Chad may face genocide, UN warns

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/africa/6367545.stm

Published: 2007/02/16 10:05:43 GMT

The violence in Chad could turn into a genocide similar to that in
Rwanda in 1994, the UN refugee agency has warned.
The UNHCR says the killing tactics from neighbouring Darfur in Sudan
have been transported to eastern Chad in full.

The warning comes as Chad, Sudan and the Central African Republic
signed a deal not to support rebels attacking each other's neighbouring
territory.

African Union head, Ghana's President John Kufuor, said they seemed
ready to agree to an AU/UN border peace force.

"They seem to be ready to accept a beefed-up force from the African
Union and the United Nations to take control of the borders among
them," Mr Kufuor told reporters at the French-African summit in Cannes
where the declaration was signed.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5m displaced since war
broke out in Darfur four years ago.

Concern is now growing for the 200,000 refugees who sought shelter in
eastern Chad.

The conflict in Darfur has followed them across the border with attacks
by Janjaweed Arab militia on camels and horseback leaving hundreds dead
and 110,000 people homeless.

The Poor Man's Air Force

A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)
By Mike Davis

Buda's Wagon (1920)

You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!
-- Anarchist warning (1919)

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his
comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario
Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad
Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly
climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A
few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets
warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for
All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The
bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they
stopped, the wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded
in a fireball of shrapnel.

"The horse and wagon were blown to bits," writes Paul Avrich, the
celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true
story. "Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve
stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a
great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas
Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble
of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets."

Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J.P. Morgan
himself was not among the 40 dead and more than 200 wounded -- the
great robber baron was away in Scotland at his hunting lodge.
Nonetheless, a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of
scrap metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented
terror to the inner sanctum of American capitalism.

His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of
anarchist fantasies about avenging angels made of dynamite; but it was
also an invention, like Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, far ahead
of the imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism of strategic
bombing had become commonplace, and when air forces routinely pursued
insurgents into the labyrinths of poor cities, would the truly radical
potential of Buda's "infernal machine" be fully realized.

Buda's wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of
an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to
transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a
high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able
to determine, until January 12, 1947 when the Stern Gang drove a
truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa,
Palestine, killing 4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist
splinter group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the
right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car
bombs to kill Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately
reciprocated by British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian
nationalists.

Vehicle bombs thereafter were used sporadically -- producing notable
massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962), and Palermo (1963) -- but
the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the Provisional
Irish Republican Army (IRA) accidentally, so the legend goes,
improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. These
new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary industrial ingredients
and synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and astonishingly
powerful: they elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the
industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes against entire
city centers as well as the complete destruction of ferro-concrete
skyscrapers and residential blocks.

The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon
that, under certain circumstances, was comparable to airpower in its
ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as
terrorize the populations of entire cities. Indeed, the suicide truck
bombs that devastated the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut
in 1983 prevailed -- at least in a geopolitical sense -- over the
combined firepower of the fighter-bombers and battleships of the U.S.
Sixth Fleet and forced the Reagan administration to retreat from Lebanon.

Hezbollah's ruthless and brilliant use of car bombs in Lebanon in the
1980s to counter the advanced military technology of the United
States, France, and Israel soon emboldened a dozen other groups to
bring their insurgencies and jihads home to the metropolis. Some of
the new-generation car bombers were graduates of terrorism schools set
up by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI), with Saudi
financing, in the mid-1980s to train mujahedin to terrorize the
Russians then occupying Kabul. Between 1992 and 1998, 16 major vehicle
bomb attacks in 13 different cities killed 1,050 people and wounded
nearly 12,000. More importantly from a geopolitical standpoint, the
IRA and Gama'a al-Islamiyya inflicted billions of dollars of damage on
the two leading control-centers of the world economy -- the City of
London (1992, 1993, and 1996) and lower Manhattan (1993) -- and forced
a reorganization of the global reinsurance industry.

