Mission Accomplished: Terrorism rises 30%

McClatchy Newspapers reveals that an upcoming terrorism report will show 29% rise in attacks and that:

"...almost all of the boost due to growing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The thing is that terrorism needs bombs and thanks to the lack of post-occupational planning the insurgents managed to loot some 250,000 tons of heavy weapons ordinance in the 30 months after the occupation of Iraq in 2003.

As I've said in the past, if the Bush Administration was capable of comprehending that a withdrawal timeline means national reconciliation and an Iraq solution then this problem would be well on its way to be being diffused. Unfortunately when your only message to the people is "Stay the Course" it doesn't leave you any room to be flexible to changing circumstances.

On top of this the recent news that Bush is to receive the Iraq bill on ‘Mission Accomplished’ day and you have a recipe for humiliation of the President in spite of his threat to veto. Make no mistake, this is an act of humiliation meant to punish and embarrass the President in order to save America's and democracy's reputation in front of the world.

There is a Voice in America, it is the voice of democracy and it will not be ignored.

An American Inquisition?

Excellent article titled Torture, Secrecy and the Bush Administration by Scott Horton over at Harpers where amongst other things he describes how John Lilburne in 1649 challenged the Star Chamber of the English Courts and also provides insight into the deal making that may have gone into Hicks plea bargain and gag order.

Freeborn John as he was known then included the following statement in the opening of his defence in 1649:

"...no man whatsoever ought to be tried in holes or corners, or in any place where the gates are shut and barred."

Scott's article goes on to detail how the majority of redactions from evidence of Guantanamo detainees are those detailing torture.

Will this time be remembered as the American Inquisition I wonder?

U.S. backed terrorists arrested

In a major set-back to U.S. efforts to undermine the Iranian government Iran Press TV reports the arrest of 90 members of the terrorist group Jundallah a terrorist group who has committed car bombings, abductions and executions of citizens in both Iran and Israel.

In a recent ABC News Exclusive: The Secret War Against Iran U.S. officials, in an act of unprecedented ass covering were reported as saying that

"...the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or "finding" as well as congressional oversight."

However, Doug Lorimer's article CIA funds terrorist operations against Iran quotes former US State Department counter-terrorism agent Fred Burton as saying:

"The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran’s ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime."

Earlier this month, Voice of America radio gave an interview with Iranian branch leader Abd el Malik Regi during which he admitted to having personally executed Iranian hostages abducted by Jundallah.

In 2005, Abu Abdallah al-Khattab, identified as the spokesman for Jundallah in Gaza as originally reported in the Jerusalem Post and quoted by scotsman.com stated:

"Our people will not remain idle in the face of American crimes in Muslim countries."

By having a "relationship with Jundullah" the United States government is, by any sane definition legitimizing terrorism and stands as the very antithesis to a "war on terror." By extension it stands as a betrayal of the American people and their trust that their government is acting in good faith.

For some I imagine, the knowledge that their government is admittedly supporting an identified enemy of the American people is an act of betrayal bordering on treason.

If 9/11 proved anything it was that there is a price for everything and in light of that sacrifice the American people have a right to know what their government is buying them into.

America spits on the graves of 9/11 victims

Terrorist's world wide are rejoicing today in the wake of America's release of convicted terrorist and boastful plane bomber Luis Posada Carriles.

When not bombing civilian airliners Luis likes to relax by bombing tourist destinations, conducting assassination, and running illegal para-military operations on behalf of the American government.

As late as 1997 Posada was known by U.S. officials to be coordinating bombing attacks of tourists in Cuba from inside the United States, including evidence that Posada had reminded the bombers by Fax that:

“If there is no publicity, the job is useless... The American newspapers will publish nothing that has not been confirmed. ... If there is no publicity, there is no payment."

So, armed with this evidence does the FBI get the chance to charge Posada with terrorism charges? No. In an act of administrative cretinism the charges are instead levied as an immigration misdemeanor.

