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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.

 

 

The killing of Osama Bin Laden did not put cuts in national security spending on the table, but the debt-ceiling debate finally did. And mild as those projected cuts might have been, last week newly minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was already digging in his heels and decrying the modest potential cost-cutting plans as a “doomsday mechanism” for the military. Pentagon allies on Capitol Hill were similarly raising the alarm as they moved forward with this year’s even larger military budget.

None of this should surprise you. As with all addictions, once you’re hooked on massive military spending, it’s hard to think realistically or ask the obvious questions. So, at a moment when discussion about cutting military spending is actually on the rise for the first time in years, let me offer some little known basics about the spending spree this country has been on since September 11, 2001, and raise just a few simple questions about what all that money has actually bought Americans.

Consider this my contribution to a future 12-step program for national security sobriety.

Let’s start with the three basic post-9/11 numbers that Washington’s addicts need to know:

1. $5.9 trillion: That’s the sum of taxpayer dollars that’s gone into the Pentagon’s annual “base budget,” from 2000 to today. Note that the base budget includes nuclear weapons activities, even though they are overseen by the Department of Energy, but — and this is crucial — not the cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, even without those war costs, the Pentagon budget managed to grow from $302.9 billion in 2000, to $545.1 billion in 2011. That’s a dollar increase of $242.2 billion or an 80% jump ($163.6 billion and 44% if you adjust for inflation). It’s enough to make your head swim, and we’re barely started.

2. $1.36 trillion: That’s the total cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars by this September 30th, the end of the current fiscal year, including all moneys spent for those wars by the Pentagon, the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other federal agencies. Of this, $869 billion will have been for Iraq, $487.6 billion for Afghanistan.

Add up our first two key national security spending numbers and you’re already at $7.2 trillion since the September 11th attacks. And even that staggering figure doesn’t catch the full extent of Washington spending in these years. So onward to our third number:

3. $636 billion: Most people usually ignore this part of the national security budget and we seldom see any figures for it, but it’s the amount, adjusted for inflation, that the U.S. government has spent so far on “homeland security.” This isn’t an easy figure to arrive at because homeland-security funding flows through literally dozens of federal agencies and not just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A mere $16 billion was requested for homeland security in 2001. For 2012, the figure is $71.6 billion, only $37 billion of which will go through DHS. A substantial part, $18.1 billion, will be funneled through — don’t be surprised — the Department of Defense, while other agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion) and the Department of Justice ($4.1 billion) pick up the slack.

Add those three figures together and you’re at the edge of $8 trillion in national security spending for the last decade-plus and perhaps wondering where the nearest group for compulsive-spending addiction meets.

Now, for a few of those questions I mentioned, just to bring reality further into focus:

How does that nearly $8 trillion compare with past spending?

In the decade before the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon base budget added up to an impressive $4.2 trillion, only one-third less than for the past decade. But add in the cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars and total Pentagon spending post-9/11 is actually two-thirds greater than in the previous decade. That’s quite a jump. As for homeland-security funding, spending figures for the years prior to 2000 are hard to identify because the category didn’t exist (nor did anyone who mattered in Washington even think to use that word “homeland”). But there can be no question that whatever it was, it would pale next to present spending.

Is that nearly $8 trillion the real total for these years, or could it be even higher?

The war-cost calculations I’ve used above, which come from my own organization, the National Priorities Project, only take into account funds that have been requested by the President and appropriated by Congress. This, however, is just one way of considering the problem of war and national security spending. A recent study published by the Watson Institute of Brown University took a much broader approach. In the summary of their work, the Watson Institute analysts wrote, “There are at least three ways to think about the economic costs of these wars: what has been spent already, what could or must be spent in the future, and the comparative economic effects of spending money on war instead of something else.”

By including funding for such things as veterans benefits, future costs for treating the war-wounded, and interest payments on war-related borrowing, they came up with $3.2 trillion to $4 trillion in war costs, which would put those overall national security figures since 2001 at around $11 trillion.

I took a similar approach in an earlier TomDispatch piece in which I calculated the true costs of national security at $1.2 trillion annually.

All of this brings another simple, but seldom-asked question to mind:

Are we safer?

Regardless of what figures you choose to use, one thing is certain: we’re talking about trillions and trillions of dollars. And given the debate raging in Washington this summer about how to rein in trillion-dollar deficits and a spiraling debt, it’s surprising that no one thinks to ask just how much safety bang for its buck the U.S. is getting from those trillions.