In the new millennium, 85 years after that first massacre on Wall
Street, car bombs have become almost as generically global as iPods
and HIV-AIDS, cratering the streets of cities from Bogota to Bali.
Suicide truck bombs, once the distinctive signature of Hezbollah, have
been franchised to Sri Lanka, Chechnya/Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait,
and Indonesia. On any graph of urban terrorism, the curve representing
car bombs is rising steeply, almost exponentially. U.S.-occupied Iraq,
of course, is a relentless inferno with more than 9,000 casualties --
mainly civilian -- attributed to vehicle bombs in the two-year period
between July 2003 and June 2005. Since then, the frequency of car-bomb
attacks has dramatically increased: 140 per month in the fall of 2005,
13 in Baghdad on New Year's Day 2006 alone. If roadside bombs or IEDs
are the most effective device against American armored vehicles, car
bombs are the weapon of choice for slaughtering Shiite civilians in
front of mosques and markets and instigating an apocalyptic sectarian war.

Under siege from weapons indistinguishable from ordinary traffic, the
apparatuses of administration and finance are retreating inside "rings
of steel" and "green zones," but the larger challenge of the car bomb
seems intractable. Stolen nukes, Sarin gas, and anthrax may be the
"sum of our fears," but the car bomb is the quotidian workhorse of
urban terrorism. Before considering its genealogy, however, it may be
helpful to summarize those characteristics that make Buda's wagon such
a formidable and undoubtedly permanent source of urban insecurity.

First, vehicle bombs are stealth weapons of surprising power and
destructive efficiency. Trucks, vans, or even SUVs can easily
transport the equivalent of several conventional 1,000-pound bombs to
the doorstep of a prime target. Moreover, their destructive power is
still evolving, thanks to the constant tinkering of ingenious
bomb-makers. We have yet to face the full horror of semi-trailer-sized
explosions with a lethal blast range of 200 yards or of dirty bombs
sheathed in enough nuclear waste to render mid-Manhattan radioactive
for generations.

The plague of bird flu will erupt out of Java, not Suffolk

The west has failed to back up its rhetoric by helping countries that will be on the front line of any human pandemic

Mike Davis
Wednesday February 7, 2007
The Guardian

Just when most of us thought it was safe to go back into the water (or at least eat chicken and turkey), H5N1 raises its black dorsal fin and reminds us that it has unfinished business with the human race. Although hypotheses abound, virologists have yet to understand avian flu's enigmatic behaviour: burning like a wildfire one season, going to ground the next. However, since the original outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997, one trend remains consistent: after each hibernation or disappearance, H5N1 re-emerges with its virulence intact and its geographical and species ranges extended.

A decade of breakneck research, driven by the fear that another 1918 influenza catastrophe (50-100 million dead in three months, the most murderous event in human history) was close at hand, has provided little solace. The daring laboratory resurrection of the 1918 virus has shown that H5N1 may be only a few amino-acid substitutions away from acquiring transmissibility at pandemic velocity. A pandemic already exists among wild birds and domestic poultry, and we saw a terrifying demonstration of its spreading power during the winter of 2005-06, when outbreaks emerged helter-skelter across western Asia, Europe and Africa - often with little clue as to the source of the infection.

Now H5N1 has resumed its mysterious and seemingly irresistible march with new human victims in China, Indonesia, Egypt and Nigeria, and a spectacular outbreak among English factory turkeys that raises troubling questions about the biosafety of the corporate poultry industry.

Maybe the cultural provincialists( and u know who u r !!) should take
some notes here ..

Bests anjx

Michael Dirda
Milan Kundera on the civilizing values of the novel.

By Michael Dirda
Sunday, February 4, 2007; Page BW10

By Milan Kundera

Translated from the French by Linda Asher

HarperCollins. 168 pp. $22.95

Joseph Conrad once wrote that his purpose as a novelist was simply "to
make you see." According to Viktor Shklovsky -- the influential
Russian formalist critic of the 1920s and '30s -- our daily, automatic
routines leach all the freshness from existence, so that we no longer
experience the wonder of the people and life around us. Art's purpose,
consequently, is to "defamiliarize" the familiar, to shake up our
dulled perceptions, to reinvest the dingy, gray and arthritic universe
with richness, color, vitality.

