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Most Terrorist Plots in the US Aren’t Invented by Al Qaeda — They’re Manufactured by the FBI

18 Feb

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Africa Studio

In the ten years following 9/11, the FBI and the Justice Department convicted more than 150 people following sting operations, though few had any connection to real terrorists.

The following is an excerpt from The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism by Trevor Aaronson (Ig Publishing, 2012). 

Antonio Martinez was a punk. The twenty-two-year-old from Baltimore was chunky, with a wide nose and jet-black hair pulled back close to his scalp and tied into long braids that hung past his shoulders. He preferred to be called Muhammad Hussain, the name he gave himself following his conversion to Islam. But his mother still called him Tony, and she couldn’t understand her son’s burning desire to be the Maryland Mujahideen.

As a young man, Martinez had been angry and lost. He’d dropped out of Laurel High School, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and spent his teens as a small-time thief in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. By the age of sixteen, he’d been charged with armed robbery. In February 2008, at the age of eighteen, he tried to steal a car. Catholic University doctoral student Daniel Tobin was looking out of the window of his apartment one day when he saw a man driving off in his car. Tobin gave chase, running between apartment buildings and finally catching up to the stolen vehicle. He opened the passenger-side door and got in. Martinez, in the driver’s seat, dashed out and ran away on foot. Jumping behind the wheel, Tobin followed the would-be car thief. “You may as well give up running,” he yelled at Martinez. Martinez was apprehended and charged with grand theft of a motor vehicle—he had stolen the vehicle using an extra set of car keys which had gone missing when someone had broken into Tobin’s apartment earlier. However, prosecutors dropped the charges against Martinez after Tobin failed to appear in court.

Despite the close call, Martinez’s petty crimes continued. One month after the car theft, he and a friend approached a cashier at a Safeway grocery store, acting as if they wanted to buy potato chips. When the cashier opened the register, Martinez and his friend grabbed as much money as they could and ran out of the store. The cashier and store manager chased after them, and later identified the pair to police. Martinez pleaded guilty to theft of one hundred dollars and received a ninety-day suspended sentence, plus six months of probation.

Searching for greater meaning in his life, Martinez was baptized and became a Christian when he was twenty-one years old, but he didn’t stick with the religion. “He said he tried the Christian thing. He just really didn’t understand it,” said Alisha Legrand, a former girlfriend. Martinez chose Islam instead. On his Facebook page, Martinez wrote that he was “just a yung brotha from the wrong side of the tracks who embraced Islam.” But for reasons that have never been clear to his family and friends, Martinez drifted toward a violent, extremist brand of Islam. When the FBI discovered him, Martinez was an angry extremist mouthing off on Facebook about violence, with misspelled posts such as, “The sword is cummin the reign of oppression is about 2 cease inshallah.” Based on the Facebook postings alone, an FBI agent gave an informant the “green light” to get to know Martinez and determine if he had a propensity for violence. In other words, to see if he was dangerous.

The government was setting the trap.

On the evening of December 2, 2010, Martinez was in another Muslim’s car as they drove through Baltimore. A hidden device recorded their conversation. His mother had called, and Martinez had just finished talking to her on his cell phone. He was aggravated. “She wants me to be like everybody else, being in school, working,” he told his friend. “For me, it’s different. I have this zeal for deen and she doesn’t understand that.” Martinez’s mother didn’t know that her son had just left a meeting with a purported Afghan-born terrorist who had agreed to provide him with a car bomb. But she wasn’t the only one in the dark that night. Martinez himself didn’t know his new terrorist friend was an undercover agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and that the man driving the car—a man he’d met only a few weeks earlier—was a paid informant for federal law enforcement.

Five days later, Martinez met again with the man he believed to be a terrorist. The informant was there, too. They were all, Martinez believed, brothers in arms and in Islam. In a parking lot near the Armed Forces Career Center on Baltimore National Pike, Martinez, the informant, and the undercover FBI agent piled into an SUV, where the undercover agent showed Martinez the device that would detonate the car bomb and how to use it. He then unveiled to the twenty-two-year-old the bomb in the back of the SUV and demonstrated what he’d need to do to activate it. “I’m ready, man,” Martinez said. “It ain’t like you seein’  it on the news. You gonna be there. You gonna hear the bomb go off. You gonna be, uh, shooting, gettin’ shot at. It’s gonna be real. … I’m excited, man.”

That night, Martinez, who had little experience behind the wheel of a car, needed to practice driving the SUV around the empty parking lot. Once he felt comfortable doing what most teenagers can do easily, Martinez and his associates devised a plan: Martinez would park the bomb-on-wheels in the parking lot outside the military recruiting center. One of his associates would then pick him up, and they’d drive together to a vantage point where Martinez could detonate the bomb and delight in the resulting chaos and carnage.

The next morning, the three men put their plan into action. Martinez hopped into the SUV and activated the bomb, as he’d been instructed, and then drove to the military recruiting station. He parked right in front. The informant, trailing in another car, picked up Martinez and drove him to the vantage point, just as planned. Everything was falling into place, and Martinez was about to launch his first attack in what he hoped would be for him a lifetime of jihad against the only nation he had ever known.

Looking out at the military recruiting station, Martinez lifted the detonation device and triggered the bomb. Smiling, he watched expectantly. Nothing happened. Suddenly, FBI agents rushed in and arrested the man they’d later identify in court records as “Antonio Martinez a/k/a Muhammad Hussain.” Federal prosecutors in Maryland charged Martinez with attempted murder of federal officers and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. He faced at least thirty-five years in prison if convicted at trial.

“This is not Tony,” a woman identifying herself as Martinez’s mother told a reporter after the arrest. “I think he was brainwashed with that Islam crap.” Joseph Balter, a federal public defender, told the court during a detention hearing that FBI agents had entrapped Martinez, whom he referred to by his chosen name. The terrorist plot was, Balter said, “the creation of the government—a creation which was implanted into Mr. Hussain’s mind.” He added: “There was nothing provided which showed that Mr. Hussain had any ability whatsoever to carry out any kind of plan.”

Despite Balter’s claims, a little more than a year after his indictment, Martinez chose not to challenge the government’s charges in court. On January 26, 2012, Martinez dropped his entrapment defense and pleaded guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction under a deal that will require him to serve twenty-five years in prison—more years than he’s been alive. Neither Martinez nor Balter would comment on the reasons they chose a plea agreement, though in a sentencing hearing, Balter told the judge he believed the entire case could have been avoided had the FBI counseled, rather than encouraged, Martinez.

The U.S. Department of Justice touted the conviction as another example of the government keeping citizens safe from terrorists. “We are catching dangerous suspects before they strike, and we are investigating them in a way that maximizes the liberty and security of law-abiding citizens,” U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein said in a statement announcing Martinez’s plea agreement. “That is what the American people expect of the Justice Department, and that is what we aim to deliver.”

Indeed, that is exactly what the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been delivering throughout the decade since the attacks of September 11, 2001. But whether it’s what the American people expect is questionable, because most Americans today have no idea that since 9/11, one single organization has been responsible for hatching and financing more terrorist plots in the United States than any other. That organization isn’t Al Qaeda, the terrorist network founded by Osama bin Laden and responsible for the spectacular 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. And it isn’t Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Al-Shabaab, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any of the other more than forty U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations. No, the organization responsible for more terrorist plots over the last decade than any other is the FBI. Through elaborate and expensive sting operations involving informants and undercover agents posing as terrorists, the FBI has arrested and the Justice Department has prosecuted dozens of men government officials say posed direct—but by no means immediate or credible—threats to the United States.

