Indian Weapons In Swat & FATA

Indian Weapons In Swat & FATA

While the Pakistani government is reluctant to confront the Americans about the activities of America’s Indian allies, the Pakistani military has given the Americans solid evidence about the activities of Indian intelligence in Pakistan’s tribal belt and Swat. These activities appear to be facilitated by the Karzai regime and the U.S. military and intelligence. The latest discovery of Indian weapons inside Pakistan is the Indian army standard issue Vicker-Berthier light machine gun.

A AhmedQuraishi.com Report

Tuesday, 16 June 2009.

WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—The Pakistani military through its own channels has shared evidence with the U.S. military about Indian support for terrorism in Pakistan’s tribal belt and Swat. [continued below].

Exclusive picture courtesy of BRASSTACKS

The evidence was embarrassing for the Americans because they have been defending Indian presence in Afghanistan and have also been defending the opening up of Indian consulates in areas close to the Pakistani border.

More embarrassing for the Americans is that besides some Indian weapons and the proof on the presence of Indian-origin special forces personnel and assets, a large amount of standard issue U.S. military weapons have been confiscated by the Pakistanis from dead terrorists. Washington is explaining this by saying these weapons were sold on the black market by the U.S.-trained new Afghan army. But the quality of the weapons – including anti-aircraft guns and launchers – and their quantity eliminates the possibility that smuggling is the only explanation.

The Pakistani government is reluctant to make the evidence public, possibly because it does not want a confrontation with the Indians and the Americans. But the Pakistani military has made its strategic red lines clear.

This is one explanation for why U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns raised for the first time in New Delhi last week the need to “trim” the Indian consulates working in Afghanistan, among other things.

A number of the Indian army standard issue Vickers-Berthier (VB) light machine gun, manufactured in India, have been found by the Pakistani military in the hands of the terrorists in Swat. This LMG has a 30-round box magazine and a bipod stand, and is sometimes mistaken for the Bren. Apart from India, it was only sold to a few Baltic and South American states. The picture here has been procured by BRASSTACKS from its own sources in Swat.

In addition to weapons and local assets, a large number of trained special operations personnel working for intelligence agencies are believed to be moving along with the local recruits of the Pakistani Taliban. These foreign operators pose as ‘Islamic fighters’. These foreigners are in addition to foreign fighters that have existed in the area before 2001. The mysterious new foreigners are believed to have introduced in Pakistan actions such as group throat slittings, mass executions, brutal murders, and kidnapping, molesting and raping of women of the poor villagers in the tribal belt in the name of religion. Pakistani soldiers have been consistently discovering uncircumcised dead terrorist fighters in the area over the past three years, something unusual for a militia fighting in the name of Islam. Pictures were posted on this forum of the latest discovery of such fighters. Click here to see the pictures.

The bulk of the heavy weapons, communications equipment and huge stacks of cash owned by the so-called Pakistani Taliban are all supplied by unknown sources in Afghanistan. The size of this entire enterprise precludes the possibility that this is the work of unorganized elements. Supporting evidence suggests that there is more than one intelligence agency in Afghanistan involved in this operation.

It is unthinkable that the Indians would risk sending Indian-made weapons to terrorists. It is believed that these weapons were sent in small numbers to a select group of operatives who slipped from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal belt. The most probable thinking might have been that the agents operating these weapons will not fight on the front lines and will not be captured. Obviously the foreign backers of the so-called Pakistani Taliban did not anticipate that the Pakistani military might at some go for an all-out war against these terrorists by draining the swamp, which means emptying up Swat from its civilian population in order to have a free hand against the terrorists.

© 2007-2009. All rights reserved. AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists

Yup, Tom Friedman Gets It Wrong, Again. What Really Happened in the Lebanese Elections?

By ESAM AL-AMIN -

Since the Lebanese parliamentary elections on June 7, the mainstream media have declared that the results of the elections clearly show that Hizbollah and its coalition partners have suffered a “crushing defeat.” Some, led by the New York Times and cable news outlets, went even further, suggesting that the Cairo address by President Barack Obama was what made the difference, tilting the elections in favor of the pro-Western governing coalition.

This is pure fantasy, and reveals a complete misunderstanding of the nature of Lebanese politics and an ignorance of the realities on the ground.

Let us first get some facts straight. In the previous parliament, Hizbollah and its coalition partners held 58 seats to the 70 seats of the governing coalition in the 128-seat parliament. The governing coalition led by Saad Hariri, the son of the slain former Sunni prime minister and billionaire Rafik Hariri, consists of mainly parties and groups which are considered friendly to the West and pro-Western Arab governments such as Saudi Arabia. This coalition also includes the traditional Christian Maronite parties supported by the Maronite church, such as the Phalanges and the Lebanese forces. On the other hand, the opposition coalition is led by the mainly Shiite parties, Hizbollah and Amal, in alliance with a main Maronite party, the Free Patriotic Movement led by former General Michel Aoun. In the regional rivalry between the U.S., Israel, and other “moderate”Arab governments on one hand, and Iran, Syria and pro-resistance movements on the other, this opposition coalition clearly supports the latter.

One of the main contentious issues in the previous parliament was the insistence of the pro-Western coalition in demanding the disarming of the resistance movement Hizbollah, ever since Israel failed to dismantle the group’s infrastructure in the 2006 summer war. So the pro-Western groups have been trying to achieve politically what Israel failed to do militarily. The pressure applied by the U.S. during the Bush administration to achieve this very goal had been relentless, triggering a confrontation that lasted over a year and culminated in the recent elections.

Electoral politics in Lebanon is at odds with democratic principles because they are based on sectarian politics. Every major religious group is allotted a certain number of seats in Parliament, based not on population but on a previous agreement reached in 1989 to end 15 years of civil war. For instance, in the current election, the Shiites and the Sunnis had about 873,000 and 842,000 registered voters, respectively, but each group was given 27 seats. On the other hand the Maronite Christians and the Druze had 697,000 and 186,000 registered voters, yet were allotted 34 and 8 seats respectively, far greater than their numbers would entitle them. In addition, more than 120,000 Lebanese expatriates were paid, mainly by the Hariri clan, to fly back to Lebanon and vote. It’s estimated that more than three-quarters of them voted for the governing coalition.

With this background, how did the Lebanese actually vote?

With 52 per cent of about 3 million registered voters actually voting, the opposition led by Hizbollah’s coalition received 55 per cent of the vote (840,000) but only 45 per cent of the seats (57). Hizbollah itself fielded only 11 candidates in deference to its coalition partners, the same number it had in the previous parliament. All of them won their seats overwhelmingly. On the other hand, the governing coalition received 45 per cent of the vote (692,000) and 55per cent of the seats. In essence, the governing coalition won 68 seats, while independents won 3 seats, but later joined the governing coalition for a total of 71 seats.

In other words, the make-up of the current parliament changed only by one seat from the previous one, and that only happened after the independents were enticed to join the governing coalition. Moreover, the real surprise was that Gen. Aoun’s party, the coalition

partner of Hizbollah, received, according to the results announced by the Lebanese interior ministry, 52 per cent of the Christian vote, though picking up fewer seats than his Christian rivals. Only in a fantasy world would such numbers be declared “a clear repudiation of Hizbollah’s coalition program,” as the clearly biased mainstream media, particularly the NYT’s Thomas Friedman ,would have you believe.

So the real story of the elections is that the will of the Lebanese people did not carry the day and the principle of majority rule was not respected. The Hizbollah-led coalition had indeed won more votes than the pro-Western coalition by a hefty 10 per cent. When President Obama received 53 per cent of the popular vote to John McCain’s 47 per cent last November, it was declared by the media and political pundits as a crushing defeat for the Republicans and a mandate for real change.

Lebanese politics is unpredictable. Today’s ally could be tomorrow’s nemesis. For instance, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt was for many years Syria’s ally in Lebanon but turned against them a few years ago because of the political shift in the country. However, he recently started sending friendly overtures to the opposition. Though unlikely in the current political environment, but with the control of 8 seats, if he were to switch sides, then the make-up of parliament would become 65-63 in favor of the opposition.

The real question now is whether the new government, having a majority in parliament, will press for disarming Hizbollah in order to satisfy their patrons. If such a policy were to be carried out, it would immediately create a crisis and the majority of the Lebanese as shown on election day will be in the streets protesting and demanding that the real will they exhibited on election day be respected.

Games of Duplicity and the End of Tribe in Pakistan

[From one year ago.  Seemed relevant now.]

Games of Duplicity and the End of Tribe in Pakistan

BY Herschel Smith
9 months, 1 week ago

Dexter Filkins of the New York Times Magazine has written a very important article on the state of affairs in the so-called tribal region of Pakistan, entitled Right at the Edge. One particular exchange stands out as indicative of the game-playing by the Pakistani Army over the last four years.

ONE SWELTERING AFTERNOON in July, I ventured into the elegant home of a former Pakistani official who recently retired after several years of serving in senior government posts. We sat in his book-lined study. A servant brought us tea and biscuits.

Was it the obsession with India that led the Pakistani military to support the Taliban? I asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

Or is it the anti-Americanism and pro-Islamic feelings in the army?

“Yes,” he said, that too.

And then the retired Pakistani official offered another explanation — one that he said could never be discussed in public. The reason the Pakistani security services support the Taliban, he said, is for money: after the 9/11 attacks, the Pakistani military concluded that keeping the Taliban alive was the surest way to win billions of dollars in aid that Pakistan needed to survive. The military’s complicated relationship with the Taliban is part of what the official called the Pakistani military’s “strategic games.” Like other Pakistanis, this former senior official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of what he was telling me.

“Pakistan is dependent on the American money that these games with the Taliban generate,” the official told me. “The Pakistani economy would collapse without it. This is how the game works.”

As an example, he cited the Pakistan Army’s first invasion of the tribal areas — of South Waziristan in 2004. Called Operation Shakai, the offensive was ostensibly aimed at ridding the area of Taliban militants. From an American perspective, the operation was a total failure. The army invaded, fought and then made a deal with one of the militant commanders, Nek Mohammed. The agreement was capped by a dramatic meeting between Mohammed and Safdar Hussein, one of the most senior officers in the Pakistan Army.

“The corps commander was flown in on a helicopter,” the former official said. “They had this big ceremony, and they embraced. They called each other mujahids. ”

“Mujahid” is the Arabic word for “holy warrior.” The ceremony, in fact, was captured on videotape, and the tape has been widely distributed.

“The army agreed to compensate the locals for collateral damage,” the official said. “Where do you think that money went? It went to the Taliban. Who do you think paid the bill? The Americans. This is the way the game works. The Taliban is attacked, but it is never destroyed.

“It’s a game,” the official said, wrapping up our conversation. “The U.S. is being taken for a ride.”

There is another important observation concerning foreigners, tribes and tribal elders.

Waziristan is believed to contain the largest number of militant Arabs and other foreign fighters, possibly even bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. To be more specific about Jan — to use his name, to identify the tribe he leads, to name the town where he lives — would almost certainly, he said, result in his death at the hands of the militants and Taliban fighters who control South Waziristan.

“There are many Arab fighters living in South Waziristan,” Jan told me. “Sometimes you see them in the town; you hear them speaking Arabic.

“But the important Arabs are not in the city,” he continued. “They are in the mountains.”

Important Arabs? I asked.

“They ride horses, Arabian horses; we don’t have horses like this in Waziristan,” Jan said. “The people from the town take food to the Arabs’ horses in the mountains. They have seen the horses. They have seen the Arabs. These horses eat better than the common people in the town.”

How do you know?

“I am a leader of my tribe. People come to me — everyone comes to me. They tell me everything.”

What about Osama? I asked. Is he in South Waziristan?

“Osama?” Jan said. “I don’t know. But they” — the Arabs in the mountains — “are important.”

The labor it took to persuade Jan to speak to me is a measure of what has become of the area over which his family still officially presides. Since it was not possible for me to go to South Waziristan — “Baitullah Mehsud would cut off your head,” the Taliban leader, Namdar, told me — I had to persuade Jan to come to Peshawar. For several days, military checkpoints and roadblocks made it impossible for Jan to travel. Finally, after two weeks, Jan left his home at midnight in a taxi so no one would notice either him or his car.

Jan had reason to worry. Seven members of his family — his father, two brothers, two uncles and two cousins — have been murdered by militants who inhabit the area. Jan said he believed his father was killed by Uzbek and Tajik gunmen who fled to South Waziristan after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. His father had opposed them. Jan’s cousins, he said, were killed by men working for Baitullah Mehsud. Jan’s father was a malik, and thousands of Waziri tribesmen came to his funeral: “the largest funeral in the history of Waziristan,” Jan said.

The rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda has come at the expense of the maliks, who have been systematically murdered and marginalized in a campaign to destroy the old order. In South Waziristan, where Mehsud presides, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have killed more than 150 maliks since 2005, all but destroying the tribal system. And there are continual reminders of what happens to the survivors who do not understand this — who, for example, attempt to talk with Pakistan’s civilian government and assert their authority. In June, Mehsud’s men gunned down 28 tribal leaders who had formed a “peace committee” in South Waziristan. Their bodies were dumped on the side of a road. “This shows what happens when the tribal elders try to challenge Baitullah Mehsud,” Jan said.

