People exit the the Financial Square building following the Goldman Sachs shareholders meeting, Friday, May 8, 2009 in New York.

While Americans suffer, glutted banks refuse to renegotiate mortgages or scale back bonuses

By Robert Reich

One out of four homeowners is now under water, owing more on their homes than the homes are worth. Why? The biggest single factor behind the housing crisis is rising unemployment. According to the latest ABC-Washington Post poll, one out of every three Americans has either lost their job or lives in a household with someone who has lost a job. Today it takes two and sometimes three incomes to buy the groceries and pay the mortgage or the rent. So if one of those incomes is gone, a homeowner can’t make the payment.

The scourge of unemployment is splitting America into three groups: 1) the third just mentioned, whose households are in danger of losing their homes and whose kids are surviving on food stamps (that’s up to one in four children in America today); 2) the vast majority of Americans who are managing but worried about keeping their jobs and homes; and 3) a small number who are taking home even more winnings than they did in the boom year 2007.

Prominent among Category 3 are Wall Street bankers, many of whom are now concluding their most profitable year ever. Goldman Sachs is so flush it’s preparing to give out bonuses in a few weeks totaling $17 billion. That will mean eight-figure compensation packages for lots of Goldman executives and traders. JPMorgan Chase is rumored to have a bonus pool of around $5 billion. The three other major Wall Street banks are ratcheting up their compensation packages so their “talent” won’t be poached by Goldman or JPMorgan.

Wall Street is booming again in large part because the rest of America — categories 1 and 2, above — bailed it out to the tune of $700 billion last year. The Street has repaid some of that but, according to the bailout program’s inspector general, much of it is gone forever. For example, the taxpayer money that bailed out giant insurer AIG went directly through AIG to its “counterparties” like Goldman Sachs — to whom Tim Geithner, according to the inspector general, gave away the store. As Goldman Sachs prepares to dole out some $17 billion to its executives and traders, it’s worth noting that Goldman received $13 billion a year ago from the rest of us via AIG and Geithner, no strings attached.

Which brings us back to homeowners who are falling further behind. The $75 billion federal program designed to bribe banks to modify mortgages has been a bust. No one knows the exact number of mortgages that have been modified (that will be reported next month) but housing experts I’ve talked with say it’s a tiny fraction of the number of homeowners in trouble. Seems that the big banks can’t be bothered. “Some of the firms ought to be embarrassed,” Michael Barr, the assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions, told the New York Times.

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Dubai World helped to develop much of the emirate’s spectacular skyline; now it wants a six-month moratorium on its debt repayments.

Shockwaves from the emirate’s financial problems could trigger ‘the credit crunch of the emerging world’

David Teather
The Observer

At the end of October, the government of Dubai issued a prospectus to promote a $2.5bn Islamic bond, which contained a little-noticed but important clause.

In it, the government and the ruling family appeared to distance themselves from the state-owned companies behind Dubai’s outlandish building boom and an acquisition spree that had included P&O, the British ports operator, department store Barneys New York and part of the firm that owns the London Eye. “The Dubai government,” it said, “is under no obligation to extend support to any government-related entity”. In other words, these companies, led by the largest, Dubai World, which benefited from implicit government guarantees when they were raising huge amounts of debt from western banks, were already being cut adrift.

The announcement on Wednesday that Dubai World, shouldering almost $60bn (£36.5bn) in debt, would seek a six-month moratorium on repayments sent shockwaves through world markets. Just hours earlier, the government, run by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, had raised $5bn from two banks for its own debts.

If anywhere is emblematic of the debt-fuelled extravagance of the past decade, it is surely Dubai, which strove to have the tallest, the biggest and the best of everything. If it collapsed, it would have profound effects on other emerging nations, the relationship between the west and the Middle East, and the ownership of scores of well-known businesses. In the worst case, it could wreck fragile confidence and pitch the world back into recession.

Dr Christopher Davidson, an expert on the region at Durham University, says that sovereign debt could be the credit crisis of the emerging markets. “It will make investors sit bolt upright. If Dubai can go down, perhaps others can as well. People might decide that markets like Dubai, where the governments are not fully transparent, are not worth a punt any more.”

