View on Regionalism! Case history-Maharashtra

Even after so many years of independence, I think we still are missing the cord of feeling like a nation. In each and every part of our country, now and then, the demon of fraction/partition appears. We can see the example of Maharashtra, Assam, Delhi, Orissa, Gujraat and many more places. Somewhere people were targeted as being minorities, somewhere being Bihari and somewhere for being Dalits. Women and children are the worst hit, I need not to say in all these occurances. So who were left. A handful of people! Who still want to dominant and rule on the society as they were doing since last thousands of years. Although they are spread over in all political outfits but they have a plateform of there own named RSS with its sister, doughter, brother and son organizations. The politics of hatred is not new for our country and till when it is going to be there. We will lag far behind as a nation in imperial experience.
And the causes are really bullshit. They claim that Biharis, Minorities are claiming there opportunities. But no body try to put his or her finger on the other communities who are in bussiness and intelligentia and they are really very powerful. They never touch a Marbadi or Bengali for that reason, who are spread over the country. Why only Bihari's and Minoritoies are on their Radar? This is a question we should ask to ourselfs first then to others. We will come on any possible solution only when we can satisfy ourselves with some answer first rather than just questioning others. Because its our lack of confidence too on these issues which gives them upper hand.
I hope, we will stay and think before questioning others for a possible solution, which lies in our active participation to save the real character of democrary and feel like a nation, as we are supposed to apart from cricket.

By

Mrityunjay Prabhakar

Connect The Dots Of Those Who Are Connected

Start connecting the dots at the very beginning.

On the 27th of February 1933, the Reichstag (German parliament) caught fire. Hitler described the fire as a "beacon from heaven". History shows that it removed many obstacles to the Nazi power grab and led directly to the rise of Hitler and the brutal killing spree that followed. Communists were blamed, and many were rounded up and imprisoned, but evidence shows the Nazi’s were responsible for the fire. "You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in German history...This fire is the beginning," Hitler told a news reporter at the scene. What followed was death, destruction, and horror. The Bush family is all too well acquainted with that part of history as Prescott Bush (GW’s grandfather) was instrumental in bringing Hitler to power. One former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor insisted that Prescott Bush should have been prosecuted for, "giving aid and comfort to the enemy."

(I can not believe that the Republican Party of Connecticut still has the annual Prescott Bush honor dinner.)

Shortly after George Bush was inaugurated on January 20, 2001, the US stock market seemed to be crumbling. The 171.32-point drop on August 30, 2001 left the Dow down more than 500 points for that week alone. Markets the world over caught the jitters and showed signs of crashing. Close to $5 trillion in paper wealth was wiped out. Personal debt, caused by credit card and ballooning mortgages was rising by an average of 8.2% a month. Thousands of workers were being laid off. Americans were unhappy. They did not feel that they had elected GW Bush, but that the election was stolen and Bush was appointed by a stacked Supreme Court. He had no mandate from the people. There was an American mind lock and a yawning void waiting to be filled by a political explosion. The explosion came on September 11, 2001.

There were people who knew a way to save Bush and the empire. Names jump at you. Larry Silverstien. Rupert Murdoch, Frank Lowy, Lewis Eisenberg, among others.

There is nothing really new here. It has all been written about before, but facts are piling up and now that the big payoff has occurred on May 24,2007 and the money trail becomes more visible, it all must be brought before the world again, and again and again. We must not allow 9/11/01 to simply pass into history. Those who suffered the unspeakable crimes that followed scream for justice.

As the reign of the Bush family comes to an end and the empire shudders and shakes, perhaps a new Nuremberg Tribunal will mete out punishment for those responsible for the tens of thousands who died and the suffering of millions of others as a result of that awful Tuesday 9/11/01.

The deadly dust had not yet settled when the drums of war began to beat. Murdoch’s pro Israel New York paper, (New York Post, 9/12/01) headlined "Kill THE BASTARDS. An editorial stated, "The response to this unimaginable 21st-century Pearl Harbor should be as simple as it is swift-- kill the bastards. A gunshot between the eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have to. As for cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into basketball courts."

