The following statement appeared in an opinion piece on the Boston Marathon bombings in the Sydney Morning Herald of April 22:
"Twelve years after the September 11 attacks the US is a transformed nation, for better and for worse. This was the first terrorism attack on US soil targeting civilians since 2001, a record that is the result of hard work and good luck. More than 45 jihadist plots have been foiled." (Freedom means life without fear)
It was penned by John Avlon, a columnist for The Daily Beast, and is basically a recycling of his September 8, 2011 piece, Forty-five foiled terror plots since 9/11.
It's obvious that Avlon hasn't bothered reading investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson's timely book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism (2013), otherwise he wouldn't be quite so sure about either the number 45 or all that supposed "hard work," presumably a reference to the FBI.
You'll see why when you read the following Aaronson piece published today by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting: How the FBI in Boston may have pursued the wrong 'terrorist':
"Could the Boston attacks have been stopped? In the aftermath that question has gained urgency with the news that the FBI was on alleged bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev's trail more than 2 years ago. But it is further underscored by another FBI operation conducted in the Boston area during that same period - one focused on a different subject of dubious importance.
"In January 2011, when the FBI looked into the alleged Boston Marathon bomber and dismissed him as a potential threat, agents in the Boston field office pursued another person they suspected could be a terrorist. While they apparently decided to stop tracking Tsarnaev - whose 6-month trip to Russia at that time is now of prime interest to investigators - the FBI conducted a sting operation against an unrelated young Muslim man who had a fantastical plan for attacking the US Capitol with a remote-controlled airplane.
"The way in which the FBI investigated these two potential extremists may help begin to explain how the federal government failed to prevent Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dzhohkar from setting off lethal bombs in the streets of Boston. The task of anticipating and stopping a terrorist attack is exceedingly complicated and the full extent of what the FBI may have known about the Tsarnaev brothers remains unclear. Some congressional leaders are now seeking further explanation. But the contrast of the two cases undertaken in Boston in early 2011 raises questions about the effectiveness of the FBI's counterterrorism strategy.
"Since the devastating attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI's top priority has been to prevent a next act of terrorism. Every year the bureau spends $3.3 billion on counterterrorism, the largest portion of its $8.2 billion annual budget. (That's roughly $650 million more than it spends on investigating organized crime, its next greatest priority by funding.) A key component of the FBI's strategy has been running sting operations against would-be terrorists - in many cases going to great lengths to enable otherwise unlikely perpetrators, as I documented in my award-winning investigation published in 2011 in Mother Jones and in my subsequent book, The Terror Factory.
"The FBI has often targeted these suspects using informants and Internet surveillance. With the latter, federal agents analyze a suspect's online presence and history, looking for activity on extremist web forums, interest in militant jihadi videos, and other activity that might indicate sympathy for terrorist organizations.
"After the Boston Marathon bombings, the FBI acknowledged that in 2011 agents had interviewd the 26-year-old Tsarnaev and scrutinized his Internet history, at the request of Russian officials. Yet, despite the Russians' concerns about Tsarnaev's potential links to militant separatist groups in Chechnya, the FBI determined he was not a threat.
"Meanwhile, in an unrelated case, the bureau vigorously pursued Rezwan Ferdaus, a Northeastern University graduate who was born in Massachusetts and lived with his parents in a Boston suburb. Ferdaus came to the FBI's attention through an informant posing as an al Qaeda operative - a man who was paid $50,000 by the FBI for his efforts, while hiding a heroin addiction from his handlers.
"According to court records, Ferdaus told the informant that he wanted to destroy the golden dome of the US Capitol using a remote-controlled model airplane loaded with grenades. If that plot was far-fetched, so was the possibility that Ferdaus could even attempt it: He did not have weapons, and even if he had known where to buy explosives, Ferdaus was broke, according to court records.
"Through the informant, the FBI encouraged Ferdaus to move forward with his idea to attack the US Capitol. They dedicated significant resources to the operation, giving him $4,000 to purchase an F-86 Sabre remote-controlled model airplane and providing him with 'explosives' - 25 pounds of fake C-4 and 3 inert grenades. In May 2011, Ferdaus travelled to Washington, D.C., to scout out locations from which to launch his weapon - all while being secretly recorded by FBI agents. Finally, on Sept. 28, 2011, after a 9-month sting operation, FBI agents arrested Ferdaus, charging him with, among other offenses, attempting to destroy a federal building and providing material support to terrorists.
"Ferdaus pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 17 years in prison, though no evidence indicated that he could have built and launched a weapon were it not for the FBI providing the money and materials.
"Since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI has arrested more than 175 alleged terrorists using operations like the one in Boston that nabbed Ferdaus. In these expensive and elaborate stings, the targets often are men on the fringes of Muslim communities; many are economically desperate and some are mentally ill, and they are easily manipulated by paid informants and undercover agents.
"But in the years since 9/11, several operational terrorists in the United States have gone unnoticed or have been overlooked by the FBI... And despite the FBI's initial interest in Tsarnaev, the same became true with him and his younger brother in Boston."
Now contrast Avlon's "45 foiled jihadist plots" with the following data from Aaronson's book:
"By August 2011, with nearly 10 years of terrorism prosecutions since 9/11, we had a database of 508 defendants whom the US government considered terrorists. The way the data broke down was illuminating. Of the 508 defendants, 243 had been targeted through an FBI informant, 158 had been caught in an FBI terrorism sting, and 49 had encountered an agent provocateur. Most of the people who didn't face off against an informant weren't directly involved with terrorism at all, but were instead Category II offenders, small-time criminals with distant links to terrorists overseas. Seventy-two of these Category II offenders had been charged with making false statements, while 121 had been prosecuted for immigration violations. Of the 508 cases, I could count on one hand the number of actual terrorists, such as failed New York City subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, who posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States." (The Terror Factory, p 15)
Finally, consider the use of sting operations against similar windbags and sadsacks here in Australia. The following item, for example, appeared in The Australian on 9 April:
"A man charged with terrorism-related offences engaged in 'jihadist chanting' and discussed how to make weapons and start bushfires with bombs, according to covert telephone recordings... He discussed making a bomb that would ignite a bushfire in Australia and said he had been trying unsuccessfully to buy a gun." (Accused terrorist faces court)
Now I know nothing of this case other than what is provided in this one brief report, including whether a paid informant was involved, but seriously, this particular boofhead sounds like he wouldn't even know which end of a match to strike on a matchbox.
