SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
international terrorism
Paris, Orlando and Turkey: Displacing the Narrative of Western Innocence
Jul 01, 2016
What is clear is that there is a context—no matter how painful to admit—of U.S. and Western complicity in creating the very forces that now terrorize the imagination of the Western public. Just a cursory glance at that sordid history reveals the baselessness of the assumption of innocence that underlies the dominant narrative pushed by the corporate press in the U.S. and inculcated as a part of Western commonsense.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor, congratulated himself on his brilliant strategy to create the "Soviet Union's Vietnam" by bogging it down militarily in Afghanistan with the creation of an international corps of right-wing Islamists ready to fight the godless Soviets. Like all colonialist calculations, the Pentagon thought that these elements could be weaponized to do the bidding of U.S. and Western imperialism. They mistakenly believed that once the mission was completed that they could conveniently toss them aside like the Hmong in Vietnam, the Gurkhas from Nepal, the black Buffalo soldiers in the West of the U.S. - the list goes on. With direct logistical support from the Pakistani ISI, the Mujahedeen performed marvelously, destroying a secular nationalist government with Marxist leanings and plunging the nation into the chaos that led to the establishment of the Taliban who created their 8th century version of an Islamic state.
When Brzezinski formulated his plan, critics of this strategy, including some elements of the U.S. and British intelligence agencies, warned that the U.S. was playing a dangerous game by empowering what had always been the lunatic fringe of Islam, but colonial hubris inoculated those decision makers in 1979 and in both the Bush and Obama administrations from those more critical reassessments. They operated instead from a historical perspective in which the use of right-wing Islamists had yielded positive results not only in Afghanistan in the 1980's but also before that during the immediate post-world-war years to undercut support for left and left nationalist forces in the so-called Middle East.
These kinds of cynical calculations have always been a cornerstone of colonial "divide and rule" politics. However, what Brzezinski and others didn't understand was the subjective factor that they were dealing with. Unlike the slimy comprador and mercenary types traditionally used to advance Western interests in various parts of the world, the religious fervor and commitment of these Islamic elements could not be turned on and off.
By concentrating these forces in Afghanistan, U.S. policy gave them an opportunity to gain valuable training, fighting experience, and some degree of prestige along with more effective post-conflict networking among themselves. They created a force in which the tail would eventually wag the dog, with the al-Qaeda network was just one of the networks of radical Islamists that emerged from that period.
This was evident when the Bush administration and then the Obama administration decided to re-empower these radical jihadists as part of their strategy to put pressure on the al-Maliki government in Iraq and effect governmental change in Syria. In short, they encouraged a jihadist invasion and then framed it as a "civil war." Western governments pretended not to notice and certainly didn't seem to care in the early days of the war that more and more of their nationals were traveling to Turkey to enter the conflict zone in Syria.
Why this lack of concern?
U.S. propagandists knew that the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) was their public relations myth. Many analysts in the U.S. intelligence agencies concluded early on that if the Assad government was going to be toppled, it would come about as a result of the Jihadist forces being created internally and pouring into the country from abroad.
In a moment of unusual candor, President Obama revealed that he thought it was a fantasy that the FSA could overthrow the Syrian government and the Baath institutional apparatus. Many critics of Obama's strategies in Syria thought that this was an insult to the "moderates" and critiqued the Obama administration's reluctance to provide support to the FSA. But instead of that comment reflecting the bogus narrative of non-support for the forces fighting to overthrow the Syrian government by the U.S., it revealed instead what was really in place - a strategy to bolster Islamic jihadist forces working with and through Turkey, the Saudi's, and the other Gulf monarchs and repressive states in the region, including Israel.
With the CIA fully involved in training and equipping what was referred to as the "rebel" forces and with the assurances from Saudi Prince Bander that they had the jihadists fully under their control, the Administration didn't appear to be too concerned when ISIS broke off from al-Qaeda and began to establish its own independent economic base once it captured the oil fields in Syria. It all seemed like part of the plan, especially when it became clear that NATO member Turkey was being used to get the Syrian oil to world markets.
