Innaugaration of a True Leader - Abu Bakr (RA) quoted by Ibn Hisham

When Abu Bakr was given the bay'a as Khalif, he stood up and addressed people, saying:

O people! I have been put in charge over you, but I am not the best of you. If I act well, then help me, and if I act badly, then put me right. Truthfulness is a trust and lying is treachery. The weak among you is strong in my sight until I restore his right to him, Allah willing. The strong among you is weak in my sight until I take the right from him, Allah willing. People do not abandon jihad in the way of Allah but that Allah afflicts them with humiliation. Shamelessness does not spread in a people but that Allah envelops them in affliction. Obey me as long as I obey Allah and His Messenger. If I disobey Allah and His Messenger, you owe me no obedience.

(Sira Ibn Hisham)

New Book - How the War on Terror is Bankrupting the World

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U.S. Wars Are Bankrupting the World
Politics / US Politics
Oct 22, 2010 - 05:14 AM

By: Global_Research

David Swanson writes: The endless and infinite "war on terra" is bankrupting the planet. I don't mean moral bankruptcy; that goes without saying. I mean financial bankruptcy. And don't take my word for it. This is the argument made in a new book called "Terrorism and the Economy: How the War on Terror Is Bankrupting the World," by Loretta Napoleoni, a financial reporter for Internazionale, l'Unita, il Caffe, Mondo e Missione, El Pais, Vanity Fair Spain, and Vanity Fair Italy.

Perhaps Napoleoni is insufficiently subservient to Wall Street to write for U.S. newspapers -- unlike, say, the United States government: "Washington needs Wall Street's help to keep international investors funding the U.S. debt," the author explains, "which in turn provides the $1.6 billion needed each month to keep troops in Iraq and Afghanistan." Which explains the lack of criminal prosecutions and serious regulation of Wall Street.
Napoleoni traces some surprising changes in the world financial system over the past nine years to the latest U.S. warmaking spree: "Though it may sound implausible, as soon as the West focused its attention on the war on terror, the United Arab Emirates and the rest of the Persian Gulf began experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. Money started to flow toward their economies." The U.S. government did not investigate the sources of terrorist funding, but did put restrictions in place through the PATRIOT Act that led money launderers to take their business to Europe, which suffered from that transfer as well.

The U.S. claimed it wanted to cut off the terrorists' lifeline, but Napoleoni finds little evidence of action behind the claim. Instead she sees Bush's failure to pursue bin Laden's bankers as in line with his failure to try to prevent 9-11 or to capture or bring bin Laden to trial. The 9-11 attacks were Bush's excuse for war, and war was what he wanted.

Napoleoni sees the "war on terror" as a response to Islamic jihad and draws a comparison to Saladin's jihad as a response to the Christian crusades. The Pope's call to "liberate" the holy land in 1095, Napoleoni writes, was for "the starving masses of Europe . . . a way of feeding themselves and an escape from a life of misery and suffering. For the knights and nobility, it offered an opportunity for economic expansion. . . . Europe was a colony of Islam. Today the Muslim world feels equally subjugated to the West."

One of the ultimate aims of the Islamic insurgency, Napoleoni writes, is "to bleed the American economy until it is bankrupt." Bin Laden has "even calculated the amount of profits that Americans have accumulated from the sale of Arab oil. For every barrel sold over the last twenty-five years, he claims they pocketed $135. The total loss of income adds up to a staggering $4.05 billion per day, which he describes as the greatest theft in history."

U.S. actions these past nine years have tended to self-inflict the economic wounds bin Laden desires, while simultaneously building al Qaeda into a more powerful and efficient enterprise. The United States had tended to tolerate money laundering because it benefitted the economy and the domestic money supply. The PATRIOT Act imposed regulations on money laundering and therefore on international banks, which immediately began advising their clients to avoid and divest from dollars. International crime syndicates took their money laundry to Europe. The war on terra also drove the price of crude oil through the roof. But it was the otherwise unregulated free-for-all on Wall Street that did the most damage to the U.S. and world economies. "The likelihood that bin Laden will destroy us is extremely low," writes Napoleoni, "the likelihood that finance will do so is, on the other hand, extremely high, a virtual certainty."

Michael Hudson: Capital controls will follow the weak dollar

Financial Times

Two weeks ago Brazil moved to deter speculators from pushing up its currency, doubling the tax on foreign investment in its government bonds. Last week Thailand acted on similar lines by no longer exempting foreign investors from paying a tax on its bonds, with the Thai finance minister warning of more to come. As the dollar falls and developing nations see speculators push up their exchange rates, other countries are also discussing more stringent restrictions. A damaging age of capital controls seems likely.

Indeed, moves by speculators purchasing assets and taking currency positions in China, Brazil and much of Asia now threaten to make this new era a self-fulfilling prophecy. Such speculative inflows contribute little to capital formation or employment. But they do price exporters out of foreign markets, and can be suddenly reversed if speculators pull out, disrupting trade patterns.

