US Govt Concern About Potential Al Qaeda Attack on US Homeland This Summer

By Jeffrey Imm


Both ABC News and the Associated Press are reporting new U.S. government concerns of an attack on the U.S. homeland this summer, and in the case of ABC News, reports of an Al Qaeda cell intending to attack a government facility or facilities.

ABC News reports that "new intelligence suggests a small al Qaeda cell is on its way to the United States, or may already be here. The White House has convened an urgent multi-agency meeting for Thursday afternoon to deal with the new threat." The meeting will address ways to minimize or counter the threat, and steps to harden and protect government facilities.

ABC reports that from former FBI agent Brad Garrett that 'It suggests they have information that the cell or cells coming this direction want to attack a government facility'.

ABC also reports that "Law enforcement officials say the recent failed attacks in London have provided important new clues about possible tactics. And officials say the London attackers use of the Internet left important clues that are being used to decode other e-mails that had initially been deemed unimportant but are now taking on new significance. A senior administration official said the level of concern of a new terror attack is now higher than it has been in some time".

Associated Press also reports that "U.S. counterterror officials are warning of an increased risk of an attack this summer, given al-Qaida's apparent interest in summertime strikes and increased al-Qaida training in the Afghan-Pakistani border region. On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune that he had a 'gut feeling' about a new period of increased risk. He based his assessment on earlier patterns of terrorists in Europe and intelligence he would not disclose. 'Summertime seems to be appealing to them,' Chertoff said in his discussion with the newspaper about terrorists. 'We worry that they are rebuilding their activities.' "

On July 1, ABC reported that "A secret U.S. law enforcement report, prepared for the Department of Homeland Security, warns that al Qaeda is planning a terror 'spectacular' this summer, according to a senior official with access to the document. 'This is reminiscent of the warnings and intelligence we were getting in the summer of 2001,' the official told ABCNews.com."

ABC also previously reported on a June 9 Al Qaeda / Taliban "graduation" ceremony, where a Pakistani journalist recorded video of the "graduation" ceremony and reported that "[l]arge teams of newly trained suicide bombers are being sent to the United States and Europe"

In other news about threats, there have been links between British Jihadist investigations and threats against the USA. On July 5, it was reported by the Daily Telegraph that 45 UK doctors were making plans to attack US facilities such as the shipping facilities for USS John F Kennedy in Jacksonville, Florida - that "45 Muslim doctors threatened to use car bombs and rocket grenades in terrorist attacks in the United States during discussions on an extremist internet chat site". On July 6, it was reported by AP and the Philadelphia Inquirer that two of the UK car bomb doctors sought work in the United States in Philadelphia. On July 4, the UK Sky News reported the full text of an email from British Anglican cleric Canon Andrew White who has said of an April discussion with Al-Qaeda representative where "[h]e told me that they were going to start killing in the UK then the USA".

Sources:

ABC News: Al Qaeda Cell in the U.S. Or On Its Way, According to New Intel
Associated Press: Officials Worry Of Summer Terror Attack
ABC News: Secret Document: U.S. Fears Terror 'Spectacular' Planned'
ABC News: Suicide Bomb Teams Sent to U.S., Europe
Daily Telegraph: 45 Muslim doctors planned US terror raids
AP: U.K. Terror Suspects Made U.S. Inquiry
Sky News: Full Text Of Vicar's Terror Warning Email


July 10, 2007 08:32 PM Link

A Triumph for Traditionalists
by Patrick J. Buchanan (More by this author)

Elevated to the papacy at 78, Benedict XVI will take no action greater in significance for the Catholic Church than his motu proprio declaring that the Latin Mass must be said in every diocese -- on the request of the faithful. Dissenting bishops must comply.

"What earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us, too," said the Holy Father in his apostolic letter, as he authorized the universal use of the sole official version of the mass allowed in the four centuries between the Council of Trent and Vatican II.

To which many Catholics will respond: "Alleluia! Alleluia!"

And so the pope has come full circle. At Vatican II, the future Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Holy Office for the Defense of the Faith under John Paul II, went about in coat and tie and was seen as a radical reformer and modernist theologian in the mold of his friend Hans Kung.

Now, Kung is silent, Ratzinger is pope, and the Latin Mass, which had fallen into disuse with the introduction of the new rite in 1970, is back.

Why? Because the Holy Father knows the solemnity, mystery and beauty of the Latin Mass hold magnetic appeal, not only for the older faithful but the searching young. And he acted to advance a reconciliation with traditionalists out of communion with the Holy See, including the 600,000 followers of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, excommunicated in 1988, who belong to his Society of Saint Pius X.

The current head of SSPX, Bishop Bernard Fellay, has welcomed papal restoration of the Latin Mass. But he has called it a first step toward addressing all doctrinal disputes dating to Vatican II. Among these are the issues of ecumenism and religious liberty. If the true church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic, then not all churches are equal.

Ever since Pope John Paul II issued his 1988 indult, which authorized, but did not require, bishops to allow the Latin Mass, the number of Catholics requesting the Tridentine rite -- and the number attending -- has steadily grown. Indeed, it was the stubborn resistance of some bishops to allow the Latin Mass to be said that brought a rising chorus of pleas to Rome from the faithful for the pope to overrule a recalcitrant hierarchy and order them to permit the old mass.

And there are other reasons Benedict XVI acted.

The introduction of the new mass has been attended by a raft of liturgical innovations by freelancing priests that are transparently heretical. And the years since Vatican II and the introduction of the new mass have been marked by a crisis of faith in Europe and the United States.

Churches have closed. Faithful have fallen away, or converted to other faiths. Congregations have dwindled. Convents have emptied out. Vocations are a fraction of what they once were. Belief in the creedal truths of Catholicism is not what it was in the years before Vatican II -- the halcyon days of the great pope and future St. Pius XII.

One cannot know the effect of Pope Benedict's decision. But the ferocity with which it was fought suggests some bishops are aware of the power of the old Latin Mass and the appeal of its mystery and solemnity to the young.

Pope Benedict, raised Catholic in Nazi Germany, once a reformer, but shaken by the events of 1968 and the social, cultural and moral revolution that followed, seems to have concluded that the Catholic Church's apertura a sinistra, its opening to the left, has run its course theologically, liturgically and morally, and failed. Restored tradition can do no harm, and may offer hope for the revival of a faith that is in its deepest crisis since the Reformation.

Indeed, the term "Tridentine Mass" is derived from the Latin name, Tirdentum, of the city in which it was declared the official mass of Roman Catholicism. And the Council of Trent was the first major step in the Counter-Reformation.

Yet the Holy Father could not make everyone happy.

Liberal European bishops were said to have fought restoration of the Latin Mass. And, according to The New York Times, Abe Foxman, resident theologian at the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, is about to anathematize the whole lot of us. Declared Abe, speaking ex cathedra for ADL:

"We are extremely disappointed and deeply offended that nearly 40 years after the Vatican rightly removed insulting anti-Jewish language from the Good Friday Mass, that it would now permit Catholics to utter such hurtful and insulting words by praying for Jews to be converted."

What is Abe talking about?

Does he not know that Catholics are required to pray for the conversion of all peoples to Catholicism and Christ? Who duped Abe into thinking this requirement was suspended by Vatican II?

Indeed, if one believes, as devout Catholics do, that Christ and his Church hold the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, it would be anti-Semitic not to pray for the conversation of the Jews. Even Abe.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of "The Death of the West," "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."

The Benchmark Blame Game

Impossible Tasks for an Embattled Government
By PATRICK COCKBURN

Arbil, Iraq.

The benchmarks the Iraqi government is meant to achieve in exchange for US support were never realistic and have more to do with American than Iraqi politics.

