Elsewhere Today 441
Aljazeera:
Pakistan deports Sharif on return
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2007
15:00 MECCA TIME, 12:00 GMT
Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's former prime minister, has been deported to Saudi Arabia amid high drama hours after arriving in Islamabad after ending a seven-year exile.
"Nawaz Sharif is now out of Pakistan. He is going back to Saudi Arabia," Ijaz-ul Haq, Pakistan's religious affairs minister, said on Monday.
Sharif had arrived from London hours earlier on a Pakistan International Airlines flight before black-uniformed commandos immediately enterered the aircraft.
He got off the aircraft after a tense 90-minutes stand-off with the authorities.
High drama
Sharif was then arrested, reportedly on money-laundering charges, and deported soon after.
"Nawaz Sharif is under pre-emptive arrest in connection with corruption charges against him," Sheikh Rashid, a railway minister and close confidant of general Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, aid.
"I feel great, I'm prepared to face any situation," Sharif told Reuters as his flight landed in Islamabad.
Soldiers and police were on the tarmac awaiting the flight.
As officials boarded the aircraft and asked for his passport, the former prime minister insisted on personally presenting his papers at the immigration counter. He refused to be deported.
Life sentence
The supreme court ruled last month that Sharif had the right to return and the government should not try to stop him.
Sharif had been sentenced to life in prison on treason charges but released on condition that he live in exile for 10 years.
Geo TV, a private Pakistani television, said the government is likely to claim that Sharif's forced deportation has not violated any court ruling.
Unconfirmed reports said Sharif was headed for Jeddah and the Saudi authorities have agreed to host him for three more years.
"The high-handedness on show at the airport would go against the regime of General Pervez Musharraf," Sharif told Geo TV earlier.
Arrest warrant
He said his brother Shahbaz Sharif, who is in London, was to "to carry on the struggle in case he is detained". His brother was expected to return with him to Pakistan.
A court in Lahore had issued an arrest warrant on Friday for Shahbaz in connection with a murder case.
Shahbaz condemned the former prime minister's arrest and subsequent deportation and said his "brother had been abducted by dictator Musharraf".
Talking to Al Jazeera, he said the treatment meted out to Sharif was "not only a blow to Sharif, but a blow to the dignity of the people of Pakistan".
Police arrested leading supporters of Sharif and clashed with others on blocked roads leading to to the airport.
Sohail Rahman, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said security forces had sealed off the airport and mobile phones have been jammed.
Procession planned
Sharif has made clear he plans to lead a campaign against Musharraf who toppled him from power eight years ago.
Sharif had insisted he would return on Monday despite calls for him to stay in exile from officials in Saudi Arabia and Saad Hariri, a Lebanese member of parliament.
"I have a duty, I have a responsibility, I have a national obligation to fulfil at all costs and that is democracy," Sharif said as he boarded his flight at London's Heathrow airport.
Sharif had planned to lead a procession to his political power base in the city of Lahore, 300km away.
Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in the capital of Punjab province, said security forces had prevented Sharif's supporters from entering or leaving the city on Sunday.
Supporters held
Ahsan Iqbal, a spokesman for Sharif, said on Sunday that authorities had detained more than 4,000 activists from his party in Punjab, the country's largest province where he commands a loyal following.
Nadir Chaudhri, another spokesman for the former prime minister, said he was planning to take part in elections due in the coming months.
"His plan is to go back to play his role in Pakistani politics, which is his right," Chaudhri said.
"He's head of his own party. Elections are coming up. He will mobilise his party for those elections."
Public support for Sharif appears to be growing and he could become a potential obstacle to a power-sharing deal that Musharraf is discussing with Benazir Bhutto, also a former prime minister, that could see her return and the president quit as head of the army.
Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz, Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, had previously called on Sharif to honour the terms of a Saudi-brokered deal which sent him into exile seven years ago.
"Nawaz Sharif should respect his commitment to the most revered Muslim country [Saudi Arabia] and its leadership and complete 10 years in exile," Muhammad Ali Durrani, Pakistan's information minister, said.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/16FDD52E-BEF6-45EC-AD94-EB77ACF6EFE7.htm
AllAfrica:
PDP Better Under Yar'Adua, Says Ali
By Chuks Okocha, and James Sowole in Akure
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
10 September 2007
The National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Dr. Ahmadu Ali, has said the party is faring better under the administration of President Umaru Yar'Adua than it did under the immediate past Olusegun Obasanjo regime.
Ali also described all those who left the party to contest the last elections on the platform of another party, including former vice president Atiku Abubakar and former chairman of the party, Chief Audu Ogbeh, as enemies of PDP.
In Ondo State, youths suspected to be members of the militant Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND), made good their threat to embarrass the Governor, Dr. Olusegun Agagu, by holding 11 PDP leaders from Ese-Odo Local Government area of the state hostage.
It was over the alleged failure of the Agagu government to settle them for the work they did for him in respect of the last April 14 governorship election.
The PDP chairman spoke on Saturday night in Abuja at a dinner the party organised for members of its National Working Committee (NWC) appointed ministers in President Yar'Adua's government.
Comparing the fortunes of PDP at present with those of the past eight years, Ali said it had never been so good.
"We are celebrating a new dawn in the NWC. We had never had it so good in the past eight years. What is happening in the NWC has never happened before. We are just two years and four months in office, yet we have made significant progress.
"The power of every political party resides in the grassroots, we are celebrating the power of the grassroots and efforts of party officials that contributed to PDP's successes would be reckoned with," Ali said.
The PDP chairman poured encomiums on President Yar'Adua saying, "Today, we have a first class young man as President. He is a Mallam, a teacher."
Some of the former NWC officials honoured by the party included the Governor of Katsina State, Alhaji Ibrahim Shema, who was former National Vice Chairman (North); Chief Ojo Maduekwe, a former National Secretary of the party now Minister of Foreign Affairs; Mr. John Odey, former National Publicity Secretary of PDP, now Minister of Information and Communication; Alhaji Ahmed Mohammed Gusau, former Political Adviser to the PDP Chairman, now Minister of state, Power and Steel, and Senator Kabir Jubril, former Legal Adviser to the party, now an elected senator.
Ali also said all those that left the party were enemies of PDP.
"I have no regrets. They have been shamed by the victory of PDP at the polls. I challenge anybody who says that we don't deserve the victory. Those of them that left the party have been shamed. They are now begging to come back.
"If not for the Dr. Alex Ekwueme's committee, they ought to re-apply before they are re-admitted back to the party. But for the Ekwueme committee, we shall re-admit them free of charge. We are sending to them, to our enemies, an olive branch."
He described the victory of the party at the April general elections as victory from God and that all other parties were complacent, explaining that PDP worked hard "to deserve the victory bestowed on it by God."
Ali also attributed PDP's victory to the superiority of the party's manifesto, which he described as unbeatable.
In his response on behalf of the honourees, Maduekwe also acknowledged the leadership qualities of President Yar'Adua, saying he was more popular than the party.
Maduekwe, however, assured that they would remain loyal to the party.
"When we spoke about synergy between party and government, we meant it. The Yar'Adua magic, which we saw in the first 100 days, we saw outpouring of love from Nigerians for him. But for PDP it is not the same. PDP is strong enough to manage those emotions. He is more popular than the party.
"What sensible party loyalists do is to make sure that the popular candidate is taken as a brand for PDP to re-invent itself. PDP should re-invent itself.
"Those engaged in PDP bashing will soon be out of work. The party is capable of reinventing itself. We shall fix back the PDP machine. As they say in America, those who know how to break it, know how to fix it," he said.
Maduekwe said PDP was more than a political machine to win election, adding that it was for good governance
"The best way of expressing our gratitude will be to say that the same loyalty to the party, NWC-that loyalty and solidarity and bonding will be rekindled to show those qualities many times over to President Yar'Adua.
"While the honourees are members of the NWC, we have a governor here who was a member of NWC. We see him as a point of reference for us to show that the ruling party broke new grounds by bringing synergy between government and the party."
Meanwhile, the militants who held the 11 PDP chieftains in Ondo hostage vowed not to release them until the government paid them N500 million.
The leaders now in custody of the militants include the Chairman of the Caretaker Committee of the local government, Chief Thompson Aka, the state financial secretary of the party, Kenneth Semudara, and member of the newly inaugurated Local Government Service Commission, Mr Corporal Nanaopiri, among others.
In a text message sent to journalists by one Owei Perekininiboyegha, the militants said the leaders were kidnapped when they went to Arogbo area of the state to select delegates for the primaries of the PDP in order to choose the chairmanship candidate of the party for the forthcoming local government election.
The group said government must meet their demands or negotiate with them.
But despite the threat, the state government said last night that it would not negotiate with anybody or group, alleging the youth were merely looking for attention in order to dupe the unsuspecting public.
The Secretary to the State Government, Mr, Isaacs Kekemeke, said those engaged in the kidnapping were not MEND members but bunch of criminals trying to get money to finance their nefarious activities.
He said the state government would not encourage criminal activities by patronising the group.
Kekemeke said MEND had announced in newspapers that it had suspended hostage taking adding that anybody who engaged in such an act was not a member of the organisation but an armed robber.
"They are people looking for attention. They are people who should be arrested and resisted. They should be made to face the wrath of the law for committing crime.
"Those PDP members they kidnapped are Ijaw people. If you say you are fighting for Ijaw, why kidnap them? Why despoil their environment with black oil?"
Kekemeke said the people were operating from only two wards out of the 203 political wards in the state and could not have helped to install the governor.
Copyright © 2007 This Day.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709100033.html
AlterNet:
The Battle for Iraq is About Oil and Democracy, Not Religion!
By Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar, AlterNet
Posted on September 10, 2007
This week, we'll be buried under a crush of analysis about an Iraq that's being ravaged by a religious civil war - an incomprehensible war between "militants" of various stripes and "the Iraqi people." But Americans will be poorly served by the media's singular focus on Iraq's "sectarian violence." It obscures the fact that sectarian fighting is a symptom - a street-level manifestation - of a massive political conflict over what kind of country Iraq will be, who will rule it and who will control its enormous oil wealth.
And it obscures the great irony of the American project: that in that defining conflict over the future of the country, the Bush administration, with the support of Congress, has taken the same side as Iran's hardliners and the same side as the Sunni fundamentalist group called al Qaeda in Iraq. All are working - separately, but towards the same ends - against the wishes of a majority of Iraqis, who polls show want a united, sovereign country in control of its own resources and free of meddling by Washington, Tehran and other foreigners.
Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died violent deaths since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, many of them as a result of the civil conflicts that have pitted Iraqi against Iraqi. But those conflicts have nothing to do with the differences that distinguish the different branches of Islam - Iraq isn't struggling with a religious civil war.
Iraqis are fighting over fundamental questions about the future of their country. They're fighting over whether it will have a strong central government or be a weak confederation of semiautonomous states, over how soon and to what degree it will be independent of foreign influence, over who will control its massive energy reserves and under what terms they will be developed - all of these things are tangible, concrete issues that are crucial in determining Iraq's future.
We refer to this central political conflict as one between Iraqi separatists and nationalists. Loosely speaking, separatists favor a "soft partition" of Iraq into at least three zones with strong regional governments, similar to the semiautonomous Kurdish "state" in Northern Iraq; they are at least willing to tolerate foreign influence - meaning Iranian, U.S. or other powers' influence, depending on which group one is discussing - for the foreseeable future; they favor privatizing Iraq's massive energy reserves and ceding substantial control of the country's oil sector to regional authorities.
Nationalists are just the opposite: They reject any foreign interference in Iraq's affairs, they favor a strong technocratic central government in Baghdad that's not based on sectarian voting blocs and they oppose privatizing Iraq's oil and natural gas reserves on the extraordinarily generous terms (to the oil companies) proposed by the U.S. government and institutions like the IMF. They favor centralized control over the development of Iraq's oil and gas reserves.
