US injustice and arbitrariness as sources of terrorism

”What was the post-9/11 madness but blind revenge? What were the lockups at Guantanamo but revenge? What is joining Al-Qaeda but revenge? Is revenge a legitimate response to an attack on America? Why isn't it equally appropriate for those who have suffered sadistic American brutality?”

Failed airliner bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told US investigators that he was only one of many trained in Yemen who plan to attack Western targets. "There are more just like me who will strike soon," he said.

FBI sources claim Abdulmutallab underwent a month-long training in Yemen; and during this training, he learned how to detonate explosives and how to pass the security check by sewing the explosives to his underwear.

According to Haaretz, Yemen's foreign minister said: “There are over 300 Al-Qaeda activists in his country and [he] requested intelligence aid from the West."

A year ago, the Yemeni government rejected US criticism of its record of combating terrorism and insisted that it could successfully handle the Yemeni detainees, who made up the largest national contingent at Guantanamo Bay.

Andy Worthington, Truthout news analyst, reported on 30 December 2009 that Yemenis make up nearly half of the remaining 198 prisoners in Guantánamo. A week earlier, six Yemenis were repatriated. Only 16 Yemenis had been freed from Guantánamo throughout the prison's long history.

An unnamed senior US administration official is reported saying that "one of the recruiting and motivational tools that it [Al-Qaeda] used in its initial announcement to generate sympathy for its cause as well as recruits was the facility at Guantanamo Bay."

Locking up "enemy combatants" without proof of any crime having been committed led to the eventual release of the large majority of Gitmo detainees. A large majority of the uncharged, tortured prisoners simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In mid-December, the Washington Post reported: “Critics of repatriation argue that sending detainees to a country where Al-Qaeda is believed to be flourishing is essentially returning soldiers to the battlefield."

If they had never been on a battlefield, how could they be returned to one? If, as there is good reason to believe, the majority of these detainees were completely innocent of any crime and had no significant connection to Al Qaeda, why would they want to become terrorists instead of celebrating their release and freedom?

The answer should be obvious to any rational thinker: they could reasonably seek revenge for the criminal mistreatment that they, their families and friends have suffered since the post-9/11 madness began with the lies of bounty hunters rewarded for delivering live bodies.

In the film “Rendition”, one question stood out as pointing to what many seem to ignore. The American who had witnessed torture in a foreign prison, his first, asked: “For every one tortured, how many enemies do we create? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?

The Boston Conservative Examiner reports: "District of Columbia Circuit Judge Richardo M. Urbina's 31 December dismissal of charges against five former Blackwater USA employees who fired upon at least 40 unarmed men, women and children in Baghdad's Nisour Square on 16 September 2007 means that Iraqi victims will not find justice in US Courts.”

How many of those men, women and children along with their families and friends, will want revenge? Can we blame them for wanting to avenge their losses? How long can we get away with treating others as lesser humans, expecting them to avoid attraction to Al Qaeda?

British journalist Kim Sengupta writes: "The ruling which clears Blackwater will confirm for Mr Salman and others in Iraq the belief that foreigners were above the law, that, in Western eyes, Iraqi lives did not, somehow, matter.” America is allowed to field terrorists, but no one else is.

Stephen Farrell of the New York Times reported (9 January 2010): “Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian suicide bomber who killed eight people at a Central Intelligence Agency outpost in Afghanistan last month, was shown in a video on Saturday [9 January] saying that the attack was carried out in revenge for the 2009 killing of the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.”

What was the post-9/11 madness but blind revenge? What were the lockups at Guantanamo but revenge? What is joining Al-Qaeda but revenge? Is revenge a legitimate response to an attack on America? Why isn't it equally appropriate for those who have suffered sadistic American brutality?

Doug Horton warned: “While seeking revenge, dig two graves – one for yourself.”

