteeda u baqeyn, ragna ayan fitneyneyn) ama TV iyo Radio Pal Talk etc. 2. Waxa laga doodayana ay tahay wax ay kaalin ( Role)fiican ka qaadan karto ( Sida arrimaha khuseeya carruurta, nolosha ijtimaaciga ah iwm. ooy ragga ka taqaanno). 3. Meesha lagu wada doodayoo ayan aheyn khalwo ( iyoda iyo nin qudha ) 4. Niyaddeedana ay khaalis Allah u tahay, ooyan dan kale leheyn. Wallaahu Aclam Nur

“The Color of Blood, the Color of Resistance, the Color of Iraq.” By Mike Whitney “If I ever get married again…..I don't want any of this white dress business. I shall wear red. Bright red. The color of blood, the color of roaring, erupting volcanoes, the color of a dying sun, the color of passion, the color of Resistance...The color of Iraq”. Layla Anwar; Arab Woman Blues, “A Bed of Roses, A Bed of Thorns” 05/14/07 "ICH" -- -- -I wonder what goes through Cheney’s mind when he visits Baghdad. Does he ever look out the window of his armor-plated limmo and see the wasteland he’s created---the burned out buildings, the pock-marked streets, the wretched orphans sorting through the garbage for something to eat? Al Arabiya news says that there may be as many as 100,000 orphans in Baghdad now. These are Cheney’s kids, aren’t they--the Vice President’s gift to the “New Middle East”? The next generation of terrorists? What a horrible legacy. What a horrible man. Iraq is in a shambles and it’s mostly Cheney’s doing. He was the chief architect of invasion. It was Cheney who convinced his buddies in the banking and oil industries that Iraq would be “easy pickins”. And, it was Cheney who figured out that the American people could be duped into attacking a defenseless nation. And he was right. For 6 years, Cheney has worked the levers behind the scenes to keep the American people in a constant state of fear. That gave him the time to move his armies into place and transform the government into a “one party” police state. For the most part, things have gone smoothly—the criminal activities of the state have been concealed behind the smokescreen of the “war on terror”, the biggest public relations swindle in history. Nevertheless, the overall plan worked like a charm. The public ate it up, the congress caved in, and the United Nations looked the other way. Now, Iraq is in tatters---the schools are closed, the children are malnourished and traumatized, unemployment is soaring, the lights are out, the water is toxic, and every day another 35 or 40 civilians are blown to bits in a conflict that seemingly has no end. Every part of Cheney’s plan has failed. Four years after “Mission Accomplished”, the “second most powerful man on earth” still has to slink into Iraq under the cover of darkness and be quickly whisked off to the safety of the Green Zone by a security-entourage the size of a small army. There’s no “progress” in Iraq and there’s no security. The US military is trying to impose its will on a civilian population through force of arms and the Iraqis are flatly refusing. America is hated in Iraq and that won’t change. That’s why Cheney has to strap on a Kevlar vest and hunker down in the Green Zone whenever he comes to town. Americans are not welcome. Cheney’s “surprise” visit comes just one week after Condi Rice passed through the region trying to drum up support for an Iraqi security plan. What a joke. Iraqis won’t have security until US troops are withdrawn and the political situation sorts itself out. That’ll take years if not decades. The (real) purpose of Condi’s mission was to open a dialogue with Syria and Iran to see if they’d help to stabilize Iraq. Up to now, the Bush team has rejected the Baker Commission’s advice to talk to the two countries. But that’s all changed now. Bush has put aside his ego long enough to address the “grave and deteriorating” situation on the ground and see what can be salvaged of the mission. Rice managed to corner the Syrian Foreign Minister and appears to have made some progress diplomatically. But she got nowhere with Iran. In fact, Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki used the conference at Sharm al-Sheik to further humiliate the United States by blasting American foreign policy and the Bush administration’s flaunting of international law. Mottaki’s speech was another black-eye for America. But that makes no difference. What’s important is that the administration is trying to talk directly with its "enemies". That gives us some reason to hope. But it also gives us some idea of how badly the war is going. After all, if Bush is talking to Syria, the situation must be really desperate. Perhaps, they’re beginning to see that--as Harry Reid said— “the war is lost.” In his brief stay, Cheney never poked his nose beyond the 18 inch cement walls of the Green Zone. If he had, he might have seen “the hell that is Iraq”. As Patrick Cockburn said in his latest article, “A Small War Guaranteed to Damage a Superpower”: “The extent of the military failure over the previous three-and-a-half years is extraordinary. The foreign media never quite made clear how little territory the U.S. and the Iraqi army fully controlled – even in the heart of Baghdad.” Cockburn makes an important point that’s normally papered-over in the media--- that after 4 years the US still doesn’t control ANY ground beyond the Green Zone. And, now, even the Green Zone is increasingly coming under fire. Cockburn also adds this: “America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S. war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas.” How true. Big military, but nothing to show for it. Just a long, protracted bloodbath and the looming prospect of defeat. Cheney’s plan for a “New American Century” depends heavily on the $500 billion US war machine. But the military has flopped in Iraq. Bombs don’t produce political solutions and the use of excessive force has only alienated the public and strengthened the resistance. The army is ineffective in urban warfare. Its advantages in weaponry and firepower are lost in an environment where guerillas can strike at will and then vanish without a trace. Still, Cheney and Company “soldier-on” impervious to the lessons of the last 4 years and unwilling to change their basic strategy. If the definition of insanity is: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results---then, the Vice President should be institutionalized. The occupation has just been one dismal blunder after the other; like Abu Ghraib and Falluja. Both suggest the moral superiority of the resistance, and both have been used to enlist new recruits. Falluja was a particularly ****** error. The siege was an extension of the same muddled thinking that produced “Shock and Awe”. The Bush Team appeared to believe that Iraqi fighters would cower at the first sign of American firepower and simply throw down their weapons. What nonsense. Instead, it rallied the resistance and intensified the fighting. Fulluja was attacked on November 8, 2004 in Operation Phantom Fury. The city of 300,000 was surrounded by concertina wire and a 6 ft high mound of dirt. The townspeople were forced to evacuate without food, water or shelter. Many still haven’t returned to their homes three years later. The city was leveled. The Dresden-type bombing continued week after week---hospitals, schools and mosques were destroyed, civilians who left their homes for food or water were shot by snipers, bodies were left to rot on the streets, and corpses were deposited in makeshift graves in the local soccer field. From beginning to end, Falluja was a war crime---illegal incendiary bombs and other “unidentified” chemical ordinance was dropped on civilians. The BBC reported that 65 to 70% of the city was in ruins. Falluja was a turning point in Cheney’s war. It should be regarded as the milestone for when the war was lost. The resistance has steadily grown in strength ever since. The Iraqis now understand that there can be no negotiations with people who are willing to flatten entire cities to achieve their imperial ambitions. To fully understand what happened in Falluja we refer to a statement made by Vietnamese General Tran Quang Co who met with ex-Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara in the 1990s. Co was trying to explain to MacNamara when exactly he knew that America would lose the war in Vietnam. He said: “When the US bombed the North and brought its troops into the South, well, of course, to us these were very negative moves. However, with regard to Vietnam, US aggression did have its positive use. Never before did the people of Vietnam, from top to bottom, unite as they did during the years that the US was bombing us. Never before had Chairman Ho Chi Minh’s appeal---that there is nothing more precious than freedom and independence—go straight to the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people as at the end of 1966” Falluja united the Iraqis against American occupation. This fact is evident in all the surveys that have been conducted since the time of the siege. The overwhelming majority of Shiites and Sunnis now want the US to leave. Public support for the resistance continues to mushroom. The neocon plan to “teach the Iraqis a lesson” by creating a humanitarian catastrophe has backfired spectacularly. After Falluja, a political solution is no longer possible. The US must either “pacify” the population by increasing the level of violence or withdrawal. The middle ground has been cut away. The War Drags On Cheney’s trip coincides with a number of stories that are being suppressed in the western media. Currently, the Iraqi city of Samarra is under siege—a cordon surrounds the city, the entrances have been blocked and food, water and medical supplies have been cut off. Similar to Falluja, the media has been banned and the city’s people are left to left to survive as prisoners in there own country. Also, there are reports that the US is building another Guantanamo-type facility in southern Iraq in Dhi-Qar province. It’s clear that the crimes perpetrated at Abu Ghraib have not deterred the authors of the war from continuing the brutalizing of Iraqi prisoners. Also, author and activist Sarah Meyer has also reproduced a map showing the location of permanent” US bases in Iraq---all of them conveniently located in the main oil fields. (“The Iraq Oil Crunch: Index Timeline”) It’s a useful primer for those who care to grasp the real objectives of the war. There’s also a new report from the child’s advocacy group Save the Children that confirming that “The infant mortality rate in Iraq has increased by a shocking 150 percent since 1990—the highest such increase recorded for any country in the world…According to the report, one in eight Iraqi children—122,000 in all—died before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of these deaths were recorded among new-born infants, with pneumonia and diarrhea claiming the greatest toll among Iraqi babies”. Save the Children’s report comes on the heels of earlier surveys which show that Baghdad orphanages are teeming with 100,000 orphans of the conflict most of whom are severely traumatized by the increasing levels of violence. Finally, there’s the tragic story of the young Marine who was involved in the massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha---and who expressed his rage by urinating on their corpses as they lay in a pool of blood on the street. This is the “democracy” Cheney has brought to Iraq. In an impromptu press conference, Cheney casually dismissed the suffering of the Iraqi people by saying that Baghdad is still “a dangerous place”. This is about as close to an admission of guilt as the V.P. will ever get. That’s why he adroitly shifted the topic to the failings of the al-Maliki government--America’s new stooge in Baghdad. Al Maliki has become the convenient scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong in Iraq. After his short visit to Baghdad; Cheney zoomed off to the Gulf where he delivered a predictably threatening speech on board the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John C. Stennis. He said: With two carrier strike groups in the gulf, we’re sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike. We’ll keep the sea lanes open. We’ll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We’ll disrupt attacks on our own forces. We’ll continue bringing relief to those who suffer, and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region." Cheney’s fiery rhetoric was mainly intended to soothe the Saudi Royal family, which are increasingly nervous about the rise of a Shiite-dominated Middle East with Iran as the de facto superpower. Still, Cheney’s shameless saber rattling cannot be entirely ignored. There are signs that the more-hawkish members of the administration are still considering an unprovoked attack on Iran. Such an attack would ensure that the entire region would be consumed in a decades-long conflagration. The administration has upset the fragile balance of power in the region by toppling the largely secular Sunni regime in Baghdad. The unintended consequence of this is that Islamic fundamentalism is progressively on the rise and bound to be a major factor in Iraq’s political evolution. Lt. General William Odom cautioned that invading and occupying Iraq would not serve America’s strategic interests. He said, “We cannot win a war that serves our enemies interests and not our own. Continuing to pursue the illusion of victory in Iraq makes no sense. We can now see that it never did.” But Cheney doesn’t heed the advice of the experts. He knows everything about war---except how to win. Now, he’s trying to mollify the allies in the Gulf by assuring them that the chaos in Iraq won’t spill over into other countries and set the whole region ablaze. But how would Cheney know? He’s been wrong about everything so far; so, why would anyone trust his judgment now? With 2 million Iraqis refugees in Jordan and Syria (Many of them wealthy Ba’athists) the prospect of a larger regional conflict is certain. In fact, the real prize for the Iraqi resistance is not Baghdad at all, but Riyadh. If fighting breaks out in Saudi Arabia, then oil futures will shoot through the roof and wreak havoc with energy supplies across the planet. It’s the quickest way to bring the industrial world to its knees---and don’t think these groups don’t know it! That’s probably why the Saudis rounded up 172 “terror suspects” without any evidence of wrongdoing just last week. The Saudis know that their widely-reviled regime is now squarely in the crosshairs of terrorist organizations. Is this the war that Cheney wants? If so, he’s crazy! This conflict is perfect-fit for decentralized guerilla cells that can independently carry out operations on vital pipelines, tankers and oil facilities. It's a "no-win" situation for the rest of us. There’s just no way to protect sensitive infrastructure or resource transport in a free market. Suppression of the population alone will not work. Just look at Nigeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, of course, Iraq. This is not a war that can be won by military means. We must look for political solutions and stop the recriminations and violence. Iraq has been the biggest mistake in American history. Bush kicked open Pandora’s Box and now we’re all going to pay the price. If the war spreads beyond Iraq; the era of cheap oil will come to a swift and decisive end. Our job now is to force the administration to rethink their strategy, change directions and work for “regional stability”. The present course will end in catastrophe for the entire world. The world is changing quickly and America will soon be on the outside looking in. Its benign-sounding institutions (the World Bank, IMF, UN) are already in trouble and new alliances in Latin America and Asia are crystallizing into power-centers for the new century. America’s “soft power” and moral authority have been discarded and coercive diplomacy is no longer working. America is treading on quicksand while the Chinese Phoenix continues to rise in the East. The exorbitant cost of the war, the ballooning deficits and the falling dollar have all contributed to the steady wearing away of American power. These long-term problems are only exacerbated by the fanatical dependence on militarism. Victory was never possible in Iraq. It was just the fantasy of armchair warriors who never served in battle and never understood the realities of war. Wars are not won by superior firepower alone. Cheney never understood this simple point. Did he really believe that we could put a Christian army of occupation in the center of the Muslim world? What arrogance. The plan was doomed from the very beginning. Countless thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed or maimed in Cheney’s war---innocent victims shot down or bombed in their own cities, on their own streets or in their own homes! Iraq has become the greatest humanitarian disaster of our time---and its a long way from over. America’s reputation is in ruins. The good faith we received after 9-11 has dried-up and been replaced with suspicion and rage. As former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski says in his new book, “Second Chance”: “Barely fifteen years after the wall came down, the once proud and globally admired America was widely viewed around the world with intense hostility, its legitimacy and credibility in tatters, its military bogged down…. its formerly devoted allies distancing themselves, and world-wide public opinion polls documenting widespread hostility toward the United States… The Middle East is fragmenting and on the brink of explosion. The world of Islam is inflamed by rising religious passion and anti-imperialist nationalisms. Throughout the world, public opinion polls show that U.S. policy is widely feared and even despised.” America is headed for a fall. Everywhere we look we see the telltale signs of U.S. aggression---the partial remains of bombed-out buildings, the scattered piles of wreckage and debris, the bloated corpses of dead victims being eaten by dogs. This is Cheney’s dark vision of the future—a “through the looking glass” world where people are slaughtered without cause and entire nations are pounded into dust. This nightmare-scenario threatens to swallow up the entire planet if a global resistance doesn’t quickly materialize. If Cheney is not stopped, millions of people will die. That's a fact.