[See my 25/2/12 post The Devil & David Irvine.]
Showing posts with label War on Terror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War on Terror. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
The Ins & Outs of Democracy Promotion
The following (abridged) exchange took place on the ABC's Q & A last night between Lydia Khalil (described simply as a Middle East politics and security analyst) and John Pilger, prominent Australian journalist, filmmaker and author:
Lydia Khalil: You know, I think people in the Middle East have been completely frustrated with these 30- year dictatorships and the repression and stagnation that they've faced. They're not thinking about the United States. They're thinking about their own conditions. When you watched the coverage of those protesters, they didn't mention the United States once. They talked about themselves and their own conditions. Now, to say that the Unites States didn't support democracy promotion in Egypt is false. There was actually a number of...
John Pilger: What? Oh, come on... They held up tear gas canisters... saying made in the USA. I mean the... regime in Egypt. It's very important [to recognise] this was kept in place by over almost $2 billion, most of it military aid from the United States... year after year.
LK: No, but there's another... side to the story. There were hundreds of millions of dollars that were put forward by the United States that helped these nascent movements go forward. Now the US has two different needs, so to speak, in the region. They need stability and yet at the same time they're trying to promote democracies that can be long-lasting allies for them and sometimes those two conflicting needs can be confused. But to say that wholesale the US did not support democracy in the region, I think is false...
JP: Where in the Arab world has the US ever supported democracy? Where in the Arab world?... Saudi Arabia, it's a major client state, right through to Jordan, Egypt - all of these are dictatorships, most of them created by the British and shored up by the Americans.
Pilger, of course, as a principled and independent observer of US intervention in the Arab world, an intervention that has only escalated since the CIA coup against the democratically-elected Mossadegh government in Tehran in 1953, is talking about the big picture, the fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-people nature of US empire-building in the area. Khalil, however, is speaking as a faithful servant of the US empire, and her reference to something called democracy promotion reflects that - a subject I'll return to later in this post. For Khalil to truly understand what Pilger is talking about would require nothing less than a complete mental and moral makeover. A quick scan of her CV shows why:
"LK has worked at home and abroad for the US government, international organizations, private companies and think tanks on a variety of international political and security issues. She specializes in Middle East politics and international terrorism. Lydia was recently appointed as an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is also a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, for the Centre on Policing, Intelligence & Counterterrorism. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute as part of the West Asia Program focusing on the Middle East. Prior to her appointments in Sydney, Lydia was a counterterrorism analyst for the NYPD focusing on international terrorism trends and terrorism cases in the Middle East, Africa and europe. Previously, Lydia worked in Iraq as a policy advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad where she worked closely with Iraqi politicians on political negotiations and constitutional drafting. Prior to her assignment in Iraq, she was appointed to the White House Office of Homeland Security as a graduate fellow. She is also a senior policy associate to the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) which examines and advocates the development of genuine democracies in the Middle East. Ms Khalil holds a BA in International Relations from Boston College and a Masters in International Security from Georgetown University. She has published extensively on issues relating to Middle East politics, terrorism and insurgency. Her current research involves extracting lessons learned for fighting insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. And she is also working on a book examining the challenges facing this current generation of Middle East youth and how the solutions they come up with transform the region. She was born in Cairo and is a native Arabic speaker." (huffingtonpost.com/lydia-khalil)
Now, to see what US-style democracy promotion is really all about, check out this hugely entertaining extract from the US State Department's Daily Press Briefing of 14/2/11. My comments, joining the dots, etc are in square brackets:
Question: The State Department started sending direct messages to Iranians in Farsi yesterday. Can you talk about that, and is this a new social media initiative from the State Department?
[Assistant Secretary] PJ Crowley:... It's a key element of our plan to - and our strategy to engage people-to-people around the world. As the Secretary has made clear, we do engage governments, but we also want to engage people directly. And as we use social media, we're also employing - using languages in key parts of the world. So last week we began Tweeting in Arabic, and this week we began Tweeting in Farsi.
Q: Are these the only two foreign languages?
PJC: Well, not necessarily. I think also embassies around the world have their own Twitter accounts. So I won't - we do employ a number of languages. But obviously, this is a little more targeted. [Hm... from around the world to a little more targeted.]
Q: So you're trying to create...
Q: There's your own language.
PJC: My own language [?]
Q: Are you trying to create a revolution then in Iran?
PJC: Well, that [is your inference] - what has guided us throughout the last 3 months and guides us in terms of how we focus on Iran is the core principles - the Secretary mentioned them again today - of restraint from violence, respect for universal rights and political and social reform.* There is a - it is hypocrisy [the pot totally calls the kettle black here] that Iran says one thing in the context of Egypt but refuses to put its own words into action in its own country.
Q: How about other [pro-American] countries - Bahrain, Yemen, or Algeria or Jordan? Why are you not talking about those countries but condemning what is happening in Iran?
PJC: Well, actually, in the other countries there is a greater respect for the rights of the citizens [Yeah, just like there was in Egypt, right?]. I mean, we are watching developments in other countries, including Yemen, including Algeria, including Bahrain. And our advice is the same. As the Secretary made clear in her Doha speech, there's a significant need for political, social and economic reform across the region, and we encourage governments to respect their citizen's right to protest peacefully, respect their right to freedom of expression and assembly, and hope that their will be an ongoing engagement, a dialogue between people in governments and they can work together on the necessary [re]forms. Now those reforms will not be identical. They'll be different country to country. But clearly, the people in the region, emboldened by what's happened in Tunisia and Egypt and well connected through social media, are gathering together, standing up, and demanding more of their governments. [Hm... so it's active intervention in Iran, but only watching, advice, encouragement, yadda yadda yadda elsewhere.]
Q: Can I have just two follow-ups on that? One, are you, in sending these Twitter messages to Iranians, are you also sending a message to the Government of Iran?
PJC: Well, we always give Iran our best advice (Laughter) They seldom follow it.
Q: In Egypt -
Q: Are Egyptians also - have you Tweeted directly with the Egyptians as well?
