The hermeneutics of takfir

This is quite a good blog, you can find it here....

Added August 26, 2006

Takfir: "...the practice of declaring that an individual or a group previously considered Muslims are in fact kafir(s) (non-believers in God)" and in some cases legalizing the shedding of their blood.


Living a religious life or shaping one's life within a religious framework requires and arises from an interpretation of religious texts and from applying those texts and those interpretations to one's life and one's approach to the wider world.

The variety of groupings and flavors of islam existing today arose out of different interpretations, different hermeneutics or methodologies of interpretation of the Qur'an and hadith and of the history that has unfolded since the advent of the book (the Qur'an). Each method of understanding the book gave rise to corresponding theological and societal structures as well as varying approaches to the surrounding social, political, and economic environments.


An individual's mental frame of reference, their religious sensibilities, and the manner in which they process and filter information is strongly impacted by what they absorb as their religious "hermeneutic" - their manner and mechanism for understanding their religion and the interpretations that arise from this understanding.


In general, hermeneutics refers to theories and methodologies of interpretation, especially of scriptures and sacred texts although the term can also be applied in a broad manner to all theories and methods of interpreting and viewing the world. In this wider sense, every society and every group has a hermeneutic - or sometimes multiple overlapping hermeneutics (religious and secular) - through which they interpret the world and interact with it. The hermeneutic could be a cohesive one or a scattered and confused one that draws the specifics of it's understanding from widely divergent and conflicting sources (in correspondence with the conflicting diversities that characterize the modern world). It may be consciously held or, more likely, has been absorbed from various sources by a process of mental osmosis and without conscious intention. This is true for believer and unbeliever and for all the gradations in between these two.


For Muslims, their interaction with the world, their mode of living, of expressing themselves in word and deed is influenced by their understanding of the requirements of their religion, and by the coherent meaning drawn from the Qur'an and other foundational sources of the religion. The focus and emphasis, the extent to which some verses and hadith overshadow others, the depth (or lack of it) of interpretation varies from group to group. This religious hermeneutic is in turn impacted and modified by the dominant modes of thought of the wider world - currents of thought and historical, social, political, and interpretative theories often transform how believers view the various elements of their religion. So we have varieties of traditional muslims, progressive muslims, conservative muslims, liberal muslims, socialist muslims, reformist muslims, secular or cultural muslims, various sectarian groupings of muslims.....


For the most part these overlapping and differing hermeneutics co-exist (even if uneasily) without undue overt strain although they constantly push and pull in different ways upon one another and are influenced (and exert influence) by relationships of power, wealth, politics, economics, media discourse, intellectual discourse, differing scholastic approaches and the like. A clash may occur when some critically conflicting aspect of the differing hermeneutics are brought into public view or into the political arena in a provocative manner. Then people generally fall back strongly into the most baseline aspects of their respective viewpoints, seeking support and justification within the frameworks of their individual interpretations and approaches. Vigorous debate and intellectual conflict may occur - but sometimes the intellectual debate gives way to ideological politics and reply by force rather than reason.


A compelling example of the important place of (nuanced and carefully considered) religious interpretation and understanding in guiding religious communities (in their internal dealings and in their dealings with other communities) is highlighted by issues such as that of "takfir" (declaring a Muslim to be a kafir [an unbeliever] because of an aspect of their belief or actions) and it's impact on sectarian conflicts (which have been amplified by extreme and turbulent political circumstances experienced across the Muslim world). It underlines how crucial and how damaging some expositions of Qur'anic hermeneutics around the issues of iman, tauhid, shirk, mushrik, kufr, etc. have been in the past and how these still continue to impact Muslims today.


One of the Qur'an's titles is "Al-Fatiha" which means "The Opener" and for the most part the early generations of Muslims took the potential implied in this title to heart. They treated it as a book whose study would open up new ways, new paths, and expand the capabilities of their fledgling societies. Muslims began in earnest to unfold the Qur'an's theological, philosophical, sociological, political, legal, and mystical potential. And despite internal conflicts and problems, despite the emergence of tribal dynasties, kingdoms and fiefdoms, and the resultant injustices and conflicts, despite high-level variations in interpretation, the overall result was a centuries long dramatic and rapid flowering of knowledge, a sudden mushrooming of the various arts and sciences that even today is capable of creating awe in students of history and its causal processes.


However, if the nascent Muslim community as a whole saw the Qur'an as an opener of hidden potentials and avenues, a small group known as the Khawarij (seceders) viewed it as a sealer of avenues. For them all human judgment and even attempts to link relationships of meanings between seemingly related verses was suspect. And their own understanding of the Qur'an was piecemeal and fractured because of their disconnected approach. This in turn led to a rigid and narrow hermeneutic centered around a fractured understanding of many concepts, the most critical of which pivoted around definitions of iman, shirk, mushrik, and kufr. The Khawarij schism marked the beginning of a process which rapidly led to wholesale declarations of takfir against diligently observant Muslims who violated even minor aspects of the Khawarij interpretation of what comprised a believer. The Khawarij represented largely a confused but extreme theological reaction to the political machinations and civil wars of their time. Intellectually unprepared to deal with the complex political games (the bids for gaining power and influence - for acquiring the caliphate as a political prize) which emerged forcefully in the time of Imam Ali (and which Ali, as Caliph, was forced to contend against), they initially fell prey to political manipulation. In reaction to the less-than-ideal situation, they sought refuge in an artificial purity through hermeneutics that revolved around an uncompromising doctrine of takfir, which would allow them to eliminate whatever they considered as heresy and deviation, whoever they considered insufficiently pure (according to their definitions).


Note: Fundamentally, the origin of their absolutist interpretation arose from a reaction to the political situation - causing them to withdraw into an extreme position where they seemingly sought only God's judgment (through the Qur'an) and rejected faulty human judgment, not recognizing (as Ali pointed out to them) that interpretation is unavoidable and when this interpretation occurs without reference to appropriate authority, method, and knowledge, error appears and rapidly compounds itself. So even as they sought to avoid human interpretation they fell into a disjointed, fanatically narrow hermeneutic - since human interpretation is unavoidable (see sidebar).


The politically aggrieved (also being religious people) often seek religious interpretations that allow or justify the actions they feel compelled to take. It becomes a matter where religion does not shape politics (politics does not unfold cohesively from the principles of the religion) but rather politics of desperation or outrage may shape and distort the interpretation of the religion - in this way religion and violent politics can, at times, become dangerously conflated (and dangerously intertwined with a misanthropic impulse to purge the society of impure elements). But the root is politics (and disillusionment), not religion. Unfortunately, the impact of seeking religious justification for extreme actions is that a (mistaken) theological precedent emerges. The more extreme the actions taken, the more unbending and absolutist the theological justification becomes.


The Khawarij method was to strive endlessly to determine who among those who call themselves believers were, in reality, heretics, and then to drive out from the community all such "so-called" believers till only "true" believers remained. Some of the sub-sects of the Khawarij accomplished this through wholesale slaughter of those Muslims believed to be engaged in any form of shirk (according to the Khawarij's own amorphous, shifting, and politically-bound ideas of what constituted shirk). They were characterized by their hasty and persistent tendency to declare Muslims who deviated even fractionally from the narrow Khawarij view of Islam as betrayers of the religion and deserving of death. Under the Khawarij, the designations of kafir and mushrik came to mean the wrong type of believer, rather than unbeliever. An unbeliever was often more palatable to them than the wrong type of believer who by his mistaken belief supposedly undermined the religion itself. This type of takfir was a praxis first widely initiated by the Khawarij. They made themselves judge, jury, and executioner in labeling, convicting, and punishing those who did not measure up to their standard (throwing aside due legal process). In the midst of the turbulent politics of that time their hermeneutic was not merely a theoretical position, and rather than engage in reflection, discussion, and exchange of ideas, the Khawarij spoke with their swords and they spoke often, and without mercy.


They "...used to go out with their swords to the marketplace. And when the innocent people gathered together without being aware of it, they suddenly cried out 'La Hukm illa lillah' (the decision is God's) and lifted up their swords against anybody they happened to overtake, and they went on killing until they themselves were killed. The people used to live in constant fear of them...." (Malati, Tanbih, p. 51 - quoted from "The Concept of Belief in Islamic Theology" - Isutzu)


Today, echoes of the error-laden precedents set by the Khawarij reverbrate through many parts of the Islamic world. The turbulent and extreme conditions generated in Muslim regions torn by decade after decade of outside interference and manipulation and internal infighting, has resulted in a situation where the hermeneutics of takfir have re-emerged with a modern face, enabling one to update the Khawarij depiction for our own times: "They used to go out with concealed explosives to the marketplaces and the masjids. And when the innocent Muslims gathered together without being aware of it, they set off their charges killing anybody who happened to be near them. The people used to live in fear of them."

