Wanted Poster

Top Ten Counter-Terrorism Scandals 2010

The new year is not very old, but several recent revelations cast the the US fight against al-Qaeda (a tiny if deadly fraternity of a couple thousand fanatics spread in dozens of countries) in a bad light, if not to say a scandalous one. The entire premise of combating al-Qaeda as though it were an enemy army, using the Pentagon as the lead agency, while simultaneously militarizing the CIA, needs to be questioned. But so too do a lot of other premises about a so-called American 'Long War' with parts of the Muslim world, including drone strikes, secret bases, and torture. Worst of all, embarrassing revelations are coming out about damaging or even criminal actions and policies that can only harm any genuine counter-terrorism program.

1. Evidence is surfacing, according to Scott Horton writing in Harper's, that the supposed group suicide of three prisoners at Guantanamo in summer of 2006 may have in fact been murder--that is, they may have died of asphyxiation during aggressive interrogation that involved stuffing rags in their throats to cut off air. The explosive allegations may put further pressure on President Obama to fulfill his pledge to close the prison.

2. The FBI falsely invoked terrorism emergencies 2000 times between 2002 and 2006 to engage in illegal phone wiretapping of Americans without obtaining a warrant. The agency was using a provision of the PATRIOT act, which Bush administration officials had assured Congress would never be used for ordinary domestic cases.

3. The FBI photoshopped the face of leftist Spanish parliamentarian Gaspar Llamazares, combining it with the features of Usama Bin Laden, to produce a supposed portrait of what the aging terrorist now looks like. Spain was furious and the whole incident spoke of amateurism and stupidity in an area, counter-terrorism, where neither is desirable. Hint to the FBI: Usama Bin Laden has not produced a video message since October 2004. We may conclude that he is either badly disfigured by a strike on his position that almost succeeded, or that he is dead. You can't project his appearance forward with photoshop usefully either way.

4. George W. Bush claimed that he had misspoken when he called his 'war on terror' a 'crusade.' But it turns out that the Michigan company that makes rifle sights for the US military inscribes them with Bible verses. The capture of the US Air Force Academy by Christian fundamentalists is worrisome enough, but a Military-Evangelical Complex is truly frightening.

5. The Iraqi government that came to power under the auspices of George W. Bush is spearheading a class action suit against the Xe (then known as Blackwater) mercenary corporation for injuries its security men inflicted on Iraqis. Xe, headed by militant fundamentalist Christian, is a prime Pentagon contractor, which replicates the work of GIs but charges 12 times as much for it. The Iraqis were furious when a government case against Blackwater mercenaries for shooting up Nisour Square in Baghdad and killing over a dozen civilians collapsed because of prosecutorial misbehavior. Based on this good recommendation, the US military has brought Xe mercenaries to Pakistan where they are allegedly involved in US drone attacks on that country, further winnning hearts and minds.

6. Worse, the Pentagon is considering bringing thousands more Blackwater security men to Afghanistan. The great Rep. Jan Schakowski (D-Ill.) is introducing a bill banning the use of such mercernary firms.

7. Der Spiegel has revealed yet another CIA plot to kidnap a citizen of an allied country on suspicion of involvement in terrorism (a suspicion years of investigation by German authorities was unable later to support). Allies don't take kindly to this sort of thing. An Italian judge recently convicted 23 CIA operatives in absentia for carrying out a kidnapping in Italy.

8. It has been revealed that then British foreign minister Jack Straw wrote a letter to PM Tony Blair in 2002 warning him that a war on Iraq would be illegal, that many Labor MPs would oppose it, that Saddam was not connected to 9/11 or al-Qaeda, that Iraq likely had no weapons of mass destruction of any importance, and that there was no guarantee that the condition of Iraqis in the wake of such a war would be an improvement on their situation in 2002. The letter shows that Blair committed to the war at Crawford, TX in April 2002, even though he later repeatedly told his own MPs that no decision had been made. The letter vindicates the 'Downing Street memo' from a few months later in which the head of British intelligence complained that the decision to go to war had been made and that the intelligence was being fixed around the policy. It also shows that the mantra of the Bush administration, that all US allies had made the same errors of judgment about Iraq as had Bush-Cheney, is simply incorrect. The British foreign ministry knew better.