PJC: Well, that's [another matter entirely] - last week we expanded our use of social media, including Twitter, to communicate in Arabic. And obviously - I don't have the numbers in front of me, but they're growing very significantly in both the Arabic Twitter and the Farsi Twitter.
On the likes of Lydia, yo might like to read the James Petras' quote in my 23/11/10 post Behind the ASIO Assessment]
[* "WikiLeaks cables... released today by the Daily Telegraph, detail the Bush and Obama Administrations were providing training to Egypt's secret police, the SSIS, which cables and human rights NGOs have repeatedly cited for routine torture of detainees." (Made in America: Mubarak's most brutal thugs trained with FBI, Jason Ditz, antiwar.com, 9/2/11)]
PS (17/2/11): The dirt on democracy promotion in Egypt: "The US has given Egypt a lot of money over the years. How much? More than you probably think. Since 1979, US assistance to Egypt has averaged about $2 billion a year, according to a new Congessional Research Service (CRS) report on US-Egyptian relations. That adds up to a whopping $64 billion. In that period, Egypt has been the second-largest foreign recipient of US cash. (Israel is No. 1, in case you're interested.) In part, that's a legacy of the Camp David Accords. The United States promised generous aid packages to both Egypt and Israel in return for their making concessions to each other in a peace pact... Here's another distinguishing thing about US aid to Egypt. The vast majority of it is earmarked for the military. In recent years Egypt has received about $1.3 billion in military aid annually. Of that, about one-third goes to weapons maintenance, one-third to weapons upgrades, and one-third to weapons purchases, according to CRS... What about aid to Egypt intended to promote democracy? Oh yeah, that. It's been cut in recent years, and since 2009 has sat at about $20 million annually. Most of that has gone to Egyptian-approved goverment-to-government projects. The bottom line here is that the impact of US democracy efforts in Egypt 'has been limited', in the words of a recent State Department Inspector General report." (US aid to Egypt: What does it buy? Peter Grier, csmonitor.com, 15/2/11)
Lydia Khalil: You know, I think people in the Middle East have been completely frustrated with these 30- year dictatorships and the repression and stagnation that they've faced. They're not thinking about the United States. They're thinking about their own conditions. When you watched the coverage of those protesters, they didn't mention the United States once. They talked about themselves and their own conditions. Now, to say that the Unites States didn't support democracy promotion in Egypt is false. There was actually a number of...
John Pilger: What? Oh, come on... They held up tear gas canisters... saying made in the USA. I mean the... regime in Egypt. It's very important [to recognise] this was kept in place by over almost $2 billion, most of it military aid from the United States... year after year.
LK: No, but there's another... side to the story. There were hundreds of millions of dollars that were put forward by the United States that helped these nascent movements go forward. Now the US has two different needs, so to speak, in the region. They need stability and yet at the same time they're trying to promote democracies that can be long-lasting allies for them and sometimes those two conflicting needs can be confused. But to say that wholesale the US did not support democracy in the region, I think is false...
JP: Where in the Arab world has the US ever supported democracy? Where in the Arab world?... Saudi Arabia, it's a major client state, right through to Jordan, Egypt - all of these are dictatorships, most of them created by the British and shored up by the Americans.
Pilger, of course, as a principled and independent observer of US intervention in the Arab world, an intervention that has only escalated since the CIA coup against the democratically-elected Mossadegh government in Tehran in 1953, is talking about the big picture, the fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-people nature of US empire-building in the area. Khalil, however, is speaking as a faithful servant of the US empire, and her reference to something called democracy promotion reflects that - a subject I'll return to later in this post. For Khalil to truly understand what Pilger is talking about would require nothing less than a complete mental and moral makeover. A quick scan of her CV shows why:
"LK has worked at home and abroad for the US government, international organizations, private companies and think tanks on a variety of international political and security issues. She specializes in Middle East politics and international terrorism. Lydia was recently appointed as an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is also a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, for the Centre on Policing, Intelligence & Counterterrorism. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute as part of the West Asia Program focusing on the Middle East. Prior to her appointments in Sydney, Lydia was a counterterrorism analyst for the NYPD focusing on international terrorism trends and terrorism cases in the Middle East, Africa and europe. Previously, Lydia worked in Iraq as a policy advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad where she worked closely with Iraqi politicians on political negotiations and constitutional drafting. Prior to her assignment in Iraq, she was appointed to the White House Office of Homeland Security as a graduate fellow. She is also a senior policy associate to the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) which examines and advocates the development of genuine democracies in the Middle East. Ms Khalil holds a BA in International Relations from Boston College and a Masters in International Security from Georgetown University. She has published extensively on issues relating to Middle East politics, terrorism and insurgency. Her current research involves extracting lessons learned for fighting insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. And she is also working on a book examining the challenges facing this current generation of Middle East youth and how the solutions they come up with transform the region. She was born in Cairo and is a native Arabic speaker." (huffingtonpost.com/lydia-khalil)
Now, to see what US-style democracy promotion is really all about, check out this hugely entertaining extract from the US State Department's Daily Press Briefing of 14/2/11. My comments, joining the dots, etc are in square brackets:
Question: The State Department started sending direct messages to Iranians in Farsi yesterday. Can you talk about that, and is this a new social media initiative from the State Department?
[Assistant Secretary] PJ Crowley:... It's a key element of our plan to - and our strategy to engage people-to-people around the world. As the Secretary has made clear, we do engage governments, but we also want to engage people directly. And as we use social media, we're also employing - using languages in key parts of the world. So last week we began Tweeting in Arabic, and this week we began Tweeting in Farsi.
Q: Are these the only two foreign languages?
PJC: Well, not necessarily. I think also embassies around the world have their own Twitter accounts. So I won't - we do employ a number of languages. But obviously, this is a little more targeted. [Hm... from around the world to a little more targeted.]
Q: So you're trying to create...
Q: There's your own language.
PJC: My own language [?]
Q: Are you trying to create a revolution then in Iran?
PJC: Well, that [is your inference] - what has guided us throughout the last 3 months and guides us in terms of how we focus on Iran is the core principles - the Secretary mentioned them again today - of restraint from violence, respect for universal rights and political and social reform.* There is a - it is hypocrisy [the pot totally calls the kettle black here] that Iran says one thing in the context of Egypt but refuses to put its own words into action in its own country.
