Milestone reached Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth

The website of Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth (ae911truth.org) reports that 1000 architects and engineers have now signed the AE911T petition demanding of Congress a truly independent investigation (another 6158 individuals from other professions have also signed this petition as of today).

I would like to extent my heartfelt congratulations and gratitude to all the folks at AE911T for having reached this milestone, in particular since their work as been the most influential in transforming me from a longtime "911 agnostic" into a committed "911 truther".

And to all of you who still cannot believe that "9/11 was in inside job" I will say the following: keep doubting, but keep an open mind and keep educating yourself about what happened on that day. Please remember this simple truth:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Neocon citadel arises in Washington, DC

Neocon citadel arises in Washington, DC

Like the "Death Star" in Star Wars, a new building is taking shape in downtown Washington, DC on Constitution Avenue. The U.S. taxpayer-funded, but non-profit and tax-exempt, U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), an Orwellian name for an institution that will house the leading pro-war neoconservatives and American expansionists and hegemonists, is nearing completion between the U.S. Department of State and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Just a few blocks away from the future citadel for neocons in Washington is the Federal Reserve Bank. The proximity of the USIP to "The Fed" is sure to give rise to further popular opposition to the secretive cabals that run Washington.

The US Institute of Peace building had an original construction cost of $108 million -- not including land acquisition costs. The building was designed by Moshe Safdie and Associates of Somerville, Massachusetts. Moshe Safdie was born in Haifa and he has Israeli, U.S., and Canadian citizenship. His firm maintains offices in Toronto and Jerusalem, in addition to Somerville. Safdie was a generous donor to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

The USIP will serve as a virtual State Department for neoconservatives who will bird-dog its larger neighbor at Foggy Bottom to second guess any U.S. foreign policy effort that appears to contradict USIP's anti-Islamic and pro-Israel policies. A past board member of USIP is the noted Zionist polemicist Richard Pipes who has made no secret of his dislike for Arabs and Muslims and is a promoter of the neocon "Clash of Civilizations" line.

USIP, when completed, will also act as an alternate virtual United Nations, bringing together neocon political leaders from around the world to push the corporate fascist agenda that serves as the center piece of neo-conservative ideology. Many of the USIP staff push the notion that the United States must wage "World War IV" against Islam. The USIP's staff includes many individuals who have long-standing links to such neocon organizations as the American Enterprise Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Committee for a Free Lebanon, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Anti-Defamation League, Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, American Jewish Committee, Manhattan Institute, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, as well as Henry Kissinger/George Soros-linked globalist organizations as the Asia Society, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Woodrow Wilson Center, and Soros's Open Society Institute.

The USIP will also ensure full employment for Washington's cadre of ex-neocon officials in past administrations, Republican and Democratic.

In the last six months, USIP has been pushing neocon policy initiatives for Afghanistan, Somalia, Liberia, Colombia, Lebanon, Iran, Guinea, Russia, Sudan, Iraq, Kosovo, Haiti, Bosnia, Pakistan, and North Korea.

One agenda item that is not found on USIP's marquee is Israel's atrocities against Gaza and the failure of Israel to honestly engage in the peace process. Considering who is involved with USIP, there is little wonder why Israel is normally a "no-go" zone.

To its credit, the libertarian Cato Institute has cited the USIP and its citadel as too costly and it has called for the organization's abolishment. This editor has a better idea for the USIP building -- turn it into a war crimes tribunal building that will hold trials for some of the very people who hope to soon occupy it to formulate future illegal wars.

The Israeli and CIA Jihad connections

Islamic fundamentalist militants are the enemies of Israel and Western governments, right? Think again.

Once upon a time, the CIA trained, financed and supported Osama bin Laden and his mujahidin networks in Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the end of the Cold War, bin Laden turned against the West and we no longer had any use for him. His persistent terrorist attacks against us for more than a decade, culminating in 9/11, provoked our own response, in the form of the ‘War on Terror’. This is the official narrative. And it’s false. Not only did Western intelligence services continue to foster Islamist extremist and terrorist groups connected to al-Qaeda after the Cold War; they continued to do so even after 9/11.

The CIA’s jihad

The story begins in the summer of 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, when the CIA had already begun financing elements of an emerging Islamist mujahidin force inside Afghanistan. The idea, according to former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA Director Robert Gates, was to increase the probability of a Soviet invasion, and entrap ‘the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire’.¹

Osama bin Laden arrived in the country later that year, sent by then-Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal, where he set up the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) which helped finance, recruit and train mujahidin fighters.² Bin Laden, the MAK, and the Afghan mujahidin in total received about half a billion dollars a year from the CIA, and roughly the same from the Saudis, funnelled through Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).³

By around 1988, as Jane’s Defence Weekly reports, ‘with US knowledge, Bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across at least 26 countries’.⁴ US and Western intelligence agencies facilitated this process, seeing rightwing Islamist movements as a counterweight to Communist, leftwing and nationalist political trends. They supported the Saudis and other Gulf states, as well as Pakistan, Turkey and Azerbaijan among others, in proliferating Islamist extremist institutions in far-flung countries such as Algeria, Yemen, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Funding for these activities was intertwined with the establishment of organized criminal financial centres in Malaysia, Madagascar, South Africa, Nigeria, Latin America, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Turkestan, and elsewhere.⁵

Islamism and the CIA’s destabilization doctrine

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in particular in 1991 when the Saudis accepted the stationing of 300,000 US troops in the country due to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Osama bin Laden reportedly turned against his former masters in Riyadh and Washington. Since then, bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network became our enemy, targeting Western citizens and interests throughout the 1990s, culminating in the most devastating strike of all in the form of the 9/11 atrocities in the US.