That's not to say that ethic and sectarian violence isn't real, or isn't a significant problem in Iraq. The point is that violence based on religious or ethnic identity - Shiite or Sunni or Christian, Arab or Turkman or Kurd - is an extension of these fundamental disputes over what the future of Iraq will hold.
Sectarian and political tensions overlap in a fluid, shifting dynamic. The Iraqi parliament began as an institution of largely sectarian coalitions, but over the past two years, as the occupation has continued to grind on, sectarian-based politics have become overshadowed by divisions between nationalists and separatists. The result of the media's singular focus on sectarian conflict is that most Americans are unable to grasp the changing terrain of Iraq's political landscape with anything approaching a sense of the context in which events occur.
Consider a recent development of some significance. At the end of August, five Iraqi parties - representing Sunni and Shiite Arabs and Kurds - signed a "unity accord" or a "five-party manifesto" that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claimed was a sign of new movement towards national reconciliation. The White House said it was "an important symbol of unity in Iraq," and congratulated "Iraq's leaders on the important agreement." A spokesman for the Iranian government called it "productive and positive." The truth, however, was that it was an agreement among parties that had long agreed - among five Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish separatist parties that had been loosely allied since at least 2000, when all belonged to the London-based Iraqi exile group called the "Independent Iraqi Democrats." All five parties were strategic allies in the 2002 "London Conference," preparing and justifying a U.S.-led invasion. The five parties have long supported al-Maliki's regime. In fact, they are al-Maliki's regime, but the commercial media never took note of that fact.
Similarly, most Americans remain largely unaware of the political tensions that have created an almost irreconcilable impasse within the Iraqi government. The U.S.-backed al-Maliki "government" - the Iraqi cabinet - is dominated by separatists, including Shiites like Abdul Aziz Al-Hakeem, leader of the pro-Iranian group SIIC (formerly SCIRI), and al-Maliki himself, representing the al-Dawa Party; Sunnis like Iraqi Vice President Tariq Al-Hashimi of the Islamic Party, Iraq's President Jalal Talabani from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish autonomous government, representing the the Kurdistan Democratic Party. (Yes, these are exactly the same five parties that met last month and repackaged their old alliance as a new political victory.)
At the same time, Shiite (al-Sadr Movement, al-Fadhila Party), Sunni (the National Dialogue Council and the People of Iraq's Council) and secular (the National Dialogue Front and the Iraqi National list) nationalist groups - along with a few Kurdish, Christian and Yazidi representatives - have a slight working majority in the Iraqi Council of Representatives. The division between Iraq's governing coalition and a majority of its legislators explains why so many resolutions are accepted by the cabinet in one day, but spend months without being acknowledged by the parliament and vice-versa.
Also obscured by the media's focus on sectarian conflict is the massive divide between U.S. interests and the desires of most Iraqis on the most important issues facing the nascent state. Reached in Finland last week, Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of the secular National Dialogue Front, said, "What we're facing in Iraq is a political war in which the U.S. is taking one side."
The clearest but not sole example of that is the controversial oil laws that the Iraqi government has struggled with for over a year. While the White House puts relentless pressure on Iraqi lawmakers to pass a law that throws Iraq's energy sector open to foreign investors, a recent poll found that almost two out of three Iraqis would "prefer Iraq's oil to be developed and produced by Iraqi public sector companies rather than foreign companies."
Reached by phone this week in Amman, Jordan, Khalaf al-Ulayyan, head of the National Dialogue Council, one of the key Sunni groups that pulled out of al-Maliki's cabinet last month, described a conflict that was anything but religious. "My party is one among many different Iraqi groups - Sunnis, Shias and seculars - who are working together inside the parliament to block the law," Ulayyan said. "This oil and gas law is a major threat to Iraq's future."
His comments were almost indistinguishable from those of Shiite nationalist Nadim al-Jaberi, the head of the al Fadhila Party, who told us by phone from Baghdad that his party favors a public referendum "regarding the oil law to prove that the majority of the Iraqi people are against this law." He added, "The U.S. is putting maximum pressure to pass the law."
On the issue of federalism, key lawmakers from both parties in Washington, along with a host of foreign-policy think tanks and media pundits, have called for partitioning Iraq into three semiautonomous regions in a loose federation. Iraqi separatists are happy with that for the obvious reasons: The strongest pro-Iranian groups want to have their Shiastan just as most of the Kurdish leadership want to keep their Kurdistan. The Islamic Party, the lone Sunni group in the bunch, is a staunch supporter of the occupation, opposes any talk of a U.S. withdrawal and supports Kurdish and Shiite separatists' aspirations.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq is thrilled with the idea as well. The fundamentalist group, which had no presence in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, announced that it planned to build an exclusively Sunni "Islamic State" in the middle of Iraq; a "Sunnistan." And while the United States is claiming that its military operations in Anbar province have cut down on the violence there, the truth is that Sunni chieftains and other nationalists in Anbar only turned on the militants after they called for the creation of a separate Islamic state. That was months before the additional U.S. troops were on the ground.
Here, too, the separatist position backed by the United States is unpopular among Iraqis; a poll conducted last September found that majorities of all of Iraq's major ethnic and sectarian groups favor a strong central government in Baghdad (although even the most hard-core Iraqi nationalists understand the importance of the unique status of the Kurdish autonomous areas and don't object to the current system).
Of course, the most important issue facing Iraq is when and if Iraqi sovereignty will be restored. According to the poll cited above, "seven in ten Iraqis want U.S.-led forces to commit to withdraw within a year. An overwhelming majority believes that the United States military presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it is preventing." That view is shared by a (slim) majority of Iraqi lawmakers - remember, nationalists have the upper hand in parliament - but rejected by the al-Maliki government.
The contours of these very real and very important conflicts are vital to understanding where the American project in Iraq is and where it's heading. But Americans aren't being given the whole picture. Consider how a few recent stories out of Iraq look in the context of a political rather than religious civil war:
The Petraeus report's "progress"
Although many are already skeptical of general Petraeus' widely anticipated testimony about the supposedly improving security situation in Iraq, understanding the full range of conflict that afflicts Iraq makes the White House's claim that its troop "surge" has reduced violence even more dubious. As Paul Krugman noted last week, only sectarian killings count in the Pentagon's books:
Apparently, the Pentagon has a double supersecret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings [bad] from other deaths [not important]; according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told the Washington Post that "if a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian. If it went through the front, it's criminal." So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people.
So it's a "progress report" that ignores the fact that the thousands of Iraqis who were killed, and other millions who have lost their homes are victims of a separatist political agenda that had one major obstacle during the last years: the millions of Sunnis living in "Shiastan," Shia living in "Sunnistan," and Arabs living in "Kurdistan." Even the so called "sectarian deaths" are about implementing a political agenda.
Why "start over" with the Iraqi police, but not the army?
Last week, a U.S. commission studying the situation in Iraq suggested that the Iraqi police force "be scrapped" - presumably putting 26,000 heavily armed men out of work - and that a new force be built from scratch. The reason: It's infiltrated by "sectarian militias" and can't be trusted, according to the commission.
Sharp observers must have been dumbfounded: Analysts agree that the Iraqi army is just as deeply infiltrated with militia forces and, like the police, they are also Shiite militias accused of "sectarian violence." Among Iraqis, the two institutions are ranked similarly - about six in 10 have confidence in both the police and the army (PDF).
What's really going on is a mystery to most news consumers: The Iraqi police force is deeply infiltrated by Shiite nationalists - specifically members of the Mahdi Army - and the army is essentially controlled by Shiite separatists, specifically the Badr Organization Linked to SIIC. This U.S. bias, supporting the Iraqi Army against the Iraqi police, is not new; in May, U.S. warplanes dropped leaflets on Al-Diwaniya, a Southern Iraqi city, asking the local police to "stay home" while the Iraqi army was attacking militia fighters in the city. The U.S. military didn't just threaten to kill any policemen who left their homes, it launched airstrikes against local police buildings when members of the Iraqi Army called for backup.
Factions battling in the "power vacuum" in Basra
Of the Shia-on-Shia conflict in the southern provinces, a conflict in which British defense officials estimate 5,000 people have been killed over the past two years, most reporting has been of a vague battle between generic Shiite "factions" over "power." That's true, but lacking the vital details: it is a civil war between Shiite separatists - pro-Iranian parties led by SIIC and backed by al-Maliki's coalition and the United States - and Shiite nationalists from the Al-Fadhila party allied to one degree or another with the fiercely nationalistic Muqtada al-Sadr.
In Najaf, SIIC and the Dawa Party seem to have the upper hand, but not in Iraq's eight other southern provinces. Separatist governors have been assassinated in two of those provinces in the past month, along with their bodyguards, and in both instances Sadrists were suspected of having carried out the attacks. They're members of the same Muslim sect fighting over earthly issues - power, national identity, sovereignty and control of wealth. But the media won't tell the story in its complexity, as it doesn't fit the sectarian civil war narrative.
Political impasse, not sectarian divide, has brought al-Maliki's government to standstill
The media has made much of the fracturing of al-Maliki's governing coalition, but for the most part hasn't explained that his government has come apart along political lines - with Iraqi nationalists of every sect and ethnicity distancing themselves from al-Maliki, a Shiite separatist. One of the first parties to abandon the coalition was al-Fadhila, a Shiite nationalist party that draws strength from the poor in the south of the country. It pulled out of the Shia coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, in March, joining other Sunni and secular nationalists. Reached by phone this week in Baghdad, the head of Fadhila, Nadim al-Jaberi, said that his party "was the pioneer in breaking up the sectarian-based coalitions in the parliament and government, and in calling for a new regrouping that's politically based regardless of sects and ethnic roots."
The Islamic Party, a Sunni separatist party, made a similar move. In joining other Shia and Kurdish separatist groups, the Islamic Party effectively broke up the largest Sunni block in the Iraqi parliament, the Accord Front. None of this fits into the neat sectarian conflict that's become the conventional wisdom about what's going on in Iraq.
Crazy ragheads
The frame of a religious civil war not only obscures the fact that the United States is backing a deeply unpopular side in Iraq's political strife - that America is in fact an enemy of the Iraqi people, not of its "extremists" - it also plays into the popular but profoundly wrong notion that the conflict in Iraq is based on an age-old and perfectly irrational dispute over Islamic theological issues. In the West, it's widely believed that religious wars are "primitive" - something Europeans shook off during the Age of Enlightenment - while the kind of struggles over land, wealth and power that are raging in Iraq, while unfortunate, are believed to be a necessary component of statehood. By ignoring the political divides that ultimately fuel the violence plaguing Iraq - by focusing on the violent symptoms and ignoring the underlying disease - the conventional wisdom plays perfectly into the widespread belief that the bloodshed in Iraq is being carried out by fanatical savages beyond our understanding.
That, in turn, diverts responsibility for the chaos that followed the U.S. invasion away from American imperial hubris. After all, how could rational, Western war planners in Maryland or Virginia possibly predict an orgy of sectarian violence when they decided to dismantle the Iraqi government and security forces and replace them with an occupation force with a "light footprint"?
But more importantly than that, the religious civil war narrative obscures the fact that the United States is not working towards political reconciliation in Iraq. As we've detailed before, Iraq's nationalist groups - groups representing the majority of Iraqis - have reached out repeatedly in a series of attempts to reach a peaceful, negotiated end to the occupation and have been rebuffed. Instead of supporting the very groups that aspire to an independent Iraq where Iranians would not interfere and groups like al Qaeda would find no shelter, we are riding the wrong horse.
