Dark night rising

Photo: Barry Gutierrez/AP

It was impossible not to think of the Denver shootings as I attended the new Batman movie at the local cinema tonight. This latest random mass murder could have been scripted in the film itself, though it would have been the work of a cardboard-evil mastermind rather than just an unhinged student. While I'm a fan of the work of director Christopher Nolan, this latest effort was turgid twaddle. The plot was so predictable I left after an hour of tedious violence, with the hero in a bit of pickle but assured that the good guys would "win" in the end. 

I came away thinking it was folly to believe there is no connection between the film and the murders.  Guns and the power they confer are at the heart of the Batman movies – as they are at the heart of most Hollywood blockbusters. Guns are the ultimate deus ex machina plot device. Whoever is holding one, calls the shots. The drama moves towards the pivot where either the tables are turned or someone is shot. In the Dark Knight Rises, guns were everywhere and only “superhero” powers can overcome them. When the real murderer went loose in the cinema, many in the dark assumed the noise was from the film and paid no attention.  James Holmes called himself The Joker for the stock Batman villain. He painted his hair red and used tear gas before opening fire.  There was no superhero to stop him.

The film producers’ coy reaction showed they are part of the problem. Warner Bros said they took “the unprecedented step” of delaying revealing “eagerly awaited weekend box office figures for Dark Knight out of respect for the victims and their families."  How the box office news would affect grieving families is beyond immediate comprehension, though there was no sign any of the record takings would be used to compensate victims or be put to a campaign against weapons.

America’s “foremost defender of Second Amendment rights”, the National Rifle Association were as quick as I was to blame the culture.  The problem was caused, they said, by “violent imaginary movies", many of them like Batman having, perish the thought, “absolutely no patriotic value”.  As NRA’s Wayne Lapierre deadpanned when wheeled out to defend their position, "Guns don't kill -Batman kills.  Had someone in the audience been armed, this tragedy could have been averted."  Multiplexes, were according to Lapierre, death traps.  Lapierre may have preferred a good old fashioned saloon shoot out where everyone could have taken a pop at the dark knight.

Lapierre is of course right on the point of violent movies, though somewhat muddled about multiplexes and patriotism.  The culture promotes death and violence, as do the movies of many other countries  But there is one big difference about America compared to nearly every other first world country. There, guns and weapons are as easy to get as movie tickets and popcorn.  The major reason the unhinged Holmes had no difficulty in acting out his fantasy was because he was able to accumulate a formidable collection of weapons and 6,000 rounds of ammunition.  None of the journalists baying at Lapierre for answers picked him up on his glib lie: Guns do kill and the tragedy would have been averted had no one in the audience been armed.

As the New York Daily News said, Holmes did not act alone. Lapierre was at his side as were Obama and Romney both cowed into silence over gun control for fear of unleashing NRA’s mighty political wrath.  “(Also) Standing at Holmes’ side as he murdered 12 and wounded 59, were the millions of zealots who would sooner see blood flow and lives end than have to check a box on a gun registration form,” the Daily News said. It wasn’t just about the occasional newsworthy massacre but the “day-to-to-day mayhem of street-crime shootings, responsible for more deaths than all the mass carnage combined, (that only) makes it to the police blotter, the courts, the newspapers, the emergency rooms and the cemeteries.” 

The Daily Beast's Adam Winkler said mass shootings don’t lead to gun control. Colorado has some of the weakest laws in the land despite the Columbine High School massacre 13 years ago. Winkler said the radicalisation of the NRA in the 1970s stalled American gun reform. He quotes Bill Clinton as saying the Brady Bill (named for Reagan aide shot in the 1981 assassination attempt) cost the Democrats the control of the House of Reps in 1994 and neither party has mounted any gun control since, despite America having five murders for every 100,000 people. 

The NRA vigorously defends its stance at every opportunity against every perceived threat to its clout. This week they attacked Obama signing a UN Arms Treaties because they might “trample our Constitutional right to bear arms.”  The 18^th century need for a well-regulated militia remains a holy cow despite bearing arms now sounding as ridiculous as arming bears.  America deserves a referendum on the “right” but in the unlikely event it happened, the majority of Batman watchers across the land would probably vote against change. Violence is endemic in the culture. Unless one of the dead in Colorado had a well-connected senior operative in the Republican Party for a relative, this latest massacre won’t change anything after all the hand-wringing is completed. Superheroes are as thin on the ground in Washington as they are in Aurora.

Mitt Romney and the meaning of Iowa

There have been two notable trains of thought regarding the Republican Iowa caucuses this week. The first is the saturation media coverage of what is the 2012 presidential race’s first meaningful contest. The second is that the media coverage is overblown and gives undue credit to a relatively unimportant event. The doings of a few hundred people in middle America has devoured television time, web pages and column inches while the impasse over the straits of Hormuz goes almost unrecognised. (photo: Reuters)

The truth is as always, somewhere in the middle. Barack Obama won the Democratic Caucus in Iowa in 2008, setting himself up for a surprise win over Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side winner Mike Huckabee pushed hard for nomination but was eventually beaten by John McCain who finished fourth in Iowa with just 13%. The importance of Iowa is not necessarily to win, though Obama showed it was handy enough, but to survive. Anything over 10% gives delegates a second chance.

The fact the caucus finished in “near deadlock” with Romney ahead of Santorum by eight votes will be of small value by the time of the GOP convention. Despite being first to vote, Iowa is last to decide. The Iowa caucuses are town meetings or “gatherings of neighbours” that have a straw vote to elect delegates to a county convention. The state convention is one of the last in the country. Iowa elects just 25 Republican delegates to National Convention, just one percent of the total. But Iowa garners a lot more than one percent in energy of candidates and media time.

2012 third place getter Ron Paul said his 21% was a good showing which “kept him in the race”. But last placed Michelle Bachman realised that the five percent of Iowans that cast votes for her was not enough to launch a nationwide campaign on and she quit immediately. “Last night the people of Iowa spoke with a very clear voice and so I have decided to stand aside,” she said.

Texan Governor Rick Perry is also on the ropes after his 10 percent showing. There were rumours he too would quit but he said he intends to fight on. "We're going to give the people of South Carolina, New Hampshire and America a choice in this election, and that's what this process is all about," he said. He said his opponents were all Washington insiders whose fault the country was “broken” and they needed an outsider like him as an alternative.

It may be wishful thinking but Perry has deep pockets and can afford one bad and possibly two bad results. It was significant Perry pushed South Carolina ahead of New Hampshire suggesting even a bad result in the northern state would not dislodge him from the race ahead of the bellwether South Carolina race – which has elected every successful Republican candidate since 1960. The South Carolina Primary is on 21 January so Perry has just over two weeks to go for broke. Newt Gingrich, with 13%, is in strife too with little money and just five days to overtake Romney in New Hampshire.

While Paul pronounced himself satisfied, Rick Santorum will be delighted. The oft-quoted reason is that of “momentum” leading into the New Hampshire Primary and the following states. Santorum’s close second place was a result of spending a lot of time in Iowa, and he will now attract a bigger buzz and more money. But it is unlikely he will not have the time to recreate his strategy and equally important, the space from the media, to perform like this in New Hampshire. The neologism “Santorum” is likely to become a crippling issue too if he continues to do well.

What Iowa really told us is this year’s Republican presidential nominee is likely to be the frontrunner Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor is the one candidate Obama might struggle to beat and he did lead Obama in the polls on several occasions during in 2011. In his favour is the fact he is telegenic and considered to be a party moderate and he can berate Obama over managing the US into a possible double-dip recession.

The charge labelled by Ron Paul in 2008, that Romney was a flip-flopper is also losing its relevance in 2012. Voters can see he changes his mind alright, but just that so does everyone else and when the facts change, what else do you do? Romney is still a classic Republican in favour of Reaganomics and cutting taxes to promote growth.

