But the real story is in the detail which the iPod's owner has cheerfully provided here. Apparently, it all started when he went to the bog and dropped his iPod down the loo. The reassuringly expensive machine blocked the pipe. The iPod's owner, who goes by the monika of 'stupid' on the WoW site said that he was not even aware that he had dropped the iPod until a stewardess started to make a bit of a panic about it.

He sheepishly told the stewardesses what had happened, but they had apparently already told the authorities. The pilot came on and told everyone that staff had found a suspicious device in the bog and the plane will be landing at Ottawa.

When he got off the plane he confessed everything to a copper and was frisked from head to toe. Then he was asked why he didn't have a job and what was he doing in Canada. Stupid told them he was on the way to visit a friend he met on World of Warcraft. Then he had to explain the concept of online gaming and 'guilds' to them and how these really were not terror cells. It went downhill from there.

The three bearded men, flanked by guards, wore identical white sweatshirts as they appeared briefly at City of Westminster magistrates court on Wednesday.

Hussain's request for bail was refused, and no bail application was made for Uddin or Gulzar, as the trio were remanded in custody until Monday when they will reappear at the Old Bailey criminal court alongside their co-accused.

Hussain, Gulzar and Uddin are charged with having "conspired with other persons to murder other persons" and acting "with the intention of committing acts of terrorism" by intending "to smuggle the component parts of improvised explosive devices onto aircraft and assemble and detonate them on board," a police statement said Tuesday.

Four others face lesser charges, including withholding information about a possible attack and possession of documents that would be useful to terrorists.

Some 25 people have been arrested in connection with the alleged plot since police carried out pre-dawn raids on August 10. Five have since been released without charge.

Security at British airports was stepped up to unprecedented levels in the aftermath of the police raids, and the national threat level ramped up to "critical" -- the highest of five levels.

The suspects were allegedly planning to smuggle seeming innocuous liquids on to planes with the intention of assembling them into bombs on board. The alleged plot was described by one senior police officer as "an attempt to commit mass murder on an unimaginable scale".

The other eight to appear in court Monday are Ahmed Abdullah Ali, 25, Tanvir Hussain, 25, Umar Islam, 28, Arafat Waheed Khan, 25, Assad Ali Sarwar, 26, Adam Khatib, 19, Ibrahim Savant, 25, Waheed Zaman, 25.

Umair Hussain, 24, was last week charged under anti-terror legislation for failing to disclose information about Nabeel Hussain, his brother.

The remaining three were remanded in custody on Tuesday when they made brief appearances in magistrates court.

Two are charged with withholding information about an impending terrorist attack -- Mehran Hussain, 23, another of Nabeel Hussain's brothers, and Cossar Ali, 24, the wife of Ahmed Abdullah Ali and mother to an eight-month baby.

The third, a 17-year-old youth who cannot be named because he is a minor, was accused of possessing a book about bomb-making, suicide notes and wills, and a map of
Afghanistan with information "likely to be useful" to someone planning an attack. He is due to next appear in court on September 10.

Umair Hussain is due in court on Friday, while Mehran Hussain is due in court on September 19. Cossar Ali will appear on Tuesday.

Khan told his lawyers he believes he's around 78, but doesn't know his exact age. He is at least 71, according to military records obtained by The Associated Press.

With the latest transfers, the military now holds about 445 men on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban, including about 115 who the U.S. has determined are eligible for release or transfer.

To be eligible for release, the U.S. must conclude the detainee no longer poses a threat to the United Sates, has no further intelligence value and does not merit criminal prosecution, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.

Ryan had been scheduled to visit Guantanamo this week to meet with Khan and Khan's adult son - who was captured with Khan and remains in custody - along with other Afghan prisoners represented by his law firm, Dechert LLP.

U.S. forces captured the elderly detainee's son, Hiztullah Nasrat Yar, in a compound with some 700 weapons, including small arms and rockets, according to military records.

Khan and his son told the military panel that the younger man was guarding the weapons for the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The father had said he was arrested while complaining about his son's capture several days later.

The military said both father and son had links to the Taliban - a notion Khan once ridiculed at a military hearing.

"How could I be an enemy combatant if I was not able to stand up?" he asked, according to transcripts released to the AP.