This is not an isolated incident either. In 1990 then president George H.W. Bush pardoned Orlando Bosch, a convicted terrorist and Posada's plane bombing co-hort, at the request of George Snr's son, Jeb, Governor of Florida.

In my mind then these acts by America are like spitting on the graves and memories of their brothers and sisters who died as a result of 9/11, every soldier who has died fighting terrorism around the world as well as spitting on the victims of every terrorist action worldwide.

America's actions on this issue are sickening if unsurprising.

Yvonne Ridley: Believe it or not

I Listened to Islamic fundamentalist Yvonne Ridley's interview by Jane Cowan on Radio ABC this morning where Jane's dogged questioning of "...do you or do you not support suicide bombing?" finally achieved a terse and exasperated "Of course I don't" response from Yvonne.

At first I thought that this was just another case of Muslim baiting so I decided to investigate further by visiting Yvonne's website, specifically her Speech at the 2006 Global Peace & Unity Conference where she said:

"Our greatest shame has been our silence while martyrdom operations ...have been condemned as acts of terror as witnessed in 9/11..."

In truth I think these words speak more to the mind of Yvonne Ridley than her public effacing reply to Jane in her radio interview. That's not to say of course that the question wasn't loaded to some extent.

To explain, dead civilians are dead civilians whether the delivery platform is an Israeli M16, a U.S. cluster bomb or a Palestinian freedom fighter with a bomb strapped to his chest. I don't imagine civilians have an opinion about how they are killed except to say that they would in the main prefer not to be. Governments have armies to protect the civilian population against attack from others but these same armies are also well placed to conduct acts of oppression on their government's behalf including the careful filtering of media access to the results of those activities. The oppressed on the other hand are usually poorly resourced and are, for the most part doomed to failure when confronting a well trained and resourced military in a conventional sense.

Subsequently, the oppressed have little choice but to visit their pain and suffering upon the oppressor's civilian population with the aim of subjecting them to the same sense of fear and hopelessness that left unchecked will ultimately catalyse them also to rise up.

Faced with terrorism then, all governments will face the choice of escalating their response to counter any groundswell of public fear and unrest a la Saddam Hussein or choose negotiation with their terrorist opponents as in the case of the Provisional IRA.

Neither solution is palatable to some but accept it or not the oppressed are never going to give up--they have nothing to go back to.

What's wrong with competitive analysis of intelligence?

Remember Team B? They were the cabal approved under President Reagan to undertake competitive analysis of intelligence on the then Soviet threat. Historically, their results have been variously described as being everything from "completely wrong" to "fantasy". Even CIA Director, George H. W. Bush finally concluded that the Team B approach set "in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy." Team B was shut-down.

So, fast forward to 2002 and the formation of the Office of Special Plans whose task was ...you guessed it "competitive analysis of intelligence". These are the guys who said Saddam had WMD's, was buying Uranium from Niger and had links with al Qaeda. All of these assertions as with their Team B forebears have been proven through courts and various senate and congressional committees to be anywhere from simply "misleading" to complete fabrications. The OSP was also shut-down amidst the Valerie Plame Affair and with one of its former members, Lawrence Franklin jailed for passing classified intelligence to foreign officials.

So here we are today and Bush Jnr. has assembled much of the same crew yet again for his Iranian Directorate whose role is rumored to be ...yep "competitive analysis of intelligence". Remember the fake Iranian IED photographs from a few months back? No, these guys are not stupid, but they are persistent.

In my mind, the Bush administration, sees intelligence analysis as a drunkard views a lamppost--as a means of support rather than illumination--nothing surprising there. The question then is what is a country to do when its most senior members of democratic government are actively involved in undermining their own country's national security by subverting intelligence to achieve the private objectives of God only knows who?

What are the potential impacts of foreign policy decisions that bear little or no relationship to actual circumstances? In my mind I see this type or partisan manipulation of intelligence as the single largest threat to any and all countries national securities worldwide.

What do you think?