With the likelihood of further falls in the dollar, central banks in developing countries face a capital loss if they try to stabilise exchange rates by buying dollar-denominated assets – as the Bank of Japan did when it recently bought $60bn of dollar securities to hold down the yen’s rise. These modest acts set rates through the open market, but their cost is now threatening to drive these economies towards more formal capital controls.

Such a trend would be grim news for the US, but its financial policymakers have only themselves to blame. By lowering interest rates to almost zero and giving clear hints of another imminent round of quantitative easing, the Federal Reserve is providing speculators (and the banks) with yet more cheap credit – much of which is being used to speculate against the dollar.

The problem is that “QE2” will quickly spill over into currency markets, prompting foreign defensive moves to defend against currency raids that push up exchange rates against the dollar. Easy credit policies in the US and Japan will further fuel speculation in the currencies of developing economies in strong balance-of-payments positions. And the largest speculative prize of all remains an anticipated upward revaluation of China’s renminbi, followed by other Asian currencies.

Here we see echoes of the 1997 Asia crisis, but in reverse. That period of panic saw speculators swamp developing markets with sell orders, emptying the central bank reserves of countries that tried to keep their exchange rates stable. Today, these same countries are those likely to find capital controls attractive, but this time they are blocking speculators from buying their assets and currencies, not selling them. The economies targeted by speculators are now those that are strong, not ones that are weak.

Developing nations are thinking seriously about how to use controls to protect themselves. Malaysia led the way in 1997, by blocking sales of its currency. In recent weeks it is Chinese officials who have been discussing tactics to isolate their financial markets from further dollar inflow. The simplest way would be for them to stop exchanging renminbi for dollar payments for non-trade transactions. This would lead, in effect, to a dual exchange rate – one for trade and another for financial transactions – a common arrangement from the 1930s into the 1960s.

The real threat is a world broken into two competing financial blocs, one centred on the dollar, the other on the Bric nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Tentative steps in this direction occurred last year when China, India and Russia, along with Iran and members of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation took early steps to use their own currencies for trade, rather than the dollar. China took a simpler path last month when it supported a Russian proposal to start direct trading using the renminbi and the rouble. It negotiated similar deals with Brazil and Turkey.

To deter this the US and Japan should refrain from QE2, even at the cost of lower US growth. An even better response, however, would be new regulations stopping western banks from speculating in foreign currencies, by using heavier reserve requirements or a short-term tax on foreign currency trades and options. Without such steps other countries will soon move to protect their currencies. If they do it will have been US policy short-sightedness, conducted without concern for its effect on developing economies, that will ultimately have isolated the dollar and its users.

Inside Story - Attacking Chechnya's parliament

U.S. Military Aid Far Outpaces Democracy Assistance

WASHINGTON, Oct 19, 2010 (IPS) - Desperate to secure supply routes to Afghanistan, the United States has been spending at least six times more on military aid for the mostly authoritarian states of Central Asia than on efforts to promote political liberalisation and human rights in the region, according to a new report released here by the Open Society Foundations (OSF).


The 45-page report found that the full extent of military aid controlled by the Pentagon and the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and channelled through a bewildering variety of programmes is uncertain, but that it is at least three times greater than the State Department's military aid programmes which are subject to human rights and other conditions.

"Nobody really knows how much military aid the U.S. government is giving the Central Asian states," according to Lora Lumpe, the author of the report, 'U.S. Military Aid to Central Asia 1999-2009: Security Priorities Trump Human Rights and Diplomacy'.

"CENTCOM'S Directorate for Policy and Plans …is likely to have the fullest picture of U.S. military assistance to the region, but those plans are classified," she noted, adding that Congressional efforts to obtain comprehensive and timely reporting on Pentagon spending in the region have been largely unavailing.

The report, which comes six months after the violent overthrow of the corrupt U.S.-backed government of former Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, is likely to spur new questions about whether the strategic benefits the military gains in securing access to bases in Central Asia outweigh the political and other costs in the long term.

In 2007, the Pentagon provided some 30 million dollars in a variety of aid programmes to the Bakiyev regime – mainly as compensation for access to the Manas Air Base, according to the report. That was roughly six times what it spent on democracy and civil society programmes.

The Pentagon also reportedly awarded exclusive fuelling contracts - now under investigation both in Bishkek and in Congress - for U.S. operations at the base to companies in which Bakiyev's cronies and son had substantial interests, contributing to the perception in Kyrgyzstan that Washington was backing a corrupt and increasingly authoritarian regime.

"Now that Bakiyev has collapsed, there are a lot of really angry voices in the new government," said Alexander Cooley, a Central Asia expert at Barnard College in New York. "The Pentagon's 'walking-around money' …may not actually guarantee access (to the bases) over the long term."

The "oversized impact" of the Pentagon - as opposed to the State Department - on U.S. foreign policy has become a major concern of human rights and other critics who claim that Washington's relations with much of the developing world have become increasingly "militarised" since the end of the Cold War.

Six months ago, for example, three Washington-based groups focused on human rights and Latin America policy published a report that found that nearly half of all U.S. aid was being channelled to the region through the Pentagon and that the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) had largely displaced the State Department as the de facto "lead actor and voice" for U.S. policy there.

