My Life with the Taliban by Abdul Salam Zaeef

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Presidency and interest groups

What do you suppose it is like to be elected president of the United States only to find that your power is restricted to the service of powerful interest groups?

A president who does a good job for the ruling interest groups is paid off with remunerative corporate directorships, outrageous speaking fees, and a lucrative book contract.  If he is young when he assumes office, like Bill Clinton and Obama, it means a long life of luxurious leisure. Fighting the special interests doesn’t pay and doesn’t succeed. 

On April 30 the primacy of special over public interests was demonstrated yet again.  The Democrats’ bill to prevent 1.7 million mortgage foreclosures and, thus, preserve $300 billion in home equity by permitting homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages, was defeated in the Senate, despite the 60-vote majority of the Democrats.  The banksters were able to defeat the bill 51 to 45.  

These are the same financial gangsters whose unbridled greed and utter irresponsibility have wiped out half of Americans’ retirement savings, sent the economy into a deep hole, and threatened the US dollar’s reserve currency role.  It is difficult to imagine an interest group with a more damaged reputation.  Yet, a majority of “the people’s representatives” voted as the discredited banksters instructed.

Hundreds of billions of public dollars have gone to bail out the banksters, but when some Democrats tried to get the Senate to do a mite for homeowners, the US Senate stuck with the banks.  The Senate’s motto is: “Hundreds of billions for the banksters, not a dime for homeowners.”

 
Obama's 100 days - the mad men did well
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the power of advertising - from the effects of smoking to politics - as he reaches behind the facade of of the first 100 days President Barack Obama.

The BBC's American television soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the “smart” people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold.

It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has been named “Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008”, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign as “an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force”. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser César Chávez – “Sí, se puede!” or “Yes, we can” – the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.

No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “Change you can believe in”, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful,” he often declared.

Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as “adroit literary creations, rich, like those Doric columns, with allusion...” (Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian). The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: “Many spiritually advanced people I know... identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who... can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not “persons”, and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of “defence”, Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, has been retained by Obama.

All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office.

In Afghanistan, the US “strategy” of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the “Taliban”) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely. Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing “a real threat” to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as “anti-nuclear”. It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new “tactical” nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.
 
Foreign occupation is the driving force of suicide terrorism, says Robert A. Pape
University of Chicago Professor Robert A. Pape refutes the common myth that suicide bombers are young, uneducated and easily led misfits who are inspired by religious fervor and driven by poverty and alienation. Rather, he says they tend to be educated, socially integrated and highly capable people who would live a good life if foreign occupation of their territories had not turned them into suicide bombers.

Pape lists community prestige, revenge and religious feelings as three motivations behind suicide terrorism, but he says these are effective only in the presence of a foreign occupation.

    "Ninety-five percent of all suicide attacks in the world are driven by foreign military occupation," says Pape.

He thinks that the sudden increase in suicide attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2005 can only be explained by the fact that in that year NATO powers began their occupation of Kandahar and eastern Afghanistan. He recalls that as soon as Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000, Hezbullah stopped all its suicide attacks. Pape is critical of Western leaders who keep calling on Muslim clerics to defeat the extremists and "be good Muslims." According to Pape, the solution to suicide terrorism is for foreign occupying forces to pull out their ground troops, while all Muslim leaders need to do is cooperate with Western leaders who will do that.

Sunday's Zaman spoke with Professor Pape, who has compiled the largest database of suicide bombings in the world, with about 2,000 cases analyzed in detail. He published his groundbreaking book "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" in 2005, and his database has continued to grow since then. We asked Pape, who traveled to Turkey to participate in a NATO conference on fighting suicide terrorism, about his earlier work on air-bombing strategies and concepts he has developed, such as "coercion by punishment" and "off-shore balancing."

Is anyone who carries a bomb and blows it up a suicide terrorist?

 
Obama

Introduction

The Prophet (saw) said: "Do not seek light from the fire of the polytheists." [Ahmad]

Did you see the crowds of Istanbul welcome Obama? Have you seen the Islamic organisations of the United States of America praising him? Have you seen the young Muslims hoping in him and his administration?