In a nutshell, the wars over state, territory, and politics that defined the Cold War era have given way to cosmic battles between "good" and "evil" - between a West apparently keen to defend secular, democratic values and its twisted opponents who prefer the idea of autocratic Islam.

This simplistic view of the new geopolitical landscape is deeply problematic. It overlooks the key role that the West played in nurturing radical Islamist groups, precisely as a means of isolating and undermining secular movements that were judged by Western governments to be too uppity or dangerous. Over the past 80 years and more - from Egypt to Afghanistan to Palestine - powerful governments in the West and their allies in the Middle East helped to create radical Islamic sects as a bulwark against secular nationalist parties or pan-Arabism. They gave the nod to, and in some instances funded and armed, Islamist movements that might challenge the claims of local anti-colonial, liberationist, or communistic outfits.

In other words, there is a deep and bitter irony in the West's current claims to be standing up to evil religious sects in the name of universal values. It was precisely the West's earlier disregard for secularism and democracy in the Middle East, its elevation of its own powerful interests over the needs and desires of local populations, which helped to give rise to a layer of apparently "evil" radical Islamism. What we have today is not a World War between a principled West and psychotic groups from "over there," but rather the messy residue of decades of Western meddling in the Middle East.

Duplicitous Western support for Islamist movements has a long and dishonorable history. In the early and middle 20th century, both British and U.S. intelligence supported the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the group from which so many of today's radical Islamic sects - including Hamas and even al-Qaeda - have sprung. Indeed, in the 1920s, the British, then the colonial rulers of Egypt, helped to set up the Muslim Brotherhood as a means of keeping Egyptian nationalism and anti-colonialism in check. The immediate precursor to the Muslim Brotherhood was an organization called the Society of Propaganda and Guidance, which was funded and backed by British colonialists. In return, the Society provided Islamist backing to British rule in Egypt. It published a journal called The Lighthouse, which attacked Egyptian nationalists - who wanted British forces out of Egypt - as "atheists and infidels." Under British patronage, the Society set up the Institute of Propaganda and Guidance, which brought Islamists from across the Muslim world to Egypt so they could be trained in political agitation, and then take such anti-anti-colonialism back to their own homelands.

One graduate of the Institute of Propaganda and Guidance was Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. According to Robert Dreyfuss, in his informative book Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, the original Muslim Brotherhood was an "unabashed British intelligence front." The mosque that served as the first headquarters of the Brotherhood - in Ismailia, Egypt - was built by the (British) Suez Canal Company. With Britain's knowledge, and tacit approval, in the 1930s and '40s the Brotherhood both challenged anti-colonial parties within Egypt and also spread to other parts of the Near and Middle East, setting up branches in Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.

Following the coming to power of the anti-colonialist and pan-Arabist Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954, elements in the West continued to look upon the Muslim Brotherhood as a weapon against secular nationalism and communism. The British government of the time encouraged the Brotherhood to challenge Nasser, and in 1954 there was open conflict between the Brotherhood's and Nasser's forces. Many hundreds were killed, and eventually the Brotherhood fled, taking refuge in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other states in the Anglo-American camp. The U.S.-friendly regime in Saudi Arabia, in particular, provided sanctuary and financial backing to Brotherhood members during Nasser's crackdown on the group.

Initially the U.S., in its interventionist policies of the postwar period, adopted the British model of supporting radical Islamists in order to undermine popular secular governments or communist-influenced outfits in the Near and Middle East. This included supporting the Brotherhood against Nasser. In his book Sleeping With the Devil, former CIA officer Robert Baer said there was a "dirty little secret" in Washington in the early 1950s:

"The White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret weapon against - what else? - communism. The covert action started in the 1950s with the Dulles brothers - Allen at the CIA and John Foster at the State Department - when they approved Saudi Arabia's funding of Egypt's Brothers against Nasser. As far as Washington was concerned, Nasser was a communist."

Baer said that the "logic of the Cold War" meant that the U.S. was willing to support radical Islamists even if they carried out activities such as assassinations or political agitation designed to foment conflict. As Baer argues, "If Allah agreed to fight on our side, fine. If Allah decided that political assassination was permissible, that was fine too, as long as no one talked about it in polite company." (There was, of course, a subsequent divergence between British and American policy on Nasser. During the Suez crisis of 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower put a stop to the British-French-Israeli invasion of Suez and backed Nasser's regime, temporarily at least.)