9. The Obama administration has been forced by an ACLU suit to release the names of the prisoners it holds at Bagram base in Afghanistan. The Obama administration maintains that these individual have no human rights at all, though some are scheduled to be tried in military tribunals. It is hard to see why Guantanamo is bad but Bagram is good. There have been allegations of torture of inmates, including of teenagers. The whole facility and its prisoners are to be turned by the US over to the Afghan government later this year.

10. The Obama administration's initial reaction to the underpants bomber was flatfooted and included forbidding children to hold teddy bears on their laps during the last hour of a flight, as well as renewed drone strikes and deeper involvement in Yemen, on the grounds that there are 300 al-Qaeda members in that craggy, inaccessible and tribally-organized country. Al-Qaeda has dug trapping pits for the US to fall into as it pursues its small, nimble foe, and the US keeps lumbering into them. The prospect of a US troop presence in Yemen provoked its council of clerics to threaten to call a jihad or holy war on the US if any attempt were made to occupy the country. The US attempted to allay such concerns with a firm statement it would not send troops, but not before the Yemenis had already gotten their backs up and anti-Americanism increased.


End/ (Not Continued)

4 Comments:

At 7:46 AM, Anonymous said...

"The explosive allegations may put further pressure on President Obama to fulfill his pledge to close the prison." !!!???

Why are you towing the party line Prof? Whatever happened to the good old American (just joking) concept of justice and accountability? If murders have been committed then is closing the prison all we can demand? Shame on us. How far have we been dumbed down.

And by the way, closing gitmo does nothing. We have new gitmos springing up right in our homeland, as Chris Hedges reports
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_day_well_all_be_terrorists_20091228/

Sad... sad... sad

At 9:57 AM, About Dan said...

Depressing, but interesting and necessary list.

My disagreement would be only with the implication that the three Guantanamo prisoners were killed as a result of aggressive interrogation, the implication being that there was some inadvertency. Having read the Harper's piece, it seems far more likely they were taken off base to be killed, and interrogation was no part of it: for three of them to die within 2 hours, in the same fashion, without the death of one, if inadvertent, not bringing to a halt the "interrogation" other than by design seems extremely unlikely to me.

At 1:09 PM, Bruce Webb said...

One prisoner dying while being tortured might be described as "negligent homicide during interrogation". Three either at a time or in sequence using the exact same methodology is something much more sinister, particularly if reported a couple were scheduled for release.

This smacks all to much of methods used by the South American right wing dictatorships where the preferred method of releasing prisoners from captivity was dropping them into the sea from helicopters.

One, an accident. Two, a coincidence. Three, a policy order.

We're The Cops Of The World

PoisonDUst - Depleted Uranium, one more American War Crime

Poison DUst tells the story of young soldiers who thought they came home safely from the war, but didn't. Of a veteran's young daughter whose birth defect is strikingly similar to birth defects suffered by many Iraqi children. Of thousands of young vets who are suffering from the symptoms of uranium poisoning, and the thousands more who are likely to find themselves with these ailments in the years to come. Of a government unwilling to admit there might be a problem here. Filmmaker Sue Harris skillfully weaves the stories of these young veterans with scientific explanations of the nature of "DU" and its dangers, including interviews with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, New York Daily News reporter Juan Gonzalez, noted physicist Michio Kaku, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Dr. Helen Caldicott and Major Doug Rokke- the former U.S. Army DU Project head.

Every American who cares about our troops should watch this film. Everyone who cares about the innocent civilians who live in the countries where these weapons are used should watch this film. And everyone who cares about the hatred of Americans that may result from the effects of our government's actions in using these weapons, should watch this film. Is there a cover-up? «

The Rape of Sabrine... By Riverbend (Baghdad Blogger)

Baghdad Burning
... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

The Rape of Sabrine... By Riverbend

It takes a lot to get the energy and resolution to blog lately. I guess it’s mainly because just thinking about the state of Iraq leaves me drained and depressed. But I had to write tonight.