The CIA -- a Terrorist Organization Agency uses same tactics it claims to be fighting By Claudia Nelson 05/14/07 "ICH" -- -- The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) can be considered a terrorist organization according to both international and American definitions of terrorism. Since September 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush announced that he would use all his resources to fight terrorist organizations and declared a war on terror, which he legally cannot do, since according to the United States Constitution only the Congress can declare war, and it must be declared on a specific source. Terrorism is a general term used to describe violence or other harmful acts carried out for achieving political ends. Most definitions of terrorism include only those acts which are intended to create fear or "terror," are perpetrated for an ideological goal (as opposed to an attack by a "madman"), and deliberately target "non-combatants." According to the United States Federal Criminal Code, Chapter 113B of Part I of Title 18, terrorism is defined as “activities that involve violent ... or life-threatening acts ... that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State and ... appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and ... © occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States ... [or] ... © occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States." The U.S. Congress created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 with the passing of the National Security Act. The official duty of the Central Intelligence Agency is to serve as an intelligence gathering agency. The headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency is located in Langley, Virginia, and was designated as the "George Bush Center for Intelligence” by the Clinton Administration. Former President George Herbert Walker Bush was Director of Central Intelligence from Jan. 30 1976 to Jan. 20 1977. In reality, the CIA does not only gather information but consistently targets and engages in covert operations, psychological operations, and acts of terrorism both domestically and internationally. CIA past operations and activities Operation Phoenix was an assassination program conducted by the CIA during the Vietnam conflict. Its objective was to eliminate Vietnamese who might oppose the U.S but also to terrorize the entire population of South Vietnam and to suppress opposition to the occupying U.S. forces. Over 20,000 Vietnamese were murdered, often at random. During the 1980s the CIA used profits from its cocaine smuggling activities to finance the Contras in Nicaragua who were responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of civilians, and it attempted to disrupt the country's economy, in order to destabilize the legitimate Sandinista government. For this, the U.S. was condemned in the World Court for "unlawful use of force," and it rejected a U.N. security council resolution calling upon it to observe international law. We must note that George Bush Sr. was vice president at the time . On Sept. 11, 1973, the CIA planned and organized the military coup d'etat in Chile which overthrew the legitimately elected government of Salvador Allende and brought to power the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. This regime abducted, tortured and killed thousands of Chilean citizens in an attempt to suppress opposition. It appears that Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations, was closely involved diplomatically with the Southern Cone governments at the time and well-aware of Operation Condor. The first cooperation agreements were signed between the CIA and anti-Castro groups, and fascist movements such as the Triple A set up in Argentina by Jose Lopez Rega ("personal secretary" of Juan and Isabel Peron), and Rodolfo Almiron. The post-junta truth commission found that the Argentine military had "disappeared" at least 10,000 Argentines in the so-called "dirty war" against "subversion" and "terrorists" between 1976 and 1983; human rights groups in Argentina put the number at closer to 30,000. We must note that George Bush Sr, was head of the CIA at the time it began and vice president at the time it ended. Operation CHAOS was the most vicious aggressive domestic surveillence operation conducted on American antiwar groups and activists like Abbie Hoffman, whose objectives were to: 1. Gather information on their immorality. 2. Show them as scurrilous and depraved. 3. Call attention to their habits and living conditions. 4. Explore every possible embarrassment. 5. Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. 6. Send articles to newspapers showing their depravity. 7. Use narcotics and free sex for entrapment. 8. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. 9. Exploit the hostilities between various persons. 10. Use cartoons and photographs to ridicule them. 11. Use disinformation to confuse and disrupt. 12. Get records of their bank accounts. 13. Obtain specimens of handwriting. 14. Provoke target groups into rivalries that resulted in deaths. The CIA was allegedly involved in the April 2002, Venezuela failed coup that tried to overthrow President Hugo Chavez, who was democratically elected. In 2002 the CIA distorted Iraq data to the media in order to justify George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003. Most recently, former CIA employee, Luis Posada Carriles, who is believed to be the mastermind behind the 1976 Cubana de Aviacion bombing which killed 73 people, walked free from a U.S. court Tuesday following a court ruling for his liberation. These are only a handful of operations; there have literally been hundreds and many are still classified as secret by the U.S. government For a time-line checkout here. It seems to me you cannot claim to fight terrorism or claim to be the beacon of democracy with an organization like the CIA in your ranks. Americans can no longer claim ignorance of the horrors committed by the CIA. They can not allow this guise of “The War on Terror" to continue, since it was started by the CIA a terrorist organization which engages in unconstitutional and illegal behavior. The United States Congress has the authority to dismantle the CIA just like it has the authority -- and more than enough evidence -- to impeach the Bush administration on war crimes, illegal wire tapping, and misappropriation of funds. But does it have the backbone or interest to do so? It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. -- Samuel Adams