That kind of inciting gutter, journalism was poured into the eyes and ears of people the world over via the Murdoch Media Empire and there was no letup for years. The Muslim community was astounded by the hate of Fox news and other Murdoch outlets. Murdoch’s unabashed support of Bush and his own devotion to Israel made him a well-known figure to those who took control of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction.

Larry Silverstein and Frank Lowy, who leased the WTC property six weeks before 9/11, insisted on the unusual insurance coverage under Terrorist acts, added to the contract. Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg approved the transfer of the leases. One has to wonder how that all came down.

On March 19.2001, Lewis M. Eisenberg released this statement, " re: Net Lease of World Trade Center.


"In connection with the net lease of the World Trade Center, on February 22, 2001, the Port Authority entered into an exclusive negotiating period with Vornado Realty Trust. During this period, Port Authority staff and its advisors, JP Morgan, Cushman & Wakefield and Milstein Brothers Realty Advisors have worked with representatives of Vornado to complete the contract and associated transactional documents.
In view of the lack of a final agreement at this time, the Port Authority's Board of Commissioners has instructed staff and our advisors to engage in exclusive negotiations with Silverstein Properties and Westfield America to conclude a 99-year net lease transaction."

In February of 2002 Silverstein Properties were granted a $861 million settlement from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein Properties investment in WTC 7 was approximately $386 million. Silverstein Properties gained almost half a billion. More litigation was to follow.

It is well known that Murdoch, Silverstein and Eisenberg were members and supporters of many right wing Zionist organizations. It is also well known that Ariel Sharon, the man responsible for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and Murdoch were friends and Sharon looked to Murdoch for support. Murdoch was also a friend and supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu who said on the day of the 9-11 attacks, "It's very good (for American and Israeli relations)…Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel)."

As soon as I heard about the Mossad agents being present and taking pictures across from the twin towers on 9/11/01 I immediately thought of The Lavon affair in 1954. The Israeli secret service set up a spy ring in Egypt with the purpose of blowing up US and British targets. The operation was code-named "Susanah." The terrorist hits were to be blamed on the regime of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, with the purpose of alienating the US and Britain from Egypt and Nasser. A bomb exploded prematurely and the ring was discovered. Israel denied knowledge and kept the information from its own citizens until the secret could be kept no longer.

On 9/11/01 police received several calls from angry New Jersey residents claiming "middle-eastern" men with a white van were videotaping the disaster with shouts of joy and mockery. The men in the white van were stopped and arrested in East Rutherford NJ.

On 9/12/01, The New York Times reported that a group of five men had set up video cameras aimed at the Twin Towers prior to the attack on Tuesday, and were seen congratulating one another afterwards. The Jewish weekly The Forward reported that the FBI finally concluded that at least two of the detained Israelis were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers confirmed this, and they noted that movers' vans are a common intelligence cover. The Israelis were held in custody for 71 days before being quietly released. If by their own admission, "they were there to document the event" does that not mean, to any intelligent person, that they knew in advance what was going to happen?


After 9/11 on a PBS documentary Silverstien admitted that he made the decision to have the building WTC 7 "pulled." meaning he planned to have it taken down well before the disaster. Not Silverstein himself or his daughter who normally would be in the building were present on 9/11/01.

On May 24, 2007 an AP story stated, "The builders of the World Trade Center site and seven insurers have reached a $2 billion settlement that ends all outstanding legal battles over its multibillion-dollar policy, state officials said Wednesday."

Gov. Eliot Spitzer and state Insurance Superintendent Eric Dinallo announced the settlement after leading two months of talks with the insurers, trade center developer Larry Silverstein and the site's owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The $2 billion, added to $2.55 billion already paid out since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that destroyed the trade center, is about $130 million less than the amount awarded to rebuild the site after the trial in 2004.

So those connected all got what they wanted. Silverstein got his money. He will rebuild and hold a 99-year lease. Murdoch sold a lot of papers and got the hate Palestinians propaganda into high gear. The Israelis got millions more of American taxpayers dollars and as Benjamin Netanyahu said, "a lot of sympathy".

Bush became the ‘war’ President and The Commander in Chief.

No one except a seemingly deranged man (Zacarias Moussaoui) went to jail.

