Fall of capitalism, Islamic banking is only option, Orya Maqbool Jan ...

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Egypt’s Top ‘Facebook Revolutionary’ Now Advising Occupy Wall Street ...

One of the key activists behind Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution” is now giving advice to a new group of protesters: the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park — and their offshoots around the country — often cite the mass demonstrations earlier this year in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as their inspiration. So maybe it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Ahmed Maher, one of the leading figures in those Egyptian protests, has been corresponding for weeks with the Occupy Wall Streeters, whom he calls “our brothers.”

Maher is one of the founders of the April 6 Youth, which used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to galvanize Egyptians against President Hosni Mubarak. Recently, however, his attention has turned toward America, where he’s been chatting online with Occupy activists. Those conversations center around practical advice from a successful Egyptian revolutionary. Usually, they occur through Facebook. On Tuesday, for the first time, they happened face to face.

“We talk on the internet about what happened in Egypt, about our structure, about our organization, how to organize a flash mob, how to organize a sit-in,” Maher tells Danger Room, and “how to be non-violent with police.”

That’s the message he brings to D.C.’s McPherson Square, home of the local Occupy offshoot, for an impromptu Tuesday afternoon visit. The denizens of the downtown park flock to an excited Maher when they learn an Egyptian revolutionary is there to support them. “We kept peaceful, because we wanted to attract people to us,” Maher explains. “If we used nonviolence, without killing any soldiers, then the people would help us.”

The Egyptian revolution hasn’t exactly panned out in the way that young democrats like Maher hoped: Cairo’s military has been brutally cracking down on what it sees as enemies of the state. And the Occupy movement is still maddeningly vague about its goals. Nevertheless, to Maher, helping the U.S. protesters is only natural. For one thing, April 6 Youth took its own inspiration from “many revolutions in Eastern Europe and non-violence strategy, from Gandhi and Martin Luther King,” says Maher, who’s in Washington D.C. for a few days thanks to an American University professor.

For another, Egypt’s democracy movement is also a movement for economic justice — one with personal resonance for Maher. “We want to improve the labor laws, the relationship between the owner and employees, because I was fired from my job several times and they were calling for security,” he says. You could almost imagine Maher, a civil engineer, on the We Are The 99 Percent Tumblr.

Maher is a controversial figure within the Egyptian democracy movement, as some consider himdictatorial and polarizing. But he was a pioneer in showing Egyptians that social networks could bepowerful political organization tools. For that, Mubarak’s goons jailed him for three months before this year’s #Jan25 Revolution, and targeted his comrades in April 6 during it.

Now the Occupy activists are essentially paying Maher and his allies forward. On Sunday, the Occupy Wall Street website cheered the movement’s expansion to 1,500 cities around the world with an article headlined, “From Tahrir Square to Times Square.” The movement says it is “inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Italy and the U.K.”

D.C. is no different. When Marc Smith, a 20something manning Occupy D.C.’s tech tent — mostly Dell and Toshiba for Tweeting, Facebooking and running the live feed from the park — learns that Maher is on his way to McPherson Square, his eyes go wide and asks if Maher was the “dude from Google.” Actually, that was Wael Ghonim, the Google exec whom Mubarak detained.

“They’ve got paintings up here of Gandhi and MLK,” Smith says. “Someone should paint [Ghonim]. He did a lot over there.”

One of the biggest pieces of advice Maher says he tells the Occupy groups: Don’t sweat the details. “Stay focused on the main issues,” he says. “For 18 days in Tahrir Square, we were united to take Mubarak down.” For a movement often criticized for incoherent messaging, it may be a resonant piece of advice.

So when Maher arrives in McPherson Square — occupied by about 75 people and nearly as many tents — he asks Metcalf: what’s the “one big idea” that the Occupy movement can rally around? Metcalf says they’re “still searching” for it.

Maher, who started snapping pictures on his phone as soon as he got to the park, has more questions. “Are you guys on Facebook, on Twitter? How are you attracting people?”

That’s more in Metcalf’s comfort zone. “We are tweeting, we are Facebooking,” he tells Maher. “There’s a tech tent over there, and there are reporters everywhere. We’re gonna be here as long as it takes.”

Maher ultimately gives Occupy D.C. the thumbs-up. “It’s very good,” he says, “I feel very happy here.”

Maher is only in Washington until the end of the week. After that, he’s headed for New York — where, he says, he’ll go to Occupy Wall Street, the movement he helped inspire, to show his support.

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The occupy Iran Fast and Furious plot (extended) ...

That Mecca of counter-revolution and hatred for the Arab Spring – also known as the House of Saud – can hardly believe their luck. It’s Christmas in October – as the United States government has just handed it the perfect gift; in the excited words of US Attorney General Eric Holder, “A deadly plot directed by factions of the Iranian government to assassinate a foreign ambassador on US soil with explosives.”

Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to Washington, former head of Saudi intelligence, former great buddy of Osama bin Laden, took no time to tell a conference in London, “The burden of proof and the amount of evidence in the case is overwhelming, and clearly shows official Iranian responsibility for this. This is unacceptable. Somebody in Iran will have to pay the price.”

So “Iran” – the whole country – has already been delivered to the guillotine by the Washington/Riyadh axis, even as the Justice Department’s murky Wag the Dog-style story – Operation Red Coalition (no, you can’t make that stuff up) – requires increasing suspension of disbelief.

Operation Red Coalition centers on one Mansour Arabsiar, a 56-year-old car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas, holding both Iranian and US passports, and an Iran-based co-conspirator, Gholam Shakuri, an alleged member of the Qods force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller insisted the allegedly Iran-masterminded terror plot, in his own words, “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script”. Yet this Fast and Furious spin-off would be hurled at the garbage can in any self-respecting Hollywood script conference.

Faster, muchachos – kill, kill
The US government expects an unsuspecting world to believe that a washed-up car salesman in Texas was tasked by a select intelligence arm of the Iranian government to fish for anyone who looked like a Mexican drug gangster and then order them a US$1.5 million hit on the Saudi ambassador in Washington – in the meantime promising them unfettered access to “tons of opium”.

Yet in the Sealed Amended Complaint against Arabsiar and Shakuri, signed by FBI special agent Robert Woloszyn, there is absolutely nothing specifically stating the involvement of the Iranian government, at the highest or at any level.

According to the US government narrative, Arabsiar was foolish enough to trust an infiltrated Drug Enforcement Agency agent who posed as a member of the Zetas Mexican drug cartel. He told this agent and his buddies he was the nephew of a Tehran high official – and that he was acting on behalf of the highest echelons.

So we are asked to believe that an Iranian general asks a Dumb and Dumber relative in the US to go contract a drug cartel for a political hit – as if US intelligence would never be able to track the whole thing back to him, especially after the matter of $100,000 wired to the US, allegedly from Iran, to a guy convicted of check fraud, as the down payment for the hit.

Beyond any ideological bias, anyone who knows how professional the IRGC and the Qods force can be cannot but dismiss this as utter rubbish – especially as part of a complex international operation involving Iran, its mortal foe the US, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. By the way, Arabsiar “confessed” to all this after 12 days of non-stop interrogation (waterboarding, anyone?)

Then there’s the target. According to the Department of Justice, the target was not the US. Thus attacking a House of Saud ambassador – a “precious” ally – on US soil can only be explained by a death wish exhibited by seriously deranged, suicidal Iranians bent on inviting a US strike, nuclear or otherwise.

To believe that a Mexican drug cartel would invest in a troublesome political hit in the US capital expecting to collect a bundle of opium (from “liberated” Afghanistan) is also a non-starter. But the picture changes if one considers the benefits for the Mujahideen-e-Kalq – the fundamentalist, terrorist organization that wants to bring down the Islamic Republic. Or the possible benefits for a ghostly al-Qaeda in terms of creating a three-way-war involving Washington, Tehran and Riyadh.

There’s also the Israeli false flag option. Apart from the fact that the plot does look like an American Israel Public Affairs Committee wet dream delivered to Holder on a silver plate, the Israel lobby in Washington as well as assorted Zionists would love nothing better than to rally alongside a causus belli established in Washington itself, leading perhaps to a US strike of some sort against Iran without direct Israeli involvement.

According to the official mantra, Americans should always be reminded that Iran is an “existential threat” to the Jewish state. Targeting the Saudi ambassador is perfect in terms of involving the House of Saud in logistical support for such a strike.

Even assuming some sort of rogue Qods force faction with a drug smuggling connection might have been involved in this sloppy would-be operation, there’s also the possibility this could have been construed as retaliation for the recent targeted assassination of senior Iranian nuclear scientists inside Iran. But still that does not explain the choice of a Saudi ambassador on US soil. (See Israel wages war on Iranian scientists Asia Times Online, August 27.)

Cui bono?
Once again; why now? The plot has allegedly been known for months. President Barack Obama was briefed about it in June. King Abdullah was briefed about it in mid-September. So why now? It’s back to the usual suspects.

The neo-conservatives. Factions of the industrial-military complex. Right-wing, bat-V****V crazy Republicans and their media shills. The Israel lobby. The House of Saud – now painted as a “victim” of the “evil” Iranians, when it has in fact been conducting the fierce counter-revolution that has destroyed any possibility of an Arab Spring in the Persian Gulf – the invasion and repression of Bahrain included.