The Hidden War for Oil Carl Bloice elucidates the failure or unwillingness of the Western media to accurately report the invasion and occupation of Somalia by a US backed Ethiopian government. He asserts that behind the US-Ethiopian political alliance lies a strategic move to secure positioning in this oil region. By Carl Bloice 05/11/07 "All Africa" -- -- The US bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya, three days before a large anti-war action in Washington on 27 January 2007. Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN), was present in Nairobi. After returning home, she asked: how 'to explain the silence of the US peace movement on Somalia?' Writing in the San Francisco community newspaper Bay View, Kidane suggested one valid reason: 'Perhaps US-based organizations don't have the proper analytical framework to understand the significance of the Horn of Africa region. Perhaps it is because Somalia is largely seen as a country with no government and in perpetual chaos; with "fundamental Islamic" forces, not deserving of defense against the military attacks by US in search of "terrorists".' To that it may be added the role of the major US media in the lead up to the invasion and the suffering now taking place in the Horn of Africa. 'The carnage and suffering in Somalia may be the worst in more than a decade - but you'd hardly know it from your nightly news', wrote Andrew Cawthorne for Reuters from Nairobi last week. Amy Goodman's Democracy Now recently examined the coverage of ABC, NBC and CBS on Somalia in the evening newscasts since the invasion. ABC and NBC had not mentioned the war at all. CBS mentioned the war once, dedicating three whole sentences to it. Despite the fact that there have been more casualties in this war than in the recent fighting in Lebanon. While the major US print media have not completely ignored the conflict, their reporting is even more shallow than prior to the invasion of Iraq. As recently as last week, Reuters was still maintaining that Ethiopian troops had invaded its neighbour with the 'tacit' support of the United States. At least The New York Times has taken to describing it as 'covert American support'. Both characterisations obscure the truth. The attack on Somalia was pre-planned. It would never have taken place without the approval of the White House. We now know that the Bush administration gave the Ethiopian government the go ahead to ignore its own imposed ban on weapons purchases from North Korea, in order to gear up for the battle ahead. US military forces took part in the assault. 'The US political and military alliance with Ethiopia - which openly violated international law in its aggression towards Somalia, is destabilizing the Horn region and begins a new shift in the way the US plans to have permanent and active military presence in Africa', wrote Kadane. Planning for the invasion actually began last summer when the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control of the Somali government. The US-Ethiopian version of shock and awe was to swiftly bring about the desired regime change, installing the Washington-favoured, government-in-exile of President Abdullahi Yusuf. Only a few days after their troops entered the country, Ethiopian officials said their forces lacked the resources to stay in Somalia, and that they would be leaving soon. At one point, the Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi declared - Bush-like - that the invaders' mission had been successfully accomplished and that two-thirds of his troops were returning home. That turned out not to be true. Three months later, the Ethiopians are still in Somalia committing what numerous observers are calling horrendous war crimes. 'The obviously indiscriminate use of heavy artillery in the capital has killed and wounded hundreds of civilians, and forced over 200,000 more to flee for their lives', Walter Lindner, German ambassador to Somalia, wrote to the country's acting president last week. Displaced persons are 'at great risk of being subjected to looting, extortion and rape - including by uniformed troops' at a various "checkpoints". Cholera - endemic to the region during the rainy season - is beginning to cut a swathe through the displaced', he continued. Adding that attempts by international groups to offer assistance to the victims are being obstructed by militias who are stealing supplies, demanding 'taxes', and threatening relief workers. On 3 April, Associated Press reported that a senior European Union security official had sent an email to the head of the EU delegation for Somalia warning that: 'Ethiopian and Somali military forces there may have committed war crimes...donor countries could be considered complicit if they do nothing to stop them. I need to advise you that there are strong grounds to believe that the Ethiopian government and the transitional federal government of Somalia and the African Union (peacekeeping) Force Commander, possibly also including the African Union Head of Mission and other African Union officials have, through commission or omission, violated the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.' In the meantime, the Bush administration has worked hard to raise troops from nearby cooperative states to take over the job. Promises were made, but with one exception, remain unfulfilled. In a telephone conversation with Bush, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni promised to provide between 1,000-2,000 troops to protect Somalia's transitional government and train its troops. The Ugandans arrived. But they are said to have been largely confined to their quarters, refraining from taking part in the effort to crush the opposition. Meanwhile, the 'transitional government' and Ethiopian forces have been reported shelling civilian areas in the capital from the government compound they are supposedly guarding. None of the reporters on the scene appear to have explored the question of why the other African governments have failed to send troops. But I think the answer is obvious. They would be called 'peacekeepers' but would be called upon to inject themselves into a civil conflict on the side of an unpopular puppet government, something they are loath to do. Three months ago, I wrote: 'If the unfolding events in Iraq are any indication, what started out as a swift invasion and occupation could turn out to be a long and widening war.' That was an understatement. At the time of writing, about 1,300 people are reported to have perished in the fighting. Over 4,300 wounded, and nearly 400,000 have fled their homes. Refugees trying to cross the Red Sea are reportedly drowning off the Somali coast. 'There is a massive tragedy unfolding in Mogadishu, but from the world's silence, you would think it's Christmas', the head of a Mogadishu political think-tank told Cawthorne. 'Somalis, caught up in Mogadishu's worst violence for 16 years, are painfully aware of their place on the global agenda.' 'Nobody cares about Somalia, even if we die in our millions', Cawthorne was told by Abdirahman Ali, a 29 year-old father-of-two, who works as a security guard in Mogadishu. And, just as in Iraq, US supported forces - the small army of the enthroned and very unpopular government and the invaders - are caught up in a civil war, set in motion by invasion and occupation. Additional to the forces loyal to the overthrown Islamist government, the regime in power is opposed by the ******, one of the country's largest clans. A spokesman for the clan recently called upon 'the Somali people, wherever it exists, to unity in the fight against the Ethiopians. The war is not between Ethiopia and our tribe, it is between Ethiopia and all Somali people', he said. 'For the major [world] leaders, there is a tremendous embarrassment over Somalia', Michael Weinstein, a US expert on Somalia at Purdue University told Reuters. 'They have committed themselves to supporting the interim government - a government that has no broad legitimacy, a failing government. This is the heart of the problem. But Western leaders can't back out now, so of course they have 100% no interest in bringing global attention to Somalia. There is no doubt that Somalia has been shoved aside by major media outlets and global leaders, and the Somali Diaspora is left crying in the wilderness.' Last week, during what was described as a lull in the fighting, Ethiopian soldiers were moving from house to house in the capital Mogadishu, taking hundreds of men away by the truckload to an uncertain fate. Meanwhile, the traumatised residents of the rubble strewn city were reported gathering up bodies, many of them rotting, for burial. 'Most of the displaced civilians are encamped on Mogadishu's outskirts, where the scenes are medieval', reported The Economist last week. On 26 April, Martin Fletcher wrote in The (London) Times about five days he spent in Mogadishu, during which he canvassed many ordinary Somalis: 'People lack water, food and shelter. Cholera has broken out. The sick sometimes have to pay rent even to sit in the shade of trees. Things will get worse with the rains, which have started. Aid agencies say people will soon start dying in large numbers. Some reckon Somalia is facing its biggest humanitarian crisis, worse than in the early 1990s, when the state collapsed amid famine and slaughter. Overwhelmingly, they loathed a government they consider a puppet of the hated Ethiopians.' Last week the Washington Post reported that interviews it conducted in Ethiopia and testimony given to diplomats and human rights groups 'paint a picture of a nation that jails its citizens without reason or trial, and tortures many of them - despite government claims to the contrary'. The paper commented that such cases are especially troubling because the US government, a key Ethiopian ally, has acknowledged interrogating terrorism suspects in Ethiopian prisons, where some detainees were sent after being arrested in connection with Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in December. The following day the paper reported: 'More than 200 FBI and CIA agents have set up camp in the Sheraton Hotel here in Ethiopia's capital and have been interrogating dozens of detainees -- including a US citizen picked up in Somalia and held without charge and without attorneys in a secret prison somewhere in this city, according to Ethiopian and U.S. officials who say the interrogations are lawful.' History will probably record the Ethiopian government's decision to team up with the US administration for regime change in Somalia as the height of folly. The country has enough problems at home, brought into sharp relief on 24 April, when forces of an ethnic-Somali separatist group, the ****** National Liberation Front, raided an oil exploration facility, killing 74 people, including nine employees of a Chinese oil company. 'As much as China's - and indeed America's - ally Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister, might like to be on top of security across the Horn, he is not always able to deliver. His army is the region's most powerful conventional force. But under his rule, Ethiopia is fraying again around the edges', said the Financial Times editorial on 26 April. Armed separatist groups are now changing tactics. Unable to match the army on the battlefield, the ****** National Liberation Front has chosen the spectacular to draw attention to its cause. Only recently, a separatist group in the north tried something similar, by kidnapping a group of British diplomats. Both horrific events can be attributed partly to fallout from Ethiopia's messy intervention in neighboring Somalia. Initial battles last December were decisively in Ethiopia's favour. But like the Americans in Iraq, the Ethiopians in Somalia were ill prepared for the aftermath. A growing insurgency has delayed the withdrawal of their troops, exposing the government to attacks at home. It has also inflamed tension among ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia. And ironically, the Chinese workers killed near Ethiopia's border with Somalia may have been victims more of Washington's policy in the region than of Beijing's. The US has actively backed Meles Zenawi's Somali adventure. In doing so it has undermined multilateral efforts to bring about peace. 'There are two main questions that Colonel Yusuf's and Ethiopia's Western backers should now ask themselves', said The (London) Guardian 26 April 26. First, what was gained by encouraging the Ethiopian army to topple the Islamic Courts? The US allowed Ethiopia to arm itself with North Korean weapons and also participated in the turkey shoot by using gunships against suspected insurgents hiding in villages near the Kenyan border. Second, Washington was convinced that the Islamic Courts were sheltering foreign terror suspects: 'But how many did they get and what price have Somalis paid?' 'America can be more heavily criticised for subordinating Somali interests to its own desire to catch a handful of al-Qaeda men who may (or may not)have been hiding in Mogadishu', said The Economist. Chatham House, a British think tank of the independent Royal Institute of International Affairs, has concluded: 'None has been caught, many innocents have died in air strikes, and anti-American feeling has deepened. Western, especially European, diplomats watching Somalia from Nairobi, the capital of Kenya to the south, have sounded the alarm. Their governments have done little. In an uncomfortably familiar pattern, genuine multilateral concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actions of other international actors - especially Ethiopia and the United States following their own foreign policy agendas.' Actually, there is no more reason to believe the Bush administration promoted this war, in clear violation of international law and the UN Charter, 'to catch a handful of al-Qaeda men', than that the invasion of Iraq was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. What has unfolded over the past three months flows from much larger strategic calculations in Washington. The invasion and occupation of Somalia coincided with the Pentagon's now operational plan to build a new 'Africa Command' to deal with what the Christian Science Monitor dubbed 'strife, oil, and Al Qaeda'. When I first visited this subject shortly after the invasion, I quoted 10 per cent as the figure which is the proportion of our country's petroleum from Africa; and noted that some experts were saying the US would need to up that to 25 per cent by 2010. Wrong again. Last week came the news that the US now imports more oil from Africa than from the Middle East; with Nigeria, Angola and Algeria providing nearly one-fifth of it - more than from Saudi Arabia. The rulers in Addis Ababa claim the invasion was a pre-emptive attack on a threatening Somalia. The Bush administration says giving a wink and a nod to the attack was merely a chance to capture a few terrorist holed up in Somalia. But for most of the media and diplomatic observers outside the US, this was another strategic move to secure positioning in a region where there is a lot of oil. On file are plans - put on hold amid continuing conflicts - for nearly two-thirds of Somalia's oil fields to be allocated to the US oil companies Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips. It was recently reported that the US-backed prime minister of Somalia has proposed enactment of a new oil law to encourage the return of foreign oil companies to the country. Salim Lone, spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq in 2003, now a columnist for The Daily Nation in Kenya, recently told Democracy Now: 'The prime minister's attempt to lure Western oil companies is on a par with his crying wolf about al-Qaeda at every turn. Every time you interview a Somalia official, the first thing you hear is al-Qaeda and terrorists. They're using that. No one believes it. No one believes it at all, because all independent reports say the contrary.' I spoke with Kidane last week and she conceded that the situation in Somalia might seem complex to many in the peace and social justice movements. However, she said, it is impossible to overlook the parallel with the situation in the Iraq: 'It's aggression, that is undeniable, and the same language is being used to justify it.' Kidane is spot on to insist that the movements for peace and justice in the US - and elsewhere - must take up the issue. The unlawful US- Ethiopian invasion and occupation of that country and the accompanying human suffering and human rights abuses constitute a new - and still mostly hidden - war, which is in many ways is similar to that in Iraq. And, waged for the same reason. Carl Bloice is a writer based in San Francisco. He is a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He is on the editorial board of Black Commentator where a version of this article was originally published on 2 May 2007. Copyright © 2007 Fahamu.

Nomads Maxaa dahcay, where are the Quraan readers? Nur

Khalaf bro. I know where you'r coming from, first read suurah Al Rum, it begins with the mention of a battle between Pagan Persia and Christian Romans, the verse describes that persecuted believers in Makkah following that war were sympathizing with the Christians as their cousins in the kinship of the Gospel of Jesus (peace be upon him) sent by Allah,( although the Quran maintains it was corrupted ) while their opponents the Qureish tribe, care takers of holy Makkah were siding with the Zoroastrian pagan Persians as they share polytheism. The Quraan maintains that the Romans who were defeated in the first battle, will eventually win in the final war, and that day, persecuted believers in Makkah will rejoice for a Roman victory. The involvement of Ethiopia in Somalia is transgression, an invasion that was against the UN charter, endorsed only by the international outlaw nation of USA ( UN Charter, Geneva Convention etc) , it has also dominated Eritrea for many years, an continues to subjugate western Somalis to this day, and Eritrea with the Help of the Siad Barre regime was liberated from Ethiopian empire, now, both nations, are victims of Ethiopia for Eritrea to help Somalia against Ethiopian occupation, without sending a single soldier, is not equivalent to the Ethiopian / American invasion and the bombardment and merciless cold blood death of thousands of civilians as a result . The issue is that of justice and oppression, regardless of faith, its an Islamic cause, Islam made alliance in the past with any non Muslim entity that helped establish itself. Allah says in Quraan : Allah does not forbid that you treat well those (unbelievers) who have not persecuted you nor have driven you out of your homes, but Allah forbids that you become allies with those unbelievers who have fougaht against you (against your faith) and who have driven you out of your homes " As we Muslims, we always side with those closer to ideal Islam, and treat well any Islamic friendly entity, even if they are non Muslim. Please read the following eNuri aqeedah article: Q. What is the Aqeedah concept of Al Walaa and Al Baraa ? A question posed by Nomad Hanif, here was my answer: Bismillah wa bihi nastaciin. Hanif bro. Jazaakallahu Khairan for posing a great question at the most needed time ever, a time when issues got mixed up, and fundemental concept in Islam got entangled with whims and desires. Before we define the concept of Al Walaa and Al Baraa in Islam, let me congratulate you for picking one of the most Tawxiid centric screen names, Hanif, is an outstanding name, it actually desctibes the concept for which you are seeking an answer for. Hanif, means a person who always is searching to connect with his maker and away from any other diversion, a person, who seeks Allah SWT, but at the same time diverging away from offering his services to othet than Allah SWT, in that sense, the name Hanif is one coin, depicting walaa on one side and baraa on the other. Abraham, the patriarch of all Monotheits was one such a Hanif, Allah SWT called him Hanifan Musliman, Navigating his way to Allah always and submittinh his will to Allah( True Jews at their time, true Christians at their time and True Muslims all allign themselves with Abraham central concept, because Abraham was the Father of Islam ( submission and allegiance to Allah alone).) , Abrahams legacy was that of true devotion to Allah SWT and denial of other forms of subjugation to creatures, be they humans, animals ar objetcs. Abrahams famous statement was " Innaa bura-aa- u, minkum wa mimmaa tacbuduuna min duunillaahi, kafarnaaa bikum, wa badaa beinanaa wa baynakum al cadaawata wal baghdaa-a, xataa tuminuu billaahi waxdah " meaning " We are indeed disowning you ( since you are criminals by worshipping other than Allah)and we further disassociate ourselves with all that you worship other than Allah, ( and because of this disownment and disassociation) clear enemity and hatred is apparent between us, up untill ( you repent) and worship Allah alone " For that bold statement, Allah honored Abraham by calling him Hanif ( mid ka soo issha waxaan Allah aheyn), Allah further instructed believers to make Abraham thier example for his brave stand against his very own tribe and father, and for his partying ways with his people on the basis of belief in Allah. Abraham's word of Walaa and Baraa, became the center principle of islam, Allah SWT says : Wa jacalahaa kalimatan baaqiyatan fii caqibihi lacallahum yarjicuun " meaning, " Allah made (that word of Abraaham) a legacy word after (Abraham) so that (Poeple) can refer back to (that word whenever they get lost from the true path of Allah ). That word, of Walaa and Baraa, took the present form under the Messneger of Allah Muhammad SAWS when he declared " Laa Elaaha illaa Allah' no allegiance to any other Sovereign other than Allah as the only rightful Sovereign. Allah SWT mentioned this concept in numerous verses in Quraan : " Ucbuduu Allah wajtanibuu Al Taaaghuut" Serve Allah, and stay away from the Service of transgressors" Taghuut in Arabic comes from the root Daghaa, which is when a measured quantity crosses thershold or its limits. So , any human who claims to have devine rights becomes Dhaguut in that sense, which exactly what Pharaoh of Egypt has claimed when he was subjugating the helpless slaves of the Children of Israel. Pharoah calimed " Maa calimtu lakum min ilaahin gheirii " meaning, I know of no other Sovereign except me to rule over you" Walaa in Arabic has the root of Yalii, meaning: following, Walaa comes from the noun Waliyy ( friend, closest to you, caretaker, overseer, defender, stake owner ). So, in that regard, Walaa means the concept that assigns Allah alone to be ( friend, closest to you, caretaker, overseer, defender, stake owner ) for a believer by virtue of his creation of the same. Walaa, therefore is the result of love of Allah, because once you assign all the above qualities to Allah alone like Abraham defined who should be his Waliyy : " The one who created me, so he(only) can guide me, and the One who feeds and quenches me, and when I get sick, Allah is the one who cures, And the one who will (finally) cause me to die and the will resurruct me, and in the day of judgement the one with whom i place my hopes to forgive my sin, Once you believe in these favors, you can not allig yourself with other than Allah SWT, you cant help but love Allah with all your soul and body and mind, a sign that you Allah also is reciprocating that love for you. Walaa of Allah SWT, therefore is born out of love of Allah. Allah SWT says in holy Quraan : Innamaa waliyyukumullahu wa rasuuluhu walladiina aamanuu" " Your Waliyy, is indeed Allah SWT, his Messneger and the believers. This verse clearly draws the meaning of Walaa to be the ultimate alligiance which is much higher than any other temporal or worldly allegiances that are born out of passing interests of the lowly life of this world, while Allah SWT is calling believrs for a better life in the hereafter if the form allegiance with Allah who will deliver his promises unlike humans who always let you down and betray you when you count on them in difficult times. Baraa, on the other hand is the exact opposit of the Walaa concept, total disowing, disassociation, cutting of sympathy, due to the crime of disbelief in Allah SWT and befriending their enemy Satan.. The word Baraa has roots in (Ba ri ah) among its derivatives, is healing from an ailment, clearing your stand that you are not of a crime that is committed by a group or a person. In ancinet times, one wars brake out between tribes, neutral tribes had to show their Baraa-ah ( they are not part of the warring parties) so that they are not drawn to an unjust war or to pay the price of being a supprort of a party. Allah SWT instructs believers in Suurah al Kaafiroon ( The unbelievers) : " Say o ye unbelievers, I do not worship that you worship, and you do not worship that which I worship..... to you is your way of life(which is based on your beliefs) and to me is my way of life ( based on my beliefs). When Abraham practiced Baraa ah of his people, Allah SWT blessed him with the following: 1. Children at old age ( he had Ishmael and Issac) 2. His Children and decendents were honored to become leaders for mankind, Allah said to Abraham" I will make you a leader to mankind, Abraham then asked " And my decendents?" Allah responded, transgressors of your progeny are not to benefit from this offer. 3. The house Abraham built for Allah in Mecca was accepted. 4.. He was given the title khalil ul Allah ( Allah's friend). This topic is much deeper than I could respond to this thread, inshAllah when I get around to it again, I shall add more of my thoughts, till then, hold the rope of Allah tight, do not differ on the eventual purpose of being true servants of Allah SWT alone. To be contiuned 2005 i-Nuuri Caqiidah First, Somaliaonline Summer Program. If You Dont take a Stand For Allah Alone, Y'd Fall For Anything Else Nur ................................................................................................... Aqeedah Concepts and Terminology Series