The big question is whether America is ready to elect a Mormon as their president. Mormons themselves preferred Jon Huntsman as their candidate which is likely to be a positive to Romney. Most Americans look uneasily at their missionary tradition and the close Church-State relations in Utah. Romney’s east coast ties keeps him away from any Salt Lake City baggage, though he did lead the 2002 Winter Olympics organising committee and turned a potential fiasco into a success.

Romney underplays his religion and is also at pains to stress the commonality of Mormonism to mainstream Christianity. But writing in 2005 about his 2008 bid, Amy Sullivan said his religion was a political problem. Sullivan said one in five voters wouldn’t vote for a Mormon and while some of this was a “fuzzy sort of bias” it was real enough to be a problem. It could particularly be a problem with his own party’s evangelic base that have serious doctrinal issues with Mormonism’s claim as the fully realised strain of Christianity - the "latter-day saints." Keeping his religion out of the picture may yet be Romney’s biggest challenge as the year pans out.

The Hitching Post: The demons that drove Christopher Hitchens

“Are you a socialist?”asked the African leader.
I said, yes.
“People have been telling me,” he said lightly, “that you are a liberal....”
(Conor Cruise O’Brien, quoted in Christopher Hitchens, “Hitch-22” p.186).

About a month before Christopher Hitchens died in December, I happened to be reading his memoir Hitch-22. It was a book I had in my possession for over 12 months before I read it – It was sent to me by Crikey as part of their bribe to make me renew the subscription. Hitchens was never someone who had impinged strongly on my conscience so I was in no hurry to read him. Hitchens was a prolific essayist but other than his support for the Iraqi war, his strong atheism, and his waterboarding experiment, I’d never really remembered anything he wrote. I also knew he was suffering from cancer, which I knew from the fatalistic tone in Hitch-22 was likely terminal.

Yet when I heard he’d died just before Christmas, I felt an ineluctable sense of sadness on the passing of someone I felt I knew. The memoir was responsible. For months, I had Hitch-22 on my ‘to do’ list but the picture on the cover of a young hipster Hitchens smoking a cigarette never really threatened to excite my imagination. But a time came when I was on holidays on the beaches of NSW in November when there was no other book handy and I picked up Hitch-22. I quickly found it engrossing reading.

It is a rich exploration of a peripatetic journalist's fully-lived life made interesting for me because I had no real understanding of its trajectory before reading it. Hitchens' parents were both British archetypes, his stiff-upper-lipped father the remote “Commander” who gave his life to the Navy rather than family and his attractive Freudian mother who Hitchens preferred to call Yvonne rather than mum. Yvonne hated the life of a Navy wife and eventually left her husband for another man. In November 1973 she committed suicide in a pact with her lover in Athens. Hitchens flew to Greece to identify her body.

Apart from the obvious grief of losing his mother, the place of her death gave additional strains. Greece was then ruled by a right-wing military junta and being there was galling for a young left-wing radical. Hitchens had a typical middle upper-class upbringing, kept away from his parents and learning the value of compulsory games and a flogging at Leys School in Cambridge. He stayed in Cambridge to do his university education at Balliol where he joined the United Nations Association and the school committee, moves he described as shrewd. Hitchens was the classic 1960s hard left revolutionary, addicted to every socialist cause. He described himself as a Trotskyist, which was safe given that Trotsky never led Soviet Russia long enough to have his reputation thrashed.

Hitchens’ ideological purity was tested with a visit to Cuba which co-incided with the 1968 Prague Spring rebellion against the Soviet Union. Hitchens was there while Cubans held their breath wondering which side their leader would come down on. Castro knew which side his bread was buttered and going on radio he supported Brezhnev much to Hitchens’ disgust. Hitchens remained convinced Stalinism could be overturned from the Left and turned his attentions from the “great hopes of 1968” to the edges of Europe. He witnessed the end of Salazar’s fascist regime in Portugal and saw at close hand how Poland managed its communist contradictions in the 1970s.

The communist in Hitchens – something he never admitted to - wanted to iron out those contradictions. America was the place where such a thing was possible and a place where despite its conservatism, Hitchens could be “as free as possible.” The man to whom the book Hitch-22 is dedicated to - his friend the poet, James Fenton - told Slate, Hitchens became American because there was always something holding him back in England.

Hitchens forged a second identity as an American despite his antipathy to Nixon and Reagan. He also hated the Bushes and Bill Clinton, whom Hitchens thought a fraud. Hitchens knew the midtown Manhattan skyscrapers he landed in were an illusion but it was an illusion always accompanied by profound happiness and an exhilerating sense of freedom never experienced in England. When he saw some of those skyscrapers come down in 9/11, it instilled a deep and personal sense of horror against what he called the “cult of death”.

Hitchens supported the Afghan invasion – which was relatively uncontroversial in October 2001. It was the subsequent Iraq war that was to see the greatest cleavage with fellow leftists. Hitchens had been to Iraq in the 1970s and knew it as an artificial creation of British civil servants. His sympathies lay with the nationalists who put Iraq first not the Ba’athists who put the regime first. It was, Hitchens called, a "Republic of Fear". He was there as in the 1991 Gulf War to see Saddam’s Republican Guard get off scot-free while army conscripts were vaporised on the Highway of Death. The outcome left the people of Iraq worse off, but still condemned to suffer Saddam as leader. In a secret visit across the border Hitchens saw Saddam’s eco-catastrophes and Kurdish and Shiite massacres. “I recognised at once it was a state of affairs worth fighting for,” he wrote. “The idea of ‘Reds for Bush’ might seem incongruous but it was a great deal more wholesome than ‘pacifists for Saddam’”.

Hitchens’ anti-Saddam rhetoric was music to the ears of PNAC-influenced Defence deputy Paul Wolfowitz and the pair hit it off when the politician invited Hitchens to meet him. Hitchens became a salesman for the Iraqi war as the debate intensified. His support for the WMD theory was half-hearted. What he really believed was that Saddam was facing a meltdown moment that would lead to Rwanda-like consequences unless the west intervened. What Hitchens could not, or would not believe, was intervention would have similar consequences.

In the final chapter of his book, Hitchens argued it was the responsibility of intellectuals to argue for complexity and insist ideas should not be sloganised. But he also felt things should be simplified where possible. It was this paradox which led him into his highly-evolved yet deeply flawed Iraqi position. “Karl Marx was rightest of all when he recommended continual doubt and self criticism,” he wrote on the final page. Nothing wrong with that, except it looks for Marx for succour when introspection should be without a muse. The only reference to Heller’s masterpiece in the Hitch-22 title comes in the second last sentence of the book. Hitch’s Catch-22 was the impossible balancing act between his Marxian uncertainty and his desire to emulate the assured and dutiful life of his father. This paradox drove his endless creativity.

Obama administration continues to hound journalist to reveal sources

US prosecutors have appealed a federal district court decision to limit the scope of a journalist’s testimony in the trial of a former CIA officer accused of leaking classified information. Last week the case against New York Times reporter James Risen was taken to the appeals court after lower courts defended his right not to name a source. Risen was originally subpoenaed to give evidence in 2008. The Justice Department were asking Risen to give up his sources for a chapter of his book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.” Risen refused citing a commitment to confidentiality.

Risen and a colleague won a Pulitzer for a December 2005 article in the New York Times that exposed the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program. His book State of War was written a year later and it included explosive revelations about illegal actions taken by President Bush, including the domestic wiretapping program. It also disclosed how Bush secretly pressured the CIA to use torture on detainees in secret prisons, how the White House ignored information that showed Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and how the Bush Administration turned a blind eye to Saudi involvement in terrorism.