According to Milan Kundera's similar literary theory of "the curtain,"
we grow up with cultural preconceptions that "pre-interpret" the world
and close off various aspects of experience. He writes that "a magic
curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don
Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened
before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose."
Ever since, the true novelist's ambition "is not to do something
better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say
what they did not say."

Perhaps the best known Czech writer of his generation ( The Unbearable
Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), Kundera has
resided in Paris for the past 30 years and now writes in French. (Such
linguistic displacement is itself a way of tearing the curtain, of
forcing oneself to see with new eyes.) In these essays, he addresses
us as a European intellectual, an advocate of what Goethe called
Weltliteratur (world-literature). Certainly, the authors Kundera
invokes to illustrate his arguments are as cosmopolitan as he is:
Cervantes, Sterne, Rabelais, Diderot, Laclos, Stendhal, Flaubert,
Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Hasek, Kafka, Faulkner, Musil, Broch,
García-Márquez. Here, he would say, is fiction's essential tradition,
and consciousness of this continuity is "one of the distinguishing
marks of a person belonging to the civilization that is (or was) ours."

In the first of Kundera's seven chapters, he stresses that the novel
explores human nature. In contrast to the high-mindedness of ancient
epic and tragedy, fiction's prosy emphasis is on "the concrete,
everyday, corporeal nature of life." After their battles, Homer's
heroes never wonder if they still have all their teeth. "But for Don
Quixote and Sancho [Panza] teeth are a perpetual concern -- hurting
teeth, missing teeth. 'You must know, Sancho, that no diamond is so
precious as a tooth.' " While heroes always demand our admiration, he
adds, the characters in novels only ask to be understood.

In his second chapter, Kundera emphasizes that "cultural diversity is
the great European value," then goes on to analyze provincialism -- an
over-emphasis on one's own national art and literature just because
it's American or Czech or French. "Indifference to aesthetic value
inevitably shifts the whole culture back into provincialism." His
third chapter explores the "soul" of the novel, in particular how
20th-century writers turned fiction away from "fascination with the
psychological (the exploration of character) and brought it toward
existential analysis (the analysis of situations that shed light on
major aspects of the human condition)." In The Trial, we learn almost
nothing about Joseph K.'s childhood, love affairs or emotional past,
for Kafka doesn't need to make his protagonist seem three-dimensional.
The only thing that matters is that he be appropriate to the
existential situation, the horrible tangle, he finds himself in.

In subsequent pages of The Curtain, Kundera discusses humor,
19th-century fiction's discovery of the "scene," an author's rights,
the main problem of modernity -- "the 'bureaucratization' of social
life"-- and how such masters as Broch and Musil used the novel as a
vehicle for real thinking about society, politics and human purpose.
Throughout, Kundera writes plainly but with passion. He bewails our
current "ethic of the archive" -- the conviction that every scribble
from a writer's hand is important -- and urges instead an "ethic of
the essential." Only the aesthetic project itself truly matters, the
fully achieved novel, poem or play. In this light, the desire for
artistic fame isn't mere egotism:

Dear Friends
 
You may be familiar with ther case of Sami Al Arian -- a former colleague, faculty at the University of South Florida. He remains in indefinite detention even though he was found not guilty of all terrorism charges brought against him. His situation is deteriorating. He has been on hunger strike for 24  days -- over one hundred people have joined him in a rolling hunger strike. If you would like to support Sami in this way, you can select one day in which you would be willing to fast in solidarity, and send an email to
Mel Underbakke
melvau@earthlink.net
 
Mel has been, for the past three years, the main engine behind the growing support effort in Tampa and nationwide.
 