Of course, it’s not an easy question to answer, but there are some troubling facts out there that should give one pause. Let’s start with government accounting, which, like military music, is something of an oxymoron. Despite decades of complaints from Capitol Hill and various congressional attempts to force changes via legislation, the Department of Defense still cannot pass an audit. Believe it or not, it never has.

Members of Congress have become so exasperated that several have tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to cap or cut military spending until the Pentagon is capable of passing an annual audit as required by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990. So even as they fight to preserve record levels of military spending, Pentagon officials really have no way of telling American taxpayers how their money is being spent, or what kind of security it actually buys.

And this particular disease seems to be catching. The Department of Homeland Security has been part of the “high risk” series of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) since 2003. In case being “high risk” in GAO terms isn’t part of your dinner-table chitchat, here’s the definition: “agencies and program areas that are high risk due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or are most in need of broad reform.”

Put in layman’s terms: no organization crucial to national security spending really has much of an idea of how well or badly it is spending vast sums of taxpayer money — and worse yet, Congress knows even less.

Which leads us to a broader issue and another question:

Are we spending money on the right types of security?

This June, the Institute for Policy Studies released the latest version of what it calls “a Unified Security Budget for the United States” that could make the country safer for far less than the current military budget. Known more familiarly as the USB, it has been produced annually since 2004 by the website Foreign Policy in Focus and draws on a task force of experts.

As in previous years, the report found — again in layman’s terms — that the U.S. invests its security dollars mainly in making war, slighting both real homeland security and anything that might pass for preventive diplomacy. In the Obama administration’s proposed 2012 budget, for example, 85% of security spending goes to the military (and if you included the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that percentage would only rise); just 7% goes to real homeland security and a modest 8% to what might, even generously speaking, be termed non-military international engagement.

Significant parts of the foreign policy establishment have come to accept this critique — at least they sometimes sound like they do. As Robert Gates put the matter while still Secretary of Defense, “Funding for non-military foreign affairs programs… remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military… [T]here is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security.” But if they talk the talk, when annual budgeting time comes around, few of them yet walk the walk.

So let’s ask another basic question:

Has your money, funneled into the vast and shadowy world of military and national security spending, made you safer?

Government officials and counterterrorism experts frequently claim that the public is unaware of their many “victories” in the “war on terror.” These, they insist, remain hidden for reasons that involve protecting intelligence sources and law enforcement techniques. They also maintain that the United States and its allies have disrupted any number of terror plots since 9/11 and that this justifies the present staggering levels of national security spending.

Undoubtedly examples of foiled terrorist acts, unpublicized for reasons of security, do exist (although the urge to boast shouldn’t be underestimated, as in the case of the covert operation to kill Osama bin Laden). Think of this as the “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” approach to supposed national security successes. It’s regularly used to justify higher spending requests for homeland security. There are, however, two obvious and immediate problems with taking it seriously.

First, lacking any transparency, there’s next to no way to assess its merits. How serious were these threats? A hapless underwear bomber or a weapon of mass destruction that didn’t make it to an American city? Who knows? The only thing that’s clear is that this is a loophole through which you can drive your basic mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicle.

Second, how exactly were these attempts foiled? Were they thwarted by programs funded as part of the $7.2 trillion in military spending, or even the $636 billion in homeland security spending?

An April 2010 Heritage Foundation report, “30 Terrorist Plots Foiled: How the System Worked,” looked at known incidents where terrorist attacks were actually thwarted and so provides some guidance. The Heritage experts wrote, “Since September 11, 2001, at least 30 planned terrorist attacks have been foiled, all but two of them prevented by law enforcement. The two notable exceptions are the passengers and flight attendants who subdued the ‘shoe bomber’ in 2001 and the ‘underwear bomber’ on Christmas Day in 2009.”

In other words, in the vast majority of cases, the plots we know about were broken up by “law enforcement” or civilians, in no way aided by the $7.2 trillion that was invested in the military — or in many cases even the $636 billion that went into homeland security. And while most of those cases involved federal authorities, at least three were stopped by local law enforcement action.

In truth, given the current lack of assessment tools, it’s virtually impossible for outsiders — and probably insiders as well — to evaluate the effectiveness of this country’s many security-related programs. And this stymies our ability to properly determine the allocation of federal resources on the basis of program efficiency and the relative levels of the threats addressed.