The Muslim Brotherhood and its various branches across the Middle East - which shared the aim of replacing secular democracy with Islamic government - also gave rise to violent splinter groups. Hamas, which today is discussed by Bush and his supporters as a great danger to peace in Israel-Palestine, if not the entire world, is a local wing of the Brotherhood, formed in the mid-1980s from various Brotherhood-affiliated charities that had gained a foothold in Palestinian territories. Al-Qaeda itself has been influenced primarily by the thinking of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), a radical member of the Brotherhood. Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, was first radicalized by the Muslim Brotherhood; he joined the group when he was 14 years old, before moving on to the more radical Islamic Jihad group in 1979 and subsequently fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Indeed, during the Afghan-Soviet war from 1979 to 1992, American and British intelligence once again supported radical Islamists against, in this instance, secularist and communist forces. Where the Cold War began with America and Britain supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamists against popular secular movements, it ended with America and Britain arming, financing, and propagandizing on behalf of radical Islamists fighting the Soviet Union's last stand in Afghanistan before its collapse in the early 1990s.

Throughout the 1980s, the CIA and the British intelligence organization MI5 arranged for the arming and training of thousands of mujahedeen in Afghanistan. American and British elements, together with Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, ensured that the mujahedeen had everything they needed to wage war against the Soviets. As Phil Gasper has argued,

"The CIA became the grand coordinator: purchasing or arranging the manufacture of Soviet-style weapons from Egypt, China, Poland, Israel, and elsewhere, or supplying their own; arranging for military training by Americans, Egyptians, Chinese and Iranians; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia, which gave many hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year, totaling probably more than a billion; pressuring and bribing Pakistan - with whom recent American relations had been very poor - to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary; putting the Pakistan Director of Military Operations, Brigadier Mian Mohammad Afzal, onto the CIA payroll to ensure Pakistani cooperation."

Two beneficiaries of such widespread American support for the mujahedeen's war against the Soviets were bin Laden and Zawahiri, currently al-Qaeda's number 1 and number 2. Both traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1980s to assist with the anti-Soviet war effort. It should be noted that America and Britain did not only fund and arm the mujahedeen; they also provided backing to mosques, madrassa schools, and propagandistic publications and radio stations that put the case for political Islam over communism or secularism. Indeed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - who would go on to devise the 9/11 attacks - was involved in a madrassa school that was funded by Saudi and U.S. money. Once again, Western forces were not only opportunistically supporting their enemy's enemy - they were also fueling the idea that radical Islamism was preferable to "evil" communism and even to secular government.

We could argue that al-Qaeda, both intellectually and practically, is a product of Western meddling in Middle Eastern affairs. It takes its inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood, that group supported by both American and British intelligence in the early and middle 20th century, and it was forged in the heat of the Afghan-Soviet war, that conflict largely facilitated by U.S., British, and Saudi funds and arms. In terms of both its political origins and its early and formative fighting experiences, al-Qaeda owes a great deal to Western interventionism.

Even Hamas is, in some ways, the product of a desire by the West and its allies to use radical Islamism as a counterweight to popular secular movements. It was formed, in 1987, from various charities with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. These charities had been allowed by Israel itself to gain strength and influence in Palestinian territories in order to, as one account puts it, "counter the influence of the secular Palestinian resistance movements." Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, who was killed by an Israeli air strike in 2004, formed the military outfit in 1987 as the armed wing of his group the Islamic Association. This organization had been licensed by Israel 10 years earlier, in the 1970s. In that period, Israeli officials gave the nod to, and even indirectly funded, the setting-up of Islamic societies in the West Bank and Gaza that might weaken and isolate Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. Martha Kessler, a senior analyst for the CIA, has said: "[W]e saw Israel cultivate Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism." The very Islamic groups "cultivated" by Israel in the 1970s went on to become Hamas in the 1980s.

In funding Islamists against secularists, Israel was following in a long tradition started by the British and Americans. As one former senior CIA official has put it, Israel's tolerance, even support, of Islamic groups that would later become Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative." There is no evidence that Israel ever supported Hezbollah, but their interests have coincided over the past two decades or more, since the founding of Hezbollah in Lebanon by Iranian elements in 1982.

As Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, has argued, "Hezbollah represented a militant, non-secular alternative to [Arafat's] Nassertie Fatah, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other groups that took their bearing from Pan-Arabism rather than Islam.... [Hezbollah] made a powerful claim that the Palestinian movement had no future while it remained fundamentally secular." Israel and Hezbollah are, of course, arch-rivals; Hezbollah was formed with the explicit aim of expelling Israel from Lebanon by any means necessary. However, in the early 1980s both Israel and Hezbollah had a shared aim of weakening the more powerful and popular secularist Palestinian movements.

Over the past 80 years, Western governments and their allies have supported radical Islamist groups. However, this was not merely opportunism, a bad case of "my enemy's enemy is my friend." As part of this process, Western governments seriously denigrated popular secular and democratic movements. Indeed, from the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s to Israel's role in the forging of Hamas in the 1980s, the explicit aim of Western support for radical Islamism was to isolate, weaken, and ultimately destroy popular political movements that very often were based on Western ideas of democracy and progress. Thus, many of these radical Islamist groups - the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah - have a built-in suspicion of and hostility toward secular democracy.

What we are faced with today is not a new World War being waged by any kind of powerful Islamist conspiracy. Instead, as secular and nationalist politics has fallen apart in the post-Cold War period, we are left with fairly small, radical Islamist sects - in other words, with those very groups that were forged as a bulwark against secular democratic politics in the first place.

Brendan O'Neill, is the deputy editor of spiked, the online magazine with the modest ambition of making history as well as reporting it. Visit his blog http://www.brendanoneill.net/

This ugly term was probably first coined in Israel - as was the other hugely successful propaganda term, "terrorism" - to dehumanize and demonize opponents and deny them any rational political motivation, hence removing any need to deal with their grievances and demands.

As the brilliant humanist Sir Peter Ustinov so succinctly put it, "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."

Both the terms "terrorism" and "fascist" have been so abused and overused that they have lost any original meaning. The best modern definition I've read of fascism comes in former Colombia University Professor Robert Paxton's superb 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism.

Paxton defines fascism's essence, which he aptly terms its "emotional lava" as: 1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one's group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign "contamination."

Fascism demands a succession of wars, foreign conquests, and national threats to keep the nation in a state of fear, anxiety and patriotic hypertension. Those who disagree are branded ideological traitors. All successful fascists regimes, Paxton points out, allied themselves to traditional conservative parties, and to the military-industrial complex.

Highly conservative and militaristic regimes are not necessarily fascist, says Paxton. True fascism requires relentless aggression abroad and a semi-religious adoration of the regime at home.

None of the many Muslim groups opposing US-British control of the Mideast fit Paxton's definitive analysis. The only truly fascist group ever to emerge in the Mideast was Lebanon's Maronite Christian Phalange Party in the 1930's which, ironically, became an ally of Israel's rightwing in the 1980's.

It is grotesque watching the Bush Administration and Tony Blair maintain the ludicrous pretense they are re-fighting World War II. The only similarity between that era and today is the cultivation of fear, war fever and racist-religious hate by US neoconservatives and America's religious far right, which is now boiling with hatred for anything Muslim.

Under the guise of fighting a "third world war" against "Islamic fascism," America's far right is infecting its own nation with the harbingers of WWII totalitarianism.

In the western world, hatred of Muslims has become a key ideological hallmark of rightwing parties. We see this overtly in the United States, France, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Poland, and, most lately, Canada, and more subtly expressed in Britain and Belgium. The huge uproar over blatantly anti-Muslim cartoons published in Denmark laid bare the seething Islamophobia spreading through western society.

There is nothing in any part of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society, with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial state fascism.

The Muslim World is replete with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the standard definition of fascism. Most, in fact, are America's allies.

Nor do underground Islamic militant groups ("terrorists" in western terminology). They are either focused on liberating land from foreign occupation, overthrowing "un-Islamic" regimes, driving western influence from their region, or imposing theocracy based on early Islamic democracy.

Claims by fevered neoconservatives that Muslim radicals plan to somehow impose a worldwide Islamic caliphate are lurid fantasies worthy of Dr. Fu Manchu and yet another example of the big lie technique that worked so well over Iraq.