Many thousands of innocent Muslims lost their lives until the Khawarij schism was finally subdued and disappeared as a distinct religious and political entity. The Khawarij were thought by some to have been manipulated and used by ambitious politicians (not cleanly as a proxy army, but as a tool of terror and as generators of political and religious confusion) in the regions where these politicians sought dominance. However, because of the volatile and fanatical nature of the Khawarij, those who at first used them (against Imam Ali - Ali was assassinated by a Khawarij) were also ultimately violently set upon.


Imam Ali had warned that even if the majority of the Khawarij groups were subdued (as they largely were in his time), their mindset would not come to an end and would continue to resurface under different leaders, groupings, and banners in whichever periods Islamic intellectual thought and the practical ethics of a balanced and tolerant polity went into decline and political manipulation and violence was in ascendancy. The Khawarij and their descendants eventually transmuted into a harmless faction but, as predicted by the Imam, the hermeneutics of takfir resurfaced again and again in later history.

So though the Khawarij themselves faded rapidly from historical relevancy, elements of their thought bubbled up in various periods, although generally the Muslim societies in which they emerged understood the danger and foolishness of such thought and were quick to restrain and contain them.


Note: Later groups, such as the Jahmites developed such rigid and narrow hermeneutical approaches that they entered into absurdities such as pronouncing takfir on some of the Prophets of the past based on some actions of those Prophets contradicting the unusual Jahmite interpretations of certain verses.


Ghazali was very clear on the need to subdue the overly free use of takfir that was rising in prevalence in his time.


"...he is a downright fool who, when asked to give his definition of kufr, answers: 'Kufr is anything that is opposed to the Ash'arite theory or the Mu'tazilite theory, or the hanbalite theory or indeed any other theory as the case may be. Such a man is more blind than a blind man..." (Faysal al-Tafriqah bayna al-Islam wa-al-Zandaqah - from a translation by Izutsu)


There was an understanding, even among puritanical literalists such as Ibn Taymiyyah of the dangers of the extremist Khawarij approach to issues of iman, shirk, and kufr.


"...the dispute on what these words mean was the first internal discord to occur among the Muslims; because of this problem the Muslim community was divided into...factions who came to differ on the Sacred Book and the Sunnah and began to call one another 'infidels'...." (Kitab al-Iman, Ibn Taymiyyah)


However, Ibn Taymiyyah himself was not entirely able to resist the easy road to applying such labels to Muslim groups, a tendency which in more recent (Colonial) times was once again taken to Khawarij-like extremes by self-declared reformers who often sought the backing and modern weaponry of Colonial powers in their bid to "reform" (a euphemism for subduing and gaining ascendancy over competing tribes in the region) those Muslims who they believed were engaged in shirk and bidah and simultaneously gain the power-position of Colonial proxy.


Our modern era has also been beset with numerous instances of groups who have fashioned their religious interpretations around a hermeneutic of takfir or who have tacked on such a hermeneutic to their existing schools of thought. On occasion, these groups have been supported, buttressed, or sheltered by foreign powers precisely because of their willingness to kill fellow Muslims - this making them, depending on the geopolitical circumstances, useful proxy agents or advantageous generators of confusion, fear, and chaos - all of which are effective precursors for clearing a path to externally imposed solutions that, unlike internal natively generated solutions, are in line with the wider interests of such powers. But, as it was for the Muslims of the past, such groups, whether they are driven solely by their own narrowly focused internal hermeneutic of takfir, or whether their extremism is used for the ambition of broader political movements - this hermeneutic is a hermeneutic of disaster for Muslims.


The myriad facets of intellectual expression historically inspired by the Qur'an and the profound and deep hermeneutics that flowered in various historical forms and in various schools of thought stands in stark contrast to the vicious tail-swallowing vision of an ideology of takfir. For most of Muslim history, the ideology of takfir was a troubling but well-contained side-issue. In recent times, in a strange historical aberration wrought by vast global political changes and the turbulence and violence they have engendered, it has come into a position (hopefully temporary) of destructive prominence.

"(It is) a Book We have revealed to you abounding in good that they may ponder over its verses, and that those who cultivate understanding may be deeply mindful....Are those who know and those who do not know alike? Only the people of understanding are deeply mindful.... And none know its complete interpretation (hermeneutic) but God and those who are profoundly and firmly rooted in knowledge." (Qur'an 38:29, Qur'an 39:9, Qur'an 3:7)

How to prank a telemarketer

This is unbelievable. Revenge on all those annoying telemarketers.

Take heed and listen :)

