The Samson Option: Israel and Middle East Nuclear Strategy

In the always arcane discourse of nuclear strategy, dialectical thinking is a "net." Only those who cast will catch. To calculate Israel's best strategic options following President Barack Obama's plans for "Palestine," therefore, the capable strategist must continue to ask and answer difficult questions -- sequentially, persistently, patiently, and above all, systematically. Only by seamlessly drawing together this complex body of interrelated queries and replies can the serious strategist ever hope for a coherent and comprehensive body of military and diplomatic theory. The only alternative is the usual patchwork quilt of journalistic or reportorial "explanation," an arbitrary mélange of more or less disjointed information and factoids lacking even the rudiments of predictive thought. Now, after Mr. Obama's speech, more than ever, Israel needs "wise counsel."

Stubbornly following the twisted cartography of his Middle East Road Map, President Barack Obama remains determined to midwife the birth of a twenty-third Arab state. This certain-to-be fragmented and radically unstable country called "Palestine" would promptly become a bitter and irreconcilable enemy of the United States.

There is further irony here. On the very same day that he praised members of the U.S. intelligence community for assassinating Osama bin Laden, Obama spoke forcefully on behalf of creating a new anti-American terror state. Should he succeed, the long-term security costs to this country from "Palestine" will likely outweigh even the most grievous new harms being conceived by al-Qaeda.

There is even a generally unrecognized nuclear dimension to probable "Palestine"-related harms. Despite Mr. Obama's expressly broad and plainly generic dislike of nuclear weapons -- a dislike based much more on visceral emotion and clichéd "wisdom" than on dialectical logic or considered reason -- any American-assisted birth of "Palestine" would substantially enlarge regional and worldwide risks of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. In essence, before any such portentous birth could be performed, a gravedigger would have to wield the forceps.

In the best of all possible worlds, Prime Minister Netanyahu, guided by lucidity, would strongly oppose all forms of Palestinian statehood. This would include opposition to even Netanyahu's own proposal for a "demilitarized" Palestinian state. Disingenuous even to Israel's allies, intra-national and international, this idealized proposal for bilateral coexistence with "Palestine" stood no chance of success from the start. Inevitably, the new Palestinian government, supported by both codified and customary international law, would correctly assert its "inherent" right to national armed forces for "self defense." Palestine, after all, with President Obama's utterly misconceived blessing, would now be a fully sovereign state.

It is possible, of course, going forward, that persistently crude and not-so-subtle pressure from Washington to accept Palestine could prove geopolitically irresistible to Mr. Netanyahu. A basic question thus presents itself: in such threatening circumstances, what should Israel's operational and doctrinal response be? Importantly, one possible answer would concern Israel's nuclear strategy, especially its so-called "Samson Option."

On its face, a Palestinian state should have no direct bearing on Israel's nuclear posture. Yet, although non-nuclear itself, Palestine could still critically impair Israel's indispensable capacity to wage essential forms of conventional war. In turn, this impairment could enlarge the Jewish State's incentive to rely on unconventional weapons in certain assorted and dangerous strategic circumstances.

Significantly, a primary cause of any such impairment is apt to be the current and ongoing training of Palestinian Authority "security forces" by the United States. Recently underway in Jordan, this flagrantly self-defeating military program, commanded by U.S. Lt. General Keith Dayton, could contribute mightily to any post-state aggression by Palestinian fighters always determined to destroy Israel.

Credo quia absurdum. "I believe because it is absurd." Barack Obama is now creating conditions on the ground in which designated IDF units, in any post-Palestinian independence Middle East, would have to fight desperately against Fatah elements trained by the United States. With this incomprehensible program, therefore, we are arming and preparing the next generation of anti-Israel and anti-U.S. terrorists.

Credo quia absurdum. The guiding U.S. presumption is that these Fatah elements are relatively "moderate." A similar and equally foolish U.S. presumption is that there are now identifiably "moderate" elements functioning within the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Extending erroneous American strategic thinking to Lebanon, this curious idea has been expressed on several occasions by John Brennan, advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism to President Obama.

What is Israel to do? Confronting a new enemy Arab state that could act collaboratively and capably (thanks to the U.S.) with other Arab states, or possibly even with non-Arab Iran, and also confronting potentially serious synergies between the birth of Palestine and renewed terrorism from Lebanon, Israel could feel itself compelled to bring hitherto clandestine elements of its "ambiguous" nuclear strategy into the light of day. Here, leaving the "bomb in the basement" would no longer make strategic sense. For Israel, of course, the geostrategic rationale for some level of nuclear disclosure would lie not in stating the obvious (merely that Israel has the bomb), but rather, inter alia, in persuading all prospective attackers that Israel's nuclear weapons are usable, secure, and penetration-capable.