Unfortunately, this is where the official story begins to break down. Because after 1991, Islamists affiliated to bin Laden and al-Qaeda continued to receive selective support from Western intelligence services. The policy was alluded to by Graham Fuller, former Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence, when he stated: ‘The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvellously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.’⁶

Afghanistan, Big Oil and the Taliban

Throughout the 1990s, the selective US intelligence sponsorship of Islamist extremist networks was linked not simply to destabilizing potential Russian and Chinese influence, but further to securing US-led Western control over strategic energy reserves. When bin Laden moved from Sudan to Afghanistan in June 1996, the State Department warned that the move ‘could prove more dangerous to US interests’, granting him ‘the capability to support individuals and groups who have the motive and wherewithal to attack US interests almost worldwide’.⁷ He had been offered protection by Pakistan in May on condition that he align his mujahidin forces with the Taliban. The new al-Qaeda-Taliban alliance was reportedly blessed by the Saudis.⁸

Yet as the respected Pakistani correspondent Ahmed Rashid reported, US intelligence supported the Taliban as a vehicle of regional influence at least between 1994 and 1998. This policy continued up to the year 2000, despite growing cautions. Thus, when the Taliban conquered Kabul in 1996, a State Department spokesperson explained that the US found ‘nothing objectionable’ in the event. One year later, a US diplomat commented: ‘The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis… There will be Aramco (consortium of oil companies controlling Saudi oil), pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.’⁹

Continued US sponsorship of the al-Qaeda-Taliban nexus in Afghanistan was confirmed as late as 2000 in Congressional hearings. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on South Asia, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher – former White House Special Assistant to President Reagan and now Senior Member of the House International Relations Committee – declared that ‘this administration has a covert policy that has empowered the Taliban and enabled this brutal movement to hold on to power’. The assumption is that ‘the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan’.¹⁰ US companies involved in the project included UNOCAL and ENRON. As early as May 1996, UNOCAL had officially announced plans to build a pipeline to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through western Afghanistan.

US officials held several meetings with the Taliban from 2000 to summer 2001, in an effort to get the Taliban to agree to a joint federal government with their local enemies, the Northern Alliance, promising financial aid and international legitimacy if the deal was struck. By then, US policymakers had belatedly concluded that the Taliban would never bring the stability needed for the pipeline project. According to Pakistani Foreign Minister Niaz Naik, who was present at the meetings, US officials threatened the Taliban with military action if they failed to comply with the federalization plan. Even the date of threatened military action, October 2001, was proposed. Needless to say, the Taliban rejected the plan.¹¹ So months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a war on Afghanistan was already on the table. Jean-Charles Brisard, a former French intelligence officer, thus speculates that 9/11 may have been a pre-emptive attack by al-Qaeda to head off the declared US military invasion of Afghanistan.¹²

There is still keen interest in the pipeline. ‘Since the US-led offensive that ousted the Taliban from power,’ reported Forbes in 2005, ‘the project has been revived and drawn strong US support’ as it would allow the Central Asian republics to export energy to Western markets ‘without relying on Russian routes’. Then-US Ambassador to Turkmenistan Ann Jacobsen noted that: ‘We are seriously looking at the project, and it is quite possible that American companies will join it.’¹³ The problem remains that the southern section of the proposed pipeline runs through territory still de facto controlled by Taliban forces.

Mega Oil and mujahidin from the Balkans to the Caucasus

Unfortunately, we now know that US flirtations with the al-Qaeda-Taliban nexus in Afghanistan throughout the 1990s were only one moment in a much wider covert US geostrategy to secure control over strategic energy resources across the Eurasian continent, by co-opting Islamist networks affiliated with bin Laden.

In 1991, the first Bush Administration wanted an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan, across the Caucasus, to Turkey. That year, three US Air Force officers, Richard Secord (a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs), Heinie Aderholt and Ed Dearborn, landed in Baku, and set up a front company, ‘MEGA Oil’. They were veterans of previous CIA covert operations in Laos and later with Lt. Col. Oliver North’s Contra scandal. In Azerbaijan, they setup an airline to secretly fly hundreds of al-Qaeda mujahidin from Afghanistan into Azerbaijan. By 1993, MEGA Oil had recruited and armed 2,000 mujahidin, converting Baku into a base for regional jihadi operations.¹⁴

The covert operation contributed to the military coup that toppled elected president Abulfaz Elchibey that year, and installed US puppet Heidar Aliyev. A secret Turkish intelligence report leaked to the Sunday Times confirmed that ‘two petrol giants, BP and Amoco, British and American respectively, which together form the AIOC (Azerbaijan International Oil Consortium), are behind the coup d’état.¹⁵

From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon flew thousands of al-Qaeda mujahidin from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. The mujahidin were ‘accompanied by US Special Forces equipped with high-tech communications equipment,’ according to intelligence sources. Bin Laden’s mercenaries were used as shock troops by the Pentagon ‘to coordinate and support Bosnian Muslim offensives’.¹⁶

The pattern continued in Kosovo, where ethnic violence broke out between Albanians and Serbs. In 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization financed by bin Laden and the heroin trade. Bin Laden had sent a senior lieutenant, Muhammed al-Zawahiri (brother of al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri), to lead an élite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict. He had direct radio contact with NATO leadership. Indeed, British SAS and American Delta Force instructors were training KLA fighters as early as 1996. The CIA supplied military assistance up to and during the 1999 bombing campaign, including military training manuals and field advice, under the cover of OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) ceasefire monitors.¹⁷

After the Kosovo War, when the KLA switched operations to Macedonia under the banner of the National Liberation Army (NLA), its links with al-Qaeda were as strong as ever according to US, Macedonian, Albanian and Yugoslav intelligence sources. Yet by 2001, Canadian military correspondent Scott Taylor reported after a visit to Tetovo that ‘there is no denying the massive amount of material and expertise supplied by NATO to the guerrillas’.¹⁸