Just as in the Martinez case, in terrorism sting after terrorism sting, FBI and DOJ officials have hosted high-profile press conferences to announce yet another foiled terrorist plot. But what isn’t publicized during these press conferences is the fact that government-described terrorists such as Antonio Martinez were able to carry forward with their potentially lethal plots only because FBI informants and agents provided them with all of the means—in most cases delivering weapons and equipment, in some cases even paying for rent and doling out a little spending money to keep targets on the hook. In cities around the country where terrorism sting operations have occurred—among them New York City, Albany, Chicago, Miami, Baltimore, Portland, Tampa, Houston, and Dallas—a central question exists: Is the FBI catching terrorists or creating them?

In the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the federal law enforcement profile of a terrorist has changed dramatically. The men responsible for downing the World Trade Center were disciplined and patient; they were also living and training in the United States with money from an Al Qaeda cell led by Kuwaiti-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. In the days and weeks following 9/11, federal officials anxiously awaited a second wave of attacks, which would be launched, they believed at the time, by several sleeper cells around the country. But the feared second wave never crashed ashore. Instead, the United States and allied nations invaded Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s home base, and forced Osama bin Laden and his deputies into hiding. Bruised and hunted, Al Qaeda no longer had the capability to train terrorists and send them to the United States.

In response, Al Qaeda’s leaders moved to what FBI officials describe as a “franchise model.” If you can’t run Al Qaeda as a hierarchal, centrally organized outfit, the theory went, run it as a franchise. In other words, export ideas—not terrorists. Al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations went online, setting up websites and forums dedicated to instilling their beliefs in disenfranchised Muslims already living in Western nations. A slickly designed magazine, appropriately titled Inspire, quickly followed. Article headlines included “I Am Proud to Be a Traitor to America,”9 and “Why Did I Choose Al-Qaeda?” Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born, high-ranking Al Qaeda official who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011, became something of the terrorist organization’s Dear Abby. Have a question about Islam? Ask Anwar! Muslim men in nations throughout the Western world would email him questions, and al-Awlaki would reply dutifully, and in English, encouraging many of his electronic pen pals to violent action. Al-Awlaki also kept a blog and a Facebook page, and regularly posted recruitment videos to YouTube. He said in one video:

I specifically invite the youth to either fight in the West or join their brothers in the fronts of jihad: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia.

I invite them to join us in our new front, Yemen, the base from which the great jihad of the Arabian Peninsula will begin, the base from which the greatest army of Islam will march forth.

Al Qaeda’s move to a franchise model met with some success. U.S. army major Nadal Hassan, for example, corresponded with al-Awlaki before he killed thirteen people and wounded twenty-nine others in the Fort Hood, Texas, shootings in 2009. Antonio Martinez and other American-born men, many of them recent converts to Islam, also sent al-Awlaki messages or watched Al Qaeda propaganda videos online before moving forward in alleged terrorist plots.

The FBI has a term for Martinez and other alleged terrorists like him: lone wolf. Officials at the Bureau now believe that the next terrorist attack will likely come from a lone wolf, and this belief is at the core of a federal law enforcement policy known variously as preemption, prevention, and disruption. FBI counterterrorism agents want to catch terrorists before they act, and to accomplish this, federal law enforcement officials have in the decade since 9/11 created the largest domestic spying network ever to exist in the United States. In fact, the FBI today has ten times as many informants as it did in the 1960s, when former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover made the Bureau infamous for inserting spies into organizations as varied as Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s and the Ku Klux Klan. Modern FBI informants aren’t burrowing into political groups, however; they are focused on terrorism, on identifying today the terrorist of tomorrow, and U.S. government officials acknowledge that while terrorist threats do exist from domestic organizations, such as white supremacist groups and the sovereign citizen movement, they believe the greatest threat comes from within U.S. Muslim communities due, in large part, to the aftereffects of the shock and awe Al Qaeda delivered on September 11, 2001.

The FBI’s vast army of spies, located in every community in the United States with enough Muslims to support a mosque, has one primary function: to identify the next lone wolf.  According to the Bureau, a lone wolf is likely to be a single male age sixteen to thirty-five. Therefore, informants and their FBI handlers are on the lookout for young Muslims who espouse radical beliefs, are vocal about their disapproval of U.S. foreign policy, or have expressed sympathy for international terrorist groups. If they find anyone who meets the criteria, they move him to the next stage: the sting, in which an FBI informant, posing as a terrorist, offers to help facilitate a terrorist attack for the target.

On a cold February morning in 2011, I met with Peter Ahearn, a retired FBI special agent who directed the Western New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, in a coffee shop outside Washington, D.C., to talk about how the FBI runs its operations. Ahearn was among the Bureau’s vanguard as it transformed into a counterterrorism organization in the wake of 9/11. An average-built man with a small dimple on his chin and close-cropped brown hair receding in the front, Ahearn oversaw one of the earliest post-9/11 terrorism investigations, involving the so-called Lackawanna Six—a group of six Yemeni-American men living outside Buffalo, New York, who attended a training camp in Afghanistan and were convicted of providing material support to Al Qaeda. “If you’re doing a sting right, you’re offering the target multiple chances to back out,” Ahearn told me. “Real people don’t say, ‘Yeah, let’s go bomb that place.’ Real people call the cops.”

Indeed, while terrorism sting operations are a new practice for the Bureau, they are an evolution of an FBI tactic that has for decades captured the imaginations of Hollywood filmmakers. In 1982, as the illegal drug trade overwhelmed local police resources nationwide and contributed to an increase in violent crime, President Ronald Reagan’s first attorney general, William French Smith, gave the FBI jurisdiction over federal drug crimes, which previously had been the exclusive domain of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Eager to show up their DEA rivals, FBI agents began aggressively sending undercover agents into America’s cities. This was relatively new territory for the FBI, which, during Hoover’s thirty-seven-year stewardship, had mandated that agents wear a suit and tie at all times, federal law enforcement badge easily accessible from the coat pocket. But an increasingly powerful Mafia and the bloody drug war compelled the FBI to begin enforcing federal laws from the street level. In searching for drug crimes, FBI agents hunted sellers as well as buyers, and soon learned one of the best strategies was to become part of the action.

Most people have no doubt seen drug sting operations as portrayed in countless movies and television shows. At its most cliché, the scene is set in a Miami high-rise apartment, its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the cresting waves of the Atlantic Ocean. There’s a man seated at the dining table; he’s longhaired, with a scruffy face, and he has a briefcase next to him. But that’s not all. Hidden on the other side of the room is a camera making a grainy black-and-white recording of the entire scene. The apartment’s door swings open and two men saunter in, the camera recording their every move and word. Everyone sits down at the table. The two men hand over bundles of cash. The scruffy man then hands over the briefcase. The two guests of course expect to find cocaine inside. Instead, the briefcase is empty, and as soon as they open it to find the drugs missing, FBI agents rush in, guns drawn for the takedown. Federal law enforcement officials call this type of sting operation a “no-dope bust,” and it has been an effective tool for decades. It’s also the direct predecessor to today’s terrorism sting. Instead of empty briefcases, the FBI today uses inert bombs and disabled assault rifles, and now that counter-terrorism is the Bureau’s top priority, the investigation of major drug crimes has largely fallen back to the DEA. Just as no-dope busts resulted in the arrest and prosecution of those in the drug trade in the twentieth century, terrorism sting operations are resulting in the arrest and prosecution of would-be terrorists in this century.

