Modi and the Boundary Question: Will History Repeat Itself?

Stephen Westcott


While negotiations during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s upcoming China visit, expected to occur on 14-16 May, will mostly focus on deepening economic ties and reducing the trade deficit, there is growing speculation that there will be some progress on resolving the long deadlocked boundary question. Indeed, this expectation has been fed by a flurry of talks between the two sides over the border in the past month. The 18th round of the Special Representative Talks were held between 23-24 March, marking the first formal talks on the border dispute since Modi took office. The Joint Military Talks were held in early April. Little has been revealed publicly about the outcome of the talks, apart from the usual platitudes over the desire to uphold ‘peace and tranquillity’ along the border. However, viewed in the light of recent statements such as the India Foreign Minister’s comment that both sides are seeking ‘out of the box’ solutions, these talks conducted smoothly so close to Modi’s visit have raised the expectations that some form of deal is in the making. Is a breakthrough in the long deadlocked negotiations imminent?

At least since the 2005 agreement on the principles for resolving the boundary question, the negotiations have pursued the less ambitious target of seeking to manage the dispute rather than resolve it. Indeed there has been only incremental progress aimed primarily at reducing tensions and establishing institutions for trust-building exercises such as the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs. However, both Modi and Xi have expressed their desire to remove the dispute that has acted as a spoiler in bilateral relations and prevented it from reaching its full potential. Modi in his tenure so far has demonstrated that he is keen to resolve some of India’s longstanding border disputes, most notably with Bangladesh, which he has framed as being in the national interest to slap down criticism from hardliners in his own party. Another sign that a deal could be in the offing is both countries have expressed strong interest in increasing their bilateral trade. Several Chinese officials and commentators in particular have been recently talking up the compatibility between the economic policies that could be easily capitalised upon with the removal of the border obstacle. 

While there is ground to be optimistic, it is also sobering to remember that both countries have been in a similar situation in the past. Once negotiations were restarted in the 1980s they started with great expectations but proceeded slowly before being nearly derailed by some border clashes, most notably the 1986 Somdurong/Wangdung incident which came close to becoming a lethal military skirmish. Though tensions were defused by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 visit, it is widely considered that a chance was lost to resolve the boundary question when he did not respond to Deng Xiaoping’s ‘package deal’ offer. This proposal effectively would have seen the formalisation of the status quo with China recognising India’s control over the east and India recognising China’s control over the west and is considered probably one of the fairest resolutions possible. While the talks that followed Gandhi’s visit marked the beginning of the establishment of the various institutions to maintain peaceful relations along the border, the desire to definitively resolve the dispute has slowly leached out of the border negotiations.

Nonetheless both Modi and Xi appear to be signalling that they wish to be the ‘future generation’ that Deng spoke of who would resolve this issue. In India, Modi is only a year into his electoral term and if a settlement with China is reached now, he can overcome criticisms as he has done with Bangladesh by painting it as being in the best interest of security and economic interest of the country. Should a deal, at least in principle, fail to eventuate early in Modi’s term, it is unlikely that he or his government would be willing to counter one as it would open them up to domestic criticism and damage electoral chances. The Chinese government for their part is facing a slowing economy and several security concerns in Tibet, Xingjian and in the seas to its west, which provide a powerful incentive to remove this distraction and focus on more important issues. 

Whether these factors will be enough to break the typical inertia that surrounds the border negotiations or whether it will be another in the litany of missed chances remains to be seen. It would be naive to believe that this would be final as any deal will require some mutual relinquishing of territorial claims which has so far proven unpalatable, at least for the Indian side. Even if it is achieved, changes on the border are unlikely, at least for several years, with the terrain needing to be rigorously surveyed and demarcated, a process that has proven to take over a decade in other disputed border areas and is likely to raise fresh issues during the process. Both countries are undoubtedly aware that the sooner this process gets underway, the sooner it can be completed. Nonetheless, the odds are any progress in this upcoming visit will fall short of such a final development but remain better than nothing. Whether it will adequately neutralise the border as bilateral issue remains to be seen, though it can be said with certainty that both countries diplomats’ will be engaged with this problem for many years to come.

China: The January Storm

Vijay Shankar

Mao launched his ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ on 16 May 1966. It unleashed furious and complex internal armed struggles driven essentially by a struggle for power between Mao’s status quoists and Liu Shaoqi’s impulse to reform. Recognising the catastrophic failures of Mao’s economic policies, his deep seated paranoia towards change and his very brittle interpretation of what conformed to Marxism and more dangerously what did not; Liu set about staging a coup d’état through manipulation of the internal mechanism of State power. Mao used more direct methods. He urged, “Bombard the headquarters and overthrow those in authority taking the capitalist road” and charged, in a mass of contradictions, that “things can be Left in form but Right in essence.” Government and the State machinery, Liu’s instruments, were thrown into paralysis and a bloody inner cleansing of opposing leadership began. The revolution combined “elements of a witch hunt, a crusade, an inquisition and cutthroat palace politics” (William A Joseph, Politics in China: An Introduction. 2014). A destructive decade on an unprecedented scale was the outcome.

In January 1967, a year after the Cultural Revolution had taken root, another seismic event occurred. Mao’s estranged wife Jiang Qing along with three cronies who included Wang Hongwen, a second vice chairman of the Party, Zhang Chunqiao, head of the Shanghai revolutionary Committee, and Yao Wenyuan, a party mass media manipulator, formed what infamously came to be known as the “Gang of Four.” It was under Wang’s leadership as the head of the Maoist faction that he seised power from the ‘capitalists’ in Shanghai; to Mao, this was his ‘January Storm’. It became the archetypal model for the Cultural Revolution in the other provinces.

More critically to the Gang of Four, Mao’s favours at a time of his failing health gave them access to the levers of power over the remains of the purged Liu. In the event the power struggle ended with a dying Mao, supreme after a heap of Liu’s cadres had been overthrown. While the Gang consolidated their sway through their slogan “suspect all, overthrow all” (Chi Hsin, The Case of the Gang of Four, Cosmos Books, Hong Kong 1978, Pg. 1-50). They mobilised over half a million Red Guards to besiege State organs, usurped control of Government and stifled all opposition. In the meantime large-scale poverty, external security anxieties and growing disenchantment of the long-suffering people forced the Party to opt for a government of stability that could end the anarchy let loose by the power struggle. The key was support and unconditional backing of the Peoples Liberation Army, which was denied the Gang.

Marshal Ye Jianying (Marshal of the PLA), Deng Xiaoping, Hua Guofeng and reform economists Chen Yun and Li Xianian formed the core of the next party leadership which in the interest of stability included four serving Marshals and seven Generals; they animated the party and challenged the Gang. Within a month of Mao’s death on 9 September 1976 this latter group led a successful coup d’état. The Cultural Revolution came to formal closure in October 1976 with the downfall of the Gang. Four features of the unsettled decade are significant to this study. Firstly, power politics that pervaded Mao’s brittle authoritarian rule. Second, the continuing distress and disenchantment of the people who had suffered famine, displacement and death on the scale of millions during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” now being subjected to a thinly veiled power tussle in the garb of a Cultural Revolution. Third, mass hysteria that the revolution generated aroused sentiments akin to religious worship of Mao; while creating power centres such as the Red Guard that surpassed law and even challenged the PLA. Lastly, violence that sought destruction of “Old Thought.”   

