As with the burning of the Qurans last month, the Pentagon has been groveling in contrition. The acting commander of the U.S.-led coalition, Lt. Gen. Adrian Bradshaw, expressed "deep regret and sorrow at this appalling incident. 'I cannot explain the motivation behind such callous acts, but they were in no way part of authorized ... military activity.'"

Afghans could be forgiven for suffering "massacre fatigue," precisely because "authorized military activity" by U.S. troops and Special Forces in Afghanistan has long since degenerated into a lethal culture of assassination, "revenge" sorties, desecration of bodies, and the harvesting of trophies such as severed fingers, ears and the like. In the recent past, Afghans have also been able to study photographs of laughing American soldiers pissing on the bodies of dead Afghans.

Back in April of 2010, after furiously denying responsibility for the deaths of three Afghan women in a messed-up Special Forces night-time raid, the U.S. commander in Kabul admitted U.S. forces had indeed killed the women after first killing two civilians—a district prosecutor and local police chief. The self-styled American "kill team" shot two men to death as they emerged from their homes armed with Kalashnikov rifles, to investigate as the raid began.

A bit later, the same unit killed three women, from the same house. With equal vehemence, the U.S. military denied charges by Afghans of evidence tampering, but a Sunday Times of London report asserted that the Afghan investigators had concluded that American forces not only killed the women but had also "dug bullets out of their victims' bodies in the bloody aftermath" and then "washed the wounds with alcohol, before lying to their superiors about what happened."

Late last year, four soldiers from a Stryker brigade at the base were convicted of deliberately murdering Afghan civilians in a series of killing sprees and of collecting their body parts as trophies in the Maiwand district. They were sentenced to prison terms ranging between three years and life, though the ringleader, Calvin Gibbs will be eligible for parole in 10 years.

A year ago, NATO helicopter gunships killed nine young boys who were collecting firewood near their home in the northeastern province of Kunar. The boys were all between the ages of 9 and 15. The dead included two sets of brothers.

The one survivor of the attack was an 11-year-old boy named Hemad. He told The New York Times, "The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting." The boy went on to say the helicopter gunships "shot the boys one after another."

This came on the heels of accusations by an Afghan government team of investigators that NATO forces were killing large numbers of civilians in air strikes, one involving some 65 people, including 40 children.

For public consumption, U.S. strategy in Afghanistan has been "population-centric counterinsurgency," or COIN, "winning hearts and minds," slowly building up trust among suspicious Afghans, all part of the great project of nation building.

The actual strategy was well described on March 3, 2011, on the Amy Goodman Show by journalist Rick Rowley who had spent months in the field in Afghanistan:

"After the surge was bogged down and COIN was failing in both Marjah and Kandahar, the U.S. has turned to a firepower-intensive kind of combat. They're resorting to air strikes. Night raids have risen to an astronomical level where there's a thousand raids a month happening, up from 30 raids a month in 2008. Decades after Vietnam, one decade into this war, we've gone back to body counts as our only way of measuring any kind of progress in the war." According to Rowley, "the covert, dark war has eclipsed completely the conventional war right now, that Special Forces is now killing and capturing, in completely covert, untransparent operations, more Taliban and Afghans than the entire conventional NATO force."

Throw into this mix obvious major deficiencies in leadership abilities by junior U.S. officers and you have the recipe for a constant diet of atrocities. As yet we are nowhere near the truth of what happened last Sunday. Was the unidentified killer actually acting alone or in concert with others in his unit? Some Afghan witnesses say there was more than one American soldier involved in the killing of the 16.

Throw into this mix the soaring death toll from drone strikes, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan's border region.

"There's been real blowback from the burning of the Quran, but there has also been real blowback from the killings from continued drone strikes," says Ann Wright, a former State Department diplomat and retired Army colonel who stood trial last month for protesting U.S. drone attacks.

Absurdly, the CIA claims that since May 2010, drones have killed more than 600 carefully selected human targets and not a single non-combatant. Recently, the British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism concluded, after a long investigation, that this is nonsense. According to the Bureau, at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 drone strikes on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border region during this past year alone. Between 282 and 535 civilians, including 60 minors, have been credibly reported as killed as a result of drone strikes since U.S. President Barack Obama took office. At least 50 civilians have been killed in second-wave drone strikes—shot down as they were helping the wounded. More than 20 other civilians were killed in strikes on funerals.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan was lost a long time ago. Today, a U.S. soldier is unwise to turn his back for long on the Afghan he is supposedly assisting to nationhood. We can brace ourselves for more horror stories like the one that came to light last Sunday until NATO's beaten armies clamber onto the planes and head for home.

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At least the DPRK doesn't trumpet its status as the least-best sanctuary of liberty. American politicians, starting with the president, do little else.

A couple of months ago, came a mile-marker in America's steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic with Obama's assertion that he has the right as president to secretly order the assassination, without trial, of a U.S. citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his 2009 betrayal of his pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.

After months of declaring that he would veto such legislation, Obama has now crumbled and will soon sign a monstrosity called the Levin/McCain detention bill, named for its two senatorial sponsors, Carl Levin and John McCain. It's snuggled into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

The detention bill mandates—don't glide too easily past that word—that all accused terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; this includes U.S. citizens within the borders of the United States.

All onslaughts on potential sedition like to cast as wide a net as possible, so the detention act authorizes use of military force against anyone who "substantially supports" al-Qaida, the Taliban or "associated forces." Of course, "associated forces" can mean anything. The bill's language mentions, "associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces." That's language that can be bent, at will, by any prosecutor. Protest too vigorously the assassination of U.S. citizen Anwar al Awlaki by American forces in Yemen in October and one day it's not fanciful to expect the thump of the military jackboot on your front step, or on that of any anti-war organizer, or any journalist whom some zealous military intelligence officer deems to be giving objective support to the forces of evil and darkness. Since 1878, here in the U.S., the Posse Comitatus Act has limited the powers of local governments and law enforcement agencies from using federal military personnel to enforce the laws of the land. The detention bill renders the Posse Comitatus Act a dead letter.