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/62042/
Asia Times:
The man with the dyed beard returns
By Ramzy Baroud
Sep 11, 2007
LONDON - Osama bin Laden has once again managed to occupy the stage and to insist on his relevance to the story of September 11, 2001. In his most recent video message, released by Reuters a few days before the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, bin Laden voiced some typically absurd statements, calling on Americans to embrace Islam and so forth.
What is really worth noting in bin Laden's message, however, is not the message itself, but the underlying factors that can be deduced from it. First, bin Laden wished to convey that he is alive and well and thus the US military efforts have failed miserably.
Second, his reappearance - a first since October 2004 - will be analyzed endlessly by hundreds of "experts" who will inundate widespread audiences with every possible interpretation - the fact that he looked healthy, that he dyed his beard, that he dressed in Arab attire as opposed to a military fatigue and a Kalashnikov by his side, that he read from a paper and so on.
Conspiracy theorists are already up in arms, some questioning whether the character in the video is bin Laden at all, and others wondering why the tape was promoted by a US terrorist watch group - SITE (Search for International Terrorist Entities) Intelligence Group - even before its release by Reuters, and why it didn't make it directly to the various extremist websites first, as is usually the case.
The news and the Internet are already rife with stories that are connected with bin Laden's re-emergence. A prominent Muslim scholar told Agence France-Press that the dyed beard is a "sign of war" according to the Salafi Islamic school to which bin Laden belongs. Go figure.
Others, who wish to highlight the fact that US security efforts have managed to prevent further attacks on US soil, would rather emphasize factors such as bin Laden not having made any direct threats (a supposed sign of weakness).
Bin Laden has indeed succeeded in diverting attention from the legacy and meaning of September 11 by reducing it to a mere fight between a disgruntled man - whose whereabouts since the Tora Bora Mountains battle in Afghanistan remains uncertain - and a president who dragged his country into a costly, unjustified and unpopular war.
The reality, however, is starkly different from this caricature reductionism, which the experts on "Islamic terrorism" fail to explain. For those who have shaped their careers on deciphering and decoding bin Laden, worrying about the bigger picture would hardly be self-serving.
But indeed there is a bigger picture, one that bin Laden's message, and the touting of the importance of that message, are unfortunately undermining. While there are lessons that must be gleaned from six years of tragic war, terror and wanton killing and destruction, these lessons hardly include the need for a wholesale conversion of Americans to Islam (one need not pose as an Islamic scholar to claim that such a call is un-Islamic).
For bin Laden somehow to represent existing opposition to President George W Bush's policy would indeed be very unfortunate and would actually detract from these important lessons.
First, although they repeatedly voice grievances similar to those held by millions of Muslims (and others) around the world, bin Laden and al-Qaeda do not speak for or represent mainstream Muslims. Mainstream Islam has historically been grounded on tolerance and moderation, qualities that bin Laden and his fanatics hardly represent.
Second, extremism in the Muslim world may be on the rise, but this doesn't pertain to bin Laden and his scarce messages. The obvious fact is that extremism (Muslim or any other) is intrinsically related to areas of conflict and never happens in a vacuum or under stable socioeconomic realities.
A study of suicide bombings and foreign occupations, oppression and radical interpretation of religious (or any ideological) texts, massacres, wanton killings and calls for revenge will show that each of these factors is greatly related to the other.
Third, the war on Iraq was a pre-calculated move that dates to 2002, when US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and his neo-conservative ilk began pushing for forceful and hostile foreign policy. September 11 merely provided the opportunity to justify such a war, even though those terrorists had nothing to do with Iraq.
Fourth, the combination of fear, public panic and war continue to undermine US democracy. Under the guise of an ill-defined "war on terror", Americans have paid an irreversible price - more Americans have died in Iraq than did in the September 11 attacks; the numbers of Americans wounded in Iraq top 20,000; Americans are spied on; people with integrity are losing their jobs for taking a moral stance and opposing the Bush administration; respected intellectuals are questioned at airports and community groups of conscientious citizens are monitored as security threats.
Fifth, it is America's war on Iraq, underreported killing fields in Afghanistan and blind support and financing of Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine that largely fuel terrorism and extremism and which are costing the US its so-called battle for "hearts and minds".
The obvious truth is that such a battle can never be won when a million Iraqis are killed and 4 million are made homeless in their own country. No "hearts and minds" can be captured when Palestinians are killed in Israel's "routine" daily missions in Gaza and the West Bank, or when poor Afghan peasants are blown to bits in random "searches" for bin Laden.
Indeed, it is in the Bush administration's interest for bin Laden to disseminate his messages at a time when some important and overdue questions ought to be asked. It isn't bin Laden and his dyed beard that should be flashing on our screens on this tragic day, but the disgraced faces of those who exploited the tragedy of a stricken nation to inflict tragedies on others.
September 11 should be a day on which we remember those who died in New York, near Washington and in Pennsylvania, and also in Kabul, Baghdad and Gaza, so that we can work together at bringing all the culprits to account.
Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian-American author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in numerous newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London). Read more about Baroud at his website ramzybaroud.net.
(Copyright 2007 Ramzy Baroud.)
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II11Ak01.html
Clarín: Israel: detienen a un grupo neonazi
acusado de ataques a inmigrantes y sinagogas
Tienen nacionalidad israelí, pero son oriundos de la desaparecida URSS. Serían culpables de agresiones contra trabajadores extranjeros, drogadictos, homosexuales y judíos religiosos. Tienen entre 16 y 21 años. Uno de los jefes del grupo logró huir al extranjero. Durante los registros en los domicilios de los sospechosos la policía halló uniformes nazis, retratos de Adolf Hitler, así como una pistola y explosivos.
Clarín.com
09.09.2007
La policía anunció el domingo la detención de ocho neonazis de nacionalidad israelí, oriundos de la desaparecida URSS, sospechosos de agresiones contra trabajadores inmigrantes, drogadictos, homosexuales y judíos religiosos.
Estos jóvenes, de edades entre los 16 y los 21 años, estaban en contacto con grupos neonazis de Rusia. Se sospecha que cometieron actos de vandalismo en dos sinagogas de Petak Tiqwa, cerca de Tel Aviv. Uno de los jefes del grupo logró huir al extranjero, añadió la policía.
Durante los registros en los domicilios de los sospechosos la policía halló uniformes nazis, retratos de Adolf Hitler, así como una pistola y explosivos. Los sospechosos se hicieron tatuar consignas con elogios a la "superioridad de la raza blanca".
En uno de los casetes filmados durante la agresión contra un drogadicto judío se ve a los miembros de la célula neonazi obligando a la víctima a pedir "perdón al pueblo ruso".
"Es muy difícil creer que partidarios de la ideología nazi puedan existir en Israel, pero es un hecho", afirmó a la radio pública la comisaria Revital Almog, quien dirigió la investigación. Según ella los sospechosos inmigraron a Israel hace unos diez años. "Algunos miembros de sus familias son judíos, pero ninguno de ellos es considerado judío desde un punto de vista religioso", añadió la comisaria.
Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2007/09/09/um/m-01495887.htm
Guardian:
Osama at large
Ian Williams
September 10, 2007 9:00 AM
The US senate, in all solemnity, sat last week and voted to double the reward for the apprehension of Osama bin Laden to $50m. So $25m was not enough to motivate the military and security forces of the world's superpower to catch the slippery Saudi? Or is it possible that there is another reason why Osama, for all the rewards being offered, has still not been caught?
Reading Cif commenters can often lead one to the conclusion that not a sparrow falls unless it has been shot by Islamic militants, poisoned by the CIA, or had its sense of direction befuddled by the Trilateral Commission. In my experience most such "plots" are just an attempt by bystanders to rationalize unbelievable and culpable stupidity on the part of governments.
On September 11, 2001, I lived down by the World Trade Centre, watched it happen, and lived in the poisonous fug of the noxious funeral pile for the rest of the year.
The Murdoch tabloids at the time carried front page pics of the beturbanned Osama Bin Laden which all the downtown shops prominently displayed:"Wanted, Alive or Dead," they proclaimed. Understandable. And then they disappeared as the war drums began to beat against Iraq, too be replaced with the omnipresent triptych of Osama, Saddam and the burning WTC.
Of course neither the tabloids nor the cable news media went out of their way to point out that Osama bin Laden was a former protégé of the CIA and its Pakistani surrogates, which is why one of my earliest hopes for a silver lining, that Americans might realize that foreign policy was not something that exclusively happened to foreigners, soon evaporated.
But reading the transcript of the latest OBL tape - which apart from its invocation to Islamic conversion could indeed read like a Guardian editorial on geopolitics - does raise the question of what he is still doing at large, with access to video cameras, hair dye and barbers?
Is it significant that OBL did not discourse on issues such as gay marriage, evolution, abortion and faith-based organizations, where his black heart beats in close harmony with those of the conservative right?
Conspiracy theorists should be asking the question: "Objectively, who benefits from allowing this malevolent, self-confessed mass murderer to remain at large?"
Well, think about an administration that has used the terrorist bogeyman to justify outright war on two countries and threatens another. One that has declared economic and diplomatic war on others; that has used the terrorist threat to build up its arms budget to unprecedented heights; that has extended the prerogatives of the president beyond all constitutional measure - and invented a whole set of them for the vice-president.
Would all this have been possible if Osama bin Laden had been brought to justice and revealed to be just a ramblingly discursive, albeit murderous, faith-based fanatic?
It's a tough call, and on the face of it, it's more plausible than the average conspiracist plot to think that OBL is out on license to allow the Bush administration to frighten voters when they go to bed.
But on the realist side, the spectacular incompetence and mendacity of this White House is demonstrable. They did indeed get the wrong man and go after Saddam Hussein who had nothing to do with 9/11 - while letting the man in the turban escape.
On the dilemma front it's the equivalent of choosing between the proffered conversion to Islam or the callow conservative brand of fundamentalist evangelism espoused by the White House.
But I rather discount the chances of anyone collecting the senate's munificent reward until after the coming debacle in Iran, which we will, of course, have to bomb in case the Ayatollahs there are sheltering the man who regards Iranian Shi'as to be heretical abominations.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2007/09/osama_at_large.html
Guardian:
The age of disaster capitalism
In the days after 9/11, America's firefighters, nurses and teachers were hailed as the country's heroes. But President Bush's embracing of the public sector didn't last long. As the dust settled on the twin towers, the White House launched an entirely new economy, based on security - with the belief that only private firms could meet the challenge. In this exclusive extract from her new book, Naomi Klein reports on those who see a profitable prospect in a grim future
Naomi Klein
Monday September 10, 2007
As George Bush and his cabinet took up their posts in January 2001, the need for new sources of growth for US corporations was an urgent matter. With the tech bubble now officially popped and the DowJones tumbling 824 points in their first two and half months in office, they found themselves staring in the face of a serious economic downturn. John Maynard Keynes had argued that governments should spend their way out of recessions, providing economic stimulus with public works. Bush's solution was for the government to deconstruct itself - hacking off great chunks of the public wealth and feeding them to corporate America, in the form of tax cuts on the one hand and lucrative contracts on the other. Bush's budget director, the think-tank ideologue Mitch Daniels, pronounced: "The general idea - that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided - seems self-evident to me." That assessment included disaster response. Joseph Allbaugh, the Republican party operative whom Bush put in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) - the body responsible for responding to disasters, including terrorist attacks - described his new place of work as "an oversized entitlement programme".
Then came 9/11, and all of a sudden having a government whose central mission was self-immolation did not seem like a very good idea. With a frightened population wanting protection from a strong, solid government, the attacks could well have put an end to Bush's project of hollowing out government just as it was beginning.