In this period, in a Chinese Government poster titled Destroy the old world; build a new world, a Red Guard of heroic proportions places his boot on a statue of Buddha, a Crucifix and traditional books and crushes them with a sledge hammer.

More than half a century after the ‘January Storm’ China has seen two decades of dazzling economic growth. This too during a period of general global economic slowdown, strife in West Asia, the rise of radical Islam, an inward looking EU and a frenetic Russia intent upon rising from the debris of empire. China’s growth story has been accompanied by ambitions of global leadership. This has in turn has spurred an unparalleled military growth. But the real alarm is, China seeks to dominate international institutions and rewrite the rule books without bringing about a change of her own morphology. China’s claims on the South and East China Sea; handling of internal dissent; proliferatory carousing with North Korea and Pakistan are cases in point.

When Xi Jinping took over reigns of general secretaryship of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in November 2012, he also took over the top offices of the Party and the Military when he had the Central Committee of the CPC anoint him as the President of the PRC as well as Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) making him, informally, the ‘Paramount Leader’. Announcing deepening reforms, his declared opening move was to crackdown on State corruption at all levels. His first target was the political grouping (coincidentally also called the Gang of Four!) of Zhou Yongkang (former security chief), Xu Caihou (former Vice Chairman CMC), Bo Xilai a “princeling” and former Chongqing party chief seen as a threat to Xi’s power base, and Ling Jihua, former advisor and confidante of the erstwhile Premier Hu Jintao. Whether the blitz was on account of political anxieties or indeed corruption-related offences is not entirely clear, but they were rising stars in the CPC firmament and were deposed. Their followers, however, remain on edge. In the meantime economic growth has slowed down (less than 7 per cent) while sustained illegal capital flight out of China has strained China’s financial system; globalisation and the arrival of the middle class (petty bourgeoisie) have raised unreal material expectations; there is restiveness amongst minorities particularly in the South West where radical Islamic influence is strong and mass incidents of social unrest caused by large scale migrations from the rural to urban regions is on a steep upward slope. All the while a brooding military finds itself shorn of its traditional CMC Chair and without a seat in the Standing Committee of the Politburo. The aggregate of these seemingly unrelated episodes leaves a question mark on whether the State apparatus can reconcile the nation’s aspirations with growing internal stresses peaceably or will reconciliation take the form of another 'January Storm'. 

Tocqueville, in 1858, suggested the most critical moment for authoritarian governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform. Mao lived the axiom; the question is, how will Xi receive this truism?

The Nakba: Israel’s Catastrophe

Vacy Vlazna

“By military force, the Jewish forces conquered 78% of Palestine in 1948 and depopulated 675 towns and villages, leaving only 15% of its Palestinian citizens under the rule of the Jewish forces. This area of Palestine was called Israel.” Salman Abu Sitta

The Palestinian Nakba is a catastrophe for the Jewish colonists and their descendants: it transformed the once decent surviving victims of European antisemitism and the Holocaust into terrorists, killers, thieves, racists, and liars - into the mirror image of their persecutors. And the same perverted brush tainted the UN and Western governments as collaborators of the sickest and most sadistic society in the world.

The 1947- 8 Nakba or ‘Catastrophe’ was the execution of the systematic and savage terrorism set out in Plan Dalet with the clear purpose of ethnic cleansing Palestine of indigenous Palestinians in the Zionist quest for Lebensraum. This land expansionism extends from the Nile to the Euphrates Rivers for the benefit of Yahweh’s chosen racists (Genesis 15:18). In reality, it is a Zionist imperial policy of racial restructuring of the Middle East (supplanting Arabs with Europeans) beginning with a Jewish state of Israel.

Over 700,000 terrified Palestinians stripped of belongings, money, homes, orchards, livestock, land, fleeing massacres by the merciless Jewish militia were forcibly expelled and rendered, for 67 years, stateless refugees packed into 59 ghettos in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza: refugees who hold fast to the love of and the keys of their family homes rooted in the ancient genealogical soil of their Palestine. Their homes were either destroyed or squatted in by Jewish trespassers morally impervious to the wretched exile of the owners:

My great grandfather's house (Ismail Mahmoud Khalil al-Najjar) in upper Lifta/Jerusalem (summer 2013), still standing, occupied by Jews. His grave is said to be somewhere on the premises behind the house…

And it is unforgivable…Lifta stands in ruins and preserved only as a "heritage" site while its inhabitants and their descendants, some of whom are right there in Jerusalem, pass by it and can only look on it with incredulity and rage. (Rima Najjar)

Today is Nakba Day, as was yesterday and all days back to the 1922 British Mandate with its broken legal obligations to hold Palestine in trust until independence.

Daily, the zionist war crimes of illegal demolitions, evictions and squatting in Palestinian homes occur. The imposed torture of fear, stress and loss the Palestinian families is unimaginably cruel.

On May 4, 2015, the zionist court ordered the removal of the Bedouin village of Susiya in southern Al Khalil. On May 5, 2015, the village of al-Araqib, that has been razed 83 times on its traditional Bedouin land was ordered to pay $500,000 to cover the cost of the demolitions! The degradation of mind that inflicts such abhorrent extortion on victims hasn’t existed since the Third Reich.

In 2014 alone, in the West Bank, 493 Palestinian facilities were demolished in acts of state terrorism and there are 11,000 demolition orders pending.

Such orders are reminiscent of the Nazi ‘Property Confiscation Order’ which goes a long way to explain the arrogant mindset of zionists indecently living in the confiscated homes and lands of the now 7.2 million Palestinians denied their inalienable Right of Return by successive Zionist governments.

Meanwhile aliyah- immigration to Israel, is accorded to all Jews mainly attracting rabid radicalised messianic bigots from the USA who are housed in the illegal parasitic colonies that leech the land and livelihoods of the ethnic Palestinians.

These colonial terrorists constitute the vanguard of the 400,000 illegal armed settler militias that, with 100% state impunity, threaten farmers, uproot olive trees and orchards, close farmland to Palestinian owners, level Palestinian agricultural lands, consume two thirds of Palestinian water, dump solid waste next to Palestinian villages, throw their faeces and urine on Palestinians, vandalise cemeteries, mosques and churches, torch cars, steal artefacts from historic and archeological sites, damage water and electricity infrastructure, purposely hit-and-run Palestinians including children, harass schoolchildren, physically assault and kill. In a decent society, the deranged perpetrators of this endemic criminality would be locked up in mental institutions.