As Prof. Andrew Bosworth notes in an incisive essay on so-called Islamic fascism, "Islamic fundamentalism is a transnational movement inherently opposed to the pseudo-nationalism necessary for fascism."

However, there are plenty of modern fascists. But to find them, you have to go to North America and Europe. These neo-fascists advocate "preemptive attacks against all potential enemies," grabbing other nation's resources, overthrowing uncooperative governments, military dominance of the world, hatred of Semites (Muslims in this case), adherence to biblical prophecies, hatred of all who fail to agree, intensified police controls, and curtailment of "liberal" political rights.

They revel in flag-waving, patriotic melodrama, demonstrations of military power, and use the mantle of patriotism to feather the nests of the military-industrial complex, colluding legislators and lobbyists. They urge war to the death, fought, of course, by other people's children. They have turned important sectors of the media into propaganda organs and brought the Pentagon largely under their control.

Now, the neoconservatives are busy whipping up war against Syria and Iran to keep themselves in power and maintain the political dynamics of this 21st century revival of fascism.

The real modern fascists are not in the Muslim World, but Washington. The neocons screaming fascist the loudest, are the true fascists themselves. It's a pity that communist and leftist propaganda so debased the term "neo-fascist" that it has become almost meaningless. Because that is what we should be calling the so-called neocons, for that is what they really are.

On the left, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. specifically indicts the Bush administration for fascistic behavior in his book "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy."

Genuine American fascists are on the run, and part of their survival strategy is to redefine the term "fascism" so it can't be applied to them any more. Most recently, George W. Bush said: "This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation."

In fact, the Islamic fundamentalists who apparently perpetrated 9/11 and other crimes in Spain and the United Kingdom are advocating a fundamentalist theocracy, not fascism.

But theocracy - the merging of religion and government - is also on the plate for the new American fascists (just as it was for Hitler, who based the Nazi death cult on a "new Christianity" that would bring "a thousand years of peace"), so they don't want to use that term, either.

While the Republicans promote the term "Islamo-fascism," the rest of the world is pushing back, as the BBC noted in an article by Richard Allen Greene ("Bush's Language Angers US Muslims" - 12 August 2006):

"Security expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies agreed that the term [Islamic fascists] was meaningless.

"'There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term,' he said. 'This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one's opponent, but it doesn't tell us anything about the content of their beliefs.'"

Their beliefs are, quite simply, that governments of the world should be subservient to religion, a view shared by a small but significant part of today's Republican party. But that is not fascism - the fascists in the US want to exploit the fundamentalist theocrats to achieve their own fascistic goals.

Vice President of the United States Henry Wallace was the first to clearly and accurately point out who the real American fascists are, and what they're up to.

In early 1944 the New York Times asked Vice President Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

Vice President Wallace's answers to those questions were published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan:

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

In this, Vice President Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." (The US dictionary definition has gotten somewhat squishier since then, as all the larger dictionary companies have been bought up by multinational corporations.)

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like John Boehner and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out his concern about the same happening here in America in his 1944 Times article:

" If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."

Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. The real problem would come, he believed, when the media was concentrated in only a few hands:

"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."

Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggested that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."

In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated "conservative" radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President. As Lewis noted in his novel:

"The President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."

Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote in The New York Times:

"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."

Thus, the rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, giant corporate behemoths wipe out small and middle sized businesses, and a corporate iron fist is seizing control of our government itself. As I detail in my new book "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against The Middle Class," the primary beneficiaries of this new fascism are the corporatists, while the once-outspoken middle class of the 1950s-1980s is systematically being replaced by a silent serf-class of the working poor.

As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."

But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.

In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays or Muslims, Wallace continued:

" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.

"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."

This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).

As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia:

"...Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."

But, he thundered in that speech:

"Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"

In 2006, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism," and "the free market" in a "flat" world. The RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said:

"In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."

President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full circle. Thus it's now critical that we reclaim the word "fascist" to describe current-day Republican policies, support progressive websites that spread the good word, and join together this November at the ballot box to stop fascist election fraud and this most recent incarnation of Republican-fascism from seizing complete and irretrievable control of our nation.

Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried on the Air America Radio network and

Sirius. www.thomhartmann.com

Mr. Bush, who has dubbed himself the "war president," has made a pathetic and absurd effort to picture himself as Winston Churchill facing off against evil. He is no Churchill. Most of the enemies he imagines, he has created himself.

The West faces no threat from Islam. Islam is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, but it really is a religion of peace. More importantly, it is a religion that concentrates on individual salvation. There is no Muslim pope, no College of Cardinals, no bishops, no priesthood. Any five Muslims anywhere in the world can start their own mosque. Imams are teachers and, like Protestant preachers or Jewish rabbis, can be fired by their congregation. The Shi'ite version is slightly more organized.

A fatwa is a statement issued by an imam, usually explanatory. It is similar to statements issued by the pope, with this important difference: No Muslim is bound by any fatwa. Muslims are free to pay attention to it or to ignore it.

Islam, like Christianity, is a universal religion that ignores nationality, race or color. To become a Muslim, one must profess belief in one God, acknowledge Muhammad as his prophet, recognize the Quran as the word of God, pray five times a day, provide for the poor and, if possible, make a trip to Mecca once in your lifetime. The God Muslims worship is the same God Christians and Jews worship.

To dispose of some of the slanderous misstatements being floated about, Islam forbids forced conversions. People would do well to read some history rather than rely on ignorant and malicious radio and TV talk-show hosts. The oldest Christian communities in the world are all in Muslim countries. There have always been Christian and Jewish communities in the Muslim world. Muslims are commanded to treat Christians and Jews as they would treat themselves. They revere Jesus as a prophet and highly respect the Virgin Mary. The disputes you see in the modern Middle East are not religious; they are all about secular matters, principally Israeli occupation of Arab lands.

The Arabs see Israel as the last European colonialist state imposed on them by the European powers. That's true, in fact.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad are concerned only with ending Israeli occupation of Palestine. Hezbollah is concerned with ending Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Al-Qaeda wants to overthrow the Persian Gulf governments and is at war with us because we are the principal backers and supporters of those governments. Al-Qaeda alone is most un-Islamic and has been so labeled by a majority of Muslims. It is a small group.

If you wish to understand Islam, turn off your TV and go to the library. Introduce yourself to some of America's 6 million Muslims. You'll find them to be very decent and patriotic people. There are some fanatics among Muslims, just as there are among Jews and Christians. Most of the New England states were originally populated by people fleeing Puritan rule in Massachusetts.

The way to combat the fanatics is to extend the hand of friendship to ordinary Muslims and to protest the slander and libel of Muslims and Islam, just as you should protest the slander and libel of Jews and other groups. Bigotry should have no place in our public dialogue, regardless of the target.

It's obvious that President Bush will never understand the world into which he was born, but most Americans have more open minds - except, of course, those who prefer to click their heels and salute when their Fuehrer of choice speaks.

A controlled people have no will of their own. They believe what they are told, and they do what their government tells them to do. They have little intellectual curiosity about the world and rarely, if ever, question authority, much less challenge it. They have little or no knowledge of their nation's history, and are a frightened and timid people that have no conception of reality. None are more effectively enslaved than those who think they are free. Americans are slaves to a corrupt system that preys upon them and tells them how well they are treated.

As America's fifty-first state-Zionist Israel influences American foreign policy nearly as much as the corporations that run the government. On Capital Hill the Zionist lobby rivals the power of even the wealthiest corporations. The Pentagon, in particular, is heavily influenced by Zionists, and chief among them are Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Michael Rubin. The combination of Zionism and corporate Plutocracy is a particularly deadly and violent one; a perfect storm that has gathered over the Middle East and rained corpses upon the land in a cyclone of savage violence without end.

The evidence visibly demonstrates that both the American and Israeli governments are savage terrorist states. I make a clear distinction between the people and their respective governments; although the people must bear some of the responsibility for what their governments do. Recent reports from Amnesty International make clear that both nations deliberately target civilians and civilian infrastructure-including roads and bridges, water sanitation facilities, electrical generating stations, ambulances transporting the wounded to hospitals, rescue workers recovering the dead, and even women and children seeking refuge in bomb shelters. Other humanitarian NGOs have uncovered similar findings.

Not only are such events an abomination, they are acts of extreme cowardice; the work of madmen intoxicated by transitory power in pursuit of private wealth.

