The chief U.S. military spokesman said on Thursday that 'Al Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi' has shifted tactics, focusing his suicide bombers on Iraqi forces and civilians instead of American troops:

"What we are seeing him do now is shift his target from the coalition forces to Iraqi civilians and Iraqi security forces," Major General Rick Lynch told a news conference.

So get this, "al-Zarqawi" (who is actually dead), faced with the changing dynamics on the Iraqi battle field, has now shifted his tactics and decided that the best way to attack and defeat American forces (you know the actual enemy) and force them out of Iraq is to attack Iraqi civilians!! WOW! That guy is amazing! How DOES he come up with such fantastic strategies? Where else but in the mind of the evil genius "al-Zarqawi" (who is dead) would we come across such a devilish yet brilliant plan?

Only now do we understand why so many great military leaders throughout history failed to realise their full potential and ultimately suffered defeat. If only they had thought a little longer, obsessed a little harder, they too might have hit upon such the ingenious plan of al-Zarqawi. Let it be recorded in the annals of military history:

"The only true way to defeat your enemy is to attack your own grass-roots support base. Indeed, the time may come when in order to entirely finish off your foe, the true great military leader may be forced to attack and kill himself."

But in truth, al-Zarqawi cannot take all the credit for this new and fool-proof strategy, because in the same report we are told that.#

"U.S. military intelligence sources in Iraq said recently that it appeared that international al Qaeda leaders may have prevailed on Zarqawi to limit attacks on Shi'ite civilians on the grounds this was counter-productive."

To which we can only respond: "No S**t Sherlock"

But we jest, of course, but not with good reason. It is shocking to read such tripe, if only because it suggests that our leaders think us so stupid as to believe it. That is not to say that someone is not attacking Iraqi civilians - they are dying by the dozen by the day - but to suggest that any Islamic militant group would attack Iraqi Muslims in an attempt to defeat American troops is so patently ridiculous as to preclude any serious comment on it (hence the above).

The real perpetrators of the massacres currently taking place in Iraq are the infamous "security contractors" and other 'private armies' paid for by the states of Israel, America and Britain. It is these states that have anything to gain from the outbreak of sectarian violence in Iraq.
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From Princess Pushy to Posh Spice, from Sophie Wessex to Sven-Goran Eriksson and Cherie's confidante, Carole Caplin, the News of the World's "fake sheikh", Mazher Mahmood, whose picture I shall shortly unveil, has gulled the greedy and the gaffe-prone. But he couldn't "get Galloway".

Thanks to my well-honed sense of smell for rats, and with the assistance of my clever comrade Kevin Ovenden and others too well placed to name, I attended London's salubrious Dorchester hotel with a heightened sense of suspicion. In my experience, few wealthy men come looking for a good cause to support. Yet the "wealthy men" described here were running after me faster than most millionaires make it into the House of Lords.

I knew from the minute I met them that they were impostors. I suspected I was in the midst of a shakedown, which later investigation proved to be the case.

There's more to this than glee at having become the first to outfox the "fake sheikh", or even schadenfreude at the discomfort of the News of the Screws. Those who doubted that there are powerful forces out there determined to discredit me must now surely agree that just because I'm paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get me.

The guttersnipes of News International now claim the abortive attempt to sting me was part of a general investigation into the campaign funding scandal now unfolding over the mainstream political parties in Britain. But our investigations conclusively prove this to be a lie.

Crestfallen at my refusal to rise to the bait of illicit funding, Murdoch's minions fell from the gutter into the sewer of anti-semitism. Posing - at least, I hope they were posing - as Holocaust deniers, they strutted their David Irving stuff, inviting me to associate myself with their racist filth. When this tactic, too, imploded, they must have regarded the large amount of money spent on a Dorchester dinner for four as a real waste of money.

In late February, Mohamed Ali, the chief executive of the Islam Channel (for which my party colleague Yvonne Ridley works) approached me several times to say that "somebody" wanted to meet me who was "keen to help Respect" and "the community".

I was a little suspicious, and so sidestepped the "offer" for several weeks. Finally, after much prompting from Mr. Ali, I agreed to meet this "someone" last Saturday after my TalkSport radio show. When I checked my diary and found the dinner was at the Dorchester, my suspicions swiftly deepened.