Inevitably, this racist extremism also contaminates the zionist werhmacht (military) similar to the ‘disturbing sense’ of enjoyment’ and sport that British intelligence catalogued in the recorded war experiences of Nazi soldiers. On May 4, 2015, Breaking the Silence, an Israeli NGO, published a report, This is how we fought in Gaza, on the horrific testimonies of ’shoot to kill’ atrocities and war crimes- revenge and random shelling, by Israeli soldiers during the zionist 51 day blitzkrieg on the captive population of Gaza:

‘If you shoot someone in Gaza it’s cool, no big deal.’ p55

‘Those guys were trigger happy, totally crazy.’ p83

‘your morals get a bit lost and you sort of lose it, and it also becomes a bit like a computer game, totally cool and real.’p101

‘It was just for kicks – the sort of fun you have at a shooting range.’ p136

‘Running over a car is sort of the wet dream of every guy in a tank crew, of every tank driver, more or less…I wasn’t thinking to myself, “Hmm, someone might need that car now.”p147

‘There were a lot of people there who really hate Arabs. Really, really hate Arabs. You could see the hate in their eyes.’p156

“Did you ever kill somebody, or not?” …most people in our society consider that to be a badge of honor. So everybody wants to come out of there with that feeling of satisfaction…We have guys in our company walking around with X’s marked on their straps, it’s a sort of culture.’ p237

Zionist children are warped and twisted by psychological child abuse from birth - they are ingrained with a victim mentality from the perpetual fear of a future holocaust. This learned paranoia is overlaid with a national superiority and Arabhass (hate) which foments hostility and aggression perfect for their military destiny as killing machines- inhuman robots in which the civilising forces of compassion and respect for the Other are castrated.

Mandatory conscription, bar few exceptions, means that every citizen is a soldier supplying Israel with an eternal army of blasé child-killers and abusers.

The children of the Israelites, outfitted in tactical assault gear, can casually shoot a teenager, truss him and let him bleed to death; they directly targeted children in drone strikes; they can fire shells that slaughter instantly four little boys playing football on the beach; they cooly load shells of illegal white phosphorous that inflict vicious burns on the tender bodies of Gazan children; they conduct gestapo night raids tearing terrified Palestinian children out of beds for throwing stones against armoured jeeps; they routinely torture Palestinian children in detention; they ensure no Palestinian child is safe.

Not only is Israel a military society with a normalisation of atrocities and barbaric cruelty, it is a military economy. It’s revenues are boosted by testing its high-tech weaponry on living innocent subjects in a locked laboratory called Gaza where the zionists control land and sea borders. The world was shocked by Nazi experiments on human beings, but Palestinian families, dead, maimed, traumatised, and hundreds of thousands homeless by pulverising bombardments, boost Israeli profits from sales to keen western and eastern governments.

To mask their crimes, in cahoots with Western mainstream media, notably Foxnews, CNN, BBC, the zionists spew out endlessly regurgitated Goebbelsian hasbara (propaganda):

Israel is a victim-Lie; Israel is a democratic state-Lie; Israel has the most moral army in the world- Lie. Israel avoids civilian casualties-Lie; Israel is only defending itself- Lie; Palestinians don’t want peace-Lie; criticising Israel is anti-semitism-Lie: dissenting Jews are self-hating Jews- Lie; BDS intends to destroy Israel- Lie; The Palestinians are the problem, they started it-Lie…

Lies lies lies ad nauseum that decent people no longer fall for.

In the new Netanyahu coalition government of Likud and Jewish Home (JH), the masks have been ditched for outright racism, warmongering and a Jewish state sans frontières and sans Palestinians.

On March 16, 2015 Netanyahu pronounced, “If I'm elected, there will be no Palestinian state"; Naftali Bennet head of the far-right settler party, JH, now Education mInister has rejected a Palestinian state. Eli Ben-Dahan, JH, is now responsible for administering Palestinians whom he denounced as, “beasts, they are not human.” and the Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, JH, called for the genocide of Palestinians. JH MK Yinon Magal said advancing two states is treason. Last year the Knesset’s deputy speaker, Moshe Feiglin, in the midst of Gaza’s devastation, called for the total extermination of all Palestinians in Gaza affiliated with Hamas and the forcible transfer of remaining refugees to concentration camps in Egypt.

The perennial tragedy of the Nakba could have been averted. When rejecting the UN’s illegal partition plan of Palestine, Azzam Pasha, the General Secretary of the Arab League, nobly offered equality between Arab and Jew,

"We are fighting for an Arab Palestine. Whatever the outcome the Arabs will stick to their offer of equal citizenship for Jews in Arab Palestine and let them be as Jewish as they like. In areas where they predominate they will have complete autonomy.”

But Ben Gurion chose the conquest and theft of Palestine, "Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."

Consequently, zionists are doomed not to live in a promised land, but doomed to exile in a wasteland of moral stagnation. And like all the invaders of ancient Palestine, they too will pass.

Palestinians, however, wherever they are scattered, live in Palestine:

Zionists and co will never comprehend….

They will never comprehend that it’s a clear-cut case, a hopeless case: it is a case of eternal love, of an unbreakable bond…. It is a case of a people, a land, an identity… it is a case of Palestine, her culture and people…. It is a case of being Palestinian. zionists and co will never comprehend that it is a hopeless case of eternal love because Palestine is us and we are Palestine. Reham Alhelsi

The Ethical Demise of the American Psychological Association

Geoff Gray

The conscience of the American Psychological Association (APA) is slowly dying as it facilitates torture, cheats its own members, and hussles junk science boondoggles to the defense industry. But the APA wasn’t always this way. Founded in the late 19th century by the intellectual giant William James and others, it had a proud history of advancing the science of psychology, defending the rights of those served by psychology, and promoting the interests of its members.

In 2005 the leadership of the APA violated its governance rules to allow psychologists to support the Bush era torture program. This was critical because the Justice Department had ruled that a health professional needed to be present during “enhanced interrogations” and because other professional organizations such as the America Medical Association and the America Psychiatric Association had unequivocally declared these programs unethical and out of bounds for their members. A national panel of human rights experts investigated a newly released cache of emails showing the APA, with the collaboration of the White House and CIA personnel, secretly modified its ethics policy to keep psychologists involved in torture. The New York Times reported on the panel’s findings on its front page late last month.

In its official response, the APA characterized the report as “recirculated allegations” and maintained that “last October we released a statement refuting these allegations.” But this response is a lie. The human rights experts presented new evidence of APA support of torture and refuted earlier APA denials. One email from Kirk Hubbard, the CIA agent overseeing the torture program, gives a shout out to former APA president Martin Seligman, saying he “had helped a lot over the last 4 years.” [2] Seligman had earlier denied involvement.

The APA describes the whole issue as a “public misunderstanding” and it has reluctantly hired an attorney to investigate the matter. It intends to publish its own report after which it plans “an aggressive communications program” to set the record straight. Sounds like they’ve already decided what their investigators will find.

Deceit is baked into the APA. Over the last several decades the compensation for APA leadership and staff has become increasingly generous and secure as the ability of the members to earn a living has become more precarious. During this time the organization’s relationship to its members became increasingly exploitative.