So here’s one final question that just about no one asks:

Could we be less safe?

It’s possible that all that funding, especially the moneys that have gone into our various wars and conflicts, our secret drone campaigns and “black sites,” our various forays into Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other places may actually have made us less safe. Certainly, they have exacerbated existing tensions and created new ones, eroded our standing in some of the most volatile regions of the world, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the misery of many more, and made Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, potential recruiting and training grounds for future generations of insurgents and terrorists. Does anything remain of the international goodwill toward our country that was the one positive legacy of the infamous attacks of September 11, 2001? Unlikely.

Now, isn’t it time for those 12 steps?

Chris Hellman, a TomDispatch.com regular, is a Senior Research Analyst at the National Priorities Project (NPP). He is a member of the Unified Security Budget Task Force and the Sustainable Defense Task Force. Prior to joining NPP, he worked on military budget and policy issues for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and the Center for Defense Information. He is also a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill, where as a congressional staffer he worked on defense and foreign policy issues.

 

 

WASHINGTON — When congressional cost-cutters meet later this year to decide on trimming the federal budget, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could represent juicy targets. But how much do the wars actually cost the U.S. taxpayer?

Yes, Congress has allotted $1.3 trillion for war spending through fiscal year 2011 just to the Defense Department. There are long Pentagon spreadsheets that outline how much of that was spent on personnel, transportation, fuel and other costs. In a recent speech, President Barack Obama assigned the wars a $1 trillion price tag.

But all those numbers are incomplete. Besides what Congress appropriated, the Pentagon spent an additional unknown amount from its $5.2 trillion base budget over that same period. According to a recent Brown University study, the wars and their ripple effects have cost the United States $3.7 trillion, or more than $12,000 per American.

Lawmakers remain sharply divided over the wisdom of slashing the military budget, even with the United States winding down two long conflicts, but there’s also a more fundamental problem: It’s almost impossible to pin down just what the U.S. military spends on war.

To be sure, the costs are staggering.

According to Defense Department figures, by the end of April the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including everything from personnel and equipment to training Iraqi and Afghan security forces and deploying intelligence-gathering drones — had cost an average of $9.7 billion a month, with roughly two-thirds going to Afghanistan. That total is roughly the entire annual budget for the Environmental Protection Agency.

To compare, it would take the State Department — with its annual budget of $27.4 billion — more than four months to spend that amount. NASA could have launched its final shuttle mission in July, which cost $1.5 billion, six times for what the Pentagon is allotted to spend each month in those two wars.

What about Medicare Part D, President George W. Bush’s 2003 expansion of prescription drug benefits for seniors, which cost a Congressional Budget Office-estimated $385 billion over 10 years? The Pentagon spends that in Iraq and Afghanistan in about 40 months.

Because of the complex and often ambiguous Pentagon budgeting process, it’s nearly impossible to get an accurate breakdown of every operating cost. Some funding comes out of the base budget; other money comes from supplemental appropriations.

But the estimates can be eye-popping, especially considering the logistical challenges to getting even the most basic equipment and comforts to troops in extremely forbidding terrain.

In Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. military spent $1.5 billion to purchase 329.8 million gallons of fuel for vehicles, aircraft and generators from October 2010 to May 2011. That’s a not-unheard-of $4.55 per gallon, but it doesn’t include the cost of getting the fuel to combat zones and the human cost of transporting it through hostile areas, which can hike the cost to hundreds of dollars a gallon.

Just getting air-conditioning to troops in Afghanistan, including transport and maintenance, costs $20 billion per year, retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson told National Public Radio recently. That’s half the amount that the federal government has spent on Amtrak over 40 years.

War spending falls behind tax cuts and prescription drug benefits for seniors as contributors to the $14.3 trillion federal debt. The Pentagon’s base budget has grown every year for the past 14 years, marking the longest sustained growth period in U.S. history, but it seems clear that that era is ending.

Since the U.S. government issued war bonds to help finance World War II, Washington has asked taxpayers to shoulder less and less of a burden in times of conflict. In the early 1950s Congress raised taxes by 4 percent of the gross domestic product to pay for the Korean War; in 1968, during the Vietnam War, a tax was imposed to raise revenue by about 1 percent of GDP.

No such mechanism was imposed for Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the early years of the wars Congress didn’t even demand a true accounting of war spending, giving the military whatever it needed. Now, at a time of fiscal woes and with the American public weary of the wars, the question has become how much the nation’s largest bureaucracy should cut.