I arrived and met Mr. Ali sitting with someone who did not introduce himself. He was a slim, bald, elegant, thirtysomething man who stood at around 5ft 8in ad was attired in a quality tailored suit. Later, this man presented me with a business card saying that he was Sam Fernando, marketing rirector of the Falcon Group International.

We were soon joined by a man, appearing from the rear of the restaurant, who embraced me, as is customary in south Asia. Oddly, he, like the other man, failed to say who he was.

In their appearance, these men did not remotely resemble devout Muslims or Islamists (which is what they later claimed to be). Neither wore a beard. Compared with cool and trendy Sam, the other man was markedly more reserved and sly in his demeanour. This sleazy character, who could have slid out from the pages of a Graham Greene novel, later claimed to be Pervaiz - Pervaiz Khan.

After some small talk, they began to ask some ludicrously leading questions, such as: "How can we help ... Can we sponsor members of parliament? Fund political parties?" In reply, I did not mince my words: "Absolutely not," I said. "It's completely illegal - and rightly so."

"But through English people ...?" asked Pervaiz, gesturing towards Mr Ali. I replied again in resolute terms: "No. It's completely illegal, and so it should be ... Britain is sinking in campaign funding sleaze involving foreign funding." I told them that if they wanted to help "the community" they should invest in the Islam Channel or start a radio station like the one I work for.

They then leapt to offensive remarks about Jewish people, even moving to cast doubt on the Holocaust. "You're not allowed even to quibble about the numbers," said Fernando. "Not even to say it might have been 5 million."

"People should never go down that road," I firmly weighed in. "David Irving isn't quibbling about numbers ... In his heart, he supports the Holocaust ... The Holocaust is the greatest crime in human history and it should be accepted as such." Come midnight, I said I had to go.

"My driver wants a picture with you," pleaded Pervaiz. "He's seen you on television." This "driver", who was sitting alone in the lobby of the hotel, was a vast being, built like a bodyguard, with a mouthful of gold teeth. When I asked where he was from, he answered enigmatically: "From up north."

Upon leaving the hotel, my suspicions were complete. I immediately rang Mr. Ali and warned him.

As the late Labour legend Nye Bevan counselled, why gaze into a crystal ball when you can read the book? In Andrew Marr's volume My Trade, the notorious "fake sheikh" makes a rare appearance. And so does his minder: the giant with the golden smile.

Yet Marr and I are not the only ones to whom he bared his gnashers: Carole Caplin recently mentioned in a Sunday tabloid her own meeting with "Jaws" - "a huge man, about 7ft tall, with gold teeth, thick lips and a bald head." He was, she states, "some kind of bodyguard", who could have been "straight out of a James Bond movie".

But whom did "Jaws" appear with? Another pair of suspicious men, it turns out. One of them was "Marcus de Silva ... very dapper ... very proper, and with an upright posture ... with a pleasant face, perfect skin and clear eyes". He told Caplin he "worked in a stressful PR job, and that the family that owned the firm he worked for was of Arabic origin and based in Dubai". Marcus later introduced Caplin to his boss, a man named - wait for it -"Parvais".

Parvais, Caplin revealed, "was 'fake sheikh' Mazher Mahmood".

At the start of this week, those ever-resourceful comrades I was telling you about produced a clear black-and-white photograph for my consideration. I instantly recognised the face: it was "Pervaiz" from the hotel.

Who is it? I asked. "The News of the World's Mazher Mahmood!"

Along with the photograph, I was handed a copy of what appears to be a passport from the Czech Republic that first surfaced in connection to Mazher Mahmood. The number on the passport is "0638942". It is valid from "9.7.1999" through to "9.7.2009". The bearer of the passport is apparently a male born in Pakistan. His name? Pervaiz Khan.

The loquacious man calling himself Sam Fernando has form. The same cannot be said for the company he claims to represent, The Falcon Group International.

Even its address, 64 Knightsbridge, is a "virtual office" where calls can be taken while those called are "in meetings" and from where post can be redirected.

Fernando, however, has cropped up before. A man claiming to be from a PR company (just like Marcus de Silva in the Caplin operation) and calling himself Sam Fernando initiated the pathetic and spiteful News of the World "sting" against my parliamentary colleague Diane Abbott in 2004.

