Homeland Security Funds Talks by Fake "Ex-Terrorist"

Submitted by Anne Landman on July 14, 2011 - 4:04pm

 

Walid Shoebat is a Palestinian-American who converted from Islam to conservative Christianity. He was born in the West Bank to an American mother, claims he was a terrorist with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, that he helped fire-bomb an Israeli bank in Bethlehem as a youth and even served time in a jail in Israel for his crimes. A self-proclaimed expert on terrorism, Shoebat says he knows how potential terrorists think, because he was one. Since 2006, he has been interviewed as a terrorism expert on CNN, Fox News and HLN. In May, Shoebat was a featured speaker at a forum put on by South Dakota's Office of Homeland Security for police and sheriff's deputies, where he earned a $5,000 fee for his appearance. In his presentations, Shoebat warns that Islam and terrorism are one in the same, that mosques are hotbeds of potential terrorist organizing and tells his audiences to be wary of Muslim doctors, engineers and students. Shoebat operates several foundations, one of which earned over $500,000 in 2009 through sales of his books and videos, and speaking fees for talks he gives at churches, universities, military bases and counterterrorism trainings. But Shoebat may not be what he claims to be. CNN's Jerusalem bureau conducted an extensive investigation into his background and was unable to substantiate Shoebat's claims of past terrorist activity. The Tel Aviv headquarters of the bank that Shoebat claims to have fire-bombed has no record of a fire-bombing at its Bethlehem branch, and Israeli police have no record of it, either. The prison where Shoebat says he was incarcerated has no record of him being an inmate there, and his relatives describe him as a "regular kid" who eventually became a computer programmer in the U.S. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico first exposed in 2008 that portions of Shoebat's past were fabricated.

'Ex-terrorist' rakes in homeland security bucks

From Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston, CNN Special Investigations Unit
July 14, 2011 5:46 a.m. EDT

Terror training fraud?

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Walid Shoebat advises police to investigate Islamic groups and mosques
He says he's a former Palestinian terrorist who once bombed an Israeli bank
A CNN investigation found no evidence to support his biography
A Senate committee has raised concerns about "self-appointed counterterrorism experts"

Watch Part 2 of Drew Griffin's special investigative report about Walid Shoebat Thursday on AC360° beginning at 10pm E.T.

Rapid City, South Dakota (CNN) -- Walid Shoebat had a blunt message for the roughly 300 South Dakota police officers and sheriff's deputies who gathered to hear him warn about the dangers of Islamic radicalism.

Terrorism and Islam are inseparable, he tells them. All U.S. mosques should be under scrutiny.

"All Islamic organizations in America should be the No. 1 enemy. All of them," he says.

It's a message Shoebat is selling based on his own background as a Palestinian-American convert to conservative Christianity. Born in the West Bank, the son of an American mother, he says he was a Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist in his youth who helped firebomb an Israeli bank in Bethlehem and spent time in an Israeli jail.

That billing helps him land speaking engagements like a May event in Rapid City -- a forum put on by the state Office of Homeland Security, which paid Shoebat $5,000 for the appearance. He's a darling on the church and university lecture circuit, with his speeches, books and video sales bringing in $500,000-plus in 2009, according to tax records.

"Being an ex-terrorist myself is to understand the mindset of a terrorist," Shoebat told CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360."

But CNN reporters in the United States, Israel and the Palestinian territories found no evidence that would support that biography. Neither Shoebat nor his business partner provided any proof of Shoebat's involvement in terrorism, despite repeated requests.

Back in his hometown of Beit Sahour, outside Bethlehem, relatives say they can't understand how Shoebat could turn so roundly on his family and his faith.

"I have never heard anything about Walid being a mujahedeen or a terrorist," said Daood Shoebat, who says he is Walid Shoebat's fourth cousin. "He claims this for his own personal reasons."

CNN's Jerusalem bureau went to great lengths trying to verify Shoebat's story. The Tel Aviv headquarters of Bank Leumi had no record of a firebombing at its now-demolished Bethlehem branch. Israeli police had no record of the bombing, and the prison where Shoebat says he was held "for a few weeks" for inciting anti-Israel demonstrations says it has no record of him being incarcerated there either.

Shoebat says he was never charged because he was a U.S. citizen.

"I was born by an American mother," he said. "The other conspirators in the act ended up in jail. I ended up released."

He said his own family has vouched for his prison time. But relatives CNN spoke to described him as a "regular kid" who left home at 18, eventually becoming a computer programmer in the United States.

Shoebat, now in his 50s, says he converted to Christianity in 1993 and began spreading the word about the dangers of Islam. He has been interviewed as a terrorism expert on several television programs, including a handful of appearances on CNN and its sister network, HLN, in 2006 and 2007.

Since al Qaeda's 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, expertise on terrorism has been in high demand. The federal Department of Homeland Security has spent nearly $40 million on counterterrorism training since 2006. The department doesn't keep track of how much goes to speakers, nor does it advise officials on the speakers hired by states and municipalities.

Shoebat spoke at a 2010 conference in South Dakota and was so well-received that he was invited back for the May event in Rapid City, according to state officials. He warned the police and first responders gathered in the hotel conference rooms that the Lebanese Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah had operatives working in Mexico and that drug cartels were raising money with Islamic groups. He also asserted that federal agents could have prevented the 9/11 attacks by looking for a chafed spot, called "zabibah," that sometimes forms on the foreheads of devout Muslims.

"You need ex-terrorists who can tell you what life is like and what thinking is like of potential terrorists," Shoebat said. "But had we looked at the zabibah only, we would have deflected a suicide action of killing 3,000 Americans."

But Shoebat also told the group there were 17 hijackers when there were 19. And perhaps more surprising from a man who bills himself as a terror expert, Shoebat said the Transportation Security Administration could have stopped them. The TSA wasn't created until after the 9-11 attacks.

Jim Carpenter, South Dakota's homeland security director, said Shoebat brought "a point of view that certainly is not mainstream."

"He brings in commentary about living and being raised as a Muslim and converting over to Christianity -- gives them a different aspect of breaking the mold, so to speak," Carpenter said. But he said Shoebat's appearance was "a small portion" of the two-and-a-half-day conference.

"It's not like we're talking about setting up training and a discipline we would follow, that this is the only way and that's the particular point of view of a Muslim or somebody of the Islamic faith. That's not the case," Carpenter said. "That's his point of view."