lol @ Caano Geel, Too many past superbowl commercials I guess, I admit that I occasionally drink foaming snow white Caano Geel ( Dhayy), what a relief after a long work week?

Munira sis The basic idea of Islamic finance is JUSTICE. In Islam the default of all actions is that they are permitted unless otherwise indicated to be prohibited (Except for Money and Sex, those two, the default is prohibition except for permitted transactions and relationships) Trading present money with larger future money ( Ribaa ) presents INJUSTICE as it exposes undue risk to the needy borrower while guaranteen profit for lender. Trading goods with money is known as selling ( Bayc). A homeowner is permitted to sell a house for cash or in future installments. As an incentive, she is permitted to lower price of cash sale ( Bayc Caajil) and to charge more for series of future payments,( Bayc aajil) Banks in the west convert unIslamic lending instruments to Islamized instruments, and there are many variants of these structured instruments. What you have to look for is 1. That you are not exposed to more risk than the lender. ( Risk and reward in Islamic trading must be shared, otherwise it conflicts with moral of the Sharia) 2. Seller is selling own property. 3. Property is real as opposed to a proposed development. 4. The term mortgage is unIslamic, its defined as: A loan to finance the purchase of real estate, usually with specified payment periods and interest rates. The borrower (mortgagor) gives the lender (mortgagee) a lien on the property as collateral for the loan. In Islamic Sharia, the Bank buys the property and then sells/rents to you in installments (hence sharing risk and reward), The Bank thus sells to you a property it rightfully owns (holding its deed) in FIXED installments ( No compounding), regardless of amount of profit, if mutually agreed. ie ( Bank buys Present house value @ 200,000 Pounds, and sells to you @ 300,000 Pounds equal monthly payments of 1000 Pounds for 25 years.) Wallaahu Aclam That is my two cents, hope it helped. Nur

Nomads. Naden sis got a valid point, we are suffering from intellectual bancruptcy, here are some more examples that show this bancruptcy. 1. Is dating halaal? 2. Shoud I use the right hand to drink Budweiser? 3. Is Michael Jackson a good role model for kids? Intellectual bancruptcy is an advanced stage of an ailment, which happens when slaves (either brought on chains or refugees on planes) try to assimilate in host country seamlessly, feeling to be inferior, quickly adapting to wholesale culure of their host, doing all it takes to fit in, their identity melts away in the process, and their moral compass points wacky south, they look down on their own folk in contempt, using language that reflects their intellectual bancruptcy. This phenomena was predicted by our Prophet SAWS: The Prophet SAWS said: You will imitate and follow the ways of those before you, to the point that if they enter an aligators hole, you would also enter. They said " Christians and Jews?" he said, " then who else. Cheer up! Everyday, is mothers day in Islam, The Prophet SAWS was reported saying: A person who prays five times a day, is grateful to Allah. A Person who Prays for her/his parents after every prayer is grateful to her/his parents. Allah said in Quraan: "Be grateful to me, and to your parents". Thus, as Muslims, we celebrate mothers day, five (5) times a day! Have you celebrated Mother's Hour, or the Happy Hour at your neighborhood bar today? Have you massaged her feet? Asked about her if she is away? Made duaa for her? Check your compass! Nur

Khalaf Brother. There is a merit to your question, the statments that you have quoted could have been put in a better way, as follows. 1. Maxkamadaha Islaamiga ah ee Somalia wexey sheegteen iney wax ku xukumaaan Quraanka iyo Sunnada, inta awooddooda tahay. 2. Dawladda (Transplanted Foreign Government) wexey la safatay cadowga ummadda kula dirirsan iney diinta Allah isku xukumaan, oo caddeystay ineyna ralli ka noqoneyn in Somalia ay ka istaagto dowlad diinta Islamka ah wax ku xukunta. 3. Labada qolo wexey isku dirireen in qolo walba ay ka taliso waddanka. 4. Qolada TFG wexy kaalmeystay cadowga ummadda ee diintooda rabta iney tirtirto, horeyna u gumeysatay dadka Somalida galbeed, ka dharjisay Jaad, una banneysay wax walboo Allah xarrimay si ay diintooda uga fogesyo, una diidday iney diintooda ku dhaqmaan. 5. Qolada Maxkamadaha, wexey kaalmeysteen Allah, ooy sheegteen ine diintiisa iyo sharcigiisa inuu saremaro u dirirayaan. Muddada gaaban ay waddanka xukumeen, wargeysyada dunidoo dhan wexey isku raaceen in ay nabad waddanka ka dhaliyeen markey ku xukumeen diinta Allah ooy ummadda ka xoreeyeen qabqablayaasha dagaalka waddanka 16 sano dhiiga daadshay, haatanna, la wada saftay cadwoga Allah, kana soo horjeeda diinta Allah in laga hirgaliyo wadankeenna. 6. Qofkii Allah diintiisa iney sare marto u dhinta ooy ka dhab tahay,WAXAAN SHAKI LAHEYN INUU jannada galayo, qofkii u dhinta asagoo la diriray cadawoga Allah iyo waxa u gargaara oo ku dhinta niyaddas Allah wuxuu noo sheegay inuu SHAHIID YAHAY. 7. Qofkii lagu dilo asagoo u gargaaraya cadowga diiddaan shareecada Allah dada lagu xukumo, oo la jira ama u kaalmeeya cadowga Allah, Allah wuxuu noo sheegay inuu ka noqday diinta Islaamka oo uu naarta galayo. May be that would have been to the point though bit long. Let me know if the point of the Ulima is clear, that is what they meant, but for previty, they fell short, hence my explanation of meanings between the lines. Nur

Haneefah sis JZK Waad ku mahadsan tahay, eNuri Softwano series will contiue inshAllah. However, your past partipation of the forum is missed, please do visit and proactively contribute, you never know how much effect your messages can have o others. Nur

Wa Caleykumu Salaan Yaa ukhtii al ghaaliyah Dhacdooyinka baryahaan ayaa ka dhiga xaliimka xayraan, sidaa darteed, eNuri wexey la nooshahay dareenka ummadda, hadba meeshey ka liisan tahay baan is ku daynaa inaan ka toosinno. Baryahanna sida uu Xiinfaniin kuu sheegay waxaa aad loogu baaha yahay wacyi gelin siyaasadeed, annagoo ogsoon in siyaasadda ay tahay mid taabaneysa diinteenna, siiba ay tahay dagaal lagula jiro Allah oo qumaati ah. Waxa ugu yar oon sameyn karro waa inaan dadka u kala saarro arrimaha isku qasan. Haseyeeshee, eNuri ma mooga in loo baahan yahay dhinacii looga bartay oo aheyd Softwaano, sidaad aragtana dhow qoraal ayaan soo qornay Af Somali ah sida " Kaalay iga tir illinta" iyo " Foolxumo Allaaa ii diiday" iyo kuwa hore oon soo nooleynay sida Sabarka iyo Jannada. Malabaad, Jazaakellahu kheiran inaad la socoto eNuri, marwalba sidaasoo kale noo toosi haddan eecanno, maxaa yeelay muminiintu xassuusinta wey anfacdaa siduu Eebbe noo sheegay. Walaalkaa Nur

Khalaf walaal You pose an Athiests Question: How could an all-knowing merciful God look into the future, see all the people who will be suffering in Hell for all eternity, and still create those people? Wouldn't it be more Merciful to have never created them? Answer: In my college days, A professor who taught the same class ( a Quantitative Analysis descipline) over and over for many years warned the class about pitfalls of not following his instructions. The Professor while explaining a methodological way to solve a special problem reflected: " I've taught this class for 20 years, and this special problem has always proven difficult for students to grasp and solve. Every year, I warn my students and tell them to stick with my method to solve the problem, because if they try to solve it any onther way, they will fail, unfortunately, every year on the average, five students fail by not following my method, not because they were not warned, but because it was their CHOICE to ignore the warning" he went on " I am sure that five students in this class who are listening to me now will fail, because of their choice" The analogy here is about a human teacher who does not know what the future holds for his students, but from data of past twenty years he formed a knowledge base on which ha can base a prediction that holds water. The key to the answer is therefore CHOICE, Allah gave us intellect to either obey or disobey, and he gave us the freedom of choice, and its utter justice that those who abide by rules are rewarded with goodness and those who commit crimes to be punished. However Allah's prior knowledge of our choices should not be reason for Allah to take away our valued freedom to choose to make our own decisions. What the Atheist is suggesting is contradictory to his own desire for personal CHOICE of not following Allah's way, if Allah took that right away from him, he will be like a rock pepple on the beach, but we know that man has a purpose on earth and mission, which the Athiest fails to understand and hence his confusion. If we followed his warped logic, We would have all been Muslims, however many verses in Quraan clarify this fact. The Polytheists during Prophet Muhammad SAWS have used the same argument " Wa law shaa'a Allahu ma cabadnaahum" ( If Allah so willed, we would not have worshipped them (idols) ), here mankind is trying to transfer blame to Allah and insist on doing evil on earth as HIS CHOICE, then complain why Allah did not take that freedom away from him in the first place. This is mockery of reason, as he asking in other words, why did Allah gave me a mind? and a Choice? I would have been better off without them. Now, that is the exact wish of evil doers who end up in hell, the Quraan reccounts the unbeliever's future wish when they end up in hell, they say: " Leytanii kuntu turaabaa" meaning, " I wish I was sand" The question that bounces back at the Athiest is this: Do you want to be a human gifted and honored with intellect hence accountable to her/his actions? or do you want to be an animal or a rock pepple unaccountable for its action? The moral of Islam's message: If you can't take the heat of hell, stay out of trouble! Fair enough? Nur