For a while, that even seemed to be the case."September 11 has changed everything," said Ed Feulner, old friend of Milton Friedman, the guru of unfettered capitalism and president of the Heritage Foundation, 10 days after the attack, making him one of the first to utter the fateful phrase. Many naturally assumed that part of that change would be a re-evaluation of the radical anti-state agenda that Feulner and his ideological allies had been pushing for three decades, at home and around the world. After all, the nature of the September 11 security failures exposed the results of more than 20 years of chipping away at the public sector and outsourcing government functions to profit-driven corporations. Much as the flooding of New Orleans exposed the rotting condition of public infrastructure, the attacks pulled back the curtain on a state that had been allowed to grow dangerously weak: radio communications for the New York City police and firefighters broke down in the middle of the rescue operation, air-traffic controllers didn't notice the off-course planes in time, and the attackers had passed through airport security checkpoints staffed by contract workers, some of whom earned less than their counterparts at the food court.
The first major victory of the Friedmanite counter-revolution in the United States had been Ronald Reagan's attack on the air-traffic controllers' union and his deregulation of the airlines. Twenty years later, the entire air transit system had been privatised, deregulated and downsized, with the vast majority of airport security work performed by underpaid, poorly trained, non-union contractors. After the attacks, the inspector general of the department of transportation testified that the airlines, which were responsible for security on their flights, had skimped significantly to keep costs down.
On September 10, as long as flights were cheap and plentiful, none of that seemed to matter. But on September 12, putting $6-an-hour contract workers in charge of airport security seemed reckless. Then, in October, envelopes with white powder were sent to lawmakers and journalists, spreading panic about the possibility of a major anthrax outbreak. Once again, 90s privatisation looked very different in this new light: why did a private lab have the exclusive right to produce the vaccine against anthrax? Had the federal government signed away its responsibility to protect the public from a major public health emergency? Furthermore, if it was true, as media reports kept claiming, that anthrax, smallpox and other deadly agents could be spread through the mail, the food supply or the water systems, was it really such a good idea to be pushing ahead with Bush's plans to privatise the postal service? And what about all those laid-off food and water inspectors - could somebody bring them back?
The backlash against the pro-corporate consensus only deepened in the face of new scandals such as that of Enron. Three months after the 9/11 attacks, Enron declared bankruptcy, leading thousands of employees to lose their retirement savings while executives acting on insider knowledge cashed in. The crisis contributed to a general plummeting of faith in private industry to perform essential services, especially when it came out that it was Enron's manipulation of energy prices that had led to the massive blackouts in California a few months earlier. Friedman, aged 90, was so concerned that the tides were shifting back toward Keynesianism that he complained that "businessmen are being presented in the public as second-class citizens".
While CEOs were falling from their pedestals, unionised public sector workers - the villains of Friedman's counter-revolution - were rapidly ascending in the public's estimation. Within two months of the attacks, trust in government was higher than it had been since 1968 - and that, remarked Bush to a crowd of federal employees, is "because of how you've performed your jobs". The uncontested heroes of September 11 were the blue-collar first responders - the New York firefighters, police and rescue workers, 403 of whom lost their lives as they tried to evacuate the towers and aid the victims. Suddenly, America was in love with its men and women in all kinds of uniforms, and its politicians - slapping on NYPD and FDNY baseball caps with unseemly speed - were struggling to keep up with the new mood.
When Bush stood with the firefighters and rescue workers at Ground Zero on September 14 he was embracing some of the very unionised civil servants that the modern conservative movement had devoted itself to destroying. Of course, he had to do it (even Dick Cheney put on a hard hat in those days), but he didn't have to do it so convincingly. Through some combination of genuine feeling on Bush's part and the public's projected desire for a leader worthy of the moment, these were the most moving speeches of Bush's political career.
For weeks after the attacks, the president went on a grand tour of the public sector - state schools, firehouses and memorials, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention - embracing and thanking civil servants for their contributions and humble patriotism. He praised not only emergency services personnel but teachers, postal employees and healthcare workers. At these events, he treated work done in the public interest with a level of respect and dignity that had not been seen in the US in four decades. Cost-cutting was suddenly off the agenda, and in every speech the president gave, he announced some ambitious new public programme.
But far from shaking their determination to weaken the public sphere, the security failures of 9/11 reaffirmed in Bush and his inner circle their deepest ideological (and self-interested) beliefs - that only private firms possessed the intelligence and innovation to meet the new security challenge. Although it was true that the White House was on the verge of spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to launch a new deal, it would be exclusively with corporate America, a straight-up transfer of hundreds of billions of public dollars a year into private hands. The deal would take the form of contracts, many offered secretively, with no competition and scarcely any oversight, to a sprawling network of industries: technology, media, communications, incarceration, engineering, education, healthcare.
What happened in the period of mass disorientation after the attacks was, in retrospect, a domestic form of economic shock therapy. The Bush team, Friedmanite to the core, quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture.
It was a bold evolution of shock therapy. Rather than the 90s approach of selling off existing public companies, the Bush team created a whole new framework for its actions - the war on terror - built to be private from the start. This feat required two stages. First, the White House used the omnipresent sense of peril in the aftermath of 9/11 to dramatically increase the policing, surveillance, detention and war-waging powers of the executive branch - a power-grab that the military historian Andrew Bacevich has termed "a rolling coup". Then those newly enhanced and richly funded functions of security, invasion, occupation and reconstruction were immediately outsourced, handed over to the private sector to perform at a profit.
Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex - a fully fledged new economy in homeland security, privatised war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatised security state, both at home and abroad. The economic stimulus of this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalisation and the dotcom booms had left off. Just as the internet had launched the dotcom bubble, 9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble. "When the IT industry shut down, post-bubble, guess who had all the money? The government," said Roger Novak of Novak Biddle Venture Partners, a venture capitalism firm that invests in homeland security companies. Now, he says, "Every fund is seeing how big the trough is and asking, 'How do I get a piece of that action?'"
It was the pinnacle of the counter-revolution launched by Friedman. For decades, the market had been feeding off the appendages of the state; now it would devour the core.
Bizarrely, the most effective ideological tool in this process was the claim that economic ideology was no longer a primary motivator of US foreign or domestic policy. The mantra "September 11 changed everything" neatly disguised the fact that for free-market ideologues and the corporations whose interests they serve, the only thing that changed was the ease with which they could pursue their ambitious agenda. Now the Bush White House could use the patriotic alignment behind the president and the free pass handed out by the press to stop talking and start doing. As the New York Times observed in February 2007, "Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government."
And so, in November 2001, just two months after the attacks, the department of defence brought together what it described as "a small group of venture capitalist consultants" with experience in the dotcom sector. The mission was to identify "emerging technology solutions that directly assist in the US efforts in the global war on terrorism". By early 2006, this informal exchange had become an official arm of the Pentagon: the Defence Venture Catalyst Initiative (DeVenCI), a "fully operational office" that continually feeds security information to politically connected venture capitalists, who, in turn, scour the private sector for start-ups that can produce new surveillance and related products. "We're a search engine," explains Bob Pohanka, director of DeVenCI. According to the Bush vision, the role of government is merely to raise the money necessary to launch the new war market, then buy the best products that emerge out of that creative cauldron, encouraging industry to even greater innovation. In other words, the politicians create the demand, and the private sector supplies all manner of solutions.
The department of homeland security, as a brand-new arm of the state created by the Bush regime, is the clearest expression of this wholly outsourced mode of government. As Jane Alexander, deputy director of the research wing of the department of homeland security, explained, "We don't make things. If it doesn't come from industry, we are not going to be able to get it."
Another is Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa), a new intelligence agency created under Donald Rumsfeld that is independent of the CIA. This parallel spy agency outsources 70% of its budget to private contractors; like the department of homeland security, it was built as a hollow shell. As Ken Minihan, former director of the National Security Agency, explained, "Homeland security is too important to be left to the government." Minihan, like hundreds of other Bush administration staffers, has already left his government post to work in the burgeoning homeland security industry, which, as a top spy, he helped create.
Every aspect of the way the Bush administration has defined the parameters of the war on terror has served to maximise its profitability and sustainability as a market - from the definition of the enemy to the rules of engagement to the ever-expanding scale of the battle. The document that launched the department of homeland security declares, "Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon," which conveniently means that the security services required must protect against every imaginable risk in every conceivable place at every possible time. And it's not necessary to prove that a threat is real for it to merit a full-scale response - not with Cheney's famous "1% doctrine", which justified the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that if there is a 1% chance that something is a threat, it requires that the US respond as if the threat is a 100% certainty. This logic has been a particular boon for the makers of various hi-tech detection devices: for instance, because we can conceive of a smallpox attack, the department of homeland security has handed out half a billion dollars to private companies to develop and install detection equipment.
Through all its various name changes - the war on terror, the war on radical Islam, the war against Islamofascism, the third world war, the long war, the generational war - the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged. It is limited by neither time nor space nor target. From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the war on terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture.
That was the business prospectus that the Bush administration put before corporate America after September 11. The revenue stream was a seemingly bottomless supply of tax dollars to be funnelled from the Pentagon ($270bn in 2005 to private contractors, a $137bn increase since Bush took office), US intelligence agencies and the newest arrival, the department of homeland security. Between September 11 2001 and 2006, the Department of Homeland Security handed out $130bn to contractors - money that was not in the private sector before and that is more than the GDP of Chile or the Czech Republic.
In a remarkably short time, the suburbs ringing Washington, DC became dotted with grey buildings housing security "start-ups" and "incubator" companies, hastily thrown together operations where, as in late-90s Silicon Valley, the money came in faster than the furniture could be assembled. Whereas in the 90s the goal was to develop the killer application, the "next new new thing", and sell it to Microsoft or Oracle, now it was to come up with a new "search and nail" terrorist-catching technology and sell it to the department of homeland security or the Pentagon. That is why, in addition to the start-ups and investment funds, the disaster industry also gave birth to an army of new lobby firms promising to hook up new companies with the right people on Capitol Hill - in 2001, there were two such security-oriented lobby firms, but by mid-2006 there were 543. "I've been in private equity since the early 90s," Michael Steed, managing director of the homeland security firm Paladin told Wired, "and I've never seen a sustained deal flow like this."
Like the dotcom bubble, the disaster bubble is inflating in an ad-hoc and chaotic fashion. One of the first booms for the homeland security industry was surveillance cameras, 30m of which have been installed in the US, shooting about 4bn hours of footage a year. That created a problem: who's going to watch 4bn hours of footage? So a new market emerged for "analytic software" that scans the tapes and creates matches with images already on file.
This development created another problem, because facial recognition software can really make positive IDs only if people present themselves front and centre to the cameras, which they rarely do while rushing to and from work. So another market was created for digital image enhancement. Salient Stills, a company that sells software to isolate and enhance video images, started by pitching its technology to media companies, but it turned out that there was more potential revenue from the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies. And with all the snooping going on - phone logs, wire-tapping, financial records, mail, surveillance cameras, web surfing - the government is drowning in data, which has opened up yet another massive market in information management and data mining, as well as software that claims to be able to "connect the dots" in this ocean of words and numbers and pinpoint suspicious activity.
In the 90s, tech companies endlessly trumpeted the wonders of the borderless world and the power of information technology to topple authoritarian regimes and bring down walls. Today, inside the disaster capitalism complex, the tools of the information revolution have been flipped to serve the opposite purpose. In the process, mobile phones and web surfing have been turned into powerful tools of mass state surveillance by increasingly authoritarian regimes, with the cooperation of privatised phone companies and search engines, whether it's Yahoo assisting the Chinese government to pinpoint the location of dissidents or AT&T helping the US National Security Agency to wiretap its customers without a warrant (a practice that the Bush administration claims it has discontinued). The dismantling of borders, the great symbol and promise of globalisation, has been replaced with the exploding industry of border surveillance, from optical scanning and biometric IDs to the planned hi-tech fence on the border between Mexico and the US, worth up to $2.5bn for Boeing and a consortium of other companies.
