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In refusing to allow Ashraf Hafiz Abdul Aziz to change his name, the courts may have adhered to the letter of the law but did they lack the compassion for transgenders, asks MOHAMMAD HASHIM KAMALI.

THE untimely death of Ashraf Hafiz Abdul Aziz at 26 and the difficulties he faced put many in a reflective mood as to what could have been done better to address his suffering when he was alive. By refusing to grant Ashraf his plea to change and register his name as Aleesha Farhana, the courts may have adhered to the letter of the law but it is questionable whether they were compassionate enough.

If one were to learn a lesson, it would be to find better answers through suitable legislation and grant of flexibility in the adjudication of intensely humanitarian cases such as Ashraf’s. The Birth and Deaths Registration Act 1957 only allows amendment in personal identity if an error had been made in the first place. The gender reassignment surgery Ashraf had two years ago apparently did not warrant

such an amendment.

There are an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 transgenders in the country, most of whom are grappling with stigma and prejudice. They get little comfort from the authorities, and even religious leaders tend to lecture them on how they should reform themselves. They have low self-esteem and often get involved in the vice trade.

Ashraf’s case evidently invoked voices of compassion in the media and elsewhere, although the media coverage on him seemed more interested in the colour and make-up of his clothes rather than his emotional trauma and pain.

Islam is cognizant of the predicament of transgender individuals, and even though the fiqh tradition provides a certain amount of detail, it is the general guidelines of the Quran and Hadith that need to be looked at first.

Islam identifies itself as din al-fitrah, a religion that manifests harmony with human nature, which implies that Islam seeks to respond positively to the legitimate needs of people. Our natural need and reason, informed by the available guidelines in Islam and scientific evidence, should guide us in our quest to provide fair responses to issues.

Justice is a cardinal principle of Islam, yet it is to be tempered with fairness (ihsan) — as in the Quranic verse “God commands justice and fairness” (al-Nahl, 16:90).

God’s affirmation that “We have bestowed dignity on the children of Adam” (17:70) is unqualified and absolute in that human dignity is divinely ordained and inheres in all individuals by virtue of their humanity. This should be duly reflected in our social and family relations, business transactions, laws and governance.

All of this is to be further moderated by the principle that “God makes no soul responsible for what is beyond its capacity” (2:233). Prophet Muhammad also said that “people are God’s children and the most beloved of them to God is the most compassionate of them to His children”. There is acknowledgement in the Quran also of “men who have no wiles with women”, side by side with minors and elderly persons with whom women can behave more freely within the home environment (24:31 and 24:60).

The fiqh discourse on transgenders draws a certain distinction between two categories of persons, namely the khuntha and the mukhannath. The former is a male person who resembles a female in speech, movement and appearance due to an inherent condition that is beyond his ability to control, and there is, therefore, no sin, shame or blame attached to it.

Juristic discourse concerning the khuntha is almost entirely focused on their rights in respect of privacy, clothing, burial ceremonies, inheritance rights and others. This is a language not of denial but affirmation that such persons do exist among us and that society should allow space for them to lead a life of dignity.

The mukhannath is, on the other hand, a person who conceals his masculinity and much of his feminine behaviour is deemed to be of his own making. There is blame attached to this and the case is treated differently to that of the khuntha.

To differentiate one from the other may admittedly not be self-evident, in which case scientific evidence plays a crucial role, although the fiqh tradition, too, has moved beyond simplistic categories to discern shades of differences between them.

Fiqh and science both confirm that sexual orientation is latent within each individual, emerging in complex interactions between one’s biological make-up and early childhood. Current research is pushing slowly but steadily towards the conclusion that sexual orientation is largely inherent.

Khuntha is further divided into two types: easy to discern (khuntha ghayr mushkil), as opposed to khuntha mushkil, whose condition is difficult to determine.

The former is a person who exhibits both masculine and feminine traits, but one of these is predominant. This is basically a man with feminine tendencies, or a woman with masculine tendencies, and it is possible to determine the application of fiqh rules pertaining to their rights.

The khunsa mushkil, or transgender in the full sense, is a person who may have both male and female sexual organs, or has neither but whose urinary tract ends with an aperture. If the former, an attempt is made to determine the manner of urination. If this proves reliable, and natural inclinations, whether towards men or women, also fail to provide a clue, the case is treated as one of indeterminable hermaphrodite.

Jurists and schools of law have differed as to details in the application of fiqh rules pertaining, for example, to inheritance, by taking an average of two separate distributions for a male and a female respectively, or the lower of the two, depending on which school of fiqh one follows, to be assigned to the hermaphrodite.

Some of these questions can now be better determined perhaps in light of advances in science, in which case the rules of ijtihad would suggest recourse to scientific evidence, general guidelines of the Quran and Hadith, as well as the enlightened aspirations and insights of our society and our quest to finding more refined answers.

Prof Mohammad Hashim Kamali is founding chairman and CEO of the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies Malaysia.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has identified credible reports of 168 children killed in seven years of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These children would account for 44% of the minimum figure of 385 civilians reported killed by the attacks.

Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, said in response to the findings: ‘Even one child death from drone missiles or suicide bombings is one child death too many.’

Child deaths

Children have been killed throughout the seven years of CIA strikes.

Pakistani father Din Mohammad had the misfortune to live next door to militants in Danda Darpakhel, North Waziristan. His neighbours were reportedly part of the Haqqani Network, a group fighting US forces in nearby Afghanistan.

On September 8 2010, the CIA’s Reaper drones paid a visit. Hellfire missiles tore into the compound killing six alleged militants.

One of the Hellfires missed its target, and Din Mohammad’s house was hit. He survived. But his son, his two daughters and his nephew all died. His eldest boy had been a student at a Waziristan military cadet college. The other three children were all below school age.

Although the Bureau’s field researchers have verified the details of this strike, the US continues to deny civilians are being killed in Pakistan strikes.

Those who died that day are just four of some 168 children credibly reported as killed and identified by the Bureau.

‘One in three’

The highest number of child deaths occurred during the Bush presidency, with 112 children reportedly killed. More than a third of all Bush drone strikes appear to have resulted in the deaths of children.

On only one occasion during Bush’s time in office did a single child die in a strike. Multiple deaths occurred every other time. On July 28 2008 for example, CIA drones struck a seminary in South Waziristan, killing al Qaeda’s chemical weapons expert Abu Khabab al Masri along with his team (see B18) . Publicly the attack was hailed a success.

But the Agency’s strike also killed three young boys and a woman. Despite the secrecy surrounding the drones campaign, details emerged in May of this year that not only was the US aware of this ‘collateral damage’, but that the then-CIA chief Michael Hayden personally apologised to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Gilani for the error.

Religious school attacked

It is one of the worst incidents of the entire drones campaign, yet one of the least reported. A CIA strike on a madrassa or religious school in 2006 killed up to 69 children, among 80 civilians.

The attack was on a religious seminary in Chenegai, in Bajaur Agency.

CIA drones attacked on October 30, flattening much of the school. Their target was reportedly the headmaster, a known militant. According to some reports, there was also a token late contribution to the assault by Pakistani military helicopters. But dozens of children were also killed, the youngest aged seven.

Veteran BBC Urdu journalist Rahimullah Yousufzai, speaking from Peshawr, recalls visiting the village just after the strike: ‘People were devastated. I met with a father who had lost two children. He was very patient, talking of how God must have willed this, but he was clearly traumatised.’

Initially the Pakistan Army claimed that it had carried out the bombardment, even as shops and offices closed across the region and protests spread. But as the scale of the attack unfolded, the story changed. The Sunday Times carried a report from a key aide to Pakistan’s then-President Musharraf stating:

We thought it would be less damaging if we said we did it rather than the US. But there was a lot of collateral damage and we’ve requested the Americans not to do it again.

A week after the attack, The News published the names and home villages of 80 victims. 69 were reported as children aged 17 or under. According to the paper’s sources:

It was claimed that one of the deceased was only seven-year old, three were eight, three nine, one was 10, four were 11, four were 12, eight were 13, six were 14, nine were 15, 19 were 16, 12 were 17, three were 18, three were 19 and only two were 21-years-old.