He contacted her on March 31 that year to fix up a meeting with someone claiming to be a representative of a Kashmiri organisation called the Jaysh-i-Muhamad party. Fernando pestered the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington to travel to Dubai with him and the "Kashmiri leader", which she refused to do.

Dubai seems a point of reference for the con artists at the News of the World. It came up in their scams against Sven-Goran Eriksson, Carole Caplin and Sophie Wessex. So what is it about Dubai?

There is a connection between the name "Sam Fernando" and Dubai: a Sam Fernando is listed in connection with the Dubai-based company Al Futtaim Carillion, which has recently received a construction contract in Dubai worth 1.2bn UAE dirhams

So can the man calling himself Sam Fernando, while conspiring to deceive British parliamentarians, really be employed by Al Futtaim Carillion? Or is a perhaps hapless employee of that company finding their name dragged through the dirt by someone pretending to be Sam Fernando?

The importuners went to considerable lengths to cover their tracks - but not far enough to escape my team's forensic investigation.

1.The website of their purported company, www.falcongroupinternational.com, resembles one of those Potemkin PR sites: pretty graphics, but pretty well no information. It is registered through Business Serve, now Legend Communications, and seems to have been acquired in 2003 and modified last summer.

However, if you go to www.al-jamalgroup.com, you'll see that that website is almost identical to the Falcon Group's, which shares the same IP address. One difference is the Arabic script, which uses the word "hizb" for "group". "Hizb" would be used for a party or partisan group - never for a commercial organisation.

2) You would end up looking hard for www.al-jamalgroup.com because The Falcon group website lies about email addresses. The "contact" page of Falcon Group International lists Mansour Ali Khan, the general manager, as mansour@falcongroupinternational.com; Stephanie Andrews, PA to the chairman, as stephanie@falcongroupinternational.com; and Shehan Perera, head of marketing and corporate affairs, shehan@falcongroupinternational.com

However, if you hold the mouse over the addresses, they come up as @al-jamalgroup.com rather than @falcongroupinternational.com.

3. Another anomaly is that if you attempt to "submit a business proposal" on either the Al-Jamal Group or Falcon Group sites, the email addresses all come up as @al-jamal.com

Unlike the other two, this appears to be a real property company, based in Lebanon and registered in the US. It is, then, a legitimate question why and how this company's name has been embroiled in an affair that is now the subject of a Metropolitan police investigation.

4) "Sean de Silva" is listed as the managing director of the Falcon Group International in London. This did not come up in searches of Ltd and plc companies. A "Falcon Group International" did come up as an advertising agency on one search. It was detailed on a "modelling" website. By coincidence, a "Sean de Silva" is a member of the same website.

He also shares a surname with "Marcus de Silva", of Carole Caplin fame, and "Sanjay de Silva", listed on the Al-Jamal Group website as "head of marketing and corporate affairs" in Dubai.

5. A breakthrough, a very spooky coincidence and a mystery: the Al-Jamal Group site turns out to have been registered at 233 Bethnal Green Road - which is also the address of the Malik law centre.

More curiously still, as this data appeared, a message flashed up saying the site was "using 30-day-old data" that was being "deleted at the moment". And indeed it did disappear - but not from another site, which also gave the registered address as having been 233 Bethnal Green Road. The current registration is at Union House, Portsaeed Road, Dubai.

Incidentally, the Falcon Group International site seems to have been originally registered with an aol.com email address: magcommsuk@aol.com.

6) A final piece of the e-jigsaw: the two emails I received from the man calling himself Sam Fernando were sent from a webmail account of the Hotmail variety. A quick search through the "header" at the top of the email revealed the IP addresses of the computers they were sent from.

One of those emails was sent from an IP address that is part of a group that belongs to Rupert Murdoch's News International in London. Clicking on this link gives you the list of names and phone numbers of those responsible for the addresses. They are in no way implicated in the scam itself, but are merely the technical contacts for dealing with spam and other forms of abuse. The link shows that one of the emails was written on a News International computer in London.

On Wednesday March 29, I informed both the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, of this attempt to suborn a British parliamentarian. The Speaker responded within three hours, from his convalescence, saying he considers "that the use of such methods brings discredit to the profession of journalism, and is surprised, that they should not only be tolerated but apparently encouraged by editors who in other contexts profess to be in favour of openness and honesty in public life.

"It will be for the police and the prosecution authorities to decide whether any of the conduct you describe might constitute a criminal offence."