So why the Balkans? Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, then-commander of NATO troops in the region, summed it up in 1999: ‘We will certainly stay here for a long time in order to guarantee the safety of the energy corridors which cross Macedonia.’ The General was talking about the Trans-Balkan pipeline passing through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania, planned to be a primary route to the West for Central Asian oil and gas.¹⁹

Around the same time, US intelligence stepped up sponsorship of al-Qaeda mujahidin in Chechnya. Chechnya is traditionally a predominantly Sufi society, yet the increasing encroachment of US-sponsored mujahidin operatives linked to Osama bin Laden transformed the character of the Chechen resistance movement, empowering al-Qaeda’s hardline Islamist ideology. US intelligence ties had been established in the early 1990s in Baku under Dick Secord’s operation, where mujahidin activities had quickly extended into Dagestan and Chechnya, turning Baku into a shipping point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia.²⁰

From the mid-1990s, bin Laden funded Chechen guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev and Omar ibn al-Khattab to the tune of several millions of dollars per month, sidelining the moderate Chechen majority.²¹ US intelligence remained deeply involved until the end of the decade. According to Yossef Bodanksy, then-Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Washington was actively involved in ‘yet another anti-Russian jihad, ‘seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces’. US Government officials participated in ‘a formal meeting in Azerbaijan’ in December 1999 ‘in which specific programmes for the training and equipping of mujahidin from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon’, culminating in ‘Washington’s tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and US “private security companies”... to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing jihad for a long time.’ The US saw the sponsorship of ‘Islamist jihad in the Caucasus’ as a way to ‘deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiralling violence and terrorism’.²²

Algeria – state terrorism in disguise

Parallel covert operations were deployed in the same period in Algeria, where the army cancelled national democratic elections in 1992 that would have brought the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) to power in a landslide victory. Tens of thousands of FIS voters were rounded up into detention camps in the Sahara, while the FIS and other Islamist political parties were banned. Not long after the coup, hundreds of civilians were being mysteriously massacred by an unknown terrorist group, identified by the Algerian junta as a radical offshoot of the FIS calling itself the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). The GIA was formed largely of Algerian veterans of bin Laden’s mujahidin forces in Afghanistan who had returned in the late 1980s.²³ To date, the total death toll from the massacres by the GIA is an estimated 150,000 civilians.²⁴

Yet in the late 1990s, evidence began to emerge from dissident Algerian Government and intelligence sources that the GIA atrocities were in fact perpetrated by the state. ‘Yussuf-Joseph’, a career secret agent in Algeria’s sécurité militaire for 14 years, defected to Britain in 1997 and told the Guardian that civilian massacres in Algeria, blamed on the GIA, were ‘the work of secret police and army death squads… not Islamic extremists’. GIA terrorism was ‘orchestrated’ by ‘Mohammed Mediane, head of the Algerian secret service’, and ‘General Smain Lamari’, head of ‘the counter intelligence agency’. According to Joseph: ‘The GIA is a pure product of Smain’s secret service. I used to read all the secret telexes. I know that the GIA has been infiltrated and manipulated by the Government. The GIA has been completely turned by the Government… In 1992 Smain created a special group, L’Escadron de la Mort (the Squadron of Death)... The death squads organize the massacres... The FIS aren’t doing the massacres.’

Joseph also confirmed that Algerian intelligence agents organized ‘at least’ two of the bombs in Paris in summer 1995. ‘The operation was run by Colonel Souames Mahmoud, alias Habib, head of the secret service at the Algerian embassy in Paris.’ Joseph’s testimony has been corroborated by numerous defectors from the Algerian secret services.²⁵

Western intelligence agencies are implicated. Secret British Foreign Office documents revealed in a terrorist trial in 2000 showed that ‘British intelligence believed the Algerian Government was involved in atrocities, contradicting the view the Government was claiming in public’. The documents referred to the ‘manipulation of the GIA being used as a cover to carry out their own operations’, and that ‘there was no evidence to link 1995 Paris bombings to Algerian militants’.²⁶

Algeria has the fifth largest reserves of natural gas in the world, and is the second largest gas exporter, with 130 trillion proven natural gas reserves. It ranks fourteenth for oil reserves, with official estimates at 9.2 billion barrels. Approximately 90 per cent of Algeria’s crude oil exports go to Western Europe, including Britain, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. Algeria’s major trading partners are Italy, France, the United States, Germany, and Spain.

Currently, the militant Algerian splinter group, the al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb – formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) – plays a predominant role in regional terrorist violence. Yet in a series of extensive analyses for the Review of African Political Economy, social anthropologist Dr Jeremy Keenan – Director of Sahara Studies at the University of East Anglia – documents ‘an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that the alleged spread of terrorist activities across much of the Sahelian Sahara, has indeed been an elaborate deception on the part of US and Algerian military intelligence services’. He discusses evidence that an al-Qaeda hostage-taking of European tourists in early 2003 ‘was initiated and orchestrated by elements within the Algerian military establishment’, an operation ‘condoned by the US’, and that al-Qaeda leader Ammar Saifi (also known as Abderazzak El Para, or ‘the Maghreb’s bin Laden’) ‘was “turned” by the Algerian security forces in January 2003’.²⁷

Energy hegemony is a key priority. Reported al-Qaeda activity in North Africa has focused on oil-rich nations, particularly the Niger Delta, Nigeria, and Chad. Thus, in July 2003, Keenan reports, under US auspices Algeria, Chad, Niger and Nigeria ‘signed a co-operation agreement on counter-terrorism that effectively joined the two oil-rich sides of the Sahara together in a complex of security arrangements whose architecture is American’. This has now evolved into the $500 million Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative, in which Algeria plays a pivotal role in US plans for future regional military deployment. The region-wide security arrangement coincides with the inauguration of a $6 billion World Bank project, the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline.²⁸