The Israeli and American governments have little regard for life, or human freedoms. Both thoroughly propagandize their own people and call themselves democracies. They are known to kidnap, imprison, torture, and assassinate their foes without due process. Both possess nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the world many times over. The world surely remembers that America is the only nation to hold human life in such low regard as to actually deploy the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even with Japan's eminent surrender at hand.

These governments are guilty of the same war crimes that the Nazi leadership was executed for after World War Two. They have histories of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The blood of innocent people runs warm on their hands, and they continually thirst for more.

It is clear that neither America nor Israel is interested in a negotiated peace in the Middle East. Both governments intend to force capitalism upon the region by systematically invading and occupying the Arab states. Their stated intent is to denationalize the immense natural wealth of the region, and turn it over to private corporations; to force the Islamic Arab states to join the World Trade Organization, and to accept capitalism as the new religious order. Some kind of Middle East Free Trade Agreement will likely be brokered at gun point, and the corporate fire sale will commence. Similar plans exist for other parts of the world.

Forget what the talking heads on the television tell you, and ignore the idiocy spewed forth by conservative talk show hosts; America's Middle East policy has nothing to do with threats stemming from the development of nuclear arsenals, or imaginary terrorist plots to maim and kill, as reported in the corporate media. Such claims are useful propaganda, shameless promotions created to deceive a gullible people into believing there is an eminent threat to their freedoms that must be dealt with militarily. None of it is true.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was foretold in a document titled, "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century." This paper was authored some six years ago by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and a host of neocon luminaries who are always clamoring for war. It provides the blue print for what is to come, but it is conveniently ignored by the corporate media.

If the neocons and their Zionist allies succeed, Iran will also be invaded and occupied, followed by Lebanon and Syria. Other states will follow, insuring that America and Israel remain in a state of perpetual war for the next hundred years. Preemptive strikes are the modus operandi. The plan calls for permanent military bases throughout the region, and the U.S. is already constructing fourteen permanent bases in Iraq. America has no intentions of leaving until the last drop of oil runs dry, and Iraq's natural wealth has been privatized.

The larger purpose of the American-Israeli Middle East policy is to force capitalism onto the region. If they are successful, the occupied territories will fall under virtual martial law, and virtual U.S-Israeli rule. The dollar will become the currency, and every Arab state will be forced to join the WTO, and to comply with its laws. Membership in the WTO effectively renders a nation's Constitution and its laws null and void. WTO membership is a key element in the new world order envisioned by the world's wealthiest people.

The independent Arab states will be coerced into accepting loans from the IMF and the World Bank. A key feature of these loans is that they require the state to open its borders to private ownership and foreign investors (privatization). That is what occurred in Iraq when the Bremer orders were issued. A puppet government is installed to lend the appearance of legitimacy to the process. Some kind of Middle East Free Trade Agreement will likely be brokered at gun point; the inhabitants will eventually lose their cultural identity and become westernized. Imagine downtown Baghdad with a McDonalds at every corner, and Wal-Mart Super Centers all around.

This is the New World Order envisioned by George Herbert Walker Bush-corporate governance by the world's wealthiest individuals. For everyone else it will be a world-sized gulag with all the accoutrements of a concentration camp.

Western capitalists break into a cold sweat when they think about the money to be made. They see private wealth in the form of the Middle East's immense oil reserves, cheap exploitable labor, and the millions of new consumers that capitalism demands.

Any nation that resists corporate globalization will be labeled 'terrorist states,' and subjected to military invasion. The imperial invaders will declare that these states are developing nuclear weapons and present an eminent threat to the U.S and its allies. The corporate media will report that we are bringing democracy to the Middle East. All of this should sound hauntingly familiar.

Once the groundwork is laid, the invasion of Dick Cheney's Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, and all of the corporations that are plundering Iraq can begin in earnest. Some 150 American corporations are already reaping billions in stolen Iraqi wealth. That is just the beginning.

The masters of war are promoting their agenda of corporate globalization by equating the resistance to free trade with terrorism. As all things Bush, this is just marketing hype and brazen lies-pure propaganda. By linking resistance to free trade to terrorism in the public mind, the perpetrators expect to market future wars and more occupations to the people who will be required to carry them out.