Governments, particularly those engaged in a Great War on Terror, like to make long lists of troublesome people to be sent to internment camps or dungeons in case of national emergency. Back in Reagan's time, in the 1980s, Lt. Col. Oliver North, working out of the White House, was caught preparing just such a list. Reagan speedily distanced himself from North. Obama, the former lecturer on the U.S. Constitution, is brazenly signing this authorization for military internment camps.

There's been quite a commotion over the detention bill. Civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have raised a stink. The New York Times denounced it editorially as "a complete political cave-in." Mindful that the votes of liberals can be useful, even vital in presidential elections, pro-Obama supporters of the bill claim that it doesn't codify "indefinite detention." But indeed it does. The bill explicitly authorizes "detention under the law of war until the end of hostilities."

Will the bill hurt Obama? Probably not too much, if at all. Contrary to widespread belief, liberals are never very energetic in protecting constitutional rights. That's more the province of libertarians and other wackos actually prepared to draw lines in the sand for matters of principle.

Simultaneous to the looming shadow of indefinite internment by the military for naysayers, we have what appears to be immunity from prosecution for private military contractors retained by the U.S. government, another extremely sinister development.

The U.S. military has been outsourcing war at a staggering rate. Even as the U.S. military quits Iraq, thousands of private military contractors remain. Suppose they are accused of torture and other abuses including murder?

The Centre for Constitutional Rights—a U.S. non-profit organization—is currently representing Iraqi civilians tortured in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq. They seek to hold accountable two private contractors for their violations of international, federal and state law. In the words of Laura Raymond of the CCR, "By the military's own internal investigations, private military contractors from the U.S.-based corporations L-3 Services and CACI International were involved in the war crimes and acts of torture that took place, which included rape, being forced to watch family members and others be raped, severe beatings, being hung in stress positions, being pulled across the floor by genitals, mock executions and other incidents, many of which were documented by photographs. The cases—Al Shimari v. CACI and Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3—aim to secure a day in court for the plaintiffs, none of whom were ever charged with any crimes."

But the corporations involved are now arguing in court that they should be exempt from any investigation into the allegations against them because, among other reasons, the U.S. government's interests in executing wars would be at stake if corporate contractors can be sued. And Raymond reports, "They are also invoking a new, sweeping defense. The new rule is termed 'battlefield preemption' and aims to eliminate any civil lawsuits against contractors that take place on any 'battlefield.'"

You've guessed it. As with "associated forces", an elastic concept discussed above, in the Great War on Terror the entire world is a "battlefield." So unless the CCRs suit prevails, and a ruling of a Fourth Circuit federal court panel stands, private military contractors could be immune from any type of civil liability, even for war crimes, as long as it takes place on a "battlefield."

Suppose now we take the new powers of the military in domestic law enforcement, as defined in the detention act, and anticipate the inevitable, that the military delegates these powers to private military contractors. A company owned by, say Goldman Sachs, could enjoy delegated powers to arrest any U.S. citizen here within the borders of the USA, "who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces," torture them to death and then claim "battlefield preemption."

Don't laugh.

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In 1945, the chief of the State Department's Division of Near Eastern Affairs wrote in a memo that the oil resources of Saudi Arabia are a "stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." The man who steered the Saudi princes towards America and away from Britain, was St. John Philby, Kim Philby's father, and with that one great stroke he wrought far more devastation on the Empire than his son ever did.

These days, the U.S. consumes about 19 million barrels of oil every 24 hours, about half of them imported. At 25 percent, Canada is the lead oil supplier. Second comes Saudi Arabia at 12 percent. But the supply of crude oil to the U.S. is only half the story. Saudi Arabia controls the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' oil price and adjusts it carefully with U.S. priorities in the front of their minds.

The traffic is not one-way. In the half century after 1945, the United States sold the Saudis about$100 billion in military goods and services. A year ago, the Obama administration announced the biggest weapons deal in U.S. history—a $60 billion program with Saudi Arabia to sell it military equipment across the next 20 to 30 years.

Under its terms, the United States will provide Saudi Arabia with 84 advanced F-15 fighter planes with electronics and weapons packages tailored to Saudi needs. An additional 70 F-15's already in Saudi hands will be upgraded to match the capabilities of the new planes.

Saudi Arabia will purchase a huge fleet of nearly 200 Apache, Blackhawk and other U.S. military helicopters, along with a vast array of radar systems, anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, and guided bombs. The U.S. trains and supplies all Saudi Arabia's security forces. U.S. corporations have huge investments in the Kingdom.

Say the words "Saudi Arabia" to President Obama or to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the high-minded prattle about the "Arab spring" stops abruptly. When the Saudis rushed security forces across the causeway and into Bahrein, counseling the Khalifa dynasty to smash down hard on the Shiite demonstrators in the homeport of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, the noises of reproof from Washington were mouse-like in their modesty.

Could the uprisings in Saudi Arabia spiral out of control? We're talking here about two different challenges. The first are the long-oppressed Shiite, making up just under a quarter of the population. The second is from the younger generation in the Sunni majority—youth under 30 accounts for two-thirds of the Saudi population--living in one of the most thoroughgoing tyrannies in the world.

In February of this year, perturbed by the trend of events in Egypt and elsewhere, the 87-year-old King Abdullah announced his plan to dispense about $36 billion in welfare handouts—about $2,000 for every Saudi. He correctly identified one of the Kingdom's big problems, which is that over 40 percent of people between 18 and 40 don't have a job.

A few days ago, Abdullah offered Saudi women a privilege—to participate in certain entirely meaningless municipal elections (if approved by their husbands.) What municipal elections can be meaningful amid resolute repression under an absolutist monarchy?