The APA recently settled a class action lawsuit. For 24 years APA members practicing as clinicians thought they had to pay a substantial special assessment that was not charged to academic psychologists. Why did clinicians think that they had to pay the extra assessment? Because the APA called the special assessment “mandatory” and said clinicians “must pay.” The APA leadership perpetrated this deception until 2011 when a disgruntled clinician learned that the mandatory assessment had never been approved.

Last month after four years and undisclosed legal expenses the APA proposed a settlement of 9.02 million dollars and agreed to change its Orwellian member communications practices. But the organization is not apologizing. According to its president, one Barry Anton, Ph.D., “we do not concede that there was any wrongdoing on our part.”

A professional organization should be guided by its membership. If the members want to pay lower dues for scaled back services that should be the end of the story. A professional organization struggling in a legal battle with its membership, as if it represents something other than its membership, has clearly lost its way.

So what about the integrity of psychological science and services? More spin, deception, and bullshit as the APA shills behavioral programs to the military-security state. Building on relationships developed while crafting torture policies, APA and APA connected psychologists have spun off a series of ventures noteworthy for their pseudoscientific underpinnings, lack of real world effectiveness and high cost. Some of the programs the APA has sponsored, abetted or profited from include:

Comprehensive Soldier Resiliency Program (237 million dollars) was developed by Martin Seligman and is now deployed throughout the military . This program aims to prevent stress-related mental health problems by teaching soldiers to be more resilient and optimistic. The APA enthusiastically promoted the program in a slew of puff pieces in its peer reviewed flagship journal, the American Psychologist. But independent evaluations show the program doesn’t work. An Institute of Medicine scientific panel noted that the program was never vetted for effectiveness and could, in fact be harmful. USA Today article cites “startling negative results.”(6) When USA Today confronted the Army, military psychologists went back and lowered the threshold for optimism to make the results look less bad.

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (81 million). Two psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, created interrogation techniques using principals developed by the same Martin Seligman. However, this program has not only failed to elicit useful information via torture, it has blackened America’s name around the world and contributed to Middle East instability and blowback.

Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques, SPOT (900 million dollars). Developed by psychologist Paul Ekman, the program trains“behavior detection officers” to identify potential threats at US airports based on personal characteristics, behavior and facial expressions. To date there has not been one verified case of a successful terrorist detection using the program.

The American Psychological Association poses as a professional organization. In truth it is a racket benefiting a few insiders. It reflects the larger society where the accumulation of money and power is the measure of success and the public good an afterthought; a society in which our president lauds bankers who impoverish millions of ordinary workers as “savvy businessmen.” The APA’s failure to fulfill its broad social mission impoverishes us all.

Flashing the Train

Jen Wallis

Viewing the world from the cab of a locomotive is a unique experience. You experience the seasons in the tiny details – the subtle changing of the foliage into Fall… the howling winds and snow of winter… the delicate green buds of Spring. Summer is nearly upon us – and that brings a new feast for the eyes among many railroaders, and a new danger I reckon the vast majority of the population is unaware of – teenage girls flashing trains on a dare.

Now, I don’t mean to discourage the time-honored tradition. It brings great joy to many a crew on an otherwise tedious and mundane run. Is it a little awkward when I’m in the conductor’s seat with a lady engineer at the throttle? You bet! The ladies won’t be getting a toot from us, unfortunately, and that is the goal of the dare – flash your tits, get a toot.

There have already been two articles about smiling teenage girls who were killed on the train tracks this week. I can’t possibly know the details of their deaths, but I do know it happens. A lot. My hope is to figure out some sort of public safety campaign about how to flash trains safely. A quick google search tells me this isn’t something Operation Lifesaver is addressing in the schools. Sorry, parents. It’s all on you.

Shortly after I hired out, a beautiful young lady was hit by a train near a very popular beach. Why? She flashed a train with her friends. After it passed, her and her friends ran across the adjacent track to go back to the beach, unaware that another train was rounding the same corner from the opposite direction. Her friends made it. She did not. There used to be a memorial on the fence near the site… quite a few pictures of smiling, beautiful young women with their whole lives ahead of them. The stories of how it happened don’t make the news. As a parent, I can understand why, but unfortunately this means the statistics continue to climb.

Flashing trains is obviously not the only danger parents need to talk to their kids about, but I hope it got your attention. Every week brings a story of teens walking the tracks talking on their phones or texting or listening to ipods. The thing about trains and train safety which leaves every railroader scratching our heads when we hear these stories is this – YOU WILL NOT BE HIT BY A TRAIN UNLESS YOU ARE ON A TRACK. The only place you will be hit by a train is the roughly five foot area between the tracks an immediately outside of them. Out of this whole big world, we have to wonder why these victims chose to walk (or in many cases, sleep… really!) in that particular five foot area instead ofeverywhere outside of it where you are pretty much guaranteed to NOT get hit by a train.

We railroaders also have a special place in heart (the dark, angry spot) for kids who think it’d be cool to post a profile picture or make a cd cover for their band of them standing on a track. I work in the yard , and thought I was safe from the trauma of hitting these kids with my drag, but I was riding up in the crew van just last week to watch a shove, when I noticed a couple of guys standing near the tracks with stools and cameras, scoping out the yard. Once I got up to the spot where I could watch the shove, I looked down and saw that they had planted themselves on their stools on the one track out of 20 where we were about to shove. I actually had to say over the radio, “Start ‘em back, good for twenty cars to the idiots sitting on stools”. Don’t be those guys. Maybe you think you can do it safely, and maybe you can – but sending the message out that it’s cool to take pictures of yourselves on tracks might make a difference to the kid who got the same idea, then lost their life doing it.

A train does not sound like a train when it approaches. It is silent until it is upon you. The speed of sound is delayed when forces of the wind are in front of it. And there is no such thing as northbound/southbound tracks. If you see a train go by heading north (or east, or west) it does not mean that this is the only direction for that track. “Expect trains at any time from any direction”… and you probably won’t hear it until it is too late. That goes for you, too – the impatient fools (including grown-ups in cars) who cross the tracks after the rear of a train goes by not realizing another train is about to enter the crossing from the other direction. If the crossing arms are still down, wait until they go back up! I’ve had dozens of near-misses with that scenario.

The crews of these trains remember every detail of fatalities on the rails for the rest of their careers. It haunts them. Many have to quit because they can no longer stomach going by those crossings and reliving it hundreds of times.

Don’t let your child be a statistic! You might think your kids already know better, but they don’t. Have the talk. Now!

Mother’s Day and Teenage Terrorism

Binoy Kampmark

It doesn’t matter if it happens or not. It does not matter how probable the eventuality is. We are working in the higher realm of probabilities, designated as such by the police authorities who found, first, the possibility that there would be terrorist attacks in Melbourne on Anzac Day; second, that a 17-year-old would initiate a “Mother’s Day terror attack”. The point repeatedly made here is that a terrorist event just might have happened “in the coming days”.

On Friday afternoon, the seventeen-year-old in question was charged with engaging in an act in preparation for, or planning, a terrorist act following a large-scale raid on the family home. The object of interest here was a two-storey dwelling at Greenvale in Melbourne’s north. This action, supposedly, prevented the materialisation of “an imminent threat to the community.”

