2011 PREDICTIONS: IT DOESN'T LOOK PRETTY

2011 PREDICTIONS: IT DOESN'T LOOK PRETTY

Bruce Krasting

Wednesday, December 29, 2010









Oh boy is 2011 going to be an exciting year! Some things that I think might happen:


-Volatility is going up across the board. If you have the stomach for the swings that are coming across all markets there is a ton of money to be made; balls and timing are all that are necessary. The markets will create dozens of opportunities to make and lose.


-There will be 50 days with a swing in the S&P greater than 1%. There will be 10 days where gold swings $50. There will be two days with a drop greater than 100 bucks. Most of the big moves will be down moves. Bonds will not be spared the volatility.


-Gold will be higher a year from now but off its peak. At some time in the fall, gold will be near 1,800 and the New York Times will do a front-page story that gold is on its way to 2,000. That will be the high point of the year.


-Copper will continue to rise. This metal will benefit as the poor man’s gold. Why buy an ounce of something for $1,600 when you can have a whole pound of something else for only $5? The logic is compelling only because there is no logic. Increasingly, it will become understood that money does not hold value. Copper will do a better job of storing value than a Treasury Bond.


-The US bond market is in for a heck of a year. The 30-year will trade at BOTH 3% and 5%. Higher rates will come early in the year, then the deflation trade will come back into vogue.


-Spain will be the next sovereign debtor that falls prey to the market. This will happen before the end of the 1st Q. The package to bail them out will exceed $500b. This will exhaust the EU resources. There will be very high expectations that contagion will then move to Italy. That will not happen in 2011 (2012?) The European Central Bank will step up to the table (finally) and support the market for Italy. Sometime between March and June Italian bonds will be a great buy.


-The IMF will contribute $125b to the Spanish bailout. The US portion of this will be $25b. Republican Senators and Congressman go nuts. The American people will side with them. The argument, "How can we help Spain but not California?" will be the mantra. In the end the IMF commitment will stand. But that will be the last time the US contributes to a sovereign bailout. This will prove to be very destabilizing at some point after 2011.


-The ECB will be forced to issue bonds that are joint and several debt of the EU members. This development will stabilize the EU temporarily, but it will be hated in Germany. The amount of the new issuance of these bonds will be small. The program will be terminated in 2012.


-The dollar versus the Euro will be all over the lot. The low for EURUSD will be ~1.17. The really big surprise is that toward the end of the year the Euro will be pushing 1.50.


-The CHF will be like copper. It will attract investors as there is no good alternative. Before June EURCHF will trade below 90.


-The market will finally wake up to the fact that the YEN is not a good store of wealth. The continuing argument will be, “Yeah the Yen stinks, but everything is worse so it should be okay”. Wrong. The Yen is a short. The best currency trade of the year will be long Sterling short Yen. There will be better levels to put this trade on then exist today; be patient.


-The US will have a full year deficit of 1.4 trillion dollars. This depressing reality will hang on the US economy/markets. Congress will talk about the problem endlessly, but little will be accomplished. By the end of the year the problem will be so acute that belt tightening is put in place for 2013-15. But it will be too late by then.


-QE2 will be the last QE we see. The program will end (on schedule) on 6/30. Perversely, long-term interest rates will rise as long as QE continues. When the program is finished rates will begin a rapid decline. This will not go unnoticed by academia. The result will be that QE will be a disgraced policy that will not be used again for at least five years.


-The high for the S&P will occur before June. The S&P will fall short of 1,500. The low will be 1,100.


-Oil will rise to $130 in the next six months. It will be above $100 at the end of the year.


-China’s inflation rate will continue to rise. Food will be the primary driver. The central government will respond with monetary tightening and an acceleration of the Yuan appreciation. It will not work. Inflation will push 7%. The domestic economy will continue to grow but at a much smaller pace. 5% GPD will be all that China sees for the year. The trade surplus will fall by a third.


-Brazil will continue to shine as a resource rich country that runs a trade surplus and has low budget deficits. The surprise of the year will be Argentina. Food will be the reason. Argentina’s fortunes will improve with rising wheat and soy prices.


-The US will wind down its presence in Iraq. With every step we take out the door domestic violence will rise. Iran will assume a larger roll in the south (Basra). This will not go over well with the US. Much of the year will be spent debating what should be done. US warships will be off the Iranian coast waiting for a phone call, but no shots will be fired. Russia and Germany will not go along with strong sanctions against Iran. The problem will fester toward a resolution in 2012.


-Kim Jong-Il will die. His son will take over. The heir is a nut, there will be more military exercises that results in shells landing on S. Korea soil. China will make public statements that it is trying to bring order; behind the scenes they will be applauding the chaos.


-Obama’s popularity will continue to fall. The legislative “successes” at the end of 2010 will convert to a series of failures. There will be no new stimulus. Portions of the health care legislation will be dialed back. The mandatory participation feature will be found unconstitutional. Without this feature the legislation makes no economic sense and a great debate will be initiated as to what to do about it. Nothing will be accomplished. Reason? There are no “answers” to this problem.


-Obama will propose a means test for Social Security in his State of the Union Address. Retirees who are living the high-life (Warren Buffet types) are going to have their SS checks cut to the bone. Any senior with income of $200k will be impacted. The great socialization of Social Security will have begun. The popularity of this program will fall of a cliff.


-The 2% reduction on worker contributions to Social Security will be extended and expanded to 3% for 2012. Rates will not go up in future years. Social Security will have to be gutted as a result. This will not happen in 2011. But the seeds will be sown for this to occur in 2014.


-2011 will be a stock pickers market. Index investing will see a bad year. Some of the darlings of 2011 like AAPL and NFLX will not fare so well. While I don’t see big declines in these stocks there are much better places to put money to work. M&A will be a dominant theme. That is where the action will be.


-There will be at least three more 'Flash Crashes'. The SEC will launch another investigation into how this could happen. The conclusion will be that ETF's and how dealers manage them are responsible for the liquidity problems in individual stock names. There is no solution to this problem. The market will be on edge looking for the next mini crash. A stock will fall prey to this and drop 20% in seconds. Unlike prior examples there will be no recovery in the stock. Holders will protest the losses. There will no restitution. Market confidence will fall as a result.


-Meredith Whitney will be proven wrong in her forecast that 50-100 munis go chapter 9 this year. The process to insolvency takes much longer than she has anticipated. Only 11 munis will make a chapter filing. The rest will be pushed to the brink in 2012.


-The center of attention will move away from California as the most bankrupt state. In his State of the State address in January, New York’s new Governor Andrew Cuomo will fess up to the fact that for the past year of so NY has been burying its problems. Substantial cutbacks in spending will be the result. NY State long -term GOs will trade at 6% at some point in the year.


-Unemployment will not go down. The average for the year will be above 10%. The number of workers who leave the system will rise to 20mm. These workers will find part-time jobs that pay cash. The new day-workers will compete with illegals for employment. Social tensions will be the result.


-The Chevy volt will not sell well. Boeing will be unable to complete a single Dreamliner. GM will trade below $30, Boeing will hit the low $50’s.


-The Singapore dollar will be the strongest currency on the globe in 2011.

-Apple will not come up with a new product this coming year. The rest of the consumer tech manufacturers will gain some market share. The problems with dropped calls with the iphone will be an issue. Apple will respond with alliances with a number of other providers. ATT's stock will suffer as a result.


-Headline inflation will rise a bit. It will push through 2%. Those numbers are meaningless. The price of a pair of jeans will be 50% higher. Food will cost us 15% more. Gas will be at $4. Bernanke’s QE will be blamed for the inflation.


-Much to my chagrin and surprise Tim Geithner will not be replaced as Treasury Secretary. He will continue to do a very mediocre job for us. He will be replaced in January of 2012.


-Comcast will complete the acquisition of NBC/CNBC. One of the first acts will be to fire Mark Haines. Nothing will help. The ratings will continue to fall. Becky Quick will move to FOX Business. Diana Olick will get her own show. She is being groomed to be the next Suzie Orman. Simon Hobbs will return to London.


-There will be violent weather episodes all over the globe. The La Nina condition that is now dominating global weather is the strongest in 50 years. This will make a dramatic shift to El Nino conditions this summer. This will set the stage for a very big Atlantic hurricane year. There will 12 named storms. Two cat. 4 storms will hit the mainland.


-Fannie and Freddie will be merged. Out of the ashes will come a good bank and a bad bank. The bad bank will hold 2.5 trillion of questionable mortgages. The US will end the year exactly where it started on this critical issue. The federal government will be responsible for more than 95% of all new mortgages issued.


-Washington's other mortgage lender FHA will run into troubles. Their minimum reserve level set by congress will be breached. A bailout will be required. The true cost is buried. The bailout will be less than $20b. As this is a problem for the Senate, the legislation will passed quickly.


-There will not be a failure of a government bond auction. But the coverage for each issuance will grow smaller. China, Russia and Brazil will reduce their holdings of US reserves. The mysterious "household" sector will show a huge increase in Treasury holdings. This will be confusing as it will not match up with other data. UK reserve holdings will show a decline. These are actually holdings of China that were not included in official reserves. This will bring uncertainty.


-Mortgage Gate will die as a headline story. In fact it will go the other way during the year. Increasingly, the problems in real estate will be focused on the fact that there has been too few foreclosures. That too many people had been living in a home without paying a dime becomes a cost that all have to bear. As a result there will be a much higher level of foreclosures throughout the year. Contrary to expectation, residential real estate for average priced homes will not decline much further. However, prices for high-end homes will continue to fall. Anything with a price tag of greater than $1mm will be worth 20% less by the end of the year.


-The narco violence in Mexico will expand to many more cities. Tourism will be hurt as a result. Some of the violence will pass over our border. Anti immigration attitudes will expand. Because the low-end economy will remain in the dumpster the actual number of illegal aliens will decline by more than 1mm. This will add to the RE woes in some US areas. It will stress the countries that they originated from as $ remittances decline.