The plot is very handy to divert attention from Saudi Arabia as the beneficiary of a multi-billionaire US weapons sale. And also very handy to divert attention from Holder himself – caught in yet another monstrous scandal, on whether he told lies regarding Operation Fast and Furious (no, you can’t make this stuff up), a federal gun sting through which no less than 1,400 high-powered US weapons ended up, untracked, in the hands of – you guessed it – Mexican drug cartels. Seems like the Fast and the Furious franchise is the entertainment weapon of choice across all levels of the US government.

Washington wants to “unite the world” against Iran (“world” meaning the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO) and is graphically threatening to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council – all over again.

So let’s anxiously wait for a hushed R2P (“responsibility to protect”) resolution ordering NATO to establish a no-fly zone over every House of Saud prince across the world. A resolution which would be interpreted as a NATO mandate to bomb Iran into regime change. Now that’s a script you can believe in.

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The Fast and Furious Plot to Occupy Iran ...

No one ever lost money betting on the dull predictability of the US government. Just asOccupy Wall Street is firing imaginations all across the spectrum – piercing the noxious revolving door between government and casino capitalism – Washington brought us all down to earth, sensationally advertisingan Iranian cum Mexican cartel terror plot straight out of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. The potential victim: Adel al-Jubeir, the ambassador in the US of that lovely counter-revolutionary Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

Fast And Furious: 22 Shocking Facts About The Scandal That Could Bring Down The Obama Administration

FBI Director Robert Mueller insisted the Iran-masterminded terror plot “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script”. It does. And quite a sloppy script at that. Fast and Furious duo Paul Walker/Vin Diesel wouldn’t be caught dead near it.

The good guys in this Washington production are the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In the words of Attorney General Eric Holder, they uncovered “a deadly plot directed by factions of the Iranian government to assassinate a foreign Ambassador on US soil with explosives”.

Holder added that the bombing of the Saudi embassy in Washington was also part of the plan. Subsequent spinning amplified that to planned bombings of the Israeli embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires.

The Justice Department has peddled quite a murky story – Operation Red Coalition (no, you can’t make that stuff up) – centred on one Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old holding both Iranian and US passports and an Iran-based co-conspirator, Gholam Shakuri, an alleged member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) Quds Force.

Arbabsiar allegedly had a series of encounters in Mexico with a DEA mole posing as a Mexican drug cartel heavy weight. The Iranian-American seems to have been convinced that the mole was a member of the hardcore Zetas Mexican cartel, and reportedly bragged he was being “directed by high-ranking members of the Iranian government”, including a cousin who was “a member of the Iranian army but did not wear a uniform”.

On top of it, he told the DEA mole that his Iranian government buddies could come up with “tons of opium” for the Mexican cartel (an Afghan connection, perhaps). Then they discussed a “number of violent missions” complete with Arbabsiar bragging about bombing a packed Washington restaurant used by the Saudi ambassador.

Holder characterised the whole thing as a $1.5m “murder-for-hire” plan. Arbabsiar was arrested only a few days ago, on September 29, at JFK airport in New York. He allegedly confessed, according to the Justice Department. Shakuri for his part is still at large.

Holder was adamant: “The United States is committed to hold Iran accountable for its actions.” Yet he stopped short of stating the plot was approved by the highest levels of the Iranian government. So what next? War? Hold your horses; Washington should first think about asking the Chinese if they’re willing to foot the bill (the answer will be no).

Predictably, the proverbial torrent of US “officials” came out with guns blazing, spinning everything in sight. An alarmed Pentagon will be increasing surveillance over the Quds Force and “Iran’s actions” in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. Former US ambassadors stated that, “it’s an attack on the United States to attack this ambassador”. Washington is about to impose even more sanctions against Iran; and Washington is urgently taking the matter to the UN Security Council.

What next? An R2P (“responsibility to protect”) resolution ordering NATO to protect every House of Saud minion across the world by bombing Iran into regime change?

Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a spokesman for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at least introduced a little bit of common sense. “I think the US government is busy fabricating a new scenario and history has shown both the US government and the CIA have a lot of experience in fabricating these scenarios … I think their goal is to reach the American public. They want to take the public’s mind off the serious domestic problems they’re facing these days and scare them with fabricated problems outside the country.” Iran has not even established yet that these two characters are actually Iranian citizens.

The Iranian government – which prides itself on a logical approach to diplomacy – would have to have been inoculated with a terminal Stuxnet-style foolishness virus to behave in such a counterproductive manner, by targeting a high-profile foreign policy adviser to King Abdullah on American soil. The official Iranian news agency IRNA described the plot as “America’s new propaganda scenario” against Iran.