Ayadoo aad u ooyeysa, aadna u calool xun ayeey tiri: " Markii hore wexey aheyd sheeko kaliyah, oon taleefinka ku wada sheekeysannay, dabadeed, sheekadii wexey isu badashay jaceyl, wuxuuna igu siray inuu rabo inuu i guursado, oo uu reerkeyga iga soo dooni doono, wuxuuna iga dalbaday inaan marka hore si qarsoodi ah isu aragno annagoo kaliyah, laakin waan diiday, markaasuu igu cabsiiyey inaan kala tagi doono, oon mar kale wada hadli doonin, hasayeeshee waan daciifay, si aan u raalli geliyo waxaan u diray masawirkeyga iyo waraaq ubax ku sawiran yahay oo aan cadar ku carfiyey si aan ugu muujiyo inaan jeclahay, dabadeed wuxuu si xoog ah iiga dalbaday inaan is aragno, haddana waan diiday, laakin, markaan dambe, markuu i maqashiiyey hadalkeygii uu iga duubay taleefonka oon ka baqay inuu i ceebeeyo ayaan haye iri inaan is aragno, waxaan markii hore is lahaa si dhakso ah usoo laabo, laakin si bey wax iga noqotay, markaan soo noqday, ceeb baan la soo noqday, markaan aqalka imi ayaan wacay oon xasuusiyey guurkeenna, wuxuu igu yiri, asagoo i liidaya, gabar halleysan ma guursado" Walaashey sharafta leh, ma aragtaa sida ay ku dhaammato sheekooyinka aan sharciyeysneyn? Hadaba is jir, yaan been laguu sheegin, ninka ku jecel lagama yaabo inuu kaa dalbadao wax foolxun, ama wax qarsoodi ah oo ka baxsan sharciga diinteenna. Ogow, in caadadeenna Somaliyeed, ay cadaaladda ka fogtahay, maxaa yeelay, haddaad xumaan la sameyso nin aad jeclaatay, raaxada iyo dambiga wuu kula qeybsan, laakin ceebta iyo xambaaridda uurka waa adiga oo qura, wiilasheenna Somaliyeed ( kuwa aan diinta ku dhaqmin) wexey kala leeyihiin labo nooc oo gabdho ah: Gabdho ay la tuntaan iyo mid ay guursadaan, hadaba ha noqonin tii ay ceebta uga tagayeen, iyo wax intaa ka culus oo sagaal bilood aad siddo. Walaashey, hadaad jaahil ka tahay diinta, wixii maanta ka dambeeya, naftaada ka celi waxa xun , cilmiga diintana raadso meel aad ka barato, si ayan kuugu dhcin wixii gabadhaas oo kale ku dhacay. 2007 eNuri Softwaano series Kuwa iga da' weyn wey iga ajar badan yihiin, Kuwa iga da' yarna wey iga dambi yar yihiin.

Jazaakellahu Kheiran Zenobia for a great contribution, we are living in a time when few bother to stop to help the needy, from individuals to governments, everyone is on their own and a matrialist "what is in for me" is the only incentive, but as Muslims, we have a different incentive for doing good on earth, and that was well illustrated by the Hadith you have posted. Below is an old eNuri article on the same subject: e- Nuri Softwaano Series Presnets and Eye Opener The Blind Old Man Who Showed Me The Way . I measure my life in terms of how useful I am to others, as a tax I pay to Allah SWT for granting me health, wealth and wisdom to appreciate and thank Allah for it. Being useful to others could mean hardships, but if one can see past the present life, and yearn for the next, happiness can be found in unlikely places. One foggy rainy day, I got out of a long busines meeting with my business associates, I was tired, but fulfilled, I wanted to reward myself with a nice evening, to relax at home and my one wish in my mind was just to go home to rest. As I emerged from the office building and strolled down the street to a rather far parking lot ahead, I came under a heavy down pour, it was raining and cars were splashing water around, so I carefully tiptoed to avoid plunging my Italian leather shoes in the water filled potholes, I rushed toward my car, after a few minutes of walking just when I thought I was about to get to my car, an old man approached me, "excuse me" he whispered, " can you take me to the XYZ airline office?" asked the old blind man. Interstingly, the airline office was in the same building that I've just left few block down the road, a rather long way back in a messy rainy day. I patiently took his hand and walked back with him, this time around I walked slowly to the opposite direction to where I was going, it just dawned on me that going back was actually going foreward in real terms, here I am helping a fellow man who is deprived of his eyesight, how many people realize the value of this gift? and do we contemplate the wisdom that going slowly with others toward their direction is sometimes going fast foreward toward your right direction? two great lessons that I learned from the old blind man that day which were well worth my trouble that day, lessons that were so insightful, it took a blind man to show me the way, the way to please Allah SWT, just like how Our Prophet Muhammad SAWS was criticized for turning away his attention from a poor blind man seeking knowledge who approached him while meeting with notables of the town. As I walked with the old man toward the airlines office, I kept thinking of his condition, his inability to go where he pleases when he pleases, his dependence on assistance of others, his slowness, and the fact that not many people were willing to stop and help such a needy person. The few minutes that I walked with the old blind man, were blessed minutes in which he taught me countless lessons of the value of sharing of our health and wealth with those less fortunate than us, I walked with him, and every step was a step toward Allah SWT as the prophet SAWS taught that the most loved to Allah SWT is the most helpful to his fellow man, I walked slowly with him as he could not walk as fast as i could, but the speed of thoughts that were crossing my mind were faster than the traffic around us, my sight was no longer set on taking him to the airline office and going back to my car afterwards, I found a purpose waiting for me in this slow walk, and my inner sight took off to the the hidden meaning of life, that our happiness should be measured with the positive difference we make in the lives of other disadvantaged fellow humans, and if we are unable, at least, we should seize our evil intentions of inflicting pain and misery on people. The moral of the story 1. Show The way to others to find yours 2. Go the opposite way, to find hidden treasures 3. To go fastforward in life, go slow for others Nur 2005 i-Nuri Softawaano Series Making Difference, is The Purpose For Existence.

Geel Jire According to eNuri Press Service, TFG is an acronym for: Transplanted Foreign Government. Jus Like " President Yusuf" functions with a transplanted Liver, taking medications that suppress his body's immunes system aka Resistance, in order for his body to accept the foreign organ, likewise, Somalia's current government known as the TFG ( Transplanted Foreign Government) was planted by US and Ethiopia for their advancing their own interests, now they are colectively working on a medicine ( Strategy) to pacify the resistance ( aka Terrorists ) of the Somali body, such as: 1. Bribing clan leaders 2. Elimination of lawmakers who are agianst the transplant government ( Politically, and if necessary physically) 3. Fomenting clan hate and division 4. Brute force that will label any resistance as "TERRORIST" for which the US and Ethiopia and Kenya are the allaince and partners to fight such war together to appease Somalia and the horn of Africa for exploitation of Foreign intersts. Read the following news from a Neocon Newspaper perspective. U.S. force aims to secure Africa By Jason Motlagh THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published April 30, 2007 The United States hopes by year's end to establish an Africa Command that will anchor military operations across a continent seen to be of increasing strategic importance and threatened by transnational terrorists. The new force, known informally as AfriCom, will preside over all countries on the continent except Egypt and is expected to be operational by the fall, according to Pentagon officials. They say it is needed to secure vast, lawless areas where terrorists have sought safe haven to regroup and threaten U.S. interests. "Part of the rationale behind the development of this command is clearly the growing emergence of the strategic importance of Africa from a global ... security and economic standpoint," Rear Adm. Robert Moeller, head of the Africa Command Transition Team, said earlier this month. "This allows us to work more closely with our African partners to ... enhance the stability across the continent." Plans for such a force were first disclosed in April 2004, but it was not until February this year that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates laid out the scope of the new command. AfriCom will initially operate as part of the Stuttgart, Germany-based European Command before becoming independent at the end of 2008. It will be a "unified combatant command" that includes branches of the military along with civilians from the departments of Defense, State and Agriculture, among others, according to Adm. Moeller. The force will deal with peacekeeping, humanitarian aid missions, military training and support of African partner countries. A headquarters location has yet to be determined. The United States now maintains five military commands worldwide, with Africa divided among three of them: EuCom covers 43 countries across North and sub-Saharan Africa; Central Command oversees East Africa, including the restive Horn of Africa; and Pacific Command looks after Madagascar. In 2001, CentCom established a task force in the Horn to track down al Qaeda terrorists and monitor instability in Somalia. It has since expanded to conduct humanitarian missions in the region. EuCom directs a seven-year, $500 million counterterrorism initiative that provides military and developmental aid to nine Saharan countries deemed vulnerable to groups looking to establish Afghanistan-style training grounds and carry out other illicit activities. The main target of U.S. Special Forces training African troops has been the Algeria-based Salafist Group for Call and Combat. The group withered after a crackdown by Algerian authorities and a state-sponsored amnesty program, but a new al Qaeda-linked offshoot claimed responsibility for the April 11 Algiers suicide bombings that killed more than 30 people. U.S. military officials say there is evidence that a quarter of suicide bombers in Iraq are from North Africa. Other jihadists are said to have traveled as far as Afghanistan to receive training before returning home to Africa to sow trouble. However, the initiative is not welcome in every African country. Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, quoted in the Libyan daily Al-Fajr Al-Jadid, said at a conference in Chad last week that such a force was neither wanted nor needed. "We told [the Americans] we do not need military aircraft flying over, nor do we need military bases," he reportedly said. "We are in need of economic elements and an economic support. If your support to us is military intervention, then we do not need you, nor your help." Some Western critics worry that a military-based policy on the continent could breed radicalism where it scarcely exists by sustaining despotic regimes that usurp funding and military hardware to tighten their grip on power. A 2005 report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, said the Saharan region is "not a terrorist hotbed," and warned that some governments try to elicit U.S. aid while using the "war on terror" to justify human rights abuses. U.S. officials insist the new AfriCom will not result in a large-scale deployment of U.S. forces on the continent. Instead, they want to place "a greater mix of diplomatic, developmental and economic experts" on the ground. Current estimates are for about 1,000 personnel, on par with other regional commands. "The goal is for AfriCom not to be a U.S. leadership role on the continent," said Ryan Henry, deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, who spoke with reporters in Washington last week after returning from a "fact-finding" trip to Africa. "We would be looking to complement rather than compete with any leadership efforts currently going on."

