A Natural Healing

It's not often that I find good news worth sharing. But this story is a gem. Every time I think the world is falling apart, I hear a story like this that warms my heart and melts my cynicism.
AlterNet

They went to kindergarten together, sharing crayons and sleeping carpets, chocolate milk and peanut butter sandwiches. They navigated the treacherous waters of adolescence, laughing their way through disastrous first dates and drivers ed. They gossiped about teachers, cried over broken hearts, and struggled with algebra.


For as long as Turner County High School's seniors can remember, they've always been together -- black and white, rich and poor. And now less than a month from graduation, they wanted to be together one more time, experiencing one of high school's most sacred traditions: the prom.


In the process, their simple wish would shatter another time-honored tradition in Ashburn, Ga., and change history.


Although segregation ended in this farming community years ago, some say the old ways never truly died. And every spring, while schools around the country planned junior/senior proms, Turner County's parents and students planned two unofficial private proms -- one for the white students, and one for the black.


Within the school's hallways, the parties weren't discussed. No posters were hung, no fliers distributed, no tickets sold. But everyone knew. It was so common that it was considered normal here in rural Georgia.


Because the parties are private, no one tracks the number of towns still holding separate proms, but most people here say fewer places seem to be continuing the practice.


[..]Mandy Alberson's eyes are shining as she inspects herself in the mirror at His and Hers Hairstyles in downtown Ashburn. Consulting a folded piece of paper, the senior, who is white, compares her tiara-topped tresses to the drawing in her hand. "Is this going to hold?" she wails to stylist Luana Moore. "It's gotta last 'til tomorrow morning for 'Good Morning America!' "


The cellphone in her lap rings. It's James Hall, the senior class president, who is African-American. He's got his own problems. A television crew is following him everywhere he goes, and he's not sure if he and his date will be able to meet Mandy and her date at Applebee's after all. They'll meet up at the prom. "I love that boy," Mandy says, clicking the phone closed.


Giddy with excitement, she explains that she and James have been planning this night since middle school. Even then the two friends knew they wanted one prom for everyone. When the school year began, the four senior class officers -- two black and two white -- came to principal Chad Stone and asked for his support. To their surprise, the first-year administrator gave it, wholeheartedly, even agreeing to devote $5,000 of his discretionary funds to the cause.

Rove in the Hotseat, Again...

With the amount of heat the Bush Administration is under, one wonders how they are getting anything done. Gonzales is mortally wounded, the cabal that was Iraq has been split up. Condi is running State and leaving Cheney out of the loop. By now, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich has drafted the Articles of Impeachment on Cheney.
Now it would appear Rove is in trouble. The whole White House could get caught up with this one.
Los Angeles Times

But the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.


The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.


First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.


"We will take the evidence where it leads us," Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. "We will not leave any stone unturned."

Update: The Special Counsel is also under investigation. There is no reason to expect objectivity here.

Terror in the Weather Forecast

When we ignore the health of the environment of this planet, we endanger our children and grandchildren. Past environmental concerns have been about water and air pollution, loss of species and habitat.
But the equation has changed. Environmental damage has already happened. The outcome is global warming. The consequence is expanding deserts, war over arable land, water rights, mass starvation and pestilence on a scale we've never seen. We are now facing lost human habitat for hundreds of millions of people.
Events promise to drive other events and the spiral of increasingly damaging consequences may well put at risk the survival of the human species.
Serious problems are already inevitable. Huge portions of the earth have become increasingly hot and dry. Deserts are expanding. The SWern US is headed for dust bowl conditions. Bangladesh is losing land by rising ocean waters by the day. We won't have the option for ethanol when we need the arable land we have for food.
New York Times OP-ED
Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”

Evidence is fast accumulating that, within our children’s lifetimes, severe droughts, storms and heat waves caused by climate change could rip apart societies from one side of the planet to the other. Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous — and more intractable — than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war or the proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue states today.


Congress and senior military leaders are taking heed: Legislation under consideration in both the Senate and the House calls for the director of national intelligence to report on the geopolitical implications of climate change. And last week a panel of 11 retired generals and admirals warned that climate change is already a “threat multiplier” in the world’s fragile regions, “exacerbating conditions that lead to failed states — the breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism.”


Addressing the question of scientific uncertainty about climate change, Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, a former Army chief of staff who is now retired, said: “Speaking as a soldier, we never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.”


In the future, that battlefield is likely to be complex and hazardous. Climate change will help produce the kind of military challenges that are difficult for today’s conventional forces to handle: insurgencies, genocide, guerrilla attacks, gang warfare and global terrorism.


In the 1990s, a research team I led at the University of Toronto examined links between various forms of environmental stress in poor countries — cropland degradation, deforestation and scarcity of fresh water, for example — and violent conflict. In places as diverse as Haiti, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Africa, we found that severe environmental stress multiplied the pain caused by such problems as ethnic strife and poverty.


Rural residents who depend on local natural resources for their livelihood become poorer, while powerful elites take control of — and extract exorbitant profits from — increasingly valuable land, forests and water. As these resources in the countryside dwindle, people sometimes join local rebellions against landowners and government officials. In mountainous areas of the Philippines, for instance, deforestation, soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have increased poverty and helped drive peasants into the arms of the Communist New People’s Army insurgency.


Other times, people migrate in large numbers to regions where resources seem more plentiful, only to fight with the people already there. Or they migrate to urban slums, where unemployed young men can be primed to join criminal gangs or radical political groups.


Climate change will have similar effects, if nations fail to aggressively limit carbon dioxide emissions and develop technologies and institutions that allow people to cope with a warmer planet.


The recent report of Working Group II of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies several ways warming will hurt poor people in the third world and hinder economic development there more generally. Large swaths of land in subtropical latitudes — zones inhabited by billions of people — will experience more drought, more damage from storms, higher mortality from heat waves, worse outbreaks of agricultural pests and an increased burden of infectious disease.


The potential impact on food output is a particular concern: in semiarid regions where water is already scarce and cropland overused, climate change could devastate agriculture. (There is evidence that warming’s effect on crops and pastureland is a cause of the Darfur crisis.) Many cereal crops in tropical zones are already near their limits of heat tolerance, and temperatures even a couple of degrees higher could lead to much lower yields.


By weakening rural economies, increasing unemployment and disrupting livelihoods, global warming will increase the frustrations and anger of hundreds of millions of people in vulnerable countries. Especially in Africa, but also in some parts of Asia and Latin America, climate change will undermine already frail governments — and make challenges from violent groups more likely — by reducing revenues, overwhelming bureaucracies and revealing how incapable these governments are of helping their citizens.

Virginia Tech: Copy Cat Violence or Social Statement

AlterNet dares to make unpopular observatations and ask uncomfortable questions. Thats why I read them every day. You just get cheerleading from the mainstream news sources, no real leadership.
Here the author asks the tough questions about the Virginia Tech killings. While I don't agree with articles conclusions or many of the commenters, I do think these questions need to be asked.
For a mental health professionals analysis of news reports and a suggestion what we can do, read here.

In his book "No Easy Answer," Brooks Brown, a former Columbine student and childhood friend of one of the Columbine killers, explained how the rage rebellion context reached his school:

The end of my junior year (1998), school shootings were making their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Miss. Two months later, in West Paducah, Ky., Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. ...


Violence had plagued inner-city schools for some time, but these shootings marked its first real appearance in primarily white, middle- to upper-middle-class suburbs. ...


When we talked in class about the shootings, kids would make jokes about how "it was going to happen at Columbine next." They would say that Columbine was absolutely primed for it because of the bullying and the hate that were so prevalent at our school.

The schoolyard shootings in Pearl, Paducah and Jonesboro in 1997 might have seemed little more than isolated incidents if they didn't already have a context in the office massacres that had been leaving behind blood-spattered workplace corpses for over a decade. The three schoolyard shootings happened one after another, creating a snowball effect that helped propel the schoolyard massacre coastward and into cities, to Pennsylvania and Oregon, and later, of course, to Columbine High in Littleton, Colo.


In fact, many schoolyard shooters very consciously saw their massacres as rebellions, however poorly expressed or thought through. Michael Carneal, who slaughtered three students in a high school prayer class in West Paducah, was found to have downloaded the Unabomber's manifesto as well as something called "The School Stopper's Textbook: A Guide to Disruptive Revolutionary Tactics; Revised Edition for Junior High/High School Dissidents," which calls on students to resist schools' attempts to mold students and enforce conformity. The preface starts off, "Liberate your life -- smash your school! The public schools are slowly killing every kid in them, stifling their creativity and individuality, making them into nonpersons. If you are a victim of this, one of the things you can do is fight back." Many of Carneal's school essays resembled the Unabomber manifesto. He had been bullied and brutalized, called "gay" and a "faggot." He hated the cruelty and moral hypocrisy of so-called normal society and the popular crowd. Rather than just complain about it all the time like the Goths he befriended, he decided to act.