Australian Federal Police Deputy Commissioner Mike Phelan gave us a sense of this hypothetical world, one where genuine consequences visit the individual who has, in fact, committed no verifiable criminal act. “We may not know exactly where it was going to occur nor when it was exactly going to occur.” (Exactitude is the enemy of actuality.) “But let me tell you, something was going to happen and as a result of Victoria Police and AFP interception yesterday, some Victorians are going to be alive because of it.”

Victoria Police acting Chief Commissioner Tim Cartwright added his share to the dish of hypotheticals. “We do believe the young man intended to explode a device at an event over the coming days.” The case for the prosecution was that the young man had “taken serious steps to prepare a device and… we made the judgment call late last week that in the interest of public safety we needed to act and we did.”

The case of exceptionality is intoned as the catch-all justification. In Cartwright’s assessment, there are two agents that figure in this pressing security emergency, one of flesh, the other distinctly absent of corporeal presence. “Overseas recruiters and, more broadly, social media are a real challenge for us, a challenge we haven’t seen in the past.”

To add plausibility to these claims, the Australian National Security Hotline, famous for its insistence on citizens reporting anything out of the ordinary, was cited as an important source. The unmistakable point about the Hotline is that it has proven a great incitement to regard everything as extraordinary. All that is banal is potentially suspect, infested with dangerous potential. Even materialistically crude occasions like Mother’s Day are not immune. Thank goodness for the excruciatingly vigilant public, especially one which sees fundamentalist enemies everywhere.

Having been created in 2002, The Adelaide Advertiser reported in 2011 that 31,495 calls out of a total of 156,694 on that celebrated phone line were teasing hoaxes. Victims of Crime Commissioner Michael O’Connell could only say, with queued exasperation, that “The line was set up for the purpose of preventing people from becoming the victims of terror and it is shameful that people are using it to perpetrate hoaxes.” Shame tends to be a relative concept, whether it comes from the phoning hoaxer, or a government official dazzled by possible terrorist activities. Such a field tends to be littered with security fantasists and pranksters.

The papers have conscientiously marched to the government tune. Andrew Rule, writing for the Herald Sun, decided to spread the seeds of terror with a nice sowing observation. The headlining of the piece was direct enough: “Mother’s Day bomb plot: A DIY guide to the dark side.” The spirit of youth can be such a terrible thing. “You don’t have to be old enough to vote to make something in your bedroom that will tear through human bodies just as murderously as shrapnel from an artillery shell machined in a modern munitions factor.”

Rule could only regret that the “gentle civilised custom” was to observe “17-year-olds” as “children”. For it was “our gentle Western law” that refused to accept that teenagers “are not children when it comes to acts of terrorism and criminality.”

Such commentary narrows to the eye of the needle. Afghanistan keeps popping up by way of comparison, as if distant Australia somehow bears resemblance to war ravaged Kabul. (Yes, Australia did its share of ruining yet another state in the ledger of crusading folly, but Rule’s wishful thinking is that ruination there implies imminent ruination here.)

The logic of the battlefield is the strained logic of Australian suburbia, where childish “beginners” are easily lured to making weapons such “that bloodthirsty peasants and zealots from Ireland to Afghanistan” can muster. An environment that has neutralised any notion of revolutionary ardour becomes energised by the likes of the “gentle” 17-year-old who has to be viewed as anything other than gentle. Such disposition acts as its own judgment. For all of this, is Rule trying to tell us something, inadvertently suggesting that foreign interventions, meddlesome engagements, and nose-poking do have consequences of blowback proportion?

The rest is left to reports to cast the accused to the wolves. The views of unnamed and unspecified friends are cited, claiming that the teen was “gullible” and susceptible to being “brainwashed”. He did not disagree with targeting kafirs. He expressed dissatisfaction on Facebook that Muslim youths supporting Sharia law were being subjected to excessive surveillance. “You will be monitored and possibly have your passport taken away.”

Finally, in this entire sordid business of speculation, a few verifiable facts. There is pervasive surveillance, along with enlarged powers on the books. And the witchdoctors in Canberra and Melbourne are desperate – one might even say very desperate – for their terrorist quarry.

Stopping the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a “Black Issue”

Ajamu Baraka

The Neoliberal assault on U.S. workers continues – this time with a slick move on the part of the 1% to sneak by the people a noxious trade bill called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Far from being a lame-duck, the TPP is just one of measures the elite hopes to conclude using Barack Obama – their most effective weapon since Ronald Reagan for convincing the middle-class and working people to support policies that are objectively against their interests.

Like the North American Free-trade Agreement ( NAFTA) concluded under Bill Clinton that promised jobs, balanced economic growth and prosperity but instead created economic devastation in the agricultural sector of Mexico and the loss of jobs in the U.S., the TPP promises more of the same but on a grander scale.

If concluded, the TPP will continue the process of concentrating economic power in the hands of U.S. based transnational corporations and financial institutions. And while the 1% who have no allegiance to any national territory or state will grow richer, the agreement will pit workers in the U.S. — especially Black and Brown workers — into cut-throat competition with exploited workers, this time in Asia, who will be paid slave wages to produce for the U.S. and European markets – this agreement producing increased exports from the U.S. is a blatant lie.

That is why for African Americans as the group that objectively has suffered more than any other group domestically as a result of the turn toward neoliberal globalization in the 1970s and the economic crisis in 2008, we should reject all neoliberal proposals, be it in the form of Obama’s phony urban “promise zones” to trade agreements. Opposition to neoliberal trade agreements, like broad opposition to neoliberal capitalism in general must be embraced as fundamental for our resistance movement and survival as a people.

However, our rejection of the TPP must not be based just on the negative consequence it will have on African American workers but on our movements’ historic commitment to justice and solidarity with the oppressed and exploited, not only in the U.S. but throughout the world.

It is the principles of social justice, self-determination for peoples’ and nations, authentic democracy and people-centered human rights that privileges dignity for the individual and the collective that must continue to inform our oppositional politics and vision for the future, and not loyalty to any individual.

Therefore, even though Barack Obama is now the front-man and making the case for Congress to give him “Fast-track” authority to conclude negotiations on TPP, our history and principles demand that we must stand in opposition.

The Propaganda Campaign Begins

President Obama traveled to the Nike headquarters in Oregon over the weekend to argue why he should be given the authority to negotiate not only the TPP but also the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investor Partnership (TTIP).

The mechanism that the Obama Administration and the economic elites want to utilize is Fast-Track Promotion Authority (TPA).

TPA is the legislative mechanism used by the Executive branch of the Federal government to coordinate with the Federal Reserve to remove democratic control over monetary and trade policies. Created by President Nixon to circumvent the treaty-making authority that the U.S. Constitution vested with Congress, it is used as cover to pass trade deals that contain measures that Congress would have difficulty passing through normal processes because of the pro-corporate, anti-democratic and anti-working class provisions contained in them.