"Worthy and Unworthy Victims" By Stephen Lendman 05/02/07 "ICH" --- - Economist and media critic Edward S. Herman and social and political critic Noam Chomsky note two kinds of victims in their classic 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent." So does journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger in his writings. "Unworthy" ones are the many unmentioned tens of thousands killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and all other places by US, Israeli and other rapacious imperial waring and occupying forces. "Worthy" ones, however, are those prominently mentioned who died or were hurt on September 11, 2001 in the US, on July 7, 2005 in a dubious London "terrorist" bombing, on March 11, 2004 in the Madrid train bombings, and the Israeli corporal practically the whole free world still knows about since he was taken captive in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) last summer and is still being held. More recent "worthy" victims are the 15 British Royal Navy seamen arrested by Iranian armed forces, now released, and BBC journalist Alan Johnston, also apparently abducted and held captive in the OPT since March 12 when his employer reported he was forcibly seized from his car by gunpoint driving home from work in Gaza City. The Royal Navy and Johnston instances particularly stand out with the kind of steady BBC and western media reporting on the incidents usually reserved for figures of note but common as well for ordinary types when it serves a propaganda purpose. First the Persian Gulf incident involving the British seamen. Iran claims geographical coordinates showed they were 0.5 km inside Iranian waters while the Brits claimed otherwise, but it hardly matters in waters where it's hard to tell. More important are CIA, Defense Department and former US and other officials admitting to years of covert and other incursions into Iranian territory on land, sea and by air. Iran is aware they're still ongoing and justifiably views them as hostile acts likely committed as prelude to planned future greater provocations or military action. Up to now, Iran showed great restraint and patience, but had every right to defend its territory by seizing the intruders March 23. They were held for interrogation until ceremonially released April 5 following their 15 day captivity during which time it appeared they were well treated even though Britain's Ministry of Defense instructed them to say otherwise once they were back home. Compare that to how British and US forces treat their captives in torture-prisons. Sent there are innocent men, women and children, held in most cases on administrative charges indefinitely, and subjected to harsh punitive treatment only revealed later by the few lucky enough to get out and go home to talk about their ordeals. Try hearing about them in the dominant western media deafeningly silent. Economist, activist and web editor Michel Chossudovsky is never silent and reported more information on the British seamen April 6 on his Global Research web site. He wrote that British "Royal Marine Captain Chris Air told (British) Sky News TV that the object of their mission (in the Persian Gulf) was to 'gather intelligence' on Iran" in a pre-recorded interview done prior to his capture, but aired only after his release. Chossudovsky reprinted the interview on his web site and included a video link to Sky News TV so readers could watch and listen to it ending any doubt what British forces are up to repeatedly in the Gulf and Iranian waters. Chossudovsky also included a BBC TV video link and reprinted a transcript of BBC's interview with Captain Air and Lt. Felix Carman during which Carman admitted this operation "followed approximately 66 similar (ones) over the previous four weeks" done to conduct boardings of ships stopped to be inspected or crews interrogated in an intrusive (and likely illegal) operation called IPAT - Interaction patrol. In spite of this, the 15 Royal Navy personnel got impressive and disingenuous headline coverage throughout their captivity during which time UK officials and Prime Minister Blair denied what Air and Carman admitted on British television so we all now know what only could be previously surmised. They're now released, back home unharmed, regarded as heros, at first allowed by Britain's Ministry of Defense to sell their stories (as obvious propaganda) to the media for profit until public outrage got the Ministry to change its mind meaning the seamen can still do it but only for free. Now the case of BBC Gaza reporter Alan Johnston. Dozens of foreigners have been abducted in Gaza in the past, but none held as long as Johnston or given the kind of publicity he gets daily in the UK. Why? Because he's from the West and works for BBC that reports it has no knowledge where he is or who may be responsible for his apparent abduction. BBC also notes 6500 people worldwide have signed a petition calling for (in fact, demanding) his release. On April 9, rallies were held in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and London on his behalf. Prayer vigils as well since. BBC reports Palestinian officials insist they're doing all they can to locate and free him, and have ordered their security services and interior ministry to take "all necessary measures" on his behalf. BBC further notes, with irony, Johnston's Gaza posting was to have ended in March, but, of course, has now been involuntarily extended indefinitely. There's more. In a show of solidarity, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ - representing over 500,000 journalists in more than 100 countries) called for Johnston's immediate release, and Palestinian journalists held a three day strike protesting what happened. IFJ General Secretary Aidan White noted that "Every day that passes jeopardises Alan's safety even further and we support our Palestinian colleagues (working for Johnston's release) quickly and unharmed." And he added "It is unconscionable that the Palestinian government has not done more to secure Alan's release." Try imagining that kind of statement if Johnston were Muslim and worked for an Arab publication or news service, especially one "unfriendly" to western imperial interests. Can readers name any Arab journalists targeted, abducted or willfully murdered in Iraq by US military forces since March, 2003? The IFJ affiliate Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS) can and shows as much concern for Johnston's safety. It already held numerous demonstrations on his behalf and set up a protest tent in front of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) demanding the government do more to free him quickly. There's more still. The IFJ, PJS, and British affiliate National Union of Journalists of the UK and Ireland combined to publicly call for Johnston's immediate release unharmed. IFJ pressed its demands in writing to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh asking them to intervene personally on Johnston's behalf. The Arab Media Forum and International Association of Press Clubs have also publicly called for Johnston's release, and BBC's web site petition has registered 50,000 names supporting Johnston's release with more added each day. And there's still more as astonishingly the European Parliament in Strasbourg passed an "emergency resolution" April 26 calling for the immediate release of Johnston with an accompanying statement that MEPs of all political stripes back it. Try imagining a whiff of sympathetic parliamentary support (let alone congressional) for the many thousands of illegally held and tortured Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan and all other political prisoners held anywhere unless they're "worthy" ones from the West. There's no end to this as even noted British journalist Robert Fisk now is "demanding the release of Alan Johnston" in his April 28 London Independent column adding "as long as he is held, how can we (other journalists) cover the atrocities of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Gaza?" Simple, as Fisk surely knows - do your job. If not you and other independent journalists, then who? However, Fisk's concern is understandable as he, as much as anyone, puts himself in the eyes of the Middle East storms he covers. He has good reason to be concerned and in the past had a few close calls. Nonetheless, all this support just cited was for "one" journalist (likely unharmed), now almost as well known in the UK as the organization he works for. For many weeks last summer, the same was true in Israel and the West for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) corporal (left unnamed here) who also had, and may still have, strong name recognition on every continent. This is how he, Johnston, the 15 UK seamen, and other "worthy" victims are treated - elevated to celebrity status, pleas made on their behalf through the media, welcomed home on release ceremonially on national television and treated like heros because they're from the West and can be exploited for maximum propaganda value. Another "worthy" victims example also deserves mention - the ones attacked, killed and injured by one or more apparent suicide bombers April 12 inside Baghdad's heavily fortified, fortress-like, four square mile Green Zone on the left bank of the Tigris River surrounded by thick blast-proof concrete wall protection against such attacks or other type bombing attempts to penetrate inside it. To enter what's called the "ultimate gated community," visitors must pass through up to eight checkpoints depending on where they're heading, and once inside security is intense including full body searches, dogs sniffing for explosives, electronic scanners and every other human and high-tech measure imaginable to guarantee safety inside no longer guaranteed. The April 12 attack was "Tet"-like in impact in a country where every day is like "Tet" proving war there is unwinnable to everyone but Bush hard-liners yet to come around as well as being blind to see nowhere and no one in Iraq is safe. One thing, however is - the hero status of the attack's dead (eight apparently, including three lawmakers) and injured. They got instant media-manipulated elevation to "worthy" victim status with the number eligible changing daily then as the count did depending on what side of their mouth US military spokesmen spoke from in an effort to turn a calamity into what Condoleezza Rice brushed off as just a "bad day." In Iraq, every day is bad, and no amount of manufactured heroics or "worthy" victims will change things. The most recent instance of "worthy" victim "made-for-TV" coverage happened April 16 in Blacksburg, VA, southwest of Roanoke, on Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's campus. It was falsely reported to be the deadliest shooting incident in modern US history conveniently ignoring state-sponsored ones and others of greater magnitude only one of which was the 1923 Rosewood, Florida massacre of up to 150 "unworthy" innocent black people. Add bombings to shootings, and there was the May 18, 1927 dynamiting of a school in Bath, MI killing 45, mostly children; the Oklahoma City April 19,1995 bombing killing 168; the 51 day state-sponsored (US Army Delta force-FBI Hostage Rescue Team) terror siege and immolation of the Branch Davidian's Mount Carmel Waco ranch compound killing 84 innocent men, women and children; not to mention the 9/11 attacks killing several thousand or more cited above. And these attacks pale in significance to 500 years of state-sponsored genocidal terror attacks still ongoing against Native Indian peoples in all the Americas killing an estimated 100 million plus as many as 50 million black African captives perishing during a Middle Passage voyage never reaching shore for them. And this leaves out many millions more murdered by American imperial marauding on six continents with US presidents trying to best the appalling records of their predecessors and George Bush racing to the top of the charts. Still, the Virginia Tech attack was horrific leaving 33 dead including five professors and the apparent shooter who reportedly shot himself in the head. For several days, this story preempted all others. It got round-the-clock blitzkrieg coverage (and is still considered newsworthy) for maximum effect highlighting "worthy" victims politically important enough for George Bush to deliver a pathetic grandstanding address in their honor to an April 17 convocation at the school's Cassel Coliseum. This incident especially stands out as a prominent instance of anointing victims "worthy" hero status just because they died. It's also a setup for a criminal administration to gain maximum political advantage from a tragedy that should highlight the need to curb our out-of-control gun-crazed culture in which getting even violently today with lethal weapons is as common as ordinary fisticuffs once were decades back. But bloody noses don't make headline news in an age of mass communication when, more than ever, "worthy" victims are needed to do it. It lets a mass-murderer like George Bush honor the dead for maximum political gain and gives him cover to deflect attention away from his far greater crimes of war and against humanity. "God bless America('s) worthy victims" deserving better than to be defiled by George Bush's presence at a solemn occasion in their honor. The Unknown, Unseen, Nameless, Faceless "Unworthy Victims" In a recent article, John Pilger quotes historian Mark Curtis' characterization of "unworthy victims" as "unpeople" while Herman and Chomsky explain the "propaganda system," played out in the dominant media, characterizes people abused and victimized by us or our client states as "unworthy." They're everywhere in numbers so huge choices to cite are limitless. None, however, stand out more prominently than those in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) where beleaguered Palestinians have endured six horrific decades under harsh Israeli rule and occupation. Their desperate state rarely gets media coverage, and when it does it's inadequate, demeaning, hostile and falsely reported turning victim into victimizer. Unmentioned is that Palestinians face daily constant Israeli-imposed assaults, restrictions and severe hardships creating nightmarish conditions for them living in virtual open air prisons enduring the cruelest kinds of endless collective punishments ignored in the West. Consider the attention on a single captured Israeli corporal, BBC's Alan Johnston, 15 UK seamen, and the Virginia Tech dead. Compare it to the virtual media blackout on life in occupied Palestine overall and for 10,000 or more Palestinian prisoners. They were forcibly abducted by Israeli forces, are kept indefinitely under harsh conditions in prisons, held mostly on administrative charges as political hostages, and are routinely tortured according to Israeli human rights monitoring group B'Tselem in flagrant violation of international law banning the use of torture or degrading treatment under any circumstances. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlawed it in 1948. The Fourth Geneva Convention then did it in 1949 banning any form of "physical or mental coercion" and affirming detainees must at all times be treated humanely. The European Convention followed in 1950. Then in 1984, the UN Convention Against Torture became the first binding international instrument dealing exclusively with the issue banning torture in any form for any reason. Israel ignores international laws and norms and gets away with it because the US and West do nothing to hold its governments accountable for their actions. Why should they? Israel is a valued ally, and its crimes are against "unworthy victims" allowed no rights in a state where only Jews get them. Further, the US notably does the same things to many thousands of unknown "unworthy" prisoners in its torture-prisons where those held have no rights either and are treated any way their captors wish out of sight and mind and virtually ignored in the West as "unpeople." For long-suffering Palestinians, their struggle for recognition, freedom and justice has gone on for six decades with little interest, redress, or aid from the West or even much of it from Arab neighbors willing to sacrifice Palestinian rights for their greater political and economic interests building western political and economic alliances, particularly with the US. As a result, over 5.3 million Palestinians (including 1.4 million Arab Israeli citizens) are denied all rights Israeli Jews get, are subjected to constant abuse and neglect, 3.9 million of them are virtual prisoners in the open air camps, cities and villages of Gaza and the West Bank (OPT), and over 10,000 are held and brutalized inside Israeli prison hellholes. They're all nameless, faceless, and ignored in the West because they're "unworthy" Palestinian Arab Muslim victims, so who cares if they're forced to endure a hostile occupier's unrestrained harshness against them. "Unworthy" Iraqis In March, 2003, US forces came, saw and "liberated" 26 million Iraqis from their freedom in a war beginning in January, 1991. They destroyed a once prosperous nation, the most advanced in the Middle East, leaving in its wake a surreal lawless armed camp wasteland with few or no essential services like electricity, clean water, medical care, fuel or most everything else needed for sustenance and survival. They also burnt, looted or destroyed most of Iraq's institutions of higher learning; plundered the nation's archeological museums, historic sites, libraries and archives - all part of a barbaric planned effort to destroy the country's cultural identity, control its vast oil resources, eliminate all opposition through daily land and air rampages through cities and neighborhoods assassinating targeted victims and randomly killing anyone including women and children sometimes for sport or out of anger. It's called democracy, US-style, through the barrel of a gun, where the law is what the occupier says it is and "unworthy" victimized subjects have no say in their own country known as "the cradle of civilization" now disappearing at the dawn of the 21st century. Then there are the prisons. An unknown number of US-run ones are in Iraq and Afghanistan plus other proxy ones throughout the greater Middle East, Eastern Europe, parts of Africa and wherever else Washington can bribe or coerce other nations to be our enforcers to treat prisoners sent there the way we do in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib hellholes and the lesser known but equally infamous one at Bagram airbase near Kabul, Afghanistan. Two Iraq prisons (Camp Bucca in the south and Camp Cropper near Baghdad) alone reportedly hold 18,000 captives among an official 34,000 known held throughout the country with the true number likely much higher. It's called justice, US-style meaning none whatever for our targeted nameless, faceless, unknown "unworthy victims" the West ignores with rare exceptions like the case of Australian David Hicks. Other "Unworthy" US Victims Hicks was held over five years at Guantanamo where he was abused, tortured, and one of only four prisoners there ever charged with an offense (using a cooked up charge of "material support for a terrorist group") after he agreed to a (Republican party official's politically arranged) plea bargain, was tried in a military tribunal kangaroo court Stalinist-type show trial, convicted unjustly and will now return home to serve nine more months in an Australian prison. As an "unworthy" prisoner, western media coverage was pathetic and inadequate failing to explain what was most important. He was a terribly abused innocent young man whose ordeal continues. He won't be treated with laurels and a hero's welcome back home if Australian Prime Minister and Bush lap dog John Howard's view prevails. After the verdict, he echoed Rupert Murdoch's "Australian" calling Hicks a "confessed terror trainee." Howard told reporters Hicks is a dangerous terrorist who "pleaded guilty to knowingly assisting a terrorist organization." In spite of it all, Hicks, his family, friends and supporters hope one day he'll be able to resume a normal life that never can be that way again for him, thanks to US "justice." Nor will it be for countless numbers of Iraqis and Afghans whose lives we changed forever, many of whom now want redress and have filed legal claims to get it. On April 11, the ACLU released information on hundreds of them obtained from the Pentagon after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get them in June, 2006. It's for 479 Iraq claims and 17 from Afghanistan that in total comprise a tiny fraction of the number of innocent civilians entitled to compensation for damages or loss of loved ones but who'll end up getting nothing. So far, 198 claims have been summarily denied on grounds of "combat exclusion" meaning the incident cited was "from action by an enemy or resulted directly or indirectly from an act of the armed forces of the United States in combat." Other claims were rejected for "lack of evidence (or) lack of proof of US involvement." Another 10% were as well because incidents cited hadn't been reported in the US military's "SIGACT" (significant action) database. Of the 496 claims ACLU knows of (there are likely others or will be), only 164 resulted in cash payment compensation to surviving family members in total amounting to $32 million that can't begin to make up for the human loss, immense suffering still ongoing, and permanent impairment to those on whom it was inflicted. Nor does it begin to address the pain, suffering and loss for millions of nameless, faceless "unworthy victims" of US aggression and occupation whose lives won't ever be the same again if they survive. How can they be as out-of-sight, out-of-mind demonized Muslims under US occupation in the age of George Bush's wars against them that "won't end in our lifetime." Nor will Jose Padilla's life improve as a US citizen held as an "enemy combatant" in military confinement for nearly four years and since then by the Department of Justice (DOJ) even though no corroborating evidence justifies his guilt on anything, let alone his original charge of being part of a terrorist plot to detonate "dirty bombs" inside the country. Nonetheless, he's