Category: Terrorism

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Homeland Insecurity: the Lashkar-i-Taiba

The Lashkar-i-Taiba is a militant Islamic group that has been fighting the occupation of the Kashmir by India.

I don’t really care about the Kashmir at this point. It’s another one of those names like Beirut and Northern Ireland and Jerusalem that evoke, for me, the long tired endurance of vindictive human folly.

The point is that until 9/11, the United States didn’t much care about them either. It was not illegal to belong to the Lashkar-i-Taiba, just as it is not illegal to belong to the Labour Party in Britain, the Green Party in Germany, or to be a personal friend of General Augusto Pinochet.

Just as it is not illegal to own guns, in the enlightened United States of America. The Republicans, in fact, just tried (and failed) to make it illegal to believe that gun companies should ever be liable for anything at all.

But the ever-vigilant Department of Homeland Insecurity found out about 11 Moslem men who like to play paintball. They were arrested. They were questioned. Astonishingly, they turned out to be Moslem! Astonishingly, they had belonged to Lashkar-i-Taiba. They had belonged to Lashkar-i-Taiba before the government decided it was illegal to belong to Lashkar-i-Taiba.

You would think that someone with common sense would say, it wasn’t illegal to belong to Lashkar-i-Taiba at the time they belong to it. Let’s give them a warning about the terrorist nature of this organization and let them go.

Not in your lifetime! And miss the opportunity to let the public know how you, the mighty Bush Administration, are stopping terrorists everywhere, dead in their tracks?

Somehow, one of them was “persuaded” to testify that the 11 were, in fact, thinking about something like something that might be construed as “anti-American” or something, and therefore should go to prison for the rest of their lives. The pattern for these trials is always the same: the only witness gets a much lighter sentence in exchange for his testimony against the others.

Would you tell the truth if you had a choice between being charged with very serious offenses that could result in sentences of up to 100 years, or being charged with less serious crimes that could result in just a few years in a jail? Tough choice.

To be specific, Yong Ki Kwon, 28, and Khwaja Mahmood Hasan, testified that they had wanted to fight for the Taliban against the U.S. Since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, where the Taliban was the government, that’s somewhat like taking a couple of German boys from New Jersey in 1944, and putting them on trial for thinking about going home to Germany to join the army. And then sending them to prison for 100 years. Meanwhile, the soldiers that actually did fight against Americans, in Germany, are all released within months of the end of hostilities.

Once again, we have “terrorists” convicted of being terrorists, without the government actually proving– or even claiming to want to prove– that they actually committed any crimes, other than the thought-crimes of being Islamic and foreign.

If Mr. Ashcroft is doing such a fabulous job of rooting out terrorists, how come he has yet to catch a single person actually planning a terrorist attack? Once again, he has nabbed a bunch of Moslems, labeled them “terrorists”, and locked them up, without being able to show that they were actually planning to commit a single crime. In fact, the government admits that it has no evidence that the men were planning any attacks at all in the U.S. Yet, they may well go to prison for 20 – 40 years?!

This is an outrage.

The Men:

Ahmed Abu-Ali (in Saudi Arabia, being sought).
Randall Todd Royer,
Donald Thomas Surratt,
Masoud Ahmad Khan,
Caliph Basha Ibn
Hammad Abdur-Raheem
Ibrahim Ahmed al-Hamdi Mohammed Aatique
Khwaja Mahmood Hasan
Sabri Benkhala

“…one of them, Masoud Ahmad Khan, had a photograph downloaded from the Internet of the FBI headquarters building in Washington.” Along with about 10 million tourists.

You know, the more you read about this case, the more bizarre it appears. The men are charged with training in combat tactics– like about 7 million militia members in the U.S. They heard lectures on the righteousness of “violent jihad” in Kashmir. I’ve probably heard lectures more filled with violent hatred from Christians in North America for Hollywood and liberals.

It is considered sinister that these men had guns. What? Like about 50 million other Americans?

There undoubtedly are real terrorists out there. We can’t catch them. We’re not that smart. We haven’t really succeeded in infiltrating their organizations. So let’s take the people we catch– like these poor 11 schmucks from Virginia– and pin something on them. That’s the truth.

