Saturday, May 14, 2011
A Marshall plan for the Middle East? | Jocelyne Cesari | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
A Marshall plan for the Middle East? | Jocelyne Cesari | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
This article is a must read... this is the policy going foraward - usurious loans for development projects to control "democracies" via foreign debt to the transnational IMF and WB - it is something we will coincidentally be discussing in tomorrow's class - but everyone should read this as it sounds so lovely but is all about retaining control - Obama will speak in a few weeks with this as a platform and of course the press will rush to present the situation as an indicator of the great beneficence of the wonderful US of A... please chack out these other informative Links as well HERE and HERE ...
One Last Battle: Spinning Bin Laden's Legacy
The operation against Osama bin Laden was more than just a military raid. It was also an opportunity to attack bin Laden's image and ideology.
The war on al-Qaida is in part a propaganda struggle, fought with the aim of changing attitudes in the Muslim world.
Finding and killing bin Laden was not enough. Almost as important was what came afterward: the work of telling the story of the operation in such a way as to advance U.S. interests.
The Bin Laden Narrative
In the time since bin Laden was killed, each day has brought a little more news about the operation. This week, we learned that a bin Laden diary found in his house showed he had differences with his followers over what targets should be hit. And U.S. officials anonymously told Reuters that pornography was found in bin Laden's compound.
Were those details leaked by U.S. officials anxious to discredit bin Laden's al-Qaida movement in the Muslim world? If so, it would be an example of what's called strategic communication — putting out news that furthers your cause.
"Strategic communication is a huge part of the bin Laden killing. Taking advantage of that, getting the message out, framing it in the right way to get some benefit from it," says Christopher Paul of the RAND Corporation.
If before his death bin Laden had lost some control over his followers, the al-Qaida movement could be in real turmoil now. Michael Doran, who served as the Pentagon's strategic communications specialist under President Bush, says he'd be emphasizing that point if he were still in his old job.
"There's one main message that you want to hammer home at every opportunity, and that's basically: al-Qaida is on the ropes, the organization is going down," Doran says.
The White House has in fact been making that point.
Paul, who studies strategic communication efforts, says administration officials have generally risen to the strategic occasion in talking about bin Laden's death.
"They got a solid B or B+. They planned ahead. They did a lot of things right. They grappled with some hard issues, and there were a few things that didn't go perfectly," Paul says.
The most notable faux pas was on the day after the bin Laden raid, when White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan suggested that bin Laden, the jihadi hero, resided in a mansion and used a woman as a shield when Navy SEALs came after him.
"Here is bin Laden, living in this million-dollar-plus compound in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years," Brennan said.
U.S. officials later corrected their own narrative, saying bin Laden did not use a woman as a human shield. They did later put out a video of bin Laden sitting on his floor, wrapped in a blanket, watching himself on television, The idea there may have been to portray him as vain and obsessed with his own image. But some pious Muslims may actually have seen him as appearing humble, and Doran points out that bin Laden's residence appeared a bit shabby.
"It didn't look like a mansion. The pictures of him, the video of him in front of the television, didn't look like he was living in luxury. If you're inclined to follow bin Laden and to respect him, I don't think anything you saw there is going to make you not respect him," Doran says.
Managing The Message
When government spokesmen exaggerate in their eagerness to score a propaganda point, their credibility suffers.
Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, says the Obama administration knows that, and he points out that any administration misstatements about the bin Laden raid were quickly corrected.
"What was important in those initial days was getting the facts out and then insofar as they needed to be corrected, very forthrightly and immediately coming forward and saying, 'We've learned additional information. Here's what we understand the facts to be,'" Rhodes says.
Propaganda and spin are generally seen as efforts to manipulate or even deceive people. But in this media age, there is little disputing the notion that any organization — from al-Qaida to the U.S. presidency — needs to have a message and put it out clearly. Rhodes says a strategic communications goal of the Obama administration has long been to challenge the al-Qaida argument that the United States is at war with Islam or the Muslim world.
"Around his death, I think we saw it as an important opportunity to say Osama bin Laden in many ways had already become irrelevant in parts of the region," Rhodes says. "His narrative of violent resistance and violent change had actually been eclipsed by the peaceful protests that we see in many parts of the Arab world."
And that strategic message is one we'll likely hear next week, when President Obama makes a speech about recent developments in the Middle East.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Bin Ladens wife: I'll stand with you
IBB, Yemen — Osama bin Laden once gave his wives the option of leaving Afghanistan, but his young Yemeni bride was determined to stay and be "martyred" alongside him.
The pledge early in her marriage to the terror leader, recounted by her family, reflected the determination of Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, now 29, to rise above her divorced mother's social standing.
It came, they said, before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the decade-long manhunt that ended May 2 when U.S. commandos killed the al-Qaida leader in a raid on his compound in Pakistan.
Amal al-Sada was shot in the leg as she rushed the Navy SEALs, according to U.S. officials. She is now in Pakistani custody, along with her daughter and two other bin Laden wives, according to Pakistani officials, who say they eventually will be repatriated.
Amal al-Sada's family told The Associated Press that they saw her only once after her marriage in late 1999 to the al-Qaida leader — during a monthlong visit to Afghanistan the following year. Communication was largely limited to messages delivered by couriers.
The interviews with the AP took place in the family's apartment in a two-story structure made of white, black and red rocks in Ibb, an agricultural town nestled in the mountains about 100 miles south of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. Shops occupy the ground floor.
The family portrayed Amal al-Sada as a simple but determined and "courageous" young woman, religiously conservative but not fundamentalist. She was a high school dropout but was eager for knowledge and to realize something more than their modest life seemed to offer.
Amal al-Sada always told her friends and family that she wanted to "go down in history," recalled her cousin, Waleed Hashem Abdel-Fatah al-Sada.
'It's your future'
The door for fame opened in 1999 when her older sister's husband arrived at her uncle's home with a proposal. A Saudi named Osama bin Laden was looking for a bride.
Joining Dr. Mohammed Ghalib al-Baany — her sister Farah's husband — was a man named Rashad Mohammed Saeed, also known as Abu al-Fedaa. They were both friends of bin Laden, the family said.