And now that the media has started digging up the early life of Cho Seung-Hui, the same pattern emerges. Former classmates of Seung-Hui say he "was pushed around and laughed at as a schoolboy" because of his "shyness and the strange, mumbly way he talked":

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va. [with Seung-Hui] ... recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said. "As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China.'"

Luke Woodham, the high school killer in Pearl, Miss., whose murder spree preceded Carneal's by two months, was even more explicit in his rebellion. Minutes before starting his schoolyard rampage, Woodham handed his manifesto to a friend, along with a will. "I am not insane," he wrote. "I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. ... All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will. ... It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can't pry your eyes open, if I can't do it through pacifism, if I can't show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet."


The Columbine killers openly declared that their planned massacre was intended to ignite a nationwide uprising. "We're going to kick-start a revolution, a revolution of the dispossessed!" Eric Harris said in a video diary he made before the killings. "I want to leave a lasting impression on the world," he added in another entry. And they certainly did leave an impression, including on Cho Seung-Hui, who referred to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" in his "multimedia manifesto."


If the immediate goal of an armed uprising is to spark wider sympathy and a wider rebellion, then many of these rage uprisings have succeeded.


One of the most troubling and censored aspects of schoolyard massacres is how popular they are with a huge number of kids -- witness the threats issued the day after Cho Seung-Hui's Virginia Tech massacre to the campuses of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, St. Edward's in Austin, Texas, and two high schools in southeastern Louisiana.


The popularity of the Columbine massacre helped spawn several more schoolyard shootings and untold numbers of school-massacre plots, many of which were uncovered, and many of which were the inventions of paranoid adults.

"They said specifically it would be bigger than Columbine," New Bedford Police Chief Arthur Kelly said." -- Associated Press, "New Bedford police say they foiled Columbine-like plot," Nov. 24, 2001

Across America, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris became anti-heroes in the aftermath of their school shooting. In a Rocky Mountain News article titled "Surfers Worship Heroes of Hate," dated Feb. 6, 2000, the journalist details the mass popularity of the Columbine killers: "They made hate-filled videotapes about the day the deed they were planning would make them cult heroes. Now, they appear to have gotten what they wanted -- at least online." The article goes on to quote some of the message boards devoted to Klebold and Harris:

In a Yahoo! club devoted to the killers, a 15-year-old Elizabeth, N.J., girl writes: "They are really my heroes. They are in a way gods ... since I don't believe in 'GOD' or any of that other crap that goes along with it. They are the closest thing we can get to it, and I think they are good at it. They stood up for what they believe in, and they actually did something about it."

A 14-year-old Toronto girl is also cited as belonging to 20 (!) online fan clubs devoted to Klebold and Harris. The point of the article is that the Internet shows just how sick our kids are. It does not consider the possibility that maybe the kids aren't simply evil but have valid[?] reasons for making Klebold and Harris into heroes. Perhaps they are considered heroes for valid[?] reasons, and the Net allows us easier access into the unofficial truth.


The reason Klebold and Harris's hero status is expressed online is obvious: It's the one place where you can exchange ideas with a reasonable hope of maintaining anonymity.


Initially it was thought that Columbine's Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were drug-addled dropouts, Nazi-enthused homosexuals, children of broken homes, Goth-geeks, Trench Coat Mafiosi, Internet/video game freaks or Marilyn Manson goons. But the truth was far more commonplace, and that's what was so disturbing about their massacre. Both came from two-parent homes, both loved their parents and both were highly intelligent but erratic students. They weren't Nazis or drug addicts. They weren't Goths, Trench Coat Mafiosi, or Marilyn Manson fiends; they weren't even gay, as some had theorized.


Some schoolyard shooters were honors students, some were bad students; some were geeks, some were fairly popular; and some were anti-social, others seemed to be easy-going and "not at all the type." Some have been girls, a fact strangely overlooked by most. Like their rage counterparts in the adult world, school shooters could be literally any kid except perhaps those who belonged to the popular crowd, the school's version of the executive/shareholding class. That is to say, about 90 percent of each suburban school's student body is a possible suspect.


And once again, I believe this at the very least suggests that the source of these rampages must be the environment that creates them, not the killers themselves. And by environment I don't mean something as vague as society but rather the schools and the people they shoot and bomb.


It isn't the schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled -- they can't be. It is the schools that need to be profiled.


The fact is that the schoolyard shooters were clear about their intentions: They wanted to "pry your eyes open."

I'm hard pressed to buy that there are any "valid" reasons for the Columbine killers to be considered heros. But indeed it is happening among a few on the web. The concept of a dispossessed underclass seems to resonate in some circles. We should be concerned and willing to do something about the social process of ostracizing and bullying in our schools and work places.

Does Obama Have What It Takes?

Hillary has got to be running scared. Obama has bested her in funding, supporters and is leading her in the critical So. Carolina primary race. The latest is that Hillary has taken a dive in the polls, and with Obama closing fast.
PRNewsWire.com

With fully ten months to go before the first primary elections for the 2008 presidential elections, Senator Hillary Clinton maintains a modest lead among potential Democratic voters over Senator Barack Obama. However, Senator Obama has more potential support than Senator Clinton among Republicans and Independents.


These are some of the results of a Harris Poll of 2,401 U.S. adults surveyed online by Harris Interactive(R) between April 3 and 16, 2007. Like all polls conducted well before an election, it should not be read as a prediction. Rather, it is a snap shot of the presidential "horse race", at a very early stage in the race.


The survey includes a sub-sample of 844 adults who say they expect to vote in a Democratic primary or caucus. When asked who they would be most likely to vote for, 37 percent picked Senator Clinton and 32 percent picked Senator Obama. No other potential candidates came close. Former Senator John Edwards, whose wife's cancer has received widespread media coverage, was picked by 14 percent of potential Democratic voters while former Vice President and Oscar- Winner Al Gore was selected by 13 percent. Three percent chose New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson while Senator Joe Biden and Congressman Dennis Kucinich were each chosen by one percent.

Personally, I've been supporting Edwards. I'm pretty tired of all the smooth talking politicians and Edwards tells us what he intends to do. But Obama has some magic that no one else has. He may just be impossible to beat. Street Prophets describes it best.

Obama laid out last night the beginnings of a simple, effective and powerful frame for his campaign. If he sticks to this script, he'll best Hillary and any Republican candidate out there. His only real competition will be John Edwards, for reasons that should soon become clear.


Here's the frame:


"Our politics is broken". In this formulation, to use Jeffrey Feldman's diagnostics, is a designed to help us do something. Specifically, it is a tool designed to connect us to other people, and it no longer functions properly.


"We have developed an 'incapacity to recognize ourselves in each other'; we have come to believe that 'we are not fundamentally connected' - but as [I] said at the 2004 convention, 'I am my brother's keeper, and my sister's, too.'"


The result of this breakdown is the violence Obama mentioned last night: not just the physical violence of the VTech shootings, but verbal, economic, and cultural violence as well.


The "fix" to broken politics is to reclaim a particular political tradition. Call this the "Abraham, Martin and John" frame, or more properly "Abraham, Martin and Robert," since Obama cited Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy in his speech:


Lincoln: government is "of the people, by the people, for the people"


MLK: "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice"


RFK: "whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded."


In short, we fix politics by restoring to the people the power to "do the right thing," that is, work together to solve problems.


The result of the fix will be a populace empowered to create political and cultural change for themselves. Obama mentioned as problematic "a coarsening culture, cynicism, and despair," as well as inner-city issues no doubt tailored to the audience. Still, this is an endlessly adaptable frame, and will no doubt continue to turn up in many different contexts.


So there's the frame. In short: is a that enables us to create . When it's broken, our connections to one another suffer. When it's fixed, we advance on moral and pragmatic grounds. It wasn't this articulate in Obama's speech, either because he had to do a quick rewrite due to the day's events, or because he's still working out all the kinks. Either way, it's got a lot of potential.

Al Qaeda Targets North Africa

A new Al Qaeda is emerging in North Africa. Though not directly associated with the bin Ladin group, they have declared allegiance in a drive for headlines and have taken to attack the general population as in Iraq. The remnants of the Islamists who fought a civil war in Algeria now want to export terror beyond their borders.
The Daily Star

Moroccan King Mohammad VI on Friday urged North African countries to work together against terrorism, warning his country risks attacks similar to the bombings that hit Algeria.


"We are ready to work with all the leaders of the five Maghreb states to ensure the protection of our people and our countries, and protect against the risks and perils of them turning into a hideous and awful base for terrorism," he said in a condolence message to Algerian President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika.


Two suicide car bombings in Algiers on Wednesday killed 33 people and wounded more than 220. Al-Qaeda's branch in North Africa, formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, claimed responsibility.


The day before, three suicide bombers blew themselves up and a fourth was killed by police in the Moroccan city of Casablanca, fuelling regional fears of resurgence in militant activity following crackdowns by North African governments.