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The Fog of McNamara

There is a remarkable moment in “Fog of War” when Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and architect of the Viet Nam War, states that the U.S. should never enter a war without the support and assistance of it’s allies.

Everybody knows that for all the window-dressing applied to the support of Great Britain and Poland and a few other states, the U.S. entered Iraq not only without the active support of most of its allies, but with their active opposition.

It’s a hard lesson to learn.

But then, the point of “Fog of War” is that every assumption has to be re-examined in the light of experience and new information. Robert McNamara has more experience than most. I’m not sure what he’d make of the Iraq war. He might observe that another piece of wisdom America should have learned by now is that when the reasons given for military action prove to be invalid, instead of finding new reasons, find new actions.

If Bush had said right from the beginning that the U.S. would now be the world’s marshal, patrolling countries near and far, saving citizens from the abusive practices of dictators and bullies, and building democracies where none existed before, we might be able to have an honest and interesting debate about how it should be done, and or even whether it should be done. We could talk about whether the United Nations should play a part, or not, and whether the U.S., like Gary Cooper, should walk down Main Street alone at High Noon,

[added 2023-05-16]

Well, screw McNamara, if he thinks that was the problem.  The problem was not that the U.S. did not have a plausible path to victory: the problem was that the U.S. had no business getting into those wars in the first place.  The problem was that the U.S. frequently intervened not on behalf of democratic, liberal political parties and leaders, but on behalf of authoritarian leaders who could be counted on to turn over their economies or raw goods to U.S. corporations.

 

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George W. Bush’s “What is ‘is’?”

I never heard Bush use the word “wrong” yet. Or “sorry”. Conservatives can be assholes at times, just as liberals can, but they are never more assholeish than in the rank hypocrisy of their horrible outrage that Bill Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky, while they blithely look the other way as Bush lies about Iraq.

Bush could argue that he was misinformed– so I would accept a simple “we were wrong” or “I was wrong” or “we were mistaken and we’ll try not to be mistaken the next time we talk you into invading a foreign country and killing 100,000 people”.

Not a chance. Bush acts as if he never claimed there were weapons of mass destruction, or that they were mere days away from deployment. He acts as if he never said that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. He acts as if his office never heaped scorn and ridicule upon those who believed that the UN inspection process was working reasonably well.

That is deceit. It is dishonest. It is as slimy as any “what is ‘is'” from the lips of Bill Clinton.

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Thomas Friedman’s Bourgeois Militarism

The New York Times, you must remember, is probably one of the few actual media outlets that lives up to the conservative bugaboo of “liberal”. Maybe. William Safire, who is very conservative, writes OpEd pieces for them. But so does Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who are polite liberals, which means that they are different from mainstream conservatism (it there is such a thing nowadays) but not too different.* Paul Krugman writes from more of a traditional liberal perspective. (Can you show me a conservative paper that gives equal prominence to a few liberals?)

Thomas Friedman just wrote an editorial on Iraq that excoriated Howard Dean for having the temerity to suggest that it was wrong to make war on Iraq. At roughly the same time that George W. Bush was tacitly admitting that there never were any weapons of mass destruction (just, in his weasel words, “programs” of research for weapons of mass destruction). Thomas Friedman insists that Dean’s position against the war is not “serious” or “credible”. Not like his plan to reach out to our good friends in Syria and Iran for help in stabilizing Iraq. Not like Mr. Friedman’s very credible plan to bring peace to Israel by….. well, I don’t know. Why shouldn’t Bush get out there and join Israel and whack the Palestinians as well, if it is supposed to help?

Do you understand the state of diversity of public opinion in the United States? It is okay to think that Bush could be doing a better job at whacking Islamic militants where-ever they are, but it is not okay, even for a supposed liberal like Friedman, to question the very idea of aggressive pre-emptive militaristic tactics against America’s “enemies”. I think Friedman really believes that no reasonable person would think that there is ever any solution other than bombs and tanks.

Here’s Mr. Friedman’s concept of diversity on the subject of Iraq:

I define “serious” as one that connects with the gut middle-American feeling that the Islamist threat had to be confronted, but one that lays out a smarter approach than the Bush team’s

Okay, now I understand. “Serious” is middle-class. Middle-class people like war, because they usually don’t have to actually fight in person, and middle-class people understand the importance of maintaining an adequate supply of oil for their SUV’s.

