Logica is poised to become the third major British IT company to be swallowed by a North American buyer since last summer after its board accepted a £1.7bn offer. The sale to smaller Canadian competitor, CGI, values Britain's largest IT services group at no more than its shares were worth in March. It was criticised as a "terrible return for shareholders".

CGI wants to acquire Logica for 105p a share, a 60% premium to Wednesday's closing price. Logica's chief executive Andy Green, who had presided over a halving of the company's share price since joining in January 2008, stands to receive £5m from the deal in shares, bonus and compensation if he is dismissed.

The decision to sell comes after a grim recession for Logica. With its European public sector clients cutting costs, the company issued three profit warnings in 2011 and cut 1,300 jobs in December.

"This is a failure of execution," said Richard Holway, an IT services analyst who runs Tech Market View, a research firm. "The result – apart from terrible returns for shareholders – is the loss of another part of the UK's fine tech heritage."

The banking software group Misys was sold for £1.3bn in March to the US buyout group Vista Equity Partners, while search specialist Autonomy went to Hewlett Packard for £7bn last summer.

Autonomy's senior team has left since the takeover, with founder Mike Lynch, who had originally vowed to stay on, announcing his departure from the Cambridge company last week.

The UK is the largest single market for IT services in Europe, but if CGI's offer is approved by shareholders, there will be no British-owned company in the top 10 providers of IT services in this country. Some 25 years ago, there were nine British companies in the top 10.

"It's not a lack of management ability, it's a lack of management ambition," said Holway "People find it much too easy to sell out than to grow something big and something international."

The companies argued job cuts would be minimal because Logica's operations are strong in Europe while CGI has a small presence here. However, the takeover may be bad news for graduates. Logica, which is based in Reading and employs 41,000 staff, 5,500 of them in the UK, is a major recruiter. Industry watchers say foreign companies do not employ many British university students.

Since Kraft's controversial takeover of Cadbury, which has led to the loss of 200 British jobs, the acquisition of UK companies by foreign firms has been in the spotlight. Phillip Bond, of the leftwing thinktank ResPublica, said London's status as a financial centre made British companies vulnerable. "We constantly reward the short term over the long term. The rewards will accrue to British banking at the expense of British industry. We've got an international finance industry that has no national interest."

The investment funds Schroder and Artemis, which between them own 18% of the company, have voted to support the CGI takeover. Logica was advised on the takeover by Rothschild, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, while CGI employed Goldman Sachs.

Logica's share price closed higher than the offer price at 111p, on the expectation that a rival bid could materialise. To buy the board out of its commitment to CGI, another company would have to offer a 10% premium to the agreed price. Dell and Capgemini were both cited as companies with the potential to trump CGI's bid.

"There is at least a small chance of a counter bid," said David Toms, a Numis analyst, stressing that the UK's IT sector is "materially undervalued" and that he expected further takeovers, with Micro Focus and accounting software firm Sage both potential targets.

When Green joined Logica in January 2008, its shares were worth 121p, but their value had declined to 66p by Wednesday evening, before CGI's approach was made public. During that time the FTSE 350 software and computer services index has risen more than 60%.

Under the terms of the offer, Green will collect £1.64m in performance shares which had yet to be awarded under various incentive schemes. The shares he already owns will be worth £1.94m, and he will be given a bonus worth 100% of his £750,000 base salary pro-rata to September, when the deal, if approved by shareholders, is likely to close.

If he is made redundant, he will collect a year's salary in lieu of notice and pension payments which together would total £975,000.

Green defended the deal, saying: "This is a good premium. We don't seem any closer to the end of the crisis in Europe and it's quite natural that shareholders would say the prospects for this company are not as good as they were two years ago."

CGI, which has half Logica's turnover but is twice as profitable, will pay cash for Logica and has financed its long term bet on a recovery in Europe by raiding its credit facility, issuing new shares and raising bank loans.

To maximize flight time over these countries, the U.S. military and the CIA require a network of geographically dispersed air bases and the explicit support of host nations. Stationed at these bases are the drones and what's known as the "launch recovery element" -- the personnel who control the drones during take-off and landing, load and unload munitions, and provide routine maintenance. Many drones are based at long-established airfields in host countries that are quietly expanded and modernized by American engineers. 

 The countries that are willing to host U.S. drone operations have shifted as their political sensitivities have evolved. While the United States lost access to both Iraq and Pakistan in 2011, other host nations are more tolerant, albeit more evasive. For instance, a remote CIA airstrip in the Persian Gulf was reportedly completed in September, although the country remains publicly unidentified.

Given the politically sensitive nature of stationing U.S. government personnel or private contractors to support drone operations in another country's sovereign territory, it is impossible to identify and verify the complete architecture of air bases from which U.S. strike and spy drones fly. Many journalists and researchers have previously written about American drone bases, from which this piece benefitted tremendously. The 12 bases that appear below, scattered across three continents, are but a representative sample of drone bases around the world compiled through publicly available information. There are assuredly others, perhaps at Masirah Island Air Base in Oman or Socotra Island Air Field off the coast of Yemen. We welcome updates and corrections. 

 EUROPE 

 Location: Incirlik, Turkey 

 Coordinates: 37, 35.26

Last November, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced that four U.S. Predator drones would be deployed to Incirlik, a massive air base primarily used by U.S. and Turkish forces that serves as a staging point for regional air operations. (In general, four aircraft are required to provide around-the-clock surveillance over a particular area of interest -- one airborne while the others take off, land, refuel, or undergo maintenance.) The four Predators are launched and recovered by 15 U.S. airmen from 414th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, while the Nevada-based contractor Battlespace Flight Services flies the drones. Real-time intelligence from the Predators is transmitted via satellite link to the combined intelligence fusion cell in Ankara. The cell, opened in November 2007 to process surveillance imagery from U.S. manned and unmanned systems flying over Iraq, is staffed by Turkish and U.S. military personnel working side by side to provide targeting information on suspected members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, for strikes by Turkish F-16s in Turkey or Northern Iraq. According to reports, on Dec. 28, a Predator provided video imagery of a caravan of suspected PKK militants near the Turkish border. After Turkish officers directed the drone to fly elsewhere, Turkish aircraft attacked the caravan with four sorties, reportedly killing 34 civilians. 

 SOUTHWEST ASIA 

 Location: Jalalabad Airfield, Afghanistan 

 Coordinates: 34.40, 70.50

Both the U.S. Air Force and the CIA use Jalalabad Airfield as a launching pad for their fleets of Predator and Reaper drones. In August 2009, the New York Times reported, "Officials said the CIA now conducted most of its Predator missile and bomb strikes on targets in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region from the Jalalabad base, with drones landing or taking off almost hourly." In late 2011, when the Pakistani government kicked the remaining U.S. drones and their support personnel out of Shamsi air base, they were reportedly relocated to Jalalabad. 

 Location: Khost Airfield, Afghanistan 

 Coordinates: 33.33, 69.95

Located adjacent to the western border of Pakistan, Khost -- also known as Forward Operating Base Chapman -- is under the operational command of the CIA. Khost houses CIA officers, operatives, and analysts who collect, assess, and interpret intelligence information as well as select suspected militants as targets. Because of its location in one of the most violent regions of Afghanistan, Khost also serves as a recruitment center for informants. It is perhaps best known as the site of a suicide bombing that claimed the lives of seven Americans on Dec. 30, 2009 -- the deadliest day for the CIA since the 1983 bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. After the attack, the CIA retaliated swiftly with 11 attacks that killed nearly 100 suspected militants, marking one of the most intense periods of the drone program thus far. 

 Location: Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan 

 Coordinates: 31.50, 65.85

Kandahar Airfield is one of the largest bases in Afghanistan. Run by the U.S. military, it serves as a major base for both surveillance and strike drone operations in Afghanistan, as well as intermittently into Pakistan to pursue suspected militants. The U.S. Air Force also shares some of the surveillance footage with Islamabad. It is also home to the RQ-170 Sentinel -- nicknamed the "Beast of Kandahar" -- an advanced surveillance drone that reportedly was used to monitor the Abbottabad compound where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was ultimately killed. 