The agreement that President Obama and the bi-partisan elites want to finalize first is the TPP, a key element of his strategic “pivot to Asia” to counter the rise of China. The TPP is a secretive agreement being negotiated behind the backs of the people and even members of Congress who have been denied access to the full texts. It was only as a result of information from sources like WikiLeaks that members of the public were able to discover that the TPP was not just about trade but represented an anti-democratic coup that transferred economic and political power from the public in the U.S. and all of the countries involved in the agreement, to non-elected, and thus unaccountable elites in the U.S. who control transnational banks and corporations.

If concluded, the TPP will include the countries of Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Chile, Peru, Mexico and even Canada. It will become the largest trading bloc on the planet, comprising some 40 percent of the world’s economy.

With the revelations that the TPP would allow private corporations to sue governments for damages on future profits if governments enact laws to protect their citizens in areas like the environment, food safety regulations and labor protections and would allow U.S. transnationals to exploit the labor of those counties by paying workers a fraction of the wages to produce products for the U.S. market that they would otherwise have to pay workers in the U.S., there has been growing opposition from groups in the U.S. to stop Obama and the elites by stopping the authorization for Fast-tracking.

We African Americans should be asking questions such as: Why are Obama and the economic elite pushing another neoliberal trade agreement when the failure of neoliberal policies to provide sustainable economic development and security for our communities is so obvious? And if, according to President Obama, the agreement will benefit working people by generating jobs and improving economic conditions, why are the provisions secret and why can’t the representatives of the people in the U.S. Congress be privy to the details of the agreement and be able to examine, reject and/or alter the provisions, as needed?

Stop Fast-Track in its Tracks

There is vote in the Senate this Tuesday where oppositional Democrats are lining up to defy Obama and the bi-partisan coalition representing the corporate and financial oligarchy. You can go to the following sites to get information on the strategy being developed to oppose the agreement and how you can join in beyond the vote on Tuesday.

https://www.popularresistance.org/first-senate-vote-on-fast-track-for-tpp-on-tuesday/
http://www.flushthetpp.org/
http://www.citizen.org/tpp//

It’s Not Culture but Capitalism

With the resistance fights from Ferguson to Baltimore and the intensifying repression being directed at our communities across the country, it is imperative that we understand how the conditions that we find our communities in today were the result of conscious policy decisions made by powerful interests outside of our communities.

Economic life that was always precarious for black people and the black working class specifically, devolved from a condition best described as a 35 year long recession to full blown depression level conditions with the crisis of 2008.

The reality of Baltimore and all of the urban areas where African Americans are located and experiencing severe economic and social deprivation cannot be understood without establishing the cause-effect relationship between those conditions and the internal logic of the capitalist system and processes like so-called free trade.
Deindustrialization and the flight of capital in the urban core cities where black people are concentrated in places like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Oakland, and secondary cities like Flint, Michigan , South Bend and Gary, Indiana, and East St. Louis, Illinois to name just a few, tell the story of the capitalisms failure during its neoliberal phase to provide long-term quality employment for workers in general and black workers in particular.

As Barack Obama dutifully carries out his job as the spokesperson and protector of concentrated white power, we must demand that black elected officials represent the interests of the people and not the capitalist oligarchy that Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama represent.

The TPP is an assault on democracy, on the people, on commonsense and a future free of corporate economic domination and ecological destruction. It is an expression of U.S. imperialism, geared toward containing China and with its sister agreement, the TTAIP, Russia. The TPP is a weapon to maintain U.S. global hegemony by denying the fundamental economic, social and cultural rights of millions of people in order to benefit a parasitic white minority ruling class in the U.S. And for that fact alone, African Americans and all people of conscience should opposed it.

*The article title is taken from “The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Political Economy of Black Opposition.”

Our Nuke is Burning!

Karl Grossman

In 1976, Robert Pollard, a rarity among U.S. government nuclear officials—honest and safety-committed—said of the Indian Point nuclear power station that it was “an accident waiting to happen.”

Pollard had been project manager at Indian Point for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from which he resigned at that time charging the NRC “suppresses the existence of unresolved safety questions and fails to resolve these problems.” He joined the Union of Concerned Scientists.

An explosion and fire at a transformer at Indian Point 3 on Saturday is but one of the many accidents that have occurred at the Indian Point facility through the years—none catastrophic as have been the disasters at the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants.

But Indian Point 2 has been in operation for 41 years, although when nuclear power was first advanced in the United States, plants were never seen as running for more than 40 years because of radioactivity embrittling metal parts and otherwise causing safety problems. So licenses were limited to 40 years.

Indian Point 2 is thus now running without an operating license while the NRC considers an application before it from the plant’s owner, Entergy, to allow it to run another 20 years—for 60 years.

Indian Point 3, where the transformer explosion and fire occurred, has been operational for 39 years and its license expires this year. (Indian Point l was shut down early because of mechanical deficiencies.) Entergy also is seeking to have Indian Point 3’s operating license extended to 60 years.

These old, long problem-plagued nuclear plants, 26 miles up the Hudson River from New York City, are now disasters waiting to happen in a very heavily populated area. Some 22 million people live within 50 miles of the Indian Point site.

“This plant is the nuclear plant that is closest to the most densely populated area on the globe,” declared New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at the Indian Point site on Sunday. Cuomo, who has been pushing to have the Indian Point nuclear plants closed, noted that this was “not the first transformer fire” at them. And the concern is that “one situation is going to trigger another.”

Entergy PR people in recent days have stressed that the transformer explosion and fire occurred in the “non-nuclear part” of Indian Point 3. However, as Pollard noted in a television documentary, “Three Mile Island Revisited,” that I wrote and narrated on that accident, “there is no non-nuclear part of a nuclear plant.”

What could be the extent of a major accident at Indian Point?

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1982 issued a report titled “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences” or CRAC-2. The research for the report was done at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

CRAC-2—you can read the full report online at http://www.ccnr.org/crac.html —projects that in the event of a loss-of-coolant accident with breach of containment at Indian Point 2, there could be 46,000 “peak early fatalities,” 141,000 “peak early injuries,” 13,000 “cancer deaths” and a cost in property damages (in 1980 dollars) of $274 billion (which in today’s dollars would be $1 trillion)

For an accident at Indian Point 3 in which the transformer explosion and fire happened, because it is a somewhat bigger reactor (generating 1,025 megawatts compared to Indian Point 2’s 1,020) the impacts would be greater, said CRAC-2

For Indian Point 3, in the event of a meltdown with breach of containment, CRAC-2 estimates 50,000 “peak early fatalities,” 167,000 “peak early injuries,” 14,000 “cancer deaths” and a cost in property damage at $314 billion.

Compounding the problem of the Indian Point plants being old—consider driving a 60 year-old car on a high-speed Interstate—they are at the intersection of the Ramapo and Stamford earthquake faults. As a 2008 study by seismologists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found: “Indian Point is situated at the intersection of the two most striking linear features marking the seismicity and also in the midst of a large population that is at risk in case of an accident. This is clearly one of the least favorable sites in our study area from an earthquake hazard and risk perspective.”