Her uncle, Hashem al-Sada, recalled telling Amal al-Sada that he knew bin Laden was from a "devout and respectable family" in Saudi Arabia but didn't know them personally. He told the AP that he wasn't aware bin Laden "was wanted by the Americans" for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
"The choice is yours," the uncle said he told her. "It's your future."
He said his niece's response was direct: "This is destiny from God, and I accept it."
That she hadn't met bin Laden, whose family was of Yemeni origin, was of little concern. Most marriages in Yemen are conducted either through intermediaries or through the selection of the prospective spouse through a picture.
This marriage was no different.
Weeks after the proposal, the uncle signed the marriage contract as her guardian and Abu al-Fedaa signed on behalf of bin Laden. The al-Qaida leader arranged for $5,000 to be paid to the bride's family, according to Yemeni traditions.
After two wedding parties, including one in a Sanaa hotel, Amal al-Sada left Yemen. Accompanied by Abu al-Fedaa, she flew to Dubai and then to Pakistan, before making the trip to Afghanistan to meet her bridegroom.
Her father, Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, said they later learned through a courier that she had given birth to a daughter named Safiya.
Amal's new life
Members of the family then went to Afghanistan to visit Amal al-Sada and the baby. Although they said the visit took place before the 9/11 attacks, this would be no easy trip.
They spent more than 20 days in a hotel in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, under the watchful gaze of fighters loyal to bin Laden, according to the father. Among them were two men who had been on the same flight from Yemen.
One night, he said, a car took them to the Afghan border. Then came a six- or seven-hour ride in another vehicle until they reached a large tent guarded by mujahedeen. Inside the tent was an opening to an underground passageway. They walked in the passageway for about 30 minutes before emerging on the other side. Then another vehicle took them to bin Laden's cave, according to his account.
The father said he was greeted by his daughter. The following morning bin Laden arrived along with other al-Qaida leaders and Afghan tribal officials. There was a celebration honoring the Yemeni family's arrival, complete with a 21-gun salute and a lavish lunch attended by dozens of people.
Bin Laden was a "kind and noble" man, the father recalled. He described the al-Qaida leader as "easygoing and modest, giving you the feeling that he was sincere."
The father recalled bin Laden apologizing for the family's delay in Pakistan, saying it was a security matter out of his control.
On the final day of the visit, the cousin recalled bin Laden telling his two wives — the other one at the time was from Syria — that they could either stay with him in Afghanistan or return to their home countries.
He said Amal al-Sada quickly put the matter to rest.
"I want to be martyred with you and I won't leave as long as you're alive," he recalls her saying. Even when bin Laden told them that he was "subject at any moment to death," Amal al-Sada cut him short. "I've made my decision," she said.
Amal al-Sada's cousin recalled her describing bin Laden as a "noble" man who treated her well.
"'It's true that my life is one of moving between caves in Afghanistan, but despite the bitterness of this life ... I'm comfortable with Osama," she apparently told her father.
'Osama bin Laden did it'
Bin Laden is believed to have spent most of his time during this period in a house in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar but was known to have visited al-Qaida training camps in remote areas. He went into hiding after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Amal al-Sada's uncle said the terror leader complained about Arab leaders, particularly Sudanese President Oman al-Bashir, who he said "sold him for nothing," a reference to bin Laden being forced to leave Sudan for Afghanistan in 1996.
According to the uncle, bin Laden said he was the focus of several "assassination" attempts by Arab and U.S. intelligence services, including airstrikes, and that one mosque in which he was delivering a sermon was struck by a cruise missile.
"I was injured ... and a lot of people were killed," bin Laden reportedly said. "But I was spared from death because God wished it."
In August 1998 the U.S. fired cruise missiles at four militant training camps in Afghanistan in retaliation for the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden was believed to have been at one of the camps but left a few hours before the attack.
The cousin said bin Laden told the family during their visit to Afghanistan "of a big event that will occur in the world."
Later, when the cousin and Amal al-Sada's father were listening to news of the 9/11 attacks, the father said: "Osama bin Laden did it."
Source
The pledge early in her marriage to the terror leader, recounted by her family, reflected the determination of Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, now 29, to rise above her divorced mother's social standing.
It came, they said, before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the decade-long manhunt that ended May 2 when U.S. commandos killed the al-Qaida leader in a raid on his compound in Pakistan.
Amal al-Sada was shot in the leg as she rushed the Navy SEALs, according to U.S. officials. She is now in Pakistani custody, along with her daughter and two other bin Laden wives, according to Pakistani officials, who say they eventually will be repatriated.
Amal al-Sada's family told The Associated Press that they saw her only once after her marriage in late 1999 to the al-Qaida leader — during a monthlong visit to Afghanistan the following year. Communication was largely limited to messages delivered by couriers.
The interviews with the AP took place in the family's apartment in a two-story structure made of white, black and red rocks in Ibb, an agricultural town nestled in the mountains about 100 miles south of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. Shops occupy the ground floor.
The family portrayed Amal al-Sada as a simple but determined and "courageous" young woman, religiously conservative but not fundamentalist. She was a high school dropout but was eager for knowledge and to realize something more than their modest life seemed to offer.
Amal al-Sada always told her friends and family that she wanted to "go down in history," recalled her cousin, Waleed Hashem Abdel-Fatah al-Sada.
'It's your future'
The door for fame opened in 1999 when her older sister's husband arrived at her uncle's home with a proposal. A Saudi named Osama bin Laden was looking for a bride.
Joining Dr. Mohammed Ghalib al-Baany — her sister Farah's husband — was a man named Rashad Mohammed Saeed, also known as Abu al-Fedaa. They were both friends of bin Laden, the family said.
Her uncle, Hashem al-Sada, recalled telling Amal al-Sada that he knew bin Laden was from a "devout and respectable family" in Saudi Arabia but didn't know them personally. He told the AP that he wasn't aware bin Laden "was wanted by the Americans" for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
"The choice is yours," the uncle said he told her. "It's your future."
He said his niece's response was direct: "This is destiny from God, and I accept it."
That she hadn't met bin Laden, whose family was of Yemeni origin, was of little concern. Most marriages in Yemen are conducted either through intermediaries or through the selection of the prospective spouse through a picture.