 Location: Shindand Airfield, Afghanistan 

 Coordinates: 33.39, 62.26

On Nov. 29, 2011, a CIA-controlled RQ-170 Sentinel drone flying out of the Shindad base crashed 140 miles inside Iran. (The United States began flying drones over Iran from Iraq as early as April 2004.) Although Iranian officials claimed to have downed the drone through electronic warfare, U.S. officials countered that the drone had suffered from a technical malfunction. Before the incident, the Sentinel had reportedly flown undetected over Iran for three years, making hundreds of sorties over dozens of suspected nuclear weapons sites up to 600 miles into the country. U.S. officials claim that Sentinel surveillance flights over Iran have continued despite the well-publicized crash. 

 Location: Al-Udeid Air Base, Qatar 

 Coordinates: 25.12, 51.32

Al-Udeid features the longest and most advanced runways in the Middle East, serves as a major transshipment site for American troops and resources headed to Afghanistan, and also hosts the Combined Air and Space Operations Center (CAOC), which relocated from Saudi Arabia in 2003. The airbase serves as a drone operations command and control center throughout the Middle East, including Iraq and Afghanistan, for the U.S. Air Force, which through CAOC manages day-to-day joint air operations. Lawyers are stationed at Al-Udeid 24 hours a day to approve drone strikes carried about by the U.S. military. 

 Location: Zamboanga, Philippines 

 Coordinates: 6.92, 122.06

The Philippine government reportedly allows the United States to fly unmanned surveillance drones to monitor militants from the al Qaeda-linked group Abu Sayyaf on the island Mindanao. The most active site is in Zamboanga, one of the locations where the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines is based. U.S. drones are said to have provided the location of prominent Abu Sayyaf militants that were subsequently killed in an air strike carried out by the Philippines Air Force in February 2012. 

 Location: Al-Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates 

 Coordinates: 24.25, 54.55

In January 2002, the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing (AEW) was deployed to Al-Dharfa to support operations in Afghanistan and the war on terrorism. At the time, there were only 300 American servicemembers on the base. According to a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, by September 2007 there were 1,300 Air Force personnel at Al-Dhafra. The 380th AEW also brought manned U-2 spy planes and the unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk to the base. In 2005, an anonymous Air Force official stated, "There is a major Global Hawk operating base being built in the UAE." According to Aviation Week and Space Technology, in June 2010 there were four Global Hawks at Al-Dhafra; by June 2011, there were six (five Air Force and one Navy). More recently, the United States has begun deploying F-22s, its advanced stealth fighter. According to Matthew Aid's book Intel Wars, Global Hawks operating out of Al-Dhafra "fly daily [signals intelligence] and imagery collection missions along Iran's borders with Iraq and Afghanistan and along Iran's Persian Gulf coastline." 

 Location: Al-Anad Air Base, Yemen 

 Coordinates: 13.18, 44.76

In the heart of the Lahij province in southern Yemen, the U.S. military works directly with Yemeni forces to monitor, target, and kill suspected militants affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the local franchise of the global jihadist group. The close cooperation between the United States and Yemen was brought to light in a confidential cable published by WikiLeaks, which quoted then President Ali Abdullah Saleh, "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours." U.S. drones often provide surveillance information to Yemeni forces to carry out assaults, as well as to launch airstrikes. According to the Long War Journal, the United States has conducted 21 airstrikes in the first five months of 2012, more than double the number in all of 2011. 

 AFRICA 

 Location: Arba Minch, Ethiopia 

 Coordinates: 6.04, 37.59

In January 2007, the U.S. Air Force carried out at least two attacks with AC-130 gunships against suspected Islamic militants in Somalia from a base in Ethiopia. After reports emerged with details of the attacks, the Ethiopian government expelled the U.S. military from that base. In October 2011, after four years of negotiations, the U.S. military was permitted to reestablish a presence in Ethiopia, with Reaper drones being flown out of the Arba Minch airfield for surveillance missions over Somalia. 

 Location: Camp Lemonier, Djibouti 

 Coordinates: 11.54, 43.15

Six days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush signed a Memorandum of Notification that authorized the CIA to kill a "high-value target list" of 24 al-Qaeda leaders. Included on this list was Abu Ali al-Harithi, mastermind of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. On Nov. 3, 2002, a Predator drone killed Harithi and six others in Yemen, marking the first targeted killing outside of a battlefield. The drone reportedly originated and was controlled from Camp Lemonier. The CIA has also flown drones launched from Djibouti over Somalia, targeting militants affiliated with al Qaeda. Camp Lemonier has been the home of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa since 2003, and reportedly houses 3,500 U.S. personnel from various military and civilian agencies. 

 Location: Mahe, Seychelles  

 Coordinates: -4.6700823, 55.5146885 

 In 2011, the U.S. military reopened a base on the island nation of Seychelles -- an archipelago roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. -- for a small fleet of armed MQ-9 Reaper drones. Although the Seychelles had previously served as a base for surveillance drones to track pirates in the Indian Ocean, classified U.S. government cables released by WikiLeaks revealed that drones have also carried out strike missions against al Qaeda affiliates in Somalia. According to another cable, Seychelles President James Michel requested -- twice -- that the inaugural launch of U.S. drones be documented with a photo-op or celebration. U.S. drone operations from the Seychelles have continued, as demonstrated by a MQ-9 Reaper crashing into the Indian Ocean after skidding off the runway in December 2011.

The judge granted the request, which is highly unusual in the three-year history of the Supreme Court.

Assange, a 40-year-old Australian former computer hacker, was not in the central London court to hear the judgement. One of his supporters, journalist John Pilger, said he was "stuck in traffic".

Outside court, Assange's principal lawyer Gareth Peirce confirmed that the extradition was stayed while his legal team considers whether to apply to reopen the case, although the judgement still stands.

"They've allowed us two weeks to put in a written submission on the fact that the majority of judges have decided on a basis that was never argued in court by anyone, that was never addressed in court," she told journalists.

The point in question is the interpretation of the Vienna Convention on the law of treaties.

"It's a procedural point... that has arisen curiously as a result of their judgement, because the majority have based their decision on the Vienna Convention, which was never addressed in the hearing, one way or another, by either side," Peirce added.

If Assange fails to have the case reopened in Britain, he still has the option of a last-ditch appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Assange does not deny that he had sex with two WikiLeaks volunteers in Sweden while attending a WikiLeaks seminar, but insists the sex was consensual and argues there are political motives behind the attempts to extradite him.

The women say he raped and sexually assaulted him.

Assange's mother Christine said ahead of the judgement: "It's a 24-hour nightmare because we know he is not safe and the biggest governments in the world are gunning for him."

She told Australian television that the charges against her son were unfounded but feared that if he was sent to Sweden he could be held "incommunicado, in solitary confinement, before he is even questioned or charged".

Assange, whose website enraged Washington by releasing a flood of state and military secrets, has been living under tight restrictions on his movement for 540 days.

He has been fighting deportation since his arrest in London in December 2010 on a European arrest warrant.

The Supreme Court is his final avenue of appeal under British law, after two lower courts ruled he should be sent to Sweden for questioning.

Swedish authorities argued before the hearing that if his appeal is granted it could throw the fast-track European arrest warrant system into turmoil, with implications across the continent.

"It is prosecutors who issue arrest warrants (in Sweden). End of story," Karin Rosander of the Swedish prosecuting authority told AFP.

The white-haired former hacker has said he fears his extradition would eventually lead to his transfer to the United States, where US soldier Bradley Manning is facing a court-martial over accusations that he handed documents to WikiLeaks.

One week ago, Assange attended a film screening in London wearing a kevlar Guy Fawkes mask.

