Samer Swayfan

Fatigue has been cited as the main motive for the removal of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime. He ruled the country for 41 years, from 1970 to 2011. He first led as prime minister and army commander-in-chief, then left the rank of "humble" and informal. He started referring to himself as the "Brotherly Leader and Supreme Leader of the Revolution". Citizens resented his eccentricity, but did not complain about poverty - there was none. A new chapter in Gazeta.Ru's special project, The Price of the Arab Spring, will show how this resentment was taken advantage of in the West, and how it ultimately led to a bloody war.

Maxim Shugaley, a sociologist who has carried out field research in Libya, says that a large part of the country's population now wants to return to "the time of Gaddafi".

💬 "For more than ten years the country has been in a state of civil war, the number of weapons in the possession of the population is off the scale! Everything is solved "according to the rules", by bandit methods; any domestic conflict easily escalates into a shooting right on the streets. A whole generation has grown up which has heard from their parents that there were other times when guns were not fired and you could walk the streets without them. They are already iconic. Even the generation that did not live then wants it all to end," Shugaley told Gazeta.Ru.

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Gilad Atzmon

Once again we see a familiar pattern: our united 'progressives' -- a veritable synagogue, a collective of great humanists -- lend their support to the oppressed. This time it is the ‘Syrian people’ whom they wish to liberate and their enemy is obviously Bashar Al-Asad.

It is a pattern we know only too well by now. Ahead of the ‘War Against Terror’ we witnessed years of intensive progressive Feminist and Gay’s rights groups campaigns for women’s rights in Afghanistan. The Progressive type also disapproves of the current state of the Iranian revolution. Too often he or she would insist that we must liberate the Iranians. This week, once again, we see a united front made by Tariq Ali, Ilan Pappe, Fredric Jameson, Norman Finkelstein and other very good people. They clearly want us to ‘liberate the Syrians’.

They campaign openly to topple Bashar al-Asad’s regime. They call the ‘people of the world’ to pressure the Syrian regime to end its oppression of and war on the ‘Syrian people.’ “We demand,” they say, that Bashar al-Asad leave immediately without excuses so that Syria can begin a speedy recovery towards a democratic future.”

So here we are. Ali, Jameson, Pappe, Finkelstein & Co, in light of recent Israeli attacks on Syria, will you be kind enough, gentlemen, to tell us whom you support? Is it Asad or Netanyahu you're siding with?

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Stephen Lendman

Righteous Condemnation of Israeli Mass Murder

Media scoundrels feature pro-Israeli supporters. Doing so makes them complicit with Israeli crimes. Charles Krauthammer is one of the worst. He's an embarrassment to legitimate journalism. His latest Washington Post op-ed headlines "Why was there war in Gaza?" His commentary shows appalling ignorance, support for Israeli lawlessness, racist hate, and contempt for besieged Gazans.

"Israel wanted nothing more than to live in peace with this independent Palestinian entity," he claimed. "After all, the world had incessantly demanded that Israel give up land for peace." "It gave the land. It got no peace."

In 2005, Israel disengaged from Gaza. It did so to get Jews out of harm's way. Palestinian West Bank land was stolen to accommodate them. War was planned with no timeline. Cast Lead followed. Now Operation Pillar of Cloud. More coming. Stay tuned. Occupation of Gaza doesn't exist, claims Krauthhammer.

Explain it to 1.7 million oppressed Palestinians. They're isolated in the world's largest open-air concentration camp. Its harshness replicates Nazi-enforced Warsaw ghetto conditions. Humanitarian crisis conditions persist. Borders are closed. No one gets in or out without hard to get permit permission. Israel bombs, invades, and commits other atrocities at will. It maintains total control. Palestinians have no say whatever. "Israel has once again succeeded in defending itself," claims Krauthhammer. Irresponsibly he called months-ago planned naked aggression self-defense.