The chapter that got him into trouble is about the CIA’s efforts to disrupt the Iranian program. The CIA sent a defected Russian scientist to Vienna to give nuclear bomb plans to an Iranian official on the pretext he would provide further assistance in exchange for cash. The CIA deliberately inserted a technical flaw in the designs but the Russian scientist spotted it and told the Iranians. In his book, Risen said the ploy was reckless and may have had exactly the opposite effect than intended. The Bush administration subpoenaed Risen to reveal his source in January 2008. Risen successfully fought the subpoena which lapsed 18 months later. But in April 2010, the New York Times reported the Obama administration was still seeking to compel Risen to testify.

In the meantime US authorities’ suspicions about the identity of the leaker fixed on Jeffrey Sterling. Sterling was a former CIA officer trained to recruit Iranians to work for the CIA in the 1990s. Sterling, who is black, was sacked in 2002 and he claimed racial discrimination. However a court upheld the sacking saying litigation would require the disclosure of highly classified information. Between 2002 and 2004, the FBI claimed it tracked email traffic between Risen and Sterling. Sterling was arrested in January on charges he illegally disclosed national defence information and obstructed justice, but there was no mention of Risen in the warrant.

In July this year, a federal judge ruled Risen did not have to testify in the Sterling case saying prosecutors had not demonstrated his testimony was critical. District Court judge Leonie Brinkema said Risen’s testimony was not necessary because court records say an unidentified former intelligence official has testified that Risen told him Sterling was the source. Prosecutors argued the official's testimony would be inadmissible hearsay, but Brinkema ruled it would not be because statements that tend to prove an individual's guilt may not be hearsay. Brinkema's order restricted Risen's testimony to matters of his authorship and the accuracy of the book.

But now prosecutors have appeal Brinkema’s decision to the US Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia further delaying Sterling’s trial which was due to start yesterday. Prosecutors cited a 1972 US Supreme Court decision Branzburg v Hayes which ruled 5-4 reporters have no First Amendment right to refuse to answer all questions before grand juries if they witnessed criminal activity. However in the years following Branzburg, federal courts nationwide interpreted the “limited nature” of case to give journalists qualified privilege to balance their right to protect the sources against the government’s need for the information.

Reporters Without Borders has urged the Obama administration to withdraw the appeal. “We remind the Obama administration that its role is not to determine what is good coverage of national security issues,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Jeffrey Sterling’s trial has now been suspended indefinitely. Forcing Risen to testify is an attempt to muzzle every journalist who might publish leaked information. It is an attempt to decide what should and should not be in the press.” They had a statement from Risen which said he would press on. “I believe that this case is a fundamental battle over freedom of the press in the United States,” Risen said. “If I don’t fight, the government will go after other journalists.”

9/11: A journey through memory and airspace

This is a picture of me on the top of the World Trade Center South Tower in late August 1991 or early September, roughly ten years before 9/11. The picture was taken by my then-wife when we were on a delayed trip around the world a year after we married. Memories being fragile and fragmental, I don’t have much recollection of the building other than vague inklings conjured up by that photo. I do remember the fantastic views and from that spot I looked out to the Statue of Liberty. In those days the Statue was still open to the public but the queue to climb the stairs was too long so we didn’t bother going to the top when we were there the day before.

Getting to the top of the World Trade Center was far less problematic. I don’t remember the queue being onerous, the minute long trip to the 107th floor was probably just as uneventful as this one in September 2000 just one year before the towers were obliterated. Yet something had already changed between 1991 and 2000 – the World Trade Center had been seriously bombed. While I was on honeymoon, the planning to destroy the towers had already begun. The aim of the 600kg explosion that went off in February 1993 was to knock one tower into the other and bring both tumbling down. That didn’t happen but the blast killed six people, seriously damaged five sublevels and sent smoke spiralling up 93 floors of both towers making evacuation difficult and two hours long.

The 1993 perpetrators came from all over the Middle East led by Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Yusef. The bombing was financed by Yusef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who is now in Guantanamo Bay and probably the main reason Obama broke his election promise to close it. As well as WTC 1993, his terror credits included the 1995 Bojinka Plot to blow up 12 US airliners and also crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yusef said the idea for using planes to crash into buildings came from his friend Abdul Hakim Murad, who in turn heard it from the CIA. An undeterred Khalid Mohammed apparently proposed the plan of the 9/11 plot to Bin Laden in 1996.

Whether that is true or not is debatable, but the idea of suicide attackers has long been an extreme staple of warfare because it is so difficult to defend against. It entered the political landscape in 1881 when Tsar Alexander II of Russia was attacked by Nihilist Ignaty Gryniewietsky who who blew himself up killing the Russian ruler in the process. Gryniewietsky’s last letter read: "Alexander II must die...He will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too...How many more sacrifices will our unhappy country ask of its sons before it is liberated? It is my lot to die young, I shall not see our victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph, but I believe that with my death I shall do all that it is my duty to do, and no one in the world can demand more of me.”

Gryniewietsky's dangerous conflation of honour and purpose was exactly the same as that inspired Japanese kamekazes in WW2 and later infused Yusef, Sheik Mohammed and those that came after them in 2001. Osama Bin Laden is now dead so there is no way of knowing what role he played in 9/11. What is clearer is the role of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 19 terrorists that brought down the four planes in the attack. Atta was one of just 4 who weren’t from Saudi Arabia.

Born in Egypt, he graduated in architecture at the University of Cairo and was the key person in the Hamburg cell of radical jihadists that got together from 1998. Atta and other members of the cell went to Afghanistan to meet Bin Laden where they agreed to work with Al Qaeda. In March 2000 he sent an e-mail to 60 companies inquiring about flight training, "Dear sir, we are a small group of young men from different Arab countries,” Atta wrote. “We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots.”

His application for a 5-year US visa was approved and he flew to Newark in June 2000 to enrol in the Accelerated Pilot Program at the Academy of Lakeland in Florida, bankrolled by Sheik Khalid. Within a month Atta was flying solo as was his friend Marwan al-Shehhi (who would lead the South Tower attack as Atta took out the North). With daily training. Atta earned his commercial pilot’s licence in November 2000. He told trainers he was hurrying because he had a job lined up at home. With plenty of money to wave around, no one asked him any questions.

By the end of the year, Atta was studying flight deck videos for most of the major commercial airline planes including Boeing 767s and Airbus A320s. In July 2001 Atta went to Spain to meet Yemeni-born Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fellow Hamburg cell co-conspirator. Ramzi was supposed to be one of the attackers but could not secure a US visa because immigration officials thought Yemenis would illegally overstay their visit. Ramzi supposedly passed on Bin Laden’s instructions what was to be targeted: "four symbols of America”: Congress, the Pentagon, and the two towers.

A plan to get a 20th hijacker to replace Ramzi was thwarted when Saudi-born Mohammed al-Qahtani (also now at Guantanamo) was not allowed in the country because he arrived with a one way ticket and not enough cash to convince authorities he wouldn’t end up an illegal immigrant. It meant Flight 93 had four hijackers unlike the five on the other planes making overpowering them slightly more feasible.

On 23 August 2001 two events occurred that might have raised the alarm about Atta. His driving licence was revoked in court for failing to turn up to defend driving when without a licence earlier that year. The same day Mossad included him on 19 names they gave to the CIA they said were planning an imminent attack. But no-one connected the dots. On September 10, he drove to Portland, Maine where he was scheduled to fly to Boston at 6am on the 11th. At the airport the following morning, Atta was selected for extra screening by the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.

The Clinton administration launched CAPPS in the late 1990s as a response to the growing terrorist threat. The system uses information on the ticket booking matched against no-fly lists, FBI fugitive lists and other data to assign a risk score. CAPPS deemed 8 of the 19 attackers worthy of further attention. One was ignored because he had no bags, and the rest, including Atta passed muster because their bags contained no explosives. The process was designed to stop people leaving bombs in the luggage and then leaving the airport. But it did not take into account people who wanted to use the planes themselves as another example of the poor man’s air force.