Q: How about other [pro-American] countries - Bahrain, Yemen, or Algeria or Jordan? Why are you not talking about those countries but condemning what is happening in Iran?
PJC: Well, actually, in the other countries there is a greater respect for the rights of the citizens [Yeah, just like there was in Egypt, right?]. I mean, we are watching developments in other countries, including Yemen, including Algeria, including Bahrain. And our advice is the same. As the Secretary made clear in her Doha speech, there's a significant need for political, social and economic reform across the region, and we encourage governments to respect their citizen's right to protest peacefully, respect their right to freedom of expression and assembly, and hope that their will be an ongoing engagement, a dialogue between people in governments and they can work together on the necessary [re]forms. Now those reforms will not be identical. They'll be different country to country. But clearly, the people in the region, emboldened by what's happened in Tunisia and Egypt and well connected through social media, are gathering together, standing up, and demanding more of their governments. [Hm... so it's active intervention in Iran, but only watching, advice, encouragement, yadda yadda yadda elsewhere.]
Q: Can I have just two follow-ups on that? One, are you, in sending these Twitter messages to Iranians, are you also sending a message to the Government of Iran?
PJC: Well, we always give Iran our best advice (Laughter) They seldom follow it.
Q: In Egypt -
Q: Are Egyptians also - have you Tweeted directly with the Egyptians as well?
PJC: Well, that's [another matter entirely] - last week we expanded our use of social media, including Twitter, to communicate in Arabic. And obviously - I don't have the numbers in front of me, but they're growing very significantly in both the Arabic Twitter and the Farsi Twitter.
On the likes of Lydia, yo might like to read the James Petras' quote in my 23/11/10 post Behind the ASIO Assessment]
[* "WikiLeaks cables... released today by the Daily Telegraph, detail the Bush and Obama Administrations were providing training to Egypt's secret police, the SSIS, which cables and human rights NGOs have repeatedly cited for routine torture of detainees." (Made in America: Mubarak's most brutal thugs trained with FBI, Jason Ditz, antiwar.com, 9/2/11)]
PS (17/2/11): The dirt on democracy promotion in Egypt: "The US has given Egypt a lot of money over the years. How much? More than you probably think. Since 1979, US assistance to Egypt has averaged about $2 billion a year, according to a new Congessional Research Service (CRS) report on US-Egyptian relations. That adds up to a whopping $64 billion. In that period, Egypt has been the second-largest foreign recipient of US cash. (Israel is No. 1, in case you're interested.) In part, that's a legacy of the Camp David Accords. The United States promised generous aid packages to both Egypt and Israel in return for their making concessions to each other in a peace pact... Here's another distinguishing thing about US aid to Egypt. The vast majority of it is earmarked for the military. In recent years Egypt has received about $1.3 billion in military aid annually. Of that, about one-third goes to weapons maintenance, one-third to weapons upgrades, and one-third to weapons purchases, according to CRS... What about aid to Egypt intended to promote democracy? Oh yeah, that. It's been cut in recent years, and since 2009 has sat at about $20 million annually. Most of that has gone to Egyptian-approved goverment-to-government projects. The bottom line here is that the impact of US democracy efforts in Egypt 'has been limited', in the words of a recent State Department Inspector General report." (US aid to Egypt: What does it buy? Peter Grier, csmonitor.com, 15/2/11)
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Crying (Lone) Wolf
"Near Eleusis, in Attica, there lurked a bandit named Damastes, called Procrustes, or 'The Stretcher'. He had an iron bed in which travelers who fell into his hands were compelled to spend the night. His humour was to stretch the ones who were too short until they died, or, if they were too tall, to cut off as much of their limbs as would make them short enough. None could resist him, and the surrounding countryside became a desert." (goines.net)
The procrusteans of today's counterterrorism industry (and their journalist stenographers), have been giving Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer, a going over:
"While the hunt for bin Laden and his henchmen remains a focus of counterintelligence efforts abroad and in Pakistan particularly, US officials understand that the al-Qaeda threat has long since mutated from a bin Laden-centric attack strategy into a hierarchy of threat levels, external and increasingly internal. 'One of the phenomena that our counterintelligence people face now is that they have to worry about the big threat of a mass casualty attack along the lines of a repeat of [sic] 9/11... and also the extreme other end, which is the lone fanatic converted by the internet', says a former CIA officer and White House adviser, Bruce Riedel. 'The latter is someone who, at most, is peripherally linked to any kind of foreign terrorist organisation, like Major [Nidal Malik] Hasan at Fort Hood, but who can still be quite deadly'. The jihadi landscape reveals several degrees of al-Qaeda affiliation, says Lydia Khalil, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations. The original leadership has passed a baton to regional subsidiaries, often coopting the nationalist struggles of disaffected local groups. Then there are 'associated free agents' who choose to commandeer al-Qaeda's rhetoric and cause, Khalil says. 'Next, there are groups of entrepreneurial jihadists: radicals from outside conflict zones who nurse simmering grievances and conceive small-bore plots, rather than attempting spectacular attacks... And then come the 'lone wolves'. Nidal Hasan has been charged with opening fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, last November, killing 13. Paul Pillar, a US intelligence veteran, says: 'They are people who are inspired at least in part by the sort of ideological framework that bin Laden represents and has propounded. They are motivated at least as much by anger over specific policies and events and conflicts, but they are not sent or directed to conduct operations by al-Qaeda central'." (Osama who?: Capturing or killing the al-Qaeda leader has become less important in America's war against terrorism, Simon Mann, Sydney Morning Herald, 2-4/4/10)
So Major Nidal Hasan is your typical lone fanatic/wolf, right? Wrong. Even the procrusteans above seem to feel the need to qualify their representation of him as a jihadi of the lone wolf variety, deploying such caveats as peripherally linked and inspired at least in part.
