By: David Dayen Tuesday May 3, 2011

But I suppose we need yet another article about this. So David Kocieniewski writes it again, with the excellent topic heading “But Nobody Pays That”:

By taking advantage of myriad breaks and loopholes that other countries generally do not offer, United States corporations pay only slightly more on average than their counterparts in other industrial countries. And some American corporations use aggressive strategies to pay less — often far less — than their competitors abroad and at home. A Government Accountability Office study released in 2008 found that 55 percent of United States companies paid no federal income taxes during at least one year in a seven-year period it studied.

The paradox of the United States tax code — high rates with a bounty of subsidies, shelters and special breaks — has made American multinationals “world leaders in tax avoidance,” according to Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California who was head of the Congressional joint committee on taxes. This has profound implications for businesses, the economy and the federal budget.

I would argue that, when 55% of US companies pay no federal income tax during at least one year out of seven, more than “some” American companies pay less than their competitors abroad. I’d go with “most.”

The best way to judge the efficiency of the corporate tax code is to look at results, and in the US, corporate tax topped out at 1.3% of GDP last year. Most industrialized countries collect DOUBLE that, around 2.5% of GDP. The corporate tax rate is a useless parameter in the face of these numbers.

The claim made by conservatives is that lowering the nominal tax rate for corporations will encourage less tax evasion, but I’m not sure why I should believe that. If we want to stop tax evasion, we can simply eliminate loopholes that don’t encourage anything but corporate profits and clean out the more anachronistic parts of the corporate tax system, and if that brings US corporate tax revenues up toward the level of similarly situated companies abroad, all the better. A focus on the nominal tax rate is a distraction to get you to ignore all the massive tax avoidance going on.

The other piece of the Kocieniewski article that’s important is that different industries pay different effective tax rates. Retailers and construction pay a much higher rate than financial services, real estate and mining. Is there any justification for that? Should we value Wall Street, real estate and Big Coal through the tax code more than building and selling things?

___________________________________________
To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
SUPPORT THE GREANVILLE POST AND CYRANOS JOURNAL TODAY.
[donation-can goal_id=’support-tgp-before-were-gone’ show_progress=true show_description=true show_donations=false show_title=true title=”]
____________________________________________

Bil Van Auken |  3 May 2011

The attack on the NYC towers provided the ideal pretext for the endless "War on Terror" and for the huge propaganda wave that continues to this day.

WASHINGTON AND THE CORPORATE media have used the killing of Osama bin Laden to launch a strident celebration of US militarism. Missing from both official speeches and media commentary, however, is any assessment of the decade-old “global war on terror,” in which bin Laden’s summary execution in Pakistan is proclaimed a landmark victory.

By the time of his death on Sunday, however, Osama bin Laden had become largely irrelevant, a sick old man who by all evidence lived under effective house arrest as a ward of Pakistan’s military intelligence. The strategic importance of his demise is generally acknowledged as nil.

He was, without question, a deeply reactionary figure, whose outlook was steeped in anticommunism and religious fanaticism. It was this ideology that made bin Laden a valuable asset of the US Central Intelligence Agency in the catastrophic war that Washington instigated against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan beginning in 1979.

In announcing bin Laden’s death, President Barack Obama affirmed that “justice has been done.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton similarly declared that “justice has been served.”

His execution by a Navy Seal team had nothing to do with justice. It had been decided in advance that he was to be killed under circumstances in which he could have been captured and brought before a court of law on charges related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Behind this decision lay a determination to prevent the long history of bin Laden’s relations with US government agencies from being opened up to public review. This relationship began with the CIA’s arming and funding of the so-called mujahideen—Islamist guerrillas fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan—whom President Ronald Reagan described as “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.”

Osama, the son of a wealthy businessman in Saudi Arabia, played a key role in recruiting and training Arab volunteers for the CIA-backed mujahideen, who ultimately gave rise to the Taliban. Al Qaeda, Arabic for “the base,” was established in that period, with aid and arms from the CIA.