Speaking truth in America is becoming tantamount to an act of sedition, or terror. We already know what happens to terrorists in Bush World.

Acting as America's fifty-first state, Israel's elite will also reap the economic spoils of war, and expand its power throughout the region. She will then be in position to police the territory, and to put down insurrections with weapons made in the USA.

Much of the world already knows that democracy and capitalism are an oxymoron. As we can see (if we are willing to look), capitalism and free trade oppresses human freedoms, rather than foster them. Do the people of Iraq feel liberated? Their country is being divvied out to corporate predators, while America holds a gun to their heads. When will we remove our blinders and see with clear eyes? Every atrocity that America and her allies accuse their enemies of committing, they have themselves committed. Will we ever remove our blinders and see with clear eyes?

There will never be peace as long as capitalism thrives and men without souls occupy human flesh. Nations will be carpet bombed, and millions of innocent people will suffer and die horribly. The corporate CEOs and their share holders view this as a small price for others to pay, so long as they profit.

In an article published in The New Yorker this week, Seymour Hersch exposed the Pentagon's covert plot to invade Iran. The corporatocracy considers Iran as the crown jewel of the Middle East. What the Plutocrats did not count on, however, was the fierce resistance the occupying forces have encountered in Iraq, where nothing has gone according to plan. Beyond the green zone there is no part of the country that is safe. The world's most powerful military cannot defeat the building guerilla resistance that continues to grow and intensify. In Lebanon, the world's second strongest military was unable to defeat Hezbollah and its antiquated weaponry.

While these are viewed as ominous signs for the New World Order, they are an indication that there may be justice in this world after all. The fierce resistance to occupation by the Palestinians on the West and Bank and the Gaza Strip, the spirited defiance to occupation in Iraq, and the repulsion of the Israeli military from Lebanon are cause for hope. They are victories for the people against their oppressors. Apart from the aggressors, the world recognizes the right of all peoples to resist foreign occupation and to determine their own fate. It is a moral duty. There is hope in resistance. Someone once said, "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."

In their unfathomable hubris, both the Israeli and the American governments have seriously underestimated the spiritual strength and determination of the freedom fighters resisting corporate globalization. They will never stop fighting until the occupiers have been driven out, as occupying armies always are. The invaders can kill the majority of the population with their sophisticated weaponry, but those who remain will expel them, as the Vietnamese expelled the U.S. from Viet Nam. History has taught us these lessons again and again, but we Americans do not know history; nor do we want to know it.

Sources:

The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time, Antonia Juhasz, May 2006

Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, Dick Cheney and others.

National Security Strategy of the USA, Dick Cheney and others, September, 2002.

Dick Cheney's Song of America, David Armstrong

A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, Richard Perle and others, 1996

Watching Lebanon, Seymour Hersch, New Yorker, August 21, 2006

Mad Dog on a Leash, Sheila Samples, Dissident Voice, August 15, 2006

Democracy Now!, Pacifica Radio Network, various dates

Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free lance writer residing in the hinterland of West Virginia. He welcomes civil comments at csullivan@phreego.com.

"Carter, who has every reason to be angry about the way in which the Iranian revolution undid his presidency over the hostage affair, is willing to meet, with no hesitation, a person who was president of the Islamic republic and who never disavowed Ayatollah Khomeni's actions when he was supreme leader," William Quandt, a national security official in charge of the Middle East during the Carter administration was quoted as saying.

The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday that it had issued a visa to Khatami to visit Washington.

There will be no restrictions on Khatami's travel in the United States, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said, adding, "This is an opportunity in part for former President Khatami to hear the concerns of the American people."

Khatami, who served as Iranian president from 1997 to 2005, was described as a reformer in Iran's political arena. He is scheduled to speak at Washington National Cathedral on Sept 7.

Khatami's schedule may also include speeches at the University of Virginia and to an Islamic group in Chicago. He may pay a private visit to Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello, according to sources familiar with his trip. He will begin his visit in New York at a U.N. conference on the dialogue of civilizations.

"Mr Khatami is free to meet with who he chooses and is able to speak freely in the United States," a White House official said on condition of anonymity.

Khatami's visit comes amid high tensions between Washington and Tehran over Iran's suspected program to develop nuclear weapons and its alleged support for Hezbollah guerrillas.