Tens of thousands have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the oil barons are running amuck. Murdoch’s media still controls the minds of millions of people. Realists are wondering are the people going to allow the 9/11 commission report to stand? Should we not be demanding a new investigation? Do we not owe that to the children of Iraq and the millions of other suffering people including Americans?


By David Truskoff
www.erols.com/suttonbear

Against State Brutality

The detention of noted human rights activist Binayak Sen under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005 (PSA) and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act has attracted nationwide condemnation. Sen, general secretary of the Chhattisgarh People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), and the union's national vice-president, was arrested for his alleged links with banned Maoist groups.

The critical allegation is that Sen met senior Maoist leader Narayan Sanyal more than 30 times in recent months in the Raipur central jail. On the very face of it, the charge is preposterous. Sen met Sanyal with the authorities' knowledge and consent and always in the presence of a jailer. As a civil liberties activist, it is his legitimate function to meet detainees and ensure that their fundamental rights are respected. Whether he met Sanyal 35 times or 100 times is totally irrelevant.

It speaks poorly of the Chhattisgarh government that it cavalierly levelled defamatory and scandalous charges against an activist-intellectual of Sen's standing, who has an illustrious record as a public-spirited paediatrician connected with the people's health movement. Sen was involved with the setting up of the Shaheed Hospital, an initiative of the great trade unionist Shankar Guha Niyogi who was murdered at the behest of rapacious industrialists.

The hospital, owned and operated by a workers' organisation, remains unmatched anywhere in India for helping the population of a backward tribal area callously neglected by the state. Sen was on the official advisory committee that drew up one of India's most successful community-based primary healthcare programmes.

It's nobody's case that Sen is a Naxalite, or a Maoist sympathiser. Everyone who knows him, as this writer has done for many years, will testify to his commitment to a peaceful struggle for a compassionate, humane society. Yet, the Chhattisgarh government arrested him under the draconian PSA. This extraordinarily repressive law allows for detention of a person on the vaguest of charges. The charges include committing acts with a "tendency to pose an obstacle to the administration of law” and actions which "encourage(s) the disobedience of the established law". This law criminalises even non-violent protests, including Gandhian civil disobedience. It's a disgrace that the PSA remains on India's statute books.

Sen was detained even before the police had obtained a shred of evidence against him. Since then, they have searched his house and claim to have collected "hundreds of incriminating documents", which include compact disks, pamphlets and other papers. Now, most of the documents are in the public domain. The list includes newspaper clippings, CDs on "fake encounters", and letters from victims of state repression, since published in newspapers. Much of the impounded material pertains to Sen's work as a health and civil liberties activist.

Clearly, these malicious police allegations are of the same variety as the charges filed in 2002 against The Kashmir Times Delhi bureau chief, Syed Iftikhar Geelani. He too was accused of possessing "classified" documents, suggesting links with terrorists. The police were forced to retract all such charges when it was established that Geelani's "secret" documents were obtained from public-domain sources, none of them remotely connected with terrorism.

Geelani was detained for eight months -- and released without apology or explanation -- because he is a Kashmiri and related to separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Sen is being harassed because he's a civil liberties activist who has courageously exposed a number of police atrocities. These, remarkably, include 155 "fake encounters" in Chhattisgarh in two years. The latest was the cold-blooded murder of 12 Adivasis on March 31 -- which made the headlines even as the public was absorbing the shock from revelations about the "encounter" killing of Sohrabuddin Shaikh and Kausar-Bi by DIG Vanzara in Gujarat.

It would be an even greater injustice if Sen has to languish for months in jail before the charges against him are disproved. Surely, Indian courts have a duty to prevent such miscarriage of justice. Surely, top politicians and bureaucrats have learned some lessons from the sordid stories of abduction and outright killings committed by trigger-happy policemen. Surely, it has not escaped the attention even of India's creaking justice delivery system that draconian laws, which allow preventive detention and forced confessions, are liable to be -- and usually are -- misused. They create a climate of impunity, in which no official is held accountable for his/her gross misconduct.

