The latest Israeli spy scandal has hit Washington, and it's not a pretty sight. Last week, a two-year FBI investigation of alleged Israeli efforts to have American supporters of PM Ariel Sharon manipulate US Mideast policy leaked to the media.
The story is potentially a huge scandal, and dramatic evidence of a furious power struggle between neoconservative supporters of Israel's far right Likud Party who dominated the Pentagon and National Security Council, and their opponents in CIA and the state department.
The FBI is focusing on the Pentagon's policy department, a mini state department within Defence that plays a key role in US Mideast and South Asian policy. It is headed by neocon activist, Defence Under Secretary, Douglas Feith, who has long-time links to Israel's extremist Likud and is an ardent Zionist.
The Pentagon's chief Iran analyst, Larry Franklin, who works for Feith's neocon deputy, William Luti, is under FBI investigation for passing top secret presidential policy papers on Iran to two senior members of the American-Israel public affairs committee (AIPAC), one of Washington's most powerful and feared lobbies. AIPAC officials allegedly passed the top secret papers to Israel's spy service, Mossad.
AIPAC and Israel deny spying. Israel insists it ceased espionage in the US after its agent, Jonathan Pollard, was jailed in 1987. Pollard's controller in the US government, known to FBI as 'Mr X,' has never been caught. This may be so, at least semantically.
Thanks to a host of joint intelligence agreements, and highly placed friends at all levels of government, Israeli has access to most secret US intelligence data. Sympathizers often informally provide the rest.
Meanwhile, other prominent neocons, including Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Harold Rhode, reportedly have also been targets of FBI inquiry.
The current investigations show growing concern that US national security and foreign policy have been gravely compromised, or even hijacked, by a small but powerful group of Bush administration neocons who seized power after 9/11 with the help of Vice-President Dick Cheney, and engineered the Iraq war to destroy an enemy of Israel.
These neocons' confused loyalties convinced them what's good for Sharon's Greater Israel is good for America, and are ardent champions of a worldwide crusade against Islamic resistance.
Connect the dots: Franklin works for Feith. Feith reports to Wolfowitz. Cheney and Wolfowitz were the prime architects of the Iraq war.
Feith ran the Pentagon's notorious Office for Special Plans (OSP) that was set up by Wolfowitz. Its sole function: channel false information about Iraq concocted by Ahmad Chalabi and PM Sharon's office to the White House and US media.
The rock just turned over by FBI also reveals other familiar denizens. Welcome back Iranian con-man, arms dealer and old Mossad asset, Manucher Ghorbanifar, a key figure in the 1980's Iran-Contra scandal that nearly brought down the Reagan administration.
And neocon stalwart, Michael Ledeen. According to a 'Washington Monthy,' investigation, he and/or fellow neocon Harold Rhode met secretly in Europe with Ghorbanifar, the chief of Italy's military intelligence service, SISMI, and Lebanese rightists, to plan overthrowing the governments of Syria and Iran. SISMI and Ledeen were also involved in the Iraq-Niger uranium hoax that so embarrassed President George Bush.
Neocon attempts to blame the disaster they created in Iraq on CIA, to blame 9/11 on the FBI, and simmering anger over three decades of Israeli spying investigations that were squelched for political reasons, caused the security agencies to go after what a CIA veteran terms 'Washington's fifth column.
DAWN.COM

Pakistan's lone girl athlete in the Athens Olympics, Ms Sumaira Zahoor, has returned from Greece complaining that she was hurt by the "anti-Islamic" sentiment she experienced at the games. She was the only athlete who ran the 1,500 metres race in full track-suit. She was also last in her heat. The 24-year-old athlete from Rawalpindi was harassed by questions about running in trousers and felt that the criticism came her way because she was a Muslim and that those who asked the questions were against Islam.
After the terrorists in Iraq recently killed a number of Nepalese workers, Kathmandu witnessed angry mobs attacking the PIA office in the capital. A government official in Islamabad opined that this could have been instigated by RAW. In fact, a national Urdu daily carried the following comment by a highly regarded columnist: "Because Pakistan is a poor country its nationals are maltreated at the airports of countries like Turkey, Iran, Bangladesh and Jordan. Our passports are looked at with suspicion at these airports too. On August 31, 12 Nepalese were killed in Iraq by terrorists but back in Nepal people attacked the PIA office building. They did this because Pakistan is a poor country. They did not care that the terrorists who killed 12 Nepalese had also earlier killed Pakistanis."
Earlier, a Pakistani cricket team playing against an Indian counterpart in Kenya had to run the gauntlet of a Kenyan crowd that was clearly 'anti-Pakistan'. In the 1990s when the Taliban destroyed the great Bamyan Buddhas there were popular riots against the Muslim communities of Burma and Thailand. So the hatred undoubtedly exists in the aftermath of the wave of terrorism experienced by countries in Asia. Thailand is also guilty of the persecution of Thai Muslims in the south of the country.
But does this mean that the world is turning against Islam? Is Pakistan bearing the brunt of international anger because it is 'poor'? We must examine the facts pertaining to our international image before trying to understand why certain countries have reacted against us. As far as the terrorists in Iraq are concerned, they could be just anyone from among the various groups with revenge on their mind.
When the Bamyan Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban most of the Urdu press in Pakistan and our religious ministry offered the 'expert' view that since there were no Buddhists in Afghanistan the destruction was 'justified'. But there were Buddhists outside Afghanistan who did not like what had happened and took revenge on their own Muslim communities. There's more.
Why are the airports all over the world suspicious of our passports? Our own press has reported large-scale disappearance of tens of thousands of passports from our missions abroad and from the passport offices in half a dozen cities in Pakistan. Only last month our interior minister revealed that in all 21,741 passport copies had disappeared from the passport offices in Pakistan in the past five years. When Pakistanis overstay their welcome, when Pakistanis try and smuggle themselves into foreign countries, when Pakistanis shelter Al Qaeda terrorists, when Pakistani professionals give succor to wanted men on the run, when Pakistanis murder foreigners in their midst because of their religion or nationality, how should the world react?
DAILYTIMES.COM.PK