This marriage was no different.
Weeks after the proposal, the uncle signed the marriage contract as her guardian and Abu al-Fedaa signed on behalf of bin Laden. The al-Qaida leader arranged for $5,000 to be paid to the bride's family, according to Yemeni traditions.
After two wedding parties, including one in a Sanaa hotel, Amal al-Sada left Yemen. Accompanied by Abu al-Fedaa, she flew to Dubai and then to Pakistan, before making the trip to Afghanistan to meet her bridegroom.
Her father, Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, said they later learned through a courier that she had given birth to a daughter named Safiya.
Amal's new life
Members of the family then went to Afghanistan to visit Amal al-Sada and the baby. Although they said the visit took place before the 9/11 attacks, this would be no easy trip.
They spent more than 20 days in a hotel in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, under the watchful gaze of fighters loyal to bin Laden, according to the father. Among them were two men who had been on the same flight from Yemen.
One night, he said, a car took them to the Afghan border. Then came a six- or seven-hour ride in another vehicle until they reached a large tent guarded by mujahedeen. Inside the tent was an opening to an underground passageway. They walked in the passageway for about 30 minutes before emerging on the other side. Then another vehicle took them to bin Laden's cave, according to his account.
The father said he was greeted by his daughter. The following morning bin Laden arrived along with other al-Qaida leaders and Afghan tribal officials. There was a celebration honoring the Yemeni family's arrival, complete with a 21-gun salute and a lavish lunch attended by dozens of people.
Bin Laden was a "kind and noble" man, the father recalled. He described the al-Qaida leader as "easygoing and modest, giving you the feeling that he was sincere."
The father recalled bin Laden apologizing for the family's delay in Pakistan, saying it was a security matter out of his control.
On the final day of the visit, the cousin recalled bin Laden telling his two wives — the other one at the time was from Syria — that they could either stay with him in Afghanistan or return to their home countries.
He said Amal al-Sada quickly put the matter to rest.
"I want to be martyred with you and I won't leave as long as you're alive," he recalls her saying. Even when bin Laden told them that he was "subject at any moment to death," Amal al-Sada cut him short. "I've made my decision," she said.
Amal al-Sada's cousin recalled her describing bin Laden as a "noble" man who treated her well.
"'It's true that my life is one of moving between caves in Afghanistan, but despite the bitterness of this life ... I'm comfortable with Osama," she apparently told her father.
'Osama bin Laden did it'
Bin Laden is believed to have spent most of his time during this period in a house in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar but was known to have visited al-Qaida training camps in remote areas. He went into hiding after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Amal al-Sada's uncle said the terror leader complained about Arab leaders, particularly Sudanese President Oman al-Bashir, who he said "sold him for nothing," a reference to bin Laden being forced to leave Sudan for Afghanistan in 1996.
According to the uncle, bin Laden said he was the focus of several "assassination" attempts by Arab and U.S. intelligence services, including airstrikes, and that one mosque in which he was delivering a sermon was struck by a cruise missile.
"I was injured ... and a lot of people were killed," bin Laden reportedly said. "But I was spared from death because God wished it."
In August 1998 the U.S. fired cruise missiles at four militant training camps in Afghanistan in retaliation for the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden was believed to have been at one of the camps but left a few hours before the attack.
The cousin said bin Laden told the family during their visit to Afghanistan "of a big event that will occur in the world."
Later, when the cousin and Amal al-Sada's father were listening to news of the 9/11 attacks, the father said: "Osama bin Laden did it."
Source
Afghanistan: war without end?
DAVID SWANSON
Afghanistan was supposed to be the campaign promise that President Barack Obama actually kept. He said he would escalate that war, and sure enough he did. Is he now going back on promises he's made as president, by proposing to withdraw 2.5% of US forces in July?
Here are the relevant promises:
"After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home … [O]ur troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended – because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own." – President Barack Obama, 1 December 2009
"I'm confident that the withdrawal will be significant. People will say this is a real process of transition; this is not just a token gesture." – President Barack Obama, 15 April 2011
"In July of 2011, you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out, bet on it." – Vice President Joe Biden, quoted in Jonathan Alter's The Promise
But let's first review how we got here. When loyal Democrats heard candidate Obama say he would escalate the war as president, they mistakenly understood him to say he would end it. Progressive bloggers have planned a panel for next month to discuss their disappointment with this "broken promise" that was actually kept.
President Obama sent the first additional 17,000 troops before he'd been in office a month and explicitly before coming up with any plan for Afghanistan. Sending the troops was, apparently, an end in itself. Then,Obama sent more. He got the total up from 33,700 US troops in late 2008 to 68,000 in late 2009. These numbers do not include tens of thousands of European troops, untold numbers of "intelligence" personnel, mercenaries hired through the US state department and US defence department contractors almost equal in number to the US troops.
Obama's 2009 "surge", which more than doubled the US troop presence in Afghanistan preceded any public debate on an Afghanistan surge. The publicly debated surge, actually Obama's second, was "debated" between the commander-in-chief and his supposed subordinates, and then executed in 2010. By the end of 2010, according to the US defence department (pdf), there were 96,900 US troops and 87,483 supporting contractors in Afghanistan. In rough terms, there are 200,000 Americans now in Afghanistan, against the will of the American people. Here are some recent polls from the weeks and months preceding the killing of Osama bin Laden:
• By 73% to 21%, Americans say: withdraw a substantial number of US combat forces from Afghanistan this summer – ABC/Washington Post
• By 63% to 30%, Americans want complete withdrawal –Bloomberg (pdf)
• By 72% to 25%, Americans want to speed up the withdrawal – USA Today/Gallup
• By 53% to 39%, Americans say US troops should not be involved in Afghanistan – CBS
• By 50% to 44%, Americans say: remove all troops ASAP –Pew
• By 64% to 31%, Americans say the war has not been worth fighting – ABC/Washington Post
• By 58% to 40%, Americans oppose the war – CNN/Opinion Research Corporation (pdf)
That first poll, with the 73% in favour of a "substantial" withdrawal this summer, is a poll on whether the president should keep a promise. On 1 December 2009, President Obama said of his upcoming second "surge" in Afghanistan:
"Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011."