Carpenter said there is "no fear of threat" from Islamic terrorism in South Dakota, where the last census reports showed the state's Muslim community made up less than one-half of 1 percent of the population. According to Rapid City's local newspaper, about two dozen Muslims live in the city.

During Shoebat's presentation, he criticized Muslim organizations and told audience members to be leery of Muslim doctors, engineers, students and mosques.

"Now, we aren't saying every single mosque is potential terrorist headquarters. But if you look at certain reports by the Hudson report, 80 percent of mosques they found pamphlets and education on jihad. So they're in the mosque, the mosque in accordance to the Muslim brotherhood is the command post and center."

The conservative Hudson Institute said it never issued such a report and has no idea why its name was invoked.

Shoebat warned that making special accommodations for Muslim beliefs was a step toward establishing Islamic religious law. And he recounted how he wore a T-shirt that read "Profile me" on a trip to the airport and approached the screeners at the security checkpoint.

"I got tapped down, I got checked, I got all these different things," he said. "I say it's wonderful."

Shoebat and business partner Keith Davies run several foundations and three websites that are all linked. Shoebat said the major group, the Forum for Middle East Understanding, includes his own Walid Shoebat Foundation.

In tax records filed by Davies, the Forum for Middle East Understanding reported 2009 earnings from speaking engagements, videos and book sales of more than $560,000. The documents are thin on specifics, and so is Shoebat.

"Basically, we are in information, and we do speaking and we do also helping Christians that are being persecuted in countries like Pakistan, and we help Christians that are suffering all throughout the Middle East," he said. Asked how they do that, he said, "None of your business" -- adding that disclosing details could endanger people he was trying to help in Islamic countries that have laws against blasphemy.

Shoebat's name doesn't appear on any of the paperwork. As for his own salary, he said he makes "probably what a gas station makes or a garage makes."

"Everybody thinks I'm just raking in the dough, which is absolutely incorrect," he said. He referred details to Davies, who offered to provide a copy of the group's tax returns -- but didn't. When asked who served on the foundation's board of advisers, Davies gave "Anderson Cooper 360" the name of a former pilot, who didn't return phone calls. But he could not name the high-ranking military officers he said were on the board.

Federal officials say they don't know exactly how much money has gone to speakers like Shoebat. But in April, the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee raised concerns about "vitriolic diatribes" being delivered by "self-appointed counterterrorism experts" at similar seminars.

Sen. Susan Collins, the committee's Republican chairwoman, and Connecticut Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman asked the department to account for how much federal grant money went to state and local counterterrorism programs and what standards guided those grants. The request followed reports by the liberal Political Research Associates and the Washington Monthly that raised similar questions.

The Homeland Security Department told CNN that it has standards -- and if training programs don't meet them, "corrective action will be taken."

"We have not and will not tolerate training programs -- or any DHS-supported program -- that rely on racial or ethnic profiling," the agency said in a written statement.

Kevin Flower and Enas I. Al-Muthaffar in Jerusalem and Amy Roberts and Max Newfield in Atlanta contributed to this report.

CNN to Air Report on Taxpayer Funded Fake Former Terrorist

By Chris Rodda
opednews.com

Tonight on CNN, Anderson Cooper will be doing "a special investigative report about a self-proclaimed former Islamic terrorist who is making good money from American taxpayers with a story that just doesn't add up."



This self-proclaimed terrorist, Walid Shoebat, was one third of a traveling anti-Muslim sideshow called the "3 ex-Terrorists," and is now a very popular solo act on the Islamophobic fear-mongering speaking circuit. The other two members of Shoebat's trio were Zachariah Anani, and Kamal Saleem.

In between his many tax-payer funded speaking engagements, Shoebat is a popular speaker at events such as Tim LaHaye's Pre-Trib (Pre-Tribulation) Research Center conferences and John Hagee's Christians United for Israel (CUFI) events. Anani is a Lebanese-born Canadian citizen who claims to have killed 223 people while a Muslim terrorist. Saleem, under his real name, Khodor Shami, worked for Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network for sixteen years, was hired by James Dobson's Focus on the Family in 2003, and founded Koome Ministries in 2006 to "expose the true agenda of [Muslims] who would deceive our nation and the free nations of the world."

As the research director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), I first became aware of Shoebat, Anani, and Saleem back in early 2008, when they were invited to speak at the U.S. Air Force Academy's 50th Annual Academy Assembly, on the topic "Dismantling Terrorism: Developing Actionable Solutions for Today's Plague of Violence," for a fee of $13,000.

After demands by the MRFF for equal time to counter the anti-Muslim screed of the Shoebat and his fellow self-proclaimed ex-terrorists turned evangelical Christians, the Air Force Academy eventually allowed MRFF founder and president, and Academy graduate, Mikey Weinstein, MRFF Advisory Board member and Islam expert Reza Aslan, and MRFF Board member and former Ambassador Joe Wilson to speak to (deprogram) the cadets.





As Reza Aslan wrote on Anderson Cooper's blog when all this was going on back in 2008, the claims of the three ex-terrorists about their exploits as Muslim terrorists have long been questioned by academics and terrorism experts who have found a plethora of unlikelihoods and outright impossibilities in their stories. Here are a few highlights:


According to Tom Quiggin, Canada's only court-qualified expert on global jihadism, and a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police intelligence and national security expert, "Mr. Anani's not an individual who rates the slightest degree of credibility, based on the stories that he has told."

Among other things, Quiggin points to Anani's claim of killing hundreds of people after joining his first militant group in Lebanon at age 13. Anani, now forty-nine, would have been 13 in 1970. However, the fighting in Lebanon did not begin in earnest until 1975, and religious-based terrorism was practically unheard of there until after 1979. According to Anani, he left Lebanon for Egypt to attend Al-Azhar University at age 18, three years earlier.

Professor Douglas Howard teaches the history of the modern Middle East at Calvin College in Michigan, where Kamal Saleem spoke last November. He was shocked to hear Saleem claim that a member of his family was the "the Grand Wazir of Islam."

"Wazir is a variation of vizier," Professor Howard explained. "The Grand Vizier was a political role in the Ottoman empire. No Muslim would ever claim that in connection with the role of mufti, which is a scholar of Islamic texts. It's like someone saying they were the governor of Christianity."