And, although U.S. development aid to Africa still dwarfs military assistance, similar fears have been voiced about the Pentagon's three-year-old African Command (AFRICOM), which is providing counter-terrorist and counter-narcotics assistance to dozens of countries, primarily in the Sahelian region and in East and West Africa.

Washington has provided military and police aid at various times to the Central Asian states - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan - virtually since their creation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In the early 1990s, military and police assistance focused mainly on preventing the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons, counter-narcotics trafficking, and border control.

By the end of the decade, aid had expanded in most of the five countries, as CENTCOM – whose writ runs from Egypt to China's southwestern border – sent Special Operations Forces (SOF) to train local troops in counterinsurgency in increasingly restive Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbek and Kazakh militaries were taking part in NATO exercises.

Most of the aid during this period came through traditional military and security programmes overseen by the State Department. Such programmes are subject to Congressionally imposed restrictions that ban, for example, any assistance to militaries that commit gross abuses of human rights or that overthrow democratically elected leaders.

The Pentagon and the combatant commands like CENTCOM, however, came to see State Department programmes as unreliable, driven more by politics than by what they regarded as the strategic needs of the U.S. military, according to the report.

In a trend that accelerated sharply after 9/11, the Pentagon developed a parallel system of "security cooperation" programmes to provide various forms of assistance that would not be subject to Congressionally imposed conditions.

"In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the DOD [Department of Defense] has sought, and Congress has granted, more than a dozen new legal authorities, increasing the ways that CENTCOM (and the other regional military commands) can spend funds from the Pentagon's general coffers to provide direct assistance to foreign militaries," according to the report.

As a result, the Pentagon provided at least 103 million dollars in military-related aid to Central Asian countries in 2007 – the last year for which the Pentagon provided relatively comprehensive figures, Lumpe said.

That was nearly three times as much as was provided under the traditional military aid programmes under the State Department's control. Total U.S. military aid, including the State Department's programmes, came to nearly half of all assistance provided by Washington to Central Asia in 2007, the report concluded.

Since 9/11, most U.S. military assistance has been geared to securing rights of access to military bases used to ferry U.S. troops and material into Afghanistan. That function has become significantly more important over the past two years as the Pakistani Taliban has attacked convoys transporting supplies from Karachi to Afghanistan.

Since the creation of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) in 2008, a land-based supply route for U.S. and allied forces that runs from Europe through Central Asia to Afghanistan, Washington has increased aid to the region's governments and militaries and, perhaps more importantly, awarded local companies – most often with close ties to local regimes – lucrative construction and supply contracts, including in Afghanistan itself.

The Uzbek military and security forces – some of them trained by the Pentagon - massacred hundreds of protesters in 2005, Washington cut off new assistance, and Uzbekistan is the one country in the region where Washington has spent more on democratisation programmes than on military assistance.

After the aid cut-off, however, the government of President Islam Karimov bought more than 12 million dollars in military equipment and training from aid credits that had already been approved. With Washington's approval, Tashkent subsequently bought more than 50 million dollars of weapons and training directly from U.S. companies, according to the report.

Despite the lack of improvements in human rights conditions, the restrictions on military aid "are beginning to be relaxed", according to the report.

American Consumerism and Liberal Values Breed Majority Mentally Ill Teen Population

Study highlights mental problems in US teens


(AFP) –

WASHINGTON — Around half of US teens meet the criteria for a mental disorder and nearly one in four report having a mood, behavior or anxiety disorder that interferes with daily life, American researchers say.

Fifty-one percent of boys and 49 percent of girls aged 13-19 have a mood, behavior, anxiety or substance use disorder, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

In 22.2 percent of teens, the disorder was so severe it impaired their daily activities and caused great distress, says the study led by Kathleen Merikangas of the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH).

"The prevalence of severe emotional and behavior disorders is even higher than the most frequent major physical conditions in adolescence, including asthma or diabetes," the study says.

Mental problems do not get the same attention from public health authorities even though they cost US families around a quarter of a trillion dollars a year, according to the study.

Around nine percent of all US children have asthma and less than a quarter of one percent of all people under the age of 20 have diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Merikangas and a team of researchers analyzed data from the National Comorbidity Study-Adolescent Supplement, which surveyed more than 10,000 US teens.

The study is the first to track the prevalence of a broad range of mental disorders in a nationally representative sample of US teens.
They found that nearly a third of the teens met the criteria for the most common mental disorder among US youth, anxiety disorders, which include social phobia and panic "attacks".

This class of disorder also had the earliest median onset age, occurring in children as young as six years old.

Behavior disorders, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, were the next most common condition (19.1 percent), followed by mood disorders (14.3 percent) such as depression.

Eleven percent of teens with a mood disorder, 10 percent with behavior disorders and eight percent who had anxiety disorders, especially social phobics, met the criteria for severe impairment, meaning their condition affected their day-to-day life and caused them great distress.

Teen mental disorder rates mirror those seen in adults, suggesting that most adults develop a mental disorder before adulthood, say the researchers, calling for earlier intervention and prevention, and more research to determine what the risk factors are for mental disorders in youth.