We have been ham-handed in the conduct of the campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are seasons in counterinsurgency, and we are almost certainly witnessing the end of tribe in Pakistan. While it might have been possible three or four years ago to have unilaterally acted in Pakistan to destroy the Taliban, and / or to pressure Pakistan to act against them, all of the while incorporating the tribes as was done in the Anbar Province, this is no longer possible. Tribe has been destroyed.

This season is gone, and another strategy must be pursued. This strategy appears to be fully in effect now, cannot rely on the Pakistan Army, and involves aggressive action inside the borders of Pakistan.

American military forces are stepping up cross-border ground attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In the last two weeks, the military has begun launching ground assaults in the Pakistani border provinces known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, American intelligence and military officials said. The region is believed by American and Pakistani intelligence to be hosting the leadership of Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden.

While American special forces and military contractors have conducted raids in Pakistan, such actions were rare and required Cabinet-level approval. In July, the leadership of Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was given the sole authority to approve ground assaults in Pakistan. Late last month, the American military began launching ground attacks in the country on a near daily basis, depending on local conditions and intelligence, according to a military official who requested anonymity.

These small raids won’t be enough, but at least the threshold has been crossed. The U.S. is now taking unilateral action inside the borders of Pakistan, as the Pakistan Army won’t carry out its duties to control the region, and the Taliban are using Pakistan as a launching, training and recovery base for its campaign in Afghanistan. As The Captain’s Journal has pointed out before, the campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan is one and the same.

Russian veto ends UN mission to Georgia

By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS – Russia has brought to an end the nearly 16-year-old U.N. observer mission that monitored a cease-fire between Georgia and its breakaway Abkhazia region.

Russia exercised its veto power in the U.N. Security Council — toppling a Western plan to extend the life of the U.N. mission for another year, or even two more weeks, to work out a compromise. The vote late Monday was 10-1 with four abstentions — China, Vietnam, Libya and Uganda.

The mission’s mandate expired at 0400 GMT Tuesday, (midnight Monday in New York), requiring about 130 military observers and more than a dozen police to leave. Both the name — the U.N. Observer Mission in Georgia — and references to Georgia’s territorial sovereignty were sticking points.

“It is understandable,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Monday, “that in the new political and legal conditions most of the names and terms previously used in the old documents are inapplicable.”

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who had recommended keeping the mission, said it would cease operations Tuesday despite his “regrets” at the lack of agreement that prompted its abrupt demise.

“This mission was helping defuse tension and deter further conflict,” British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Tuesday. “Its withdrawal will affect the day-to-day lives of people living in conflict areas.”

Georgian Ambassador Alexander Lomaia said his nation would now “cooperate very closely with our friends,” including the European Union and its monitoring mission to Georgia and human rights organizations also operating there.

“It is of deep regret for the government of Georgia that the United Nations mission in Georgia has terminated its activity due to the rejection of a single country, due to the single hand raised,” he said, adding that the U.N.’s withdrawal is sure to be viewed negatively by local inhabitants.

The vote coincided with clashes Monday between Georgian police and opposition activists pressing for the ouster of President Mikhail Saakashvili in the capital of Tbilisi. Officials said dozens of protesters were arrested and an Associated Press photographer saw masked officers armed with truncheons beating demonstrators, several TV journalists and camera crews.

Following the Georgian-Russian war in the breakaway region of South Ossetia last August, Russia recognized the independence of both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgia insists that both regions are still part of its territory, but Moscow insists they are not.

The mission’s abrupt termination follows months of talks between Russia, the United States, Britain, France and Germany.

Also at stake is Georgia’s pivotal location for energy supplies, serving as a route for oil and natural gas pipelines that can supply Western nations without going through Russia or Iran.

As promised, Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin used his nation’s right as one of the council’s five permanent members to veto the draft resolution.

“We need to get rid of this apparition,” Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told the council after casting the veto. “Our partners, however, prefer poison to medicine.”

He had offered to extend the mission’s mandate for one month on condition that the Security Council agree to delete all the “offensive references” in the resolution to names and sovereignty — an offer that was rejected by the Western powers.

The Security Council could seek to restore a U.N. mission some time in the future, but if it met Russia’s demands it would effectively recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and determine that Georgia no longer had sovereignty over the two areas, which the U.S. and its European allies refuse to do.

The mission was operating on a four-month extension granted by the Council in February to allow for more negotiations. The plan for extending it was put forward by the U.S., Britain and France — all of them permanent members — and non-permanent members Croatia, Turkey, Austria and Germany.

It was modeled on Ban’s recommendations last month for a continuing but unnamed U.N. “stabilization mission” to ensure no armed forces or military equipment operated in security zones extending 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) on each side of the cease-fire line.

The Black Sea province of Abkhazia has been independently run since 1993, when two years of fighting with Georgian troops ended with a U.N.-monitored cease-fire. Two-thirds of Abkhazia residents hold Russian passports, and along with South Ossetia it had sought independence or union with Russia.

Cut off their roots

After military operations in Malakand and Bannu Frontier Region, the government decision to cut down Baitullah Mehsud and his terrorist caboodle in South Waziristan was inescapably the next logical step. Baitullah is at once the centrifugal and centripetal figure of the TTP murder shop, sustaining the merchants of death in their horrific trade in every way and giving them refuge when ensnared, as surely must be now with Swati thug Fazlullah’s fleeing brigands. With his cunning networking, this evil incarnate keeps expanding his murder shop, seducing even pro-government commanders to his terrorism nest, as have Mullah Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazir, both vowing to henceforth fight only against the Pakistan military. To rid this nation of savage terrorism, this devil has indispensably to be decimated hook, line and sinker. There is no other way out. But who is this Baitullah? Just about a few years ago, he was just an obscurity, unknown to even to Mehsuds. So where did he pop up from? Which hidden hand had planted him and propped him up to become the central figure of terrorism bloodying our people so terribly? Who is keeping him so flush with money, arms and mercenaries and so affluently to run a bustling slaughter trade? Mullah Umar, the Afghan Taliban’s leader, expelled him from his Shura council about three years ago on the ground that he had started fighting against the Pakistan army instead of the coalition and Afghan forces in Afghanistan? Then whose man is he? And at whose behest has he taken to fighting against the Pakistan military alone? It is only now that the Americans have begun branding more dangerous than Osama bin Laden and a real threat to America’s security. And it is only now they have placed head money on him, too. But in his murder trade he has been now for years, targeting only the people of Pakistan and their security forces and posing a potent threat to their stability and solidarity. If at all he is a security threat to America, how comes he escaped throughout the American drone attacks, so unsparing of even a suspect in the American eye? Why was he not taken out even when, according to credible information, no less than twice were his specific whereabouts pinpointed to the Americans? And who gave him the most sophisticated communication equipment that even the Pakistan military doesn’t have? And who supplied him for his killer squads night-vision goggles that the Americans had over eight years declined to supply to the Pakistan army in spite of its persistent requests? And where was holed up Fazlullah all through his disappearance of four years in Afghanistan after abandoning thousands of Swati raw youths his father-in-law Sufi Mohammad had shepherded under his command to fight against the invading US-led coalition forces? Whose guest was this Fazlullah in Afghanistan, this staunch comrade of Baitullah and his fellow peddler of brutal murder trade? Who put wads of cash in his hands to buy recruits for his thuggery? For his thuggish errands, who gave him bundles of sophisticated deadly weapons, not even available to our military? And who aided him with highly trained and foreign fighters to fight so toughly our highly trained army? And at whose behest had these Sufi herded these thousands of Swati green horns into Afghanistan? Know this: this ethnic Tajik Panjsheri by origin, Sufi was not welcome to the Afghan Taliban. Despite his persistent requests, their leader Mullah Umar flatly refused to see him and asked his men to tell him to go back to Pakistan and take those Swati youths along. But the Sufi personally escaped, but left those youths behind to die or end up in Afghan warlord’s captivity. At whose urgings was Sufi so persistent? And why he acted so criminally and so sinfully? Sound intriguing; doesn’t it? Look from any angle you want, the act these principal merchants of death looks diabolically conspiratorial, leaving no doubt that the head office of their murder trade they have in Afghanistan, where over the time hundreds of thousand of weapons have unaccountably disappeared from coalition force’s armouries and Afghan defence ministry’s stores and where a booming poppy cultivation and drugs trafficking have flourished under the US-led foreign occupiers very noses, from which government allies and its opponent Taliban are making fortunes alike. Even some coalition forces’ personnel are reportedly under investigation not just for drugs use but for trafficking as well. Unless these Afghan roots of terrorists plying their murder business in Pakistan are cut off for good, there will be no peace in this country. New Baitullahs, new Fazlullahs, new brigands will be propped up to bleed and bloody this nation. Hence Pakistan must insist on the shutting down of these wellsprings in Afghanistan for terrorism and violence in Pakistan. The Islamabad establishment must make hue and cry to this effect on every world forum. No diplomatic nicety should be let to come in the way.

Renegade Uzbek Leader Wounded S. Waziristan

[SEE: The IMU in Pakistan: A Phoenix Reborn, or a Tired Scarecrow?] Spokesman: Al-Qaeda-linked militant leader hurt in Pakistan

www.chinaview.cn 2009-06-16 20:36:28

ISLAMABAD, June 16 (Xinhua) — A senior Uzbek Al-Qaeda-linked militant leader has been injured in Pakistan’s tribal region, a military spokesman said on Tuesday.

The private Geo TV channel quoted Director General of the Inter Services Public Relations Major General Athar Abbas as saying that there were unconfirmed reports that Tahir Yuldashev, leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, had been hurt in South Waziristan tribal region.

He said Tahir was hurt at the Makeen area, the stronghold of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

The Pakistani forces have received orders to launch an operation against Mehsud and his fighters, he said.

In 2004 the army claimed that Tahir Yuldashev was injured along with his local facilitators when the army for the first time started a military operation near Wana, the center of South Waziristan, according to the News Network International (NNI) news agency.

Yuldashev is the most wanted man in Uzbekistan and is considered a close confidant of Osama bin Laden. In 1999, he was sentenced to death in his absence for a series of bombing in the Uzbek capital Tashkent.

The NNI quoted intelligence officials as saying that Yuldashev had taken refuge in South Waziristan some time after the United States-led military campaign ousted the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001.

A ZIONIST SHADOW GOVERNMENT

OBAMA ‘CZARS’

A ZIONIST SHADOW GOVERNMENT
By Brother Nathanael Kapner, Copyright 2009

___________________________________

ANOTHER ZIONIST JEW IS OBAMA’S LATEST ‘CZAR’ APPOINTMENT as America falls further under the total domination of one of the world’s tiniest minority groups.

Washington Zionist Jewish attorney, Ken Feinberg, will now have the power to actually determine compensation of the senior executives of seven firms that have received US taxpayer bailouts.

Executives at companies such as the American International Insurance Group (AIG), Bank of America and General Motors, will be marked for special oversight by Feinberg who will be operating inside the White House with complete autonomy.

This latest move by the puppet teleprompter ‘President’ reflects his masters’ agenda that companies cannot decide for themselves on matters of pay but will now have a Zionist deciding compensation arrangements. This, of course, comes on the heels of Obama completely reversing himself on his call for salary caps for elite banking and other key executives.

Even Vladimir Putin Warned The US Against Obama’s Creeping Socialism Here.

OBAMA’S ‘CZARDOM’ BRINGS OUR NATION one step closer to a blatant Soviet-oriented socialist Zionist government in what is supposed to be, and what was, an American republic. With Obama’s latest appointment, Zionist-Jewish power in America’s legal and economic infrastructure expands and intensifies to staggering levels.

America’s bailout scam payoffs to wealthy, top Zionist Jewish banksters last year – as ordered by the Fed and Wall Street – showed the world how far the US has been taken over by world Zionism.

Feinberg becomes the newest member of what can quite arguably be called Obama’s Zionist shadow government. Keep clearly in mind that these ‘czars’ – appointed by Obama without Congressional approval – not only oversee Congressional-approved cabinet members, but act as independent national policy makers. ALL of Obama’s leading ‘Czars’ are Zionist Jews…who come from a fraction of a percent of the American population.

A LIST OF OBAMA ‘CZARS’

WITH ACCOUNTABILITY TO NO ONE BUT OBAMA, our new puppet president has embarked upon a wholesale power grab in his appointments of over 16 White House ‘czars.’ In a recent CBS News Interview, Senator Robert Byrd, who has the constitutional authority as President Pro Tempore of the US Senate, expressed his and many Americans’ concerns with the unconstitutional ‘czardom’ in Obama’s White House:

“Obama’s czars are a slick way of governing without having to answer to Congress. The rapid and easy accumulation of power by White House czars threatens the constitutional system of checks and balances.

Oversight of federal agencies is the responsibility of officials approved by the Senate, not appointees of the White House who operate with complete autonomy. These czars are accountable to no one but Obama. They have far reaching powers and Congress cannot stop a single decision they make.” View Entire Story Here & Here.

Senator Byrd is absolutely correct. Obama has taken the appointments of ‘czars’ to an unprecedented level wherein he is liable for acting against the US Constitution. The Constitution (Article II) commands that government officers with significant authority (called “principal officers”) are nominated by the president but are subject to the “advice and consent” of the US Senate.

Thus, any person, for example, whose pay is deemed excessive by the Zionist Jew, Feinberg, or affected by any other Zionist ‘czar,’ could file a federal suit asserting that the order is an unconstitutional exercise of government power, and have the court both invalidate the order and hold that the position itself doesn’t legally exist. Then we all could just ignore these ‘czars’ – because they would simply be private citizens, without the authority to order any of us to even tie our shoes. View Entire Story Here, Here, & Here.