-Interest rates will be higher throughout the year for corporate bonds and Munis. This will bring a reversal of the mania to buy dividend stocks. Those who thought that this investment strategy would work for them will be disappointed. The number of hucksters pushing the dividend story will grow in number while the popularity of the strategy declines.


-Jon Hilsenrath will write an article for the Wall Street Journal that is actually critical of the Fed. The unpopularity of the Fed will rise to such a level that Jon will have no choice but to follow suit.


-The Fed will come under attack from all sides. They are truly in a no-win situation. Unemployment will continue to rise while inflation rises and the dollar declines. One side will shout that the Fed did too little (Krugman), others they did too much (the rest of the world). Everyone will hate the Fed as a result. Bernanke will not lose his job, but his term as the boss at the Fed will be forever tainted.


-ZIRP will be with us for yet another year. Bernanke will not let go of this loser policy. Inflationary expectations will respond at some point. By the end of the year a Fed Funds rate increase will be seen as imminent even though the economy will be soft.


-Social unrest will become visible in America in 2011. There will be demonstrations in many major cities. Some will turn violent. Economics will be at the heart of the anger. The frustration that was evident in France in recent years will come to the US.


Have a great year!!


http://www.activistpost.com/2010/12/2011-predictions-doesnt-look-pretty.html#more

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Wikileaks' Christmas Message

Wikileaks' Christmas Message

Bringing "Good News" of Great Truths for "All the People"

By Rev. WILLIAM E. ALBERTS

Christmas Weekend Edition

December 24-26, 2010





WikiLeaks is a modern-day Christmas story about the secrets of those who abuse power and pretend to represent what they are not. According to the Biblical story, King Herod became “frightened” when he heard of the prophesized birth of a Messiah, who would set the Jewish people free from Roman domination. So Herod sent for and met “secretly” with the wise men who were tracking the star leading to the birthplace of the future Jewish liberator. Herod told the wise men to inform him when they found the child, “so that I may also go and pay him homage.” Herod sounded respectful, even reverent of life. But the wise men, being “divinely” warned in a (WikiLeak-like) dream of Herod’s real, imperialistic intent, avoided him by taking a different road and traveling incognito back to their own country. “Infuriated” at being found out and “tricked” by the wise men, Herod paid “homage” to the prophesized birth of the Messiah: he ordered the killing of all the male Jewish children, “two years and under,”` throughout Bethlehem born beneath that star—to dispose of any threat to his power. And, according to the ancient story, there was “lamentation, weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they are no more.” (Matthew 2: 1-18)

Former president George W. Bush and his vice preident, Dick Cheney, are “King Herods” of today. They and their administration paid “homage” to Iraq, calling their criminal invasion and occupation, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” stating their pre-emptive war against Iraq was about protecting America and its allies from Saddam Hussein’s horrible weapons of mass destruction. They claimed it was also about bringing “freedom” and “democracy” to the Iraqi people—palatable goals for American public consumption. They kept secret all of the critical evidence that revealed Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. But that did not stop them once they got their war of choice going. The goal of “the greatest nation on earth,” they told everyone, included making America and the world safe by getting rid of the Iraqi tyrant. In reality, they brought fear not “freedom” to Iraq—and to America, and death and not “democracy” to both countries. There is “lamentation, weeping and great mourning” in Iraq today. Rachel is weeping for her Iraqi children, and refusing to be comforted because of the deaths and maiming and diminishing of so many of her children’s lives, on the orders of America’s “King Herods.” Rachel is also weeping for her American children needlessly sacrificed on the altars of corporations and politicians who profit and maintain their power through endless war.

The truths being disclosed are very “frightening” to America’s “King Herods.” Thus they are violently opposed to the “good news” being revealed by WikiLeaks for all the people to see. WikiLeaks’ disclosure of nearly 400,000 classified US Iraqi war documents show that US foreign policy is not about paying “homage” to the Iraqi people but about committing homicide against them. Being “tricked” by WikiLeaks and its whistleblowers, like true humanistic patriot Private Bradley Manning, the “King Herods” of American foreign policy, find these truths “frightening” and “infuriating.”

A number of their spokespersons have condemned the leaking of state secrets. The BBC News reported that “both US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the UK’s Ministry of Defence suggested the disclosures put lives at risk.” And Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the release of more documents, “Another irresponsible posting of stolen classified documents by Wikileaks puts lives at risk and gives adversaries valuable information.” (“Wikileaks: Iraq war logs ‘reveal truth about conflict,’” 23 October 2010)

The documents’ release “puts lives at risk?” The “Iraq war logs” document “more than 109,000 violent deaths between 2004 and the end of 2009. . . .including 66,081 civilians . . . and 3,771 coalition troops . . . which appear to contradict earlier claims that the US did not keep records of civilians killed.” The Iraq Body Count, which collates the death of Iraqi civilians, stated that a sampling of only 860 logs of the nearly 400,000 secret US documents indicates “that around 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths would be identified.” Furthermore, “The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which US forces killed civilians at checkpoints and during operations.” And the documents “describe the apparent torture of Iraqi detainees by the Iraqi authorities, sometimes using electrocution, electric drills and in some cases even executing detainees, says BBC’s Adam Brookes.” The story continues, “The US military knew of the abuses, the documents suggest, but reports were sent up the chain of command marked ‘no further investigation,’ our correspondent adds.” (Ibid)

Admiral Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates reacted similarly when WikiLeaks released 75,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan. The New York Times reported Mullen as stating, “Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.” (“Gates Assails WikiLeaks Over Release Of Reports,” By Charlie Savage, July 30, 2010) Defense Secretary Gates joined in by “asserting that the security breach had endangered lives and damaged the ability of others to trust the United States government to protect their secrets.” (Ibid)

WikiLeaks “might already have on their hands the blood of some American soldier or that of an Afghan family?” WikiLeaks founded Julian Assange, as reported, responded by “accusing the Pentagon of trying to distract attention from the thousands of lives being lost in the war.” He said, “One must consider why the Pentagon is focusing on the hypothetical blood that it says might be on our hands—although there is no evidence of that—compared to the 20,000 lives that have been lost in Afghanistan that are documented and exposed by our material. (“Afghan leak: Wikilaks’ Assange denies ‘blood on hands,’” BBC NEWS US & CANADA, 30 July 2010) As also reported, Assange “has said that hundreds of . . . unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings by NATO forces . . . should be investigated by the media for evidence of war crimes.” (“WikiLeaks set to release more Afghan files,” By Raphael G. Satter and Anne Flaherty, Associated Press, The Boston Globe, Aug. 13, 2010)

“WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands?” Julian Assange is quoted as “blast[ing] the Pentagon’s leadership today for not announcing a broad inquiry into the war efforts. Saying he was “’disappointed in what was left out’ of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ comment . . . ‘about hypothetical blood,’ Assange said . . . ‘the grounds of Iraq and Afghanistan are covered with real blood.’” (“WikiLeaks’ Assange Strikes Back at Pentagon,” by Sharon Weinberger, Contributor, Aol News., July 30, 22010)

How many of those, whose blood has been shed in Iraq and Afghanistan by America’s “King Herods,” are male and female children, “two year and under?” Three years and older? Christmas is about the blood of Rachel and her children in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congressman Ron Paul proclaimed the “good news” of great truths for all the people to hear, in defending WikiLeaks before Congress in a speech called, “WikiLeaks: Don’t Kill the Messenger—Stop Lying to the People!” Congressman Paul dared to ask the real question: “Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?” He got at the truth with, “Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?” He went to the heart of the matter: “Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?” And he ended with a deeper Christmas meaning of “Blessed are the peacemakers”: “Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?”(RonPaul.com, Dec. 10, 2010)

“Good news” at Christmas, or at any other time, is about WikiLeaks’ and other revelations of truths that expose the secrets of today’s “King Herods.” Truths that inform people, and thus free and empower them to live by the Golden Rule, which is the heartbeat of democracy and of peacemakers.

Rev. William E. Alberts, Ph.D. is a hospital chaplain and a diplomate in the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy. Both a Unitarian Universalist and a United Methodist minister, he has written research reports, essays and articles on racism, war, politics and religion.

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From Jefferson to Assange

From Jefferson to Assange

Posted on Dec 7, 2010

By Robert Scheer / www.truthdig

All you need to know about Julian Assange’s value as a crusading journalist is that The New York Times and most of the world’s other leading newspapers have led daily with important news stories based on his WikiLeaks releases. All you need to know about the collapse of traditional support for the constitutional protection of a free press is that Dianne Feinstein, the centrist Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has called for Assange “to be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.”

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Feinstein, who strongly supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has the audacity to call for the imprisonment of the man who, more than any other individual, has allowed the public to learn the truth about those disastrous imperial adventures—facts long known to Feinstein as head of the Intelligence Committee but never shared with the public she claims to represent.

Feinstein represents precisely the government that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he said, in defense of unfettered freedom of the press, “ Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

In the 1787 letter in which he wrote those words, Jefferson was reflecting the deep wisdom of a political leader who often had been excoriated by a vicious press that would make the anarchist-inflected comments of an Assange seem mild in comparison. More than 35 years later, after having suffered many more vitriolic press attacks, Jefferson reiterated his belief in a free press, in all its vagaries, as the foundation of a democracy. In an 1823 letter to Lafayette, Jefferson warned: “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted to be freely expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.”

It is precisely that agitation that so alarms Feinstein, for the inconvenient truths she has concealed in her Senate role would have indeed shocked many of those who voted for her. She knew in real time that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, yet she voted to send young Americans to kill and be killed based on what she knew to be lies. It is her duplicity, along with the leaders of both political parties, that now stands exposed by the WikiLeaks documents.