“The debt crisis has been a game changer in terms of defense spending,” said Laura Peterson, a national security analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog.

“It used to be that asking how much the wars cost was unpatriotic. The attitude going into the war is you spend whatever you cost. Now maybe asking is more patriotic.”

Still, deep cuts to the Pentagon remain unpalatable to many lawmakers. The debt limit deal that Congress passed earlier this month calls for $350 billion in “defense and security” spending cuts through 2024, but that’s expected to be spread across several government agencies, sparing the Pentagon much of the blow.

However, if the 12-member bipartisan “super-committee” of lawmakers can’t agree on further federal budget cuts later this year, the law mandates across-the-board cuts of $1.2 trillion over 10 years, with half of that coming from the Pentagon. The prospect of such deep defense cuts is thought to provide a strong incentive for deficit hawks to compromise and spread the pain more broadly.

Politics aside, finding defense savings is complex, even with the Obama administration trying to wind down two wars. For one thing, reducing troop levels doesn’t necessarily yield commensurate cost reductions, given the huge amount of infrastructure the military still maintains in each country.

In Afghanistan, the cost per service member climbed from $507,000 in fiscal year 2009 to $667,000 the following year, according to the Congressional Research Service. Fiscal year 2011 costs are expected to reach $694,000 per service member, even as the U.S. military begins drawing down 33,000 of the 99,000 troops there.

In Iraq, even with the overall costs of the war declining and the U.S. military scheduled to withdraw its remaining 46,000 troops by the end of this year, the cost per service member spiked from $510,000 in 2007 to $802,000 this year.

In fiscal year 2011, Congress authorized $113 billion for the war in Afghanistan and $46 billion for Iraq. The Pentagon’s 2012 budget request is lower: $107 billion for Afghanistan and $11 billion for Iraq.

In the more austere fiscal climate, the Pentagon has tried to be proactive, proposing cuts to some major military programs such as the controversial and hugely expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called the national debt the biggest threat to U.S. national security. Before leaving office last month as defense secretary, Robert Gates ordered his department to find ways to cut $400 billion from the defense budget over 12 years, under Obama’s orders.

Among the challenges of determining the costs of war is defining what to include. Rising health care costs for veterans? The damage done to Iraqi and Afghan families, cities and institutions? Holding tens of thousands of detainees at U.S. military prisons in those two countries and others around the world? The massive interest on war-related debt, which some experts say could reach $1 trillion by 2020?

“The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects have been underappreciated,” wrote a team of Brown University experts who authored a June report called “Costs of War.”

Critics of the defense budget process note that the U.S. already has paid a heavy cost for the wars, spending billions to wind up with older equipment and troops receiving less training.

Winslow Wheeler, who worked on national security issues on Capitol Hill for 30 years, said the Navy and Air Force fleets were smaller after a decade of war. The Army has been left with run-down, overworked vehicles and equipment.

“The danger of that is that as we blithely go on not paying attention, things happen that we don’t notice, like the older, less trained forces,” Wheeler said. Because the cost of replacing equipment has risen dramatically over the past decade, “what we are paying is a higher cost for a smaller force.” He likened it to replacing a Lamborghini with a Volkswagen.

The stock market panic of the past two weeks has clearly shown that none of the problems have been solved that led the world financial system to the brink of collapse in 2008. On the contrary, the global economic crisis has deepened over the past three years.

An editorial in the Süddeutsche Zeitung at the weekend drew a parallel to the Great Depression of 1931, which culminated in the Second World War. Two years after the Wall Street crash of 1929, several economic experts declared with optimism that the worst was over.

“What an illusion—and what disturbing parallels to today’s crisis, to the second world economic crisis, as one must now call it,” says the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Meanwhile, it was clear that as was the case “eight decades ago, several waves of crisis will follow: triggered by collapsing banks, bankrupt states, poor credit ratings or—at worst—the collapse of the euro zone.”

Three years ago, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, politicians protested they had drawn the lessons of 1931 and would not repeat the mistakes of stifling the world economy through a deflationary policy. With the help of bank bailouts, stimulus packages and low interest rates, they pumped billions from state coffers into the banks that had triggered the crisis through their irresponsible and criminal speculation.

Now the state budgets stand at the heart of the crisis. State debt has risen sharply because of the support for the banks. For example, Irish government debt has quadrupled, Spain’s has doubled, America’s has grown by one third and Germany’s by one fifth. The banks have turned the tables. First they were rescued using public funds, now they are demanding that budgets be slashed through brutal cost-cutting measures.