It has fallen to author* Mark Ames to blow the whistle on those who would cry (lone) wolf over Major Hasan. Here are the opening paragraphs of his salutary essay, The memory scrub about why Ft Hood happened is almost complete... If it weren't for archives (alternet.com, 24/11/09):
"What happened to all the initial reports that accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan of having snapped because he was distraught over the Army's refusal to grant him either a discharge or an exemption from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, wars which the Muslim psychiatrist abhorred - and how it was this callous Army refusal to accomodate Maj. Hasan that led to his downward spiral into despondency, rage and mass murder? We heard quite a bit about this in the first couple of days, and then - poof! That part of the Fort Hood story disappeared so neatly that I almost started to wonder if I'd imagined it - such is the power of media bombardment versus a mere soap bubble like the human memory. I might have forgotten too and gone along with the reality-scrub, the way all of Official America has gone, but thanks to all the news archives, it was possible to check the record as it was first reported on November 5, and trace how a key part of the Nidal Hasan story was airbrushed away from reality.
"The Army's pig-headed failure to accomodate Maj. Hasan was, for a time, the most important - and most damaging - detail for understanding his shooting rampage. Because if Maj. Hasan tried to get out of his deployment, and if he telegraphed every warning signal possible (emailing terrorists, cruising 7-11s in his Al-Qaeda costume) to bolster his case to reverse his deployment orders, and all the while the Army bureaucracy ignored him despite his 20 years' service - then that means the massacre can't be blamed just on one crazy Islamofascist's inner evil. Instead, much of the blame for driving Maj. Hasan to crack would fall on his superiors in the Army, who held his fate in their hands. They could have shown some flexibility, but instead treated him with the kind of callous bureaucratic insolence and nasty ethnic harassment you'd expect to find in a 19th century army, not 21st century America. If the Army really did fail to respond to a million-billion signals from Maj. Hasan, then it means we'd have to investigate more than just his evil little Muslim soul. We'd also have to look at the environment that changed him from a good loyal soldier into a cracked lunatic. That would mean examining just how screwed up the Army culture really is, how poorly it manages its resources and personnel, and why we went so long without knowing how bad things were...
"We'd also have to examine the link between Hasan's rampage and the Army's record number of suicides this year - which so far nearly equals the total number of US combat deaths in Iraq. A lot of this year's suicides involve Army personnel which hadn't yet shipped out to the war zones, like Maj. Hasan - a grim statistic that belies the chickenhawks' screeching attacks denying the existence of pre-combat stress syndrome. But the problem with investigating questions like these is that the answers could be one giant bummer - nothing makes an American's brain switch into 'hibernate' mode more quickly. The point being that as the horror of the Fort Hood massacre started to emerge, a lot of people were interested in superimposing a more comforting, simplistic version of events over the anbiguous, demoralizing reality. According to the new version of what led to the Fort Hood massacre, all along Maj. Hasan was a sleeper-jihadist moled up inside the Army structure, patiently waiting for his Al-Qaeda handlers in AfPak to give him the jihadi signal - and in the meantime, the Islamofascist sleeper cell ran around Walter Reed scaring the shit out of his Army colleagues for 2 years straight with his frothing lectures threatening to behead Infidels and pour hot oil down their necks."
[*Going Postal: Rage, Murder & Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine & Beyond, 2005]
The procrusteans of today's counterterrorism industry (and their journalist stenographers), have been giving Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer, a going over:
"While the hunt for bin Laden and his henchmen remains a focus of counterintelligence efforts abroad and in Pakistan particularly, US officials understand that the al-Qaeda threat has long since mutated from a bin Laden-centric attack strategy into a hierarchy of threat levels, external and increasingly internal. 'One of the phenomena that our counterintelligence people face now is that they have to worry about the big threat of a mass casualty attack along the lines of a repeat of [sic] 9/11... and also the extreme other end, which is the lone fanatic converted by the internet', says a former CIA officer and White House adviser, Bruce Riedel. 'The latter is someone who, at most, is peripherally linked to any kind of foreign terrorist organisation, like Major [Nidal Malik] Hasan at Fort Hood, but who can still be quite deadly'. The jihadi landscape reveals several degrees of al-Qaeda affiliation, says Lydia Khalil, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations. The original leadership has passed a baton to regional subsidiaries, often coopting the nationalist struggles of disaffected local groups. Then there are 'associated free agents' who choose to commandeer al-Qaeda's rhetoric and cause, Khalil says. 'Next, there are groups of entrepreneurial jihadists: radicals from outside conflict zones who nurse simmering grievances and conceive small-bore plots, rather than attempting spectacular attacks... And then come the 'lone wolves'. Nidal Hasan has been charged with opening fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, last November, killing 13. Paul Pillar, a US intelligence veteran, says: 'They are people who are inspired at least in part by the sort of ideological framework that bin Laden represents and has propounded. They are motivated at least as much by anger over specific policies and events and conflicts, but they are not sent or directed to conduct operations by al-Qaeda central'." (Osama who?: Capturing or killing the al-Qaeda leader has become less important in America's war against terrorism, Simon Mann, Sydney Morning Herald, 2-4/4/10)
So Major Nidal Hasan is your typical lone fanatic/wolf, right? Wrong. Even the procrusteans above seem to feel the need to qualify their representation of him as a jihadi of the lone wolf variety, deploying such caveats as peripherally linked and inspired at least in part.
It has fallen to author* Mark Ames to blow the whistle on those who would cry (lone) wolf over Major Hasan. Here are the opening paragraphs of his salutary essay, The memory scrub about why Ft Hood happened is almost complete... If it weren't for archives (alternet.com, 24/11/09):
"What happened to all the initial reports that accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan of having snapped because he was distraught over the Army's refusal to grant him either a discharge or an exemption from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, wars which the Muslim psychiatrist abhorred - and how it was this callous Army refusal to accomodate Maj. Hasan that led to his downward spiral into despondency, rage and mass murder? We heard quite a bit about this in the first couple of days, and then - poof! That part of the Fort Hood story disappeared so neatly that I almost started to wonder if I'd imagined it - such is the power of media bombardment versus a mere soap bubble like the human memory. I might have forgotten too and gone along with the reality-scrub, the way all of Official America has gone, but thanks to all the news archives, it was possible to check the record as it was first reported on November 5, and trace how a key part of the Nidal Hasan story was airbrushed away from reality.