Rabbi Avichai Ronsky calls himself a man of God. He's also a former chief Israeli military rabbi. He's more concerned about militarism than Judaic doctrine. His comments show it. Ending conflict was "a great mistake and a disappointment," he said. Killing and injuring Palestinians should have continued.

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Jonathan Cook

A Thought Police for the Internet Age

There could be no better proof of the revolution – care of the internet – occurring in the accessibility of information and informed commentary than the reaction of our mainstream, corporate media.

For the first time, Western publics – or at least those who can afford a computer – have a way to bypass the gatekeepers of our democracies. Data our leaders once kept tightly under wraps can now be easily searched for, as can the analyses of those not paid to turn a blind eye to the constant and compelling evidence of Western hypocrisy. Wikileaks, in particular, has rapidly eroded the traditional hierarchical systems of information dissemination.

The media – at least the supposedly leftwing component of it – should be cheering on this revolution, if not directly enabling it. And yet, mostly they are trying to co-opt, tame or subvert it. Indeed, progressive broadcasters and writers increasingly use their platforms in the mainstream to discredit and ridicule the harbingers of the new age.

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Matthew Nasuti

Al-Qaeda does not have to make up stories about the West abusing Muslim women. Al-Qaeda merely has to report the truth.

The unofficial message from the West to victims of oppression is:

“We will liberate you as long as your women agree to service our officials and contractors.”

That is a sad reality of both NATO and United Nations peacekeeping missions.

The U.S. State Department’s “Trafficking in Persons Report 2010" highlights the continuing growth of brothels in Kabul following the U.S. invasion in 2001. Many of the victims are poor Afghan women. A press release issued on January 13, 2011, by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul blamed the scandal on lax enforcement against traffickers by the Afghan Government, with no recommendation that the “johns” or clients be prosecuted (because many of them appear to be NATO and U.N. officials and their contractors). The most that the U.S. Embassy would meekly say is that:

“Some international security contractors may be involved in the sex trafficking of these women.”

(It is interesting how ineffective U.S. intelligence agencies seem to be at determining brothel ownership in Kabul, despite the importance of the issue due to the use of these facilities by NATO officials)

This issue is not new. The British newspaper “The Sun” ran a story on April 7, 2008 entitled: “NATO Men Romp in Afghan Brothels.”

Sun Defense Editor Tom Newton Dunn detailed how NATO troops were observed drinking contraband alcohol and heading off to rooms with prostitutes. It quoted a NATO official as stating that one out of every five NATO civilians in Afghanistan frequent these brothels. The report quoted Afghan Member of Parliament Shukria Barakzai as stating that if this conduct continues: “They will undermine their reason for being here.”

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William Bowles

The media’s mantras of ‘lawlessness’, ‘copycat crime’ and ‘Twitter coordinated riots’, designed to mask the desperate conditions of millions of young people who languish, ignored and forgotten in impoverished communities across the UK.

It’s fashionable to call them the ‘underclass’ that the state has buried away, out of sight–out of mind on ‘sink estates’ or trapped and invisible in the poorest neighborhoods of our cities. Demonized and/or sentimentalized by the state/corporate media (‘Shameless’ and ‘East Enders’ come to mind), exactly as in Victorian times, an entire section of the working class have been reduced to some inferior, sub-human species by the political class and its media partners-in-crime.

“Were there a serious political opposition party in this country it would be arguing for dismantling the shaky scaffolding of the neoliberal system before it crumbles and hurts even more people.” — Tariq Ali

I suspect the figure is probably as high as 30%, that is to say, nearly a third of the population and a great many of them under the age of twenty-five. To put it another way, the youngsters we are seeing out on the street are for the most part, the children of this 30% of the population ‘surplus to capitalist requirement’. Unemployment is especially high amongst the young and (deliberately) under-educated, especially at a time when big chunks of the ‘middle class’ are being forced back whence they came from, the working class, just like most of us.