Governments have bowed to the dictates of the financial markets and are responding like their predecessors eighty years ago. They no longer talk about the lessons of the Great Depression. Instead, they are destroying the livelihoods of broad layers of the population, pushing the economy into recession through new austerity measures.

The stock market panic of recent days must be seen in this context. The trigger was the downgrading of the United States credit rating by Standard & Poor’s and the deepening of the debt crisis in Europe.

Standard & Poor’s lowered its rating on US government bonds because the financial markets considered that the social cuts agreed by the Obama administration and the Congress were insufficient. In Europe, Spanish, Italian and French government bonds came under the spotlight of the speculators because the financial markets were not satisfied with the devastating austerity programmes in the peripheral countries of Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

The run on the financial markets signalled that investors will not rest until the last remaining social achievements of recent decades are destroyed—and not just in the small countries in the periphery of the euro zone, but throughout Europe.

The political elite understood the message and responded immediately. Last week, the Italian government agreed on an additional cuts package of €45 billion, although it had only recently slashed spending by €79 billion. The German Chancellor and French President agreed to meet at a special summit today to give a sign to reassure the financial markets.

The main topic dominating financial discussions is the introduction of common European bonds—that is, debt issued jointly by all the euro zone countries. So-called euro-bonds would allow countries such as Greece to finance their debt at the same rate as Germany. Greece would face much lower interest rates than before, while Germany would face higher interest rates on its debts.

This is why Germany has so far categorically refused to accept such euro-bonds. Although the German economy, more than any other, has benefited from the euro, Berlin rejects in any form a “transfer union,” a transfer of finances from richer to the poorer countries of the euro zone.

But the pressure on Germany has grown considerably in recent days. In an urgent appeal last weekend Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti called for the establishment of common bonds. Euro-group president Jean-Claude Juncker and EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn also called for euro-bonds.

In a contribution published in a number of German newspapers, the financial investor George Soros spoke in favour of the introduction of euro bonds. “Germany and other countries with ‘AAA’ bond ratings must agree to some form of euro-bond regime. Otherwise, the euro will collapse,” he told finance daily Handelsblatt.

The German government still officially rejects euro-bonds. And on Monday Chancellor Merkel’s spokesman even explained that euro-bonds were not the subject of the meeting with Sarkozy.

However, the Welt am Sonntag reported over the weekend, citing several government members, that Berlin was now prepared to accept common European bonds if this was the only way to save the euro. The previously chosen route, to help countries with financial difficulties with multi-billion dollar bailouts is reaching its limits.

However, Berlin does not want to openly announce such a move, but negotiate “concessions from its euro-partners” in a longer process, was how Welt am Sonntag described it. In essence, the highly indebted countries must give up their economic and monetary sovereignty and submit to the dictates of the financial markets unconditionally.

In this context, German Economics Minister Philipp Rösler suggested the formation of a “stability union,” in which hard, tangible criteria would automatically ensure the reliability of the single currency. First, all countries should take up the German model of a constitutionally mandated balanced budget and put their labour market to a stress test. A European “stability council” should then decide on the use of credit and monitor compliance with the loan conditions. It would act as an “executive committee” of the EU in accordance with specified criteria that cannot be mitigated by political influence.

Rösler justified his proposal, which had been agreed with Chancellor Merkel, with the fact that the markets express a “basic mistrust” of the reliability of political decisions. The markets assessed the economic situation of a country more objectively than the political institutions.

In other words, the German government is demanding that the euro countries subordinate their financial and economic policies to a European body that stands outside any democratic control, and whose policies are largely determined by Berlin. In return, they would then be willing to finance some of the debts of weaker countries by means of euro-bonds.

The billionaire George Soros also supports this position. Euro-bonds would “then be acceptable for German voters if they were based on clear financial rules that must be set from Germany,” he told Der Spiegel.

What additional burden euro-bonds would mean for Germany’s budget is a matter of dispute. A representative of the Ifo Institute spoke of a total of €47 billion per year, which is likely to be an exaggeration. What is certain is that the German government would shift the additional costs onto the working class and pursue a harsh austerity plan similar to what Berlin has dictated for Greece, Portugal and other highly indebted countries.

Several economists have calculated that a failure of the euro would prove far too expensive for the export-dependent German economy.