While the assumptions behind drug stings and terrorism stings are similar, there is a fundamental flaw in the assumption underpinning the latter. In drug stings, federal law enforcement officials assume that any buyer caught in a sting would have been able to buy or sell drugs elsewhere had that buyer not fallen into the FBI trap. The numbers support this assumption. In 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, the DEA seized 29,179 kilograms, or 64,328 pounds, of cocaine in the United States. Likewise, in terrorism stings, federal law enforcement officials assume that any would-be terrorists caught in a sting would have been able to acquire the means elsewhere to carry out their violent plans had they not been ensnared by the FBI. The problem with this assumption is that no data exists to support it, and what data is available suggests would-be Islamic terrorists caught in FBI terrorism stings never could have obtained the capability to carry out their planned violent acts were it not for the FBI’s assistance.

In the ten years following 9/11, the FBI and the Justice Department indicted and convicted more than 150 people following sting operations involving alleged connections to international terrorism. Few of these defendants had any connection to terrorists, evidence showed, and those who did have connections, however tangential, never had the capacity to launch attacks on their own. In fact, of the more than 150 terrorism sting operation defendants, an FBI informant not only led one of every three terrorist plots, but also provided all the necessary weapons, money, and transportation.

The FBI’s logic to support the use of terrorism stings goes something like this: By catching a lone wolf before he strikes, federal law enforcement can take him off the streets before he meets a real terrorist who can provide him with weapons and munitions. However, to this day, no example exists of a lone wolf, by himself unable to launch an attack, becoming operational through meeting an actual terrorist in the United States. In addition, in the dozens of terrorism sting operations since 9/11, the would-be terrorists are usually uneducated, unsophisticated, and economically desperate—not the attributes of someone likely to plan and launch a sophisticated, violent attack without significant help.

Reprinted from The Terrorr Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism – Copyright © 2012 by Trevor Aaronson. Reprinted with permission of Ig Publishing, Brooklyn, NY.

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Former Drone Operator turned Whistleblower: “I saw men, women and children die”

3 Feb

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by Ezra Van Auken

American drones have been a problem around the world since their inception in the early 2000s; in the past year or so, the advocacy against drones has increased immensely. This could be partly due to the acceleration of drone strikes that have occurred in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya – along with Afghanistan. Within the drone world has come about a whistleblower to the operations.

Former United States drone operator, 27-year-old Brandon Bryant from Montana worked for nearly a decade flying predator drones. A turn for the worst made Bryant decide that the predator drone job wasn’t the best job for him after conducting and witnessing the killing of a child in Afghanistan. “I saw men, women and children die during that time,” Bryant explained to Spiegel Online. The former drone pilot went on to say, “I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn’t kill anyone at all.”

Replaying his experience, Bryant noted that after killing his first two men by drone strike, he then “cried on his way home” from work. The 27-year-old commented about how he felt lost from sanity, “I felt disconnected from humanity for almost a week.” Shockingly, Bryant detailed the accounts of a time he mistakenly, but by orders, killed a young boy in Afghanistan.

Before the hellfire missile hit the target and the mud-roofed house was destroyed, a boy walked around the corner. Bryant recalled asking, “Did we just kill a kid?” In response, his operational partner said, “Yeah, I guess that was a kid.” As the Guardian reported, “One day he collapsed at work, doubling over and spitting blood. The doctor ordered him to stay home, and not to return to work until he could sleep more than four hours a night for two weeks in a row.”

If more honorable and moral individuals who have been in the drone business were to come out about what is going on, I’m positive we would hear more of the same stories.

Without much transparency from the Obama administration regarding drones, it is likely that these practices will not change anytime soon. For instance, Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan is looking forward to an expansion of overseas drone use. Brennan explained earlier this year, “There are aspects of the Yemen program that I think are a true model of what I think the U.S. counterterrorism community should be doing.”

Members in Washington including Rep. from Texas, Ron Paul and Rep. Dennis Kucinich have been heavy advocates for reforming the drone programs and learning more about what the drones are doing overseas.

Image Reference

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/12/17/report-regulatory-mess-may-hold-up-domestic-drone-revolution

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Bomber in Chief: 20,000 Airstrikes in the President’s First Term Cause Death and Destruction From Iraq to Somalia

25 Jan

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Written by Nicolas J.S. Davies | AlterNet

Day after day, U.S. air strikes have conclusively answered the familiar question of 9/11: “Why do they hate us?”

Many people around the world are disturbed by U.S. drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. The illusion that American drones can strike without warning anywhere in the world without placing Americans in harm’s way makes drones dangerously attractive to U.S. officials, even as they fuel the cycle of violence that the “war on terror” falsely promised to end but has instead escalated and sought to normalize. But drone strikes are only the tip of an iceberg, making up less than 10 percent of at least 20,130 air strikes the U.S. has conducted in other countries since President Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

The U.S. dropped 17,500 bombs during its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It conducted  29,200 air strikes during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. U.S. air forces conducted at least another  3,900 air strikes in Iraq over the next eight years, before the Iraqi government finally negotiated the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces. But that pales next to at least 38,100 U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan since 2002, a country already occupied by U.S. and NATO forces, with a government pledged by its U.S. overlords to bring peace and justice to its people.

The Obama administration is responsible for  at least 18,274 air strikes in Afghanistan since 2009, including at least 1,160 by pilotless drones. The U.S. conducted at least 116 air strikes in Iraq in 2009 and about  1,460 of NATO’s 7,700 strikes in Libya in 2011. While the U.S. military does not publish figures on “secret” air and drone strikes in other countries, press reports detail a five-fold increase over Bush’s second term, with at least  303 strikes in Pakistan, 125 in Yemen and 16 in Somalia. Aside from the initial bombing of Afghanistan in 2001 and the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq in March and April 2003, the Obama administration has conducted more air strikes day-in day-out than the Bush administration. Bush’s roughly 24,000 air strikes in seven years from 2002 to 2008 amounted to an air strike about every 3 hours, while Obama’s 20,130 in four years add up to one every 1-3/4 hours.The U.S. government does not advertise these figures, and journalists have largely ignored them. But the bombs and missiles used in these air strikes are powerful weapons designed to inflict damage, death and injury over a wide radius, up to hundreds of feet from their points of impact. The effect of such bombs and shells on actual battlefields, where the victims are military personnel, has always been deadly and gruesome. Many soldiers who lived through shelling and bombing in the First and Second World Wars never recovered from “shell-shock” or what we now call PTSD.The use of such weapons in America’s current wars, where “the battlefield” is often a euphemism for houses, villages or even urban areas densely populated by civilians, frequently violates otherwise binding rules of international humanitarian law. These include the  Fourth Geneva Convention, signed in 1949 to protect civilians from the worst effects of war and military occupation.

Beginning in 2005, the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) issued quarterly reports on human rights in Iraq. They included details of U.S. air strikes that killed civilians, and UNAMI called on U.S. authorities to fully investigate these incidents.  A UNAMI human rights report published in October 2007 demanded, “that all credible allegations of unlawful killings by MNF (multi-national force) forces be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force.”