Michael Flynn, the frustrated head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who naively thought that the U.S. was concerned about "Islamic terrorism," revealed recently that after the DIA submitted analysis in 2012 that U.S. policies in Syria were enhancing the power of Islamic forces and leading to the establishment of a "Salafist principality" not only was that analysis ignored, it became clear to him that the Obama administration had made a "willful decision to do what they were doing."
But this Frankensteinian strategy turned farce into disaster when ISIS double-crossed their benefactors by breaking the rules and attacking the "good Kurds" in Iraq. The strategy appeared to be more concerned with holding territory in Iraq and Syria than carrying out their assignment to overthrow the Assad government and completing the dismemberment of the Syrian state - the strategic objective of U.S. and Israeli policy to counter the regional power of the Iranians.
With the categorical transformation of jihadist forces in Syria into "moderates" and their military enhancement with U.S.-supplied anti-tank weapons and better military and political coordination, the stage was set by the summer of 2015 for the last push after a no-fly zone was established. This move would have allowed coordinated ground operations with air power provided by the U.S., with symbolic participation from France and Britain, to give the operation its NATO credentials. Under this configuration and shift in the balance of forces, ISIS had outlived its utility for U.S. interests and became an obstacle because of its independent agenda. So it had to be cut down to size - not destroyed - at least not at that point.
But the rhetorical commitment to eliminate ISIS created a political/ideological opening for the Russians to be invited in by the Syrian government to "counter" ISIS. The result was to completely undermine the no-fly zone plan and the plan to support a final push on to Damascus by the newly concentrated Islamic forces in the form of the Jaish al-Fatah or the "Army of Conquest," as the new "moderates."
With the combined attacks by the Russians and U.S., the ISIS caliphate has constricted in size. In particular, some of the combatants from the West have left the battlefield and slowly tricked back to the West. Battled hardened and still committed to the cause, the strategic shift appears to be focused on taking the battle to the West, something that Abu Baka al-Baghdadi, an alleged former CIA asset and subsequent leader of ISIS, warned would happen if they were targeted.
The series of attacks in Paris, Brussels, Turkey, and Orlando reflect what Malcolm called the "chickens coming home to roost." Innocent human beings are the ones that suffer the consequences of imperial policy. From the tens of thousands of displaced Syrians who found themselves as political pawns in the manufactured "refugee crisis" in Europe to the Puerto Rican patrons of Pulse nightclub in Orlando, it is the people who suffer when these destructive forces unleashed on the world by their Western governments double back on their masters and bring the terror "home."
This "blowback" theory is controversial especially among some who view all of these attacks as part of some grand design to manipulate public opinion to support the permanent war strategy being operationalized across the planet in the name of fighting terrorism. While the forces of domination can tactically take advantage of these attacks to further that agenda, the position that this is all part of a grand plan gives those forces a ubiquity and level of competence among the people making policy that the evidence of how policy is developed and executed does not support.
There are already calls being made in some quarters for a more forceful intervention into Syria to crush ISIS in response to the attack in Turkey. Erdogan, the neo-Ottoman maniac who leads Turkey, declared with a straight face and not a hint of irony that the world must double its effort to defeat international terrorism.
Not supporting terrorism was precisely the demand that many Turkish citizens made to Erdogan before this attack. And like many of the innocents in the U.S. who have died from 9/11 to Orlando who probably opposed U.S. state terrorism, I am sure that many of the Turkish citizens who were murdered or wounded in that airport probably also opposed the immoral and fundamentally dangerous policies of their government in Syria. Their families and all of the people of Turkey should be outraged. As should the people of the U.S. whose government is now seen by so many people of the world as the greatest threat to world peace and as Dr. King declared the "greatest purveyor of violence" on the planet.
Keep ReadingShow Less
We Don't Need to Wait for Chilcot, Blair Lied to Us About Iraq. Here's the Evidence.
With the help of the BBC and Dr David Morrison, I carried out my own inquiry. The facts are devastating for Blair, for Parliament and for all of us.