Professor Howard described the talk at Calvin College as "a tent meeting revival sermon sponsored by academic organizations."


The Village Voice also reported on the Air Force Academy Assembly, which was co-sponsored by the American Assembly, a policy forum affiliated with Columbia University. Here's what some of the eighteen New York students who attended the Assembly had to say about Shoebat and his fellow ex-terrorists:


[Omar] Khalifah, who is from Jordan, says he was shocked and offended by the proselytizing he saw. "We left our study for one week to try to find solutions, not to listen to a person who is speaking as a preacher, as if he is in a church," Khalifah says. ...

... Khalifah and other New Yorkers say they were initially annoyed at the trio's alarmist rhetoric, including claims that jihadist ideology is being taught in 90 percent of American mosques, and the characterization of Islam as an inherently violent religion. But they were truly offended by Shoebat's announcement that converting Muslims to Christianity was a good way to defeat terrorism.


Columbia law student Ernest Jedrzejewski compares the presentation to a Christian tent revival. "All we needed was a light from above and someone to suddenly get over an incurable illness," he says.

After the speakers left the stage, Khalifah approached Saleem and challenged statements that he considered offensive and inaccurate. Saleem claims that Khalifah went even further, addressing a death threat to him in Arabic: "You are an enemy of Islam and you must die." Police questioned Khalifah but didn't charge him. "All the allegations were proved to be unsubstantiated, and I was free to go," Khalifah says. But it didn't end there.

Once the contentious presentation made national headlines, the self-proclaimed ex-terrorists put out a press release about Khalifah's supposed death threat and the "smear campaign" orchestrated against them by Muslim groups and the "liberal media." The three have also vehemently denied accusations by journalists and Muslim groups that they are "stooges of the Christian right," saying that they were explaining their personal experiences in the jihadist underground, not proselytizing. "We are terrorism experts coming in to talk about terrorism. . . . Christianity worked for us, but that was not the theme of the speech," Shoebat tells the Voice. "It's racist to say a Christian is not allowed to be an expert on terrorism."


The most obvious question, of course, is why, if their stories are true, haven't these three self-proclaimed terrorists, who have been traveling the country for years admitting to numerous killings and other terrorist acts, not been deported or jailed. Well, apparently, even our government's terrorist hunters don't believe these guys. According to a New York Times article about the trio's appearance at the Air Force Academy, "A spokesman for the F.B.I. said there were no warrants for their arrest."

But wait, it gets worse. Shoebat and his ex-terrorist buddies aren't the only anti-Muslim fear-mongerers who have been brought in to speak to the military and various government agencies. There's also Brigitte Gabriel, founder of the ACT! for America and author of B ecause They Hate. In 2007, Gabriel, who has also spoken to other government agencies, delivered a lecture at the Joint Forces Staff College (JFSC) as part of the JFSC's Islam elective for American military and national security personnel.





During the question and answer segment of the lecture, Gabriel made her opinion of Muslims very clear. In answer to the question, "Should we resist Muslims who want to seek political office in this nation?," Gabriel replied:

"Absolutely. If a Muslim who has -- who is -- a practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day -- this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America."


As part of her answer to this same question, Gabriel also asserted that a Muslim's oath of office is meaningless, giving the following reason:

"A Muslim is allowed to lie under any situation to make Islam, or for the benefit of Islam in the long run. A Muslim sworn to office can lay his hand on the Koran and say 'I swear that I'm telling the truth and nothing but the truth,' fully knowing that he is lying because the same Koran that he is swearing on justifies his lying in order to advance the cause of Islam. What is worrisome about that is when we are faced with war and a Muslim political official in office has to make a decision either in the interest of the United States, which is considered infidel according to the teachings of Islam, and our Constitution is uncompatible [sic] with Islam -- not compatible -- that Muslim in office will always have his loyalty to Islam."


Both Shoebat and Gabriel appeared in Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West -- the politically useful anti-Muslim pseudo-documentary distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers a few months before the 2008 election. But even more disturbing than this film being used to scare voters into voting a certain way, Gregory Ross, the film's co-writer and director, stated in an interview that this film was also being used by the U.S. Navy. According to Ross, who is also Communications Director for Clarion Fund, the organization that produced the film and funded the DVD newspaper insert scheme, "I know that the U.S. Department of the Navy uses the film and that it has also been shown on Capitol Hill on many occasions in order to education politicians."

While the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has made much progress with the military, including getting Brigitte Gabriel disinvited from speaking at the Air Force Academy, Islamophobes and frauds like Walid Shoebat continue to regularly speak to other government agencies, as will apparently be exposed on CNN tonight.

ALEC Exposed

Through ALEC, Global Corporations Are Scheming to Rewrite YOUR Rights and Boost THEIR Revenue

Through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that govern your rights. These so-called "model bills" reach into almost every area of American life and often directly benefit huge corporations. Through ALEC, corporations have "a VOICE and a VOTE" on specific changes to the law that are then proposed in your state. DO YOU?

Who Is Behind ALEC?

ALEC Corporations ALEC Politicians ALEC "Scholars" ALEC Boards & Task Forces ALEC Staff More Information ALEC FAQ ALEC Exposed Press Release ALEC Funding ALEC Hotels ALEC Decoded ALEC & NCSL Comparison Common Cause Asks IRS to Audit ALEC  Get the Goods on ALEC ALEC Exposed Audio & Video From The Nation Magazine: ALEC & Democracy ALEC & Education ALEC & Labor ALEC & Health ALEC & Koch From PR Watch: ALEC & Injury Law ALEC & Wisconsin ALEC & Tobacco (NEW!) NEWFrom Ms. Magazine: ALEC & Women and Families From SourceWatch: Press on ALEC Exposed ALEC Quotes  FIND the "Model Bills" HERE Click here for a zip file of Worker and Consumer Rights bills (plus Trade, Pensions, Privatization, Banking, Housing, Property Insurance, Transportation, Telecomm & IT). For more details click here. Click here for a zip file of Tort Reform and Injured Americans bills. For more details click here. Click here for a zip file of Privatizing Schools and Higher Education bills. For more details click here. Click here for a zip file of Health, Big Pharma, and Social Welfare bills. For more details click here. Click here for a zip file of Environment, Energy, and Agriculture bills. For more details click here. Click here for a zip file of Democracy, Voting, and Federal Relations bills. For more details click here. Click here for a zip file of Tax & Budget bills. For more details click here. Click here for a zip file of Guns, Prisons, Crime and Immigration bills. For more details click here.

Quartet reset? International peacemakers seemingly stumped on Middle East

By Laura Rozen
The Envoy
Wed, Jul 13, 2011

For the small clique that comprises the world's most senior statesmen and -women, the Monday night meal hosted by Hillary Clinton to review efforts to get the Israelis and Palestinians back to the peace table might have been expected to follow the usual script: familiar colleagues, familiar talking points, followed by the expected issuing of a joint statement expressing international consensus on the urgent need for resumed negotiations.

Blah blah blah blah.

Or so one might have thought.

But as this week's dinner meeting at the State Department stretched on well past two hours, something extraordinary happened. Or rather, didn't happen. The so-called Middle East Quartet— Clinton, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton—who gathered around the table with Quartet Envoy former British prime minister Tony Blair, could not even agree amongst themselves what to say in a statement. And so they didn't issue one, blaming the "significant gaps" that still exist between the parties. That would be the parties to the conflict, the Israelis and the Palestinians, who weren't even in the room.

So what happened?

Lavrov, speaking at the Russian embassy Tuesday, did little to dispel the perception the meeting was a flop, signaling growing international divisions over how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Adding urgency to the long-vexing issue: Palestinian plans to seek statehood recognition at the UN in September, bypassing negotiations with the Israelis altogether if new talks can't be resumed.

The Quartet meeting wasn't a total loss, Lavrov demurred, when asked about it, adding: "For one, the wine was very good."

But State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland was put through the paces at a press conference Tuesday, as she tried to mitigate journalists' sense that the Quartet peacemaking apparatus is at best stumped—at worst broken, if not entirely bankrupt.

"So, I hope the dinner was good last night because not a lot seems to have come out of" it, one journalist posed to Nuland. "Why could they not agree on a statement?"

The purpose of the meeting "was not necessarily to issue a statement," Nuland responded. "The main purpose of the Quartet was to have the principals, who have all been working on diplomacy with the parties themselves, come together and assess where we are and talk about how each of the principals, all of the envoys working together, can meet our goal of getting the parties back to the table."

After fielding several more passes at variations on the question, Nuland added: "The major effort yesterday was to concert views on how best to encourage the parties back to the table. ... I'm not going to speak to the private diplomacy that went on in that room."

You get the picture.

Former Washington Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller conceded that even he was surprised the Quartet veteran diplomatic pros couldn't muster the bare minimum of a joint statement -- not that he thought one would have amounted to much.

"I think it was just too hard — given the gaps, [and] differences on substance and politics," Miller said by e-mail Wednesday. "Issuing a nothing-burger statement would have been worse frankly; they are very serious these days about avoiding saying or doing things that don't produce."

"Keep in mind, this is never over," he added. "I'm told they are working at lower levels to generate some kind of follow-up."

But diplomats and Mideast analysts have notably not yet definitively explained what the real hold-up was among the international group that is supposed to deliver the parties to the peace table, and U.S. and European officials have been unusually tight-lipped about the specifics.

One report, by Israeli daily Haaretz, said Lavrov refused to agree to a statement that would have called for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state before going into negotiations.

Other analysts suggested that Washington, out of consideration for Israeli sensitivities, refused to have a statement that would have referenced negotiating borders based on Israel's pre 1967 war lines. (This though President Barack Obama himself proposed border negotiations based on '67 lines with mutually agreed swaps in a May 19th speech.) An earlier Israeli news report said that France, which wasn't even directly present at the Quartet meeting, was insisting on a Quartet position that referenced some variation of '67 lines.

And, naturally, Palestinians and Israelis blamed each other for the Quartet coming up empty.

"Israeli officials said Tuesday that the Mideast Quartet refrained from releasing a statement of its conclusions after Monday's meeting due to Palestinian objections," Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharanot reported. "Officials say the Palestinian Authority opposed a Quartet demand to withdraw their plan to declare statehood unilaterally at the UN in September."

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. meantime, "accused the Quartet of succumbing to Israeli 'pressure,'" the Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday. Erekat "said that it was high time that the US administration stopped treating Israel as if it were a state above the law."

Palestinian spokesman Nabil Sha'ath apparently had another theory: He "credited Moscow Wednesday with silencing a statement by the Mideast Quartet after its meeting earlier this week," Yediot reported in a further piece Wednesday. "He praised Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for his support of the Palestinians and called on the Quartet to adopt the same stance."

One might be advised to bring a few bottles of good wine.

About ALEC Exposed

Submitted by Lisa Graves on July 13, 2011 - 8:00am

 

The Center for Media and Democracy has obtained copies of more than 800 model bills approved by corporations through ALEC meetings, after one of the thousands of people with access shared them, and a whistleblower provided a copy to the Center. We have analyzed and marked-up those bills and made them available at ALEC Exposed. This article has been updated.

About ALEC Exposed

An open letter from CMD's Executive Director, Lisa Graves
In April 2011, some of the biggest corporations in the U.S. met behind closed doors in Cincinnati about their wish lists for changing state laws. This exchange was part of a series of corporate meetings nurtured and fueled by the Koch Industries family fortune and other corporate funding.

At an extravagant hotel gilded just before the Great Depression, corporate executives from the tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds, State Farm Insurance, and other corporations were joined by their "task force" co-chairs -- all Republican state legislators -- to approve “model” legislation. They jointly head task forces of what is called the “American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC).

There, as the Center for Media and Democracy has learned, these corporate-politician committees secretly voted on bills to rewrite numerous state laws. According to the documents we have posted to ALEC Exposed, corporations vote as equals with elected politicians on these bills. These task forces target legal rules that reach into almost every area of American life: worker and consumer rights, education, the rights of Americans injured or killed by corporations, taxes, health care, immigration, and the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink.

The Center obtained copies of more than 800 model bills approved by companies through ALEC meetings, after one of the thousands of people with access shared them, and a whistleblower provided a copy to the Center. Those bills, which the Center has analyzed and marked-up, are now available at ALEC Exposed.