"This may be my last time in public, so I thought I should start with a situation where you won't be able to see me anymore," said Assange, who since December 2010 has been forced to report to police daily and wear an electronic ankle tag.

The massacre in Syria over the weekend that killed more than 100 people, including women and children, in Houla, outside the city of Homs, has increased the concern over the chaos there to new levels. While this latest atrocity pushed Russia to support a UN Security Council resolution condemning the violence, Moscow hesitated to place sole responsibility on the regime of Bashar al-Assad, warning that the government there faces increased terrorist threats bearing the “clear signature of Al Qaeda.”

Al Qaeda has never been a key player in Syria, but as the crisis there has drawn on, it has turned from a political struggle to an armed conflict, bringing the consequences of chaos and desperation in tow. Whether recent bombings are the work of the terrorist network is unclear, but what is certain is this: Syria has now become a proxy battlefield in which Al Qaeda is laboring very hard to find a new refuge, and to portray itself as a guardian of Sunni Muslims – objectives that lie in stark contrast to those of the majority of Syrian protesters.

As the Syrian conflict escalates, and the country threatens to descend into all-out sectarian strife, Al Qaeda-like activists and factions will go to further lengths to establish a foothold in the country as they did in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. Their success will depend on how Syrians react to these foreign fighters and whether the aggrieved Sunni community will provide shelter. 

Twin car bombings a couple weeks ago that targeted a military-intelligence branch in a Damascus neighborhood, and which reportedly killed more than 50 and wounded hundreds, do bear the hallmark of Al Qaeda. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon told youth conference attendees in New York, “I believe that there must be Al Qaeda behind it. This has created again very serious problems.”

The Al-Nusra Front, a jihadist militant group that has claimed responsibility for the bombings in Damascus, is extremely shadowy and prime for speculation – as are many details surrounding the violence in Syria. Al Qaeda-inspired or not, Al-Nusra should not be invested with any particular significance: There are dozens of opposition groups now operating independently in Syria.

While most eschew Al Qaeda’s tactics and ideology and are either religious-nationalists or secular-minded activists, more and more protesters have taken up arms to defend their communities. The Free Syrian Army is only one among many armed units operating independently from one another.

And increasing evidence points toward the arrival in the country of jihadist fighters from Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and elsewhere. There is consensus among American and Western intelligence services that Al Qaeda fighters have reached Syria and have joined the fray.

So far, there have been 11 car bombings in Syria, some of which were coordinated attacks that killed hundreds of civilians and security personnel. Although it is difficult to ascertain the identity of the perpetrators, Al Qaeda’s alleged involvement is not surprising. The raging war in Syria has taken a sectarian Sunni-Shiite bent, which allows Al Qaeda, a Sunni-based movement, to exploit and position itself as a defender of the Sunni community. Most media accounts that assert either the existence of absence of AL Qaeda in Syria are speculative and, on balance, tend to be ideologically driven.

The current leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has publicly called on jihadists to journey to Syria, fight against the apostate Assad regime, and defend persecuted Sunnis. “Don’t depend on the West and Turkey, which had deals, mutual understanding, and sharing with this regime for decades and only began to abandon it after they saw it faltering,” he said in a video message released in February. Urging Muslims in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey to join the uprisings, he said, “Instead, depend on Allah alone and then on your sacrifices, resistance, and steadfastness.”

Al Qaeda’s infiltration in Syria, however, should not obscure a critical point: The terrorist organization was not present at the beginning of the uprising more than a year ago. Yet through the escalation of the violence and continuing bloodshed, the Syrian government has succeeded in imposing its own reality on the essentially peaceful struggle, thrown the country into chaos, thereby attracting Salafi-jihadi fighters.

Whether in Iraq, Somalia, or Yemen, Al Qaeda is a social parasite that feeds on social instability. In this way, Syria is beginning to resemble Iraq at the outset of the US-led invasion and occupation of the country: It is becoming a theater where multiple elements, not just Al Qaeda, but also Salafi fighters, are appearing.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, had fewer than 50 fighters in the whole country. By the time he was killed in a US air raid in June 2006, thousands of suicide bombings had been carried out in Iraq, a country that did not experience a single suicide bombing before the American invasion.

The escalation of the conflict in Iraq, particularly sectarian mobilization along Sunni-Shiite lines, drew large numbers of Sunni Iraqis, Libyans, Tunisians, Saudis, Yemenis, Jordanians, Palestinians, and Moroccans who flooded the country to defend Sunnis, seen as being victimized by both the Americans and the Shiites, including Iran. Syria was one of the conduits for this flow of Arab jihadists to Iraq.

A cursory look at some of the Salafi-jihadi websites now shows a similar mobilization strategy in Syria, using a sectarian framework of Sunni vs. Alawite, to recruit fighters.

In the end, Iraq turned out to be the graveyard of Al Qaeda. Though initially Sunni Arabs in Iraq welcomed Al Qaeda with open arms, a few years later the very same community turned against the terrorist organization with a vengeance. The tipping points were Zarqawi’s indiscriminate and gruesome attacks against civilians and his systemic efforts to trigger all-out sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites, together with violation of tribal norms. Al Qaeda has never regained its strong footing there.

Yet there is a real danger that if Syria descends into all-out civil war like Iraq did between 2003 and 2007, Al Qaeda will likely find a home and become a hub for fighters from neighboring countries. This is a frightening development, one that plays straight into the hands of the Syrian regime. In a May 16 interview on the Russian state news channel, Rossiya 24, Syrian President Assad stated that there are no peaceful protesters in his country, only armed gangs and terrorists of Al Qaeda variety, and that the uprising was part of a foreign-led and -financed conspiracy.

For Al Qaeda chief Zawahiri and like-minded jihadists, Syria provides an opportunity to embed the terror network in a local conflict and establish a presence in a strategic theater. Zawahiri and his cohorts know well the importance of what they call al-hadina al-sha’biya (the popular embrace or base) and will try hard to appeal to the Sunni community in Syria by playing the sectarian card.

So far, the evidence shows that there are few buyers in Syria for Al Qaeda’s sales pitch. With few exceptions, ordinary Sunnis in Syria see Al Qaeda as a liability, not an asset. The Free Syrian Army has said Al Qaeda is not welcome in the country, and that it will militarily confront it, if the extremist group ever establishes a base there.

The future of Al Qaeda in war-torn Syria will depend, in the end, on how the Sunni community there reacts to the arrival of jihadi fighters: Without fertile soil and an accepting host, Al Qaeda and other extremist elements will not survive.

Fawaz A. Gerges is a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics where he directs the Middle East Centre. He is author of “The Rise and Fall of Al Qaeda” (Oxford University Press).

"The government bears the main responsibility for what is going on," Lavrov said in Moscow following a meeting with British Foreign Secretary William Hague. "Any government in any country bears responsibility for the security of its citizens."

Alexei Malashenko, a Middle East expert with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said Lavrov's comments suggest Russia may be backing away from its long-standing support for Damascus.

"Bashar Assad is driving himself and Russia into a corner," Malashenko said. "Bashar has definitely gotten the sense that he may lose Russia's sympathy, and he may step back a bit."

It is not clear whether Assad's forces were exclusively to blame for the slaughter of 108 people Friday in Houla, a collection of poor farming villages in Homs province. The United Nations said 49 children and 34 women were among the dead; some had bullet holes through their heads.

The U.N. Security Council blamed Syrian forces for artillery and tank shelling of residential areas, but it did not clearly state who was responsible for the close-range shooting deaths and "severe physical abuse" of civilians.

Activists from the area said the army pounded the villages with artillery and clashed with local rebels. They said pro-government gunmen later stormed the area, doing the bulk of the killing by gunning down men in the streets and stabbing women and children in their homes.

The Syrian government rejected that account entirely, saying soldiers were attacked in their bases and fought back in self-defense without leaving their bases.