On arrival at Boston, Atta and the others had to go through security again – something the hijackers were not expecting and got angry about - but they got through without incident. The Portland detour served several purposes – a smaller airport was easier to get through, it deflected attention from the fact 8 other Middle Eastern men were leaving directly from Boston and also left the operation intact if Atta had been arrested in Maine.

There was no evidence Atta had box cutters aboard the plane. He did have two Swiss Army knives and a Leatherman multi-tool. He boarded American Airlines Boeing 767 Flight 11 to LAX scheduled to depart at 7.45am. 81 passengers (out of a 158 capacity) and 11 crew were aboard. Two hijackers sat in first class, Atta and two others sat in business class with none in economy (coach). Flight 11 took off at 7.59am and was close to cruising altitude in 15 minutes. The last routine instruction the plane responded to was “American 11 turn 20 degrees right”. When air traffic control radioed Flight 11 seconds later to climb to 35,000 feet, there was no response. They asked 8 more times in the next 10 minutes with no answer.

By now Atta and his 4 helpers stabbed and slashed their way to control of the cockpit. At 8.19am flight attendant Betty Ong rang the NC reservations office to say there was something wrong. She rang that number because it was a common help line for passengers with reservation issues. Her call lasted 25 minutes, though only a default first four minutes was recorded. A calm sounding Ong told the bemused operator the cockpit was not answering her calls and she thought they were getting hijacked. She said two attendants had been stabbed.

By 8.25am Boston air traffic control knew there was a hijack situation. They heard a hijacker’s voice saying “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be okay. We are returning to the airport”. Seconds later Boston Control heard him say “If you try to make any moves you will endanger yourself and the airplane.” As they escalated the information, Ong told NC the plane was flying erratically. Boston told FAA command in Virginia the flight had entered New York air space.

Another Flight 11 attendant Madeline Sweeney got through to Boston Airport and spent 12 minutes talking to the American Airlines flight service manager. The airline then set up an emergency response centre. By now Ong was reporting a fatality in seat 9B held by former Israeli soldier Daniel Lewin. A minute later Boston heard another message from the cockpit: "Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport.” Boston desperately tried to raise Cape Cod military staff to get fighters airborne to tail the plane.

By 8.38am Ong was telling the operator the flight was descending rapidly. At the same time, Boston told the North American Aerospace Defense Command's Northeast Air Defense Sector a plane had been hijacked. Battle Commander Colonel Robert Marr was getting ready for a NORAD exercise when he confirmed this was "real-world" and ordered fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts to battle-stations. He phoned Major General Larry Arnold who confirmed the order to scramble the planes and “get permission later”.

At 8.44am the Ong call ended abruptly. At the same time Sweeney was saying “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent... we are all over the place." The flight service manager asked her to look out the window to work out where they were. Sweeney told him, "We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low." Seconds later she said, "Oh my God we are way too low" and her call ended.

A minute later the Air Force was scrambled but had no idea where to go. At 40 seconds past 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the World Trade Center. Atta, Ong, Sweeney and 89 others in the plane were dead as well as countless others in the North Tower. The full horror of Sheik Mohammed’s planned day would take just two more hours to enfold on the world, mostly on live television. The scars it left on America’s psyche, the Arab world and the airplane-travelling public have yet to heal 10 years later.

Ultimately Sheik Khalid Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden were successful in hastening the destruction of US power. In October 2001, Bush turned down a Taliban offer to hand over Bin Laden to a third country and as early as late 9/11 Rumsfeld was pushing the line to bomb Iraq “because there were no targets in Afghanistan”. At no point was any effort made to punish Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah for providing most of the terrorists or Egypt's Mubarak for providing Atta.

Instead the PNAC agenda pushed the 9/11 disaster cost of $240 billion out to the dubious double war cost of $1,248 trillion and counting. At 10 percent of US GDP in a time of financial crisis, neither crippling war can yet be considered a success. Instead, they represent a victory to terrorists far greater than they could have imagined with the long-planned destruction of large buildings.

Bahrain government continues brutal crackdown

The main Shiite opposition party in Bahrain has said it will boycott the proposed “national dialogue” next month and will also sit out the planned September elections. Al Wefaq leader Shaikh Ali Salman said it was a protest against the government for not doing enough to address Shiite concerns. "There has to be real dialogue that results in political reforms,” Salman said. “We believe the dialogue was a step forward for the country but setting conditions before the process is not acceptable.” Salman told Chinese news agency Xinhua they would not take part in the 24 September elections because the “issues faced by people are more important and are still ignored”. He also said government needed to address the sacking of workers, arrest of doctors and nurses, as well as politicians and other citizens before entering any dialogue. (photo of Shaikh Ali Salman by Hasan Jamali)

The national dialogue forum Salman is referring to starts on Saturday. It is aiming to attract 300 participants bringing together the full spectrum of Bahrain's political, social, economic and rights groups. According to Dubai’s Gulf News (which is distributed in Bahrain), the participation rate of invitees is 94 percent. But Al Wefaq was the big undecided group and suspicious that the too wide variety of issues on the table would diminish the chances of agreeing on real democratisation. Despite being almost ha;f of parliament, it was invited to choose only five representatives to the 300-person conference.

Al Wefaq is Bahrain’s largest party winning 18 of the 40 seats in last year’s parliamentary election. However they are regularly outvoted by a bloc of Sunni parties and independents. In February, all 18 Al Wefaq MPs resigned after police killed seven people in the battle for Pearl Roundabout (now razed and known as Al Farooq junction). The Government crushed the rebellion in March with the aid of troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

On 1 June, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa announced the lifting of a "state of national safety" he had decreed and offered talks. Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Khalifa went to the Oval Office a week later to meet President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to seek support for the national dialogue. Bahrain is home to the US Fifth Fleet so the US has been cautious about overtly attacking the regime despite condemning the security crackdown. The State Department formally welcomed the talks on 15 June. However Assistant Secretary Michael Posner told his Bahraini hosts meaningful dialogue could only take place “in a climate of respect for the freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.”

This was a veiled reference to the many trials and military court proceedings initiated by the government to deal with 500 people arrested since the February protest. On Monday Bahrain launched a mass trial of 28 doctors and nurses accused of joining the protests and spreading “false information” which means talking to foreign media. Another 20 doctors and nurses are accused of an "anti-state plot". On 22 June, a special security court in Bahrain sentenced eight activists and opposition leaders to life in prison on charges of “plotting to overthrow the government”.

Meanwhile a special military court called the Court of National Safety came into being on 12 June to hold the trials of politically motivated cases against opposition members of parliament and a prominent defence lawyer. According to Amnesty International, the courts were put in place to respond to the protests and are presided by one military and two civilian judges. The court sentenced a young activist to a year in prison for charges related to her public recital of a poem critical of Bahrain’s King.

Two Al Wefaq MPs are among those arrested and kept in secret solitary confinement. They have no access to legal representation or family present. Human Rights Watch has called on Bahrain to end the proceedings. “Most defendants hauled before Bahrain's special military court are facing blatantly political charges, and trials are unfair," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "The Crown Prince may be sincere in his efforts to promote dialogue, but what good is that while back home the government is crushing peaceful dissent and locking up people who should be part of the dialogue."

Obama and Osamarama

The joke Donald Trump is demanding to see Osama’s death certificate will wear thin very quickly if the US doesn’t scuttle rumours he is still alive. According to the president, America finally got its man. The body of Osama Bin Laden was taken into “US custody” after a firefight in Pakistan on the weekend. After facial identification and DNA matching was confirmed, he was buried within 24 hours of his death which was according to Muslim tradition but the burial took place at sea, which wasn’t. Osama was responsible for thousands of deaths, but so were the people who killed him. The least the Americans could to do was to bury him with dignity.