Oct 29, 2015
Two weeks ago, I found myself in conversation with Dr Hans Blix, head of the United Nations weapons inspection team, ahead of the Iraq invasion in 2003.
Dr Blix told me that Tony Blair's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were simply not an accurate reflection of the intelligence provided to the British government.
"The big difference in the British dossier," Dr Blix told me, "was that they simply asserted that these items are there. But when Mr Blair asserts that there were weapons, well, that's an assertion, which was not supported by evidence. Both the UK and the US replaced question marks with exclamation marks. I certainly think it was a misrepresentation."
"Both the UK and the US replaced question marks by exclamation marks. I certainly think it was a misrepresentation."
--Hans Blix
He talked about how cautious assessments were turned into bold statements by Blair and the UK government. For example, intelligence chiefs gave this assessment on March 15, 2002: "Intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles programs is sporadic and patchy."
Three weeks later, the prime minister stridently claimed: "We know that he [Saddam Hussein] has stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons."
Shaken by the force of his testimony, I eventually said to Dr Blix: "That's devastating. And so basically you are telling me that Mr Blair misrepresented the truth, lied indeed to the British parliament to make the case for an illegal war?"
He paused. Then he said: "Well, I'm a diplomat, so I'm not using such... such words. But in substance, yes. They misrepresented what we did, and they did so in order to get the authorization that they shouldn't have had".
Lies, delays, and a national embarrassment
Dr Blix's comments were made before Tony Blair claimed to CNN earlier this week that the information he had received was "wrong". As far as Hans Blix is concerned, Tony Blair misled the British public and parliament about the intelligence he was given.
My conversation with Dr Blix was the culminating moment of my search for the truth about how Britain came to invade Iraq. It is now a matter of days before John Chilcot writes to David Cameron, setting out the timetable for publication of his long-delayed inquiry into the Iraq war.
One report has suggested that Chilcot may push back his report as far as 2017 - no less than seven years late, and a full decade after the last British troops pulled out of Iraq in 2007. The delay in his inquiry, commissioned by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009, has become a national scandal. This is why I approached the BBC a few months ago and asked the Corporation for permission to carry out my Chilcot inquiry.
I pointed out that most of the testimony to Chilcot was publicly available. I also suggested that we should call our own witnesses.
The BBC agreed. For the last few weeks a producer, a researcher and I have been seeking answers to the key questions about the lead up to the Iraq war. The results can be heard tonight on BBC Radio 4.
What we need to know
As background to our work, I asked my friend Dr David Morrison to prepare a series of background narratives on the four crucial questions. These are published today by openDemocracy and they address four key questions:
Question 3:Was the war legal?
Question 4:Did our military action in Iraq increase the terrorist threat to Britain?
I have known Dr Morrison for more than 12 years. Back in 2003, I read the devastating evidence that he dispatched to the Foreign Affairs Committee as it made its report into the Iraq war. The Foreign Affairs Committee ignored the thrust of Dr Morrison's arguments. However, they published his brilliant paper as a memorandum for their own report.
His paper and a later one on the Committee's findings, which are still worth reading today, provided devastating evidence that Tony Blair misled the British public about the threat from Saddam Hussein in order to make the case for war.
I have not accepted all of Morrison's arguments. However, his narratives provided an invaluable basis for our work, because he has a remarkable gift for highlighting like nothing else the key issues.
These documents set out with great clarity the key facts that everyone will need in order to assess whether John Chilcot has produced a fair report. I have summarised Morrison's most devastating points here.
Tony Blair misrepresented the evidence on WMD
On February 14 2003, Hans Blix told the UN Security Council: "Many proscribed weapons and items are not accounted for. To take an example, a document, which Iraq provided, suggested to us that some 1,000 tonnes of chemical agent were 'unaccounted for'. One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist."
Yet less than a month later, on March 18, Tony Blair told MPs: "When the inspectors left in 1998, they left unaccounted for 10,000 liters of anthrax; a far-reaching VX nerve agent program; up to 6,500 chemical munitions; at least 80 tonnes of mustard gas, and possibly more than 10 times that amount; unquantifiable amounts of sarin, botulinum toxin and a host of other biological poisons; and an entire Scud missile program. We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years--contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence--Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd."