been kept in brutalizing solitary confinement and tortured there awaiting trial just begun April 16 on a lesser vague charge of "supporting terrorism (by being) part of a vast international movement of foot soldiers, recruiters and financiers who foment violent jihad around the globe" with no evidence to make this case or any other on an innocent man. Occasionally a brief story pops up about him as it did when wire services like Reuters reported his trial began in Miami. It then quickly disappears as this "unworthy" abused, victimized and emotionally turned to mush young man is left to the whims of DOJ justice meaning he'll get none. Nor will the media explain he experienced some of the mind-altering treatment common at Guantanamo and Human Rights Watch says goes on at Kabul's US-run "prison of darkness" where detainees are so abused a lucky former one reported he "could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors (in a delusional state)." The Pentagon knows what it's doing and even puts it in writing. The current Army field manual states: "Sensory deprivation (or extremes) may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior (and) significant psychological distress." John Walker Lindh got his share of it too. He's a US citizen former Attorney General John Ashcroft labelled an "American Taliban." He was captured, held and tortured in Afghanistan in 2001 based on false claims he was a Taliban terrorist fighting US forces. In fact, he only arrived in the country four weeks before 9/11 and went to help the Taliban fight the brutal Afghan warlords at a time Washington was still providing the Taliban financial aid. Under torture at Baghram Airbase, he confessed to crimes he never committed, for which there was no corroborating evidence, and while there was denied legal counsel. Lindh is an innocent man, should be freed, and likely is as bad off emotionally as Padilla. Instead, he's been moved to the federal supermax prison in Colorado where he's held in brutalizing solitary confinement, forced to undergo sensory deprivation, other periods of extreme noise, routine beatings, mindless strip searches and more because that's what goes on in these hellholes designed to destroy human beings and doing a pretty good job of it. The public only got false and misleading reports and media images of Lindh portrayed as a "dangerous Taliban terrorist" now in custody and unable to commit further crimes. He never committed any. More injustice for another "unworthy victim" of it. The Case of Lynne Stewart's Struggle for Justice As An "Unworthy Victim" Targeted by Bush's DOJ Lynne Stewart's courageous struggle for justice is followed, discussed and will be remembered by growing legions of supporters everywhere in spite of the dominant media's blackout on almost all of it. DOJ indicted Stewart on four counts of aiding and abetting a terrorist organization April 9, 2002 under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). She was unjustly accused of providing material support for terrorism and violating Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) imposed by the US Bureau of Prisons including a gag order on Sheik Abdel Rahman whom she represented in his 1995 trial and who now is serving a life sentence for "Seditious Conspiracy" in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Because the so-called "radical" cleric was so radioactive, his case was high-profile enough to make Stewart herself a target that began with her arrest, indictment and trial using her case to threaten other lawyers not to represent unpopular clients in the age of George Bush's witch-hunt "war on terrorism" against them. It was the beginning of Stewart's long ordeal that included her battle with breast cancer, de facto court disbarment following her conviction February 10, 2005 on all four counts of her indictment - made official April 25, 2007 when she was formally (and unjustly) disbarred by the New York Bar Association. October 17, 2006 was her sentencing date that could have been for life for a 67 year old woman if presiding Judge John G. Koeltl handed down the 30 years DOJ prosecutors asked for. Judge Koeltl, however, had other ideas effectively vindicating Stewart in his 28 month sentence, allowing her to remain free pending her appeal to a higher court which he acknowledged might overturn the case that was clearly a gross miscarriage of justice for a woman whose her long career was dedicated to fighting for justice. Stewart spent 30 years as a civil rights attorney representing the rights of those in society never afforded due process unless they're lucky enough to have an advocate like her. For that and representing Sheik Rahman, she became a targeted "unworthy victim" whose struggle for exoneration continues. Both she and DOJ are appealing Judge Koeltl's sentence with Stewart's fate hanging on the outcome that likely will be appealed to the Supreme Court whichever way it goes with final resolution on it still many months away. And it may not end there. If the High Court rules for Stewart or affirms her maximum 28 month sentence, DOJ may decide to reindict her on new charges meaning a new ordeal would begin where the present one leaves off. In the age of George Bush, that's how things work for society's "unworthy" targeted victims including those representing due process rights of others when DOJ doesn't want them to have any. For now, Stewart's appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and DOJ's will be heard and likely ruled on together by a three-judge panel at a date so far unannounced. Stewart's appeal challenges the validity of the charges, the application of statutes used, the constitutionality of pre-trial tactics plus the conduct of and various rulings made at trial. Her hope is for what she deserves - a verdict reversal and full exoneration, case closed at the appellate level. Stewart also opposes DOJ's objections to her sentence and has a January 22, 2007 US Supreme Court decision in Cunningham v. California to bolster her case. In the 6 - 3 ruling, the High Court affirmed the district judge's exercise of discretion in imposing sentence. The Court struck down California's tiered sentencing system under which judicial findings of fact resulted in higher sentences. That, in turn, bolsters the notion that prosecution Sentencing Guidelines are only advisory and aren't to be used as a line in the sand benchmark basis for imposing sentence. Two other cases before the High Court may also bear on Stewart's appeal. One is Claiborne v. United States on whether extraordinary circumstances are needed to justify a sentence substantially different from Guidelines. The other is Rita v. United States on a sentence within Guidelines. Here the issue is whether Guidelines sentencing is presumed reasonable, or whether a court must still examine other factors justifiable enough to warrant a lesser sentence. Lynne Stewart's fate hangs on all these issues along with whatever DOJ has in mind for her ahead - whether to let her case end in the courts or continue its witch-hunt persecution of her. It may be a good while yet before it's known. Other Examples of "Unworthy" Victims In the age of George Bush, all Muslims are "unworthy," and those singled out for targeting are its victims. Citing national security, thousands were and still are hunted down witch-hunt style, rounded up, held indefinitely on administrative charges or none at all, denied bail, restricted or denied their right to counsel, tried in secret courts with no right of appeal, and incarcerated or deported. They're invisible save for their broad brush demonization in the major media as "Islamofascists" to justify the "long war on terror" against them because of their faith and ethnicity. They're its innocent victims. Along with them are "unworthy" Latino immigrants here in the US undocumented because NAFTA, CAFTA and other predatory trade agreements destroyed their ability to survive at home leaving them no other choice than to come north. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) feels otherwise targeting them as criminals and terrorist threats. Its agents seize them at the border or in workplace raids separating parents from children, holding thousands in detention where they're harshly treated and denied any rights. The rest are deported, but will just return to face ill-treatment as exploited workers or by ICE if caught because of their race and ethnicity. More "unworthy" nameless, faceless victims. The US-based Gulag Prison System's "Unworthy Victims" Few people in the country know anything about the US prison system and who's held there because almost nothing about it gets reported in the major media. Most in it are many tens of thousands of "unworthy victims" because of oppressive statutes on the books incarcerating huge numbers unjustly, many innocent of any crime, and most come from society's most vulnerable and unwanted so who'll care or notice. The result is the largest prison population in the world at over 2.2 million, growing by over 1000 new inmates a week. Half or more are black, about two-thirds including Latinos, over half are there for non-violent offenses, and half of those are drug related. Then consider how they're treated. What goes on at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other overseas hellholes happens here at home as well in US-based ones at both federal and state levels. It includes constant harassment, savage beatings by prison guards; attacks by fierce dogs inflicting painful bites; severe shocking with cattle prods and 50,000 volt-emitting Taser electro-shock guns strong enough to kill and often used multiple times making victims (who survive) shake in pain for hours; assaults by toxic chemicals like pepper spray inflicting severe discomfort or pain; and for many 23 hour lockdowns in rat and roach-infested windowless cells under 24 hour artificial light with alternating periods of sensory deprivation and extreme noise and kept in painful hand and feet shackles whenever outside their cells. There's more including denial of medical treatment or poor quality when received even though prisons are known hotbeds of diseases including contagious ones. In September, 2006, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) estimated over half the prison population suffers mental problems, mostly related to their incarceration and for many it's severe. It includes serious melancholia, mania and hallucinations. In addition, an astonishing 1.5 million inmates are released each year afflicted with threatening contagious diseases like TB and HIV/AIDS. In prison, these and other diseases cause 7000 mostly preventable reported deaths yearly plus a rising level of suicides and many more unsuccessful attempts. In addition, prison sexual assaults are commonplace, and victims of it have virtually no effective defense against predators. The UN Committee Against Torture reported the numbers conservatively estimating in May, 2006 it happens to at least 13% of inmates with many more suffering frequent sexual abuse. The UN Committee believes around 200,000 current inmates were or will become sexual assault victims and that over the past 20 years the number exceeds a shocking one million. Then there are the political prisoners in the many hundreds in a nation where the very notion of them is repugnant and appalling. The Prison Activist Resource Center web site lists over 100 names it focuses on (mostly unknown to the public) including a few that are like framed American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, imprisoned 30 years unjustly, and internationally known journalist and former Black Panther activist Mumia Abu-Jamal on death row for 25 years for a crime he didn't commit. Most others there include former Black Panther members and other black activists; Native American activists; Puerto Rican freedom fighting activists; Muslims and undocumented immigrants because of their faith and ethnicity; and others (men and women) who dared fight for rights, principles and causes America rejects. Palestinian refugee, scholar, academic, community leader, civic activist and freedom-fighting advocate Dr. Sami Al-Arian stands out as a dramatic example of injustice in post-9/11 America with its climate of state-induced fear and harsh repression targeting all Muslims, distinguished ones included. Following 11 years of investigations and harassment, he was arrested and imprisoned February 20, 2003 on trumped up charges, held in oppressive 23 hour lockdown solitary confinement in rat and roach-infested windowless cells under 24 hour artificial light even after being tried and acquitted December 6, 2005 on eight of 17 false charges with the jury deadlocked 10 - 2 in his favor on the other nine. On March 2, 2006 he agreed to a plea agreement to bring closure to his case and end his long ordeal. Under its terms, the prosecution stipulated Al-Arian committed no violent acts or had knowledge of any; that he would not be required to "cooperate" further by providing prosecutors more information; and that he would be released for time served and be willing to be voluntarily deported. It didn't happen because prosecutors subpoenaed Al-Arian to testify before a grand jury investigating an Islamic think tank violating his plea agreement that he no longer would have to cooperate in further goverment investigations. Al-Arian rightfully refused to testify knowing doing so might involuntarily entrap him in possible or interpreted perjury leaving him vulnerable to endless government opportunities to harass and reincarcerate him. As a result Al-Arian's sentence was extended, and he remains imprisoned where, as a diabetic, he underwent a 60 day life-threatening hunger strike in protest requiring his transfer to the Butner, North Carolina medical facility where he remained until being transferred to the Alexandria Detention Center in northern Virginia. Before arriving, he endured a 30 hour stopover at the Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg, Virginia where, still recovering from his hunger strike, he was placed in a tiny, freezing cold windowless cell with pools of water on the ground and extremely cold air fed in through a vent, given no additional clothing or cleaning supplies to clean his cell, and no clock or watch to tell time or ability to know the proper direction to perform his Muslim prayers. In addition, guards illegally seized his legal documents and then claimed they misplaced them. They've yet to be found or returned. This is how extra harshly Muslim political prisoners are treated post-9/11 as Al-Arian's long ordeal for freedom, justice and full exoneration continues. He's well represented by William Mitchell College of Law professor and past President of the National Lawyers Guild Peter Erlinder as his lead attorney, but his struggle ahead is daunting. Al-Arian is up against a rogue administration determined to resist efforts to free him and is ready to file new charges to keep him imprisoned as long as DOJ wants him there. Today, that's the state of judicial fairness in America endangering anyone daring to speak out and dissent in an age of state-sponsored terrorism targeting innocent victims. Another noted one is Dr. Rafil Dhafir, a Muslim American of Iraqi descent and practicing oncologist until his license was suspended following his politically motivated conviction in a DOJ-run "kangaroo court" trial. He was charged with violating the Iraqi Sanctions Regulations (IEEPA) using his own funds and what he could raise through his Help the Needy charity to bring desperately needed essential to life humanitarian aid to Iraqi people unable to get it because of US/UN-imposed punitive sanctions from 1990 - 2003. For his "Crime of Compassion" (see dhafirtrial.net, Katherine Hughes), he was convicted of violating the sanctions and a total of 59 of 60 trumped up total charges including tax fraud, money laundering, and mail and wire fraud resulting in a 22 year prison sentence he's currently serving in Terre Haute's special illegal secret "Communications Management Unit" (CMU) targeting Muslims. Its existence was first revealed in a breaking news story February 16 by lawyer and legal analyst, academic, author and journalist Jennifer Van Bergen in an online article in The Raw Story. Van Bergen reported the CMU is for so-called "high-security risk" Muslim and Middle Eastern (Arab) prisoners to severely limit or cut them off entirely from contact and communication with the outside world violating federal law prohibiting such action. Sami Al-Arian was exonerated by a jury and Rafil Dhafir is an innocent man never charged with or convicted of "terrorism" or any act of violence. Neither is a "high-security risk" but both are treated like them because they're high-profile Muslims in the witch-hunt "war on terror" targeting them unjustly. These distinguished men are also "trophy" prisoners for the Bush administration using them especially, but all demonized Muslims as well, as scapegoats because of their faith and ethnicity and are treating them with extreme harshness as a result. These examples aren't happening at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, but right here at home in prisons everywhere where mostly non-violent human beings are locked in cages. It's often for offenses deserving little more than a reprimand or fine or that never should have been criminalized in the first place. Or in the case of Al-Arian, Dhafir and many others it represents a state crime against humanity, against innocent men, women and even children unjustly imprisoned for political reasons only. The result is victims of injustice are forced to serve hard time, and for repeat offenders or political targets it could be life without parole because society judges them "unworthy," punishing them in ways never done to the "worthy" afforded special treatment because of their privileged status. In the age of George Bush, we're all potential Sami Al-Arians and Rafil Dhafirs, and far too many targeted end up unjustly in the heart of prison darkness on death row as the "unworthiest" of this country's "unworthy victims." Today, the US is the only western country still using the death penalty as a punitive measure. Since 1985, over 50 countries abolished it and of the approximate six dozen still using it just a small handful account for nearly all executions. Amnesty International 2005 data showed 94% of known ones were carried out in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US. The US-based Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) is a "chapter-based grassroots organization dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment in the United States (with) active chapters in cities and campuses across the country." It reports more than 3500 people now on death row in the country, the largest number ever and growing listing five reasons why it's wrong and must end. It's racist, punishes the poor, condemns the innocent, doesn't deter crime, and is "cruel and unusual punishment" nearly always targeting "unworthy victims" of our criminal justice system under which those on death row get the worst of it. Since 1973, 123 or more US prisoners were released after evidence found them innocent. It concerned former Illinois Governor George Ryan enough in 2000 to declare a moratorium on all state executions after the 13th death row prisoner was found to have been wrongfully convicted since the nation's death penalty was reinstated in 1977. Ryan then pardoned four death row inmates and commuted 167 other sentences. The ACLU reported the results of a disturbing study conducted by Columbia University professor James Liebman in which he examined thousands of US capital sentences reviewed by courts in 34 states from 1973 - 1995. His shocking conclusion was "An astonishing 82% of death row inmates did not deserve to receive the death penalty (and) One in 20 death row inmates is later found not guilty." Reasons why were that someone later confessed to the crime, key witness testimony was later found to be illegitimate, or new evidence supported innocence. Investigations like this and others prove the death penalty is this country's ultimate punitive measure used almost exclusively against "unworthy, unpeople victims" to eliminate the unwanted, and those targeted are largely defenseless against it. Only the fortunate innocent few survive also proving our criminal justice system is irreparably broken and shamefully unjust in nominally democratic America for the "worthy" alone. America the Beautiful - Only for the Privileged "Worthy" "Worthy and unworthy victims" live in different Americas, highlighted in the age of George Bush in blazing starkness. Those anointed "worthy" are named, known, seen media-manipulated heros while the "unworthy" are mostly nameless, faceless unknown abused "unpeople" targets of the administration's "war on terror," the poor and anyone "in times of universal deceit" courageously daring to dissent. Above are case examples of injustice portraying America's dark side in contrast to those qualifying as special because Washington gets propaganda value from their misfortune. Add to them the privileged few, always special and "worthy" in a nation beholden to them at the expense of all others. Boosted as well in the process is what Edward Herman calls our "indispensable state" image and essential goodness giving us special dispensation to wage perpetual wars for an elusive peace in the name of democracy, human rights and justice for all we preach but don't practice. They're easily justified by manipulating false notions of exceptionalism and moral superiority giving us special rights and obligations to spread our way of life to others hiding our darker imperial agenda to impose it on them through the barrel of a gun, like it or not. This essay shows its effects on real people - those going along are "worthy" and those who don't or don't matter are "unworthy unpeople." Wellesley College English professor Katherine Lee Bates wrote the famous words to American the Beautiful on a trip west in 1893 but never could have imagined her "spacious skies...amber waves of grain...and purple mountain majesties" would become George Bush's ugly America for the "worthy" alone uncrowned by any of the "good" or "brotherhood" she wrote about "from sea to shining sea" everywhere.