The American Empire has effectively lost Iran and Iraq. What of Saudi Arabia? Suppose, fissures continue to open up in the Kingdom itself? I doubt, at such a juncture, that we would hear too much talk from Washington about "democracy" or orderly transitions. The Empire would send in the 101st Airborne.

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All he had to do was announce that he'd trudged the last half mile towards a deal, but that there is no pleasing fanatics who reject all possibilities of compromise. Fanatics who are ready and eager to shut down the government, to see seniors starve and veterans denied their benefits.

Obama could have proclaimed he was invoking the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that the "validity of the public debt of the United States...shall not be questioned."

Obama could have done that, but he didn't. At the 11th hour and the 55th minute, he threw in the towel and gave the exultant Republicans 95 percent of what they wanted: cuts in social programs and a bipartisan congressional panel to shred, at its leisure, what remains of the social safety net.

As America plummets into phase two of the double-dip recession, Obama's deal has stripped the country of all available remaining defenses: no job program and no hope of stimulus money for stricken states and cities across the country.

It's as bad as the Republicans' onslaught on Franklin Roosevelt's Great Depression programs—an onslaught that launched the terrible downturn of 1937, from which America was extricated only by the vast war spending after Pearl Harbor.

Why did Obama do it? Like all first-term presidents, he thinks first and foremost about re-election. The thinking in the White House is that the all-important, independent voters are eager for deficit reduction, however ruinous it may be for the economy.

If Obama and his advisors think that this sell-out will yield rich political rewards, current polling is not encouraging. Eighty percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, and a majority think Obama is doing a bad job. This is scarcely surprising since 30 million Americans are without work or work part-time.

But beyond coarse political calculation, it's plain enough that Obama is a quitter by nature. As someone joked bitterly last week, he turns up for a strip poker session already down to his shorts. In the crunch, the weapon he snatches from its scabbard is the white flag, which he flourishes at the bankers, the Pentagon and America's billionaires.

It was clear in 2006—the first time I looked at his record—that Obama was gutless and devoid of principle. By 2008, before his victory, he was already reassuring the establishment that he was set to "reform" Social Security and Medicare - i.e., to hand these entitlement programs over to Wall Street and the insurance industry.

Indeed, the best outcome for the left in 2008 would have been a victory for McCain, Obama's Republican opponent. Under Bush's two terms the spirit of opposition throve; the antiwar movement was flourishing; the labor movement fierce in its organizing; African-Americans militant. Bush's hopes to privatize Social Security were dead within months of the start of his second term in 2004. But since 2008, a Democratic president has neutralized all these constituencies.

Even after last week's frightful betrayals, there's been barely a fretful bleat from Democrats about running a challenger to Obama in the primaries. Much like the late Ted Kennedy mounted against Carter, another Obamian sell-out, in 1979.

The time to launch a third party left challenge to Obama was back in January of 2010, when the writing was on the wall. In these very columns I remember imploring ousted progressive U.S. Senator Russell Feingold to do just that. Now, it's far too late.

In 2013, we could be faced with Republican majorities in both houses and the prospect of Obama spending four years catering obediently to their requirements—defusing all liberal and left opposition. We need a Republican in the White House. But who?

Michele Bachmann is popular mostly with Tea Party ultras, Jon Huntsman with the Washington elites. Governor Rick Perry of Texas has yet to enter the race and is loathed by the Bush clan. The only candidate within reach of Obama is Mitt Romney, the Mormon millionaire businessman whose nomination bid fizzled in 2008.

Romney kept quiet through most of the recent brouhaha about raising the deficit ceiling, aside from a pro forma nod to Tea Party ultras near the end. He plans to placate them in early primary states like Iowa.

On casual inspection, Romney doesn't seem to be marked for greatness, but greatness is not required of him. He just needs the tenacity to win the White House, therefore driving Obama out of national politics and destroying his appalling vision of bipartisanship as the way forward for America.

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But, back to dreary business and the fight over the deficit. Here we have the supposed specter of Uncle Sam turning into a deadbeat rather than the best credit risk on the planet. On Aug. 2, the United States could start defaulting on its obligations, as the tea party crowd in the House of Representatives refuses to raise the debt ceiling.

On Aug. 3, the lights might start to go out: The U.S. government is scheduled to send out $23 billion in Social Security checks to 56 million people. If the checks don't arrive, within a couple of days America's old folk are going without food and can't make the rent. U.S. Treasuries will lose their top rating, and the entire credit structure of the planet starts to come unglued. Goldbugs will be crazed with triumph, as the precious metal soars to $3,000 an ounce and hyperinflation roars into life. Next thing you know, greenbacks are being tossed in the trash, and we're heading back to a barter economy.

America is in love with Apocalypse. It always has been. Every couple of years, someone says the End is Nigh. When I came to America's shores in 1972, Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth had just been published and sold 30 million copies over the next 20 years. Lindsey wrote, rather presciently, that the Antichrist would rule over a 10-nation European Community through the 1970s until the Rapture—scheduled for the 1980s—and the Second Coming.

The next big rendezvous with Apocalypse I remember was New York's brush with bankruptcy in the late 1970s. The air was thick with what-ifs, and remained so till the arrival of the third Christian millennium and a tremendous burst of alarm at the notion that the world's computers would shut down. They called it Y2K, and it was a bust. From there, it was a brisk transition to Global Warming—the non-believers' version of the End Times.

Not many people here really think the U.S. government will shut down on Aug. 3. As former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts writes on our CounterPunch site: "The U.S. government will never default on its bonds, because the bonds, unlike those of Greece, Spain and Ireland, are payable in its own currency. Regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised, the Federal Reserve will continue to purchase the Treasury's debt. If Goldman Sachs is too big to fail, then so is the U.S. government."

The fight over the deficit is one of those American ceremonies, as embalmed in ritual speech and gesture as an English coronation. I came to an America about to writhe under the lash of Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter comminations about living beyond our means and the need for "zero-base" budgeting and fiscal prudence.