Chemical analysis links ISI to CIA killings in Khost

Washington, Jan 11(ANI): The chemical fingerprint of the bomb used by the Jordanian double agent that killed seven Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers at a US base in Khost Province of Afghanistan last week reportedly matches the kind produced by Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

According to the Daily Beast, early evidence in the December 30 bombing suggests a link to Pakistan, and the chemical fingerprint of the bomb matches an explosive type used by ISI.

“It is not possible that the Jordanian double agent received that type of explosive without the help of ISI. The problem is that CIA trusted a Jordanian, but not the Afghan operatives we offer to them. If the U.S. forces recruit, they must recruit Afghans who do not have family members in Pakistan,” the website quoted a senior Government aide to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, as saying.

Meanwhile, the CIA has declined to comment on the accusation of a possible ISI role.

Seven CIA operatives, including the chief of the base, an officer of Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate and the Afghan base security chief at the base were killed and six others were seriously wounded in the attack.

Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for the attack, and the attacker was identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor.

While the CIA thought that al-Balawi would be an important informant, who could help the intelligence agency to capture top leaders of the Taliban and of al-Qaeda, he actually was loyal to Islamist extremists.

The bombing was the most lethal attack against the CIA in more than 25 years, and a major setback for the agency’s operations in the region. (ANI)

"We've Never Seen this Before – Such a Huge Rally, and the Little Guy Is Out"

Joseph Stiglitz says that Wall Street is hyping up the economy to sell more stock.

Has it worked?

Well, the stock market certainly has rocketed up from its March lows.

But many investors are still avoiding equities.

As Vincent Deluard - a strategist for TrimTabs Investment Research (25% of the top 50 hedge funds in the world use TrimTabs' research for market timing) - says:

We've never seen this before – such a huge rally, and the little guy is out.

In other words, the stock market rally is due almost entirely to hedgies, pension funds, banks and other institutional investors, and not every day investors.

It is even possible that the government itself has been propping up the stock market. And Bill Gross and Nouriel Roubini say that we have a Ponzi style economy.

TrimTabs notes that small investors pulled out $14 billion net from stock mutual funds from the beginning of last year through mid-December, on top of a net $245 billion withdrawn in 2008.

Given that, at the end of September, individuals held 80% of the $19 trillion in stock in U.S. companies, both private and public - according to the Federal Reserve - recovery will not happen so long as the little guys are sitting on the sidelines.

TrimTabs notes that most of $592 billion taken out of money market mutual funds last year has gone into bond and bond-hybrid funds instead.

No wonder David Rosenberg is saying:

• "People have been lured into two bubbles seven years apart, and for a lot of them it's over."

• "The bulls say if the market is up this much without retail investors, just watch when they come in, but it isn't going to happen."

• Investors who have not been spooked or angered by the market are probably too poor to buy anyway.

Egypt: New find shows slaves didn't build pyramids

CAIRO – Egypt displayed on Monday newly discovered tombs more than 4,000 years old and said they belonged to people who worked on the Great Pyramids of Giza, presenting the discovery as more evidence that slaves did not build the ancient monuments.

The series of modest nine-foot-deep shafts held a dozen skeletons of pyramid builders, perfectly preserved by dry desert sand along with jars that once contained beer and bread meant for the workers' afterlife.

The mud-brick tombs were uncovered last week in the backyard of the Giza pyramids, stretching beyond a burial site first discovered in the 1990s and dating to the 4th Dynasty (2575 B.C. to 2467 B.C.), when the great pyramids were built on the fringes of present-day Cairo.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once described the pyramid builders as slaves, creating what Egyptologists say is a myth later propagated by Hollywood films.

Graves of the pyramid builders were first discovered in the area in 1990 when a tourist on horseback stumbled over a wall that later proved to be a tomb. Egypt's archaeology chief Zahi Hawass said that discovery and the latest finds last week show that the workers were paid laborers, rather than the slaves of popular imagination.

Hawass told reporters at the site that the find, first announced on Sunday, sheds more light on the lifestyle and origins of the pyramid builders. Most importantly, he said the workers were not recruited from slaves commonly found across Egypt during pharaonic times.