That is why U.S. governmental leaders will now employ the massive power of the state to discredit and destroy Assange, who dared let the public in on the depths of official deceit—a deceit that they hide behind in making their claims of protecting national security. Claims mocked by released cables that show that our puppets in Iraq and Afghanistan are deeply corrupt and anti-democratic, and that al-Qaida continues to find its base of support not in those countries but rather in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, the very nations we arm and protect. The notion that the official tissue of lies enhances our security is rejected by the growing strength of radical Islam in the region, as evidenced by the success of Iran, the main beneficiary of our invasion of Iraq, as the leaked cables make clear.

The pretend patriots who use the national security argument to gut what remains of our most important security asset—our constitutional guarantees of a truly free press—are just what President George Washington feared when in his farewell address he warned “against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the Impostures of pretended patriotism. …”

The pretended patriotism of Feinstein, the first Democrat to co-sponsor the bill extending the U.S. Patriot Act, represents the death of the Democratic Party as a protector of our freedoms. As a California resident, I will not vote for her again, no matter how dastardly a right-wing Republican opponent she might face. There is no lesser evil to be found in one who would so cavalierly imprison practitioners of a free press.

That is the issue here, pure and simple. It is unconscionable to target Assange for publishing documents on the Internet that mainstream media outlets have attested had legitimate news value. As in the historic case in which Daniel Ellsberg gave The New York Times the Pentagon Papers exposé of the official lies justifying the Vietnam War, Assange is acting as the reporter here, and thus his activities must be shielded by the First Amendment’s guarantee of journalistic freedom.

Actually Ellsberg’s position, as morally strong as it was, was weaker than that of Assange, in that the former Marine and top Pentagon adviser was working at the government-funded Rand Corp., where he had agreed to rules about the handling of classified information, including the Pentagon Papers. Assange operates under no such restraints and is an even clearer example of the journalist who ferrets out news and attempts to report it. He had no special clearance that provided him access, and what he did was no different from what the editors of The New York Times did in publishing news that was fit to print.

It is outrageous for any journalist, or respecter of what every American president has claimed is our inalienable, God-given right to a free press, not to join in Assange’s defense on this issue, as distinct from what increasingly appear to be trumped-up charges that led to his voluntary arrest on Tuesday in London in a case involving his personal behavior. Abandon Assange and you abandon the bedrock of our republic: the public’s right to know.

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Information Terrorists The Vile Campaign Against Julian Assange and Wikileaks

The Vile Campaign Against Julian Assange and Wikileaks

Information Terrorists?

By DAVE LINDORFF

December 7, 2010

WikiLeaks is under concerted attack from the US government. Also under attack by the US government is the whole idea of freedom of thought and of information.

It is increasingly clear that the "rape" charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are trumped-up affairs resulting from pressure by the US government and intelligence agencies on Swedish authorities. The main allegation of rape is being made by a Swedish woman, Anna Ardin, who admits she had consensual sex with Assange, but claims he failed to halt their love-making when a condom allegedly failed. Calling such a situation "rape"--if it even happened--makes a mockery of the term.

The idea of an international arrest warrant through Interpol on such a flimsy and in any case virtually unprovable charge is an insult to all the victims of real rape whose cases in the US and elsewhere around the world are regularly left unprosecuted. In addition, the woman making the allegation has a connection to a CIA-linked anti-Castro organization and a brother in Swedish intelligence who was a liason in Washington to US intelligence services, raising further questions about the whole "incident." A second woman's charges against Assange are even more specious--amounting essentially to a claim that Assange didn't answer the woman's phone calls after spending the night with her, or mention that he'd slept with someone else a while earlier.

For a great expose of the sham charges of rape (which are being reported in the US as if they were acts of violence or abuse), read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, which points out that Swedish law, which essentially makes having sex without a condom legally form of rape, even if consensually done, is about to make that country a "laughing stock," which further shows that Ardin threw a party for Assange the day after the alleged "rape", and which also shows that both women were boasting on twitter about their "conquests" of Assange after the alleged "violations" occurred.

The Obama administration has sunk to a new low in pursuing Assange, and is now having its so-called Justice Department try to manufacture a crime with which to prosecute Assange for doing precisely what real journalists should have been doing--namely exposing the criminal activities of the US government in engaging in acts of wars in countries like Yemen and Pakistan where the US is not legally at war, in pressuring foreign allies like Spain on behalf of US companies, in trying to trump up arguments to attack Iran with false information about alleged importation of long-range missiles from North Korea, etc.

The US is almost certainly also behind efforts to shut down WikiLeaks by closing down its DNS account, by attacking its servers through sophisticated hacking techniques, and by putting pressure on banks and payment systems like Paypal to get them to stop handling donations of support. Paypal, for instance, which was a major vehicle for donating to WikiLeaks, suddenly cut off the organization, saying it had violated Paypal policies by engaging in "illegal" activity, though nothing that WikiLeaks has done has violated any law. The hand of the US government is clearly visible in this decision, too.
WikiLeaks has currently found a new home at www.WikiLeaks.ch, thanks to the Pirate Party, a small independent political organization in Switzerland committed to freedom of information. Go there to make a donation of support, which can still be accomplished by credit card through an online transaction at a Swiss bank, or by wire transfer.

This is a critically important struggle. We can now see graphically illustrated the horrible reality that was created when President Obama issued his outrageous executive order claiming the right to order the extra-judicial execution of Americans overseas--an order the White House is now aggressively defending in federal court. We now have American political figures like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, both former and current presidential aspirants, openly calling for the killing of someone simply because he has opened up government secrets, and a depressingly large percentage of Americans are reportedly okay with that idea. If this kind of thinking continues unchallenged, none of us who espouse open government and freedom of the press will be safe for long.

To give an idea of how grave the situation has already become, I received an email today from a TCBH reader warning that with some people in Congress and the media suggesting, rather ludicrously, that Wikileaks and its members, including Assange, should be classified as "information terrorists," writing articles telling people how to contribute to the organization might, under the Patriot Act, be then construed as "aiding terrorism," which could lead to a forced one-way trip to Guantanamo or worse. If that sounds pretty paranoid, consider that Columbia University, a leading Ivy League institution, has warned its students not to view Wikileaks or to write favorably about it, for fear that this could "hurt job prospects" of graduates in the future.

It needs to be clearly understood by all Americans, and especially by anyone in the media who takes the profession seriously, that the attacks on WikiLeaks by the US government--attacks which have included heavy pressure on companies like Paypal, Amazon Books, Visa and Mastercard, all of which have closed their accounts with the organization, making it difficult if not impossible for Assange and his team to raise money, and on internet servers, making it harder for WikiLeaks to stay online--could as easily be used against news organizations and political organizations. If the government gets away with pressuring a server to close out an organization it doesn't like, it could as easily pressure a print shop not to publish a magazine, a news distributor not to distribute newspapers, or a power company not to provide juice to a broadcaster. If the government can pressure banks to close WikiLeaks' accounts, it could pressure banks to close a book publisher's account. And if the government can, as Attorney General says he is doing, tries to create a law with which to arrest and punish Assange, it can as easily trump up a "crime" and arrest a print publisher or radio network owner. These actions are not the actions of a democracy. They are the lawless actions of a dictatorship.

The darkness is rapidly closing in during this administration that once claimed to be about "hope and change."

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The Arrest of Julian Assange Truth in Chains

The Arrest of Julian Assange

Truth in Chains

By CHRIS FLOYD

London.

December 7, 2010

Well, they got him at last. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the target of several of the world’s most powerful governments, turned himself into British authorities today and is now at the mercy of state authorities who have already shown their wolfish – and lawless – desire to destroy him and his organization.

It has been, by any standard, an extraordinary campaign of vilification and persecution, wholly comparable to the kind of treatment doled out to dissidents in China or Burma. Lest we forget, WikiLeaks is a journalistic outlet – just like The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, all of whom are even now publishing the very same material – leaked classified documents -- available on WikiLeaks. The website is also a journalistic outlet just like CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox and other mainstream media venues, where we have seen an endless parade of officials – and journalists! – calling for Assange to be prosecuted or killed outright. Every argument being made for shutting down WikiLeaks can – and doubtless will – be used against any journalistic enterprise that publishes material that powerful people do not like.

And the leading role in this persecution of truth-telling is being played by the administration of the great progressive agent of hope and change, the self-proclaimed heir of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama. His attorney general, Eric Holder, is now making fierce noises about the “steps” he has already taken to bring down WikiLeaks and criminalize the leaking of embarrassing information. And listen to the ferocious reaction of that liberal lioness, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who took to the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to call for Assange to be put in prison – for 2,500,000 years:

“When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.

“The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit "information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation." ... Importantly, the courts have held that "information relating to the national defense" applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.”

So there you have it. Ten years for each offense; 250,000 separate offenses; thus a prison term of 2.5 million years. Naturally, tomorrow the same newspaper will denounce Feinstein for being such a namby-pamby terrorist-coddling pinko: “Why didn’t she call for Assange to be torn from limb to limb by wild dogs, as any right-thinking red-blooded American would do!?”

Meanwhile, corporate America and its international allies continue to do their bit. Joining PayPal and Amazon, who had already cut off their services to WikiLeaks, most of the remaining venues through which the internet journal is funded are also freezing out the organization -- MasterCard, Visa, and a Swiss bank that WikiLeaks used to process donations. All of these organizations are obviously responding to government pressure.

What is perhaps most remarkable is that this joint action by the world elite to shut down WikiLeaks – which has been operating for four years – comes after the release of diplomatic cables, not in response to earlier leaks which provided detailed evidence of crimes and atrocities committed by the perpetrators and continuers of Washington’s Terror War. I suppose this is because the diplomatic cables have upset the smooth running of the corrupt and cynical backroom operations that actually govern our world, behind the ludicrous lies and self-righteous posturing that our great and good lay on for the public. They didn’t mind being unmasked as accomplices in mass murder and fomenters of suffering and hatred; in fact, they were rather proud of it. And they certainly knew that their fellow corruptocrats in foreign governments – not to mention the perpetually stunned and supine American people – wouldn’t give a toss about a bunch of worthless peons in Iraq and Afghanistan getting killed. But the diplomatic cables have caused an embarrassing stink among the closed little clique of the movers and shakers. And that is a crime deserving of vast eons in stir – or death.