Sir Ian Blair's office also swiftly acknowledged receipt of my letter calling for just such an investigation. I had already forewarned my parliamentary colleague Jeremy Corbyn, whom the fake sheikh and his sidekick also sought to approach.

Questions, however, are outstanding. Who registered the Al-Jamal Group's website address at 233 Bethnal Green Road, London E2 6AB? What - if any - light can the occupiers of that address, the Malik law centre, shed on the matter?

Did the Al-Jamal company in Lebanon or any of its employees know that its web addresses are part of a conspiracy that has now been referred to the Metropolitan police? If the company is innocent and also a victim, what measures is it taking to help the investigation?

Is the man calling himself Sam Fernando really the Sam Fernando reported to have taken part in business deals in Dubai? If he is, what view does the government of the United Arab Emirates have over the activities of someone who has attempted to procure a breach in British electoral law and who is so brazenly trying to damage the Arab and Muslim cause by associating it with such criminality (not to mention smearing it with Holocaust denial, too)?

Above all, how long are people in Britain going to tolerate the activities of Rupert Murdoch, a multi-billionaire who pays precious little tax in this country, who has overweening political influence and a tightening grip on the media, and who is nothing short of a cancer on public life?



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Privatizing the Apocalypse
By Frida Berrigan

Started as the super-secret "Project Y" in 1943, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has long been the keystone institution of the American nuclear-weapons producing complex. It was the birthplace of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Last year, the University of California, which has managed the lab for the Department of Energy since its inception, decided to put Los Alamos on the auction block. In December 2005, construction giant Bechtel won a $553 million yearly management contract to run the sprawling complex, which employs more than 13,000 people and has an estimated $2.2 billion annual budget.

"Privatization" has been in the news ever since George W. Bush became president. His administration has radically reduced the size of government, turning over to private companies critical governmental functions involving prisons, schools, water, welfare, Medicare, and utilities as well as war-fighting, and is always pushing for more of the same. Outside of Washington, the pitfalls of privatization are on permanent display in Iraq, where companies like Halliburton have reaped billions in contracts. Performing jobs once carried out by members of the military -- from base building and mail delivery to food service -- they have bilked the government while undermining the safety of American forces by providing substandard services and products. Halliburton has been joined by a cottage industry of military-support companies responsible for everything from transportation to interrogation. On the war front, private companies are ubiquitous, increasingly indispensable, and largely unregulated -- a lethal combination.

Now, the long arm of privatization is reaching deep into an almost unimaginable place at the heart of the national security apparatus --- the laboratory where scientists learned to harness the power of the atom more than 60 years ago and created weapons of apocalyptic proportions.

Profane Problem or Prolific Profit?

Nuclear weapons are many things to many people -- the sword of Damocles or the guarantor of American global supremacy, the royal path to the apocalypse or atoms for peace. But in each notion, they are treated as idols -- jealously-guarded, shrouded in code, surrounded by sacred secrecy. That is changing.

Private companies have long played a role in the nuclear complex, but it's been a peripheral one. For example, Kaiser-Hill, a remediation company, is cleaning up radioactive waste at Rocky Flats, the Denver, Colorado complex that manufactured nuclear weapons. At Idaho Falls, another company, CH2M, is mopping up the mess left behind after the construction of 52 nuclear reactors. BWX and Honeywell formed a new company along with Bechtel to manage and operate the Pantex Plant in Texas which assembled nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. At least ten different subcontractors are involved in managing the Hanford nuclear complex. But the famed nuclear laboratories, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia -- where the high priests of nuclear physics are free to explore the outer realms of their craft -- have long been above prosaic bottom-line or board-room considerations. Until this year, that is.

At Los Alamos, the University of California has already been replaced by a "limited liability corporation," says Tyler Przybylek of the Department of Energy's Evaluation Board; and, more generally, the writing is on the containment wall. Nuclear laboratories are no longer to be intellectual institutions devoted to science but part of a corporate-business model where research, design, and ultimately the weapons themselves will become products to be marketed. The new dress code will be suits and ties, not lab coats and safety glasses. Under Bechtel, new management will lead to a "tightly structured organization" that will "drive efficiency," predicts John Browne, who directed the lab at Los Alamos from 1997-2003. "If there is a product the government wants," he concludes, "they will necessarily be focused on that. A lot more money will be at stake."