The weak and embattled Iraqi government is supposed to make changes which the US at the height of its power in Iraq failed to make stick. At stake are policies deeply divisive among Iraqis that are to be introduced at the behest of a foreign power, the US, in a way that makes the Iraqi government look as if it is a client of America.

One US benchmark is for the elimination of militias and an end to sectarian violence. But the Shia-Kurdish parties that make up the ruling coalition almost all have their own powerful militias that they have no intention of dissolving. In much of southern Iraq the militias and the local police forces are the same. In almost all cases units of the security forces are unwilling to act against their own community.

The new law on oil and gas is critical for the distribution of economic power in Iraq. It is not something that can be decided in a hurry. The sense that a new law is being foisted on Iraq by the US is also tainting it in the eyes of many Iraqis who have always suspected America is after the country's oil wealth.

The US is demanding the government conciliate the Sunni community and reverse de-Baathification. But the previous US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, made conciliating the Sunni his main objective in 2005-07 without positive result. Those Sunni politicians who were conciliated turned out to have no influence over the insurgents.

It was Paul Bremer, the US envoy, who introduced stringent de- Baathification in 2003. It later became conventional wisdom in the US that he had gone too far, sacking teachers and doctors who had joined the party merely to hold their jobs. But it is also true that Baath party members slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the great majority of them Kurds and Shia. The latter communities are not going to blithely allow their former persecutors to get their jobs back.

Like many of the benchmarks, the reversal of de-Baathification is unrealistic since most ministries have become the bastion of one community or another. For instance, a former Baathist who confidently resumed his job at the Health Ministry would be lucky to survive a day since the ministry has long been controlled by militant Shia.

The constitution is also to be reviewed by a committee according to the benchmarks, but it was the US which in October 2005 trumpeted the success of the referendum in which there was an overwhelming majority in favour of the constitution.

Paradoxically, the benchmarks suppose that the Iraqi government is, at one and the same time, so powerful that it can introduce and implement unpopular policies, but is also under the thumb of the United States.

Politics in Iraq is largely stalemated. The "surge", the introduction of 22,000 more US troops, has had only a limited effect on the ground. Sectarian warfare between Shia and Sunni in the capital declined for a few months but then rose again. Baghdad is increasingly a Shia-dominated city. The US Army did not in the event confront the Shia militias, something it now demands the Iraqi government should do.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006.

Is the U.S. Responsible for the Death of Nearly a Million Iraqis?
Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, July 11, 2007 This week and next the Senate is considering amendments to the FY 2008 authorization for the Pentagon, an authorization that includes more money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of the proposed amendments would try to force the Bush Administration to end the Iraq war. A few more Senate Republicans have rhetorically broken ranks with the Administration, and the question of the hour is whether they will put their votes where their mouths are and vote for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops or other measures that would force the Administration to move towards ending the war.

This week, the Congressional Research Service put the financial cost of the war in Iraq at $10 billion a month. The New York Times editorialized that "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit."

A key question is missing from this debate. How many Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion? The New York Times editorial is silent on this matter.

In a scientific study published last fall in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, researchers from Johns Hopkins estimated that 650,000 Iraqis had died because of our government's invasion of their country. The survey that produced that estimate was completed in July, 2006. That was a year ago.

Unfortunately, despite the calls of the Lancet authors for other studies, there has been no systematic effort to update these results.

Just Foreign Policy has attempted to update the Lancet estimate in the best way we know. We have extrapolated from the Lancet estimate, using the trend provided by the tally of Iraqi deaths reported in Western media compiled by Iraq Body Count. Our current estimate is that 974,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion. The web counter and fuller explanation are here.

The Iraqi death toll resulting from the U.S. invasion is a key fact. We cannot make intelligent and moral choices about U.S. foreign policy while ignoring such a key fact. It has implications for our choices in Iraq, for our choices in dealing with Iran, for our choices about the size of the U.S. military (for why do our leaders want to expand the U.S. military, except to have the capacity to invade other countries?)

The exact toll will never be known. But this is no reason not to attempt to know what the best estimate is. We also don't know many other key facts with certainty. We don't know how many people live in the U.S. The census department creates an estimate, and this estimate is the basis of policy.

The Johns Hopkins researchers used the methods accepted all over the world to estimate deaths in the wake of war and natural disasters. The United Nations, for example, uses them to plan famine relief. Even the Bush administration relies on them when it accuses Sudan of genocide in Darfur. At present, this represents the best information we have.

As Congress considers legislative efforts to end the war, best estimates of the Iraqi death toll must be part of the debate.

$10bn scramble for India's fighter deal

India's rush to ramp up its military includes the purchase of 126 multi-role jet fighters in a deal worth almost US$10 billion - the world's biggest single fighter contract. The prospect has manufacturers from the US, Russia, Sweden, France and a European consortium salivating. Their competition will be intense, as there will be only one winner of the contract. But if India's past arms procurements are anything to go by, there will also be many Indian winners - the notorious middlemen and agents whose palms have to be greased. - Siddharth Srivastava (Jul 11, '07)

"War Powers Resolution: Presidential Compliance," updated June 12,
2007:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33532.pdf

Ailing Party
by Michael D. Tanner

Michael Tanner is director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big Government Conservatism Brought down the Republican Revolution.



The long–simmering battle for the soul of the Republican party may be about to erupt, not over immigration or Iraq, but over the unlikeliest of issues, health care.

Republicans have been increasingly split between traditional Reagan–Goldwater small–government conservatives and a new breed of "big–government conservatives" who believe in using an activist government to achieve conservative ends — even if it means increasing the size, cost, and power of government in the process.

The difference in the two camps is as clear as the difference between Ronald Reagan saying, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem," and George W. Bush's saying, "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move."

Bush's brand of big–government conservatism brought us No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription–drug benefit, and a 23–percent increase in domestic discretionary spending. It may well have cost Republicans control of Congress. After all, on election night 2006, 55 percent of voters said that they thought the Republican party was the party of big government.

Now, the Republican primary campaign raises the question of whether the party will continue down the Bush path or return to its Reagan–Goldwater roots. And the coming debate over health–care reform may clearly expose the split.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has embraced the big–government approach. He has joined Democrats in calling for universal health coverage. The plan he supported in Massachusetts is a variation of HillaryCare. It has received most of its attention for its unprecedented individual mandate, a requirement that every Massachusetts citizen purchase health insurance or face legal penalties. This represents the first time that a state has said that a citizen, simply by virtue of living in a state, must purchase a specific government–designated and designed product.

But even more significantly, Romney's plan also created a managed–competition–style regulatory authority called the Massachusetts Health Care Connector. This new regulatory body has already mandated that every health care policy sold in the state must cover prescription drugs and has outlawed policies with deductibles of more than $2,000.

And Romney has also joined Democrats in spending more to subsidize health–care coverage. In Massachusetts, he significantly increased Medicaid eligibility and provided taxpayer–funded subsidies for families of four earning as much as $62,000 year, effectively extending welfare well into the middle class.

It is very hard to reconcile Romney's vision of health–care reform with traditional small–government conservatism.

In contrast, the traditional conservative approach to health care so far is being carried by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani, who will release a detailed health–care plan later this summer, believes that the biggest problem facing American health care is not a lack of universal coverage but a lack of consumer choice. "It's your health; you should own your own insurance," he said in the most recent debate. "The reality is that we need a free market."

Giuliani wants to reduce the regulation of health insurance and change federal tax law which pushes people into expensive all–inclusive plans. He says health insurance should be more like car insurance, where people pay out of pocket for minor repairs and maintenance, but are protected against catastrophic costs. In pursuit of this goal, he has called for calling for expansion of Health Savings Accounts and replacing the current tax exclusion for employer–provided health care with a standard deduction for health insurance.

