Rationalising imperial conquest

BOOKS

PRAFUL BIDWAI

The book is a devastating critique of the U.S. Empire-building project and its principal rationalisations.

FIVE and a half years after the United States launched its Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by invading Afghanistan, the world has become considerably more insecure, and terrorism has become more menacing than ever before. A study for Mother Jones magazine in the U.S. by the Centre on Law and Security at the New York University (NYU) Foundation finds that there has been a 607 per cent increase in the incidence of terrorism between September 2001 and March 2003, and March 2003 and September 2006.

One of the biggest failures of GWOT strategy is none other than Iraq, where over 150,000 U.S. troops are deployed. A country free of religious extremism and terrorism until its invasion four years ago, Iraq now reports the world's largest number of terrorist and violent incidents, week after week. Over 650,000 civilians have perished in Iraq, besides 3,000-plus U.S. troops. The occupation forces there have no grip on the fast-deteriorating situation despite the "surge" in U.S. troops.

Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq has seen any of the promised "stabilisation" or "democratisation". In Afghanistan, there is a strong resurgence of the Taliban amidst rampant warlordism, and a serious danger that President Hamid Karzai's regime may come unhinged altogether. Opium production is booming as never before and now accounts for well over one half of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).

Worse, GWOT has alienated and antagonised large numbers of people in the Islamic world. The U.S. has lost all credibility in their eyes, as well as among growing numbers of people in the West. Discontent in the Islamic world, in particular West Asia, is growing along with the expanding cesspools of unaddressed grievances — further feeding violence, counter-violence and terrorism.

The U.S. is now increasingly perceived as a power in search of an Empire, to be built primarily by military means. It presents a new, ugly, aggressive and belligerent face in the post-Cold War era. New apologists have also emerged for the new imperialism of the post-Cold War era. During the Cold War, U.S. hegemonism was based on "saving the world from communism", and presenting a benevolent face to the "free world". Today's Empire needs different, if equally irrational, justifications or rationalisations.

Six of these rationalisations or banners and apologies for Empire are important: (i) the global war on terror; (ii) weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the `wrong hands'; (iii) failed states; (iv) the necessity and justice of external and forcible humanitarian intervention; (v) regime change in the name of democracy; and (vi) the war on narcotics.

The present book, an initiative of the Transnational Institute, an Amsterdam-based radical fellowship, and authored mainly by its Fellows, is a devastating critique of the U.S. Empire-building project and its principal rationalisations. Its greatest merit is that it centrally confronts the reality of post-Cold War U.S. imperialism and tries to analyse it comprehensively. It persuasively argues that each of the slogans and premises through which U.S. Empire-building is sought to be legitimised is fundamentally flawed.

The book's authors make their case on a broad canvas, which includes a discussion on the purposes of Empire (themselves related to specific regimes of economic power and to furthering inequality-enhancing neoliberal capitalism); the manufacture of intellectual opinion in favour of neoliberal ideas; and the special role played by American exceptionalism in legitimising Empire-building through its assertion that the U.S. is unique as the world's "natural" leader, in that "it is the one country whose pursuit of its national interest is, at one and the same time, the pursuit of a cosmopolitan universal interest".

These essays are followed by six chapter presentations on the six ideological banners. As important as these sections are the Introduction and Conclusion, both by Achin Vanaik, who weaves together the different themes and illuminates numerous connections between them.

To begin with, Walden Bello analyses the economics of Empire by postulating a massive crisis of over-accumulation: overproduction and building up of excess capacities, whose output the economics of the industrial North cannot absorb. He argues that recent attempts by international capital to develop new communications technologies; to colonise public spheres such as health, education, power, water supply and transport; to "financialise" itself; and to tap China's rapid growth to finance a debt-led consumption boom in the U.S. will not adequately remedy the causes of this crisis. Walden Bello presents U.S. post-Cold War belligerence as a consequence of economic weakness, not strength.

Susan George presents a critique of the neoliberal doctrine, rooted in a combination of conservative interpretation of neoclassical economic theory, and libertarian and ultra-individualist legal-political ideas. Susan George convincingly shows that the dominance of neoliberalism owes little to its intrinsic merit; nor was it a "natural" outcome of intellectual debate.

Rather, it followed a systematic and lavishly funded effort to "sell" the ideology through think tanks, select university departments, policy institutes and key individuals in the media. She explores and exposes the institutional framework through which this $1 billion enterprise was conducted.

Mike Marquesee's chapter is a searing critical analysis of American exceptionalism and its historical roots in settler colonialism. This notion sees the U.S. not just as a territorial entity, but as a "great social experiment", which must be propagated — if necessary, through colonial wars and the Monroe Doctrine. American exceptionalism sees the U.S. as the ultimate telos and goal of modernity itself.

Marquesee explains how this exceptionalism survives despite the blows delivered by the U.S.' ignominious defeat in the Vietnam war and the visible inferiority of the U.S. model of capitalism in relation to its Western European variants in respect of, say, public services.

The six chapter presentations that follow delve into the rationalising banners, by analysing their provenance and purpose, and their structural weaknesses and deceitful nature. They also suggest some alternative approaches.

Vanaik argues that the one-sided view of terrorism contained in the dominant discourse in the U.S. (which excludes state terrorism altogether), and the militarised solutions offered to it through GWOT, is an excellent "framing device" for the imperial project and "possesses the greatest capacity to mobilise domestic support for the U.S. pursuit of Empire abroad".

Vanaik, however, dissects GWOT's failure. He holds that demonisation of Islam and Muslims is "an inevitable corollary" of GWOT. Vanaik offers the International Criminal Court as an alternative framework within which to prosecute and punish terrorist acts.

Zia Mian takes apart the WMD argument as an excuse for waging war on Iraq. Washington deliberately concocted falsehoods about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of WMD and manipulated the media. The "in the wrong hands" proposition is a means of selectively rewarding friends, allies or client-states, while attacking enemies and "Axis of Evil" states.

Mian documents the U.S.' spectacular hypocrisy in developing new uses for and designs of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile defence systems, while preaching disarmament to others. He also shows how the mystique built around the bomb comes back repeatedly to haunt the U.S. through its spread to other countries. This is the inevitable consequence of the "Empire of Fear".

The U.S. claims that its wars in Central and West Asia were rationally calculated to promote regime change in the interests of "democracy"; or they were humanitarian interventions, necessitated by the failure/paralysis of the multilateral system (the United Nations, in particular). This argument has some resonance outside the U.S., especially given the context of the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda — although the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisaion (NATO) allies failed to act in these very cases.

But as Mariano Aguirre shows, unilateral, offensive, armed intervention mocks at international law and weakens multilateral institutions that ought logically to intervene and honour their obligation to protect threatened civilians.

Aguirre persuasively argues that the Left "should not abandon the moral imperative to protect victims, nor the principles of democracy and international law... We need to recognise that there are massive violations of human rights, that there are dysfunctional states that do not protect their people... Also, that the U.N. system lacks the administrative capacity and flexibility to respond and that power politics limit its capacities, and that, therefore, the international community has a role to play."

Phyllis Bennis writes a blisteringly critical account of how the U.S. first contemptuously bypassed the U.N. Security Council, and then cynically manipulated it to obtain a carte blanche in Afghanistan and Iraq. She criticises the U.S.' mollycoddling of regimes with dubious human rights records (for instance, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Russia), its setting up of puppet regimes in the occupied countries, and its policies of creating or widening sectarian divides and of promoting the outright loot of Iraq's wealth through corporatisation and privatisation.

Bennis presents a scathing analysis of the effects of U.S. policy in West Asia, including promoting authoritarian allies, legitimising Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine, and the negative examples all this has set for West Asia as a whole.

David Sogge exposes state weaknesses, fragility or "failure" as a dishonourable pretext for Empire-building.

Most characterisations of failing states totally ignore the causes of failure, typically rooted in the structure of the global economy, neoliberal policies imposed by international financial institutions or Western governments, and absence of democracy and accountability. Military interventions rarely offer a solution, nor does the "shell of elections".