HERE IS A LIST of Obama’s leading ‘czars,’ (all Zionist Jews save one), and their Zionist agenda to install a Zionist inspired socialist system in America’s government:

Economic Czar - Larry Summers. Director of Obama’s National Economic Council. A Zionist Jew, Summers served as President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006.

In a recent article: Is Larry Summers Taking Kickbacks From The Banks He’s Bailing Out?, Summers is exposed as acting in his own interests and not America’s in his role as Obama’s economic ‘czar.’ On June 12, 2009, Summers addressed the Zionist-led Council on Foreign Relations, defending his policies against the accusation of “backdoor socialism.”

Regulatory Czar - Cass Sunstein. Director of Obama’s Office of Regulatory Affairs. A Zionist Jew, Sunstein joined the faculty of the Zionist-run Harvard Law School and began serving as the director of its Program on Risk Regulation.

A leading architect of the Cyber Security Act of 2009, now before Congress, Sunstein stated that the Internet is a “threat to democracy.” Indeed, our last bastion of freedom, the Internet, may soon be under the dictatorial control of this Zionist Jew, Sunstein.

Pay Czar - Kenneth Feinberg. Appointed by Obama to “regulate the pay for over 175 US corporate executives.” Feinberg, a Zionist Jew and Washington lawyer, worked for President Bush to prevent lawsuits against the US by the families of victims of the alleged 9-11 terrorist attacks, thus assisting in the Zionist cover-up of 9-11’s “inside job.”

Guantanamo/Military Jails Czar - Daniel Fried. Appointed by Obama to plead “individual war on terror detainee cases” while ostensibly working to close Guantanamo Bay’s US torture & detention camp.

A Zionist Jew and Clinton retread, Fried is currently the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, responsible for the division that handles NATO enlargement and coordination with the European Union on the war on terror.

Acting on behalf of the US State Department, this Zionist Jew, Fried, opposed Congress’ Armenian Genocide Resolution. Fried stated that recognizing the 1915 Armenian genocide by Muslim Turks, (plotted by Zionist Jews), would “damage US interests.”

As Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs during the Clinton administration, this Zionist Jew, Fried, supported the bombing of Christian Serbs during the Kosovo crisis in 1999.

Car Czar - Steven Rattner. Director of Obama’s Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry. Rattner is a Zionist Jew and former executive with three Jewish banks: Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, and Lazard Freres.

Rattner, who reported his overall networth of between $188 million and $608 million, enjoys a close friendship with both New York Times owner, Arthur Sulzberger, and NYC Mayor and financial magnate, Michael Bloomberg.

How then could Rattner ever act on behalf of America’s interests and the common Gentile laborer with his intimate Zionist-Jewish ties? How then could Rattner, with his millions of Zionist-earned dollars, ever relate to the Gentile common laborer who has lost his UAW health-care benefits?

Border Czar - Alan Bersin. Director of Obama’s Special Representative For Border Affairs. Raised as a Talmudic Jew, Bersin’s appointment brings yet another Jew to America’s Department of Homeland Security, of which, Bersin is now a Zionist insider by serving as Assistant Secretary for International Affairs.

Climate Czar - Todd Stern. Named by Obama as Envoy for Climate Change. Stern is a Zionist Jew and longtime friend and advisor to both Hillary and former President Bill Clinton. Stern, a Clinton retread, served as his staff secretary.

Currently, Stern is a senior fellow at the Zionist “think tank,” Center for American Progress, funded & staffed by Zionist Jews. Stern promotes the Center’s Zionist ideology of perpetual war for perpetual peace in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East, all in the name of “US security.”

Global Warming Czar - Carol Browner. Appointed by Obama as Energy Coordinator. Browner, yet another Clinton retread as administrator of the EPA, was listed until recently as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group, Socialist International, that advocates “global governance.”

The Washington Times reported that Browner’s name was listed on the member’s Web page for Socialist International. But Browner, not wishing to prompt objections to her White House appointment due to her socialist ideology, asked the organization to remove her name and biography from their site. See More Obama ‘Czars” Here & Here.

THUS, WE HAVE NON-ELECTED ‘CZARS’ – Zionist Jews in the leading positions – who operate with impunity – who are backed by Obama – and who are given the tools and resources to implement their pernicious, Anti-American, Zionist agenda …

Iran: Some Dots You May Want To Connect

By Editorial. Moon of Alabama. Axis of Logic

Moon of Alabama

Editor’s Comment: Before you start connecting the dots, consider this: The attempt to discredit the elections and cause instability in Iran look very much like a scheme we’ve seen before – directly out of the CIA playbook. We’ve seen this pattern in so many elections in Venezuela, for example, I swear that even the Chavistas would be disappointed if it doesn’t reappear next time around. After all, a little drama does add some excitement in elections where consistent landslide victories are won by presidents like Chavez and Ahmadinejad. So here we go again – the old Langley one, two, three:

1. Groom an opposition candidate to run against the guy you hate, pay him well and line up your media to back him.

2. During the campaign, sell him as the savior of the bourgeois opposition who lost their money in the revolution. Use your own pollsters and media propaganda to convince his followers that they are going to win by a wide margin.

3. When your guy loses, scream “FRAUD!” It’s akin to yelling “FIRE!” in a crowded theatre, inflaming all those disappointed bourgeois counter-revolutionaries. Get them out on the street, setting fires, playing the victim, waving flags, ready-to-go placards, banners, women crying in front of CNN cameras and men yelling angrily into Christiana Amanpour’s microphone. Only this time, they’re ready to burn their own flag instead of the U.S. flag. I tell ya, it makes great TV for a western audience. (Incidentally, don’t take Christiana’s reports too seriously. The Amanpours, like many Iranian expats, led a privileged life under the Shah of Iran and lost their ill gotten wealth as a result of the Iranian revolution in ’79. Naturally, Christiana was very upset. Later, she married James Rubin, an arch-Zionist, and regained her status, good money and even some fame, this time as a CNN reporter in service to the empire.)

Mir Hussein Mousavi followed his script, declared to his followers that the election was invalid instead of graciously accepting defeat. CIA’s shill, Manuel Rosales, did exactly the same thing in Venezuela when he lost large to President Chavez in 2006. The opposition came out and banged their pots and pans, then went home to bed. When Ahmadinejad reached out to Mousavi and his followers, offering to give them a part in the new government, Mousavi rejected the offer. Folks, these are not exactly marks of a real statesman, ready to lead a nation.

Yes, they’ll succeed in smearing Iran and marring this election in the minds of those who prejudged them before they took place. The CIA/Mossad duo can be proud of the pain and confusion they’ve caused in Iran and worldwide. Now they’ve got some video of some angry Iranians to show their bosses for a pat on the head. But if they think that they can destabilise Iran by getting a few thousand Iranians out on the streets of Teheran, they’re even dumber than I thought.

Manucher Ghorbanifar	Mir Hussein Mousavi

Indeed, connect the dots below, get acquanted with Manucher Ghorbanifar and find out a little more about Hussein Mousavi, the U.S.-backed candidate before you buy the western media line about fraud in the 2009 Iranian election.

- Les Blough, Editor

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June 14, 2009
Some Dots You May Want To Connect
Moon of Alabama Editorial

…In any ordinary business, Manucher Ghorbanifar would cut an implausibly mysterious figure. Officially, he has been a shipping executive in Tehran and a commodities trader in France. By his own account he was a refugee from the revolutionary government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, which confiscated his businesses in Iran, yet he later became a trusted friend and kitchen adviser to Mir Hussein Mousavi, Prime Minister in the Khomeini government. Some U.S. officials who have dealt with Ghorbanifar praise him highly. Says Michael Ledeen**, adviser to the Pentagon on counterterrorism: “He is one of the most honest, educated, honorable men I have ever known.” Others call him a liar who, as one puts it, could not tell the truth about the clothes he is wearing. The Murky World of Weapons Dealers, Time Magazine, Jan. 19, 1987

…On or about November 25, 1985, Ledeen received a frantic phone call from Ghorbanifar, asking him to relay a message from the prime minister of Iran to President Reagan regarding the shipment of the wrong type of HAWKs. United States v. Robert C. McFarlane, Walsh Iran Contra Report, 1985

…Franklin, along with another colleague from Feith’s office, a polyglot Middle East expert named Harold Rhode, were the two officials involved in the back-channel, which involved on-going meetings and contacts with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and other Iranian exiles, dissidents and government officials.

…The administration’s reluctance to disclose these details seems clear: the DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a “regime change” agenda not approved by the president’s foreign policy principals or even the president himself. Iran-Contra II?, Washington Monthly, September 2004

…Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.

…“The Finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” Preparing the Battlefield, The New Yorker, July 7, 2008

…The Ukrainian Orange phenomenon was modeled quite explicitly on the example of the Rose Revolution, which featured a disputed election, massive youth-oriented street protests, and plenty of subsidies from U.S. government agencies. The ‘Color’ Revolutions: Fade to Black, Antiwar, September 29, 2006.

…The Pentagon and US intelligence have refined the art of such soft coups to a fine level. RAND planners call it ‘swarming,’ referring to the swarms of youth, typically linked by SMS and web blogs, who can be mobilized on command to destabilize a target regime. Color Revolutions, Geopolitics and the Baku Pipeline”, Engdahl, (no date)

…Even before the count began, Mousavi declared himself “definitely the winner” based on “all indications from all over Iran.” He accused the government of “manipulating the people’s vote” to keep Ahmadinejad in power and suggested the reformist camp would stand up to challenge the results.

…“It is our duty to defend people’s votes. There is no turning back,” Mousavi said, alleging widespread irregularities. Iran declares win for Ahmadinejad in disputed vote, Associated Press, June 13, 2009

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More On The Iran Election

There is a full effort of the “western” media and some expatriate Iranian organizations to de-legitimize the Iranian election despite the absence of any real evidence of voting fraud. These events show all characteristics of an engineered “color evolution”.

As said before I find the reelection of Ahmadinejad quite plausible. He has done a lot for the poor and the elections were for a decent part class based. As Robert Fisk relates from someone not-regime-friendly in Tehran:

But I must repeat what he said. “The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad.”

My guest and I drank dookh, the cool Iranian drinking yoghurt so popular here. The streets of Tehran were a thousand miles away. “You know why so many poorer women voted for Ahmadinejad? There are three million of them who make carpets in their homes. They had no insurance. When Ahmadinejad realised this, he immediately brought in a law to give them full insurance. Ahmadinejad’s supporters were very shrewd. They got the people out in huge numbers to vote – and then presented this into their vote for Ahmadinejad.”

The myth in the “western” media is that Ahmadinejad is a “right-wing hardliner”. While he asserts nationalism and sovereignty as any president should do, in interior politics and economics, dominant in elections everywhere, his position is more to the left of the typical “western” right-left scale.

The argument favored by Juan Cole and others that high inflation and high unemployment numbers should have favored Mousavi and the ‘reformers’ backed by Iran’s richest man Rafsanjani. But those numbers, as asserted in the “west”, are not what they are said to be.Unfortunately the myth that is currently created, will likely be used to favor the agenda of the war mongers. We will all be in trouble if their argument wins. This whole issue will do wonders for oil speculators and thereby snuff up any “green shots”.

Source: Moon of Alabama

READ MORE: Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s Iran/Contra Connection?

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Notes

**Michael A. Ledeen

Michael Ledeen holds the Freedom Chair and is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington. He is also on the board of advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Ledeen is a particularly hawkish neo-conservative, with a lot of influence among policymakers. He lectures on war and peace, terrorism, the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. He is an advisor to Bush advisor and to presidential campaign mastermind Karl Rove.

In 1981-86, Ledeen was a special advisor and consultant to top policy officials in the Reagan administration, including the Secretary of State, National Security Advisor and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Ledeen was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair while a consultant to National Security Advisor Robert C. McFarlane, and there was much controversy over the intricate details of Ledeen’s role including his involvement with various Israeli figures and with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. He gave his version of the affair in the book Perilous Statecraft: An Insiders Account of the Iran-Contra Affair.

Ledeen’s biographical notes, posted on the AEI website and elsewhere, boast that he is one of the world’s leading authorities on intelligence, contemporary history and international affairs, and that “in a few years in government he carried out some of the most sensitive and dangerous missions in recent American history.” They quote a profile as saying “this is a man who has helped shape American foreign policy at its highest levels�as Ted Koppel puts it, ‘Michael Ledeen is a Renaissance man� in the tradition of Machiavelli.”

Ledeen is the author of 15 books, among them The War Against the Terror Masters  (published in 2002, highly-praised by Bernard Lewis); Tocqueville on American Character; Machiavelli of Modern Leadership, and Freedom Betrayed: How American Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War and Walked Away.

Ledeen writes for the Wall Street Journal, The International Economy, the American Spectator, the New York Sun and National Review and so on. (In addition to promulgating his ultra-hawkish views, he writes about contract bridge for the Wall Street Journal and New York Sun).

