Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's Blog, page 8

Fracking: A new dawn for misplaced optimism

Published in The Independent on Sunday (18.11.2012)





You would think we were swimming in oil. The International Energy Agency's (IEA) latest World Energy Outlook forecasts that the United States will outstrip Saudi Arabia as the world's largest producer by 2017, becoming "all but self-sufficient in net terms" in energy production. While the "peak oil" pessimists are clearly wrong, so is a simplistic picture of fossil fuel abundance.

When the IEA predicts an increase in "oil production" from 84 million barrels a day in 2011 to 97 in 2035, it is talking about "natural gas liquids and unconventional sources", which includes a big reliance on "fracking" for shale gas. Conventional oil output will stay largely flat, or fall.

The IEA has been exposed before as having, under US pressure, artificially inflated official reserve figures. And now US energy consultants Ruud Weijermars and Crispian McCredie say there is strong "basis for reasonable doubts about the reliability and durability of US shale gas reserves". The New York Times found that state geologists, industry lawyers and market analysts privately questioned "whether companies are intentionally, and even illegally, overstating the productivity of their wells and the size of their reserves." And former UK chief government scientist Sir David King has concluded that the industry had overstated world oil reserves by about a third. In Nature, he dismissed notions that a shale gas boom would avert an energy crisis, noting that production at wells drops by as much as 90 per cent within the first year.

The rapid decline rates make shale gas distinctly unprofitable. Arthur Berman, a former Amoco petroleum geologist, cites the Eagle Ford shale, Texas, where the decline rate is so high that simply to keep production flat, they will have to drill "almost 1,000 wells" a year, requiring "about $10bn or $12bn a year just to replace supply". In all, "it starts to approach the amount of money needed to bail out the banking industry. Where is that money to come from?"

In September, the leader of the US shale gas revolution, Chesapeake Energy, sold $6.9bn of gas fields and pipelines to stave off collapse. Four months ago Exxon's CEO, Rex Tillerson, told a private meeting: "We're making no money. It's all in the red." The worst-case scenario is that several large oil companies at once face financial distress. Then, says Berman, "you may have a couple of big bankruptcies or takeovers and everybody pulls back, all the money evaporates, all the capital goes away."

Far from fuelling prosperity, the gas glut will generate an unsustainable debt bubble whose bursting precipitates a supply collapse and price spike. The New Economics Foundation estimates the arrival of "economic peak oil" – when the costs of supply exceeds the price economies can pay without significantly disrupting economic activity – in around 2014/15. Black gold is not the answer.

Abu Qatada: the Asset We Can't Get Rid of

published on Huffington Post
The debate about Abu Qatada's untimely release from prison boils down to two, simplistic, polarised narratives. On the one hand, we have a pro-civil liberties, human rights perspective which lauds the government's inability to deport Qatada back to Jordan where he faces the prospect of torture and possibly death. On the other, we have a pro-state backed security perspective which lauds the government's efforts to do exactly this in the name of keeping a dangerous terrorist off British streets.The debate seems to reinforce the idea of a zero-sum conflict between liberty and security - too much of one tends to undermine the other. Or does it?The truth is, the debate overlooks a simple, obvious fact. If Abu Qatada is such a dangerous terrorist, how do we know this? And if we do know this, based on clear evidence, why is he not being prosecuted and jailed accordingly under UK jurisdiction in a British court of law?The strange reluctance to deal with British terror suspects on British soil is nothing new. We've seen this in relation to the murky cases of Abu Hamza, Khalid Fawwaz, Haroon Rashid Aswat, Babar Ahmed and Talha Ahsan. Whereas there appears to be no meaningful evidence against either Babar or Talha, an abundance of damning evidence on UK-based terror plotting by Hamza, Fawwaz and Aswat has been simply ignored, in lieu of deporting them all wholesale to face US SuperMax 'justice'.Abu Qatada's terror credentials should not be underestimated. Dubbed Osama bin Laden's right hand man in Europe and the "spiritual head of the mujahedin in Britain" by Spanish arch anti-terror judge Baltazar Garzon - and for good reason (see my book,  The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry ) - Qatada had a solid record of inciting to and facilitating terrorism, including active links with al-Qaeda affiliated groups in Algeria and Spain, as well as providing religious counsel to 9/11 plotters, Zacarias Moussaoui and 'shoe bomber' Richard Reid.But Qatada's burgeoning terror career was incubated directly by MI5. As Richard Norton-Taylor of the  Guardian  recalls: "Hours before a new anti-terrorism law allowing foreign terrorism suspects to be held without charge or trial, Qatada left his London home. Mysteriously, MI5 and the police could not find him anywhere. Several months later, he was discovered in a council house in Bermondsey, south London and incarcerated in Belmarsh jail."

But a  Times  investigation discovered from allied intelligence sources that it was Britain's very own security service that had helped Qatada escape the clutches of the law. "Al Qaeda cleric exposed as an MI5 double agent" read the headline. "Britain ignored warnings - which began before the September 11 attacks - from half a dozen friendly governments about Abu Qatada's links with terrorist groups and refused to arrest him." MI5 chiefs intended to "use the cleric as a key informer against Islamist militants in Britain."French intelligence officials were particularly - and understandably - annoyed, accusing "MI5 of helping the cleric to abscond." While Qatada was on the run, one intelligence chief in Paris told theTimes: "British intelligence is saying they have no idea where he is, but we know where he is and, if we know, I'm quite sure they do." A year later Qatada was found "hiding in a flat not far from Scotland Yard."The report was corroborated by a separate investigation by  TIME  magazine, which cited "senior European intelligence officials" revealing that Qatada had been "tucked away in a safe house" where he and his family were "lodged, fed and clothed by British intelligence services."No wonder Norton-Taylor concludes that the impetus to avoid properly putting Qatada on trial in the UK under more serious terrorism charges than he has been tried for, is his relationship to the security services - and potentially the role this played in severely undermining British national security. "Putting the terror suspect on trial would quite simply embarrass MI5", he wrote in the  Guardian  earlier this year. There is "far too much embarrassing information about MI5 and the Met police [that] would come out in court."Instead of allowing such embarrassing information on MI5's long-term cooptation of a senior al-Qaeda extremist in the UK to emerge officially in the public domain through a domestic court process, the government would prefer either to waste hundreds of thousands of pounds more of taxpayers money on a costly legal effort to deport him to Jordan where his intelligence secrets can be put to rest (along with him, presumably); or to spend £5 million a year to monitor his "every movement... from space."If the government is serious about Qatada's terrorist credentials - and it should be - they should be pursuing a solid legal effort to put the al-Qaeda puppet master behind bars for good, in this country, under specific charges that address the totality of his support for mass death. And if MI5 ends up in the firing line of that process, so be it - it would certainly be in the public interest to know how our security services' games with Islamist terrorists bred a hotbed of violent extremism in this country.

My TEDx Talk: The New Paradigm - From Endless Growth to a New Model of Democracy

On 9th October 2012, I was honoured with the opportunity of delivering a TEDx Talk on the theme of Change Through Cooperation in the town of Hornstull in Stockholm, Sweden. I talked about the crisis of civilization as symptomatic of not simply the end of a particular outmoded way of doing things, but more importantly, the birth of an exciting new paradigm for prosperity through grassroots self-empowerment.

Watch my TEDx Talk, and read the full transcript below. 

Please support by sharing with your family, friends, colleagues and networks as far and wide as possible! Here's to a future we co-create together...