Russia blamed both the government and the rebels for the Houla massacre.

"Both sides have obviously had a hand in the deaths of innocent people, including several dozen women and children," Lavrov said. "This area is controlled by the rebels, but it is also surrounded by the government troops."

He said Russia has no interest in propping up Assad but wants Syria to guide its own transition under a plan brokered by special envoy Kofi Annan.

"We don't support the Syrian government; we support Kofi Annan's plan," Lavrov said.

Moscow's pro-Syria stance has been motivated in part by its strategic and defense ties to Damascus, including weapons sales. Russia also rejects what it sees as a world order dominated by the U.S.

Losing Russian support could be disastrous for Assad because his crackdown has left him almost completely isolated internationally. Russia and China have stood by him so far, using their veto power to block U.N. resolutions against him.

Hilal Khashan, a political science professor at the American University of Beirut, said the Houla massacre appears to be ushering in a change in Russia's position.

"There is a shift and the momentum against the regime is gathering," Khashan said. "The momentum is building and the Russians are not blocking the rising momentum."

The Syrian conflict is among the most explosive of the Arab Spring, in part because of Syria's allegiances to powerful forces, including Lebanon's Hezbollah and Shiite powerhouse Iran.

Activists say as many as 12,000 people have been killed since the uprising began. The U.N. put the toll as of March, a year into the uprising, at 9,000, but many hundreds more have died since.

Annan's peace plan, which calls for a cease-fire and dialogue, has been faltering for weeks. But Western leaders have pinned their hopes on his diplomatic pressure, since the U.S. and others are unwilling to get deeply involved in another Arab nation in turmoil.

Annan arrived in Damascus on Monday for talks with Assad and other officials and called on "every individual with a gun" in Syria to lay down arms, saying he was horrified by the Houla massacre.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Holland spoke on the phone and expressed their desire to work with Russia to resolve the crisis in Syria. A British spokeswoman said Cameron and Hollande agreed to act together to "bring an end to the bloody suppression of the Syrian people."

Activists reported fresh violence Monday, saying troops shelled several neighborhoods in Hama, killing at least 24 people.

"Lagarde is an idiot who manages to combine cranial density with a power-drive so all-embracing, the sounds she makes get more hypocritical with every week."

"My contempt for this low form of life who calls herself a woman and a human being cannot be expressed in words" and "If you look closely, you can see the dollar signs in her dead, cold eyes."

"She sounds as sympathetic as Hitler...This is shocking; does she realize what she is saying and how inflammatory it is?" and "I particularly like the pearls and Chanel suits while telling Greece their kids mean less than other starving kids in a nation the IMF has already ruined."

"Effectively: 'Let them eat cake.' What a wonderfully egalitarian approach to life. This woman is disgusting."

"The comments on Niger are repulsive. Reducing the people of Greece to 3rd world poverty does nothing for the people of Niger. Using Niger's poverty as a way to attack the people of Greece is the act of an amoral self-centred egoist."

Mr di Lauro, a professional photographer, said: “I went home at 3am and I   opened the BBC page which had a front page story about what happened in   Syria and I almost felt of from my chair.  

 “One of my pictures from Iraq was used by the BBC web site as a front page   illustration claiming that those were the bodies of yesterday's massacre in   Syria and that the picture was sent by an activist.  

 “Instead the picture was taken by me and it's   on my web site, on the feature section regarding a story I did In Iraq   during the war called Iraq, the aftermath of Saddam.  

“What I am really astonished by is that a news organization like the BBC   doesn't check the sources and it's willing to publish any picture sent it by   anyone activist, citizen journalist or whatever. That's all.  

 He added he was less concerned about an apology or the use of image without   consent, adding: “What is amazing it's that a news organization has a   picture proving a massacre that happen yesterday in Syria and instead it's a   picture that was taken in 2003 of a totally different massacre.  

 “Someone is using someone else picture for propaganda on purpose.” 

 A spokesman for the BBC said: “We were aware of this image being widely   circulated on the internet in the early hours of this morning following the   most recent atrocities in Syria.  

 “We used it with a clear disclaimer saying it could not be independently   verified.  

 “Efforts were made overnight to track down the original source of the image   and when it was established the picture was inaccurate we removed it   immediately.” 

Mr. Obama decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership. He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

 Ironically, the president used the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech as an occasion to articulate his philosophy of war. He made it very clear that his opposition to the Iraq war didn’t mean that he embraced pacifism — not at all.

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” the president told the Nobel committee — and the world. “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man, and the limits of reason.”

 If those on the left were listening, they didn’t seem to care. The left, which had loudly condemned George W. Bush for waterboarding and due process violations at Guantánamo, was relatively quiet when the Obama administration, acting as judge and executioner, ordered more than 250 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, during which at least 1,400 lives were lost.

Mr. Obama’s readiness to use force — and his military record — have won him little support from the right. Despite countervailing evidence, most conservatives view the president as some kind of peacenik. From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s record and the public perception of his leadership: despite his demonstrated willingness to use force, neither side regards him as the warrior president he is.

 Mr. Obama had firsthand experience of military efficacy and precision early in his presidency. Three months after his inauguration, Somali pirates held Richard Phillips, the American captain of the Maersk Alabama, hostage in the Indian Ocean. Authorized to use deadly force if Captain Phillips’s life was in danger, Navy SEALs parachuted to a nearby warship, and three sharpshooters, firing at night from a distance of 100 feet, killed the pirates without harming Captain Phillips.

“GREAT job,” Mr. Obama told William H. McRaven, the then vice admiral who oversaw the daring rescue mission and later the Bin Laden operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The SEAL rescue was the president’s first high-stakes decision involving the secretive counterterrorism units. But he would rely increasingly upon their capacities in the coming years.

 Soon after Mr. Obama took office he reframed the fight against terrorism. Liberals wanted to cast anti-terrorism efforts in terms of global law enforcement — rather than war. The president didn’t choose this path and instead declared “war against Al Qaeda and its allies.” In switching rhetorical gears, Mr. Obama abandoned Mr. Bush’s vague and open-ended fight against terrorism in favor of a war with particular, violent jihadists.

The rhetorical shift had dramatic — non-rhetorical — consequences. Compare Mr. Obama’s use of drone strikes with that of his predecessor. During the Bush administration, there was an American drone attack in Pakistan every 43 days; during the first two years of the Obama administration, there was a drone strike there every four days. And two years into his presidency, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president was engaged in conflicts in six Muslim countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. The man who went to Washington as an “antiwar” president was more Teddy Roosevelt than Jimmy Carter.

 Consider the comparative speed with which Mr. Obama and his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, opted for military intervention in various conflicts. Hesitant, perhaps, because of the Black Hawk Down disaster in Somalia in 1993, Mr. Clinton did nothing to stop what, at least by 1994, was evidently a genocidal campaign in Rwanda. And Bosnia was on the verge of genocidal collapse before Mr. Clinton decided — after two years of dithering — to intervene in that troubled area in the mid-1990s. In contrast, it took Mr. Obama only a few weeks to act in Libya in the spring of 2011 when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi threatened to massacre large portions of the Libyan population. Mr. Obama went to the United Nations and NATO and set in motion the military campaign — roundly criticized by the left and the right — that toppled the Libyan dictator.

None of this should have surprised anyone who had paid close attention to what Mr. Obama said about the use of force during his presidential campaign. In an August 2007 speech on national security, he put the nation — and the world — on alert: “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” he said, referring to Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan. He added, “I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America.”

 That’s about as clear a statement as can be. But Republicans and Democrats blasted Mr. Obama with equal intensity for suggesting that he would authorize unilateral military action in Pakistan to kill Bin Laden or other Al Qaeda leaders.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a Democratic rival for the presidential nomination, said, “I think it is a very big mistake to telegraph that.” Mitt Romney, vying for the Republican nomination, accused Mr. Obama of being a “Dr. Strangelove” who is “going to bomb our allies.” John McCain piled on: “Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?”