As for the Washington mantra that “Iran has been insinuating itself into many of the struggles in the Middle East”, that’s undiluted Saudi propaganda. In fact it’s the House of Saud who’s been conducting the fierce counter-revolution that has smashed any possibility of an Arab Spring in the Persian Gulf – from the invasion and repression of Bahrain to the rash pre-emption of protests inside Saudi Arabia’s Shia-dominated eastern provinces.

The whole thing smells like a flimsy pretext for a casus belli. The timing of the announcement couldn’t be more suspicious. White House national security advisor Thomas E. Donilon briefed King Abdullah of the plot no less than two weeks ago, in a three-hour meeting in Riyadh. Meanwhile the US government has been carrying not plots, but targeted assassinations of US citizens, as in the Anwar al-Awlaki case.

So why now? Holder is caught in yet another scandal – on whether he told lies regarding Operation Fast and Furious (no, you can’t make this stuff up), a federal gun sting through which scores of US weapons ended up in the hands of – here they come again – Mexican drug cartels.

So how to bury Fast and Furious, the economic abyss, the 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the increasing allure of Occupy Wall Street – not to mention the Saudi role in smashing the spirit of the Arab Spring? By uncovering a good ol’ al-Qaeda style plot on US soil, on top of it conducted by “evil” Iran. Al-Qaeda and Tehran sharing top billing; not even Cheney and Rumsfeld in their heyday could come up with something like this. Long live GWOT (the global war on terror). And long live the neo-con spirit; remember, real men go to Tehran – and the road starts now.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is named Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

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Bloomberg: Occupy Wall Street Can Stay Indefinitely ...

Jason Andrew for the Wall Street Journal

Demonstrators rest at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday that he’ll allow the Wall Street protesters to stay indefinitely.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday that he’ll allow the Wall Street protesters to stay indefinitely, provided they abide by the law, marking his strongest statement to date on the city’s willingness to let demonstrators occupy a park in Lower Manhattan.

“The bottom line is – people want to express themselves. And as long as they obey the laws, we’ll allow them to,” said Bloomberg as he prepared to march in the Columbus Day Parade on Fifth Avenue. “If they break the laws, then, we’re going to do what we’re supposed to do: enforce the laws.”

Bloomberg said he has “no idea” how much longer the Wall Street demonstration will last. “I think part of it has probably to do with the weather,” he said.

Up til now, the mayor has been cagey when asked how long he’ll allow the protesters to stay, replying: “We’ll see.” His words Monday morning signal a stronger commitment to allowing the demonstration to continue unimpeded by municipal government.

Occupy Wall Street calls itself a resistance movement with participants from myriad backgrounds.

Bloomberg, the city’s 108th mayor, has a long track record as a strong defender of first amendment rights. Last year, he passionately defended plans to build a mosque and cultural center two blocks from the World Trade Center, a controversy that dominated media for months.

“This is the place where you can protest,” Bloomberg said last week, calling New York the “most tolerant, open city in the world.”

“Whether it’s the mosque or anything else, this is a city that values people’s rights and gives them the ability to say what they want to say. I think more so than any other city that I know of around the world,” he said.

The mayor has also defended the NYPD during several incidents with protesters during the past few weeks.

“We will enforce the law,” he said. “The freedom of speech is the freedom to say what you want to say but it is also the freedom to let people have opposing views, and people that don’t want to…say anything to go about their business.”

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Billionaire Tells Occupy Wall Street to Get Off His Lawn ...

Bloomberg News

We present without (much) comment today’s statement from John Paulson, the billionaire hedge fund manager, about the Occupy Wall Street protesters today doing an angry tour of rich guys’ homes, including Paulson, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. (News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.)

“Instead of vilifying our most successful businesses, we should be supporting them and encouraging them to remain in New York City and continue to grow,” Paulson said in a statement.

The “successful businesses” line comes with an asterisk for Paulson. While Paulson scored several of the biggest financial windfalls Wall Street has ever seen, so far this year his two largest hedge funds are down more than 32% and nearly 47%.

UPDATE: Alison Fox for WSJ’s Metropolis reports the Occupy Wall Street protesters have skipped over Paulson’s house. It was a little too far astray from their chosen route, it seems. Oh, and our Metropolis team is having trouble finding anyone in the crowd who has even heard of Paulson. That hurts.

Here is the full statement from the Paulson & Co. hedge fund:

“The top 1% of New Yorkers pay over 40% of all income taxes, providing huge benefits to everyone in our city and state. Paulson & Co. and its employees have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in New York City and New York State taxes in recent years and have created over 100 high paying jobs in New York City since its formation.

New York currently has the highest income taxes of any state in the country and thousands of businesses have fled New York to states with no income taxes such as Florida, Texas and Nevada, or moved offshore.

Instead of vilifying our most successful businesses, we should be supporting them and encouraging them to remain in New York City and continue to grow.”

–Alison Fox and Steve Eder contributed to this post.

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