But before Assange was taken into custody, he fired off one last message to the world, in The Australian, a newspaper in his native land. With supreme irony, he tied WikiLeaks’ operation to the roots of the Murdoch media empire, which began by speaking truth to murderous and wasteful power – and now, of course, is one of the most powerful and assiduous instruments of murderous and wasteful power itself. Assange writes:

“IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.” His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

“Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public. … Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

“WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain ‘s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

“Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US Special Forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.”

These, of course, are the defenders of Western Civilization, that pinnacle of human progress, that bulwark against savagery like murder and torture, that bastion of temperance and reason. But in his piece, Assange once more gives the lie to the ferocious canards of Feinstein, Holder, Obama and Palin about the “great harm” the leaks have done:

“WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

“US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.”

Yes, how many thousands of people, how many tens of thousands, have been killed by our bipartisan Terror Warriors in the four years of WikiLeaks’ existence? How many millions have been “harmed” not only by the direct operations of the Terror War, but by the ever-widening, ever-deepening violence, hatred and turmoil it is spreading throughout the world? (Not to mention the accelerating collapse of American society, which has been financially, politically and morally bankrupted by the acceptance of aggressive war, torture, elite rapine and authoritarian rule.)

But none of the perpetrators of these acts, past or present, are in jail, or have even been prosecuted, or investigated, or inconvenienced in any way. Yet Assange is in a British prison tonight – and it is certainly not for the “sexual misconduct” charges that were filed against him in August, which then became the basis of an unprecedented worldwide arrest order of the type ordinarily reserved for war criminals – for those, in fact, accused of aggressive war, torture, elite rapine and authoritarian rule. The judge refused to grant bail, saying that Assange had “access to financial means” and could flee the country – perhaps a bitter joke on milord’s part, aimed at a man whose means of financial support are being systematically shut down by the most powerful government and corporate forces in the world. Journalist John Pilger and filmmaker Ken Loach were among those who appeared in court ready to stand surety for Assange, but to no avail.

WikiLeaks will doubtless try to struggle on. And Assange says he has given the entire diplomatic trove to 100,000 people. By dribs and drabs, shards of truth will get out. But the world’s journalists – and those persons of conscience working in the world’s governments – have been given a hard, harsh, unmistakable lesson in the new realities of our degraded time. Tell a truth that discomforts power, that challenges its domination over our lives, our discourse, our very thoughts, and you will be destroyed. No institution, public or private, will stand with you; the most powerful entities, public and private, will be arrayed against you, backed up by overwhelming violent force. This is where we are now. This is what we are now.

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Julian Quixote Wikileaks vs. the Empire

Wikileaks vs. the Empire

Julian Quixote

December 8, 2010

By ERIC WALBERG

It was United States president Woodrow Wilson who called for "open diplomacy" — number one of his fourteen points in 1918 — so that "diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view." He would surely approve of Wikileaks' efforts at open diplomacy, though current US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called them "an attack on America's foreign-policy interests" and indeed on "the international community", though she failed to specify which particular community members were the victims, or what they were the victims of.

On 7 December, the bane of US empire voluntarily gave himself up to Scotland Yard and will face trial and extradition to Sweden possibly by the end of the year, accused of "rape, unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation", alleged to have been committed in August 2010. The trumped-up cases involve consensual relations, one an obvious "honey trap" by a CIA plant and the other a spurned Lewinsky-like groupie.

Assange is nothing short of a legend after a year of leaks, especially an April video taken from a US helicopter in Iraq in 2007 showing GIs shooting at least 12 innocent Iraqis like rabbits. Starting in July, he issued 500,000 US military documents on the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The straw for the imperial camel was a batch of 250,000 US diplomatic notes (1966-2009) in November, revealing a US diplomatic world increasingly acting as a branch of the CIA, and the cynicism of both Western and Arab regimes anxious to destroy Iran.

The leaks have been hailed as a blow to US criminal activity by people around the world, including staunchly American US Congressman Ron Paul, and condemned by lovers of US empire such as former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who called for Assange to be "pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders". Former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind said WikiLeaks' actions were "active assistance to terrorist organisations", neglecting to reflect on the UK's own long history of worldwide terrorist activities.

The 39-year-old Assange is an Australian citizen, though his Prime Minister Julia Gillard has threatened to cancel his passport. He is described by colleagues as charismatic, driven and highly intelligent, with an exceptional ability to crack computer codes. To his critics, he is just a publicity-seeker and womaniser.

In 1995 he was accused with a friend of dozens of hacking activities and fined, promising to be a good boy. He quietly co-authored Underground with Suelette Dreyfus, dealing with the subversive side of the Internet. Dreyfus described Assange as "quite interested in the concept of ethics, concepts of justice, what governments should and shouldn't do".

He began Wikileaks in 2006 as a "dead-letterbox" for would-be leakers — the real heroes of this saga, the unknown soldiers disgusted with their role as hired killers. His collective developed a Robin Hood guerrilla lifestyle, moving communications and people from country to country to make use of laws protecting freedom of speech. Co-founder Daniel Schmitt describes Assange as "one of the few people who really care about positive reform in this world to a level where you're willing to do something radical".

Wikileaks was forced this year to switch to a Swiss host server after several US Internet service providers shut him down, claiming he was endangering lives, though he made clear he was careful to vet the military cables from Afghanistan and Iraq precisely to avoid this. His site also came under cyber attack and PayPal cut off his ability to raise funds.

There is no doubt that Gillard, the Swedish prosecutor, PayPal, etc are all being pressured by the US government to help snuff out this ray of light exposing its many crimes. Only French Internet service provider OVH said it had no plans to end the service it provides to Wikileaks, and a judge threw out Industry Minister Eric Besson's case to force it to.

Hackivist admirers of Mr Quixote have set up mirror sites faster than traditional servers can shut Wikileaks down and are launching denial-of-service attacks targetting its Internet enemies. Coldblood, a member of the computer group Anonymous, told BBC, "Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets. We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs the government."

The Man of La Mancha fought off more than "100 legal attacks" before his arrest, including one by Swiss banks whose illicit offshore activities were exposed. That case too was dismissed and left the bankers to scramble to protect their ill-gotten gains.

The show goes on. Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said Assange's arrest was an attack on media freedom but assured, "Wikileaks is operational. We are continuing on the same track as laid out before." Assange — or his colleagues still at large — hopes to set up a number of "independent chapters around the world" as well as to act as a middle-man between sources and newspapers.

Strangely, he has been attacked on the left as a stooge of the CIA or Israel, though the former makes no sense at all. True, the latter comes off relatively clean amidst the diplomatic cesspool. But what the few tight-lipped US diplo leaks relating to Israel really show is the fear that US diplomats have of saying anything negative about Israel. Perhaps they fear they will be passed over for their "anti-Semitism" or perhaps they fear that all their missives are read by Mossad as a matter of course.

A terse cable from the US embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan compares Israeli-Azeri relations ominously to an "iceberg with nine-tenths unseen". Another polite one from Tel Aviv reveals that several "OT" (organised crime) figures applied for visas to attend a "security conference" in Los Vegas but thankfully didn't come back when asked for their prison records in Russia.

An interesting comparison is between Assange and another exposer of US military secrets, Jonathan Pollard, the (only) US-Israel spy serving a life sentence he received in 1987 for revealing US military secrets. The big difference, of course, is Pollard did not apply the "open diplomacy" principle. If he had blacked out the sensitive names, and exposed the secrets to broad daylight, like Assange, he could have had a beneficial influence on world politics. Instead he sold the secrets to Israel, and uncounted CIA agents lost their lives in the Soviet Union as a result.

Another worthy comparison is with the legendary Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, who like Assange, gave himself up and faced the music, which turned out to be sweet. The judge dismissed all charges against him in 1973 and the New York Times pompously applauded him in 1996, saying that the papers demonstrated "that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied" about "a subject of transcendent national interest and significance."

Ellsberg and Assange, following the advice of Woodrow Wilson, are heroes. Pollard, truly a villain, is worshipped today in Israel, where his 9000th day in prison last year was commemorated with a light show on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. Last month 39 Congressmen petitioned US President Barack Obama to pardon him. Last summer, Netanyahu had the gall to offer to hold off a few more months on settlements if Obama freed him.

Will Assange suffer the fate of Pollard or Ellsberg? The US military machine was in disarray in 1971 and Ellsberg gave it a brave shove and helped bring the troops home. But this is 2010. The open calls to free Pollard are treated as a matter of course. While the Hillaries and Sarahs are calling to assassinate Assange for doing something noble, their like are calling to free a traitor who was responsible for betraying his country and causing untold deaths of US officials.

The sides are lining up, much like Bush predicted in 2001 with his "You are with us or against us." A brave Aussie, a principled French judge, an American libertarian congressman, a youthful computer nerd — the enemies of empire come in all shapes and sizes.

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Wikileaks and the New Global Order

Wikileaks and the New Global Order

By JONATHAN COOK

November 30, 2010

The Wikileaks disclosure this week of confidential cables from United States embassies has been debated chiefly in terms either of the damage to Washington’s reputation or of the questions it raises about national security and freedom of the press.


The headlines aside, most of the information so far revealed from the 250,000 documents is hardly earth-shattering, even if it often runs starkly counter to the official narrative of the US as the benevolent global policeman, trying to maintain order amid an often unruly rabble of underlings.


Is it really surprising that US officials appear to have been trying to spy on senior United Nations staff, and just about everyone else for that matter? Or that Israel has been lobbying strenuously for military action to be taken against Iran? Or even that Saudi Arabia feels threatened by an Iranian nuclear bomb? All of this was already largely understood; the leaks have simply provided official confirmation.