There, Tony Blair stated as a fact that proscribed material deemed "unaccounted for" by inspectors actually existed. In doing so, he seriously misled the House of Commons.
Furthermore. Blair neglected to mention that his own intelligence services had advised that even if Saddam still had weapons stockpiled, they would have degraded to the point where they were unusable.
Tony Blair stated as a fact that proscribed material deemed "unaccounted for" by inspectors actually existed. In doing so, he seriously misled the House of Commons.
According to a 2002 report the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), much of Iraq's pre-Gulf war stocks of chemical and biological agents listed by Blair, if they existed at all, would have degraded to such an extent that they would no longer be effective as warfare agents. The government's own dossier, which was published a few weeks later, referred to the IISS approvingly as "an independent and well-researched overview."
Among other things, the IISS report notes: "As a practical matter, any nerve agent from this period [pre-1991] would have deteriorated by now ..." It also says: "Any VX produced by Iraq before 1991 is likely to have decomposed over the past decade ...Any G-agent or V-agent stocks that Iraq concealed from UNSCOM inspections are likely to have deteriorated by now. Any botulinum toxin produced in 1989-90 would no longer be useful".
The prime minister didn't tell MPs any of this on 18 March 2003 when they voted to go to war.
What Blair didn't tell us about Hussein Kamal
Blair also used vital testimony selectively in order to build the case for war. On 18 March 2003, he told MPs:
In August [1995], it [Iraq] provided yet another full and final declaration. Then, a week later, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, defected to Jordan. He disclosed a far more extensive biological weapons program and, for the first time, said that Iraq had weaponized the program--something that Saddam had always strenuously denied. All this had been happening while the inspectors were in Iraq."
The prime minister chose not to divulge to MPs that Kamal also told UN inspectors that, on his orders, all Iraq's proscribed weapons had been destroyed.
A transcript of the IAEA/UNSCOM interview with Kamal came into the public domain in early 2003. In that interview, he said: "I ordered destruction [sic] of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed". He described anthrax as the "main focus" of Iraq's biological program, and when asked, "Were weapons and agents destroyed?" he replied: "Nothing remained". Of missiles, he said: "not a single missile left but they had blueprints and molds [sic] for production. All missiles were destroyed."
A transcript of a CNN interview with Hussein Kamal on 21 September 1995 can be read here. In it, he said "Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction".
The Iraq war made Britain more vulnerable to terrorist attacks
In the build up to the Iraq war, Blair's government was repeatedly warned by intelligence chiefs that invading Iraq would dramatically increase the threat of terrorist attacks on UK soil, and act as a recruiting tool for al Qaida and other extremists across the world.
Sir David Omand, Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office from June 2003 until April 2005, has testified to Chilcot that the Joint Intelligence Committee [JIC] "judged that the build-up of forces in the Gulf, in the region, before an attack on Iraq, would increase public hostility to the west and western interests.
He also said the JIC "warned that AQ [al-Qaeda] and other Islamist extremists may initiate attacks in response to coalition military action. We [the intelligence services] pointed out that AQ would use an attack on Iraq as justification ... for terrorist attacks on Western or Israeli targets. We pointed out that AQ was already in their propaganda portraying US-led operations as being a war on Islam and that, indeed, this view was attracting widespread support across the Muslim community".
"Coalition attacks would, we said, radicalize increasing numbers... [and] that the threat from AQ would increase at the onset of any attack on Iraq and that we should all be prepared for a higher threat level to be announced and for more terrorist activity in the event of war."
In addition, Eliza Manningham Butler, head of MI5 at the time, has testified to Chilcot that the Iraq war "substantially" exacerbated the overall terrorist threat MI5 and fellow services had to deal with. She said there was hard evidence for this, for instance "numerical evidence of the number of plots, the number of leads, the number of people identified, and the correlation of that to Iraq and statements of people as to why they were involved, the discussions between them as to what they were doing".