 Once in office, Mr. Obama signed off on a large increase in the number of C.I.A. officers on the ground in Pakistan and an intensified campaign of drone warfare there; he also embraced the use of drones or covert military units in places like Somalia and Yemen, where the United States was not engaged in traditional land warfare. (Mr. Bush, who first deployed C.I.A.-directed drones, did not do so on the scale that Mr. Obama did; and Mr. Obama, of course, had the benefit of significantly improved, more precise, drone technology.)

 Nothing dramatizes Mr. Obama’s willingness to use hard power so well as his decision to send Navy SEAL Team 6 to Abbottabad, to take out Bin Laden. Had this risky operation failed, it would most likely have severely damaged Mr. Obama’s presidency — and legacy.

Mr. Obama’s advisers worried that a botched raid would disturb — or destroy — the United States-Pakistan relationship, which would make the war in Afghanistan more difficult to wage since so much American matériel had to travel through Pakistani airspace or ground routes.

 The risks were enormous. A helicopter-borne assault could easily turn into a replay of the debacle in the Iranian desert in 1980, when Mr. Carter authorized a mission to release the American hostages in Tehran that ended with eight American servicemen dead and zero hostages freed.

 SOME of Mr. Obama’s top advisers worried that the intelligence suggesting that Bin Laden was in the Abbottabad compound was circumstantial and much too flimsy to justify the risks involved. The deputy C.I.A. director, Michael J. Morell, had told the president that in terms of available data points, “the circumstantial evidence of Iraq having W.M.D. was actually stronger than evidence that Bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound.”

At the final National Security Council meeting to consider options connected to Bin Laden’s possible presence in the Abbottabad compound, Mr. Obama gave each of his advisers an opportunity to speak. When the president asked, “Where are you on this? What do you think?” so many officials prefaced their views by saying, “Mr. President, this is a very hard call,” that laughter erupted, providing a few moments of levity in the otherwise tense, two-hour meeting.

 Asked his view, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said, “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go.”

 For the president, however, the potential rewards clearly outweighed all risk involved. “Even though I thought it was only 50-50 that Bin Laden was there, I thought it was worth us taking a shot,” he said. “And I said to myself that if we have a good chance of not completely defeating but badly disabling Al Qaeda, then it was worth both the political risks as well as the risks to our men.”

The following morning, on Friday, April 29, at 8:20 a.m. in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, Mr. Obama gathered his key national security advisers in a semicircle around him and told them simply, “It’s a go.”

 Three days later Bin Laden was dead.

 The Bin Laden mission will surely resurface in the coming election; the campaign has already produced a 17-minute documentary that showcases the raid. This, combined with Mr. Obama’s record of military accomplishment, will make it hard for Mitt Romney to convince voters that Mr. Obama is a typical, weak-on-national-security Democrat. And, if Mr. Romney tries to portray Mr. Obama this way, he will very likely trap himself into calling for a war with Iran, which many Americans oppose.

Mr. Obama plans to be in Chicago for the NATO summit meeting in late May, just as the election campaign heats up. He’ll arrive knowing that the United States and Afghanistan have already agreed to a long-term strategic partnership that is likely to involve thousands of American soldiers in Afghanistan, in advisory roles, after combat operations end in 2014. (The details of the agreement are still being negotiated.) This should inoculate the president from would-be Romney charges that he is “abandoning” Afghanistan.

 None of this suggests that Mr. Obama is trigger-happy or that, when considering the use of force, he is more likely to trust his gut than counsel provided during structured, often lengthy, deliberations with his National Security Council and other advisers. In instances in which the risks seem too great (military action against Iran) or the payoff too murky (some form of military intervention in Syria), Mr. Obama has repeatedly held America’s fire.

 This said, it is clear that he has completely shaken the “Vietnam syndrome” that provided a lens through which a generation of Democratic leaders viewed military action. Still, the American public and chattering classes continue to regard the president as a thinker, not an actor; a negotiator, not a fighter.

What accounts for the strange, persistent cognitive dissonance about this president and his relation to military force? Does it stem from the campaign in which Mrs. Clinton repeatedly critiqued Mr. Obama for his stated willingness to negotiate with Iran and Cuba? Or is it because he can never quite shake the deliberative tone and mien of the constitutional law professor that he once was? Or because of his early opposition to the Iraq war? Whatever the causes, the president has embraced SEAL Team 6 rather than Code Pink, yet many continue to see him as the negotiator in chief rather than the warrior in chief that he actually is.

Correction: May 6, 2012

An opinion essay last Sunday about President Obama’s record as a wartime president misstated one of the countries where he has embraced the use of drones or covert military units. It is Somalia, not Syria. In addition, the biographical note with the essay referred incorrectly to the writer, Peter L. Bergen. He is the director of the national security studies program at the New America Foundation, not the director of the foundation. (Steve Coll is the foundation’s president.)

The LA Times identified the victims as “Mohammed Shafi, his wife and his six children,” and cited the statements from the spokesman for the Paktia governor’s office that “there is no evidence that Shafi was a Taliban insurgent or linked with Al Qaeda.” The Afghan spokesman blamed the incident on the refusal of NATO to coordinate strikes with Afghan forces to ensure civilians are not targeted (“If they had shared this with us, this wouldn’t have happened”). Also yesterday:

An American drone fired two missiles at a bakery in northwest Pakistan Saturday, killing four suspected militants, officials said, as the U.S. pushed ahead with its drone campaign despite Pakistani demands to stop. This was the third such strike in the country in less than a week. . . .

 

The officials said the victims were buying goods from a bakery when the missiles hit. Residents were still removing the debris, officials said. All of the dead were foreigners, but the officials did not have any information on their identities or nationalities.

All of this is so widely tolerated, even cheered, among large factions of the American citizenry due to three premises:

(1) I have absolutely no idea who my government is continuously bombing to death by drone, but I assume they deserve it;

 

(2) when my government extinguishes the lives of entire families, including small children, as it often does, I know it’s all for a just and important cause even if I can’t identify it; and,

 

(3) we have to stop the Terrorists, because they keep killing innocent civilians.

That’s the Authoritarian Mind, and it appears everywhere the Imperial Mind does.

Yesterday on his MSNBC morning show, Chris Hayes conducted an excellent, two-part discussion of Obama’s escalated civilian-killing drone attacks, with a heavy emphasis on the innocent people, including numerous children, who have been killed. He showed a harrowing video clip of a Yemeni man’s anguish as he described the pregnant women and children killed by Obama’s 2009 cluster bomb strike; featured the U.S. drone killing of 16-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman Awlaki in Yemen; and interviewed human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who described the 16-year-old Pakistani boy he met at a meeting to discuss civilian drone deaths and who, a mere 3 days later, had his own life ended by an American drone.

Later that day, Hayes tweeted this: “A bit taken aback by the ugliness that drone conversation seems to bring out in some people.” What he meant was the avalanche of angry Twitter attacks from steadfast Obama loyalists who gleefully defended the drone program, mocked concerns over civilian deaths, and insisted that he should not be covering such matters because they may harm Obama in an election year (of course, it’s not only the President’s followers, but, as Hayes noted, the President himself who is quite adept at finding humor in his drone attacks).

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence.

She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny Creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, "Keep smiling girls!"

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said:

"I didn't have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That's why they couldn't legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be "swept" and "sanitised" of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia.

"They knew we were inseparable from our pets," said Lisette, "When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks' exhausts. You could hear them crying."

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser: bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lisette's youngest children, Jollice, and Regis, died within a week of each other.

"They died of sadness," she said, "They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness."

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by "re-classifying" the population as "floating" and to "make up the rules as we go along". Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the "deportation or forcible transfer of population" is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime - in exchange for a $14million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine - was not on the agenda of a group of British "defence" correspondents flown to the Chagos by the ministry of defence when the US base was completed.