"The Army's pig-headed failure to accomodate Maj. Hasan was, for a time, the most important - and most damaging - detail for understanding his shooting rampage. Because if Maj. Hasan tried to get out of his deployment, and if he telegraphed every warning signal possible (emailing terrorists, cruising 7-11s in his Al-Qaeda costume) to bolster his case to reverse his deployment orders, and all the while the Army bureaucracy ignored him despite his 20 years' service - then that means the massacre can't be blamed just on one crazy Islamofascist's inner evil. Instead, much of the blame for driving Maj. Hasan to crack would fall on his superiors in the Army, who held his fate in their hands. They could have shown some flexibility, but instead treated him with the kind of callous bureaucratic insolence and nasty ethnic harassment you'd expect to find in a 19th century army, not 21st century America. If the Army really did fail to respond to a million-billion signals from Maj. Hasan, then it means we'd have to investigate more than just his evil little Muslim soul. We'd also have to look at the environment that changed him from a good loyal soldier into a cracked lunatic. That would mean examining just how screwed up the Army culture really is, how poorly it manages its resources and personnel, and why we went so long without knowing how bad things were...
"We'd also have to examine the link between Hasan's rampage and the Army's record number of suicides this year - which so far nearly equals the total number of US combat deaths in Iraq. A lot of this year's suicides involve Army personnel which hadn't yet shipped out to the war zones, like Maj. Hasan - a grim statistic that belies the chickenhawks' screeching attacks denying the existence of pre-combat stress syndrome. But the problem with investigating questions like these is that the answers could be one giant bummer - nothing makes an American's brain switch into 'hibernate' mode more quickly. The point being that as the horror of the Fort Hood massacre started to emerge, a lot of people were interested in superimposing a more comforting, simplistic version of events over the anbiguous, demoralizing reality. According to the new version of what led to the Fort Hood massacre, all along Maj. Hasan was a sleeper-jihadist moled up inside the Army structure, patiently waiting for his Al-Qaeda handlers in AfPak to give him the jihadi signal - and in the meantime, the Islamofascist sleeper cell ran around Walter Reed scaring the shit out of his Army colleagues for 2 years straight with his frothing lectures threatening to behead Infidels and pour hot oil down their necks."
[*Going Postal: Rage, Murder & Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine & Beyond, 2005]
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Some Zhengyou are More Equal Than Other Zhengyou
"Unfazed by the growing diplomatic unrest, [Australian Prime Minister] Kevin Rudd has told the Chinese in their own language there are 'significant human rights problems in Tibet'... Mr Rudd told the university students he came as a 'true friend' - zhengyou - not a critic..." (I'm saying it in plain Mandarin: fix Tibet, Phillip Coorey, SMH, 10/4/08
Judging by letters to the establishment press, Rudd's stocks as a statesman and supposed speaker of 'truth to power' have soared. There were, however, a handful of dissenters:-
"How dare Kevin Rudd tell the Chinese that there have been human rights violations in Tibet. Would he do the same and tell the Israelis that there are gross human rights violations in Palestine? On the contrary, at a recent dinner organised by an Australian Jewish organization, he went to great lengths to say that Australians and Israelis are the same type of people." Letter, Simon Chan, The Age, 11/4/08
"If Kevin Rudd thinks that his manufactured 'dispute' with China will convince Australians that he is anything other than a pro-Chinese apologist, then he should think again. To describe the events in Tibet as 'human rights problems' is a gross insult to the Tibetan people. Equally, why didn't he once mention democracy or freedom of speech in China? The silence was equally deafening about Hu Jia and Yang Chunlin, two dissidents recently jailed for 3 and 5 years respectively. Their 'crimes' were to criticise the Communist Party of China and 'incite subversion of state power'. It's obvious that the Prime minister's statements in China are designed for a domestic audience, not to actually effect change..." Letter, Jeremy C Browne, The Age, 11/4/08
"Kevin Rudd does not need to learn Hebrew to call on Israel to end its gross violations of Palestinian human rights. He can say it in plain English." Letter, Ali Kazak, The Australian, 12/4/08
Among the pundits, veteran SMH journalist Alan Ramsey, who only last month had castigated Rudd for kowtowing to the Israelis in federal parliament (See my posts, The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 1 & 5), was having second thoughts about the man: "To publicly stand up to the Chinese, in their own capital, in their own language, on an issue so sensitive to the planet's last great totalitarian state - and, since May last year, Australia's biggest (in dollars) trading partner - is something no visiting head of government, of any kind, has ever done, let alone one from this country. To say it took courage and no little risk only parrots the obvious. What it took was leadership of the most dramatic kind. In recent years, we have been force-fed national leadership, wrapped in the flag, that gloried in sticking its head up the backside of Washington and its dependent satellite in the Middle East. To have an Australian prime minister behave as Rudd has done in Beijing is to think that maybe he is different after all and not just another political control freak with a brain as big as his smile. The bloke is worth watching." (12/4/08)
Ramsey's otherwise polar opposite over at The Australian, Foreign Editor Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, was even more impressed, gushing : "...Kevin Rudd this week has produced his own cultural revolution... For Rudd has shown the world that it is possible to be a good friend of China and still speak to the Chinese leadership frankly and in public about its appalling human rights practices. This is a profound revolution.... it is a radical departure from the practice of John Howard, who preferred to concentrate on what he and the Chinese had in common... No Western leader, with the partial exception of US presidents, does what Rudd did this week: criticise the Chinese over human rights abuses in Tibet before he arrives, in fact in a joint press conference with US President George W Bush. Repeat the criticism in London. Absorb furious official Chinese protests in Beijing and Canberra, then go to China and repeat the offence in public, in front of a Chinese audience." (12/4/08)
Our pundits, it seems, are easily pleased - the dissenting letters are closer to the mark. If our supposedly fearless Australian Helmsman is really concerned about the human rights of downtrodden people, how is one to explain why, as a zhengyou of both China and Israel, he can say boo to the former about Tibetan human rights, but remain mum about Palestinian rights? And, not only not say boo, but host a parliamentary party for the buggers to boot! A partial answer must surely lie in the fact that the parliamentary wing of the Labor Party has not only not been captured by the China lobby, but that the latter, in so far as it even exists, has nowhere near the clout of the Israel lobby.