It bears recalling that the rate of conviction under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act was less than two per cent. This speaks of gross abuse of the law. The police didn't bother to collect evidence, which would help their case stand up. They used TADA (and later POTA) to bung people into jail and extract confessions from them under duress, including threats of "encounters". Such laws became excuses not to conduct diligent investigation, while raising alarmist fears about extremism, terrorism and threats to "national security".

The PSA was used in Chhattisgarh four times earlier -- for instance, to arrest a petty shopkeeper for selling groceries to Maoist sympathisers (of whose identity he probably wasn't aware), and to harass a Class XII student who was in love with a suspected Naxalite.

The Chhattisgarh police are now planting stories about a "close relative" of Dr Sen's, who is subversive by virtue of having studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University! Only a warped khaki brain can think in such philistine, irrational ways. Yet, it's precisely this way of thinking that led the Chhattisgarh government to set up Salwa Judum, a viciously right-wing band of thugs who target and kill Maoists. They have razed villages, raped women and looted what little the poor possess -- with police collusion. Salwa Judum has ignited a civil war and done incalculable harm to ordinary Advasis. No fewer than 47,000 people have become homeless owing to its depredations.

However, the Chhattisgarh government's anti-Naxalite juggernaut continues to roll on, setting Advasi against Adivasi, village against village, and bankrupting the state of all its legitimacy. The government now plans to use helicopter gunships to intimidate villagers, cut down prime forests, and repeat the "Strategic Hamlets" strategy of the United States during the Vietnam War by creating "Naxalite-free" villages. And yes, they plan to use grenades, not just bullets, in skirmishes with Maoists.

There's a larger purpose behind the anti-Naxal operations apart from trying to liquidate Maoists. It is to make Chhattisgarh safe for huge mining and industrial projects, which dispossess people. Chhattisgarh is selling its precious mineral wealth cheap to promote neoliberal capitalism. It has signed more than 30 memoranda of understanding with business houses, including multinationals with a terrible human rights record. The human consequences of such a strategy have become obvious -- especially in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Orissa. In Orissa, there's growing popular resistance to the South Korean company POSCO's steel plant and the Tatas' steel mill. 2006 began with the gunning down of 13 Adivasis at Kalinganagar. And last fortnight saw attacks upon peaceful protestors by goons hired by POSCO.

This insanity must stop. The monstrous mining and steel projects, in which the people have no stake, must not be granted clearance by bypassing environmental and rehabilitation scrutiny. Or else, the state will lose all its popular legitimacy. Then, the Maoists will have achieved their purpose.