The UN human rights report included a reminder to U.S. military commanders that, “Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian nature of an area.”

But no Americans have been held criminally accountable for civilian casualties in air strikes, either in Iraq or in the more widespread bombing of occupied Afghanistan. U.S. officials dispute findings of fact and law in investigations by the UN and the Afghan government, but they accept no independent mechanism for resolving these disputes, effectively shielding themselves from accountability.

Besides simply not being informed of the extent of the U.S. bombing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. public has been subject to military propaganda about the accuracy and effectiveness of “precision” weapons. When military forces detonate tens of thousands of powerful bombs and missiles in a country, even highly accurate weapons are bound to kill many innocent people. When we are talking about 33,000 bombs and missiles exploding in Iraq, 55,000 in Afghanistan and 7,700 in Libya, it is critical to understand just how accurate or inaccurate these weapons really are. If only 10 percent missed their targets, that would mean nearly 10,000 bombs and missiles blowing up something or somewhere else, killing and maiming thousands of unintended victims.

But even the latest generation of “precision” weapons is not 90 percent accurate. One of the world’s leading experts on this subject, Rob Hewson, the editor of the military journal Jane’s Air Launched Weapons, estimated that  20 to 25 percent of the 19,948 precision weapons used in the “shock and awe” attack on Iraq in 2003 completely missed their targets. The other 9,251 bombs and missiles were not classified as “precision” weapons in the first place, so that only about 56 percent of the total 29,199 “shock and awe” weapons actually performed with “precision” by the military’s own standards. And those standards define precision for most of these weapons only as striking within a 29 foot radius of the target.

To an expert like Rob Hewson who understood the real-world effects of these weapons, “shock and awe” presented an ethical and legal problem to which American military spokespeople and journalists seemed oblivious. As he told the Associated Press, “In a war that’s being fought for the benefit of the Iraqi people, you can’t afford to kill any of them. But you can’t drop bombs and not kill people. There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.”

The actual results of U.S. air strikes were better documented in Iraq than in Afghanistan. Epidemiological studies in Iraq bore out Hewson’s assessment, finding that tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. air strikes.  The first major epidemiological study conducted in Iraq after 18 months of war and occupation concluded:

Violent deaths were widespread … and were mainly attributed to coalition forces. Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children … Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.

When the same team from Johns Hopkins and Baghdad’s Al Mustansariya University did  a more extensive study in Iraq in 2006 after three years of war and occupation, it found that, amidst the proliferation of all kinds of violence, U.S. air strikes by then accounted for a smaller share of total deaths, except in one crucial respect: they still accounted for half of all violent deaths of children in Iraq.

No such studies have been conducted in Afghanistan, but hundreds of thousands of Afghans now living in refugee camps tell of  homes and villages destroyed by U.S. air strikes and of family members killed in the bombing. There is no evidence that the pattern of bombing casualties in Afghanistan has been any kinder to children and other innocents than in Iraq. Impossibly low figures on civilian casualties published by the U.N. mission in Afghanistan are the result of small numbers of completed investigations, not comprehensive surveys. They therefore give a misleading impression, which is then amplified by wishful and uncritical Western news reports.

When the UN identified only 80 civilians killed in U.S. Special Forces night raids in 2010, Nader Nadery of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, who worked on the UN report, explained that this was based on completed investigations of only 13 of the 73 incidents reported to the UN for the year. He estimated the number of civilians killed in all 73 incidents at 420. But most U.S. air strikes and special forces raids occur in resistance-held areas where people have no contact with the UN or the Human Rights Commission. So even thorough and complete UN investigations in the areas it has access to would only document a fraction of total Afghan civilian casualties. Western journalists who report UN civilian casualty figures from Afghanistan as if they were estimates of total casualties unwittingly contribute to a propaganda narrative that dramatically understates the scale of violence raining down from the skies on the people of Afghanistan.

President Obama and the politicians and media who keep the scale, destructiveness and indiscriminate nature of U.S. air strikes shrouded in silence understand only too well that the American public has in no way approved this shameful and endless tsunami of violence against people in other countries. Day after day for 11 years, U.S. air strikes have conclusively answered the familiar question of 9/11: “Why do they hate us?” As Congressmember Barbara Lee warned in 2001, we have “become the evil we deplore.” It is time to change course. Ending the daily routine of deadly U.S. air strikes, including but by no means limited to drone strikes, should be President Obama’s most urgent national security priority as he begins his second term in office.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is author of Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He wrote the chapter on “Obama At War” for the just released book, Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations: Resolution on the Situation in Syria

18 Dec

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The plenary of the ICMLPO, held for the first time in Africa, reaffirms its support for the right of the Syrian people to live under a democratic regime: a regime that guarantees freedom, equality, social justice and dignity, as well as assures the unity and total independence of the country, including the recovery of the Golan Heights occupied by Zionism since 1967.

The ICMLPO:

1. Denounces the dangerous development of events in Syria. The popular movement of protest has been transformed into a destructive civil war. The bloodthirsty repression is striking the people, and since the beginning, the Assad regime has rejected any democratic reform that would satisfy the aspirations of the Syrian people. This situation is the consequence of the foreign reactionary, imperialist and Zionist intervention, through Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which masked by the so-called “Free Syrian Army” and under the pretext of “saving the Syria people”

2. We reaffirm that this war has nothing to do with the interests of the Syrian people and their aspirations. On the contrary, it serves the reactionary forces of the country, the region and internationally. Syria is at the moment the place of confrontation between, on the one side the U.S., France and Israel and Arab and Turkish reaction that are trying to subject Syria to Western rule and make it break its ties with Iran and Hezbollah. On the other side, Russia and China are supporting the regime to preserve their strategic interests in Syria and the region, after having lost their influence in Libya.

3. We reject all intervention by NATO in Syria under any pretext, given the dangers that this represents for the Syrian people, the peoples of the region and world peace in general. The Conference calls on the Turkish people to oppose Turkey’s intervention in Syria. It sends a call to the workers and peoples of the Western countries, in the first place of the United States, Great Britain and France, whose leaders are threatening military intervention in Syria, to pressure their governments to stop them from carrying out their criminal strategy that caused disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, etc. in the past

4. It is up to the Syrian people, in all cases, to determine their own future. The ICMLPO calls on the Syrian patriotic and democratic forces to unite to save their country from the claws of the Assad regime and the armed gangs and to prevent the foreign powers from mortgaging their future and making use of a part of their minorities to undermine their unity. The ICMLPO calls on those forces to strive to build a new, democratic, secular, independent and united Syria in which the different religions and nationalities live together in freedom and equality.

5. Calls on the patriotic, democratic and progressive forces of the region to urgently mobilize and to undertake the necessary measures of solidarity to support the patriotic and democratic forces of Syria, forces that must act to end the slaughters perpetrated against the Syrian people, to stop the destruction of the country and prevent the foreign intervention, to facilitate dialogue among its inhabitants to achieve their aspirations and break with the tyranny and foreign domination.

Organisation pour la construction d’un parti communiste ouvrier d’Allemagne

Parti Communiste des Ouvriers du Danemark – APK

Parti Communiste d’Espagne (marxiste – léniniste) – PCE(ml)

Plateforme Communiste d’Italie

Parti Communiste des Ouvriers de France – PCOF

Organisation Marxiste Léniniste Révolution de Norvège – Revolusjon !

Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire de Turquie – TDKP

Parti des Travailleurs de Tunisie – PT

Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire de Côte d’Ivoire – PCRCI

Source

Video: General Wesley Clark explains US military plans to attack Iran & other countries

24 Sep

The Dictator You Didn’t Know About

6 Sep

He’s a virtual dictator who presides over a virtual one-party state controlled by his own ethnic minority. True, he has been elected multiple times, but he relies on violence and intimidation to win “mind-bogglingly one-sided elections.” (1) In the last election, his party won all but two of 546 seats in parliament. (2)

When opposition supporters objected to one of his improbable election victories, he ordered regime forces to open fire, “killing 193 and wounding hundreds. Thousands of opposition leaders and supporters were rounded up and detained.” (3) Opponents who weren’t jailed were denied food aid, jobs and other social benefits. (4)

A rebellion against his regime has been met by “brutal campaigns” involving rape and the killing of his own people. (5) Last year, he sentenced two Western journalists to 11 years in prison for reporting on rebel groups fighting to overthrow his tyrannical regime. (6) And in 2006, he sent his forces into a neighbouring country to occupy it militarily, because it was weak and unable to defend itself.

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad?

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe?

The description fits the picture painted of these two leaders by the US State Department and its echo chamber, the Western mass media. But it is neither of these men. Both are reviled in Washington—and so automatically by the Western press—for reasons allegedly having to do with their bad attitudes to democracy and human rights and so it’s easy to believe the leader depicted above is one of them.

But the real reason the US State Department–and in train the mimetic Western media—treat these men as heinous criminals has to do with their attitudes to Western free enterprise and domination from abroad. Neither man has been willing to open his country to untrammelled exploitation by foreigners (or in Zimbabwe’s case to the descendants of settlers.) Neither votes in the United Nations as Washington directs, and neither is willing to act as a military proxy for the Pentagon.

But Meles Zenawi, the leader I’ve described above—the dictator you haven’t heard about—was willing to do all these things.

Meles, the prime minister of Ethiopia, died last Monday. An anti-Communist, he dropped out of medical school in the 1970s to fight Ethiopia’s then Marxist-Leninist government. As prime minister, he shepherded Ethiopia through a free-market, free-enterprise takeover that opened Ethiopia’s economy to foreign investors. (7) In 2006, when the United States asked him to invade neighbouring Somalia, Meles—the uncompromising local agent of US interests—was only too happy to comply.

For his services the Ethiopian strongman was showered with aid—$1 billion from Washington in 2010, and nearly the same amount last year. (8) And his “military and security services” are celebrated in Washington as “among the Central Intelligence Agency’s favourite partners…in Africa.” (9)

While Meles was the kind of leader Washington professes to revile, there were no campaigns for Meles’s removal engineered by the US State Department, and then taken up by a compliant mass media, and from there by liberals, soft-leftists, non-violent pro-democracy activists, and “no-fly-zone-arms-to-the-rebels” Trotskyists. All of these forces were too busy trying to outdo each other in denouncing the rogue’s gallery of socialists and economic nationalists Washington trotted out for disdain, allegedly because they hate democracy and human rights, but actually because they hate foreign domination. Meles never made Washington’s list of rogues. Nor by consequence the Western mass media’s. Nor by consequence the aforesaid leftists’.

Writing Meles’ obituary, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman felt moved to explain the gulf between Washington’s rhetoric about supporting democracy and human rights, and its practice of supporting their very enemies.

“Ethiopia,” wrote Gettleman, “is hardly alone in raising difficult questions on how the United States should balance interests and principles.” Contra Gettleman, the trouble here is that there is no balance between interests and principles. US interests—which is to say the interests of the one percent—vastly outweigh principles, which is why Washington continues to support leaders like Meles and tyrants in the Gulf. Principles are simply rhetoric to cover up the rape of other countries in the pursuit of profit.

“Saudi Arabia,” continued Gettleman, “is an obvious example (of interests trumping principles), a country where women are deprived of many rights and there is almost no religious freedom. Still, it remains one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East for a simple reason: oil.”

Right, but not oil, as a resource US consumers and industry depend on that can’t be obtained elsewhere. Indeed, the United States is one of the world’s top oil producers and more than half of US oil is sourced domestically. Neighbouring Canada supplies as much oil to the United States as do all of the oil producing countries in North Africa and the Middle East combined. (10) The loss of Saudi Arabia as an ally wouldn’t leave the United States short of oil. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia is a source of only a small part of the oil the United States consumes. But it is a source of gargantuan oil profits for US businesses, not only directly, but through the recycling of petro-dollars through US banks. Saudi Arabia remains one of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East for a simple reason: not oil itself, but for what it delivers–immense profits.

Gettleman went on to point out that, “In Africa, the United States cooperates with several governments that are essentially one-party states, dominated by a single-man, despite a commitment to promoting democracy.” (11) But he didn’t say why. If it’s oil profits in Saudi Arabia, what is it in Africa? The Wall Street Journal is more forthcoming. Meles transformed a Communist-controlled economy by “loosening up of lucrative industries” and attracting “investment in agriculture and manufacturing.” (12) In other words, he helped make US investors—the one percent— richer.

Meanwhile, leaders who have resisted their country’s exploitation by the West’s one percent have been destabilized, sanctioned, bombed, and—with the help of plenty of leftists—tarred by the blackest campaigns of vilification.

1. Jeffrey Gettleman (a), “Ethiopian leader’s death highlights gap between U.S. interests and ideals”, The New York Times, August 21, 2012.
2. Peter Wonacott, “Ethiopia in flux after leader dies”, The Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2012.
3. Wonacott
4. Gettleman (a)
5. Jeffrey Gettleman (b), “Ethiopian leader’s death highlights gap between U.S. interests and ideals”, The New York Times, August 21, 2012.
6. Gettleman (a)
7. Wonacott
8. Wonacott
9. Gettleman (a)
10. Danile Yergin, “America’s new energy security”, The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2011; Juliet Eilperin, “Canadian government overhauling environmental rules to aid oil extraction”, The Washington Post, June 3, 2012; Sheila McNulty and Ed Crooks, “US groups unlock secret recipe for oil”, The Financial Times, March 3, 2011.
11. Gettleman (b)
12. Wonacott

Source

US expands ‘shadow war’ in Africa with spy planes, report says

18 Jun

A wounded man stands at the scene of an explosion in Somalia. (AP/File)

By Dylan Stableford

The U.S. military is expanding its intelligence-gathering operations across Africa, the Washington Post reports, mainly using small, unarmed planes “equipped with hidden sensors that can record full-motion video, track infrared heat patterns, and vacuum up radio and cellphone signals”—part of a “shadow war” against al-Qaida and other militants.

Approximately a dozen secret U.S. air bases have been established there in the last five years, according to the paper, which “pieced together descriptions of the surveillance network by examining references to it in unclassified military reports, U.S. government contracting documents and diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group.”

One of them is in “Ouagadougou (WAH-gah-DOO-goo), the flat, sunbaked capital of Burkina Faso.” But the planes often “refuel on isolated airstrips favored by African bush pilots, extending their effective flight range by thousands of miles.”