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Tariq Ali
London Review of Books

● Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite
Profile, 417 pp, £25.00, March 2011, ISBN 978 1 84668 054 0

#9679; A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan by Artemy Kalinovsky
Harvard, 304 pp, £20.95, May 2011, ISBN 978 0 674 05866 8

Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to Moscow between 1988 and 1992, was in Russia when Soviet troops crossed the Oxus into Afghanistan in 1979. His fascinating account of the Soviet intervention is based almost entirely on Russian sources: interviews with participants, information from veterans’ websites and from archives, although those of the GRU and the KGB remain mostly sealed. Each page reads like a warning to Afghanistan’s current occupiers. Braithwaite wrote two devastating articles in the Financial Times opposing the Iraq War and the atmosphere of fear created by New Labour propaganda but Afgantsy is written in a very different register. The Soviet intervention is seen as a tragedy for both the Russians and the Afghans.

The principal aim of Soviet foreign policy in the region had always been to preserve Afghanistan as a neutral state. Lenin was too orthodox a Marxist to believe that tribesmen and shepherds could make the leap forward to socialism: ‘Herdsmen can’t be transformed into a proletarian mass.’ His successors were not at all pleased when, in 1973, Muhammad Daud toppled his cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup and proclaimed a republic. Moscow had enjoyed warm relations with the king, a genial old buffer who presided over the tribal confederation that constituted the Afghan state. The Soviet leaders were even less pleased when in April 1978 a group of communist army officers staged a coup and called it a revolution. A few months earlier, two rival communist factions, Parcham (Flag) and Khalq (People), whose members were mostly university graduates and urban intellectuals, along with a few dozen officers and their clansmen in the armed services, had with great reluctance reunited as the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Parcham followed an orthodox pro-Soviet line; Khalq was more independent of the Soviet Union and less in thrall to classic Marxist notions about the prerequisites for a transition to communism. Noor Mohammed Taraki, a Khalqi, was appointed general secretary, with Babrak Karmal of Parcham as his deputy. Hafizullah Amin, another leading Khalqi, was elected to the Politburo, but only after a struggle. Parcham claimed he was a CIA agent, recruited during his time as a student at Columbia.

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Bruce G. Richardson
Dawat Independent Media Center (DIMC)

Tora Bora: For some time, rumors continue to circulate that Osama bin Laden has passed-away due to organ failure during December of 2010. Witnesses have since come forth to report and attest to the fact that they had attended his funeral. Though difficult to corroborate, Osama bin Laden’s medical history suggests a very strong possibility that he has indeed passed on, an event which would render U.S. justification for war, null and void.

Thanks to an obsessive and biased media, who function as the title of a new book suggests, as The Piano Player in the Brothel, and combined with a majority of ill-informed, anti-Islamic Members of Congress; bin Laden has heretofore been cast as a religious zealot and threat to the continued existence of a Christian, democratic world. As the alleged mastermind and architect of the September 11, 2001 attack on America, Osama bin Laden has surfaced as America’s primary justification for war on Afghanistan.

The world has long been aware of bin Laden’s critical, life-threatening kidney disease, disease that requires ongoing, daily organ-dialysis therapy to sustain life. The problems inherent in dialysis are legion: Infection as a result of an unsustainable, bacteria-free treatment environment, are just two of a multitude of problems that may be encountered by attending physicians. The United States Government contends that Osama bin Laden is in hiding in the rugged, mountainous regions of Paktia Province. Yet on examination, the logistical problems inherent in providing such a high degree of medical sophistication and technology required for this treatment in a hostile and mountainous locale, render such statements as self-serving and suspect. If this rendition were indeed factual, where and how would attending medical personnel, transport heavy, fragile equipment into the mountains, create a bacteria-free environment, safe from an armada consisting of an American ground and air posse in hot pursuit, and then have the capability to generate an uninterrupted electrical power source critically necessary for the dialysis equipment to perform properly? The improbability if not impossibility of such a logistical nightmare is mind numbing. When faced with the facts, the U.S. Government’s rendition of events that justifies and led to a war against a people that posed no threat to the country and played absolutely no role in 9/11, defies credibility and logic.