"Coalition attacks would, we said, radicalize increasing numbers... [and] that the threat from Al Qaeda would increase at the onset of any attack on Iraq."
--Sir David Omand
She added: "By 2003, I needed to ask the prime minister to double our budget. This is unheard of, it's certainly unheard of today, but he and the Treasury and the Chancellor accepted that because I was able to demonstrate the scale of the problem that we were confronted by."
In the build up to war, Blair's government was very keen to bring intelligence assessments of the threat from Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" to public attention, but it kept silent about the pre-war intelligence assessments that the al-Qaeda threat to Britain would be heightened by British participation in military action against Iraq. Had MPs been aware of these assessments on 18 March 2003, they might not have given the green light to military action.
On that day, Tony Blair did not tell them that al-Qaida activity in Britain would likely increase with murderous effect if they voted for war. On the contrary, he told them that a vote for war was a vote to combat al-Qaida; that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would prevent a future alliance between him and al-Qaida, as a consequence of which al-Qaida would be armed with "weapons of mass destruction".
'Go blame the French'
On March 18 2003 Tony Blair claimed that France had undermined support for a second UN resolution, which would have authorized the use of force to disarm Saddam. He told the House of Commons: "Last Monday [10 March], we were getting very close with it [the second resolution]. We very nearly had the majority agreement... Then, on Monday night, France said that it would veto a second resolution, whatever the circumstances."
In fact, France said no such thing. On the contrary, in an interview that Monday night, President Chirac made it very clear that there were circumstances in which France would not veto a resolution for war. Early in the interview, he identified two different scenarios, one when the UN inspectors report progress and the other when the inspectors say their task is impossible - in which case, in his words, "regrettably, the war would become inevitable." That portion reads:
"The inspectors have to tell us: 'we can continue and, at the end of a period which we think should be of a few months' - I'm saying a few months because that's what they have said - 'we shall have completed our work and Iraq will be disarmed'. Or they will come and tell the Security Council: 'we are sorry but Iraq isn't cooperating, the progress isn't sufficient, we aren't in a position to achieve our goal, we won't be able to guarantee Iraq's disarmament'. In that case it will be for the Security Council and it alone to decide the right thing to do. But in that case, of course, regrettably, the war would become inevitable. It isn't today."
From that, it is plain as a pikestaff that there were circumstances in which France would not have vetoed military action, namely, if the UN inspectors reported that they couldn't do their job. They had never reported this. By contrast, as Hans Blix told the Chilcot Inquiry in 2010, inspectors were given access to every site they asked to visit and inspect: "on no particular occasion were we denied access".
Tony Blair gave Alastair Campbell "his marching orders to play the anti-French card with the Sun and others."
This is not the story the British public was told. The day after Chirac's interview, on 11 March 2003, Blair blamed France for the US/UK failure to persuade more than two other members of the UN Security Council (Spain and Bulgaria) to vote for war. We know this from evidence given to the Chilcot inquiry on 19 January 2011 by Stephen Wall, who was Tony Blair's EU adviser from 2000 to 2004. He confirmed that he had witnessed Tony Blair in a Downing Street corridor give Alastair Campbell "his marching orders to play the anti-French card with the Sun and others".
Over to Chilcot
On the basis of the evidence before Chilcot, there is little reason to doubt that the Blair government misrepresented the intelligence to parliament and to the British public to make the case for an illegal war in which 179 British soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died.
The invasion of Iraq was intended to deal with international terrorism. It is plain that the terrorist threat to Britain has increased beyond measure as a result of the decision to go into Iraq.
Let's see if John Chilcot agrees.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Most Wanted List: International Terrorism
If, for a moment, we can adopt the perspective of the world, we might ask which criminals are "wanted the world over."
Feb 27, 2008
On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. "The world is a better place without this man in it," State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: "one way or the other he was brought to justice." Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been "responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden."
Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as "one of the U.S. and Israel's most wanted men" was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, "A militant wanted the world over," an accompanying story reported that he was "superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden" after 9/11 and so ranked only second among "the most wanted militants in the world."