Daniel Gros of the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) expects a complete collapse of the European financial and banking systems if the monetary union should break up. The German economy would slump by 20 to 30 percent. In 2009, it only dropped by five percent due to the financial crisis.

Gustav Horn from the Institute for Macroeconomic Research, and Michael Burda of Berlin’s Humboldt University, anticipate that a re-introduced Deutschemark would soon grow in value against the dollar and other European currencies by up to 50 percent. According to Horn, this would be a catastrophe for the export sector. “It would wipe out medium-sized German businesses in one fell swoop.”

Nevertheless, the German government coalition is deeply divided over the issue of euro-bonds. The Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and some Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentarians oppose European community bonds categorically. Many media comments now consider the question a political powder keg that could cost Chancellor Merkel her majority.

Both the Greens and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) are ready to step into the breach. Both have spoken out forcefully for the course that is currently advocated in the majority of German business circles: the introduction of euro-bonds, combined with strict European finance rules and other austerity measures.

In a TV broadcast, SPD chair Sigmar Gabriel advocated the introduction of euro-bonds. The prerequisite, however, was that countries seeking access to the bonds submit themselves to strict European control and give up their budget rights, he said.

Green Party chair Cem Ozdemir told the Rheinische Post that the appointment of a European finance minister, control over the budgets of member states by the European Union, and effective measures and incentives for fiscal discipline were prerequisites for introducing euro-bonds. He specifically advocated even more austerity measures. Those who want the euro must “be willing to pay a price for it,” he said.

The establishment parties—whether conservative, social democratic or Green—know only two answers to the economic crisis: the introduction of a European financial dictatorship in defence of the euro, or the Balkanization of Europe in the name of national interests. Both lead to disaster, deepening the social crisis and exacerbating national tensions.

The worsening of the economic crisis is putting immense class struggles on the agenda. In Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain, Israel and many other countries, workers and young people have begun to oppose the dictates of finance capital. But these struggles can only succeed if they are guided by an international socialist perspective.

Workers all over Europe must unite across the national borders and launch a joint struggle against the dictates of the banks and their stooges in the establishment political parties and the trade unions. Its goal must be the establishment of the United Socialist States of Europe. This requires the building of the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections in the whole of Europe.

 

The riots in London and other cities of U.K. like Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester, Liverpool indicate end of multi-culturalism in the West. The horrible massacre in Norway last month also a pointer in that direction? We need to seriously analyze these events. When Asians and Africans from former colonies began to migrate to western countries the Europe began to be multi-racial and multi-cultural which was a new experience for people of the West. In other words they were now paying the price for their colonial policies the brunt of which so far was borne by colonized countries only.

 

When the considerable number of Afro-Asian peoples became part of these former colonies, like France, England, Germany, Netherland and several other countries, the sociologists and political scientists evolved a theory of multi-culturalism. So far these countries had only one religion, one language and one culture. But now these countries had people of different cultures, religion and language and hence called this phenomenon as multi-culturalism.

 

It is interesting to note that they called their countries multi-cultural rather than multi-religious because culture has deeper impact on human behaviour and intellectual orientation than religion. Among those who migrated to western countries many were their fellow religionists i.e. Christians but with African or Asian cultural background which was as unacceptable to them despite sharing religion with them. Also, their ethnic origin (skin colour) was also very different.

 

Thus being Hindu, Muslim or Christian hardly mattered to the whites of Europe. They considered themselves as superior culturally, racially and educationally and considered non-whites as inferior. So for them culture and ethnicity were far more important than being of different religion.

 

Also, they thought they are more tolerant and people of Afro-Asian origin more religiously orthodox and much less tolerant. However, it was mere rhetoric than reality. When the numbers of migrant began to reach certain critical limit, their intolerance manifested itself. As long as their (migrants) number was insignificant they boasted about their tolerance but when it exceeded certain limits their intolerance surfaced and governments began to make stringent laws to control migration. In Netherland, government even decided to show naked women’s pictures to Muslim migrants and see whether they would accept it. They did not even think about women’s dignity.

 

The massacre in Norway was also result of extreme intolerance of other cultures and religions. Anders Behring Breivik was angry because more migrants (especially Muslims) were coming to his country and the ruling party was too liberal towards migrants and hence migrations must stop. It is interesting to note that he learnt a lesson or two from Hindutva forces also in intolerance and especially mentioned that in his voluminous manifesto comprising over 1500 pages. Thus it is evident that all rightwing forces, whatever their religion or cultural background, think alike.