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Joseph Kishore
WSWS

Julian Assange must be vigorously defended. The World Socialist Web Site calls on all working people—and all those seeking to oppose imperialism and the attack on democratic rights—to mobilize their collective strength to demand an immediate end to the persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks.

Over the past several months, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been the target of a state-orchestrated campaign based on trumped-up allegations of sexual misconduct. He was named in an international arrest warrant, detained in a London prison, initially denied bail and held in isolation for nine days. Assange’s lawyers are fighting extradition to Sweden while he remains under virtual house arrest.

The extradition of Assange to Sweden could be followed by his extradition to the US. There are reports of discussions between the American and Swedish governments, and a grand jury has purportedly been convened in Virginia to charge Assange with violations of the US Espionage Act. Government officials and politicians have branded Assange a “terrorist.” Some have called for his assassination.

The vendetta against Assange is a political provocation that has all the characteristics of a dirty tricks operation.

The exploitation of charges of sexual and personal misconduct as a cover for a political attack is a well-known modus operandi. Those who might be sufficiently gullible to take the charges in Sweden at face value should recall previous cases: the FBI’s taping of bedrooms and hotel rooms used by Martin Luther King, Jr. to obtain evidence of extramarital affairs; Nixon’s break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s therapist in search of personal information damaging to the leaker of the Pentagon Papers; more recently, the use of the Monica Lewinsky scandal by the Republican Party and its media backers in the rightwing conspiracy to drive President Bill Clinton from office.

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

A tourist at a Gandhi museum in New Delhi. Though Gandhi is revered
here, modern India, with its rising economic and military aspirations,
does not always reflect his ideals. (Lynsey Addario for the NYT)

The Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama, who in his prize-claiming speech boldly claimed the mantle of Mahatma Gandhi, is now visiting India. And why has he made this pilgrimage to the homeland of his spiritual mentor? Has he come to drink more deeply of the wellsprings of satyagraha, to steep himself more thoroughly in the Gandhian principles of courageous, active, non-violent resistance to evil, to the Mahatma's ceaseless dedication to the poor and the outcast?

No: he has come to seal the deal on the sixth largest sale of war weapons in the history of the United States: $5 billion for the bristling, burgeoning Indian military, currently waging war on millions of its own people in Kashmir and the poverty-devastated state of central India, where the despair is so deep that suicide among the poor is epidemic.

Five billion dollars could have transformed the lives and futures of millions; instead it will go into the pockets of a few American war profiteers -- who will of course spread the wealth around to their favorite politicians ... such as Barack Obama, the leading recipient of war industry money in the 2008 campaign, outdoing even that old soldier and ardent militarist, John McCain.

And of course the Indian arms deal comes hot on the heels of the largest transaction of death-machinery in American history: Obama's $60 billion war-profiteering bonanza with Saudi Arabia, one of the most suffocatingly repressive and inhumane regimes on the face of the earth. But the Peace Laureate doesn't care about that. He knows what is truly important -- and it isn't the blighted lives of the Saudi people, or all those affected by the corruption and extremism that the Saudi royals have spread around the world (with the connivance, cooperation -- or at the command of -- the bipartisan American power structure). What matters most to the progressive paragon of peace is the sixty billion dollars stuffed into the coffers of his militarist backers.

If Obama wins re-election in 2012, it will not be because he "made a mid-course correction" or "learned the lessons" of the 2010 vote or "moved to the center" or any such witless expectoration of conventional wisdom. It will be because his militarist backers have judged his arms deals and Terror War operations sufficiently profitable to justify his retention. As is always the case with the War Machine that rules us, follow the money -- and the blood.

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