The spy program is overseen by U.S. Special Operations but relies on help from private military contractors and African troops, the Post said. And while it’s not technically part of the White House’s controversial drone program—which killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, al-Qaida’s No. 2, in a drone strike in Pakistan earlier this month—the U.S. military does use a few unmanned spy planes there, too.

“We don’t have remotely piloted aircraft in many places other than East Africa, but we could,” a senior U.S. military official told the paper. “If there was a need to do so and those assets were available, I’m certain we could get the access and the overflight [permission] that is necessary to do that.”

Most, though, “take off the old-fashioned way—with pilots in the cockpit.” Why not drones? Conventional aircraft “are cheaper to operate and far less likely to draw attention because they are so similar to the planes used throughout Africa.”

Source

Drone attacks create terrorist safe havens, warns former CIA official

12 Jun

Protestors against US drone attacks in Pakistan burn a US flag.

Indiscriminate use of drones in Middle East causes too many civilian casualties, warns former CIA counterterrorism head

A former top terrorism official at the CIA has warned that President Barack Obama’s controversial drone programme is far too indiscriminate in hitting targets and could lead to such political instability that it creates terrorist safe havens.

Obama’s increased use of drones to attack suspected Islamic militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen has become one of the most controversial aspects of his national security policy. He has launched at least 275 strikes in Pakistan alone; a rate of attack that is far higher than his predecessor George W Bush.

Defenders of the policy say it provides a way of hitting high-profile targets, such as al-Qaida number two, Abu Yahya al-Libi. But critics say the definition of militant is used far too broadly and there are too many civilian casualties. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates up to 830 civilians, including many women and children, might have been killed by drone attacks in Pakistan, 138 in Yemen and 57 in Somalia. Hundreds more have been injured.

Now Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism center from 2004 to 2006 and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, has told the Guardian that the drone programme is targeted too broadly. “It [the drone program] needs to be targeted much more finely. We have been seduced by them and the unintended consequences of our actions are going to outweigh the intended consequences,” Grenier said in an interview.

Grenier emphasised that the use of drones was a valuable tool in tackling terrorism but only when used against specific identified targets, who have been tracked and monitored to a place where a strike is feasible. However, recent media revelations about Obama’s programme have revealed a more widespread use of the strike capability, including the categorising of all military-age males in a strike zone of a target as militants. That sort of broad definition and the greater use of drones has outraged human rights organisations.

The BIJ has reported that drone strikes in Pakistan over the weekend hit a funeral gathering for a militant slain in a previous strike and also may have accidentally hit a mosque. That sort of action adds credence to the claims that the drone campaign is likely to cause more damage by creating anger at the US than it does in eliminating terrorist threats.

“We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield. We are already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he said.

Grenier said he had particular concerns about Yemen, where al-Qaida linked groups have launched an insurgency and captured swathes of territory from the over-stretched local army. US drones have been active in the country, striking at targets that have included killing US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son.

The BIJ estimates that there have been up to 41 confirmed US drone strikes in Yemen since 2002 and possibly up a 55 unconfirmed ones. Grenier said the strikes were too indiscriminate and causing outrage among the civilian population in the country, lending support to Islamists and seeing a growth in anti-US sentiment.

“That brings you to a place where young men, who are typically armed, are in the same area and may hold these militants in a certain form of high regard. If you strike them indiscriminately you are running the risk of creating a terrific amount of popular anger. They have tribes and clans and large families. Now all of a sudden you have a big problem … I am very concerned about the creation of a larger terrorist safe haven in Yemen,” Grenier said.

Grenier was the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York and attacked the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. He played a key role in co-ordinating covert operations that led up to the downfall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. He later headed up the CIA’s CTC where he led the CIA’s global operations in the War on Terror as its top counter-terrorism official. He left the agency in 2006.

Source

Humanitarian Aid Is Military Intervention

6 Apr

By Joel Poindexter

The recent YouTube documentary Kony 2012 has become quite a sensation. It has inspired millions of people to demand, in one form or another, that the U.S. military take action in Uganda in order to bring to justice a supposedly ruthless warlord. The fact that numerous wars are being waged already, none of them just, inexpensive, or anywhere near a real end, is not even considered. That such little thought is apparently being given to the consequences of greater U.S. military involvement is indeed troubling.

Similarly, many Americans strongly desire to intervene in Syria, as evidenced by this recent poll conducted by Fox News. Fortunately, most polled did not wish to see overt military action, and only 14% were in favor of a ground invasion. However, 82% agreed that the United States should “provide humanitarian aid.”

But exactly how might the United States provide this aid without the use of ground troops? After all, we are told that President Bashar al-Assad is oppressing dissidents and using his military to slaughter rebels. If aid were sent to this war-torn country, how might we ensure it is not intercepted on its way to those who need it? The answer to this question is very important and must be carefully thought out before we rush headlong to intervene in yet another conflict.

Historically, the role of the U.S. military was to “provide for the common defense” of the states, as outlined in the Constitution. Local militias played a much larger role in defending the states from both foreign and internal threats. And for this reason, large standing armies were far less common throughout most of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Only when the mainland was invaded were large armies raised to repel the attackers.

Despite these military buildups during times of heavy conflict, such as the War of 1812, the War Between the States, and World War I, the military typically experienced a reduction in force following the end of hostilities. While some troop reductions occurred at the close of the Second World War, President Dwight Eisenhower famously noted that a “permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” had risen during the course of the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War brought with it some reductions to the U.S. military. Nevertheless, its budget remained vast relative to that of other industrialized nations. It is now many times higher than the next country’s military outlays. The “military-industrial complex” described by Eisenhower has become deeply ingrained in the political process and the culture at large.

Military intervention, large and small, clandestine and open, has become the norm in U.S. foreign relations. The result is that very little justification is needed to send U.S. troops into virtually any country around the world, regardless of whether any real threat exists. Propaganda and insinuation are  all a president needs to begin dropping bombs and deploying ground troops.

The ease with which many Americans now favor sending troops abroad is disturbing. This is especially true in light of how few Americans will actually take part in the actions themselves, or even see the effects such policies have on those who live in the subject countries. In some ways this is a good thing; the fewer who experience war, the better. War is not a place for people. The downside to this is that, as we’re seeing, the insulation means that war is less offensive and thus more likely to be easily supported.

At one time I fully supported such policies. Not only did I think it was the proper role for the United States to intervene in the affairs of other nations, I felt called to participate in the endeavor. I, along with millions of others, was fooled into thinking that sending armed men trained to kill and maim others wouldn’t lead to increased violence and destruction. Looking back on it all, I’m always struck by how confused my thinking was.

The very idea that an organization principally designed to cause humanitarian disasters — for that is what war truly is — should be used to relieve human suffering is preposterous. No matter what the specified goal, stationing armed troops in a foreign land almost always leads to conflict. Consider Operation Restore Hope, the name given to the 1992-1993 humanitarian mission in Somalia. Originally designed to relieve famine in the horn of Africa, it quickly escalated into a much larger military operation, resulting in catastrophe.

When I first arrived in Baghdad at the beginning of 2005, I certainly believed that removing Saddam Hussein and “liberating” the Iraqi people was a noble undertaking. When I first began patrolling the city, we were often thanked for removing Saddam Hussein. This, I thought, was all the proof I needed to conclude that justice had been served. Then I began to see people die.