Below, a recent interview about the case of Dr Al-Arian, a link to a documentary soon to be released.
http://www.diplo.no/index.php?article=1223
 
best
 
rozalinda
 
Road Map to Despotism
ig
11 February 2007
Editor's note: Despite spending an estimated $80 million, the government was
unable to prove that Dr. Sami Al-Arian was a terrorist, yet he remains in prison
and his sentence will likely be extended. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Chris Hedges warns that the abusive imprisonment of this nonviolent Palestinian
dissenter does not bode well for the rest of us.

Dr. Sami Al-Arian, photo courtesy www.usamotalarian.no   
Professor Sami Al-Arian, whose persecution and show trial are parts of a
long string of egregious acts of injustice perpetrated by the Bush
administration, has been on a hunger strike since Jan. 22 to protest the
prolongation of his imprisonment.
Al-Arian's travels through the halls of American justice, and now the
subterranean corridors of the nation's Stygian prison system, reads like a
bad rip-off of Kafka. Al-Arian was acquitted on eight of the 17 counts against
him by a Florida jury, which deadlocked on the rest. He agreed to plead
guilty to one of the remaining charges four months later in exchange
for being released and deported. The judge gave Al-Arian as much prison
time as possible under a plea deal—57 months at his sentencing. He was set
to be released this April, something that now appears unlikely.
The trial was a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration's drive to turn
the American judicial system into kangaroo courts. Over the six-month trial
a parade of 80 witnesses, including 21 from Israel, attempted to brand
the Florida professor as a terrorist. The government submitted thousands of
documents, phone interceptions and physical surveillance culled from 12
years of investigations. The trial cost taxpayers an estimated $80 million.
The 94 charges against Al-Arian and his co-defendants resulted in no
convictions. But because Al-Arian has twice refused to testify before a grand
jury in Virginia in a case involving a Muslim think tank, he has now been
charged with contempt of court. The date of his release could be extended
by as much as 18 months.

Notes on Bourdieu
Gene Ray

It’s been five years since the French sociologist and activist Pierre Bourdieu died. In Berlin, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the educational arm of the Leftist Party, marked his “death day” by putting on a two-day conference called “A Wide Field: The Left and Bourdieu.” (Does the day of his death mean something different than his birthday, as the occasion for an academic conference? And if so, what?)

In his last decade, Bourdieu became an energetic opponent of neoliberal economic policies. His textual salvos, practical interventions, and effective organizing are impressive and inspiring. Along with Noam Chomsky and a few others, he may be a last instance of that principled “public intellectual” targeted for extinction by market-driven structural adjustments in the universities. Still, the affinities are obvious between Bourdieu and the Leftist Party, which more than others in the German parliamentary system has voiced a coherent opposition to the neoliberalist onslaught.

Presumably the aim of this conference was to explore how far these affinities extend to the large body of Bourdieu’s theoretical work and sociological research. This is not a report on the conference, which I didn’t attend. I’m told it was great; why shouldn’t it have been? What follows is more like a supplemental contribution from the outside.

If Bourdieu’s death day is a valid occasion for commissioned reflections from academics[1], then who will complain if we unsalaried DIYers think it should be good enough for us, as well?

A Theory of the Given
Anyone who has occupied “positions” and left traces of a “trajectory” in the contemporary art world will recognize a reflection of their own experiences in Bourdieu’s account of the logic and structure of the cultural field. It’s immediately obvious that his elaborated conceptions of “field” and “habitus” have great descriptive and explanatory power. And it’s hard to imagine now doing without his notion of cultural, academic, symbolic, and social “capital,” as a means to understand the different forms of power that are specific to the various sub-fields making up the “field of class relations.” These forms of specific capital don’t simply or crudely reduce to economic capital, though they can often be converted into it. However, all these specific forms of power share a common “economic logic.” Bourdieu thus rejects the mechanistic base-superstructure model and reflection theory of what used to be called “vulgar” Marxist orthodoxy.