This collaboration did not end with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, or with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda once again served as assets of the US military intelligence complex in the wars that tore apart Yugoslavia, first in Bosnia and then, at the end of the 1990s, in Kosovo.

As so often happens in US foreign policy, today’s ally turns into tomorrow’s enemy. The Islamist insurgency sponsored by Washington as a means of undermining the Soviet Union ultimately became hostile to the growing US presence in the Middle East, in particular in Saudi Arabia.

The history of this long and intimate relationship between an individual portrayed as America’s deadliest enemy and the US intelligence agencies is systematically covered up by the media.

The events of 9/11, which to this day have yet to be seriously investigated and explained, provided the pretext for launching the “global war on terror.”

What is striking about Washington’s responses to the tragic events of September 11, 2001 is that they never could be deduced logically from the events themselves. Fifteen of the 19 accused 9/11 hijackers—like the supposed mastermind Osama bin Laden—were citizens of Saudi Arabia, which has remained immune from any retribution. None of them came from either Afghanistan or Iraq, both of which would shortly be engulfed in violence and death.

While bin Laden was based in Afghanistan, the relations between Al Qaeda and the Taliban government were always tenuous. In October 2001, Taliban ministers first indicated that they would be prepared to surrender bin Laden if Washington would provide evidence of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. The request was rejected. The Taliban then said it was prepared to discuss turning bin Laden over to a neutral country if the US ceased its bombing of Afghanistan. Again, the Bush administration said it wasn’t interested. It wanted regime change.

After invading Afghanistan on the pretense of capturing bin Laden, the Bush administration allowed him to escape in the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, with the US military essentially ordered to stand down as the Al Qaeda leader made his way across the border into Pakistan.

Bush soon indicated that he had no particular interest in capturing bin Laden. He acknowledged that the Al Qaeda leader played no particularly important role in terms of the opposition to the US occupation of Afghanistan. Indeed, he was useful alive as a symbol for the “war on terror” in general, and, in particular, for his release of threatening videotapes at politically opportune moments, such as on the eve of the 2004 election.

According to the Obama administration’s account, US intelligence located the compound occupied by bin Laden in August 2010. Why it took nine months to mount a raid cannot be explained merely by technical preparations. Clearly, there were political issues involving bin Laden’s ties not only to Pakistani intelligence but to elements within the US intelligence apparatus itself.

Nearly a decade after the launching of the “war on terror,” 100,000 American troops are fighting a growing armed resistance movement, fueled in large measure by the killing and wounding of hundreds of thousands of Afghans in the US colonial war.

At the same time, the so-called global war on terror took a sharp turn a year-and-a-half after 9/11 with the launching of the “shock and awe” assault on Iraq. Again, the aim was regime change—justified with lies about “weapons of mass destruction”—although the target, Saddam Hussein, was an avowed enemy of bin Laden and the Islamist terrorists. Over a million Iraqi lives have been lost as a result of the US war of aggression against Iraq, and 47,000 American soldiers continue to occupy that country.

Now the Obama administration has joined in another military intervention, this one aimed at overthrowing Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi—an erstwhile ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda—and installing a puppet regime more subservient to Washington and the Western energy conglomerates. In this conflict, the US and its European allies are providing close air support, advisers and arms to a “rebel” force that includes Islamist elements who trained at bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan.

This record makes clear that Washington never saw the supposed “global war on terror” as anything more than a useful pretext—and Osama bin Laden as a convenient boogeyman—for marketing what the US military has come to refer to as the “long war” in Central and South Asia and the Persian Gulf.

What were the real aims of this war? Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter administration national security advisor who engineered the CIA intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s, provided clear insight into US imperialism’s strategic concerns.

In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski described Eurasia as “the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.” He stressed that with the end of Soviet power in the region, the challenge facing US imperialism was to prevent “the emergence of a dominant antagonistic Eurasian power.”