Yousufzai is adamant that the attack was the work of the CIA: ‘I am absolutely confident, 100 per cent, that this was carried out by US drones, based on witnesses at the time and the subsequent comments of [Pakistani] government officials.’

Escalating War

President Obama, too, has been as Commander-in-Chief responsible for many child deaths in Pakistan. The Bureau has identified 56 children reported killed in drone strikes during his presidency – although child deaths have dropped significantly in recent months.

On February 14 2009 the 8-year-old son of Maezol Khan lost his life. More than 25 alleged militants were killed in a massive strike on a nearby house. But flying shrapnel killed the young boy as he slept next door. His grandfather later asked asked: ‘How can the US invade our homes while we are sleeping, and target our children?’

But one 2009 incident in which children died gives a chilling insight into the tactics of those the CIA are hunting. On August 11 of that year drones attacked an alleged Pakistan Taliban compound, killing up to 25 people. At the time there were reports of women and children killed (see Ob31).

Two years later, young survivor Arshad Khan, now in Pakistani police custody, told reporters that the compound was a training camp for teenage suicide bombers. He named four young victims. Arshad says he was recruited without realising he was to be a suicide bomber.

Commenting on children killed by drone strikes, Unicef’s South Asia regional spokesperson Sarah Crowe told the Bureau:

Even one child death from drone missiles or suicide bombings is one child death too many. Children have no place in war and all parties should do their utmost to protect children from violent attacks at all times.

Reducing deaths 

There are indications that the Obama administration is making efforts to reduce the number of children being killed. Following the incident in September 2010 that killed Din Mohammad’s children, and another strike just weeks earlier in which a further three children died, there has been an apparent steep fall in the number of child fatalities reported by media.

That is partially in line with claims by some US intelligence officials that drone targeting strategies have been altered to reduce civilian casualties. Although the Bureau has demonstrated that CIA claims of ‘zero casualties’ are false, there are fewer reports of child casualties since August 2010.

Along with two undefined reports of ‘children killed’, a 17-year-old student was killed in November last year. And on April 22 2011 two drones destroyed a house and guesthouse in Spinwan, North Waziristan. A 12-year-old boy, Atif, was killed in that strike, according to researchers working with the Bureau in Waziristan.

Mirza Shahzad Akbar, an Islamabad-based lawyer representing a number of families caught up in drone strikes said:

All these children are a big recruitment agent for militants in the area. When you can show people that children are being killed in the drone strikes, all those who are so far non-aligned, that gets them onto the other side. That is what most worries me as a Pakistani.

A US counter-terrorism official, commenting generally on the Bureau’s findings, denied that civilians were being killed in the numbers suggested and said: ‘Nobody is arguing perfection over the life of the program, but this remains the most precise system we’ve ever had in our arsenal.’

* For this research, we have adopted the UN’s definition of a child as being someone aged between 0 and 17. The majority of those we have come across have been significantly younger than 17.

As the poor of Britain rise in a fury of inchoate rage and stock exchanges worldwide experience manic upswings and panicked swoons, the financial elite (and their political operatives) are arrayed in a defensive posture, even as they continue their global-wide, full-spectrum offensive vis-à-vie The Shock Doctrine. Concurrently, corporate mass media types fret over the reversal of fortune and trumpet the triumphs of the self-serving agendas of Wall Street and corporate swindlers…even as they term a feller, in ill-gotten possession of a flat screen television, fleeing through the streets of North London, a mindless thug.

According to the through-the-looking-glass cosmology of mass media elitists, when a poor person commits a crime of opportunity, his actions are a threat to all we hold dear and sacred, but, when the hyper-wealthy of the entrenched looter class abscond with billions, those criminals are referred to as our financial leaders.

Regardless of the propaganda of “free market” fantasists, the great unspeakable in regard to capitalism is its wealth, by and large, is generated for a ruthless, privileged few by the creation of bubbles, and, when those bubbles burst, the resultant economic catastrophe inflicts a vastly disproportionate amount of harm upon those — the laboring and middle classes — who generate grossly inequitable amounts of capital for the elitist of the fraudster class…by having the life force drained from them by the vampiric set-up of the gamed system.

Woody Guthrie summed up the situation in these two (unfortunately) ageless stanzas:

“Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men;

Some will rob you with a sixgun,

And some with a fountain pen.

“And as through your life you travel,

Yes, as through your life you roam,

You won’t never see an outlaw

Drive a family from their home.”

–excerpt from Pretty Boy Floyd.

Although, at present, U.S. bank vaults contain little tangible loot for a Pretty Boy Floyd-type outlaw to boost. How would it be possible for an old school bank robber such as Floyd to make-off with a haul of funneling electrons?

Here’s the lowdown: The Wall Street fraudsters of the swindler class want to refill their coffers and line their pockets (that is, offshore accounts) with Social Security and Medicare funds. That’s the nature of the unfolding scam, folks. Oligarchic rule has always been a system defined by legalized looting that leaves a wasteland of want, deprivation, and unfocused rage in its wake.

Consequently, in the U.K. (and beyond): When poor people’s hopes dry up, cities become a tinderbox of dead dreams, and we should not be stricken with shock and consternation when these degraded places are set aflame, nor should we be surprised when the bribed, debt-beholden and commercial media propaganda-bamboozled middle class (who helped create the wasteland with their arid complicity) cry out (predictably) for police state tactics to quell the fiery insurrection.

There have been incidents in which a fire has smoldered for years in an abandoned, sealed-off mineshaft, and then the fire, traveling through the tunnels of the mine, and up the roots of dead, dried trees have caused a dying forest to bloom into flames. The rage that sparks a riot can proceed in a similar manner — and the insular, sealed-off nature of a nation’s elite and the willful ignorance of its middle class will only make the explosion of pent-up rage more powerful when it reaches the surface.

We exist in a culture that, day after day, inundates its have-nots with consumerist propaganda, and then, when the social order breaks down, its wealthy and bourgeoisie alike express outrage when the poor steal consumer goods — as opposed to going out and looting an education and a good job.

Under Disaster Capitalism, the underclass have had economic violence inflicted upon them since birth, yet the corporate state mass media doesn’t seem to notice the situation, until young men burn down the night. Then media elitists wax indignant, carrying on as if these desperate acts are devoid of cultural context.

A mindset has been instilled in these young men and boys that they are nothing sans the accoutrements of consumerism. Yet when they loot an i-Phone, as opposed to creating economy-shredding derivative scams, we’re prompted by the corporate media to become indignant.

When the slow motion, elitist-manipulated mob action known as our faux democratic/consumerist culture deprives people of their basic human rights and personal dignity — then, in turn, we should not be shocked when a mob of the underclass fails to bestow those virtues upon others.

The commercial mass media’s narrative of narrowed context (emotional, anecdotal and unreflective in nature) serves as a form of corporate state propaganda, promulgated to ensure the general population continues to rage against the symptoms rather than the disease of neoliberalism. The false framing of opposing opinions — of those who state the deprivations of neoliberalism factor into the causes of uprisings, insurrections and riots as being apologists for violence and destruction is as preposterous as claiming one is an apologist for dry rot when he points out structural damage to a house due to a leaking roof.

Because of the elements of inverted totalitarianism, inherent within the structure of corporate state capitalism, and internalized within the general population by constant, commercial media re-enforcement, one should not be surprised when a sizable portion of the general populace is inclined to support police state tactics to quell social unrest among the disadvantaged of the population.

Keep in mind: When watching the BBC or the corporate media, one is receiving a limited narrative (tacitly) approved by the global power elite, created by informal arrangements among a careerist cartel comprised of business, governmental and media personality types who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, even if, in doing so, they serve as operatives of a burgeoning police state.

Accordingly, you can’t debate fascist thinking with reason nor empathetic imagination e.g., the self-righteous (and self-serving) pronouncements of mass media representatives nor the attendant outrage of the denizens of the corporate state in their audience — their umbrage engineered by the emotionally laden images with which they have been relentlessly pummeled and plied — because their responses will be borne of (conveniently) lazy generalizations, given impetus by fear-based animus.

Through it all, veiled by disorienting media distractions and political legerdemain, we find ourselves buffeted and bound by the predicament of paradigm lost…that constitutes the onset of the unraveling of the present order.

“The kings of the world are growing old,

and they shall have no inheritors.

Their sons died while they were boys,

and their neurasthenic daughters abandoned

the sick crown to the mob.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from The Kings of the World”

Yet, while there is proliferate evidence that, even as people worldwide are rising up against inequity and exploitation, the economic elite have little inclination to do so much as glimpse the plight of those from whose life blood their immense riches have been wrung, nor hear the admonition of the downtrodden…that they are weary of life on their knees and are awakening to the reality that the con of freedom of choice under corporate state oligarchy is, in fact, a life shackled to the consumerism-addicted/debt-indenturement that comprises the structure of the neoliberal, global company store.

“The rotten masks that divide one man

From another, one man from himself

They crumble

For one enormous moment and we glimpse

The unity that we lost, the desolation

…Of being man, and all its glories

Sharing bread and sun and death

The forgotten astonishment of being alive”

–Octavio Paz, excerpt from “Sunstone”

Accordingly, the most profound act of selfless devotion (commonly called love) in relationship to a society gripped by a sociopathic mode of being is creative resistance. Submission is madness. Sanity entails subversion. The heart insists on it; otherwise, life is only a slog to the graveyard; mouth, full of ashes; heart, a receptacle for dust.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com . Visit Phil’s website http://philrockstroh.com / And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100…

A single shot – Duggan’s killing – ignited berserk in Britain exposing the advanced bourgeois democracy’s terminus ad quem. Questions haunt the governing system baffled with teenagers’ outburst of rage now impacting British political map.

In London, Manchester and Birmingham, courts with chaotic scenes worked through the night to process the alleged looters and vandals. Police in London raided houses to round up rioting suspects. (AP, “London police raiding houses over UK riots”) About 1,200 people have been arrested. Most of them are poor youths. The court scene followed disturbed streets.

Disordered English cities and towns including London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester witnessed scenes resembling war zone: leaping red flames, plumes of black smoke, rocks, bottles and debris littered streets, torched cars and buildings, smashed shops and windows, firebombed police station, thrown Molotov cocktail, and deployed police dogs, horses and armored cars. So many fires were fought in London that led authorities to warn that some customers could face water pressure drops.

PM Speaks

Prime Minister David Cameron vowed on to hunt down the street gang members and opportunistic looters, and acknowledged that police tactics had failed at the start of the rioting. “I say this: We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done,” Cameron said in parliament. (Reuters, “British PM Cameron vows crackdown on rioters”)

It now appears that street gang members can outwit or outmaneuver police. Are the police so foolish? Or, is there something else in the agenda?

“This is not about poverty, it’s about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority,” Cameron said.

From where the violence glorifying culture comes? What nourishes that culture? What’s that: subaltern or dominant culture? Has subaltern culture grown so powerful that that can create disturbances with this magnitude in towns and cities?

Cameron proposed more police powers, and said he would consider calling in the army for secondary roles in future unrest. Curbing the use of social media tools would be explored if these were used to plot “violence, disorder and criminality.”

It appears that the “street gang members and opportunistic looters” may turn so powerful that that may require “calling in the army”! Can the looters turn so powerful? It appears that criminal street gangs’ action can impact democratic space. They appear disproportionately powerful! Has the democracy grown that much weak?

Cameron said criminal street gangs were at the heart of the violence. “Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, they are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes,” he added.

A few questions can follow the statement: What makes homes dysfunctional? Are not these homes of the poor? Why the society is not taking care of these young boys as they appear powerful to incite incidents that damage private property worth millions of dollars, and require mobilizing police and recalling parliament into special session? Why the democracy is failing to handle these youth without resorting to force? Viewing “the rioters as thrill-seeking thugs who are indicative of a breakdown in Britain’s social fabric and morals” raises questions: why and how the breakdown occurred or what are the forces that breakdown these?

The vows, the statements show state of a democracy, its capacity or incapacity.

Three Versions

Through scores of news, there emerged three raw versions of the Britain berserk:

Cameron told reporters: “This is criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted and defeated.” “We will do everything necessary to restore order to Britain’s streets and to make them safe for the law-abiding citizens,” he said after the first meeting of crisis committee. “The violence we have seen is simply inexcusable. Ordinary people have had their lives turned upside down by this mindless thuggery,” the police commander said.

All most all authorities forget Robert Kennedy’s observation: “History offers cold comfort to those who think grievances and despair can be subdued by force.”

Tony Lloyd, Labour MP, felt “a sense of outrage and deep frustration” at the destruction. One lady said: “It was just completely lawless.” City councillor Pat Karney “was shocked and horrified to see the ages of some of these hooligans.”

How a decent society generates so many teen aged “hooligans” bent on loot and destruction? What are the roots? Is “something… rotten in the state of” Britain? Is there seed of rebellion in these acts of “mindless thuggery” at social scale?

On the contrary, one British boy boasted: “The streets are ours.” One youth said: “It’s payback for the police p***ing us off.” “There’s been tension for a long time. The kids aren’t happy. They hate the police,” said a teacher.

The contrary-version tells an old “story” well known to but ignored by most of authorities.

An AP news report cited a self-professed anarchist: “This is the uprising of the working class. We’re redistributing the wealth.” At that time, as the report described, a group of youths emerged from a store with chocolate bars and ice cream cones.

The “claim” of “uprising of the working class” and of “redistribution of wealth” is also an old slanted story that has always failed to stand on scientific ground. Working class neither owns the version nor joins the act. Working people don’t enjoy anarchism. Today is not 1917, London is not Petrograd, and London streets are not Winter Palace. Despite the fact, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World describes working people’s attitude and behavior with luxury items of the rich: the working people don’t envy these, with unshakable discipline and sense of dignity the working people don’t touch these, don’t pilfer, don’t plunder these. It is part of working class culture.

There are, a Reuters news report said, “visible inequalities where the wealthy often live in elegant houses just yards away from run-down city estates.” “But occupying the moral high ground is tricky in a country where some lawmakers and policemen have been embroiled in expenses and bribery scandals, and top bankers take huge bonuses even as the taxpayer bails out financial institutions.” (“British PM Cameron vows crackdown on rioters”)

Slashing 80 billion pounds from public spending, rising taxes, modified subsidy program for unemployed, cutting down welfare payments and tens of thousands of public sector jobs through 2015 create a ground for discontent. Prices for everything go up. Tottenham, the place the rage got its first outburst, is said to house 10,000 persons looking for jobs, and each available job has some 54 people vying for the position. In Britain, youth unemployment, in the age group of 16-24 who aren’t in school, is about 20%, the highest rate in 20 years. The inhuman living condition of the marginalized is now again coming out to public view. It is intolerable, miserable, hell-like, and not much different from the living condition of the Third and Fourth Worlds’ poor. Today’s living condition of many poor in the advanced democracy is not much different from the one Engels depicted in his book on the working class condition in that country.

The widespread dissent has unifying causes created over long time: marginalization, deprivation, unheard voices, bankrupt promises, and, in Martin Luther King’s language: “quicksands of…injustice”. Community leaders said the violence in London, the worst for decades in the city, was rooted in growing disparities in wealth and opportunity. The victims of the disparity are, as Martin Luther King once said of an American riot victims, “have been by passed by the progress of the past decade”.

A section of analysts, who likes to forget greed of bankers, speculators and their cohorts, insisted that greed was the “rioters’” only motive.

But no space for greed remains vacant in the human existence whose only driving force is hunger and humiliation. The poor have no power to own the attribute – greed – even in their dreams over their entire life. They lack that capacity. Many of them are completely unaware of the one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history – trillions of dollars for the speculators and cutting public spending for health, education, pensioners, laboring souls. How the poor fed with manipulated feelings and beliefs can nourish greed in their hearts?

A Lost Generation

“Each of the young rioters who clogged Britain’s courthouses painted a bleak picture of a lost generation: a 15-year-old Ukrainian whose mother died, a 17-year-old who followed his cousin into the mayhem, an 11-year-old arrested for stealing a garbage can” worth 50 pounds. The youngster pleaded guilty to burglary. (AP, “Britain’s rioters: young, poor and disillusioned”)

The boy, “member of a street gang” is honest enough that he pleads guilty, and he is considerate enough that he has not pocketed billions of dollars of public money to get bailed out of poverty. He has not speculated, has not brought disorder in financedom, and is not sitting on stash of public money handed out to banks.

“Many of the youths themselves struggle to find any plausible answer, but a widespread sense of alienation emerges from their tales”, said the news report. “‘Nobody is doing nothing for us — not the politicians, not the cops, no one,’ said a 19-year-old who lives near Tottenham, the blighted London neighborhood where the riots started.”

“Courts have been running nearly 24 hours a day to hear all the cases since the rioting began. Most cases are heard in a blink of an eye and only give a snapshot of some of the youngsters’ lives. Many of the defendants haven’t had a chance to talk at length with their attorneys, and most can’t be named because they are minors.” (AP, “Britain’s rioters: young, poor and disillusioned”)

The brief news report exposes who the “rioters” were. The teenage “rioters” seem have come out from Chaplin’s childhood days, days of cruel civility. (My Autobiography)

Unknown Mutiny Moment

Instances of unorganized public action are centuries-old, when people are frustrated, are in a seemingly hopeless or stifling situation, when pro-people politicians are nervous or indifferent or betraying, and there is absence of organized channels of expression, few of the pre-conditions for unorganized spontaneous civil unrest. Julius Caesar’s cremation stared at an incensed mob attacking the houses of Brutus and Cassius. “Heroes” of the conspiracy were unaware of people’s (in broad sense) pent up anger.

The students’ strike in the University of Paris in 1229 led to its closing for two years. The 13th century student activists were not fully sure of the result of their initiative.

In May 1875, there was outbreak of violence, “plunder of property”, and “murderous assault upon the money-lenders” in two Poona villages. The Government of Bombay appointed a committee on the same year to report on the “riots in Poona and Ahmednagar.” It produced the Report of the Deccan Riots Commission. The committee noted that the outbreak could just as easily have happened at any other place in the “affected area”: “The combustible elements were everywhere ready; design, or mistake or accident would have surely supplied the spark to ignite them.”

Those were the last days of Lord Lytton in British occupied India. Allan Octavian Hume, a retired civil servant in colonial India, observed that the people of India had a sense of hopelessness. He noted “a sudden violent outbreak of sporadic crime, murders of obnoxious persons, robbery of bankers and looting of bazaars, acts really of lawlessness which by a due coalescence of forces might any day develop into a National Revolt.” Hume suggested a safety valve and outlet to avoid further unrest – an Indian association that would give vent to the feelings of the Indians. He formed the Indian National Congress in 1885.

Despite commission enquiries and reports, “safety valve and an outlet” the British colonial masters could not ascertain the moments of outburst of numerous revolts and risings that swept colonial India including the Midnapur rising by people, Solapur Commune by workers, the Khyber revolt by navy sailors.

Elements that feed rebellions, mutinies, civil unrest, etc. – anger, distrust, deprivation, disregard, folly of authority, crack down by authority, and many more – are now known to all. But determining the moment these strike spontaneously – Duggan Moment – is the problem. The moment is unknown. Unknown also is the place of spontaneous strike. It is almost like the Uncertainty Principle. When and where the match of spontaneity will be lighted is known by none but sudden torrent of incidents, incendiary under surface while the surface appears calm.

Britain has faced its Duggan Moment. But why the modern state with its immense intellectual and material resources failed to create a “safety valve and an outlet” in home despite having the experience of one of its civilian officers, who contemplated and materialized such a “safety valve”, etc. in a colony more than a hundred years ago? Similar more questions probably haunt, if not baffle, British elite mind.

The unorganized spontaneous protest in Britain, one of the most violent in contemporary Europe, alert states that nourish billionaire speculators and maintain the political order of financial disorder financial oligarchy creates. With the status quo of stratospheric inequality, mega-corruption, liquidated public services, squeezed down public space in environment, economy and politics, and choked down channels of organized protest unheard voices wait for appropriate moments for more spontaneous violence as that is the only way they are heard by forces of luxury and indulgence.

Dhaka based free lancer Farooque Chowdhury contributes on socioeconomic issues.

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Richard Rouget,  a gun for hire over two decades of bloody African conflict, is the unlikely face of the American campaign against militants in Somalia.

A husky former French Army officer, Mr. Rouget, 51, commanded a group of foreign fighters during Ivory Coast’s civil war in 2003, was convicted by a South African court of selling his military services and did a stint in the presidential guard of the Comoros Islands, an archipelago plagued by political tumult and coup attempts.

Now Mr. Rouget works for Bancroft Global Development, an American private security company that the State Department has indirectly financed to train African troops who have fought a pitched urban battle in the ruins of this city against the Shabab, the Somali militant group allied with Al Qaeda.

The company plays a vital part in the conflict now raging inside Somalia, a country that has been effectively ungoverned and mired in chaos for years. The fight against the Shabab, a group that United States officials fear could someday carry out strikes against the West, has mostly been outsourced to African soldiers and private companies out of reluctance to send American troops back into a country they hastily exited nearly two decades ago.

“We do not want an American footprint or boot on the ground,” said Johnnie Carson, the Obama administration’s top State Department official for Africa.

A visible United States military presence would be provocative, he said, partly because of Somalia’s history as a graveyard for American missions — including the “Black Hawk Down” episode in 1993, when Somali militiamen killed 18 American service members.

Still, over the past year, the United States has quietly stepped up operations inside Somalia, American officials acknowledge. The Central Intelligence Agency, which largely finances the country’s spy agency, has covertly trained Somali intelligence operatives, helped build a large base at Mogadishu’s airport — Somalis call it “the Pink House” for the reddish hue of its buildings or “Guantánamo” for its ties to the United States — and carried out joint interrogations of suspected terrorists with their counterparts in a ramshackle Somali prison.

The Pentagon has turned to strikes by armed drone aircraft to kill Shabab militants and recently approved $45 million in arms shipments to African troops fighting in Somalia.

But this is a piecemeal approach that many American officials believe will not be enough to suppress the Shabab over the long run. In interviews, more than a dozen current and former United States officials and experts described an overall American strategy in Somalia that has been troubled by a lack of focus and internal battles over the past decade. While the United States has significantly stepped up clandestine operations in Pakistan and Yemen, American officials are deeply worried about Somalia but cannot agree on the risks versus the rewards of escalating military strikes here.

“I think that neither the international community in general nor the U.S. government in particular really knows what to do with the failure of the political process in Somalia,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa program at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research institution.

For months, officials said, the State Department has been at odds with some military and intelligence officials about whether striking sites suspected of being militant camps in Somalia’s southern territories or carrying out American commando raids to kill militant leaders would significantly weaken the Shabab — or instead bolster its ranks by allowing the group to present itself as the underdog against a foreign power.

Lauren Ploch, an East Africa expert at the Congressional Research Service, said that the Obama administration was confronted with many of the same problems that had vexed its predecessors — “balancing the risks of an on-the-ground presence” against the risks of using “third parties” to carry out the American strategy in Somalia.

Teaching Fighting Skills

The Shabab has already shown its ability to strike beyond Somalia, killing dozens of Ugandans last summer in a suicide attack that many believe was a reprisal for the Ugandan government’s decision to send troops to Somalia. Now, though, thanks in part to Bancroft, the private security company, the militants have been forced into retreat. Several United Nations and African Union officials credit the work of Bancroft with improving the fighting skills of the African troops in Somalia, who this past weekend forced Shabab militants to withdraw from Mogadishu, the capital, for the first time in years.

Like other security companies in Somalia, Bancroft has thrived as a proxy of sorts for the American government. Based in a mansion along Embassy Row in Washington, Bancroft is a nonprofit enterprise run by Michael Stock, a 34-year-old Virginia native who founded the company not long after graduating from Princeton in 1999. He used some of his family’s banking fortune to set up Bancroft as a small land-mine clearing operation.

In recent years, the company has expanded its mission in Somalia and now runs one of the only fortified camps in Mogadishu — a warren of prefabricated buildings rimmed with sand bags a stone’s throw from the city’s decrepit, seaside airport.

The Bancroft camp operates as a spartan hotel for visiting aid workers, diplomats and journalists. But the company’s real income has come from the United States government, albeit circuitously. The governments of Uganda and Burundi pay Bancroft millions of dollars to train their soldiers for counterinsurgency missions in Somalia under an African Union banner, money that the State Department then reimburses to the two African nations. Since 2010, Bancroft has collected about $7 million through this arrangement.

Both American and United Nations officials said that Bancroft’s team in Mogadishu — a mixture of about 40 former South African, French and Scandinavian soldiers who call themselves “mentors” — has steadily improved the skills of the African troops and cut down on civilian casualties by persuading the troops to stop lobbing artillery shells into crowded parts of Mogadishu. One Western consultant who works with the African Union credits Bancroft with helping “turn a bush army into an urban fighting force.”

The advisers typically work from the front lines — showing the troops how to build sniper pits or smash holes in walls to move between houses.

“Urban fighting is a war of attrition, you nibble, nibble, nibble,” said Mr. Rouget, the Bancroft contractor. Last year, he was wounded in Mogadishu when a piece of shrapnel from a Shabab rocket explosion sliced through his thigh.

Still, he seems to thoroughly enjoy his work. “Give me some technicals” — a term for heavily armed pickup trucks — “and some savages and I’m happy,” he joked.

Privatizing War

Some critics view the role played by Mr. Rouget and other contractors as a troubling trend: relying on private companies to fight the battles that nations have no stomach for. Some American Congressional officials investigating the money being spent for operations in Somalia said that opaque arrangements like those for Bancroft — where money is passed through foreign governments — made it difficult to properly track how the funds were spent.

It also makes it harder for American officials to monitor who is being hired for the Somalia mission. In Bancroft’s case, some trainers are veterans of Africa’s bush wars who sometimes use aliases in the countries where they fought. Mr. Rouget, for example, used the name Colonel Sanders.

He denies that he is a mercenary, and said that his conviction in a South African court was “political,” more a “regulatory infraction” than a crime. He added that the French government, which sent peacekeeping troops to Ivory Coast, was well aware of his activities there.

Mr. Stock, Bancroft’s president, also flatly rejects the idea that his employees are mercenaries, insisting that the trainers do not participate in direct combat with Shabab fighters and are supported by legitimate governments.

“Mercenary activity is antithetical to the fundamental purposes for which Bancroft exists,” he said, adding that the company “does not engage in covert, clandestine or otherwise secret activities.”

He did say, though, that there is only a small pool of people Bancroft can hire who have experience fighting in African wars.

In recent years, according to a United Nations report, many companies have waded into Somalia’s chaos with contracts to protect Somali politicians, train African troops and build a combat force to battle armed Somali pirates.

The report provides new details about an operation by the South African firm Saracen International to train a 1,000-member antipiracy militia for the government of Puntland, a semiautonomous region in northern Somalia, effectively creating “the best-equipped indigenous military force anywhere in Somalia.” Using shell companies, some of which the United Nations report links to Erik Prince, who founded the Blackwater Worldwide security company, Saracen secretly shipped military equipment — which the report says violated an arms embargo — into northern Somalia on cargo planes leaving from Uganda and the United Arab Emirates. Several American officials have said that the Emirates, concerned about the piracy epidemic, have been secretly financing the Saracen operation.

Aid From the Pentagon

The Pentagon has recently told Congress that it plans to send nearly $45 million worth of military equipment to bolster the Ugandan and Burundian troops. The arms package includes transport trucks, body armor, night vision goggles and even four small drone aircraft that the African troops can use to spy on Shabab positions.

Unlike regular Somali government troops, the C.I.A.-trained Somali commandos are outfitted with new weapons and flak jackets, and are given sunglasses and ski masks to conceal their identities. They are part of the Somali National Security Agency — an intelligence organization financed largely by the C.I.A. — which answers to Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government. Many in Mogadishu, though, believe that the Somali intelligence service is building a power base independent of the weak government.

One Somali official, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, said that the spy service was becoming a “government within a government.”

“No one, not even the president, knows what the N.S.A. is doing,” he said. “The Americans are creating a monster.”

The C.I.A. Plays a Role

The C.I.A. has also occasionally joined Somali operatives in interrogating prisoners, including Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, a Kenyan arrested in Nairobi in 2009 on an American intelligence tip and handed over to Somalia by the Kenyans. The C.I.A. operations in Somalia were first reported last month by the magazine The Nation.

An American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of restrictions against discussing relationships with foreign intelligence services, said that agency officers had questioned Mr. Hassan in a Somali prison under strict interrogation rules.

“The host country must give credible assurances that suspects will be treated humanely,” the official said, and intelligence officials “must be convinced that the individual in custody has time-sensitive information about terrorist operations targeting U.S. interests.”

A C.I.A. spokeswoman said that the spy agency was not holding suspects in secret American prisons, as it did in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“The C.I.A. does not run prisons in Somalia or anywhere else, period,” said the spokeswoman, Marie Harf. “The C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program ended over two and a half years ago.”

In Washington, American officials said debates were under way about just how much the United States should rely on clandestine militia training and armed drone strikes to fight the Shabab. Over the past year, the American Embassy in Nairobi, according to one American official, has  become a hive of military and intelligence operatives who are “chomping at the bit” to escalate operations in Somalia. But Mr. Carson, the State Department official, has opposed the drone strikes because of the risk of turning more Somalis toward the Shabab, according to several officials.

In a telephone interview, he played down any bureaucratic disagreements and rejected criticism that America’s approach toward Somalia had been ad hoc. It is a country with historically difficult problems, he said, and the American support to the African peacekeepers has helped beat back the Shabab’s forces.

And as for the rest of southern Somalia, still firmly in the Shabab’s hands?

“One step at a time, he said. “One step at a time.”

Mr. Stock, Bancroft’s president, said that bickering in Washington about how to contain the Shabab threat had made the American government even more dependent on companies like his.

As he put it, “We’re the only game in town.”

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Mogadishu, and Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

In a new documentary, former national-security aide Richard Clarke suggests the CIA tried to recruit 9/11 hijackers—then covered it up. Philip Shenon on George Tenet’s denial.

With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a month away, former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks.

The source of the explosive, unproved allegations is a man who once considered Tenet a close friend: former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who makes the charges against Tenet and the CIA in an interview for a radio documentary timed to the 10th anniversary next month. Portions of the Clarke interview were made available to The Daily Beast by the producers of the documentary.

In the interview for the documentary, Clarke offers an incendiary theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil—terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11.

Clarke speculates—and readily admits he cannot prove—that the CIA withheld the information because the agency had been trying to recruit the terrorists, while they were living in Southern California under their own names, to work as CIA agents inside Al Qaeda. After the recruitment effort went sour, senior CIA officers continued to withhold the information from the White House for fear they would be accused of “malfeasance and misfeasance,” Clarke suggests.

Clarke says it is fair to conclude “there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information.” Asked who would have made the order, Clarke replies, “I would think it would have been made by the director,” referring to Tenet.

Clarke said that if his theory is correct, Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today “even if you waterboarded them.”

Clarke’s theory addresses a central, enduring mystery about the 9/11 attacks— why the CIA failed for so long to tell the White House and senior officials at the FBI that the agency was aware that two Al Qaeda terrorists had arrived in the United States in January 2000, just days after attending a terrorist summit meeting in Malaysia that the CIA had secretly monitored.

In a written response prepared last week in advance of the broadcast, Tenet says that Clarke, who famously went public in 2004 to blow the whistle on the Bush White House over intelligence failures before 9/11, has “suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration.”

The CIA insisted to the 9/11 Commission and other government investigations that the agency never knew the exact whereabouts of the two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, inside the U.S.—let alone try to recruit them as spies.

Agency officials said the CIA’s delay in sharing information about the two terrorists was a grave failure, but maintained there was no suggestion of deception by CIA brass. Tenet has said he was not informed before 9/11 about Hazmi and Mihdhar’s travel to the U.S., although the intelligence was widely shared at lower levels of the CIA.

The 9/11 Commission investigated widespread rumors in the intelligence community that the CIA tried to recruit the two terrorists—Clarke was not the first to suggest it—but the investigation revealed no evidence to support the rumors. The commission said in its final report that “it appears that no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA” about the two terrorists.

But in his interview, Clarke said his seemingly unlikely, even wild scenario—a bungled CIA terrorist-recruitment effort and a subsequent cover-up—was “the only conceivable reason that I’ve been able to come up with” to explain why he and others at the White House were told nothing about the two terrorists until the day of the attacks.

“I’ve thought a lot about this,” Clarke says in the interview, which was conducted in October 2009. He said it was fair to conclude “there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information.” Asked who would have made the order, Clarke replies, “I would think it would have been made by the director,” referring to Tenet.

Clarke, now a security consultant and bestselling author, has hinted in his writings in the past that there may have been a CIA cover-up involving Hazmi and Mihdhar, although he has never made such direct attacks on Tenet and others at the CIA by name.

He did not reply to requests from The Daily Beast to expand on his comments or to explain why he has not repeated them publicly since the 2009 interview. The documentary’s producers, FF4 Films, said they had been in contact with Clarke this month and that he stood by his remarks in the broadcast.

The producers, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, had previously made a well-reviewed film documentary, Press for Truth (www.911pressfortruth.com), on the struggle of a group of 9/11 victims’ families to force the government to investigate the attacks.

In finishing the radio documentary, they recently supplied a copy of Clarke’s comments to Tenet, who joined with two of former top CIA deputies—Cofer Black, who was head of the agency’s counterterrorism center, and Richard Blee, former head of the agency’s Osama Bin Laden unit—in a statement denouncing Clarke.

“Richard Clarke was an able public servant who served his country well for many years,” the statement says. “But his recently released comments about the run-up to 9/11 are reckless and profoundly wrong.”

“Clarke starts with the presumption that important information on the travel of future hijackers to the United States was intentionally withheld from him in early 2000. It was not.”

The statement continued. “Building on his false notion that information was intentionally withheld, Mr. Clarke went on to speculate—which he admits is based on nothing other than his imagination—that the CIA might have been trying to recruit these two future hijackers as agents. This, like much of what Mr. Clarke said in his interview, is utterly without foundation.”

Clarke, who led governmentwide counterterrorism efforts from the White House during the Bush and Clinton administration, has said in the past that he was astonished to learn after 9/11 that the CIA had long known about the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar inside the United States.

“To this day, it is inexplicable why, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism, that the director didn’t tell me, that the director of the counterterrorism center didn’t tell me,” Clarke said in the interview for the documentary, referring to Tenet and Cofer Black. “They told us everything—except this.”

He said that if he had known anything about Hazmi and Mihdhar even days before 9/11, he would have ordered an immediate manhunt to find them—and that it would have succeeded, possibly disrupting the 9/11 plot.

“We would have conducted a massive sweep,” he said. “We would have conducted it publicly. We would have found those assholes. There’s no doubt in my mind, even with only a week left. They were using credit cards in their own names. They were staying in the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square, for heaven’s sake.” He said that “those guys would have been arrested within 24 hours.”

A FEW weeks ago I received an e-mail from an acquaintance with the subject line: Have you seen the video everyone is talking about?

I clicked play, and there was Howard Dean, on March 19 in Berlin, at his most impassioned, extolling the virtues of a woman named Maryam Rajavi and insisting that America should recognize her as the president of Iran.

Ms. Rajavi and her husband, Massoud, are the leaders of a militant Iranian opposition group called the Mujahedeen Khalq, or Warriors of God. The group’s forces have been based for the last 25 years in Iraq, where I visited them shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.

Mr. Dean’s speech stunned me. But then came Rudolph W. Giuliani saying virtually the same thing. At a conference in Paris last December, an emotional Mr. Giuliani told Ms. Rajavi, “These are the most important yearnings of the human soul that you support, and for your organization to be described as a terrorist organization is just simply a disgrace.” I thought I was watching The Onion News Network. Did Mr. Giuliani know whom he was talking about?

Evidently not. In fact, an unlikely chorus of the group’s backers — some of whom have received speaking fees, others of whom are inspired by their conviction that the Iranian government must fall at any cost — have gathered around Mujahedeen Khalq at conferences in capitals across the globe.

This group of luminaries includes two former chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff, Gens. Hugh H. Shelton and Peter Pace; Wesley K. Clark, the former NATO commander; Gen. James L. Jones, who was President Obama’s national security adviser; Louis J. Freeh, the former F.B.I. director; the former intelligence officials Dennis C. Blair and Michael V. Hayden; the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson; the former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former congressman who was co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

Indeed, the Rajavis and Mujahedeen Khalq are spending millions in an attempt to persuade the Obama administration, and in particular Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to take them off the national list of terrorist groups, where the group was listed in 1997. Delisting the group would enable it to lobby Congress for support in the same way that the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 allowed the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi to do.

Mrs. Clinton should ignore their P.R. campaign. Mujahedeen Khalq is not only irrelevant to the cause of Iran’s democratic activists, but a totalitarian cult that will come back to haunt us.

When I arrived at Camp Ashraf, the base of the group’s operations, in April 2003, I thought I’d entered a fictional world of female worker bees. Everywhere I saw women dressed exactly alike, in khaki uniforms and mud-colored head scarves, driving back and forth in white pickup trucks, staring ahead in a daze as if they were working at a factory in Maoist China. I met dozens of young women buried in the mouths of tanks, busily tinkering with the engines. One by one, the girls bounded up to me and my two minders to recite their transformations from human beings to acolytes of Ms. Rajavi. One said she had been suicidal in Iran until she found Ms. Rajavi on the Internet.

At Camp Ashraf, 40 miles north of Baghdad, near the Iranian border, 3,400 members of the militant group reside in total isolation on a 14-square-mile tract of harsh desert land. Access to the Internet, phones and information about the outside world is prohibited. Posters of Ms. Rajavi and her smiling green eyes abound. Meanwhile, she lives in luxury in France; her husband has remained in hiding since the United States occupied Iraq in 2003.

During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the group served as Mr. Hussein’s own private militia opposing the theocratic government in Tehran. For two decades, he gave the group money, weapons, jeeps and military bases along the border with Iran. In return, the Rajavis pledged their fealty.

In 1991, when Mr. Hussein crushed a Shiite uprising in the south and attempted to carry out a genocide against the Kurds in the north, the Rajavis and their army joined his forces in mowing down fleeing Kurds.

Ms. Rajavi told her disciples, “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.” Many followers escaped in disgust.

So the Rajavis then began preying on Iranian refugees and asylum seekers in Europe to fill their ranks. The Rajavis promise them salaries, marriage, family, freedom and a great cause — fighting the Iranian government. Then the unwitting youths arrive in Iraq.

What is most disturbing is how the group treats its members. After the Iran-Iraq war, Mr. Rajavi orchestrated an ill-planned offensive, deploying thousands of young men and women into Iran on a mass martyrdom operation. Instead of capturing Iran, as they believed they would, thousands of them were slaughtered, including parents, husbands and wives of those I met in Iraq in 2003.

After my visit, I met and spoke to men and women who had escaped from the group’s clutches. Many had to be deprogrammed. They recounted how people were locked up if they disagreed with the leadership or tried to escape; some were even killed.

Friendships and all emotional relationships are forbidden. From the time they are toddlers, boys and girls are not allowed to speak to each other. Each day at Camp Ashraf you had to report your dreams and thoughts.

If a man was turned on by the scent of a woman or a whiff of perfume, he had to confess. Members had to attend weekly ideological cleansings in which they publicly confessed their sexual desires. Members were even forced to divorce and take a vow of lifelong celibacy to ensure that all their energy and love would be directed toward Maryam and Massoud.

Mr. Hamilton and Generals Jones and Clark have been paid speakers’ fees by front groups for Mujahedeen Khalq and have spoken in support of the group in public conferences. They claimed ignorance of how the group treated its members.

“I don’t know a lot about the group,” Mr. Hamilton told me over the phone last week. But in 1994, when he was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Hamilton received a report describing the group as a violent cult with a distinct ideology synthesizing Marxism and messianic Shiism.

At a February conference in Paris, Mr. Dean praised the group’s extraordinary “bill of rights.” And General Jones said to Ms. Rajavi: “It is time for those of us from the United States who have come to know and admire you and your colleagues and your goals to do what is required to recognize the legitimacy of your movement and your ideals.” When I asked General Jones last week if he knew that some considered the group a totalitarian cult, he replied, “This is the first time I’ve heard anything about this.”

He said he’d checked with military and F.B.I. officials. “I wanted to make sure we weren’t supporting a group that was doing nefarious things that I don’t know about,” he said. “Nobody brought it up, so I didn’t know what questions to ask.”

IN fact, a 2004 F.B.I. report on the group detailed a joint investigation by the American and German police, which revealed that the group’s cell in Cologne, Germany, had used money from a complex fraud scheme to buy military equipment. The group used children with multiple identities to claim multiple benefit checks from the German government. Evidence also showed that the group had obtained money in Los Angeles to purchase GPS units to increase the accuracy of planned mortar attacks on Tehran.

It is possible that such plots do not bother General Jones and other supporters of the group. But Iraq will no longer tolerate its presence. Its government wants the Mujahedeen Khalq out of the country by the end of the year. In April, Iraqi forces attacked Camp Ashraf. General Jones and other supporters of the group were outraged.

They are right that we should have compassion for those trapped inside the camp. A 2009 RAND Corporation study found that up to 70 percent of the group’s members there might have been held against their will. If the group’s American cheerleaders cared for those at the camp half as much as they did for the Rajavis, they would be insisting on private Red Cross visits with each man and woman at Camp Ashraf.

American officials who support the group like to quote the saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” By this logic, the group’s opposition to the Tehran theocracy justifies American backing. But there is another saying to consider: “The means are the ends.”

By using the Mujahedeen Khalq to provoke Tehran, we will end up damaging our integrity and reputation, and weaken the legitimate democracy movement within Iran.

As a senior State Department official told me, “They are the best financed and organized, but they are so despised inside Iran that they have no traction.” Iranian democracy activists say the group, if it had had the chance, could have become the Khmer Rouge of Iran.

“They are considered traitors and killers of Iranian kids,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Mujahedeen Khalq’s status on the terrorist list is under review. “They are so unpopular that we think any gesture of support to them would disqualify and discredit us as being interested in democratic reform.”

If the group is taken off the terrorist list, it will be able to freely lobby the American government under the guise of an Iranian democracy movement.

Recent history has shown that the United States often ends up misguidedly supporting not only the wrong exile groups in the Middle East, but the least relevant ones. We cannot afford to be so naïve or misguided again.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 14, 2011

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to a RAND Corporation study in 2009 on members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq, or Warriors of God. The study found that up to 70 percent of the members at the group’s operating headquarters, Camp Ashraf, in Iraq, might have been held against their will, not that at least 70 percent were being held against their will.

Elizabeth Rubin is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, where her article “The Cult of Rajavi” appeared in July 2003.

Majer, Libya: Located about 20 miles east of the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna, six miles south of Zliten, and off Libya’s southern coast across the Mediterranean from Rome, Majer was a picturesque village known for the fine quality of its dates and is claimed by locals to produce the best tarbuni (date juice) in Libya.

Family members, eyewitnesses and Libyan government officials claim that NATO’s air-strikes at Majer killed 85 people, including 33 children, 32 women and 20 men. Reporters and visitors were shown 30 of the bodies in a local morgue, including a mother and two children. Officials and residents explained that approximately 50 bodies were taken to other locations for family burial and most of the injured rushed to hospitals at Tripoli.

At Majer, NATO chose to bomb three neighboring compounds and visitors examined a total of five bombed-out houses. There was no evidence of weapons at the farmhouses, but rather mattresses, clothes and books littered the area. One badly injured 15-year old young lady, Salwa Ageil Al Jaoud, had earlier written her name inside one notebook found amidst the rubble. She was later visited in hospital and attested, like the witnesses at Qana had, that there was no military presence in the homes that were bombed.

NATO used the same tactic that Israel used during the two Qana massacres. After the first three bombs dropped at around 11:00 pm (2100 GMT) on Monday, August 8, many residents of the area ran to the bombed houses to try to save their loved ones. NATO then instantly struck with more bombs slaughtering 85 Libyans.

The badly burned and mangled bodies of two boys named Adil Moayed Gafes and Aynan Gafees were pulled from the rubble by family members deeply in shock. One anguished gentleman repeated the words, “”There is no God but Allah, and a martyr is loved by Allah,” and soon others joined in.

Standing on a pile of rubble, Libyan government spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, declared, “This is a crime beyond imagination. Everything about this place is civilian!”

According to Libyan officials interviewed at the Rixos Hotel here in Tripoli last night, NATO attacked Majer “to try to help rebel fighters enter the government-held city from the south as it deepens its involvement and military command and control of one side in what has become a civil war hoping for billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts and special oil deals from its chosen team set up in eastern Libya.”

Seemingly borrowing a page from the Israeli army media office, NATO’s Carmen Romero, the NATO Deputy Spokesperson and Colonel Roland Lavoie, Operation ”Unified Protector” military spokesperson on 8/9/11 told a joint Brussels-Naples news conference that “the village bombed contained a military assembly area and that NATO to date had no evidence of any civilian casualties but that NATO always takes extraordinary measures to assure the safety of civilians.”

It is predictable, that as the evidence of the massacre at Majer becomes public and NATO is pressed to explain the killing of yet more Libya civilians, NATO, probably within the next 48 hours, will announce “an internal investigation” into the events at Majer while asserting in advance, as the Israelis regularly do, that their bombing was only directed at “legitimate military targets.”

Every Muslim and Christian Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, and every Lebanese citizen whose family members or loved ones were slaughtered during Israel’s two massacres at Qana, Lebanon, is reminded today of the indescribable loss suffered yesterday by their Libyan sisters and brothers at Majer, Libya.

The Majer massacre was perpetrated yet again with American weapons once more gifted by American taxpayers without their knowledge or consent and against every American humanitarian value shared by all people of good will.

As at Qana, the inventory of American weapons that has been provided to NATO and available for use here in Libya since March 29, 2011, sometimes indiscriminately, in order “to protect civilians” includes, but if not limited to, the following:

B-2 stealth bombers from the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base, F-15Es currently based at the 492nd Fighter Squadron and 494th Fighter Squadron at RAF Lakenheath, Britain, F-16CJ “defense-suppression” aircraft based at the 480th Fighter Squadron at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, EC-130 Commando Solo psychological operations aircraft from the 193rd Special Operations Wing, Pennsylvania Air National Guard, Middletown, PA, KC-135s from the 100th Air Refueling Wing currently based at Mildenhall, Britain and the 92nd, Air Refueling Wing, Fairchild AFB, WA,C-130Js recently based at the 37th Airlift Squadron at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, and A-10 attack fighters, and AC-130 gunships. The NATO attacks on Libya began with the bombing of claimed Libyan air-defense equipment using 110 American Tomahawk and Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles. Also launched were bombing attacks using three American B-2 Spirit Bombers delivering 45 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) against Libyan air bases. Tomahawks were also fired from British ships in the area.

U.S. Navy ships being used by NATO “to protect Libyan civilians” include:

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Stout (DDG 55) and USS Barry (DDG 52),Submarines USS Providence (SSN 719), USS Scranton (SSN 756) and USS Florida (SSGN 728),Marine amphibious ships USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) and USS Ponce (LPD 15) Command ship USS Mount Whitney (LCC/JCC 20), Support ships Lewis and Clark, Robert E. Peary and Kanawha,AV-8B Harrier fighters, CH-53 Super Stallion helicopters and MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft aboard the Kearsarge and Ponce, KC-130J tanker aircraft flying from Sigonella Air Base, Italy, EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft of VAQ-132, based at Whidbey Island, WA and flying from Aviano Air Base, Italy (the above listed aircraft were diverted from Iraq at NATO’s request “to help protect Libyan civilians”), P-3 Orion sub-hunters and EP-3 Aries electronic attack aircraft.

In addition to the above listed weapons, more than 50 types of American bombs and missiles are stockpiled for NATO use “to protect civilians in Libya” and their use to date is illegal under both American and International law, because it has resulted in the killing, maiming or wounding of approximately 7,800 Libyan civilians between March 29 and August 9, 2011.

A survey of NATO bombing sites, ground inspections, cataloged serial numbers from unexploded ordnance, examination of bomb and missile fragments at civilian sites in Western Libya, and consultation with Libyan military sources confirm what two US Senate Armed Services Committee staffers and international lawyers have postulated. NATO, like their Israeli allies at Qana, Lebanon, committed war crimes and crimes against humanity at Majer, Libya on August 8, 2011.

Specifically, NATO stands accused of committing the following crimes against the people of Libya according to a consensus from meetings with an increasing number of visiting international lawyers and human rights advocates who have come here from Europe, Asia and South and North America.

Applicable international law includes but is not limited to Article 3 of the Statute of The Hague International Penal Court which clearly states that one criterion for indictment for war crimes is: “Attack or bombardment, by whatever means, against undefended cities, towns, villages, buildings or houses”. 

NATO’s continuous use of civilian targets for military purposes, a scenario which NATO wantonly and callously calls “collateral damage” fits this clause exactly and would be a cornerstone of a case accusing this organization of being guilty of war crimes. 

Violation of the Geneva Convention IV, Article 3 (a): “To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds.”

These are similar causes of action that were filed against Israeli officials by American lawyers at the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights in Ali Saadallah BELHAS, et al., Plaintiffs, v. Moshe YA`ALON, Defendant (466 F.Supp.2d 127 (2006) A case that educated the international legal community and the public about the necessity to strip sovereign immunity from international outlaws and allow lawsuits in domestic as well as international courts.

The NATO massacre at Majer requires international law suits that achieve nothing less.

Rioting and looting was not the only violent activity being carried out by Englishmen on Sunday night. Some hours before Cameron appeared on our TV screens vowing to take revenge on the risen British youth, his bomber pilots carried out a raid which slaughtered 33 Libyan children, along with 32 women and 20 men in Zlitan, a village near Tripoli. He, along with the rulers of France and the USA, are desperately trying to stave off economic collapse in the same way they always have – through the slaughter of third world people and the theft of their resources.

That is the context in which these riots need to be seen. Our mode of living in the West is predicated on violence and looting. For those who do not understand this, you need to look into how Western military forces have turned Afghanistan into a giant heroin poppy plantation with one of the lowest life expectancies on the planet, how they have turned Iraq into a living hell to steal its oil, how they are setting up Syria for an invasion as a prelude to the ‘final solution’ of the Palestinian ‘problem’ and how they are already stealing Libyan oil wealth which Gaddafi had ploughed into African development but will now go straight into the coffers of Western arms companies. This is before we even mention the debt-extortion under which third world countries pay 13 times as much in loan interest to the West (on loans they have already paid back many times over) as they receive in aid.

Our young people have grown up witnessing all of this. They are well aware that the West enriches itself by violent plunder. They are also aware that more than half of their so-called ‘representatives’ in parliament have been systematically stealing TVs, electronic goods, clothes and anything else they think they can get away with, by means of large-scale fraud. They know that the police murder people with impunity, and their communities are subject to harassment and humiliation by police on a mass scale. They know that the bankers who have destroyed the livelihoods of millions, are still paying themselves bonuses extorted from the public purse.

They also know that none of these people are ever likely to be bought to justice through legal mechanisms. Most of the MPs guilty of fraud either still have their jobs, or have moved on to lucrative directorships with the companies for whom they did favours whilst in office. The police investigate themselves and find themselves not guilty. The army investigate themselves and find themselves not guilty. Tony Blair investigates himself and finds himself not guilty. The rich and powerful are demonstrating to our young people daily that the way to succeed is through robbery, theft and violence. This is the world into which they were born. This is the morality which surrounds them. This is the air they breathe.

Compared to their role models, the vast majority of the rioters have behaved impeccably. Attacks on small businesses, houses and civilians have been the exception, not the rule; the main activity has been the looting of big chain stores and the besieging of police stations. In so doing, the youth have succeeded in achieving what everyone else has failed to achieve – holding the police and corporations to account. The message to the police has been clear – you cannot murder, beat and humiliate us with impunity. Several police stations have been burned to the ground and all London police have had their summer leave cancelled. When incidents like Mark Duggan’s murder arise, it is never a case of one ‘bad apple’; the process of cover-up is a systematic one which requires large-scale collusion. Some officers may now think twice before getting entangled in such matters in the future.

As for the big corporations, the efficiency of their exploitation and enslavement of third world people has created such poverty across the globe that people are increasingly unable to afford to buy what they produce. This is the major systemic cause of the economic crisis. They may not know it, but the corporations our children are attacking are indeed the primary cause of their own poverty. More than this, these companies employ advertising techniques that ruthlessly target our children with a cruel message that their social status depends on the acquisition of their goods; they should not then feign surprise when poor children also try to acquire them.

With their so-called “mindless looting”, the dispossessed youth are in fact carrying out a primitive form of wealth redistribution. What they are doing in a disorganised and spontaneous way, is precisely what we should be doing in a systematic and disciplined way. We need to build organisations that are serious about creating ‘socialism from below’ – taking control of the factories, chain stores and land, and using them in a way that provides for the massive social needs for which capitalism is completely unable to provide. This is the real Big Society – the one Cameron and his ilk are utterly scared of.

I am not blaming Cameron, or the politicians, or the media. These are our enemies. They are being true to their class. They are exploiting us and lying to us efficiently and effectively. They are doing their jobs perfectly. I am blaming those of us who do care, who do want equality and an end to classism, racism and imperialism. We need to step up and provide leadership and organisation, and until we do that – our criticisms of the youth are hollow and deceitful. If we leave it to children to bring accountability to policing and to redistribute wealth, without any leadership or guidance, we shouldn’t be surprised if they do a messy job.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has issued a stark warning to Syrian authorities to immediately halt military operations across the country or he said there will be nothing left to talk about the steps that would be taken.

Davutoğlu told reporters on Monday after full-scale military operations in a number of Syrian cities since Thursday by Syrian authorities to crush the five-month uprising against the 11-year rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that Turkey is demanding that all military operations that result in civilian death must be stopped immediately and unconditionally.

“If these operations do not stop there will be nothing left to say about the steps that would be taken,” he said, without elaborating.

“This is our final word to the Syrian authorities, our first expectation is that these operations stop immediately and unconditionally,” Davutoğlu said in Turkey’s strongest rhetoric yet against its once close ally and neighbour.

Stressing that Turkey will always stand by Syrian people, Davutoğlu said the Syrian army indeed stepped back for two days after he had talks with Assad in Damascus last Tuesday but has resumed military operations since Thursday.

He stressed the Turkish government has contacted with Syrian authorities every day to stop the bloodshed in the neighboring country, strongly dismissing allegations that Turkey gave time to Syria to stop military operations.

Davutoğlu said his message to the Syrian government is that all operations in big cities must be stopped and the military should be withdrawn from the cities, life should return to normal.

“In the context of human rights this cannot be seen as a domestic issue,” he told reporters.