Last but not least is a discussion by David Bewley-Taylor and Martin Jelsma of the "war on narcotics" as yet another excuse for Empire. The U.S.'s supply-side approach to the drugs problem emphasises physical interdiction, although this has proved a failure. In practice, as "Plan Colombia" shows, the "war on narcotics" provides a convenient excuse for attacking Left-wing insurgents and maintaining a heavy U.S. military presence in select Third World countries. The authors argue for an alternative "harm reduction" and "decriminalisation" approach to drugs.

Vanaik concludes with a final summing up, which takes a bird's-eye view of the six legitimising themes and their weaknesses, and argues for a comprehensive, critical, Left-wing approach to dissecting Empire.

The book is, then, a broad-horizon yet penetrating critique of the rationalisations for Empire in the post-Soviet era. One wishes it had explored some themes (for instance, the economics of Empire, the relations between the U.S. and its allies, the manufacture of domestic consent in different countries, and alternative international arrangements, and so on) in greater depth.

Above all, one wishes it had devoted some space to a discussion of the growing resistance to Empire through the anti-war and peace movements, themselves linked to the global justice agenda.

Despite these shortcomings, the book remains one of the sharpest critical analyses of contemporary imperialism published recently. It is highly recommended.

Praful Bidwai is a Fellow of the Transnational Institute. He co-authored with Achin Vanaik South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999.

In The Philippines Bush's War On Terror Has Become A War Of Terror

May 1, 2006

By Brian Mcafee

In the Philippines Bush's War On Terror has become a War Of Terror. Last week Elias Mabundas, 25, and Auling Bugahod, 50, both left wing activists were gunned down by the philippine military as they were driving down a freeway. On Wednesday, April 18, Carmelo Palacios, 41, became the 51st journalist to be killed since Gloria Macapagal Arroyo came to power in 2001. Two days prior to the Palacios killing Willie Jerus, 43, a member of the National Peasant Movement (KMP) and a local organizer was gunned down in front of his wife by an unidentified gunman. He was the 843rd leftist to be killed, usually by the same proverbial unidentified gunman/gunmen since Arroyo came to power. In addition to those known killed an additional 210 are reported as missing. Most on the left place full responsibility for the killings and disappearances on the military, the Arroyo government And the Bush administration because of its close ties to Arroyo and the Philippine military.

Rebuked by the UN and the Permanent Peoples Tribunal over human rights abuses and the ongoing killings Arroyo and the U.S. have begun to be held to account. Those murdered have been from every region of the Philippine archipelago and represent a cross section of society. They include priests, journalists, farmers, human rights workers, union leaders and those in the health field among others. Two weeks prior to the for mentioned killings two other KMP activists were found shot, stabbed and placed in garbage bags. Arthur Orpilla and Dionisio Baltad were found 240 miles north of Manila near a military base. The list of deaths has been compiled by Karapatan, the Philippines most prominent human rights organization.

Among those killed about ten percent have been women and a large number of the disappeared have been women.

On March 31, Grecil Gelacio, nine years old, was gunned down by members of the Philippine Army's 101st Infantry Brigade. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) as a whole, the Arroyo administration and the U.S. government needs to be held accountable for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people across the Philippines that have occurred over the past 6 years.

The U.S. Military has had a long time training program with the Philippine Military and Philippine National Police. The U.S. Embassy in Manila provides information on the most pertinent joint training program between the U.S. Military and the Philippines, an except from this program description reads- "The International Military Education and Training (IMET) program is an important component of U.S. efforts to professionalize the AFP. The IMET program strives to strengthen the AFP's professionalism, commitment to human rights, discipline and technical expertise. IMET graduates populate top AFP ranks and actively promote close and professional U.S. and Philippine military-to-military relationships." Philippine Military assistance from the U.S. went from $14.6 million in 2001 to $86.5 million a year in 2005. The U.S./Philippine joint military training includes small unit and sniper training. The only suspension that occurred of this joint training was when a rift developed between the two countries when a U.S. Marine was tried and convicted of raping a Philippine national. The U.S. government upset that their rapist was put in a Philippine jail suspended the joint exercises
until he was transfered to the U.S. Embassy. Raul Gonzalez, Arroyo's justice secretary was pivotal in making sure the U.S. was accommodated in this case and generally seems side with the U.S. government over the well being of his own people.

The War Of Terror the U.S. is inflicting on the Philippine people through its blanket support for Arroyo and the Philippine Military and National Police is also a War On The Poor as the targets are generally those concerned with the poverty issue and the beneficiaries of the killings would seem to be those that don't want change, the rich and foreign capital or corporate interests.

War on Terror in Campaign 08

BLOG | Posted 04/30/2007 @ 12:20am

Ari Melber

The most significant moment in last week's Democratic presidential candidate debate came during the evening's most simplistic question. Moderator Brian Williams asked for a show of hands on whether the candidates "believe" there is a Global War on Terror, yielding a four-to-four split. It was a silly choice, since Williams was technically asking if the candidates believe that Bush's foreign policy exists, but it could still spark an important discussion. John Edwards was the only one of the "top three" candidates to vote no, which swiftly brought him praise, scorn and ridicule. After saying the U.S. must strongly deal with "dangerous leaders in the world," Edwards emphasized the need to use all the tools of foreign policy, not simply hard military power. His argument was not really a denial of the existence of Bush's Global War on Terrorism, but a nod towards an alternative.

There is really no denying that President Bush has organized U.S. foreign policy around an endless Global War on Terrorism (or "GWOT" in government circles). As he declared in his historic address to a joint session of Congress after 9/11, even if Al-Qaeda is destroyed, Bush envisions a war that "will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." He means that literally. It is a war that targets a tactic instead of an enemy; like declaring war on war, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has noted. Without a defined enemy, of course, it is a war that can creep far from our vital security interests. In 2002, administration officials claimed Bush could invade Iraq without any congressional authorization at all, based on GWOT, and Condi Rice made the same claim about Syria in 2005. The administration invokes the same endless war to justify imprisoning American citizens without trial; suspending habeas corpus; illegally spying on American citizens; and detaining hundreds of people for years without charges in the lawless Gitmo prison. The policy is built on the twin fallacies that the best defense is a reckless offense, and the world wants (and hates) our freedom. In the name of fighting terror, President Bush aims to advance democracy abroad while restricting it at home, treating Congress and the Courts as barriers to national security. The 2005 National Defense Strategy report even argues American "judicial processes" can be a weapon of choice for our enemies.

Yet as everyone knows, GWOT has resulted in a total security failure. A new State Department report shows terrorism is up 29 percent; Bin Laden remains at large; Iraq is in a civil war, draining resources from counterterrorism and Afghanistan; and Gitmo, which has generated no major terrorist convictions, is such a failure that Defense Secretary Robert Gates made shutting it down one of his first priorities in office. Meanwhile, it is only through congressional and judicial oversight, which Bush derides as counterproductive to his endless global war, that the public has learned about critical vulnerabilities exploited by the 9/11 hijackers; false intelligence regarding WMDs; wasteful defense spending; and the failed detention system at Gitmo, to name a few items.

The question is not whether people "believe" these facts. The question is what the U.S. can do to change them.

Any credible presidential aspirant must present a detailed alternative to Bush's Global War on Terrorism. On the merits, it's hard to understand why candidates (in either party) would try to attach themselves to such a discredited policy from a very unpopular president. For too long, the Global War on Terrorism has been presented as little more than a tough slogan that all mainstream figures must support. By daring the candidates to doubt its existence in a show of hands, Brian Williams cracked the door just wide enough for simplistic protest. Now it's up to the candidates to elaborate on their proposed alternatives. And it's up to activists and voters to make sure this consequential issue stays on the agenda.

To that end, some Democratic bloggers are cheering Edwards and pressing other candidates to challenge the GWOT. MyDD's Matt Stoller writes that Edwards' opposition was a welcome "departure from the bipartisan consensus" backing GWOT. Writing on the same blog in 2004, Chris Bowers called on Democrats to abandon the war on terror frame. This argument is not confined to bloggers or liberal critics, either. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, an influential foreign policy adviser to Democrats across the political spectrum, argued in 2005 that while GWOT had "entered the English language" as the "way our highest national priority is described by almost everyone," it was simply "not an accurate description of America's enemy or of what we are engaged in." He called for jettisoning GWOT and adopting a more focused attack on Al Qaeda.