Biixi bro. Thank you for your opinion, I appreciate your contribution that shows your diligence in defining terms such as genocide and qualifying other claims of wrong doing by the USA and Ethiopia. From your message, I understand the following: 1. All the bad things that have happened in Somalia the past 17 years were ONLY committed by Somalis, no foreign interference in the killings, rape, destruction and destabilization of the nation. If there is any foreign forces responsible for our problems, its Al Qaeda. 2. Ethiopia is not an enemy of Somalia, its a trusted friend, The Ethiopians are in Somalia ligitimately, they are worried that "terrorists" who were in power in Mogadishu will cause trouble in western Ethiopia ( Somali Territory), so Ethiopia is justified to shell civilian areas and kill anyone who refused to leave their houses since they were warned to leave by the Kind and Caring President Yusuf of TFG. 3. USA has never done anything wrong in Somalia, It has no interest what-so-ever, economic, political, strategic, Oil, Minerals, apart from its humaniterian programs for the poor and the suffering, its only looking for criminals linked to "Terror" in US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar esSalaam, and if they find them, the USA will process these suspects with full internationl transprency, provide them lawyers, treat them humanely, following all the conventions signed for such procedures as an example to the world. 4. The Islamic Courts Union has never done anything good in Somalia the six months they were in power in Mogadishu. Instead, they returned properties to its owners without the governments consent, killed inncent Ethiopian soldiers who came to help them establish a government, they attacked peaceful warlords and removed their road blocks illegally, they banned children to watch the World Cup football games, they banned fun and parties, and Qat and alcohol which is against Democratic principles of modern lifestyle, in short, they made Mogadishu too boringly peaceful to live. 5. The TFG is a legitimate representative government of Somalia, its sovereign and independent, and it draws its power from the people, not foreign powers, Members of Parliament who resigned are sympathizers of terrorists, therefore they were replaced by responsible MPs. 6. The current governmenet officials who were past warlords of the past 17 years civil war, have no criminal records, and are fit to be government officials. Killing Somalis in civil war is not crime, but killing Ethiopians and Americans are crimes and anyone who is even believed to have any link with any suspect is guilty which justifies large scale invasion of Ethiopian Taknks and artillery (Our trusted national friend) and America (la peace loving nation looking for three suspects believed to live in Somalia, but who accidently bombed and killed hundreds of civilins along with their goats by mistake as collateral damage, yet failed to capture even a single "terrorist" after questioning hundreds of innocent people in Ethiopian Secret prisons . 7. The death of over 2 thousand people in Mogadishu and the largest exodus of civilians 400,000 from Mogadisu, demolushing of their homes, was necessary to instal a government even after the Islamic Courts offered the President to come to Mogadishu and rule the country peacefully and the President preferred to come to Mogadishu on Ethiopian Tanks. 8. Islamic Sharia Law is not allowed in Somalia according to the Somali constitution drafted in Kenya in the presence of UN and US and IGAD countries, Sharia law is not acceptable by neighboring friendly nations. Instead, Somalia will apply secular laws that will make everything lawful if the people so desire, religion should be confined to houses, not in public since the Somali Christians will be offended if applied, and also Somali gays feel threatened if the Sharia is applied. Let me know if that is what you meant, because that is what is understood from your message. Nur