THE NEW PARADIGM: FROM ENDLESS GROWTH TO A NEW MODEL OF DEMOCRACY

Humanity faces a momentous period of transition. Modern civilization is not only in crisis. It confronts a multiplicity of overlapping global crises that are potentially terminal.
We're all aware of the devastating findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose worst case scenario, is that on a business-as-usual trajectory, global average temperatures will rise by 6 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, creating an uninhabitable planet. We now know that this was far too conservative. The IPCC didn't sufficiently account for the interconnected complexity of different ecosystems. Arctic sea ice coverage is now at the lowest level it's been for a million years. It will likely disappear in the summer by 2015. The loss of summer sea ice is linked to the accelerating melt of permafrost, releasing the vast underground stores of methane – about 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon. The process is happening much faster than anticipated. Methane concentrations in the Arctic now average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years.
If this reaches a tipping point, we could trigger a process of unstoppable runaway warming, and we could see a rise of 8-10 degrees Celsius, by the end of this century.
Scientists also link the Arctic melt to our increasingly extreme weather. It will mean more colder, stormier winters in the UK and northern Europe. This, in turn, will damage British and European agriculture. With four-fifths of the United States in drought, prolonged droughts in Russia and Africa, and a lighter monsoon in India - all due to climate change - we're already seeing a global food supply crash that will precipitate dramatic food price spikes. This alone will lead to unprecedented food riots in poor countries around the world.
By mid-century, if we fail to act, world crop yields could fall as much as 20-40 per cent due to global warming. Imagine what this would look like when we factor in the role of energy depletion. In 2010 the International Energy Agency acknowledged that world conventional oil production had most likely peaked in 2006. Future production, relying increasingly on unconventional sources like tar sands, oil shale and shale gas, will be increasingly expensive. But industry hype has promised to reduce these costs dramatically with new drilling technologies, namely fracking. But this just isn't true. Despite the US having increased its total oil supply by up to 2.1 million barrels per day since 2005 – world crude oil production overall has remained largely flat since that very year.
Writing in the journal Nature, Sir David King, the former UK government chief scientist, confirms that unconventional oil and gas won't be able to produce sufficiently cheap liquid fuels at the same rate as that of conventional oil. Production rates at shale wells drop off by 60 to 90 per cent within their first year of operation. Sir King also argues that oil companies have overestimated the size of world oil reserves by about a third. To make matters worse, a typical frack job uses about 4.5 million gallons of water - what New York City consumes in seven minutes. As climate change intensifies drought, it will make fracking more costly and unsustainable.
The problem is that every major point in industrial food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels – on-site machinery; production of artificial fertilisers; processing, packaging, transport and storage. Ten per cent of energy consumed yearly in the United States is used by the food industry. So as oil becomes more expensive, this will place massive strain on industrial food production. 
And it won't just be food. By 2030, on our current course, climate change alone will lead to deaths worldwide of over 100 million people, and a 3.2 per cent reduction in global GDP. What happens when we factor in the impact of peak oil? A study this year in the leading journal, Energy, concluded that “world oil supply has not increased” since 2005, that this was “a primary cause of the recession”, and that the “expected impact of reduced oil supply” will mean the “financial crisis may eventually worsen.” What happens when we factor in the interconnected feedback effects of water scarcity, food riots, civil breakdown, state failure, mass migrations? The costs will be amplified tremendously.
This is because the growth that we've pursued over the last decades has been tied, inextricably, to the systematic expansion of debt. Although total world GDP is around $70 trillion, global external debt is at $69 trillion, and global public debt is at 64 per cent of global GDP. Meanwhile, the total size of global derivatives trading - the debt-based speculation which got us into this mess - has risen from $1,000 trillion in 2008, to now $1,200 trillion; a number with no relation to the real-economy. It's no coincidence that debt and derivatives have both intensified, because the speculative investments designed to benefit the 1 per cent are being bailed out by the 99. So it's only a matter of time before accelerating costs catch up with unsustainable debt.
It's time to wake up to the fact that the conventional economic model has run out of steam. Having outlasted its welcome, it's now leading us along a path to self-destruction. The heart of the problem is the skewered structure of our current form of capitalism, which makes endless material growth at any cost a seemingly rational imperative.
What is this structure? It comes down to who owns the Earth. Today’s capitalism is based on a completely unnatural condition where approximately 1-5 per cent of the world’s population, owns the entirety of the planet’s productive resources, as well as the technologies of production and distribution. This is the outcome of centuries of colonisation, imperialism and globalisation, which has centralised control of the earth’s resources and raw materials into the hands of a few.
With the entire planet subjected to the unrestrained logic of endless growth, we're witnessing the accelerated degradation of our natural environment, our resource base, our economic and financial system, as well as our material and psychological well-being. These are not separate crises. They are interconnected symptoms of a global Crisis of Civilization.
So how can we respond? We must first awaken to the reality that this is not the end, but the beginning. We are witnessing the collapse of the old paradigm, which hell-bent on planetary suicide, isn't working. By the end of this century, whatever happens, civilization in its current form will not exist. The question we must therefore ask ourselves is this. What will we choose to take its place?
As a species, we are on the cusp of an evolutionary choice. Standing at the dawn of this perfect storm, we find ourselves at the beginning of a process of civilizational transition. As the old paradigm dies, a new paradigm is born. And many people around the world are already making the evolutionary choice to step away from the old, and embrace the new.
Already, local communities and grassroots activists are co-creating this new paradigm as I speak, from the ground up. In Greece, locals in Athens gave up their salaries to form an eco-village, producing their own food, building sustainable houses, and decreasing reliance on money. As austerity wipes out jobs and businesses, the eco-village has become a citizen's hub, giving advice and running workshops on independent living. In the UK, there are 43 communities producing renewable energy through co-operative ownership structures. These projects are established and run by local residents, who collectively invest their own time and money to install local wind turbines, solar panels, and hydro-electric power. The Borough of Woking in Surrey, for instance, produces 135 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources, selling energy to the national grid, and earning revenue that feeds back into the local economy. In 2008, 200,000 US households were living off grid - sourcing their own water, generating their own electricity, and managing their own waste disposal. By 2010, this had jumped to 750,000, and is now rising by about 10 per cent a year. Across the Western world, there are now 380 Transition Towns, whose citizens are actively collaborating to make urban life resilient to fossil fuel depletion and climate change.
The new paradigm is premised on a fundamentally different ethos, in which we see ourselves not as disconnected, competing units fixated on maximising consumerist conquest over one another; but as interdependent members of a single human family. Our economies, rather than being assumed to exist in a vacuum of unlimited material expansion, are seen as embedded in wider society, such that economic activity for its own sake is recognised as the pathology that it is. Instead, economic enterprise becomes aligned with the deeper values that make us human - values like meeting our basic needs, education and discovery, arts and culture, sharing and giving: the values which psychologists say contribute to well-being and happiness, far more than mere money and things. And in turn, our societies are seen not as autonomous entities to which the whole of the planet must be ruthlessly subjugated, but rather as inherently embedded in the natural environment.
These grassroots endeavours are pointing us toward a vision in which people reverse their irrational investments in counterproductive conflict. Over the last decade, under the old paradigm, we've steadily increased world military spending by about 4.5 per cent annually. In 2011, world military spending totalled $1.74 trillion – rising 0.3 per cent from the preceding year – flattening only due to the financial crisis. Imagine what we could achieve if we transferred such absurdly huge expenditures on war-preparations for the nation, into development concerns for the species. Study after study proves that we could successfully transition to a 100% global renewable energy infrastructure, within the next 30 years. The costs of this transition would be no more than 1 per cent of the annual national budgets of all world governments.
This implies not just sending home armed forces, reducing unnecessary weapons production, and curtailing the influence of the military-industrial complex. We must convert that very industrial capacity by re-training our workers in the defence industries, and re-employing them in the new industries of sustainable peace that can underpin post-carbon civilization.
This will generate a new sustainable form of prosperity. Even by today's completely inadequate levels of investment, by 2020, some 2.8 million people in Europe will be employed in the renewable energy sector, boosting Europe’s GDP by some 0.24 per cent. Imagine what we could achieve if hundreds of millions of households across Europe came together in their communities to invest their collective resources into each becoming owners and producers of energy?  The new energy paradigm is not about corporate-dominated mega-projects, but about empowering small businesses and communities. Up to 70 per cent of energy is lost in transmission over large distances. So there's potential for huge efficiency gains when power is produced and consumed closer to the source. This model, where households, communities and towns become producers and consumers of clean energy, is being successfully scaled-up in Germany, where 20 per cent of the country's electricity comes from renewables, and 51 per cent of distributed energy generation is owned by individuals, not utility companies.
This new paradigm also applies to food. On the one hand, we need to put an end to the wasteful practices of the industrial food system, by which one third of global food production is lost or wasted every year. On the other, we must shift away from resource-intensive forms of traditional corporate-dominated  agriculture. In many cases, we will find that smaller-scale forms of organic farming which are more labour intensive, though less energy and water intensive, can be more sustainable than current industrial practices. Communal organic farming offers immense potential not only for employment, but also for households to become local owners and producers in the existing food supply chain. In poorer countries, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food finds that small-scale organic methods could double food production. And a recent University of Michigan study concludes that no-pesticide, local forms of organic agriculture without artificial fertilisers, could theoretically be scaled up to sustain high nutritional requirements for the entire global population.
This new paradigm of distributed clean energy production, decentralised farming, and participatory economic cooperation, offers a model of development free from the imperative of endless growth for its own sake; and it leads us directly to a new model of democracy, based not on large-scale, hierarchical-control, but on the wholesale decentralisation of power, towards smaller, local ownership and decision-making.
In the new paradigm, households and communities become owners of capital, in their increasing appropriation of the means to produce energy, food and water at a local level. Economic democratisation drives political empowerment, by ensuring that critical decisions about production and distribution of wealth take place in communities, by communities. But participatory enterprise requires commensurate mechanisms of monetary exchange which are equitable and transparent, free from the fantasies and injustices of the conventional model. In the new paradigm, neither money nor credit will be tied to the generation of debt. Banks will be community-owned institutions fully accountable to their depositors; and whirlwind speculation on financial fictions will be replaced by equitable investment schemes in which banks share risks with their customers, and divide returns fairly. The new currency will not be a form of debt-money, but, if anything, will be linked more closely to real-world assets.
But equally, the very notions of growth, progress, and happiness will be redefined. We now know, thanks to research by the likes of psychologist Oliver James and epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, that material prosperity in the West has not only failed to make us happy, it has proliferated mental illnesses, and widened social inequalities, which are scientifically linked to a prevalence of crime, violence, drug abuse, teenage births, obesity, and other symptoms of social malaise. This doesn't mean that material progress is irrelevant - but that when it becomes the overriding force of society, it is dysfunctional. So we must accept that the old paradigm of unlimited material acquisition is in its death throes – and that the new paradigm of community cooperation is far more in tune with both human nature, and the natural order. This new paradigm may well still be nascent, like small seeds, planted in disparate places. But as the Crisis of Civilization accelerates over the next decades, communities everywhere will become increasingly angry and disillusioned with what went before. And in that disillusionment with the old paradigm, the seeds we're planting today will blossom and offer a vision of hope that will be irresistible tomorrow. 
There's only one question that remains. Are you going to hold fast with the grip of death to the old paradigm, or will you embrace life to become an agent of the new paradigm of community cooperation? 
For more, check out my film The Crisis of Civilization, based on my latest book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (Pluto/Macmillan, 2010).