Los Alamos was the first to go. Now, the management contract for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is on the auction block as well.

Bechtel's Boondoggles

Many say strong corporate oversight will correct a legacy of embarrassing missteps at Los Alamos. The keystone of the nuclear complex, it has been dogged by missing classified computer disks, cost overruns on its expensive new projects, and an outspoken cadre of scientists who found their voice on LANL: The Real Story, a blog where once deferential employees blew off steam and exposed lapses in lab management.

The idea is that, under private management, this legacy of money wasted and dreams deferred can do an abrupt u-turn. But the question is: Can Bechtel (or any other private military contractor) usher in a new era of nuclear responsibility? Pete Domenici, Republican Senator and Chairman of the powerful Energy and Water Committee, thinks so. In January, he claimed that "this great lab will thrive under the management team led by Bechtel."

But a look at Bechtel's record might not inspire others to Domenici's confidence. The California-based construction giant has a long history of big projects, big promises, bigger budgets and even bigger failures.

In Boston, Bechtel was put in charge of the "Big Dig," the reconstruction of Interstate 93 beneath the city. In 1985, the price tag for the project was estimated at about $2.5 billion. Now, it is a whopping $14.6 billion (or $1.8 billion a mile), making it the most expensive stretch of highway in the world. Near San Diego, citizens are still paying the bills for cost over-runs at a nuclear power plant where Bechtel installed one of the reactors backwards.

In 2003, Bechtel took this winning track record to Baghdad, where it blew billions in a string of unfinished projects and unfathomable errors. The company reaped tens of millions of dollars in contracts to repair Iraq's schools, for example, but an independent report found that many of the schools Bechtel claimed to have completely refitted, "haven't been touched," and a number of schools remained "in shambles." One "repaired" school was found by inspectors be overflowing with "unflushed sewage."

Bechtel also has a $1.03 billion contract to oversee important aspects of Iraq's infrastructure reconstruction, including water and sewage. Despite many promises, startling numbers of Iraqi families continue to lack access to clean water, according to information gathered by independent journalist Dahr Jamail. The company made providing potable water to southern Iraq one of its top priorities, promising delivery within the first 60 days of the program. One year later, rising epidemics of water-borne illnesses like cholera, kidney stones and diarrhea pointed to the failure of Bechtel's mission.

Outside of its ill-fated reconstruction contracts in Iraq, Bechtel is not known as a large military contractor, but the company has been quietly moving into the nuclear arena. It helped build a missile-defense site in the South Pacific, runs the Nevada Test Site where the United States once performed hundreds of above-and underground nuclear tests. Bechtel is also the "environmental manager" at the Oak Ridge National Lab, which stores highly-enriched uranium, and is carrying out design work at the Yucca Mountain repository where the plan to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste has environmentalists and community activists up in arms.

At Washington State's Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, Bechtel is working on technology to turn nuclear waste into glass. But the estimated costs of building the facility to do that have doubled in one year to about $10 billion while the completion date slipped from 2011 to 2017. Members of Congress have proposed that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission take over management of the project from Bechtel because of its cost overruns and delays.

Proliferation's New Meaning

Given this track record, it's hard to make the case that Bechtel assumes the helm at Los Alamos out of an altruistic, even patriotic, desire to impose clean, lean corporate management on a complacent institution long overfed at the public trough. The question remains: Why this urge to privatize the apocalypse?

To answer that question, you have to begin with the post-Cold War quest of the nuclear laboratories for a new identity and raison d'être. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the loss of the other superpower as a nuclear twin and target, and an international shift in favor of nuclear disarmament sent Los Alamos and the whole U.S. nuclear complex into existential crisis: Who are we? What is our role? What do we do now that nuclear weapons have no obvious role in a world of, at best, medium-sized military enemies? Throughout the Clinton years, these questions multiplied while the nuclear arsenal remained relatively stable. More recently, with a lot of fancy footwork, a few friends in Congress, and the ear of a White House eager to be known for something other than the Long War on global terrorism, the labs finally came up with a winning solution that has Bechtel and other military contractors seeing dollar signs.

They found their salvation in a few lines of the Nuclear Posture Review, released in January 2002, where the Bush administration asserted: "The need is clear for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will be able, if directed, to design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements; and maintain readiness to resume underground testing if required."