I don’t jump for joy Bin Laden is dead but I don’t mourn him either. His 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania showed no respect for neutrals in his war. His actions killed over 200 people mostly Kenyans and Tanzanians and were designed to do one thing: goad the US into retaliation by waging an unwinnable win in Afghanistan. Backed by Pakistan he succeeded handsomely, surviving ten years as the world hide-and-seek champion before intelligence possibly produced under torture finally gave the US enough clues to his whereabouts.

Born in Riyadh in 1957 of a Yemeni father and Syrian mother, Osama was the inauspicious forty-third of fifty-three siblings. His father Muhammad Bin Laden was a wealthy builder and the family was adopted by the Saudi Royal Family after Muhammad died in a plane crash. Osama was educated at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah where he studied Islamic trends under Muhammad Qutb (brother of the Egyptian Father of Islamism Sayyid Qutb) and Abdullah Azzam. Azzam encouraged Osama to join the Afghan mujahideen in 1982 and fight against the Soviets. Osama set up a database of Arab fighters he called al qaeda – meaning the base or foundation.

Osama spoke out against the US invasion of Iraq in 1990 because it put troops on Saudi soil. It was a sacrilege to have the infidel so close to Mecca. He emigrated to Pakistan, Afghanistan and then Sudan to organise a new jihad against the foreign invader. From Sudan, Osama launched his first attack – on Yemen - and also fought against the Americans in Mogadishu in 1993. Under increasing international pressure in 1996, Sudan president Bashir told him he could no longer protect him from assassination. After meeting Mullah Omah, he moved to Afghanistan and threw his weight behind the Taliban. That year he also sent his declaration of war against Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holiest Sites to British based Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan.

Atwan was one of the last to interview Bin Laden at the Tora Bora Caves in the winter of 1996. He was struck by how modestly Bin Laden lived. His austerity contributed to an air of a champion of revolution and rebellion to many Muslims. After the Taliban overran the Northern Alliance, they refused Americans demands to hand him over. These requests continued "until just days before” 9/11.

The Taliban wanted proof of his involvement in criminal offences; the US demurred. They would never offer the Taliban a face-saving way out of the impasse and continued to insist bin Laden face trial in the US justice system. Even after 9/11, the Taliban offered to handover Bin Laden. Spokesman Amir Khan Muttaqi said in late October 2001, "we do not want to fight. We will negotiate. But talk to us like a sovereign country. We are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama’s involvement, but they have refused. Why?"

The answer was that Osama had nothing to do with the American demand, nor was there any convincing evidence linking him to 9/11. The PNAC had their sights set on war in Afghanistan and Iraq and capturing Osama would not aid that outcome. But the Americans seriously underestimated him. As Guy Rundle said, for Osama surviving the war by three months was an achievement, but 10 years was a major victory. “Bin Laden won this one, every year since 2001, a shelf of premierships, the phantom West versus the phantom al-Qaeda,” Rundle said. “If he lost in the Arab heartland, where it matters, it's because, as a conspiracy rather than a movement, it was always going to, as a real historical process took over there.”

Though many in the Arab world supported Bin Laden as a hero after 9/11, his reputation has been nosediving in recent years. Al Qaeda's indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Jordan and Iraq gradually alienated many Muslims as did his links to hardline Wahhabi extremism. The recent wave of Arab pro-democracy revolutions have also left the terror groups feeling irrelevant. Paul Mason at the BBC said Osama died politically on 25 January due to the events in Tahrir Square in Cairo.

His real death was not long in coming. The CIA found him through a Libyan named Abu al-Libi, who was with Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Al-Libi later fled to Peshawar. A courier named Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan contacted al-Libi and asked him to work for Bin Laden. Jan wanted al-Libi to collect donations, organise travel and distribute funds for families in Pakistan. In 2003 al-Libi moved to Abbottabad and worked the link back to Peshawar. The US captured Al-Libi two years later and he was among a network of couriers the CIA interrogated to pin down Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

He was found in the flash suburb of Bilal in the city of Abbottabad named for British army officer General Sir James Abbott. Abbottabad is a military-cantonment city in the hills north of Islamabad, where much of the land is controlled or owned by the Pakistani Army and retired Army officers. Here Osama was housed under state control safe from international action, protected by the human shield of a sympathetic Pakistani military and ISI, or so he thought.

On Sunday, US helicopters stormed the area. One eye witness stood on his roof and saw people attacking a house where women and children could be heard screaming and crying. The women and children were loaded onto a chopper with “some other stuff” and flown away. “Geronimo EKIA,” the mission team reported back to the White House and Obama went on air at 11.55pm Eastern Time to tell Americans the news.

Obama said his troops had killed Osama. The justification was 9/11, “carried out by al Qaeda - an organization headed by Osama bin Laden, which had openly declared war on the United States and was committed to killing innocents in our country and around the globe." Death was the simplest solution, as Robert Fisk said a court would have worried more people than Bin Laden. America never wanted more than his body “in custody”.

Obama would never admit this but did say an intelligence lead in August led them to Osama in Abbottabad. “Last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.” Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA who ran the mission, was rewarded with the Defence Secretary job to replace the retiring Republican appointee Robert Gates.

Now other Republicans want some of the credit for this “justice”. It was the strict laws and waterboarding Bush put in place, they argued, that laid the groundwork for the capture. As left-leaning Talking Points Memo acidly put it, the credit had to extend to two presidents: one who didn't find bin Laden, and one who did.

It is well Obama soak it up while he can. This was the night he probably won the 2012 election he was probably going to win any way. Or perhaps not. For everyone saying this was a massive boost for Obama there were others who said it was not. Of more importance is what does Osama’s death do Obama’s attitude to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Salman Rushdie has called on the world to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. The narrative propelling the $1.3 trillion war on terror and the Western presence in Afghanistan will almost definitely prove harder to sustain. The truth of Bin Laden’s death will also struggle against the weight of conspiracy theories with Pakistan Taliban among those saying he is still alive.

It is not just the theorists having loopy moments, the media are too. There were fake pictures and a fake quote but Twitter bignoted itself best by breaking the news in “a CNN moment”. The firefight was live tweeted by someone who had no idea what he was seeing and then broken by Keith Urbahn, Rumsfeld’s chief of staff who heard rumours of the operation.

This is not the first time the activity has been conflated with the tool, but it was easily the biggest. Within hours, the Internet was awash with speculation and memes. If social media really is the future of news it is a serious worry. As Twin Laden pointed out (and I was guilty of several of these sins in the last 24 hours) we “only deal with news through a prism of pop culture references, manic hysteria and unfettered ego”. Osama’s death will end up adding to the myth of his life.

Walker gets closer to pushing his anti-labour laws through in Wisconsin

US capital has won a major battle in the war against labour in the state of Wisconsin. A bill to bust the power of the state’s public workers unions was set for approval on Thursday US time after Republicans lawmakers pulled a fast one. With Democrats deliberately out of the state, the Republican could not get a quorum to pass a budget bill. So what they have done is strip references to the budget from the bill, which allowed it to pass without the legislative quorum required for fiscal measures. The State’s Republican Governor Scott Walker said passing the bill will give them the tools to reward productive workers and improve their operations. Unions disagree and have maintained large protests in the capital for three and a half weeks. (Photo of rally at Wisconsin Capitol by WxMom)

Wisconsin is not unlike many government agencies across the world running at a loss, enduring a $3.6 billion budget shortfall for 2011. Walker wants to solve the problem by getting public sector workers to reduce their salary and give away their collective bargaining rights through legislation. NBC’s John Bailey is expecting to blow out to $1.3 billion by 2013 blaming falling tax revenues for the blowout allied to rising unemployment putting pressure on the public purse. Tax cuts since 2003 have accumulated to $3.7 billion in lost income, though it is harder to estimate whether they have had positive effect. Walker was keener to balance the books with cuts rather than taxes. He claimed the alternative was worse: laying off 6,000 state workers, and taking away Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands of children.