The new disclosures, however, do provide a useful insight, captured in the very ordinariness of the diplomatic correspondence, into Washington’s own sense of the limits on its global role -- an insight that was far less apparent in the previous Wikileaks revelations on the US army’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.


Underlying the gossip and analysis sent back to Washington is an awareness from many US officials stationed abroad of quite how ineffective -- and often counter-productive -- much US foreign policy is.


While the most powerful nation on earth is again shown to be more than capable of throwing its weight around in bullying fashion, a cynical resignation nonetheless shines through many of the cables, an implicit recognition that even the top dog has to recognise its limits.


That is most starkly evident in the messages sent by the embassy in Pakistan, revealing the perception among local US officials that the country is largely impervious to US machinations and is in danger of falling entirely out the ambit of Washington’s influence.


In the cables sent from Tel Aviv, a similar fatalism reigns. The possibility that Israel might go it alone and attack Iran is contemplated as though it were an event Washington has no hope of preventing. US largesse of billions of dollars in annual aid and military assistance to Israel appears to confer zero leverage on its ally’s policies.


The same sense of US ineffectiveness is highlighted by the Wikileaks episode in another way. Once, in the pre-digital era, the most a whistleblower could hope to achieve was the disclosure of secret documents limited to his or her area of privileged access. Even then the affair could often be hushed up and make no lasting impact.


Now, however, it seems the contents of almost the entire system of US official communications is vulnerable to exposure. And anyone with a computer has a permanent and easily disseminated record of the evidence.


The impression of a world running out of American control has become a theme touching all our lives over the past decade.


The US invented and exported financial deregulation, promising it to be the epitome of the new capitalism that was going to offer the world economic salvation. The result is a banking crisis that now threatens to topple the very governments in Europe who are Washington’s closest allies.


As the contagion of bad debt spreads through the system, we are likely to see a growing destabilisation of the Washington order across the globe.


At the same time, the US army’s invasions in the Middle East are stretching its financial and military muscle to tearing point, defining for a modern audience the problem of imperial over-reach. Here too the upheaval is offering potent possibilities to those who wish to challenge the current order.


And then there is the biggest crisis facing Washington: of a gradually unfolding environmental catastrophe that has been caused chiefly by the same rush for world economic dominance that spawned the banking disaster.


The scale of this problem is overawing most scientists, and starting to register with the public, even if it is still barely acknowledged beyond platitudes by US officials.


The repercussions of ecological meltdown will be felt not just by polar bears and tribes living on islands. It will change the way we live -- and whether we live -- in ways that we cannot hope to foresee.


At work here is a set of global forces that the US, in its hubris, believed it could tame and dominate in its own cynical interests. By the early 1990s that arrogance manifested itself in the claim of the “end of history”: the world’s problems were about to be solved by US-sponsored corporate capitalism.


The new Wikileaks disclosures will help to dent those assumptions. If a small group of activists can embarrass the most powerful nation on earth, the world’s finite resources and its laws of nature promise a much harsher lesson.

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Why Wikileaks is Good for Democracy

Why Wikileaks is Good for Democracy

By BILL QUIGLEY

November 30, 2010

“Information is the currency of democracy.”
-- Thomas Jefferson.

Since 9-11, the US government, through Presidents Bush and Obama, has increasingly told the US public that “state secrets” will not be shared with citizens. Candidate Obama pledged to reduce the use of state secrets, but President Obama continued the Bush tradition. The Courts and Congress and international allies have gone meekly along with the escalating secrecy demands of the US Executive.

By labeling tens of millions of documents secret, the US government has created a huge vacuum of information.

But information is the lifeblood of democracy. Information about government contributes to a healthy democracy. Transparency and accountability are essential elements of good government. Likewise, “a lack of government transparency and accountability undermines democracy and gives rise to cynicism and mistrust,” according to a 2008 Harris survey commissioned by the Association of Government Accountants.

Into the secrecy vacuum stepped Private Bradley Manning, who, according to the Associated Press, was able to defeat “Pentagon security systems using little more than a Lady Gaga CD and a portable computer memory stick.”

Manning apparently sent the information to Wikileaks – a non profit media organization, which specializes in publishing leaked information. Wikileaks in turn shared the documents to other media around the world including the New York Times and published much of it on its website.

Despite criminal investigations by the US and other governments, it is not clear that media organizations like Wikileaks can be prosecuted in the US in light of First Amendment. Recall that the First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Outraged politicians are claiming that the release of government information is the criminal equivalent of terrorism and puts innocent people’s lives at risk. Many of those same politicians authorized the modern equivalent of carpet bombing of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, the sacrifice of thousands of lives of soldiers and civilians, and drone assaults on civilian areas in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. Their anger at a document dump, no matter how extensive, is more than a little suspect.

Everyone, including Wikileaks and the other media reporting the documents, hopes that no lives will be lost because of this. So far, that appears to be the case as McClatchey Newspapers reported November 28, 2010, that ‘US officials conceded that they have no evidence to date that the [prior] release of documents led to anyone’s death.”

The US has been going in the wrong direction for years by classifying millions of documents as secrets. Wikileaks and other media which report these so called secrets will embarrass people yes. Wikileaks and other media will make leaders uncomfortable yes. But embarrassment and discomfort are small prices to pay for a healthier democracy.

Wikileaks has the potential to make transparency and accountability more robust in the US. That is good for democracy.

Bill Quigley is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans.

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LINKING WORD / CONNECTORS CAUSE AND RESULT

LINKING WORD / CONNECTORS CAUSE AND RESULT






Download Link:

http://ifile.it/t39paih/

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America's Devolution Into Dictatorship

America's Devolution Into Dictatorship

Licensed to Kill

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

November 11, 2010

http://www.counterpunch.org/


The United States Department of Justice (sic) routinely charges and convicts innocents with bogus and concocted crimes that are not even on the statutes book. The distinguished defense attorney and civil libertarian, Harvey A. Silverglate, published a book last year, “Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,” which conclusively proves that today in “freedom and democracy” America we have punishment without crime.

This same Justice (sic) Department, which routinely frames and railroads the innocent, argued in Federal Court on November 8 that the US government, if approved by the president, could murder anyone it wishes, citizens or noncitizens, at will. All that is required is that the government declare, without evidence, charges, trial, jury conviction or any of the due process required by the US Constitution, that the government suspects the murdered person or persons to be a “threat.”

The US Justice (sic) Department even told US Federal District Court Judge John Bates that the US judiciary, formerly a co-equal branch of government, has absolutely no legal authority whatsoever to stick its nose into President “Change” Obama’s decision to assassinate Americans. The unaccountability of the president’s decision to murder people is, the US Justice (sic) Department declared, one of “the very core powers of the president as commander in chief.”

The argument by the Justice (sic) Department that the executive branch has unreviewable authority to kill Americans, whom the executive branch has unilaterally, without presenting evidence, determined to pose a threat, was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center For Constitutional Rights.

The outcome of the case will determine whether president George W. Bush, was correct when he said that the US Constitution was nothing but a “scrap of paper.”

It is my opinion that the American people and the US Constitution haven’t much chance of winning this case. The Republican Federalist Society has succeeded in appointing many federal district, appeals and supreme court judges, who believe that the powers of the executive branch are superior to the powers of the legislature and judiciary. The Founding Fathers of our country declared unequivocally that the executive, legislative, and judicial branches were co-equal, However, the Republican brownshirts who comprise the Federalist Society have implanted the society’s demonic ideology in the federal bench and Justice (sic) Department. Today the erroneous belief is widespread that the executive branch is supreme and that the other branches of government are less than equal.

If Americans have a greater enemy than neoconservatives, that enemy is the Federalist Society.

Disagree with me as you will, but now let’s look at this development from another perspective. I am old enough to remember the Nixon years, and I was a presidential appointee, confirmed by the US senate, in the Reagan administration. For those of you too young to know and those who are to old to remember, President Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment simply because Nixon lied about when he learned about the burglary of the Watergate office of the Democratic party.

Nixon lied about when he learned of the burglary, because he knew that the Washington Post would make an issue of the burglary, if he launched an investigation, to defeat his re-election. The military/security complex and the black ops groups in the US government were angry at Nixon for smoothing US-China relations. The Washington Post, long regarded as a CIA asset, hid behind its “liberal” image to bring Nixon down. Woodward and Bernstein wrote thriller-type reports of midnight meetings with “Deep Throat” in parking garages to get the scoop on the date of Nixon’s knowledge of the meaningless burglary.

Let’s assume that I have it all wrong. The fact remains that Nixon was driven from office because of the Watergate burglary. No one was harmed. Nixon did not kill anyone or claim the right to kill, without proof or accountability, American citizens. If the dastardly President Nixon had a Justice (sic) Department like the present one, he simply would have declared Woodward, Bernstein, and the Washington Post to be a threat and murdered them by merely exercising the power that the Obama administration is claiming.

Nixon might be too far in the past for most Americans, so let’s look at Ronald Reagan.

The neoconservatives’ Iran/Contra scandal almost brought down President Reagan. It is unclear whether President Reagan knew about the neocon operation and, if he did, whether he was kept in the loop. But all of this aside, what do you think would have been President Reagan’s fate if he, or his Justice (sic) Department, had declared that Reagan had the power as commander in chief to murder anyone he considered to be a threat?

Instantly, the media would have been in an uproar, law schools and university faculties would have been in an uproar, the Democrats would have been demanding Reagan’s impeachment, and his impeachment would have occurred with the speed of light.

Today in Amerika, approximately 25 years later, the ACLU has to go to federal court in order to attempt to affirm that “if the Constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have unreviewable authority to summarily execute any American whom he concludes is an enemy of the state.”

In reply, the Justice (sic) Department told the court that murdering American citizens is a “political question” that is not subject to judicial review. The “freedom and democracy” government then invoked the “state secrets privilege” and declared that the case against the government’s power to commit murder must be dismissed in order to avoid “the disclosure of sensitive information”

If the Obama Regime wins this case, the US will have become a dictatorship.