There's gold in that there sentence. During the Cold War, spending on nuclear weapons averaged $4.2 billion a year (in current dollars). Almost two decades after the "nuclear animosity" between the two great superpowers ended, the United States is spending one-and-a-half times the Cold War average on nuclear weapons. In 2001, the weapons-activities budget of the Department of Energy, which oversees the nuclear weapons complex through its "semi-autonomous" National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), totaled $5.19 billion; and a "revitalized nuclear weapons complex," ready to "design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads," means a more than billion-dollar jump in spending to $6.4 billion by fiscal year 2006.

And that's just the beginning. The NNSA's five-year "National Security Plan" calls for annual increases to reach $7.76 billion by 2009. David Hobson, Republican congressional representative from Ohio, calls this kind of budgeting "the ultimate white-collar welfare," saying that the weapons complex can be "viewed as a jobs program for PhDs."

He's right. That's a lot of money for a few labs and a few thousand scientists. And private military contractors large and small are all over it.

Entering Acronym Land

To justify this huge jump in spending, the nuclear laboratories have cooked up plans for an alphabet soup of projects as part of the SSMP, scientists are pushing -- to mention just a few of the acronyms on the table right now -- ASCC, MESA, the RRWP, the ICFHY campaign and the RNEP.

In the interest of not putting everyone to sleep, we can take a closer look at just a few of the Bush administration's proliferating nuclear projects. Under the umbrella of Stockpile Stewardship Management (SSMP), scientists are working to safeguard the stockpile of nuclear weapons and materials so it is not ravaged by time and neglect. The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program (RRWP) will exchange existing warheads for more "reliable" (read: more powerful) ones. There are plans underway to develop the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) and other "useable" new nuclear weapons supposedly to meet new threats by new enemies -- "rogue states" like Iran -- in future preemptive anti-proliferation wars. Under each of these programs are many other acronym-heavy, cash-rich programs that seem to lead nowhere -- except toward further nuclear proliferation.

The Inertial Confinement Fusion and High Yield Campaign is just one of the more outlandish and expensive of these projects. It proposes using lasers to replicate what happens inside an actual nuclear explosion in weapons labs. Sounds simple enough, right? The Nuclear Ignition Facility -- where the lasers will do their work -- is the single largest project in the NNSA budget and, according to analyst Christopher Paine, "quite possibly the most expensive experimental facility ever built." The Department of Energy projects $3.5 billion in costs for this alone, but the independent environmental group, the National Resources Defense Council, puts the figure higher yet -- at $5.32 billion -- and that money will be spent before anyone can even demonstrate that the system works.

The Age of Nuclear Terror?

Do nuclear weapons have a role in the "Age of Terror" -- other than as potential weapons for terrorist groups? In a new and ever-shifting environment of emerging regional powers and wars that transcend national boundaries, the Bush administration is taking a have-it-both-ways approach: It is pushing aggressive non-proliferation policies for chosen enemy nations and embracing a policy of accelerated nuclear proliferation for itself. How much harder will it be in the future to dissuade other powers from building nuclear weapons when the American nuclear industry and its weapons labs have switched even more fully into private mode and the profit-motive is increasingly at stake in global nuclear planning? These and many other questions unfortunately remain unasked. Yet, a new era of nuclear weapons for profit threatens to turn Armageddon into a paying operation.

During the height of the Cold War, when competition between the nuclear laboratories seemed to rival the superpower stand-off, a Lawrence Livermore scientist posted a sign that read: "Remember, the Soviets are the Competition, Los Alamos is the Enemy."

In a new era of potential corporate antagonism over apocalyptic weaponry, will there be a sign at the Bechtel-run nuclear lab emblazoned with: "Remember, the Terrorists are the Competition, Lockheed Martin is the Enemy"?

Frida Berrigan (berrigaf@newschool.edu) is a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center. Her primary research areas with the project include nuclear-weapons policy, war profiteering and corporate crimes, weapons sales to areas of conflict, and military-training programs. She is the author of a number of Institute reports, most recently Weapons at War 2005: Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict.