One popular myth that Egyptologists say was perpetrated in part by Hollywood movies held that ancient Israelite slaves — ancestors of the Jewish people — built the pyramids.

Amihai Mazar, professor at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that myth stemmed from an erroneous claim by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, on a visit to Egypt in 1977, that Jews built the pyramids.

"No Jews built the pyramids because Jews didn't exist at the period when the pyramids were built," Mazar said.

Dorothy Resig, an editor of Biblical Archaeology Review in Washington D.C., said the idea probably arose from the Old Testament Book of Exodus, which says: "So the Egyptians enslaved the children of Israel with backbreaking labor" and the Pharaoh put them to work to build buildings.

"If the Hebrews built anything, then it was the city of Ramses as mentioned in Exodus," said Mazar.

Dieter Wildung, a former director of Berlin's Egyptian Museum, said it is "common knowledge in serious Egyptology" that the pyramid builders were not slaves and that the construction of the pyramids and the story of the Israelites in Egypt were separated by hundreds of years.

"The myth of the slaves building pyramids is only the stuff of tabloids and Hollywood," Wildung told The Associated Press by telephone. "The world simply could not believe the pyramids were build without oppression and forced labor, but out of loyalty to the pharaohs."

Hawass said the builders came from poor Egyptian families from the north and the south, and were respected for their work — so much so that those who died during construction were bestowed the honor of being buried in the tombs near the sacred pyramids of their pharaohs.

Their proximity to the pyramids and the manner of burial in preparation for the afterlife backs this theory, Hawass said.

"No way would they have been buried so honorably if they were slaves," he said.

The tombs contained no gold or valuables, which safeguarded them from tomb-raiders throughout antiquity, and the bodies were not mummified. The skeletons were found buried in a fetal position — the head pointing to the West and the feet to the East according to ancient Egyptian beliefs, surrounded by the jars once filled with supplies for afterlife.

The men who built the last remaining wonder of the ancient world ate meat regularly and worked in three months shifts, said Hawass. It took 10,000 workers more than 30 years to build a single pyramid, Hawass said — a tenth of the work force of 100,000 that Herodotus wrote of after visiting Egypt around 450 B.C.

Hawass said evidence from the site indicates that the approximately 10,000 laborers working on the pyramids ate 21 cattle and 23 sheep sent to them daily from farms.

Though they were not slaves, the pyramid builders led a life of hard labor, said Adel Okasha, supervisor of the excavation. Their skeletons have signs of arthritis, and their lower vertebrae point to a life passed in difficulty, he said.

"Their bones tell us the story of how hard they worked," Okasha said.

Wildung said the find reinforces the notion that the pyramid builders were free men, ordinary citizens

"But let's not exaggerate here, they lived a short life and tomography skeletal studies show they suffered from bad health, very much likely because of how hard their work was."

____

Associated Press Writer Ian Deitch contributed to this report from Jerusalem.

Iran Six to meet this week in New York - Clinton

The Iran Six will meet this week in New York, U.S. State Secretary Hillary Clinton told journalists on her way to Hawaii on Monday.

A diplomatic source told RIA Novosti the meeting would take place on Saturday.

A meeting of the Iran Six - Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States - was scheduled for December 22, but was canceled by request of China.

The Iran Six have been trying to persuade Tehran to halt uranium enrichment it says it needs for electricity generation for economic and diplomatic incentives. Iran Six envoys last met in Geneva on October 1.

Iran, which is already under three sets of United Nations sanctions for refusing to halt uranium enrichment, recently announced plans to build 10 new uranium enrichment facilities. Western powers suspect it of pursuing an atomic weapons program.

Britain's envoy to the UN Mark Lyall Grant said in late December that the UN Security Council could introduce new sanctions against Iran by late February unless Tehran accepts the Iran Six's offer on its controversial nuclear program.

Charles Goyette The Dollar Meltdown

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Ron Paul on Imus - The Danger of Bank Bailouts

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