The Least Accountable Regime in the Middle East

Ed Harriman US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction | Link: http://www.sigir.mil US Government Accountability Office | Link: http://www.gao.gov US Congressional Research Service | Link: http://www.crs.gov US Department of State | Link: http://www.state.gov Kurdistan Regional Government | Link: http://www.krg.org Platform | Link: http://www.platformlondon.org American military spending on Iraq is now approaching $8 billion a month. Accounting for inflation, this is half as much again as the average monthly cost of the Vietnam War; the total spent so far has long surpassed the cost of the entire Apollo space programme. Three and a half months of occupation costs the equivalent of Iraq’s estimated oil revenues for the current financial year. We now know, thanks to the leaked report of James Baker’s Iraq Study Group, that if US troops withdrew, they would in all probability be redeployed to neighbouring countries, increasing the already massive expenditure and inevitably threatening new arenas of conflict. Here’s an unimaginable alternative. If the US army left the region, and if the money was instead handed out to every Iraqi man, woman and child, they would each receive more than $300 a month. They need it: Iraq has run out of reconstruction money. The funds in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq – some $20 billion of Iraqi money – were spent by Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority in the first year of the occupation. The US Embassy in Baghdad has spent virtually all of the $18.4 billion that Congress appropriated for ‘rebuilding’ the country; $5.6 billion of it was used to run the embassy, promote American ‘values’ and set up the new armed forces and police. Most of the American money never even gets to Iraq. The bulk of it has gone to American consultants, or into American contractors’ international bank accounts. ‘Most of the projects planned in sewerage, irrigation, drainage and dams have been cancelled,’ the auditors of the US Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction (SIGIR) report. Others have been ‘descoped’. A 238 km canal brings fresh water to Basra from the Gharraf river, a tributary of the Tigris. The long neglected banks of the canal are crumbling. There was a plan to line its entire length with concrete; the idea now is merely to repair one badly damaged 20 km stretch. This is what ‘descoped’ means. In July, SIGIR could find no evidence of emergency repairs or even routine maintenance. According to the increasingly implausible State Department, Iraq’s basic utilities – its electricity, oil production and water supply – have reached standards close to or above those under Saddam. The US General Accountability Office (GAO), however, says these claims are meaningless, since they are based on numbers of completed projects, without indicating how much has been done of what was originally planned. One thing is certain: the Coalition has created and fostered the least accountable and least transparent regime in the Middle East. It’s impossible to say whether it’s also the most corrupt, because so little is known about how Iraq’s ministers spend their government’s revenue. The US Embassy says it’s trying to find out, but it hasn’t had much success. Paul Bremer handed over $8.8 billion in cash to the interim government in the first year of occupation; it has never been accounted for. American auditors are also still in the dark about Iraq’s reconstruction budget for the two years that followed: another $14 billion. ‘SIGIR has no further information about how much of these funds has been expended.’ Iraqis don’t know either, since there are no meaningful public accounts. Public opinion polls show that Iraqis list corruption as one of their three biggest worries, along with power cuts and violence. The inspector general for the Ministry of Health recently estimated that corruption costs Iraq $4 billion each year. World Bank officials told the GAO that putting contracts out for tender is still an ‘alien concept’ for Iraqi ministries. There are countless allegations of ‘ghost employees’ on ministry payrolls, of kickbacks, cronyism, nepotism and fraud that reach right up to the president, Jalal Talabani. SIGIR says that ‘corruption is a virtual pandemic in Iraq.’ The embassy’s ‘expenditure on anti-corruption has been modest’ – some $65 million, or 0.3 per cent of its reconstruction budget. It’s spending more than $1 billion on ‘democracy building’ activities, however, such as pro-American propaganda and PR. The propaganda keeps quiet about the torture of prisoners in secret jail cells, and about the infiltration of the security forces by sectarian militias. These activities are overseen by the Interior Ministry, which reportedly employs at least a thousand ghost employees, whose wages amount to more than $1 million a month. The US Embassy has lost track of the weapons, radios and other hardware it has supplied over the past two years, and the auditors talk of ‘uncertain property ownership’ and ‘political difficulties’. The ministry’s audit director, who is responsible for police activities throughout Iraq, has six staff and one computer. Much of the equipment intended for government use is probably with sectarian militias, or has been sold. Iraq has a Commission on Public Integrity, along with the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit and inspector generals in the ministries, which is supposed to investigate corruption. Arrest warrants were issued last year for several former cabinet ministers. The defence minister Hazem Shaalan, accused of being party to corruption involving more than $1.3 billion, fled to London. He is now said to be in Iraqi Kurdistan. The transport minister Louay Hatim Sultan al-Aris disappeared. The electricity minister Abdul Muhsin Shalash is reportedly living in Jordan. There are signs that efforts to prosecute these people are finally being stepped up. The labour minister Laila Abdul Latif at least went to court, though she was only convicted of a minor offence and given a suspended sentence. Another ex-electricity minister, Aiham al-Sammarai, has now been convicted of corruption and embezzlement and sentenced to two years in prison. But he’s also an American citizen so he isn’t in an Iraqi jail. The chairman of the Commission on Public Integrity, Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, says he’s keen to prosecute at least forty former cabinet ministers and senior officials. Yet ‘it is impossible to bring to justice a high-level official without the permission of his minister and if he is implicated as well, then he does not give this permission.’ Influential suspects either have immunity from prosecution or get tipped off so they can slip out of the country. As of July, the Commission had sent 1370 cases to the central criminal courts. Only 40 yielded convictions, and only one of those convicted was a senior ministry official. Many judges are corrupt; others are frightened, and with good reason: more than twenty have been assassinated. The State Department is unforthcoming about the real cost of the corporate armies operating in Iraq: the mercenaries, or ‘private security contractors’, who guard US officials and international contractors ensuring that Coalition forces are free to fight insurgents. The GAO estimated last year that there were more than 25,000 of these ‘contractors’, significantly outnumbering British troops. A former squaddie, kitted out with dark glasses, automatic pistol, rifle, body armour and radio, working for a construction team, can earn at least $12,000 a month. A former special forces NCO protecting a Coalition official or construction firm boss can make more than twice that. The State Department says the cost of security makes up 16 to 22 per cent of the overall outlay on big reconstruction projects, but this may be an underestimate. The GAO has observed that the State Department’s reports to Congress ‘do not identify the magnitude or impact of the costs associated with security providers on reconstruction efforts or available funding’. When asked why not, embassy officials in Baghdad claimed that ‘such requests can be burdensome for both the contractors and agency officials.’ Publishing the true cost of ‘security contractors’ would mean admitting to the American public that what has become a deeply unpopular occupation is also even more expensive than it currently appears. American officials talk of travelling ‘the last tactical mile’, by which they mean completing the work of hooking up Iraqi neighbourhoods and houses to the electricity grid, water mains and sewage systems. But that hasn’t happened across much of the country, and it’s not likely to happen soon. SIGIR estimates that the Iraqi government needs to spend almost $1 billion next year just to keep the projects going. But the government is short of cash: American advisers within the ministries say that they are making do with only a third of the budget they asked for. The auditors asked the State Department’s development arm, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), for ‘reliable and transparent’ estimates of how much it will cost to complete its projects. An answer was not forthcoming. American reconstruction programmes are failing for reasons the audit reports make very clear, despite USAID’s refusal to co-operate. Many of Iraq’s dilapidated power stations, bombed during the first Gulf War, were kept functioning throughout the years of UN sanctions by resourceful engineers using makeshift spare parts. After the invasion in 2003, while Coalition forces stood by, looters trashed much of what little still worked. The Coalition planned to change all that. Initially, $5.56 billion of the $18.4 billion voted by Congress was budgeted for electricity. Then, in the summer of 2004, the embassy in Baghdad appropriated $1.25 billion of that to pay for the escalating costs of the war. This June, electricity output finally exceeded – just – the prewar level. Today, Baghdadis are lucky to get eight hours of electricity a day uninterrupted by power cuts, and many depend on their own generators, but for that they have to scrabble together the cash to buy one – around $200. The embassy says there isn’t much American money left for electricity. The privately-owned California-based engineering company Bechtel was contracted in 2o03 ‘on an urgent basis’ to build two new 250 megawatt diesel-fired generating stations near Baghdad, enough to supply 1.5 million homes. It was soon discovered, however, that ‘there was insufficient fuel and no fuel delivery system of any kind in the Baghdad area.’ So there was a change of plan. The Coalition decided to use natural gas from the Mansuria gas fields 105 kilometres north-east of Baghdad. Costs shot up from $78 million to $381 million. They bought two General Electric gas turbine generators, for $25 million each. Then they cancelled the project. The gas has never been collected, so there is no infrastructure for delivering it from the oilfields to power stations. American advisers working with the CPA knew all along that the infrastructure wasn’t in place. So, too, did the then electricity minister, Aiham al-Sammarai, the minister who faces a prison sentence for embezzlement, and who ran a successful energy consultancy near Chicago before the invasion. Still, there was no way the Coalition was going to spend millions of dollars building new gas pipelines. So the gas continues to be burned off in the oilfields. Iraq’s gas turbines now run on fuel oil, which, according to the GAO, makes them half as efficient, requires three times more maintenance, and is likely to result in damage or failure of equipment. The new electricity minister, Kareem Waheed, says that his budget ‘is only a fraction of what the ministry needs’, and SIGIR says Iraq needs to invest $20 billion in power plants over the next four years. Getting the electricity into Iraqi homes depends on massive transmission projects, more than a third of which have yet to be started on. The last tactical mile is a long way off. Before 1991, Iraq had one of the best health services in the Middle East. Baghdad’s doctors and nurses provided care often comparable to that of their counterparts in Tel Aviv or Cairo. A decade of sanctions scuppered that: by 2002 the Health Ministry budget had been reduced by 90 per cent. According to both the UN and the World Bank, the health system needed $1.6 billion just to resume normal operation. The CPA set aside less than a quarter of that. A new children’s hospital in Basra was to be a showcase for American generosity. It was a joint venture of Bechtel and Project Hope, one of Laura Bush’s favourite charities, overseen by USAID. Congressional Democrats questioned whether Iraq needed a state of the art 94-bed paediatric unit when existing hospitals were in dire need of basic repairs and medical supplies. The contract was signed anyway: $50 million was set aside for construction and $30 million for supplies and training. The project was to be finished by 31 December 2005. This June, the embassy finally ordered work to stop: $150 million had been spent, and Bechtel estimated that a further $98 million would be needed. Part of the problem was security on the site, but SIGIR auditors were more concerned about the ‘lack of effective programme management and oversight’ by the embassy. But the auditors also found that USAID had cooked the books and that the State Department had withheld details of delays and increased costs in its reports to Congress. In the meantime, Iraq’s existing hospitals are in dire condition. In May, the renovation of twenty maternity and children’s hospitals was halted. The contracts have been ‘descoped’ and the work won’t be finished for at least a year. The al-Hillah general hospital still lacks basic equipment, and medicines; Yarmuk hospital in southern Baghdad is in desperate need of repair. The centrepiece of the Coalition’s health programme was to be 150 new primary care centres: at $243 million, this was the largest US-funded reconstruction project in Iraq – oil-related programmes aside. The contract was given to Parsons Global Services, which quickly subcontracted most of the work. The centres were supposed to be open and treating patients by last December. By March this year, three-quarters of the budget had been spent. Of the 150 centres, 135 were partially constructed. Only six had been finished. The embassy blamed Parsons; Parsons blamed the embassy. The subcontractors, it turned out, had further subcontracted the work ‘through a system of layered brokers’. The Iraqi construction firms at the bottom of the chain regularly went on strike, cut corners and ignored Parsons’s engineers. As a result, the buildings suffer from ‘roof failures . . . low strength concrete and poor foundations that are now costly to repair’. In April, the estimated cost of finishing 121 of the remaining centres was $36 million. So far, only two clinics are receiving patients. Meanwhile, the auditors, worried that medical equipment would go missing if delivered to the Iraqi health ministry, had it sent instead to a secure US-run warehouse at Abu Ghraib. Even so, several of the containers were found to have been broken into and the supplies stolen. Parsons has 9000 employees and an annual turnover of $2.4 billion; its board includes James McNulty, the former director of the Pentagon’s Star Wars programme, and Admiral ‘Zap’ Zlatoper, the former commander-in-chief of the US Pacific fleet, as well as directors who have held senior positions in leading banks and universities. DynCorp, which won the contract to train the Iraqi police in Jordan, where staff rioted over pay, is one of the world’s largest private security contractors. On its board have sat former senior officials from Nasa, the FBI, the Federal Communications Commission and the US army. Bechtel has been one of the world’s largest overseas contractors for decades; other US firms which have earned more than $1 billion in Iraqi contracts include Fluor, Washington Group International and Kellogg, Brown and Root, which is owned by Dick Cheney’s former firm, Halliburton. Three years on, America’s corporate giants look stretched and exhausted in Iraq. They have proved quick at subcontracting and overrunning on costs, slower at meeting deadlines and on-site management. The auditors have also found evidence of corruption and gross incompetence in some of their dealings. Take the question of oil pipelines. Oil from the southern oilfields is exported through a terminal port south of Basra. From the northern oilfields in Iraqi Kurdistan it goes by pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. To defend Iraq’s oil and electricity networks from attacks by insurgents, the CPA decided in the summer of 2003 to create ‘Task Force Shield’. This would protect 810 key oil installations, 7000 km of oil pipeline and 14,000 km of electricity cables. Erinys, a British security business which employs several of Ahmed Chalabi’s family, would train and equip 14,400 guards for an Oil Protection Force (OPF). A few months later, an American security firm was contracted to train and equip 6000 guards for an Electrical Power Security Service (EPSS). It was a disaster. The Task Force ‘ultimately proved unsuccessful’, the auditors say. ‘Although the OPF showed some initial success, the EPSS programme barely got started before it was cancelled.’ Some $147 million, two-thirds of it Iraqi money from the Development Fund, had been spent. Today, the Iraqi Defence Ministry guards the pipelines and the Oil Ministry guards all other installations. The Oil Ministry’s inspector general says its security forces are undermanned, poorly equipped and unco-ordinated. Acts of sabotage go uninvestigated. The Electricity Ministry fares even worse. The auditors discovered that ‘tribal chiefs are paid to protect transmission lines . . . but are reportedly selling materials from downed lines and exacting tariffs for access to repair lines.’ Secure pipelines are useful only if oil flows through them. Coalition aircraft bombed the bridge carrying the main pipelines from the Kirkuk oilfields over the Tigris at al-Fatah. As well as carrying oil to Turkey, the lines supplied two of Iraq’s biggest refineries. A temporary pipe was laid across the bridge until a new, sabotage-proof pipeline could be constructed. Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) won the contract to rebuild the crossing and three others over nearby irrigation canals. The job was expected to cost $220 million, and was supposed to be completed by March 2004. By August 2004, KBR had claimed $75.7 million for the al-Fatah crossing alone, all 600 feet of it, but the drilling was a mess. The boreholes under the river kept caving in. A geologist hired by KBR said that the riverbed was unstable and needed further testing. KBR insisted its drilling subcontractors carry on regardless, and refused to let them talk to the Army Corps of Engineers. Finally, the contract was reassigned to Parsons, who, for another $29 million, dug a trench in the riverbed and buried the pipe. That was the easy part. SIGIR inspectors found one irrigation canal crossing half finished. The US army engineer in Kirkuk reckoned another was about a tenth complete. Parsons again had the contract, but had not inspected the crossing because, the firm said, its Iraqi subcontractor ‘would only perform the work with the guarantee of no American presence at either site’. The workers were afraid of insurgent attacks. SIGIR questioned whether the site was quite as dangerous as all that, and wondered why Parsons was paid $13 million for three months when no one was working in the area. SIGIR has also found evidence that some of the buried pipelines are smaller than the contracts stipulated. The plan now is for a subcontractor from the Republic of Georgia to finish the crossing, protected by US paratroopers. In southern Iraq, crude oil flows fairly smoothly from the Rumaila oilfield to the Basra terminal. Yet much of it is diverted along the way into small, illegal ‘sucker’ pipes that snake through palm groves to small huts, where the oil is pumped into waiting tanker lorries. There are bigger scams, too: sometimes the entire contents of oil storage depots disappear. As a centre of oil smuggling, the British-occupied area around Basra is rivalled only by the Niger delta. More than 1600 fishing boats in Basra spirit away 15 million litres of oil a month. Basra is now the most corrupt city in Iraq. Everyone has been accused of smuggling: the Iranian-funded Shia militias, criminal syndicates, the mayor, the Baghdad Oil Ministry. More than two and a half years after the invasion, Iraq still does not meter its oil, despite repeated warnings from the International Advisory and Monitoring Board. Iraq has the world’s second largest proven reserves of oil after Saudi Arabia, possibly up to 200 billion barrels, worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Shell, BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil all want to have what’s known as a production sharing agreement with the Iraqi government. Under the terms of such an agreement, in return for bearing the cost of getting new oilfields up and running, the companies would be guaranteed long-term access to Iraq’s reserves. Platform, the British oil monitoring group, has worked out that at a cost of production of only $40 a barrel, the companies’ return on investment would be somewhere between 42 per cent and 162 per cent, representing between $74 billion and $194 billion in profits that Platform feels should go to the Iraqi government. This doesn’t seem likely. The oil companies have been lobbying hard in Baghdad since the first days of the occupation, and a succession of executives have been sent to work as advisers within the Oil Ministry. ‘Coalition officials and other international experts,’ the auditors say, ‘are working with the Iraqi government to craft oil legislation that would promote an efficient, competent, transparent, and investor-friendly oil and gas sector.’ In August, the Kurdish regional government published a draft petroleum act. Under articles 3 and 4, ‘Kurdistan has sole authority in respect of petroleum operations in Kurdistan and in the “Disputed Territories”, where Kurdistan is a party to the dispute, including Kirkuk.’ This has not pleased the Oil Ministry in Baghdad, which is now under intense pressure to publish a petroleum law by the end of the year with terms that British and American oil companies find attractive. If the Coalition’s mission fails, Iraq’s future rulers may prefer to invite tenders from the Chinese, the French and the Russians. Also in August, the month that the new Baghdad Police Training Academy opened, the Baghdad morgue reported 1535 deaths from violence. SIGIR reports that the police academy is now closed: raw sewage from the toilets was leaking into the overhead light fittings. But construction of the US Embassy compound – the largest and at more than $1 billion the most expensive embassy in the world – is on schedule. So, too, is work on four large permanent US military bases. It isn’t clear how Tony Blair can think Iraq is a country on the verge of being a successful liberal democracy. But we do know what kind of mess will be left behind if the Coalition forces do eventually withdraw. 19 October