He says investors have been especially spooked because the Dubai ruler and officials had maintained in recent weeks that everything was fine. “They were just buying time until they could get a bailout from somewhere. The ruler has suffered a massive loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the business community. During the boom years, there was no separation between the government wealth and the companies’ wealth – they were creaming it off. They can’t now have it both ways.” The sheikh, he says, could end up as “the most bankrupt person in the world”.

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Heavy early morning fog near the Dubai marina

Photograph: Steve Crisp/Reuters

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Hopes Abu Dhabi will ride to the rescue of troubled state as experts fear crisis could plunge world back into recession

Elena Moya, David Teather, Heather Stewart
The Observer

Furious bondholders have arranged emergency talks with Dubai officials this week in an effort to get some clarity on the financial health of the state-owned company Dubai World, which caused widespread panic on world markets last week when it asked creditors for a six-month standstill on debt repayments.

A conference call has been organised by the New York-based hedge fund QVT Financial, after an attempt last week was abandoned when the telephone system collapsed under the weight of calls.

Investors are angry that the announcement was made at the start of the Islamic Eid and US Thanksgiving holidays, leaving them in the dark for days. “They won’t be able to raise a penny again from the international investment community,” one hedge fund manager said.

Dubai World, which owns assets including the former British ports business P&O, as well as luxury store Barneys in New York and was the main developer behind some of the state’s grand property schemes, stunned markets with the announcement last Wednesday. The company is shouldering some $60bn (£36.5bn) in debt and was due to repay around $4bn next month. There are fears that the debt crisis in the towering city state could fracture the fragile investor confidence that has been built in the past few months and plunge the world back into recession.

As well as putting the frighteners on stock market investors who had been betting on a “V-shaped” bounce out of recession, Dubai’s crisis has turned the spotlight on other countries that could struggle to repay their hefty debts.

Danny Gabay, director of City consultancy Fathom says Latvia, Greece, Ukraine and Hungary, which all face severe fiscal problems, are “on the front line,” in the battle to avoid a government debt crisis in the future.

Vulture funds are circling Dubai and buying up distressed bonds, which could put further pressure on Dubai World to dispose of assets in a fire sale.

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James K. Galbraith

As part of the Roosevelt Institute’s 10-part series on the Jobs Crisis, running on the New Deal 2.0 blog from Nov. 12-25, I was asked to reflect on what can be done to get Americans working again. Here’s my take.

I’m tempted to say that the United States is plainly unable to cope with the economic crisis in a serious way. The barriers are philosophical, procedural, and constitutional. So long as economic thinking is mired in a world that disappeared with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, so long as any action requires 60 Senate votes, and so long as political capital erodes from the start of a fixed four-year presidential term, we’re stuck.

Technically it would have been fairly easy, 10 months ago, to get this bus back on the road. There could have been open-ended fiscal assistance to stop the budget hemorrhage of the states and cities. There could have been a jobs program and effective foreclosure relief. There could have been a payroll tax holiday. There could have been a strategy for sustained massive effort on infrastructure, energy and climate. There could have been prompt corrective action to resolve, instead of coddle, the worst of the banks.

I mostly don’t blame President Obama; he and his team went as far as they felt they could. I blame the head-in-the-sand politicians in Congress, the over-optimistic forecasters, the half-educated press, and the power of the financial lobby. I blame the avatars of fiscal virtue, the public debt scare-mongerers, the astrologers for whom thirteen significant digits (a trillion) for the stimulus package was just too much. I blame the Senate, which hands the balance of power to small states at the expense of disaster areas like California, Florida and New York. I do blame the Bush-Obama financial policy team, who either believed that “credit would flow again” if you stuffed the banks with money, or knew that it wouldn’t.

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Pastors are invoking Psalm 109 — “May his days be few” — in hopes of saving our country, and our souls

By Lilly Fowler

Pastor Wiley Drake preaches on most Sundays in a church tucked in between California’s big amusement parks, a place some people refer to as “Wiley World.”

The particular Sunday I visited First Southern Baptist Church was the weekend following the Fort Hood tragedy, when U.S. Army psychiatrist, and Muslim, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, shot and killed 13 people.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Drake said as he addressed the group of about 60 gathered in Buena Park that evening, just down the street from Knott’s Berry Farm. “If they’re a Muslim, they’re a danger to this country.”

Statements like these are a dime a dozen in “Wiley World.” Political correctness isn’t a concern to Drake. And yet, his assertions about Muslims are far from his most controversial. What has garnered him the most media attention is what he said to national radio talk show host Alan Colmes in June.