Following the military campaign in Iraq, Ledeen has been urging that the U.S. take on Iran and Syria, in terms that are worry some observers. He dubs Iran “the mother of modern terrorism,” and told JINSA on April 30, 2003 that now is the time for Iranian “liberation.” He also said it is “clear that Saudi Arabia is the main financier of terrorism, and that mosques and schools built by the Saudis continue to preach the Wahhabi doctrine of global Jihad (holy war) against non-believers and urging that arms be taken up against the U.S., Israel and their allies.”

Ledeen said the Middle East is on the verge of drastic change, and concluded by saying, “the time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon.”

According to Ledeen, the process by which this should be achieved is a violent one, termed “total war.” “Total war not only destroyed the enemy’s military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends,” Ledeen writes. “The sparing of civilians lives cannot be the total war’s first priority� The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people.”

He wrote an article in March 2003 in the New York Post about “The story of Iran’s mad dash to develop nuclear weapons.” He claimed that “the relationship between Iran and North Korea is still under appreciated,” and that “the mullahs are determined to obliterate Israel.” He suggested that Iran could be like a state suicide bomber, attacking Israel with nuclear weapons even if it knows that Israel would retaliate and wipe Iran off the map. “Why are we doing nothing to support the Iranian people’s efforts to rid themselves of their monstrous regime?” He criticized Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage for saying that Iran is a democracy. “Why are we making deals with Iranian-sponsored Shiites regarding the future of Iraq?” Ledeen asked. “Will we finally move against all the components of the “Axis of Evil,” or must we wait until President Bush’s analysis is confirmed by a new act of horror?”

In an April 14, 2003 article in The Australian he called for regime change in Syria and Iran. “No one I know wants to wage war on Iran and Syria, but there is now a clear recognition that we must defend ourselves against them. They are an integral part of the terror network that produced 11 September. Left undisturbed, they will kill us in Iraq and Afghanistan and mount new attacks on our homelands.” He said unlike Iraq there is no need for a military campaign. “Our most potent weapons are the peoples of Syria and Iran and they are primed, loaded and ready to fire. We should now pull the political lanyards and unleash democratic revolution on the terror masters in Damascus and Tehran.”

© Copyright 2009 by AxisofLogic.com

Attacking Baitullah’s den

The Governor of the NWFP, Mr Owais Ahmad Ghani, says: “The government has launched a full-fledged operation in the tribal areas including Waziristan. Operations will continue till the elimination of the militants.” The objective is to rout the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Baitullah Mehsud and his fighters in South Waziristan Agency. But apparently the decision made at the political level has not seeped down to the military hierarchy, or perhaps the governor has spoken too soon. The army’s spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, says: “The government has made the announcement. We will give a comment after evaluating the orders.”

The military operation in Swat is going well and the Taliban are on the run with more and more local citizens now arrayed against them in the form of jirgas and fighting groups. In the rest of the country, the opinion is in favour of the operation despite attacks by the TTP in Peshawar and elsewhere in the country. While the operation proceeded, rumours were persistent that the army planned to attack South Waziristan, the headquarters of the leader of the TTP, Baitullah Mehsud. After the assassination by him of the famous Lahore religious scholar Mufti Naeemi, the Pakistan Air Force has softened the South Waziristan stronghold with targeted sorties. Is it time to go for a full-fledged operation, obviously of a scale larger than the one in Swat, or should it come after Swat has been fully pacified?

There can be two views on this. Those who, like the NWFP governor, prefer an attack on South Waziristan now convincingly argue that the heart of the terror network is in South Waziristan and any Taliban who come under pressure tend to escape to Waziristan. The argument goes: as long as Baitullah’s fastness remains intact or is not brought under pressure, the pressure on Peshawar and other strategic locations will not abate. The opposed view is that an attack on South Waziristan will require more force and that force is not available just yet as the Swat operation continues and more troops can’t be spared from the Indian border as New Delhi is in a hostile posture towards Pakistan. This hostility is assessed on the basis of India’s interference in Balochistan and also, according to rumours, in the tribal areas. The point that more refugees will flow from any such operation is another negative factor.

South Waziristan is a stronghold on many counts. Baitullah and his friends have set up a chain of local commanders who control almost all the agencies of the FATA region in varying degrees of strength. The recent attack on the Pearl Continental hotel in Peshawar was owned by the Abdullah Azzam Brigade based on Orakzai. Abdullah Azzam was the founder-philosopher of Al Qaeda who convinced many Pakistani jihadi leaders to join his cause. An outfit named after him sends this message: “Al Qaeda is very much engaged in the war against Pakistan and the TTP of Baitullah Mehsud forms a part of its over-all strategic map.” Therefore we know that Orakzai is being run by a deputy of Baitullah Mehsud.

On the other hand, this is the high water mark of Pakistan’s military success against the terrorists. The Taliban are on the run in Swat and elsewhere while their casualties are the highest known since the war of terrorism started. There are reports not only that the Taliban are cornered but that Al Qaeda too is squeezed for resources and is appealing internationally for funds. This could be the time to strike. But with one strong qualification: not before sorting out some foreign policy complications.

One big complication is with India. After pressure from the United States, New Delhi seems to be agreeable to “thinning” its troops’ strength in Kashmir, thus allowing the Pakistan Army to mobilise more effectively in South Waziristan. President Asif Ali Zardari’s meeting in Moscow with the Indian Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, during the sessions of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) could clinch the matter in addition to coordinating with the other states that neighbour Afghanistan and are perturbed by Al Qaeda’s foot soldiers ensconced in FATA.

There is no doubt that the operation in South Waziristan, if it materialises, will have to be well-coordinated at the international level. As for inside Pakistan, the national consensus against the Taliban is intact and will favour the war being taken to the enemy instead of waiting for the enemy to continue to strike at will. *

Militancy’s HQ

The state must be careful about who it sees as its allies. — AFP/File Photo

Pakistan

Fresh shelling reported in South Waziristan

VIDEO FEATURE

Displaced & Distraught

‘It has been decided that a comprehensive and decisive operation will be launched to eliminate Baitullah Mehsud and dismantle his network,’ NWFP Governor Owais Ghani announced at a press conference in Islamabad on Sunday. For weeks now, skirmishes between the security troops and militants and air strikes in parts of South Waziristan Agency controlled by Baitullah Mehsud have built up the expectation that the Pakistan state may finally be preparing to take him on in a decisive battle.

It is clear why: the Waziristan agencies have long been a viper’s nest. Militants based there have been involved in attacks against every conceivable target: across the Pak-Afghan border on foreign troops and the Afghan government and security forces; in the Malakand division and other areas against the Pakistan state and local rivals; and in Pakistan’s cities and towns against the state, security forces, sectarian leaders and the general population.

Al Qaeda too is believed to have a substantial presence in the Waziristan agencies, and international terrorist plots, including the July 2007 attacks in the UK, have been traced back to the area. And there appears to be an almost endless supply of the dreaded suicide bombers who are trained in the area and then sent forth to wreak havoc and undermine the state’s will to fight the militants.

What is not clear though at the moment is what exactly the security forces’ plan is. Will they only go after Baitullah Mehsud and his network or will they try and clean  up both South and North Waziristan Agency of all militants? The last time the militants in North Waziristan were taken on was in October 2007, but within weeks the state pushed for a peace deal after it suffered heavy losses.

The deal was eventually signed in February 2008. In South Waziristan, the last round of major fighting was in January 2008, but there too heavy losses forced the state to quickly sue for peace. This time, the security forces’ strategy appears to be to cut off the three main routes leading to the South Waziristan bastion of Baitullah Mehsud and to use aerial power to pound his network. The operation underway in Frontier Region Bannu appears to be a part of that plan.

But it remains to be seen how far the state is willing to go, the losses it is willing to accept, the cost it is ready to impose on the local populations and to what extent it is ready to disrupt the various networks of militants that are intertwined. Just as importantly, the state must be careful about who it sees as its allies. Baitullah Mehsud has many rivals and enemies among the Mehsud tribe, but defeating him with the help of others only to see those others become the next menace — that must not be allowed to happen.

Does This Suck-up Really Speak for Pakistan?

Target Qaeda but respect our sovereignty: Haqqani

* Says Pakistan not against US eliminating terrorists but civilian deaths bother country

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: Pakistan is concerned over the violation of its sovereignty and civilian casualties in drone attacks on Al Qaeda leaders, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States Hussain Haqqani said on Monday.

In an interview with BBC Hard Talk, Haqqani said, “There is no doubt that the drones have eliminated many top Al Qaeda terrorists. That is not what Pakistan objects to – the elimination of militant leaders and terrorists through drone technology. Our issue is with respect to Pakistan’s sovereignty and we do not want civilian casualties.”

Explaining Pakistan’s position on the strikes, he added, “ It is wrong to misinterpret Pakistan’s objections to the use of Predator drones as an objection to the elimination of senior Al Qaeda leaders. We want Pakistan’s sovereignty to be respected but it does not mean Pakistan does not want Al Qaeda or its allies to be eliminated from its soil. We are looking for ways which would allow the advantage and the positive aspect of the drones—that they help locate the bad guys and then can take them out –to continue without killing our innocent civilians and also ensure that Pakistan’s sovereignty is not violated.”

“Intelligence sharing between Pakistan and the US has improved and the US knows Pakistan is on the right path. Even the Afghan and Indian intelligence services, which have been at loggerheads with Pakistan’s intelligence service for years, recognise that Pakistan has found the right kind of intelligence against terrorists and is following it,” he was quoted as saying.

Decisive action against Baitullah

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 Rahimullah Yusufzai

No military operation against Taliban militants in NWFP could be decisive without taking on and defeating the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) head, Baitullah Mehsud. The Pakistan army’s action in Swat and the rest of Malakand division and even in Bajaur and Mohmand tribal regions was like a side-show. The major threat was none else but the TTP founder and the main battlefield was always going to be Waziristan. The military command realised it and so did the ruling politicians, particularly those from the Awami National Party in the Frontier who knew firsthand that their first peace accord with the Swat militants in May 2008 collapsed due to Baitullah Mehsud’s intransigence.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the government has predictably and finally decided to launch a full-fledged battle against Baitullah Mehsud in his native South Waziristan. President Asif Ali Zardari had hinted that Waziristan was next even though his comment was unguarded and premature when it was made a few weeks ago. But he wasn’t wrong as this must have been discussed by the army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, with him. After all the president of Pakistan is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

However, it is a bit intriguing that instead of the president the announcement for launching the military operation against the Taliban in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in general and Baitullah Mehsud in particular was made by the governor of NWFP, Owais Ahmad Ghani. There is no doubt that the governor runs the affairs of FATA but he does so on behalf of the president of Pakistan. Also, the launch of the military action in Swat, Buner, Lower Dir and other districts of Malakand division was made by Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, and not NWFP Chief Minister Ameer Haider Khan Hoti. Maybe the governor had to make the announcement Sunday night because the president by then had left for yet another foreign visit, this time to Russia and Belgium.

In fact, the military action against Baitullah Mehsud was launched even before a formal announcement was made about it. The air force used jet-fighters to bomb his positions in Makeen, Ladha and Kotki in South Waziristan on June 13 and the army’s long-range artillery guns deployed in Razmak in North Waziristan shelled his strongholds the same day. The security forces explained the assault as retaliation against Baitullah Mehsud for ordering the assassination of the anti-Taliban religious scholar, Maulana Dr Sarfaraz Naeemi, in Lahore and then claiming responsibility for the suicide bombing that killed him and four others. The army command until now has been insisting that it was merely responding to attacks rather than launching a new offensive. But it seems it will now go all-out and tackle Baitullah Mehsud and the TTP after having received the orders from the civilian government.

Though the military has already carried out a build-up of forces in the Waziristan area and reinforcements are being sent to the new frontline, it can still take some time in launching a full-scale ground offensive. More importantly, the army is already fighting on a number of fronts and it cannot afford to spread its forces thin. The battle for Swat is far from over even if the troops now control the major population centres and the main roads and supply lines. Taliban militants after having retreated from Mingora and other big towns and villages are now resorting to guerrilla strikes, ambushes and improvised explosives device (IED) attacks. They have attacked the troops in Kabal, Charbagh and the Matta area, including their former stronghold Peochar where the Pakistan army airdropped its commandoes to secure mountain peaks and escape routes.

In neighbouring Buner, the militants have been pushed back to Swat and Shangla almost from the whole district, but it will take a while for durable peace to return and for the internally displaced persons (IDPs) to feel confident enough to come back to their deserted homes and villages. The situation in the twin Dir districts, named Upper and Lower by some dim-witted bureaucrats fascinated with English words instead of continuing with the Pashto equivalent of Bala and Payeen, is uncertain and unpredictable. The government-backed lashkar, or armed force, in Dir Bala is struggling to defeat the outnumbered and besieged pro-Taliban villagers in Dhog Darra after having pushed them towards their last mountain hideouts. In Dir Payeen, the militants remain defiant despite suffering losses. They are still able to launch attacks on security forces’ outposts and convoys and copy the Taliban from Swat, Bajaur, Mohmand and Darra Adamkhel in blowing up government schools.

For a while, Shangla district became the base of militants escaping the army assault in Swat and Buner and alarmed the local population. But the surrender of Maulana Waliullah, an influential cleric from Kabulgram village aligned to Maulana Sufi Mohammad’s TNSM, to the security forces has raised hopes that Shangla will not become a fresh battleground between the military and the militants. Some displacement did take place from Shangla and the people suffered from long hours of curfew and shortages of food and goods. But Shangla has been spared of the large-scale dislocation of people and suffering that was witnessed in Swat, Buner and Dir. The government also will have to ensure that Maulana Sufi Mohammad, reportedly in protective custody of the intelligence agencies, isn’t harmed. This is important not to push his largely peaceful followers into the arms of the Taliban militants. Already, many TNSM activists are angry over the mysterious deaths of two of their top leaders, Maulana Mohammad Alam and Maulana Amir Izzat, who were in custody of the security forces.