As hi-tech firms have jumped from one bubble to another, the result has been a bizarre merger of security and shopping cultures. Many technologies in use today as part of the war on terror - biometric identification, video surveillance, web tracking, data mining - had been developed by the private sector before September 11 as a way to build detailed customer profiles, opening up new vistas for micromarketing. When widespread discomfort about big-brother technologies stalled many of these initiatives, it caused dismay to both marketers and retailers. September 11 loosened this log jam in the market: suddenly the fear of terror was greater than the fear of living in a surveillance society. So now, the same information collected from cash cards or "loyalty" cards can be sold not only to a travel agency or the Gap as marketing data but also to the FBI as security data, flagging a "suspicious" interest in pay-as-you-go mobile phones and Middle Eastern travel.
As an exuberant article in the business magazine Red Herring explained, one such program "tracks terrorists by figuring out if a name spelled a hundred different ways matches a name in a homeland security database. Take the name Mohammad. The software contains hundreds of possible spellings for the name, and it can search terabytes of data in a second." Impressive, unless they nail the wrong Mohammad, which often seems to happen, from Iraq to Afghanistan to the suburbs of Toronto.
This potential for error is where the incompetence and greed that have been the hallmark of the Bush years, from Iraq to New Orleans, becomes harrowing. One false identification coming out of any of these electronic fishing expeditions is enough for an apolitical family man, who sort of looks like someone whose name sort of sounds like his (at least to someone with no knowledge of Arabic or Muslim culture), to be flagged as a potential terrorist. And the process of putting names and organisations on watch lists is also now handled by private companies, as are the programs to crosscheck the names of travellers with the names in the data bank. As of June 2007, there were half a million names on a list of suspected terrorists kept by the National Counterterrorism Centre. Another program, the Automated Targeting System (ATS), made public in November 2006, has already assigned a "risk assessment" rating to tens of millions of travellers passing through the US. The rating, never disclosed to passengers, is based on suspicious patterns revealed through commercial data mining - for instance, information provided by airlines about "the passenger's history of one-way ticket purchase, seat preferences, frequent-flyer records, number of bags, how they pay for tickets and even what meals they order". Incidents of supposedly suspicious behaviour are tallied up to generate each passenger's risk rating.
Anyone can be blocked from flying, denied an entry visa to the US or even arrested and named as an "enemy combatant" based on evidence from these dubious technologies - a blurry image identified through facial recognition software, a misspelled name, a misunderstood snippet of a conversation. If "enemy combatants" are not US citizens, they will probably never even know what it was that convicted them, because the Bush administration has stripped them of habeas corpus, the right to see the evidence in court, as well as the right to a fair trial and a vigorous defence.
If the suspect is taken, as a result, to Guantánamo, he may well end up in the new 200-person maximum-security prison constructed by Halliburton. If he is a victim of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme, kidnapped off the streets of Milan or while changing planes at a US airport, then whisked to a so-called black site somewhere in the CIA's archipelago of secret prisons, the hooded prisoner will likely fly in a Boeing 737, designed as a deluxe executive jet, retrofitted for this purpose. According to the New Yorker, Boeing has been acting as the "CIA's travel agent" - blocking out flightplans for as many as 1,245 rendition voyages, arranging ground crews and even booking hotels. A Spanish police report explains that the work was done by Jeppesen International Trip Planning, a Boeing subsidiary in San Jose. In May 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union launched a lawsuit against the Boeing subsidiary; the company has refused to confirm or deny the allegations.
Once the prisoners arrive at the destination, they face interrogators, some of whom will not be employed by the CIA or the military but by private contractors. According to Bill Golden, who runs the job website IntelligenceCareers.com, "Over half of the qualified counter-intelligence experts in the field work for contractors." If these freelance interrogators are to keep landing lucrative contracts, they must extract from prisoners the kind of "actionable intelligence" their employers in Washington are looking for. It's a dynamic ripe for abuse: just as prisoners under torture will usually say anything to make the pain stop, contractors have a powerful economic incentive to use whatever techniques are necessary to produce the sought-after information, regardless of its reliability.
Then there is the low-tech version of this application of market "solutions" to the war on terror - the willingness to pay top dollar to pretty much anyone for information about alleged terrorists. During the invasion of Afghanistan, US intelligence agents let it be known that they would pay anywhere from $3,000 to $25,000 for al-Qaida or Taliban fighters handed over to them. "Get wealth and power beyond your dreams," stated a typical flyer handed out by the US in Afghanistan, introduced as evidence in a 2002 US federal court filing on behalf of several Guantánamo prisoners. "You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces...This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life."
Soon enough, the cells of Bagram and Guantánamo were overflowing with goat herders, cab drivers, cooks and shopkeepers - all lethally dangerous, according to the men who turned them over and collected the rewards.
According to the Pentagon's own figures, 86% of the prisoners at Guantánamo were handed over by Afghan and Pakistani fighters or agents after the bounties were announced. As of December 2006, the Pentagon had released 360 prisoners from Guantánamo (out of 759 held between 2001 and the end of 2006). The Associated Press was able to track down 245 of them; 205 had been freed or cleared of all charges when they returned to their home countries. It is a track record that is a grave indictment of the quality of intelligence produced by the administration's market-based approach to terrorist identification.
In just a few years, the homeland security industry, which barely existed before 9/11, has exploded to a size that is now significantly larger than either Hollywood or the music business. Yet what is most striking is how little the security boom is analysed and discussed as an economy, as an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison. When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information, but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.
When new economies emerged in the past, from the Fordist revolution to the IT boom, they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production of wealth were also altering the way we as a culture worked, the way we travelled, even the way our brains process information. The new disaster economy has been subject to none of this kind of far-reaching discussion. There have been and are debates, of course - about the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, about indefinite detention, about torture and extraordinary rendition - but discussion of what it means to have these functions performed as commercial transactions has been almost completely avoided. What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand-wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors - rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatised war built to have no end.
Part of the problem is that the disaster economy sneaked up on us. In the 80s and 90s, new economies announced themselves with great pride and fanfare. The tech bubble in particular set a precedent for a new ownership class inspiring deafening levels of hype - endless media lifestyle profiles of dashing young CEOs beside their private jets, their remote-controlled yachts, their idyllic Seattle mountain homes. That kind of wealth is being generated by the disaster complex today, though we rarely hear about it. While the CEOs of the top 34 defence contractors saw their incomes go up an average of 108% between 2001 and 2005, chief executives at other large American companies averaged only 6% over the same period.
Peter Swire, who served as the US government's privacy counsellor during the Clinton administration, describes the convergence of forces behind the war on terror bubble like this: "You have government on a holy mission to ramp up information gathering and you have an information technology industry desperate for new markets." In other words, you have corporatism: big business and big government combining their formidable powers to regulate and control the citizenry.
· Extracted from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, published by Allen Lane on September 20, priced £25. © Naomi Klein 2007.
· Naomi Klein will be discussing The Shock Doctrine at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre on Thursday 13 September at 7.30pm.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2165953,00.html
Jeune Afrique: Al-Qaïda au Maghreb
revendique les attentats de samedi et jeudi en Algérie
ALGÉRIE - 9 septembre 2007 - par AFP
Un attentat suicide à la voiture piégée contre une caserne a fait 30 morts et 47 blessés samedi à Dellys, un petit port de Kabylie situé à 70 kilomètres à l'est d'Alger, selon un bilan du ministère de l'Intérieur. Il s'agit de l'un des attentats les plus meurtriers survenus en Algérie ces derniers mois.
La chaîne qatari Al-Jazira a affirmé dans la nuit de samedi à dimanche que la Branche d'Al-Qaïda au Maghreb (ex-GSPC algérien) a revendiqué, dans un communiqué diffusé sur internet, cet attentat ainsi que celui perpétré jeudi à Batna (est) qui avait fait 22 morts et plus de 100 blessés.Selon des experts algériens de l'antiterrorisme, ce groupe affilié à la nébuleuse d'Oussama ben Laden aurait constitué une brigade de kamikazes parmi les jeunes recrues du maquis, dont le fils d'Ali Belhadj, ancien numéro deux du Front islamique du salut (FIS, dissous), Abdel Qahar Belhadj, âgé de 20 ans.
"L'attentat perpétré samedi matin à Dellys (département de Boumerdes) au niveau d'une caserne militaire a fait 30 morts, dont trois civils, et 47 blessés", a indiqué le ministère de l'Intérieur. Trois civils figurent parmi les blessés, a précisé le ministère, qui a fait état pour la première fois de l'implication de "deux terroristes", "auteurs de l'attentat" qui "ont péri sur les lieux".
Les premiers témoignages recueillis par l'AFP faisaient état d'un seul kamikaze conduisant une fourgonnette bourrée d'explosifs, qui a défoncé une porte à l'arrière de la caserne des garde-côtes de la marine algérienne et pénétré à une vingtaine de mètres à l'intérieur, selon des témoins. La fourgonnette, immatriculée dans le département d'Alger, servait à l'approvisionnement de la caserne. Elle a explosé à l'intérieur de la caserne, composée de chalets en préfabriqué, dont la plupart ont été éventrés par la puissance de la déflagration.
Des débris de bois, de ferraille et de béton jonchaient le port sur plusieurs centaines de mètres. Des vêtements et des valises ont été projetés sur des poteaux électriques et des barrières du port. La région de Dellys avait été le théâtre de plusieurs attaques islamistes ces dernières années. Adossée à la montagne de Sidi Ali Bounab, elle est considérée comme un fief des islamistes depuis le début des violences en 1990 en Algérie.
Cette attaque à la voiture piégée est intervenue au surlendemain d'un autre attentat suicide visant le cortège du président Abdelaziz Bouteflika à Batna (est de l'Algérie), qui avait fait 22 morts et plus de 100 blessés, et à quelques jour du début du ramadan propice au jihad, selon les islamistes.
L'Union européenne a fermement condamné samedi l'attentat perpétré à Dellys, déclarant que le "terrorisme dans toutes ses formes constitue une des plus sérieuses menaces à la paix dans le monde". Aux Nations unies, le Conseil de sécurité a de nouveau condamné "tous les actes terroristes" et "dans les termes les plus fermes" ce "nouvel attentat odieux".
Paris a adressé "ses plus sincères condoléances aux familles des victimes et à leurs proches ainsi qu'aux autorités et au peuple algériens, endeuillés par cette nouvelle manifestation de terrorisme". Le gouvernement espagnol a également condamné "avec la plus grande fermeté" l'attentat, réitérant "son engagement de soutenir (l'Algérie) dans la lutte contre le terrorisme".
Plusieurs attentats ont eu lieu depuis le 11 avril en Algérie. Deux attaques simultanées à la voiture piégée avaient visé le palais du gouvernement (centre d'Alger) et un commissariat, faisant au moins 30 morts et plus de 200 blessés.
A Lakhdaria (70 km à l'est d'Alger), une caserne de l'armée avait été le 11 juillet la cible d'un kamikaze à bord d'un véhicule frigorifique piégé. L'attaque avait fait 10 morts et 35 blessés parmi les militaires.
Les attentats d'Alger et de Lakhdaria avaient déjà été revendiqués par la Branche d'Al-Qaïda au Maghreb, dirigée par Abdelmalek Droukdel, alias Abou Mossab Abdelouadoud
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP42127alqadeirgla0#
Página/12:
La Shell presentará un plan ecológico en el Docke
Con esta propuesta, la petrolera intentará que el Gobierno levante la clausura sobre su refinería. El plan incluye propuestas de reconversión e inversiones para proteger el medio ambiente.