I don’t mind Friedman saying that he supports the war on Iraq, which is as much as to say that Democrats and everybody else should agree with him. What pisses me off is his insistence that opinions other than his or George Bush’s, are not allowed to be taken seriously, and can’t be respectable, and should not be allowed as a political platform. How can you have serious political discourse in this country if members of the opposition have the temerity to actually disagree with the administration?

That is essentially what he is saying: it’s okay to have diversity of opinion, but not too much diversity.*

The generals in the Pentagon and the masters of intrigue and John Ashcroft would surely be happy to hear that the supposed flagship media outlet of the global liberal conspiracy thinks that pre-emptive war is okay and that it’s just plain silly to think otherwise.

The odd thing is, that Friedman may not even be right about the political viability of a pro-war position. Iraq is looking more and more like a dumb idea, like a quagmire that just might explode in a few years. We’ll never know** about it, because CNN and ABC will pull up their tent-pegs and disappear long before the consequences of it become apparent, just as they have deserted Afghanistan, and just as they deserted Nicaragua many years ago. But it just might. The average American believes in capital punishment (though less-so than they used to) but he also believes in minding your own business, generally, unless you really need to do something, and it’s looking more and more like we didn’t really have any more business in Iraq than we do in Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia or dozens of other countries.

* I am alluding, of course, to the hilarious scene in Woody Allen’s “Bananas” wherein Miss America is called to testify at the trial of Fielding Mellish (Allen) for treason, and asserts that, in America, it’s okay to be “different, but not too different”.

** 2022-04-30  Of course, in fact we do know, in spades, and the media have more or less acknowledged that Iraq was a massive blunder.

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Wrong About Being Wrong About Afghanistan

I’m trying not to forget, by the way, that I was wrong about Afghanistan.

February 2007: Wow. If you actually look up what I said about Afghanistan… well, here it is:

There are good reasons why the U.S. would not want to invade or occupy Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or whoever. It would take a long time, and there would be an enormous cost in lives. It would likely introduce instability into a potentially volatile region. It would create a large pool of new, future terrorists. It would create alarm and concern in China and Russia and Pakistan. If the U.S. occupied the nation, it would have to constantly contend with terrorists and insurrectionists.

It would result in disaster.

How about that? I was wrong.

I was wrong when I thought I had been wrong about Afghanistan.

 

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Libya and Dubbya

Bush toots Libya as a model of how a bit of forthright action can impress other countries and achieve American foreign policy goals without further expenditures of men and materiel.

The trouble is, exactly what have we got from Libya? Libya says that they will no longer pursue weapons of mass destruction. Libya, however, is still under the rule of Muamar Qadhafi and his secret police and terror squads. Now, Bush is telling us, all is okay?

There is a problem, isn’t there? Bush said he was going to invade Iraq because it had weapons of mass destruction. They didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, but that’s okay: we invaded because Saddam Hussein is a cruel tyrant with an appalling disregard for human rights. He imprisons and murders his own people. He has crushed all political opposition and thrown his political opponents into prison. He has suppressed a free press and he has destroyed his nation’s economy.

Just like Qadhafi.

Does anyone realize that Bush has been out-snookered by Qadhafi, who appears to be making a few smart movies. Qadhafi seems to have guessed that Bush doesn’t really care about democracy or human rights or torture or murder. Give Bush a public relations gift, announce that you are no longer pursuing weapons of mass destruction, and maybe he’ll leave you alone.

Bush, so far, has played along. Or is he really that dumb?

Is Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia paying attention? Some kind of public obeisance, especially in this election year, is certainly called for. Get the horn to Karl Rove and ask for a sample text and a knee pad. You have no idea of what you have to gain. Play hardball. Demand some trade concessions while you’re at it– this is an election year, dammit!

In January 2003, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights elected Libya to the rotating chairmanship.