“Are you praying for his death?” Colmes asked Drake, referring to President Obama. “Yes,” Drake replied. “So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?” Colmes asked. “Yes.” “You would like for the president of the United States to die?” Colmes asked once more. “If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death, that’s correct.”

Drake says he regrets the media frenzy caused by the Colmes interview, but he stands by his use of imprecatory prayer, a form of prayer he says is biblically mandated — an appeal to God that is, unlike most prayers, a request not for something positive but for misfortune, a kind of curse meant to fall on those considered evildoers.

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By Jeremy Scahill

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater’s involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so “compartmentalized” that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.

The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.” A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. “We don’t have any contracts to do that work for us. We don’t contract that kind of work out, period,” the official said. “There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services.”

The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency’s director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. “This is a parallel operation to the CIA,” said the source. “They are two separate beasts.” The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war–knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country.

Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. “Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government,” Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The Nation, adding that the company has “no other operations of any kind in Pakistan.”

A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source’s claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.

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DAVID STRINGER | 

LONDON — The United States was “hell bent” on a 2003 military invasion of Iraq and actively undermined efforts by Britain to win international authorization for the war, a former British diplomat told an inquiry Friday.

Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations from 1998 to 2003, said that President George W. Bush had no real interest in attempts to agree on a U.N. resolution to provide explicit backing for the conflict.

The ex-diplomat, who served as Britain’s envoy in Iraq after the invasion, said serious preparations for the war had begun in early 2002 and took on an unstoppable momentum.

As diplomats frantically attempted in early 2003 to agree upon a U.N. resolution approving a military offensive, Bush’s key aides grew impatient – criticizing the process as an unnecessary distraction, he said.

Grumbling from Washington “included noises about ‘this is a waste of time, what we need is regime change, why are we bothering with this, we must sweep this aside and do what’s going to have to be done anyway – and deal with this with the use of force,’” Greenstock testified before the inquiry into the Iraq war.

Several nations had hoped to stall the invasion of Iraq to allow U.N. weapons inspectors more time to search for evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – the key justification for the war. No such weapons were ever found.

Yet Bush’s inner circle cared little about what international allies thought and refused to halt plans to invade in March 2003, Greenstock said. He said even Blair was unable to persuade Bush, winning only a brief hiatus of two weeks.

“The momentum for earlier action in the United States was much too strong for us to counter,” Greenstock said in a written statement to the inquiry, provided alongside his live testimony.

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Monument to mammon . . . the Palm Island offshore property development in Dubai.

Dubai’s fantasy skyline seems to have been built on sand

Charlie Brooker
The Guardian

I am phenomenally stupid. Stupid in every conceivable way except one: I’m dimly aware that I’m stupid. This means I spend much of my time assuming the rest of the world knows better, that everyone else effortlessly comprehends things I struggle to understand. Things like long division, or which mobile phone tariff to go for. In many ways, this is a comforting thought, as it means there’s a limitless pool of people more intelligent than myself I can call on for advice.

But sometimes I find out my gut assumption was right all along, and it’s a deeply unsettling experience. Take Dubai. I’m no expert on Dubai. Never been there, and only read about it in passing. The one thing I knew was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sarcastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai’s skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense off-shore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from Super Mario Sunshine. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn’t enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system.

When I first read about all this stuff, I felt a bit uneasy. None of it sounded real or even vaguely sustainable. I’d been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go. The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pair of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice.

But even at their most huge and demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects being announced in Dubai. Yet the novelties, while larger, were wearing thin even more quickly. Dubai’s The World archipelago hadn’t even opened when the same developers announced The Universe, thereby making The World sound like a rather diminished prototype before anyone had moved in.

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Wednesday, Mar. 14, 2007

By Scott MacLeod

The first thing Halliburton chief executive David Lesar would need upon re-locating from Houston to Dubai, is a place to live. That won’t be easy to find, even with a Texas-sized wallet — when it comes to property bonanzas, Dubai is a 21st century version of the California Gold Rush.