Lunes, 10 de Septiembre de 2007
La petrolera Shell presentará hoy ante la Secretaría de Medio Ambiente una propuesta de saneamiento para las áreas afectadas por su refinería de Dock Sud y un plan de reconversión industrial que incluiría promesas de inversión para mejorar su desempeño ambiental. De este modo, la compañía busca que el Gobierno levante la clausura que rige sobre la planta desde el miércoles pasado. Entre las estaciones de servicio persistía ayer el temor a un posible desabastecimiento, pues la firma angloholandesa les anticipó el jueves a sus clientes que si esta situación se mantiene no podrá cumplir con los contratos de suministro firmados.
Directivos de la Asociación de Estaciones de Servicio Independientes comentaron ayer que “las estaciones de Shell, aunque con dificultades, siguen operando”. “Hasta el momento no hay faltantes, y si hay un arreglo y se levanta la clausura de la refinería entre el lunes y martes no habrá problemas, ya que la petrolera dijo oportunamente que tiene en sus depósitos combustible para diez días”, expresaron.
Desde la clausura, Shell dejó de producir paulatinamente para no hacer peligrar el funcionamiento de las instalaciones y se supone que hoy la planta ya estará completamente detenida. Una vez resuelto el conflicto se requerirán otros cuatro o cinco días para que vuelva a funcionar a pleno. Por lo tanto, los estaciones aseguran que si el conflicto se prolonga deberán cruzar las mangueras y dejar de vender.
La Dirección Nacional de Control Ambiental dispuso la clausura total de la refinería de Shell en forma preventiva, tras constatar que no tenía permiso para extraer del canal Dock Sud ni del Río de la Plata los “18,4 millones de litros de agua por hora” que utiliza. Además aseguró haber detectado pérdidas y derrames que acreditarían la contaminación ambiental producida por la planta. La empresa calificó la decisión de “arbitraria”, pero la acató y hasta el momento no se presentó ante la Justicia para impugnar la decisión, pues pareciera que primero quiere intentar revertirla negociando con el Gobierno.
Más allá de los motivos puntuales que llevaron a la clausura, lo que genera inquietud en el ambiente empresario es el momento elegido para concretarla. El Gobierno denunció a Shell ante la Justicia a comienzos de julio por violar la Ley de Abastecimiento en el mercado de gasoil y a fines de agosto el secretario de Comercio Interior, Guillermo Moreno, se presentó como querellante en esa causa solicitando que se aplicara la pena de prisión para los máximos directivos de la multinacional. La clausura llegó apenas diez días después y hasta los más ingenuos sostienen que la decisión oficial se inscribe dentro de ese conflicto. La cuestión de fondo que enfrenta a Shell con el Gobierno es la decisión oficial de mantener “congelado” el precio de los combustibles destinados al mercado interno.
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http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/economia/2-91142-2007-09-10.html
The Independent: Former PM Sharif deported
immediately after return to Pakistan
AP
Published: 10 September 2007
The former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was deported from Pakistan today, hours after he had landed in Islamabad after seven years in exile.
About four hours after he arrived on a flight from London, Sharif was taken into custody and charged with corruption, but then quickly spirited to another plane and flown out of Pakistan toward Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, an intelligence official said.
An official in President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's office confirmed Sharif was deported. An intelligence official said the former premier was being flown to Saudi Arabia. Pakistan's Dawn News TV and ARY TV networks reported that Sharif's destination was Jeddah.
Sharif's deportation came despite a landmark Supreme Court ruling last month that the two-time former premier, whose elected government was ousted by Musharraf in a 1999 coup, had the right to return to Pakistan and that authorities should not obstruct him.
While the move apparently sidelines a powerful political enemy of the general, it is likely to deepen Musharraf's growing unpopularity and reinforce public perceptions that he is an authoritarian ruler ahead of presidential and legislative elections.
Musharraf's grip on power has faltered after a failed attempt to oust the country's top judge ignited mass protests, but he is still plans to seek a new five-year term in office by mid-October.
His government is also struggling to combat surging Islamic extremism that has spread from the Afghan border where al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding.
Sharif's party condemned his deportation.
"It is a violation of the constitution, and it is a violation of the court order under which Nawaz Sharif was allowed to arrive and stay in Pakistan," Sadique ul-Farooq, a close aide to Sharif told The Associated Press.
He said Sharif has been deported to Jeddah.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2947672.ece
The Nation:
Why We're Losing the War on Terror
by DAVID COLE & JULES LOBEL
[from the September 24, 2007 issue]
President George W. Bush is fond of reminding us that no terrorist attacks have occurred on domestic soil since 9/11. But has the Administration's "war on terror" actually made us safer? According to the July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, Al Qaeda has fully reconstituted itself in Pakistan's northern border region. Terrorist attacks worldwide have grown dramatically in frequency and lethality since 2001. New terrorist groups, from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia to the small groups of young men who bombed subways and buses in London and Madrid, have multiplied since 9/11. Meanwhile, despite the Bush Administration's boasts, the total number of people it has convicted of engaging in a terrorist act since 9/11 is one (Richard Reid, the shoe bomber).
Nonetheless, leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claims that we are safer. Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani warns that "the next election is about whether we go back on defense against terrorism...or are we going to go on offense." And Democrats largely respond by insisting that they, too, would "go on offense." Few have asked whether "going on offense" actually works as a counterterrorism strategy. It doesn't. The Bush strategy has been a colossal failure, not only in terms of constitutional principle but in terms of national security. It turns out that in fighting terrorism, the best defense is not a good offense but a smarter defense.
"Going on offense," or the "paradigm of prevention," as then-Attorney General John Ashcroft dubbed it, has touched all of us. Some, like Canadian Maher Arar, have been rendered to third countries (in his case, Syria) to be interrogated by security services known for torture. Others have been subjected to months of virtually nonstop questioning, sexual abuse, waterboarding and injections with intravenous fluids until they urinate on themselves. Still others, like KindHearts, an American charity in Toledo, Ohio, have had their assets frozen under the USA Patriot Act and all their records seized without so much as a charge, much less a finding, of wrongdoing.
In the name of the "preventive paradigm," thousands of Arab and Muslim immigrants have been singled out, essentially on the basis of their ethnicity or religion, for special treatment, including mandatory registration, FBI interviews and preventive detention. Businesses have been served with more than 100,000 "national security letters," which permit the FBI to demand records on customers without a court order or individualized basis for suspicion. We have all been subjected to unprecedented secrecy about what elected officials are doing in our name while simultaneously suffering unprecedented official intrusion into our private lives by increased video surveillance, warrantless wiretapping and data-mining. Most tragically, more than 3,700 Americans and more than 70,000 Iraqi civilians have given their lives for the "preventive paradigm," which was used to justify going to war against a country that had not attacked us and posed no imminent threat of attack.
The preventive paradigm had its genesis on September 12, 2001. In Bush at War, Bob Woodward recounts a White House meeting in which FBI Director Robert Mueller advised that authorities must take care not to taint evidence in seeking 9/11 accomplices so that they could eventually be held accountable. Ashcroft immediately objected, saying, "The chief mission of US law enforcement...is to stop another attack and apprehend any accomplices.... If we can't bring them to trial, so be it." Ever since, the "war on terror" has been characterized by highly coercive, "forward-looking" pre-emptive measures-warrantless wiretapping, detention, coercive interrogation, even war-undertaken not on evidence of past or current wrongdoing but on speculation about future threats.
In isolation, neither the goal of preventing future attacks nor the tactic of using coercive measures is novel or troubling. All law enforcement seeks to prevent crime, and coercion is a necessary element of state power. However, when the end of prevention and the means of coercion are combined in the Administration's preventive paradigm, they produce a troubling form of anticipatory state violence-undertaken before wrongdoing has actually occurred and often without good evidence for believing that wrongdoing will ever occur.
The Bush strategy turns the law's traditional approach to state coercion on its head. With narrow exceptions, the rule of law reserves invasions of privacy, detention, punishment and use of military force for those who have been shown-on the basis of sound evidence and fair procedures-to have committed or to be plotting some wrong. The police can tap phones or search homes, but only when there is probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed and that the search is likely to find evidence of the crime. People can be preventively detained pending trial, but only when there is both probable cause of past wrongdoing and concrete evidence that they pose a danger to the community or are likely to abscond if left at large. And under international law, nations may use military force unilaterally only in response to an objectively verifiable attack or threat of imminent attack.
These bedrock legal requirements are a hindrance to "going on offense." Accordingly, the Administration has asserted sweeping executive discretion, eschewed questions of guilt or innocence and substituted secrecy and speculation for accountability and verifiable fact. Where the rule of law demands fair and open procedures, the preventive paradigm employs truncated processes often conducted in secret, denying the accused a meaningful opportunity to respond. The need for pre-emptive action is said to justify secrecy and shortcuts, whatever the cost to innocents. Where the rule of law demands that people be held liable only for their own actions, the Administration has frequently employed guilt by association and ethnic profiling to target suspected future wrongdoers. And where the rule of law absolutely prohibits torture and disappearances, the preventive paradigm views these tactics as lesser evils to defuse the proverbial ticking time bomb.
All other things being equal, preventing a terrorist act is, of course, preferable to responding after the fact-all the more so when the threats include weapons of mass destruction and our adversaries are difficult to detect, willing to kill themselves and seemingly unconstrained by any recognizable considerations of law, morality or human dignity. But there are plenty of preventive counterterrorism measures that conform to the rule of law, such as increased protections at borders and around vulnerable targets, institutional reforms designed to encourage better information sharing, even military force and military detention when employed in self-defense. The real problems arise when the state uses highly coercive measures-depriving people of their life, liberty or property, or going to war-based on speculation, without adhering to the laws long seen as critical to regulating and legitimizing such force.
Even if one were to accept as a moral or ethical matter the "ends justify the means" rationales advanced for the preventive paradigm, the paradigm fails its own test: There is little or no evidence that the Administration's coercive pre-emptive measures have made us safer, and substantial evidence that they have in fact exacerbated the dangers we face.
Consider the costliest example: the war in Iraq. Precisely because the preventive doctrine turns on speculation about non-imminent events, it permitted the Administration to turn its focus from Al Qaeda, the organization that attacked us on 9/11, to Iraq, a nation that did not. The Iraq War has by virtually all accounts made the United States, the Iraqi people, many of our allies and for that matter much of the world more vulnerable to terrorists. By targeting Iraq, the Bush Administration not only siphoned off much-needed resources from the struggle against Al Qaeda but also created a golden opportunity for Al Qaeda to inspire and recruit others to attack US and allied targets. And our invasion of Iraq has turned it into the world's premier terrorist training ground.
The preventive paradigm has been no more effective in other aspects of the "war on terror." According to US figures, international terrorist attacks increased by 300 percent between 2003 and 2004. In 2005 alone, there were 360 suicide bombings, resulting in 3,000 deaths, compared with an annual average of about ninety such attacks over the five preceding years. That hardly constitutes progress.
But what about the fact that, other than the anthrax mailings in 2001, there has not been another terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11? The real question, of course, is whether the Administration's coercive preventive measures can be credited for that. There were eight years between the first and second attacks on the World Trade Center. And when one looks at what the preventive paradigm has come up with in terms of concrete results, it's an astonishingly thin file. At Guantánamo, for example, once said to house "the worst of the worst," the Pentagon's Combatant Status Review Tribunals' own findings categorized only 8 percent of some 500 detainees held there in 2006 as fighters for Al Qaeda or the Taliban. More than half of the 775 Guantánamo detainees have now been released, suggesting that they may not have been "the worst of the worst" after all.
As for terror cells at home, the FBI admitted in February 2005 that it had yet to identify a single Al Qaeda sleeper cell in the entire United States. And it hasn't found any since-unless you count the Florida group arrested in 2006, whose principal step toward an alleged plot to blow up the Sears Tower was to order combat boots and whose only Al Qaeda "connection" was to a federal informant pretending to be Al Qaeda.