By Praful Bidwai

Israel Targets Hamas’s Political Leadership

Israel is continuing to mount air strikes in Gaza as part of its drive to destroy Hamas as a military and political force and torpedo the Palestinian national unity government, as well as any possibility of a negotiated deal with Palestinian leaders.
Israel argues that its air strikes are aimed at halting Hamas’s ability to launch Qassem rocket attacks on its towns bordering Gaza. On Sunday, an Israeli man died as a result of a Qassem rocket in Sederot—the twelfth person to have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza at Israel in the past three years.
But the scale of deaths, injuries and damage sustained by Palestinians defies such claims. Nearly 50 people have been killed in Israeli attacks over the past fortnight. Dozens more have been injured, including women and children, and many buildings have been destroyed.
Moreover, while previously Israel’s military forces have focussed on Hamas’s armed wing, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned on Sunday: “There will be no limit in acting against the terror groups and against those who are responsible for the terror. No one is immune.”
Helicopters and fighter planes, using precision weapons, have conducted air strikes against money-changing offices and businesses in the Gaza Strip that Israel claimed had been transferring money to Hamas and other militant organisations, as well as Hamas’s arms caches, training bases and command posts for its militia, the Executive Force.
Having eschewed a major ground offensive against Gaza at this stage, Israel is extending its policy of targetted assassinations to political as well as militant leaders, including Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas’s political wing.
On Saturday, Israel’s military forces fired two missiles that landed near Haniyeh’s home in the Shati refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City. They hit trailers used by his bodyguards and cut electricity to the crowded camp.
Though the army claimed Haniyeh was not a target, the missile strike was part of a larger offensive against Hamas targets that killed five people only hours after Gaza militants had indicated they would stop their rocket attacks if Israel halted its air strikes. Following this assault, Hamas rejected any talk of a ceasefire.
Earlier in the week, Israeli missiles destroyed the home of Khalil al-Haya, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, killing eight of his relatives and neighbours.
In the West Bank, Israeli forces arrested leading members of the Palestinian government, including cabinet minister Wasfi Kabaha. Last Thursday alone, 33 Hamas politicians, legislators, the mayors of four West Bank cities, including Nablus and Qalqilya, and local council members, were detained in overnight raids. The army also seized computers and files from politicians’ offices, charities and a school in Hebron.
Palestinian information minister, Mustafa Barghouti, described the arrests as “a massacre” of Palestinian democracy and civil society. Last year, Israel arrested more than 40 Hamas politicians, including several ministers and the speaker of the parliament, Aziz Dweik, following the capture of Israeli Army corporal, Gilad Shalit. They had been elected in January 2006 on Hamas’s Change and Reform list, which won the parliamentary elections. Nearly all are still being detained without trial in Israeli jails. The charges against them include membership of Hamas, which Israel and the US have designated as a terrorist organisation.
The most senior Palestinian official arrested in the recent raids, Education Minister Nasser Eddin al-Shaer, is not even a member of Hamas. He was also detained in last year’s swoop but was released later by a military court, because no incriminating evidence was found.
Israel’s foreign ministry issued a statement saying, “a terrorist organisation remains a terrorist organisation, even if its members stand for democratic elections. Membership in such an organisation is a violation of Israeli and international law.”
Defence Minister Amir Peretz said in a radio interview that Israel would not make a distinction between the political and military wings of Hamas. “The arrest of these Hamas leaders,” he said, “sends a message to the military organisations that we demand that this firing [of Qassem rockets] stop. If the rockets do not stop, we will not stop.” He added that Israel was “biting its lip” and refraining, for now, from launching a wide-scale ground offensive in Gaza.
Peretz’s deputy, Ephraim Sneh, went even further. Having described Hamas leaders as “terrorists in suits,” he was asked if this meant the Palestinian prime minister could be targetted for assassination.
Sneh replied, “I’ll put it like this. We don’t care if he’s a ringleader, a perpetrator of rocket launching or if he is one of the political leaders. No one has immunity. There is no one who is in the circle of commanders and leaders in Hamas who is immune from a strike. For what does political Hamas do? It gives the operational approval to those who are doing the fighting.”
In other words, Israel has arrogated to itself the power to kill another country’s elected leadership so as to eliminate it as a political force. It is to this end also that Israel has intervened in support of Fatah in the factional fighting with Hamas that has killed at least 50 Palestinians this past month.
Confirmation of Israel’s success in this regard has come from Javier Solana, the European Union foreign minister. Speaking after talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli leaders on Thursday, Solana said he did not know whether the current Fatah-Hamas unity government had reached its “death,” but it was a “non-functioning government”.
The recent offensive in Gaza and the West Bank underscores Israel’s hostility to any form of Palestinian state. The logic of the demographic situation is that for Israel to survive as an explicitly Jewish state, the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories must be driven out and the Palestinians as a whole reduced to an atomised mass that is easily policed.
No Palestinian leadership, whatever its political hue, is therefore acceptable to Israel. It had previously rejected Fatah, which had recognised Israel, as a “partner for peace” under Yasser Arafat’s leadership. In so far as Israel continues to have any dealings with Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas, this is solely for the purpose of fomenting civil strife and chronic instability so that the Palestinians either leave “voluntarily” or submit to Israel’s diktats.
The right-wing Likud leader and former Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu articulated this policy most openly. Last week he proposed “a wide range of actions... to apply pressure”. This was to “begin with a general closure of Gaza,” he said, “through a controlled stoppage of services such as electricity and water, up to targetted killings and actions from the area on infrastructure targets, or limited ground incursion to the radius of the Qassam range or a larger ground incursion.”
Asked if he favoured a large-scale infantry incursion, Netanyahu said, “I think the problem here is to return to the balance of deterrence that was so very eroded in the last year. As a result of the last war, Gaza has turned into Lebanon Two with bunkers.”
In an interview published on Thursday in the Financial Times, Netanyahu reiterated Likud’s long-standing position that the Palestinians already had their own state—Jordan—and called for “some kind of federation or confederation between Jordan and the Palestinians”.
Netanyahu, who is closely aligned with Washington’s neo-conservative clique, also indicated that the offensive against the Palestinians was part of a broader objective to reorder the Middle East.
Israel was fighting a war on several fronts, he stressed. “We now have three live fronts: one Hizbullah, which has rearmed itself with more weapons than it had before the war and better kinds of weapons... Second, Gaza, which is turning itself into a second Lebanon; and, third, Syria, which is arming itself feverishly, which is something it has not done in 30 years.”
He added: “The largest issue confronting Israel is the tide of militant Islam sweeping our region and threatening the entire world. But it is centred on the Middle East and the two streams—the Shia stream in Iran and the Sunni stream in al-Qaeda—they sometimes collide with each but more often than not, as in Iraq, they collude against the common enemy.”
The greatest danger was Iran, he continued, which Israel claims is funding and training all the terrorist groups. Here, he said, there were three courses of action: “First, nothing, in which case they will get [nuclear] weapons, possibly in three or four years ... Second, you can reserve the military option, preferably by the US, which has the means to do so. But that should be a last resort.”
Finally, “you can use the economic weakness of the regime to put economic pressure upon it by a combination of actions to limit its credit lines and divestment, divesting by companies, primarily European companies that do business there”.