The unions responded by agreeing to the pay cuts but refusing to give away their rights. Walker said that wouldn’t work for the organisations that get their funding from the state. Collective bargaining, he said, stood in the way of local governments and school districts being able to balance their budget. "My goal all along has been to give these folks tools to control their own budgets. You've got to give them some flexibility."

Wisconsin is normally a safe pro-labour state that has voted Democrat in the last six presidential elections. But it swung viciously to the Republicans in the 2010 midterms as the recession shattered consumer confidence. The GOP won a Senate seat and control of the House of Reps. They also gained the governorship as Scott Walker ended a Democrat eight year reign after Governor Jim Doyle retired.

Doyle’s replacement is a typical fiscal conservative Republican who is pro-life, anti-big-government, tough-on-crime, and pro welfare reform. During his election, Walker campaigned on business tax cuts to promote growth. He said he would pay for this by cutting public sector pay. His opponent Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett attempted to portray Walker as an extremist due to his moral positions but the electorate were in a mood to punish the Democrats with Walker winning 52-48. Walker took office on new year’s day and immediately got to work on his plan. He approved new tax cuts in January which he called “a bold statement that Wisconsin is a more welcoming place for businesses.”

On Valentine’s Day, Walker made another bold statement when he romanced the Committee on Senate organisation to introduce a budget repair bill known as Senate Bill 11. The bill requires state workers pay additional direct pension and health insurance contributions and removes collective bargaining rights except for wages, which is limited to CPI.

The budget repair bill also included provisions to empower the state to sell government infrastructure on a no-bid basis without Public Service Commission oversight. Koch Industries, a major contributor to Walker’s election campaign are the likely beneficiaries of this looser arrangement and could potentially snap up Wisconsin power plants at bargain basement prices.

Union leaders began pressing lawmakers to reject the idea. This was personal – Wisconsin was the first state to provide collective bargaining rights to public employees over 50 years ago in 1959. Rallies started in the state capital Madison on the same day the legislated was released, 14 February. Within three days, they were getting 70,000 and visits from Jesse Jackson. There was serious talk the protests would energise the Democrat base. On 20 February they occupied the Capitol. By 3 March police were opening fire outside the building.

Walker threatened to get the National Guard out to “handle state duties”. However other state duties are proving less important with the Governor also saying he would also dismiss 1,500 workers this week if the billed is not passed soon. Democrats have taken evasive action to delay it. Minority leader Mark Miller and his colleagues crossed into Illinois to avoid taking part in a vote. Until they return, there is no quorum and the measure cannot be passed.

In revenge, the Republicans suspended direct debit payments forcing them to pick up pay cheques in person. They have been docked $100 for every day they stay away, their parking spaces have been seized and their secretaries fired. A blogger named Buffalo Beast pretending to be David Koch caught Walker out into admitted he was ratcheting up his actions every day.

While Walker made his demands, unions protested in ever larger numbers in a direct echo of events in North Africa - echoes of “Mubarak of the West” played down in American media but not in the Guardian or Herald Scotland. Meanwhile Michael Moore has urged others to join in saying it was a lie to saying Wisconsin is broke. “The truth is, there's lots of money to go around,” Moore said. “It's just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates.”

House of Saud on the verge of a nervous breakdown

Sooner or later the protests that have racked the Middle East and North Africa will finally affect the most undemocratic regime of them all, Saudi Arabia. Arguably that has already happened. Absolute monarch King Abdullah is now 86. Well aware of his own vulnerability, he gave away over $36 billion in benefits to lower and middle income Saudis last week. He also granted thousands of civil servants job security and said he would reshuffle the cabinet. Abdullah rushed back to the country after months of hospitalisation and recuperation in the US and Morocco to make these announcements. No one is under any illusion he wasn’t panicked into action by the wave of protests across the region that threatened to roll across his equally undemocratic border.

Abdullah’s bribery will likely keep the protesters at home for now and the illegality of political parties and public protest are a deterrent. Yet resistance to the power of the Sauds is growing slowly. The Saudiwoman blog says the country is “still on the train heading to revolution town.” The young are unhappy with large-scale unemployment and the conservative grip of the religious police, she said. Older generations are fed up with the corruption, nepotism and the disappearance of the middle class.

Activists are calling for protests on 11 and 20 March but may well be frustrated by police. They stymied two attempts to stage protests in Jeddah last month after they arrested 30 to 50 people. Saudi blogger Ahmed al-Omran said authorities were watching closely what people were saying on Facebook and Twitter. “They are anxious as they are surrounded with unrest and want to make sure we don't catch the bug,” al-Omran said.

Western leaders are also keen the Saudis don’t catch the bug. In 2007 then British foreign office minister Kim Howells infamously talked about Britain and Saudi Arabia’s “shared values”. Meanwhile in October 2010, the US Obama Administration kept the Carter Doctrine alive with the sale of $60.5 billion worth of arms to the KSA which was the biggest arms sale in American history. According to an Israeli study of the sale, the package was totally offensive in nature, with its attack planes, helicopters, and "bunker-buster" bombs, and designed to show the US would stand strongly by its allies. ‘US officials have also begun to refer to the "Persian Gulf" as the "Arabian Gulf," a hot-button issue for the Iranians,’ the study said.

The financial world is also less interested in the democratic desires of ordinary Saudis than they are in the fate of light sweet crude oil futures. Crude was trading at $97.25 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange yesterday having spiked since the start of the year. This has more to do with Libya and issues in Oman and Bahrain but Saudi Arabia remains pivotal to production with the world’s largest reserves. Saudi Aramco have stepped up production since the Libyan revolution started but as the Financial Times points out, oil-dominated economies create few jobs, “especially if they support a bloated royal family that affects not to understand where a privy purse ends and a public budget begins”.

Abdullah’s successor in the agnatic seniority preferred by that 7000-strong royal family is his half-brother Crown Prince Sultan. Sultan, 82 or possibly 86 is just as old, just as unhealthy and just as corrupt as Abdullah. Behind them comes the conservative autocrat Prince Nayef who abhors the idea of reform. The monarchy survived the 20th century thanks to the black gold they controlled and their alliance with the Wahhabists that control religious affairs. The end of the carbon economy would have killed them anyway but with everyday Saudis unwilling to wait, the days of authority of both these ancient institutions are likely to be numbered.

The US and Mubarak: Our sonofabitch

“The day is coming when the promise of a fully free and democratic world, once thought impossible, will also seem inevitable. The people of Egypt should be at the forefront of this great journey, just as you have led this region through the great journeys of the past.”

This extract from a stirring speech was not made in the last few days by Mohamed ElBaredi or Ayman Nour in an attempt to rouse the crowds to overthrow Mubarak. It was in fact spoken in 2005 by the then American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the American University of Cairo. Rice told her audience this call for democracy marked a change from long-standing American policy. “For 60 years, my country pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither,” she said. “Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”

Rice’s public demand for Hosni Mubarak to call elections was as startling as it was embarrassing for one of the US’s greatest allies. But in the end pragmatic priorities triumphed over promises. The US glossed over Mubarak’s sham poll victory later that year and the true state of affairs was shown by George W Bush when he met Mubarak at Sharm el Sheikh in January 2008. Bush spoke about building a “democratic future” in Egypt but problems elsewhere meant he had to rely on Mubarak’s support. “It's important for the people of Egypt to understand our nation respects you, respects your history, respects your traditions and respects your culture,” Bush said. “Our friendship is strong. It's one of the main cornerstones of our policy in this region, and it's based on our shared commitment to peace, security and prosperity.”