This is not a question of the merits of either candidate, but a fundamental question about the direction of the Republican party and the conservative movement in general. Being a conservative Republican should be about more than abortion policy and the war on terror. The candidates should have to tell voters whether they still believe in traditional principles of limited government, federalism, and individual liberty.

The debate over health–care reform may offer voters the first opportunity to ask this question.

This article appeared in the National Review on June 29, 2007.

<h1 align="center">[b]It’s What Bush Craves![/b]</h1>
by Karen Kwiatkowski
by Karen Kwiatkowski
We observe the modern American political theme – global democracy, global freedom, global security, global planning – from afar, as if on a big screen, framed and shaped for our consumption, neat.

Americans watch and wonder. George W. Bush speechwriters, neoconservatives and the odd state-worshipping evangelical – or do I repeat myself – nod encouragingly in our direction, in Paris Hilton-style and say, "Do you love it?"

Sadly, overwhelmingly, we do not.

The recent image of Paris Hilton curled, shaking and incoherent in a fetal position on the floor of an LA County jail may be more reality-based. Greed, incompetence, immorality and outsized egos leading justifiably to pain, confession, and reformation – my goodness, someone ought to make a movie about that!

But that’s Hollywood.

In Washington, the script is simple, and life is good. Scooter Libby’s commutation, paving the way for a full pardon to be passed at midnight of the last day of the Bush presidency, was quick in coming. Surely we wouldn’t want to see Scooter curled up in some corner of his cell, shaking and repenting, suffering the snide remarks of his fellow liars and thieves.

Scripts help us understand complexities in human arrangements. A good story, on paper or on screen, takes what we know and grasp, and helps us see the next level, imagine new connections, imbue with grand meaning the previously mundane.

Our primary American script, for good or for evil, was that City on the Hill of our Puritan ancestors. But the script for the latter days of the Bush Administration is looking more and more like Mike Judge’s Idiocracy.

I’ve mentioned this movie before, but increasingly it seems to truly explain and define the Bush presidency.

For those who haven’t seen it, Idiocracy suggests a future animating force of American government and society. It isn’t democracy, freedom, security or some sense of human order. It’s Brawndo, a futuristic Gatorade, produced by the biggest company, biggest employer, biggest advertiser and biggest lobbyist in America.

The way people think about Brondo is insane and hilarious, and all too typical. And "thinking" is not really the right word. Watch this Idiocracy clip of a presidential cabinet meeting, entitled "It’s Got What Plants Crave."

Just as the New York Times public editor noted recently, there has been too little rational thought, and too much circular logic about our present day Brondo, our government’s preferred brand.

Al Qaeda is what Bush craves.

Al Qaeda doesn’t have electrolytes, but it delivers the punch, it keeps it simple, and it keeps the printing presses and primary industries in America running.

Al Qaeda – not complicated civil wars or the reality of human suffering and rage, not human longing for autonomy and liberty and love and community – Al Qaeda is what Bush craves. Al Qaeda is what the U.S. government, taxpayer dependent industry and mainstream media need.

Thus, we are fed Al Qaeda, morning, noon and night. We consume it, over and over again, repeating the mantra.

The solution to Bush and Cheney, and our $12 billion a month wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may not be impeachment– although impeachment is certainly warranted. The solution to a warped national economy that depends heavily on overpriced, underneeded munitions and pharmaceuticals will not be found in polling and the ballot box – although this will help!

The solution is – as Idiocracy’s Luke Wilson character suggests – is to try something different.

To treat the sickness of Dubya and Dick, stop drinking the Kool-aid. Trust me, it’s easy. Ignore those media outlets that transmit his message – and that’s pretty easy too. Media is business (even when corrupted by government linkages), and it will give us what we want to hear.

Stop buying the recycled BS and terror-filled Washington talking points, and they’ll stop selling. Conservative TV and talk radio are already feeling the pain of a nation that disapproves of war and global intervention, wasted treasure and blood.

On Iraq and Afghanistan, try walking away. Quickly, like a puddle of water evaporating in the Mesopotamian sun. Don’t worry that a well-dressed, finely fed and perfectly coiffed neocon in Washington will call you gutless.

If the global policing, base-building, corporate capitalists cry that if we leave now, even more innocent people will die, just remember that "more" is an awful big number. Americans have already killed a million Iraqis and Afghanis, and displaced nearly three million. And this doesn’t count the 500,000 dead Iraqi children our government justified as "worth" a decade of economic sanctions.

Don’t worry that a soldier will ask the impossible question of "If we leave now, why was I maimed, lied to, wasted, and made a murderer?" He’ll ask anyway, and there is only one answer, an old and oft repeated answer, and it hurts. You chose to serve the state, and it sacrificed you for nothing.

The government war on terror, everywhere and all the time – captioned and captive by "Al Qaeda" – is what Bush craves. Like some futuristic Brondo, it’s killing our country, destroying our economy, and creating morally decrepit automatons where millions of free Americans might stand.

Over 70% of Americans oppose Bush, and his bloody cravings. Just in case we really are approaching idiocracy, that’s plus or minus 200 million. 200 million people who do not support the policy of a dwindling few in Washington, in a republic, ought to mean something. Shouldn’t it?






LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for MilitaryWeek.com, hosted the call-in radio show American Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com and Liberty and Power.

Military Analyst: West Needs More Terror Attakcs To Save Doomed Foreign Policy: Only attacks on scale of 9/11 and 7/7 can save bolster resolve according to war studies head

Report: White House calls meeting on al Qaeda threat

White House official says level of concern of new attack in United States is higher than it has been in some time

07.11.07, 04:44 / Israel News

The White House has called an urgent multi-agency meeting for Thursday to discuss a potential new al Qaeda threat on US soil, ABC News reported on Tuesday.

Top intelligence and law enforcement officials have been told to meet in the White House Situation Room to report on steps to minimize or counter the threat and what steps are being taken to tighten security at government buildings, ABC said.

The meeting would be one of a number that have been convened in light of new intelligence and information learned from the recent failed car bomb attempts in London, ABC reported, citing a senior US administration official. The unnamed official told ABC the level of concern of a new attack in the United States was now higher than it had been in some time.

Law enforcement officials said the botched bombings in London provided clues about possible tactics, ABC reported.

ABC News cited senior US intelligence officials as saying that new information suggests a small al Qaeda cell was on its way to the United States or may already be in the country. Separately, US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune's editorial board his "gut feeling" is that the United States faces an increased risk of attack this summer.

Chertoff said his assessment was based on past patterns of terrorists in Europe, intelligence he did not disclose and recent al Qaeda statements, the Tribune reported.

"Summertime seems to be appealing to them. ... We worry that they are rebuilding their activities," Chertoff told the newspaper.

Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has spoken out regularly in audio-taped messages in recent months. In the latest recording, posted on the Internet on Tuesday, the Egyptian cleric threatened more attacks on Britain.

Satellite Map Shows HUGE Areas of the Earth Are On Fire! Are drought and fire being used as a means by which to change the social structure of the nations of the world?

The media’s tragic misunderstanding of Iraqi domestic politics
ASK THIS | July 09, 2007 The conventional media narrative about Iraqi politics misses all sorts of hugely important factors. Robert Dreyfuss raises some provocative questions journalists should be asking about motivations, alliances – and whether the U.S. is backing all the wrong people.