The bills that ALEC corporate leaders, companies and politicians voted on this spring now head to a luxury hotel in New Orleans' French Quarter for ALEC’s national retreat on August 3rd. In New Orleans, Koch Industries -- through its chief lobbyist -- and lobbyists of other global companies are slated for a “joint board meeting” with a rookery of Republican legislators who are on ALEC's public board. (ALEC says only the legislators have a final say on all model bills. ALEC has previously said that "The policies are debated and voted on by all members. Public and private members vote separately on policy.") Before the bills are publicly introduced in state legislatures by ALEC politicians or alumni in the governor’s offices, they will be cleansed of any reference to the secret corporate voting or who really wrote them.

With CMD’s publication of the bills, the public can now pierce through some of the subterfuge about ALEC, and see beyond the names of the bills to what the bills really do, alongside the names of corporations that lead or have helped lead ALEC's agenda and accompanied by analysis to help decode the bills.

Many of the bills have obvious financial benefits for corporations but little or no direct benefit to the constituents that a particular legislator was elected to represent. Still, it may be tempting to dismiss ALEC as merely institutionalizing business as usual for lobbyists, except that ALEC’s tax-free donations are linked to it not spending a substantial amount of time on lobbying to change the law. ALEC has publicly claimed its “unparalleled” success in terms of the number of model bills introduced and enacted. But seeing the text of the bills helps reveal the actual language of legal changes ALEC corporations desire, beyond what can be known by the PR in their titles. ALEC says it has created a “unique” partnership between corporations and politicians. And it has.

It is a worrisome marriage of corporations and politicians, which seems to normalize a kind of corruption of the legislative process -- of the democratic process--in a nation of free people where the government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people, not the corporations.

The full sweep of the bills and their implications for America’s future, the corporate voting, and the extent of the corporate subsidy of ALEC's legislation laundering all raise substantial questions. These questions should concern all Americans. They go to the heart of the health of our democracy and the direction of our country. When politicians -- no matter their party -- put corporate profits above the real needs of the people who elected them, something has gone very awry.

As President Teddy Roosevelt observed in response to corporate money corrupting the democratic process a century ago, "The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth . . . . The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being."

--Lisa Graves, Executive Director, Center for Media and Democracy

P.S. ALEC anointed the billionaire Koch Brothers as two of the first few recipients of its “Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award.” Smith argued that self-interest promoted more good in society than those who intend to do good. "Greed is good!" is how Oliver Stone translated this concept to fiction on screen.

On that score, perhaps, the award was apt, except that ALEC apparently ignores Smith’s caution that bills and regulations from business must be viewed with the deepest skepticism. In his book, ''Wealth of Nations,'' Smith urged that any law proposed by businessmen “ought always to be listened to with great precaution . . . It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

One need not look far in the ALEC bills to find reasons to be deeply concerned and skeptical.Take a look for yourself.

How The FBI Entraps US Citizens To Feign Success Against Terror

30 Years in Prison For Saying the Wrong Thing? By Rehanna Jones-Boutaleb, Foreign Policy in Focus
Posted on July 11, 2011,

On August 28, 2008, two childhood friends from Midland, Texas, Bradley Crowder and David McKay, traveled north to join thousands of protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC). In the company of six Austin activists, Crowder and McKay were ready for adventure, and prepared, in Crowder's words, to protest to "change the world." What began as a journey of hope, however, ended in sudden catastrophe. Crowder and McKay's efforts to mark their opposition to the Republican administration and the U.S. involvement in Iraq resulted in multiple charges of domestic terrorism and a high- stakes entrapment defense in federal court. What the "Texas Two" hadn't realized in Minnesota was that their trusted comrade, Brandon Michael Darby - the very activist to whom they had looked for inspiration and guidance - was in fact an FBI informant.

Tracing Crowder and McKay's saga from its very origins, the 2011 documentary Better this World cunningly unveils the intricacies of the two protestors' federal trials, as well as the media sensation they precipitated. The film, which is scheduled to air nationally on PBS's "POV" series, not only provides a nuanced perspective of two alleged cases of domestic terrorism but also cuts to the heart of the "war on terror" and its effect upon civil liberties.

Aiming to go beyond the "nice-kids-turned-domestic- terrorists" narrative propagated by mainstream media sources, film-makers Kelly Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega have turned their attention to the viewpoints of the key players themselves: Crowder, McKay, and Darby. Although both directors are clearly sympathetic toward the convicted Texas youths, they take care to interview multiple FBI agents and prosecutors, providing viewers with conflicting approaches to the trials. The result is a documentary thriller that stands as both a compelling character study and a necessary reminder of the broader themes behind McKay and Crowder's testimony, namely the post-9/11 security apparatus and the use, and abuse, of informants in the government's "war on terror." David v. Goliath

Playing out against the backdrop of the RNC in St. Paul, Minnesota, Better this World opens with visceral footage from the 2008 protests. These recordings, alongside testimonies detailing McKay and Crowder's involvement with Austin's progressive scene, reveal that both youths were not only newcomers to the activist community but also indisputably shocked by what they encountered in St. Paul. There was, in Crowder's words, a "pervasive sense of occupation…it was a war zone…a police state." Indeed, police searched the group's rented white van without a warrant on its arrival in St. Paul and seized their homemade shields constructed for the protests.

Unnerved by this illegal bust and inspired by Darby's militant polemics, Crowder and McKay walked into a Walmart on August 31 and bought provisions to construct Molotov cocktails. Although they proceeded to make eight bottled gasoline bombs, the next morning the two protestors realized, in Mckay's words, that they "didn't know what they were doing." Leaving the Molotovs behind, they joined other protestors in St. Paul only to be arrested soon after for disorderly conduct. Due to lack of identification on his person, Crowder was held in jail.

At this point, the narrative takes its tragic turn. Incensed that Crowder had not been released, McKay foolishly announced to Darby that he was planning to throw his homemade bombs on police cars in a nearby parking lot. His conversation with Darby, held in a moment of hotheadedness, was in fact being transmitted to the FBI through electronic surveillance gear. Although McKay and Darby agreed to meet once more at 2 a.m. to use the Molotovs, McKay decided against this plan and ceased contact with Darby. Nevertheless, several hours later, just before McKay was due to leave for the airport, the FBI arrested him at gunpoint.

When McKay took his case to trial, arguing that he'd walked into an FBI trap, he was facing up to 30 years in federal prison. As his father remarked in a phone conversation prior to his trial, the case was that of "David against Goliath." An entrapment defense had no precedent of success in the United States. Crowder, in contrast, found himself in a more secure position; he had never conversed with Darby on employing firebombs. The prosecution offered him a two-year plea deal for accepting one charge of possession of unregistered firearms. In the belief that this would exempt him from testifying against McKay, Crowder agreed to these terms.

The two friends nonetheless found themselves pitted against each other as their cases played out. As Better this World critically reveals, when McKay's trial resulted in a hung jury, the prosecution crawled back to Crowder, effectively blackmailing him for information on McKay. Although the latter still had a chance to prove entrapment, when he was offered a plea-deal of four years in prison, he accepted, thus allowing Darby and the FBI to wash their hands of the case. Faced with the decision to accept four years in prison, or risk 30 in proceeding with a second trial, McKay backed down.

As Crowder explained in an interview on June 23, he and McKay were simply "pawns in somebody else's game." A paid FBI informant -- once respected for his involvement with Common Ground Relief, the post-Katrina recovery effort -- directly influenced their progression to more radical activism. More importantly, the machinery of the U.S. judicial system constrained and shaped their decisions following arrest. Broader Implications

Crowder and McKay's experience serves as a crucial reminder of broader and more disquieting government trends, such as the tendency to amplify minor offences as cases of "homegrown" domestic terrorism and employ pre-emptive counterterrorism strategies on U.S. soil. "Going on the offense," as former Attorney General John Ashcroft once dubbed it, has worked to push the boundaries of civil privacy to their limit. Since 9/11, Ashcroft and his successor Michael Mukasey have steadily weakened rights protections and relaxed appropriate checks put in place for FBI investigations. In recent years, the Attorney General Guidelines, first promulgated in 1976 to eradicate the forms of investigative abuse that marked the COINTELPRO program, have markedly eroded. As documented in a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Mukasey's 2008 guidelines continue to permit the FBI to authorize intrusive surveillance techniques, such as the dissemination of untrained informants, without any factual predicates to suspected criminal conduct.

The relaxation of criteria required to engage in investigative activity has been a recurrent feature of the post-9/11 world. Mukasey's Guidelines, for instance, allow the FBI to conduct preliminary "assessments" on the activities of individuals or organizations without any prior allegations indicating criminal activity or threats to national security. In these assessment stages that occur prior to preliminary investigations - which themselves can last up to six months! - FBI agents are also permitted to "assess individuals who may have value as human sources," effectively enabling the premeditated recruitment of informants. Crucially, the Guidelines refrain from imposing "supervisory approval requirements in assessments."

Taking advantage of this dearth of checks and balances, the U.S. Department of Justice has heretofore brought charges against just over 400 individuals in "terrorism- related investigations," since 9/11. As noted by David Cole, a professor of law at Georgetown University, this figure is widely regarded as inflated in that it incorporates a vast number of cases that relate to minor offences, such as immigration fraud, rather than actual terrorism. Entrapment and Surveillance

Brandon Darby's recognized collaboration with the FBI also hints of a larger reality: government entrapment. As the FBI's focus, in the counterterrorism context, has steadily shifted to a preventative model, it has increasingly emphasized the use of paid and untrained informants in the "fight against terrorism." In 2009 alone there were the high-profile cases of Maher Husein Smadi, 19, and Michael Finton, 29, both of whom were convicted on charges of domestic terrorism when their crimes were, in no small part, shaped by the work of FBI informants. FBI agents posing as al-Qaeda members frequently approached Smadi, who was arrested for plotting to bomb a downtown Dallas skyscraper. Undercover U.S. agents also provided inert explosives to Finton, convicted of attempting to bomb the Paul Findley Federal Building and the offices of Congressman Aaron Schock in Illinois.

These cases are only two of hundreds that raise questions about the dividing line between covert operations and government entrapment. Have government informants been given too much leeway? In the eyes of James Weddick, one of several FBI veterans interviewed in Galloway's film, the answer is yes: "Before 9/11 it was eyes and ears only. Now it's eyes, ears, and the informant's mouth." In recent years, these surveillance techniques have become ominously extreme.

Indeed, one of the more shocking realities Better this World brings to light is the fact that the FBI was preparing for the 2008 RNC at least two years prior to its opening. In the words of one agent interviewed in the film, authorities treated the RNC as a 100% security threat. To that end, the FBI relied on informants in neighboring jurisdictions to track the activities of allegedly threatening activist groups, such as the RNC Welcoming Committee, which coordinated discussions and preparations for the 2008 protests. McKay and Crowder themselves had actually been on the FBI's radar for more than a year when they travelled to St. Paul. Given the enormous funds spent on RNC security operations, the FBI was under considerable pressure to produce results, to effectively press charges against the alleged terrorists whom they had been tracking.

For those convicted on dubious charges of domestic terrorism, the probability of mounting a successful entrapment defense is slim to nil. According to the Center for Law and Security, from 2001 to 2007, ten defendants charged with "terrorism-related" crimes have formally issued an entrapment defense. None, however, has prevailed. Although Brandon Darby, currently a right-wing political commentator, now refers to Crowder and McKay as "American-hating Americans," the reality is that the two boys' progression to militant activism was undeniably influenced by his words and actions. In an effort to "better this world," a phrase taken from Darby himself, government informants are taking suspects to the edge of the pool and pushing them in.

Rehanna Jones-Boutaleb is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

Once More to Tahrir

On a hot summer day, Egypt's revolution grinds on.

BY MAX STRASSER |JULY 8, 2011 FP

CAIRO — Under a baking hot Egyptian afternoon sun, old women in full face veils mingle with teenage boys in designer jeans. Coptic Christians stand next to conservative Muslims, chanting together that they want freedom. Factory workers from the Nile Delta sit in tents, reading pamphlets passed out by web-savvy activists. The whole country is watching. On a Friday 147 days after Hosni Mubarak resigned from Egypt's presidency, tens of thousands of Egyptians are again taking to downtown Cairo's Tahrir Square to pressure their government to listen to their demands for change. Many are saying they will not leave the square until their demands are met. Meanwhile, other cities around Egypt are seeing similar protests.