Bush’s blarney may have boosted Mubarak’s ego but did not fool ordinary Egyptians. Despite financial largesse of up to $33 billion in military aid in the last 25 years, opinion polls show anti-Americanism to be higher in Egypt than in any other Middle Eastern country. Egyptians are all too aware of the dirty work their government does on behalf of the US. Egypt was home to many American cases of extraordinary rendition.

Al Qaida camp commander Ibn-al Shaykh al-Libi, was captured by US forces in late 2001 and taken to a prison in Cairo where he was repeatedly tortured by Egyptian officials. Mamduh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen was apprehended in October 2001 in Pakistan and taken to a prison in Cairo where he was repeatedly tortured by Egyptian officials. Habib was beaten frequently with blunt instruments, including an object similar to an “electric prod.” His jailers told him if he did not confess to belonging to al-Qaida he would be anally raped by specially trained dogs. Habib was returned to later sent to Guantanamo after his stint in an Egyptian prison. The Mubarak regime’s contempt for due process was an ideal fit with Bush’s “war on terror”.

Condoleezza Rice’s own tune was changed just two years after she attempt to rouse the nation to democracy. As the New York Times noted, underground media were full of state-sanctioned atrocities in the weeks before Rice arrived in the country again in 2007. “Cellphone videos posted on the Internet showed the police sodomising a bus driver with a broomstick. Another showed the police hanging a woman by her knees and wrists from a pole for questioning. A company partly owned by a member of the governing party distributed tens of thousands of bags of contaminated blood to hospitals around the country,” the Times said. But faced with chaos in Iraq, rising Iranian influence and the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the US decided stability was a more important priority than encouraging freedoms for everyday Egyptians.

The Obama administration has shown an equal unwillingness to rock the boat. Obama did show Rice-like signs of bucking the trend when he went to Egypt in June 2009 and made a historic speech in Cairo about US-Muslim relations. He told his audience no system of government should be imposed by one nation by another. “That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people,” he continued. “Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose.”

The crowd enthusiastically applauded Obama for his lesson on freedom but may not have been so happy with what he told Mubarak when they met at the White House two months later. “I want to thank the government of Egypt for being an Arab country that has moved forward to try to strengthen Iraq as it emerges from a wartime footing and a transition to a more stable democracy.” Once again, the needs of Egyptians played second fiddle to the Great Game of American oil security in the Middle East. As FDR said of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in the 1930s, “he may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch." The now powerless Americans are now watching Al Jazeera like everyone else wondering whose sonofabitch will emerge victorious from Tahrir Square in the coming weeks.

Return of the Bread Riots: Egypt spinning on its history

(photo of Egypt's bread intifada of 1977 from libcom.org)

There is a good reason why only Israel gets more American military money than Egypt. Both are vitally important countries at the centre of the world’s political, economic and religious fault lines. Stopping the two from tearing each other's throat has been a vital plank of US foreign policy for 40 years. US religiosity will keep Israel, the home of the bible, front and centre of their overseas donations. Americans may be less keen to celebrate the role of next door Egypt in the lives of Moses, Joseph and Jesus but their Government realises the importance of Cairo.

Though it was in decline by Jesus’ time, Egypt was an extraordinary civilisation in the ancient world. Alexandra had the largest library in the world and the Pyramid of Cheops was the tallest building in the world for 3800 years until one of the country's eventual colonial masters built Lincoln Cathedral in 1311.

The pyramids of Giza were cathedrals of their own and part of a rich culture. Egypt’s brilliance began after it mastered irrigation of the Nile and established a system of agriculture that built the foundation stones of western science: writing, mathematics and medicine. Its art and architecture were legendary and the pyramids were the result of advanced quarrying, surveying and construction techniques.

It was also created by slave labour and the Greeks inherited the Egyptian acceptance of slavery in its sense of democracy. This failure to see how the proper division of labour was crucial to a human’s sense of self importance would haunt Egypt to modern times. A succession of rulers including Romans, Arabs, Mamluks, Turks, an Albanian named Muhammad Ali, and later the English and Americans made sure it was the bondholders not the bonded that kept control in the country.

General Abdel Nasser was the first Egyptian in thousands of years to properly lead his country. He tried to steer an independent course but his attempt to nationalise the Suez Canal brought down the wrath of the UK, France and Israel in an opportunist war that crippled his state and brought the problems of Gaza to world attention. Israel's continued nagging killed him of a heart attack in 1970.

Vice President Anwar Sadat was Nasser’s logical successor. He was a senior member of Nasser’s Free Officers group that overthrew the hated royal regime and the one who announced Farouk’s removal on radio. Sadat was an astute president. When the Russians refused his request for more arms, he retaliated by agreeing to American terms for a peace settlement with Israel. He also courted senior Christian religious figures such as the Pope and Billy Graham to humanise himself with American voters. His visit to Israel in 1977 cemented his status as a senior Arab leader and earned him a Nobel a year later, even if it brought on the wrath of most of the Arab world.

But in the same year he went to Jerusalem, there were riots in Cairo. Sadat like other rulers before him tolerated no dissent on the home front and like Nasser he never put himself up for election. His economic policy “infitah” aimed at liberalising the economy saw cuts to subsidies to foodstuffs. The cuts to flour, rice, and cooking oil subsidies triggered the bread riots of 1977 forcing Sadat to backtrack. Despite its oil money, Egypt was caught between the demands of its people and the international bankers.

With rage growing over his Israeli peace deal, his opponents attempted a coup that was defeated by Sadat’s intelligence organisation. Their crackdown missed one key opposition figure Khalid Islambouli who murdered Sadat in a victory parade in 1981. Egypt executed Islambouli while the Ayatollah’s Iran celebrated him as a martyr. Sadat’s death brought his deputy Hosni Mubarak to the presidency where he tentatively remains to this day.

Mubarak kept to the Sadat agenda. He survived six assassination attempts and got his payday in 1991 when the US and its allies forgave Egypt $20 billion in debts for joining the war to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. By then Mubarak was able to play the “politically stable” card as a long-term leader in a country with few changes of power. The west was prepared to overlook it was a lack of democracy that led to this stability, in order to “deal with” the Egyptian regime.

Its oil industry, tourism and shipping made it a safe bet for western business that showed (just as it does with China, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere) it was prepared to export anything to the country except its political ideas. Mubarak held elections in 2005 but with the opposition Muslim Brotherhood banned it was a sham. The real source of his power was control over the media and enforcement by police intimidation.

As long as oil prices were high, Muburak could buy his way out of trouble. But the global crisis has hit Egypt hard with a triple whammy: high unemployment, rampant food inflation and low wages. The fuel was there and needed just a spark. That was provided in near-by Tunisia which exploded into riots against a similarly corrupt long-term leadership.

When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire it was as if millions across the region shared his pain. His martyrdom set off a wave of discontent against Egypt and countless similar autocratic rules across the Arab world. The monied West which was happy to accept these countries' sacrifice of lack of democracy to keep the dollars rolling now finds itself in an awkward position of exposed hypocrisy and redundancy. They can only watch as Mubarak and other dominoes wobble and fall in a feverish show of people power. For once, the West can no longer control what will happen next.

Media miss the news in first Aussie Wikileak

Oblivious to the fact that one of the dreaded new media was providing the scoop, the Australian newspaper reported on its front page today the first Wikileaks document to mention Australian officials was “Rudd’s plan to contain Beijing”. It’s hardly surprising The Australian would go data-mining for the thing that would most embarrass the Federal Government. But it’s hardly surprising too they got it wrong.