PINR in it's recent Intelligence Brief attributes the Algerian attack to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, formerly known as the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (G.S.P.C.). Their assessment persuasively concludes that the events in Casablanca were not coordinated with the Algerian attack in any organized way. The Casablanca event was poorly conceived and foiled by police. The Algerian event was "successful", "hitting the heart of Algerian political power and killing tens of people".
The recent enactment of a "policy of national reconciliation has paradoxically prompted the resurgence of Algerian terrorism." PINR notes that:

in the past, Algerian authorities have tried to depict Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as a region-wide organization that controls all terrorist activities in the area, but this statement has never been supported by any evidence and seems biased toward an overestimation of its structure in order to obtain more military aid from the United States.


On the contrary, the latest operations seem to confirm that Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is still based on the structure and organization of the former G.S.P.C. Algeria acts as the epicenter of Islamic terrorism in the region: the G.S.P.C. is the only group capable of ambushing a military patrol and hitting the prime minister's office in less than ten days; the degree of coordination and discipline needed to achieve these operations is unknown in places like Libya, Tunisia and even Morocco.


In this sense, the renaming of the organization and its affiliation to al-Qaeda (with all the advantages stemming from the use of this world-famous brand, including wider media coverage) can be seen as a major offensive by the G.S.P.C. to impose its regional control and thus become the most important terrorist group in the area.

With Eye on Iran, Rivals Also Want Nuclear Power

Nuclear technology is now a race for all the countries in the Middle East. I'm sure many of them are fully intending to go to nuclear weapons, truly the only way to deter a threat of invasion or nuclear blackmail.
I can't believe this is good news for the world. I can't believe this new development helps Israel. Clearly, we will be seeing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East like the world has never seen.
Will they be so reluctant to use them? All we need is a radial group to take over one of the government and I believe, eventually, we will see nuclear war in the Middle East.
New York Times

Two years ago, the leaders of Saudi Arabia told international atomic regulators that they could foresee no need for the kingdom to develop nuclear power. Today, they are scrambling to hire atomic contractors, buy nuclear hardware and build support for a regional system of reactors.


So, too, Turkey is preparing for its first atomic plant. And Egypt has announced plans to build one on its Mediterranean coast. In all, roughly a dozen states in the region have recently turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna for help in starting their own nuclear programs. While interest in nuclear energy is rising globally, it is unusually strong in the Middle East.


“The rules have changed,” King Abdullah II of Jordan recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Everybody’s going for nuclear programs.”


The Middle East states say they only want atomic power. Some probably do. But United States government and private analysts say they believe that the rush of activity is also intended to counter the threat of a nuclear Iran.


By nature, the underlying technologies of nuclear power can make electricity or, with more effort, warheads, as nations have demonstrated over the decades by turning ostensibly civilian programs into sources of bomb fuel. Iran’s uneasy neighbors, analysts say, may be positioning themselves to do the same.

Wholesale Discrimination

cbs5.com - More Credit Reports Ruined By Feds' Terror List
A little known Treasury Department terror watch list is causing trouble for people trying to buy homes and cars. CBS 5 Investigates first uncovered the problems last year. Now, a report released Tuesday by civil rights lawyers provides new evidence showing the problem is becoming more widespread.
The 250-page list, posted publicly on a Treasury Department Web site, is being used by credit bureaus, health insurers and car dealerships, as well as employers and landlords, according to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The list includes some of the world's most common names, such as Gonzalez, Lopez, Ali, Hussein, Abdul, Lucas and Gibson, and companies are often unsure how to root out mismatches. Some turn consumers away rather than risk penalties of up to $10 million and 30 years in prison for doing business with someone on the list, the group said.

Obama Leads in So. Carolina Polls

Obama's Up, Clinton's Down and Edwards Has Got Trouble
the most interesting news from the campaign trail at the moment is actually coming out of South Carolina, which is scheduled to hold a critical primary January 29. That's a week after New Hampshire votes and so South Carolina could be a definitional player in the process leading up to the "Super-Duper Tuesday" primaries of February 5, 2008.
Unlike Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina is a state with a substantial African-American population. Additionally, its Democratic politics are defined by traditional Democratic constituencies: people who live in cities, public employees, dockworkers and, yes, people of color.
So who is ahead in South Carolina?
A new Insider Advantage survey, which was not conducted on behalf of any of the campaigns, gives Illinois Senator Barack Obama ☼ a substantial lead.
Obama's at 34 percent.
New York Senator Hillary Clinton ☼ has 20 percent.
Former North Carolina Senator, John Edwards is pulling 17 percent.
The numbers are great for Obama, who has only begun to establish his campaign in the state.
They are very bad news for Clinton, who has put enormous effort into South Carolina, going so far as to hire key political players in the African-American community in an attempt to thwart the Obama surge.
They are even worse news for Edwards, who needs to do well in South Carolina, a state where he won the 2004 Democratic primary, to maintain what credibility he may have as a Democrat who can win in the south. No serious observer of the race doubts that Edwards has done a better job than the other frontrunners of staking out coherent progressive stances on the issues. Clinton continues to try and make the mushy middle sound interesting.
Obama leans left -- indeed, his record on a number of issues, including the war, is one of getting things right when the others did not -- but his campaign so far has tended to be weak when it comes to specifics. His personal story and his rhetoric are his strengths, and that could be enough to bump Edwards aside.

Motives Behind Prosecutor's Firings

Tomorrow Gonzales testifies to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the firings of US Prosecutors. This morning the news had his latest CYA statement about having a hazy memory of the affair.
Some people still say the President can choose whomever he wants to prosecute federal cases. If that were true, every President could cover any wrong-doing by party hacks by simply threatening the job of the prosecutor. One can be sure that this has happened in the past. But a wholesale firing at the top is about manipulating rule of law. AlterNet has an interesting theory of the reason behind the firings.

[..]the Supreme Court declared in Berger v. United States that a prosecutor's job is to see that justice is done, not to politicize justice. The mass ouster of the top prosecutors had more to do with keeping a grip on power -- by manipulating voting rights -- than with doing justice. And like the Watergate scandal, the evidence points to a cover-up.


This cover-up revolves around efforts by the Bush administration to disenfranchise African-American voters in communities where the vote would likely be close. George W. Bush came to power in 2000 by a razor- thin margin awarded him by the Supreme Court. During the 2004 election, there were allegations of attempts to disenfranchise African-American voters, especially in Ohio. Yet no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African-American or Native American voters from 2001 to 2006.


Instead, the administration instigated efforts that would further disenfranchise these voters. U.S. attorneys were instructed to prosecute "voter fraud" cases. "Voter fraud" has "become almost synonymous with 'voting while black,'" the New York Times' Paul Krugman observed. Also, Republican lawmakers enacted voter ID laws which established new hurdles for voters to jump.


Former staffers in the Justice Department's civil rights division said they were "repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia's voter ID law to Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters," Krugman added.


The administration's effort to prosecute voter fraud is a sham. The New York Times reports that voter experts have found "widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud." [..]


The Bush administration has been hyping voter fraud since the last election; Karl Rove called it an "enormous and growing" problem. Two of the fired U.S. attorneys, David Iglesias from Albuquerque and John McKay from Seattle, were dismissed because they refused to file voter fraud charges after being warned to do so by well-placed Republicans. Others were fired for pursuing investigations of Republicans.


Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales' former right-hand man, wrote in an email that the qualification to be a U.S. attorney was to be a "loyal Bushie."


[..]Likewise, there is a suspicious 16-day gap in the email records between the Justice Department and the White House just before seven of the U.S. attorneys were fired in December. Moreover, many of the communications about the matter were conducted using email accounts of the Republican National Committee instead of government accounts, possibly in violation of the Presidential Records Act.


The Los Angeles Times reported that senior Justice Department officials prepared documentation to justify the firings after the dismissals. One Justice Department official threatened to "retaliate" against the eight fired U.S. attorneys if they continued to publicly speak about their dismissals.


Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who heads the Justice Department, denied he was involved in discussions about the firings. But Sampson testified that Gonzales was consulted at least five times and signed off on the plan to fire the U.S. attorneys. "I don't think it's entirely accurate what he [Gonzales] said," Sampson told the Senate Judiciary Committee.


Gonzales is reportedly sweating bricks over his own testimony before that Committee, slated for April 17. As a result of Gonzales' stonewalling in response to the House Judiciary Committee's request for documents, committee chairman Rep. John Conyers has subpoenaed the records. If the Justice Department defies the subpoena, the Judiciary Committee, and the full Congress, could cite the department for contempt of Congress, and a federal grand jury could issue criminal indictments for obstruction of justice.


The White House has indicated it will not allow Karl Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers to testify under oath. Why the resistance unless they intend to lie?


Alberto Gonzales should be fired, not just for malfeasance in the U.S. attorney affair, but also for advising Bush to violate the Geneva Conventions which led to torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. Recall that Gonzales told Bush the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete." Those were the same words the Nazi lawyers used at Nuremberg to describe the Geneva Conventions.