By Jean Shaoul
28 May, 2007
World Socialist Web

Bush Administration Seeks Big $$$ For New Nuclear Weapons Complex

In the nearly two decades since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has not produced new H-bombs or felt the need to significantly modernize its nuclear arsenal. Now, the Bush administration is seeking funding for a major, costly ?upgrade? that would allow the U.S. to produce new nuclear weapons.
The administration argues the ?upgrade? is needed to make the U.S. more secure. But members of Congress from both major political parties have expressed skepticism about the need to enhance the U.S. nuclear arsenal and have questioned the $150 billion price tag. Stopping this proposal, called ?Complex 2030? for the date the upgrade would be completed, is a priority for FCNL?s legislative program in the 110th Congress.

The U.S. nuclear weapons complex is a network of facilities across the country that develop and maintain the United States? arsenal of nuclear weapons. The complex is administered by a semi-autonomous agency inside the Energy Department called the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Just maintaining the existing nuclear weapons complex currently costs taxpayers more than $6 billion a year.

The plan released by the NNSA this past fall calls for a complete overhaul of existing U.S. nuclear weapons facilities. Included in the proposal is the construction of a new nuclear bomb-making plant, which would give the U.S. a weapons production capability it has not had since the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado closed in 1989. If completed, the new bomb plant would annually produce 125 to 200 plutonium pits, the primary component of thermonuclear weapons.

For years since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. arsenal of nearly 10,000 nuclear warheads has been viewed by the executive branch as ?reliable,? and large enough to protect the United States. (Indeed this arsenal is sufficient to kill everyone on the plant many times over.) Yet, Complex 2030 and the proposed bomb plant, for the first time in more than a decade, would result in a sharp increase in U.S. nuclear weapon production capacity. As NNSA administrator Thomas D?Agostino told a congressional committee in April 2006, Complex 2030 would return the U.S. to a ?level of capability comparable to what we had during the Cold War.?

A Program Without a Mission

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. nuclear weapons program has struggled to justify its existence. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recently noted, ?the doctrine of mutual Soviet-American deterrence [has become] obsolete [and] reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.? In an op-ed published January 4 in the Wall Street Journal, Kissinger joined former Secretary of State George Schultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn in calling for universal nuclear disarmament.

But if nuclear weapons are not needed, funding for the nuclear weapons complex would be in jeopardy. This funding represents the paychecks of weapons scientists and bomb plant production employees working at eight primary facilities located in congressional districts across the country. Members of Congress from districts where these facilities are located recognize the economic impact to local communities, and they frequently advocate for increased funding for new nuclear weapons projects.

In some cases, support for the weapons complex becomes more a matter of turning on the Treasury spigot in members? districts rather than a serious congressional evaluation of the ?merits? of nuclear weapons. As Robert Civak, a former White House budget official in the first Bush and Clinton administrations, stated, ?The weapons labs are more interested in job security than national security.?