The Justice Department claims on its website www.lifeandliberty.gov to have charged more than 400 people in "terrorism-related" cases, but its own Inspector General has criticized those figures as inflated. The vast majority of the cases involved not terrorism but minor nonviolent offenses such as immigration fraud, credit-card fraud or lying to an FBI agent. The New York Times and the Washington Post found that only thirty-nine of the convictions were for a terrorism crime. And virtually all of those were for "material support" to groups labeled terrorist, a crime that requires no proof that the defendant ever intended to further a terrorist act. While prosecutors have obtained a handful of convictions for conspiracy to engage in terrorism, several of those convictions rest on extremely broad statutes that don't require proof of any specific plan or act, or on questionable entrapment tactics by government informants.
Many of the Administration's most highly touted "terrorism" cases have disintegrated after the Justice Department's initial self-congratulatory press conference announcing the indictment, most notably those against Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo initially accused of being a spy; Sami Al-Arian, a computer science professor acquitted on charges of conspiracy to kill Americans; Muhammad Salah and Abdelhaleem Ashqar, acquitted in Chicago of aiding Hamas; Sami al-Hussayen, a Saudi student acquitted by an Idaho jury of charges that he had aided terrorism by posting links on his website to other sites containing jihadist rhetoric; and Yaser Hamdi, the US citizen held for years as an enemy combatant but released from military custody when the government faced the prospect of having to prove that he was an enemy combatant. The Administration recently managed to convict José Padilla, the other US citizen held as an enemy combatant, not for any of the terrorist plots against the United States that it once accused him of hatching but for attending an Al Qaeda training camp and conspiring to support Muslim rebels in Chechnya and Bosnia before 9/11.
Overall, the government's success rate in cases alleging terrorist charges since 9/11 is only 29 percent, compared with a 92 percent conviction rate for felonies. This is an astounding statistic, because presumably federal juries are not predisposed to sympathize with Arab or Muslim defendants accused of terrorism. But when one prosecutes prematurely, failure is often the result.
The government's "preventive" immigration initiatives have come up even more empty-handed. After 9/11 the Bush Administration called in 80,000 foreign nationals for fingerprinting, photographing and "special registration" simply because they came from predominantly Arab or Muslim countries; sought out another 8,000 young men from the same countries for FBI interviews; and placed more than 5,000 foreign nationals here in preventive detention. Yet as of September 2007, not one of these people stands convicted of a terrorist crime. The government's record, in what is surely the largest campaign of ethnic profiling since the Japanese internment of World War II, is 0 for 93,000.
These statistics offer solid evidence to support the overwhelming consensus that Foreign Policy found when it polled more than 100 foreign policy experts-evenly dispersed along the political spectrum-and found that 91 percent felt that the world is becoming more dangerous for the United States, and that 84 percent said we are not winning the "war on terror."
It is certainly possible that some of these preventive measures deterred would-be terrorists from attacking us or helped to uncover and foil terrorist plots before they could come to fruition. But if real plots had been foiled and real terrorists identified, one would expect some criminal convictions to follow. When FBI agents successfully foiled a plot by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (popularly known as "the blind sheik") and others to bomb bridges and tunnels around Manhattan in the 1990s, it also convicted the plotters and sent them to prison for life.
In October 2005 Bush claimed that the United States and its allies had foiled ten terrorist plots. But he couldn't point to a single convicted terrorist. Consider just one of Bush's ten "success" stories, the one about which he provided the most details: an alleged Al Qaeda plot to fly an airplane into the Library Tower, a skyscraper in Los Angeles. The perpetrators, described only as Southeast Asians, were said to have been captured in early 2002 in Asia. As far as we know, however, no one has ever been charged or tried for this alleged terror plot. Intelligence officials told the Washington Post that there was "deep disagreement within the intelligence community about...whether it was ever much more than talk." A senior FBI official said, "To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous." American officials claim to have learned about some of the plot's details by interrogating captured Al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, but he was captured in 2003, long after the perpetrators had been arrested. As the Los Angeles Times put it, "By the time anybody knew about it, the threat-if there had been one-had passed, federal counter-terrorism officials said." These facts-all omitted in Bush's retelling-suggest that such claims of success need to be viewed skeptically.
if the Bush strategy were merely ineffectual, that would be bad enough. But it's worse than that; the President's policy has actually made us significantly less secure. While the Administration has concentrated on swaggeringly aggressive coercive initiatives of dubious effect, it has neglected less dramatic but more effective preventive initiatives. In December 2005 the bipartisan 9/11 Commission gave the Administration failing or near-failing grades on many of the most basic domestic security measures, including assessing critical infrastructure vulnerabilities, securing weapons of mass destruction, screening airline passengers and cargo, sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, insuring that first responders have adequate communications and supporting secular education in Muslim countries. We spend more in a day in Iraq than we do annually on some of the most important defensive initiatives here at home.
The preventive paradigm has also made it more difficult to bring terrorists to justice, just as FBI Director Mueller warned on September 12. When the Administration chooses to disappear suspects into secret prisons and use waterboarding to encourage them to talk, it forfeits any possibility of bringing the suspects to justice for their alleged crimes, because evidence obtained coercively at a "black site" would never be admissible in a fair and legitimate trial. That's the real reason no one has yet been brought to trial at Guantánamo. There is debate about whether torture ever results in reliable intelligence-but there can be no debate that it radically curtails the government's ability to bring a terrorist to justice.
Assuming that the principal terrorist threat still comes from Al Qaeda or, more broadly, a violence-prone fundamentalist strain of Islam, and that the "enemies" in this struggle are a relatively small number of Arab and Muslim men, it is all the more critical that we develop close, positive ties with Arab and Muslim communities here and abroad. By alienating those whose help we need most, the preventive paradigm has had exactly the opposite effect.
At the same time, we have given Al Qaeda the best propaganda it could ever have hoped for. Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld identified the critical question in an October 2003 internal Pentagon memo: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" While there is no precise metric for answering Rumsfeld's question, there can be little doubt that our preventive tactics have been a boon to terrorist recruitment throughout the world.
More broadly still, our actions have radically undermined our standing in the world. The damage to US prestige was perhaps most dramatically revealed when, after the report of CIA black sites surfaced in November 2005, Russia, among several other countries, promptly issued a press release claiming that it had nothing to do with the sites. When Russia feels the need to distance itself from the United States out of concern that its human rights image might be tarnished by association, we have fallen far.
In short, we have gone from being the object of the world's sympathy immediately after 9/11 to being the country most likely to be hated. Anti-Americanism is at an all-time high. In some countries, Osama bin Laden has a higher approval rating than the United States. And much of the anti-Americanism is tied to the perception that the United States has pursued its "war on terror" in an arrogant, unilateral fashion, defying the very values we once championed.
The Bush Administration just doesn't get it. Its National Defense Strategy, published by the Pentagon, warns that "our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism." The proposition that judicial processes and international accountability-the very essence of the rule of law-are to be dismissed as a strategy of the weak, aligned with terrorism itself, makes clear that the Administration has come to view the rule of law as an obstacle, not an asset, in its effort to protect us from terrorist attack.
Our long-term security turns not on "going on offense" by locking up thousands of "suspected terrorists" who turn out to have no connection to terrorism; nor on forcing suspects to bark like dogs, urinate and defecate on themselves, and endure sexual humiliation; nor on attacking countries that have not threatened to attack us. Security rests not on exceptionalism and double standards but on a commitment to fairness, justice and the rule of law. The rule of law in no way precludes a state from defending itself from terrorists but requires that it do so within constraints. And properly understood, those constraints are assets, not obstacles. Aharon Barak, who recently retired as president of Israel's Supreme Court, said it best in a case forbidding the use of "moderate physical pressure" in interrogating Palestinian terror suspects: "A democracy must sometimes fight terror with one hand tied behind its back. Even so, a democracy has the upper hand. The rule of law and the liberty of an individual constitute important components in its understanding of security. At the end of the day, they strengthen its spirit and this strength allows it to overcome its difficulties."
The preventive paradigm has compromised our spirit, strengthened our enemies and left us less free and less safe. If we are ready to learn from our mistakes, however, there is a better way to defend ourselves-through, rather than despite, a recommitment to the rule of law.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070924/cole_lobel
ZNet | Culture:
The New Atheism
by A. J. Chien
September 10, 2007
“This is atheism’s moment.” That according to David Steinberger, CEO of Perseus Books LLC, which recently signed Christopher Hitchens to edit a book of atheist readings for publication this fall. The book will come on the heels of Hitchens’ God is Not Great, the latest in a string of books critical of religion that have become modest bestsellers in recent years. As of June 2007 there were 296,000 copies in print of Hitchens’ book; 500,000 of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion; and 185,000 of Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation. Harris’ previous book The End of Faith was on the New York Times bestseller list for thirty-three weeks in 2004.
How could this happen in a country where upward of 80% majorities assert belief in God, Christ, and miracles? According to some booksellers, wanting to “know thine enemy” is partly why books have been selling even in the Bible Belt. But another dynamic may also be at work. Dawkins suggests that what John Stuart Mill wrote in the nineteenth century remains true today: “The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.” But in a highly religious culture, declaring oneself an atheist can be as difficult as open homosexuality was fifty years ago. Today, after the Gay Pride movement, 55% of Gallup respondents declare willingness to vote for a homosexual candidate: a lower percentage than those who would vote for a Catholic, African-American, woman, Mormon, or septuagenarian, but higher than the 45% who would vote for an atheist . Dawkins and others hope to help inspire an Atheist Pride movement, building a critical mass that would encourage closet non-believers to come out.
Dawkins’ central argument is a variation on the argument from design, which he sees as “easily today’s most popular argument offered in favour of the existence of God.” Organized complexity in nature could not have arisen by chance. Just as upon finding a watch one would infer a watchmaker, upon finding eyes, wings, or digestive systems one should infer a maker of nature. In his earlier book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins admires the wonder of the 18th century theologian William Paley who made this argument, preferring it to the blasé reply of those who see no need to explain nature. But of course Dawkins and modern science give a different explanation than Paley’s. While genetic mutations do arise by chance, occasionally a mutation improves fitness. Individuals with such a mutation tend to have more descendants, enlarging the mutation’s share of the gene pool. Over a great many generations, a succession of thus naturally-selected mutations leads to complex adaptation and the appearance of design.
So the argument from design fails: true, it’s highly unlikely that organized complexity arose by chance, but it didn’t. This much only shows that God’s existence isn’t proven. But Dawkins aims at more, to prove God’s non-existence, by varying the argument to apply to God. A being capable of making nature must have an organized complexity of its own, and it’s highly unlikely this could have arisen by chance. So God, at least a creative God such as the God of Abraham, probably does not exist. I think Dawkins is right that there’s no good reply to this, because it exposes the double standard that’s essential to all versions of creationism or “intelligent design”: nature must be explained, but God not at all. Victor Stenger’s recent book fully surveys the conflicts between modern science and the God hypothesis.
These matters pertain to whether religious beliefs are true, but another issue is whether they are harmful. It’s an independent issue. A common attitude - what Daniel Dennett calls “belief in belief” - is that even if a given religion is not true, it inspires good things and so is worth preserving. Harris and Hitchens remind us however of atrocities inspired by religion throughout history up to the present: to take one of countless examples, the immolation after unspeakable torture of accused heretics during the Inquisition. To those who dismiss such doings as perversions of Judaeo-Christianity, Harris points out that on the contrary they were mandated by such scripture as the following:
If you hear that in one of the towns which Yahweh your God has given you for a home, there are men, scoundrels from your own stock, who have led their fellow citizens astray, saying “let us go and serve other gods,” hitherto unknown to you, it is your duty to look into the matter, examine it, and inquire most carefully. If it is proved and confirmed that such a hateful thing has taken place among you, you must put the inhabitants of that town to the sword; you must lay it under the curse of destruction – the town and everything in it. You must pile up all its loot in the public square and burn the town and all its loot, offering it all to Yahweh your God. It is to be a ruin for all time and never rebuilt. (Deuteronomy 13:12-16).