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If the scene is reminiscent of last winter's dramatic three-week uprising -- scorching heat aside -- it is not by coincidence. July 8's protest is an extension of the revolution, which many Egyptians believe has not yet been brought to fruition. The feeling has been reinforced in recent weeks by the perception that justice is not being served for dozens of corrupt officials who ran the country and then ordered the killing of protesters during the uprising. "Revolution First," reads a common protest sign in Tahrir.
"They don't care about change," Mohamed Said, a young electrical engineer, said of the military junta that now runs the country, as we stood in one of the square's few shady spots. "They just care about holding the situation together. But if we pressure them, they will respond."
During the 18 days that captured the world's attention, demonstrators around Egypt chanted what is now the iconic slogan of the Arab Spring: "The people demand the removal of the regime."
Five months later, the regime's figurehead is gone and some changes have occurred, but many here believe that the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is happy to keep most of the characteristics of the regime in place, from university presidents with ties to Mubarak's corrupt National Democratic Party to a new foreign minister who was a longtime Mubarak sycophant to continuing censorship of the media.
With everyone from trade unionists to ultraconservative Salafists participating in the protest, a single, unified list of demands is hard to find. In a statementreleased on July 4, the Coalition of Youth of the Revolution, which speaks for some revolutionaries, announced a list of ambitious demands that included economic concerns -- like raising the minimum wage and increasing spending on health care and education -- in addition to demands for political change, like cracking down on corruption and prosecuting police officers who violated human rights. When the Muslim Brotherhood announcedits participation, the group dropped its economic and political demands and focused on reform of the security forces.
That might not be a problem. "I don't think we need to have a particular focus," Alaa Abd El Fattah, a prominent Egyptian bloggerand longtime anti-regime activist, told me. "We are returning back to the slogan about the fall of the regime. Initially, when we toppled Mubarak, we felt that the rest of the job would be easy. Now it is obvious that the regime is regrouping and the SCAF has finally chosen a side," i.e., the regime's.
Euphoria followed Mubarak's resignation on Feb. 11, but since then the pace of change has been slow. In March, the much-despised domestic torture and spying apparatus was officially dissolved, but many of its ranking members kept their jobs -- the institution was simply rebranded under old management. In April, Mubarak's ruling party was disbanded, but many of its cronies maintain their positions in influential institutions and some party members are regrouping and forming new political parties. Mubarak and his sons have been detained for investigation on charges of corruption and killing protesters. The two sons are in jail, but Mubarak is said to be in a hospital in the Sinai resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh. (The ex-president allegedly had a heart attack after the investigation began in April. His defense lawyers claimedlast month that he has cancer.) Many doubt he will ever stand trial.
The past few weeks have seen a surge of frustrations for pro-change Egyptians.
The most worrying issue has been a trend of postponements and acquittals in trials of former regime officials. On June 26, the trial of Habib el-Adly, the former interior minister responsible for the domestic security services and one of the most hated figures in the deposed regime, was postponed until late July. On Tuesday, July 5, a criminal court acquitted two former Mubarak-era ministers on corruption charges. A day later, seven police officers accused of killing protesters in January in the canal city of Suez -- seen in Egypt as the beating heart of the revolution -- were released on bail, prompting violent clashes between the families of murdered protesters and security forces.
"The judgment is slow, and that's not what we need right now," said Mohamed Mohsen, a middle-age employee at an import-export company, attending the protest. "We are in a revolution. A revolution demands speedy judgment and special judgment."
Previous major protests have been preceded by concessions from the SCAF and the government. This time the concession came too little too late. On Thursday evening, just hours before the protests were set to begin and after some had already set up their tents, the interim interior minister announced that later this month there will be a major shake-up at the ministry, with hundreds of police officers to be fired. That's barely a beginning, though. "Reform begins when those who were implicated in torture, murder, and corruption stand serious trials," Fattah, the blogger, said.
The issue of justice for the families of those killed in the uprising, who are widely venerated and considered martyrs, has helped push frustration to the surface. On June 28, amid somewhat confusing circumstances, relatives of the martyrs clashed with the Interior Ministry's security forces. More anti-regime forces arrived for the fight and a downtown battle of projectiles (rocks and glass bottles from the protesters; tear gas and, according to human rights organizations, live fire from the police) lasted for more than 12 hours.
"It's the martyrs that brought people here today," Said, the electrical engineer, told me. "If this were a protest just about the Constitution, it would be very different."
Expectations for Friday were high. "May God protect the youth tomorrow who are fighting for justice for the martyrs," Shaaban Hassan Al Magali, an elderly man who works odd jobs in downtown Cairo, said to me the day before the protests. "This is our country, and there must be justice for those who died for it."
By Thursday afternoon, the small tent city that has been in the square since the clashes on June 28 had doubled in size. Over the past few days the area in and around Tahrir Square had seen an explosion of graffiti that reads "Take to the streets on July 8: The revolution is still on."
But not everyone in Egypt is happy about a continuing revolution. "There are too many protests. Every week they are in Tahrir, and no one even knows why," said Gameel Ali, who runs a small vegetable stand in downtown Cairo not far from the square. Ali says that when there are protests he has no business.
That sentiment is fairly common. Many Egyptians believe that ongoing political uncertainty contributes to the country's current economic hardships, an argument that the state-run media, on which many Egyptians still rely for news, has eagerly promoted. Over the past few days, a previously unknown group calling itself the People's Committee to Defend Egypt has been passing out fliers in subway stations and at busy street corners arguing that protesters against the military are destroying Egypt.
But the protesters don't necessarily need a majority of Egyptians to join them in the street in order to have their message heard by the SCAF and the interim government. According to a poll conducted this spring by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center, only 11 percent of Egyptians participated in the 18-day uprising. But they were still able to topple a president who had been in power for 30 years.
Friday's demonstration suggests that the street can still put pressure on the SCAF. "The Egyptian revolution is now going through a critical moment, a real fork in the road. It can either win and accomplish its goals or (heavens forbid), it can also lose, leaving the old regime to return in a slightly different form," Alaa Al Aswany, a bestselling novelist and respected public intellectual, wrote in a recent op-ed. "Only those who made the revolution can protect it."

Bashir's Choice

The brutal means that the Sudanese president has used to keep his country together have instead blown it apart in the most chaotic way possible.

BY JAMES TRAUB |JULY 8, 2011
FP

South Sudan is being baptized in blood. On Saturday, July 9, when the south formally declares its independence from Sudan, civilians in the disputed border region of Southern Kordofan will be scrambling to survive a sustained campaign of aerial bombardment. A report by an aid worker in the Nuba Mountains of Southern Kordofan described a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" carried out by "troops, artillery, tanks, and machine gun carriers" as well as Antonov bombers. Since Khartoum has blocked the United Nations, NGOs, and the media from the region, it is impossible to know how many civilians have been killed in recent weeks, though aid workers cited in the New York Times put the number at "hundreds." And hundreds more were killed last month in Abyei, another border state.