 

This intolerance becomes sharper at the time of economic downturn. The Western economy is going through crisis and unemployment is increasing which causes frustration among the unemployed youth and frustration and anger motivates them to indulge in acts of violence. They begin to think that real cause of their unemployment is migrants who take away their jobs though that is not the real reason. It is crisis of capitalist economy and also American war dependent economy but migrants become target of their wrath.

 

What happened in London a few days ago and spread to several other cities of U.K., especially Birmingham and Manchester which have large sub-continental population, is much more complex and one should understand it with all its complexity. It all started with police killing a coloured person of 30 years age who was married with three children. The way it spread rapidly not only in different parts of London but to several other cities shows there was much more than most commentators have written about.

 

The British Prime Minister called it ‘pure criminality’. It is too superficial an observation and cannot be accepted as a comprehensive explanation from a responsible person like Prime Minister. Indeed criminals are also involved but it is not doing of criminals only. Criminals just joined in when disturbances started as always happen. In communal rots too in our country criminals too take benefit of rioting and indulge in looting and even settling scores with their rivals. One did not expect from the Prime Minister of a country to give such over-simplistic explanation.

 

A comprehensive explanation would include political, economic as well as cultural aspects. It also has to be seen in the background of rising intolerance and rejection of multi-culturalism in Europe in the wake of revival of rightwing politics and revival of rightwing politics is mainly on account of deep economic crisis western world is going through. It has been observed since Second World War that economic downturn brings in its wake revival of racism and neo-fascism.

 

This again shows that tolerance or intolerance is not a religious phenomenon as often thought  but quite a complex phenomenon which include several factors including cultural ones and those of identity and power-sharing. We unfortunately think it is religion which makes one tolerant or intolerant. The way blacks have killed Asians not only during these disturbances in London and Birmingham but also in earlier riots in England shows it is not merely racial but also economic.

 

Asians, especially those from Indian sub-continent have done well economically as they run businesses and have better standard of living than blacks, blacks bear grudge towards more successful Asians and take it out during such disturbances. The widespread looting of shops in which some whites were also involved as in India many middle class people, especially women loot shops during communal riots, shows how our values have collapsed.

Our education system itself is to be blamed for this. Like everywhere in capitalist system whole emphasis in education system is on competition, not on cooperation. Competitive spirit is the very foundation of our education and, of the two pillars of capitalism, competition and consumerism, consumerism generates spirit of jealousy and people want to imitate the rich and super-rich and want to consume what they consume and that leads to crime of all sorts.

 

A little spark can ignite the whole city or cities. As if people were waiting just for a spark to fly and everything will go up in flames. A few years ago, in Los Angeles it erupted when a white cop beat up a Blackman for minor traffic violation and this incident was video-recorded and shown. Whole of Los Angeles went up in flame. It shows how skin-deep is our culture and our civilizational values.

 

Riots like those of London and massacre like that of Norway show mirror to people of the west how superficial is their understanding of their culture and civilization. They accuse Muslims of being violent and undemocratic, how violent they themselves are and how deep are their prejudices. It was not very difficult for Hitler to capture imagination of German with his Nazi philosophy, Germany which had centuries of civilization.

 

Also USA, in partnership with U.K. and certain other European countries has been waging wars in Asia and Africa and recruiting soldiers for that purpose and indulges in propaganda justifying violence has its own effect on the youth who go and fight as soldiers. It tells upon their psychology. The American debt crisis, though it is not being admitted, has much to do with the needless wars it waged in Iraq and Afghanistan and that has brought about economic crisis in whole of Europe causing so much socio-economic woes and frustration among the youth.

 

There are violent tendencies among all of us and it needs great efforts to keep them under check and time and again we have to stress basic values like compassion, justice, human dignity, wisdom, mutual cooperation in goodness, humility and so on especially through our education system. But if all the time we all of competition and achieving at the cost of others and bullying weaker sections by parading our strength would only spur violent tendencies and these tendencies would recoil on ourselves also. The old adage that if you dig a pit for other to fall in, you yourself are likely to fall in it, is based on great deal of wisdom.

 

There is no doubt that western society evolved concept of human dignity and human rights  but its ruling classes are greatest violators of those norms and values. The Western societies which all the time talk about tolerance is increasingly becoming intolerant of the others. Will they learn from events such as in Norway and London?