By Robert Dreyfuss
robert@robertdreyfuss.com

The conventional wisdom is that Iraqis can’t get their act together; that Iraqi politicians are hopeless squabbling, fratricidal hate-mongers; and that there’s really no use trying understand what passes for Iraqi politics. The narrative continues like this: that Iraq’s civil war is hundreds of years old, with Sunnis and Shia killing each other since the dawn of Islam;.that Iraq isn’t really even a country, since its borders were arbitrarily drawn up by a cigar-smoking Winston Churchill in the 1920s; and that there is no chance that Iraq will meet the 18 so-called “benchmarks” that were enacted by Congress earlier this year because it’s impossible that Iraqis will ever forge a consensus that can hold their country together.

Is any of that true? Even careful consumers of news about Iraq would be hard-pressed to challenge any of it, since by and large the press has failed to ask the kinds of questions that might shed light on Iraqi politics and society: Is the real cleavage in Iraqi politics between Shia and Sunni? Or is it something else? Is it possible that the real division within Iraq is not the cut along sectarian lines, but one that pits Iraqi nationalists against separatists?

There’s a case to be made that a majority of Iraqis – both on the street and in politics, including members of parliament – believe in a unified Iraq with its capital in Baghdad. Among those who support that view are the vast majority of Sunni Arabs, who don’t want to be squeezed into an oil-poor “Sunnistan,” and a significant majority of Shia Arabs, who support Muqtada al-Sadr’s bloc and the important, but usually ignored Fadhila (Virtue) party. When put together with the dwindling, but still important middle class and the secular bloc of voters represented by Iyad Allawi’s party, the “nationalists” achieve or are close to majority status in the parliament. If you count the extra-parliamentary forces, including the Sunni-led Iraqi resistance and some Shia fighters who disdain parliament, the nationalists have a large majority among Iraqi Arabs.

The “separatists,” meanwhile, are represented by the Kurds, who are scheming to win U.S. support for an independent Kurdistan, and the party that used to call itself the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is pushing hard for a Shiite super-region in the south that is widely seen as the first step toward a breakaway, Iran-allied “Shiastan” in the south.

Why isn’t the press making more of this? Why aren’t they asking American officials to explain why U.S. support mostly lines up behind the separatists, i.e., the Kurds and SCIRI? Why aren’t they asking whether SCIRI (and, for that matter, Al Dawa, the small party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki) have much support left among the 60 percent of Iraqis who are Shia Arabs? Many observers have concluded that, if elections were held today, large majorities of Shia Arabs would back Muqtada al-Sadr and Fadhila, which is a quasi-Sadrist party – not SCIRI and Dawa. If so, why is the United States siding with SCIRI and Dawa against Sadr? Is that why SCIRI and Dawa are dragging their feet on holding provincial elections in 2007 -- because they know they’d lose massively?

Why aren’t reporters digging more into the two stunning votes in parliament this year: the first in support of bill that demanded that the United States set a timetable for withdrawal, and the second insisting that any Iraqi effort at the United Nations to extend the mandate that allows the United States to continue to occupy Iraq be subject to approval by the Iraqi parliament? (The UN mandate, which provides the legal basis for the American occupation of Iraq, expires in December.) It’s true that polling in Iraq, under wartime conditions, has only limited usefulness; still, polls have shown that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis want the United States to get out of Iraq and that a large majority also believes in a unitary, nationalist Iraqi state.

There are three “no’s” in Iraqi politics that could serve as a basis for a consensus among Iraqi factions: opposition to the occupation, opposition to Al Qaeda, and opposition to excessive Iranian influence in Iraq. Most Sunnis, most secular Iraqis, and Shia supporters of the Sadr and Fadhila parties agree on all three of those. In addition, those parties have also taken steps in recent weeks to distance themselves from the feckless Maliki regime in Baghdad, either quitting or suspending their participation in both the Cabinet and the parliament. Yet, according to the New York Times, yet another U.S. review of its Iraq policy has concluded that there is no alternative to Maliki’s faltering coalition. Why is the United States so wedded to the Dawa-SCIRI-Kurdish alliance? Don’t they realize that any Iraqi government that depends on U.S. favor by definition can’t win support from the Iraqi people?

Reporters should ask: Can any government or political party that has American support succeed in Iraq? Or is American support effectively the kiss of death for an Iraqi politician? Corrupt and venal Iraqi leaders, squatting in bunkers in the Green Zone, might welcome American support and American money – but do they have any “street cred” whatsoever?

Lately, the United States has stepped up the propaganda blaming Iran for much of the violence in Iraq – and, undoubtedly, Iran’s secret services have their fingers in a lot of pies in Iraq. But it’s also true that the two politicians with the closest ties to Iran are SCIRI’s Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, now ill with cancer and passing the torch to his son, Amar Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, and President Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Kurdish party, PUK. (In the 1980s, the Hakims were hosted by Iran, and their paramilitary force, the Badr Brigade was owned and operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the ministry of intelligence. And in the 1990s, Talabani’s PUK made common cause with Iran against the rival Kurdish bloc of the Barzani clan, the Kurdistan Democratic Party.) Why isn’t the media paying more attention to the Iranian connections of the Hakims and Talabani?

Despite recent U.S. efforts to recruit, arm and train paramilitary Sunni militia from the ranks of the Iraqi resistance, the vast majority of U.S. aid to Iraq’s police and army goes directly to the Shia forces associated with SCIRI’s Badr Brigade and the pesh merga militia of the Kurds.

Here’s a legitimate question: Is the United States arming all three sides of an Iraqi civil war? If so, rather than trumpeting U.S. support for the Sunni militia, wouldn’t it better to stop arming all sides? Why, if the United States begins to leave Iraq, should it arm one, two, or all three sides in a civil war? Why not let Iraqis sort that out?

The dénouement of America’s failed occupation of Iraq could be bloody indeed. But not enough reporters and news analysts are looking at the other possibility: In the wake of an orderly withdrawal over, say, the next year, might not Iraq’s nationalists join forces against the separatists and struggle to create a new center in Iraqi politics? As Zbigniew Brzezinski says: “The only Iraqis who want us to stay are the ones who will have to leave when we leave.”
Robert Dreyfuss covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, and the Washington Monthly. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. His web site and blog, The Dreyfuss Report, can be found at www.RobertDreyfuss.com.
E-mail: robert@robertdreyfuss.com

In a June 13 commentary published by the Prague Post, CDI Research Analyst Victoria Samson and BASIC Executive Director Ian Davis warn Europe about the missile defense installations that are being peddled by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. “Ultimately,” they write, “Europe is being asked to buy into a costly, destabilizing and unproven system, which includes an interceptor missile that is not yet on the drawing board, to meet a threat that does not yet exist.” “The Latest Snake Oil: Beware of the salesmen peddling missile defense for Europe” is available at http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=3984&StartRow=1&ListRows=10&appendURL=&Orderby=D.DateLastUpdated&ProgramID=6&from_page=index.cfm.

Analysis: Hamas won the battle - and it may win the war, too

ERAN SHAYSON, THE JERUSALEM POST Jul. 12, 2007 A month after its takeover of Gaza, it seems Hamas has begun to translate its military achievements into political dividends, while Fatah is wallowing in the mud and becoming even less relevant.

Although Hamas's victory in Gaza was decisive, leaving the movement with no serious rivals in the area, the victory also held the potential to work against it. First, following the collapse of the Rafah agreement, Hamas had to ensure the continued operation of the border crossings in order to provide for the basic needs of the population.

Second, the Arab League's negative reaction to the coup, and the Egyptian pullout of its diplomatic delegation from Gaza, seemed to have isolated Hamas. Third, Hamas's actions gave Mahmoud Abbas the pretext - and allegedly the legitimacy - to dissociate Fatah from Hamas and to move forward with Israel on the political path.