The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines "the world" as the political class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters). It is common, for example, to read that "the world" fully supported George Bush when he ordered the bombing of Afghanistan. That may be true of "the world," but hardly of the world, as revealed in an international Gallup Poll after the bombing was announced. Global support was slight. In Latin America, which has some experience with U.S. behavior, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16% in Panama, and that support was conditional upon the culprits being identified (they still weren't eight months later, the FBI reported), and civilian targets being spared (they were attacked at once). There was an overwhelming preference in the world for diplomatic/judicial measures, rejected out of hand by "the world."
Following the Terror Trail In the present case, if "the world" were extended to the world, we might find some other candidates for the honor of most hated arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this might be true.
The Financial Times reports that most of the charges against Moughniyeh are unsubstantiated, but "one of the very few times when his involvement can be ascertained with certainty [is in] the hijacking of a TWA plane in 1985 in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed." This was one of two terrorist atrocities that led a poll of newspaper editors to select terrorism in the Middle East as the top story of 1985; the other was the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro, in which a crippled American, Leon Klinghoffer, was brutally murdered. That reflects the judgment of "the world." It may be that the world saw matters somewhat differently.
The Achille Lauro hijacking was a retaliation for the bombing of Tunis ordered a week earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. His air force killed 75 Tunisians and Palestinians with smart bombs that tore them to shreds, among other atrocities, as vividly reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia that the bombers were on the way, though the Sixth Fleet and U.S. intelligence could not have been unaware of the impending attack. Secretary of State George Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action," which he termed "a legitimate response" to "terrorist attacks," to general approbation. A few days later, the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an "act of armed aggression" (with the U.S. abstaining). "Aggression" is, of course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism. But giving the United States and Israel the benefit of the doubt, let us keep to the lesser charge against their leadership.
A few days after, Peres went to Washington to consult with the leading international terrorist of the day, Ronald Reagan, who denounced "the evil scourge of terrorism," again with general acclaim by "the world."
The "terrorist attacks" that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext for the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as Israel conceded, had nothing to do with Tunis, though they might have had Syrian connections. Tunis was a preferable target, however. It was defenseless, unlike Damascus. And there was an extra pleasure: more exiled Palestinians could be killed there.
The Larnaca killings, in turn, were regarded as retaliation by the perpetrators: They were a response to regular Israeli hijackings in international waters in which many victims were killed -- and many more kidnapped and sent to prisons in Israel, commonly to be held without charge for long periods. The most notorious of these has been the secret prison/torture chamber Facility 1391. A good deal can be learned about it from the Israeli and foreign press. Such regular Israeli crimes are, of course, known to editors of the national press in the U.S., and occasionally receive some casual mention.
Klinghoffer's murder was properly viewed with horror, and is very famous. It was the topic of an acclaimed opera and a made-for-TV movie, as well as much shocked commentary deploring the savagery of Palestinians -- "two-headed beasts" (Prime Minister Menachem Begin), "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" (Chief of Staff Raful Eitan), "like grasshoppers compared to us," whose heads should be "smashed against the boulders and walls" (Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir). Or more commonly just "Araboushim," the slang counterpart of "kike" or "nigger."
Thus, after a particularly depraved display of settler-military terror and purposeful humiliation in the West Bank town of Halhul in December 1982, which disgusted even Israeli hawks, the well-known military/political analyst Yoram Peri wrote in dismay that one "task of the army today [is] to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim living in territories that God promised to us," a task that became far more urgent, and was carried out with far more brutality, when the Araboushim began to "raise their heads" a few years later.