This deadline for "beginning" the withdrawal has been repeated for a year and a half. In May 2010, Obama said he was "confident" he could meet the deadline, but that it would just be a beginning. Many observers believed July 2011 was a promised date for completing a withdrawal, but in reality, it was always a promised date for beginning it. Still, most people assumed that beginning a withdrawal would involve a substantial number of troops leaving. After all, if a pair of "surges" of 70,000 troops lasts for years, in what sense are they "surges" rather than ordinary escalations?
In November 2010, the White House started talking about December 2014, leading the Washington Post to print this headline: "When it comes to Afghanistan policy, December 2014 is the new July 2011." It wasn't. July 2011 was still the date to start the withdrawal, and 2014 was the date by which a pretence would be established of Afghan "sovereignty", despite the ongoing presence of tens of thousands, but not hundreds of thousands, of foreign troops.
In President Obama's 25 January 2011 state of the union address, July was still the start date: "This year, we will work with nearly 50 countries to begin a transition to an Afghan lead. And this July, we will begin to bring our troops home." Yes, but how many troops, and how many contractors? Of 200,000 people, will you bring home three-quarters? Half? A quarter?
Apparently, the answer is 2.5%.
We learned this week that: "US military officers in Afghanistan have drawn up preliminary proposals to withdraw as many as 5,000 troops from the country in July and as many as 5,000 more by the year's end, the first phase of a US pullout promised by President Barack Obama, officials say." This is what you call a trial balloon. It could easily be revised upward if the American people or the United States' allies raised enough hell. It could go away entirely if we meekly accept it. The Wall Street Journal report continued:
"The proposals, prepared by staff officers in Kabul, are likely to be the subject of fierce internal debate in the White House, state department and Pentagon – a discussion influenced by calculations about how Osama bin Laden's death will affect the Afghan battlefield. The plans were drafted before the US killed the al-Qaida leader, and could be revised. They have yet to be formally presented to General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, who must then seek White House approval for a withdrawal."
And this trial balloon is smaller than the 5% withdrawal it appears to be. You might assume that 5,000 troops from a total of 100,000 would mean 5,000 contractors departing as well, for a total of 10,000 people out of 200,000. But you'd be wrong. The 5,000 seems to be a total of troops and contractors:
"If approved by top military officers and the president, an initial withdrawal of 5,000 would represent a modest reduction from the current 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan, allowing the military to preserve combat power through this summer's fighting season. Some of the troops that leave in July will be combat troops but commanders hope to minimise the impact by culling support staff as well."
In other words, 5,000 out of 200,000 – or 2.5% of US forces – would be withdrawn under this plan. Does that seem like a substantive beginning to you? It does to some anonymous military officials: "Some military officials believe a cut of 10,000 troops this year would be significant because it would represent one-third of the troop surge." The only thing significant here is the fudging of the numbers. We've "surged" close to 70,000, not 30,000, troops, plus a similar number of contractors.
According to Congressman Dennis Kucinich, "the announcement of such a paltry troop withdrawal is an Orwellian attempt to appear to drawdown the war without actually ending the war." Kucinich pointed out that at this pace of withdrawal, the Afghanistan war would drag on for another full decade. The proposal may actually be better than that, and worse as well. The plan that has now been floated publicly would supposedly withdraw 70,000 troops by 2014, meaning the pace of withdrawal would pick up. But 20,000 to 30,000 US troops would remain indefinitely. As would British troops. And multi-year plans are notoriously subject to revision.
I'm glad to be working with groups in the US and in the UK that intend to reject this latest plan. Now is the moment to put an end to the "global war on terror", not to ease our way into its permanent establishment.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Tennessee bill calls for the end of Islamic Sharia
Lawmakers in Tennessee, USA, have passed a new bill (pdf), calling for a ban on Sharia. Tennessee is one of the 15 other states, which is actively trying to pursue laws banning Sharia - the legal code of Islam. The bill says Sharia is “inextricably linked” to its “war doctrine known as jihad.”
According to this law, practising Islam in your house, i.e. in isolation is fine, but when a Muslim starts practising Islam with partners or in a group, then they are forming a "Sharia Organisation"
Way to go America.
Cross posted from al hittin
According to this law, practising Islam in your house, i.e. in isolation is fine, but when a Muslim starts practising Islam with partners or in a group, then they are forming a "Sharia Organisation"
“Sharia organization” means any two (2) or more persons conspiring to support of acting in convert in support of, Sharia or in furtherance of the imposition of sharia…So that means, Muslims can no longer pray in congregation in a Mosque. Well, first of all Muslims can no longer form a Mosque, or a charitable organisation, or any other organisation, as such a formation will go against the law, which confines Islam to the solitude of a house. This also means Muslims can no longer marry based on Islamic Sharia, as such a marriage would be in direct violation of the new law.
...Any rule, precept, instruction, or edict arising directly from the extant rulings of any of the authoritative schools of Islamic jurisprudence of Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, Ja’afariya, or Salafi, as those terms are used by sharia adherents, is prima facie sharia without any further evidentiary showing.That means, adhering to any School of thought is illegal.
...Any person who knowingly provides material support or resources to a designated sharia organization, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall commit an offense.Violation of this law is:
...punishable by fine, imprisonment of not less than fifteen (15) years or both.However, if the support causes a death, the sentence becomes:
...imprisonment for life or imprisonment for life without possibility of parole.If this is not a War on Islam, then what is?
Way to go America.
Cross posted from al hittin
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Famine, Counterinsurgency and Food Aid Blockades in Ethiopia
Funding Genocide in the Horn of Africa
By THOMAS MOUNTAIN
As the UN famine warning center issues urgent reports that millions of Ethiopians are once again starving in the Somali populated Ogaden the International Committee of the Red Cross publishes a statement that the Ethiopian government has denied the Red Cross an operating permit to carry out relief work in the region. Blocking the Red Cross from relief work somewhere is almost unheard of yet when it comes to Ethiopia, headed by the G-20 "statesman" Meles Zenawi, this is business as usual.