“This aging dilapidated facility has endless problems leaking radioactive chemicals, oil and PCB’s into the Hudson River. It’s unconscionable to permit the continued operation of Indian Point,” said Susan Hito-Shapiro, an environmental attorney and member of the leadership council of the Indian point Safe Energy Coalition.

Further, she pointed out this week, Indian Point has been described as “the most attractive terrorist target” in the U.S. because of its proximity to New York City and it also being seven miles from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Indeed, there was consideration by the 9/11 terrorists of crashing into Indian Point. Both captured jets flew over the Indian Point nuclear station before striking the World Trade Center
minutes later.

And she described it as “outrageous” that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has approved an evacuation plan for Indian Point “although it would never work” in the event of an major accident at the plants considering the millions of people who stand to be affected.

The key to New York State’s strategy to shut down Indian Point is the denial by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to give Entergy a “water use permit” to let it continue to send many hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day from the nuclear plants into the Hudson River.

“We need to make sure DEC stays strong,” says Hito-Shapiro.

In light of the historic, reckless, scandalous weakness of the federal government when it comes to Indian Point—and the nuclear power plants of other utilities—strong state action is most necessary.

Bin Laden’s Assassination: a Volcano of Lies

Alexander Cockburn

On Sunday, the London Review of Books published an new account of the killing of Osama Bin Laden by legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, which exposed the story told by the Obama Administration to be, in Hersh’s piquant words, “a blatant lie.” Using sources inside the CIA and Pakistani intelligence, Hersh dismantles plank-by-plank the official narrative first paraded by President Obama in his public address a few hours after the raid in Abbottabad and later embellished by John Brennan.

In sum, Hersh’s revelations reveal that: At the time of the raid Bin Laden was essentially an invalid. He was living under a sort of house arrest by the Pakistanis, who were monitoring him 24/7. US intelligence was alerted to Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad  by “walk-in” informant, who wanted to collect (and, in fact, did) a portion of the $25 million award. Pakistani intelligence helped provide DNA evidence, collected by Bin Laden’s doctor who was also an ISI agent, confirming Bin Laden’s identity prior to the raid. The CIA alerted Pakistan to the timing of the raid. Pakistani intelligence turned off the electric power to Abbottabad , cleared the flight path for US helicopters and provided an on-the-ground agent to guide Navy SEALS through the house. There was no firefight in the Bin Laden compound. Navy SEALS were under orders to kill Bin Laden on site. Bin Laden offered no armed resistance. No significant intelligence was collected from the compound. As a result of this cooperation, dark money to Pakistani intelligence and the military once again began to flow and the US consented to allow Pakistani a freer hand inside Afghanistan as the US began its withdrawal.

Hersh’s report demolished one of the cornerstones of the myth constructed by the CIA about the killing of Bin Laden: that the use torture had led to the discovery of a network of couriers which they eventually tracked to the white house in Abbottabad. That lie has now been crushed.

Predictably Hersh has become under withering attack from torture apologists and Obama defenders, especially the talking heads on MS-DNC. Last night, MS-DNC’s hipster teleprompter reader Chris Hayes lead the attack on Hersh, while simultaneously cheerleading the findings of the MS-DNC “investigative” team which “independently confirmed” the two major assertions in Sy Hersh’s report. Hersh, to his credit, swatted down Hayes’s juvenile deprecations like the seasoned pro he is.

Hersh’s story confirms what Pakistanis have long considered common knowledge. In fact, soon after Bin Laden’s assassination we heard from a former Pakistani military officer, Shaukat Qadir, who told us the whole story “was bunk.”  According to Qadir: “For the record, this house has been under ISI surveillance while it was under construction. It was first raided in 2003, and the ISI just missed capturing al-Libi (he was later captured by the ISI close to Mardan in K-P Province). It has been raided on numerous occasions since.” Shaukat tells me that contrary to a report in the New York Times by Carlotta Gall on May 5, neither of the two trusted couriers were among the dead in the compound.”

Alexander Cockburn wrote a story about Qadir’s revelations and other glaring inconsistencies in the official account on May 6, 2011, four days after Bin Laden’s death. Here it is. — JSC 

Barack Obama, who pledged to restore ethical honor to the White House after the Bush years, is now burying himself under an active volcano of lies, mostly but not exclusively concerning the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

There was scarcely a sentence in the President’s Sunday night address, or in the subsequent briefing by John Brennan, his chief counter-terrorism coordinator, that has not been subsequently retracted by CIA director Leon Panetta or the White House press spokesman, Jay Carney, or by various documentary records.

The White House photograph of Obama, Clinton and top security advisors supposedly watching real-time footage of the Navy Seals’ onslaught on the Abbottabad compound, their killing of two men and a woman (excuse for the latter killing: the standard “caught in crossfire”) and liquidation of OBL himself turns out to have been a phony. BO and friends could have been watching basketball replays. Panetta has admitted the real-time video link stopped working before the Seals got into the compound.

Panetta also admits Osama bin Laden was not armed, and that he did not hide behind his young wife’s skirt. He conceded that under military rules of engagement Osama should have been taken prisoner, but then added vaguely that he showed some unspecified form of resistance. He probably reached for his walking stick, since he has been ailing from kidney and liver problems. As any black or brown resident in, say, the purview of the  Ramparts Division of the LAPD knows full well, reaching for a walking stick or even holding a cell phone can be a death warrant; multiply that likelihood by a factor of 100 if you are the world’s most wanted terrorist  in front of a score of heavily armed and homicidal Navy SEALs, no doubt amped up on amphetamine.

An admitted fan of the herb, Osama may have been stoned as part of his pain management program since there was a marijuana patch outside in the allotment and, like any world star in retirement, Osama liked to smoke a lot of weed and made DVDs of important speeches which stacked up forlornly on the bookshelf next to the bottles of pills and the Koran, hoping to get picked up by Al Jazeera or HBO. How his lieutenants must have yearned for his summary martyrdom as they received his importunate bulletins that they derail a train during Obama’s State of the Union and other madcap schemes.

The White House claims that issues of delicacy prohibit the release of photographs of Osama’s bullet-riddled face and required that after an alleged match with a relative’s DNA he be given a swift but formal sea burial in a weighted body bag dropped from the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson into the north Arabian Sea, presumably awaiting retrieval by salvagers with a fix on the Vinson’s position at the time of burial.

Maybe the Navy Seal photographer forgot to take his lens cap off. Obama’s claims of ethical sensitivity certainly ring hollow. He’s battling the wimp factor, and “Lo! The head of Osama” would be a nifty prop. There was lengthy display back in Bush-time of the mutilated bodies of Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, killed by US special forces in 2003, plus filming of Saddam’s own execution by hanging.

Further back, when DNA matches were unknown, US special forces verified Che Guevara’s execution by permitting many photographs immediately post-mortem. They also cut off Che’s hands, for subsequent verification by the CIA. We’re not talking Miss Manners here.

The official “back story” released Sunday night by Obama is that US intelligence learned of the Abbottabad compound only last August and spent the following months watching the place, following Osama’s trusted couriers and concluding that it was highly likely, though not certain, that Osama was there.