His theory and methodology — like those of the Frankfurt School – is a more subtle and (though he generally doesn’t use this term) dialectical form of materialist analysis. Still, he claims that his “general science of the economy of practices” takes into account all the forces and forms of agency active in the social meta-field and, as such, is capable of analyzing “all practices, including those purporting to be disinterested or gratuitous, and hence non-economic, as economic practices directed toward the maximizing of material or symbolic profit.”[2]

Bourdieu is always careful to situate different fields in time and place and to indicate their historical genesis. But one is led to agree with the conclusion of one of his commentators, that for Bourdieu the competition for power and resources is a “universal invariant property” of all social fields — and thus a key aspect of every kind of cultural and political practice.[3] Entry into any field is only granted to those who, demonstrating practically that they have learned the rules of the game, can accumulate sufficient specific capital to occupy a position and compete to accumulate more capital. As an account of the given order — of the genesis, structure, and logic of the dominant parts of the capitalist world system – this amounts to a powerful theoretical description.

What remains unclear is how far, if at all, Bourdieu’s work supports a radical push beyond this given. We can read, and use, Bourdieu’s studies as an ideology critique of current reality. But is it a critical theory, in the sense of a critique oriented to praxis, to the radical transformation of the given? After working through five of his texts, including his major works on the cultural field, I’m still looking for the revolutionary horizon. In this respect Bourdieu is probably open to the Frankfurt critique of positivism: the rigorous self-restriction to the world “that is the case” ends in tautology and affirmation. This must be an issue for any radical leftist or anti-capitalist appropriation of his work.

This letter is heart-breaking and marks one of the daily tragedies which take place in the name of Israeli security. However, the mechanisms behind the occupation SEEM so great that all the goodness in the heart of the palestinians and all the desire for peace does not seem to stop this machine. -rg

a-plea-for-peace-from-a-bereaved-palestinian-father

On her way out the door to school, Abir announced, in that way children have of doing, that she would be playing with a friend that afternoon rather than coming straight home to study for an exam scheduled for the next day. She was 10 years old, smart, dedicated to her schoolwork and still a little girl.

She wanted to play. I told her to not even think about it.

If I could tell her anything now, it would be: Go. Do whatever you want. Play.

Because now, she never will. She will never laugh again, never hear her friends calling her name, never feel the love of her family wrapped around her at night like a warm blanket.

Abir, the third of my six children, was shot in the head as she left school January 16, caught in an altercation between Israel Border Guard troops and older kids who may or may not have been throwing rocks. She died two days later.

No 10 rejects police state claim

Mr Blair's spokesman said a police state would not have freed Mr Bakr
Tony Blair has rejected claims that the UK is a "police state for Muslims" as "categorically wrong".
Abu Bakr, who was arrested, questioned and then released without charge over an alleged kidnap plot, made the remarks on BBC Two's Newsnight.

But the prime minister's official spokesman said anyone arrested in a police state would not have been freed and allowed to appear on television.

He said: "It is a gross caricature of the political process in this country."

'Open fact'

Chancellor Gordon Brown described Mr Bakr's comme

The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted February 8, 2007.

From Alternet:
http://www.alternet.org/stories/47679/

We must attend to growing social and economic inequities in order to stop the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- or face a future of fascism under the guise of Christian values.

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

The holy blitz rolls on
from salon.com

The Christian right is a "deeply anti-democratic movement" that gains force by exploiting Americans' fears, argues Chris Hedges. Salon talks with the former New York Times reporter about his fearless new book, "American Fascists."
By Michelle Goldberg

Jan. 08, 2007 | Longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges, the former New York Times bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans, knows a lot about the savagery that people are capable of, especially when they're besotted with dreams of religious or national redemption. In his acclaimed 2002 book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," he wrote: "I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of Southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments." Hedges was part of the New York Times team of reporters that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting about global terrorism.