This really is like putting a McDonald’s cook in charge of the Gourmet Diners Association. Is there something I don’t get about this process? Is there some strategic thinking here that I don’t understand, like giving the Olympics to China in 2008? Will Libya try to set an example for the world by releasing all their own prisoners of conscience?

Who is in charge of this? Someone should be sacked.

“Over the past three decades, Libya’s human rights record has been appalling. It has included the abduction, forced disappearance or assassination of political opponents; torture and mistreatment of detainees; and long-term detention without charge or trial or after grossly unfair trials.”  Human Rights Watch

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The Ongoing Comic Adventures of George W’s Inquisition Into Hostile Acts of Aggression and Subversion

How many times have you noticed an article in the newspaper or on TV about some terrorist suspects being apprehended? Caught them. Another attack prevented. Phew! We’re safe again.

But of course, some of those arrests include the Lackawana 5, and Iyman Faris. Add to the list the horribly frightening and terrifying Captain James J. Yee.

Captain Yee was a chaplain at the detention camp for foreign combatants of the war in Afghanistan in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Captain Yee joined the army years ago, left the army and became a Moslem, and then rejoined the army recently as a chaplain. The army liked to brag about Yee. He was emblem of their enlightened diversity, tolerance, and broad-mindedness. He was sent to Guantanamo Bay to minister to the Moslem prisoners of war being held there under obscure and nebulous of legal rationalizations.

Then Yee joined up with Osama Bin Laden and began laying nefarious plots for incendiary activities at Guantanamo. I’m not sure what he was planning exactly. An escape would be difficult– from Cuba. He and his evil Islamic radicals could take over the base, I suppose, and litter.

Anyway, Captain Yee was arrested and charged with committing terrorist acts and there was a trial and convincing evidence was presented and Captain Yee defended himself to no avail and was convicted and sent to prison.

Or maybe not.

You see, that kind of eventuality would require real evidence and testimony. It would require reasonable people to look at his evidence and say, well, by golly, this guy committed a crime.

Much, much more convenient to simply hold a press conference and announce that some more terrorists have been stopped dead in their tracks — meaning Mr. Yee among others– and then charge him with littering. Well, not exactly littering. Adultery.

Yes, adultery.

Yes, adultery. For which he was held in a brig in solitary confinement, usually in leg irons, for 76 days. Well, not really for the adultery. The adultery, you see, is what they found evidence for. They held him because some idiot thought he was plotting to overthrow the U.S. government.

Do you care about the adultery? Do you care about the miscarriage of justice? You probably don’t. I’m a cynic. I bet you won’t care until it happens to you or somebody close to you. In the meantime, George W. Bush and John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge are your heroes. Do we have John Ashcroft actions figures yet?

I do care, and that’s why I’m taking a few minutes here to write about him, even if I doubt it will make any difference to most people out there.

If you feel safer tonight knowing that George W. Bush and the boys are out there like hawks guarding your personal safety and security, repeat, to yourself, the word “adultery”.

Or, “improperly gathering military information”, as one of Mr. Yee’s supposed cohorts have been charged with. Read that line carefully if you think it sounds sinister. What it really means is, we couldn’t find any real evidence against this guy so we charged him with something we could charge anybody with so as to not look like total idiots…. oops. Too late.

Captain Yee was arrested September 10, 2003, at Jacksonville Naval Air Station. When it was discovered that Airman Al- Halabi had had dinner with Captain Yee, he too was arrested, and charged with Grand Malarkey, or whatever it is that means that he was plotting to commit terrorist or otherwise nasty and unpleasant things of a hostile nature. Airman Al- Halabi– don’t laugh– was charged with aiding the enemy, which carries a death penalty.

As near as anyone with any brains can figure out, Al-Halabi was polite to the prisoners, which is what initially raised suspicions. Then he had a private dinner with Captain Yee, whom they thought was…. never mind. Anyway, Al-Halabi is an Arab name, so most Americans won’t care what happens to him. Lock him up. Leg irons. What the hell, hang him.

If you can’t figure it out for yourself just yet, here is a sure indicator of when prosecutors have gone nuts: it’s when they inspect themselves and go “eureka”. Of course, they never, as in the case of Colonel Jack Farr, actually arrest and incarcerate themselves. That would be unseemly. But Colonel Jack Farr, one of the men investigating Captain Yee, was caught also “wrongfully transporting classified material without the proper security container.” I’m not sure who caught him– the New York Times didn’t say. But it did say that he wouldn’t be treated like Yee or Al-Halabi.

That’s because he’s holding the gun.

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Conspiracy Theory

“The whole point is to disrupt terrorism at an early stage instead of letting the conspiracy fully hatch,” said Viet Dinh, a former top Justice Department official under Attorney General John Ashcroft who now teaches law at Georgetown University. “We cannot take the risk of the conspiracy taking place. What you get is shorter sentences but greater prevention.” NY Times, December 7, 2003

My question is, why is our government so modest? Where are the visionaries? Why are they so humble? Where is that “can do” spirit?

We have a government department, under John Ashcroft, that seeks to prevent conspiracies before they happen. But why aren’t they out there preventing murders and larcenies and drug deals and marijuana smoking before they happen? Lack of vision, that’s all. Lack of spirit. If they only applied the kind of exciting focus and determination that they show in the pursuit of terrorist conspiracies!

Think about it. If we could catch some of those teenagers reading books or watching movies about drug use, and give them more frequent but lighter sentences, why we could put the entire drug problem to rest in less than one generation.

How about kids playing with guns? It’s clear they’re thinking of growing up to become hit men. Bust ’em.

Two men in Oregon were sentenced to 18 years in prison for planning to go to Afghanistan to train for jihad. A jihad is a holy war against the infidels.

I don’t think the U.S. government means to say that it is illegal to believe that the west wants to destroy Islam and, therefore, conscientious young Moslems ought to be trained to be ready to fight the west. Well, wait, I think they do. It’s a new approach to war: it is now illegal.

It wasn’t illegal ten years ago. If a young Arab in the U.S. decided to go join the Muhajadeen, the U.S. did not interfere.

But today, it is illegal.

Yesterday, it wasn’t. Yesterday, the same young men were going over to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians. That was okay. These young men became the Taliban and oppressed and brutalized their own people. That was okay.

Then they turned on us.

It’s Legal When I Say It’s Legal!

For people who think, however, we have achieved the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the absurd: the United States of America now imprisons people for thinking about doing things that probably shouldn’t be illegal in the first place. The U.S. has sponsored terrorism in Afghanistan when the Soviets were the occupying force. We gave them bazookas and grenades and told them to take back their country. But now that we have taken their country, similar
actions are deemed terrorist.

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Baghdad: Getting Better Every Day

The United States is doing everything it can to fight their fears. All over the city, the occupying authorities have put up large billboards featuring bucolic scenes of date palms arched over a river bank. Inspirational messages are splashed over the pretty pictures. “Baghdad is getting better,” says one. NY Times, October 27, 2003

How odd this sounds. It sounds, for all the world, like North Korea, where big billboards tell citizens to love their government.

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Snipers and Lynch

Sniper teams from the West Virginia State Police were positioned along the route of Private Lynch’s motorcade, and staff from the state’s Division of Natural Resources patrolled the Little Kanawha River, which flows beside the park where Private Lynch appeared. NY Times, July 22, 2003

This was for a personal appearance by Jessica Lynch, the hero of the mighty war against Saddam Hussein. Jessica Lynch single-handedly fought off an entire division of well-armed fanatic Iraqi Mujahideen before repairing her Hummer while it was being sabotaged by a Greenpeace activist and driving a wounded Shiite cleric to the hospital where she set up a foundation to care for his children.

I mean, Jessica Lynch, whose truck rolled over and who was injured and taken to a hospital where she was treated well until the marines were able to rescue her and take her to an American hospital where she could be treated even better.

I like Jessica Lynch. She is on my “Not Sold Out” list because she refused to cooperate with the fanatic capitalist media exploiters who wanted to embellish her story just a little.

But they didn’t need to embellish this part. Yes, there were police snipers positioned along the motorcade route because, I suppose, some absolutely idiotic administrator with the West Virginia State Police actually believed that Saddam Hussein might try to assassinate Jessica Lynch.

[Added December 2003:]

Have you gone to see Peter Pan yet? You ought to, really.