We can easily assess the sincerity of the sentiments expressed about the Klinghoffer murder. It is only necessary to investigate the reaction to comparable U.S.-backed Israeli crimes. Take, for example, the murder in April 2002 of two crippled Palestinians, Kemal Zughayer and Jamal Rashid, by Israeli forces rampaging through the refugee camp of Jenin in the West Bank. Zughayer's crushed body and the remains of his wheelchair were found by British reporters, along with the remains of the white flag he was holding when he was shot dead while seeking to flee the Israeli tanks which then drove over him, ripping his face in two and severing his arms and legs. Jamal Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel's huge U.S.-supplied Caterpillar bulldozers demolished his home in Jenin with his family inside. The differential reaction, or rather non-reaction, has become so routine and so easy to explain that no further commentary is necessary.
Car Bomb
Plainly, the 1985 Tunis bombing was a vastly more severe terrorist crime than the Achille Lauro hijacking, or the crime for which Moughniyeh's "involvement can be ascertained with certainty" in the same year. But even the Tunis bombing had competitors for the prize for worst terrorist atrocity in the Mideast in the peak year of 1985.
One challenger was a car-bombing in Beirut right outside a mosque, timed to go off as worshippers were leaving Friday prayers. It killed 80 people and wounded 256. Most of the dead were girls and women, who had been leaving the mosque, though the ferocity of the blast "burned babies in their beds," "killed a bride buying her trousseau," and "blew away three children as they walked home from the mosque." It also "devastated the main street of the densely populated" West Beirut suburb, reported Nora Boustany three years later in the Washington Post.
The intended target had been the Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, who escaped. The bombing was carried out by Reagan's CIA and his Saudi allies, with Britain's help, and was specifically authorized by CIA Director William Casey, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's account in his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. Little is known beyond the bare facts, thanks to rigorous adherence to the doctrine that we do not investigate our own crimes (unless they become too prominent to suppress, and the inquiry can be limited to some low-level "bad apples" who were naturally "out of control").
"Terrorist Villagers" A third competitor for the 1985 Mideast terrorism prize was Prime Minister Peres' "Iron Fist" operations in southern Lebanese territories then occupied by Israel in violation of Security Council orders. The targets were what the Israeli high command called "terrorist villagers." Peres's crimes in this case sank to new depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder" in the words of a Western diplomat familiar with the area, an assessment amply supported by direct coverage. They are, however, of no interest to "the world" and therefore remain uninvestigated, in accordance with the usual conventions. We might well ask whether these crimes fall under international terrorism or the far more severe crime of aggression, but let us again give the benefit of the doubt to Israel and its backers in Washington and keep to the lesser charge.
These are a few of the thoughts that might cross the minds of people elsewhere in the world, even if not those of "the world," when considering "one of the very few times" Imad Moughniyeh was clearly implicated in a terrorist crime.
The U.S. also accuses him of responsibility for devastating double suicide truck-bomb attacks on U.S. Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 Marines and 58 paratroopers, as well as a prior attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, a particularly serious blow because of a meeting there of CIA officials at the time.
The Financial Times has, however, attributed the attack on the Marine barracks to Islamic Jihad, not Hizbollah. Fawaz Gerges, one of the leading scholars on the jihadi movements and on Lebanon, has written that responsibility was taken by an "unknown group called Islamic Jihad." A voice speaking in classical Arabic called for all Americans to leave Lebanon or face death. It has been claimed that Moughniyeh was the head of Islamic Jihad at the time, but to my knowledge, evidence is sparse.
The opinion of the world has not been sampled on the subject, but it is possible that there might be some hesitancy about calling an attack on a military base in a foreign country a "terrorist attack," particularly when U.S. and French forces were carrying out heavy naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and shortly after the U.S. provided decisive support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 20,000 people and devastated the south, while leaving much of Beirut in ruins. It was finally called off by President Reagan when international protest became too intense to ignore after the Sabra-Shatila massacres.
In the United States, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is regularly described as a reaction to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist attacks on northern Israel from their Lebanese bases, making our crucial contribution to these major war crimes understandable. In the real world, the Lebanese border area had been quiet for a year, apart from repeated Israeli attacks, many of them murderous, in an effort to elicit some PLO response that could be used as a pretext for the already planned invasion. Its actual purpose was not concealed at the time by Israeli commentators and leaders: to safeguard the Israeli takeover of the occupied West Bank. It is of some interest that the sole serious error in Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid is the repetition of this propaganda concoction about PLO attacks from Lebanon being the motive for the Israeli invasion. The book was bitterly attacked, and desperate efforts were made to find some phrase that could be misinterpreted, but this glaring error -- the only one -- was ignored. Reasonably, since it satisfies the criterion of adhering to useful doctrinal fabrications.