The public should demand leadership and bold policies from these candidates who would be president. So how about a show of hands of voters who believe in this position: Any candidate who cannot outline an effective alternative to Bush's failed Global War on Terrorism does not deserve to be president.

----

NOTES AND FURTHER READING

Zbigniew Brzezinski repeated his opposition to GWOT in an essay this weekend.

I elaborated on GWOT in this op-ed about the President's authority under the 2001 authorization of force, coauthored with Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and these remarks at last year's YearlyKos convention.

It's also worth noting that even the Bush Administration has conceded flaws in the GWOT framework, and it briefly experimented with a different concept in 2005. The Christian Science Monitor summarized responses to that effort at the time, and Democracy Arsenal's Suzanne Nossel proposed several alternative priorities.

Brian Williams felt that the NBC organizers were too restrictive with the debate time limits, which forced him to "suppress" his "instincts to challenge candidates on unanswered questions" almost a dozen times.

For a thorough analysis of whether GWOT is a sustainable foreign policy, check out this 2003 report by Dr. Jeffrey Record of the U.S. Army War College.

Echoes of Terror Case Haunt California Pakistanis

April 27, 2007

LODI, Calif., April 24 — Khalid Farooq has shunned the low-slung yellow bungalow that serves as the Pakistani community’s mosque here for nearly two years, ever since a father and son who worshiped there were arrested on suspicion of being foot soldiers for Al Qaeda.

If he runs an errand at someplace like Wal-Mart, away from the neat, tree-lined streets that constitute the heart of Lodi’s Pakistani neighborhood, Mr. Farooq trades his traditional baggy clothes for standard American attire, he said, as often as four times in one day.

“Something has changed in the air; it’s a scary time,” said Mr. Farooq, who first arrived to work in the flat, black fields that surround this town 25 years ago. “We don’t want to talk; we’re all afraid.”

The tide of fear rolled in and has never quite receded after an informant incriminated two Lodi men, Umer Hayat, an ice cream truck driver, and his son Hamid, who were arrested in June 2005. Their trial ended a year ago with the younger Mr. Hayat, 24, convicted of providing material support for terrorism by attending a training camp in Pakistan. His lawyers recently began seeking a new trial based on arguments that the jury was tainted.

Members of the Pakistani community here distrust one another almost as much as they do outsiders. Even now, residents with evidence of sudden wealth, like a new car, are immediately rumored to be on the F.B.I.’s payroll. Anything connected to the government is inherently suspect.

By NEIL MACFARQUHAR

--MORE--

Put Bush's 'puppy dog' terror theory to sleep

By RICHARD CLARKE

Posted Wednesday, April 25th 2007, 4:00 AM

Be Our Guest

Does the President think terrorists are puppy dogs? He keeps saying that terrorists will "follow us home" like lost dogs. This will only happen, however, he says, if we "lose" in Iraq.

The puppy dog theory is the corollary to earlier sloganeering that proved the President had never studied logic: "We are fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we will not have to face them and fight them in the streets of our own cities."

Remarkably, in his attempt to embrace the failed Iraqi adventure even more than the President, Sen. John McCain is now parroting the line. "We lose this war and come home, they'll follow us home," he says.

How is this odd terrorist puppy dog behavior supposed to work? The President must believe that terrorists are playing by some odd rules of chivalry. Would this be the "only one slaughter ground at a time" rule of terrorism?

Of course, nothing about our being "over there" in any way prevents terrorists from coming here. Quite the opposite, the evidence is overwhelming that our presence provides motivation for people throughout the Arab world to become anti-American terrorists.

Some 100,000 Iraqis, probably more, have been killed since our invasion. They have parents, children, cousins and fellow tribal clan members who have pledged revenge no matter how long it takes. For many, that revenge is focused on America.

At the same time, investing time, energy and resources in Iraq takes our eye off two far more urgent tasks at hand: one, guarding the homeland against terrorism much better than the pork-dispensing Department of Homeland Security currently does the job; and two, systematically dismantling Al Qaeda all over the world, from Canada to Asia to Africa. On both these fronts, the Bush administration's focus is sorely lacking.

Yet in the fantasyland of illogic in which the President dwells, shaped by slogans devised by spin doctors, America can "win" in Iraq. Then, we are to believe, the terrorists will be so demoralized that they will recant their beliefs and cease their terrorist ways.

In the real world, by choosing unnecessarily to go into Iraq, Bush not only diverted efforts from delivering a death blow to Al Qaeda, he gave that movement both a second chance and the best recruiting tool possible.

U.S. military raids in Iraq have uncovered evidence that Iraqis are planning attacks in America, perhaps to be carried out by terrorists with European Union passports that require no U.S. visas. But such attacks here over the next several years are likely now no matter what happens next in Iraq - and that is because of what Bush has already done, not because of any future course we choose in Iraq.

But we can be sure that when the next attacks come in the U.S., if Bush is down on the ranch cutting trees, he and whatever few followers he retains by then will blame his successor. You can almost hear them now: If only hissuccessor had left enough U.S. troops in the Iraqi shooting gallery to satisfy the blood lust of the enemy, as Bush did, then they wouldn't have come here.

The truth: If not for this administration's reckless steps to push America into war - and strategic blunder after strategic blunder that has satisfied the blood lust of the enemy - fewer evildoers would follow us home like the dogs that they are.


Clarke served as chief counterterrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He is now chairman of Good Harbor Consulting.

Hypocrisy: Thy Name Is Bush

Related
A terrorist walks
Luis Posada Carriles has boasted of bombing Havana hotels, yet American justice lets him go free.
LUIS POSADA CARRILES - THE DECLASSIFIED RECORD
---
consortiumnews.com

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)

George W. Bush likes to present the “war on terror” as a clear-cut moral crusade in which evildoers who kill innocent civilians must be brought harshly to justice, along with the leaders of countries that harbor terrorists. There are no grays, only blacks and whites.

But evenhanded justice is not the true core principle of the Bush Doctrine. The real consistency is hypocrisy: violence which Bush favors – no matter how wanton the slaughter of innocents – is justifiable, while violence that goes against Bush’s interests – even an insurgency against a foreign military occupation – must be punished without remorse as “terrorism.”

In other words, if Bush hates the perpetrators, they are locked up indefinitely without charge and, at his discretion, can be subjected to “alternative interrogation techniques,” what most of the world considers torture. The rule of law is out the window. Wild West hangin' justice is in. Even the ancient fair trial right of habeas corpus is discarded.

However, when the killers of civilians are on Bush’s side, they get the full panoply of legal protections – and every benefit of the doubt. Under this Bush double standard, therefore, right-wing Cuban terrorists Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, though implicated in a string of murderous attacks on civilians, get the see-no-evil treatment.

On April 19, the 79-year-old Posada was released on bail from federal custody for an immigration violation and allowed to fly to Miami where he will live at home while his case winds its way through the U.S. courts. Bosch, too, has been allowed to live out his golden years in south Florida with the help and protection of the Bush family.

But the evidence in U.S. government files is overwhelming that Posada and Bosch were the architects of the 1976 mid-air bombing of a civilian Cubana airliner, killing 73 people, including young members of the Cuban national fencing team.

Since the conspiracy was hatched in Caracas, Venezuela, where Posada worked as a Venezuelan intelligence officer, the Venezuelan government has sought Posada’s extradition. However, when a Posada friend testified at Posada’s immigration hearing that Venezuela practices torture, Bush administration lawyers let the unverified claim go unchallenged, leading the judge to forbid Posada’s deportation there.

So, the Bush administration, which has subjected its own terrorism suspects to such practices as painful stress positions and simulated drowning by “water-boarding,” wasn’t willing to take the chance that Posada might be abused in Venezuela, even though there was no real evidence that he would be.

Justifying Terrorism

The Bush administration also took no note a year ago when Bosch publicly justified the 1976 mid-air bombing. The stunning TV interview of Bosch by reporter Juan Manuel Cao on Miami’s Channel 41 was cited in articles on the Internet by José Pertierra, a lawyer for the Venezuelan government. But Bosch’s comments caused him no further difficulty. [For Pertierra’s story, see Counterpunch, April 11, 2006]

“Did you down that plane in 1976?” Cao asked Bosch.

“If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself,” Bosch answered, “and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other.”