Islamist extremism and the Israeli connection

Curiously, Israel has played a key role in some of these policies, starting with the involvement of Congressman Charlie Wilson, who used his position in the House Select Committee on Intelligence, gained with the support of then Senator Dick Cheney, to ramp up billions of dollars’ worth of support for both Israel and the Afghan mujahidin.²⁹ Gust Avracotos, the CIA’s Station Chief in Islamabad, commented that Wilson brought ‘the Israelis into the CIA’s Muslim jihad’, opening opportunities for Mossad penetration of the ISI and al-Qaeda and securing Israeli arms contracts and intelligence ties with Pakistan.³⁰

Closer to home, Israel played a very similar game in its ambiguous relationship to Hamas. US Government and intelligence sources confirm that Israel provided direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas in the late 1970s as a counterbalance to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).³¹ According to the Israeli military affairs experts Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, at the time of the first Intifadah, Fatah ‘suspected the Israelis of a plot first to let Hamas gather strength and then to unleash it against the PLO, turning the uprising into a civil war... many Israeli staff officers believed that the rise of fundamentalism in Gaza could be exploited to weaken the power of the PLO’.³²

Israeli support for Hamas reportedly continued even after the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993, during the period of some of the worst suicide bombings.³³ Even the late Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yassir Arafat said in 2001 that Hamas ‘continued to benefit from permits and authorizations, while we have been limited, even [for permits] to build a tomato factory... Some collaborationists of Israel are involved in these [terrorist] attacks.’³⁴

Indeed, there are indications that the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Abu Hanoud in November 2001 was a ploy to provoke more terror bombings. Three months earlier, the Israeli Insider reported Ariel Sharon’s plan for an all-out attack on the PA to permanently destroy its infrastructure, noting that the plan would only ‘be launched immediately following the next high-casualty suicide bombing’ – which was later provoked by Israel’s extrajudicial killing of Hanoud. As Israeli military security analyst Alex Fishman noted: ‘Whoever gave a green light to this act of liquidation knew full well that he was thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman’s agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Under that agreement, Hamas was to avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line (pre-1967 border), having come to the understanding that it would be better not to play into Israel’s hands by mass attacks on its population centres. This understanding was, however, shattered by the assassination the day before yesterday – and whoever decided upon the liquidation of Abu knew in advance that that would be the price. The subject had been extensively discussed both by the military and the political echelon, before it was decided to carry out the liquidation.’³⁵

Elements of the Israeli far-right, including senior cabinet officials, recognized that the plan to destroy the PA would facilitate the rise of Hamas. In an Israeli Cabinet meeting in December 2001, for instance, one minister declared: ‘Between Hamas and Arafat, I prefer Hamas.’ He added that Arafat is a ‘terrorist in a diplomat’s suit, while Hamas can be hit unmercifully… there won’t be any international protests’.³⁶

Ties with terror

Islamist terrorism cannot be understood without acknowledging the extent to which its networks are being used by Western military intelligence services, both to control strategic energy resources and to counter their geopolitical rivals. Even now, nearly a decade after 9/11, covert sponsorship of al-Qaeda networks continues. In recent dispatches for the New Yorker, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh cites US Government and intelligence officials’ confirmation that the CIA and the Pentagon have funnelled millions of dollars via Saudi Arabia to al-Qaeda affiliated Sunni extremist groups, across the Middle East and Central Asia. The policy, which Hersh says began in 2003, has spilled over into regions like Iraq and Lebanon, fuelling Sunni-Shi’a sectarian conflict.³⁷ The programme is part of a drive to counter Iranian Shi’a influence in the region. In early 2008, a US Presidential Finding to Congress corroborated Hersh’s reporting, affirming CIA funding worth $400 million to diverse anti-Shi’a extremist and terrorist groups. This was not contested by any Democratic members of the House.³⁸ Now, President Obama has retained Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, as his own. Yet Gates was the architect of the covert strategy against Iran. To date, Obama has given no indication that this strategy will change. The history outlined here throws into doubt our entire understanding of the ‘war on terror’. How can we fight a war against an enemy that our own governments are covertly financing for short-sighted geopolitical interests?

If the ‘war on terror’ is to end, it won’t be won by fighting the next futile oil war. It will be won at home by holding the secretive structures of government to account and prosecuting officials for aiding and abetting terrorism – whether knowingly or by criminal negligence. Ultimately only this will rein in the ‘security’ agencies that foster the ‘enemy’ we are supposed to be fighting.

This is an extended version of the article which appeared in the October 2009 issue of NI, Islam in Power.

How To Destabalize Countries -

Author of The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption.

"...there's no question in my mind that both Jaime Roldos and Omar Torrijos were assassinated by CIA-sponsored jackals. When we economic hit men failed to bring these people around, to corrupt these presidents, we knew that standing in the shadows were the jackals. And they either overthrew governments or assassinated leaders. And so, although it was deeply, deeply disturbing to me, I was not terribly surprised when this happened.

I liked both of these men tremendously. I knew Torrijos especially well and was a great admirer of his. And I was caught in this very, very difficult situation, because my job was to corrupt him, and I really respected the fact that he wouldn't be corrupted. It gave me great hope. In fact, it changed my life. It got me out of being an economic hit man. On the other hand, I knew that if I wasn't able to corrupt him, something dire was likely to happen."

The Known Universe

The Known Universe by AMNH

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang.

Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.

The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010...

http://aslwww.cr.usgs.gov/Seismic_Data/

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.php

http://cryptome.org/haarp-gun.htm

For more information visit http://www.amnh.org

Discover the Universe. Download the Digital Universe Atlas.

h/t: spacefuture

False flags attacks common but rarely reported in the corporate media

False flags attacks common but rarely reported in the corporate media

Revelations about a shadowy right-wing group called Ergenekon participating with Turkish military and intelligence elements in “false flag” terrorist attacks in order to bring down the Turkish government are nothing new and are, in fact, a normal tactic used by intelligence services. However, the term “false flag” has been irresponsibly relegated to the arena of “conspiracy theories” by a corporate media answering to their own hidden agendas.