As far as I can tell, the “liberal media” and most Americans do not care. Indeed, conservative Republicans are cheering it on.






......"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

......“Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor.
I'll piss on 'em.
That's what the Statue of Bigotry says.
Your poor huddled masses, let's club 'em to death,
And get it over with and just dump 'em on the boulevard.”
Lou Reed

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USEFUL EXPRESSIONS WITH PREPOSITIONS

USEFUL EXPRESSIONS WITH PREPOSITIONS

to accuse sb. of doing sth.

They accused him of stealing the chickens.

to be accustomed to doing sth.

She isn't accustomed to having a lot of money.

to advise sb. to do sth.

I advise you to work harder in future.

to advise sb. against doing sth.

He advised his son against studying abroad.

to agree to do sth.

He has agreed to help us.

to agree with sb. about sth.

I agree with you about the new decisions.

to allow sb. to do sth.

My father doesn't allow me to go out at night.

to be angry / annoyed with sb. for doing sth.

He was annoyed with me for not coming to the meeting yesterday.

to be anxious about sb. / sth.

I'm very anxious about her health. She looks so tired these days.

to be anxious to do something

He is anxious to meet you

to apologize to sb. for doing sth.

I must apologize to them for not answering their letter.

to appeal to sb. for / against sth.

The hospital appealed to the local population for financial help.

The players appealed against the referee's decision.

to apply to sb. for sth.

She has applied to the bank for a job as cashier.

to approve of sb. / sth.

He doesn't approve of their marriage.

to argue with sb. about sth.

You're always arguing with me about what I should wear.

to be aware / unaware of sth.

Are you aware of the dangers of smoking?

to beg for sth.

They were so poor that they had to beg for all their food.

to beg sb. to do sth.

They begged me to help them.

to believe in sb. / sth.

He believes in God.

to blame sb. for sth.

They blamed the child for breaking the clock.

to boast about sth.

They're always boasting about their children's successes.

to borrow sth. from sb.

I borrowed this jacket from my uncle,

to cheer sb. up

I was feeling very sad, but your visit has cheered me up.

to complain to sb. about / of sth.

He has complained to me about your bad behaviour.

I'll give her an aspirin. She's complaining of a headache.

to concentrate on (doing) sth.

Let's concentrate on finding a solution.

to congratulate sb. on (doing) sth.

We congratulated her on her success.

to convince sb. of sth.

He has convinced me of his honesty.

to be cruel to sb.

Young children are often cruel to animals.

to differ from

How does Arabic differ from French?

to be disappointed at sth / in / with sb / sth.


I was disappointed at not finding you at home.

He is disappointed in / with his new car.

to discourage sb. from doing sth.

Some people have discouraged me from studying law.

to be doubtful about sth.

I'm very doubtful about what I should do next year.

to dream of doing sth.

I've always dreamt of living on a desert island.

to dream about sb. / sth.

I dreamt about you last night.

to be eager to do sth.

She's always eager to help.

to encourage sb. in sth. / to do sth.

Teachers should encourage their pupils in their studies / to work hard.

to excuse sb. for doing sth.

Please excuse me for being late.

to excuse sb. from doing sth.

I'll excuse you from playing tennis today if you don't feel well enough.

to expect sb. to do sth.

We expect him to write next week.

to be famous for sth.

Khemisset is famous for its « brochettes ».

to feed sb. on sth.

We feed our dog on raw meat.

to be fond of sb / sth / (doing) sth.

Little girls are fond of playing with dolls.

to forgive sb. for doing sth.

Please forgive me for not doing my homework.

to be good at sth.

He's very good at languages.

to be grateful to sb. for sth.

I'm very grateful to them for helping us.

to haggle with sb. about / over sth.

Some tourists enjoy haggling with shopkeepers about prices.

to inquire about sth.

I must inquire about trains to Fes.

to inquire after sb.

Bill wasn't at work today. I must inquire after him.

to be interested in sb. / sth.

I'm very interested in music.

to introduce sb. to sb.

May I introduce you to my wife?

to insist on sth.

They insist on coming with us.

to be jealous of sb.

The little boy is very jealous of his baby sister.

to be kind to sb.

We should be kind to animals.

to be kind of sb. to do sth,

It was very kind of you to help us.

to laugh at sb. / sth.

You shouldn't laugh at people who are in trouble.

to laugh over sb. / sth.

We laughed over the funny letter we received from you.

to lend sth. to sb. / sb. sth.

I've only a few books. I can't lend one to everybody.

to long for sth. / to do sth.

I'm longing for next year to come.

I'm longing to leave school.

to manage to do sth.

Although it was dark, he managed to find his way.

to operate on sb. (for sth.)

The surgeon has operated on her for appendicitis.

to be overjoyed at sth.

I was overjoyed at the good news.

to pay sb. for sth.

We paid them 2.000 DH for this old car.

to be pleased with sb. / sth.

She's very pleased with your progress.

to praise sb, for sth.

They praised him for his courage.

to prevent sb. from doing sth.

Bad weather prevented us from visiting the whole region.

to promise sb. sth. / to do sth.

I promise you a present if you win.

I promise to be there on time.

to protest against sth.

The children protested against going to bed early.

to be proud of sb. / sth.

She's proud of her husband's success.

to provide sb. with sth.

Parents provide their children with food and clothes.

to punish sb. for (doing) sth.

We must punish them for getting such low marks.

to quarrel with sb. about sth.

Her son often quarrels with his sister about silly things.

to rely on sb.

He is very conscientious. You can rely on him to do the job well.

to remember sb. to sb.

Please remember me to your parents when you write.

to remind sb. of sb.

That woman reminds me of my aunt.

to remind sb. to d© sth.

Please remind me to buy some milk; otherwise I might forget,

to be responsible for sth.

Who is responsible for that noise?

to reward sb. for sth.

We shall reward you for your good work.

to rob sb. of sth.

They robbed him of his watch.

to be rude to sb.

Children mustn't be rude to their parents.

to scold sb. for (doing) sth.

She scolded her son for being lazy.

to send for sb. / sth.

I feel ill. You'd better send for the doctor.

to smell / to taste of sth.

This meat smells of garlic.

This cake tastes of lemon.

to. be sorry about sth.

I'm very sorry about that mistake.

to be / to feel sorry for sb.

I feel sorry for people who have to work in the hot sun.

to stop sb. from doing sth.

They stopped us from going near the blazing hut.

to steal sth. from sb.

Somebody stole my wallet from me yesterday.

to succeed in doing sth.

They have succeeded in finding a nice house.

to suffer from sth.

He is suffering from shock.

to suspect sb. of (doing) sth.

We suspected him of telling lies.

to thank sb. for (doing) sth.

Please thank your father for lending me his hammer.

to translate from x into y

We must translate this letter from Spanish into English.

to be used for sth.

Wood is used for making furniture.

to be used to doing sth.

He is used to working hard. He has done it all his life.

to worry about sb. / sth.

Don't worry about your future.

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Crusade 2.0 The Lies of Islamophobia

Crusade 2.0

The Lies of Islamophobia

The Three Unfinished Wars of the West Against the Rest

Posted by John Feffer at 5:25pm, November 7, 2010.

Almost two years and one disastrous election later, we’re still waiting for the other Barack Obama to make an appearance, and from the gab coming out of Washington right now, it looks like we’ll be twiddling our thumbs a bit longer (if not forever). Once again, the sweet talk of compromise and bipartisanship is on the lips of the president, but not, of course, on the lips of top Republicans. Talk about consistency!

Right now, all the news chatter is about domestic policy (health care, tax cuts, etc.), but count on the Republicans -- Rand Paul aside -- to light out after the president sooner or later at least as hawkishly on foreign policy as they have domestically. Already, Senator John McCain and others are preparing the ground to launch what's likely to become a jihad against Obama’s civilization-busting “mistake” in announcing a vaguely “conditions-based” drawdown of vague numbers of U.S. troops in Afghanistan for July 2011. And that’s just a start. On a whole host of issues from the Iraq and Afghan wars to Israel, Iran, and North Korea, buckle your seatbelts and hold onto your hats. The critical weather in Congress, especially in the House, is going to get fiercer, and a president with a most un-Harry-Truman-ish tendency to placate is unlikely to stake his fighting future on foreign policy.

So expect war drums and alarums to the horizon (i.e. 2012) from congressional Republicans. And when it comes to the famous Republican urge to cut every budget in sight, be assured of one thing: our wars, the Pentagon budget, and the industrial part of the military-industrial complex -- in other words, our next generation weaponry, however ill-conceived -- will surely be removed from the “table” where “all options” are always placed.

According to Chris Nelson of the invaluable Washington insider newsletter, the Nelson Report, “The likely new chair of House Armed Services, ‘Buck’ McKeon (R-Ca.), is a big supporter of Missile Defense and the Navy, while the Armed Services appropriations subcommittee will likely be chaired by Bill Young (R-Fla.), and between his and McKeon's districts, there are very few ‘missing’ major space and defense contractors.” McKeon has already made it crystal clear that he’s in favor of “boosting” the already bloated Pentagon budget.

Oh, and to complete the trifecta, the likely new head of the House Foreign Affairs committee is Cuban refugee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. (She once said: "I welcome the opportunity of having anyone assassinate Fidel Castro and any leader who is oppressing the people.") She’s guaranteed to push for an ever fiercer policy on Iran, while offering total support to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Israeli government against the Obama administration. She’s already called on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to expel all Palestinian diplomats from the U.S., and to cease sending American Muslim religious leader Feisal Abdul Rauf, creator of “the mosque at Ground Zero,” abroad to represent the country.