Palestine, too -- even if it would not actively seek collaboration with other Arab or Islamic countries -- could still be exploited militarily and geographically against Israel by different regional enemies of the Jewish State. Iran and Syria, of course, represent the most obvious candidates to carry out any such exploitations. One year ago, Iran reportedly transferred an undetermined number of Scud missiles to Syria. In Damascus, the "Arab Spring" notwithstanding, plans are being made to smuggle these Scuds into northern Lebanon, from where they could then strike any major city in Israel.

Israel's core nuclear strategy, however secret and ambiguous, must always remain oriented toward deterrence. The Samson Option refers to a presumed Israeli policy that is necessarily based upon an implicit threat of massive nuclear retaliation for certain specific enemy aggressions. This policy, to be sure, could be invoked credibly only where such aggressions would threaten Israel's very existence. For anticipated lesser harms, Samson threats would likely not appear believable.

In Jerusalem/Tel-Aviv, the main point of any Samson Option would not be to communicate the availability of any graduated Israeli nuclear deterrent -- that is, a deterrent (resembling what was once called "flexible response" in the U.S.) in which all possible reprisals would be more or less specifically calibrated to different and determinable levels of enemy aggression. Rather, it would intend to signal the more-or-less unstated promise of a counter-city ("counter value" in military parlance) reprisal.

The Samson Option, then, would be unlikely to deter any aggressions short of nuclear and/or certain biological first strike attacks upon the Jewish State.

In essence, Samson would "say" the following to all potential attackers: "We (Israel) may have to 'die,' but, this time, we don't intend to die alone."

A Samson Option could serve Israel better as an adjunct to particular deterrence and preemption options than as a core nuclear strategy. The Samson Option, therefore, should never be confused with Israel's main security objective. This core objective must always be to seek effective deterrence at the lowest possible levels of conflict.

To suitably strengthen Israeli nuclear deterrence, visible preparations for a Samson Option could help to convince enemy states that aggression would not be gainful. This would be most convincing if (1) Israeli Samson preparations were coupled with some level of visible nuclear disclosure (e.g., ending Israel's posture of nuclear ambiguity); (2) Israel's Samson weapons appeared sufficiently invulnerable to enemy first strikes; and (3) Israel's Samson weapons were recognizably "counter value" in mission function.

Samson could also support Israeli nuclear deterrence by demonstrating a greater Israeli willingness to take existential risks. In matters of nuclear strategy, it may sometimes be better to feign irrationality than to purposefully project complete rationality. Earlier, in IDF history, Moshe Dayan had genuinely understood this strangely counterintuitive injunction: "Israel must be like a mad dog," said Dayan, "too dangerous to bother."

In our topsy-turvy nuclear world, it can be perfectly rational to pretend irrationality. But in any given Middle East conflict situation, the precise nuclear deterrence benefits of pretended irrationality would have to depend in large part upon prior enemy state awareness of Israel's counter value targeting posture. Rejecting nuclear war as a purposeful strategic option, the Project Daniel Group, in its then-confidential report to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon more than seven years ago (January 16, 2003), recommended exactly such a deterrence posture.

To strengthen possible strategies of preemption, preparations for a Samson Option could help to convince Israel's own leadership that certain defensive first strikes would be cost-effective. These leaders would then expect that any Israeli preemptive strikes, known under international law as expressions of "anticipatory self-defense," could be launched with reduced apprehensions of unacceptably damaging enemy retaliations. This complex expectation would depend upon many pertinent factors, including (1) previous Israeli decisions on nuclear disclosure; (2) Israeli perceptions of the effects of such nuclear disclosure on enemy retaliatory intentions; (3) Israeli judgments about enemy perceptions of Samson weapons vulnerability; and (4) a presumed enemy awareness of Samson's counter value force posture.

As with Samson-based enhancements of Israeli nuclear deterrence, any identifiably last-resort nuclear preparations could support Israel's critical preemption options by displaying a bold national willingness to take existential risks. In this connection, the steady and undisturbed nuclearization of Iran should come immediately to mind.

But pretended irrationality can be a double-edged sword. Brandished too "irrationally," Israeli preparations for a Samson Option could encourage enemy preemptions. Here, again, the specter of a nuclear Iran should emerge front and center.