Nearly 40 years later, here we are listening to Barack Obama lofting the battle standard of austerity, calling on Republicans to find common ground. Here's comes Pete Peterson with yet another bipartisan report calling for the evisceration of entitlement programs. Here are the Gangs of Five, Six, Seven marshalling bipartisan support for evisceration of social programs, balanced by tax fakery. At the end of the day, there are real dead bodies—decent programs tossed to the wolves, food and energy costs taken out of measurements of inflation. The ship settles a bit lower in the water, and on we go.

The essentials of the long-term crisis are simple. For a generation now, the only essential plank for any Republican candidate is a pledge not to raise taxes and to roll back even the modest sums that the rich and corporations are supposed to send to the U.S. Treasury each year. The second plank is an equally vehement pledge, proclaimed by both parties, to keep America strong by throwing money at the Pentagon. Right now, the total military/security budget is in the vicinity of $1.1-$1.2 trillion, or 70-75 percent of the federal budget deficit.

The Republicans would like to erode and ultimately privatize Social Security and Medicare. Not so secretly many Democrats are of the same disposition but know that they may depend for political survival on the votes of poor and middle-income citizens who see them as the defenders of social programs. Hence the complex rituals, the dancing at the edge of the cliff. Can Obama coax Reps. Eric Cantor or Paul Ryan into even more ferocious demands for cuts in social programs, before calling the Republicans' hand?

In this latest ritual enactment, the Republicans are faring badly, losing in the opinion polls because many of them are insane and increasingly perceived as such by the American electorate, magnificently tolerant in such matters. There's nothing like hearing that you might not get your Social Security check next Wednesday to concentrate the mind.

Meanwhile the left legitimately fears that Obama's unceasing public tributes to bipartisanship and the spirit of compromise will end up with him giving away the store. It's a fake question. It's the historic mission of the Democrats to give away the bits of the store that the Republicans don't dare torch directly. It's a gradual process but an unceasing one.

Don't look for Apocalypse. These are familiar rituals, and no one really has the nerve to toss a bomb onto the dance floor, however much they may swear that the time has come for brutal measures. It seems we have to turn to Dominique Strauss-Kahn for that kind of commitment.

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Don't worry if you missed it. There will be many, many more debates, all conducted in the idiom of political infantilism, as was bleakly conceded by David Brooks, the New York Times' leading Republican columnist, himself the retailer of noxious policies at a more devious level.

"The Republican growth agenda—tax cuts and nothing else—is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible," Brooks moaned. "Gigantic tax cuts—if they were affordable—might boost overall growth, but they would do nothing to address the structural problems that are causing a working-class crisis.

"Republican politicians don't design policies to meet specific needs, or even to help their own working-class voters. They use policies as signaling devices—as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox."

There were seven of them lined up, and the single woman, the fiery Rep. Michele Bachmann, was acclaimed the winner the next day simply because she elected to wear the mantle of relative sanity for a few hours. She made no excessively preposterous onslaughts on history, as her rival Sarah Palin had just done by claiming that Paul Revere had undertaken his famous ride to warn the British of an impending uprising.

Espying lips unmarred by the foam of political delirium, journalists raised cheers for Bachmann. At this rate, they'll be calling this toast of the tea party "statesmanlike" by the third debate.

Palin herself was a no-show. So was the current favorite of the Republican elite, Jon Huntsman Jr. He's a former governor of Utah, more recently U.S. ambassador to China and now burdened with a lethal thumbs-up from Henry Kissinger, who praises Hunstman as a "very intelligent man" and "a very good ambassador" to China and a credible Republican candidate. Kissinger added that he doesn't do formal endorsements because when he does, his choice plummets to disaster.

Huntsman has the advantage of having a billionaire dad in the form of Huntsman Sr., who made a fortune out of Styrofoam packing, which Americans spend many hours a day picking out of their carpets after opening the day's haul from eBay.

Huntsman is a Mormon, thus putting two in the race this time. Mormon Mitt Romney, defeated for the nomination by McCain in 2008, is back again. He's reneged on his best-known achievement (aside from putting his dog in a cage on the roof of his car), the health plan he engineered when governor of Massachusetts, regarded by the tea party crowd as the harbinger of hated "Obamacare." He'd no doubt like to give up being a Mormon because all evidence suggests that Americans don't care for the idea of a Mormon in the White House. The right-wingers prefer fundamentalist Christians, and your average middle-of-the-road nonbeliever prefers astrology, which is why they liked Ron and Nancy Reagan, who had astrologists counseling them at all times.

So much for Huntsman and Romney.

Newt Gingrich is a busted flush. His entire senior staff quit on him on this week, claiming Gingrich was under the thumb of his third wife, Callista, whose form he has bedizened with half a million dollars worth of jewelry from Van Cleef & Arpels. It seems Gingrich is her love slave, dumping all political business whenever she crooks her finger and demands a restoring jaunt to the Caribbean.

He also briefly attacked the lunacy—de rigueur for all Republican candidates—of pledging to end Medicare.

Ron Paul, the libertarian assailant of America's wars, often sounds like a Grade A crank, calling for abolition of Medicare and Social Security, though his denunciation of Obama's wars did raise a cheer.

The only black contender, Herman Cain—founder of Godfather's Pizza—did not put up a convincing showing. Nor did Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota, who wimped out on the opportunity to punch Romney on the nose for his health plan, even though he was standing right next to him. Rich Santorum brought up the rear.

It has to be said, imbecility was in evidence on both sides of the footlights. The questions from the so-called labor and intellectual spokeswomen/men were not always of a high standard.

Huntsman is scheduled to formally announce his candidacy next Tuesday, in the shadow of the State of Liberty. The only other name being bandied is Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, but he'd better hurry up.

Does this crowd of Republican nutballs mean that Obama is going to canter home in 2012, assuming his family lets him?

The big threat to Obama's re-election is not his family, but the economy, where the news is very bad.