Some people are too defeated to look themselves straight in the mirror; they can only see themselves in the eyes of others. They can only revive their spirits in the words of those who oppose them; they can only find meaning and relevance through the praise of the wolves who seek to destroy them. That is the tragedy of who we have become today: a reactive and dwarfed people who only muster the audacity to speak, hope, act or think when we are compelled or asked to. And even when we do, we cannot escape the intellectual constraints and examples of those who have disbelieved in God and fought us.

We tend to forget that even those we tend to imitate and glorify are amongst the most deluded and criminal of all.

Barack Obama

“As Americans, we can take enormous pride in the fact that courage has been inspired by our own struggle for freedom, by the tradition of democratic law secured by our forefathers and enshrined in our Constitution. It is a tradition that says all men are created equal under the law and that no one is above it.” – Barack Obama

President Obama's delusion isn't in his sense of eloquence or intelligence, for he is one of the few unique men America has produced in a long time. His delusion is in believing he and his people possess and grasp history's great men and God's truth; that an aura of true privelige rests in his nation's founding documents and earliest dreams. For as long as this man cries in the name of his nation's founders and calls upon a God he associates partners with, he is a poor and destitute man bound to failure like the many before him. There is no fruit to be found in the land in which he so passionately ploughs; men far greater than him have searched and met the fate Obama will soon meet.

Fragile Dreams

The Americans construct fragile dreams upon the words of long gone men, known for their extravagance, regality and genocide. They established a dead constitution and hollow laws that have only served to enslave the Americans in a constant commitment to their whims and desires; man marries man, woman kills what lives in her womb, bodies are sold in the name of enterprise, the big and rich usurp the small and poor and humans live realities even the animals are ashamed of.

They find hollow prescriptions in their legislature; we find revelation from God and inspiration in our Messengers. While his nation's founders launched their quest from the lounges of pompous wealth, our Prophet launched his from a dusty and dry mountain and conquered the world from there; their nation fights in the name of themselves, our nation strives in the name of God and truth.

The Conscience of Mankind

While they are deluded into believing they have the conscience and justice of mankind in their hands, they do not. The very wealth they have today is thieved from the soils and oils of Asia and Africa; the marble and fine wood of their Supreme Court and Congress was carried on the backs of the oppressed sons of Africa; their constitution, nation and state were established on the genocide of the native and indigenous American Indians. Has the world forgotten the American Indian population, which once numbered over five million, and has dwindled to just 500,000 today? Of what freedom and morality does this man speak?

Our Prophet (saw) took off his shirt and muddied his own blessed hands in the construction of the mosque of Madinah; he died with his home in poverty and his stomach screaming from the pangs of hunger – only so those poorer than him might sleep satisfied. He treated his slaves with such compassion and love that they were almost ascribed to him as sons. He, the messenger of God, was stoned with the pebbles of the mad and stupid, but asked Allah (swt) to guide and forgive them – that is the founding father of our state and nation, a father of mankind's true conscience.

The Bible

The Bible that is held aloft and sworn on in their American inaugurations is the word of corruption and contradiction, inked by those who waged war on God and altered his words for petty material gains. The Americans fiddle with a fallen book to maintain a token of religion in their godless system of autolatry, where whims and desires rule over the human mind and conscience, as well as the law of God.

Our Qur'an is a pure, relevant and untainted book. No-one has dared claim its alteration or contradiction without being defeated and grouped with the mad. Our nation is that of God's word, while the disbelievers busy themselves with the remnants of Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. For that reason, he who follows the Qur'an acts in the spirit of truth, and he who follows the Bible acts in the spirit of corruption and defeat.

Equality

The equality between black and white was established amongst us hundreds of years of ago. A young Abyssinian's first call to prayer before our Prophet (saw), on a platform higher than that of all those around him, out-does and out-weighs any other honour. Our Lord (swt), from above His throne, told us that we were equal and the best of us are those most immersed in piety and righteousness.

We are a people who allowed slaves become our kings, because they were the best amongst us; the Mamelukes, that shook the thrones of the Crusaders began as mere slaves, and our history remembers them better than any of the masters and pashas of the time. Indeed, we all owe them the presence of Islam in our lands.