Left to themselves, neither deterred nor preempted, certain Arab and/or other Islamic enemies of Israel, especially after the U.S.-assisted creation of a Palestinian state, could bring the Jewish State face-to-face with the palpable torments of Dante's Inferno, "[i]nto the eternal darkness, into fire, into ice." Israeli strategic planners and political leaders, therefore, should soon begin to acknowledge an absolutely primary obligation to (a) strengthen their country's nuclear security posture and (b) ensure that any failure of nuclear deterrence would not spark nuclear war or nuclear terror.

One way for Israel to partially meet this obligation, particularly after President Obama's undimmed support for Palestine and equally misguided support for "a world free of nuclear weapons," would be to focus more openly and precisely on the Samson Option. In so doing, considerable attention will need to be directed to the presumed rationality of enemy leaderships, both state and sub-state. How can the capable IDF strategist recognize the difference between real and pretended irrationality?

This will become an urgent question. In those rare cases where an enemy state or terror group might not value its own physical survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences, the standard logic of deterrence would be rendered inoperable. In such cases, all bets would be off regarding probable enemy reactions to Israeli threats of retaliation. The probability of any such case arising may be very low, but the attendant disutility of any single case could still be intolerably high.

IDF planners and other interested strategists should now consider also the cumulative capabilities and intentions of Israel's non-state enemies -- that is, the entire configuration of anti-Israel terrorist groups. Such assessments should now offer more than a simple group by group inventory of enemy assets and intentions. These groups should also now be considered in their entirety, collectively, as they may interrelate with one another vis-à-vis Israel.

These several hostile non-state organizations will also need to be examined in their interactive relationships with core enemy states. Recalling, for example, the discussion of Palestine (above), it is important to recognize and understand all possible synergies with Iran and Syria in particular.

In the matter of synergies, interested strategists will also need to consider critical "force multipliers." A force multiplier is a collection of related characteristics, other than weapons and size of force, that may make any military organization more effective in combat. A force multiplier may be generalship, tactical surprise, tactical mobility, or particular command/control system enhancements.

Seeking improved force multipliers for Israel, strategic thinkers should now assess well-integrated elements of cyber-warfare, and a reciprocal capacity to prevent and blunt any incoming cyber-attacks. Today, this particular force multiplier could even prove to be decisive.

In a world of growing international anarchy, IDF planners should now investigate all pertinent enemy force multipliers, challenging and undermining enemy force multipliers, and developing/refining its own force multipliers. More specifically, this means an appropriately heavy IDF emphasis on air superiority, communications, intelligence, and surprise. Again, recalling Moshe Dayan's counterintuitive injunction, it may also mean a heightened awareness of the possible benefits of pretended irrationality (Samson Option).

The state system of international statecraft came into being in the 17 th century, after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. For the most part, our "Westphalian" system remains almost entirely anarchic. Several emerging hazards to Israeli national security will be shaped by this primary condition.

Nonetheless, to observant strategists, there will also be a discernible geometry of chaos, and calculating the implications of this particular "geometry" will prove to be an important and cost-effective task. Before this can happen, interested strategists must take steps to ensure that their analyses and recommendations are detached from any false hopes. Recalling Thucydides, writing prophetically (416 BCE) on the ultimatum of the Athenians to the Melians during the Peloponnesian War: "Hope is by nature an expensive commodity, and those who are risking their all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined[.]"

To the extent that these forthcoming strategic difficulties are related to the now-impending creation of a Palestinian state, they are problems largely created by U.S. President Barack Obama. For Israel, it follows that the very best current path to prevent existentially perilous interactions between enemy state nuclearization and Palestinian statehood is to oppose the latter immediately and totally.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is Professor of International Law at Purdue. He is the author of some of the earliest major books on Israeli nuclear strategy. (source)

The Left In Action: WI Democrat Demonstrators Against A 14 Yr-Old Girl

LIBYAN MELTDOWN: France is First To Recognize Libyan Rebels

In a major diplomatic victory for the Libyan opposition, France has become the first country to formally recognise Libya’s rebel leadership, pledging to exchange ambassadors between Paris and the Libyan opposition stronghold of Benghazi.

France became the first country to formally recognize the Libyan opposition – the Interim Transitional National Council – as legitimate representatives of the Libyan people on Thursday, pledging to exchange ambassadors with the country’s newly created transitional council in a major diplomatic victory for the Libyan opposition.

The announcement followed a meeting between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and two representatives of Libya’s Interim Transitional National Council in Paris Thursday

Speaking to reporters at the Elysée presidential palace in Paris, Ali al Issawi, a former Libyan ambassador to India who quit his post last month, announced that, “France recognises the National Council as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people.

"There will be an exchange of ambassadors between Paris and Benghazi," he added, referring to the eastern Libyan city that has emerged as a rebel stronghold over the past few weeks.

The recognition comes as European Union foreign ministers meet in Brussels Thursday and defense ministers of NATO’s 28 member states also gathered in the Belgian capital to consider the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya.

Ahead of the Brussels meeting, AFP reported that Sarkozy would propose “targeted airstrikes” in Libya as a way to end the violence.

Reacting to the news of France’s diplomatic recognition, Imane Boughaighis, media organizer for Libya’s Interim Transitional National Council, said the Libyan people were “very grateful” to the French government.

“We thank the French government and the people of Libya will never forget that they (the French government) were the first country to recognize us and they stood with us in our difficult time.”

In Benghazi, people gathered near the National Council's headquarters, honking cars and cheering as some fired celebratory gunshot rounds, according to Reuters.

In a phone interview with FRANCE 24 from Benghazi, Boughaighis said she hoped France’s formal recognition of the opposition would trigger a domino effect across Europe.

Diplomatic dominoes or diplomatic tit-for-tat?

In a sign of a likely diplomatic tit-for-tat between Paris and Tripoli, the official Libyan news agency Jana quoted an unnamed foreign ministry official as saying Libya “will think about severing its relations with France because of information being circulated about France's damaging intervention in Libya's internal affairs.”

When asked whether Italy would follow France’s example, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said his government would seek the opinion of other European countries before deciding whether to recognise Libyan rebels as the country's legitimate representatives.

"That's a decision by a single government," Berlusconi told a news conference Thursday. "I think it's better for us to listen to the stance of the entire European community."

The Italian foreign minister, Franco Frattini, underlined the point by saying that that Italy "will not participate in air strikes on Libyan territory”.

Italy, Libya’s former colonial power, is Tripoli’s main European trading partner, importing about 25 percent of its oil and 12 percent of its gas from the North African nation.

Hours after the announcement at the Elysée presidential palace, a British Foreign Office spokesman said members of the Interim Transitional National Council were "valid interlocutors with whom we wish to work closely".

Gaddafi in the image race

As the search for a coordinated international response to the Libyan conflict has gained momentum, embattled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has also sent envoys to a number of European countries, according to numerous reports.

On Wednesday, the Portuguese foreign ministry confirmed that Foreign Minister Luis Amado had “an informal meeting in a Lisbon hotel with a Libyan emissary, on the request of the latter”. No further details of the meeting were revealed.

Portugal chairs the UN Security Council's committee on sanctions for Libya starting this week.

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini has also confirmed that Gaddafi’s regime "is moving towards contact" with the international community after a senior Gaddafi aide arrived in Cairo Wednesday.

Mainstream Media Diary: BEHIND THE SCENES AT NPR (Public Radio VP reveals how Tea Party taxpayers are viewed after their contributions are counted)

Barry As President: Agrees To Tell Russia Britain's Nuclear Secrets

Obama secretly agreed to give the Russians sensitive information on Britain’s nuclear deterrent to persuade them to sign a key treaty


Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.

Defence analysts claim the agreement risks undermining Britain’s policy of refusing to confirm the exact size of its nuclear arsenal.

The fact that the Americans used British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called “special relationship”, which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website.



Details of the behind-the-scenes talks are contained in more than 1,400 US embassy cables published to date by the Telegraph, including almost 800 sent from the London Embassy, which are published online today. The documents also show that:

• America spied on Foreign Office ministers by gathering gossip on their private lives and professional relationships.

• Intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US became strained after the controversy over Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo Bay detainee who sued the Government over his alleged torture.

• David Miliband disowned the Duchess of York by saying she could not “be controlled” after she made an undercover TV documentary.

• Tens of millions of pounds of overseas aid was stolen and spent on plasma televisions and luxury goods by corrupt regimes.

A series of classified messages sent to Washington by US negotiators show how information on Britain’s nuclear capability was crucial to securing Russia’s support for the “New START” deal.

Although the treaty was not supposed to have any impact on Britain, the leaked cables show that Russia used the talks to demand more information about the UK’s Trident missiles, which are manufactured and maintained in the US.

Washington lobbied London in 2009 for permission to supply Moscow with detailed data about the performance of UK missiles. The UK refused, but the US agreed to hand over the serial numbers of Trident missiles it transfers to Britain.

Professor Malcolm Chalmers said: “This appears to be significant because while the UK has announced how many missiles it possesses, there has been no way for the Russians to verify this. Over time, the unique identifiers will provide them with another data point to gauge the size of the British arsenal.”

Duncan Lennox, editor of Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems, said: “They want to find out whether Britain has more missiles than we say we have, and having the unique identifiers might help them.”

While the US and Russia have long permitted inspections of each other’s nuclear weapons, Britain has sought to maintain some secrecy to compensate for the relatively small size of its arsenal.

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, last year disclosed that “up to 160” warheads are operational at any one time, but did not confirm the number of missiles.(source)

FRANCES FOX PIVEN And The "Orchestrated Crisis" Strategy

Cloward-Piven Strategy

Born in Alberta, Canada in 1932, Frances Fox Piven earned a Ph.D. in social science from the University of Chicago in l962. Today she is a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she has taught since 1982. She was formerly a professor at Columbia University.

Piven and her late husband, Columbia social-work professor Richard Cloward, are best known for having outlined, in 1966, the so-called Cloward-Piven Strategy – a tactic which seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading government bureaucracies with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level."

In 1966 Piven was a panel member at a Socialist Scholars Conference in New York. There, she and her husband presented a paper proposing that the poor should engage in "irregular and disruptive tactics" designed to overburden city and state governments with demands for welfare money – the ultimate objective being to force those governments to turn to the federal government for assistance. Such “disruption of the system,” said Piven, would result in a situation where:

“Welfare rolls will begin to go up; welfare payments will begin to go up – the impact will be very, very sharp. The mounting welfare budget will increase taxes, force cities to turn to the federal government. We have to help people to make claims; for this they will organize and act."

Beginning in 1967, Piven served as an advisor to the newly formed National Welfare Rights Organization.

In their 1977 book, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Piven and Cloward reemphasized that because the poor and unemployed were politically powerless in America, they would be well advised to withhold “quiescence in civil life: they can riot.” The authors stated, approvingly, that in the 1930s, violent disruptions such as “mob looting” and “rent riots” – fomented by leftist and Communist-party organizers – had enabled the first great expansion of the welfare state to take place. Likewise, Cloward and Piven credited the urban riots of the 1960s for helping to further grow the welfare state by forcing changes in traditional procedures for investigating and verifying applicants’ eligibility for welfare benefits.

In 1979-80, Piven served as a “lecturer on U. S. political activities” with the Institute for Policy Studies.

In October 1983 Piven was a New York delegate to a conference of the newly formed Democratic Socialists of America. In subsequent years, she served on DSA's Feminist Commission. To this day, she remains an honorary DSA chair.

In 1983 Piven and Cloward co-founded Human SERVE, an organization that sought to register voters at social-service agencies and Departments of Motor Vehicles. Piven's hope was that federal and state governments would eventually try to rein in the efforts of politicized welfare workers who were registering new voters, and that this, in turn, would cause welfare recipients to rise up in a massive protest movement -- rendering society “disrupted and transformed.”

That same year, Piven delivered the opening remarks at the Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC) in New York City, an event that was likely attended by a young Barack Obama. The conference commemorated the 100-year anniversary of Karl Marx’s death. Piven described Marx as the man whose ideas had enabled “common people” around the globe to become “historical actors.” She urged her listeners to “stand within the intellectual and political tradition Marx bequeathed,” treating it not as a “dead inheritance” but rather as a “living tradition—the creation of thinking, active people.” In subsequent years, Piven would appear at numerous additional SSCs.

In the fall of 1994, a publication of the pro-socialist New Party (NP) listed Piven among the more than 100 activists “who are building the NP.” Other notable names on the list were John Cavanagh, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Randall Forsberg, Maude Hurd, Manning Marable, Zach Polett, Wade Rathke, Mark Ritchie, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, Quentin Young, and Howard Zinn.

In 1996, Piven was one of the 130 individuals who played key roles in founding the Campaign for America's Future. Among the other notables were Mary Frances Berry, Julian Bond, Heather Booth, Robert Borosage, John Cavanagh, Richard Cloward, Peter Dreier, Barbara Ehrenreich, Betty Friedan, Todd Gitlin, Tom Hayden, Denis Hayes, Roger Hickey, Patricia Ireland, Jesse Jackson, Joseph Lowery, Robert Reich, Mark Ritchie, Arlie Schardt, Susan Shaer, Andrew Stern, John Sweeney, and Richard Trumka.

On September 20, 2001, Piven was a guest speaker at a New York City gathering to honor the work of her husband, Richard Cloward, who had died a month earlier. Other speakers included Barbara Ehrenreich, Howard Zinn, June Jordan, Gus Newport, Tim Sampson, Joel Rogers, Miles Rappaport, and Cornel West.

In January 2002, Piven endorsed the founding of War Times, a national anti-Iraq War newspaper established by a group of San Francisco leftists affiliated with such organizations as STORM, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Among the more prominent founders of the publication was Van Jones. Along with Piven, key individual and organizational endorsers of War Times included Phyllis Bennis, Paul Buhle, Noam Chomsky, Kathleen Cleaver, Winona LaDuke, Tim Wise, Howard Zinn, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and Students for Justice in Palestine.

In August 2004, Piven endorsed a New York City demonstration at the site of the Republican National Convention in New York, protesting President George W. Bush's “endless war and repression.” The rally was organized by Not In Our Name, a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Fellow endorsers of the event included Ed Asner, Medea Benjamin, Eve Ensler, Danny Glover, Tom Hayden, C. Clark Kissinger, Barbara Lubin, Michael Parenti, Rev. George Regas, Leonard Weinglass, Howard Zinn, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Code Pink, the Freedom Socialist Party, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the
 Women's International League for Peace & Freedom.

During 2006-07, Piven served as president of the American Sociological Association.

On December 22, 2010, Piven published an article in The Nation titled "Mobilizing the Jobless," where, after noting that some 15 million Americans were unemployed, she asked: “So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?” Admonishing the Left not to wait patiently for “the end of the American empire and even the end of neoliberal capitalism,” she called for active measures to bring about “big new [government] initiatives in infrastructure and green energy.” Such measures, she explained, should take the form of “mass protests” that could pressure President Obama “hard from his base.” Piven urged that the disruptions begin on the local and state levels, where governments that were “strapped for funds” would look, by necessity, for “federal action” to help them. Wrote Piven:

“An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.”

Before the unemployed or any other disadvantaged group “can mobilize for collective action,” added Piven, “they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant …. [A] kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.”

As of January 2011, Piven was a sponsor of New Politics, a self-described “independent socialist forum.” Other sponsors included Stanley Aronowitz, Derrick Bell, Paul Buhle, Noam Chomsky, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jesse Lemisch, and Cornel West. The late Howard Zinn had previously been a sponsor.

In addition to Poor People's Movements, Piven has authored such books as: Regulating the Poor (1972, co-authored with Richard Cloward); Why Americans Don't Vote (1988); The War at Home (2004); Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (2008), and Keeping Down the Black Vote (2009). (source)

THE LEFT: How They Really Feel (American Leftists Call For Thomas To Be Lynched Or Enslaved)

At a rally this past weekend in Palm Springs, proud, noble Leftists and Progressives assembled to protest the Koch brothers. Listen to the way random attendees express their feelings about American members of the Supreme Court and other citizens:

Mubarak Says He Won’t Run for President Again

President Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not run for another term in elections scheduled for the fall, appearing on state television to promise an orderly transition but saying he would serve out his term. In comments translated by CNN, he swore that he would never leave Egypt but would “die on its soil.”

Television cameras showed the vast crowds gathered in Tahrir Square in central Cairo roaring, but not necessarily in approval. The protesters have made the president’s immediate and unconditional resignation a bedrock demand of their movement, and it did not appear that the concession mollified them. Reports said that thousands of protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square chanted "Leave! Leave!" after the speech.

Mr. Mubarak’s announcement came after President Obama urged him not to run, effectively withdrawing America’s support for its closest Arab ally, according to American diplomats in Cairo and Washington.

The message was delivered by Frank G. Wisner, a seasoned envoy with deep ties to Egypt, the American diplomats said. Mr. Wisner’s message, they said, was not a blunt demand for Mr. Mubarak to step aside now, but rather firm counsel that he should make way for a reform process that would culminate in free and fair elections in September to elect a new Egyptian leader.

This back channel message, authorized directly by Mr. Obama, appeared to tip the administration beyond the delicate balancing act it has performed in the last week — resisting calls for Mr. Mubarak to step down, even as it has called for an “orderly transition” to a more politically open Egypt.

In remarks after Mr. Mubarak’s announcement, Mr. Obama said he spoke directly to the Egyptian leader. “He recognizes that the status quo is not sustainable,” Mr. Obama said. The president said he told Mr. Mubarak an orderly transition ”must begin now” and “include opposition parties.” And to the young people protesting the government, Mr. Obama said, “We hear your voices.”

It was not clear whether the administration favored Mr. Mubarak’s turning over the reins to a transitional government, composed of leaders of the opposition movement and perhaps under the leadership of Mohamed ElBaradei, or to a caretaker government led by members of the existing government, including the newly appointed vice president, Omar Suleiman.

The decision to nudge Mr. Mubarak in the direction of leaving is a critical step for the United States in defining its dealings not just with its most critical ally in the Arab world, but also with the rising swell of popular anger on the streets of Cairo and in countries like Jordan, Yemen, Algeria and Tunisia.