With the Malakand division military offensive entering a decisive phase, it was surprising that the armed forces opened a new front in the Frontier Region Bannu to punish the militants in the Janikhel and Bakkakhel areas for assisting Baitullah Mehsud’s men in kidnapping students of Cadet College, Razmak, and also indulging in roadside bombings and kidnappings. The action provoked Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the commander of the North Waziristan militants, to send hundreds of his fighters to the Janikhel and Bakkakhel areas to stop the advancing army troops. Though he hasn’t formally ended his peace accord with the government, it will come under strain as the two sides face off in the wilderness of the Frontier Region Bannu, which serves as the entry-point to North Waziristan. It can be a matter of time before their peace agreement meets a familiar fate and ends without any formal announcements. This can push Hafiz Gul Bahadur to join forces with Baitullah Mehsud and form a formidable front to stop the armed forces from regaining control of the two Waziristans.

The increasingly confident and determined armed forces also opened two more fronts, one in Bajaur’s Charmang area where aerial strikes and artillery shelling was followed by a ground offensive, and in Orakzai Agency and the adjoining Hangu district. Bajaur is thus once more on fire after repeated claims that the militants have been defeated and that IDPs can return home. If displaced again, this will be probably the third time that the unfortunate Bajauris from the Mamond and Charmang areas will be uprooted and exposed to an uncertain future. In Orakzai Agency, the air force was used again to strike at TTP targets, but there were reports of a number of civilian casualties and displacement. There was also ‘collateral damage’ in neighbouring Hangu district, where respected religious scholar Maulana Mohammad Amin was killed in an airstrike along with his nephew. Men and women and children belonging to the family of JUI-F head for Hangu, Maulana Din Asghar, were also killed in the air raid. Attiqur Rahman, the provincial assembly member from Hangu affiliated to former interior minister Aftab Sherpao’s PPP-S, has alleged that the police high-ups in Kohat provided wrong information to the security forces about the presence of militants in the madressah that led to the aerial bombardment and death of Maulana Amin and other innocent civilians.

By fighting on so many fronts, the security forces already appear over-stretched. This will increase dependence on air power, which invariably causes civilian casualties and displacement and isn’t the most effective way to fight shadowy and fast-moving guerrilla fighters. Without forces on the ground to clear and hold captured locations, there is always the possibility that the militants may stage a comeback. There have already been two major military operations against Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan and in both cases the government and the army had to accept his power and make peace deals with him in February 2005 and January 2009 and agree to an exchange of prisoners and compensation for losses suffered by his tribe. Baitullah Mehsud is the most powerful Pakistani Taliban commander. He is capable of carrying out suicide bombings and terrorist attacks in all major cities of Pakistan, kidnapping important people and using them as bargaining chip, and activating fighters from TTP units all over NWFP and his jihadi allies in Punjab and Sindh to put pressure on the government to once again seek peace with him. He has done this in the past and will try to do so again.

The writer is resident editor of The News in Peshawar. Email: rahimyusufzai @yahoo.com

Zardari-Manmohan meeting begins

YEKATERINBURG: The leaders of India and Pakistan began meeting in Russia today, raising expectations their first meeting since last November’s Mumbai attacks will ease tensions between the two countries.

According to an Indian television report, the meeting will last for 40 minutes.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari are holding talks on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg.

But it was unclear whether the two would make any real breakthrough in improving relations, which it is hoped hopes will ease tensions across the region, including in Afghanistan.

“I am happy to meet you, but my mandate is to tell you that the territory of Pakistan must not be used for terrorism,” Singh said when they met on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation summit in Russia.

India broke off talks with Pakistan after the Mumbai attacks which it blamed on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.

Before the meeting, Singh called for regional cooperation against terrorism and other security threats.

“The spectre of terrorism, extremist ideologies and illicit drug trafficking haunts our region. Terrorist crimes committed today are transnational in nature,” Singh said in the text of the speech prepared for the summit.

“It is imperative that we genuinely cooperate with one another and on a global scale to resolutely defeat international terrorism.”

India and Pakistan are both observer states in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

New Delhi has put on hold a five-year-old peace process, saying Pakistan must act decisively against the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants. Islamabad says it has detained some militants, but needs more evidence from New Delhi for further action.

State Department Reaches Out to Pakistani-Americans

By Michael Novinson – The U.S. special ambassador for Pakistan and Afghanistan held a roundtable discussion with 25 Pakistani-Americans Friday in an effort to improve relations between the two nations Washington, D.C. – infoZine – Scripps Howard Foundation Wire – The meeting came one day after the House of Representatives approved an additional $1.5 billion in aid to Pakistan for each of the next five years.

Richard C. Holbrooke joined Reps. Elijah E Cummings, D-Md., and Shelia Jackson Lee, D-Texas, to meet with Pakistani businesspeople and lawyers from Cummings’ district to discuss ways to strengthen the American-Pakistani relationship.

Cummings’ 7th District encompasses the majority of Howard County, a suburb between Baltimore and Washington, and majority-black sections of Baltimore County.

Much of the discussion focused on providing humanitarian aid to the Swat Valley region of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, where recent fighting between the Pakistani government and Taliban has displaced 2.5 million people. Holbrooke said the United States has already committed $330 million to this effort, but the Pakistanis at the meeting said the U.S. must take a leadership role in raising $1 billion.

Holbrooke agreed with the amount but said the rest of the world must contribute. He said 65 percent of all current humanitarian aid to Pakistan comes from the United States, even though the U.S. normally funds only 30 percent of international relief efforts.

At the same time, he emphasized President Barack Obama’s personal commitment to supporting Pakistan.

“President Obama has essentially been the chief refugee officer, the chief helicopter procurement officer and the chief economic officer for Pakistan,” he said.

He said al-Qaida’s dwindling popularity in Afghanistan and Pakistan has lessened their involvement in the region, thereby reducing pressure on both nations’ militaries. However, he said the true test will be how soon the refugees can return home.

The humanitarian aid might accompany a more comprehensive aid package that would bolster Pakistan’s democratic, economic, social development and security apparatuses. On Thursday, The House passed the PEACE Act, sponsored by Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., by a 234-185 vote.

Jackson Lee, who co-chairs the Congressional Pakistan Caucus, said this result points to the increased prestige of Pakistani-Americans.

The Senate is considering the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act, sponsored by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., which would provide aid for projects that promote democratic governance, economic freedom and growth and investments in women and children. A spokeswomen in Kerry’s office said the Foreign Relations Committee has not yet scheduled hearings on the bill.

After Holbrooke spoke, his discussions with the Pakistani-Americans was closed to reporters, but the Pakistani-Americans composed a written statement outlining their desired improvements in the bilateral relationship over the next several weeks and months.

In the near term, the group would like to reduce mistrust between the people of the two nations through institutions, culture and increased trade. And in the long term, they would like Pakistan’s leaders to be more accountable and U.S. leaders to be less closely affiliated with particular individuals and political parties.

These efforts might be facilitated through a visit by Holbrooke and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to India next month. Holbrooke announced the trip at the meeting, and a State Department spokesman confirmed it. Holbrooke said the department wants to ensure that Clinton can visit Pakistan as well – the State Department wouldn’t confirm this, however.

In the meantime, government and Pakistani expatriates are moving to create the Pakistani-American Foundation, a nonprofit organization that would bring together diverse Pakistani voices and give them an elevated platform from which to unite and express their concerns. Clinton suggested the foundation, which will be modeled after the Irish Fund created by President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

“This is a big deal,” Jackson Lee said. “This is American democracy at its best.”

Cummings said the foundation will also enhance democracy in Pakistan.

“This is not a one-day thing,” he said. “This is something that will go on for a long time, for generations that are not yet born.”

THE CIA THE REAL TRUTH ARE “DIAMETRICALY OPPOSED”

Gary Ater

June 15, 2009

…CIA Headquarters

It´s laughable that the Republicans in Congress are questioning that the CIA, with their tainted history, could have actually lied to Nancy Pelosi.

For weeks now, the far right radio and TV talkers, as well as the Republicans in Congress, have continued to give House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi a hard time for accusing the CIA of “misleading her in a 2003 briefing about using torture techniques on suspected terrorist detainees“.

And the big hubbub got even bigger when the current CIA Director, Leon Panetta, said that, “It hurts the country when the Congress and the CIA don´t feel like they are being good partners.”

What is so confusing about all this is that it is well known that the CIA has a long history of not being truthful with those in the US Congress. In fact, it has been a problem for years with the heads of all of the US intelligence agencies, that at one time or another, they will not be completely up front in their briefings to Congress.

People don´t seem to realize that the job of a spy agency is to know how to “lie, cheat and steal” in order to just do their jobs. As per a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, “The CIA is an organization that thrives on deception.”

The CIA was formed at the beginning of the Cold War, way back in 1947. The long-time US Senator, John Stennis once advised: “Make up your mind that if you are going to have an intelligence agency, you protect it as such, and you shut your eyes some, and then you take what is coming.”

It´s interesting when one looks at the CIA´s “not so stellar history for truth-telling“, and then the “neo-cons” make all this noise that someone might actually have the gall to accuse a government spying agency of not being completely truthful….? Please, give me a break!

Has everyone forgotten the former CIA Director, Richard Helms, who received a two year suspended sentence in 1977, on a federal charge of lying to Congress about President Richard Nixon´s order for the CIA to overthrow the government of Chile? Helms admitted that he was under oath to tell the truth, but he felt that as the head of the CIA, he was also obliged to keep the country´s secrets.

Robert Gates, the current Defense Secretary was also the number two man to Ronald Reagan´s CIA Chief, William Casey. Gates has admitted that Casey foiled the Congress for six years. Per Gates; “Casey was guilty of contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in.”

Casey´s senior officers always testified evasively and the final effect was what became known to the public as the Iran / Contra affair. This was the CIA program where the United States was caught shipping weapons to Iran, skimming the profits off and sending those profits to the anti-communists fighting in Central America.

// <![CDATA[//
// <![CDATA[// And today some people seriously have a question about the CIA´s truthfulness about not torturing suspected terrorists….?

And let´s not forget when President Gerald Ford let it slip out that the CIA had set up and ran major secret plots against foreign leaders.

Ford later also admitted that when he was on the Warren Commission for investigating the assignation of President Kennedy, the CIA had kept secrets from the commission, specifically its many plots against Fidel Castro.

Ford´s then Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld, once called for an internal “damage-limiting operation” to save the CIA´s secrets from spilling out in Congress. Ford then chose his new Director of the CIA, George H.W. Bush, who then tried to do the “damage-limiting” job, but he was eventually unable to rescue the previous Director, Richard Helms.

In 1995, the CIA even went outside the US military and used the Peruvian air force to shoot down planes suspected of carrying cocaine. But in 2001, it mistakenly attacked and shot down a plane carrying rescue missionaries flying over the Amazon, killing a woman and her 7 month old daughter. It was reported much later by the CIA´s Inspector General that the CIA had hidden these misdeeds from Congress, the US Justice Department and the National Security Council.

It wasn´t till seven years later that the House Intelligence Committee published a report saying; “The CIA operates outside the law and covers up what it does and lies to the US Congress“. Isn´t it interesting that that´s pretty much what Pelosi said.

As Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Tim Weiner wrote in a recent article in The Nation Magazine: on orders from President Obama, the CIA is killing suspected terrorists with remote controlled missiles fired from drone aircraft over Pakistan. “Do we really want to live in a world where the CIA´s clandestine service has the authority to decide who lives and who dies?”

Today, Congress has the responsibility of overseeing the CIA. But will the CIA just continue to lie to Congress as they have in the past?

As Mr. Weiner wrote; “If the trust is broken, intelligence will fail again. And when intelligence fails, soldiers and civilians die.”

Pelosi was right, and the GOP nay-sayers in Congress, and the conservative media talkers are dead wrong.

Copyright G.Ater 2009

US Gen McChrystal Takes Command in Afghanistan

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Russia hosts key security summit

By Anna Smolchenko – 1 hour ago

YEKATERINBURG, Russia (AFP) — Russia hosted the second day of a key security summit seen as a counter to US power with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, making his first foreign trip since his disputed re-election, in attendance.

Ahmadinejad arrived early Tuesday to attend the high-profile get-together dominated by Russia and China, being hosted by the Kremlin in the Urals Mountains deep inside Russia.

The summit organizers broadcast live footage showing a widely-smiling Ahmadinejad, wearing a dark suit but not tie, shaking hands with a beaming Medvedev before the leaders went into the second day of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit.

The summit organizers also showed footage of a relaxed and smiling Iranian leader coming down the stairs of his plane as he was being met by a host of journalists and officials at a local airport.

Whether Ahmadinejad, who has a habit of stealing the limelight at international events, would turn up at the summit had become a source of intrigue after he postponed his planned arrival on Monday following unrest over his disputed election victory.

Ahmadinejad was initially scheduled to hold a bilateral meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev but a Kremlin spokesman said that meeting has been cancelled.