Author and Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation Michael Lind's comparison of ethnic lobbies in the US may perhaps have some relevance here: "Most ethnic lobbies...have based their power on votes, not money... The influence of these lobbies has usually been confined to the cities and states in which particular ethnic groups have been concentrated... The Israel lobby, however, is not primarily a traditional ethnic voter machine; it is an ethnic donor machine. Unique among ethno-political machines in the US, the Israel lobby has emulated the techniques of national lobbies based on economic interests (both industry groups and unions) or social issues (the National Rifle Association, pro- and anti-abortion groups) . The lobby uses nationwide campaign donations, often funnelled through local 'astroturf' (phony grassroots) organizations... to influence members of Congress in areas where there are few Jewish voters. Stephen Steinlight [former director of national affairs at the American Jewish Committee], in an essay for the Center for Immigration Studies, describes how the Israel lobby uses donations to influence elected officials: 'Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete...the great material wealth of the Jewish community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel'. Steinlight adds: 'For perhaps another generation... the Jewish community is thus in a position to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas'." Distorting US Foreign Policy: The Israel Lobby & American Power, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 5/02
For Rudd to really be a zhengyou to the wretched of the earth, he'd need to be equally critical of China and the US (throw in Russia and a host of other international bovver boys here), with an understanding that both, in their own way, have essentially embraced the worldview of the Israeli right - what US author/activist Naomi Klein calls the Likud doctrine: "Common wisdom has it that after 9/11 a new era of geopolitics was ushered in, defined by what is usually called the Bush doctrine: pre-emptive wars, attacks on terrorist infrastructure (read: entire countries), an insistence that all the enemy understands is force. In fact, it would be more accurate to call this rigid worldview the Likud doctrine. What happened on September 11, 2001, is that the Likud doctrine, previously targeted against Palestinians, was picked up by the most powerful country on earth and applied on a global scale. Call it the Likudisation of the world: the real legacy of 9/11. On September 11 George Bush went looking for a political philosophy to guide him in his role as 'war president'. He found that philosophy in the Likud doctrine, handed to him ready-made by the ardent Likudniks ensconced in the White House. In the 3 years since [now 7], the Bush White House has applied this logic with chilling consistency to its global war on terror - complete with the pathologising of the 'Muslim mind'. It was the guiding philosophy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and may well extend to Iran and Syria. Bush has cast the US in the same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the same threat. In this narrative the US is fighting a never-ending battle for its survival against irrational forces that seek its total extermination."(Beware the Likud doctrine, Guardian, 10/9/04)
It is the Likud doctrine, which allows every manifestation of resistance by the oppressed to be labelled terrorism by their oppressors, that has provided the rhetoric for China's crackdown on the Tibetans: "Far from heeding international calls for dialogue with the Dalai Lama, China has accused Tibet's exiled god-king of colluding with Muslim terrorists to destabilise the country before the Olympic Games... The People's Daily said that the Dalai Lama had never abandoned violence after fleeing China in 1959 after a failed revolt against Beijing. 'The Dalai Lama is scheming to take the Beijing Olympics hostage to force the Chinese Government to make concessions to Tibetan independence'. It also accused Tibet's spiritual leader of planning attacks with the aid of violent Uighur separatist groups seeking an independent East Turkestan for their largely Muslim people in the northwestern Xinjiang region of China. It said: 'The Dalai clique has also strengthened collusion with East Turkestan terror organizations and planned terror activities in Tibet'. " (China accuses Dalai Lama of being a terrorist, The Times, 24/3/08)
This talk of collusion with China's equally colonized, oppressed (and conveniently) Muslim Uighur population to the north of Tibet in East Turkestan (Xinjiang), is hardly coincidental, the whole point being that, post 9/11, once discreet movements of national resistance to colonial oppression, can now be lumped together and smeared, Israeli fashion, as generic Islamist terrorists bent on an irrational course of Dalek-like extermination of all we (and supposedly 'the Middle East's only democracy') hold dear. Simply slap on the convenient and durable Made-in-Israel 'War on Terror' label and all is forgiven, whether in the occupied Palestinian territories, Tibet, East Turkestan, Afghanistan, Iraq or Chechnya.
In being "passionately pro-Israel;"* in describing the US as an "overwhelming force for good in the world;"** and in swallowing the Likud doctrine all the way to Afghanistan and Iraq, Rudd is actually doing his bit to bury the hopes and aspirations of millions of Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, Uighers and Tibetans.
* Rudd outlines foreign policy vision, AM, Radio National, http://www.abc.net.au/, 27/3/08
** Kevin Rudd on the ALP and Israel, The Religion Report, Radio National, 3/11/04
Judging by letters to the establishment press, Rudd's stocks as a statesman and supposed speaker of 'truth to power' have soared. There were, however, a handful of dissenters:-
"How dare Kevin Rudd tell the Chinese that there have been human rights violations in Tibet. Would he do the same and tell the Israelis that there are gross human rights violations in Palestine? On the contrary, at a recent dinner organised by an Australian Jewish organization, he went to great lengths to say that Australians and Israelis are the same type of people." Letter, Simon Chan, The Age, 11/4/08
"If Kevin Rudd thinks that his manufactured 'dispute' with China will convince Australians that he is anything other than a pro-Chinese apologist, then he should think again. To describe the events in Tibet as 'human rights problems' is a gross insult to the Tibetan people. Equally, why didn't he once mention democracy or freedom of speech in China? The silence was equally deafening about Hu Jia and Yang Chunlin, two dissidents recently jailed for 3 and 5 years respectively. Their 'crimes' were to criticise the Communist Party of China and 'incite subversion of state power'. It's obvious that the Prime minister's statements in China are designed for a domestic audience, not to actually effect change..." Letter, Jeremy C Browne, The Age, 11/4/08
"Kevin Rudd does not need to learn Hebrew to call on Israel to end its gross violations of Palestinian human rights. He can say it in plain English." Letter, Ali Kazak, The Australian, 12/4/08
Among the pundits, veteran SMH journalist Alan Ramsey, who only last month had castigated Rudd for kowtowing to the Israelis in federal parliament (See my posts, The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 1 & 5), was having second thoughts about the man: "To publicly stand up to the Chinese, in their own capital, in their own language, on an issue so sensitive to the planet's last great totalitarian state - and, since May last year, Australia's biggest (in dollars) trading partner - is something no visiting head of government, of any kind, has ever done, let alone one from this country. To say it took courage and no little risk only parrots the obvious. What it took was leadership of the most dramatic kind. In recent years, we have been force-fed national leadership, wrapped in the flag, that gloried in sticking its head up the backside of Washington and its dependent satellite in the Middle East. To have an Australian prime minister behave as Rudd has done in Beijing is to think that maybe he is different after all and not just another political control freak with a brain as big as his smile. The bloke is worth watching." (12/4/08)
Ramsey's otherwise polar opposite over at The Australian, Foreign Editor Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, was even more impressed, gushing : "...Kevin Rudd this week has produced his own cultural revolution... For Rudd has shown the world that it is possible to be a good friend of China and still speak to the Chinese leadership frankly and in public about its appalling human rights practices. This is a profound revolution.... it is a radical departure from the practice of John Howard, who preferred to concentrate on what he and the Chinese had in common... No Western leader, with the partial exception of US presidents, does what Rudd did this week: criticise the Chinese over human rights abuses in Tibet before he arrives, in fact in a joint press conference with US President George W Bush. Repeat the criticism in London. Absorb furious official Chinese protests in Beijing and Canberra, then go to China and repeat the offence in public, in front of a Chinese audience." (12/4/08)
Our pundits, it seems, are easily pleased - the dissenting letters are closer to the mark. If our supposedly fearless Australian Helmsman is really concerned about the human rights of downtrodden people, how is one to explain why, as a zhengyou of both China and Israel, he can say boo to the former about Tibetan human rights, but remain mum about Palestinian rights? And, not only not say boo, but host a parliamentary party for the buggers to boot! A partial answer must surely lie in the fact that the parliamentary wing of the Labor Party has not only not been captured by the China lobby, but that the latter, in so far as it even exists, has nowhere near the clout of the Israel lobby.