None of this should surprise anyone. Starting in January, it will evidently be morning in America again for Islamophobes. As co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus and TomDispatch regular John Feffer points out, there’s a little bit of history going back a mere thousand years or so that, when it comes to Islamophobia, we ignore at our peril. Tom

The Lies of Islamophobia
The Three Unfinished Wars of the West against the Rest

By John Feffer
The Muslims were bloodthirsty and treacherous. They conducted a sneak attack against the French army and slaughtered every single soldier, 20,000 in all. More than 1,000 years ago, in the mountain passes of Spain, the Muslim horde cut down the finest soldiers in Charlemagne’s command, including his brave nephew Roland. Then, according to the famous poem that immortalized the tragedy, Charlemagne exacted his revenge by routing the entire Muslim army.

The Song of Roland, an eleventh century rendering in verse of an eighth century battle, is a staple of Western Civilization classes at colleges around the country. A “masterpiece of epic drama,” in the words of its renowned translator Dorothy Sayers, it provides a handy preface for students before they delve into readings on the Crusades that began in 1095. More ominously, the poem has schooled generations of Judeo-Christians to view Muslims as perfidious enemies who once threatened the very foundations of Western civilization.

The problem, however, is that the whole epic is built on a curious falsehood. The army that fell upon Roland and his Frankish soldiers was not Muslim at all. In the real battle of 778, the slayers of the Franks were Christian Basques furious at Charlemagne for pillaging their city of Pamplona. Not epic at all, the battle emerged from a parochial dispute in the complex wars of medieval Spain. Only later, as kings and popes and knights prepared to do battle in the First Crusade, did an anonymous bard repurpose the text to serve the needs of an emerging cross-against-crescent holy war.

Similarly, we think of the Crusades as the archetypal “clash of civilizations” between the followers of Jesus and the followers of Mohammed. In the popular version of those Crusades, the Muslim adversary has, in fact, replaced a remarkable range of peoples the Crusaders dealt with as enemies, including Jews killed in pogroms on the way to the Holy Land, rival Catholics slaughtered in the Balkans and in Constantinople, and Christian heretics hunted down in southern France.

Much later, during the Cold War, mythmakers in Washington performed a similar act, substituting a monolithic crew labeled “godless communists” for a disparate group of anti-imperial nationalists in an attempt to transform conflicts in remote locations like Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iran into epic struggles between the forces of the Free World and the forces of evil. In recent years, the Bush administration did it all over again by portraying Arab nationalists as fiendish Islamic fundamentalists when we invaded Iraq and prepared to topple the regime in Syria.

Similar mythmaking continues today. The recent surge of Islamophobia in the United States has drawn strength from several extraordinary substitutions. A clearly Christian president has become Muslim in the minds of a significant number of Americans. The thoughtful Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has become a closet fundamentalist in the writings of Paul Berman and others. And an Islamic center in lower Manhattan, organized by proponents of interfaith dialogue, has become an extremist “mosque at Ground Zero” in the TV appearances, political speeches, and Internet sputterings of a determined clique of right-wing activists.

This transformation of Islam into a violent caricature of itself -- as if Ann Coulter had suddenly morphed into the face of Christianity -- comes at a somewhat strange juncture in the United States. Anti-Islamic rhetoric and hate crimes, which spiked immediately after September 11, 2001, had been on the wane. No major terrorist attack had taken place in the U.S. or Europe since the London bombings in 2005. The current American president had reached out to the Muslim world and retired the controversial acronym GWOT, or “Global War on Terror.”

All the elements seemed in place, in other words, for us to turn the page on an ugly chapter in our history. Yet it’s as if we remain fixed in the eleventh century in a perpetual battle of “us” against “them.” Like the undead rising from their coffins, our previous “crusades” never go away. Indeed, we still seem to be fighting the three great wars of the millennium, even though two of these conflicts have long been over and the third has been rhetorically reduced to “overseas contingency operations.” The Crusades, which finally petered out in the seventeenth century, continue to shape our global imagination today. The Cold War ended in 1991, but key elements of the anti-communism credo have been awkwardly grafted onto the new Islamist adversary. And the Global War on Terror, which President Obama quietly renamed shortly after taking office, has in fact metastasized into the wars that his administration continues to prosecute in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere.

Those in Europe and the United States who cheer on these wars claim that they are issuing a wake-up call about the continued threat of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other militants who claim the banner of Islam. However, what really keeps Islamophobes up at night is not the marginal and backwards-looking Islamic fundamentalists but rather the growing economic, political, and global influence of modern, mainstream Islam. Examples of Islam successfully grappling with modernity abound, from Turkey’s new foreign policy and Indonesia’s economic muscle to the Islamic political parties participating in elections in Lebanon, Morocco, and Jordan. Instead of providing reassurance, however, these trends only incite Islamophobes to intensify their battles to “save” Western civilization.

As long as our unfinished wars still burn in the collective consciousness -- and still rage in Kabul, Baghdad, Sana’a, and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan -- Islamophobia will make its impact felt in our media, politics, and daily life. Only if we decisively end the millennial Crusades, the half-century Cold War, and the decade-long War on Terror (under whatever name) will we overcome the dangerous divide that has consumed so many lives, wasted so much wealth, and distorted our very understanding of our Western selves.

The Crusades Continue

With their irrational fear of spiders, arachnophobes are scared of both harmless daddy longlegs and poisonous brown recluse spiders. In extreme cases, an arachnophobe can break out in a sweat while merely looking at photos of spiders. It is, of course, reasonable to steer clear of black widows. What makes a legitimate fear into an irrational phobia, however, is the tendency to lump all of any group, spiders or humans, into one lethal category and then to exaggerate how threatening they are. Spider bites, after all, are responsible for at most a handful of deaths a year in the United States.

Islamophobia is, similarly, an irrational fear of Islam. Yes, certain Muslim fundamentalists have been responsible for terrorist attacks, certain fantasists about a “global caliphate” continue to plot attacks on perceived enemies, and certain groups like Afghanistan’s Taliban and Somalia’s al-Shabaab practice medieval versions of the religion. But Islamophobes confuse these small parts with the whole and then see terrorist jihad under every Islamic pillow. They break out in a sweat at the mere picture of an imam.

Irrational fears are often rooted in our dimly remembered childhoods. Our irrational fear of Islam similarly seems to stem from events that happened in the early days of Christendom. Three myths inherited from the era of the Crusades constitute the core of Islamophobia today: Muslims are inherently violent, Muslims want to take over the world, and Muslims can’t be trusted.

The myth of Islam as a “religion of the sword” was a staple of Crusader literature and art. In fact, the atrocities committed by Muslim leaders and armies -- and there were some -- rarely rivaled the slaughters of the Crusaders, who retook Jerusalem in 1099 in a veritable bloodbath. “The heaps of the dead presented an immediate problem for the conquerors,” writes Christopher Tyerman in God’s War. “Many of the surviving Muslim population were forced to clear the streets and carry the bodies outside the walls to be burnt in great pyres, whereat they themselves were massacred.” Jerusalem’s Jews suffered a similar fate when the Crusaders burned many of them alive in their main synagogue. Four hundred years earlier, by contrast, Caliph ‘Umar put no one to the sword when he took over Jerusalem, signing a pact with the Christian patriarch Sophronius that pledged “no compulsion in religion.”

This myth of the inherently violent Muslim endures. Islam “teaches violence,” televangelist Pat Robertson proclaimed in 2005. “The Koran teaches violence and most Muslims, including so-called moderate Muslims, openly believe in violence,” was the way Major General Jerry Curry (U.S. Army, ret.), who served in the Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. administrations, put it.

The Crusaders justified their violence by arguing that Muslims were bent on taking over the world. In its early days, the expanding Islamic empire did indeed imagine an ever-growing dar-es-Islam (House of Islam). By the time of the Crusades, however, this initial burst of enthusiasm for holy war had long been spent. Moreover, the Christian West harbored its own set of desires when it came to extending the Pope’s authority to every corner of the globe. Even that early believer in soft power, Francis of Assisi, sat down with Sultan al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade with the aim of eliminating Islam through conversion.

Today, Islamophobes portray the building of Cordoba House in lower Manhattan as just another gambit in this millennial power grab: "This is Islamic domination and expansionism,” writes right-wing blogger Pamela Geller, who made the “Ground Zero Mosque” into a media obsession. “Islam is a religion with a very political agenda,” warns ex-Muslim Ali Sina. “The ultimate goal of Islam is to rule the world.”

These two myths -- of inherent violence and global ambitions -- led to the firm conviction that Muslims were by nature untrustworthy. Robert of Ketton, a twelfth century translator of the Koran, was typical in badmouthing the prophet Mohammad this way: “Like the liar you are, you everywhere contradict yourself.” The suspicion of untrustworthiness fell as well on any Christian who took up the possibility of coexistence with Islam. Pope Gregory, for instance, believed that the thirteenth century Crusader Frederick II was the Anti-Christ himself because he developed close relationships with Muslims.

For Islamophobes today, Muslims abroad are similarly terrorists-in-waiting. As for Muslims at home, “American Muslims must face their either/or,” writes the novelist Edward Cline, “to repudiate Islam or remain a quiet, sanctioning fifth column.” Even American Muslims in high places, like Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), are not above suspicion. In a 2006 CNN interview, Glenn Beck said, “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’"

These three myths of Islamophobia flourish in our era, just as they did almost a millennium ago, because of a cunning conflation of a certain type of Islamic fundamentalism with Islam itself. Bill O’Reilly was neatly channeling this Crusader mindset when he asserted recently that “the Muslim threat to the world is not isolated. It’s huge!” When Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence William Boykin, in an infamous 2003 sermon, thundered "What I'm here to do today is to recruit you to be warriors of God's kingdom," he was issuing the Crusader call to arms.

But O’Reilly and Boykin, who represent the violence, duplicity, and expansionist mind-set of today’s Western crusaders, were also invoking a more recent tradition, closer in time and far more familiar.