Stop Funding Before It Gains Momentum

Frequently, when a large new federal program such as Complex 2030 is proposed, the president?s initial request is only a small portion of the program?s overall cost. Subsequent budgets call for ever larger allocations. In the case of Complex 2030, the projected cost is expected to balloon from the president?s fiscal year 2008 request of $25 million for the design phase of the new bomb plant, to an eventual final cost of $150 billion when the program is complete.

Each subsequent annual funding allocation would take the United States one step further along on the path to completion and each step makes it harder to reject the whole project. We at FCNL believe this dangerous and ill-founded program should be stopped at the starting gate. Congress has the "power of the purse? and can defund this ambitious plan before it gains momentum.

During congressional hearings on the Complex 2030 plan this past March, members expressed doubt about the viability of and need for the new complex. Many members noted the lack of a coherent national nuclear weapons policy that would be a prerequisite for such a large expansion.

As Rep. Pete Visclosky (IN), the chair of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee stated, ?We are not going to begin building more nuclear bombs without a serious and open national debate on that policy question.?

other members question NNSA?s track record of project management and frequent budget overruns. Rep. David Hobson(OH), the ranking Republican on the same subcommittee noted, ?I discussed [with the Energy Department] the department?s bad habit of making very expensive commitments and then expecting Congress to fork over billions of dollars to pay the costs of these commitments, especially when they weren?t budgeted.?

Rep. Visclosky questioned how the U.S. could ask North Korea and India to stop developing nuclear weapons programs while the U.S. rebuilds its own arsenal. ?Given the United States? nuclear nonproliferation commitments around the world, our desire to stop proliferation of nuclear weapons in other countries, and the pressing need to reduce the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex within a believable period of time, I am disappointed that the Department of Energy and this administration has chosen to make [new nuclear weapons] its top priority,? Rep. Visclosky said.

For FCNL, these expressions of congressional caution are good news. But members of Congress still need to hear from their constituents and to be reminded by them of the unacceptable financial and moral costs of nuclear weapons.

FCNL Washington Newsletter

Blair's Legacy... Violent Extremism

Finally. Blair's going. But why now? And what has Blair left us behind?

There are many reasons one can guess as to why, but perhaps one of the biggest – yet least talked about – is the "cash for peerages" criminal investigation, which has been getting rather close to home, too close perhaps for Blair's comfort.

After the arrest and questioning by police in July last year of Lord Levy, Blair's chief fundraiser, the Independent ran a piece whose title got straight to the point: " Levy arrest lays trail that leads all the way to Blair". For anyone who needs reminding, the criminal investigation began in March 2006 after revelations that Blair had "nominated four businessmen for peerages who had also given donations in the form of loans, which did not have to be declared." The loans totalled as much as 4 million pounds. The peerages were scrutinised and blocked by an anti-sleaze committee, all but one which voluntarily withdrew.

When Lord Levy was re-arrested at the end of January this year on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice (and later bailed), following the arrest of Ruth Turner, director of government relations at Downing Street, things were really looking bad. So bad that some senior Ministers got together a group of senior Labour MPs – " men in grey suits" – from the backbenches to "urge the Prime Minister to quit". At that time Blair was adamant that he would not resign while the police inquiry was still ongoing.

The inquiry ended on 23 April this year when police handed a 213-page file to the Crown Prosecution Service for deliberation. "The decision on whether to recommend charges will be taken after consultations with Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, and an old friend of the Prime Minister." The scope of Lord Goldsmith's interference in the CPS' "deliberations" is impossible to discern. But there is no doubt that the Attorney-General is advocating on behalf of his "old friend".
Just like he did with the Iraq War 2003, where he regressed from his own doubts over the war to advise that the war would be " unequivocally" legal even without a new UN resolution.