Of central importance were the energy resources of the Caspian basin, second only to the Persian Gulf in their global importance. Afghanistan provided the main pipeline routes for funneling these strategic resources to the West and lay in close proximity to the three powers seen as the most likely to be antagonistic to US dominance of the region: China, Russia and Iran.

In his book, Brzezinski lamented that America was “too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad,” with popular sentiments limiting Washington’s ability to use “military intimidation” to achieve its ends. This could be overcome only, he suggested, “in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.”

The attacks of 9/11 provided just such a “sudden threat” and were immediately exploited by the Bush administration to implement previously worked-out plans for US military interventions in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. America’s ruling elite sought to counter the crisis of US capitalism through the military seizure of strategic positions in these two regions, both centers of vast energy reserves. To what extent elements within the US state and its intelligence agencies knew that such a “sudden threat” was imminent and allowed it to unfold remains a subject for serious investigation.

The wars of aggression of the past decade have been accompanied by terrible crimes against democratic rights at home and abroad. The systematic use of assassination, torture, indefinite detention and extraordinary rendition against terror suspects has been accompanied by the erection of the scaffolding of a police state in the US itself.

In their speeches, both Obama and Clinton made clear that the death of bin Laden would not stem the global eruption of American militarism. Obama insisted that “securing our country is not complete,” while Clinton vowed, “The fight continues, and we will never waver.”

Just as the supposed hunt for bin Laden served as the pretext for the invasion of Afghanistan, so his death may be utilized to effect certain tactical changes in what has become a deepening debacle for the US military in that country. In her remarks, Clinton suggested that there could be a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.

Yet, in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, US imperialism confronts a far more potent enemy than it could ever make Al Qaeda and bin Laden out to be. The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere have been driven by the stirrings of a working class determined to struggle against the mass unemployment, poverty and social inequality imposed by global capital and the national ruling elites.

In the US itself, a decade into the “war on terror” the crisis of US capitalism has grown far deeper, while the American working class has suffered a profound deterioration in its living standards and social conditions, even as politicians of both major parties demand massive new cutbacks.

The momentary, media-manufactured euphoria over the killing of Osama bin Laden will soon be eclipsed by the inexorable growth of the class struggle and revolutionary confrontations between US imperialism and the working class, both at home and abroad.

Bill Van Auken is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

___________________________________________
To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
SUPPORT THE GREANVILLE POST AND CYRANOS JOURNAL TODAY.
[donation-can goal_id=’support-tgp-before-were-gone’ show_progress=true show_description=true show_donations=false show_title=true title=”]
____________________________________________

Raucous celebration upon bin Laden's death. An unsurprising display considering the chauvinism of politicians and media.

The assassination of Osama bin Laden by US Special Forces in Abbotabad, Pakistan will likely assure Barack Obama’s victory in the 2012 presidential race. Republican hawks will have a hard time pressing their claims that Obama is “soft on terrorism.”

Details about the killing of bin Laden remain obscure. The mission, a joint operation between CIA and Special Forces, appeared to have been mounted from a US-controlled air base in Pakistan – without the advance knowledge of Pakistan’s government. US sources say Osama was shot twice in the head; his son was also killed.

Bin Laden’s body was photographed and then apparently dumped into the sea from a US aircraft. Washington claims this was done to observe Muslim funeral rites calling for almost immediate burial. This sounds preposterous.

The real reason was more likely to prevent bin Laden’s burial site from becoming a shrine and, some cynics will assert, getting rid of the evidence. Expect endless claims that a bin Laden double was killed while the real McCoy still haunts Pakistan’s badlands. Various fakes videotapes used to depict bin Laden as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks used doubles.

Gleeful Americans are rejoicing that the man credited with the monstrous crime of 9/11 has been killed after a ten year search. More thoughtful ones may stop to ponder the remarkable Quixotic drama of a single man who set out to overturn the mighty American Imperium.

To people of the Muslim world, where many hailed bin Laden as a hero and liberator from Western domination, his killing in Pakistan will recall American gangland rub-outs  and bodies dumped  in New Jersey’s waters and swamps. Particularly after NATO warplanes killed Muammar Gadaffi’s youngest son and three grandchildren in Libya.

Expect already acid US-Pakistan relations to yet worsen as Americans accuse Pakistan of sheltering bin Laden for a decade. This writer has long said that Bin Laden was in Pakistan, and likely with at least some  knowledge of ISI, Pakistani intelligence, though its able former Director General, Hamid Gul, whose word I respect, disputes this claim.

It is most unfortunate that bin Laden was literally rubbed out. If he could have been taken alive, the co-founder of al-Qaida should have been brought to the United States to stand trial in New York City, or, failing that, on a military base – but with lawyers and a civilian jury under full US law.

The whole story of 9/11 and al-Qaida remains murky and confused. Fully a third of Americans don’t accept the official US government version of 9/11, believing the US government or Israel were somehow involved – without any conclusive evidence but a lot of angry questions.

Much of the rest of the world also disbelieves the official 9/11 version. In the Muslim world the percentage of disbelievers rises to over 80%.

Now, after bin Laden’s death, we may never really know. Dead men tell no tales. Bin Laden long claimed he had no role in 9/11.   Yet he certainly gave his approval and support after the fact.   Those al-Qaida suspects brutally tortured by CIA into confessions are unreliable sources of evidence that would never stand up in US courts.

One point I want to set to rest: based on my long experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan and with jihadi groups and bin Laden’s mentor and guide, Sheik Azzam, I can say with a high level of assurance that bin Laden never worked for or with CIA, as has been often claimed.   They were merely on the same side during the anti-Soviet struggle.

A big question now is what justification will Washington come up with to keep 150,000 Western troops in Afghanistan?

Hunting down bin Laden was, remember, the primary reason for sending US troops to that remote nation. No doubt Taliban and its leader Mullah Omar will be morphed by the US media machine into a bin Laden stand-ins.

What of al-Qaida? This extremist group, as I have been writing since 1999, was tiny. Never more than 300 men in 2001. Today, the core al-Qaida in Pakistan consists of a handful of hunted men. CIA chief Leon Panetta asserted that there were something less than 50 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan.   There may be a hundred in Pakistan – all on the run.

North America’s media and the Bush administration wildly exaggerated the menace, strength and reach of al-Qaida, panicking Americans into believing, as the analyst Kevin Phillips wrote, that suburban soccer moms in the deepest Midwest were petrified Osama bin Laden was coming for their kids.

The specter of al-Qaida provided a handy pretext to invade Afghanistan to secure strategic territory next to Central Asian oil, keep China out of that region, and double spending on arms.   The invasion of oil-rich Iraq was also justified by patently false White House claims Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden over 9/11.

Al-Qaida “affiliates” in North Africa, Arabia, and south Asia are simply small groups of local militants who have taken the al-Qaida brand name without having any organic or communications links to the remnants of the core al-Qaida in Pakistan. They are more a dangerous nuisance than a deadly threat.

Osama bin Laden may well and truly be dead.   He predicted long ago he would die a martyr in a gunfight with US forces. Bin Laden has been more or less retired for the past 8-10 years, spending his time and energies in staying alive with a $25 million price on his head. He had almost become irrelevant.

Al-Qaida’s number two, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, remains at large and is now titular head of what remains of the organization of which he has been operations chief for many years.   Dr. Zawahiri, who was brutally tortured in Egypt, is a dangerous extremist with much blood on his hands and a lust for revenge.

Bin Laden is dead, but bin-Ladenism lives on.   Osama’s primary goal was to end Western domination of the Muslim world, and exploitation of its resources, which he claimed were being plundered. The Western-backed dictators, generals and kings that ruled the Muslim world as overseers for foreign interests had to be overthrown proclaimed bin Laden.

The Muslim world rejected bin Laden’s bloody-mindedness and his utopian calls for a reborn Islamic caliphate, but many of its people, particularly so younger ones, embraced his calls for revolutions to liberate the region from brutal dictatorships that licked the West’s boots, spread corruption, and betrayed the cause of Palestine.   Husni Mubarak’s Egypt amply fit this description.

Osama bin Laden lived long enough to see the revolutions that he had helped ignite among young people burst into towering flames. In this sense, bin Ladenism will prosper and spread, enhanced by the image of Osama the martyr.

The Saudi revolutionary leaves another legacy. He repeatedly stated that the only way to drive the US from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing the United States into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt it.   The United States under President George W. Bush and then Barack Obama rushed right into bin Laden’s carefully laid trap.

Today, the nearly bankrupt United States is spending hundreds of billons annually waging small wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and the Sahara.   Grotesquely overblown military spending and debt addiction are crippling United States. That is why the ghost of bin Laden may be smiling.

30

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2011

___________________________________________
To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
SUPPORT THE GREANVILLE POST AND CYRANOS JOURNAL TODAY.
[donation-can goal_id=’support-tgp-before-were-gone’ show_progress=true show_description=true show_donations=false show_title=true title=”]
____________________________________________

In a November 2008 book review entitled “Deflating the Churchill Myth”, Margolis in the Toronto Sun endorsed Pat Buchanan‘s book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War as a “powerful new book”.^[24] Margolis stated:

“Buchanan’s heretical view, and mine, is that the Western democracies should have let Hitler expand his Reich eastward until it inevitably went to war with the even more dangerous Soviet Union. Once these despotisms had exhausted themselves, the Western democracies would have been left dominating Europe. The lives of millions of Western civilians and soldiers would have been spared”.^[24]

In a 2009 essay entitled “Don’t Blame Hitler Alone For World War II”, Margolis endorsed the claims of Viktor Suvorov that Operation Barbarossa was a “preventive war” forced on Hitler by alleged impending Soviet attack, and that it is wrong to give Hitler “total blame” for World War II.^[25]

With these caveats in mind, do listen to what he’s got to say on the Obama/Osama historical intersection featured below.

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington. As most of the world knows by now, President Obama has told us that Osama bin Laden was killed sometime yesterday early morning outside of Islamabad. Now joining us to talk about the significance of this and about the reaction of the American media to all of this is Eric Margolis. Eric is the author of the book Top of the World. He’s also author of the book–and I’m holding it up here–is American Raj: Liberation or Domination. Thanks for joining us again, Eric.

ERIC MARGOLIS, AUTHOR: Pleasure.

JAY: So what do you make, first of all, of the reaction of the American media, of the whole culture, to the killing of bin Laden?

MARGOLIS: Well, bin Laden has been so demonized and blown up out of proportion as an archbogeyman that there’s an understandable amount of euphoria and self-congratulation and sort of lynch mob atmosphere. It’s sort of Wild West justice. You know, the Wicked Witch of the West is dead. But–and the cheering will go on, certainly, but I think some more thoughtful people will start asking themselves: does it make any difference to America’s conflict with much of the Muslim world? And that answer is: certainly not. I was disappointed to hear President Obama say that Osama bin Laden had been brought to justice. I was brought up as an American to believe that justice was handed out by the courts after fair trials. And going in and knocking someone off is more worthy, as I said, of the Wild West or Tony Soprano, dumping their body in the water.

JAY: There’s not even been a trial in abstentia. They could have at least done that.

MARGOLIS: You know, the United States, after 9/11, vowed to issue a white paper, official government paper, detailing bin Laden’s crimes, and it never came forth. And Taliban offered to arrest bin Laden if the US would provide evidence for extradition, and this was never done.

JAY: Well, it was never made public. The Pakistani authorities do acknowledge the Americans gave them such a document, but as far as I know, it’s never been seen by anyone other than that, so we’re not sure what really was handed over.

MARGOLIS: It’s unfortunate, Paul, because it would have been much better, in my view, if he had been captured alive and brought to face trial, particularly so at the Hague and the International Court, a war crimes trial, International Court of Justice, to stand trial for his crimes so we could understand the story, we learn [incompr.] 9/11, whether bin Laden was actually behind it, whether al-Qaeda was behind it, if there was such a thing as al-Qaeda. The questions go on and on. But we will not get any of them answered now. Dead men tell no tales.

JAY: Now, just before we get into a little bit of 9/11 issues and bin Laden, I personally have been finding the response of the American media and culture obscene. I don’t know any other word to use for it–to–. Whatever bin Laden was, first of all, he killed less people than certainly the previous American administration killed. And even if one takes and believes all the assumptions about bin Laden, it doesn’t justify, I would think, such glorifying of the killing of anybody. And then, as you say, all the questions that have been left unanswered go begging. But, first of all, talk a little bit more. What do you make of the response of people celebrating in the streets, and Bloomberg with a press conference, and it’s as if they just won a major war, and as you say, probably nothing very significant’s been gained? And perhaps they just create a martyr. They actually be–there may be more [incompr.] lost here than gained.

MARGOLIS: Well, bin Laden has been in retirement for the last eight years. He hasn’t been doing anything. He hasn’t been hooked up with the teeny organization al-Qaeda, which is no more than probably 100 men, maybe less. He hasn’t been doing anything. So killing him didn’t achieve anything except a huge political boost for President Obama, who may win reelection in 2012 because of this. He certainly pulled out the carpet from under the Republicans, who were going to make a big issue of national security. Watching all the flag-waving and jingoism going on in the States, I felt it embarrassing and way beneath the dignity or the nature of the United States to do this. But I understand, as I said, that people are so wound up by the media, they see this as a giant video game or a sports game. It’s great hang ’em high. We saw the same thing with Saddam Hussein. We’re seeing the same thing in Libya with Gaddafi. We’ve developed a Tony Soprano culture where you go and take ’em out, knock ’em off, waste him, use all these euphemisms to kill, assassinate world leaders that we don’t like. But God help any of these leaders if they try and do the same thing to us.

JAY: Right. Now, let’s talk a little bit about the things that are not being asked around all of this euphoria, as you describe it. The whole issue of wanting the truth about 9/11 has been reduced to the issue of you either accept the official version or you are a conspiracy theorist. The thing is, the official version is there is a conspiracy. The only real debate is who [is] in on it. The 9/11 Commission decided there was a conspiracy between bin Laden and a bunch of other people who conspired to fly planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and who knows where else. So even the official version, there’s a conspiracy. But there are so many unanswered questions. Now, I’m personally not going to [incompr.] ask you if you want to venture an opinion. I don’t know what to say about any of the engineering issues and all the rest about the buildings. Other than that, there seems to be a lot of rather serious people who have raised real questions about it. But I can’t make anything of it myself. But on the other hand, there are certain outstanding questions that have never gone answered. For example, three Qataris, apparently, three people from Qatar, were found having just left a hotel room the day before 9/11, leaving passports and all kinds of paraphernalia that led the cleaning crew to think they were in on something. That wasn’t even reported on, apparently, in the 9/11 Commission, certainly hasn’t been followed up, and there’s many of other questions. What do you make of all this?

MARGOLIS: You can write volumes about all the gaps and the questions regarding 9/11. I don’t see any conclusive evidence that it was a plot by the government. But, on the other hand, about a third of Americans, by polls that were taken, believe that they’re not getting the truth or that the American government was somehow behind it. Hope it’s not true. And certainly abroad, most of the rest of the world believes that 9/11 was a plot of some kind. There was certainly a conspiracy and a plot to cover it up and to dismiss anybody who questioned it as a lunatic or a madman. I’ve had columns censored from leading publications ’cause I dared raise the issue of 9/11 or even referred to it. So it’s become very taboo in the United States. [incompr.] more important point, al-Qaeda was vastly exaggerated by the North American media. It was blown hugely out of proportion, demonized. It became a genuine bogeyman. I was there at the very beginning in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al-Qaeda never had more than 300 men. It was located–it was–then it was driven into Pakistan. Today, Leon Panetta, the CIA chief, says it is no more than 50 men, 50 members in Afghanistan. All these Qaeda people, all they’re doing is trying to stay alive. And al-Qaeda, you have to remember, was not an anti-Western organization when it was founded; it was an anticommunist organization. Osama bin Laden was waging war against the Afghan communists, who ironically are now America’s allies in Afghanistan. So this is a much more complicated story. We’ve never had any proof.

JAY: And, of course, I guess most people know this, but bin Laden himself was more or less invited to Afghanistan by the CIA. And if people want to see, watch an interview I did with Brzezinski, you know, this was the grand chessboard plan, to try to install extreme Wahabbism in Afghanistan. At any rate, let’s go to what just happened yesterday (for people watching tomorrow, it’ll be two days before). I find this whole thing rather strange. He’s living in a mansion down the road from a major Pakistani military base, in a big mansion surrounded by barbed wire, and we’re supposed to think the Pakistan intelligence agencies didn’t know about this.

MARGOLIS: Well, that’s what they say. General Hamid Gul, its former director, who I know quite well and in whose word I have quite a fair amount of confidence, denies that ISI intelligence knew about it. I find it really incredible. Bin Laden was surrounded by three regiments of Pakistani troops. It wasn’t really a mansion as we would think of it, but it was a big, walled compound. My own view is that Pakistan had agreed to let bin Laden retire to Pakistan, provided he didn’t commit any mayhem outside, because it was keeping him on the shelf for possible use in Afghanistan, where he’s still considered a war hero by the Pashtuns, and a very revered figure, and as another leader of the anticommunist forces there. But if and when the Americans withdrew and Pakistan reasserted its historic and traditional interests in Afghanistan, bin Laden might prove very useful to Pakistan’s interests. That’s my view. Whatever the case, Pakistan is now in deep doo-doo. They’re really in the doghouse with the Americans. And WikiLeaks just came out a week ago where the US State Department is calling Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, a terrorist organization.

JAY: Now, maybe that’s part of why they cooperated here. Who knows? But the other piece of this story, which almost never gets talked about, is the role of the Saudis in all of this. I mean, it got talked about at the time, but it’s disappeared into the United States of Amnesia. Not only do we know from the LA Times that there was a report to one of the congressional investigation committees that actually named names of members of the Saudi royal family that had been directly connected in financing members of the 9/11 crew, but it wasn’t that much later, a couple of years after 9/11, where the king of Saudi Arabia virtually threatens Tony Blair that if you continue your investigation into the bribery scandal over the arms sale from England to Saudi Arabia, I can’t guarantee you we won’t be able to stop more terrorist attacks [sic], which practically says they can turn a tap on and turn a tap off. What do you make of the Saudi role in all of this?

MARGOLIS: Well, that’s very true with the Saudis. They’re at the center of all of this. And what really scared Tony Blair was the thought that the Saudis might stop buying British arms–and right after the Brits started investigating billions of dollars of British kickbacks to the Saudi royal family. We have to remember, one thing that’s disappeared down the memory hole is that Saudi Arabia was waging a proxy war against Iran in that part of the world–in South Asia, in Pakistan, Afghanistan–during those years, and the Saudis were doing it by financing and arming all kinds of fundamentalist extremists like Osama bin Laden, Wahhabi groups. And they were designed to fight Iranian missionaries who were going out there spreading revolutionary Iranian Islamic theology. So this was a side battle, but the unintended result of this was that all these extremist groups were funded by Saudi Arabia to go and make mayhem wherever you want, just stay away from Saudi Arabia. But they ran completely out of control.