The recovery is failing. The most recent figures show the economy growing at an annual rate of just 1.8 percent. Manufacturing is at its slowest pace of growth in 20 months. Employers hired only 54,000 new workers in May, the lowest number in eight months. Jobless claims increased to 427,000 in the week ended June 4. Nearly half of all unemployed Americans have been without work for more than six months. More than 44 million Americans—one in seven—rely on food stamps. The unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent.

The record in presidential races suggests that if unemployment is higher than 7 percent, things look bleak for the incumbent.

Obama can rely on support from the left—even though from a left perspective, his record is in many ways worse, as regards war and constitutional issues, than George Bush's.

Years ago, I remember Auberon Waugh electioneering in Fulham, England, in a challenge to the Labour and Conservative candidates. Waugh was outraged by the betrayal of Biafra, a chunk of Nigeria that had dared to secede in the late 1960s. Catholics, from the pope to Waugh, backed Biafra. Not the Labour government, whose foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, MP for Fulham, stuck firmly to stentorian support for oil-producing Nigeria. About a million people died.

"People of Fulham," I remember Waugh bellowing to a modest throng, "an awful choice confronts you: the choice between a mass murderer and an imbecile."

But then, the American political system right now is hospitable to imbeciles and has always had a soft streak for them. Obama is certainly a mass murderer if you count up his wars and body counts of innocent bystanders. But then, the American political system has been hospitable to mass murderers, too.

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There was scarcely a sentence in the president's Sunday night address or in the subsequent briefing by John Brennan, his chief counterterrorism coordinator, that has not been subsequently retracted by CIA director Leon Panetta, White House press spokesman Jay Carney or by various documentary records.

The White House photograph of Obama, Clinton and top security advisers supposedly watching real-time footage of the Navy SEALs' onslaught on the Abbottabad compound, their killing of two additional men and a woman (excuse for the latter killing: the standard "caught in crossfire") and liquidation of OBL himself turns out to have been a phony. OB and friends could have been watching basketball replays. Panetta has admitted the real-time video link stopped working before the SEALs got into the compound.

Panetta also admits bin Laden was not armed, and that he did not hide behind his young wife's skirt. He conceded that under military rules of engagement, bin Laden should have been taken prisoner, but then added vaguely that he showed some unspecified form of resistance. He probably reached for his walking stick, since he has been ailing from kidney and liver problems. As any black or brown resident in, say, the purview of the Ramparts Division of the LAPD knows full well, reaching for a walking stick or even holding a cellphone can be a death warrant, particularly in front of a score of heavily armed and homicidal SEALs, no doubt amped up on amphetamine.

The White House claims that issues of delicacy prohibit the release of photographs of Obama's bullet-riddled face and required that after an alleged match with a relative's DNA, he be given a swift but formal sea burial in a weighted body bag dropped from the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson into the north Arabian Sea, presumably awaiting retrieval by salvagers with a fix on the Vinson's position at the time of burial.

Maybe the Navy SEAL photographer forgot to take his lens cap off. Obama's claims of ethical sensitivity certainly ring hollow. He's battling the wimp factor, and "Lo! The head of Osama" would be a nifty prop. There was lengthy display back in Bush time of the mutilated bodies of Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, killed by U.S. special forces in 2003, plus filming of Saddam's own execution by hanging.

Further back, when DNA matches were unknown, U.S. special forces verified Che Guevara's execution by permitting many photographs immediately post-mortem. They also cut off Guevara's hands, for subsequent verification by the CIA. We're not talking Miss Manners here.

The official "backstory" released Sunday night by Obama is that U.S. intelligence learned of the Abbottabad compound only last August and spent the following months watching the place, following Osama's trusted couriers and concluding that it was highly likely, though not certain, that Osama was there.

This is bunk. The three-story house has been a well-known feature of Abbottabad. Shaukat Qadir, a well-connected Pakistan army officer, reports to CounterPunch from Pakistan: "For the record, this house has been under ISI surveillance while it was under construction. It was first raided in 2003, and the ISI just missed capturing al-Libi (he was later captured by the ISI close to Mardan in K-P Province). It has been raided on numerous occasions since."

In fact, specific knowledge by U.S. intelligence of the compound and its likely possible prime denizen goes back to 2005.

This has been established by Israel Shamir, also writing for CounterPunch. Shamir compares certain passages in the WikiLeaks documents on Guantanamo against those recently published by The New York Times and the Guardian.

Shamir reports these newspapers were working from the WikiLeaks files supplied to them (price unknown) by WikiLeaks' former German employee, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, "who went AWOL after this appropriation." Shamir says Domscheit-Berg made a deal with the Guardian, which subsequently made a co-publication arrangement with The New York Times.

"Both papers published the cables after redacting them, or should we say 'censoring'—removing everything the secret services demanded (they) remove."

When Julian Assange learned that the Guardian and The New York Times planned to publish the Guantanamo files, his WikiLeaks team also prepared the files and began to upload. So did the competitors, possessing the Domscheit-Berg appropriated copy.

The most important redactions by the Guardian and The New York Times, Shamir writes, "were directly dictated by the US intelligence services. The name of Nashwan Abd Al Razzaq Abd Al Baqi, or by another name, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi or by his number IZ-10026 was edited away from the file of Abu al-Libi (US9LY-010017DP) and elsewhere."

This is significant because al-Iraqi was in close contact with al-Libi, who had been designated by Osama in 2003 as his trusted official courier, therefore aware of Osama's whereabouts at all times. In the end, at separate times, the U.S. captured both al-Libi and al-Iraqi, had them both tortured and thus became aware of al-Libi's courier duties and hence the possibility that Osama was in Abbottabad.

Comparison of the redacted version of the Guardian and in the uncut version of WikiLeaks shows to what extent all the traces of al-Iraqi, the likely informer under torture, were removed at the behest of U.S. intelligence. It was not connected to "caring about informers," for al-Libi was understood at the time to have committed suicide in a Libyan jail just before the arrival of the U.S. ambassador in Tripoli. The file of al-Iraqi is missing in all databases; he was captured in 2005 and kept in various secret prisons, until transferred to Guantanamo, where he remains detained.