The Totalitarian Myth

In 1951, the CIA and the emerging anti-communist elite, including soon-to-be-president Dwight Eisenhower, created the Crusade for Freedom as a key component of a growing psychological warfare campaign against the Soviet Union and the satellite countries it controlled in Eastern Europe. The language of this “crusade” was intentionally religious. It reached out to “peoples deeply rooted in the heritage of western civilization,” living under the “crushing weight of a godless dictatorship.” In its call for the liberation of the communist world, it echoed the nearly thousand-year-old crusader rhetoric of “recovering” Jerusalem and other outposts of Christianity.

In the theology of the Cold War, the Soviet Union replaced the Islamic world as the untrustworthy infidel. However unconsciously, the old crusader myths about Islam translated remarkably easily into governing assumptions about the communist enemy: the Soviets and their allies were bent on taking over the world, could not be trusted with their rhetoric of peaceful coexistence, imperiled Western civilization, and fought with unique savagery as well as a willingness to martyr themselves for the greater ideological good.

Ironically, Western governments were so obsessed with fighting this new scourge that, in the Cold War years, on the theory that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, they nurtured radical Islam as a weapon. As journalist Robert Dreyfuss ably details in his book The Devil’s Game, the U.S. funding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan was only one part of the anti-communist crusade in the Islamic world. To undermine Arab nationalists and leftists who might align themselves with the Soviet Union, the United States (and Israel) worked with Iranian mullahs, helped create Hamas, and facilitated the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Though the Cold War ended with the sudden disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, that era’s mind-set -- and so many of the Cold Warriors sporting it -- never went with it. The prevailing mythology was simply transferred back to the Islamic world. In anti-communist theology, for example, the worst curse word was “totalitarianism,” said to describe the essence of the all-encompassing Soviet state and system. According to the gloss that early neoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick provided in her book Dictatorships and Double Standards, the West had every reason to support right-wing authoritarian dictatorships because they would steadfastly oppose left-wing totalitarian dictatorships, which, unlike the autocracies we allied with, were supposedly incapable of internal reform.

According to the new “Islamo-fascism” school -- and its acolytes like Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, Bill O’Reilly, Pamela Geller -- the fundamentalists are simply the “new totalitarians,” as hidebound, fanatical, and incapable of change as communists. For a more sophisticated treatment of the Islamo-fascist argument, check out Paul Berman, a rightward-leaning liberal intellectual who has tried to demonstrate that “moderate Muslims” are fundamentalists in reformist clothing.

These Cold Warriors all treat the Islamic world as an undifferentiated mass -- in spirit, a modern Soviet Union -- where Arab governments and radical Islamists work hand in glove. They simply fail to grasp that the Syrian, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian governments have launched their own attacks on radical Islam. The sharp divides between the Iranian regime and the Taliban, between the Jordanian government and the Palestinians, between Shi’ites and Sunni in Iraq, and even among Kurds all disappear in the totalitarian blender, just as anti-communists generally failed to distinguish between the Communist hardliner Leonid Brezhnev and the Communist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.

At the root of terrorism, according to Berman, are “immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world,” rather than the violent fantasies of a group of religious outliers or the Crusader-ish military operations of the West. In other words, something flawed at the very core of Islam itself is responsible for the violence done in its name -- a line of argument remarkably similar to one Cold Warriors made about communism.

All of this, of course, represents a mirror image of al-Qaeda’s arguments about the inherent perversities of the infidel West. As during the Cold War, hardliners reinforce one another.

The persistence of Crusader myths and their transposition into a Cold War framework help explain why the West is saddled with so many misconceptions about Islam. They don’t, however, explain the recent spike in Islamophobia in the U.S. after several years of relative tolerance. To understand this, we must turn to the third unfinished war: the Global War on Terror or GWOT, launched by George W. Bush.

Fanning the Flames

President Obama was careful to groom his Christian image during his campaign. He was repeatedly seen praying in churches, and he studiously avoided mosques. He did everything possible to efface the traces of Muslim identity in his past.

His opponents, of course, did just the opposite. They emphasized his middle name, Hussein, challenged his birth records, and asserted that he was too close to the Palestinian cause. They also tried to turn liberal constituencies -- particularly Jewish-American ones -- against the presumptive president. Like Frederick II for an earlier generation of Christian fundamentalists, since entering the Oval Office Obama has become the Anti-Christ of the Islamophobes.

Once in power, he broke with Bush administration policies toward the Islamic world on a few points. He did indeed push ahead with his plan to remove combat troops from Iraq (with some important exceptions). He has attempted to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to stop expanding settlements in occupied Palestinian lands and to negotiate in good faith (though he has done so without resorting to the kind of pressure that might be meaningful, like a cutback of or even cessation of U.S. arms exports to Israel). In a highly publicized speech in Cairo in June 2009, he also reached out rhetorically to the Islamic world at a time when he was also eliminating the name “Global War on Terror” from the government’s vocabulary.

For Muslims worldwide, however, GWOT itself continues. The United States has orchestrated a surge in Afghanistan. The CIA’s drone war in the Pakistani borderlands has escalated rapidly. U.S. Special Forces now operate in 75 countries, at least 15 more than during the Bush years. Meanwhile, Guantanamo remains open, the United States still practices extraordinary rendition, and assassination remains an active part of Washington’s toolbox.

The civilians killed in these overseas contingency operations are predominantly Muslim. The people seized and interrogated are mostly Muslim. The buildings destroyed are largely Muslim-owned. As a result, the rhetoric of “crusaders and imperialists” used by al-Qaeda falls on receptive ears. Despite his Cairo speech, the favorability rating of the United States in the Muslim world, already grim enough, has slid even further since Obama took office -- in Egypt, from 41% in 2009 to 31% percent now; in Turkey, from 33% to 23%; and in Pakistan, from 13% to 8%.

The U.S. wars, occupations, raids, and repeated air strikes have produced much of this disaffection and, as political scientist Robert Pape has consistently argued, most of the suicide bombings and other attacks against Western troops and targets as well. This is revenge, not religion, talking -- just as it was for Americans after September 11, 2001. As commentator M. Junaid Levesque-Alam astutely pointed out, “When three planes hurtled into national icons, did anger and hatred rise in American hearts only after consultation of Biblical verses?”

And yet those dismal polling figures do not actually reflect a rejection of Western values (despite Islamophobe assurances that they mean exactly that). “Numerous polls that we have conducted,” writes pollster Stephen Kull, “as well as others by the World Values Survey and Arab Barometer, show strong support in the Muslim world for democracy, for human rights, and for an international order based on international law and a strong United Nations.”

In other words, nine years after September 11th a second spike in Islamophobia and in home-grown terrorist attacks like that of the would-be Times Square bomber has been born of two intersecting pressures: American critics of Obama’s foreign policy believe that he has backed away from the major civilizational struggle of our time, even as many in the Muslim world see Obama-era foreign policy as a continuation, even an escalation, of Bush-era policies of war and occupation.

Here is the irony: alongside the indisputable rise of fundamentalism over the last two decades, only some of it oriented towards violence, the Islamic world has undergone a shift which deep-sixes the cliché that Islam has held countries back from political and economic development. "Since the early 1990s, 23 Muslim countries have developed more democratic institutions, with fairly run elections, energized and competitive political parties, greater civil liberties, or better legal protections for journalists," writes Philip Howard in The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Turkey has emerged as a vibrant democracy and a major foreign policy player. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, is now the largest economy in Southeast Asia and the eighteenth largest economy in the world.

Are Islamophobes missing this story of mainstream Islam’s accommodation with democracy and economic growth? Or is it this story (not Islamo-fascism starring al-Qaeda) that is their real concern?

The recent preoccupations of Islamophobes are telling in this regard. Pamela Geller, after all, was typical in the way she went after not a radical mosque, but an Islamic center about two blocks from Ground Zero proposed by a proponent of interfaith dialogue. As journalist Stephen Salisbury writes, “The mosque controversy is not really about a mosque at all; it’s about the presence of Muslims in America, and the free-floating anxiety and fear that now dominate the nation’s psyche.” For her latest venture, Geller is pushing a boycott of Campbell’s Soup because it accepts halal certification -- the Islamic version of kosher certification by a rabbi -- from the Islamic Society of North America, a group which, by the way, has gone out of its way to denounce religious extremism.

Paul Berman, meanwhile, has devoted his latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, to deconstructing the arguments not of Osama bin-Laden or his ilk, but of Tariq Ramadan, the foremost mainstream Islamic theologian. Ramadan is a man firmly committed to breaking down the old distinctions between “us” and “them.” Critical of the West for colonialism, racism, and other ills, he also challenges the injustices of the Islamic world. He is far from a fundamentalist.

And what country, by the way, has exercised European Islamophobes more than any other? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? Taliban Afghanistan? No, the answer is: Turkey. "The Turks are conquering Germany in the same way the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: by using higher birth-rates,” argues Germany’s Islamophobe du jour, Thilo Sarrazin, a member of Germany's Social Democratic Party. The far right has even united around a Europe-wide referendum to keep Turkey out of the European Union.

Despite his many defects, George W. Bush at least knew enough to distinguish Islam from Islamism. By targeting a perfectly normal Islamic center, a perfectly normal Islamic scholar, and a perfectly normal Islamic country -- all firmly in the mainstream of that religion -- the Islamophobes have actually declared war on normalcy, not extremism.

The victories of the tea party movement and the increased power of Republican militants in Congress, not to mention the renaissance of the far right in Europe, suggest that we will be living with this Islamophobia and the three unfinished wars of the West against the Rest for some time. The Crusades lasted hundreds of years. Let’s hope that Crusade 2.0, and the dark age that we find ourselves in, has a far shorter lifespan.

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular World Beat column, and will be publishing a book on Islamophobia with City Lights Press in 2011. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website. He would like to thank Samer Araabi, Rebecca Azhdam, and Peter Certo for research assistance.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175317/tomgram%3A_john_feffer%2C_crusade_2.0/#more

Copyright 2010 John Feffer

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