Most significantly, it was the cautious "satisfaction" expressed in Jerusalem and Washington regarding the split between a Hamas-led Gaza and a Fatah-led West Bank, that created the impression that Hamas's coup was in fact a hasty move. Israel and the US seemed to have found the formula that would force Hamas to face the responsibility towards Gaza's population, while making the Fatah government a political partner.

However, a month later, it seems that Hamas had the political wisdom to overcome its drawbacks. The group has been successful in consolidating its control over Gaza, in gaining back popular support, in preventing the hermetic closure of the Israel-Gaza border and in conducting a dialogue with Arab and international actors. The return of the Egyptian diplomatic delegation to Gaza is considered a major political achievement for Hamas. Moreover, the release of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston granted the group a certain amount of prestige in the international arena.

Fatah, on the other hand, has not shown the capacity to deliver in the West Bank. The movement has not recovered from its defeat and has been unsuccessful in unifying its political and military ranks. Some of Abbas's presidential decrees, by which he has been trying to impose his rule in the West Bank, have simply been ignored, even by Fatah members. The most prominent example of this was displayed by the Fatah factions' disregard for Abbas's decree to dissolve them all.

Moreover, following this decree, some members of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades decided to leave the PA security forces and urged Abbas to sack Prime Minister Salaam Fayad. Finally, by formulating an unrealistic set of preconditions for dialogue with Hamas, including a demand to restore the status quo ante in Gaza and accept Fayad's government, Fatah is slowly rendering itself irrelevant.

Israel's frustration with Hamas's buildup emanates mostly from its failure to influence the Palestinians' internal balance of power. Israel is entangled in a "bear-hug paradox": Its obvious gestures toward moderate Fatah elements weaken those elements politically, while confrontation with Hamas or other extremist elements may even strengthen their status.

Therefore, Israel's efforts to strengthen Abbas should be conducted wisely. For example, Abbas should not receive free gifts. Gestures like the release of Fatah prisoners should be carried out only in return for Palestinian concessions following negotiations, so as not to be considered suspicious. Moreover, Israel should seek to transfer powers and authorities to the PA. Only when the West Bank is ruled by a genuinely self-governing Palestinian authority will there be a chance for the creation of a partner.

The true victory of Hamas is that it leaves Israel with no political alternatives vis-à-vis Gaza; Israel knows that the only political alternative to the Hamas regime in Gaza is al-Qaida.

Therefore, if Israel wishes to stay relevant, it will have to recognize Hamas as the true address in Gaza.

The writer is the analyst team leader at the Reut Institute for policy planning.

Reported in Headline News, Israel Today
Lieberman: US will back Israeli strike on Iran
Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman said on Tuesday that he received the tacit blessing of Europe and the United States for an Israeli military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

“If we start military operations against Iran alone, then Europe and the US will support us,” Lieberman told Army Radio following a meeting earlier in the week with NATO and European Union officials.

Lieberman said the Western powers acknowledged the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat to the Jewish state, but said that ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are “going to prevent the leaders of countries in Europe and America from deciding on the use of force to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities,” even if diplomacy ultimately fails.

The message Lieberman said the NATO and EU officials conveyed to him is that Israel should “prevent the threat herself.”

Hizballah Has Missiles for Downing Israeli Warplanes One Year after Lebanon War

DEBKAfile Exclusive Military Report

July 11, 2007, 11:04 PM (GMT+02:00)


The highly mobile Rapier 2 anti-air missile


One year ago to the day, the Lebanese Shiite terrorist Hizballah sent a unit across the border into Israel and ambushed an Israeli patrol, killing eight of its members and kidnapping two. The raid, followed by a Katyusha rocket attack on northern Israel sparked the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and a 34-day war.

Today, DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Hizballah is in better military shape than ever before. its sponsors, Iran and Syria, have not only replenished the rocket stocks depleted by daily barrages against Israeli towns and villages, but topped them up by 50%. Whereas Hizballah started the 2006 war with 12,000 rockets of different types, today the Lebanese Shiite terror group has accumulated 18,000 in its arsenal.

Drawing lessons of that war, Hizballah has doubled the number of teams trained to launch rockets and given them a fleet of all-terrain vehicles and motorbikes for speedy movement between firing locations.

Hizballah’s long-range rocket force, designated “Planning Unit,” is stationed in northern Lebanon in the Hermel district. Most of the new rocket supplies, including hundreds of Zilzal-2, Zilzal-3, and Fatah-110, which has a range of 250 km (reaching Tel Aviv and points south), are stored in large emergency depots on the Syrian side of the border with Lebanon to keep them out of sight of UN peacekeepers and out of the way of the Israeli Air Force in a flare-up of hostilities.

Hizballah plans to delay hauling the rockets into Lebanon until the last moment before they are fired.

Hizballah’s short-range rocket unit, designated the “Nasr Unit”, is stationed in the Tyre region of the South and its command center in the village of Maarub. They are positioned for striking the northern Israeli towns of Haifa, Kiryat Shemona, Tiberias, Safed, Acre and Nahariya.

To stay out of sight of UN peacekeepers policing in the South, this brigade keeps a low profile, reactivating only very few of the bunkers which served them in the war. the bulk have been cleared out, restocked with ammunition and combat rations, prepared for military use and kept closed.

This enables the Lebanese government and, less willingly, the Israel high command, to maintain that a lot has changed for the better since the war and Hizballah is no longer deployed right up to the border but at a distance.

This is only a half-truth. The fact is that the Shiite terrorists are back in the South, albeit well hidden in the Shiite villages. Consequently, Israeli policy-makers can continue to spin illusions, like those the Olmert government fed the public and the media before the last war.

Hizballah has tripled its shore-to-sea C-802 missiles, one of which crippled an Israeli missile ship in July, 2006. With 25-30 of these weapons, the Shiite militia is capable of menacing any of the warships cruising Mediterranean waters opposite the Lebanese coast, be they Israeli missile boats, the American Sixth Fleet or the European flotilla attached to UNIFIL.

Several dozen more are concealed across the Syrian border, ready for transfer at short notice.

Hidden there too is double the number of anti-tank missiles in service with the Hizballah in 2006, of types which caused heavy damage and casualties to Israeli tank crews. Syria has upgraded this stock with a large supply of “Third Generation” missiles bought in Russia with Iranian funding.

Another major difference between then and now is that Hizballah has established its first air defense unit armed with ground-to-air shoulder-borne Strela-7 missiles and the mobile Rapier 2s.

Last year, Hizballah fielded 1,600 well-trained commandos, the backbone of its fighting force, and lost 750 in combat with the Israeli army. Since then, 1,200 fresh fighters have been recruited and are undergoing commando training at a special facility near Tehran.

Each course of three to four months has an intake of 300 to 400 Hizballah recruits. The third course went into training in July. By the end of the year, Hizballah will have some 2,000 elite troops, 400-500 more than its number at the outset of the last war.

Hizballah’s secretary-general, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, presents a charismatic, powerful image. However, since the war, Iran and the movement’s leadership have reduced his mandate to internal Lebanese politics in opposition to prime minister Fouad Siniora and the rest of Lebanon’s anti-Syrian political bloc, headed by Saad Hariri and Walid Jumblatt.

The militia’s present war chief, special operations planner and liaison with Iran, Syria and al Qaeda, is the veteran Hizballah super-terrorist and kidnapper, Imad Mughniyeh.

Serving under him as chief of staff is Ibrahim Aqil.

Number 3 in the movement’s military hierarchy is Hajj Khalil Harb, commander of Unit No. 1800, which kidnapped the Israeli soldiers Udi Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in its cross-border raid of July 12, 2006, and is responsible for special operations in Israel, the Palestinian territories and Iraq.