Despite persistent rumors that Dubai’s bubble is about to burst, the tiny Arab sheikhdom keeps on growing, and real estate prices continue rising. Whatever controversy the announcement that oil-services giant is re-locating its headquarters to Dubai may be generating on Capitol Hill, in the Gulf region it is being seen as validating Dubai’s ambitions to become the new frontier of globalization. At High Society Real Estate, Lesar would learn that a one-bedroom apartment in his new hometown will cost anything from $200,000 to $2.9 million. A relatively commonplace property offered by High Society is a $1.4 million, five-bedroom, 7,469-sq.ft. villa in the Dubai Sports City complex. That’s if he can get one at any price, because the delivery date for many luxury dwellings is a year or two away. “Things are booming and the boom will continue,” says Boutros Boutros, an executive at Dubai’s flagship corporation, Emirates Airlines. “No matter how fast we run, Dubai stays ahead of us.”

Dubai’s pace of development is, indeed, staggering. A few years ago, Emirates announced plans to expand its fleet to 100 planes by 2010. It passed that mark last year, and is set to receive some of the first super jumbo Airbus A-380s. Only a decade ago, Dubai was a relatively sleepy sheikhdom — one of seven that make up the United Arab Emirates — known for being a trading hub due to its ports, rather than the oil output that enriches its neighbor, Abu Dhabi. But the ambitious Sheikh Mohammed, who formally became its ruler in 2006, implemented a vision that combined Dubai’s international trade links with a CEO-management style rare in Middle East governance, transforming Dubai into a global business center and tourist destination.

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Author: Randall Beisecker, Research Assistant
Monterey Institute of International Studies
James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies
March 2006

Introduction

Evergreen ship at Port Newark/Elizabeth, NJ.
[Source: http://www.aapa-ports.org/]

On March 2, 2006, state-owned Dubai Ports World (DP World) received final approval from the British High Court to acquire the British port operator Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O). Among its international operations, P&O provides terminal operations and stevedoring services to 21 ports along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The acquisition had previously received approval from the U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS, see below) on January 17, 2006. Attention was not drawn to the deal until Singapore-based PSA–another major terminal operator–dropped its competing bid to acquire P&O on February 10, 2006, leaving the way clear for DP World. Since then, debate over the DP World deal has engulfed Washington, D.C. in a political firestorm. Politicians in the U.S. Congress from both parties expressed anger that they had not been informed of the deal either before or after CFIUS approved it and expressed concern over the security implications of an Arab state-owned company being given access to U.S. ports. Some members of Congress have threatened to block the sale, and congressional hearings continue to examine the security implications of the takeover and the process by which the deal received Executive Branch approval.[1]

During an interview on Meet the Press on Sunday, February 26, 2006, Senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, announced that DP World had agreed to an additional 45-day investigation of its controversial purchase of P&O. This development helped calm the political haranguing and averted a clash between the president and Congress. However new issues, some substantive, many political, continue to be brought forward by different communities. This has greatly complicated the ability to both examine the particulars of this proposed acquisition, and to bring attention to the serious challenges that confront authorities attempting to secure U.S. ports and maritime infrastructure.

This article provides an overview of the U.S. port system, corrects some of the misconceptions about DP World’s acquisition of P&O, and examines the issues and security concerns being raised by both lawmakers and local interests. Next, the article will assess the process by which the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States determined DP World poses no national security threat. Finally, the article will conclude with several recommendations on how Congress should proceed.

Overview of the U.S. Shipping System

Ports are vital, but largely misunderstood hubs in the international shipping system that underpins U.S. trade. A port consists of a number of separate shipping systems that operate quite independently, with facilities designed to handle the movement of bulk cargo, oil and natural gas, chemical materials or shipping containers. In recent years, the standardization of container design and the development of megaships capable of transporting over 3,000 containers at a time have led to explosive growth in container shipping. The 361 commercial ports in the United States receive 95 percent of U.S. imports by weight and 75 percent by value, with the 9 million shipping containers that arrive yearly accounting for 66 percent of total maritime trade value.[2]

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Monday, February 16, 2009

Lou Minatti

I few months back I jokingly said that Halliburton would move its headquarters back to Houston. In light of recent events I no longer think it’s a joke. Here’s why.

Many, if not most of these senior-level managers took the leap and bought super-expensive houses and condos when they left for Dubai 2 years ago, at the peak of the Dubai bubble. Dubai real estate is now cascading down a cliff, where I think it will crash down a full 90% from peak value.