No matter what perception the Bush administration hoped to convey, we were anything but liberators. Tens of thousands were killed, and millions were displaced from their homes. As an occupying force we imposed martial law on the people. Curfews were strictly enforced. Violators were arrested and taken to jail. Homes were raided in the dark of night. Fathers, sons, and brothers were rounded up, blindfolded, and secreted away. So violent were the prisons, a sentence of six years or longer may as well have been for life: that was the average lifespan inside. Many were tortured and abused by the very same force sent to free them from a tyrant.

Some of the arrested had no doubt engaged in violence, though it was in retaliation against an invading army or toward rival Iraqi groups. In either case, the U.S. military had no business invading a nation that had not attacked or threatened the U.S. We had become that which we were sent to remove: a tyrannical force that intimidated the populace, destroyed their property, kidnapped their family members, and murdered them without regard.

The American people must recognize that sending men with guns to deliver humanitarian aid is no way to bring peace to a war-torn country. Instead of protesting the actions of other governments, we should hold our own accountable first. Instead of delivering freedom through airstrikes and tank fire, we should demand trade and friendship.

Source

Review: Genocide, War Crimes and the West

1 Aug

Adam Jones’ book Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity is an incredibly revealing anthology containing accounts of atrocities carried out by Western imperial capitalism and those who serve its interests abroad. Articles describing the little-known and little-understood history of imperialist actions from Algeria to Vietnam, Armenia to Yugoslavia, and even the genocide of Native peoples by colonialism in the United States and Canada are reproduced in this essential text. Jones’ book serves as an important lesson to its readers about the reality behind the United States and other powers’ attempts to “spread democracy and civilization” at gunpoint, as well as to remind those who advocate “peaceful resistance” to imperialism of the futility of their position.

Imperialism at the Forefront

One strength of this work that makes it useful to those who seek to understand and resist imperialism is how the authors of this text never forget the broader context behind the events chronicled. Unlike some more traditional perspectives on genocide and war crimes that seek to address the issue via the psychology of the perpetrators, these authors correctly connect the geopolitical agenda of capital as the root of these events. In essence, this text provides not only the what, but the why, behind the greatest crimes of the 20th century – and the why is capitalism. Several chapters discuss US interventionism in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and while outlining the extent of crimes committed by Henry Kissinger and other imperialist agents, the context of the Cold War and the yearnings of US capital to maintain its hegemony over what it saw as its “back yard” are not forgotten. Rather than merely catalog the violence in Somalia under Siad Barre, the text talks about how funds and arms from the United States made it possible. Behind the many horrors being perpetrated all over the globe at any given moment, there is the presence of capital, the influence which leads to war, genocide and poverty for much of the world’s peoples, and Jones’ book is faithful in recognizing this connection.

Understanding Vietnam and Iraq as Genocide

This book makes an important contribution to the understanding of the Vietnam War and the sanctions against Iraq as genocidal actions. This is important, because these direct attacks on civilian population centers have yet to be admitted as genocidal actions by the United States. Apparently, the targeting of defenseless villages in Vietnam and the starving of 500,000 Iraqi children do not count as genocide because it was the United States who perpetrated it. If the Soviet Union is perceived as being slow to provide aid to the Ukraine during famine, then it was clearly Stalin who intended to starve the populous into submission, yet when the United States imposes crippling sanctions after bombing raids targeting sanitation facilities and other essentials to civilian life, starvation and illness are merely a convenient accident. And, when it comes to the bombing of civilian population centers within “free fire zones” in Vietnam, the United States would attest that in wartime such atrocities are unavoidable. The double standard put forward by Western propaganda in the context of Cold War does well to whitewash the crimes they committed, and in engaging these accounts of mass murder, Jones’ text serves to reveal the true nature of imperialist violence. Capitalism: Itself a Genocide

The most important chapter of this anthology is an article entitled Collateral Damage: The Human Cost of Structural Violence in which the author, Peter G. Prontzos, outlines how international capitalism itself is a genocide. In this chapter, Prontzos compiles a wealth of statistical data about death associated with poverty world-wide, and argues that this structural violence is generated by the capitalist system itself; that since there is no material reason for the disparities in this world, the ultimate source of this death and despair is imperial capitalism’s imperative to reap profits from the labor and material resources of the rest of the world. Even without warfare, without bombing raids on civilian population centers in the name of profit margins, capitalism itself functions as a system of the organized exploitation and murder of the world’s laboring masses. Prontzos begins his essay quoting Darwin, saying, “If poverty is not a result of nature, then great is our sin.” This quote is appropriate, being that the misery of world capitalism is not the cause of nature and the sin of its structural violence and imperialist warfare falls on the capitalist exploiters themselves.

What about Israel?

This text does well to incorporate important examples of genocide and war crimes throughout the 20th century, but unfortunately makes no reference to the crimes perpetrated by the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. This myopia towards a nationalist state which sees fit to drop white phosphorus on schools and hospitals, or impose an illegal blockade which is driving the standard of living of Palestinians to incredible squalor, cannot be viewed as anything other than intentional. Jones admits that his work is not exhaustive, and makes reference to the fact that material regarding Israel and British crimes in Ireland have been left out, though we at the APL must protest to this decision, being that not addressing such crimes is what allows them to be perpetrated.

Conclusion: This Text is Essential

This book is essential for those who wish to understand the true nature of Western imperial capitalism. Capitalism is a system of organized crime; an economic construction built to allow a small minority of the population plunder and exploit the laboring masses. When this system doesn’t break out into earnest warfare against the world proletariat by shooting and bombing men, women and children at will, it seeks to reinforce its hegemony through structural violence. Adam Jones and the authors of the various articles included in this anthology do a great service by offering these accounts. Poverty and imperialist war, genocide and the multitude of atrocities presented by both, are the crimes of capital. Only when one understands this essential truth is one able to wage an effective resistance to it, and this book is incredibly useful in bettering that understanding.

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National Liberation & Islamophobia

24 Nov

Iranian Student Protests in 1979; the Movement Would Lead a Revolution Against the Shah

Islamic “jihadist” movements of today are a product of imperialist—particularly US imperialist—aggression, intervention, bullying, exploitation and suppression of the oil-rich Islamic and Arab countries of West Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, etc., and the persecution of the entire Muslim religious community. The imperialist governments, particularly the US imperialists, have cheered on every war of aggression waged by the rogue state of Israel against the Muslim peoples, including the recent Gaza Massacre.

The American Party of Labor opposes every attack on Arab and Muslims peoples in the name of the global “War on Terror.” The imperialists do not care about “fighting Islamic fundamentalism” even if they preach about it. In fact, Muslim religious fundamentalism is encouraged and fostered by imperialists as long as it serves their interests, such as in Saudi Arabia. Islamism is not the force that is currently waging war on the peaceful peoples of the world—imperialism is.

Islamic “jihadist” movements and Islamic national liberation movements have two sides to them. On one hand, they wage a just struggle against invasion and occupation by imperialist superpowers, and on the other, they have a reactionary aspect in social matters. Our Party supports the struggle of Islamic countries against imperialism, while criticizing the reactionary social outlook of Muslim fundamentalism. It is only Marxist-Leninist leadership that can provide correct scientific orientation and achieve liberation of the Muslim peoples as well as people of other religious persuasions. Nevertheless, national liberation movements lead by Islamic fundamentalist forces can play a progressive role in fighting colonialism and occupation of oppressed nations.

