What We Are or What We Do?

Again, a tad tangential, but what the hell. In reading the first press coverage of Australia's biggest terrorism trial so far, which commenced in the Victorian Supreme Court on 13/2/08, I was struck by two things:-

1) Remember this? "American's are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber - a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." President GW Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20/9/01

That speech, so soon after 9/11, produced the rationale, repeated ad nauseam by every pro-war pundit and politician since, for the Bush/Cheney War on Terror: it's not what we are doing (or have done) in the Middle East, it's what we are, our very way of life, that motivates our jihadi enemies to attack us.

How did this rationale stack up in light of the Crown's case? Not very well, it would seem. The prosecutor, Richard Maidment SC, told the Court that the 12 accused "believed a mass-casualty bombing would force the federal government to withdraw its troops from Iraq." (Terrorist plan to hit trains, court told, Sydney Morning Herald, 14/2/08)

2) The second matter to give me pause came after reading the following words in the same article: "Mr Maidment said that an undercover officer had breached the cell, posing as a Muslim from Turkey with an interest in violent jihad and expertise in building bombs with ammonium nitrate, a commonly available chemical. At one point, the undercover agent was asked by Benbrika [the group's leader] how much ammonium nitrate would be required to blow up a large building. He then asked for the agent...to obtain twice as much - 500 kilograms. The infiltrator...also demonstrated to Benbrika the power of a small ammonium nitrate bomb during a visit to country Victoria. The men were under heavy surveillance for 18 months before their arrests and Mr Maidment said the transcripts of almost 500 intercepted conversations would make up the bulk of the evidence before the jury."

I was reminded of Guy Lawson's fascinating Rolling Stone article (7/2/08), The Fear Factory, on the practice of 'lawfare' - the convergence of local police work and FBI intelligence-gathering, relying on the use of paid informants, who "cajole and inveigle targets...into pursuing hairbrained schemes," and surveillance recordings - under the aegis of 102 US Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF).

Lawson writes: "[T]he use of informants has led the government to flirt with outright entrapment. In Brooklyn, a Guyanese immigrant and former cargo handler named Russell Defreitas was arrested last spring for plotting to blow up fuel tanks at JFK International Airport. In fact, before he encountered the might of the JTTF, Defreitas was a vagrant who sold incense on the streets of Queens and spent his spare time checking pay phones for quarters. He had no hope of instigating a terrorist plot of the magnitude of the alleged attack on JFK - until he received the help of a federal informant known only as 'Source', a convicted drug dealer who was cooperating with federal agents to get his sentence reduced. Backed by the JTTF, Defreitas suddenly obtained the means to travel to the Caribbean, conduct Google Earth searches of JFK's grounds and build a complex, multifaceted, international terror conspiracy - albeit one that was impossible to actually pull off. After Defreitas was arrested, US Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf called it 'one of the most chilling plots imaginable'. Using informants to gin up terrorist conspiracies is a radical departure from the way the FBI has traditionally used cooperating sources against organized crime or drug dealers, where a pattern of crime is well established before the investigation begins. Now, in new-age terror cases, the JTTFs simply want to establish that suspects are predisposed to be terrorists - even if they are completely unable or ill-equipped to act on that predisposition. High-tech video and audio evidence, coupled with anti-terror hysteria, has made it effectively impossible for suspects to use the legal defence of entrapment. The result in many cases has been guilty pleas - and no scrutiny of government conduct."