For the past four years all aid agencies, including the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and UN relief agencies have been blocked by the Ethiopian military from feeding starving people in Ogadenia. Millions of starving people, maybe as many as 6 million, though no can can say for sure because...no one is allowed into the region.
Why is this? Why is there no outcry against this enormous crime against humanity, the blocking of food aid to millions of starving people?
The answer lies at the doorstep of those "humanitarian interventionists", the western countries and their puppets in the U.N. who pump billions of dollars a year into propping up the Meles Zenawi regime in Ethiopia. Ethiopia has for several years now surpassed Egypt as the largest recipient of cash from the west in the entire continent of Africa. While the exact amount is hidden deep inside the opaque reports gathering dust in the offices of the international financial cartels, the IMF reported that in 2010 Ethiopia's import bill was $8.7 billion while it exported only $1.7 billion. $7 billion a year, in direct cash grants, loans that are inevitably forgiven (the bulk of so called African debt relief) or various methods involving financial chicanery, the bill has to be paid or the west knows all to well how quickly their East African henchman Meles Zenawi's followers will abandon him. If Meles Zenawi goes, who will be the western enforcer in East Africa, the one who does the dirty work so the west can show the world how clean its hands really are?
Drought, famine and an increasingly brutal counterinsurgency carried out by the Ethiopian military, the largest in Africa, the people of the Ogaden are forgotten by the world, thanks in no small part to the western media as well as the "human rights" corporations. In one moment of desperation I sent an e-mail about this to a reporter for the L.A. Times based in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa , only to receive a reply that they could not cover this matter due to "access and logistic difficulties". At least they cant say they didn't know.
Yet in all this darkness there is light, for the people of Ogadenia have been increasingly effective in armed self defense, and have begun to go on the offensive against the Ethiopian military and their local paramilitary death squads. Still, it remains far beyond the means of the several thousand fighters in the Ogaden National Liberation Front to feed millions of their people, all the while fighting some very desperate battles against their western armed and funded enemies in the Ethiopian military.
The Horn of Africa has been one of, if not the most, war and starvation plagued regions in the world, and these ongoing calamities can all be traced back to the western overlords footing the bill.
The west, especially the Obama White House may pretend ignorance of this crime, but the fact remains that a senior Obama advisor, Gayle Smith, in her pre-Obama opposition to George Bush day job at the so called Enough Project wrote about this back in 2007 and 2008.
So the powers that be know, all to well, that they are directly responsible for the forced starvation of millions, but don't expect any action from them. The mandate of the leaders of the western "democracies" is not to save lives, far from it, it is to protect their empire. So what does it matter if their capos in East Africa cause hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people to die of starvation?
International Law is really the Law of the Jungle, where only the strong survive, and the long suffering people of the Ethiopian Ogaden are the latest victims. The people of the the Ogaden have little choice but to fight for their lives, at least until the gangster, genocidal regime of Meles Zenawi is sent packing, with Meles fleeing to his palace in London and his ill gotten billions. Until then don't expect anything better than crocodile tears from the "humanitarian interventionists" in the west.
Thomas C. Mountain lives in Asmara, Eritrea. He can be reached at: thomascmountain at yahoo dot com
The Secular and the Not So Sacred: Few Thoughts on Asef Bayats 'The Sacred and the Secular'
Ali Harfouch (A.H)
Asef Bayats piece on The Sacred and the Secular represents, a stark reality pointing towards the fact that our road towards decolonization is still a work-in-progress. Considering the hegemonic status which Liberal-Democracy and Modernity have both attained, a natural epidemic rampant amongst our academia and intelligentsia – Paradigm Paralysis might help explain this phenomenon, namely ones inability to "think outside the box (read, paradigm)"It’s hard to speak of hope, agency, and autonomy when our past, present, and future are clearly defined. Modernity, a Euro-centric teleological project seemingly has it all sorted out. Our past is limited to our colonial legacy, our present a despicable state of half-breed attempt at modernization, and our future a bright liberal and democratic state. A colonial ploy, trapping Muslims within a sort of historical determinism, or fixed uni-linear progression.
Paradigm Paralysis, in our Bayat’s case also manifests its self in his inability to think outside certain hegemonic constructs. Amongst them, the nation-state. Few realize, and take for granted that the Secular, and/or Democratic state is inextricable to the totalizing, and monopolizing nation-state. one must suggest that in an age in which European nations are drawing a common narratives and incrementally diluting its inter-state borders, consolidating our own national borders in the Muslim world is a regressive idea, not to mention strategically absurd. In speaking of the fate of minorities, he forgets that the majority/minority dilemma is a rotten fruit of the identity-forming nation-state.
Talal Asad, points out in his Formations of the Secular the way through which Modernity and the Western Liberal Paradigm provide a distinct and value-laden discursive framework through which religions is conceptualized and reconfigured. Totally ignoring the inner-dynamics and modernizing mechanisms in Islam – Bayat assumes the inability of Islam to meet the modern demands and requirements of society. The comprehensive Islamic Paradigm corresponding to Islam’s holistic and all-inclusive worldview and ontological foundations explicitly lays out political principles which determine the very legitimacy and authority of the executive in Islamic Political System, amongst them: Shura (consultation), Bay’ah (must incur allegiance of people, freely), and accountability (not only a right, but a religious obligation upon the community). Which of these, would Bayat find “not modernizing”?
And lastly, his assumption regarding the inevitable secularization of religion in governance is loaded with assumptions and preconceptions inherent to a Judeo-Christian conception of religion. Ignoring, that in Islam governance and acts related to ones “worldly-affairs” are not only religious acts, but acts of worship. As a matter of fact, the very notion, and Secular/Sacred binary never has, and never will exist in Islam. Asef Bayat’s secular, for Muslims, is not so sacred after all.
Monday, May 9, 2011
(the objective) face of terrorism
Some time ago, the introduction to Palestinian website Electronic Intifada began with an up close portrait of a boy. It showed his face wrapped in a kūfiyyah, the symbolic black and white Palestinian chequered scarf. We see a barrel of his rifle that runs across his strong, swollen and angry eyes. His intense stare drags in the viewer. We become uncomfortable as words crawl ever so provocatively on to the screen. They tempt political loyalties, challenge moral sensibilities. They question, they confront, they bluntly ask is this the face of terrorism?