You might think that Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for carrying out genocide in the western region of Darfur, has decided to violently nullify the January referendum in which the people of the south voted overwhelmingly for independence. But that's almost certainly not the case. A recent report by the International Crisis Group speculates that Bashir has launched the onslaught in order to improve his negotiating position on a range of issues between north and south, including the drawing of borders and the division of oil revenues. This is Bashir's idea of statecraft. As Sudan scholar Gérard Prunier once wrote, the regime's "policy and political philosophy since it came to power in 1989 has kept verging on genocide in its general treatment of the national question in Sudan."

The essential story of Sudan over the last several decades is the story of the regime against the people. This is, of course, a perfectly familiar African story, but what makes Sudan's story distinctive is the way a small, homogenous class of riverine Arabs has used massive and barely controlled violence to maintain control over an immense and vastly diverse country. In Darfur, it has succeeded. In the south, it has failed; and on Saturday's independence day the beleaguered people of the south will explode with euphoria before settling down to face an extremely grim future, for South Sudan will be one of the world's poorest and least-developed countries.

It did not have to be this way, and a remarkable new book of essay and photographs titled We'll Make Our Homes Here: Sudan at the Referendum offers a powerful reminder that that is so. Tim McKulka, a staff photographer for the U.N. Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), took the pictures, compiled and edited the essays, and somehow -- this may be the most impressive part -- persuaded UNMIS itself to publish the book. McKulka's pictures show Sudan in all its topographical and human variety: deserts, mountains, rivers, and the oil-boom capital of Khartoum; nomadic cattle-herders, Arab traders, and Nuer tribesmen with ritual scarification. Sudan is a vast migratory space -- at almost 1 million square miles, the world's 10th-largest country and the largest in Africa -- which tribes have crisscrossed over the centuries, depositing one layer of culture and habits atop another.

The book's 13 essays, most of them intensely personal and all written by Sudanese, are shot through with nostalgia for this densely layered past and for the vanished ethos of tolerance that allowed such varied peoples to live alongside one another. Leila Aboulela, an author and playwright, recalls the cosmopolitan Khartoum of her childhood in the 1960s: "The city was spacious and languid; close-knit and unconventional; a place to be innovative and adventurous." (Afghans who remember the Kabul of that time describe it in much the same language.) Abdalla Adam Khatir, a Darfuri journalist and activist, describes his days as a university student in the 1970s traveling from the Blue Nile to Port Sudan to the massifs of Kordofan. This act of discovery, he writes, "deepened my commitment to the notion of a Sudanese nation."

There may be some glossing over of ugly realities here. The Sudanese have long been pittted against one another as well as against the state: Nuer tribesmen fight Dinka in the south; nomads fight pastoralists along the border. But politics matter, and those who have controlled Sudan have always used some variant of divide-and-rule. As historian Edward Thomas notes in a prefatory essay, 19th-century Ottoman rulers used the south as a source of slaves for the Egyptian army. British administrators later separated the country into ethnic zones in order to preclude the rise of nationalism. When Britain granted Sudan independence in 1956, the Christian south agreed to join with the Islamic north only on the condition that the country adopt a decentralized system; instead, Britain handed off its full colonial powers to a mercantile Arab regime in Khartoum. A campaign to forcibly Islamize the south provoked a civil war that lasted until a 1972 peace treaty. A new military ruler dissolved the south's autonomous government, setting off a new round of fighting in 1983. Two million people died before the two sides signed the 2005 agreement that set the stage for this year's referendum and independence. And as one war was winding down, a new one in Darfur, provoked by the same repressive policies and carried out with the same brutality, was starting up.

I cannot help thinking of India when I read this story. There is an obvious analogy between the bloodshed surrounding the hiving off of south from north and India's Partition, which led to the deaths of perhaps a quarter-million people as Muslims fled north to Pakistan and Hindus south to India. Sudan is suffering through a partition of its own. But there was nothing inevitable about the fratricide either at India's birth or at South Sudan's; both are a consequence of political choices. And in fact what actually strikes me is the contrast between the choices made by the two countries' post-colonial leaders. India's prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, horrified by the violent energies unleashed by Partition, went to enormous lengths to calm anti-Muslim feeling in India and to blunt calls to redraw state borders along linguistic lines. And when violence flared over the linguistic issue in 1955, Nehru gave in, recognizing that India could survive as a diverse country only by granting more regional and cultural autonomy.

Multiethnic states like Sudan are not doomed to failure. India is just one example; Indonesia is another. It all depends on political leadership. Of course, the problem is harder in diverse states ruled by a minority tribe, such as Sudan or Syria. Leaders must either bring others into the circle of power or practice endless repression. Bashir has made the latter choice; so, too, has the Assad family in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad is now discovering the corollary to this choice: As repression provokes resistance, the regime must keep ratcheting up the level of brutality in order to survive.

If you're the president of a country as big as Sudan, you can sustain your rule by letting go of a piece of the country you can no longer successfully repress. But you cannot sustain the idea of the country. John Garang, the southern leader who had signed the 2005 agreement with the Bashir regime and died soon thereafter in a plane crash, had fought for the vision of a single Sudan with a mixed leadership. That sounds almost laughably naive today. Jacob J. Akol, a southern journalist, writes in We'll Make Our Homes Here that while the myth of Sudan is "an Islamic and culturally Arab nation in the heart of Africa," the reality is "a people trying to break away from a forced and unfair unity about which they were never consulted." Nothing but force holds Sudan together.

Leafing through the volume, I was struck by a picture of a giant parabola on Khartoum's skyline -- a new oil company headquarters. That hadn't been there when I visited in 2004. Oil revenue has made Sudan one of Africa's fastest-growing states; the fight over the border regions has much to do with access to that oil wealth. But while it will transform Khartoum's skyline, oil wealth will not solve Sudan's problems: By increasing corruption and further concentrating wealth and power in the center, it will only further alienate the millions who live along the periphery. Bashir has a genius for survival, and he may outlast his enemies; but Sudan, as a country, will fail.

James Traub is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of, most recently, The Freedom Agenda. "Terms of Engagement," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly.