Decoding bin Laden's Latest: An Odd Congruence from the Daily Kos is a must read. Osama's complaints since 9/11 have been remarkably consistent and they are not groundless:

The author cites Michael Sheuer's list of Osama's complaints in his book Imperial Hubris.

(1) Unquestioning U.S. support for Israel, especially U.S. support for Israel's heavy-handed treatment of Palestinians.

(2) The presence of U.S. troops on the Arabian Peninsula. Bin Laden and his sympathizers view this presence as an occupation.

(3) The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, and now of Iraq.

(4) U.S. support for what bin Laden considers to be the suppression of Islamic minorities in Russia, China, and India.

(5) U.S. pressure on Arab energy producers to keep the world markets awash in sufficient oil to keep oil prices low for the U.S. and other Western powers. Bin Laden believes that more oil revenues should be allocated for the benefit of Arab peoples.

(6) Closely related to (5) above, U.S. support for what bin Laden asserts are apostate, corrupt, tyrannical governments in the Islamic world, as in Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Egypt, and North Africa.

Irrespective of whether or not you agree, these are not frivolous complaints.

The author warns us not to underestimate Osama bin Laden:

Bin Laden is a serious and wily adversary who knows how to manipulate the Arab "street." He is intelligent and well-informed-- clearly far better informed about the U.S. and the West than the apparatchiks and their bosses in the current White House are informed about him and his region of influence. Bin Laden thinks strategically and takes the long view; he is tactically flexible and is not afraid to retreat to attain an ultimate strategic advantage. Unfortunately for the U.S., he probably has a 40 point I.Q. advantage over the current occupant of the White House.

In short, we should not risk underestimating bin Laden by dismissing him out of hand as "crazy" and "evil."

Do read the article.

Steve Clemons features a CNN interview worth reading with free-lance writer, filmmaker and photographer Nir Rosen of the New America Foundation on the situation in Iraq. According to Rosen, who has spent two years in Iraq, the Shiites have ethnically cleansed Baghdad of Sunnis, so that it is no longer a Sunni city. Iraq has been completely remade and it has no central government, only warlords. The picture is grim:

FOREMAN: So Nir, we keep hearing reports, though, nonetheless out of Baghdad. People saying that give us time, we are trying to get this government worked out. We are going to make some progress. Do you see any way that can happen?

ROSEN: No. This has been the case for the past ... two years at least. There is no hope. There is no government. Neither side is interested in compromise and why should they? The Shias control Baghdad. They have removed the Sunnis from Baghdad, from Iraq's political future.

FOREMAN: What's going to change that if anything?

ROSEN: Nothing is going to change that.

It will be interesting to see how General Petraeus manages to spin that reality in the coming weeks.

Unknown to me The Independent (UK) stopped charging to read Robert Fisk's excellent writings on the middle east, and in one of the first articles that I read, Fisk confesses to doubts about the official 9/11 story.

Like most of us, Fisk doesn't claim to know what really happened, but he seem pretty sure that it didn't happen the way the administration said it happened:

I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us.

Read the whole article.

Fisk is a middle east scholar and reporter. He speaks Arabic and who knows how many other languages fluently. He knows Islamic culture by having lived among Muslims for years and years. He is totally at home in the middle east. Fisk's remarks about the "weird letter" supposedly written by Mohamed Atta tells much about what is wrong with the official story.

Clowns, puppets, songs and street drama are no longer effective means of protest, at least not when the purpose is to mobilize public opinion against a war. Their effectiveness depends upon media coverage and the reactionary powers that presently command our media have learned to ignore not only the public spectacles but also the thuggery the demonstrators frequently experience at the hands of the police. In the '60s, the protesters manipulated the media; now the media make demonstrations look more like civil unrest by broadcasting only unfavorable video coverage and by refusing to inform its audience what the demonstration is all about.

Television, radio and newspapers are very profitable. Profits require scarcity. A television or cable franchise is valuable precisely because both air and cable channels are limited, and until the growth of the Internet, there were no electronic alternatives. Now that there is an alternative, the issue of net neutrality has become one of the most important issues of our times, since the outcome of the battle will determine whether the owners of the physical network will either be common carriers, like the phone companies, or gatekeepers, like the media networks.

The mainstream media and the political elite have been implacably hostile to the independent web-based news organizations that have arisen since the advent of the Internet and the Worldwide Web, and have used every stratagem in their arsenal to limit and even destroy their power and independence. One of the best-known of these web-based news organizations, the Indymedia Network, has been the target of police raids, government harassment, and criminal prosecutions as a result of its broadcasting news, audio and video that governments and multinational corporations want to suppress.

Once the Internet can handle full-screen video, channel scarcity will cease to exist, and an independent media, provided with news contributed by both volunteer and professional reporters, will reach into the vast majority of the nation's homes. This will not only diminish the profitability of the networks, which will be faced with serious competition, but the Corporatocracy that secretly controls our nation and much of the world—deriving much of its power by virtue of the public's ignorance of what is really going on—will find itself directly threatened, much as the medieval church found itself threatened by the invention of the printing press and the rapid spread of literacy spawned by the availability of inexpensive books written in the vernacular.

These corporate media folks take the matter of net neutrality very, very seriously, and have consequently spent many millions, both in campaign contributions and media advertising, to wrest control of the Internet away from the public and concentrate it into the same hands that now control the mass media. In an nation already being seduced and frightened into authoritarianism and all the evils that invariably accompany an authoritarian regime, a neutral Internet, protected by the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution, may be one of our last opportunities to arrest what is increasingly looking like a slow-motion coup by the extreme right-wing.

So it's time to put away the clown suits, the puppets and the street theatre. In the early Sixties, protesters wore suits and dresses. They looked serious and respectable. They made an impact. They changed the nation.

The media couldn't make them into hoodlums, communists or wild-eyed radicals because they looked and dressed like the viewers, or, even more significantly, their children. Respectable clothes may or may not be the answer today, but the current approach isn't working most of the time. Now that the Bush administration appears to be set on a course to attack Iran, the stakes have become too high not to rethink our approach. If Bush paid no attention to the millions of demonstrators around the world who opposed the invasion of Iraq there is no reason to believe that ten times as many demonstrators will make the slightest difference in his plans to invade Iran.

Here is an IndyMedia NewsPaper. No wonder the powers-that-be oppose them.

Update: Clowns can have a powerful impact, under the right circumstances:

It's beginning to look that way. This administration is insane. And Congress is pusillanimous. God help us.

Updates:

Juan Cole: Cheney & Iran: Here We Go Again?, and Bush and Ahmadinejad: Will they or Won't They?

Todd Gitlin: Iraq with an N? Anatomy of a Rumor That Has to be Taken Seriously

George Packer: Test Marketing

Victor Davis Hanson In the National Review: Don't Bomb, Bomb Iran (Included to show that even some of most prominent wingnuts think that bombing Iran is nuts.)

Yes, I know, this is not exactly hot news. You didn't need me to tell you Gonzales quit, since it was splashed all over the mainstream media and the blogosphere in great detail.

I must eat humble crow as a prognosticator, however, having offered to bet anyone that Gonzales would leave the day that Bush leaves. I was flat wrong. I remained silent until now, because I didn't understand why I was so wrong. I still don't and neither the MSM or the blogosphere has helped to enlighten me.

Greg Palast believes that Karl Rove quit in order to work his dark magic for the next Republican presidential candidate, but I am skeptical of that explanation, since Rove's magic has dramatically faded in the last couple of years. That explanation, even if true for Rove, wouldn't explain Gonzales's exit, since Gonzales has no marketable skills beyond his willingness to betray every principle he swore to uphold if ordered by his boss to do so.

I briefly considered what one might call the Lew Alcindor substitution. As a graduate student at UNC Chapel Hill, I watched UCLA, on March 3, 1968, crush UNC for the NCAA Mens Division basketball championship. Most humiliating, though, was Alcindor's being taken out of the game long before it was over. Perhaps Bush is demonstrating that he doesn't need Gonzales any more—that he can act with impunity for the rest of the game without having the nations' chief prosecutor in his hip pocket.

The Alcindor explanation doesn't make much sense, either. Gonzales was Bush's insurance policy that covered his whole administration and he will not get another Gonzales confirmed by the Senate, even with the Democrats as feckless as they have been since returning to majority status.

It is difficult to believe that Gonzales left to avoid impeachment or because he was about to be indicted. He's the attorney general of the United States; without a special prosecutor, there is no way he will be indicted by his own department. The Democrats lack a sufficient majority in the Senate to remove Gonzales even if the House of Representatives voted to impeach.

Sidney Bumenthal, Writing in Salon, contends that Rove was the puppeteer pulling Gonzales's strings:

From the beginning of his rise with George W. Bush until the day of his abrupt resignation, Alberto Gonzales was anointed, directed and protected by Karl Rove. At the Department of Justice, Gonzales served as Rove's figurehead. In the real line of authority, the attorney general, a constitutional officer, reported to the White House political aide. Bush did not nickname Gonzales "Fredo," after the weak brother in "The Godfather," without reason.

As White House counsel and attorney general, Gonzales operated as the rubber stamp of the two great goals of the Bush presidency -- the concentration of unaccountable power in the executive and the subordination of executive departments and agencies to partisan political imperatives. Vice President Cheney directed the project for the imperial presidency, while Rove took charge of the top-down politicization of the federal government. Gonzales dutifully signed memos abrogating the Geneva Conventions against torture, calling them "quaint," and approved the dismissal of U.S. attorneys for insufficient partisan zeal.

Thus when Rove left, goes the argument, Gonzales the puppet collapsed.

There may be some truth in this. Gonzales is clearly not the sharpest tack in the box, and his usefulness to the Bush administration largely rested on his unswerving loyalty and obedience to Bush, Cheney and Rove.

Still, there is something extremely odd about all these people close to the president leaving 17 months before the end of the administration that makes me feel that there is more to these departures than what has been said up to now. Too many dogs are not barking in the night. This blogger is not privy to what Washington whispers, but something tells me that Gonzales's departure is related to Rove's departure and that this is a big deal.

Time will tell.

James K Galbraith (son of late economist John K. Galbraith) has an excellent article on the sub-prime mortgage crisis in Mother Jones. Once again, manipulators forced the Federal Reserve to bail them out when they should have gone directly to jail, with a short side trip to bankruptcy court. Of course, the Fed cannot permit them to go bankrupt because of the dire consequences of widespread economic collapse. Galbraith:

This is how the system works. Big players can, and do, put the Federal Reserve over a barrel. The Fed doesn't like it, but what can it do? Not to bail, when the markets implode, isn't an option. Too many innocents would get massacred on the way by.

Sordid necessity thus killed Bernanke's "inflation targeting" approach to monetary policy. And this leaves the true nature of Fed policy plainly exposed. In normal times, a Fed chair can pretend to follow his academic formulae. But once the air-raid sirens sound, policy isn't made on Constitution Avenue at all. It's made on Wall Street, and don't let us forget it.

Wall Street likes volatility. And so we have a system based on credit bubbles, one after the other. The information-technology bubble from the late nineties to 2001 brought us full employment and budget surpluses, but it could not be sustained. The housing bubble has kept us going ever since. It too was bringing us high employment and falling budget deficits. And it too could not be sustained.

I suppose this is one of the reasons that economics is not a required subject, either in high school or college. Most people, even if taught badly, would know that this is a shell game designed to fleece one more time the great unwashed, as well as most of the washed.

These con games will continue until the economy completely collapses or we restructure the financial system. Don't bet on the latter.