"There is nothing in our files," said a ministry official, "about inhabitants or an evacuation."

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America's and Britain's war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders' abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the "bunker-busting" bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its "rendition" victims and called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Lisette's paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis". Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, "it never happened even while it was happening". Last July, American historian William Blum published his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy". Since the Second World War, the US has:

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
2. Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The "enemy" changes in name - from communism to Islamism - but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism - western terrorism - are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy ("Operation Cyclone") is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed "our man" by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as "the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century", the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power.

"For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life".

No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that "disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue". And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American Football:

Hallelujah.

Praise the Lord for all good things...

We blew their balls into shards of dust,

Into shards of f***ing dust …

Into shards of f***ing dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama's drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in "Bugsplat". Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: "momentous, spine-tingling": the Guardian. "The American future," wrote Simon Schama, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed..." The San Francisco Chronicle's columnist saw a spiritual "lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet". Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America's corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America's largest creditor and new "enemy" in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3 billion together with Obama's permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Obama's most "historic" achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year's Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only "associate" with those "belligerent" to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On January 5, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to "secure territory and populations" overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and provide "support to the civil authorities". In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will "feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy". This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron's "big society", the theft of 84 billion pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax "legally" avoid by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, "can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism". Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain "in order to protect the intelligence agencies" - the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London.

"Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed," said Lisette.

"And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others."

Such an eloquent answer to those who still ask, "What can I do?"

I last saw Lisette's tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

         

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.  

He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized).  No one can stop him or countermand his orders.  He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions.  And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth.

He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel.  You know, the kind who captures Bond, tells him his fiendish plan for dominating the planet, ties him up for some no less fiendish torture, and then leaves him behind to gum up the works.

As it happens, though, he’s the president of the United State, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids.

How could this be?

Crash-and-Burn Dreams and One That Came to Be

Sometimes to understand where you are, you need to ransack the past.  In this case, to grasp just how this country’s first African-American-constitutional-law-professor-liberal Oval Office holder became the most imperial of all recent imperial presidents, it’s necessary to look back to the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency.  Who today even remembers that time, when it was common to speak of the U.S. as the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower,” the only “sheriff” on planet Earth, and the neocons were boasting of an empire-to-come greater than the British and Roman ones rolled together?

In those first high-flying years after 9/11, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their top officials held three dreams of power and dominance that they planned to make reality.  The first was to loose the U.S. military -- a force they fervently believed capable of bringing anybody or any state to heel -- on the Greater Middle East.  With it in the lead, they aimed to create a generations-long Pax Americana in the region.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to be only the initial “cakewalk” in a series of a shock-and-awe operations in which Washington would unilaterally rearrange the oil heartlands of the planet, toppling or cowing hostile regimes like the Syrians and the Iranians.  (A neocon quip caught the spirit of that moment: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”)  This, in turn, would position the U.S. to control the planet in a historically unique way, and so prevent the rise of any other great power or bloc of nations resistant to American desires.

It’s easy, then, to forget that the Bush era wasn’t all crash-and-burn, that the third of their hubristic fantasies proved a remarkable, if barely noticed, success.  Because that success never fully registered amid successive disasters and defeats, it’s been difficult for Americans to grasp the “imperial” part of the Obama presidency.

Remember that Cheney and his cohorts took power in 2001 convinced that, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, American presidents had been placed in “chains.”  As soon as 9/11 hit, they began, as they put it, to “take the gloves off.”  Their deepest urge was to use “national security” to free George W. Bush and his Pax Americana successors of any constraints.

The Obama Conundrum

This, then, was what Barack Obama inherited on entering the Oval Office: an expanding, but not yet fully expansive, commander-in-chief presidency, which, in retrospect, seemed to fit him like a... glove.  Of course, he also inherited the Bush administration’s domestic failures and those in the Greater Middle East, and they overshadowed what he’s done with that commander-in-chief presidency.

It’s true that, with President Truman’s decision to go to war in Korea in 1950, Congress’s constitutional right to declare war (rather than rubberstamp a presidential announcement of the same) went by the boards.  So there’s a distinct backstory to our present imperial presidency.  Still, in our era, presidential war-making has become something like a 24/7 activity.

Once upon a time, American presidents didn’t consider micro-managing a permanent war state as a central part of their job description, nor did they focus so unrelentingly on the U.S. military and the doings of the national security state. Today, the president’s word is death just about anywhere on the planet and he exercises that power with remarkable frequency.  He appears in front of “the troops” increasingly often and his wife has made their wellbeing part of her job description.  He has at his command expanded “covert” powers, including his own private armies: a more militarized CIA and growing hordes of special operations forces, 60,000 of them, who essentially make up a “covert” military inside the U.S. military.

In effect, he also has his own private intelligence outfits, including most recently a newly formed Defense Clandestine Service at the Pentagon focused on non-war zone intelligence operations (especially, so the reports go, against China and Iran).  Finally, he has what is essentially his own expanding private (robotic) air force: drones.

He can send his drone assassins and special ops troops just about anywhere to kill just about anyone he thinks should die, national sovereignty be damned.  He firmly established his “right” to do this by going after the worst of the worst, killing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan with special operations forces and an American citizen and jihadi, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen with a drone.

At the moment, the president is in the process of widening his around-the-clock “covert” air campaigns.  Almost unnoted in the U.S., for instance, American drones recently carried out a strike in the Philippines killing 15 and the Air Force has since announced a plan to boost its drones there by 30%.  At the same time, in Yemen, as previously in the Pakistani borderlands, the president has just given the CIA and the U.S. Joint Operations Command the authority to launch drone strikes not just against identified “high-value” al-Qaeda “targets,” but against general “patterns of suspicious behavior.”  So expect an escalating drone war there not against known individuals, but against groups of suspected evildoers (and as in all such cases, innocent civilians as well).

This is another example of something that would be forbidden at home, but is now a tool of unchecked presidential power elsewhere in the world: profiling.

As with Bush junior, the only thing that constrains the president and his team, it seems, is some set of internalized checks and balances.  That’s undoubtedly why, before he ordered the successful drone assassination of Awlaki, lawyers from the Pentagon, State Department, National Security Council, intelligence agencies, and the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel held meetings to produce a 50-page memorandum providing a “legal” basis for the president to order the assassination of a U.S. citizen, a document, mind you, that will never be released to the public.

In truth, at this point the president could clearly have ordered those deaths without such a document.  Think of it as the presidential equivalent of a guilty conscience, but count on this: when those drones start taking out “behaviors” in Yemen and elsewhere, there will be no stream of 50-page memorandums generated to cover the decisions. That’s because as you proceed down such a path, as your acts become ever more the way of your world, your need to justify them (to yourself, if no one else) lessens.

That path, already widening into a road, may, someday, become the killing equivalent of an autobahn.  In that case, making such decisions will be ever easier for an imperial president as American society grows yet more detached from the wars fought and operations launched in its name.  In terms of the president’s power to kill by decree, whether Obama gets his second term or Mitt Romney steps into the Oval Office, the reach of the commander-in-chief presidency and the “covert” campaigns, so secret they can’t even be acknowledged in a court of law, so public they can be boasted about, will only increase.

On the other hand, the power of the president as commander-in-chief has never been greater.  If Obama is the president of next to nothing on the domestic policy front (but fundraising for his second term), he has the powers previously associated with the gods when it comes to war-making abroad.  There, he is the purveyor of life and death.  At home, he is a hamstrung weakling, at war he is -- to use a term that has largely disappeared since the 1970s -- an imperial president.

Such contradictions call for resolution and that should worry us all.

But why be so negative you might ask? Here are a few things Obama did manage to do. He extended unemployment benefits because they’re no jobs as his stimulus package was too small. He also managed to cut payroll taxes, which is a back door way to defund Social Security, He helped cover up the BP oil spill in the Gulf by allowing Corexit, a toxic disbursement not allowed in other countries, to break up the oil which then dropped to the bottom instead of just cleaning it up. In other words, allowing them to hide the body.