A newspaper called the Victoria Times Colonist ran a very backwards political cartoon on its opinion page. The cartoon first began with the title “guide to extremist factions in the Middle East,” and proceeded to feature Hamas, Fatah, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade, all located above an identical cartoon of a mob of crazy armed Muslim stereotypes. The joke was obviously that all of these groups are therefore “identical.” What a vile insinuation.

The truth, of course, is the exact opposite. All of these organizations mentioned are guided by different struggles, goals, methods and ideological centers. While organizations such as Al-Qaeda have the self-stated goal of global Jihad, organizations like Hezbollah no longer preach the line of establishing an Islamic state in their own nation, let alone others. While the Taliban was essentially a theocratic government, Al-Aqsa martyrs brigade has been classified as secular and nationalist. The contradictory goals and methods of these organizations can even be seen as some of these organizations have fought against each other, such as Hamas and Fatah.

So, what exactly is similar, let alone identical, about these groups? Why, the fact that their membership is comprised of Arabs/Muslims. Does that also mean that the Irish Republican Army is identical to the Ku Klux Klan? Technically, both of these organizations are formed of European Christians. Was the FLQ the same as the Branch Davidians?

The most important question is, is this comic simply a racist, Euro-centric misconception, or something much more sinister? In addition to the continued wars of occupation in the Middle East, there is still the tireless struggle of various militant groups against foreign imperialism, and many of these groups have won major battles in the last few years. Hezbollah won staggering victories against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Iraqi resistance continues to chip away at the American occupiers and their puppet army in Iraq, Hamas won a landslide majority in the Palestinian elections and successfully fought off a genocidal massacre in Gaza, and a resistance force is rising in occupied Afghanistan as well.

The imperialist occupiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Somalia are once again seeing the true strength of peoples’ power; they are learning that fancy techno-weaponry accounts for nothing against mass popular dissent. People, not weapons, win wars.

And this is the motivation behind this cartoon. The “powers that be” spread these ignorant notions that compliment their militarism in the form of Islamophobic entertainment. They attack legitimate national liberation movements using the race and religion of the members to smear the reputations of armed groups attempting to overthrow the conditions of occupation that they live under.

Many of these militant organizations do not aim to establish an Islamic state, and the majority of all of these organizations harbor no intentions of “spreading Islamic rule” to other countries via invasion. We need to stop writing off the national liberation fighters of the Middle East as “religious fanatics” and “terrorists”; most of these fighters pick up a gun because some of their family members were killed in a bombing raid by an occupying power, not because of something they read in the holy Quran. A resistance fighter is noy a terrorist.

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The Imperialist War

26 Jun

Imperialism: the invasion, occupation and conquering of sovereign nations by foreign powers for capitalist interests and profit.

Six Years of War

The sixth anniversary of the imperialist war has now passed. What gave the motivation to write this work was the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by United States Coalition forces. The imperialist American government with George Bush and now with Barack Obama at the head preaches endlessly about “peace” and “human rights” while they ruthlessly invade and plunder other countries, slaughtering millions to feed the jaws of their American Empire and the businesses which form its blood. They talk of promoting “democracy” while they continue to carry on their wars of aggression against peaceful peoples. We can’t limit ourselves to simply “condemning” these horrendous acts: it is better to be able to explain them.

Protest and anger in itself may help the people endure their woes, but they do not help them understand their causes or struggle to get rid of them and prevent their reoccurrence. By explaining the reasons for the war we can help to motivate popular uprisings and resistance, eventually leading to a revolution, in order to see that such bloody events never occur again.

In the case of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is all the more important we understand why the war took place and what its interests are. The issue at hand is to judge what the United States, Britain and the UN have become today, since it was chiefly the U.S. and its “allies” which carried out this invasion. Over 1,000,000 people are now dead, and these are Iraqi people who have already suffered a U.S. starvation blockade that killed over 500,000, many of them children, as well as the regime of Saddam Hussein, a CIA puppet. Thousands of Iraqis are imprisoned, many of them tortured by American troops. Over 4,500 American soldiers have died.The unprovoked invasions of other nations in wars of aggression violate every kind of international law and common morality. President Obama has promised to withdraw a meager portion of the over 100,000 (at the time of this writing) troops stationed in Iraq, and then only over a period of three months, and then only to redeploy another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. The working people must realize this is hardly “ending the war”; it is hardly even dialing it down. Even if all troops were pulled out tomorrow, the harm has been done—the destroyed nation is now under the thumb of international capital. Why has all this happened? What motivation do the American leaders have for these horrendous killings?

The Present War is a Capitalist War111

The answer is that this sort of aggression is not a recent development, but rather the logical conclusion of the capitalist system, and a repeat of what has been going on for centuries. Each year for the past 226 years, the US has been engaged in conflict somewhere in the world. Its state institutions, such as the CIA, have been responsible for setting up many bloody dictatorships throughout the world, including the ones of Mobutu, Park Chung-Hee, Suharto, Pinochet, the Shah of Iran—the list simply goes on. It has set up these oppressive military governments in order to make the work force and home markets of these countries were ripe for exploitation by American capitalism.In this age of economic instability and rising global tensions however, such “light” techniques such as setting up puppet governments are no longer enough to make sure that the hundreds of millions of people in African, Asian and Latin American nations stay firmly under the iron heel of capitalism. The imperialists have now resorted to outright occupation and open, declared warfare in violation of every law that the bourgeoisie themselves have claimed to uphold. Through the use of bloody violence, bombing, illegal weapons, networks of spies and now outright occupation, the US is trying, unsuccessfully, to crush any nations that threaten its desire for global conquest.

Just as the unprovoked wars of aggression against Haiti, Vietnam, Korea, Somalia, Libya and many others were waged chiefly to safeguard the interests of capitalism, so is the present war. After the September 11th attacks by former CIA asset Osama bin Laden, the U.S. undertook a “War on Terror” against whomever it so chooses to label as a “terrorist.” This quickly resulted in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, in which America installed a former Unocal executive, Hamid Karzai, as president. He immediately began construction on the extremely profitable natural gas and oil pipeline.

Capitalism Needs War to Surviveimpkills

On the basis of the capitalist need for new markets, subjugated nations and the ever-present greed for oil, what we have seen the US do since 1960 is a deliberate attempt to economically sabotage through sanctions, blockades and oftentimes outright bombing and warfare, the nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan which resist its domination. Coalitions of other capitalist and imperialist nations such as the United Nations have always either supported these conflicts or have raised minor vocal objections while never taking concrete action against the US.The US and the NATO bloc are the sole world powers left. They are seeking to secure as many economic and political advantages as possible through the use of massive violence. The US has equipped itself with an excuse for intervention anywhere in the world by announcing that it has the right to invade any sovereign nation it feels is a threat. The recent air strikes in Pakistan and the smart missiles fired into Yemen (both of which killed alleged “terrorists”) illustrate this point. The US has already told nations like Syria and Iran that they could be next.

The wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, like the many wars before them, happened because of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism in which more savage methods of oppression are needed in order for the ruling class to hold onto power. The root cause of these wars is the system of capitalism, which needs warfare to survive. The world cannot know peace until capitalism is overthrown, until the imperialist government is defeated and capitalism is done away with.

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