His visit to Russia, Iran’s key ally, is Ahmadinejad’s first foreign trip since his landslide re-election victory over his moderate rival Mir Hossein Mousavi sparked two days of street protests and some of the worst rioting in Tehran in a decade.

Russia hopes to use the SCO summit and the first summit of Brazil, Russia, India and China — known as the BRIC grouping of rapidly developing states — being held later on Tuesday in Yekaterinburg to boost its stature as an influential powerbroker.

While the Kremlin is seeking to build bridges with the new administration of US President Barack Obama, the summit is expected to emphasise the group’s suspicion of the US as a global superpower.

The SCO was set up in 1996 as an alternative to NATO that would allow Russia and China to counter US influence in Asia.

The group also includes Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Iran has in the past expressed interest in becoming a full member and currently has observer status.

The Kremlin said that the summit’s main task would be preparing a communique that would emphasise the importance of “multipolarity” in global diplomacy.

Indian Premier Manmohan Singh and Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari, also in attendance, were “likely” to hold face-to-face talks in an effort to break the ice between the two nations following the deadly Mumbai attacks late last year, officials have said.

Afghanistan is also to be a major focus of the talks with President Hamid Karzai attending as a guest.

Medvedev, Karzai and Zardari held joint and bilateral talks late Monday, and vowed to unite in the battle against terrorism.

“Many issues including most serious challenges our nations are facing such as terrorism and crime can only be fought by collective effort,” Medvedev said.

“Afghanistan will be your full-fledged partner in this very timely and much needed endeavour,” President Karzai said.

Pakistani security forces are locked in a seven-week campaign against insurgents in three northwest districts.

The attendance of China’s Hu Jintao at the SCO summit kicks off a busy week of diplomacy for the Chinese head of state in Russia.

Later on Tuesday he will take part in the first official summit of the BRIC group, and then heads to Moscow for a state visit through Thursday, including a meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Detainee says he gave false story after harsh interrogation

Suspected Sept. 11 organizer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told U.S. military officials he gave false information to the CIA even after undergoing…

By Julian E. Barnes and Greg Miller

Sept. 11 suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

months of “suffering and torture”

WASHINGTON — Suspected Sept. 11 organizer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told U.S. military officials he gave false information to the CIA even after undergoing punishing bouts of interrogation, according to documents made public Monday, a claim likely to intensify the debate over the Bush administration’s use of harsh techniques to gain information from terrorism suspects.

Mohammed made the assertion during hearings held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the militant leader was transferred in 2006 after being held at secret CIA sites since his capture in 2003.

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation likely administered by the CIA concerning the location of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.

“Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” Mohammed said. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ “

The admission could amplify calls for the Obama administration to make public more information about the abuse of detainees or to allow a broader inquiry into the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. Monday’s disclosure, representing the first allegation by a detainee that he lied while being subjected to harsh practices, also could raise more questions about the effectiveness of the techniques.

The transcripts were released as part of a lawsuit in which the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking documents and details of the government’s terrorism-detainee programs.

Previous accounts of the military tribunal hearings had been made public, but the Obama administration reviewed the still-secret sections and determined that more could be released.

Most of the new material centers on the detainees’ claims of abuse during interrogations while being held overseas in CIA custody.

One detainee, Abu Zubaydah, told the tribunal that after months “of suffering and torture, physically and mentally, they did not care about my injuries.”

Zubaydah was the first detainee subjected to Bush administration-approved harsh interrogation techniques, which included a simulated form of drowning known as waterboarding, slamming the suspect into walls and prolonged periods of nudity.

Zubaydah claimed in the hearing that he “nearly died four times.”

VIOLENCE VIDEO: Militia members open fire on Tehran crowd | McClatchy

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Iran’s Political Coup..

Iran’s Political Coup..

By Gary Sick

If the reports coming out of Tehran about an electoral coup are sustained, then Iran has entered an entirely new phase of its post-revolution history. One characteristic that has always distinguished Iran from the crude dictators in much of the rest of the Middle East was its respect for the voice of the people, even when that voice was saying things that much of the leadership did not want to hear.

In 1997, Iran’s hard line leadership was stunned by the landslide election of Mohammed Khatami, a reformer who promised to bring rule of law and a more human face to the harsh visage of the Iranian revolution. It took the authorities almost a year to recover their composure and to reassert their control through naked force and cynical manipulation of the constitution and legal system. The authorities did not, however, falsify the election results and even permitted a resounding reelection four years later. Instead, they preferred to prevent the president from implementing his reform program.

In 2005, when it appeared that no hard line conservative might survive the first round of the presidential election, there were credible reports of ballot manipulation to insure that Mr Ahmadinejad could run (and win) against former president Rafsanjani in the second round. The lesson seemed to be that the authorities might shift the results in a close election but they would not reverse a landslide vote.

The current election appears to repudiate both of those rules. The authorities were faced with a credible challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had the potential to challenge the existing power structure on certain key issues. He ran a surprisingly effective campaign, and his “green wave” began to be seen as more than a wave. In fact, many began calling it a Green Revolution. For a regime that has been terrified about the possibility of a “velvet revolution,” this may have been too much.

On the basis of what we know so far, here is the sequence of events starting on the afternoon of election day, Friday, June 12.

• Near closing time of the polls, mobile text messaging was turned off nationwide
• Security forces poured out into the streets in large numbers
• The Ministry of Interior (election headquarters) was surrounded by concrete barriers and armed men
• National television began broadcasting pre-recorded messages calling for everyone to unite behind the winner
• The Mousavi campaign was informed officially that they had won the election, which perhaps served to temporarily lull  them into complacency
• But then the Ministry of Interior announced a landslide victory for Ahmadinejad
• Unlike previous elections, there was no breakdown of the vote by province, which would have provided a way of judging its credibility
• The voting patterns announced by the government were identical in all parts of the country, an impossibility (also see the comments of Juan Cole at the title link)
• Less than 24 hours later, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene`I  publicly announced his congratulations to the winner, apparently confirming that the process was complete and irrevocable, contrary to constitutional requirements
• Shortly thereafter, all mobile phones, Facebook, and other social networks were blocked, as well as major foreign news sources.

All of this had the appearance of a well orchestrated strike intended to take its opponents by surprise – the classic definition of a coup. Curiously, this was not a coup of an outside group against the ruling elite; it was a coup of the ruling elite against its own people.

It is still too early for anything like a comprehensive analysis of implications, but here are some initial thoughts:

1. The willingness of the regime simply to ignore reality and fabricate election results without the slightest effort to conceal the fraud represents a historic shift in Iran’s Islamic revolution. All previous leaders at least paid lip service to the voice of the Iranian people. This suggests that Iran’s leaders are aware of the fact that they have lost credibility in the eyes of many (most?) of their countrymen, so they are dispensing with even the pretense of popular legitimacy in favor of raw power.

1. The Iranian opposition, which includes some very powerful individuals and institutions, has an agonizing decision to make. If they are intimidated and silenced by the show of force (as they have been in the past), they will lose all credibility in the future with even their most devoted followers. But if they choose to confront their ruthless colleagues forcefully, not only is it likely to be messy but it could risk running out of control and potentially bring down the entire existing power structure, of which they are participants and beneficiaries.

1. With regard to the United States and the West, nothing would prevent them in principle from dealing with an illegitimate authoritarian government . We do it every day, and have done so for years (the Soviet Union comes to mind). But this election is an extraordinary gift to those who have been most skeptical about President Obama’s plan to conduct negotiations with Iran. Former Bush official Elliott Abrams was quick off the mark, commenting that it is “likely that the engagement strategy has been dealt a very heavy blow.” Two senior Israeli officials quickly urged the world not to engage in negotiations with Iran. Neoconservatives who had already expressed their support for an Ahmadinejad victory now have every reason to be satisfied. Opposition forces, previously on the defensive, now have a perfect opportunity to mount a political attack that will make it even more difficult for President Obama to proceed with his plan.

In their own paranoia and hunger for power, the leaders of Iran have insulted their own fellow revolutionaries who have come to have second thoughts about absolute rule and the costs of repression, and they may have alienated an entire generation of future Iranian leaders. At the same time, they have provided an invaluable gift to their worst enemies abroad.

However this turns out, it is a historic turning point in the 30-year history of Iran’s Islamic revolution. Iranians have never forgotten the external political intervention that thwarted their democratic aspirations in 1953. How will they remember this day?

************************************************

Gary G. Sick (born 1935) is an American academic and analyst of Middle East affairs, with special expertise on Iran, who served on the U.S. National Security Council under three presidents. He has authored three books, and is perhaps best known to the wider public for voicing support for elements of the October surprise conspiracy theory regarding the Iran Hostage Crisis and the 1980 Presidential Election.

Old Ukranian chickens coming home to roost

[Is it anti-Semitic to notice that most of the names associated with organizing the major campaigns of political genocide from Ukraine to Armenia have been Jewish?  Some people see nothing wrong with sacrificing a few million cattle ("goyim") to advance the international agenda.]

Old Ukranian chickens coming home to roost

Tuesday, 16 June 2009 06:40 Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Jewish group objects to ‘Great Famine’ case

A Jewish group in Ukraine is objecting to a criminal case brought over the “Great Famine” committed in the 1930s. The nation’s security service is pressing the case against a list of former Soviet officials accused of committing the Holodomor, which caused the deaths of millions in Ukraine in 1932-33. Most of the names on the list were Jewish.

Ukrainian lawmaker Aleksandr Feldman, leader of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, said last week that it was “a farce” to press the case.

“All organizers of the Great Famine are dead,” he said.

Last July, the Ukrainian Security Service released a list of high-ranking Soviet state and Communist Party officials — as well as officials from NKVD, the police force of Soviet Russia — that essentially blamed Jews and Latvians responsible for perpetrating and executing the famine because most of the names on the list were Jewish.

The Ukrainian Jewish Committee called on the secret service to revise the list, which incited interethnic hatred, in order to clear up the “inaccuracy.”

Feldman believes there is a danger that the “Holodomor Affair” materials are being used for political purposes.

In late May, security service head Valentin Nalivaychenko claimed at a meeting with representatives of the World Congress of Ukrainians that “Ukraine has collected enough evidence to bring a criminal case regarding the famine, which was artificially created by the Bolshevik regime and caused mass death of citizens.”

Through the World Congress of Ukrainians, Nalivaychenko turned to leading foreign lawyers with a request to help find out the circumstances connected with preparing and committing the genocide.

Source: JTA

New UN Report Denounces America’s Human Rights Record

Tuesday, 16 June 2009 05:09 Stephen Lendman

On May 26, the UN Human Rights Council issued a report titled “Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development – Report of the Special Rapporteur (Philip Alston) on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.”

Alston was damning in his criticism regarding “three areas in which significant improvement is necessary if the US Government is to match its actions to its stated commitment to human rights and the rule of law:”

(1) Its imposition of the death penalty under which innocent people are executed. Alston was shocked about “glaring criminal justice system flaws,” citing Texas and Alabama as examples, but many other states are as derelict. He criticized politicized judges and recommended that Congress “should enact legislation permitting federal court habeas review of state and federal death penalty cases on their merits.”

He condemned the 2006 Military Commissions Act and its provisions that violate international human rights and humanitarian law with regard to due process and fairness.

(2) America needs “greater transparency into law enforcement, military, and intelligence operations that result in unlawful deaths.” Domestically, it provides inadequate information about deaths of immigrants and other detainees, but the worst failures are in international military and intelligence operations.

(3) The government fails to “provide greater accountability for potentially unlawful deaths in its international operations.” It ignores civilian casualties, both their number and conditions under which they occur, and fails to provide ordinary people, including US citizens, with basic information regarding investigations and prosecutions when laws were violated. It fails to assure safeguards are in place to prevent so-called collateral damage – that is, civilians wrongfully (and at times willfully) targeted and killed.

Overall, “there have been chronic and deplorable accountability failures with respect to policies, practices and conduct that (cause) alleged unlawful killings – including possible war crimes – in the United States’ international operations.” Effective investigations have been lacking and guilty parties, throughout the chain of command, haven’t been punished. Even worse, private contractors and civilian intelligence personnel have been granted “a zone of impunity” because of failures to hold them accountable. Alston recommends a national “commission of inquiry” and a special prosecutor to conduct thorough investigations “independent of the pressure on the political branches of Government.”

(More here)

Seven killed during Iran protest

Extremism and Suffering Children

By William John Cox
June 15, 2009

Editor’s Note: The further radicalizing of America’s right-wing extremists – reflected in recent outbursts of violence – recalls other times when dangerous ideologies sought extermination of political enemies and inflicted suffering on the innocent.

In this guest essay, lawyer/writer William John Cox explores some of those dark corridors and their real-life consequences for children:

What does a shootout at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the confessions of a Khmer Rouge jailer and the murder of a Kansas medical doctor have in common? The answer is “children,” and how they suffer from being targeted and used by extremists to advance their own hateful agendas.

In 1981, acting as a public interest lawyer, I represented a Holocaust survivor who had been a 17-year-old boy when his entire family was murdered in Nazi concentration camps. We sued a group of radical right-wing organizations that denied the Holocaust and, as a publicity ploy, had offered a reward for proof it had occurred.

During the hearing in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, I asked, “If the Holocaust is a hoax, then where are all the children?”

The answer was that the death camps were primarily industrial operations that worked prisoners to death, and children were quickly murdered because they were too young to contribute either their labor or body fat to the enterprise.