Put yourself in the shoes of a Halliburton fatcat. The asset they bought via an onerous mortgage for, say, $2 million, is now worth two thirds what they paid. The value of that asset continues to bleed. In most of the world, the options for the Halliburton fatcats are civil in nature, at most involving foreclosure. But as we’ve learned over the past week, in Dubai they will stick your ass in jail if you welch on a debt. New York Times:

“I’m really scared of what could happen, because I bought property here,” said Sofia, who asked that her last name be withheld because she is still hunting for a new job. “If I can’t pay it off, I was told I could end up in debtors’ prison.”

These Halliburton fatcats have two options: They stop paying for these anchors around their necks and either flee or go to jail. Or they continue paying millions for a dead asset and stay in Dubai. Dunno about you, but if I was rich I’d cut my losses and move back home.

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Blair Speedy
From: The Australian

THE future of Australia’s multibillion-dollar stevedoring industry has been thrown into question after the Dubai government, owner of the country’s second-largest ports operator, flagged a restructure of its entire asset portfolio.

Amid looming debt repayments, the oil-rich emirate yesterday said it would restructure its investment company Dubai World, owner of ports operator DP World, the stevedore responsible for loading and unloading of about one-third of Australia’s sea cargo.

The fate of the Australian business, acquired just three years ago as part of a takeover of P&O Ports global operations, will be decided by Dubai’s Financial Support Fund, which is responsible for managing the state’s debt and has been tasked with assessing the level of restructuring needed at Dubai World.

“The restructuring will be designed to address financial obligations and improve business efficiency for the future,” the Dubai government said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Paul Little, managing director of transport and logistics major Toll Holdings, said DP World’s Australian port operations, which include sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Fremantle, were “trophy assets” and would attract keen interest if they came up for sale.

However, there were few potential buyers with both the desire and the ability to make a purchase, he said.

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Sheikh Mohammed lured investors with futuristic projects. Now they’re left with $80 billion in debt, little confidence in Dubai, and growing questions

By Stanley Reed

The boom years of the early 21st century were good for many people, but perhaps no one enjoyed them more than Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai. Stripped to its essentials, Dubai is a sweltering strip of sand blessed with a natural harbour known as the creek, which has been an entrepot for merchants and smugglers for centuries. Building on his father’s vision, Sheikh Mohammed turned Dubai into a 21st Century boomtown, luring western financiers and tourists with gleaming steel and glass towers, vast beaches, and green golf resorts.

Now Sheikh Mohammed is calling for a standstill on debt repayments at one of his most important companies, Dubai World, least temporarily rocking world markets and raising huge questions about the future of Dubai. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index of 500 stocks fell 1.7% in abbreviated trading Friday, to 1,091.49, and the MSCI Emerging Markets Index had slipped 1.8% as of 2:12 p.m.

Dubai was always a confidence game—a momentum play. Unlike Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi, the hugely wealthy emirate to the West, Sheikh Mohammed had scant oil production to fuel his grandiose ideas. Instead he sold the world on his vision of Dubai as a hub for the Middle East, western Asia, and Africa, attracting investment from his wealthier neighbors—both Arabs and Iranians—and increasingly, from the West and Russia.

For a while, it worked. Western bankers fell over each other to book space in his Dubai International Financial Center, a handsome if somewhat over-the-top real estate project aimed at being the Wall Street of the Gulf. The cream of technology companies and media companies, from Cisco Systems (CSCO) to Microsoft (MSFT), set up shop in Dubai’s Internet City. CEOs and politicians came to Dubai to pay court to the ruler, whom they treated like a sage.

Sheikh’s subordinates competed rashly

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by Johann Hari

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‘The Family’ behind proposed Ugandan law that would execute HIV+ men

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Times Online

Osama bin Laden was cornered and within reach of US troops in the Afghanistan mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001 when America military leaders made the costly decision not to attack the terror leader with the massive force at their disposal, according to a US Senate report.

The report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden in December 2001, three months after the September 11 attacks, has had lasting and disastrous consequences. Bin Laden’s escape laid the foundation for today’s reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says.

In an introduction to the report, which will be published on Monday, Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, writes: “When we went to war less than a month after the attacks of September 11, the objective was to destroy Al Qaeda and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden and other senior figures … Our inability to finish the job in late 2001 has contributed to a conflict today that endangers not just our troops and those of our allies, but the stability of a volatile and vital region.”

The report, entitled: “Tora Bora revisited: how we failed to get Bin Laden and why it matters today” will offer some support to President Barack Obama as he prepares to announce this week that he is to send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.