Firing Gonzales may temporarily stanch the flood of accusations about the U.S. attorney matter. But the corruption, the lawbreaking, and the cover-up go deeper -- all the way up to the Oval Office. Hopefully, Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers will put impeachment back on the table.

Walter Reed: A Case of Neglect

Here is an article that helps create a new scapegoat for the Bush Administration trying to avoid responsibility for severely cutting funding for veteran health care. All money went to Iraq. Funding for anything else was severely cut, especially in the military and veteran programs. CBS News helps Bush by attributing the blame to the "Pentagon", a behomouth that includes no real accountability.

Money woes and Pentagon neglect are to blame for shoddy outpatient conditions and bureaucratic delays at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, an independent review has concluded.


The blistering report called for major changes in troop care and cautioned that problems probably extend to Army hospitals around the country.


“The American ethic is that America always takes care of its wounded,” said John O. “Jack” Marsh, Army secretary during the Reagan administration and co-chairman of the review. “We must make certain that America continues that ethic.”


Co-chairman Togo D. West, secretary of the Army and Veterans Affairs under President Clinton, blasted the Pentagon's “virtually incomprehensible” inattention to maintenance at Walter Reed as well as an “almost palpable disdain” for troop care.


“Although Walter Reed's rich tradition remains to this day unchallenged, its high reputation has not been maintained,” he said.

Another Bush Slime-ball Caught

Another of Bush' cronies has been shown to be the slime-ball he is. Wolfowitz, the man we can thank for the Iraq debacle, went to the World Bank to root out third world corruption, and spread a little manure of his own by giving his girlfriend a big fat raise.
Al Jazeera

"I take full responsibility for the details of the agreement," he said, after explaining that he had followed advice given by the bank's ethics committee on the employment of his Libyan-born partner, Shaha Riza.


She was transferred from the World Bank's communications office to the US state department in line with bank regulations to avoid a conflict of interest after Wolfowitz's appointment in mid-2005. While still on the World Bank payroll, she was rapidly promoted and ended up with a $200,000 package - more than Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state.


Wolfowitz acknowledged that the situation surrounding Riza "had the potential to harm this institution" and stressed that he had initially wanted no involvement in her employment terms. Given his romantic involvement with her, he faced a "painful personal dilemma when I was new to the institution" but had made a "good-faith effort to promote my understanding of that advice" of the ethics committee.


The committee's advice had been to "promote and relocate" Riza out of the World Bank, he said, although that is disputed by some bank staff. According to a Financial Times report published on Thursday, Wolfowitz personally ordered the hefty pay rises given to Riza. It cited two people who had seen a memo from Wolfowitz to the head of human resources spelling out the terms of the package.

The truth is, Wolfowitz was given a golden parachute by Bush to reward him for falling on his sword for Bush. He was never the right man for the job, he just wanted to be near his girl friend and to make the world safe for multi-nationals.
MSNBC.com

Some experts in international development praise what Wolfowitz tried to do at the World Bank, demanding that governments, especially in Africa, reduce corruption as a condition of receiving bank funds. But rather than moving the whole bank in that direction—creating a broad-based consensus as a savvy manager might do—Wolfowitz sought to achieve this goal by bringing in a coterie of ideologically pure acolytes who proceeded to offend most World Bank careerists. Even while claiming, as he did in his e-mail message, that “I believe deeply in the mission of the institution,” Wolfowitz seemed to have little use for or trust in the institution. “He set out with a series of objectives that I think were pretty reasonable, but he built up a lot of antibodies within the World Bank and among the executive directors,” says Dennis de Tray, a Washington-based economist and former World Bank official. “Wolfowitz and the cabal sent signals to the staff that their expertise was unneeded and uninteresting.” So powerful did the internal rebellion against Wolfowitz’s tactics grow—well before the Riza story broke—that Britain, a stalwart U.S. ally, led a campaign to remove Wolfowitz’s sole decision-making authority on bank lending.


Wolfowitz’s entire career in Washington, dating back nearly 40 years, has been largely about leading small right-wing insurgencies against establishment thinking. In 1969, he joined forces with fellow neocon Richard Perle for the first time when the two ran a committee that sought to undermine the Nixon-Kissinger push for an antiballistic-missile treaty.

“War on Drugs” Is Class Warfare

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: The U.S. “War on Drugs” Is an Assault on South America’s Poorest
Like elsewhere in the Chapare, Eterazama is surrounded by small coca farms. The tropical climate allows farmers to produce coca year-round, harvesting their crop every three to four months. Most of the region's coca is produced by small farmers who travel for miles by bike, car and on foot to sell their leaves at legal, union-controlled markets in towns like this. Coca purchased at town markets is usually resold in larger city markets. The union controls sales as tightly as possible, and those caught selling coca outside the legal, union-controlled markets are not allowed back.
For many farmers in the Chapare, the alternative to growing coca is unemployment and hunger. "We need to take care of our coca as if it were a child so that the whole family can survive," Zurita said. "The coca gives us food. It takes care of our education and healthcare because here education and healthcare are not free. When we sell coca, we are able to buy school supplies for our children so they can study."

Sudan and Chad Clash

The disaster that is Darfur has turned into a border war between Sudan and Chad. Two of the poorest countries in the world now spend their money and men on war while the population gets caught in the cross fire. I suspect global warming will lead to a lot of these conflagrations in the future.
washingtonpost.com

Sudanese Janjaweed militiamen killed as many as 400 people in the volatile eastern border region near Sudan, leaving an "apocalyptic" scene of mass graves and destruction, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday.


The attacks took place March 31 in the border villages of Tiero and Marena, about 550 miles from Chad's capital, N'Djamena. Chadian officials initially said that 65 people had died but that the toll was certain to rise.


"Estimates of the number of dead have increased substantially and now range between 200 and 400," the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said. "Because most of the dead were buried where their bodies were found -- often in common graves owing to their numbers -- we may never know their exact number."


The attackers encircled the villages and opened fire, pursued fleeing villagers, robbed women and shot the men, UNHCR said. Many who survived the initial attack died later from exhaustion and dehydration, often while fleeing.


Sudan and Chad repeatedly have traded accusations of backing rebels in each other's countries, and both have denied the allegations. Both countries also have signed peace deals promising to stop the border fighting.


U.N. officials have warned of the possibility of increasing violence in the region where Chad, Sudan and the Central African Republic meet. Fighting in Sudan's western Darfur region has left as many as 450,000 dead from violence and disease.


Sudanese leaders are accused of unleashing the pro-government Arab militia, the Janjaweed, which is blamed for widespread attacks and rapes against ethnic Africans.


On Monday, the Sudanese military said 17 of its soldiers were killed repelling a Chadian army raid on a Sudanese border town in western Darfur.


In a statement, Osman Mohamed al-Aghbash, a Sudanese army spokesman, said a Chadian army unit consisting of 140 trucks and seven armored vehicles crossed into Sudan and attacked For Baranga, a small town within several miles of the Chad border.

Another Enemy of the People

Sometimes it seems that the Bush Administration is so determined to carry out it's agenda, it's willing to chew off it's own leg to get it's way. Now the Bush Administration has turned to harassing a conservative law professor who dared to make a speech critical of the Bush Administration.
Has anyone any doubts how fascistic these guys are? Bush's comment, "You're either with us or against us" takes on a new meaning.
Balkinization

Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. For those who do not know, Professor Murphy is easily the most distinguished scholar of public law in political science. His works on both constitutional theory and judicial behavior are classics in the field. Bluntly, legal scholarship that does not engage many themes in his book, briefly noted below, Constitutional Democracy, may be legal, but cannot be said to be scholarship. As interesting, for present purposes, readers of the book will discover that Murphy is hardly a conventional political or legal liberal. While he holds some opinions, most notably on welfare, similar to opinions held on the political left, he is a sharp critic of ROE V. WADE, and supported the Alito nomination. Apparently these credentials and others noted below are no longer sufficient to prevent one from becoming an enemy of the people.


"On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving."


"When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years."


"I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said. "

Iglesias: Why I Was Fired

Bush and the Republicans have systematically undermined rule of law to benefit themselves and to further a fascistic agenda to roll back our civil rights under the guise of "never ending war." This in and of itself undermines the Constitution and American values and is in my mind an impeachable offense.
We see just how far our system has been undermined when a President who can't keep his pants zipped is impeached where as a President who would be king is still supported by a major political party.
There are so many impeachable offenses, yet none so far appears to be sticking. Hopefully, the latest will.
New York Times

WITH this week’s release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters.