But when Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded, “In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

“But don’t you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?” Cao asked.

“Who was on board that plane?” Bosch responded. “Four members of the Communist Party, five North Koreans, five Guyanese.” [Officials tallies actually put the Guyanese dead at 11.]

Bosch added, “Four members of the Communist Party, chico! Who was there? Our enemies…”

“And the fencers?” Cao asked about Cuba’s amateur fencing team that had just won gold, silver and bronze medals at a youth fencing competition in Caracas. “The young people on board?”

Bosch replied, “I was in Caracas. I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. … She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant.

“We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny.” [The comment about Santo Domingo was an apparent reference to a strategy meeting by a right-wing terrorist organization, CORU, which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1976.]

“If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn’t you think it difficult?” Cao asked.

“No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba,” Bosch answered.

In an article about Bosch’s remarks, lawyer Pertierra said the answers “give us a glimpse into the mind of the kind of terrorist that the United States government harbors and protects in Miami; terrorists that for the last 47 years have waged a bloody and ruthless war against the Cuban people.”

CIA Files

Beyond Bosch’s incriminating statements, the evidence of his and Posada’s guilt is overwhelming. Declassified U.S. documents show that soon after the Cubana Airlines plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the bombing.

But in fall 1976, Bush’s boss, President Gerald Ford, was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Still, inside the U.S. government, the facts were known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in anti-communist Cuban extremists Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP.

The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”

On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor during which Bosch requested cash from the Venezuelan government in exchange for assurances that Cuban exiles wouldn’t demonstrate during Andres Perez’s planned trip to the United Nations.

“A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said.

“Following the 6 October Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

The CIA report was sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as to the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies, according to markings on the cable.

In South America, police began rounding up suspects. Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack.

A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.

Posada and Bosch were charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the men denied the accusations. The case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez.

Lost Interest

After the Reagan-Bush administration took power in Washington in 1981, the momentum for fully unraveling the mysteries of anti-communist terrorist plots dissipated. The Cold War trumped any concern about right-wing terrorism.

In 1985, Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison, reportedly with the help of Cuban exiles. In his autobiography, Posada thanked Miami-based Cuban activist Jorge Mas Canosa for providing the $25,000 that was used to bribe guards who allowed Posada to walk out of prison.

Another Cuban exile who aided Posada was former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who was close to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and who was overseeing secret supply shipments to the Nicaraguan contra rebels, a pet project of President Ronald Reagan.

After fleeing Venezuela, Posada joined Rodriguez in Central America and was assigned the job of paymaster for pilots in the White House-run contra-supply operation. When one of the contra-supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua in October 1986, Posada was responsible for alerting U.S. officials to the crisis and then shutting down the operation’s safe houses in El Salvador.

Even after the exposure of Posada’s role in the contra-supply operation, the U.S. government made no effort to bring the accused terrorist to justice.

By the late 1980s, Orlando Bosch also was out of Venezuela’s jails and back in Miami. But Bosch, who had been implicated in about 30 violent attacks, was facing possible deportation by U.S. officials who warned that Washington couldn’t credibly lecture other countries about terrorism while protecting a terrorist like Bosch.

But Bosch got lucky. Jeb Bush, then an aspiring Florida politician, led a lobbying drive to prevent the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from expelling Bosch. In 1990, the lobbying paid dividends when Jeb's dad, President George H.W. Bush, blocked proceedings against Bosch, letting the unapologetic terrorist stay in the United States.

In 1992, also during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, the FBI interviewed Posada about the Iran-Contra scandal for 6 ½ hours at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras.

Posada filled in some blanks about the role of Bush’s vice presidential office in the secret contra operation. According to a 31-page summary of the FBI interview, Posada said Bush’s national security adviser, Donald Gregg, was in frequent contact with Felix Rodriguez.

“Posada … recalls that Rodriguez was always calling Gregg,” the FBI summary said. “Posada knows this because he’s the one who paid Rodriguez’ phone bill.” After the interview, the FBI agents let Posada walk out of the embassy to freedom. [For details, see Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]

More Attacks

Posada soon returned to his anti-Castro plotting.

In 1994, Posada set out to kill Castro during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Posada and five cohorts reached Cartagena, but the plan flopped when security cordons prevented the would-be assassins from getting a clean shot at Castro, according to a Miami Herald account. [Miami Herald, June 7, 1998]

The Herald also described Posada’s role in a lethal 1997 bombing campaign against popular hotels and restaurants inside Cuba that killed an Italian tourist. The story cited documentary evidence that Posada arranged payments to conspirators from accounts in the United States.

“This afternoon you will receive via Western Union four transfers of $800 each … from New Jersey,” said one fax signed by SOLO, a Posada alias.

Posada landed back in jail in 2000 after Cuban intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate Castro by planting a bomb at a meeting the Cuban leader planned with university students in Panama.

Panamanian authorities arrested Posada and other alleged co-conspirators in November 2000. In April 2004, they were sentenced to eight or nine years in prison for endangering public safety.

Four months after the sentencing, however, lame-duck Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso – who lives in Key Biscayne, Florida, and has close ties to the Cuban-American community and to George W. Bush’s administration – pardoned the convicts.

Despite press reports saying Moscoso had been in contact with U.S. officials about the pardons, the State Department denied that it pressured Moscoso to release the Cuban exiles. After the pardons and just two months before Election 2004, three of Posada’s co-conspirators – Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez – arrived in Miami to a hero’s welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters.

While the terrorists celebrated, U.S. authorities watched the men – also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida – alight on U.S. soil. As Washington Post writer Marcela Sanchez noted in a September 2004 article about the Panamanian pardons, “there is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11 (2001), fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on U.S. streets.” [Washington Post, Sept. 3, 2004]

Posada Arrives

Posada reportedly sneaked into the United States in early 2005 and his presence was an open secret in Miami for weeks before U.S. authorities did anything. The New York Times summed up Bush’s dilemma if Posada decided to seek U.S. asylum.

“A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists,” the Times wrote. “But to turn Mr. Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother, Jeb.” [NYT, May 9, 2005]

Only after Posada called a news conference to announce his presence was the Bush administration shamed into arresting him. But even then, the administration balked at sending Posada back to Venezuela where the government of Hugo Chavez – unlike some of its predecessors – was eager to prosecute.

At a U.S. immigration hearing in 2005, Posada’s defense attorney called as a witness a Posada friend who alleged that Venezuela’s government practices torture. Bush administration lawyers didn’t challenge the claim, leading the immigration judge to bar Posada’s deportation to Venezuela.

Venezuela’s Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez accused the Bush administration of applying “a cynical double standard” in the “war on terror.”

“The United States presents itself as a leader against terrorism, invades countries, restricts the civil rights of Americans in order to fight terrorism, but when it is about its own terrorists, it denies that they be tried,” Alvarez said.

As for the claim that Venezuela practices torture, Alvarez said, “There isn’t a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela.” Alvarez added that the claim was particularly ironic given widespread press accounts that the Bush administration has abused prisoners at the U.S. military base in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Posada-Bosch cases point to one unavoidable and unpleasant conclusion: that the Bush family regards terrorism – defined as killing civilians for a political reason – as justified or at least tolerable in cases when their interests match those of the terrorists.

Terrorism is only a moral evil to the Bushes when the violence against civilians clashes with the Bush family’s interests.

This blatant hypocrisy often has been aided and abetted by the U.S. news media, which intuitively understands the double standard and acts accordingly. The U.S. press corps downplays or ignores cases in which terrorism has connections to U.S. government officials – and especially to the Bush family.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com.

The Turf War on Terror

by John Liechty

Perhaps the Global War on Terror would not seem such a mutant if it had emerged spontaneously, and not by Caesarian delivery under a government whose steps to nourish terrorism have proven as convincing as its steps to eliminate it. But then, campaigns of the GWOT sort are doomed from the start to mutate into meaningless slogans fronting motivations and realities far removed from those declared. Thus, there are wars on terror, drugs, waste, children left behind, poverty, and corruption – and in their wake, reinvigorated strains of corruption, poverty, children left behind, waste, drugs, and terror.