Rummy's best moments... goodbye :)

egypt police brutality

Hidden victims of a brutal conflict: Iraq's women

Abduction, rape and murder are the punishments for any woman who dares to hold a professional job. A month-long investigation by The Observer reveals the terrible reality of life after Saddam Peter Beaumont in Baghdad Sunday October 8, 2006 Observer They came for Dr Khaula al-Tallal in a white Opel car after she took a taxi home to the middle class district of Qadissiya in Iraq's holy city of Najaf. She worked for the medical committee that examined patients to assess them for welfare benefit. Crucially, however, she was a woman in a country where being a female professional increasingly invites a death sentence. As al-Tallal, 50, walked towards her house, one of three men in the Opel stepped out and raked her with bullets. A women's rights campaigner, Umm Salam - a nickname - knows about the three men in the Opel: they tried to kill her on 11 December last year. It was a Sunday, she recalls, and 15 bullets were fired into her own car as she drove home from teaching at an internet cafe. A man in civilian clothes got out of the car and opened fire. Three bullets hit her, one lodging close to her spinal cord. Her 20-year-old son was hit in the chest. Umm Salam saw the gun - a police-issue Glock. She is convinced her would-be assassin works for the state. The shootings of al-Tallal and Umm Salam are not isolated incidents, even in Najaf - a city almost exclusively Shia and largely insulated from the sectarian violence of the North. Bodies of young women have appeared in its dusty lanes and avenues, places patrolled by packs of dogs where the boundaries bleed into the desert. It is a favourite place for dumping murder victims. Iraqis do not like to talk about it much, but there is an understanding of what is going on these days. If a young woman is abducted and murdered without a ransom demand, she has been kidnapped to be raped. Even those raped and released are not necessarily safe: the response of some families to finding that a woman has been raped has been to kill her. Iraq's women are living with a fear that is increasing in line with the numbers dying violently every month. They die for being a member of the wrong sect and for helping their fellow women. They die for doing jobs that the militants have decreed that they cannot do: for working in hospitals and ministries and universities. They are murdered, too, because they are the softest targets for Iraq's criminal gangs. Iraq's women live in terror of speaking their opinions; of going out to work; or defying the strict new prohibitions on dress and behaviour applied across Iraq by Islamist militants, both Sunni and Shia. They live in fear of their husbands, too, as women's rights have been undermined by the country's postwar constitution that has taken power from the family courts and given it to clerics. 'Women are being targeted more and more,' said Umm Salam last week. Her husband was a university professor who was executed in 1991 under Saddam Hussein after the Shia uprising. She survived by running her family farm. When the Americans arrived she got involved in civic action, teaching illiterate women how to read and vote, independent from the influence of their husbands. She helped them fill in forms for benefits and set up a sewing workshop. In doing so she put herself at mortal risk. And since the assassination attempt, like many women in Najaf, she has found it hard to work. Which is what the men in the white Opel wanted. To silence the women like Umm Salam, who is 42. 'It is very difficult for women here. There is a lot of pressure on our personal freedoms. None of us feels that we can have an opinion on anything any more. If she does, she risks being killed.' It is a story familiar to women across Iraq, betrayed by the country's new constitution that guaranteed them a 25 per cent share of membership of the Council of Representatives. That guarantee has turned instead into a fig leaf hiding what women activists now call a 'human rights catastrophe for Iraqi women'. After a month-long investigation, The Observer has established that in almost every major area of human rights, women are being seriously discriminated against, in some cases seeing their conditions return to those of females in the Middle Ages. In areas such as the Shia militia stronghold of Sadr City in east Baghdad, women have been beaten for not wearing socks. Even the headscarf and juba - the ankle-length, flared coat that buttons to the collar - are not enough for the zealots. Some women have been threatened with death unless they wear the full abbaya, the black, all-encompassing veil. Similar reports are emerging from Mosul, where it is Sunni extremists who are laying down the law, and Kirkuk. Women from Karbala, Hilla, Basra and Nassariyah have all told The Observer similar stories. Of the insidious spread of militia and religious party control - and how members of those same groups are, paradoxically, increasingly responsible for the rape and murder of women outside their sects and communities. 'There is a member of my organisation, an activist who is a Christian,' said Yanar Mohammed, head of the Organisation for Iraqi Women's Freedom, who has had death threats for her work in protecting women threatened by domestic violence or 'honour' killings. 'She would have to walk home each day to her neighbourhood through an area controlled by one of the Islamic Shia militias, the Jaish al-Mahdi. She does not wear a veil so she gets abused by these men. About three weeks ago, one of them starts following her home saying that he wants a sexual relationship with her. He tells her what he wants to do, and if she doesn't agree he says she will be kidnapped. In the end he thinks that, because he is armed, because he threatens her existence, she will have to agree to a "pleasure marriage" [a temporary sexual union arranged by a cleric].' Strong anecdotal evidence gathered by organisations such as that of Yanar Mohammed and by the Iraqi Women's Network, run by Hanna Edwar, suggests rape is also being used as a weapon in the sectarian war to humiliate families from rival communities. 'So far what we have been seeing is what you might call "collateral rape",' says Besmia Khatib of the Iraqi Women's Network. 'Rape is being used in the settling of scores in the sectarian war.' Yanar Mohammed describes how a Shia girl was kidnapped, raped and dumped in the Husseiniya area of Baghdad. The retaliation, she says, was the kidnapping and rape of several Sunni girls in the Rashadiya area. Tit for tat. Similar stories are emerging across Iraq. 'Of course rape is going on,' says Aida Ussayaran, former deputy Human Rights Minister and now one of the women on the Council of Representatives. 'We blame the militias. But when we talk about the militias, many are members of the police. Any family now that has a good-looking young woman in it does not want to send her out to school or university, and does not send her out without a veil. This is the worst time ever in Iraqi women's lives. In the name of religion and sectarian conflict they are being kidnapped and killed and raped. And no one is mentioning it.' Women activists are convinced there is substantial under-reporting of crimes against women in some areas, particularly involving 'honour killing' - there is a massive increase against a background of pervasive violence - and that families often seek death certificates that will hide the cause. In regions such as the violent Anbar province, the country's largest, which borders Jordan and Syria, there is little reporting of the causes of any death. And activists complain, in any case, that they have been blocked from examining bodies at the Medical Forensic Institute in Baghdad, or collecting their own figures to build up an accurate picture of what is happening to women. While attacks on women have long been the dirty secret of Iraq's war, the sheer levels of the violence is now pushing it into the open. Last week in Samawah, 246 kilometres (153 miles) south of Baghdad, three women and a toddler were killed when gunmen stormed their home in an unexplained mass murder. Like Dr al-Tallal in Najaf, they were Shia Muslims in a Shia city. The three women were shot. The 18-month-old baby had her throat slit. In the north, too, last week the killing of women became more visible, with the al-Jazeera network reporting that attacks on women in the city of Mosul had led to an unprecedented rise in the number of women's bodies being found. Among them was Zuheira, a young housewife, found shot dead in the suburb of Gogaly. Salim Zaho, a neighbour, quoted by the television station, said: 'They couldn't kill her husband, a police officer, so they came for his wife instead.' It is one of the recurring narratives of murder told by Iraqi women. It is a violence that would not be possible without a wider, permissive brutalising of women's lives: one that permeates the 'new Iraq' in its entirety. For it is not only the religious militias that have turned women's lives into a living hell - it is, in some measure, the government itself, which has allowed ministries run by religious parties to segregate staff by gender. Some public offices, including ministries, insist on women staff wearing a headscarf at all times. A women's shelter, set up by Yanar Mohammed's group, was closed down by the government. Most serious of all are the death threats women receive for simply working, even in government offices. Zainub - not her real name - works for a ministry in Baghdad. One morning, she said, she arrived at work to find that a letter had been sent to all the women. 'When I opened up the note it said, "You will die. You will die".' The situation has been exacerbated by the undermining of Iraq's old Family Code, established in 1958, which guaranteed women a large measure of equality in key areas such as divorce and inheritance. The new constitution has allowed the Family Code to be superseded by the power of the clerics and new religious courts, with the result that it is largely discriminatory against women. The clerics have permitted the creeping re-emergence of men contracting multiple marriages, formerly discouraged by the old code. It is these clerics, too, who have permitted a sharp escalation in the 'pleasure marriages'. And it is the same clerics overseeing the rapid transformation of a once secular society - in which women held high office and worked as professors, doctors, engineers and economists - into one where women have been forced back under the veil and into the home. The result is mapped out every day on Iraq's streets and in its country lanes in individual acts of intimidation and physical brutality that build into an awful whole. And so in Salman Pak, on the Tigris 15 miles south of Baghdad, The Observer is told, the Karaa Brigade of the Ministry of the Interior rounds up some Sunni men. Later some of the police return to the men's houses and promise their worried women to help find the missing men in exchange for sex. In the Shia neighbourhood of al-Shaab in Baghdad, militiamen with the Jaish al-Mahdi put out an order banning women from wearing sandals and certain shoes, skirts and trousers. They beat up others for wearing the wrong clothes. In Amaryah, a Sunni stronghold in Baghdad, Sunni militants shave three women's heads for wearing the wrong clothes and lash young men for wearing shorts. In Zafaraniyah, a largely Shia suburb south of Baghdad, the Jaish al-Mahdi militiamen wait outside a school and slap girls not wearing the hijab. It is a situation bleakly recorded by the Human Rights Office of the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq. 'There are reports that, in some Baghdad neighbourhoods, women are now prevented from going to the markets alone,' Unami reported. 'In other cases, women have been warned not to drive cars, or have faced harassment if they wear trousers. Women have also reported that wearing a headscarf is becoming not a matter of religious choice but one of survival in many parts of Iraq, a fact particularly resented by non-Muslim women. Female university students are also facing constant pressure in university campuses.' 'Since the beginning of August it has just been getting worse,' says Nagham Kathim Hamoody, an activist with the Iraqi Women's Network in Najaf . 'There are more women being killed and more bodies being found in the cemetery. I don't know why they are being killed, but I know the militias are behind the killing... We went to the mortuary here in Najaf, but the authorities would not co-operate in helping to identify the murdered women. There was one doctor, though, who told us that some of the bodies showed signs that they had been beaten prior to their murder.' And so the painful lives of Iraqi women go on.

Can You Tell a Sunni From a Shiite?

By JEFF STEIN
Washington
FOR the past several months, I've been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: "Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?"

A "gotcha" question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don't think it's out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I'm not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who's on what side today, and what does each want?

After all, wouldn't British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants? In a remotely similar but far more lethal vein, the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.

A complete collapse in Iraq could provide a haven for Al Qaeda operatives within striking distance of Israel, even Europe. And the nature of the threat from Iran, a potential nuclear power with protégés in the Gulf states, northern Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, is entirely different from that of Al Qaeda. It seems silly to have to argue that officials responsible for counterterrorism should be able to recognize opportunities for pitting these rivals against each other.

But so far, most American officials I've interviewed don't have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

My curiosity about our policymakers' grasp of Islam's two major branches was piqued in 2005, when Jon Stewart and other TV comedians made hash out of depositions, taken in a whistleblower case, in which top F.B.I. officials drew blanks when asked basic questions about Islam. One of the bemused officials was Gary Bald, then the bureau's counterterrorism chief. Such expertise, Mr. Bald maintained, wasn't as important as being a good manager.

A few months later, I asked the F.B.I.'s spokesman, John Miller, about Mr. Bald's comments. "A leader needs to drive the organization forward," Mr. Miller told me. "If he is the executive in a counterterrorism operation in the post-9/11 world, he does not need to memorize the collected statements of Osama bin Laden, or be able to read Urdu to be effective. ... Playing 'Islamic Trivial Pursuit' was a cheap shot for the lawyers and a cheaper shot for the journalist. It's just a gimmick."

Of course, I hadn't asked about reading Urdu or Mr. bin Laden's writings.
A few weeks ago, I took the F.B.I.'s temperature again. At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau's new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. "Yes, sure, it's right to know the difference," he said. "It's important to know who your targets are."

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. "The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following," he said. "And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following."

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran - Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. "Iran and Hezbollah," I prompted. "Which are they?"

He took a stab: "Sunni."
Wrong.
Al Qaeda? "Sunni."
Right.
AND to his credit, Mr. Hulon, a distinguished agent who is up nights worrying about Al Qaeda while we safely sleep, did at least know that the vicious struggle between Islam's Abel and Cain was driving Iraq into civil war. But then we pay him to know things like that, the same as some members of Congress.

Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.

"Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?" I asked him a few weeks ago.
Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: "One's in one location, another's in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don't know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something."

To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. "Now that you've explained it to me," he replied, "what occurs to me is that it makes what we're doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area."

Representative Jo Ann Davis, a Virginia Republican who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the C.I.A.'s performance in recruiting Islamic spies and analyzing information, was similarly dumbfounded when I asked her if she knew the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

"Do I?" she asked me. A look of concentration came over her face. "You know, I should." She took a stab at it: "It's a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs. The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it's the Sunnis who're more radical than the Shia."

Did she know which branch Al Qaeda's leaders follow?
"Al Qaeda is the one that's most radical, so I think they're Sunni," she replied. "I may be wrong, but I think that's right."

Did she think that it was important, I asked, for members of Congress charged with oversight of the intelligence agencies, to know the answer to such questions, so they can cut through officials' puffery when they came up to the Hill?

"Oh, I think it's very important," said Ms. Davis, "because Al Qaeda's whole reason for being is based on their beliefs. And you've got to understand, and to know your enemy."

It's not all so grimly humorous. Some agency officials and members of Congress have easily handled my "gotcha" question. But as I keep asking it around Capitol Hill and the agencies, I get more and more blank stares. Too many officials in charge of the war on terrorism just don't care to learn much, if anything, about the enemy we're fighting. And that's enough to keep anybody up at night.

Jeff Stein is the national security editor at Congressional Quarterly.

Was he? Had he?

Corey Robin

The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David Johnson · Chicago, 277 pp, £13.00

Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security by David Cole and James Dempsey · New Press, 320 pp, £10.99

General Ashcroft: Attorney at War by Nancy Baker · Kansas, 320 pp, £26.50

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen · Free Press, 240 pp, £18.99

Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert · Free Press, 352 pp, $25.00

According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists.’ The executive branch responded immediately. That year, the State Department fired ‘perverts’ at the rate of one a day, more than twice the figure for suspected Communists. Charges of homosexuality ultimately accounted for a quarter to a half of all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy’s fan letters complained of ‘red infiltration’; the rest fretted about ‘sex depravity’.

The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an aide: ‘Can you please tell me, what can two women possibly do?’ Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked one Hoey Committee witness whether there wasn’t a ‘quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things’.

The official justification for the purge was that homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail and could be turned into Soviet spies. But as Johnson points out, investigators never found a single instance of this kind of blackmail during the Cold War. The best they could come up with was a dubious case from before the First World War, when the Russians allegedly used the homosexuality of Austria’s top spy to force him to work for them.

The real justification was even more suspect: gays were social misfits whose pathology made them susceptible to Communist indoctrination. Many conservatives also believed that the Communist Party was a movement of and for libertines, and the Soviet Union a haven of free love and open marriage. Gays, they concluded, couldn’t resist this freedom from bourgeois constraint. Drawing parallels with the decline of the Roman Empire, McCarthy regarded homosexuality as a cultural degeneracy that could only weaken the United States. It was, as one tabloid put it, ‘Stalin’s Atom Bomb’.

How could a nation confronting so many foreign threats allow itself to be sidetracked like this? (This is not just a question for historians: in recent months, Congress has devoted considerable energy to debating gay marriage, while in the last 13 years the US military has fired 55 of its Arabic speakers for being gay; the most recent was uncovered after investigators asked him if he had ever participated in community theatre.) With the Soviets in possession of the bomb and Korea on the march, why was Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, dispatched to Congress to defend his heterosexuality and that of his ‘powder puff diplomats’? Didn’t he have more important things to do than host rowdy gatherings of politicians and journalists that were

reminiscent of ‘stag parties’, featuring copious amounts of Scotch and bourbon, and smiling women ‘whose identity remained undisclosed’. As one senator remarked, ‘It reminded me somewhat of the fraternity rushing season at college.’ Dean Acheson tried to appear as ‘one of the boys’, slapping senators on the back. A journalist reported that ‘his hair was rumpled, his tie awry. The stiff and precise manner and speech which have antagonised many of us had disappeared. He even seemed to have removed the wax from his moustache.’

Johnson’s book is one of the most instructive histories of the domestic Cold War to have appeared in years, but its reach extends beyond its immediate subject to the question, which vexes us today, of achieving the right balance between freedom and security. Johnson’s book suggests not only that we seldom strike the right balance but that the concept of ‘balance’ may itself be deeply flawed.

The first problem with this notion is that it assumes security is a transparent concept, unsullied by ideology and self-interest. Because it benefits everyone – ‘the most vital of all interests’, John Stuart Mill called it, which no one can ‘possibly do without’ – it is immune to politics. Yet, as Arnold Wolfers wrote years ago, security is an ‘ambiguous symbol’, which ‘may not have any precise meaning at all’. It allows political leaders to pursue partisan and ideological courses of action under the banner of a seemingly neutral, universal value.

The actions of the US government during the war on terror bear this claim out. According to two official commissions, one of the reasons US intelligence agencies did not anticipate 9/11 was that turf wars prevented them from sharing information. The ‘obstacles to information sharing were more bureaucratic than legal’, David Cole and James Dempsey write in Terrorism and the Constitution, and had little to do ‘with the constitutional principles of due process, accountability, or checks and balances’. But while the government rides roughshod over constitutional principles, it has done little to remove these bureaucratic obstacles. Even the Department of Homeland Security, which was supposed to unite competing agencies, ‘is bogged down by bureaucracy’ and a ‘lack of strategic planning’, according to a recent wire report.

Despite evidence that the pre-emptive arrest and detention of suspected terrorists frustrates the gathering of intelligence, the US continues to rely on such policies. In the two years following 9/11, federal authorities rounded up more than five thousand foreign nationals. As of today, Cole and Dempsey write, none of them has been ‘convicted of any terrorist crime’, while the FBI has yet to identify a single al-Qaida sleeper cell in the United States. After 9/11, Cole reported in Enemy Aliens (2003), the Justice Department selected thousands of male immigrants for questioning on the basis of their age, date of arrival and country of origin. Though the Justice Department claimed it chose men only from countries harbouring al-Qaida cells, it did not interview anyone from Britain, France, Spain or Germany.

The pattern is clear: measures that would improve security are not taken, while the measures that are taken either fail to improve security or undermine it. There are several explanations for this, including racism and the blinkered interests of the intelligence bureaucracy. But a key factor, as Nancy Baker shows in General Ashcroft, her comprehensive assessment of John Ashcroft’s tenure as Bush’s first attorney general, is that conservatives view national security through the lens of their ongoing Kulturkampf against the 1960s.

As attorney general in Missouri, Ashcroft nearly got cited for contempt – not usually a good career move in American politics – for fighting the court-ordered desegregation of schools in St Louis and Kansas City. As a senator, he received an honorary degree from Bob Jones University, which has barred interracial dating, and gave a friendly interview to Southern Partisan, a magazine sympathetic to the Old Confederacy. Like the biblical kings, he had his father anoint his head with oil when he became a governor and then a senator, and, after his father’s death, had the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas do the honours when Bush appointed him attorney general. Convinced that calico cats were signs of the devil, he reportedly had his team make sure that the International Court at The Hague had none on its premises.

Ashcroft’s peculiar notions reflect the broader discontent of his party with the political culture bequeathed to or foisted on the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. During those years, liberals and leftists not only toppled legalised racial and gender hierarchies; they also attempted to rein in the security apparatus. They limited executive power, championed an activist judiciary, increased the rights of dissenters and criminals, and separated law enforcement from intelligence gathering. Though these reforms proved short-lived – as Cole and Dempsey show, they were significantly undermined by Reagan and Clinton – they have come to stand for the larger culture of freedom that conservatives have loathed and liberals have loved for years.

Conservatives in America generally don’t talk about terrorism’s root causes, but they make one exception in their wish to blame the decadent liberalism that has supposedly hampered the government’s ability to fight evil-doers both at home and abroad. Constitutional rights, Ashcroft insisted after 9/11, are ‘weapons with which to kill Americans’. Terrorists ‘exploit our openness’. According to the Republican senator Orrin Hatch, terrorists ‘would like nothing more than the opportunity to use all our traditional due process protections to drag out the proceedings’. For these conservatives, 9/11 was a thunderous judgment on thirty years of treason and a golden opportunity to move in the opposite direction: to expand the power of the presidency at the expense of Congress and the courts; and to blur the lines between intelligence gathering, political surveillance and law enforcement.

The synergy between national security and conservative anxiety is hardly new. As Johnson shows, the Lavender Scare reflected a general backlash against the loosening of sexual mores and gender roles that resulted from the New Deal and the Second World War. Roosevelt’s welfare state, conservatives argued, sapped the nation’s energy, drained away patriarchal vigour. Instead of sturdy husbands and firm fathers controlling their wives and children, lisping bureaucrats and female social workers were now running the show. World War Two exacerbated the problem: with so many men away at the front, and women working in the factories, male authority was further eroded. Citing these ‘social and family upheavals’, J. Edgar Hoover argued that ‘the wartime spirit of abandon and “anything goes” led to a decline of morals among people of all ages.’

Washington was the centre of this cultural revolution. A boom town for young single people in the 1930s and 1940s, it had a tight housing market, forcing men to bunk up with men, and offered women plentiful opportunities to support themselves by government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in front of the White House) and the company of tolerant female colleagues in the federal bureaucracy, homosexuals managed to turn Washington into a ‘very gay city’. Hoover grew up in DC when it was a racist backwater of the Old South, and despite his own ambiguous sexuality, he was not happy about these changes.

After the war conservatives stirred a panic about gender roles – ‘A great emphasis,’ according to Cheever, ‘by way of defence, was put upon manliness, athletics, hunting, fishing and conservative clothing, but the lonely wife wondered, glancingly, about her husband at his hunting camp, and the husband wondered with whom he shared a rude bed of pines. Was he? Had he? Did he want to? Had he ever?’ – and deftly turned the public against a government bent on making everyone gay. The New Deal, they claimed, was a Queer Deal; America was run by ‘fairies and Fair Dealers’ (Truman called his domestic programme the Fair Deal). Because of this ungodly union of Democrats, Communists and fags, the United States was now vulnerable to the Soviet Union.

Today’s conservatives believe that decades of domestic reform, driven this time by an excessive tenderness about the constitution, have created a devitalised society that lacks the will and wherewithal to face down foreign threats. That is why Bush promised after 9/11 that there would be ‘no yielding. No equivocation. No lawyering this thing to death.’ It’s also why Ashcroft bridled at the notion that the US government should read al-Qaida ‘the Miranda rights, hire a flamboyant defence lawyer, bring them back to the United States to create a new cable network of Osama TV’. It’s not clear who, if anyone, was recommending such a policy, but that Ashcroft felt compelled to denounce it gives an indication of what he thinks is at issue when he talks about security. Conservatives certainly believe that the Patriot Act and other restrictions on civil liberties will protect the American people: whether or not it’s from terrorism that they’re being protected is another question.

There is a second problem with the notion of a ‘balance’ between freedom and security. Ever since warfare became the business of peoples rather than kings, security’s compass has steadily expanded beyond the barracks and high command of the military. Frederick II waged war, as Lukács wrote, ‘in such a manner that the civilian population simply would not notice it’; modern war insinuates itself into ‘the inner life of a nation’. It requires the full mobilisation of a country’s resources and active support of its citizenry. Limiting freedom in the most remote parts of society can thus be justified as a legitimate act of national defence. One can find a clear and present danger in the nation’s political economy, its schools and popular culture, even in its beds, and resolve to suppress liberty there in order to avert the threat. When liberals and conservatives affirm the priority of security over freedom in wartime, they are not just endorsing government restrictions on what the press reports about the military, they are also licensing the suppression of all manner of dissent, throughout the entire social order.

Consider the National Security Agency’s surveillance of all telecommunications traffic in the United States, which was first reported in the New York Times in 2005. As James Risen, who helped break the story, writes in State of War, the NSA is ‘the largest organisation in the United States intelligence community, double the size of the CIA and truly the dominant electronic spy service in the world’. Thanks to a secret order issued by Bush in 2002, it ‘is now eavesdropping on as many as five hundred people in the United States at any given time and potentially has access to the phone calls and emails of millions more. It does this without court-approved search warrants and with little independent oversight.’

The administration’s justification for this programme, which may be ‘the largest domestic spying operation since the 1960s’, is that, in order to monitor international traffic between terrorists, it must tap into the domestic network. ‘The switches carrying calls from Cleveland to Chicago . . . may also be carrying calls from Islamabad to Jakarta,’ with the result that ‘it is now difficult to tell where the domestic telephone system ends and the international network begins.’ The administration has authorised the NSA to work secretly with telecommunications companies to spy on this international traffic and encouraged them to route more of it through the United States. If they aren’t already, the NSA and its helpers in private industry may soon be spying not only on America but on Europe and Asia as well.

The expansion of the security domain into all areas of society does more than curtail freedom in the abstract: it also empowers the forces of political repression. Influential conservatives argue that national unity is an essential weapon of war, that opposition undermines the war effort, and that dissenters are either subversive or traitorous. After the recent victory in the Connecticut Democratic primary of the antiwar candidate Ned Lamont over the hawkish senator Joe Lieberman, Cheney declared that Lamont’s election would only embolden ‘the al-Qaida types’, who were ‘betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people’.

The Patriot Act, passed by Congress six weeks after 9/11, takes the equation of dissent with subversion a step further, suggesting that opponents of the war are not just helping terrorists but may be terrorists themselves. Section 802 of the Act defines ‘domestic terrorism’ as ‘acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws’ and that ‘appear to be intended . . . to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion’. As Nancy Chang points out in Silencing Political Dissent (2002), a definition as vague and broad as this could easily be used against demonstrators marching without a permit (a protest might make it impossible for ambulances or other emergency vehicles to get through). After anti-war protesters caused a disruption in Portland, Oregon in the autumn of 2002, state legislators drafted an anti-terrorism bill along these lines. They defined terrorism as, among other things, any act intended ‘by at least one of its participants’ to disrupt ‘commerce or the transportation systems of the State of Oregon’.

During the Republican National Convention of September 2004, the New York police department arrested 1800 anti-war protesters on various charges, most of which were later thrown out of court. Justifying these arrests, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said: ‘Some people think that we shouldn’t allow people to express themselves. That’s exactly what the terrorists did, if you think about it, on 9/11. Now this is not the same kind of terrorism, but there’s no question that these anarchists are afraid to let people speak out.’

Because war mobilises all spheres of society, defenders of the social order claim that any disruption to that order – from, say, striking labour unions – is as threatening to the war effort as opposition to the war itself. It was on these grounds that in 1950 the Supreme Court upheld the federal government’s denial of labour protection to Communist-led unions. These union leaders, the court argued, might use their positions of power ‘at a time of external or internal crisis’ to call ‘political strikes’ and disrupt the channels of commerce. In January 2003, the office of Tom DeLay, then the House majority leader, sent out a fundraising letter to supporters of the National Right to Work Foundation, a business group seeking to rid America of unions. Claiming that the labour movement ‘presents a clear-and-present-danger to the security of the United States at home and the safety of our Armed Forces overseas’, the letter denounced ‘Big Labour Bosses . . . willing to harm freedom-loving workers, the war effort and the economy to acquire more power!’

Republicans in Congress also worked closely with Bush to deny union rights and whistle-blower protection to 170,000 employees in the Department of Homeland Security. Even though many of them are clerical workers, and even though employees in the Defense Department are not denied these rights, the administration claimed that eliminating them would make the department as ‘agile and aggressive as the terrorists themselves’. After Congress passed the anti-union bill in November 2002, a White House official declared it to be a model for all federal employees.

The government shares these weapons with private employers, who are often better positioned to use and abuse them. Because they aren’t subject to the constraints of the First Amendment, they are generally free to use their powers of hiring and firing, promotion and demotion, to silence dissent. During the McCarthy years, for example, the government imprisoned fewer than two hundred men and women for political reasons. But anywhere between 20 and 40 per cent of the workforce was monitored for signs of ideological nonconformity, which included support for civil rights and labour unions.

The effects of this outsourcing of repression are particularly visible in the media. As Eric Boehlert shows in Lapdogs, his scathing and exhaustively researched critique of contemporary journalism, the US media practises a form of censorship that must be the envy of tyrants everywhere. Without the government lifting a finger, informal pressure and newsroom careerism is enough to make reporters toe the line. The former CBS news anchor Dan Rather claims that conservatives are ‘all over your telephones, all over your email’. As a result, ‘you say to yourself: “You know, I think we’re right on this story. I think we’ve got it in the right context, I think we’ve got it in the right perspective, but we better pick another day.”’ Those at the bottom get the message fast. The television reporter Sam Donaldson, who covered the White House during the Reagan years, tells Boehlert:

Today, not all the bosses support their reporters. So if you’re a reporter at the White House and you’re thinking about further successes in the business and you’re nervous about your boss getting a call, maybe you pull your punches because of the career track.