Presidential candidate Massooda Jalal (l) greets women wearing burqas after her speech at the start of campaigning for the Oct. 9 election in Kabul, Sept 7. (AP Photo)

On May Day, 2003, (US Defense) Secretary Rumsfeld announced in Kabul that the U.S. had "ended major combat activity" in Afghanistan and a period of stability was beckoning. His faithful executor, Hamid Karzai, sat at his side with some prophetically sagging flowers between the pair. The U.S. corporate media dutifully transcribed this "truth."
One year and some $40 billion later, an assessment can be made.
The following data presents a summary of what it looked like in an Afghanistan "after major combat activity." Between 1,350 and 1,600 people (including some in the Pakistani border areas where the Afghan conflict spilled over into) had been killed. Around 350 civilians had died in the continuing conflict. Around 55 U.S. and European soldiers had died (more than in the "combat" phase of the U.S. intervention), as had 500-600 Afghan soldiers and police. Is all this caused by mere "remnants" of a defeated Taliban?
The one striking "success" of the United States has been its ability to get Afghans to do the fighting and be killed. This year has been a difficult one for Afghan soldiers serving the Karzai regime, much more deadly than being a Taliban or Al Qaeda member. For every Euro-American soldier who died, 10-13 Afghan troops were killed. "Afghanization" has been carried out with a vengeance, repeating the U.S. effort at Vietnamization. For every U.S. soldier killed in the Afghan theater, the Taliban/Al Qaeda has suffered 7-9 deaths--a relatively low ratio by historical standards.
The low level of U.S. military deaths and the almost total absence of reporting in U.S. mainstream media about on-the-ground activity have served the Bush Administration well.
As Mike Whitney wrote, "It doesn't matter if the country is already a "basket case" just as long as the flag draped coffins aren't being dumped off in Dover twice a week."
How could the upcoming Afghan "elections" be sold to the American public if people were aware of the widespread fighting and death? The signifier must be detached from the signified. The new real is produced and marketed.
Does anyone really believe that on-the-ground reality in Afghanistan will change after October 9, 2004? October 9, 2004 will be for U.S. consumption, a veritable post-modern spectacle. Huge problems of vote-buying, intimidation, extremely biased resource availability to candidates (with Karzai and some Northern Alliance thugs holding the disproportionate amounts), the holding by one person of many voter cards, etc., but most importantly, how can a western-style election be realistically carried out in an environment where illiteracy rates are extremely high, and rampant violence abounds?
Indeed, the U.N. continually adjusts upwards its numbers of eligible voters! An Afghan voting card sells for $100 today. What did Karzai have to say at a press conference (attended to by Rumsfeld too)?
"If Afghans have two registration cards and if they would like to vote twice--well, welcome! This is an exercise in democracy. Let them exercise it twice."
Karl Rove and George Bush sorely need an "Afghan success story" (as Iraq remains in dire turmoil) to parade before the U.S. electorate one month before the November elections. Such parading has already begun with the Bush campaign advertisements referring to the "two more free nations"--Afghanistan and Iraq--competing in the Athens Olympics.
A further indicator of how Afghan elections are for U.S. consumption is revealed in U.S. pressures to have the voting take place before November. As Seymour Hersh put in early 2004, in an interview about a New Yorker article he wrote:
"The idea is that the White House will be able to say, 'Look, we can make democracy... we went to Afghanistan, we've got the war, and it's now a democratic country; it'll happen in Iraq, too.'"
COMMONDREAMS.ORG