Of course, as one of the eight, I’ve felt this way for some time. But now that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for “performance related” reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly. MORE

washingtonpost.com

Mr. Iglesias, it turns out, was a late addition to the target list. He was a "diverse up-and-comer" considered for promotion and, in a March 2005 assessment, was placed in the category of "recommend retaining; strong U.S. attorneys who have produced well, managed well and exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general." Indeed, Mr. Iglesias's name didn't turn up on the list of those to be terminated until Nov. 7, 2006. How and why? The answers, though still incomplete, do not paint the Bush administration in an attractive light.


It was already known, before testimony last month by D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, that two New Mexico Republicans -- Sen. Pete V. Domenici and Rep. Heather A. Wilson -- had called Mr. Iglesias before the election to inquire about a criminal investigation involving a Democratic politician. Mr. Domenici, having reached Mr. Iglesias at his home, hung up when the prosecutor informed him that no indictment would be forthcoming before the election; he also placed repeated calls to the attorney general and deputy attorney general complaining about Mr. Iglesias.


In addition, New Mexico Republican Party Chairman Allen Weh complained to White House adviser Karl Rove about Mr. Iglesias. And, last but not least, President Bush himself passed on to the attorney general complaints about U.S. attorneys, including Mr. Iglesias, who were allegedly failing to aggressively pursue voter fraud cases.


Mr. Sampson's testimony showed that Mr. Iglesias was added to the list after Mr. Rove also complained to the attorney general about Mr. Iglesias's supposedly poor performance on voter fraud. This revelation not only adds to the evidence undercutting the attorney general's professions of ignorance about the whole episode; it deepens the sense that the judgment about whom to fire was influenced, if not dictated, by political considerations.

Sunni group condemns Iraq al-Qaeda

Death Squads are laying low, waiting for the "surge" to end. So death rates are down in Baghdad. But devastting suicide bombings that are taking increasing numbers of casualties have kept overall death rates the same. From the pattern of violence, many Sunni insurgents have shifted operations to outside of Baghdad. According to the New York Times

...there is little sign that the Baghdad push is accomplishing its main purpose: to create an island of stability in which Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds can try to figure out how to run the country together. There has been no visible move toward compromise on the main dividing issues, like regional autonomy and more power sharing between Shiites and Sunnis.

But something is going on in the Sunni community. Insurgent leaders have continued to speak out against Al Qaeda. It appears to be increasingly isolated.
Al Jazeera

The Islamic Army in Iraq, believed to be the largest group of former Baathists and army officers fighting Iraqi and US forces, called on Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, to take more responsibility for al-Qaeda in Iraq. "Killing Sunnis has become a legitimate target for them, especially rich ones. Either they pay them what they want or they kill them," a statement from the group said. "They would kill any critic or whoever tries to show them their mistakes." The group said it had dealt with al-Qaeda with "patience and wisdom" to keep a united "resistance front". "But this was not fruitful," the group said.


The growing tension highlights a struggle for power involving Sunni tribal leaders who are angered by al-Qaeda in Iraq's indiscriminate killing of civilians. Sunni Arab officials have also urged what they call "the real resistance" to disown al-Qaeda and engage in talks with the government to end violence which has driven the country closer to an all-out civil war. "We also call ... on every Qaeda member in the Land of Mesopotamia to review themselves and their positions ... and for those who committed wrongful acts to repent quickly," the statement said.

Ethiopia 'expands Somali mission' - EU Investigating Alleged War Crimes

Al Jazeera is reporting a new offensive in Somalia accompanied by a new incursion of Ethiopian troops. Local residents have reported hundreds of Ethiopian soldiers moving into Mogadishu via trucks and air transport. Ethiopia is still reporting they are withdrawing from Somalia.
However there is clearly an offensive going on, allegedly prior to a "National Reconciliation" conference scheduled to begin on April 16th. Perhaps most significantly, the US new allies are being accused of war crimes.

A senior European Union security official has warned the head of the EU delegation for Somalia and Kenya that military forces may have committed war crimes in Somalia. The official warned that donor countries could be considered complicit in any possible crimes if they do nothing to stop them. The warning was made in an urgent memo to Eric van der Linden, the EU ambassador based in Nairobi, Kenya. The author, whose name was blanked out on the copy obtained by The Associated Press, went on to detail the exact statutes that they believed may have been violated.


The official's email said: "I need to advise you that there are strong grounds to believe that the Ethiopian government and the transitional federal government of Somalia and the African Union (peacekeeping) Force Commander, possibly also including the African Union Head of Mission and other African Union officials have through commission or omission violated the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Apparently whole neighorhoods have been bombed to rubble by a joint Somali-Ethiopian offensive. Alleged targetting of civilians with indiscriminate fire from rockets, tanks and artillery from March 29-April 1 have reportedly killed at least 400 people and wounded about 1,000.
The Bush Administration has a consistent way of choosing allies. The more brutal and outrageous the better. As long as the victims are Muslims, it's ok.

Stealing Farm Subsidies

washingtonpost.com
In the past five years alone, the U.S. government has handed out more than $95 billion in agricultural subsidies. Post reporters criss-crossed the country in 2006, identifying more than $15 billion in wasteful, unnecessary and redundant spending.

U.S. agents eye secret prisons in Ethiopia

Our president has not kept his promise to back off the torture or extra-legal renditions. They've just found a patsy to do it for him. Ethiopia is Bush's new Christian country joined in the "war against terror." The Ethiopians have been long known for their use of torture and extra-legal detentions. They have taken the war to Somalia at the bidding of the Bush Administration and are holding accused terrorists from Somalia, Kenya, and Nigeria as well as I'm sure many other locations.
But of course, since they are Christians, that makes it ok.
MSNBC.com

CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaida militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.
Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.


The detainees include at least one U.S. citizen, and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP.


Some were swept up by Ethiopian troops that drove a radical Islamist government out of neighboring Somalia late last year. Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland.


Ethiopia, which denies holding secret prisoners, is a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.


U.S. government officials contacted by AP acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of terrorism.


The prisoners were never in American custody, said an FBI spokesman, Richard Kolko, who denied the agency would support or be party to illegal arrests. He said U.S. agents were allowed limited access by governments in the Horn of Africa to question prisoners as part of the FBI’s counter-terrorism work.

Suicidal Statecraft

GlobalResearch.ca
Unfortunately, one of Carter’s successors – George Walker Bush – has no capacity for diplomacy. Neither has Bush followed the well-established traditions of the American presidency. By engulfing America in a succession of foreign misadventures – and longing to increase their severity and number – Bush has repudiated the sage advice of presidents from George Washington to his immediate predecessor. Bush has displaced the platform of peace as the cornerstone of American foreign policy with a platform of pre-emptive war that he proudly proclaims as “The Bush Doctrine.” Washington, Adams and Carter would never have committed America to such a drastic course.
Another glaring distinction between Bush’s presidency and all the others that went before him has been his repudiation of the separation of church and state. By implementing an undisguised Christian prejudice in funding state programs, Bush has become the theocratic president, a notion that is troubling for the people he governs and deeply disturbing for scholars of constitutional history.
Many have noticed Tony Blair’s references to his own religious preferences as comforting him in his decision to support the theocratic shift in Bush’s America. In Israel, there are theocratic parties in the Knesset and theocratic policies in the constitution. In Occupied Iraq, the constitution has theocratic elements. In Lebanon – a nation governed by Fouad Siniora, a friend of Bush’s theocratic White House – there are numerous theocratic elements that encumber the people from expressing their will through democratic processes. The same can be said for the nations that adhere most closely to American policy throughout the Middle East, including: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and many of the Gulf States.
Seymour Hersh and Michel Chossudovsky have informed us that the goal of the Bush theocracy is to Balkanize the entire Middle East. By transforming the Middle East into a patchwork of religious enclaves, fiefdoms, satrapies and states, Bush’s neoconservative presidency hopes to dismember the region for centuries to come.
By dividing, conquering and infantilizing the Islamic nations, America and its allies will have much more leverage and political control of the oil, gas and energy reserves unique to the region. In an age of diminishing oil supplies, this power would give the American Imperium virtual dictatorial control over world civilization for centuries to come.
Michael Carmichael is Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of The Planetary Movement, Oxford United Kingdom. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Fomenting a Secret War in Iran

The Blotter
A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News. The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran. It has taken responsibility for the deaths and kidnappings of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials.
U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or "finding" as well as congressional oversight.
Tribal sources tell ABC News that money for Jundullah is funneled to its youthful leader, Abd el Malik Regi, through Iranian exiles who have connections with European and Gulf states.
Jundullah has produced its own videos showing Iranian soldiers and border guards it says it has captured and brought back to Pakistan.
The leader, Regi, claims to have personally executed some of the Iranians.
"He used to fight with the Taliban. He's part drug smuggler, part Taliban, part Sunni activist," said Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant who recently met with Pakistani officials and tribal members.
"Regi is essentially commanding a force of several hundred guerrilla fighters that stage attacks across the border into Iran on Iranian military officers, Iranian intelligence officers, kidnapping them, executing them on camera," Debat said.
Most recently, Jundullah took credit for an attack in February that killed at least 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard riding on a bus in the Iranian city of Zahedan.
Last month, Iranian state television broadcast what it said were confessions by those responsible for the bus attack.
They reportedly admitted to being members of Jundullah and said they had been trained for the mission at a secret location in Pakistan.
The Iranian TV broadcast is interspersed with the logo of the CIA, which the broadcast blamed for the plot.
A CIA spokesperson said "the account of alleged CIA action is false" and reiterated that the U.S. provides no funding of the Jundullah group.
Pakistani government sources say the secret campaign against Iran by Jundullah was on the agenda when Vice President Dick Cheney met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in February.
A senior U.S. government official said groups such as Jundullah have been helpful in tracking Al Qaeda figures and that it was appropriate for the U.S. to deal with such groups in that context.
Some former CIA officers say the arrangement is reminiscent of how the U.S. government used proxy armies, funded by other countries including Saudi Arabia, to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.