So the trail to Abbottabad was known to the U.S. intelligence services at least since 2005, when al-Iraqi was captured.

"Careful reading of the file," Shamir writes, "shows that al-Libi was connected with al-Iraqi since October 2002. In 2003, Osama stated al-Libi would be the official messenger between OBL and others in Pakistan. In mid-2003, al-Libi moved his family to Abbottabad, Pakistan and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar. He maintained contact with al-Iraqi."

We can conclude, from this narrative, that when the unredacted WikiLeaks files surfaced, U.S. intelligence concluded that Osama's associates would soon figure out that the Americans had made the appropriate connections and conjectures and urged him to move on with all due haste. So Obama decided to send in the SEALs.

From this active volcano of lies, we can safely assume that Obama's re-election campaign has been well and truly launched. Liftoff began on April 27 with the White House's release of the long birth certificate. Obama seems to have problems with timely provision of convincing documentation about arrivals (his own) and departures (bin Laden's).

Had it not been for cloud cover over Abbottabad, the raid on Osama's compound could have come on Friday, April 29, the same day as the royal wedding.

Saturday, April 30 was reserved for the attempted assassination of Col. Gadhafi, with the dropping of precision-guided bombs on the house of his son Saif, who died along with three grandchildren. Saif was in the Gadhafi family compound on April 15, 1986 when bombs ordered up by Ronald Reagan were dropped from F-111s, killing his 15-month old sister, adopted by Gadhafi 11 months earlier. "Decapitation"—going for the enemy's top guy—is now standard NATO strategy. Would Obama have been briefed on the plan or have signed off on a program of targeted assassination of Gadhafi? It seems highly likely.

But Gadhafi survived. So Obama only had one bloodied feather in his cap when he gave one of the most morally repellent speeches I have ever heard delivered from the White House. Bush at least had a crude brio when he vaunted America's prowess. Obama's "we nailed him" paragraphs of mendacity concluded with a Dickensian "Tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history."

Alas, the actual story of "our history" is an unrelenting ability to lie about everything, while simultaneously claiming America's superior moral worth.

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Let's start with the fierce hand-to-hand combat between members of the coalition, arguing about the basic aims of the operation. How does "take all necessary measures" square with the ban on any "foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory." Can the coalition kill Gadhafi, and recognize a provisional government in Benghazi? Who exactly are the revolutionaries and national liberators in eastern Libya?

In the United States, the intervention was instigated by liberal interventionists: notably three women, starting with Samantha Power, who runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights in Obama's National Security Council. She's an Irish-American, 41 years old, who made her name back in the Bush years with her book A Problem From Hell, a study of the U.S. foreign-policy response to genocide, and the failure of the Clinton administration to react forcefully to the Rwandan massacres. She had to resign from her advisory position on the Obama campaign in April 2008, after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" in an interview with The Scotsman, but was restored to good grace after Obama's election, and the monster in her sights is now Gadhafi.

America's U.N. ambassador is Susan Rice, the first African-American woman to be named to that post. She's long been an ardent interventionist. In 1996, as part of the Clinton administration, she supported the multinational force that invaded Zaire from Rwanda in 1996 and overthrew dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, saying privately that "Anything's better than Mobutu."

But on Feb. 23, she came under fierce attack in the Huffington Post at the hands of Richard Grenell, who'd served on the U.S. delegation to the U.N. in the Bush years. Grenell dwelt harshly on instances where in his judgment Rice and her ultimate boss, Obama, were dropping the ball, and displaying lack of leadership amid the tumults engulfing the Middle East and specifically in failing to support the uprising against Gadhafi.

Both Rice and Clinton took Grenell's salvo to heart. Prodded by the fiery Power, they abruptly stiffened their postures, and Clinton lobbed her furious salvoes at Gadhafi, "the mad dog." For Clinton it was a precise rerun of her efforts to portray Obama as a peace wimp back in 2008, liable to snooze all too peacefully when the red phone rang at 3 a.m.

For his part, Obama wasn't keen on intervention, seeing it as a costly swamp, yet another war and one bitterly opposed by Defense Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But by now, the liberal interventions and the neocons were in full cry, and Obama, perennially fearful of being outflanked, succumbed, hastening to one of the least convincing statement of war aims in the nation's history. He's already earned a threat of impeachment from leftist congressman Dennis Kucinich for arrogating war-making powers constitutionally reserved for the U.S. Congress, though it has to be said that protest from the left has been pretty feeble.

As always, many on the left yearn for an intervention they can finally support, and initially, many of them have been murmuring ecstatically, "This is the one." Of course, the sensible position (mine) simply states that nothing good ever came out of a Western intervention by the major powers, whether humanitarian in proclaimed purpose or not.

So much for the instigators of intervention in the U.S. In France, the intellectual author is the intellectual dandy and "new philosopher" Bernard-Henri Levy, familiarly known to his admirers and detractors as BHL. As described by Larry Portis in our CounterPunch newsletter, BHL arrived in Benghazi on March 3. Two days later, BHL was interviewed on various television networks. He appeared before the camera in his habitual uniform—immaculate white shirt with upturned collar, black suit coat and disheveled hair.

His message was urgent but reassuring. "No," he said, "Gadhafi is not capable of launching an offensive against the opposition. He does not have the means to do so. However, he does have planes. This is the real danger."

BHL called for the scrambling of radio communications, the destruction of landing strips in all regions of Libya and the bombardment of Gadhafi's personal bunker. In brief, this would be a humanitarian intervention, the modalities of which he did not specify.

Next step, as BHL explained: "I called him (Sarkozy) from Benghazi. And when I returned, I went to the Elysee Palace to see him and tell him that the people on the National Transition Council are good guys."