After years of ridicule, the greens' jeremiads about declining oil production are now spilling from other people's mouths. Politicians and the press have at last picked up our arguments.
James Lovelock, the environmentalist famous for his "Gaia hypothesis", made this plea in The Independent: "I am a green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrong-headed objection to nuclear energy." "Green guru goes nuclear!" the headlines said.
They weren't quite right. Lovelock has always been an enthusiast. It is, in both senses, a generational thing. Fifty years ago, Britain was promised that nuclear power would generate "electricity too cheap to meter". That dream lodged in the minds of his generation: almost all the technology's big fans are over 60.
In July, Tony Blair was asked by the parliamentary liaison committee to answer Lovelock's points. "I have fought long and hard," he told the MPs, "both within my party and outside, to make sure that the nuclear option is not closed off... you cannot remove it from the agenda if you are serious about the issue of climate change."
Two weeks ago, Blair's former energy minister, Brian Wilson, bravely abandoning the convention that articles in the Observer should be written in English, assured us that "retrievability has been established as being deliverable.
In any case, waste is overwhelmingly a legacy issue. The waste produced by a new generation of nuclear stations would be incremental only at the margins." But there might be a clue in the title: "Face the facts. The future must be nuclear."
Last month, the directors of the Centre for Alternative Technology--which is supposed to be developing alternatives to nuclear power--argued that "the worst possible nuclear disasters are not as bad as the worst possible climate change disasters", and suggested "a modest revival of nuclear energy in sites where there are already nuclear installations...to sell the idea to the sceptics". Their premise is surely correct. Let us use the cruel moral calculus with which we became familiar during the arguments over the Iraq war. The daily discharges from a plant like Sellafield probably kill several dozen people a year. A meltdown could slaughter thousands, possibly tens of thousands. Climate change has already killed hundreds of thousands, will kill millions, and, if we don't do something pretty dramatic pretty soon, could kill billions.
Nuclear power isn't carbon-free. Mining uranium, and building and decommissioning power stations all use oil, and concrete releases carbon dioxide as it sets. But the total emissions, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, are tiny by comparison with the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.
And it may no longer be true to say that there is no safe means of disposing of nuclear waste. I have just read a technical report produced by the Finnish nuclear authority Posiva which, to my untrained eye, looks pretty convincing.
The spent fuel is set in cast iron, which is then encased in copper and dropped down a borehole. The borehole is filled with saturated bentonite, a kind of clay. Posiva's metallurgists suggest that under these conditions the copper barrier would be good for at least a million years.
Of course, what can be done is not the same as what will be done. There's a danger that Posiva's good example is used as a Potemkin village by the rest of the nuclear industry: a showcase project which creates the impression that the problem has been sorted out. We certainly can't expect Britain's nuclear generators to behave as responsibly as Finland's.
The moral calculus shifts a little, but still comes down on the side of nuclear power, if that is the only alternative to burning fossil fuel.
George Monbiot
MONBIOT.COM

Consider this: Singapore is among the most successful instances of nation-building in the post-colonial era. It is difficult to imagine a multiracial model startlingly superior to what was achieved in the space of three decades here. And yet, senior Singapore leaders are on record doubting if Singapore is yet a nation. A Singaporean state exists, a Singaporean identity is forming, but we are not there yet. How come?
Because a nation is not the same as a state. The latter refers to an institutional capacity 'to plan and execute policies and to enforce laws cleanly and transparently', as Professor Francis Fukuyama writes in his important recent book, State-Building: Governance And World Order In The 21st Century.
Or as sociologist Max Weber put it: A state is 'a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory'. A state that fails to establish this monopoly, cannot accomplish the various goals of modern government, from providing education to building transportation infrastructure, from regulating financial institutions to managing a stable currency.
A nation, on the other hand, is something larger than a state--'a community bound together by shared history and culture'. A matter more of shared sensibilities than institutions, a nation is the work of generations.
Given these facts, the first thing the international community should realise about the nation-building exercises it is undertaking in various parts of the world is that it is an impossible task.
Nobody from outside parachuting into Afghanistan or Iraq can convert these geographical entities into nations. Only Afghans or Iraqis can do that--and only after several generations, and only after they have constructed strong states.
It is possible, of course, for a nation or people to persist despite the absence of an effective state, as happened in the histories of old countries like France or China.
But that is not possible in the case of newly-created countries. There the trajectory is clear: State first, nation next--some time in the future. It is state-building, not nation-building, that should be engaging the United States and the international community in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
And learning to do it is going to be 'central to the future of the world order', Prof Fukuyama argues.
The professor specifies three distinct phases in state-building:
The post-conflict reconstruction stage, 'where state authority has collapsed completely and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up'. Here the issue is 'the short-term provision of stability through infusions of security forces, police, humanitarian relief and technical assistance to restore electricity, water' and so on;
Creating 'self-sustaining state institutions that can survive the withdrawal of outside intervention'; and
Strengthening weak states, 'where state authority exists in a reasonably stable form but cannot accomplish certain necessary state functions, like the protection of property rights or the provision of basic primary education'.
The US failed to draw on this institutional memory in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, this was due in part to the unilateral way in which the administration went into the war, and in part to the fact that the US approached state-building in an ad hoc fashion, with no one directing the effort. 'State-building is something needed, not just in collapsed or weak Third World states, but occasionally in Washington as well.'
STRAITSTIMES.ASIA1.COM.SG