Senator Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, has argued for some time that the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaeda leader and his top deputies when they were holed up in the forbidding mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan only three months after September 11. He commissioned the report as President Obama was trying to decide whether he should boost troop numbers in Afghanistan.

The report lays the blame for the state of Afghanistan and Pakistan today at the feet of the military leaders who served former President George W Bush, notably Donald Rumsfeld, the then Defence Secretary, and his most senior military commander General Tommy Franks.

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Rod Liddle

This is a rough time for the cute Russian whores in the fetid nightclub of the Dubai Metropolitan hotel, plying their wares for 50 quid a go.

Even during the boom days they outnumbered the punters by about five to one; now, all the money has run out and the European expats will soon be leaving.

What will they do, these viciously bleached blonde Katyas and Natashas from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan?

They won’t sell themselves to the berobed local Emiratis, whom they loathe. I suppose they will have to go home and the whore-traffickers will be out of work too.

Perhaps one day soon there will be only Emiratis left in Dubai — its population dropped by 17% at the start of last year’s credit crunch and now there’s much, much, worse to come because there is no money to pay for anything. The desert will reclaim the expensive hotels with their bling-encrusted lobbies and opulent suites for the likes of Paris Hilton, who once turned up here to open a mall and was indistinguishable from her surroundings.

And the sea will wash away those hideous palm-shaped islands where our cheaper celebs spend spring weekends, the expat apartment blocks will crumble into dust, the scorpions will return and Dubai will be what it was in the 1960s, a frowsy fishing port in a scorched and very backward Third World country, with a moral code for the indigenous population drawn from AD 1335. And the rest of us will look on and wonder: what powerful but unrecorded race / Once dwelt in this annihilated place? Well, hell, you can hope this might happen. Better that than what it has been these past 15 years.

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Entirely logically, the Rev. Billy Talen of the Church of Life After Shopping has endorsed today’s Buy Nothing Day, suggesting people stop shopping and start giving. Video from his interview on “Democracy Now” here.

“We can’t just be full of cheap stuff everywhere made in sweat shops thousands of miles away with fossil fuel everywhere, plastics everywhere, and credit cards and everybody in debt. We can’t continue that. So we’re looking for an alternative.”

There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less.

So this November 27 (November 28 in Europe and overseas), we’re calling for a Wildcat General Strike. We’re asking tens of millions of people around the world to bring the capitalist consumption machine to a grinding – if only momentary – halt.

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Until Chilcot hears UN weapons inspectors’ testimony, the fiction of Britain honestly seeking a WMD smoking gun prevails

Scott Ritter
guardian.co.uk,

With its troops no longer engaged in military operations inside Iraq, Great Britain has been liberated politically to conduct a postmortem of that conflict, including the sensitive issue of the primary justification used by then Prime Minister Tony Blair for going to war, namely Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or WMD.

The failure to find any WMD in Iraq following the March 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of that country by US and British troops continues to haunt those who were involved in making the decision for war. The issue of Iraqi WMD, and the role it played in influencing the decision for war, is at the centre of the ongoing Iraq war inquiry being conducted by Sir John Chilcot.

Among the more compelling testimonies provided to date has been that of Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to the US, who served in that capacity during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Meyer convincingly portrayed an environment where the decision by the US to invade Iraq, backed by Blair, precluded any process (such as viable UN weapons inspections) that sought to compel Iraq to prove it had no WMD. Rather, Great Britain and the US were left “scrambling” to find evidence of a “smoking gun” to prove Iraq indeed possessed the WMD it was accused of having.

In short, Saddam had been found guilty of possessing WMD, and his sentence had been passed down by Washington and London void of any hard evidence that such weapons, or even related programmes, even existed. The sentence meted out – regime termination – mandated such a massive deployment of troops and material that all but the wilfully blind or intentionally ignorant had to know by the early autumn of 2002 that war with Iraq was inevitable. One simply does not initiate the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands of armoured vehicles and aircraft, and dozens of ships on a whim or to reinforce an idle threat.

President George Bush was able to disguise his blatant militarism behind the false sincerity of his ally Blair and his own secretary of state, Colin Powell. The president’s task was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain, where reporters and editors alike dutifully repeated both the hyped-up charges levied against Iraq and the false pretensions that a diplomatic solution was being sought.

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