Indeed, on March 6, BHL returned to France and met with Sarkozy. Four days later, he saw Sarkozy again, this time with three Libyans whom he had encouraged to visit France, along with Sarkozy's top advisers. On March 11, Sarkozy declared the Libyan National Transition Council the only legitimate representative of the Libyan people.

Back in Benghazi, people screamed in relief and cheered Sarkozy's name, popularity at last for Sarko, whose approval ratings in France have been hovering around the 30 percent mark.

So much for the circumstances in which intervention was conceived. It has nothing to do with oil, everything to do with ego and political self-protection. But to whom exactly are the interveners lending succor? There's been great vagueness here, beyond enthusiastic references to the romantic revolutionaries of Benghazi, and much ridicule for Gadhafi's identification of his opponents in eastern Libya as al-Qaida.

In fact, two documents strongly back Gadhafi on this issue. The first is a secret cable to the State Department from the U.S. embassy in Tripoli in 2008, part of the WikiLeaks trove, entitled "Extremism in Eastern Libya," which revealed that this area is rife with anti-American, pro-jihad sentiment.

According to the cable, the most troubling aspect "... is the pride that many eastern Libyans, particularly those in and around (Darnah), appear to take in the role their native sons have played in the insurgency in Iraq ... (and the) ability of radical imams to propagate messages urging support for and participation in jihad."

The second document—or rather, set of documents—is the so-called Sinjar Records, captured al-Qaida documents that fell into American hands in 2007. They were duly analyzed by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Al-Qaida is a bureaucratic outfit, and the records contain precise details on personnel, including those who came to Iraq to fight and, when necessary, commit suicide, fighting American and coalition forces.

The West Point analysts' statistical study of the al-Qaida personnel records concludes that one country provided "far more" foreign fighters in per-capita terms than any other: Libya. The records show that the "vast majority of Libyan fighters that included their hometown in the Sinjar Records resided in the country's Northeast."

Benghazi provided many volunteers. So did Darnah, a town about 200 km. east of Benghazi, in which an Islamic emirate was declared when the rebellion against Gadhafi started. New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid even spoke with Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, who promulgated the Islamic emirate.

Al-Hasadi "praises Osama bin Laden's 'good points,'" Shadid reported, though he prudently denounced the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Other sources have said that this keen admirer of Osama would be most influential in the formation of any provisional government.

The West Point study of the Iraqi Sinjar Records calculates that of the 440 foreign al-Qaida recruits whose hometowns are known, 21 came from Benghazi, thereby making it the fourth-most-common hometown listed in the records. Fifty-three of the al-Qaida recruits came from Darnah, the highest total of any of the hometowns listed in the records. The second-highest number, 51, came from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Darnah (80,000) has less than 2 percent the population of Riyadh. Darnah contributed "far and away the largest per capita number of fighters."

As former CIA operations officer Brian Fairchild writes, amid "the apparent absence of any plan for post-(Gaddhfi) governance, an ignorance of Libya's tribal nature and our poor record of dealing with tribes, American government documents conclusively establish that the epicenter of the revolt is rife with anti-American and pro-jihad sentiment, and with al-(Qaida)'s explicit support for the revolt, it is appropriate to ask our policymakers how American military intervention in support of this revolt in any way serves vital U.S. strategic interests."

As I wrote here a few weeks ago, "It sure looks like Osama is winning the Great War on Terror." But I did not dream then that he would have a coalition of the U.S., Great Britain and France bleeding themselves dry to assist him in this enterprise.

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Along much of California's coastline runs the "ring of fire," which stretches round the Pacific plate, from Australia, north past Japan, to Russia, round to Alaska, down America's West Coast to Chile. 90 percent of the world's earthquakes happen round the ring.

The late great environmentalist David Brower used to tell audiences, " Nuclear plants are incredibly complex technological devices for locating earthquake faults."

Halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles is the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, planned in 1968 when no one knew about the Hosgri fault, part of the ring of fire, a few miles offshore. Further inquiry established that there'd been a 7.1 earthquake 40 years earlier, offshore from the plant, completed in 1973. The power company—Pacific Gas and Electric—said it would beef up defenses. In their haste, the site managers reversed the blueprints for the new earthquake proofing of the two reactors, and so the retrofit wasn't a total success.

They recently discovered yet another fault and are now worried about "ground liquefaction" in the event of a big quake. In 2008, there was a terrorist attack by jellyfish, which blocked the cold water intake, and the plant was shut down for a couple of days.

Head south another 150 miles, and we get to the San Onofre plant, right on the shoreline. In fact, I've swum in its shadow, in waters highly esteemed by anglers because fish gather there, enjoying the elevated water temp; some also claim the fish there get bigger, faster. There are storage ponds for spent fuel in a decommissioned unit in a spherical containment of concrete and steel with the smallest wall being 6 feet thick, just about the same as the ruptured containment at one of the Fukushima units.

The power company says San Onofre is built to withstand a 7.0 quake. There is a 25-foot sea wall, which is just over half the height of the walls that crumbled like sand last week along Japan's northeast coast. San Onofre is seawater cooled. Environmentalists don't care for that, so they plan to build two cooling towers the other side of Interstate 5, California's main north-south road, thus immune to jellyfish attack, but open to other methods of assault.

The Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast figures the probability of an earthquake 6.7 or higher is 67 percent for Los Angeles, 63 percent for San Francisco. Up where I live, in the Cascadia subduction zone, we have a 10 percent possibility of an 8- or 9-force quake.

There are robust souls who look on the bright side. Some of them are in the pay of the nuclear industry—President Obama for example, who took plenty of money from the nuclear industry for his presidential campaign, and in his State of the Union address last January reaffirmed his commitment to "clean, safe" nuclear power, about as insane a statement as pledging commitment to a nice clean form of syphilis. This week, Obama's press spokesman confirmed that nuclear energy "remains a part of the President's overall energy plan."

The United States produces more nuclear energy than any other nations. It has 104 nuclear plants, many of them old, many prone to endless shutdowns, all of them dangerous.