The Bible has many such passages. God commands death for homosexuals, adulterers, brides who are not virgins, those who disobey priests, those who work on the Sabbath, rebellious children, all first-born sons in Egypt, those who impede the Hebrews or whose ancestors did, prior inhabitants of the promised land, and those who disobey God, among others. Women, children, and infants do not get mercy. (For example, Exodus 12:1-30, 32:1-28; Leviticus 20:1-16; Numbers 31:7-18; Joshua 6:1-21, 10:28-43; Samuel 15:1-33.) This seems sufficient to disqualify scripture as the best source of moral inspiration, the existence of many fine passages notwithstanding.
The New Testament is often taken as kinder than the Old. But Jesus apparently endorses all Hebrew law (Luke 16:17, Matthew 5:17-18). The Gospels have their own stains, including portrayal of Jews as collectively responsible for the death of Jesus (e.g. Matthew 27:25), inspiring centuries of pogroms. And then there’s hell: as Bertrand Russell remarked, this concept alone disqualifies Christianity as a kind religion. Even those who live morally exemplary lives but do not accept the savior are destined to burn. The damage is real even if hell is not. Dawkins tells us about Jill Mytton, a psychotherapist who specializes in helping those who have been terrified by thoughts of hell, often as children. Mytton suggests that the psychological harm is as serious as the abuse inflicted by pedophile priests.
Most of the devout are decent people, do not believe all scripture (or in the US, don’t know much about it, according to polls), and recognize past and present abuses of their faith, often working for reform from within. Thus Leora Tanenbaum, in her review of Hitchens, dismisses his arguments against religion as “based on the lowest common denominator.” And when religious people do bad things, we can’t assume it’s because of their religion, anymore than we can assume that when atheists do bad things it’s because of their atheism. At least as likely a candidate is a person’s nature: in general, good people do good things and bad people bad things.
Here, though, we come to the heart of the matter. Dawkins quotes what Steven Weinberg adds: “But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.” Does the Pope oppose condom use in Africa despite the many lives it would save because he is a bad person? Are many US fundamentalists sanguine about nuclear war, seeing it as heralding the Second Coming, because they are bad people? Were all the Crusaders, often poor and sacrificing livelihoods and incurring debt for the cause, just bad people? The problem here is the power of faith to prevail against evidence and natural sense. That’s the essence of faith.
Moderates give up parts of their religion in recognition of modernity. But cherry-picking from religious teachings isn’t following the religion, any more than picking which laws to obey makes one a law-abiding citizen. It’s the extremists who are following the religion. And what remains after the cherry-picking can’t be considered a source of morality, because the selectivity must be guided by a sense of right and wrong that one already has. We expect this sense of normal adults regardless of religious conviction. As Hitchens asks, isn’t it rather an insult to the Hebrews to suppose that they didn’t know stealing was wrong before God handed down the commandments?
Meanwhile, Harris argues, religious moderation insofar as it insists on tolerance lends legitimacy to extremism. If faith of all stripes must be respected, that includes the faith of those who do believe that homosexuals and adulterers should be executed (as the Christian Reconstructionists do), or that Hindu widows should immolate themselves, or that unmarried Muslim mothers-to-be should be stoned to death. In civil society, we can try to control such extremes with laws and criminal penalties. But religious tolerance means that we can’t get to the root of the problem: we can’t discredit the beliefs that the deeds are based on. Indeed, from the faithful’s point of view the case is impeccable. If God commands it, it must be done.
Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens have been widely reviewed, but it seems to me these few central points have scarcely been addressed. One common criticism, for instance by Terry Eagleton, is that Dawkins overlooks the many variants of Christian belief. But any variant that maintains an interventionist God is subject to Dawkins’ arguments; if there’s any that doesn’t, then it isn’t what Dawkins is addressing. So the criticism is pointless. Criticism like Tanenbaum’s is likewise typical: simply asserting the existence of moderate believers is easy, but just repeats what has been granted and ignores the argument about them.
I myself tend to agree with the case so far. But it shouldn’t be restricted to religion. People have faith in all sorts of things besides God: in their stock brokers, in the Red Sox, in their friends. Of course this is not always harmful, and can be beneficial. Through faith in himself, a recovering alcoholic might find needed resolve. His history might indicate that he won’t be able to recover, but he needs to believe that he can in order to have any chance.
But now, consider faith in country and its political leaders. Russell once wrote of a Greek friend who analyzed the self-serving motives all the nations fighting in World War I – except Greece which, he was sure, had only the noblest of intentions. If we can’t recognize ourselves in this story, it’s because of our own nationalist blinders: a faith in what the country does under a political leadership, which makes the phrase “God and country” resonate. This is harmful because it’s part of what fuels war. It’s a faith that inclines us to follow leaders without demanding evidence that war is necessary, as democracy requires.
It’s not just among the unsophisticated. Let Exhibit A be Sam Harris. Harris thinks his critique of religion is especially urgent because terrorists could get access to weapons of mass destruction. And he’s confident that these terrorists are motivated by religion, in particular Islam. So his otherwise ecumenical critique includes a chapter devoted to “The Problem with Islam.” By his lights, the problem is that the Koran repeatedly commands death for non-believers and promises heavenly reward for those who carry out the commands. This is the reason “we must now confront Muslim, rather than Jain, terrorists in every corner of the world.” Daniel Dennett has a similar view. (Hitchens is a complicated special case.)
Harris is unusual in his emphasis on religious motives of terrorism. The orthodox view is expressed by Louise Richardson for example, who acknowledges religion as a possible factor, in part because it promotes a manichean worldview in which the terrorists are good and their targets evil. But she adds that it “is never the sole cause of terrorism; rather religious motivations are interwoven with economic and political factors" and generally the "three R's": revenge, renown, and reaction. Take the London bombings of July 2005. According to the first, and plausible, claim of responsibility, the bombings were a response to British support of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. The suspects had reportedly been moved by television coverage of civilians killed in Iraq. That aligned with the assessment by British intelligence before the bombings, that British involvement in Iraq increased the risk of terrorism on British soil. The US National Intelligence Estimate has similarly noted t he US occupation as motivating terrorists. So this would seem to be primarily a case of Richardson’s first ‘R’, revenge.
Recognizing revenge as a motive doesn’t justify terrorism, but it does invite us to widen our condemnation. The civilian toll of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands according to a study published in the Lancet, with a declining but substantial portion (from a third to a quarter over a three-year period) attributable directly to US military strikes. As Nick Turse has described, the public knows little about the regular attacks by the US Air Force in Iraqi population centers because of underreporting and Pentagon secrecy. In Afghanistan, even Hamid Karzai has denounced the regular NATO bombardment of civilian areas; the total dead is unknown, but five years ago various estimates were already in the thousands. Taking another known grievance in the Islamic world, the US was the aggressive and knowing driver of sanctions against Iraq which were a major factor in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children according to several studies.
Our victims well outnumber those of 9/11. But Harris joins the Western intellectual mainstream helping to keep the toll rising, by making sure we feel no shame. His denial of “moral equivalence” between our deeds and terrorists’ comes not by denying facts: he accepts that “we have surely done some terrible things in our past [and] undoubtedly we are poised to do terrible things in the future,” naming genocide of native Americans, slavery, bombing of Cambodia, support of dictatorships, etc. Harris nonetheless distinguishes us from terrorists with the usual: we are a “well-intentioned giant.” We don’t kill innocents on purpose. If we had a “perfect weapon” that incurred no collateral damage, he argues, we would use it to kill only evildoers whereas terrorists would use it to kill innocents.
There are two problems here. First, suppose a man burns down a house knowing that there are people inside. His purpose is not to kill the people, but to make sure the house isn’t used for drug dealing. Is he less guilty than one whose purpose is to kill the people? It would seem not. This is encoded in US criminal law, under which “knowingly” and “purposely” are morally equivalent states of what’s called “mens rea” (“guilty mind”). Thus in both cases the arsonist can be convicted of murder. Note also that if the first man could truthfully say he would have availed himself of a “perfect fire” that would have spared the victims, that wouldn’t lessen his guilt. He knowingly set a real fire, and he’s responsible for that.
Harris’ argument here is made in the course of criticizing Chomsky. Anticipating a reply by Chomsky (correctly, I think) that regardless of intention we are responsible for likely known consequences of our acts, Harris counters that this is an unreasonable standard, citing the manufacturers of roller coasters, baseball bats, and swimming pools who surely are innocent notwithstanding potential harm that could ensue from use of their products. The reader can judge whether dropping 500-pound bombs in residential areas suspected of harboring insurgents is more like the arsonist or the swimming pool manufacturer. To correct for bias, we should imagine Iraqi jets regularly bombing California neighborhoods in pursuit of suspected attackers of an Iraqi occupation, following an illegal Iraqi invasion of the US.
Which brings us to the second problem with appealing to our good intentions. What is the evidence? Harris admits the historical record, which includes many cases in which it can’t even be said that killing innocents was a matter of collateral damage, such as saturation bombing in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, sponsorship of death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and elsewhere in Latin America, overthrow of democratically-elected governments and support of dictatorships in Chile, Iran, Guatemala, Haiti, and many others. Here civilians were the targets, for reasons spelled out in our own national security documents: promoting governments that serve our economic and strategic interests, destabilizing those that don’t, and fighting insurgents in part by “drying up the sea” of their civilian support. In the case of Iraq, I recommend Sonia Shah’s book Crude for making our oil interest as obvious as it should be (an interest served by a pending Iraqi law, drafted under US supervision, which would give much control of Iraq’s oil to foreign corporations).
Americans who see good intentions in US interventions do so because they are Americans. If similar deeds are perpetrated by enemies, we don’t hesitate in our moral judgments: we didn’t wonder about good intentions of Iraq when it invaded Kuwait or the Soviet Union when it installed a puppet regime in Afghanistan, and rightly so. Likewise, those abroad often fail to see our benevolence. For example, a BBC News poll of January 2007 found that in 18 countries outside the US, only 29% of respondents thought the US played a mainly positive role in the world. In glamorizing ourselves (enabled by our media), we are no different than Russell’s Greek patriot.
So here lies Harris’ nationalist faith. It’s not the faith of those who deny or are unaware of the record. It’s stronger. Because as an intellectual he accepts evidence, which then must be overridden. This, as we’ve seen, is the essence of faith. And too as with religious faith, manichean illusion comes along. In this respect Harris’ view that “we must now confront Muslim terrorists in every corner of the world” is not unlike Bush’s, which is not unlike bin Laden’s, except with the good and evil sides switched. The explanation for the US record is, not that we are evil, but that we pursue our own interests. Just like everyone else, but our record is worse because we have more power to do so.
Accordingly, and because this is our country, criticism should begin at home. So for example if Harris, Dennett, or any other Americans are worried about nuclear weapons finding their way to terrorists, they should work to change US policy. Experts tell us that nuclear know-how is out of the bag, available from public sources including the internet. What needs to happen is control of nuclear material, as would be accomplished by the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. Which the US opposes. The US rejects negotiation of a nuclear-free zone throughout the Middle East (because it would include Israel), as called for in UN Security Council Resolution 687. In its preservation of a nuclear stockpile and pursuit of next-generation weapons, the US is in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. By undermining international agreements and intervening militarily as it sees fit, the US motivates those who may pursue nukes for revenge or self-defense, terrorists or not. And all th is poses a much greater threat to civilization than the Koran.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=105&ItemID=13739
posted by attilav at 18:43
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