JAY: Yeah. And the other part of this is that US policies had no problem working with various forms of what you could say are dictatorships, even fascist kind of political forces, which I personally–what I would consider these bin Laden types, an extreme kind of nationalism that takes draconian types of policies. So it’s not like I have any sympathy for bin Laden, but I don’t think one can have, can see al-Qaeda, bin Laden, as any more of a product of what was US policy in the region. They wouldn’t have had much standing if there hadn’t been US hegemony in the region to start with. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?

MARGOLIS: I think the US has certainly been in bed with many unsavory people–“our SOBs”, as they used to be known in Washington, one of the most notorious case being the Lebanese fascist Phalange Party. That’s par for the course. And as long as bin Laden was useful to the American side or the Western side, they were very happy to use him. I’m not saying he ever worked for CIA. I really–I see no evidence of that. But certainly the Saudis provided him with a lot of money, and as a result he became one of the major heroes of the war against the Soviets.

JAY: Well, thanks very much for joining us, Eric. And one thing I would like to say on air, ’cause I’m not sure I’ve said it, or if I have, I’ll say it again, which is that I think this is a good enough time to say again, there should be an independent commission into what happened on 9/11, who bin Laden was, what al-Qaeda was. All of this is just being taken for granted, and the official version, at the very least, is clearly riddled with holes. I’m throwing you a softball here ’cause I think I know you agree with this. But [do] you agree that there should be such a commission, Eric?

MARGOLIS: Absolutely. We should have an international tribunal based out of the Hague that investigates all of this. And, you know, North Americans deserve the truth, and the rest of the world does too, because the US has been waging wars on mistaken or false stories for a decade now. We need some facts.

JAY: Thanks very much for joining us, Eric.

MARGOLIS: You’re welcome, Paul.

JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network. And don’t forget there’s donate button over here, because if you don’t do this, we can’t do that–do it the other way. I actually mixed up my final tag line. Can you believe that? I’m just going to keep going: ’cause if you don’t do that, we can’t do this. Thanks for joining us on The Real News Network.

End of Transcript

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

The original program IS ARCHIVED HERE

_________________________________________
To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
SUPPORT THE GREANVILLE POST AND CYRANOS JOURNAL TODAY.

[donation-can goal_id=’support-tgp-before-were-gone’ show_progress=true show_description=true show_donations=false show_title=true title=”]
____________________________________________

05/02/2011 by Peter Hart

The Obamas at the WH Correspondents' Dinner. Incest is the proper word, and all's well even if destruction and suffering envelope most of the world.

The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank deserves some credit for writing this about all of the awful things about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

The fun begins, appropriately enough, at the offices of the American Gas Association, where White House reporters are feted by the lobbyists of the Quinn Gillespie firm. More lobbyist-sponsored entertainment comes from the Motion Picture Association. Along the way, journalists wind up serving as pimps: We recruit Hollywood stars to entertain the politicians, and we recruit powerful political figures to entertain the stars. Corporate bosses bring in advertisers to gawk at the display, and journalists lucky enough to score invitations fancy themselves celebrities.

Milbank points out that his own paper invited Donald Trump as one of its guests (which is reason enough to write such a column, and skip the event altogether, as Milbank did).

He adds that the parties, after-parties and celebrity-studded receptions add up, and that:

the cumulative effect is icky. With the proliferation of A-list parties and the infusion of corporate and lobbyist cash, Washington journalists give Americans the impression we have shed our professional detachment and are aspiring to be like the celebrities and power players we cover.

Broder, who rarely expressed that kind of critical attitude towards politicians. The most notable exception might have been Broder’s hostility towards Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky affair.

___________________________________________
To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
SUPPORT THE GREANVILLE POST AND CYRANOS JOURNAL TODAY.
[donation-can goal_id=’support-tgp-before-were-gone’ show_progress=true show_description=true show_donations=false show_title=true title=”]

____________________________________________

Read The Greanville Post by RSS Syndication (updates delivered every 4 days to your emailbox) and fortify your ability to fight back! Just click anywhere on Lady Liberty below and enter your email address.