As I write this, Oprah is on Channel 4 (one of the MBC channels we get on Nilesat), showing Americans how to get out of debt. Her guest speaker is telling a studio full of American women who seem to have over-shopped that they could probably do with fewer designer products. As they talk about increasing incomes and fortunes, Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, is on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks. In the end she tells the reporter that she can’t talk about it anymore and she covers her eyes with shame.

She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name. Hearing her tell her story physically makes my heart ache. Some people will call her a liar. Others (including pro-war Iraqis) will call her a prostitute- shame on you in advance.

I wonder what excuse they used when they took her. It’s most likely she’s one of the thousands of people they round up under the general headline of ‘terrorist suspect’. She might have been one of those subtitles you read on CNN or BBC or Arabiya, “13 insurgents captured by Iraqi security forces.” The men who raped her are those same security forces Bush and Condi are so proud of- you know- the ones the Americans trained. It’s a chapter right out of the book that documents American occupation in Iraq: the chapter that will tell the story of 14-year-old Abeer who was raped, killed and burned with her little sister and parents.

They abducted her from her house in an area in southern Baghdad called Hai Al Amil. No- it wasn’t a gang. It was Iraqi peace keeping or security forces- the ones trained by Americans? You know them. She was brutally gang-raped and is now telling the story. Half her face is covered for security reasons or reasons of privacy. I translated what she said below.


“I told him, ‘I don’t have anything [I did not do anything].’ He said, 'You don’t have anything?’ One of them threw me on the ground and my head hit the tiles. He did what he did- I mean he raped me. The second one came and raped me. The third one also raped me. [Pause- sobbing] I begged them and cried, and one of them covered my mouth. [Unclear, crying] Another one of them came and said, 'Are you finished? We also want our turn.' So they answered, ‘No, an American committee came.’ They took me to the judge.

Anchorwoman: Sabrine Al Janabi said that one of the security forces videotaped/photographed her and threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the rape. Another officer raped her after she saw the investigative judge.


Sabrine continuing:
“One of them, he said… I told him, ‘Please- by your father and mother- let me go.’ He said, ‘No, no- by my mother’s soul I’ll let you go- but on one condition, you give me one single thing.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘[I want] to rape you.’ I told him, ‘No- I can’t.’ So he took me to a room with a weapon… It had a weapon, a Klashnikov, a small bed [Unclear], he sat me on it. So [the officer came] and told him, ‘Leave her to me.’ I swore to him on the Quran, I told him, ‘By the light of the Prophet I don’t do such things…’ He said, ‘You don’t do such things?’ I said, ‘Yes’.

[Crying] He picked up a black hose, like a pipe. He hit me on the thigh. [Crying] I told him, ‘What do you want from me? Do you want me to tell you rape me? But I can’t… I’m not one of those ***** [Prostitutes] I don’t do such things.’ So he said to me, ‘We take what we want and what we don’t want we kill. That’s that.’ [Sobbing] I can’t anymore… please, I can’t finish.”

I look at this woman and I can’t feel anything but rage. What did we gain? I know that looking at her, foreigners will never be able to relate. They’ll feel pity and maybe some anger, but she’s one of us. She’s not a girl in jeans and a t-shirt so there will only be a vague sort of sympathy. Poor third-world countries- that is what their womenfolk tolerate. Just know that we never had to tolerate this before. There was a time when Iraqis were safe in the streets. That time is long gone. We consoled ourselves after the war with the fact that we at least had a modicum of safety in our homes. Homes are sacred, aren’t they? That is gone too.


She’s just one of tens, possibly hundreds, of Iraqi women who are violated in their own homes and in Iraqi prisons. She looks like cousins I have. She looks like friends. She looks like a neighbor I sometimes used to pause to gossip with in the street. Every Iraqi who looks at her will see a cousin, a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt…

Humanitarian organizations are warning that three Iraqi women are to be executed next month. The women are Wassan Talib, Zainab Fadhil and Liqa Omar Muhammad. They are being accused of 'terrorism', i.e. having ties to the Iraqi resistance. It could mean they are relatives of people suspected of being in the resistance. Or it could mean they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of them gave birth in the prison. I wonder what kind of torture they've endured. Let no one say Iraqi women didn't get at least SOME equality under the American occupation- we are now equally as likely to get executed.

And yet, as the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.

Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.











"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell

“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow


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