The presiding judge wisely disposed of the primary issue by simply taking “judicial notice” of the “historical fact” that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.

As I was reading in Mother Jones about the murder of a guard at the Holocaust Museum last week, I was not surprised to learn that James von Brunn, the shooter, had left a note saying “the Holocaust is a lie,” and that he was associated with the very same organizations we had defeated almost 30 years ago.

In the past, von Brunn expressed his admiration of Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby as an umbrella organization for other extremist groups, including the National Alliance organized by William Pierce, whose hatred had focused on African Americans.

Carto also established the Institute for Historical Review to promulgate anti-Semitic propaganda on college campuses, including the reward offer. And, he used the Noontide Press to publish a wide range of hate materials, including at least one book by von Brunn in which he claimed there was a Jewish conspiracy to “destroy the white gene pool.”

In our lawsuit, we established that these organizations were essentially moneymaking operations that profited by tailoring and peddling hate materials to the various prejudices and hatreds of their customers.

Ultimately, the defendants paid a $90,000 judgment and issued an apology “to Mr. Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and all other survivors of Auschwitz for the pain, anguish and suffering he and all other Auschwitz survivors have sustained relating to the $50,000 reward offer for proof that ‘Jews were gassed in gas chambers at Auschwitz.’”

Khmer Rouge Atrocities

Last week, after being painfully reminded about the murdered children of the Holocaust, both Jews and Gypsies, another horrible story about murdered children came across my desktop.

Reuters reported that the chief jailer of the Khmer Rouge confessed at his trial in Phnom Penh that Pol Pot had specifically ordered the murder of the children – among the estimated 1.7 million Cambodians who died as a result of Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s – because “we were afraid those children would take revenge.”

The Cambodian children were not murdered in gas chambers. They were taken into the “Killing Fields” and clubbed to death.

Finally, as I later read about the murder of Dr. George Tiller by a “staunch opponent of abortion,” yet another, more complex, image of suffering children came to mind.

Dr. Tiller’s clinic had been bombed in 1985, and he was shot in both arms in 1993 by an anti-abortionist; however, his murder reveals another way how children suffer as a result of extremist hatred.

He was one of the few doctors who had the courage to help women cope with impossible late-term pregnancies that threatened either their own lives, or which would deliver a child incapable of leading anything other than a life of misery, one whose quality of “living” would be so poor as to not even qualify as “life.”

Dr. Tiller did not “murder babies.” He was a healer who helped women abort late-term pregnancies under conditions where the fetus would die shortly after birth from conditions, such as an exposed brain or Down Syndrome with severe congenital heart defects, or where one twin had died in the womb and toxins were killing the other twin and the mother.

Many of his patients desperately wanted children, and Dr. Tiller saved their lives and preserved their health so they had the chance to bear healthy babies and build strong families.

While many extremists are the first to say they act on behalf of children, they are often the last to lift a finger to help poor mothers raise, educate or provide health care for disabled children.

“Pro-life” extremists are quite willing to condemn these children, and their families, to a lifetime of suffering to promote their own intolerant religious beliefs. As was Scott Roeder, the murderer of Dr. Tiller, who subscribed to hate literature advocating that the killing of an abortionist should be legally justifiable homicide.

Undoubtedly, Roeder was also exposed to the ranting of conservative propagandists, such as Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, who compared the doctor to a Nazi “operating a death mill” and who called him “Tiller the Baby Killer.”

The effect of these twisted hate messages on Roeder is revealed in a post he made in 2007 on the Operation Rescue Web site, ChargeTiller.com:

“It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the ‘lawlessness’ which is spoken of in the Bible. Tiller is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgement upon our nation.”

According to the Kansas City Star, Roeder was also involved in the “Freemen” movement, which had been among the organizations cultivated by Willis Carto, my former opponent in the Holocaust Case.

The Freemen declared they were not subject to any government and were exempt from all laws, including the payment of income taxes.

In 1996, Roeder was found to be in possession of bomb-making materials and was sentenced to probation on condition he avoided anti-government groups that advocated violence.

Dr. Tiller was serving as an usher in the Reformation Lutheran Church handing out church bulletins when Roeder invaded the sanctuary and shot him down. The church is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest of all Lutheran denominations in the U.S.

Evangelical Lutherans are “supportive of life” and encourage women to explore alternatives to abortion when possible; however, the church believes it can be “morally responsible” to end a pregnancy in cases where the pregnancy “presents a clear threat to the physical life of the woman,” and in “circumstances of extreme fetal abnormality, which will result in severe suffering and very early death of an infant.”

The church also opposes “laws that deny access to safe and affordable services for morally justifiable abortions.”

The Catholic and Orthodox Churches and many fundamentalist evangelical congregations oppose virtually all abortions, including pregnancies that threaten the lives of mothers and those resulting from rape or incest.

However, most mainstream Christian denominations, including the United Church of Christ, American Baptist Churches, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church, support a woman’s right of choice.

In addition to the thousands of women helped by Dr. Tiller over the years, four children and 10 grandchildren will mourn his death.

Holocaust Museum Assault

The son of Holocaust Museum guard Stephen Johns is undoubtedly devastated by the loss of his father to violent hatred, and even the son of Johns’s murderer has suffered from his father’s extremism.

The Washington Post quotes James von Brunn’s son, Eric as saying that his father “should not be remembered as a brave man or a hero, but a coward unable to come to grips with the fact that he threw his and his family’s lives away for an ideology that fostered sadness and anguish.”

We have much to fear from these radicals. Even the Department of Homeland Security has issued a warning regarding a “resurgence in radicalization and recruitment by right-wing extremists.”

An April 7, 2009, report concluded that: “Antigovernment conspiracy theories and ‘end times’ prophecies could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons. These teachings also have been linked with the radicalization of domestic extremist individuals and groups in the past, such as violent Christian Identity organizations and extremist members of the militia movement.”

Extremists who murder children and who are willing to condemn children and their families to a lifetime of suffering to promote a philosophy of hatred or a religion of intolerance, threaten the freedom and safety of everyone, especially those who oppose them.

Efforts of extremists to compel others to adopt their warped views and unhealthy beliefs have resulted in the enslavement of their victims in prisons and concentration camps. Or, through their efforts to impose their religious beliefs through legislation, they have mentally and emotionally shackled others by forcing them to accept unfair laws they can’t believe in.

The innocent children have no voice in these matters but the sound of their cries, yet they suffer the very most of all.

William John Cox is a retired supervising prosecutor for the State Bar of California. As a police officer he wrote the Policy Manual of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Role of the Police in America for a national advisory commission. Acting as a public interest, pro bono lawyer, he investigated and successfully sued a group of radical right-wing organizations in 1981 that denied the Holocaust; and he arranged in 1991 for publication of the suppressed Dead Sea Scrolls. His 2004 book, You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth: A Brief on the Bush Presidency is reviewed at http://www.yourenotstupid.com, and he is currently working on a fact-based fictional political philosophy. His writings are collected at http://www.thevoters.org, and he can be contacted at u2cox@msn.com.

Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire

De-Dollarization: Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire The Yekaterinburg Turning Point by Prof. Michael Hudson

The city of Yakaterinburg, Russia’s largest east of the Urals, may become known not only as the death place of the tsars but of American hegemony too – and not only where US U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, but where the US-centered international financial order was brought to ground.

Challenging America will be the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) today and tomorrow (June 15-16) for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

The attendees have assured American diplomats that dismantling the US financial and military empire is not their aim. They simply want to discuss mutual aid – but in a way that has no role for the United States, NATO or the US dollar as a vehicle for trade. US diplomats may well ask what this really means, if not a move to make US hegemony obsolete. That is what a multipolar world means, after all. For starters, in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia. Two years later the SCO countries formally aligned themselves with the former CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO.

Yet the meeting has elicited only a collective yawn from the US and even European press despite its agenda is to replace the global dollar standard with a new financial and military defense system. A Council on Foreign Relations spokesman has said he hardly can imagine that Russia and China can overcome their geopolitical rivalry,1 suggesting that America can use the divide-and-conquer that Britain used so deftly for many centuries in fragmenting foreign opposition to its own empire. But George W. Bush (“I’m a uniter, not a divider”) built on the Clinton administration’s legacy in driving Russia, China and their neighbors to find a common ground when it comes to finding an alternative to the dollar and hence to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits ad infinitum.

What may prove to be the last rites of American hegemony began already in April at the G-20 conference, and became even more explicit at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 5, when Mr. Medvedev called for China, Russia and India to “build an increasingly multipolar world order.” What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth.

“The artificially maintained unipolar system,” Mr. Medvedev spelled out, is based on “one big centre of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks.”2  At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is that the United States makes too little and spends too much. Especially upsetting is its military spending, such as the stepped-up US military aid to Georgia announced just last week, the NATO missile shield in Eastern Europe and the US buildup in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia.

The sticking point with all these countries is the US ability to print unlimited amounts of dollars. Overspending by US consumers on imports in excess of exports, US buy-outs of foreign companies and real estate, and the dollars that the Pentagon spends abroad all end up in foreign central banks. These agencies then face a hard choice: either to recycle these dollars back to the United States by purchasing US Treasury bills, or to let the “free market” force up their currency relative to the dollar – thereby pricing their exports out of world markets and hence creating domestic unemployment and business insolvency.

When China and other countries recycle their dollar inflows by buying US Treasury bills to “invest” in the United States, this buildup is not really voluntary. It does not reflect faith in the U.S. economy enriching foreign central banks for their savings, or any calculated investment preference, but simply a lack of alternatives. “Free markets” US-style hook countries into a system that forces them to accept dollars without limit. Now they want out.

This means creating a new alternative. Rather than making merely “cosmetic changes as some countries and perhaps the international financial organisations themselves might want,” Mr. Medvedev ended his St. Petersburg speech, “what we need are financial institutions of a completely new type, where particular political issues and motives, and particular countries will not dominate.”

When foreign military spending forced the US balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances. The alternative by default was to invest their subsequent payments inflows in US Treasury bonds, as if these still were “as good as gold.” Central banks now hold $4 trillion of these bonds in their international reserves – land these loans have financed most of the US Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades now! Given the fact that about half of US Government discretionary spending is for military operations – including more than 750 foreign military bases and increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and transporting countries – the international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon, along with US buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold.

The main political issue confronting the world’s central banks is therefore how to avoid adding yet more dollars to their reserves and thereby financing yet further US deficit spending – including military spending on their borders?

For starters, the six SCO countries and BRIC countries intend to trade in their own currencies so as to get the benefit of mutual credit that the United States until now has monopolized for itself. Toward this end, China has struck bilateral deals with Argentina and Brazil to denominate their trade in renminbi rather than the dollar, sterling or euros,3 and two weeks ago China reached an agreement with Malaysia to denominate trade between the two countries in renminbi.[4] Former Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad explained to me in January that as a Muslim country, Malaysia wants to avoid doing anything that would facilitate US military action against Islamic countries, including Palestine. The nation has too many dollar assets as it is, his colleagues explained. Central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan of the People’s Bank of China wrote an official statement on its website that the goal is now to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations.”5  This is the aim of the discussions in Yekaterinburg.

In addition to avoiding financing the US buyout of their own industry and the US military encirclement of the globe, China, Russia and other countries no doubt would like to get the same kind of free ride that America has been getting. As matters stand, they see the United States as a lawless nation, financially as well as militarily. How else to characterize a nation that holds out a set of laws for others – on war, debt repayment and treatment of prisoners – but ignores them itself? The United States is now the world’s largest debtor yet has avoided the pain of “structural adjustments” imposed on other debtor economies. US interest-rate and tax reductions in the face of exploding trade and budget deficits are seen as the height of hypocrisy in view of the austerity programs that Washington forces on other countries via the IMF and other Washington vehicles.

The United States tells debtor economies to sell off their public utilities and natural resources, raise their interest rates and increase taxes while gutting their social safety nets to squeeze out money to pay creditors. And at home, Congress blocked China’s CNOOK from buying Unocal on grounds of national security, much as it blocked Dubai from buying US ports and other sovereign wealth funds from buying into key infrastructure. Foreigners are invited to emulate the Japanese purchase of white elephant trophies such as Rockefeller Center, on which investors quickly lost a billion dollars and ended up walking away.

In this respect the US has not really given China and other payments-surplus nations much alternative but to find a way to avoid further dollar buildups. To date, China’s attempts to diversify its dollar holdings beyond Treasury bonds have not proved very successful. For starters, Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs steered its central bank into higher-yielding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities, explaining that these were de facto public obligations. They collapsed in 2008, but at least the US Government took these two mortgage-lending agencies over, formally adding their $5.2 trillion in obligations onto the national debt. In fact, it was largely foreign official investment that prompted the bailout. Imposing a loss for foreign official agencies would have broken the Treasury-bill standard then and there, not only by utterly destroying US credibility but because there simply are too few Government bonds to absorb the dollars being flooded into the world economy by the soaring US balance-of-payments deficits.

Seeking more of an equity position to protect the value of their dollar holdings as the Federal Reserve’s credit bubble drove interest rates down China’s sovereign wealth funds sought to diversify in late 2007. China bought stakes in the well-connected Blackstone equity fund and Morgan Stanley on Wall Street, Barclays in Britain South Africa’s Standard Bank (once affiliated with Chase Manhattan back in the apartheid 1960s) and in the soon-to-collapse Belgian financial conglomerate Fortis. But the US financial sector was collapsing under the weight of its debt pyramiding, and prices for shares plunged for banks and investment firms across the globe.