In the haste to follow a narrow political agenda, the Oz skipped over far more substantive elements to the story. Not only that, they also misquoted Rudd. The first line of Paul Maley’s front page story said Rudd had warned the world "must be prepared to deploy force” if China didn’t co-operate with the international community.

Compare this to what the cable actually said:
Rudd argued for “multilateral engagement with bilateral vigour” - integrating China effectively into the international community and allowing it to demonstrate greater responsibility, all while also preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.

Suggesting the world has a Plan Z for China that involves force is a long way from advocating it and certainly doesn't make it “Rudd’s plan”. It wasn’t just The Australian that took this slanted approach. The ABC took a similar tack with the material saying it was Rudd's "suggestion that the US use force against China in a worst case scenario”.

It was nothing of the sort and a poor way of using what was remarkable information put out in the public domain. The ABC added insult to injury by turning it into a petty domestic squabble by harvesting a meaningless quote from Julie Bishop about “disturbing reading”. Don't read it Julie, if it disturbs you.

Beyond this dross, the reportage ignores some major issues discussed when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Australian PM Kevin Rudd in Washington on 24 March 2009. Private Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and his army of Wikileaks helpers deserve praise for putting the material in the public domain nine years ahead of schedule. The cable about the meeting 09STATE30049 was marked “confidential” which is a mid-level security due to be released into the public domain in 2019.

The meeting talked about problems in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia, China was the biggest topic. Some of it was just polite platitudes with Rudd buttering up a valued friend but most of it was extremely useful and informative sharing of intel among allies.

Rudd told the Americans one possibility was the little-known philosophy of Kang Youwei which he said provided China’s idea of a harmonious world and could potentially fit in well with the West’s concept of responsible stakeholders. He also said Hu Jintao did not have the same level of power as former leader Jiang Zemin.
“No one person dominated Chinese leadership currently, although Hu’s likely replacement, Xi Jinping, had family ties to the military and might be able to rise above his colleagues,” Rudd told Clinton.

He also noticed an important distinction between China’s attitude to Taiwan and Tibet. With the former it was purely “sub-rational and deeply emotional” (because China has no intention of disturbing the status quo on Taiwan) while the more concrete hardline policies against the latter were designed not only to show who was boss in Llasa but to send a message to other minorities within mainland China.

Rudd also told Clinton the Standing Committee of the Politburo was the real decision-making body in China which then passed decisions to the State Council for implementation. He saw the new Asia Pacific Community initiative as a bulwark against any Chinese plans to issue an Asian Monroe Doctrine, but understood American reluctance to get involved in another international initiative. Rudd did say the 2009 Australian Defence White Paper was a response to Chinese power, something most people assumed but he could never admit publicly at the time.

In return for this information, Rudd wanted Washington’s intelligence on Russia so he could prepare for an upcoming meeting in Moscow. Conversation centred on the power struggle between Medvedev and Putin with both sides agreeing the President’s desire for “status and respect” could drive him closer to western thinking. But it was an outside chance.

On the AfPak situation, both parties agreed there was no point in “total success” in Afghanistan if Pakistan fell apart. Pakistan needed to drop its obsessive focus on India and attend to its western border problems.

What comes across in the cables I have read is not so much the “brutality and venality of US foreign policy” as its growing impotence. This is the reason the US is after Assange. It is the embarrassment he has caused them rather than the exposing of any international secrets that angers them so much.

The one phrase that sums up the problem was uttered by Hillary Clinton to Rudd in relation to China: “how do you deal toughly with your banker?” A damn good question and given China is our banker too, one Australian media should be asking. “Rudd’s embarrassment” has nothing on our media’s for missing the real news.

A Journey into Tony Blair's Brutopia

In his just published autobiography, Tony Blair tells the story of a passenger jet that breached closed British airspace in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A senior RAF commander was following the plane which was out of contact and heading towards London. The commander was awaiting instruction from Downing St to shoot it down. As recounted in "A Journey" (published yesterday) Blair said he talked with his advisors for several minutes “trying desperately to get an instinct as to whether this was threat or mishap”. When the deadline came, Blair decided to wait. “Moments later the plane regained contact. It had been a technical error,” Blair wrote. “I needed to sit down and thank God for that one.”

Blair’s desperation for a sign of “instinct” is almost as telling a factor as his gratitude to “God” for the way it eventually passed without incident. Blair is ultimate proof of John Gray’s suggestion in Black Mass modern politics is merely a chapter in the history of religion. While Blair initially recoiled with desperate horror against the possibility of making a preemptive strike against someone who may or may not be a threat, such decisions grew a lot easier for him in the years that followed. 9/11 was a watershed moment for Blair, as much as it was for the Bush administration as it marked a time when Gray said foreign policy would be shaped by Utopian thinking.

Blair always had a strong dash of neo-liberalism to go with his strong powers of faith. He came to the Labour leadership in 1994 when the party had been out of office for 15 years. He inherited Margaret Thatcher’s total belief in the power of the markets. John Gray said Thatcher’s aim of destroying socialism in Britain assisted Blair in his political rise. By dismantling the Labour settlement that had served Britain since the end of World War II, she removed the chief reason for the existence of the Conservative Party. Without an enemy, it lacked identity. Blair’s “New Labour” easily stepped into its shoes and deprived them of relevance for a decade.

As the 1997 British election proved, strategy and organisation were more important than policy. Once he won, Blair carried on Thatcher’s privatisation agenda moving it into the justice system and prison service while also making the NHS and schools subject to market forces. In his early international dealings he advocated a “doctrine of international community” which reflected the “end of history” thesis that infected much 1990s intellectual thought. It was destroyed with the towers on 11 September 2001 and exposed Blair’s more naked belief in the power of good intentions to triumph regardless of flaw in the execution.

Like Bush, Blair saw his destiny as the unfolding of providential design. The neocons in the White House made it abundantly clear to him on a Camp David visit in April 2002 the Afghan War would be a sideshow and Iraq was the real target. The Foreign Office knew the case for war was a thin one; Saddam was little threat and had no weapons to speak of. Yet by the time of the 23 July Downing Street Memo, he accepted the advice of MI6 war was inevitable and “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.

He cautioned Bush to seek UN support but in January 2003 Bush told him plainly the US was invading with or without a resolution. Bush offered Blair the opportunity to pull out given the strong anti-war rhetoric in the UK but Blair pledged his support. Blair actively covered up any intelligence that contradicted the official line Iraq was a major threat that had to be stopped. The March 2002 Iraq Options paper produced by the Cabinet Office and the February 2003 Defence Intelligence Staff document both said there was no justification for invasion. All they succeeded in doing was to get Blair to shift the case to arguments about WMDs where intelligence could be more easily manipulated.

Blair wasn’t interested in the facts. Armed with his dogged Utopian belief in the ineluctable nature of progress, he screened out inconvenient data. Blair was only interested in faith-based intelligence that supported his moral imperative. As the disasters unfolded in the aftermath of invasion such as Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition, Blair kept silent. Again Gray: “Deception is justified if it advances human progress...Blair’s untruths are not true lies. They are prophetic glimpses of the future course of history and they carry the hazards of all such revelations.”

Blair’s militant faith in human progress brought him eventually to the political abyss. His was a true enlightenment view of unending human progress. In his ten years as Prime Minister his overriding concern was the shaping of public opinion to support his beliefs and his lies became an integral feature of government function. Despite winning three elections, he is remembered only as a Bush lackey. Both men practiced missionary politics and saw their goal as the salvation of humankind.

The difference was Bush could do faith better than Blair in a country with a lot more millenarian tendencies than the UK. An American Lt Col in Fallujah could get away with saying the war was “battle against Satan”; a British General in Basrah could not. But both Britain and the US have now left the country. Iraq turned out not to be a Utopian project after all.