Members of this elite unit are deployed in the Gaza Strip in support of Hamas.

In Iraq, they cooperate with Sunni and Shiite terrorists fighting US troops.

Unit No. 1800 has a permanent complement of 5,000 trained men and a partially-trained reserve force of 9,000 on standby.

The militia’s fighting manpower, including its special intelligence and security agencies, totals between 15,000 and 16,000.

<h1 align="center"> Praying for a Terrorist Strike:
The GOP's Newest Political Strategy</h1>

Nuclear terrorism: If it happens, it will be an answer to Republican prayers. Former Republican Senator Rick Santorum made the grand crusade against “Islamic fascism” the central focus of his unsuccessful 2006 re-election effort.

On numerous occasions the preening Keystone State solon – who couldn't glance at a mirror without seeing Churchill's bulldog demeanor glowering back at him – insisted that it was the “destiny” of “this generation” to fight an apocalyptic war against radical Islam. Unlike his more equivocal comrades in the Republican branch of the War Party, Santorum made it clear that his preferred “exit strategy” for Iraq would be to invade (or at least bomb) Iran.

After long acquaintance with, and scrutiny of, Mr. Santorum, Pennsylvania's voters decided he was more Church Lady than Churchill,* and gave him a chance to pursue new opportunities in the private sector. So Santorum delivered a suitably melodramatic farewell address and retreated into a comfortable sinecure as a Washington lobbyist.

Despair not for Rick Santorum during that bleak season when he, like Churchill before him, toils in the exile into which he was cast by an ungrateful electorate. He has never abandoned the hope that the American public will come to embrace the wisdom of a generational war. It's just that Santorum has now invested that hope in the murderous intentions of the Islamic fanatics he has warned about. To put the matter bluntly, Santorum is obviously hoping, and perhaps even praying, for Americans to die at the hands of Jihadists.

How else are rational people supposed to understand the following remarks offered by Santorum during a July 7 interview on Hugh Hewitt's syndicated radio program:

“[C]onfronting Iran in the Middle East as an absolute linchpin for our success in that region.... And while it may not be a popular thing to talk about right now, and I know public sentiment is against it [namely, the war in Iraq and expanding the conflict to Iran] ... between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public’s going to have a very different view of this war, and it will be because, I think, of some unfortunate events, that like we’re seeing unfold in the UK. But I think the American public’s going to have a very different view....”

As others have pointed out, Santorum is not the only prominent Republican figure to predict that wayward Americans, having allowed themselves to doubt the divine insight of the Dear Leader, will soon be smitten by the chastening hand of history.

Just weeks ago, Arkansas Republican chairman Dennis Milligan, who describes himself as “150 percent” behind Bush and his Iraq war, said in an on-the-record interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001], and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country.”

Both of those abhorrent comments are riffs on a familiar Rovian theme: Vote Republican and support the Dear Leader, or die. Speaking of Rove: In the current issue of American Spectator conservative actor and economist Ben Stein, a long-time war supporter who now considers the Iraq venture to be “an unmitigated disaster,” describes a recent dinner at Rove's house with GOP adviser Aram Bakshian. Both Rove and Bakshian were “very upbeat about the GOP and the war,” which to minds as cynical as my own suggests that something Santorum would consider usefully “unfortunate” may soon transpire.

People like Santorum and Milligan (and Dana Rohrabacher, the stupidest consequential public figure not named Bush or Hannity) ache for disaster. They pant after it with vulgar, undisguised lust. They are tremulous with unconsummated desire for validation in the form of dead Americans and ruined cities.

Revolting and vile as this is, it is not unique. In fact, these repellent people are firmly and squarely in the interventionist tradition of American politics, in which cheerfully anticipating the death of Americans has a long and venerable history.

Writing in Foreign Affairs a dozen years ago (excerpt), the late Establishment historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that “it is to Joseph Stalin that Americans owe the 40-year suppression of the isolationist impulse.”

Stalin's regime slaughtered scores of millions, helped precipitate the Second World War, and (thanks to the connivance of Washington) acquired thermonuclear weapons capable of incinerating much of the world – but at least he wasn't an isolationist. Stalin and his successors were immeasurably useful allies for the American Power Elite against their common enemy – Americans and others who wanted to cultivate their own gardens and live in freedom and peace.

In 1947, Senator Arthur Vandenberg described Washington's foreign policy at the beginning of the Cold War as that of “scaring hell out of the American people.” In the same year, Senator Robert Taft, who yielded to nobody in his detestation for Communism and other forms of collectivism, described himself as being “more than a bit tired of having the Russian menace invoked as a reason for doing any – and everything that might or might not be desirable or necessary on its own merits.”

By 1950, American public sentiment was fiercely anti-Communist and just as passionately opposed to the interventionist foreign policy “consensus.” It was at that moment of crisis, recalled former Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1954, that the Korean war “came along and saved us.”

Some scenes from the Korean War, also known as
"Saving Secretary Acheson (and his Interventionist Buddies)." Saving the plans of Acheson and his comrades cost the lives of more than 50,000 Americans in a war that has never formally been brought to an end.

Interventionists have always known that Americans aren't naturally inclined to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, unless the monsters in question kill a suitably large number of Americans. That's why FDR, Dean Acheson, and people of that ilk offered a prayer of gratitude for Josef Stalin six decades ago, and why the likes of Rick Santorum are praying for Jihadists to strike today.

*I do not want to leave the impression that <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/churchill-full.html">Churchill himself was an entirely commendable figure.

Planet Pentagon
by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch As the editor of Chalmers Johnson's Blowback Trilogy for the American Empire Project, I was struck by an oddity when the second volume, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, was published in 2004 to splendid reviews in this country. Johnson's focus in the book – its heart and soul, you might say – was what he called our "empire of bases," the over-700 military bases, giant to micro, that the Pentagon then listed as ours. The book vividly laid out the Pentagon's global basing structure, its "footprint" (to use the term the Defense Department favors), in startling detail.

It was a way of getting at the nature of imperial power for a country that largely avoided colonies, but nonetheless managed to garrison the globe. As a topic, all those bases would have seemed unavoidable in any serious review, no less one praising the book. Yet, somehow, review after review managed not to mention, no less substantively discuss, this crucial aspect of Johnson's thesis. Only recently, all these years later, has a mainstream review appeared in this country that focused on his work on those bases. Jonathan Freedland, reviewing the third volume in Johnson's trilogy, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, in the New York Review of Books, took up the subject eloquently – and (wouldn't you know it?), he isn't an American. He works for the British Guardian.

Isn't it strange that we Americans can garrison the planet and yet, in this country, bases are only a topic of discussion when some local U.S. community suddenly hears that it might lose its special base and an uproar ensues. Typically, we have made it through years of war since 2001, during which untold billions of dollars have gone into constructing massive bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet these bases (as well as the planning behind them) have, until recently, gone almost totally unmentioned in all the argument, debate, and uproar over what to do about Iraq.

In reality – explain it as you will – Americans have little grasp of the enormity of the Pentagon, despite real military budgets that, by some calculations, exceed three-quarters of a trillion dollars yearly. (And don't forget that, since 2002, we've been piling on with a second Defense Department, the hapless bureaucratic morass that goes by the name of the Department of Homeland Security.) Nick Turse, Tomdispatch associate editor whose book, The Complex – about all the newest twists on the old Military-Industrial you-know-what – will be out in the spring of 2008, quite literally sizes the Pentagon up for us. Tom




Planet Pentagon
How the Pentagon Came to Own the Earth, Seas, and Skies
By Nick Turse Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on a proposal, championed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq in exchange for bipartisan Congressional support for the long-term (read: more or less permanent) garrisoning of that country. The troops are to be tucked away on "large bases far from Iraq's major cities." This plan sounded suspiciously similar to one revealed by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times on April 19, 2003, just as U.S. troops were preparing to enter Baghdad. Headlined "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq," it laid out a U.S. plan for:

"a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish north."