In 1996, then-South African Deputy President Thabo Mbeki told the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the apartheid government carried out “false flag” terrorist attacks that were then attributed to the African National Congress (ANC), which had a policy of not targeting civilians in its battle with the apartheid regime. The horrible execution method of “necklacing,” putting a burning tire over the necks of victims that would burn them to death, was carried out by apartheid agents provocateurs to damage the reputation of the ANC, Mbeki told the commission.

Some of the gruesome videotaped beheadings carried out on Westerners in Iraq may also have been carried out by agents provocateurs on the payroll of U.S. and other intelligence services to generate sympathy for the U.S.-led occupation of the country and pin blame on the Iraqi insurgents.

Many observers point out that Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish national who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, may have been unwittingly used by Western intelligence in order to foment a Polish insurrection against the Soviet Union. Agca thought at various times he was working for the Soviets, Bulgaria, or Iran through the CIA. Turkish Interior Minister Hussan Gunes, who investigated Agca, said he thought Agca was involved in an attempt to provoke an uprising in Poland and cut it off from the Warsaw Pact.

The most infamous and documented U.S. false flag operation was the proposed Operation Northwoods, a plan hatched by the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy administration in 1962 that included terrorist attacks against ships and passenger planes, claiming Cuba was behind them and providing a pretext for a U.S. invasion of Cuba.

In 1967, Israel attacked the National Security Agency intelligence ship, the U.S.S. Liberty, hoping the Americans would believe Egypt carried out the attack, prompting a U.S. military strike on Egypt, with which Israel was fighting the Six Day War. The Israeli operation was reportedly code-named Operation Cyanide.

More recently, Ikram Yabukov, a former Uzbek National Security Service (SNB) major, said the government of President Islam Karimov carrid out a number of false flag terrorist attacks and then blamed them on Islamist extremists to win support at home and abroad. Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray validated Yabukov’s claims. Uzbekistan was an early U.S. coalition partner in the so-called “Global War on Terrorism” following the 9/11 attacks.

Yakobov also claimed that many Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) leaders, designated terrorists by the U.S. State Department, were nurtured by the Uzbek government, which supported their bombings in Tashkent and the 2005 Andijon uprising, which killed more than 1,500 people. In another false flag, Yakubov said the SNB engineered a 2004 passenger plane crash in Tashkent that killed senior UN official in Uzbekistan Richard Conroy. Conroy apparently had information linking Karimov to trafficking of drugs and women forced abroad into prostitution.

Last month, three German BND intelligence agents were arrested by Kosovo authorities after they were accused of throwing a bomb at the European Union office in Pristina, the Kosovo capital. The previously unheard of Army of the Republic of Kosovo claimed responsibility for the attack. The BND believes that their agents were fingered by corrupt Kosovo politicians who were the actual perpetrators of the attack on the EU building. The Germans are aware that the Kosovo government, which is riddled with criminals of every strike, takes its orders from the United States.

What is certain is that “false flag” operations run throughout history. There is new evidence that Ergenekon key players are supported by certain elements in Utah. Ironically, one of the most dastardly uses of the false flag attack was by Mormon settlers in Utah who preyed upon California-bound wagon trains. One such attack, the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, saw 120 California-bound men, women, and children massacred by Mormon militiamen who left Indian artifacts at the crime scene to make authorities believe the wagon train had been beset upon by Indians.

Report: 2000 Iraqi Christians Killed, 1.5 Million Evicted Since 2003

On Christmas Eve, the Rev. Thaer al-Sheik offered communion to a dwindling congregation at Sacred Heart Church in Baghdad.

Under the tutelage of US forces and zionist covert forces.....

Some 1968 Christians Killed In Iraq Since 2003 – Survey -- Aswat al-Iraq

SULAIMANIYA / Aswat al-Iraq: Around 1,968 Christians were killed by gunmen in Iraq since March 2003, head of the Chaldean Cultural Association for Peace in Iraq said on Saturday.

“Christians in Iraq are going through miserable conditions,” Hawal Ziqiya Masho told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

According to the association’s survey, property of at least 500,000 Christians were taken away and 200,000 Christians were forced to pay extortion money, while dozens others were kidnapped then released for ransom.

“Before 2003, there were around 2.1 million Christians in Iraq, but now there are not more than 500,000 of them,” Masho said.

Read more ....

As usual , Just some news that was ignored by the Western media this Christmas......?????

About the Lie of the Century?

Obama should get off his butt and insist upon war crimes trials of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condo Rice. That Iraq had WMD was a bald faced lie to justify the seizure of Middle East oil fields! Ergo --every Iraqi death following is one count in a WAR CRIMES INDICTMENT on the scale of those charged to Adolph Hitler and high mucky mucks in the murderous Third Reich.

TITLE 18 >(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.-- PART I > CHAPTER 118 > § 2441, War crimes

I say let the trials begin with George W. Bush who believed himself above the law and that the US Constitution was just a 'goddamned piece of paper'!

The government official who wrote the first draft of the "dodgy dossier" that helped propel Britain into war in Iraq today admits, "We were wrong."John Williams, a former Foreign Office aide, said last night that publication of his document would expose how members of Tony Blair's team were locked in a mindset that made military action inevitable.On Wednesday, ministers will hit a deadline for publishing the 2002 document, after years of resistance.The Williams draft was written in September 2002, only days after Mr Blair, then Prime Minister, announced that the Government would publish a dossier of intelligence showing that Saddam Hussein threatened the world with his weapons.The draft was not disclosed at the Hutton inquiry into the death in 2003 of the former Iraq arms inspector David Kelly. The scientist had suggested the dossier was exaggerated to justify the UK joining the 2003 invasion.--'Dodgy dossier' was 'wrong', its author says, The Independant

According to the Times of London, Ministers had been warned in July 2002 that it "had no choice but to find a way" of making the American-led invasion of Iraq legal. In other words, the government in Britain KNEW that what Bush was doing in and to Iraq was a prosecutable war crime but, instead of doing the right thing, Britain sought to 'make it legal'. The very phrase --'to make it legal' --speaks to guilt and pre-meditation of both the US government of George W. Bush and the British government of Tony Blair in whom so many hopes had been invested, later dashed by the corrupting influences of the worst and most criminal White House in US history.

Damn Liars and War Criminals!

If the nation had wanted another eight years of war, a total of some twenty years of quagmire, war crimes and other atrocities. it might have put two idiots in the White House --John McCain and the even stupider Sarah Palin.

Rather, the nation wanted change and expressed that hope by electing an articulate man of substance. Committing the nation to an quaqmire well underway is NOT what the nation voted for. Another eight years of Bush's war crime is NOT the path the US should be on if it wishes to restore its blackened image throughout the world.

Nope! No WMD under the podium!

Instead of disengaging from Afghanistan, Obama escalates war

Instead of disengaging from Afghanistan, Obama escalates war

Huh, did I hear Obama’s speech right? We’re sending 30,000 troops at a cost of $30 billion to Afghanistan, bringing the troop level to over 100,000. But we’re doing all this to give ourselves time to train the Afghan Security Forces and the Pakistan Forces, as well, who will then root out remaining Al Qaeda and Taliban members in both countries. All this will happen over the next 18 months, so that by Christmas troops can start deploying. Who’s he kidding?

Of course, our troops are going to befriend village chiefs, like the chiefs are dying to talk with us, literally, as we continue pounding their country. All this, as we ask them to point out Taliban hangouts to us for their own good. Of course, with the example of Iraq as to what can happen to their country, this should really be an incentive.

President Obama does mention what a botched mess Iraq was, but nevertheless Mother America’s work is never done. It’s a dirty job and somebody’s gotta do it. So it might as well be us, because that’s been our job since WW II and we’ve spilled blood all over the place to show once more our “American Exceptionalism.”

Oh, and we’re doing this ultimately to prevent “the wrong people” from getting their hands on Pakistan’s nukes with no mention of India’s or Israel’s nuclear arsenals.

Uh huh! But this is part of our national destiny to be World Cop, another word for Empire. And by the way, Afghanistan and Pakistan are supposedly the places that harbored the people who committed 9/11 and killed thousands of our people and still are trying to sting us here and there. So, that’s why we should shore up Afghans’ and Pakistanis’ safety, and our security, which is at stake, too? Is that another agenda, as well?

Also, because AfPak is “the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by Al Qaeda,” we can expect more to come if we don’t “act now” and accept this offer we can’t refuse. Our soldiers are not there, the Afghans and Pakistanis should know, as occupiers but as helpers, and to help ourselves to the dope, the oil, the pipelines and the money, not to mention keeping a path through Pakistan to China for the black gold to flow. If this ain’t geopolitical, it’s a waste of time. Of course, “the burden is not just ours.” Our allies will help. England is sending an additional 500 troops. Piece of cake.

Then, too, we’ll have the UN, our partners, to work on a “more effective civilian strategy” so that the Afghan government can “take advantage of improved security.” It’s sort of like paying for protection, paying with your country, your freedom, your life. And the Afghans will be “rated for performance” like New York City school teachers. I mean, no more blank checks, except to the Pentagon, Blackwater, and Israel. But no more single bids. There will be transparency. We’re “building a partnership” on a “foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect, and mutual trust.” And mutual baloney.

Back home, we will be building a tower of debt, trying to forget about health care reform and bringing back derivatives with a bang, to give us a “double-dip” recession. That’s our manifest destiny, folks.

And as the camera scanned over the West Point cadets, I did not see the usual ear-to-ear grins, the fists clenched to get at them, the jaws clenching with commitment. I saw serious faces, guys and gals seeing their lives fly out the window like birds from a coop. It was like they were watching a bad movie, called Vietnam Redux, in which ratcheting up troop levels was always the answer to why we were failing. And the more troops we sent, the more came home in body bags, or out of their minds on drugs, or shot to pieces and barely walking. Sound familiar?

But now we have Obama’s “three core elements of our strategy: a military effort to create conditions for a transition; a ‘civilian surge’ that reinforces positive action; and an effective partnership with Pakistan.” Just like that 1, 2, and 3! Got it, kids?

Yes, the president said, “Unlike Vietnam we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our actions.” I’d love to see the list, their troop and financial commitments, thank you. He also said, “Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.” Then, why will we have a hundred thousand troops there? Well, I guess “to keep the pressure on al Qaeda (CIA brand name copyrighted),” which might “create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.” Oh gosh, no.

Gee, I’ll bet George W. Bush is sitting back home in Texas, slapping his knee, saying, “Sock it to ’em, Obie. That’s the way I like it, uh huh, talk that terrist stuff. It always gets them. Nothin’ like a little, no, a lot of terrist fear.”

And then there was President Obama referencing President Eisenhower who said, “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.” Well, Ike must be rolling over in his grave, seeing the national debt in the trillions, health care hemorrhaging money thanks to the insurance trust, the economy on the edge, millions of jobs lost to offshore outsourcing, a recent gift of one billion dollars made to India for outsourcing development projects. Can you friggin’ believe that, Ike?

This was the President Eisenhower who warned of the military-industrial-complex, of the danger of keeping standing armies, and how they all get in bed with each other to screw the rest of us. Yes, Eisenhower, the West-Pointer from Kansas, whose last home was at Gettysburg, probably to remind him of the horrors of war, which he witnessed in mega-doses. What an obscenity to even mention that man’s name in this buggered speech, which sounded like Rahm Emanuel wrote it.

Especially this line: “ . . . America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars and prevent conflict [with a global swath of military bases]. We will have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power [not sloppy with that pinpoint bombing’s collateral damage of civilians, men, women and children]. Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold -- whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere [as surrogates of the CIA] -- they must be confronted with growing pressure and strong partnerships.” He just couldn’t resist the phony rhetoric.

He went on: “We will have to take away the tools of mass destruction . . .” Gee, where have I heard that one before? Could it be, Iraq? And there were no WMD there, nada. And we attacked it anyway. Hey, what the hell, we got all these soldiers, planes, guns, bombs, generals. We have to do something with them. So let’s shock and awe them. But remember, “true security will never come from an endless race for ever more destructive weapons -- true security will come from those who reject them.” Those who reject them are dead, like the citizens of Gaza, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Beirut, Mylai, Gulf I, and so on.

Yes, but “Our union was founded in resistance to oppression . . .” and 246 years of slavery. How is that forgotten? “We do not seek to occupy other nations.” Then why the ring-around-the-world-military-bases? Only to protect oil fields, pipelines, private plantations, and multi-national corporations whose needs and laws supersede those of our own nation? And maybe we’re not as innocent now “as when Roosevelt was president. Yet we are still heirs to a noble struggle for freedom.” That’s why we had all those killer armies left behind in Europe post WW II, Operation Gladio, to make sure freedom reigned, and any progressive movement to help the people not the elites was doomed to destruction. C’mon, man, you’re yanking my chain, talking to me like a 3-year old.

And by the way, is this story by noted Washington investigative reporter Wayne Madsen true: New Details on Obama’s CIA front employer. It reads, “WMR has obtained additional details on Business International Corporation (BIC), the CIA front company where President Obama spent a year working after graduating from Columbia University in 1983.

“BIC used journalists as non-official cover (NOC) agents around the world. The firm published weekly and fortnightly newsletters for business executives, including Business International, Business Europe, Business Latin America, and Business Asia.

“On February 24, 2009, WMR reported: ‘For one year, Obama worked as a researcher in BIC’s financial services division where he wrote for two BIC publications, Financing Foreign Operations and Business International Money Report, a weekly newsletter.

“An informed source has told WMR that Obama’s tuition debt at Columbia was paid off by BIC. In addition, WMR has learned that when Obama lived in Indonesia with his mother and his adoptive father Lolo Soetoro, the 20-year-old Obama, who was known as ‘Barry Soetoro,’ traveled to Pakistan in 1981 and was hosted by the family of Muhammadmian Soomro, a Pakistani Sindhi who became acting president of Pakistan after the resignation of General Pervez Musharraf on August 18, 2008.

“WMR was told that the Obama/Soetoro trip to Pakistan, ostensibly to go ‘partridge hunting’ with the Soomros, related to unknown CIA business. The covert CIA program to assist the Afghan mujaheddin was already well underway at the time and Pakistan was the major base of operations for the CIA’s support . . . BIC had long been associated with CIA activities since being founded by Eldridge Haynes, a self-professed liberal Democrat. The BIC headquarters was located at the prestigious address of 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in Manhattan . . .

“Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, and his father, Barack Obama, Sr., met at the University of Hawaii in 1960 in a Russian-language class. At the time, the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 were concerned about Soviet penetration of Kenya’s independence movement. Kenya became independent of Britain in 1963.

“After marrying Indonesian national Lolo Soetoro, Dunham moved with Barack Obama, Jr., to Indonesia in 1966, just as the Suharto dictatorship was consolidating its hold on power, which included the massacre of some 1 million Indonesian Communists. Dunham left Indonesia in 1972, returning to Hawaii with her son. Dunham periodically made trips back to Indonesia, as well as to Pakistan, while working for the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the latter commonly used by the CIA for official cover agents.”

Hey, Barry! Is that where your affinity for double identities comes from? Of saying one thing and being another. I mean running statements like these on us: “It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united [we were?]- bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack, and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear. I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again.” We’ll summon it when you and Bush and Rahm and Cheney stop pushing the administration’s conspiracy theory on us that four airliners piloted by four novice pilots caused the WTC to fall in a pyroplastic tsunami and rise in an awful gray atomic cloud over New York City.

Or asking us to believe that Flight 93 fell down a rabbit hole in a Pennsylvania field when numerous eyewitnesses saw it hit by missiles shot from two F-16s, the same kind that couldn’t get to New York on time, or to the Pentagon, where no remains of a crashed 757 remained, simply a hole in the wall, most likely put there by a missile firing drone, so much like the ones that have been used in Pakistan to get at so-called terrorists but keep hitting innocent civilians.

In conclusion, dear heart, you got one thing right: “We are passing through a time of great trial.” And our republic won’t be brought down by double-talkers or their henchmen. Our freedom won’t be stolen if we have differing opinions. Our nation won’t die of greed, of Wall Streeters and their trillions in stolen bailouts, and by a run-away military. No sir, we, the people will go on, as you say. We will endure, but not you and the Trojan Horse you came in on. And god bless our misguided troops [they’re going to need it], god bless the United States of America [we’re going to need it]. And “all power to the people” as Huey Newton and the Black Panthers once shouted to the crowd surrounding them.

L’indépendance du Liban....

L’indépendance du Liban....

Nous avons du mal à croire que le Liban moderne fête déjà ses 66 ans d’indépendance !
Depuis 1943, le pays des cèdres n’a cessé d’affronter crise sur crise et d’essuyer secousse sur secousse. Un coup d’œil rapide sur cette histoire tourmentée est cependant suffisant pour comprendre les causes de cette instabilité chronique.

En effet, le tournant décisif fût sans doute la création de l’état d’Israël en 1948 sur le territoire et au dépend du peuple palestinien, ce qui lança du même coup la crise du Moyen Orient qui n’arrive pas, à ce jour, à trouver une voie de sortie.