Given such intimacy with horror, one might expect him to be aloof from the seemingly less urgent cultural disputes that dominate domestic American politics. Yet in the rise of America's religious right, Hedges senses something akin to the brutal movements he's spent his life chronicling. The title of his new book speaks for itself: "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." Scores of volumes about the religious right have recently been published (one of them, "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism," by me), but Hedges' book is perhaps the most furious and foreboding, all the more so because he knows what fascism looks like.

Part of his outrage is theological. The son of a Presbyterian minister and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Hedges once planned to join the clergy himself. He speaks of the preachers he encountered while researching "American Fascists" as heretics, and he's appalled at their desecration of a faith he still cherishes, even if he no longer totally embraces it. Writing of Ohio megachurch pastor Rod Parsley and his close associate, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, he says, "[T]he heart of the Christian religion, all that is good and compassionate within it, has been tossed aside, ruthlessly gouged out and thrown into a heap with all the other inner organs. Only the shell, the form, remains. Christianity is of no use to Parsley, Blackwell and the others. In its name they kill it."

I first met Hedges at last spring's War on Christians conference in Washington, D.C., where Parsley, a wildly charismatic Pentecostal who loves the language of holy war, electrified the crowd. ("I came to incite a riot!" he shouted. "Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! Lock and load!") It was shortly before the publication of my book, and as Hedges and I spoke, we realized we had similar takes on our subject. Both of us relied on Hannah Arendt's analysis of totalitarian movements in their early stages, and on some of the concepts that historian Robert O. Paxton elucidated in his book "The Anatomy of Fascism." But where I, anxious not to be seen as hysterical, tried to treat these ideas gingerly, Hedges is unabashed and unsparing. His rage and contempt for the movement's leaders, though, is matched by sympathy for its followers, because he understands the despair, the desperate longing for community and even the idealism that often drives them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_84-PT-REc4

Some comments on the video
Goes under the category of debunking the entire situation of the "war on terror." One has to do further research on the books mentioned and the persons involved but the concept of creating your enemy is nothing new, and as they point out, history of the the left in Italy or the ETA in Spain as an incredibly illluminating period for understanding the state's unabashed embrace for "terrorism" to scare its people into obedience and to delegitimized any resistance to it. The difficulty of the argument, which comes from the section posted below is that, at this moment, it would be hard to even recognize or name a "legitimate" anti-imperialist, pan-arab movement, so just what or whom is Al Qaeda deligitimizing? the Palestinian Struggle? What struggles are taking place that are so persecuted or underground that we have no awareness of?

Guy Debord already had the assessment down in the 80's in his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle:

IX.

This perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State and it is thus instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, in any case more rational and democratic.

The modernization of repression has succeeded in perfecting -- first in the Italian pilot-project under the name of pentiti [12] -- sworn professional accusers; a phenomenon first seen in the seventeenth century after the Fronde, when such people were called 'certified witnesses.' This spectacular progress of Justice has filled Italy's prisons with thousands of people condemned[13] to do penance for a civil war which did not take place, a kind of mass armed insurrection which, by chance, never actually happened, a putsch woven of such stuff as dreams are made of.

One can remark that interpretations of the mysteries of terrorism appear to have introduced a symmetry between contradictory views, as if there were two schools of philosophy professing absolutely incompatible metaphysical systems. Some would see terrorism as only several blatant manipulations by the secret services; others, on the contrary, estimate that it is only necessary to reproach the terrorists for their total lack of historical understanding. [14] The use of a little historical logic permits us to quite quickly conclude that there is nothing contradictory in recognizing that people who lack all historical sense can easily be manipulated; even more easily than others. It is much easier to lead someone to 'repent' when it can be shown that everything he thought he did freely was actually known in advance. It is an inevitable effect of clandestine forms of organization of the military type that it suffices to infiltrate a few people at certain points of the network to make many march and fall. Critique, when evaluating armed struggles ...

http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html

see number 9 and footnotes at the bottom of the page

-gdr