Journalists afraid for their careers aren’t likely to question their government in time of war. And they haven’t. ABC’s Ted Koppel, reputed to be one of the most aggressive interviewers in the business, admits that ‘we were too timid before the war’ in Iraq. The PBS anchor Jim Lehrer says: ‘It would have been difficult to have had debates [about occupying Iraq] . . . you’d have had to have gone against the grain.’ The few journalists who bucked the trend were swiftly punished. After criticising the media for its coverage of the war, Ashleigh Banfield was ‘taken to the woodshed’ by her bosses, according to a Newsday report, and her career at NBC was finished. A Wall Street Journal reporter sent a personal email describing the terrible situation in Iraq: her editors pulled her out of the country and off the story.

The notion of a balance between freedom and security mistakenly assumes that its benefits and burdens will be distributed equally among all members of society. Cole and Dempsey point out that some members of society, often the most marginalised and despised – gays and leftists during the Cold War, Arabs and Muslims (and gays and leftists to a lesser degree) today – are always forced to give up their freedoms so that the rest can enjoy their security. Indeed, it is precisely because these groups are powerless, and not because they are dangerous, that the powerful can require them to bear the cost. (Two per cent of American men aged between 18 and 21 are arrested for drunk driving, yet the Supreme Court has ruled that that does not justify denying men of that age the right to buy alcohol. Many fewer than 2 per cent of Arabs and Muslims in the United States are engaged in terrorist activity but the US government has denied these groups far more fundamental rights.) What the metaphor of balance between freedom and security conceals is the fundamental imbalance of power between groups in society; unequal costs are paid in return for unequal gains.

In No Equal Justice (1999), David Cole turned a commonplace – that white and/or wealthy Americans get better treatment from the cops and courts than black and/ or poor citizens – into a startling theorisation of the dual justice system that prevails in America. Granting maximal rights to all citizens would have a high cost in terms of safety, he observed, while denying those rights would have a high cost in terms of freedom. So what does America do? It does both: it formally grants rights to all, but systematically denies them to blacks and the poor. White, wealthy America gets maximal freedom and maximal safety, and ‘sidesteps the difficult question of how much constitutional protection we could afford if we were willing to ensure that it was enjoyed equally by all people’.

In Enemy Aliens and Terrorism and the Constitution, Cole extends this argument to non-citizens in wartime. Ever since the Alien Act of 1798, America’s first impulse when faced with a foreign threat has been to restrict the rights of immigrants. Cole argues that the appeal of such measures is similar to the appeal of the dual system of criminal justice. It is a ‘politically tempting way to mediate the tension between liberty and security. Citizens need not forgo their rights’ in order to be – or to feel – protected. Non-citizens forgo theirs, and because they ‘have no direct voice in the democratic process by which to register their objections’, few people complain.

After 9/11, Cole points out, security measures that would have affected all citizens – such as Operation TIPS, in which utility employees, delivery men and other individuals were to spy on their fellow citizens, or the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness programme, a massive surveillance project of public and private computer records – were quickly blocked, even by leading Republicans. But measures affecting non-citizens, particularly Muslims and Arabs, received overwhelming public support. Perhaps that is why, a year after 9/11, believed themselves to have sacrificed basic rights and liberties.

But there is one difference between the treatment of aliens in wartime and the treatment of blacks and the poor in peacetime. As Cole argues, wartime measures inflicted on non-citizens eventually influence measures against US citizens, especially liberals or progressives, or those with the wrong skin colour. In 1942, the federal government put Japanese non-citizens and Japanese-Americans in internment camps (on the assumption that even if they were citizens, their racial heritage made them aliens). Several years later, the FBI compiled a secret list of 12,000 citizens to be detained in the event of a national emergency – an initiative ratified in 1950 by the passage of the Internal Security Act, which remained on the books until 1971. Whether or not a similar mutation will occur in the war on terror is anyone’s guess, but the evidence so far is not encouraging.

When we speak about a balance beteeen freedom and security what we really mean is a balance between power and powerlessness. It makes perfect sense for conservatives to use the metaphor, for it conceals and protects their natural constituency. The real question is: why do liberals oblige them?

It was liberals who first argued that individuals should be free to say and do whatever they wish, as long as they don’t harm anyone else. Liberal democracies should use coercion only to punish acts or attempted acts of harm, including threats to the security of the nation. One can see variants of this argument in Locke’s account of religious toleration, which could be sacrificed only for ‘the safety and security of the commonwealth’; Mill’s theory of liberty, which could be limited only to avert harm; and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s defence of freedom of speech, which could be abridged only to thwart ‘a clear and present danger’.

The problem with these arguments is that it is nearly impossible to define harm – or danger, threat, menace – in a neutral way. Every definition of harm and its national security cognates rests on ideological assumptions about human nature, morality and the good life. And in this regard, liberals are as guilty as conservatives. The only difference is that they have less power to act on their convictions – and to stop their opponents from acting on theirs.

In 1957, while the US was conducting its purge of homosexuals, the Wolfenden Committee in the UK recommended, among other things, that gay sex between consenting adults in private be decriminalised. Speaking at the British Academy in March 1959, the conservative jurist Patrick Devlin bridled at the committee’s contention that there is ‘a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business’ and that only concrete acts of injury or harm should be prosecuted and punished by law. Not so, Devlin said: ‘What makes a society of any sort is community of ideas, not only political ideas but also ideas about the way its members should behave and govern their lives.’ Any challenge to those ideas – no matter how private, incidental or symbolic – undermined social cohesion and posed as great a threat to the civic order as treason. In the same way that treason could lead to the overthrow of a government, homosexuality could produce a ‘loosening of moral bonds’, which ‘is often the first stage of disintegration’. Thus, ‘the suppression of vice is as much the law’s business as the suppression of subversive activities.’

The liberal philosopher H.L.A. Hart’s response was fast, and furious. ‘It is grotesque,’ he declared, ‘to think of the homosexual behaviour of two adults in private as in any way like treason or sedition.’ Not just grotesque but obtuse: Devlin mistakenly assumed ‘that deviation from a general moral code is bound to affect that code, and to lead not merely to its modification but to its destruction.’ If one man’s private acts did alter a society’s beliefs – a big if, Hart insisted – such a shift would constitute not a collapse but a transformation of social morality. The proper political analogue to gay sex, then, was not treason but ‘a peaceful change’ in a form of government.

Critics tend to think that Hart got the better of Devlin. But I wonder. Hart, after all, never defined harm with any precision or persuasiveness, and it’s not clear that he could have. So what was to stop Devlin from claiming that homosexuality was as harmful as treason – or, as his American counterparts claimed, that homosexuality was treason? Very little, it seems, either politically or philosophically. For when harm comes in shades of grey, someone, somewhere, will inevitably see it in lavender and pink – or some other disfavoured colour of the rainbow.

Mini Hindi Break n' Pop

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx-NLPH8JeM

Borat at MySpace

Link here

Emptiness

Consider the difference
in our actions and God's actions.

We often ask, "Why did you do that?"
or "Why did I act like that?"

We do act, and yet everything we do
is God's creative action.

We look back and analyse the events
of our lives, but there is another way
of seeing, a backward-and-forward-at-once
vision, that is not rationally understandable.

Only God can understand it.
Satan made the excuse, "You caused me to fall,
whereas Adam said to God, "We did this
to ourselves." After this repentance,
God asked Adam, "Since all is within
my foreknowledge, why didn't you
defend yourself with that reason?"

Adam answered, "I was afraid,
and I wanted to be reverent."

Whoever acts with respect will get respect.
Whoever brings sweetness will be served almond cake.
Good women are drawn to be with good men.

Honour your friend.
Or treat him rudely,
and see what happens!

Love, tell an incident now
that will clarify this mystery
of how we act freely, and are yet
compelled. One hand shakes with palsy.
Another shakes because you slapped it away.

Both tremblings come from God,
but you feel guilty for the one,
and what about the other?

These are intellectual questions.
The spirit approaches the matter
differently. Omar once had a friend, a scientist,
Bu'l-Hakam, who was flawless at solving
empirical problems, but he could not follow Omar
into the area of illumination and wonder.

Now I return to the text, "And He is with you,
wherever you are," but when have I ever left it!

Ignorance is God's prison
Knowing is God's palace.

We sleep in God's unconsciousness.
We wake in God's open hand.

We weep God's rain.
We laugh God's lightning.

Fighting and peacefulness
both take place within God.

Who are we then
in this complicated world-tangle,
that is really just the single, straight
line down at the beginning of ALLAH?

Nothing.
We are
emptiness.

                ----

When you are with everyone but me,
                         you're with no one.
When you are with no one but me,
                         you're with everyone.

Instead of being so bound up with everyone,
                         be everyone.
When you become that many, you're nothing.
                         Empty.

         -- Jalaluddin Rumi

Very cool video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYhhfHYZa5s

This video is absolutely amazing.  Especially the Tetris!