Back in those good old times, in 1982, explaining the Klan's anti-immigrant advocacy, Duke said, "Every new immigrant adds to our crime problems, our welfare rolls and unemployment of American citizens.... We are being invaded in the southwest as if a foreign army were coming over the border.... They're going to take more and more hard-earned money from the productive middle class in the form of taxes and social programs." And Duke called for the deportation of all undocumented immigrants and harsh penalties for businesses that employ them. "I'd make the Mexican-American border almost like a Maginot line," he said, referring to the militarized barrier France constructed between itself, Italy and Germany after World War I.

At the time, Duke was widely dismissed as little more than a turbo-charged version of the paranoid style--"the Klan's answer to Robert Redford," as reporter Patty Sims described him in 1978. But today his anti-immigration rhetoric sounds not so remote from one of top-rated CNN host Lou Dobbs's fulminations during his daily "Broken Borders" segment. Duke's Klan Border Watch, meanwhile, served as the forerunner and inspiration of the Dobbs-touted Minutemen groups that have proliferated from the Mexico border to Herndon, Virginia, the city that hosted the American Renaissance conference, where disgruntled locals hold regular protests outside a day-labor center. Under pressure from Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, chair of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, and with sponsorship from House Judiciary Committee chair James Sensenbrenner (tough-talking heir to the Kotex fortune), the Republican-dominated House has approved a bill that makes it a felony to be in the United States illegally, mandates punishment for providing aid or shelter to undocumented immigrants and allocates millions for the construction of an iron wall between the United States and Mexico. Duke may have fallen short on the national stage, but his old notions have gained a new life through new political figures.

"Tancredo, he's pretty good. I would probably vote for him for President," Duke told me.

For self-proclaimed white nationalists, however, the mainstreaming of some of their ideas has created new challenges. "Immigration was the white nationalist movement's hot issue, but it's really left beyond them," said Devin Burghart, director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group. "They've gone through this before, where they've had to reinvent themselves. Now, they're searching for a new issue to take them forward."

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Autum Ashante, the precocious 7-year-old black nationalist poet, who said white people are "devils and they should be gone." If this daughter of a Nation of Islam activist father had instead been an Aryan supremacist child of a Klan activist, she'd still be all over the network news and pages of pop culture magazines (as a pair of white nationalist teen pop singers, Lamb and Lynx Gaede, have been since last fall). But with rare exceptions, nobody wanted to touch Autum's spoon-fed hatred with a 10-foot-pole. That would be, you know, "intolerant." We have to "respect diversity."

Aztlan is a long-held notion among Mexico's intellectual elite and political class, which asserts that the American southwest rightly belongs to Mexico. Advocates believe the reclamation (or reconquista) of Aztlan will occur through sheer demographic force. If the rallies across the country are any indication, reconquista is already complete.

You might expect Malkin to give her readers some evidence that Aztlan really is "a long-held notion among Mexico's intellectual elite and political class," but she never does.

Why? Because Aztlan and reconquista these days aren't, for the most part, ideas held by Mexicans: they're ideas held by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The myth of reconquista stems from a misreading of one of the founding documents of the Chicano movement, "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan."

In much the same way that the Black Power movement meant the words "Black Power" in a metaphorical sense, that is, as a call to African-Americans to recognize after years of being stigmatized that they too were people with something to contribute to society, "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan" was an appeal to nationalism as a means to achieve a greater self-awareness and self-esteem.

But that's not the way some white supremacists, fearful of a brown mass ready to take over the United States, has interpreted it.

A simple Google search shows that the people talking about Aztlan and reconquista are predominantly not Mexican (though there are some radical fringe groups) but white supremacists.

For those who would argue that a group like MEChA is only nascent in its racism, and could eventually wreak such horrors if its agenda flamed out of control, it is worth remembering that racist organizations nearly always display their true colors almost immediately. The Klan, as just seen, was violent and terroristic from the start; so, too, were the European fascists, particularly during the fascista and SA years.

And what has MEChA done? Advocate for increasing the numbers of Latinos in higher education. Organize student rallies. Emphasize self-determination.

Here is how one commenter named "cat" on Atrios' boards put it:

MeCHA has been an integral part of student life for decades; many, if not most, of my Chicano friends and acquaintances were involved with it; it was then and probably is now an advocacy organization which worked to bring Chicanos (now Latinos) into the educational institutions, to feed and clothe underprivileged children in the community, including those of the migrant farmworkers, was involved with Caesar Chavez in advocating for better working conditions for the migrant workers, and provided tutoring, mentoring, and fellowship for students, as do many other student organizations.

This view is one expressed consistently by people who have experience with MEChA. Among these is O. Ricardo Pimentel, a columnist for the Arizona Republic, who recently penned a column addressing the current campaign from the right, "California coup plays a race card on Bustamante":

But let us acknowledge that MEChA was born in the racial turmoil and rhetoric leading up to 1969. Its founding historical documents, El Plan de Aztlan and El Plan de Santa Barbara, contain incendiary language.

But the truth is, few joining even back then were thinking of overthrowing government. They were talking about changing society, for the better.

"We all understood the history of MEChA," says Loredo, a MEChA president at Phoenix College in 1987. "We took it in the context of the times, 1969 (the founding year)."

To liberate Aztlan, Loredo and other MEChistas pushed to get more Latinos into college and performed community service. Many, like Bustamante, entered public service.

MEChA elsewhere also led walkouts and protests to form Chicano studies programs and to push for more Chicano faculty hires.

Indeed, Republicans who wish to push the argument that MEChA is racist might want to talk to Mike Madrid, an advisor to the GOP on Latino affairs (and someone for whom this meme is probably the biggest nightmare since Proposition 187), who had this to say in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle:

"It's bizarre to assume this is some kind of radical group, seeking to overthrow part of the United States," said Mike Madrid, who has worked on Latino affairs for the state Republican Party. "It was part of the Brown Beret and Chicano studies movement, but it's mainly a social group and has been for years. To suggest it's involved in paramilitary training or some underhanded conspiracy is ludicrous."

Apologists are quick to argue that Latino supremacists are just a small fringe faction of the pro-illegal immigration movement (never mind that their ranks include former and current Hispanic politicians from L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to former California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante).

But you'll never hear or read such forgiving caveats in the mainstream press's hostile coverage of the pro-immigration enforcement members of the Minutemen Project-who are universally smeared as racists. For what? For peacefully demanding that our government enforce its laws and secure its borders.

Malkin, in fact, has numerous dalliances with right-wing extremists -- the real ones that she claims conservatives are busy policing.

The most vivid instance of this is her long association with VDare, which has been designated a hate group by the SPLC, and for good cause:

Fast forward to 2003. Once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page, VDARE has now become a meeting place for many on the radical right.

One essay complains about how the government encourages "the garbage of Africa" to come to the United States. The same writer says once the "Mexican invasion" engulfs the country, "high teenage birthrates, poverty, ignorance and disease will be what remains."

Another says that Hispanics have a "significantly higher level of social pathology than American whites. ... In other words, some immigrants are better than others." Yet another complains that a Jewish immigrant rights group is helping "African Muslim refugees" come to America.

Brimelow's site carries archives of columns from men like Sam Francis, who is the editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group whose Web page recently described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity."

It has run articles by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine, which specializes in dubious race and IQ studies and eugenics, the "science" of "race betterment" through selective breeding.

As I've said before, Malkin's In Defense of Internment is likewise of a piece of this same willingness to indulge views that are by any measure bigoted, and in some cases, extremist, by ignoring the latent bigotry and its broader ramifications.

These are hardly the only instances. Let's not forget her link in a blog post to an anti-immigrant site operated by an extremist Holocaust-denial organization. (The link is still up.)

Then there are the Minutemen, hailed by Malkin as "the mother of all neighborhood watch programs", and defended with regularity on her blog. As I've observed numerous times, the Minutemen are a magnet for the most extreme racists and xenophobes in America, and their claims to be "weeding out" such extremists are so much hooey.

After all, not only is the Minuteman Project directly descended from the militia movement, the Minuteman leader have a history of extremism. And they haven't changed their stripes, their media makeover notwithstanding. Jim Gilchrist, one of the Minuteman Project cofounders, is currently running for Congress under the banner of the far-right Constitution Party -- which itself is closely bound up with promoting the militia movement. And then there are the charming folks who show up for Minuteman parties.

Given Malkin's extraordinarily high tolerance for right-wing extremism -- indeed, her open participation in advancing their agenda -- it's probably not any wonder that the presence of right-wing extremism, and its positive embrace by the mainstream conservative movement, is simply left out of her narrative.

After all, if you think racial hygienists like Jared Taylor and Steve Sailer and the rest of the VDare gang are "normal," well, then what "real extremists on the right" remain for people like Michelle Malkin to denounce?