Foreigners see the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization as Washington surrogates in a financial system backed by American military bases and aircraft carriers encircling the globe. But this military domination is a vestige of an American empire no longer able to rule by economic strength. US military power is muscle-bound, based more on atomic weaponry and long-distance air strikes than on ground operations, which have become too politically unpopular to mount on any large scale.

On the economic front there is no foreseeable way in which the United States can work off the $4 trillion it owes foreign governments, their central banks and the sovereign wealth funds set up to dispose of the global dollar glut. America has become a deadbeat – and indeed, a militarily aggressive one as it seeks to hold onto the unique power it once earned by economic means. The problem is how to constrain its behavior. Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank advisor now with China’s Academy of Sciences, suggested that US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner be advised that the United States should “save” first and foremost by cutting back its military budget. “U.S. tax revenue is not likely to increase in the short term because of low economic growth, inflexible expenditures and the cost of ‘fighting two wars.’”6

At present it is foreign savings, not those of Americans that are financing the US budget deficit by buying most Treasury bonds. The effect is taxation without representation for foreign voters as to how the US Government uses their forced savings. It therefore is necessary for financial diplomats to broaden the scope of their policy-making beyond the private-sector marketplace. Exchange rates are determined by many factors besides “consumers wielding credit cards,” the usual euphemism that the US media cite for America’s balance-of-payments deficit. Since the 13^th century, war has been a dominating factor in the balance of payments of leading nations – and of their national debts. Government bond financing consists mainly of war debts, as normal peacetime budgets tend to be balanced. This links the war budget directly to the balance of payments and exchange rates.

Foreign nations see themselves stuck with unpayable IOUs – under conditions where, if they move to stop the US free lunch, the dollar will plunge and their dollar holdings will fall in value relative to their own domestic currencies and other currencies. If China’s currency rises by 10% against the dollar, its central bank will show the equivalent of a $200 million loss on its $2 trillion of dollar holdings as denominated in yuan. This explains why, when bond ratings agencies talk of the US Treasury securities losing their AAA rating, they don’t mean that the government cannot simply print the paper dollars to “make good” on these bonds. They mean that dollars will depreciate in international value. And that is just what is now occurring. When Mr. Geithner put on his serious face and told an audience at Peking University in early June that he believed in a “strong dollar” and China’s US investments therefore were safe and sound, he was greeted with derisive laughter.7

Anticipation of a rise in China’s exchange rate provides an incentive for speculators to seek to borrow in dollars to buy renminbi and benefit from the appreciation. For China, the problem is that this speculative inflow would become a self-fulfilling prophecy by forcing up its currency. So the problem of international reserves is inherently linked to that of capital controls. Why should China see its profitable companies sold for yet more freely-created US dollars, which the central bank must use to buy low-yielding US Treasury bills or lose yet further money on Wall Street?

To avoid this quandary it is necessary to reverse the philosophy of open capital markets that the world has held ever since Bretton Woods in 1944. On the occasion of Mr. Geithner’s visit to China, “Zhou Xiaochuan, minister of the Peoples Bank of China, the country’s central bank, said pointedly that this was the first time since the semiannual talks began in 2006 that China needed to learn from American mistakes as well as its successes” when it came to deregulating capital markets and dismantling controls.8

An era therefore is coming to an end. In the face of continued US overspending, de-dollarization threatens to force countries to return to the kind of dual exchange rates common between World Wars I and II: one exchange rate for commodity trade, another for capital movements and investments, at least from dollar-area economies.

Even without capital controls, the nations meeting at Yekaterinburg are taking steps to avoid being the unwilling recipients of yet more dollars. Seeing that US global hegemony cannot continue without spending power that they themselves supply, governments are attempting to hasten what Chalmers Johnson has called “the sorrows of empire” in his book by that name – the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order. If China, Russia and their non-aligned allies have their way, the United States will no longer live off the savings of others (in the form of its own recycled dollars) nor have the money for unlimited military expenditures and adventures.

US officials wanted to attend the Yekaterinburg meeting as observers. They were told No. It is a word that Americans will hear much more in the future.

Notes

1 Andrew Scheineson, “The Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” Council on Foreign Relations,

Updated: March 24, 2009: “While some experts say the organization has emerged as a powerful anti-U.S. bulwark in Central Asia, others believe frictions between its two largest members, Russia and China, effectively preclude a strong, unified SCO.”

2 Kremlin.ru, June 5, 2009, in Johnson’s Russia List, June 8, 2009, #8.

3 Jamil Anderlini and Javier Blas, “China reveals big rise in gold reserves,” Financial Times, April 24, 2009. See also “Chinese political advisors propose making yuan an int’l currency.” Beijing, March 7, 2009 (Xinhua). “The key to financial reform is to make the yuan an international currency, said [Peter Kwong Ching] Woo [chairman of the Hong Kong-based Wharf (Holdings) Limited] in a speech to the Second Session of the 11^th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country’s top political advisory body. That means using the Chinese currency to settle international trade payments …”

4 Shai Oster, “Malaysia, China Consider Ending Trade in Dollars,” Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2009.

5 Jonathan Wheatley, “Brazil and China in plan to axe dollar,” Financial Times, May 19, 2009.

6  “Another Dollar Crisis inevitable unless U.S. starts Saving – China central bank adviser. Global Crisis ‘Inevitable’ Unless U.S. Starts Saving, Yu Says,” Bloomberg News, June 1, 2009. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aCV0pFcAFyZw&refer=asia

7 Kathrin Hille, “Lesson in friendship draws blushes,” Financial Times, June 2, 2009.

8  Steven R. Weisman, “U.S. Tells China Subprime Woes Are No Reason to Keep Markets Closed,” The New York Times, June 18, 2008.

Why the World Should Be Watching Central Asia

By ISHAAN THAROOR Ishaan Tharoor – Mon Jun 15, 10:45 am ET

When Pakistani troops began to pummel Taliban positions in the Swat Valley last month, there were other military advances against insurgent outposts – barely noticed by the global media – taking place in valleys not so far away. In late May, Uzbek soldiers and tanks patrolled parts of the troubled Ferghana Valley following shootouts with suspected Islamist extremists and a suicide bombing in the valley’s main city of Andijan. In neighboring Tajikistan, government forces fanned out across the remote Rasht Valley in a supposed attempt to hunt down a notorious militant commander named Abdullo Rakhimov. The veteran jihadi, according to some local reports, had recently abandoned Taliban allies in Pakistan to resume the struggle in his nearby native land.

While much of the focus of the U.S.-led war on terror now surrounds that theater of operations the Obama administration terms “Af-Pak,” the post-Soviet ‘Stans to the north present their own strategic quagmire. The tactical support of governments in the region is becoming increasingly vital for U.S. plans to bring stability to Afghanistan. Central Asian countries also sit atop a significant chunk of the world’s untapped oil and natural gas reserves, assets which are eyed covetously by both neighboring Russia and China, as well as the West. Yet the region – dominated by corrupt and repressive regimes – is itself precariously poised, home to its own native Islamist insurgencies vulnerable to domestic upheaval. “There is the possibility for really unpredictable change,” says Jeffrey Mankoff, a fellow for Russian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. And

it’s change few Central Asia watchers expect to be positive. While great powers vie for resources and influence, countries that were once seen as a bulwark against more turbulent nations to the south and west are themselves lurching toward crisis. See pictures of the fight for water in Central Asia. Still, Central Asia exists on the periphery for most policy makers in the U.S. When not the illusory realm of Borat or an exotic waypoint of horse markets and mutton skewers, the region has been cast off as a dysfunctional Russian annex, easily manipulated by a Kremlin that still views these young republics as satellite states. From Ashgabat to Astana, the ruling elites are all holdovers from the Soviet era, and sometimes more fluent in Russian than their national tongues. “Their regimes operate,” says Eric McGlinchey, a Central Asia specialist and professor of politics and government at George Mason University, “along almost pathological networks of patronage” – and ones that Moscow knows how to navigate. That close working relationship has been on full display recently in Kyrgyzstan: spurred by a Russian promise of $2 billion in aid, the Kyrgyz government signaled its intent to shut down the U.S.’s pivotal Manas air base there in January, and reaffirmed that pledge this week despite recent overtures from the Obama administration.

Russia may be keen to deter an entrenched American presence in its traditional sphere of influence, but is more muted about China‘s expanding role in the region. Resource-hungry Beijing has steadily made inroads west, tying up lucrative energy contracts in Kazakhstan, while committing tens of million dollars to infrastructure and hydropower projects in impoverished Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. China has also become the single largest investor in Afghanistan, building roads through Kabul and setting up a massive $3 billion copper mine. In 2001, China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a geo-political grouping aimed at improving economic and political relations with Russia and other Central Asian nations – as well as a vehicle for Beijing to quash support for separatists in its restive Xinjiang province, whose Muslim Uighurs share ethnic ties with Central Asia’s Turkic populations. The SCO – which is set to convene at a summit in Yekaterinaburg, Russia this week – also declared in 2005 that there must be a timeline for withdrawing all U.S. military bases in Central Asia, a clear sign of Beijing and Moscow’s intent to limit U.S. influence. “Russia and China are both interested in maintaining the status quo,” says Sean Roberts, a Central Asia expert at George Washington University. See pictures of Chinese investment in Africa.

That translates into a somewhat depressing reality for the over 50 million people living in the region. The world’s “freedom rankings” compiled by Freedom House, a Washington D.C.-based human rights NGO, place all five of the post-Soviet ‘Stans near the bottom. Independent media is almost non-existent. Human rights activists are frequently detained and tortured, and many others live in exile. Even in Kyrgyzstan, where a so-called “velvet” revolution toppled the ruling president in 2005, the subsequent government has done little to distinguish itself from the past. “Central Asians tolerate an awful lot,” says Roberts. “They’ve inherited a mentality from the Soviet days where they don’t necessarily believe in politics, or have faith that turning over the government yields a lot of results.”

Yet they are hardly isolated from global events: the impact of the worldwide recession is pushing some Central Asian societies to the brink. Tajikistan, like other poor Central Asian nations, has over the years seen many of its able-bodied men leave to work in the more prosperous cities of Russia and oil-rich Kazakhstan – at least a tenth of the Tajik population of 7 million is migrant labor. Remittances sent home comprise some 40% of the country’s total GDP, according to UN figures, and account for only slightly less in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Now, with the collapse of the Russian economy and the drying up of its construction boom, tens of thousands are returning to rugged homelands that offer few opportunities and to families that depended on their labor abroad. Observers in Tajikistan tell of depressed village after village where groups of unemployed men amble around. The situation “is a potential time bomb,” says the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank, in a report earlier this year that labeled the country “on the road to failure.”

Analysts fear that the deteriorating economic climate, a legacy of ineffectual governance, and an increasingly frustrated population may feed into the designs of established militant groups in the region. The Ferghana Valley, the most densely populated pocket of Central Asia, straddles the Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz borders, and is home to the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a State Department listed terror organization. Militants are known to slip easily across the porous 1,300 km boundary between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, which is also a chief thoroughfare for Afghan opium into the markets of the West. According to Pakistani media, the IMU has helped contribute some 4,000 Uzbek and Tajik fighters to the Taliban forces warring with Islamabad.

The specter of an Islamist threat has often worked in favor of the region’s governments. After 9/11, U.S. Central Asian strategy was dictated largely by the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld. Uzbekistan, ruled its entire independent life by the iron-fisted Islam Karimov, was brought into the fold as a staging ground for American operations in Afghanistan, as well as a willing accomplice in the renditions of suspected terrorists. That cozy partnership ended in 2005 when the Uzbek army gunned down hundreds of civilians protesting for reform in the Ferghana Valley under the pretense that it was curbing an Islamist revolt. U.S. and European condemnation only led the government to turn to Moscow‘s embrace and throw out numerous international NGOs and foreign aid agencies. The country’s dissidents receded further into the margins; the more pronounced opposition now tends to be radical and violent. “Islamic militancy here,” says McGlinchey, “has almost always more to do with the oppressiveness of the local governments than some kind of trans-national religious calling.”

With the anticipated loss of Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. has again turned to Karimov’s Uzbekistan for logistical assistance. Central Asia watchers in the U.S. say that part of the difficulty Washington now faces in the region stems from its own short-sightedness in engaging governments there. “The U.S. approach was one-dimensional,” says Mankoff of the Council on Foreign Relations. “A lot of attention has been paid to cooperating with military and security forces at the expense of a broader relationship.” The Obama administration has no dedicated Central Asia envoy nor is it willing to pursue a strong agenda for change and reform at the risk of provoking Moscow. “Many think it’s a battle not worth fighting,” says Roberts.

Events may soon outpace that calculus, given the alarming collapse of the region’s economies and spikes in militant violence. It’s unclear, though, what a beefed-up American role in the region could look like, and whether it would be in concert – or at odds – with Moscow or Beijing. Headlines in the international press tout the advent of the new “Great Game” in a region that for centuries has been at the whim of larger forces. Not many locals are that interested, though. “We waited and hoped for democratic change after the influence of America,” says Umida Niyazova, a journalist and prominent Uzbek activist living in exile in Germany. “But the years since have only brought more instability.”