Mr. Wisner, who had been expected to leave Egypt on Tuesday but decided to extend his stay, is among the United States’ most experienced diplomats, and a friend of Mr. Mubarak. His mission was to “keep a conversation going,” according to a close friend of Mr. Wisner.

As a result, this person said, the administration’s first message to the Egyptian leader was not that he had to leave office, but rather that his time in office was quickly coming to a close. Mr. Wisner, who consulted closely with the White House, is expected to be the point person dealing with Mr. Mubarak as the situation evolves, and perhaps as the administration’s message hardens.

Mr. Wisner’s mission took shape over the weekend in a White House meeting, after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recommended him to the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon.

Reinforcing the administration’s message to Mr. Mubarak was an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Tuesday by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he advised Mr. Mubarak to bow out gracefully “to make way for a new political structure.”

Egyptians turned out around the country on Tuesday in the largest demonstrations yet to demand Mr. Mubarak’s ouster. They may hold to that demand and want even more far-reaching change, as Tunisians did after their strongman president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled in mid-January.

In Tahrir Square earlier in the day, the chants of perhaps 200,000 protesters had suggested that the demonstrators would not stop at Mr. Mubarak’s departure.

“The people of Egypt want the president on trial,” some chanted for the first time, shadowed by the burned headquarters of Mr. Mubarak’s ruling party and a vast complex housing a bureaucracy many Egyptians have accused of endlessly humiliating them.

Others chorused: “The people of Egypt want the government to fall.”

“Nobody wants him, nobody,” said El-Mahdy Mohamed, one of the demonstrators. “Can’t he see on the TV what’s happening?”

While the numbers fell short of the million called for at the square, the protest rivaled some of the most epic moments in Egypt’s tumultuous modern history, from the wars with Israel to a coup that sent a corpulent monarch packing on his yacht in 1952.

With little regard, protesters defied a curfew that has become a joke to residents here and overcame attempts by the government to keep protesters away by closing roads, suspending train service and shutting down public transportation to Cairo. Some walked miles to the square, whose name means liberation. Others woke up there in the muddy patches where they had slept for days.

“No one would have imagined a week before that this would happen in Egypt,” said Bassem Ramsis, 37, a director who returned from Spain for the uprising.

The momentous events in Egypt, the most populous Arab country and once the axis on which the Arab world revolved, have reverberated across the region. Earlier in the day, King Abdullah II of Jordan fired his cabinet after protests there, and organizers in Yemen and Syria, with their own authoritarian rulers, have called for protests.

In scale and message, the protests in Egypt were a remarkable expression of unity in a country that once represented the Arab world’s nexus but stagnated under Mr. Mubarak’s withering authoritarianism. Peasants from southern Egypt joined Islamists from the Nile Delta and businessmen from upper-class suburbs rubbed shoulders with street-smart youths from gritty Bulaq in a square that served as a vast tapestry of a country’s diversity joined in a blunt message: Mr. Mubarak must surrender power.

“Go already,” read one sign held aloft. “My arm’s starting to hurt.”

Tens of thousands of people also took to the streets of Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city, north of Cairo on the Mediterranean coast.

Meanwhile, the thousands of foreigners seeking to flee the country led to chaotic scenes at the Cairo airport. The United States ordered all nonemergency embassy and other American government personnel to leave the country, fearing unrest as the protests continue.

The breadth of the uprising, organized by youthful activists and driven by the legions of poor and dispossessed in Egypt, a country of 80 million, stunned even those most critical of Mr. Mubarak’s government. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s most powerful opposition movement, has largely stayed in the background. Other opposition leaders — the Nobel laureate, Mohamed ElBaradei among them — have struggled to cultivate support among the protesters, whose demands seem to grow as the uprising gathers force.

Margaret Scobey, the American ambassador to Egypt, spoke by telephone to Mr. ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency who has emerged as a potential rallying point for opposition, as American officials sought to navigate an uprising that has not only challenged their most loyal ally in the region but also posed a threat to a broader American-backed order in Jordan, Yemen and the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

Mr. ElBaradei told Reuters that Mr. Mubarak must leave the country before any dialogue could start between the opposition and the government.

“There can be dialogue but it has to come after the demands of the people are met and the first of those is that President Mubarak leaves,” Mr. ElBaradei told Al Arabiya television. “I hope to see Egypt peaceful and that’s going to require as a first step the departure of President Mubarak. If President Mubarak leaves, then everything will progress correctly.”