In the last few days, as with the last ten years, the portrait of the “terrorist” as the principal “evil-doer” has entered mainstream consciousness through media. Commentators regularly rely on dark Islamist caricatures. They construct, appeal to, and tell simplistic biographies to explain why terrorist X is an unpardonable enemy to Western society.
These days, we hear about Bin Laden’s biography, as an example par excellence. There is an accompanying Western anger and condemnation at his “subjective” forms of violence. There is also some celebration that he is dead. Some are discussing a “new beginning”. After all, bin Laden promoted suicide bombing in Islam’s holy name. He glorified terrorism as a religious duty, when its a “religion of peace”, and against all multicultural sensibilities he called for assassinations of opposing leaders in a Jihad against “Crusaders and Zionists”.
However, they commonly focus on his “subjective violence”, where there is a clear actor, a doer of violence. This blinds viewers to “objective violences”, or systematic forms; a collective set of institutions of which the West are the principal perpetrators through economic exploitation: the system as violence.
We can make the point here that the types of violence Western media show are the inexplicable acts that have a subject, that disrupt the Western viewer’s sense of the normative behaviour. They tell us about the doers of violence that disrupt the general calm of everyday life, without showing the systematic violence needed to create such everyday life. It would take four planet earths, so the saying goes, for everyone to enjoy the material wealth of an American. Someone out there is losing.
Is it not easier then, in the comforts of leafy suburbs, while watching bin Laden’s capture on a LCD television in surround sound, to disregard, and distance one’s self from the results of “objective violence” which are endemic to today’s socioeconomic order? Is it not easier to say, “We got him”?
Doesn’t Osama bin Laden’s “evil portrait” serve a few things here, above all an ideological excuse to ignore Western responsibilities to Western created oppression?
Returning to Electronic Intifada, the camera, after focusing on the boy, starts to move slowly outwards. The website’s opening sequence leaves the viewer with an understanding of how framing one scene excludes more about the overall picture. The camera begins to make visible the boy’s background. We begin to hear the surrounding noise. We hear harrowing screams, and sirens blaring. We start to catch the flickering of flames and notice gushing smoke. We start to see the boy in a broader frame. He stands among a small hill of concrete rubble. His slight figure shows he is younger than his eyes, and is a little less threatening. He wears no shoes, but stands tall with a gun protecting whatever remains of his home.
The camera keeps moving away until we lose sight of his eyes.
It eventually rests on a panoramic shot of a destitute refugee camp hit by overhead jets. The camera moved away from a Palestinian to a wider view of Israeli occupied Palestine. The words are still on the screen. The question remains without an individual in sight and only the somber broad view of their conditions: is this the face of terrorism?
Although the portrait captures the boy as an actor of “subjective violence”, it excludes his surroundings as the victim of “objective violence”. It is probably wrong to debate the portrait of the boy as more political accurate than the panoramic of the refugee camp when explaining terrorism. Yes, there are actors in this world who fight and resist, but there also exist systems that subjugate and impose. Palestine is no more the first scene than the second.
Both scenes are momentary snapshots denying us a vision of the problem as a whole. It is the camera’s movement itself that tells us most. To understand terrorists we must understand the surroundings that prefigure terrorism. We must escape the traps of comforts, and normalcy, and ask what constructs these privileges. Today’s political discussions should flow between “subjective and objective” forms of violence. There is no use talking about Bin Laden without understanding the Muslim world. We need a dispassionate commentary on capitalism and not just a condemnation of “evil” caricatures.
by Brother Yassir Morsi
visit the brother's blog Journal for the Un-Integrated Muslim(a)
Shariah: The Only Solution - Paltalk Conference in Authentic Tawheed May 7, 2011 9pm GMT
Please post to forums, social networking sites and etc. to help publicize this important event insha'Allah
Point Person: Michael Scheuer, former CIA bin Laden tracker
source Following is the full transcript of an interview I conducted this week with Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA unit charged with tracking Osama bin Laden. Scheuer is author of the 2004 book Imperial Hubris. His latest book, Osama bin Laden, was published earlier this year.
Do we have to be willing to kill a lot of civilians?
A lot of people would argue that by killing civilians, you create yet another tool for recruitment.
Despite the death of bin Laden, do you still believe the U.S. is losing this war?
On every front, sir. We've already admitted defeat in Afghanistan. No matter how we leave Afghanistan, no matter how we dress it up, the Muslim world as a whole will see it as the defeat of the second superpower. I personally am quite a hawk on Afghanistan. If we were going to desire to win there, I would support it. But I don't think another Marine or soldier should die for political leaders who don't intend to win. I think that's a very big loss. The defeat against the Soviets was the galvanizing effect for bin Laden's generation. And our defeat there will be a similarly galvanizing event in the Muslim world, which is already largely anti-American.
Is there anything to be learned from the methods they used to locate and kill bin Laden?
The lesson to be learned is that we can never prevail and protect America by killing and capturing them one at a time. I started the rendition program for the CIA in late summer of 1995, and we have been killing or capturing them one at a time, bringing them to justice, as our presidents say, since then, 16 years ago. There are multiple times the number of people in the field fighting against us or our allies, or for Islam, than there were then. I don't mean at all to denigrate the operation that got Osama bin Laden, but the point is that it's just a body count.
Then what's the right way to go about it?
The next time we need to deploy an army to defend ourselves, we need to annihilate the enemy. All the talk about "the military option has been tried" is really nonsense. If this is all the power that the American people have paid for over the past 30 years, since the end of the cold war, and this is the best we can do, it really is a shame. Any war can be won if you kill enough of the enemy and their supporters.
Do we have to be willing to kill a lot of civilians?
Absolutely. Either you go to war to win in an insurgency, or you don't go at all. If you go to war to win, an enemy that doesn't wear a uniform and is supported by the local population is going to take a lot of killing. You're making the decision about whether America is worth defending.
A lot of people would argue that by killing civilians, you create yet another tool for recruitment.