ELEVATE THE APOCALYPSE? My Q&A for the Elevate Festival 2012, Graz, Austria

     I'm excited to be taking part in this year's Elevate Festival, whose theme 'Elevate the Apocalypse' is all about asking the hard question of whether we need systemic failure and breakdown before we're capable of making the big changes we need for the 21st century. I'll be on a panel this Thursday 25th with some cool scientist types, including the renowned climate expert Stefan Rahmstorf, a lead IPCC author and advisor to the German govt. Ahead of the Festival, guests have been asked to answer some penetrating questions about our current civilizational predicament. My answers will be published on the Elevate Festival website this Thursday to coincide with our panel; but you gorgeous people get to see them now. So here you go...



1)      What's your take on the current multiple crisis (economic, ecological, social, political) and the (anti)crisis politics?
We are currently facing an unprecedented convergence of global climate, energy, food, water, economic, social, psychological and political crises. Unfortunately, our conventional epistemological approaches, which are reductionist and fragmentary, tend to view these crises in isolation, failing to comprehend their inherent systemic interconnections. But these are not separate crises. They are interconnected symptoms of a global Crisis of Civilization.
So how can we respond? We must first awaken to the reality that this is not the end, but the beginning. We are witnessing the collapse of the old paradigm, which hell-bent on planetary suicide, isn't working. By the end of this century, whatever happens, civilization in its current form will not exist. The question we must therefore ask ourselves is this. What will we choose to take its place?


As a species, we are on the cusp of an evolutionary choice. Standing at the dawn of this perfect storm, we find ourselves at the beginning of a process of civilizational transition. As the old paradigm dies, a new paradigm is born. And many people around the world are already making the evolutionary choice to step away from the old, and embrace the new.
The new paradigm, although it remains nascent and is emerging disparately in different parts of the world, consists of a combination of key alternative structures: distributed clean energy production, decentralised organic farming, participatory economic cooperation, to name a few: offering a model of development free from the imperative of endless growth for its own sake; and leading us directly to a new model of democracy, based not on large-scale, hierarchical-control, but on the wholesale decentralisation of power, towards smaller, local ownership and decision-making; yet joined-up globaly through locally-managed information technology networks.
The new paradigm is premised on a fundamentally different ethos, in which we see ourselves not as disconnected, competing units fixated on maximising consumerist conquest over one another; but as interdependent members of a single human family. Our economies, rather than being assumed to exist in a vacuum of unlimited material expansion, are seen as embedded in wider society, such that economic activity for its own sake is recognised as the pathology that it is. Instead, economic enterprise becomes aligned with the deeper values that make us human - values like meeting our basic needs, education and discovery, arts and culture, sharing and giving: the values which psychologists say contribute to well-being and happiness, far more than mere money and things. And in turn, our societies are seen not as autonomous entities to which the whole of the planet must be ruthlessly subjugated, but rather as inherently embedded in the natural environment.



2)      Do you consider global social movements such as La Via Campesina and more recently the Occupy Movement decisive actors when it comes to changing course and achieving the fundamental transformations we need? What's their potential in your opinion? Which other actors are important?
People are increasingly disenchanted with prevailing socio-political and economic structures, and they are hungry for alternatives. Yet they see none readily available, no existing mechanism which allows their voices to be truly heard – what left to do, then, beyond simply occupying public space in an effort to, somehow, reclaim power?


The Arab Spring in the Middle East and the Occupy Movement across the West are, in this context, populist outbursts of resistance against planetary-level human suicide; the beginnings of the death-throes of an overarching civilizational form that is simply not working. The very nature of our civilization – given its accelerating trajectory toward ecological and economic self-destruction – is now in question; its ideology of nature and life, its value system, and how these are inherently linked to its socio-political, economic and cultural forms.


For the first time in human history, we face a civilizational crisis of truly planetary proportions. With it we are witnessing the self-destruction and decline of an exploitative, regressive and harmful industrial civilizational form within the next few decades, and certainly well within this century. With all this, we have an unprecedented historic opportunity, as this regressive civilizational form undergoes its protracted collapse, to push for alternative ways of living, doing and being – economically, politically, culturally, ethically, even spiritually – which are potentially far more conducive to human prosperity and well-being than hitherto imaginable.
That can only be done if we galvanise the energy and excitement of the Occupy Movement to develop firstly, coherent critical diagnoses of the true nature of the problem; and on that basis, coherent alternative frameworks of action. We need to work concertedly to demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of alternative social, political, economic, cultural, and ethical models of life. Not only do we need to develop our thinking and action on this, we need to develop innovative ways to show-case these ideas, to popularise them, and to educate communities and institutions. Most critically, we need to explore how communities, particularly those who are most marginalised and disenfranchised, can act on these models now, to begin creating real change at the grassroots, from the ground up. How can we work together to develop more participatory forms of economic exchange? How can we pool local and community resources to become more resilient to energy shocks – by becoming more self-sufficient in decentralized renewable energy production? How can we learn new skills so that we can grow our own food and be less dependent on the unequal and temperamental international networks of industrial agribusiness? How can we build new community-level political and cultural structures that render top-down state-military structures increasingly irrelevant?
Taking to the streets and occupying public spaces are important seeds of direct action, but from them should blossom the models of social transformation and empowerment that the 99 per cent can begin exploring, in open dialogue with one another, and even with the 1 per cent whose monopolies we are protesting. For it is imperative to ensure that these popular energies develop accurate diagnoses of our predicament, so that our activism can be pointed in the right direction – not just at the 1 per cent, but at the wider political, economic, ideological and ethical system which enables their very existence, and which thus empowers the dysfunctional pathway on which we’re currently heading.

3)      What's your take on the central question related to this year's festival topic "Elevate the Apocalypse?": Will humanity succeed in creating an economic system and a lifestyle based on justice, solidarity and respect for the planet's ecological limits? Or will it take big disasters before people start acting decisively?
While at first glance, this self-defeating trajectory of increasing centralisation of state and corporate power in the face of crisis convergence appears overwhelming, it is in the inherent faultlines of this process that opportunities for transformative resistance not only remain, but will widen as the acceleration of crisis in itself weakens the capacity of the system to sustain itself.
The political scientist Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, one of the few scholars like myself who've undertaken a holistic, systemic appraisal of our civilizational predicament, points out:
"Conventional economics is the dominant rationalization of today's world order. As we've overextended the growth phase of our global adaptive cycle, this rationalization has become relentlessly more complex and rigid and progressively less tenable. Breakdown will, all at once, discredit this rationalization and create intellectual space for new ideas to flourish. But this space will be brutally competitive. We can boost the chances that humane alternatives will thrive by working them out in detail and disseminating them as widely as possible beforehand."
This dynamic - mirroring the life-cycle of natural systems - is a form of "categenesis", constituting "the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions, and societies in the aftermath of breakdown." As the old system increasingly fails, new ideas, technologies and social realities, previously unthinkable, now become possible. To some extent, then, breakdown, is necessary for renewal. Categenesis cannot follow except in the wake of collapse.


That is not to laud 'collapse' in itself for its own sake; nor to presume that deliberately accelerating collapse by itself would contribute to renewal. On the contrary, collapse in itself does NOT necessitate categenesis - far from it; which is why we must be very cautious about those who advocate "bringing the system down" through force which, in itself, would not guarantee renewal, and in fact might well pave the way for alternative dysfunctional systems of violence to emerge instead. In other words, the outcome could go either way, extremely negatively, or positively, depending on the way in which we prevent, mitigate, adapt to and respond transformatively to the Crisis of Civilization.
As the infrastructure of industrial civilisation faces increasing shocks from the convergence of multiple global crises, so does the possibility for catagenesis through the new paradigm. The emergence of Occupy is a symptom of this process, and a sign of the immense potential that exists for renewal, but it must be galvanised in the right direction. We are witnessing the widening of possibility even now, as increasing systemic failures continue to accelerate widespread public disillusionment with prevailing policies - the challenge is to channel that sense of disillusionment into a coherent programme of collaborative, grassroots transformative action. The imperative, therefore, is to focus our efforts on catalysing the emergence of the new paradigm, raising consciousness, implementing, consolidating and spreading alternative social, political, economic and cultural models

On the extraordinary extradition ruling on Babar Ahmad

Extraordinary. 

FBI says 'jump' 
The Met says 'how high' 
The Home Office bends over backwards
The Attorney General does a jig 
And the High Court trips over its own behind 
While the US deep state sits back and enjoys the show

Meanwhile, habeas corpus is sacrificed on the altar of Big Brother 
Welcome to the Brave New World 
Where Orwell spins in a grave 
Dug for him by Men in Black

This is the terror of a freedom defined by fighting terror

My new big writing project: The Zero Point

Hot on the heels of the wonderful success of The Crisis of Civilization (2011) and the book on which it's based, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), I'm involved in a number of endeavours to build on what we achieved, including some exciting new initiatives under the umbrella of the Institute for Policy Research & Development.
However, the thing I'm going to introduce now is my current writing project: The Zero Point.

A Novel!?
Yes. The Zero Point is my first novel. It's a political science fiction thriller, and what I envisage to be the first in a trilogy.
The Zero Point has been in the making for almost four years - I started writing it while I was also working on Crisis. When I first started, it was a bit of fun when I had some time on my hands (oh the good ol' days...). But working with Dean Puckett to make The Crisis of Civilization opened my eyes to a whole new arena of creative communication and expression. The process of making the film increased my ability to engage as both a speaker and a writer, and helped me to learn how to make complex ideas accessible to a wide audience. And that created a whole new world of possibility for me to consider. While I will always seek to ground myself in rigorous scholarship, my Crisis experience made me even more interested in exploring new ways of communicating. One medium I decided to experiment with is fiction.
Why Fiction?
I wrote The Zero Pointwith a couple of overlapping goals. Obviously, I wanted to entertain. I love reading political thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy - and I love movies and TV shows which can combine strong characters with exciting plots and fast action. So I wanted to write something that I myself might like to read - something straight up fun, cool, and intriguing.



But I also felt that a novel could be a medium for expressing ideas and reflections which would perhaps never make it into my academic or journalistic work; for exploring possibilities that may well be speculative, but could yet throw light on some of the big global issues we face today and how they're already changing our lives, often for the worse.
I've kept the project quiet until I felt reasonably confident that I was really onto something. I'm pleased to say I'm now at a point where I'm comfortable with letting you guys know that this is what I'm working on - the novel is now complete, has gone through a series of successive painstaking re-drafts and edits, and is in the last stage of editing.
What's the Story?
So what's the novel about you're probably (hopefully) wondering. The novel's about a lot of things. 
On the one hand, it's a fast-paced high octane action adventure replete with violence, profanity, political intrigue, conspiracy, and suspense with a dash of science fiction and even paranormal weirdness. 


On the other, beneath the glossy surface, it's a dystopian reflection on how excessive secrecy in the intelligence community can compromise democratic accountability and endanger national security; and the fact that technology, no matter how unbelievably powerful, cannot save us from crises of our own making. 




And with those big themes in mind, it's very much about addressing the crisis-ridden zeitgeist of today's world. But what's it actually about?
The Synopsis!
Well here's the blurb:

In a near-future dystopian London on the brink of collapse, a reluctant ex-soldier fighting to clear his name after being framed for the assassination of the Prime Minister uncovers an ancient Nazi conspiracy to unleash imminent Quantum Apocalypse. 

Great Britain in the near future. Mass riots. Economic depression. Power cuts. And another war to stabilise Iraq.

When Prime Minister Carson is brutally assassinated by Islamist extremists, police officer and Iraq War veteran David Ariel goes on the run after becoming an unofficial suspect in a compromised investigation.

As London is locked-down under martial law, the threat of Middle East Armageddon looming, the love of Ariel's life - renowned war correspondent Julia Stephenson - warns of a wider plot to bring the West to its knees, before going missing in Iraq. In a frenetic race against time to elude death and stop the next attack, Ariel is forced down a blood-soaked path of no return facing off against unscrupulous terrorists, bent coppers, and double-crossing secret agents.

Traumatised by his past and haunted by inexplicable visions, Ariel's hunt for Carson's killers leads him unwittingly into the heart of an international conspiracy involving Nazi black weapons projects during the Second World War. As he struggles to retain his sanity, conflicted over his return to violence, Ariel finds himself caught in the crossfire of a secret battle to control terrible technologies that could rip apart the fabric of spacetime itself.

What makes this project special, for me, is that although it's an unadulterated work of speculative fiction, it's inspired throughout by the real-world: the strange and dubious history of Western intelligence agencies, highly classified efforts to weaponise the potential and theoretical implications of quantum physics, and a possible near-future on a planet crumbling under the weight of climate change, energy depletion, and economic crisis.



A Pre-Publication Award!
Earlier this year, while no one was looking (except my wife), I submitted an early draft of The Zero Point to the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. After some months of serious nail-biting tension, I was delighted to discover that The Zero Point was a Second Prize Quarterfinalist in the Award.




Since then, I've been editing and re-writing away to make the novel the best if can be...
When's it Ready?
Well, first off, for all those out there who've ever been fans and supporters of any of my work, I think you'll be really excited by this novel, and I want you to know about it now and support the project by spreading the word!




Secondly, I'm not yet decided on how I'm going to proceed with publication. The traditional route - through my literary agent - is the obvious one as it's what I've done for the most part throughout my writing career; but friends and colleagues have urged me to seriously consider going the non-traditional Indie route of self-publication. They think I'm in a great position to make the project a massive success without relying on an 'outmoded' publishing model. I don't really know the answer, and, well, I thought I'd ask you. What do you think?


Thirdly, I've consulted with a few people in the know in the novel writing world, who've confirmed that one of the best ways to get feedback is to use beta readers. I gave this a shot a while back and was fortunate to nab some really wonderful critique friends, but admittedly my approach to doing so was a bit haphazard. As I'm in the final stage of editing, I'm now at a point where the novel is ready for a final beta reading, with a view to solicit critique and feedback! This is YOUR chance to get involved in the finalisation of the novel, winning an acknowledgement in the book, and helping me to take it to that next level. 



But there's a BUT. 
Naturally, there are only a very limited number of ZP Beta Reader positions available, and certain qualifications are required. If, by now, you're an aspiring ZP Beta Reader, you should be the following:
1. A lover of reading, in particular enjoying a diverse range of fiction
2. Constructive and reasonably articulate - someone who is able and willing to give specific and constructive genre-specific feedback on plot, character development, writing style, and so on (you don't need to be an expert by any means, or have specific experience, but you should be confident about communicating)
3. In possession of decent English language skills and a healthy respect for spelling and grammar (though you won't be asked to proof-read so don't worry!)
4. A person of honesty, integrity and reliability who can commit to providing feedback within a mutually-agreed time frame
5. Someone who doesn't mind a good literary dose of brutal violence, nor gratuitous profanity - and may well get their rocks off on both
If you think you're a good fit, would like to be a ZP Beta Reader, and can't wait to read and give feedback on an exclusive copy of my draft manuscript, please apply in writing directly to me at nafeez.ahmed AT iprd.org.uk, with a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you fit the above criteria. 
Applications will close on midnight, GMT, Sunday 7th October. The countdown to the zero point begins...

Extradition: A Victory for Terror

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five British terror suspects, the most notorious of which is the self-styled ex-Finsbury Park mosque cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, can be extradited to the United States to be tried on terrorism charges. 




While the usual cheerleaders and critics have been out in force, lost in the debate are serious questions about the repercussions of this move not just for habeas corpus and the prosecution of terrorism in British jurisdiction, but more importantly for the dubious role of the British intelligence services in secretly facilitating the activities of Islamist extremists on UK soil. 

On the one hand, assumptions of guilt concerning at least two of the alleged terror suspects, Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad, appear pre-emptive in the extreme. On 19th July 2006, Talha was suddenly arrested by British police at his home. That very week, he had several job interviews scheduled to train as a librarian - although diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, Talha is an extraordinarily bright young man, who had recently graduated with first class honours from the School of Oriental and African Studies. For the last six and a half years since then, Talha has been imprisoned without charge. 




Talha's arrest was made at the request of US authorities under the 2003 Extradition Act, in relation to evidence supposedly obtained during the original arrest of Babar Ahmad. Babar's home was searched by police on 2nd December 2003 on the basis that since 2000 he was operating websites hosted in the US promoting al-Qaeda jihad. Less than a week later, the Crown Prosecution Service determined that there was no evidence to justify charging Babar for this offense, and he was released without charge. 



In July 2004, the police passed a further file onto the CPS based on an eight-month investigation, which resulted in the same conclusion. This very file, rejected by the CPS, was passed on by British police to US authorities and provided the basis of an extradition request the following month. On cue, Babar was arrested on 5th August that year, has been imprisoned without charge ever since, and has been beaten brutally by police while in custody. 

So both Babar and Talha have been detained without charge or trial for nearly a decade on the basis of a file, never tested in court, that British prosecutors had already thrown out - simply because US authorities said so. 

This is not simply a gross affront to civil liberties. It is a slap in the face to British rule of law. 

But on the other hand, the cases of the other three, Abu Hamza, Khaled al Fawwaz and Adel Abdul Bari, raise even more disturbing questions about the political games being played behind-the-scenes by US and British intelligence agencies. 

For while Abu Hamza is being extradited for involvement in terrorist activities from 1998 through to 2001, his role in fostering domestic terrorism has never been tried. To be sure, Hamza has been jailed for simple incitement offences relating to his former role at Finsbury Park mosque. 

But four years before Hamza's belated conviction for incitement based on evidence that had been in possession of the authorities for seven years, sources at the Finsbury mosque confirmed how he had hosted "British Islamist extremists" involved in "weapons training with assault rifles." Worshippers at the mosque recruited by MI5 to monitor extremist activities reported that "several groups had been taught to strip and reassemble Kalashnikovs in the mosque's basement" and that:

"... scores of young men were being sent from the mosque for training at camps in Afghanistan. They reported that consignments of supplies including radio and telecommunications equipment were dispatched to Pakistan for eventual distribution in the Afghan training camps allied to or run by al-Qaeda. They also revealed a complex operation run by some men attending the mosque to provide volunteers with false documents." 




And that wasn't all that Hamza did under the watchful eye of MI5. As early as 1997, Hamza was running a terror training network across the UK, including at Tunbridge Wells and Brecon Beacons. His followers were taught to use guns, strip and clean weapons, and were given endurance and surveillance training by British ex-soldiers who had fought in Bosnia. Much of this material was known to British authorities. 

Special Branch agent and MI5 informant Reda Hassaine gave his handlers "scores of documents" linked to Hamza, containing "communications from GIA [al-Qaeda affiliated Armed Islamic Group] activists in Algeria" and "cells planning terrorist attacks in Britain." Yet none of the preceding evidence ever made it to court. No wonder Hassaine concludes that "terrorist recruitment and fundraising by Islamic militants" under Hamza's tutelage "were ignored for years by the British security services." 




But Hamza wasn't just "ignored". During this period of terrorist activity extensively monitored by MI5 informants, as journalists Sean O'Neill and Daniel McGrory document in their seminal book, The Suicide Factory (p. 229), Hamza was courted by the security services: 

"Special Branch, the intelligence-gathering arm of Scotland Yard, had been talking to Abu Hamza since early 1997, when he was still preaching in Luton. In the classified records of the meetings he is referred to by the codename 'damson berry'. Unknown to the police, MI5 had also begun meeting Abu Hamza at the behest of French intelligence; he was given the MI5 code number 910... Confidential memos of meetings between the imam of Finsbury Park and his MI5 and Special Branch contacts reveal a respectful, polite and often cooperative relationship. There were at least seven meetings between Abu Hamza and MI5 officers between 1997 and 2000." 

Amongst the extraditees, Hamza was not the only violent extremist being handled by MI5 for reasons obscure - even while they were complicit in grotesque terrorist plots in the US, Europe and elsewhere. And it gets worse. 



According to former Army intelligence officer and US Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus, Hamza, along with his colleagues Omar Bakri Mohammed and Haroon Rashid Aswat, had been on the MI6 payroll since 1996 to facilitate Islamist-activities in the Balkans. 

As for Aswat, he was arrested shortly after the 7th July bombings by British police on suspicion of masterminding the attacks, based on extensive National Security Agency telephone intercepts between him and Mohamed Sidique Khan in the weeks prior. After Loftus' startling revelations, the allegations against Aswat were inexplicably withdrawn, and instead he was slated for extradition to the US on separate charges similar to that faced by Hamza - until the case was adjourned on mental health grounds. 



Hamza's extradition thus raises disturbing questions about continued efforts by the authorities to conceal the role of these violent extremists as assets of the security services in pursuit of narrow geostrategic interests abroad, a function which appears to have facilitated their capacity to support terrorist activity from British soil - including the 7/7 attacks. 

This is not a problem that has disappeared. Across the Middle East, US and British security agencies continue to facilitate the activities of al-Qaeda affiliated extremist groups as part of a regional covert anti-Iran offensive - a policy rooted in several decades of manipulating Islamist terrorist networks for geopolitical and geoeconomic purposes.




Extradition, in other words, does nothing for the fight against terrorism. On the contrary, it is a self-serving red-herring designed to conceal the dubious systemic failures of British and American security agencies from public knowledge, while vindicating their unaccountable powers to override the rule of law. If we want to win the 'war on terror', we should wonder why so many UK-based Islamist violent extremists have failed to be properly prosecuted in the UK - and we would do well to demand that light be cast on how the very agencies we trust to keep us safe have, and continue to, flagrantly foster the enemy we are supposed to be fighting.

Gore Vidal Passes... His Legacy Lives On

Just heard the tragic news today that US literary giant, Gore Vidal, has passed away at the age of 86. This is a truly sad day. Apart from his groundbreaking contributions to literature, Gore was a caustic critic of 'the American empire' and of the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies of Western culture, politics and economics.

Gore was also one of the early supporters of my work, having endorsed my first book, The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001 (used by the 9/11 Commission and part of its 'Special Collection'), which he cited and reviewed extensively in an essay in The Observer about a decade ago.

I recently defended Gore (and myself) from another late literary giant, ideologically on the opposite fence - Christopher Hitchens - who took issue with Gore' 'war on terror' essay in a Vanity Fair piece. My response to Hitchens was published in The Independent on Sunday .

Below, in tribute to Gore, I re-publish the full text of his original seminal essay in The Observer. It is one of his least known, yet most incisive, pieces of work. A quick reading of this essay can lead to easy misunderstandings and generalisations - which is what inspired Hitchens (inaccurate) criticisms of him. For contextualisation and clarification of this provocative essay, see my Independent piece in reply to Hitchens.



The Observer, Sunday 27th October 2002, Review Section, Pages 1-4
Gore Vidal is America’s most controversial writer and a ferocious, often isolated, critic of the Bush administration. Here, against a backdrop of spreading unease about America’s response to the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath, we publish Vidal’s remarkable personal polemic urging a shocking new interpretation of who was to blame.

The Enemy WithinBy Gore Vidal
On 24 August, 1814, things looked very dark for freedom's land. That was the day the British captured Washington DC and set fire to the Capitol and the White House. President Madison took refuge in the nearby Virginia woods where he waited patiently for the notoriously short attention span of the Brits to kick in, which it did. They moved on and what might have been a Day of Utter Darkness turned out to be something of a bonanza for the DC building trades and up-market realtors.
One year after 9/11, we still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil-libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president with the oil and gas Cheney/Bush junta.
Meanwhile, our more and more unaccountable government is pursuing all sorts of games around the world that we the spear carriers (formerly the people) will never learn of. Even so, we have been getting some answers to the question: why weren't we warned in advance of 9/11? Apparently, we were, repeatedly; for the better part of a year, we were told there would be unfriendly visitors to our skies some time in September 2001, but the government neither informed nor protected us despite Mayday warnings from Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even from elements of our own FBI. A joint panel of congressional intelligence committees reported (19 September 2002, New York Times) that as early as 1996, Pakistani terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was 'learning to fly in order to crash a plane into CIA HQ'.
Only CIA director George Tenet seemed to take the various threats seriously. In December 1998, he wrote to his deputies that 'we are at war' with Osama bin Laden. So impressed was the FBI by his warnings that by 20 September 2001, 'the FBI still had only one analyst assigned full time to al-Qaeda'.
From a briefing prepared for Bush at the beginning of July 2001: 'We believe that OBL [Osama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.' And so it came to pass; yet Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, says she never suspected that this meant anything more than the kidnapping of planes.
Happily, somewhere over the Beltway, there is Europe - recently declared anti-Semitic by the US media because most of Europe wants no war with Iraq and the junta does, for reasons we may now begin to understand thanks to European and Asian investigators with their relatively free media.
On the subject 'How and Why America was Attacked on 11 September, 2001', the best, most balanced report, thus far, is by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed ... Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often know things that we don't - particularly about what we are up to. A political scientist, Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development 'a think-tank dedicated to the promotion of human rights, justice and peace' in Brighton. His book, 'The War on Freedom', has just been published in the US by a small but reputable publisher.
Ashmed provides a background for our ongoing war against Afghanistan, a view that in no way coincides with what the administration has told us. He has drawn on many sources, most tellingly on American whistleblowers who are beginning to come forth and hear witness - like those FBI agents who warned their supervisors that al-Qaeda was planning a kamikaze strike against New York and Washington only to be told that if they went public with these warnings they would suffer under the National Security Act. Several of these agents have engaged David P. Schippers, chief investigative counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee, to represent them in court. The majestic Schippers managed the successful impeachment of President Clinton in the House of Representatives. He may, if the Iraqi war should go wrong, be obliged to perform the same high service for Bush, who allowed the American people to go unwarned about an imminent attack upon two of our cities as pre-emption of a planned military strike by the US against the Taliban.
The Guardian (26 September 2001) reported that in July 2001, a group of interested parties met in a Berlin hotel to listen to a former State Department official, Lee Coldren, as he passed on a message from the Bush administration that 'the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action ... the chilling quality of this private warning was that it came - according to one of those present, the Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik - accompanied by specific details of how Bush would succeed ...' Four days earlier, the Guardian had reported that 'Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of possible American military action against them two months before the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington ... [which] raises the possibility that bin Laden was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats.' A replay of the 'day of infamy' in the Pacific 62 years earlier?
Why the US needed a Eurasian adventure
On 9 September 2001, Bush was presented with a draft of a national security presidential directive outlining a global campaign of military, diplomatic and intelligence action targeting al-Qaeda, buttressed by the threat of war. According to NBC News: 'President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaeda ... but did not have the chance before the terrorist attacks ... The directive, as described to NBC News, was essentially the same war plan as the one put into action after 11 September. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly ... because it simply had to pull the plans "off the shelf".'
Finally, BBC News, 18 September 2001: 'Niak Naik, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. It was Naik's view that Washington would not drop its war for Afghanistan even if bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taliban.'
Was Afghanistan then turned to rubble in order to avenge the 3,000 Americans slaughtered by Osama? Hardly. The administration is convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates us, 'cause we're rich 'n free 'n he's not. Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the most frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan, planning for which had been 'contingency' some years before 9/11 and, again, from 20 December, 2000, when Clinton's out-going team devised a plan to strike at al-Qaeda in retaliation for the assault on the warship Cole. Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, personally briefed his successor on the plan but Rice, still very much in her role as director of Chevron-Texaco, with special duties regarding Pakistan and Uzbekistan, now denies any such briefing. A year and a half later (12 August, 2002), fearless Time magazine reported this odd memory lapse.
Osama, if it was he and not a nation, simply provided the necessary shock to put in train a war of conquest. But conquest of what? What is there in dismal dry sandy Afghanistan worth conquering? Zbigniew Brzezinski tells us exactly what in a 1997 Council on Foreign Relations study called 'The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives'.
The Polish-born Brzezinski was the hawkish National Security Advisor to President Carter. In 'The Grand Chessboard', Brzezinski gives a little history lesson. 'Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the centre of world power.' Eurasia is all the territory east of Germany. This means Russia, the Middle East, China and parts of India. Brzezinski acknowledges that Russia and China, bordering oil-rich central Asia, are the two main powers threatening US hegemony in that area.
He takes it for granted that the US must exert control over the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, known to those who love them as 'the Stans': Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan and Kyrgyzstan all 'of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and most powerful neighbours - Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China signaling'. Brzezinski notes how the world's energy consumption keeps increasing; hence, who controls Caspian oil/gas will control the world economy. Brzezinski then, reflexively, goes into the standard American rationalization for empire;. We want nothing, ever, for ourselves, only to keep bad people from getting good things with which to hurt good people. 'It follows that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single [other] power comes to control the geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.'
Brzezinski is quite aware that American leaders are wonderfully ignorant of history and geography so he really lays it on, stopping just short of invoking politically incorrect 'manifest destiny'. He reminds the Council just how big Eurasia is. Seventy-five percent of the world's population is Eurasian. If I have done the sums right, that means that we've only got control, to date, of a mere 25 percent of the world's folks. More! 'Eurasia accounts for 60-per cent of the world's GNP and three-fourths of the world's known energy resources.'
Brzezinski's master plan for 'our' globe has obviously been accepted by the Cheney-Bush junta. Corporate America, long over-excited by Eurasian mineral wealth, has been aboard from the beginning.Ahmed sums up: 'Brzezinski clearly envisaged that the establishment, consolidation and expansion of US military hegemony over Eurasia through Central Asia would require the unprecedented, open-ended militarisation of foreign policy, coupled with an unprecedented manufacture of domestic support and consensus on this militarisation campaign.'
Afghanistan is the gateway to all these riches. Will we fight to seize them? It should never be forgotten that the American people did not want to fight in either of the twentieth century's world wars, but President Wilson maneuvered us into the First while President Roosevelt maneuvered the Japanese into striking the first blow at Pearl Harbor, causing us to enter the Second as the result of a massive external attack. Brzezinski understands all this and, in 1997, he is thinking ahead - as well as backward. 'Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.' Thus was the symbolic gun produced that belched black smoke over Manhattan and the Pentagon.
Since the Iran-Iraq wars, Islam has been demonized as a Satanic terrorist cult that encourages suicide attacks - contrary, it should be noted, to the Islamic religion. Osama has been portrayed, accurately, it would seem, as an Islamic zealot. In order to bring this evil-doer to justice ('dead or alive'), Afghanistan, the object of the exercise was made safe not only for democracy but for Union Oil of California whose proposed pipeline from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean port of Karachi, had been abandoned under the Taliban's chaotic regime. Currently, the pipeline is a go-project thanks to the junta's installation of a Unocal employee (John J Maresca) as US envoy to the newly born democracy whose president, Hamid Karzai, is also, according to Le Monde, a former employee of a Unocal subsidiary. Conspiracy? Coincidence!
Once Afghanistan looked to be within the fold, the junta, which had managed to pull off a complex diplomatic-military caper, - abruptly replaced Osama, the personification of evil, with Saddam. This has been hard to explain since there is nothing to connect Iraq with 9/11. Happily, 'evidence' is now being invented. But it is uphill work, not helped by stories in the press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must - for the sake of the free world - be reassigned to US and European consortiums.As Brzezinski foretold, 'a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat' made it possible for the President to dance a war dance before Congress. 'A long war!' he shouted with glee. Then he named an incoherent Axis of Evil to be fought. Although Congress did not give him the FDR Special - a declaration of war - he did get permission to go after Osama who may now be skulking in Iraq.
Bush and the dog that did not bark
Post-9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well, at least the bright days of Reagan and deregulation. Ironically, less than a year after the massive danger from without, we were confronted with an even greater enemy from within: Golden Calf capitalism. Transparency? One fears that greater transparency will only reveal armies of maggots at work beneath the skin of a culture that needs a bit of a lie-down in order to collect itself before taking its next giant step which is to conquer Eurasia, a potentially fatal adventure not only for our frazzled institutions but for us the presently living.
Complicity. The behavior of President George W. Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to all sorts of not unnatural suspicions. I can think of no other modern chief of state who would continue to pose for 'warm' pictures of himself listening to a young girl telling stories about her pet goat while hijacked planes were into three buildings.
Constitutionally, Bush is not only chief of state, he is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Normally, a commander in such a crisis would go straight to headquarters and direct operations while receiving the latest intelligence.
This is what Bush actually did - or did not do - according to Stan Goff, a retired US Army veteran who has taught military science and doctrine at West Point. Goff writes, in 'The So-called Evidence is a Farce': 'I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks. Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plan, all the while on FAA radar.'
Goff, incidentally, like the other astonished military experts, cannot fathom why the government's automatic 'standard order of procedure in the event of a hijacking' was not followed. Once a plane has deviated from its flight-plan, fighter planes are sent up to find out why. That is law and does not require presidential approval, which only needs to be given if there is a decision to shoot down a plane. Goff spells it out: 'The planes were hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10am. Who is notified? This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.
'By around 8:15am it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handling teachers. By 8:45am, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower, Bush is settling in with children for his photo op. Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously and one has just dived into the twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander-in-Chief.
'No one has apparently scrambled [sent aloft] Air Force interceptors either. At 9:03, Flight 175 crashes into the South Tower. At 9:05 Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff whispers to Bush [who] "briefly turns somber" according to reporters. Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No. He resumes listening to second-graders ... and continues the banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington DC.
'Has he instructed Card to scramble the Air Force? No. An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement telling the United States what they have already figured out - that there's been an attack on the World Trade Centre. There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No.
'At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 [degrees] over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC. Now the real kicker: a pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of the building at 460 knots.
'When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further training on a flight simulator. This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on the freeway at rush hour by buying her a video driving game ... There is a story being constructed about these events.'
There is indeed, and the more it is added to the darker it becomes. The nonchalance of General Richard B. Myers, acting Joint Chief of Staff, is as puzzling as the President's campaigning-as-usual act. Myers was at the Capitol chatting with Senator Max Cleland. A sergeant, writing later in the AFPS (American Forces Press Service) describes Myers at the Capitol. 'While in an outer office, he said, he saw a television report that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. "They thought it was a small plane or something like that," Myers said. So the two men went ahead with the office call.'
Whatever Myers and Cleland had to say to each other (more funds for the military?) must have been riveting because, during their chat, the AFPS reports, 'the second tower was hit by another jet. "Nobody informed us of that," Myers said. "But when we came out, that was obvious. Then, right at that time, somebody said the Pentagon had been hit."' Finally, somebody 'thrust a cellphone in Myers' hand' and, as if by magic, the commanding general of Norad - our Airspace Command - was on the line just as the hijackers mission had been successfully completed except for the failed one in Pennsylvania. In later testimony to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Myers said he thinks that, as of his cellphone talk with Norad, 'the decision was at that point to start launching aircraft'. It was 9:40am. One hour and 20 minutes after air controllers knew that Flight 11 had been hijacked; 50 minutes after the North Tower was struck.
This statement would have been quite enough in our old serious army/air force to launch a number of courts martial with an impeachment or two thrown in. First, Myers claims to be uninformed until the third strike. But the Pentagon had been overseeing the hijacked planes from at least the moment of the strike at the first tower: yet not until the third strike, at the Pentagon, was the decision made to get the fighter planes up. Finally, this one is the dog that did not bark. By law, the fighters should have been up at around 8:15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted or shot down. I don't think that Goff is being unduly picky when he wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following its normal procedure instead of waiting an hour and 20 minutes until the damage was done and only then launching the fighters. Obviously, somebody had ordered the Air Force to make no move to intercept those hijackings until ... what?
On 21 January 2002, the Canadian media analyst Barry Zwicker summed up on CBC-TV: 'That morning no interceptors responded in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which ... are 12 miles from the White House ... Whatever the explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of reprimands. This further weakens the "Incompetence Theory". Incompetence usually earns reprimands. This causes me to ask whether there were "stand down" orders.'?? On 29 August 2002, the BBC reports that on 9/11 there were 'only four fighters on ready status in the north-eastern US'. Conspiracy? Coincidence? Error?
It is interesting how often in our history, when disaster strikes, incompetence is considered a better alibi than ... well, yes, there are worse things. After Pearl Harbor, Congress moved to find out why Hawaii's two military commanders, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, had not anticipated the Japanese attack. But President Roosevelt pre-empted that investigation with one of his own. Short and Kimmel were broken for incompetence. The 'truth' is still obscure to this day.
The media's weapons of mass distraction
But Pearl Harbor has been much studied. 11 September, it is plain, is never going to be investigated if Bush has anything to say about it. In January 2002, CNN reported that 'Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the Congressional investigation into the events of 11 September ... The request was made at a private meeting with Congressional leaders ... Sources said Bush initiated the conversation ... He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry .. Tuesday's discussion followed a rare call from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the same request ...'
The excuse given, according to Daschle, was that 'resources and personnel would be taken' away from the war on terrorism in the event of a wider inquiry. So for reasons that we must never know, those 'breakdowns' are to be the goat. That they were more likely to be not break - but 'stand-downs' is not for us to pry. Certainly the one-hour 20 minute failure to put fighter planes in the air could not have been due to a breakdown throughout the entire Air Force along the East Coast. Mandatory standard operational procedure had been told to cease and desist.
Meanwhile, the media were assigned their familiar task of inciting public opinion against bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind. These media blitzes often resemble the magicians classic gesture of distraction: as you watch the rippling bright colours of his silk handkerchief in one hand, he is planting the rabbit in your pocket with the other. We were quickly assured that Osama's enormous family with its enormous wealth had broken with him, as had the royal family of his native Saudi Arabia. The CIA swore, hand on heart, that Osama had not worked for them in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Finally, the rumour that Bush family had in any way profited by its long involvement with the bin Laden family was - what else? - simply partisan bad taste.
But Bush Jr's involvement goes back at least to 1979 when his first failed attempt to become a player in the big Texas oil league brought him together with one James Bath of Houston, a family friend, who have Bush Jr. $50,000 for a 5 per cent stake in Bush's firm Arbusto Energy. At this time, according to Wayne Madsen ('In These Times' - Institute for Public Affairs No. 25), Bath was 'the sole US business representative for Salem bin Laden, head of the family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden... In a statement issued shortly after the 11 September attacks, the White House vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested his own money, not Salem bin Laden's, in Arbusto. In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests ... after several reincarnations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation.'
Behind the Junior Bush is the senior Bush, gainfully employed by the Carlyle Group which has ownership in at least 164 companies worldwide, inspiring admiration in that staunch friend to the wealthy, the Wall Street Journal, which noted, as early as 27 September 2001, 'If the US boosts defence spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Laden's alleged terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: bin Laden's family ... is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle Group, a well-connected Washington merchant bank specialising in buyouts of defence and aerospace companies ... Osama is one of more than 50 children of Mohammed bin Laden, who built the family's $5 billion business.'
But Bush pere et fils, in pursuit of wealth and office, are beyond shame or, one cannot help but think, good sense. There is a suggestion that they are blocking investigation of the bin Laden connection with terrorism. Agent France Press reported on 4 November 2001: 'FBI agents probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama ... were told to back off soon after George W. Bush became president ...' According to BBC TV's Newsnight (6 Nov 2001), '... just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House, whose official line is that the bin Ladens are above suspicion.' 'Above the Law' (Green Press, 14 February 2002) sums up: 'We had what looked like the biggest failure of the intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning now is it wasn't a failure, it was a directive.' True? False? Bush Jr will be under oath during the impeachment interrogation. Will we hear 'What is a directive? What is is?'
Although the US had, for some years, fingered Osama as a mastermind terrorist, no serious attempt had been made pre-9/11 to 'bring him to justice dead or alive, innocent or guilty', as Texan law of the jungle requires. Clinton's plan to act was given to Condeleezza Rice by Sandy Berger, you will recall, but she says she does not.
As far back as March 1996 when Osama was in Sudan, Major General Elfatih Erwa, Sudanese Minister for Defence, offered to extradite him. According to the Washington Post (3 October 2001), 'Erwa said he would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over ... [US officials] said, "just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia", where he had once been given credit for the successful al-Qaeda attack on American forces that in '93 that killed 18 Rangers.' Erwa said in an interview, 'We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they [US officials] said, "Let him."'
In 1996 Sudan expelled Osama and 3,000 of his associates. Two years later the Clinton administration, in the great American tradition of never having to say thank you for Sudan's offer to hand over Osama, proceeded to missile-attack Sudan's al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory on the grounds that Sudan was harboring bin Laden terrorists who were making chemical and biological weapons when the factory was simply making vaccines for the UN.
Four years later, John O'Neill, a much admired FBI agent, complained in the Irish Times a month before the attacks, 'The US State Department - and behind it the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage - blocked attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt. The US ambassador to Yemen forbade O'Neill (and his FBI team) ... from entering Yemen in August 2001. O'Neill resigned in frustration and took on a new job as head of security at the World Trade Centre. He died in the 11 September attack.' Obviously, Osama has enjoyed bipartisan American support since his enlistment in the CIA's war to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But by 9/11 there was no Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, indeed there was no Soviet Union.
A world made safe for peace and pipelines
I watched Bush and Cheney on CNN when the Axis of Evil speech was given and the 'long war' proclaimed. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were fingered as enemies to be clobbered because they might or might not be harbouring terrorists who might or might not destroy us in the night. So we must strike first whenever it pleases us. Thus, we declared 'war on terrorism' - an abstract noun which cannot be a war at all as you need a country for that. Of course, there was innocent Afghanistan, which was levelled from a great height, but then what's collateral damage - like an entire country - when you're targeting the personification of all evil according to Time and the NY Times and the networks?
As it proved, the conquest of Afghanistan had nothing to do with Osama. He was simply a pretext for replacing the Taliban with a relatively stable government that would allow Union Oil of California to lay its pipeline for the profit of, among others, the Cheney-Bush junta.
Background? All right. The headquarters of Unocal are, as might be expected, in Texas. In December 1997, Taliban representatives were invited to Sugarland, Texas. At that time, Unocal had already begun training Afghan men in pipeline construction, with US government approval. BBC News, (4 December 1997): 'A spokesman for the company Unocal said the Taliban were expected to spend several days at the company's [Texas] headquarters ... a BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea.' The Inter Press Service (IPS) reported: 'some Western businesses are warming up to the Taliban despite the movement's institutionalisation of terror, massacres, abductions and impoverishment.' CNN (6 October 1996): 'The United States wants good ties [with the Taliban] but can't openly seek them while women are being oppressed.'
The Taliban, rather better organised than rumoured, hired for PR one Leila Helms, a niece of Richard Helms, former director of the CIA. In October 1996, the Frankfurter Rundschau reported that Unocal 'has been given the go-ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan ..' This was a real coup for Unocal as well as other candidates for pipelines, including Condoleezza's old employer Chevron. Although the Taliban was already notorious for its imaginative crimes against the human race, the Wall Street Journal, scenting big bucks, fearlessly announced: 'Like them or not, the Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history.' The NY Times (26 May 1997) leapt aboard the pipeline juggernaut. 'The Clinton administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would act as counterweight to Iran ... and would offer the possibility of new trade routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in the region.'
But by 1999, it was clear that the Taliban could not provide the security we would need to protect our fragile pipelines. The arrival of Osama as warrior for Allah on the scene refocused, as it were, the bidding. New alliances were now being made. The Bush administration soon buys the idea of an invasion of Afghanistan, Frederick Starr, head of the Central Asia Institute at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in the Washington Post (19 December 2000): 'The US has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out bin Laden.'
Although with much fanfare we went forth to wreak our vengeance on the crazed sadistic religious zealot who slaughtered 3,000 American citizens, once that 'war' was under way, Osama was dropped as irrelevant and so we are back to the Unocal pipeline, now a go-project. In the light of what we know today, it is unlikely that the junta was ever going to capture Osama alive: he has tales to tell. One of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's best numbers now is: 'Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There? Somewhere? Who knows?' And we get his best twinkle. He must also be delighted - and amazed - that the media have bought the absurd story that Osama, if alive, would still be in Afghanistan, underground, waiting to be flushed out instead of in a comfortable mansion in Osama-loving Jakarta, 2,000 miles to the East and easily accessible by Flying Carpet One.
Many commentators of a certain age have noted how Hitlerian our junta sounds as it threatens first one country for harbouring terrorists and then another. It is true that Hitler liked to pretend to be the injured - or threatened - party before he struck. But he had many great predecessors not least Imperial Rome. Stephen Gowan's War in Afghanistan: A $28 Billion Racket quotes Joseph Schumpeter who, 'in 1919, described ancient Rome in a way that sounds eerily like the United States in 2001: "There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented ... The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours."' We have only outdone the Romans in turning metaphors such as the war on terrorism, or poverty, or Aids into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands.
As of 1 August 2002, trial balloons were going up all over Washington DC to get world opinion used to the idea that 'Bush of Afghanistan' had gained a title as mighty as his father's 'Bush of the Persian Gulf' and Junior was now eager to add Iraq-Babylon to his diadem. These various balloons fell upon Europe and the Arab world like so many lead weights. But something new has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra, 'they are threatening us, we must attack first'. Now everything is more of less out in the open. The International Herald Tribune wrote in August 2002: 'The leaks began in earnest on 5 July, when the New York Times described a tentative Pentagon plan that it said called for an invasion by a US force of up to 250,000 that would attack Iraq from the north, south and west. On 10 July, the Times said that Jordan might be used as a base for the invasion. The Washington Post reported, 28 July, that "many senior US military officers contend that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat ..."' And the status quo should be maintained. Incidentally, this is the sort of debate that the founding fathers intended the Congress, not military bureaucrats, to conduct in the name of we the people. But that sort of debate has, for a long time, been denied us.
One refreshing note is now being struck in a fashion unthinkable in imperial Rome: the cheerful admission that we habitually resort to provocation. The Tribune continues: 'Donald Rumsfeld has threatened to jail any one found to have been behind the leaks. But a retired army general, Fred Woerner, tends to see a method behind the leaks. "We may already be executing a plan," he said recently. "Are we involved in a preliminary psychological dimension of causing Iraq to do something to justify a US attack or make concessions? Somebody knows.' That is plain.
Elsewhere in this interesting edition of the Herald Tribune wise William Pfaff writes: 'A second Washington debate is whether to make an unprovoked attack on Iran to destroy a nuclear power reactor being built with Russian assistance, under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, within the terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory ... No other government would support such an action, other than Israel's (which) would do so not because it expected to be attacked by Iran but because it, not unjustifiably, opposes any nuclear capacity in the hands of any Islamic government.'
Suspect states and the tom-toms of revenge
'Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it compromises and develops the germ of every other. As the parent of armies, war encourages debts and taxes, the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended ... and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people ...' Thus, James Madison warned us at the dawn of our republic.
Post 9/11, thanks to the 'domination of the few', Congress and the media are silent while the executive, through propaganda and skewed polls, seduces the public mind as hitherto unthinkable centers of power like Homeland Defence (a new Cabinet post to be placed on top of the Defence Department) are being constructed and 4 per cent of the country has recently been invited to join Tips, a civilian spy system to report on anyone who looks suspicious or ... who objects to what the executive is doing at home or abroad?
Although every nation knows how - if it has the means and the will - to protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought us 9/11, war is not an option. Wars are for nations not root-less gangs. You put a price on their heads and hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has been doing that with the Sicilian Mafia; and no one has yet suggested bombing Palermo.
But the Cheney-Bush junta wants a war in order to dominate Afghanistan, build a pipeline, gain control of the oil of Eurasia's Stans for their business associates as well as to do as much damage to Iraq and Iran on the grounds that one day those evil countries may carpet our fields of amber grain with anthrax or something.
The media, never much good a analysis, are more and more breathless and incoherent. On CNN, even the stolid Jim Clancy started to hyperventilate when an Indian academic tried to explain how Iraq was once our ally and 'friend' in its war against our Satanic enemy Iran. 'None of that conspiracy stuff,' snuffed Clancy. Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
As of August, at least among economists, a consensus was growing that, considering our vast national debt (we borrow $2 billion a day to keep the government going) and a tax base seriously reduced by the junta in order to benefit the 1 per cent who own most of the national wealth, there is no way that we could ever find the billions needed to destroy Iraq in 'a long war' or even a short one, with most of Europe lined up against us. Germany and Japan paid for the Gulf War, reluctantly - with Japan, at the last moment, irritably quarrelling over the exchange rate at the time of the contract. Now Germany's Schroder has said no. Japan is mute.
But the tom-toms keep beating revenge; and the fact that most of the world is opposed to our war seems only to bring hectic roses to the cheeks of the Bush administration (Bush Snr of the Carlyle Group, Bush Jnr formerly of Harken, Cheney, formerly of Halliburton, Rice, formerly of Chevron, Rumsfeld, formerly of Occidental). If ever an administration should recuse itself in matters dealing with energy, it is the current junta. But this is unlike any administration in our history. Their hearts are plainly elsewhere, making money, far from our mock Roman temples, while we, alas, are left only with their heads, dreaming of war, preferably against weak peripheral states.
Mohammed Heikal is a brilliant Egyptian journalist-observer, and sometime Foreign Minister. On 10 October 2001, he said to the Guardian: 'Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of this magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaeda as if it were Nazi Germany or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and al-Qaeda has been penetrated by US intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organisation and sophistication.
The former president of Germany's domestic intelligence service, Eckehardt Werthebach (American Free Press, 4 December 2001) spells it out. The 9/11 attacks required 'years of planning' while their scale indicates that they were a product of 'state-organised actions'. There it is. Perhaps, after all, Bush Jnr was right to call it a war. But which state attacked us?
Will the suspects please line up. Saudi Arabia? 'No, no. Why we are paying you $50 million a year for training the royal bodyguard on our own holy if arid soil. True the kingdom contains many wealthy well-educated enemies but ...' Bush Snr and Jnr exchange a knowing look. Egypt? No way. Dead broke despite US baksheesh. Syria? No funds. Iran? Too proud to bother with a parvenu state like the US. Israel?
Sharon is capable of anything. But he lacks the guts and the grace of the true Kamikaze. Anyway, Sharon was not in charge when this operation began with the planting of 'sleepers' around the US flight schools 5 or 6 years ago. The United States? Elements of corporate America would undeniably prosper from a 'massive external attack' that would make it possible for us to go to war whenever the President sees fit while suspending civil liberties. (The 342 pages of the USA Patriot Act were plainly prepared before 9/11.) Bush Snr and Jnr are giggling now. Why? Because Clinton was president back then. As the former president leaves the line of suspects, he says, more in anger than in sorrow: 'When we left the White House we had a plan for an all-out war on al-Qaeda. We turned it over to this administration and they did nothing. Why?' Biting his lip, he goes. The Bushes no longer giggle. Pakistan breaks down: 'I did it! I confess! I couldn't help myself. Save me. I am an evil-doer!'
Apparently, Pakistan did do it - or some of it. We must now go back to 1997 when 'the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA' was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Central Asia specialist Ahmed Rashid wrote (Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999): 'With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war, waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals, from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and '92 ... more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghanistan jihad.' The CIA covertly trained and sponsored these warriors.
In March 1985, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 166, increasing military aid while CIA specialists met with the ISI counterparts near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Jane's Defence Weekly (14 September 2001) gives the best overview: 'The trainers were mainly from Pakistan's ISI agency who learnt their craft from American Green Beret commandos and Navy Seals in various US training establishments.' This explains the reluctance of the administration to explain why so many unqualified persons, over so long a time, got visas to visit our hospitable shores. While in Pakistan, 'mass training of Afghan [zealots] was subsequently conducted by the Pakistan army under the supervision of the elite Special Services ... In 1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base); a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across 26 or so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda.'
When Mohamed Atta's plane struck the World Trade Centre's North Tower, George W. Bush and the child at the Florida elementary school were discussing her goat. By coincidence, our word 'tragedy' comes from the Greek: for 'goat' tragos plus oide for 'song'. 'Goat-song'. It is highly suitable that this lament, sung in ancient satyr plays, should have been heard again at the exact moment when we were struck by fire from heaven, and a tragedy whose end is nowhere in sight began for us.
© Gore Vidal

Report - Race and Reform: Islam and Muslims in the British Media

Earlier this year, I and my colleagues at Unitas Communications – where I’m currently Chief Research Officer – decided to address the issue of British media coverage of Islam and Muslims for the ongoing Leveson Inquiry appointed last year by Prime Minister David Cameron. 
We agreed with the letter to The Guardian signed by over 50 public figures – including people like Bianca Jagger and Jemima Khan – which criticised the Inquiry for focusing largely on high-profile cases of phone hacking affecting celebrities, but very little on broader issues within the Inquiry’s terms of reference on less high-profile cases. However, while that letter called for an "alternative inquiry" - which, however, would ultimately have little in the way of teeth that might actually influence the process of media reform directly, we felt it important that pressure be brought to bear on the Leveson Inquiry to fulfil the terms of reference of its investigations as much as possible.
So we decided to leverage our networks in the relevant media and political sectors, and to do some solid research of our own, to produce a comprehensive report on this issue for submission to the Leveson Inquiry.
In the end, we interviewed a total of 16 media professionals – including journalists and editors across the main print and broadcasting institutions in the UK – as well as scholars, and community leaders. We also examined the key literature on the subject going back as far back as the 1990s.
We eventually completed the report, titled Race and Reform: Islam and Muslims in the British Media, earlier this month – which you can download here. The report was formally submitted to the Inquiry on the 9th of July. Since then, I have published some articles about it which summarise our main findings and recommendations, in Huffington Post (focuses on elaborating the key facts), Le Monde diplomatique (focuses on our key recommendations), and Public Service Europe (a more general summary).

BBC News Vindicates Our Story on Troubles Facing The Muslim Youth Helpline

On 21st June, BBC London News ran an exclusive television report on the recent troubles facing the Muslim Youth Helpline (MYH), about which I had issued this lengthy public statement.
The BBC London News team attempted to contact myself and Akeela several times asking us to give a statement before the camera – going so far as to send reporter Guy Smith round our flat - but we explained to them that due to the harassment we had faced, we had no desire to further inflame tensions on this issue by going public, which we felt would be irresponsible, provoke further attacks on us, as well as potentially invite unnecessary public scrutiny of Muslim communities.
In the end, the report that they ran was very fair and objective, and set the record straight on matters that have been speculated about in the blogosphere and beyond.
It confirmed the following:
1.       The helpline had been suspended in June due to the impact of the hacking activities, which had compromised security severely and created an unsafe environment for volunteers.
2.       The hacking was part of a campaign of harassment and intimidation against my wife Akeela, who was then CEO of MYH, which was designed to cause her to lose her job. The campaign succeeded in doing so - after her personal gmail account was hacked, she resigned to avoid further harassment.
3.       We had contacted the police about this criminal campaign and notified them that we believed it was motivated by an extremist agenda linked to racism and homophobia (which as I clarified in my statement revolved around the employment of a non-Muslim about whom malicious rumours were spread concerning his alleged sexuality).
4.       We had not referred names of helpline workers to the Anti-Terrorism police officers, and this was directly confirmed by Scotland Yard, who stated that nothing of the sort was received by them.
Unfortunately when the crimes were reported to Marylebone Police Station, we were told that a criminal investigation would not be proceeding and that Anti-Terrorism had been asked to look at the case. What the BBC London News report confirms is that Scotland Yard had very quickly assessed the case and sent it straight back down. However, the police hadn’t communicated any of this to us, which is why I had chosen to reach out to a senior police officer I had come into contact with working at the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) on Prevent strategy, with a view to get a proper police investigation into the criminal activities we had reported.
That criminal investigation is thankfully still underway.