This is bunk. The three-storey house has been a well-known feature of Abbottabad. Shaukat Qadir, a well-connected Pakistan Army officer, reported to CounterPunch from Pakistan: “For the record, this house has been under ISI surveillance while it was under construction. It was first raided in 2003, and the ISI just missed capturing al-Libi (he was later captured by the ISI close to Mardan in K-P Province). It has been raided on numerous occasions since.”

Shaukat tells me that contrary to a report in the New York Times by Carlotta Gall on May 5, neither of the two trusted couriers were among the dead in the compound.

Shaukat: “The house where Osama had sought refuge belonged to two brothers from Mardan (a Pashtun dominated region of K-P) who had numerous aliases; locally they were known as Arshad (or Bara?meaning elder) and Chota (younger) Pathan, who have been residents of that house for seven years past. The rub is; neither one has been identified among the dead. If Osama was followed to this house by constant tracking of his courier who, according to CIA reports, shouldn’t one, if not both brothers, should have been present, shouldn’t they? But they weren’t. Of the seven bodies left behind (a female, a child and five men of ages ranging from mid-twenties to mid-thirties), none have been identified as being either brother?. “ Inference: “Osama was sold out. The operation was the result of entrapment. An entrapment organized through one or more of his most trusted aides?”

In fact, specific knowledge by US intelligence of the compound and its likely possible prime denizen goes back to 2005.

This has been established by Israel Shamir, also writing for CounterPunch. Shamir compares certain passages in the WikiLeaks documents on Guantanamo against those recently published by the New York Times and the Guardian.

Shamir reports these newspapers were working from the WikiLeaks files supplied to them (price unknown) by WikiLeaks’ former German employee, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, “who went AWOL after this appropriation”. Shamir says Domscheit-Berg made a deal with the Guardian which subsequently made a co-publication arrangement with the New York Times. “Both papers published the cables after redacting them, or should we say ‘censoring’ – removing everything the secret services demanded [they] remove.”

When Assange learned that the Guardian and the New York Times planned to publish the Guantanamo files, his WikiLeaks team also prepared the files and began to upload. So did the competitors, possessing the Domscheit-Berg appropriated copy.

The most important redactions by the Guardian and the New York Times, Shamir writes, “were  directly dictated by the US intelligence services. The name of Nashwan Abd Al Razzaq Abd Al Baqi, or by another name, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi or by his number IZ-10026 was edited away from the file of Abu al-Libi (US9LY-010017DP) and elsewhere.”

This is significant because al-Iraqi was in close contact with al-Libi who had been designated by Osama in 2003 as his trusted, official courier, therefore aware of OBL’s whereabouts at all times. In the end, at separate times, the US captured both al-Libi and al-Iraqi, had them both tortured and thus became aware of al-Libi’s courier duties and hence the possibility that Osama was in Abbottabad.

Comparison of the redacted version of the Guardian and in the uncut version of WikiLeaks shows to what extent all the traces of al-Iraqi, the likely informer-under-torture, were removed at the behest of US intelligence. It was not connected to “caring about informers”, for al-Libi was understood at the time to have committed suicide in a Libyan jail just before the arrival of the US Ambassador in Tripoli. The file of al-Iraqi is missing in all databases; he was captured in 2005 and kept in various secret prisons, until transferred to Guantanamo where he remains detained.

So the trail to Abbottabad was known to the US intelligence services at least since 2005, when al-Libi was captured. “Careful reading of the file,” Shamir writes, “shows that al-Libi was connected with al-Iraqi since October 2002. In 2003, Osama stated al-Libi would be the official messenger between OBL and others in Pakistan. In mid-2003, al-Libi moved his family to Abbottabad, Pakistan and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar. He maintained contact with al-Iraqi.”

We can conclude, from this narrative, that when the unredacted WikiLeaks files surfaced, US intelligence concluded that Osama’s associates would soon figure out that the Americans had made the appropriate connections and conjectures and there the associates urged him to move on with all due haste. So Obama decided to send in the Seals.

From this active volcano of lies, we can safely assume that Obama’s re-election campaign has been well and truly launched. Lift-off began on April 27 with the White House’s release of the long birth certificate. Obama seems to have problems with timely provision of convincing documentation about arrivals (his own) and departures (Bin Laden’s).

Release of the full birth certificate could have come in 2008, when it first became a minor issue. Instead Obama refused to authorize release until last week, by which time 25 per cent of all Americans and 50 per cent of all Republicans thought he was hiding something fishy. A photo of the dead Osama would have been useful this week in quelling speculation.

Had it not been for cloud cover over Abbottabad, the raid on Osama’s compound could have come on Friday, April 29, the same day as the royal wedding.

Saturday, April 30 was reserved for the attempted assassination of Colonel Gaddafi, with the dropping of precision-guided bombs on the house of his son Saif, who died along with three grandchildren. Saif, then four, was in the Gaddafi family compound on April 15, 1986 when bombs ordered up by Ronald Reagan were dropped from F-111s, killing his 15-month old sister, adopted by Gaddafi 11 months earlier.  Thus have Reagan and Obama shared a target. ‘Decapitation’ – going for the enemy’s top guy – is now standard Nato strategy. In the “shock and awe” assaults on Iraq in 2003, the prime mission of US bombers was to target whatever houses Saddam was presumed to be visiting. We can assume electronic eavesdrops or maybe a human observer told the Nato targeteers that Gaddafi himself was in the house that Saturday, and the bombers were swiftly dispatched from Nato’s Allied Air Command in Izmir, Turkey, whose overall commander is Lt-Gen Ralph J. Jodice II (US).

Would Obama have been briefed on the plan, or have signed off on a program of targeted assassination of Gaddafi? It seems a sure thing.

Reverse the rationale. If a Libyan bomber had blown up the wedding couple and a goodly tranche of the British upper crust in Westminster Abbey under justification that the whole place and its human contents, down to the grandchildren, not to mention the hats, were fair game because Cameron was there.

As the Oxford historian Mark Almond subsequently wrote in this site, “Little wonder, the royal newlyweds’ honeymoon was suddenly cancelled on Saturday. So much of William and Kate’s nuptials was choreographed around their parents’ and grandparents’ weddings that it was a fair guess that like Princess Elizabeth and Philip they were going to fly to Malta to start their honeymoon before going on to Kenya where three generations of Windsors have enjoyed cementing their relations. Malta is too close to Libya for comfort and Kenya’s Muslim minority might not be too friendly to a serving Nato officer.”

But Gaddafi survived. So Obama only had one bloodied feather in his cap when he gave one of the most morally repellent speeches I have ever heard delivered from the White House. Bush at least had the crude brio of a semi-literate jock when he vaunted America’s prowess. Obama’s “we nailed him” paragraphs of mendacity concluded with Dickensian Heepishness: “Tonight we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history.”

Alas, the actual story of “our history” is an unrelenting ability to lie about everything, while simultaneously claiming America’s superior moral worth.