Sir, I was trained as a historian, and that is the most insane argument I think that I've ever heard in the sense that, do people think that we were popular for killing German civilians? Do we not think that the Wehrmacht fought harder after we bombed Dresden? It's the price of war. You have to defend someone. It's a very ahistorical argument. I used to have a priest who said, if you're going to say something that can't be held up logically, say it fast and maybe no one will pay attention. That's just an argument that's just a non-started.
But lots of jihadist groups post videos using the killing of civilians to prove what a monster the U.S. is.
Of course they do. I'm not saying that it's not important. But what's your object? Isn't the object to win? We probably could have defeated Nazi Germany or imperial Japan if we took another 10 or 15 years by not destroyed their cities and their factories and the civilians that worked in each one of them. I assume that the propaganda of those powers also featured dead Japanese and German civilians to inspire their fighters. It's just the nature of war.
Were Americans wrong to hate bin Laden? Do you think Americans will ever understand what he was all about?
No, I think it's very difficult to fight a war if you don't hate the enemy, or at least consider that the enemy is a threat to your way of life or your survival as a nation. Somewhere along that spectrum, you have to have an animosity toward him. But Americans will never understand why they're going to lose in the long run until we have a politician that transfers to being a statesman and stands up and says to the American people: You know, we've been lying to you for the past 25 years. These people who are attacking us really don't give a damn about women in the workplace, about liberty, about democracy, about elections. They wouldn't have it in their country, but very few of them would ever blow themselves up because my daughters go to university. The reality is that we're fighting these people, and the number of people we're fighting is growing, because of what the U.S. government does in the Muslim world. And until we accept that our support for the Saudi police state, our military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen, our support for the Israelis - until we understand that those policies are the main recruitment tools for the enemy, we will never get a grip on the size, the durability and the potential of that enemy. That's not to say those policies are evil or wrong, it's simply to look at the situation and understand what motivates your enemy.
Years ago, bin Laden released a statement that al-Qaeda would negotiate peace as soon as the U.S. withdraws from all Muslim land. Was he at all realistic in thinking this was a starting point? Let's say, for starters, we withdraw all support for what you call the Saudi police state. Is that realistic?
I'm not sure if he thought it was realistic, but he certainly thought it was necessary. ... [As for Saudi Arabia], of course not. The Saudis own us. We need their oil. We need them to buy our jets. We need them to buy our debt. And if they kill enough Shias up in Bahrain in the next month of two, we'll be at war with Iran because the Iranians will come to the Shias' rescue. And the American people won't have a thing to say about it.
The way in which U.S. forces staged the assault on Abbottabad, and following the courier: Is that the way you would have done it?
I think that's the way everyone would've done it. Intelligence work is often the accumulation of little pieces of information that really seem to go together but don't tell a story. Then you either stumble or you're very crafty and find a piece of information that kind of lends a border to the mass of other information that you have. And it appears that the war name or pseudonym of the courier that we got from Khaled Sheikh Mohammed brought some unity to the mass of information that we had. And therefore, once we had the true name of the courier, it led all the way back and ended up in the operation that occurred on Sunday. The one thing that should have been clearer to a lot of people for some time was Mr. Bush and, until Sunday, Mr. Obama's story that Osama was running from rock to rock and cave to cave was certainly not correct. They kept saying that, but if you keep moving around a lot, you're going to get caught.
How will bin Laden's death affect the psyche of al-Qaeda?
Nobody's going to like it, but they're not yet to the Western level of self-centered psychological analysis. They're not a terrorist group. They're an insurgent organization, and as such, they're always expecting to lose senior leaders, leaders of all kinds because they're fighting an immensely more powerful enemy. And the one thing we do know about al-Qaeda over the past 16 years at least is that they've put enormous planning into succession. I'm not sure that Zawahiri will be the permanent replacement. One of the reasons we have seen bin Laden so quiet over the past few years is that he let other, younger men in the next generation dominate the media. Like [Nasir] al-Wuhayshi, the leader of the al-Qaeda group in the Arabian Peninsula, Abu Yahya al-Libi, who is both a scholar and an insurgent with combat credentials. Those are two of the leading candidates in the next generation - smarter, better educated and probably much more bloody-minded and ruthless than bin Laden.
What about Anwar al-Awlaki?
Awlaki is kind of a creation of the Western media as a leader. He is a very talented propagandist, but he really has no credentials at all in terms of being a fighter or being a man who has stood by the cause forever and served overseas. He's got a lot of potential, but I think it's a stretch to think he can become bin Laden's replacement.
But does al-Qaeda need an eloquent, charismatic figure at the top?
I'm not sure if they need an eloquent leader at the top. Zawahiri is a man who is extremely intelligent and a good planner. He's an abrasive personality, though, and he will not create the sort of endearing, intimate relationship with the people he's speaking with. And he's had trouble over the years getting along with especially Gulf Arabs - Saudis, Kuwaitis and Yemenis, But he's a very smart man, and again, a man who is much more bloody-minded than Osama was.
What should be the next steps in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula to exploit this moment?
There really is only one place where we have any choice, and that is in Afghanistan. We can choose to turn up the pressure and try to kill as many Taliban and what al-Qaeda are there before we surrender and leave. There is nothing we can do in Pakistan. I think Mr. McCain and Sen. Feinstein and all the rest of these politicians blowing up on Pakistan not being cooperative, and being duplicitous, is a function of the public finding that out, because the intelligence community has been telling them that for the last 15 years. The reality is, we can't abandon Pakistan. We are the servant and they are the master in that relationship. NATO forced depend on resupply overland from Karachi, where the material is brought in, through Pakistani territory into Afghanistan. So the day-to-day survival of NATO forces in terms of logistics depends on Pakistani permission to use Karachi as a naval base and to run our trucks full of supplies into Afghanistan. There's going to be a general that shows up in Feinstein's office with someone from the White House, and into McCain's office and say, listen, our army is basically marooned in Afghanistan in terms of supplies and logistics. We cannot possibly bring in enough stuff by airplane, and we can't bring in enough stuff over the Russian border. We need Pakistan. And the other reason we can't really cut back on Pakistan is that the Pakistanis have helped us so much that they have a civil war in their own country at the moment, and that has weakened Pakistani stability. And the money we give them is used both to try and stabilize the country's economic situation and to let the Pakistanis feel they are still competent to face the Indians. But really what that money is for is to prevent the collapse of a nuclear power. This is all a song and dance, which I think will blow over in the near term because it's going to become apparent to Americans that, like Saudi Arabia, we don't have the whip hand in this relationship.
The U.S. is in a fix. It helps us, but typically turns around and does things to hurt us or tweak us.
I don't think it's really tweaking the United States. No matter which party is in the White House, there's always a fundamental naivete or arrogance because we deal with every other nation as if their interests were the same as ours. In Imperial Hubris, I wrote in 2004 that our interests and the Pakistanis' interests have very few touching points. What Pakistan needs is an Islamist government in Kabul. It needs a quiet western border. And it needs to make sure that its own militants and the militants in Afghanistan are looking north toward Central Asia and not east into Pakistan. That's not rocket science. That's just obvious. To expect Pakistan to do more than they've done, which has brought them to the brink of instability, is really either arrogance or naievete on the part of the American political establishment.
Are Americans foolish to think that because bin Laden is now dead, that we finally have the upperhand in this war?
I tend to think that bin Laden died a complete success. From the very founding of al-Qaeda to the last, long statement that he gave back in 2009, he made clear that the West was foolish if they thought that al-Qaeda thought that it could win the war by itself or that bin Laden was central to all this. He's always said that al-Qaeda's main role, and his main role, was to incite and instigate Muslims. To convince them first that victory was possible and to urge them to fight the Americans and their allies and drive them out of the Middle East. If you look around the Arab world and the Muslim world generally, the attitudes toward the United States - at least in that enormous Pew poll in 2007 - 80 percent of all Muslims regard U.S. foreign policy as an attack on their faith and on its followers. So much of that animosity was driven by bin Laden's rhetoric and his example. In his own mind, if he had time before he croaked, that he certainly thought: well, I did the best that I could and it's not a bad situation that I leave behind.
Does al-Qaeda look at all of the economic turmoil in the United States as something of a victory?
They certainly have long established, since 1998, a metric for their progress. Bin Laden said publicly, how are we going to measure progress? He only mentioned three things, and they've stuck to them ever since: The first was to take advantage of international economic conditions to undertake actions that would further bleed the American economy toward bankruptcy. The second was to take actions and use rhetoric that would spread out American military and intelligence forces until they were lacking in reserves and flexibility. Third, to create as much public dissent in the United Statesas possible and to strip away our allies one at a time or in bunches. And if you're using those three things as metrics, it's hard not to argue that progress since 9/11 has been really stunning from their perspective.
If al-Qaeda isn't a terrorist organization, what is?
There used to be. Things like Abu Nidal. Some of the geriatric Palestinian groups: the Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP, the PFLP-GC. Carlos the Jackal - which were all lethal nuisances. Hezbollah's terrorist wing didn't drive the Israelis out of southern Lebanon, for example. It was their insurgent forces that finally did that. I think it's much more than a semantical difference, in large measure because an insurgent organization usually is about 70 percent support - logistics, weapons procurement, safe houses, training camps, finances. And it's meant to survive very bloody blows. And bin Laden's organization is patterned on the insurgent groups that fought the Soviets.
Is what we see on the U.S.-Mexico border these days something you would regard as terrorism?
I don't see a lot of coverage along the border, but I think that what we're seeing is the development in the Mexican cartels of very much an insurgent-looking organization. They have all the components: the people who do terrorism, certainly - assassinations, abductions. But they also seem increasingly to have units that can take on the Mexican military which are much more insurgent-like. They certainly use the border as a conduit for logistics and finance and their illicit traffic in narcotics. They have the potential. Whether it's going to congeal into more of an insurgent operation, I don't know. But it's only in America where we can possibly define national defense without thinking that it doesn't include borders. Only we could have the most powerful army on earth, and they didn't think protecting the continental United States wasn't important. It's unbelievable. ... It really tears at the union. The people of Texas and Arizona and New Mexico and southern California and elsewhere have really been treated as the shreds and tatters of our union, as if they're not true U.S. citizens. It's just appalling to me.
What about public, civilian trials for people like Khaled Sheikh Muhammad. Considering that the U.S. can claim it dealt justice to bin Laden, does that add merit to the case for civilian trials?
That argument is still up in the air. It was a wonderful operation, but I think the botching of the aftermath is going to be big problem, both in Europe, the United States and in the Muslim world. But leaving that aside, I think the thing we should do most of all is move this entire war out of the realm of law enforcement. These men are not criminals. They're soldiers without uniforms. After all is said and done, the arguments about Guantanamo and rendition and enhanced interrogation, and we and the Europeans screaming at each other for the past 15 years, there's a necessity that we sit down with the Europeans and every signatory to the Geneva Conventions and start to figure out what we do with prisoners of war who can never be released. That seems to be an issue of very striking importance, given the large number of people who have been released and have been either subsequently killed or recaptured on the battlefield. This is a new phenomenon for the West. When I resigned in 2004, I said, listen, this is not going to work. We're not faced with Germans who are going to go home and build Volkswagens. We're looking at people who're going to go back to the battlefield. What do we do with them? But we haven't summoned enough maturity to sit down and admit that we're in a quandary about this new phenomenon.
NATO Chief: ‘Stay the Course’ in Afghan War
Source: Antiwar
Petraeus Says Bin Laden Death Won't End Conflict With Taliban
by Jason Ditz, May 08, 2011
In an interview today with the Associated Press, Afghan War Commander General David Petraeus suggested that the death of Osama bin Laden would harm putative ties between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He estimated “between 50 and 100 al-Qaeda” members were in Afghanistan.
At the same time, Petraeus said the death wouldn’t end the war, and fighting would continue with the massive Taliban insurgency. He also warned that other “transnational terror groups” might set up in Afghanistan.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussenexpressed similar sentimentsin his own talks today. The alliance leader said NATO would continue to “stay the course” in Afghanistan through at least 2014.
“International terrorism still poses a threat toward our countries,” Rasmussen insisted. Since officials have long used bin Laden as the nominal reason for the war in Afghanistan, his death has led to a number of calls to end the conflict. Officials seem united in wanting to keep the war going in an open-ended manner.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)