9/11 - Buck Passing American Style

I just read a September 2006 Interview With the New York Post Editorial Board and Condoleezza Rice, where they asked her if she was calling former President Clinton a liar when he said that the Bush Administration "didn’t even try to go after al-Qaida" prior to 9/11. She responded:

"I would just suggest that you go back and read the 9/11 Commission report on the efforts of the Bush Administration in the eight months, things like working to get an armed Predator that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important..."

I thought what good idea! I'll read the report. Sure enough, The 9/11 Commission Report Executive Summary states:

"The CIA also produced a plan to improve intelligence collection on al Qaeda, including the use of a small, unmanned airplane with a video camera, known as the Predator."

Imagine my surprise then, to read a report of former White House Counter Terrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke's 9/11 Commission testimony specifically the reference to his damning memo to Rice, blasting the CIA for blocking the predator program.

No wonder he resigned. It must be bad enough having to fight assholes who want to terrorize your country while a willfully deaf, dumb and blind Administration remains incomprehensively fixated on it's own selfish and partisan objectives.

As Clarke stated in his testimony:

"...all of the things we recommended back in January were those things on the table in September. They were done ...after September 11th. They were all done. I didn't really understand why they couldn't have been done in February."

Well Richard, that's because Bush & Co. used those eight months to plan Operation Pork-barrel in Iraq.

Sally Neighbour: Inside the mind of a terrorist

Sally Neighbour's article in The Australian titled Inside the mind of a terrorist dated 19 February 2007 amongst other things identifies the bonding between disaffected young adults who turn to terrorism but are we still missing something?

In one part I'm glad that Sally acknowledged that Bin Laden is/was driven more by politics than religion. This is key to combating the myth of his motives as being purely religious. However, I feel we need to make more room in the overall discussion to explore some of the other myths surrounding our understanding of terrorism and terrorists. To examine issues that fall outside of what I call the symptoms of terrorism such as disaffected young adults and their need to bond. we need to do more than simply relate the personality traits that are present in one form or another throughout mainstream society.

Critically, I think we need to be aware that our burgeoning terrorists come from all walks of life, ideologies, religions and economic backgrounds. Thus, the one thing this broad demographic denotes is the overwhelming futility of attempting to "profile" would-be terrorists.

What it does identify however, is that as individuals, we often participate in collective actions at times for widely differing reasons. This ranges from our rebels without a clue all the way to intellectuals who have a broad understanding of the complexities of geopolitical dynamics. They may rally under the same banner but their respective raison d'êtres may differ markedly.

In this sense then, trying to understand the behaviour of individual terrorists (the foot soldiers) is tantamount to confusing a private soldier's reasons for joining his country's army as definitive insight into why his country is at war.

My point is that we need to look more broadly at the collective or organisational motives of these organisations as key indicators for their actions. This is more politically difficult for governments to do as this means treating the illness rather than it's symptoms.

Issues form the core of all disputes and by that I mean issues real or imagined. Some of these issues will be concrete such as specific economic, political, territorial issues etc. or may be abstract such as values, culture and belief based issues or a combination of the two such as historical.

I'm not suggesting that all issues can be legitimized just that they need to be heard. The argument that we will not legitimise terrorist activity by sitting down and talking with them is a straw man argument.

By this I mean that it is not enough for governments to rail against a terrorist organisation one moment and support them covertly the next (Hamas, Fatah, MEK and others). It is not enough for governments to demonize acts of terrorism but continue to support those same acts to meet their own short term goals. We must act consistently with our core policies if we expect others to believe we act in good conscience.

If we are unable to behave consistently with our core values and policies then we cannot hold ourselves to be any different from our claimed enemies. We need to understand that no matter what we do as a society we set an example--like it or not. We can choose to set a good example i.e. behave consistently with our core values providing the space for our enemies to follow or we can behave inconsistently and have our people wear the cost when our enemies do the same. However we choose to behave, consistently or inconsistently, behaviour in our society is guaranteed to reflect that.