Shortly thereafter, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, denied any such plans: "I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting," and, while the bases were being built, the story largely disappeared from the mainstream media.

Even with the multi-square mile, multi-billion dollar, state-of-the-art Balad Air Base and Camp Victory thrown in, however, the bases in Gates' new plan will be but a drop in the bucket for an organization that may well be the world's largest landlord. For many years, the U.S. military has been gobbling up large swaths of the planet and huge amounts of just about everything on (or in) it. So, with the latest Pentagon Iraq plans in mind, take a quick spin with me around this Pentagon planet of ours.

Garrisoning the Globe

In 2003, Forbes magazine revealed that media mogul Ted Turner was America's top land baron – with a total of 1.8 million acres across the U.S. The nation's ten largest landowners, Forbes reported, "own 10.6 million acres, or one out of every 217 acres in the country." Impressive as this total was, the Pentagon puts Turner and the entire pack of mega-landlords to shame with over 29 million acres in U.S. landholdings. Abroad, the Pentagon's "footprint" is also that of a giant. For example, the Department of Defense controls 20% of the Japanese island of Okinawa and, according to Stars and Stripes, "owns about 25 percent of Guam." Mere land ownership, however, is just the tip of the iceberg.

In his 2004 book, The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson opened the world's eyes to the size of the Pentagon's global footprint, noting that the Department of Defense (DoD) was deploying nearly 255,000 military personnel at 725 bases in 38 countries. Since then, the total number of overseas bases has increased to at least 766 and, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, may actually be as high as 850. Still, even these numbers don't begin to capture the global sprawl of the organization that unabashedly refers to itself as "one of the world's largest landlords."

The DoD's "real property portfolio," according to 2006 figures, consists of a total of 3,731 sites. Over 20% of these sites are located on more than 711,000 acres outside of the U.S. and its territories. Yet even these numbers turn out to be a drastic undercount. For example, while a 2005 Pentagon report listed U.S. military sites from Antigua and Hong Kong to Kenya and Peru, some countries with significant numbers of U.S. bases go entirely unmentioned – Afghanistan and Iraq, for example.

In Iraq, alone, in mid-2005, U.S. forces were deployed at some 106 bases, from the massive Camp Victory, headquarters of the U.S. high command, to small 500-troop outposts in the country's hinterlands. None of them made the Pentagon's list. Nor was there any mention of bases in Jordan on that list – or in the 2001-2005 reports either. Yet that nation, as military analyst William Arkin has pointed out, allowed the garrisoning of 5,000 U.S. troops at various bases around the country during the build-up to the war in Iraq. In addition, some 76 nations have given the U.S. military access to airports and airfields – in addition to who knows where else that the Pentagon forgot to acknowledge or considers inappropriate for inclusion in its list.

Even without Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the more than 20 other nations that, Arkin noted in early 2004, were "secretly or quietly providing bases and facilities," the available statistics do offer a window into a bloated organization bent on setting up franchises across the globe. According to 2005 documents, the Pentagon acknowledges 39 nations with at least one U.S. base, stations personnel in over 140 countries around the world, and boasts a physical plant of at least 571,900 facilities, though some Pentagon figures show 587,000 "buildings and structures." Of these, 466,599 are located in the United States or its territories. In fact, the Department of Defense owns or leases more than 75% of all federal buildings in the U.S.

According to 2006 figures, the Army controls the lion's share of DoD land (52%), with the Air Force coming in second (33%), the Marine Corps (8%) and the Navy (7 %) bringing up the rear. The Army is also tops in total number of sites (1,742) and total number of installations (1,659). But when it comes to "large installations," those whose value tops $1.584 billion, the Army is trumped by the Air Force, which boasts 43 mega-bases compared to the Army's 39. The Navy and Marines possess only 29 and 10, respectively. What the Navy lacks in big bases of its own, however, it more than makes up for in borrowed foreign naval bases and ports – some 251 across the globe.

Diversification

Land and large installations, however, are not all that the Defense Department owns. Until relatively recently, the U.S. Navy operated its own dairy, complete with a herd of Holsteins. Even though it did get rid of those cows in 1998, it kept the 865-acre farm tract in Gambrills, Maryland, and now leases it to Horizon Organic Dairy.

While it doesn't have a dairy, the Army still operates stables – such as the John C. McKinney Memorial Stables where many of the 44 horses from its ceremonial Caisson Platoon live. It also has a big farm (the Large Animal Research Facility). In fact, the Pentagon owns hundreds of thousands of animals – from rats to dogs to monkeys. In addition to an unknown number of animals used for unexplained "other purposes," in 2001 alone, the DoD utilized 330,149 creatures for various types of experimentation.

Then, there's the equipment the DoD owns, loads of it. For instance, it is the unlikely owner of "over 2,050 railcars, know[n] as the Defense Freight Rail Interchange Fleet." The DoD also reportedly ships 100,000 sea containers each year and spends $800 million annually on domestic cargo, primarily truck and rail shipments. And when it comes to trucks, the Army, alone, has a fleet of 12,700 Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks (huge, eight-wheeled vehicles used to supply ammunition, petroleum, oils, and lubricants to other combat vehicles and weapons systems in the field) and 120,000 Humvees. All told, according to a 2006 Pentagon report, the DoD had a total of at least "280 ships, 14,000 aircraft, 900 strategic missiles, and 330,000 ground combat and tactical vehicles."

The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the DoD's largest combat support agency (with operations in 48 of the 50 states and 28 foreign countries) boasts: "If America's forces eat it, wear it, maintain equipment with it, or burn it as fuel, DLA probably provides it." In fact, the DLA claims that it "manages" some 5.2 million items and maintains an inventory, in its Defense Distribution Depots (which stretch from Italy and Japan to Korea and Kuwait), valued at $94.1 billion.

The DLA runs the Defense National Stockpile Center (DNSC) which stores 42 "strategic and critical materials" – from zinc, lead, cobalt, chromium, and mercury (more than 9.7 million pounds of it in 2005) to precious metals such as platinum, palladium, and even industrial diamonds – at 20 locations across the U.S. With a stockpile valued at over $1.5 billion and $5.7 billion in sales of excess commodities since 1993, the DNSC claims that there is "no private sector company in the world that sells this wide range of commodities and materials."

All told, the Department of Defense owns up to having "[o]ver $1 trillion in assets [and] $1.6 trillion in liabilities." This is, no doubt, a gross underestimate given the DoD's historic penchant for flawed book-keeping and the fact that, according to a study by its own inspector general, it cannot even account for at least $1 trillion dollars in money spent – or perhaps, according to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as much as $2.3 trillion. Cooking the books and stashing cash is fitting enough for an American organization, in the age of Enron, that thinks of itself not just as a government agency but, in its own words, as "America's oldest company, largest company, busiest company and most successful company." In fact, on its website, the DoD makes the point that it easily bests Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil, and General Motors in terms of budget and staff.

It's Got the Whole World in Its Hands

In addition to assembling a dizzying array of assets, from tungsten to tubas – in 2005 alone, it spent more than $6 million on sheet music, musical instruments, and accessories – the Pentagon owns a great deal of housing: 300,000 units worldwide. By its own admission, it is also a slumlord par excellence – with an inventory of "180,000 inadequate family housing units." According to the Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Installations & Environment):

"Approximately 33 percent of all [military] families live on-base, in housing that is often dilapidated, too small, lacking in modern facilities – almost 49 percent (or 83,000 units) are substandard."