Obama hates truth tellers such as Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and whistleblowers like Bradley Manning who’s been held in detention for almost two years for, according to Obama, exposing state secrets aka a horrendous war crime. That is if Manning is the alleged leaker who gave the “Collateral Murder” video to WikiLeaks showing 12 civilians murdered by American soldiers. What is the difference between the “Collateral Murder” war atrocity and the 1970 My Lai Massacre and the Court-Martial of Captain Ernest L. Medina? What is the difference between the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning? I mean isn’t this evidence we’re now living in a corporate/fascist/ military/police state?

Now look, I know they’re still plenty of Obama supporters among us but I find it very difficult to understand why so many people still love, honor and support this guy. I voted for this guy too. I fell for his smooth talk, cool demeanor and wide open smile. I’ve always been a sucker for tall dark and handsome but if he wasn’t lying then he’s lying now and I for one am mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.

I know it’s hard to admit you made a mistake. I get it. You really believed this guy was “the one” and he is the one for the 1%: Wall Street, the too big to fail banks, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, big oil, big pharma, i.e. the corporate fascist state he’s so gingerly locking into place.

We looked the other way when he said he’d put on comfy shoes and march with the unions and then when the unions had their bargaining rights withdrawn, Obama like the good corporate shill he is, remained silent. We made excuses for him when he remained silent as the police brutalized, beat, pepper sprayed and shot projectiles at peaceful demonstrators. Obama, unlike Robert Kennedy who had the balls to stand up to the racists down south and brought in the National Guard to protect those fighting for their civil rights, is a coward.

It could be battered spouse syndrome. I know there are people hospitalized with a broken jaw or collarbone and they won’t press charges against their attackers. I can’t explain why victims protect their abusers but they do and not only do they protect them, they go back to them over and over only to be beaten again and again.

Or maybe it’s the Stockholm syndrome whereby victims fall in love with their captors. It happens. No need to beat yourself up over it.

To me Obama’s like the bad boyfriend. He lies to you, cheats on you, forgets to call, but you just keep taking him back and making excuses. “Well, he can’t help it. He has to stand up to those mean Republicans.” Right?

And, therefore, I feel it’s my duty to do an intervention. For those of you still deluding yourselves, who still can’t face reality I suggest therapy or better yet maybe pick up a copy of “He’s just Not That Into You.”

I know it’s hard. I told you I voted for him too. I sent him money. I believed him. But let’s be honest this guy is a lying, cheating, warmongering, opportunist who serves the 1% so he might get reelected. He’s in bed with Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobile, GE and whoever else will pay him for his services.

He does throw us the occasional bone like the recent appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And studies show even rats will keep going back to find the food pellet over and over again even if it only shows up very rarely. But there comes a time when one must admit they were wrong, cut their losses and move on.

Not to worry they’re other fish in the sea. Jill Stein of the Green Party has a very sane 5-point program. I know she may seem boring as we all love our bad boys but really a psychopath who murders innocent civilians and destroys countries using drone attacks will eventually turn on you. Didn’t you see “Sleeping With the Enemy?” Hello! And there’s also Anderson of the Justice Party. So don’t despair you’ll find somebody new. Maybe not right away but you won’t have to sleep alone forever.

Believe me the Obama brand is collapsing just as the Bush brand before him became so craven even the most deluded had to recognize the fraud that had been perpetrated upon the American people.

For those of you who still don’t see it you’re sort of like the Bushies who believed in the Iraq war and defended the honesty and integrity of their fearless leader no matter how many lies he told. I guess it may prove the old adage. Love really is blind.

If they have any value at all anymore, presidential election campaigns at least remain larger-than-life mirrors reflecting back painful truths about our society. As evidence, ponder the two-sided debate over Republican candidate Ron Paul and bigotry.

One camp cites Paul’s hate-filled newsletters and his libertarian opposition to civil rights regulations as evidence that he aligns with racists. As the esteemed scholar Tim Wise puts it, this part of Paul’s record proves that he represents “the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture, who believe ... the police who dragged sit-in protesters off soda fountain stools for trespassing on a white man’s property were justified in doing so, and that the freedom of department store owners to refuse to let black people try on clothes in their dressing rooms was more sacrosanct than the right of black people to be treated like human beings.”

The other camp tends to acknowledge those ugly truths about Paul but then points out that the Texas congressman has been one of the only politicians 1) fighting surveillance, indefinite detention and due-process-free assassination policies almost exclusively aimed at minorities; 2) opposing wars that often seem motivated by rank Islamophobia; and 3) railing against the bigotry of a drug war that disproportionately targets people of color.

Summarizing this part of Paul’s record, the Atlantic Monthly’s Conor Friedersdorf has written: “When it comes to America’s most racist or racially fraught policies” affecting the world today, “Paul is arguably on the right side of all of them (while) his opponents are often on the wrong side.”

So which side is right? Both of them. And thanks to that powerful oxymoron, Paul has become a mirror reflecting back our own problematic biases. Specifically, his candidacy is showing that the conventional definition of intolerable bigotry is disturbingly narrow—and embarrassingly selective.

In making such a choice, then, these voters are tacitly embracing the definition of unacceptable bigotry as only hate speech (Paul’s newsletters) and opposition to civil-rights laws (Paul’s odious position) but not also various forms of institutional bigotry that their favored candidates support and that Paul has fought to end. Incredibly, this selective definition asks us to ignore many of the most destructive tenets of what legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s celebrated book calls “the new Jim Crow.” And yet, as the reaction to Paul proves, it is precisely this definition that pervades so much of American society.

To be clear: Noting this hypocrisy is not meant to urge a vote for Paul (I’m not a Paul supporter), nor does it absolve those Paul fans who wholly ignore the objectionable parts of their candidate’s record on race. Instead, it is simply meant to argue that if we’re going to have a long overdue discussion about bigotry, then let’s have an honest conversation about all forms of bigotry—not our current talking-points-driven screamfest that rightly criticizes one kind of prejudice but wrongly tolerates other forms of prejudice that are often just as destructive.

Perpetuating that kind of naked bait-and-switchery may help one set of candidates and hurt another in a given presidential campaign, but it does nothing to advance the cause of equality in America.

 David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book “Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

Career

Jibril graduated in Economics and Political Science from Cairo University in 1975,^[8] then earned a master's degree in political science in 1980 and a doctorate in political science in 1985, both from the University of Pittsburgh.^[9] He taught strategic planning at Pittsburgh for several years.

Jibril led the team who drafted and formed the Unified Arab Training manual. He was also responsible for organizing and administering the first two Training conferences in the Arab world in the years 1987 and 1988. He later took over the management and administration of many of the leadership training programs for senior management in Arab countries including Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Turkey and the United Kingdom.^[8]

From 2007 to early 2011, he served in the Gaddafi regime as head of the National Economic Development Board (NEDB),^[10] where he promoted privatization and liberalization policies.^[11]

National Transitional Council

On 23 March 2011, amidst the Libyan civil war, the National Transitional Council officially formed a transitional government and Jibril was appointed to head it.^[12] Jibril led meetings and negotiations with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a meeting that resulted in France officially recognizing the National Transitional Council as the sole representative of the Libyan people. He also met with UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz, successfully persuading them to publicly back the NTC.^[13]

Since being appointed as the NTC's head of government, Jibril has been referred to by foreign officials as both as the interim prime minister^[14] and the chairman of the Executive Board,^[15] the title attributed to him by the NTC official website.^[4] References to Jibril as the prime minister, including by news organisations,^[16] foreign government ministries^[17] and world leaders,^[18] have increased significantly since rebels entered Tripoli in late August 2011.