Missed Opportunity for Peace

Bush has been determined to support Israel no matter what. Perhaps the best opportunity for peace has presented itself to the Israelis. A Sunni Arab coalition has decided the arising power of Iran needs to be faced head on. The Sunnis can't do that with a fire broiling in their backyard, one the Iranians have been successfully manipulating to their own ends by throwing oil money at Hamas and Hezbolah.
But because Bush won't pressure Israel, this opportunity will pass. The best opportunity to effectively counter Iran with a united front of it's neighbors has been thwarted. Obviously that is not in our interests.
Robert D. Novak - washingtonpost.com

An overriding melancholy here this Holy Week follows Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's mission to Jerusalem last week. To Arabs and Jews seeking meaningful peace negotiations, it confirmed that no progress toward a two-state solution is likely for the remainder of George W. Bush's presidency.


Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected Rice's offer to participate in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for a permanent peace treaty. The word in the Olmert government is that the prime minister's reluctance even to begin talks at this time is fully shared by Bush. Rice is sincere in her desire for peace, but she can accomplish nothing important without the full support of her chief.


The aphorism (originated by Israeli statesman Abba Eban) that Arabs "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" now can be applied to Israel. Last week's Riyadh declaration indicated the willingness of the Arab world to consider a peaceful solution. Now, belief here among peace-seekers is that nothing will happen until a new president enters the Oval Office in 2009.


That was the consensus Tuesday at a conference here on Middle East policy in which I took part. Deal W. Hudson, executive director of the Morley Institute in Washington, which held the conference, expressed hope that Bush might yet grasp the reins of peace. But a diverse assemblage of Palestinians (both Muslim and Christian), Israelis, Americans and other foreigners held little hope for a Bush initiative in the closing months of his administration.


The atmosphere has changed since I was here for Holy Week a year ago. Israeli self-confidence was at a peak then, with the newly installed Olmert openly avowing the unilateral solution to the Palestinian problem developed by his predecessor, Ariel Sharon. Behind that posture was confidence in military superiority. The unhappy results of the Lebanon incursion have modified Israeli expectations and caused a different tone.

Iranian Leader Says He Will Free Brits

It would appear that Iran's intent was to leverage their diplomats being held by Iraqi, Israeli and/or the US. The other reason they captured the Brits was to provoke the US into acting if they were going to while their military was in full activation during it's exersize. By picking the timing of a US strike, they'd be the most prepared.
It would appear that all the sabre rattling by the Bush Administration has been just that. If there was a contingency to attack as soon as provoked, they certainly would have found sufficient provocation. Blair would have certainly accomodated them.
I would not discount the Bush Administration retaining a military option. At least some cooler heads have prevailed. I'm sure the neo-cons were screaming.
And Iran did not get all they wanted. They got access to the diplomats seized at Irbril, but their former prime minister has not reappeared. But Jalal Sharafi, the second secretary at Iran’s mission in Baghdad, was released by unknown armed men, likely Iraqi Intelligence, "affiated" with the CIA. That probably means doing the CIA's bidding. Mr. Sharafi was seized more than eight weeks ago. Holding a diplomat is a violation of international law, akin to the Iranian hostage drama of the Carter Administration.
washingtonpost.com

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today said he had pardoned 15 British sailors seized by the Iranian military two weeks ago and would free them today to be with their families.


In a Tehran press conference Ahmadinejad first decorated members of the Republican Guards who had taken the 15 British personnel captive -- then announced that the British personnel would be released.


"After our meeting they will go to the airport and be with their families," the Iranian president said, according to a translation of the press conference aired on CNN.


The release comes in the midst of intense diplomatic contacts. In addition, in recent days Iraqi authorities released an Iranian diplomat held in Iraq. The Islamic Republic News Agency also reported that Iranian personnel would be allowed to meet with five Iranian men taken by U.S. forces late last year in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil.

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

Remember Lee Iacocca? He was the man that singled handedly rescued Chrysler Corporation from the death throes. He has a new book, and boy to I like what I hear. Here is an excerpt from the Borders Books webpage.

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course."


Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!


You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?


I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have.[...]


The Biggest C is Crisis


Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.


On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It's all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn't safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day—and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero.


That was George Bush's moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he'd regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq—a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn't listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn't scare the crap out of you, I don't know what will.


A Hell of a Mess


So here's where we stand. We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership.


But when you look around, you've got to ask: "Where have all the leaders gone?" Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, competence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.


Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.


Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.


Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when "the Big Three" referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen—and more important, what are we going to do about it?


Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.


I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bobblehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?


Had Enough?


Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope. I believe in America. In my lifetime I've had the privilege of living through some of America's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises—the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the 1970s oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11. If I've learned one thing, it's this: You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it's building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That's the challenge I'm raising in this book. It's a call to action for people who, like me, believe in America. It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close. So let's shake off the horseshit and go to work. Let's tell 'em all we've had enough.


Excerpted from Where Have All the Leaders Gone?. Copyright © 2007 by Lee Iacocca. All rights reserved.

US/Israel and Iran: Trading Disinformation

The war of words has reached a fever pitch. The stuff of supermarket tabloids has made the big time. Sensationalist newspapers are selling papers based on the disinformation campaigns seeking to disarm Iran. Iran counters with an absurd report of a "suicidal" pre-emptive attack on it's neighbors. Probably to poke fun at what they see as psychological warfare that seeks to bring Iran to the negotiation table with a broken spirit.
Russian and Jerusalem newpapers are reporting an imminent attack by US forces against Iran. Meanwhile, Iran is reporting a planned pre-emptive strike from Israel against neighboring Arab states.
GlobalResearch.ca

Citing Russian media and AP, the Jerusalem Post is now reporting that the US will strike Iran on Good Friday between the hours of 4.00 am and 4.00 pm in a coordinated series of air strikes and missile attacks aimed at selected strategic targets.


Russian intelligence sources identify US forces assembled in the Persian Gulf armed with aircraft and missiles that could carry out the hard power attack. The US fleet in the Gulf includes two aircraft carriers: USS Eisenhower and USS Stennis with a third on the way, USS Nimitz.


Russian sources describe Iran's nuclear facilities as well as the command and control architecture of its military as the primary targets of the US attack.


[...]The Russian Defense Ministry rejected the claims of an imminent attack as "myths." There was no immediate response from Washington.


The reports come as the Iranian chief of staff, Hassan Fayrouz Abadi, was quoted on Saturday by Iran's Fars news agency warning leaders of Arab countries that Israel plans to open a "suicidal attack" on its neighbors this summer, to "prevent the withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq and the area."


"I warn the dear leaders and Muslim brothers in the neighboring countries of the occupied territories that this suicidal attack of the Zionists is threatening them," he said.


The countries in danger, he said, were "Lebanon and Syria, and later Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia."


Also on Saturday, Russia urged Britain and Teheran to resolve the dispute over 15 British sailors and marines captured by Iran last week, a local news agency reported.


Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin urged the two sides to provide the United Nations with their own assessments as to what happened and where exactly the detention occurred so that the body could conduct an independent probe.

However, even the alarmists on the Internet say the timing is all wrong. Michel Chossudovsky says to look for an attack when the third carrier group arrives in the Persian Gulf. He notes the attack on Iraq involved 4 US and one British carrier. Iran has a respectable airforce with advanced surface to air missiles and fighter aircraft.
GlobalSecurity.org

In December 2005 Iran entered into a contract to purchase 29 TOR M1 [SA-15 GAUNTLET] mobile surface-to-air missile defence systems from Russia worth more than USD 700 million (EUR 600 million). The TOR-M1 is a mobile system designed for operation at medium- and low-altitude levels against aircraft and guided missiles. Each unit consists of a vehicle armed with eight missiles and a radar that can track 48 targets and engage two simultaneously. The TOR-M1 systems have medium-range capabilities for intercepting planes and missiles and are not designed for ground operations.