Meanwhile, the Department of Defense's own home, the Pentagon, bests the Sultan of Brunei's Istana Nurul Iman palace, the largest private residence in the world – 3,705,793 to 2,152,782 square feet of occupiable space. The DoD likes to boast that the Pentagon is "virtually a city in itself" – with 30 miles of access highways, 200 acres of lawn space. It includes a five-acre center courtyard, 17.5 miles of corridors, 16 parking lots (with an estimated 8,770 parking spaces), seven snack bars, two cafeterias, one dining room, a post office, "credit union, travel agency, dental offices, ticket offices, blood donor center, housing referral office, and 30 other retail shops and services," a chapel, a heliport, and numerous libraries. Moreover, says the DoD, the Pentagon consumed a huge portion of its natural environment, its concrete reportedly contains "680,000 tons of sand and gravel from the nearby Potomac River."

In value, the Pentagon's other properties are almost as impressive. The combined worth of the world's two most expensive homes, the $138 million 103-room "Updown Court" in Windlesham, Surrey in the United Kingdom and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan's $135 million Aspen ski lodge don't even come close to the price tag on Ascension Auxiliary Airfield, located on a small island off the coast of St. Helena (the place of Napoleon Bonaparte's exile and death). It has an estimated replacement value of over $337 million. Other high-priced facilities include Camp Ederle in Italy at $544 million; Incirlik Air Base in Turkey at almost $1.2 billion; and Thule Air Base in Greenland at $2.8 billion; while the U.S. Naval Air Station in Keflavik, Iceland is appraised at $3.4 billion and the various military facilities in Guam are valued at more than $11 billion.

Still, to begin to grasp the Pentagon's global immensity, it helps to look, again, at its land holdings – all 120,191 square kilometers which are almost exactly the size of North Korea (120,538 square kilometers). These holdings are larger than any of the following nations: Liberia, Bulgaria, Guatemala, South Korea, Hungary, Portugal, Jordan, Kuwait, Israel, Denmark, Georgia, or Austria. The 7,518 square kilometers of 20 micro-states – the Vatican, Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Maldives, Malta, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Seychelles, Andorra, Bahrain, Saint Lucia, Singapore, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati and Tonga – combined pales in comparison to the 9,307 square kilometers of just one military base, White Sands Missile Range.

Downsizing?

While it has been setting up hundreds of bases across the globe to support ongoing wars, the Pentagon has also been restructuring its forces in an effort to reduce troop levels at old Cold War mega-bases and close down less strategically useful sites. Does this mean less Pentagon control in the world?

Don't bet on it. In fact, the U.S. military is exploring long-term options to dominate the planet as never before. Previously, the DoD has only maintained a moving presence on the high seas. This may change. The Pentagon is now considering – and planning for – future "sea-basing." No longer just a ship, a fleet, or "prepositioned material" stationed on the world's oceans, sea-bases will be "a hybrid system-of-systems consisting of concepts of operations, ships, forces, offensive and defensive weapons, aircraft, communications and logistics." The notion of such bases is increasingly popular within the military due to the fact that they "will help to assure access to areas where U.S. military forces may be denied access to support [land] facilities." After all, as a report by the Defense Science Board pointed out, "[S]eabases are sovereign [and] not subject to alliance vagaries." Imagine a future where the people of countries at odds with U.S. policies suddenly find America's "massive seaborne platforms" floating just outside their territorial waters.

With a real-estate portfolio that includes the earth and the sea, the sky would, quite literally, be the limit for the DoD. According to Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired's "Danger Room" blog, the "U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan" of 2004 outlined what "analysts call the most detailed picture since the end of the Cold War of the Pentagon's efforts to turn outer space into a battlefield, the report makes U.S. dominance of the heavens a top Pentagon priority in the new century." As the U.S. military's outer-space policy statement puts it, "Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power."

When you're focused on effectively controlling a planet, the idea of occupying Iraq, a country about the size of the state of California, for the next decade or five, must seem like a small thing. In practice, however, the global landlord on the Potomac has found property values in Iraq steep indeed. As all now know, it has been fought to a standstill there by modest-sized bands of guerrillas lacking air power, sea power, or high-tech spy satellites in outer space. The Pentagon may be landlord to massive swaths of the globe, but from Vietnam to Laos, Beruit to Somalia, U.S. forces have also found themselves evicted by neighborhood residents from properties they were prepared to consider their own. The question remains: Will Iraq be added to the list of permanently occupied territories and take on the look of long-garrisoned South Korea as Secretary of Defense Gates and President Bush have urged – or will it be added to a growing list of places that have effectively resisted paying the rent on Planet Pentagon?

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American Empire Project Series by Metropolitan Books in 2008.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

Al Qaeda to Pakistanis: Join The Jihad

By Jeffrey Imm


Al Qaeda's Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri issued a new videotape on Wednesday titled "The Aggression against Lal Masjid".

This message is focused on the clashes between the Pakistan Army and Islamic students at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Pakistan, in which Al-Zawahiri calls upon Pakistani Muslims to rise up and take revenge against the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani government for their actions against the Lal Masjid mosque. Al-Zawahiri stated: "Muslims of Pakistan: your salvation is only through Jihad".

This 4 minute, 24 second address is the third in seven days, and the 10th this year by Al-Zawahiri.

The video is available on Laura Mansfield's web site.

Associated Press, Laura Mansfield, and SITE Institute have reported translations of this new Al-Zawahiri message.

Al-Zawahiri says of the Lal Masjid clashes: "I talk to you today on the occasion of the criminal aggression carried out by Musharraf, his army and his security organs - the Crusaders' hunting dogs - against Lal Masjid in Islamabad, and on the occasion of the dirty, despicable crime committed by Pakistani military intelligence - at the orders of Musharraf - against Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi when it showed him on television in women's dress. This is a message of blinding clarity to the Muslims in Pakistan, the Pakistani Ulema, and indeed, the Ulema in the rest of the Islamic world, and this crime can only be washed away by repentance or blood. I call on the Ulema in Pakistan and tell them: this is what you are worth to Musharraf, and this is the treatment that awaits you in the prisons of Musharraf's hunting dogs, and this is what you are worth to the Crusaders... Musharraf won't spare any of you, and won't stop until he eradicates Islam from Pakistan".

Al-Zawahiri tells Pakistanis that "demanding that he [Pakistan President Musharraf] adhere to Islam and refrain from worshiping the Crusaders and Jews will only get you the worst types of contempt, humiliation and degradation", and that "this is your fate if you are silent and prefer the life of this world to the hereafter."

Al-Zawahiri calls Pakistanis to take action: "Muslims of Pakistan: your salvation is only through Jihad."

Furthermore, Al-Zawahiri calls Pakistanis to also back Jihad in Afghanistan: "so you must now back the Mujahideen in Afghanistan with your persons, wealth, opinion and expertise, because the Jihad in Afghanistan is the door to salvation for Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the region. Die honorably in the fields of Jihad, and don't live like women with moustaches and beards. Aren't there any honorable ones in Pakistan? Aren't there any jealous ones? Isn't there anyone who prefers the hereafter to the life of this world? O you who believe! What is the matter with you, that, when you are asked to go forth in the cause of Allah, you cling heavily to the earth? Do you prefer the life of this world to the hereafter?"

This new Al-Zawahiri message comes on the heels of report by Reuters on intelligence analysts appearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee stating that Al Qaeda remains entrenched in Pakistan, and an AP report that