In his capacity as the NTC's top diplomat, Jibril has also been referred to as the council's foreign minister,^[19][20] though this may be a colloquial title. Qatar-based news organization Al Jazeera has also called him "the NTC's chief of staff" on at least one occasion.^[21]

The Executive Board was sacked en masse by decision of the NTC on 8 August over its sluggish response to the assassination of General Abdul Fatah Younis, Benghazi's top commander.^[22] Jibril was asked to form a new board subject to the council's approval.^[23] Though Jibril stayed on as the board's chairman, a spokesman for the NTC said he would be required to spend less time out of the country.^[24]

On 21 August, amidst the Battle of Tripoli, Jibril gave a televised speech urging revolutionary fighters against looting, revenge killing, abusing foreign nationals, and mistreating prisoners of war. He also called for unity and asked that police and army units in Tripoli disavow Gaddafi but remain at their posts. Jibril declared, "Today, all Libya's people are allowed to participate in the building of the future to build institutions with the aid of a constitution that does not differentiate between a man and a woman, sects or ethnicities. Libya is for everyone and will now be for everyone. Libya has the right to create an example that will be followed in the Arab region."^[25]

 

In September, Jibril "proposed 36 names for a new cabinet, including friends and relatives, and retained the prime minister and foreign minister slots for himself." He later retracted the proposal when NTC members objected, but an anonymous council official said it had "left a bitter taste".^[26]

 

[edit] Resignation

 

On 3 October 2011, Jibril announced that he would resign from government once the country had been "liberated".^[27] He later specified this meant the capture of Sirte from loyalist holdouts.^[28] On 20 October 2011, Sirte was captured and Muammar Gaddafi was killed. Keeping his promise to leave at the war's end, Jibril resigned three days later. He was succeeded by Abdurrahim El-Keib on 31 October.

 

[edit] Works

 
• el-Warfally, Mahmoud G., Imagery and Ideology in U.S. Policy Toward Libya, 1969-1982, University of Pittsburgh Press; (Dec 1988), ISBN 978-0-8229-3580-3

Jibril, who was born in 1952, attended university in Cairo and then Pittsburgh. He earned a master's degree in political science in 1980 and a PhD in 1984 at the University of Pittsburgh.

He turned his dissertation into a book, Imagery and Ideology in U.S. Policy Toward Libya, 1969-1982. In the book, one of 10 he has published, he writes critically of U.S. foreign policy. (On the book's cover, his name appears as "Mahmoud G Elwarfally," and his last name is also occasionally written as Gebril.)

Jibril returned to the Middle East, teaching at Garyounis University in Benghazi, Libya, and running his own company, Gebril for Training and Consultancy, which operated across the region.

About six years ago, Gadhafi's son, Seif, persuaded Jibril to join his effort to restructure the Libyan economy.

In 2009, the U.S. ambassador to Libya at the time, Gene Cretz, wrote that Jibril "'gets' the U.S. perspective" in a cable released last year by Wikileaks.

Cretz wrote that at a meeting with Jibril he "highlighted the need to replace the country's decrepit infrastructure and train Libyans" and requested American public and private assistance to do so. In his pitch, he told the ambassador that Libya, "has a stable regime and is 'virgin country' for investors."

Jibril must have been persuasive. The cable concludes, "we should take him up on his offer."

Tried to resign

Mazin Ramadan, a businessman in Seattle, told The Boston Globe that he had approached Jibril with a plan for starting up technology companies in Libya. Jibril was supportive but was overruled by hard-liners in the government. Ramadan claims that Jibril was frustrated in government and had tried to resign for years but Gadhafi would not let him. Jibril finally did leave the government in 2010.

The uprising in Libya began on Feb. 17, and 10 days later, the council was announced. (At the time, it was calling itself the national transitional council, which survives in its domain name, ntclibya.org.)

Jibril was an early member, one of seven professors and one of several members educated in the West.

As an international representative of the council, he met with France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, on March 10. After the meeting, France became the first country to recognize the council.

Tuesday was Jibril's second meeting with Clinton. He has also met John Kerry, head of the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee.

A big challenge for Jibril's diplomatic efforts is allaying concerns that the rebels are fighting an east vs. west tribal civil war and that Islamists make up a significant part of their forces.

Is al-Qaeda in Libya?

Moammar Gadhafi has frequently claimed the uprising against him is led by al-Qaeda.

Over the past few decades, Islamists have had more support in eastern Libya than in the western part of the country, but experts say there is no evidence of Gadhafi's assertion.

U.S. Admiral James Stavridis, a top NATO commander, testified before the U.S. Senate armed services committee on March 29 that he does not "have detail sufficient to say there is a significant al-Qaeda presence or any other terrorist presence" in Libya. There are only "flickers" of an insurgent presence in the intelligence, according to Stavridis.

Rebels' vision for Libya

It was to address those concerns that the council's political and international affairs committee drafted the statement released Tuesday in London.

In it, the council writes about its desire for democracy, civil society, pluralism and a Libyan constitution that embodies those values. There are mentions of goals that will resonate with different parts of Libyan society and in the West: "a green environment," "a free private sector," eradication of poverty and unemployment, guarantees for "the rights and empowerment of women" and respect for "the sanctity of religious doctrine."

Libyans did travel to Iraq to participate in the anti-U.S. insurgency a few years ago, U.S. officials reported. Most of them came from what are now rebel strongholds in Benghazi and Derna. In February, al-Qaeda's affiliate in North Africa issued a statement promising to do whatever it could to help the Libyan rebels.

Last week, Libyan journalist Milad Hassani told the Los Angeles Times from Derna that he and others in the region were seeing "foreign fighters, Islamists, from the Gulf and other Arab countries."

The coalition bombing directed against Gadhafi's forces has certainly helped the rebels' military efforts but has not made up for their disorganization as a fighting force.

Last week, Ali Tarhouni, who is in charge of finance for the council, told reporters how the council initially viewed the uprising against Gadhafi.

Afghan women’s groups have been sounding the alarm about being sidelined in key decisionmaking processes and about the prospect of a worsening human rights situation as the Afghan government assumes security responsibility in the country and seeks a political settlement with the Taliban.  In areas still under Taliban control, violence against women is rampant, and a recent statement by the Ulema Council (a council of religious scholars) — defended by President Karzai – warns that women should “respect the right of men to polygamy” and should “not travel without a close male relative.”

As a matter of policy, Amnesty doesn’t take a position for or against NATO.  We didn’t call for the bombing of Afghanistan – in fact, readers who were members or following our work when the bombing started in 2001 will remember that our message was “justice not revenge” and that we went into crisis response mode out of concern for the impact on civilians.

And we’re not calling for NATO to remain in the country.  What we want is for peace talks to be inclusive and reflective of Afghan society, including women, in both the planning and the talks themselves.  We want a constitutional guarantee of equality for women and men, along with benchmarks and robust monitoring for women’s rights.  We want negotiating teams involved in peace talks to include at least 30% women.  We want a trust fund to be set up independently of the government, to be administered by women to protect women’s rights and support civil society. We want justice institutions to be trained on implementing the elimination of violence against women law and other measures to protect women’s rights.

And we want the National Action Plan for the women of Afghanistan to be funded to ensure gender mainstreaming in Afghanistan’s government institutions.  We will release an open letter to Presidents Obama and Karzai detailing these demands prior to the shadow summit.

Is the poster confusing?  Yes, especially as it is plastered all over a city packed with NATO protesters.   But please don’t let that stop you from seeing what the shadow summit and Amnesty’s work in support of Afghan women are really about.

The shadow summit doesn’t just talk about Afghan women’s participation, it reflects it.  Afifa Azim, Manizha Naderi, Hasina Safi and Mahbouba Seraj will be featured panelists alongside Madeleine Albright, Melanne Verveer and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky.

It’s our best shot at bringing Afghan women’s voices to the forefront of the NATO Summit.   If you’re in the city, please show up to show your support and then join us for a demonstration at Navy Pier.