So does this man, whose mother and upbringing is white, and whose education is from Harvard, want us to believe in his shallow story of today, while our God (swt) set the precedent and principle thousands of years ago?

The Crisis of Women

Let Obama first settle the dilemma of his wife, who's constantly parodied for her looks and who cannot escape the fashion pundits who slice and dice all she wears and says. For while their wives are judged on the gowns they wear, our women are judged on what resides in their heart, the fluency of their love and the generations they give life to. Our women changed the world and nurtured the greatest of men and legacies without having to compromise the sanctity of what is exclusively theirs. Our women's greatness does not need to be tempered and flavoured with the sight of their bosoms and legs to be appreciated.

Let him first solve the crisis of young teen girls selling themselves in public parks just to be able to purchase bread, before coming to lecture us on hope and freedom. Let him deal with the throngs of women who throw themselves from the Golden Gate because of the pain of an abortion that lingers even after decades. Let him deal with the women, who at fifty and above, still pose nude and dance, like the drugged, to maintain any sort of relevance in their lives.

This man presides over a social and family meltdown almost unprecedented in history. Their values of liberty have given birth to hedonistic attitudes to life based upon the pursuit of carnal desires and immorality, manifested in escalating levels sex crimes and social disasters . Does this debased man want to lecture the Ummah of Islam on liberty and freedom while his own kind dies from what it brought upon itself?

Economic Exploitation

All their skyscrapers and towers cannot cover the shame of their systems of exploitation and greed, which have rightly blown in their faces and will blow again. Their problem is not one of regulation, but one of system altogether. This cycle we are in today is nothing new; it is but a bead in a long chain of meltdowns and collapses that will only become more frequent. The greed of the financiers, the boom and bust nature of their economy and the degrading premise that man is an economic unit in a jungle of numbers will swallow up their lives and put their society on the brink of breakdown.

In Islam, we are a people above delusion and virtual wealth, depending on a real economy which spurs growth after government has satisfied the needs of all those underneath its authority. Economic equity is established, where the poor are taken care of and the entrepreneurs are bound, by what is correct, in their endeavours and attainment of further wealth.

Even without the State of Islam today, our financial and monetary example is the lone one that stands untainted and undefeated all over the world. So do he and his followers want to come and lecture us on prosperity?

'The US is not and never has been at war with Islam'

"And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel's security. That starts with ensuring Israel's qualitative military advantage... As president, I will implement a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade..." – Barack Obama, speech to AIPAC

How could this man, who supports Israel and recognises its legitimacy, not be at war with Islam? Israel is a false and illegitimate nation that stands on a land that is not its own and never will be. It upholds policy of eternal war and engages with the tyrants of the Arabs in thieving the holiest of lands from its rightful owners. Only the deluded would see this man as any sort of ally or saviour.

He announced in Turkey that his nation is not at war with Islam and never has been. If so, what of the American embassies which give life to the tyrannical and oppressive of our capitals? What about the intellectual war against Islamists who seek to reform their societies and return them to the havens they once were? Do this man and his legion of followers believe the eloquence of his words will blind us from what our eyes see and the taste of the blood smeared across our faces? There will be no peace, whatsoever, until all American involvement ceases from our homelands and our people are given the right to be governed by what is in their interests.

Finally, it is a matter of time before true leaders arise, from amongst the ranks of the believers, to flip the tables on which the wars against us are drawn; and, those naive Muslims sitting at those tables, with the enemies of Allah, better move away.

Abdul-Latif Halmi

 
Obama Requests $83.4 Billion for Iraq and Afghanistan
By Brian Faler and Tony Capaccio

 April 13

President Barack Obama is seeking an additional $83.4 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other initiatives, a request that would bring the total cost of the conflicts to more than $900 billion.

The administration submitted a request to Congress yesterday for $75.8 billion more in war funding for the remainder of the 2009 fiscal year. The request includes $11.6 billion to replace military equipment, including $600 million to buy the last four Lockheed Martin Corp. F-22 fighters the Pentagon wants and $400 million for 12 Boeing Co. AH-64 Apache helicopters.

 
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