The benchmark catastrophe amid peacetime nuclear disasters remains the explosion in the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station on April 26, 1986, in the Ukraine. In 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences published "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," a 327-page volume by three scientists—Alexey Yablokov and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko—the definitive study to date. In the summary of his chapter "Mortality After the Chernobyl Catastrophe," Yablokov says flatly, "The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout."

Set Fukushima next to Chernobyl and its ongoing lethal aftermath. Think of Southern California or North Carolina. Nuclear expert Robert Alvarez, who advised President Clinton on nuclear matters, writes this week that a single spent fuel rod pool—as in Fukushima (or Diablo Canyon or San Onofre)—holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined, and an explosion in that pool could blast "perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster."

In the past few years, there's been an explicit political trade-off here in the U.S. and in Europe, too, between the nuclear industry and many green organizations and prominent environmentalists, fixated solely on the increasingly disheveled hypothesis of humanly caused global warming. When the House of Representatives (though not the U.S. Senate) voted for a climate bill in 2009, the inclusion of a clean-energy bank to provide financial backing for new energy production, including nuclear, was part of the bargain.

This shameful pact has got to end. Nuclear power is over, or should be. Look at the false predictions, the blunders, the elemental truth that Nature bats last and that human folly and greed are ineluctable ingredients of man's condition. There's no middle ground.

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The entire world court of enlightened opinion has borne down on this former hotel manager, now senior pastor at the Dove World Outreach Center and its modest congregation, which does—on the evidence of videos of the church's proceedings—boast of some young female members of whom many a beleaguered Anglican parish would be only too proud to have raising their arms in ecstasy next to the altar.

Take Hillary Clinton, U.S. secretary of state. "It's regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Fla., with a church of no more than 50 people can make this outrageous and distressful, disgraceful plan and get, you know, the world's attention," Clinton said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, a folk moot for the elites debating homicidal policies around the world. Clinton concluded, "It doesn't in any way represent America or Americans, or American government, or American religious or political leadership."

This is the same Hillary Clinton who has spent much of her term as helmswoman of the nation's foreign affairs demonizing Iran and threatening it with nuclear obliteration, during which uncounted millions of Qurans and the people clutching them would turn to cinders.

And here's U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman imploring Jones to reconsider: "I appeal to people who are planning to burn the Quran to reconsider and drop their plans because they are inconsistent with American values and, as Gen.Petraeus has warned, threatening to America's military."

This is the same Lieberman who is the most sedulous U.S. lobbyist for the interests of Israel in Washington, D.C. Has Lieberman warned Israel that its planned law to force every Palestinian to swear explicit allegiance to the Jewish state, hence the tenets of Zionism, is inconsistent with American values, and thus prompts him to reconsider his approval of America's annual disbursement of $3 billion to Israel's collection plate?

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has called Jones' plan "idiotic and dangerous." Would Holder call the action of his Democratic predecessor as attorney general, Janet Reno, in ordering the federal onslaught that led to the incineration in 1993 of the Branch Davidian church in Waco "idiotic and dangerous"? The Justice Department has always defended Reno's action, even though it prompted the blowing up of the Murrah center in Oklahoma City—until the 9/11 attacks, the most deadly act of terror perpetrated on American soil.

And here's Petraeus making what is described as an unusual—for a member of the military—intervention: "Images of the burning of a Quran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan—and around the world—to inflame public opinion and incite violence." Petraeus can only advise the Rev. Jones, who has the constitutional freedom to dispose of the Quran as he thinks fit, consonant with local laws pertaining to public bonfires. He can, however, suspend by a simple order the lethal Predator onslaughts that regularly blow to pieces civilian groups in Afghanistan and the Pakistan border region, inflaming public opinion and leading invariably to escalation in violence.

For their part, Afghans are already demonstrating in Kabul in anticipatory protest at Jones' plan. They denounce disrespect for the Quran. But we also learn from earnest proponents of religious tolerance and interconfessional amity that the Quran promotes respect for the Bible, (though not, of course, the Christian claim of the divinity of Christ—a view also held by followers of Judaism, whose Talmud locates Christ in hell for all eternity, boiling in excrement).

What did the indignant Afghans say when, in early August of this year 10 members of a Christian medical team—six Americans, two Afghans, one German and a Briton, three women among them—were gunned down by the Taliban, who claimed they were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity? The gunmen spared an Afghan driver, who screamed he was a Muslim and babbled some verses from the Quran. The group were members of the International Assistance Mission, one of the longest-serving nongovernmental organizations operating in Afghanistan, registered as a nonprofit Christian organization, apparently not proselytizing. So, what if they were?

Jones is animated by religious principle, salted by the opportunism that every effective evangelist for a faith is endowed with as a part of the armory of conversion. He's aroused the fury of the American establishment, which has, as a matter of regular imperial maintenance, promoted the murder of millions across the world in the name of "American values." Modern Christians, fusionists of the all-get-along school deplore him, too. Many Evangelicals think Jones is on track, though they mostly won't say so publicly. As a Southern Baptist said to me last week, "Alex, they say that Christianity is tolerant. But Christ drove the moneychangers from the Temple. He didn't tolerate them. A line has to be drawn, just like Jones is doing."

What better symbol than Jones of what should have been America's overall resilience in the aftermath of the Muslim attacks of 9/11: an assertion of one of the greatest of American values, as embodied in constitutional provisions for free speech. These freedoms matter most when they are under duress. Amid the duress after 9/11, the Constitution was trashed by the same leaders the leaders who now decry Jones.

My hope has been that on the other side of the road from Jones' burn barrels, or on some piece of property volunteered by the mayor of Gainesville, a gay man, there will be other barrels, into which could be tossed by their opponents the Bible, and kindred sacred texts such as the Talmud, plus Bacon's "Advancement of Learning," Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" and "Das Kapital." Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature of the crucible, in which ideas and principles survive or die.

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