Author and Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation Michael Lind's comparison of ethnic lobbies in the US may perhaps have some relevance here: "Most ethnic lobbies...have based their power on votes, not money... The influence of these lobbies has usually been confined to the cities and states in which particular ethnic groups have been concentrated... The Israel lobby, however, is not primarily a traditional ethnic voter machine; it is an ethnic donor machine. Unique among ethno-political machines in the US, the Israel lobby has emulated the techniques of national lobbies based on economic interests (both industry groups and unions) or social issues (the National Rifle Association, pro- and anti-abortion groups) . The lobby uses nationwide campaign donations, often funnelled through local 'astroturf' (phony grassroots) organizations... to influence members of Congress in areas where there are few Jewish voters. Stephen Steinlight [former director of national affairs at the American Jewish Committee], in an essay for the Center for Immigration Studies, describes how the Israel lobby uses donations to influence elected officials: 'Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete...the great material wealth of the Jewish community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel'. Steinlight adds: 'For perhaps another generation... the Jewish community is thus in a position to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas'." Distorting US Foreign Policy: The Israel Lobby & American Power, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 5/02
For Rudd to really be a zhengyou to the wretched of the earth, he'd need to be equally critical of China and the US (throw in Russia and a host of other international bovver boys here), with an understanding that both, in their own way, have essentially embraced the worldview of the Israeli right - what US author/activist Naomi Klein calls the Likud doctrine: "Common wisdom has it that after 9/11 a new era of geopolitics was ushered in, defined by what is usually called the Bush doctrine: pre-emptive wars, attacks on terrorist infrastructure (read: entire countries), an insistence that all the enemy understands is force. In fact, it would be more accurate to call this rigid worldview the Likud doctrine. What happened on September 11, 2001, is that the Likud doctrine, previously targeted against Palestinians, was picked up by the most powerful country on earth and applied on a global scale. Call it the Likudisation of the world: the real legacy of 9/11. On September 11 George Bush went looking for a political philosophy to guide him in his role as 'war president'. He found that philosophy in the Likud doctrine, handed to him ready-made by the ardent Likudniks ensconced in the White House. In the 3 years since [now 7], the Bush White House has applied this logic with chilling consistency to its global war on terror - complete with the pathologising of the 'Muslim mind'. It was the guiding philosophy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and may well extend to Iran and Syria. Bush has cast the US in the same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the same threat. In this narrative the US is fighting a never-ending battle for its survival against irrational forces that seek its total extermination."(Beware the Likud doctrine, Guardian, 10/9/04)
It is the Likud doctrine, which allows every manifestation of resistance by the oppressed to be labelled terrorism by their oppressors, that has provided the rhetoric for China's crackdown on the Tibetans: "Far from heeding international calls for dialogue with the Dalai Lama, China has accused Tibet's exiled god-king of colluding with Muslim terrorists to destabilise the country before the Olympic Games... The People's Daily said that the Dalai Lama had never abandoned violence after fleeing China in 1959 after a failed revolt against Beijing. 'The Dalai Lama is scheming to take the Beijing Olympics hostage to force the Chinese Government to make concessions to Tibetan independence'. It also accused Tibet's spiritual leader of planning attacks with the aid of violent Uighur separatist groups seeking an independent East Turkestan for their largely Muslim people in the northwestern Xinjiang region of China. It said: 'The Dalai clique has also strengthened collusion with East Turkestan terror organizations and planned terror activities in Tibet'. " (China accuses Dalai Lama of being a terrorist, The Times, 24/3/08)
This talk of collusion with China's equally colonized, oppressed (and conveniently) Muslim Uighur population to the north of Tibet in East Turkestan (Xinjiang), is hardly coincidental, the whole point being that, post 9/11, once discreet movements of national resistance to colonial oppression, can now be lumped together and smeared, Israeli fashion, as generic Islamist terrorists bent on an irrational course of Dalek-like extermination of all we (and supposedly 'the Middle East's only democracy') hold dear. Simply slap on the convenient and durable Made-in-Israel 'War on Terror' label and all is forgiven, whether in the occupied Palestinian territories, Tibet, East Turkestan, Afghanistan, Iraq or Chechnya.
In being "passionately pro-Israel;"* in describing the US as an "overwhelming force for good in the world;"** and in swallowing the Likud doctrine all the way to Afghanistan and Iraq, Rudd is actually doing his bit to bury the hopes and aspirations of millions of Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, Uighers and Tibetans.
* Rudd outlines foreign policy vision, AM, Radio National, http://www.abc.net.au/, 27/3/08
** Kevin Rudd on the ALP and Israel, The Religion Report, Radio National, 3/11/04
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