Calls for Mr. Mubarak to step aside had been growing. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — a predominantly Islamic country often held up as a model of Western-style democracy — canceled a visit to Egypt planned for next week, urging Mr. Mubarak to “listen to people’s outcries and extremely humanistic demands” and to “meet the freedom demands of people without a doubt,” Reuters reported.(source)

'Al-Qaida on brink of using nuclear bomb'

Al-Qaida members participate in military training in Afghanistan

Al-Qaida is on the verge of producing radioactive weapons after sourcing nuclear material and recruiting rogue scientists to build "dirty" bombs, according to leaked diplomatic documents.


A leading atomic regulator has privately warned that the world stands on the brink of a "nuclear 9/11".


Security briefings suggest that jihadi groups are also close to producing "workable and efficient" biological and chemical weapons that could kill thousands if unleashed in attacks on the West.


Thousands of classified American cables obtained by the WikiLeaks website and passed to The Daily Telegraph detail the international struggle to stop the spread of weapons-grade nuclear, chemical and biological material around the globe.


At a Nato meeting in January 2009, security chiefs briefed member states that al-Qaida was plotting a program of "dirty radioactive IEDs", makeshift nuclear roadside bombs that could be used against British troops in Afghanistan.


As well as causing a large explosion, a "dirty bomb" attack would contaminate the area for many years.


The briefings also state that al-Qaida documents found in Afghanistan in 2007 revealed that "greater advances" had been made in bioterrorism than was previously realized. An Indian national security adviser told American security personnel in June 2008 that terrorists had made a "manifest attempt to get fissile material" and "have the technical competence to manufacture an explosive device beyond a mere dirty bomb".


Alerts about the smuggling of nuclear material, sent to Washington from foreign U.S. embassies, document how criminal and terrorist gangs were trafficking large amounts of highly radioactive material across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.


The alerts explain how customs guards at remote border crossings used radiation alarms to identify and seize cargoes of uranium and plutonium.


Freight trains were found to be carrying weapons-grade nuclear material across the Kazakhstan-Russia border, highly enriched uranium was transported across Uganda by bus, and a "small time hustler" in Lisbon offered to sell radioactive plates stolen from Chernobyl.


In one incident in September 2009, two employees at the Rossing Uranium Mine in Namibia smuggled almost half a ton of uranium concentrate powder - yellowcake - out of the compound in plastic bags.


"Acute safety and security concerns" were even raised in 2008 about the uranium and plutonium laboratory of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nuclear safety watchdog.


Tomihiro Taniguchi, the deputy director general of the IAEA, has privately warned America that the world faces the threat of a "nuclear 9/11" if stores of uranium and plutonium were not secured against terrorists.


But diplomats visiting the IAEA's Austrian headquarters in April 2008 said that there was "no way to provide perimeter security" to its own laboratory because it has windows that leave it vulnerable to break-ins.


Senior British defence officials have raised "deep concerns" that a rogue scientist in the Pakistani nuclear program "could gradually smuggle enough material out to make a weapon", according to a document detailing official talks in London in February 2009.


Agricultural stores of deadly biological pathogens in Pakistan are also vulnerable to "extremists" who could use supplies of anthrax, foot and mouth disease and avian flu to develop lethal biological weapons.


Anthrax and other biological agents including smallpox, and avian flu could be sprayed from a shop-bought aerosol can in a crowded area, leaked security briefings warn.


The security of the world's only two declared smallpox stores in Atlanta, America, and Novosibirsk, Russia, has repeatedly been called into doubt by "a growing chorus of voices" at meetings of the World Health Assembly documented in the leaked cables.


The alarming disclosures come after Barack Obama, the U.S. president, last year declared nuclear terrorism "the single biggest threat" to international security with the potential to cause "extraordinary loss of life". (source)

Muslim Brotherhood: ‘Prepare Egyptians for war with Israel'

A leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt told the Arabic-language Iranian news network Al-Alam on Monday that he would like to see the Egyptian people prepare for war against Israel, according to the Hebrew-language business newspaper Calcalist.

Muhammad Ghannem reportedly told Al- Alam that the Suez Canal should be closed immediately, and that the flow of gas from Egypt to Israel should cease “in order to bring about the downfall of the Mubarak regime.” He added that “the people should be prepared for war against Israel,” saying the world should understand that “the Egyptian people are prepared for anything to get rid of this regime.”

Ghannem praised Egyptian soldiers deployed by President Hosni Mubarak to Egyptian cities, saying they “would not kill their brothers.” He added that Washington was forced to abandon plans to help Mubarak stay in power after “seeing millions head for the streets.”(source)