Or, dès le début, la raison d’être de ce petit Grand Liban était d’assurer une convivialité et une coexistence entre ses différentes communautés religieuses qui partagent ensemble beaucoup de valeur et de traditions, mais aussi des années de confrontation et de sang.
Ce nouveau Liban devait être bâti sur une entente interne basée sur une répartition du pouvoir entre les communautés et une démocratie permettant le renouvellement des personnes.
Cette formule était certainement fragile et à peine viable mais elle devait constituer la rampe de lancement de cet Etat qui devait naturellement évoluer vers une modernisation de ses instances et vers sa libération progressive mais ferme des démons du communautarisme religieux.

Cette évolution n’a malheureusement pu avoir lieu et la société libanaise a raté complètement sa mutation, la seule voie qui aurait pu lui permettre de survivre et surmonter les défis du monde.

Les causes de cet échec se situent à deux niveaux : interne et externe.

En interne, d’abord, le régime instauré en 1943 avait favorisé l’émergence d’une classe politique qui abusait du pouvoir en s’abritant derrière la communauté religieuse. Plusieurs leaders ont crée leurs fonds de commerce politico-religieux qui devenaient, progressivement, plus puissants que l’état lui-même.
Les féodaux du 18 et du 19 ème siècle ont pu faire évoluer leur domination et l’adapter aux nouvelles donnes. Ces fonds de commerces ont été appelés, par exemple, des « partis » avec souvent des idéologies importées. Cependant, ces partis étaient construits autour du même chef tribal ou sa descendance, destinés à servir leurs intérêts et assurer leur aisance matérielle. L’idéologie n’était que prétexte fallacieux puisque vidée de tout contenu et les règlements intérieurs et les semblants de conseils de direction n’étaient utiles que pour approuver les choix du chef et assurer une succession royale vers le fils (ou le conjoint ou le frère) par simple transmission de la fameuse « abaya ».
Ces féodaux n’ont, en réalité, jamais exercé une fonction dans la société et n’ont jamais eu à dépendre d’un emploi rémunéré pour vivre, ni à affronter des soucis d’argent ou de chômage, leur opulence matérielle, de génération en génération, étant complètement assurée par leur dispositif politique.

Aux côtés de ces « politiciens », le régime de 1943 avait octroyé un pouvoir moral assez puissant aux religieux, chrétiens et musulmans, doublé d’une aura politique et d’un dividende matériel qu’ils risquaient fort de perdre avec la modernisation et la laïcisation de la société.

Cette coalition politico-religieuse a pu constituer un frein puissant à l’évolution du pays et, à contrario, a contribué à son enracinement durable dans les coutumes et les mœurs des siècles précédents.

En externe, l’image du Liban, pays de tolérance et de convivialité, constituait de facto une antithèse flagrante et dérangeante de tout son entourage : une antithèse de la théocratie israélienne ainsi qu’une antithèse du totalitarisme arabe.
Les belligérants du conflit arabo-israélien ont pu trouver une convergence d’intérêts pour détruire ce pays naissant qui risquait de prouver au monde entier, que des communautés différentes pouvaient vivre ensemble démocratiquement et en harmonie. L’intérêt commun était donc de tuer cette expérience humaine unique ou, du moins, de prouver qu’elle était non viable.

Ainsi, les facteurs régionaux se sont accaparés des fragilités locales et les leaders libanais se sont montrés facilement manipulables et sensibles aux pressions externes. Cette double complicité a été suffisante pour stopper net l’évolution prédestinée du pays. Au moment où tous les pays entamaient leur émancipation, le Liban se figeait dans le 19ème siècle et s’éloignait du monde moderne. Toutes les tentatives internes qui ont visé à libérer la société de ces maux étaient sérieusement contrées par les tenants de l’establishment politico-religieux (comme l’action du feu Général Fouad Chéhab à la tête de l’Etat).

66 ans après, nous n’avons certes pas le droit de rester sur un bilan négatif car l’indépendance est une lutte quotidienne et le peuple libanais n’a que le choix de poursuivre la bataille de la modernité et de l’évolution.

Il appartient aux libanais tout d’abord de tirer les leçons de leur histoire et d’analyser leur drames et leurs échecs afin de mieux bâtir leur lendemain commun. Les libanais savent que leur Liban n’est pas un pays comme un autre. Par la richesse de son histoire et la force du message humain qu’il représente, leur responsabilité est plus grande et leurs devoirs de préserver l’équilibre interne plus importants.

Les libanais doivent refuser toute hégémonie d’une communauté sur les autres. La domination politique maronite pendant des décennies, appelée par quelques uns « maronitisme politique » a été préjudiciable pour le pays mais aussi et surtout pour la communauté chrétienne. Le « sunnitisme politique » qui tente actuellement de le remplacer ne pourra que subir les mêmes conséquences et aboutir aux mêmes drames. Le Liban sera soit une société ouverte et équitable envers tous ces enfants ou il ne sera pas.

La laïcité de l’état parait être effectivement l’alternative la plus crédible sur laquelle pourra se fonder le Liban de demain. Cette laïcité cependant ne doit pas rester un vœu pieu ou un dogme utopique ou chimérique mais plutôt un objectif réel et vital à atteindre à travers l’apaisement des tensions sociétales et en rassurant les communautés sur leur survie et sur leur dignité. A ce niveau, l’application stricte de la démocratie consensuelle à travers la participation effective et pleine de toutes les composantes devrait constituer le premier pas sur ce long chemin.

Au lendemain du 66ème anniversaire, les libanais n’ont plus le droit de rater les occasions avec l’histoire. Après le rendez-vous manqué de 2005, peut-être que la constitution d’un gouvernement d’union nationale sera le début d’une ère de collaboration et de compréhension mutuelle, ouvrant la voie à l’édification d’un état moderne et solide.