There is no dispositive source of information on Iranian air defense deployment. Key SAM-defended areas include Tehran and centers involved in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs. Iran appears to have deployed the SA-5 batteries to defend Tehran, major ports, and oil facilities, providing long-range medium-to-high altitude coverage of vital coastal installations. The I-Hawk and SA-2 batteries are reportedly located around Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Bandar Abbas, Kharg Island, Bushehr, Bandar Khomeini, Ahwaz, Dezful, Kermanshah, Hamadan, and Tabriz, providing point defense for key bases and facilities. Some of these sites lack sufficient missile launchers to be fully effective.


Iran imported surveillance radars from the China National Electronics Import-Export Corporation. The radar can detect targets up to 300 km away and is now part of Iran's air defense system. But even with China's help, Iran's air defenses remained porous, perhaps on par with Iraqi capabilities demonstrated in the 1991 Gulf war. The launchers are scattered too widely prevent relatively rapid suppression. Iran lacks the low altitude radar coverage, overlapping radar network, command and control integration, sensors, and resistance to jamming and electronic countermeasures needed for an effective air defense net. The defenses operate a point defense mode.


[..]As of 2000 it was estimated that only 40 of the 132 F-4Ds, 177 F-4Es and 16 RF-4E. Phantoms delivered before 1979 remained in service. At that time, approximately 45 of the 169 F-5E/Fs delivered are still flying, while perhaps 20 F-14A Tomcats of the 79 initially delivered were airworthy. Another 30 F-4s, 30 F-5s and 35 F-14s have been cannibalized for spare parts. One report suggested that the IRIAF can get no more than seven F-14s airborne at any one time. Iran claims to have fitted F-14s with I-Hawk missiles adapted to the air-to-air role.


Russia and Iran enjoy a close military sales relationship, and have taken steps for the Russians to sell modernized air defense systems to Iran. In February 2001 a spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry stated that "Iran hopes for ongoing military-technical cooperation with Russia. Our country plans to modernize Iranian Air Defense and it will ask Russia to sell some air defense systems in support of that."


An unknown number of "new" Su-25s were delivered to the Iranian Revolution Guards Corps Air Force (IRGCAF) in 2003. Where these Frogfoots originate from is unclear.


In July 2003 Chengdu Aircraft Industrial Corporation (CAIC) unveiled the new ‘Super-7’ or Chao Qi fighter plane to the public. The new Super-7 is “an all-purpose light fighter, required to have all-weather operation capabilities, be capable of performing the dual tasks of dogfight and air-to-ground attack, and have the ability to launch medium-range missiles. Mass production of the fighter will not begin until two and a half years of research are completed. The plane is being produced to be sold abroad to developing nations. China already has received orders from Iran and some African countries.


There have been reports of some 10 F-8Ms "Finback", 7 Tu-22Ms, 19 MIG-27s, and several MIG-31s (Russia's most modern fighter aircraft, US$40 million ) being present in Iran, but these are not confirmed.

It is unlikely the US would dare attack Iran without it's full capabilities readily at hand.

Supreme Court: America's Have No Right To Elect A President

E. J. Dionne Jr. - Bypassing the Electoral College - washingtonpost.com
"The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States. . . . "
That is not some reactionary piece of propaganda denying your right to choose the next president. It is one of the more memorable sentences from the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, the hard-to-forget 2000 case that put the current occupant in the White House.
And strictly speaking, the court was right. As the majority opinion went on to note, we have the right to use our ballots to pick members of the electoral college -- which in turn chooses the president -- because every state legislature has decided on "statewide election" as the way to get the job done. In theory, legislatures have the power to pick electors without even consulting the voters.
The American way of electing presidents is antiquated, impractical and dangerous. It is odd indeed that in 2000, a nation devoted to spreading democracy throughout the world gave power to a man who received 543,895 fewer votes than his opponent. Under our system, George W. Bush's disputed 537-vote margin in Florida was deemed more important than Al Gore's half-million-ballot advantage nationwide.
And please, dear Republican friends, don't shout "Get over it!" Think back to 2004, when Bush defeated John Kerry by 3 million votes nationally. If just 59,300 people in Ohio had voted for Kerry instead of Bush, Kerry would have won the electoral college and become president. You can write the scripts for the Fox News commentaries about Kerry stealing the White House.
It does not have to be this way. As someone who lives in Maryland, I am proud that my state may pioneer a process that could lead to popular election of the president. The state Senate passed a bill last Wednesday that would commit Maryland's 10 electors to voting for the winner of the nationwide popular vote. The bill is expected to pass in the House of Delegates this week, and Gov. Martin O'Malley has said he would sign it.

Somalia Returns To Chaos

The US backed Ethiopian incursion into Somalia has bogged down into an urban street fight. Civilians are again caught in the crossfire, recruiting more for the ICC side of the conflict.
This little adventure is symptomatic of the Bush Administration weak foreign policy. If you don't like a someone vying for power, create the opposition. If that doesn't work, shoot him.
Al Qaeda is now recruiting for this war as well. The Somali Government claimed that al-Qaeda had named an Islamist commander, Aden Hashi Ayro, as its leader in Mogadishu.
Al Jazeera

On Thursday, Ethiopian troops backed by tanks and helicopters launched the assault to crush armed groups opposing Somalia's weak interim government in Mogadishu.


The armed groups, made up of the remnants of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) movement that was pushed out of the city last year as well as a number of clan militias fighting alongside them, have fired mortars from inside residential areas.


Ethiopian troops have used heavy artillery to shell the fighters' positions inside those areas. However, civilians caught in the crossfire have been the main victims. Hospitals have been overwhelmed, but most victims have been unable to seek any kind of help because of the ongoing clashes. Doctors were also trapped in their homes by the violence and thousands of people have fled Mogadishu in recent days. Corpses remain on the streets as ongoing fighting and mortar fire made it difficult to retrieve bodies or tally the dead.


An AFP news agency correspondent on Sunday said he saw the bodies of at least six civilians lying in the street. Residents said hundreds were believed to have been killed across the city of one million people.

New York Times

The chaos in Somalia took an ugly turn on Wednesday when full-scale fighting broke out in Mogadishu and furious crowds mutilated the bodies of government soldiers, chanting, “We will burn you alive!”


The scene was reminiscent of 1993, when Somalis turned on American peacekeepers and dragged their bodies through the streets. Those images and the loss of 18 American soldiers in a single battle, the infamous “Black Hawk Down” episode, led to a swift American withdrawal.


This time the targets were Ethiopian troops and the soldiers of Somalia’s transitional government, both reviled by many people in Mogadishu, Somalia’s chaotic capital. Residents are now beginning to fear that this transitional government is headed in the same direction as the 13 transitional governments that came before it — into a vortex of clan violence and anarchy that has made Somalia an icon of a failed state.


The recent injection of a small force of African Union peacekeepers does not seem to have made a difference.


At dawn on Wednesday, Ethiopian and government soldiers stormed into a neighborhood in southern Mogadishu to disarm gunmen there. Instead, witnesses said, they were greeted by dozens of masked insurgents who blasted them with rocket-propelled grenades.


More than 15 people were killed, including several government soldiers and possibly two Ethiopians.


The neighborhood is home to several clans that feel alienated by the transitional government and was a stronghold of the Islamist movement that took over the city and much of south-central Somalia last year, before being defeated by Ethiopian and government soldiers in December.

TimesOnline

Al-Qaeda has named a militant Islamist commander - trained in Afghanistan and known for his ruthlessness - as its key representative in Mogadishu, as clashes between government troops and insurgents broke out in the Somali capital for the second day.


In this morning’s exchanges, which took place in both northern and southern parts of the city, insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and heavy machine-guns as government troops responded with a barrage of artillery and machine-gun fire, according to witnesses.
No casualties were yet reported, but terrified residents - unwittingly caught up in the exchanges - rushed to make their way out of Mogadishu amid fears that the latest bloodshed would spread.


Today’s events came a day after fierce fighting between government forces and insurgents killed at least 14 people, including soldiers whose bodies were dragged though the streets and set on fire.


The violence – some of the worst in the Somali capital since last year’s ousting of Islamists – led Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi to urge civilians to leave areas in southern Mogadishu “for security reasons”.

What To Do About Pakistan?

Pakistan has been called by the Bush Administration a key ally in the so-called "War On Terror". The truth is, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has been no ally. His involvement with the Bush Administration has been coerced at every turn. Musharraf knows that if he were an ally of Bush, he would have already sparked a civil war in his country. His only control however, has been the support of the military whose blank check has been paid by the US.
Musharraf's control has been dependent on the military and an unlikely alliance with the extreme right wing activists that support the Taliban, which include Pakistan's intelligence community. The problem is that the US war in Afghanistan has taken this ally away. The so-called "Tribal Areas" in Pakistan have evolved since the invasion and have truly become controlled by conservative mullahs who support the Taliban, rather than rightwing patricians owing loyalty to Musharraf. All attempts to intervene in the tribal areas have radicalize the population and solidified control of the mullahs.
Here is a good description of the bleak situation in Pakistan that appears this week in The Nation. Following this is an analysis of options available to Musharraf and the US to attempt to influence the worsening situation in the Tribal Areas.