For many, this in itself is sufficient evidence that our own Attorney-General suffers from a politicized contempt for the rule of law. But it doesn't end there, because he also "breached his Government's own freedom of information laws by refusing to make public how he came to the controversial conclusion that war with Iraq would be legal." Only after a complaint from the Independent to the UK's Information Commissioner's Office was he forced to release some information about how he reached his decision in the 10 days running up to the war. But even so, information commissioner Richard Thomas "held back from making Lord Goldsmith publish further documents, including minutes, e-mails and memos, that would show exactly what political or other pressures were in play."

Notice the manner in which, under Blair, purportedly independent institutions designed to hold the government to account, in practice act as damage control organs of the state in times of political crisis. The CPS, the ICO, even the Office of the Attorney-General, all of them fundamentally compromised and caught up in a web of financial shenanigans.

In any case, the Attorney-General's distinctly partial advice over the Iraq War – dubbed blatantly illegal by people as far apart on the political spectrum as then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (although he took his bloody time about it) and full-time neoconservative fanatic (part-time Pentagon adviser) Richard Perle – was ultimately a stamp of official approval cajoled by Blair to convince British Army chiefs they wouldn't be prosecuted for war crimes if they went to war. Because Blair had already decided he was " solidly behind" the US invasion plans with or without compliance with international law and the United Nations.

But supposedly we should all be reassured, because in his heart-rending resignation speech, Blair told us: "Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right." For once, Blair's probably telling the truth. I mean, Richard Perle put it well when he said: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

At least now we know that people like Blair and Perle think that violating international law to go to war on the basis of fabricated pretexts about WMD, and then on top of that manipulating public offices to support such a violation, is very much "the right thing." Even Hitler thought he was "right" when he committed the Holocaust to annihilate the Jews (among other groups) whom he saw as a parasitical entity plaguing the German national body. Deluded fanatical violent extremists always think they're "right", no matter what. That's precisely what defines them as deluded fanatical violent extremists.

Perhaps, then, in the global "struggle against violent extremism", we need to start looking not simply at the Khans and Tanweers of the world, but perhaps more urgently at Western state practices. Given Blair's record as a war criminal culpable in part in the Protracted Holocaust in Iraq, a Holocaust that has been directly linked to the escalation of the threat of terrorism in the UK by our very own Foreign Office and military strategists, we really do need to start struggling against the violent extremists who run and manipulate the state.

What do I mean by the Protracted Holocaust in Iraq? There is an unfortunate tendency within Western political science, international relations and journalism, to view events like the 2003 Iraq war in historical isolation. There are quite painful cultural reasons for this, largely to do with exposing the extent of our complicity in modern genocidal episodes that issue forth directly from the way our advanced "Civilization" goes about securing its undoubtedly legitimate interests.

The catastrophe that started in 2003 in Iraq is only the end-point of a continuum of genocidal catastrophe that began early in the twentieth century. The British state has conducted brutal military interventions in Iraq on and off for 90 years or so. Of course for legitimate interests. It continued to do so under the leadership of the United States since 1991. I discuss this Protracted Holocaust in Iraq in my book Behind the War on Terror (2003).

Dr Gideon Polya, a retired senior biochemist at Le Trobe University working on a scientific analysis of global mortality, has put together a staggering overview of some of most reliable estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians who have died as a consequence of the direct and indirect impact of these interventions and occupations over a period of almost a century. Since 1950, 5.2 million, during the period in which the CIA and MI6 were fostering coups, installing and re-installing dictators until they finally got Saddam himself in power. Between 1991 and 2003, about 1.7 million from the UN sanctions regime. Add to this the figures for the 1991 Gulf War, at least 150,000. And after the 2003 war, as many as 650,000. That's just under eight million up to now.

The blood of eight million Iraqi civilians on the hands of the Anglo-American axis since the early twentieth century, and still counting...

What does this say about "Civilization"? About the fruits of "liberal democracy" as it stands? About the wonders of "modernization" and "globalization"? Why is the progress of the West tied to the installation of metaphorical gas chambers in the East?

Blair can happily see himself as a leading participant in this genocidal continuum. He is in the same ranks as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and of course Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, among others. But if there's anything that this brief glimpse of Anglo-American historical genocide in the Middle East reveals, it's that Blair's resignation means absolutely nothing whatsoever in the way of halting the genocidal march of the global system. Blair was one particularly clever cog in a machine that has yet to run its course.



By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed