Monthly Archives: December 2014

CIA, Espionage, Torture, U.S. Congress, U.S. Foreign Policy

Hijacking America: from Liberators of Europe to Rectal Feeding by Hired Contractors………

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KuwaitCox2    ChristmasPeanuts

Have Yourself a Merry Little——-> Kenny G. Holiday ………..

“The CIA torture report lists ‘rectal feeding’ as a legitimate means of nourishing detainees. But the practice has no scientific backing, and is nothing but a torture method. There is enough contained in the newly-released Senate report on CIA torture practices to shock anyone’s conscience. News that CIA interrogators threatened violence against the children or parents of detainees, made them stand in stress positions on broken feet, and deprived them of sleep for up to a week at a time is appalling on its face. One needs no medical expertise to parse the horrors described. But what of “rectal feeding”? At first blush, this practice may have the appearance of legitimacy in cases where detainees refused to eat or drink. One man was put in a head-down position and Ensure was instilled into his rectum……………”

Does one hijacking deserves another? They say in the West that the Wahabbi Jihadis have hijacked Islam. So the solution is to have the torturers and their enablers hijack America and her traditions and values. To move her closer (and lower) to the level of the terrorists……….

How did it come down to this?
From the bright America of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy to this? To the recent American regimes of prevalent KGB-style domestic espionage and imaginative external torture? To the sorry lot of the past fourteen years of Bush, Cheney, and whoever calls the shots for Obama?

During the cold war, a favorite criticism of the Soviet Union was its all-powerful untouchable apparatus of internal espionage. The West allegedly won the Cold War, or did it? Can we say that after the disclosures of widespread spying on American citizens and their private correspondence and communications? The Allies won the war against the Nazis, but Western regimes are now using methods of torture for which they tried Nazis and others after the war. There is a difference in the extent of the torture. So it is a difference between “widespread torture” and “mass torture” as done by totalitarian regimes.

Could it be this new for-profit approach to national security of these past few years? The system that hires unaccountable “private contractors” and torturers and creates a chance of deniability? A deliberate alibi for officials at a cost of millions to the treasury paid to these private contractors? The modern legal equivalent of Mafia “hit men” pretending to be patriotic while inflicting unusual pain for a lot of money?
Would Messrs Bush, Cheney, their accommodating Counselors, and those in the Obama White House who condoned the practice accept to be “rectally fed”?
Can anyone imagine “rectal feeding” condoned under any American president that preceded Bush, Obama, and possibly one of the Clintons? Not even Reagan and Nixon, who were perceived as tough but had some honorable limits.
Normally you would consider the U.S. Senate as a sane place where grown-ups would impose some limits on such un-American behavior. But even that window will not be there anymore. It will be closed come January. The crazies look ready to control the asylum.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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Caliphate, GCC, Jihadis, Middle East, U.S. Foreign Policy

Qatar and Her Sisters: Foundation for the Defense of More War……..

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KuwaitCox2    ChristmasPeanuts

“It has been dubbed the most two-faced nation in the world, backing the U.S.-led coalition against the militants of the Islamic State while providing a permissive environment, in the words of one top American official, for terrorist financiers to operate with impunity. And despite a growing furor on both sides of the Atlantic, Qatar, the tiny but super-wealthy Gulf emirate, shows scant willingness to clamp down on the jihad moneymen. Indeed, it may never unless Western powers start raising the political stakes. A new report identifies more than 20 funders designated as terrorist-linked by the U.S. or UN who have benefited from a mixture of benign neglect or support in Doha. “With every important case of suspected terror finance involving a Qatari national in past years, the government in Doha has refused effectively to crack down,” according to the study, “Qatar and Terror Finance,”……………Al-Nuaymi, who has also been fingered by the UN and the European Union as a funder of terrorism, has held major roles in official Qatari organizations, including serving as a board member on charities backed by the government and at the Qatar Islamic Bank…………….”

This Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) website claims it is “a non-profit, non-partisan 501(c)3 policy institute focusing on foreign policy and national security………” The most reasonable among its leaders is dead: one former NFL quarterback named Jack Kemp who went on to Congress and the Reagan cabinet. I usually take their analysis about the Middle East with a pound or two of salt, and I am being extremely polite here.
The Foundation For the Defense of Democracies has little to do with “democracy”. It is an extreme warlike group inhabited by frustrated American warhawks/chickenhawks and scurrilous Arabs and other exiles who seek more Western wars and destruction on their native region. The group is dedicated to two things: (a) absolute Israeli supremacy in the Middle East, and (b) waging more wars of choice on any remaining Middle East country that is not allied with the United States. Just a list of its board and its comments and its contributors will tell the story.

Having said that, this is not to deny that certain elements in the Persian Gulf states are heavily involved in financing Jihadi terrorists in Iraq and Syria. And not just Qatar, the Little Wahhabi gas power. I have written on this since before 2011, before the first Wahhabi suitcases of cash money from the Gulf entered Syria, through Turkey and Lebanon (the latter care of the pro-Saudi March 14 bloc). In Iraq the trail can lead all the way back to the elections of 2005 and the rise of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, possibly earlier.

Ironically, there were no Qataris involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks, mainly Saudis, and Egyptians and Emiratis. Qatar has a tiny native population (some 90% are imported temporary foreign labor) but a lot of surplus money. Unlike some other Gulf states, they send more money and less Wahhabi volunteers to kill Shi’as and people of other faiths.

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Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Economics, Finance, Globalization, Pacific, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

Corporation Democrats and Globalization from Obama to Clinton: TP the TPP?……..

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“President Barack Obama is ready to buck his liberal base in order to advance the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the pro-corporate international trade deal currently being negotiated in secret by the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries……..”

It is the corporations, stupid.
There was a time when it was true that what was good for corporate America was good for mainstreet America. Not so much anymore. Now what is good for corporate America is mainly good for the large shareholders and for the club of CEOs of America in this age of bonus-hunting by management. The real shareholders matter, not the average Jane with an IRA, as they try to tell us on the financial networks.

If you want to know what American corporations probably prefer the ideal state of American labor to be, look at China, India, and some Latin American countries. Well, a mild exaggeration to make the point perhaps, but not by much. A huge lower lower middle class enshrined in a permanent American class society the like of which has not been seen in more than a century.

Mr. Obama is in many ways like ALL other American presidents since Ronald Reagan. He is a corporation president, even though the U.S. Chamber of Commerce strongly campaigned for his Republican rivals (that was just a matter of comparative preference). His party aspires that he will be followed into the White House by the two most corporatist Democrats available in decades: Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Given the country’s well-financed shift to the right, those two might be the only Democrats who have a chance to keep the White House for their party two years from now.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Caliphate, Islamic History, Jihadis, Libya, Spain

Islamic State of North Africa: Return to Andalucia……..

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“The caliphate has a beach. It is located on the Mediterranean Sea around 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Crete in Darna. The eastern Libya city has a population of around 80,000, a beautiful old town and an 18th century mosque, from which the black flag of the Islamic State flies. The port city is equipped with Sharia courts and an “Islamic Police” force which patrols the streets in all-terrain vehicles. A wall has been built in the university to separate female students from their male counterparts and the disciplines of law, natural sciences and languages have all been abolished. Those who would question the city’s new societal order risk death. Darna has become a colony of terror, and it is the first Islamic State enclave in North Africa. The conditions in Libya are perfect for the radical Islamists………………”

Most Jihadis, and some otherwise sane Wahhabi Arabs, often talk of Al Andalus. Andalucia is a term used not just for the famous province in Spain, but for the bulk of Iberia that was conquered by Muslims. An expansion that was stopped at Poitier (Palace of Martyrs in Arabic) and was eventually reversed by the conjugal union of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.
Andalucia is now something beyond a geographic place to most Muslims, especially to Arabs. It reflects a state of mind that looks back to a bygone bright light in a current dark tunnel. A symbol of lost glory in our current era of weakness and irrelevance.

The Jihadi Salafis claim that their goal is to ‘recover’ Al Andalus. Actually the Andalucia of early Muslims is not what the Jihadis dream of. Theirs would be an intolerant stagnant homogeneous Wahhabi theocracy that has little to do with the vibrant melting-pot Spain of the Islamic era. Others promise to have their ‘horses tied’ in the center of Rome, and not just because these Wahhabi dudes like the Chianti or the Prosecco.
And what better place to retrace history, to conquer Europa, than from the spot where that earlier successful conquest started. North Africa.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Cinema, Culture, Lebanon

Joie de Vivre of Lebanon and the Region: a Bundle of Artistic Energy Passes……….

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Sabah was her screen name. The legendary Lebanese singer who also often acted and sang in Egyptian films, was an institution in the Arab world. Not on the same level as Um Kalthoum: she was of a different style. Good Arab and Middle East entertainers transcend national borders and religion and sect (as do some very bad ones too). She was one of the good ones. Many people did not even know or care what religion she was born into. Those were the days when religion and sect were kept confined to places of worship in the Middle East, except in Saudi Arabia.

She had quite an appetite for life, apparently including love. She was married numerous times, to Lebanese, to Egyptian celebrities, and others. And at least one brief marriage to an Arab oil potentate from the Gulf, actually from my hometown: probably a mix of passion and money involved. God knows how many others.

I saw her perform in Paris years ago. At a dock restaurant on the banks of the Seine, not far from La tour Eiffel. She was in her seventies then, but outlasted some of us who could not stay up that late. A bundle of energy and joie de vivre………..
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Caliphate, Iraq, Lebanon, Marriage

From Iraq to Lebanon: the Caliph of Mosul Evades a Conjugal Shortage……….

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“A woman detained by Lebanese authorities was not the wife of the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but the sister of a man convicted of bombings in southern Iraq, Iraq’s interior ministry has said. “The one detained by Lebanese authorities was Saja Abdul Hamid al-Dulaimi, sister of Omar Abdul Hamid al-Dulaimi, who is detained by authorities and sentenced to death for his participation in … explosions,” a ministry spokesman said on Wednesday. “The wives of the terrorist Al-Baghdadi are Asmaa Fawzi Mohammed al-Dulaimi and Esraa Rajab Mahel al-Qaisi, and there is no wife in the name of Saja al-Dulaimi,” he said…………….”

The Salafis apparently like being able to switch partners without missing a ‘beat’. At least some people attach this characteristic to them. That explains the plethora of wives and concubines they prefer to have around. Some bought and paid for, others captured or just kidnapped and considered legitimate war booty. Hence the confusion over the number and identities of the wives of Caliph Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi (a.k.a. Ibrahim Awwad Al Samarrai). The man from Looney Tunes.

All of which does not explains why anyone would think a wife or concubine of a Wahhabi Caliph would travel from Mosul to Beirut. Maybe just a shopping spree to recycle some of the oil money they get from exporting (through the Caliphate of Turkey)? A la the more-established and not-so-nouveau riche Persian Gulf potentates and oligarchs and their women?
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Blockade of Iran, Caliphate, Iran, Weapons deals

Western Weapons Sanctions: Unintended Long-Term Consequences………

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“It is a tribute to Iranian ingenuity that Iran has been able to keep the planes flying, given US sanctions in place since 1979. The Iranians have done so by a combination of smuggling – using shadow companies to buy parts – and cannibalising parts from civil aircraft. They have also engaged in reverse engineering, though this seldom produces a perfect match, resulting in weaker parts. Justin Bronk, a research analyst in the military science programme at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, said of the plane spotted over Iraq: “This is the equivalent of a late Vietnam-era F-4 Phantom D or E variants. We do not know which one.” Bronk, who specialises in combat air power, added: “It is extremely impressive that the Iranians have kept this airworthiness given the ban on spare parts. The Iranian aerospace industry is one of the best in the world in keeping old aircraft airworthy.”…………”

For some reason they can’t seem to get more modern warplanes from their Chinese and Russian allies. Or maybe the mullahs are just as attached to old American jets as the Shah was to new ones.

In any case, they have managed to improvise and build up their technical skills and weapons industries. Necessity is truly the mother of invention, and a fount of new research, technical skill, and knowledge. If and when the American-European blockade is lifted, they will probably find themselves with a robust domestic weapons and space industry that can only be rivaled by the Israelis.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Arab Revolutions, Baath Party, Jihadis, Syria

Jihadist Revolutionary Council in Syria Adopts Old Baathist Jargon……….

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“Seventy-two Syrian rebel groups on Saturday announced a new coalition to battle the government of President Bashar Assad. But hopes that moderate rebels would dominate the meeting were dashed when extremists gained more of the 17 executive positions than had been expected. Col. Muhammad Hallak, who represented a moderate faction attending the three-day organizational meeting, accused Islamists, especially Ahrar al Sham, which is known to work closely with al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, of capturing more positions than its influence in the rebellion deserved. A review of the names by McClatchy indicated that moderates hold only six or seven of the 17 executive positions. Hallak also expressed skepticism toward the October document on which the new group, the Revolutionary Command Council…………..”

Revolutionary Command Council: now that is a blast from the lousy Arab Baathist past. It was a common term in the old days, before the Wahhabi oil princes and shaikhs, with their tribal ideology and money, took control of Arab destiny. Before the fate of much of the Arab east from the Persian Gulf to Libya became hostage to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi (with some exceptions).

Whenever a few Baathist (or other Arab) officers staged a military coup and took power, they would immediately establish a Revolutionary Command Council. That was how it went. These Jihadis are merely using a term with which many Arabs, especially in Syria and Iraq are quite familiar.

Then there are the so-called ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels who believe in freedom, human rights, and representative government. As well as other aspects of the American way of life, except perhaps for changing attire in a phone booth. These rebels will reportedly be trained in such bastions of human freedom and representative government as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and possibly the UAE.

I haven’t decided which one is funnier, yet……..
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Human Right, Justice, Racism, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

America Divided over New Lynchings, but the Song Remains the Same……..

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It is a common headline, it has been for some time. The new media and technology makes it impossible to cover up most of it. A black teenager or a black man, almost always unarmed, is shot or killed otherwise by the police who are on-duty or off-duty. It is never one bullet, it is never two bullets. Mostly a whole magazine of a gun is emptied in a living body, sometimes more. Occasionally some civilian idiot takes the law into his own hands and follows and shoots an unarmed black man for being in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood. Or a black child is riddled with many police bullets while playing with a toy gun in a park.
In all cases, at least those cases that are publicized, the killer(s) get off free. Always. We are told that ‘race’ has nothing to do with it. So what then? Is it the economic class that dehumanizes some? Which brings us to the same point.
Soon after every killing, Republicans, at least those who express an opinion, and their media side with the police or with the vigilante who killed the unarmed black boy or man. Democrats wait briefly before jumping in by obliquely criticizing the police. There are protests, complaints, handwringing, bluster, investigations, even some singing of kumbaya………
Then bang! It happens again, the widely-accepted modern equivalent of lynching………

The beat goes on. The song remains the same………
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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AIPAC, Iran, Israel, US Congress

How Far Will AIPAC Want the U.S. to Go on Iran?………

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“The powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC is urging a dramatic escalation in sanctions on Iran in response to a recent seven-month extension of nuclear talks. It also seeks a US ban on Iranian oil exports worldwide and more Iranian industries blacklisted…………”

No doubt a majority in the Knesset Congress and Senate will immediately bow and push for this. They have been at it on a bipartisan basis since at least early 2009. Some of them have been at it even before AIPAC went public with its demands, pushing poison pill clauses in some congressional resolutions and measures, with the aim of dragging the USA into yet another regional war.
Tightening a unilateral blockade that other countries are forced to observe, courtesy of AIPAC.

I am beginning to suspect that if AIPAC (the right-wing Israeli lobby) some day demands that Iran be hit with nuclear weapons, a shocking number of legislators in Washington may start talking seriously about it. I am almost not being facetious here.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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