Pakistan's tribal areas are seven "agencies" piled up against its mountainous border with Afghanistan. Rugged and raw, they are home to 3 million Pashtun tribesmen. For a millennium, they have lived by the Pashtunwali ethic of honor, loyalty and revenge. Some--like North West Frontier Province (NWFP) Governor Ali Mohammed Jan Orakzai, who rules the tribal areas as Musharraf's viceroy--see in such codes a "historical romance of freedom and independence." Others see them as blights of backwardness, poverty and powerlessness. For the past twenty-five years the areas' small but vocal middle class has been demanding their integration into the NWFP and democracy rather than direct rule from Islamabad. Neither has been given.


Change has come in other ways. Following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the tribal areas became the last front line of the cold war. Powered by US and Saudi money, but orchestrated by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), they became the matrix for national, regional and global Islamist movements, of which Al Qaeda was only the most notorious. Where there had been illiteracy, hundreds of madrassas schooled thousands in the litanies of jihad. Where there had been penury, war economies boomed, driven by currencies of gold, guns and opium. According to historian Fazal-ur-Rahim Marwat, 500,000 young men were socialized in such ways of man, God and dope. Most were Pashtun tribesmen, who eventually morphed into the Taliban. Some were Arabs, including Osama bin Laden.


Pakistan's purpose in planting this "volcano on both sides of the border" was geopolitical, says Marwat. Islamization of the tribal areas was to be the vector through which pro-Pakistan Afghan movements like the Taliban could be supplied, enabling if not a client regime in Kabul then at least an anti-Indian one. Domestically, the production of so many versed in political Islam would serve as a counter to secular parties demanding elections and nationalist Pashtun parties demanding rights. The Pakistani military has long seen India, democracy and regional autonomy as existential threats.


What the army did not foresee was the way Islamization would rupture the tribal order on which its rule rested. As a result of the anti-Soviet insurgency and then the Taliban government in Afghanistan, power in tribal areas slipped away from "political agents" and tribal elders appointed by Islamabad. It fell instead to young clerics or mullahs and their followers, who, like them, were poor, disenfranchised and radical. These are the "Pakistan Taliban." Their ideology is an incendiary mix of Pashtun nationalism, anti-Americanism and a prohibitive, Al Qaeda-influenced Islamism. It is not necessarily anti-Pakistan, but it is beyond the writ of the Pakistani regime, says military analyst Ayesha Siddiqa.


"In the old days--the days of the ISI, the CIA and the mujahedeen--there was command and control, including of warlords who went on to join the Taliban," she says. "But [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar was always autonomous, and so are his followers in the tribal areas. What you call the Pakistan Taliban are young men opposed to Musharraf's policies. They will use arms to bring down the policy. They are out of command and control."


The 9/11 attacks made these dynamics visible. Following the Taliban's ouster from Afghanistan in 2001, Pakistani and Pashtun tribesmen gave sanctuary to 2,000-3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in South Waziristan.


For the tribesmen, it was a matter of honor: supporting kinsmen against an invader no less alien than the Soviets. For Pakistan it was a matter of insurance, writes journalist and historian Ahmed Rashid. Musharraf "avoided [confronting] the Taliban because he was convinced that the U.S.-led coalition forces would not stay long in Afghanistan. He wanted to maintain the Taliban as a strategic option in case Afghanistan dissolved into civil war and chaos again."


The initial US response to the Taliban's and Al Qaeda's recovery in the tribal areas was disinterest. "We thought, 'If the region's not on fire, there is no need to bring hoses,'" recalls one Western diplomat. "But it became a fire." By 2003 it was clear the Taliban were resurgent in Afghanistan, aided by its bases in South Waziristan, and that senior Al Qaeda leaders, including perhaps bin Laden, were at large in the tribal areas. American commanders told Musharraf that if his army did not go after them, their army would have to. The Pakistani leader submitted. In fifty-six years of independence Pakistani soldiers had never set foot in the Waziristans, part of the trade-off for keeping the tribes loyal. Musharraf told the elders that with conquest would come largesse. He told the army the operation would be a cakewalk.


The army's tribal campaigns lasted nearly three years. With every incursion, civilian death and displacement, the Pakistan Taliban grew stronger. They defended villages, ambushed army patrols, killed pro-government elders and imposed their own brand of "Islamic" law and order. When the army sued for peace with pro-Taliban tribesmen in the Waziristans in 2005 and 2006, it was not because of a new "holistic" strategy for the tribal areas, as sold by Musharraf to Washington. It was because of the army's military and political defeat. Seven hundred soldiers had been killed, many had deserted and a handful of commissioned officers were court-martialed for refusing to serve. The numbers of civilians killed and displaced were in the thousands. "Everyone supported the Taliban when the army came in. It was a people's revolt. Pakistan had broken its promise, and that's a big thing in the tribal areas. You don't break your promise," says Malik Qadir Khan, a tribal leader in North Waziristan.


The agreements consecrated the Pakistan Taliban as a political power, says Afrasiab Khattak, a Pashtun politician. With the military campaigns, "a vacuum was created, and the Taliban filled it. They had money and guns, both of which are handy for achieving leadership in tribal societies. The only thing they lacked was recognition from the state, and this they got from the agreements." And with the withdrawal of the army, the Taliban could territorialize power into rule. A trip to Miramshah, capital of North Waziristan, confirms that it is no longer the police or elders who assume the functions of governance. It is the mullahs and young men with black shaggy hair and rifles slung over their shoulders. "There's no government in Miramshah. The political agent cannot leave his home. It's the Taliban which runs the place," says Bat Shajjar, a local.

IPS News

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's plans to crack down on Karachi's religious schools and the violent sectarian and jihadi groups many of them support has been an outright failure, says a report released Wednesday by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG).


Banned jihadi and sectarian groups, along with the madrasas -- Islamic religious schools -- and mosques which support them, continue to operate freely in Pakistan's capital city and to train and dispatch jihadi fighters to Afghanistan and Indian-administered Kashmir.


The ICG report calls upon the international community to apply pressure on Musharraf to follow through on his commitments to enforce government controls over the madrasas, and to allow open elections in 2007.


Although concerns about madrasa-trained jihadists largely focus on Pakistan's border regions and Afghanistan, violence has threatened the internal stability of Pakistan.


In 2006, Karachi was rocked by three separate suicide bombings, which killed a U.S. diplomat and the leader of a prominent Shia political group, and wiped out the entire leadership of a Sunni militant group that was locked in a struggle for control over mosques with Sunni rival.


"Exploiting Karachi's rapid, unplanned and unregulated urbanisation and its masses of young, disaffected and impoverished citizens, the madrasa sector has grown at an explosive rate over the past two decades," says the report.


The madrasas are accused of capitalising on the climate of lawlessness in Karachi to encourage illegal activities ranging from land encroachment to violent attacks on rival militant groups.


[..]The ICG points to the absence of a single Pakistani agency with the authority to regulate the madrasa sector, specifically its money flows, as a crucial failure in every one of Musharraf's attempts to curb radical Islam in Pakistan.


To date, most plans to counter radical Islam in madrasas have focused on reforming the madrasa system through the curricula, usually in the form of requiring a range of non-religious courses to be taught alongside the existing religious courses.


Instead, the ICG suggests government and donor funding should be shifted towards increased support and reform of the public school system and away from reforming a madrasa system that has consistently refused to cooperate with government policies.


Focusing on removing sectarian, pro-jihad and anti-minority curricula may find a more responsive audience in the public school system, which depends largely on public funds for survival.


However, such a policy would require large sums of time and money to implement. "You can't just take people off the street and say you're a teacher. They need training," said Lieven.


The report recommends that the government of Pakistan adopt an "effective, mandatory, and madrasa-specific registration law", establish a madrasa regulatory authority, stop treating madrasa certificates as the equivalent of degrees issued by boards of education and universities, and take "effective action against all extremist groups and parties".


[..]The ICG hinges their policy prescriptions on the likelihood of free and fair elections marginalising religious parties and bringing greater political influence to national level moderate parties.


However, some analysts don't believe Musharraf has incentives for free and fair elections or that a smoother democratic process would improve the political situation in Pakistan.


"The Pakistani political system runs on patronage, and there isn't enough patronage to go around," said Lieven.


The report does acknowledge that the international community should use foreign aid to support the public school system and make financial support contingent on the holding of free and fair elections in Pakistan.


Although the ICG recommendations focus on the necessity of democratic transparency and open elections, Lieven points to the dire economy in Pakistan as one of the sources of Islamic extremism in Pakistan.


"It is important that anyone who emerges from the Pakistani education system, madras or public school, have jobs to go to," he said. "Unless you can find jobs for people who come out of the system, including the madrasa system, you won't greatly reduce the threat (of extremism)."