Inasmuch as our wars on abstractions tend to backfire, why don’t we exploit the tendency? One wonders why it has never occurred to Those Who Know Best to decree a war on peace, prosperity, or freedom, in a backhand effort to promote peace, prosperity, and freedom. Had the Bush Government, for instance, declared War on Democracy and gone into Iraq for the express purpose of Enslaving the Iraqi People, with a declared aim to trigger a New Dawn of Totalitarianism across the Middle East…. Who knows, Iraq might actually have become the democratic haven some of the masterminds behind its Liberation said they were yearning for all along.

gwx = x² (Government Wars on Whatever lead to more of Whatever): the unfortunate equation is rarely proven wrong. Apart from a measure of good intentions and genuine concern, government is such a tangle of hidden motives, base intentions, false fronts, forked tongues, hypocrisy, greed, self-interest, self-promotion, inefficiency, ineptitude, cynicism, and general rascality that it is a wonder the equation is ever proven wrong. It would be wonderful to believe, as I grew up believing, that governments are largely composed of the Good and the Wise – people who selflessly channel their thought, spirit, and energies into Making the World a Better Place. I am still enough of a child to believe that now and then such individuals really do venture into government, and that their good will and sense of responsibility really do matter.

Such innocence, however, is frequently undercut by experience. Years ago, some friends and I were just getting comfortable on an isolated stretch of beach north of Rabat, Morocco. It was nearly midnight, the tent and moon were up, the meat was grilling, the bottle was open, the silence was sublime, and then a horn started to honk, persistently. Aware of only one car in the area (ours), we went off to investigate.

Our car had been appropriated by four grinning, smoking gendarmes, one of whom was still trying the horn. The rest of the story is predictable, and I’ll try to make it short. We were asked (told) to pack up and follow our rescuers to a police station, where we sat through hours of questioning and paperwork. We were released after paying for the services of a phantom tow truck. The truck, the police said, had had to turn back once notified that the rogue car’s owners had materialized, and 200 dirhams ($20) was needed to compensate the inconvenience and emotional anguish borne by the driver.

The claim may have been true, though it sounded about as sincere as the parting words of the policeman who saw us off, the horn-honker. "You’re very lucky," he said, with a look that failed somehow to enlist one’s sense of good fortune. "Imagine what might have happened if we hadn’t come along." (The gendarmes had spent a lot of time insisting that the remote beach we’d chosen was a magnet for thieves. This claim too may have been true, though it didn’t sound or feel true. Our chances of getting hit by thieves that night were on par with our chances of getting hit by meteorites. True, the car was broken into and a fair chunk of our money had vanished – but servants of the state had arranged these losses on our behalf.)

If my friends and I were painfully aware of the fleecing we’d endured, we were at least grateful for a free illustration of the way governments sometimes operate. The worst, like mobsters, offer protection (often to cover threats of their own devising), and collect their cut. Every so often, a War on Racketeering is declared to give the public something to chew on.

How strange that the architects of the War on Terror seem more closely aligned to the bad guys than to the people whose security they bill as their top priority. A Dick Cheney has more in common with a Saddam Hussein than with either the Iraqi people he claims to be liberating or the American people he claims to be protecting. Birds of a feather, mobster elements understand each other, look after each other, and occasionally bump each other off. We slip our protection money into plain envelopes, meanwhile, and hope our homes, livelihoods, and loved ones escape the turf wars and drive-by shootings. Whether it goes by democracy, autocracy or theocracy, government by extortion is dismally familiar worldwide.

April 17, 2007

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com

U.S. Watch Lists Sow Frustration and Fear

Ryan Singe 04.16.07 | 12:00 AM

Elizabeth Kushigian spent time in an isolation room at Miami International Airport every time she returned from an international trip -- until a senator got her taken off a DHS watchlist.

For years, Elizabeth Kushigian never had a problem flying back-and-forth to Costa Rica, where she runs a local micro-lending nonprofit. But in 2004, she suddenly found it impossible to re-enter the United States without being ordered into a special isolation room at Miami International Airport. There, she'd wait for extra scrutiny.

"I was in the line where you come in and stamp your passport, and each time they would scan the passport and look at (the) screen and stiffen," Kushigian says. "I was on some sort of list. I don't know why; it could have been because of something I did in the '60s and in the early 1980s, I did some civil disobedience on behalf of El Salvador."

Kushigian is just a member of a growing club of American citizens whose lives have been touched by a slew of government watch lists proliferating with little oversight or redress mechanisms since the 9/11 attacks. Containing, by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of names submitted by dozens of agencies, the lists have not only snagged people like Kushigian -- who wind up on them for mysterious reasons -- they've also stigmatized and inconvenienced thousands of others whose names happen to be similar to an entry on the list.

The issue returned to national debate last week after one of the nation's most respected constitutional law professors was told by an airline official that he'd been placed on a watch list for his criticism of the president, a claim that U.S. officials deny.

Kushigian's hassles at the airport ranged from minor delays to full-blown interrogations. The second time she was pulled aside at the border, officials with the Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement demanded to know how she could afford to travel on her salary. When she explained that she'd inherited money from her father, they peppered her with questions about what his factory used to make, and what charities he donated to.

"It was unnerving sitting in that little room even for a short period of time, Kushigian says. "You get a sense of what people who are not senators and not citizens go through."

Kushigian tried to figure out why she'd been targeted by filing a Freedom of Information Act request, but learned nothing. Then she turned to her elected representatives in Massachusetts, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, who himself was famously fingered by a watch list in 2004. Eventually Kennedy's office sent along a letter signed by the head of Immigration and Customs, which said in part: "With respect to Mrs. Kushigian's specific situation, we are pleased to report that action has been taken in order that she not be subjected to automatic special attention when arriving at U.S. Ports-of-Entry."

Kushigian was one of the lucky ones: Winning even a tacit acknowledgement that she was on a list is a rare victory over the federal homeland security bureaucracy. Tens of thousands of travelers have applied to get help from the Transportation Security Administration, which now has three lists: a no-fly list of persons considered too dangerous to be allowed on a plane or cruise ship; a selectee list of people who must undergo extra screening to fly; and a white list of persons who have names similar to those on the other lists, but who are not threats.

The last publicly reported tally of the no-fly and selectee lists in October 2006 put the combined number of names at 119,000. The current number is a closely guarded secret, but Homeland Security officials announced earlier this year that it cut the no-fly list in half after hand-reviewing the names, which are submitted by a hodgepodge of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Despite that, last month constitutional scholar Walter F. Murphy, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Princeton University, found himself unable to check in curbside at a New Mexico airport. A check-in clerk with American Airlines told him it was because he was on a "terrorist watch list," Murphy says.

"One of them, I don't remember which one, asked me, 'Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying for that,'" recalls Murphy. "I said, 'No, but I did give a speech criticizing George Bush,' and he said, 'That will do it.'"

Incensed at the thought that the administration was using an anti-terrorism measure for political purposes, Murphy publicized his run-in through a prominent law blog, Balkinization. His accusations lit up the comment boards on several influential websites.

The evidence remains thin that Murphy was actually on a watch list -- he was able to get a boarding pass on his return trip -- but the incident shows how the watch list programs have put their imprint on America's consciousness. It's in the very nature of secret watch lists to induce paranoia, says Lee Tien, an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer and longtime critic of government watch lists.

"If (the lists) weren't secret, you would know if you were on one and you would be able to scream about it," Tien says. "Without accountability, they will be stupid or evil; and without transparency, there's no way to tell the difference."

Following a string of high profile cases of watch lists snaring innocent travelers -- ranging from U.S. armed forces personnel, to prominent politicians and nuns -- the Department of Homeland Security launched a website in February to help out people who are wrongly matched with names on the list. Travelers can fill out a complaint form online, and so far, 3,700 people have applied for help.

That's a big change for the government, which didn't even admit that it had a no-fly list until fall of 2002. The existence of a second list, known as the "selectee list", was also kept secret until it surfaced in documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and first reported by Wired News.

Those lists also largely derived from the "unified terrorist watch list," a blend of information from intelligence agencies and the FBI that's also shared with the FBI's National Crime Information Center. The NCIC database is queried nearly any time a cop or county sheriff makes an arrest or pulls someone over for speeding.

The Treasury Department runs a separate list known as the OFAC list (short for Office of Foreign Assets Control), which is the only published government anti-terrorism watch list. The 250-page long list includes organizations and individuals with which American companies are prohibited from doing business.

While there are almost no American citizens on the OFAC list, it is routinely used during home purchases, credit checks and even apartment rentals, and has caused people with common Latino and Muslim names to be denied mortgages for having a name that only vaguely resembles a name on the list, according to a recent report (.pdf) from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights.

The transparency of the public OFAC list is a double-edged sword: Unlike the other watch lists, people can easily determine if a name similar to theirs is on the OFAC list. At the same time, because it's unclassified and published, the OFAC is widely used by companies that run background checks. The potential for of civil liberties abuse is high, says Shirin Shinnar, who wrote the LCCR report.

"If you are denied an apartment or a job, you often aren't told at all why -- let alone that it was because you were identified as a possible terrorist," Shinnar says.

Just as murky is the question of how useful the lists actually are. The Transportation Security Administration refuses to provide any statistics on whether the lists have ever prevented any known terrorist from boarding a plane.

For its part, the Terrorist Screening Center, which compiles the unified terrorist watch list created by a 2003 presidential directive, did not respond with a request for comment. But a 2005 Inspector General report (.pdf) found the center's database of hundreds of thousand of records was plagued with technical difficulties and inaccurate entries.

Comment on this story.

UK: No More 'War on Terror'

Monday April 16, 2007 12:46 PM

LONDON (AP) - The British government has stopped using the phrase ``war on terror'' to refer to the struggle against political and religious violence, according to a Cabinet minister's prepared remarks for a Monday speech.

International Development Secretary Hilary Benn, a rising star of the governing Labour Party, says in a speech prepared for delivery in New York that the expression popularized by President Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks strengthens terrorists by making them feel part of a bigger struggle.

Extracts from Benn's speech at New York University's Center on International Cooperation were released by his office.

``We do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organized enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives,'' Benn said.

``It is the vast majority of the people in the world - of all nationalities and faiths - against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger.''

Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman said he was unsure when Blair had last used the phrase.

``We all use our own phraseology, and we talk about terrorism, we talk about the fight against terrorism, but we also talk about trying to find political solutions to political problems,'' he said on condition of anonymity, in line with government policy.

According to the advance text, Benn urged Americans to use the ``soft power'' of values and ideas as well as military strength to defeat extremism.

Benn's comments were at least partly directed at his own Labour Party, which is uneasy about Blair's close alliance with Bush and overwhelmingly opposed to Britain's participation in the Iraq war.

Benn currently is the bookies' favorite to become Labour's deputy leader in a party election once Blair steps down as premier later this year.

Democrats put end to global war on terror

By Toby Harnden in Washington

Last Updated: 12:47am BST 10/04/2007

Democrats have banned the phrase "global war on terror" from the draft Pentagon budget, arguing that it is a propagandist term designed to boost President George W Bush's contention that the Iraq conflict was a war of necessity. The term, coined by the Bush administration shortly after the September 11 attacks, soon entered the American political lexicon. In Pentagon documents, it has its own acronym - GWOT. But Democrats on the House of Representatives' armed services committee, in an unconscious echo of Basil Fawlty's refrain of "Don't Mention the War!" in a Fawlty Towers episode "The Germans", has said that GWOT should be avoided. Republicans seized on the decision as evidence that the Democrats were weak on defence. "The attempt by Democrats to erase the words 'global' and 'terror' from our current war is an absurd effort to deny the fact that America is battling terrorism on a global scale," said Congressman John Boehner, the Republican minority leader. "How do Democrats expect America to fight and win a war they deny is even taking place?... It's no wonder Democrats don't like the phrase 'global war on terror': they have completely failed to take the threat of global terrorism seriously." But Congressman Ike Skelton, the Democratic leader of the House armed services committee and whose staff made the ruling that terms such as "the war in Afghanistan" and "ongoing military operations" should be used, was unrepentant. "GOP [Republican] objections to our efforts to clarify legislative language represent the typical Republican leadership attempt to tie together the misadventure in Iraq and the overall war against terrorists," he said. Some conservatives have questioned the use of the term, arguing that it does not communicate the full extent of the threat.

The Press is playing patsy with terrorist propaganda

BY JONATHAN POWER

5 April 2007

DOUBTLESS, at the moment of impact, the shards of the suicide bombers’ device will turn me into an emotional wreck, not to say a physical mess. But until that moment arrives I trust that I am in charge of my mental faculties.

Pace 9/11, I am not afraid of terrorism, even though I lived in London during the worst years of IRA activity and already this year I missed a terrorist attack on my hotel in Islamabad by only a couple of days. Terrorism and the damage it can do -- in particular the political and societal damage -- is greatly overrated. Who to blame? Doubtless, the politicians have a vested interest in whipping up the populace’s reaction, but most of all we should blame the media. They behave like patsies to the terrorists. They give their dirty deeds every bit of publicity they could ever dare to hope for and, as I saw last month in Nigeria’s oil producing delta, ignore the often valuable activities of the plethora of non-violent activists.

By and large the media get the perspective totally wrong -- who but a few observant folk know that the Tamil terrorists (Hindus for the most part) have a much worse terrorism record than Al Qaeda, with their attacks on Sri Lanka’s Buddhists and fellow Hindu’s? If there is a clash of civilisations anywhere on the planet -- which frankly I doubt -- it is on this pear shaped, tropical paradise of an island in the balmy Indian Ocean far away from any strategic interests of the big powers.

Second, the media, with only a handful of worthy exceptions, do an appalling job of presenting the facts behind the outrages. In the new issue of Prospect Magazine, Robert Dreyfus reports that Wayne White -- who led the State Department’s intelligence effort on Iraq until 2005 -- describes most of the “terrorists” in Iraq today as POIs, or “pissed off Iraqis “ who are fighting because “they don’t like the occupation”. Yet the press, until relatively recently, constantly replayed the Bush administration’s plain chant that without the American/British military presence Al Qaeda might take over Iraq. No wonder it has taken four years too long for the American and British public to turn against the war.

Ronald Steel noted in the New Republic after the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans, that the US media were fixated on “who or what bin Laden attacked” but “what bin Laden had been saying about why he and his Al Qaeda forces were attacking was given short shrift”. Only since the publication of Michael Schueur’s “Imperial Hubris” in 2004 has some of the media been shamed into regularly publishing excerpts of Al Qaeda’s communiques.

But there is an even more serious problem than that. The way the media and the politicians always play it is that the terrorists are in danger of winning and unless our political leaders are licensed to get tough we are going to succumb. A new study by Max Abrahms in Harvard University’s quarterly, “International Security”, shows the shallowness of such thinking. The study analyses the political life of 28 terrorist groups -- the complete list of foreign terrorist organisations designated by the State Department. The data yield a quite unexpected finding -- the terrorists accomplished their objectives only seven per cent of the time.

This is not an argument for giving into terrorism. It is a foul tactic that claims too many innocent lives. It is an argument simply for de-emphasising it and allowing the space for diplomacy and negotiations to work, and for the terrorists to get old and tire of the rough life, as they often do.

Look at the political plight of the Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero. Since the first day he took office he has constantly been pilloried by the principal opposition party for being soft on the Basque terrorist group, ETA. The Popular Party has kept up the false refrain that the Madrid station bombings of three years ago that took 190 lives were the work of ETA. For long enough Zapatero tried to ignore them, and continued his quiet and seemingly progressing negotiations with ETA. But then late last year what is probably a dissident ETA grouping killed two people at Madrid airport and most of the media, softened up by three years of the opposition’s carping, turned on Zapatero. His negotiating hands are now effectively tied.

In Britain, progress was only made with the IRA because the government simply lied over many years that it was negotiating with the terrorists.

Who today would dare stand up and say talk to Al Qaeda, negotiate with the Taleban or treat the leaders of Hamas as sincere fellows whose agenda is worth discussing? There are few of our politicians, and even fewer members of the media.

Jonathan Power is a widely published commentator based in London. He can be reached at JonatPower@aol.com

Let’s Hear it for the War on Terror: Somalia

On April 5th, there was a moving ceremony at the State Department. Assistant Secretary Barry Lowenkron presented—as mandated by the U.S. Congress—the fifth annual Supporting Human Rights and Democracy Report, which, said the secretary, “ documents the many ways the United States worked worldwide last year to foster respect for human rights and promote democratic government.”

Then, citing one of the globe’s great champions of human rights, “ As President Bush has said, what every terrorist fears most is human freedom — societies where men and women make their own choices, answer to their own conscience and live by their hopes instead of their resentments.”

Of course, in that war on terror, as in any war, you’ve got to be tough minded. You do what you have to do: torture, kidnap, murder, whatever. You also find your allies where you can, right? Like in the horn of Africa where Al Qaeda has been active—killing and bombing for years. One place they were supposed to be operating was Somalia, Black Hawk Down country: the very definition of a failed state, a seething, ungovernable land of perpetually warring clans. Between 1991 and last year, 13 governments came and went.

Then, last year a coalition of Islamic groups managed to bring calm to the capital of Mogadishu by getting the feuding clans to disarm their militias, and convincing Somalis, the majority of whom are Sunnis, to accept Islam as the solution to their turmoil.

That calm lasted for six months. The problem was that, as the U.S. saw it, while militant Islam might pacify the Somalis, it could also offer sanctuary for groups linked with Al Qaeda to regroup and train for future attacks—attacks like their bloody bombings in 1998 of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

U.S. Special Forces went to work with their military buddies in neighboring Ethiopia. And so it was that in December 2006, the Ethiopians attacked and Somali crowds cheered in the battered streets of Magadishu as the Islamists were sent packing. The Ethiopians and their U.S. advisors patted themselves on the back. This was the beginning of a new era for Somalia. It was like Baghdad after the fall of Saddam, or Kabul after the Taliban were evicted.

Similarly as well, the Ethiopian military scooped up scores of people –people of all ages, some apparently just passing through–and packed them off to clandestine prisons. Added to those were several hundred more who had fled to neighboring Kenya. International reaction was not long in coming.

According to the Associated Press, “Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.” They include citizens of 19 countries, including the U.S. Canada, France, Sweden.

While the Ethiopians deny they have any secret prisons in their country. American officials admitted to the AP that the FBI and CIA have been allowed “limited access” to question prisoners as part of their counter-terrorism work.”

As Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, put it “To fight terror, CIA acts boldly and lawfully, alone and with partners, just as the American people expect us to.”

U.S. officials, however, claimed that America had nothing to do with the arrests or imprisonment. But John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counter-terrorism, charged that, on the contrary, the United States has acted as “ringleader” in what he labeled a “decentralized, outsourced Guantanamo.”

O.K. so what goes on in the prisons of Ethiopia, America’s partner? You could ask Human Rights Watch, which of course talks of torture and beatings. But we know what knee-jerks the HRW folks are. To get the real truth, we turn to the U. S. State Department and its current report on Human Rights around the globe.

Their summary on Ethiopia?
“Human rights abuses reported during the year included: limitation on citizens’ right to change their government during the most recent elections; unlawful killings, and beating, abuse, and mistreatment of detainees and opposition supporters by security forces; poor prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention, particularly those suspected of sympathizing with or being members of the opposition; detention of thousands without charge and lengthy pretrial detention”…and so on.
You get the picture.

Meanwhile, back in Somalia, turns out that, after the initial euphoria, the regime installed by the Ethiopians and –one presumes—their American advisors, has been incapable of bringing together the major clans. Large numbers of African peacekeepers who were supposed to take over from the Ethiopians have, for more the most part, yet to show up. Meanwhile, as the interim government, which was supposed to be a transition on the road to democracy, has become ever more authoritarian and isolated, a new insurgency has grown. It began with some clans linked to the Islamists, but has now greatly expanded.

The past weeks have seen increasingly bloody battles in Mogadishu. Government troops often refused to take action , while the Ethiopians, feeling no such restraint, have reportedly been launching devastating and indsicriminate barrages into heavily populated urban areas. Mogadishu is once again filled with death and destruction. Over a hundred thousand Somalis have fled.

Impressive, while we’ve been obsessed with Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran, the progress being made elsewhere in the War Against Terror.

Land of the free, home of the War on Terrorism

April 6, 2007

by William Blum

"They told us this was one of the world's worst terrorists, and he got the sentence of a drunken driver," said Ben Wizner, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, referring to David Hicks, a 31-year-old Australian who in a plea bargain with a US military court will serve nine months in prison, largely in Australia. That's after five years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba without being charged with a crime, without a trial, without a conviction. Under the deal, Hicks agreed not to talk to reporters for one year (a slap in the face of free speech), to forever waive any profit from telling his story (a slap -- mon Dieu! -- in the face of free enterprise), to submit to US interrogation and testify at future US trials or international tribunals (an open invitation to the US government to hound the young man for the rest of his life), to renounce any claims of mistreatment or unlawful detention (a requirement which would be unconstitutional in a civilian US court).

"If the United States were not ashamed of its conduct, it wouldn't hide behind a gag order," said Wizner.)[1]

Like so many other "terrorists" held by the United States in recent years, Hicks had been "sold" to the American military for a bounty offered by the US, a phenomenon repeated frequently in Afghanistan and Pakistan. US officials had to know that once they offered payments to a very poor area to turn in bodies that almost anyone was fair game.

Other "terrorists" have been turned in as reprisals for all sorts of personal hatreds and feuds.

Many others -- abroad and in the United States -- have been incarcerated by the United States simply for working for, or merely contributing money to, charitable organizations with alleged or real ties to a "terrorist organization", as determined by a list kept by the State Department, a list conspicuously political.

It was recently disclosed that an Iraqi resident of Britain is being released from Guantánamo after four years. His crime? He refused to work as an informer for the CIA and MI5, the British security service. His business partner is still being held in Guantánamo, for the same crime.[2]

Finally, there are those many other poor souls who have been picked up simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Most of these guys weren't fighting. They were running," General Martin Lucenti, former deputy commander of Guantánamo, has pointed out.[3]

Thousands of people thrown into hell on earth for no earthly good reason. The world media has been overflowing with their individual tales of horror and sadness for five very long years. Said Guantánamo's former commander, General Jay Hood: "Sometimes we just didn't get the right folks."[4] Not that the torture they were put through would be justified if they were in fact "the right folks".

Hicks was taken into custody in Afghanistan in 2001. He was a convert to Islam and like many others from many countries had gone to Afghanistan for religious reasons, had wound up on the side of the Taliban in the civil war that had been going on since the early 1990s, and had received military training at a Taliban camp. The United States has insisted on calling such camps "terrorist training camps", or "anti-American terrorist training camps", or "al-Qaeda terrorist training camps". Almost every individual or group not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wants to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there's a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American imperialism while being a member of al Qaeda and retaliating against American imperialism while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit into your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

It should be noted that for nearly half a century much of southern Florida has been one big training camp for anti-Castro terrorists. None of their groups -- which have carried out many hundreds of serious terrorist acts in the US as well as abroad, including bombing a passenger airplane in flight -- are on the State Department list. Nor were the Contras of Nicaragua in the 1980s, heavily supported by the United States, about whom former CIA Director Stansfield Turner testified: "I believe it is irrefutable that a number of the Contras' actions have to be characterized as terrorism, as State-supported terrorism."[5] The same applies to groups in Kosovo and Bosnia, with close ties to al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, in the recent past, but which have allied themselves with Washington's agenda in the former Yugoslavia since the 1990s. Now we learn of US support for a Pakistani group, called Jundullah and led by a Taliban, which has taken responsibility for the recent kidnapings and deaths and of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials in cross-border attacks.[6] Do not hold your breath waiting for the name Jundallah to appear on the State Department list of terrorist organizations; nor any of the several other ethnic militias being supported by the CIA to carry out terrorist bombing and assassination attacks in Iran.[7]

The same political selectivity applies to many of the groups which are on the list, particularly those opposed to American or Israeli policies.

Amid growing pressure from their home countries and international human rights advocates, scores of Guantánamo detainees have been quietly repatriated in the past three years. Now, a new analysis by lawyers who have represented detainees at this 21st century Devil's Island says this policy undermines Washington's own claims about the threat posed by many of the prison camp's residents. The report, based on US government case files for Saudi detainees sent home over the past three years, shows inmates being systematically freed from custody within weeks of their return. In half the cases studied, the detainees had been turned over to US forces by Pakistani police or troops in return for financial rewards. Many others were accused of terrorism connections in part because their Arab nicknames matched those found in a computer database of al-Qaeda members, documents show. In December, a survey by the Associated Press found that 84 percent of released detainees -- 205 out of 245 individuals whose cases could be tracked -- were set free after being released to the custody of their native countries.

"There are certainly bad people in Guantánamo Bay, but there are also other cases where it's hard to understand why the people are still there," said Anant Raut, co-author of the report, who has visited the detention camp three times. "We were struggling to find some rationality, something to comfort us that it wasn't just random. But we didn't find it."

The report states that many of the US attempts to link the detainees to terrorism groups were based on evidence the authors describe as circumstantial and "highly questionable", such as the travel routes the detainees had followed in flying commercially from one Middle East country to another. American officials have associated certain travel routes with al Qaeda, when in fact, says the report, the routes "involve ordinary connecting flights in major international airports." With regard to accusations based on similar names, the report states: "This accusation appears to be based upon little more than similarities in the transliterations of a detainee's name and a name found on one of the hard drives."

Raut said he was most struck by the high percentage of Saudi detainees who had been captured and turned over by Pakistani forces. In effect, he said, for at least half of the group in the study, the United States "had no first-hand knowledge of their activities" in Afghanistan before their capture and imprisonment.[8]

When Michael Scheuer, former CIA officer who headed the Agency's Osama bin Laden unit, was told that the largest group in Guantánamo came from custody in Pakistan, he said: "We absolutely got the wrong people."[9]

Never mind. They were all treated equally. All thrown into solitary confinement. Shackled, blindfolded, excruciating physical contortions for long periods, denied medicine. Sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation. And two dozen other methods of torture which American officials do not call torture. (If you torture these officials, they might admit that it "torture lite".)

"The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment," a senior American defense official said in 2003, "so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited."[10]

When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and invading and occupying their country, without their country attacking or threatening the US, become completely discredited? When will the use of depleted uranium and cluster bombs and CIA torture renditions become things that even men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld will be too embarrassed to defend?

Australian/British journalist John Pilger has noted that in George Orwell's 1984 "three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Today's slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is terrorism."


Throwing the earth on the mercy of the market

Al Gore appeared before a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on global warming on March 21. The star of "An Inconvenient Truth" was told by Cong. Joe Barton of Texas: "You're not just off a little -- you're totally wrong." In the afternoon Gore testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, during which the former vice president was told by Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma: "You've been so extreme in some of your expressions that you're losing some of your own people."[11]

These members of Congress know the facts of economic life in the United States. Fighting global warming is a threat to the principal human generator of it -- corporations -- who avail themselves of the best congress members money can buy to keep government regulations as weak as can be.

Does Al Gore know the same facts of American economic life? Of course, but you would have a hard time discerning that from his film. It's as cowardly in dealing with the corporations as Gore was in fighting the theft of the 2000 election. In the film's hour and a half, the words "corporations" or "profit" are not heard. The closest he comes to ascribing a link between the rape of the environment and the incessant corporate drive to optimize profits is a single passing mention of American automakers' reluctance to increase car gas mileage. He discusses the link between tobacco and lung cancer, as an example of how we have to "connect the dots" on environmental issues, with no mention of the tobacco corporations or their gross and deliberate deception of the American people. He states at another point that we must choose the environment over the economy, without any elucidation at all. Otherwise, the film's message is that it's up to the individual to change his habits, to campaign for renewable energy, and to write his congress member about this or that. In summary, the basic problem, he tells us, is that we're lacking "political will".

It would be most interesting if Al Gore were the president to see how tough he'd get with the corporations, which every day, around the clock, are faced with choices: one method of operation available being the least harmful to the environment, another method being the least harmful to the bottom line. Of course, Gore was vice-president for eight years and was in a fantastic and enviable position to pressure the corporations to mend their ways and Congress to enact tougher regulations; as well as to educate the public on more than their own bad habits. But what exactly did he do? Can any readers enlighten me as to what extent the man used his position and his power then in a manner consistent with the image and the word of his new film?

But could Gore be elected without corporate money? And how much of that money would reach his pocket if he advocated (choke, gasp!) free government-paid public transportation -- rail, bus, ferry, etc.? That would give birth to a breathtaking -- or rather, breath enhancing -- reduction in automobile pollution; easily paid for by ceasing America's imperialist wars.


Microsoft and the National Security Agency

I have long felt that the American media's gravest shortcoming is its errors of omission, rather than its errors of commission. It's what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. In January the Washington Post reported that Microsoft had announced that its new operating system, Vista, was being brought to us with the assistance of the National Security Agency. The NSA said it helped to protect the operating system from worms, Trojan horses and other insidious computer attackers. "Our intention is to help everyone with security," said the NSA's chief of vulnerability analysis and operations group. The spy agency, which provided its service free, said it was Microsoft's idea to acknowledge NSA's role, although the software giant declined to be specific about NSA's contributions to Vista.[12]

What the Post -- and most likely the entirety of mainstream American media -- do not remind us of is what came out in 1999 and 2000, although it's all over the Internet.

In September 1999, leading European investigative reporter Duncan Campbell revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special "keys" into Windows operating systems, beginning with Windows 95. An American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun -- Microsoft's developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for two keys. One was called "KEY". The other was called "NSAKEY". Fernandez presented his finding at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users' knowledge. Fernandez says that NSA's "back door" in the world's most commonly used operating system makes it "orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer."[13]

In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to the DAS report, "it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration." The report stated that there had been a "strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumours about the existence of spy programmes on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates' development teams." Microsoft categorically denied all the charges and the French Defense Ministry said that it did not necessarily stand by the report, which was written by "outside experts".[14]

In case the above disturbs your image of Bill Gates and his buddies as a bunch of long-haired, liberal, peacenik computer geeks, and the company as one of the non-military-oriented halfway decent corporations, the DAS report states that the Pentagon at the time was Microsoft's biggest client in the world. The Israeli military has also been an important client. In 2002, the company erected enormous billboards in Israel which bore the Microsoft logo under the text "From the depth of our heart -- thanks to The Israeli Defense Forces", with the Israeli national flag in the background.[15]


The Myth of the Good War
Readers of this report will be aware that one of the points I try very hard to convey is that the reason so many Americans support US atrocities abroad is that they're convinced that no matter how bad things may look, the government means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are honorable. Of that most Americans are certain. And one of the foundation stones for this edifice of patriotic faith is the Second World War, an historical saga that all Americans are taught about from childhood on. We all know what its real name is: "The Good War".

Which leads me to recommend a book, "The Myth of the Good War", by Jacques Pauwels, published in 2002. It's very well done, well argued and documented, an easy read. I particularly like the sections dealing with the closing months of the European campaign, during which the United States and Great Britain contemplated stabbing their Soviet ally in the back with maneuvers like a separate peace with Germany, using German troops to fight the Russians, and sabotaging legal attempts by various Communist Parties and other elements of the European left to share in (highly earned) political power after the war. This last piece of sabotage was of course very effectively realized. Stalin learned enough about these schemes to at least partially explain his post-war suspicious manner toward his "allies". In the West we called it "paranoia".[16]


NOTES

[1] Seattle Times, March 31, 2007

[2] Washington Post, March 30, 2007, p.11

[3] Financial Times (London), Oct 4, 2004

[4] Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2005

[5] Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, April 16, 1985

[6] ABC News, April 3, 2007

[7] Sunday Telegraph (London), February 25, 2007

[8] Washington Post, March 18, 2007

[9] Richard Ackland, "Innocence ignored at Guantanamo", Sydney Morning Herald, February 24, 2006.

[10] New York Times, January 17, 2003, p.10

[11] Washington Post, March 22, 2007, p.2

[12] Washington Post, January 9, 2007. p.D1

[13] Duncan Campbell's article of September 3, 1999 can be found on the website of TechWeb: http://www.techweb.com/wire/29110640

[14] Agence France Presse, February 18 and 21, 2000

[15] To see one of the billboards: www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-news-0022.html

[16] http://www.alys.be/pauwels/2publi_the_myth.htm
Available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch editions


William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at
Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.