Killing without Intent
Another allegation is that Moughniyeh "masterminded" the bombing of Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, killing 29 people, in response, as the Financial Times put it, to Israel's "assassination of former Hizbollah leader Abbas Al-Mussawi in an air attack in southern Lebanon." About the assassination, there is no need for evidence: Israel proudly took credit for it. The world might have some interest in the rest of the story. Al-Mussawi was murdered with a U.S.-supplied helicopter, well north of Israel's illegal "security zone" in southern Lebanon. He was on his way to Sidon from the village of Jibshit, where he had spoken at the memorial for another Imam murdered by Israeli forces. The helicopter attack also killed his wife and five-year old child. Israel then employed U.S.-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing survivors of the first attack to a hospital.
After the murder of the family, Hezbollah "changed the rules of the game," Prime Minister Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset. Previously, no rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then, the rules of the game had been that Israel could launch murderous attacks anywhere in Lebanon at will, and Hizbollah would respond only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.
After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hizbollah began to respond to Israeli crimes in Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel. The latter is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin launched an invasion that drove some 500,000 people out of their homes and killed well over 100. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far as northern Lebanon.
In the south, 80% of the city of Tyre fled and Nabatiye was left a "ghost town," Jibshit was about 70% destroyed according to an Israeli army spokesperson, who explained that the intent was "to destroy the village completely because of its importance to the Shi'ite population of southern Lebanon." The goal was "to wipe the villages from the face of the earth and sow destruction around them," as a senior officer of the Israeli northern command described the operation.
Jibshit may have been a particular target because it was the home of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, kidnapped and brought to Israel several years earlier. Obeid's home "received a direct hit from a missile," British journalist Robert Fisk reported, "although the Israelis were presumably gunning for his wife and three children." Those who had not escaped hid in terror, wrote Mark Nicholson in the Financial Times, "because any visible movement inside or outside their houses is likely to attract the attention of Israeli artillery spotters, who... were pounding their shells repeatedly and devastatingly into selected targets." Artillery shells were hitting some villages at a rate of more than 10 rounds a minute at times.
All of this received the firm support of President Bill Clinton, who understood the need to instruct the Araboushim sternly on the "rules of the game." And Rabin emerged as another grand hero and man of peace, so different from the two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, and drugged roaches.
This is only a small sample of facts that the world might find of interest in connection with the alleged responsibility of Moughniyeh for the retaliatory terrorist act in Buenos Aires.
Other charges are that Moughniyeh helped prepare Hizbollah defenses against the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, evidently an intolerable terrorist crime by the standards of "the world," which understands that the United States and its clients must face no impediments in their just terror and aggression.
The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of Israel's High Court when it recently authorized severe collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity (hence water, sewage disposal, and other such basics of civilized life).
The same line of defense is common with regard to some of Washington's past peccadilloes, like the destruction in 1998 of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The attack apparently led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to kill them, hence not a crime on the order of intentional killing -- so we are instructed by moralists who consistently suppress the response that had already been given to these vulgar efforts at self-justification.
To repeat once again, we can distinguish three categories of crimes: murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S. atrocities typically fall into the third category. Thus, when Israel destroys Gaza's power supply or sets up barriers to travel in the West Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder the particular people who will die from polluted water or in ambulances that cannot reach hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of the al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that it would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. Human Rights Watch immediately informed him of this, providing details; nevertheless, he and his advisers did not intend to kill specific people among those who would inevitably die when half the pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor African country that could not replenish them.
Rather, they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such consideration. Needless to say, comparable attacks by Araboushim in areas inhabited by human beings would be regarded rather differently.
If, for a moment, we can adopt the perspective of the world, we might ask which criminals are "wanted the world over."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular