Deep Politics: Drugs, Oil, Covert Operations and Terrorism, A briefing for Congressional staff

by Peter Dale Scott
The American people have been seriously misled about the origins of the al Qaeda movement blamed for the 9/11 attacks, just as they have been seriously misled about the reasons for America’s invasion of Iraq.

The truth is that for at least two decades the United States has engaged in energetic covert programs to secure U.S. control over the Persian Gulf, and also to open up Central Asia for development by U.S. oil companies. Americans were eager to gain access to the petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin, which at that time were still estimated to be “the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel in the planet.”[1]

To this end, time after time, U.S. covert operations in the region have used so-called “Arab Afghan” warriors as assets, the jihadis whom we loosely link with the name and leadership of al Qaeda.[2] In country after country these “Arab Afghans” have been involved in trafficking Afghan heroin.
Full:globalresearch.ca

Tony Blair has welcomed a plan for an “alliance of civilisations” to combat Islamist terrorism by bringing together Christian and Muslim nations, after meeting both the Spanish and Turkish leaders in Downing Street today.

Although details were scant on the bones of the proposal from the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Mr Blair welcomed it as a way of joining “civilised people from whatever race or religion to combat the barbarity of terrorism”.

…”I should think everyone can see the common-sense of having a coming together of civilised people from whatever religion.

“And that is the importance of it. And the term the alliance of civilisations is in direct contrast to the idea that we are in clash of civilisations.

“It is the terrorists who want to stir up these differences between Islam and the rest of the world.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

John Gardner is the Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, and occasional Visiting Professor at Yale Law School.

Like many of my fellow-Londoners I am less alarmed by suicide bombers than I am by the police’s Mossad-style execution of a ’suspect’ (who turned out to be a completely innocent passer-by) on Friday 22 July. This is not because we are at greater risk of death at the hands of the police than at the hands of the bombers. (Both risks are pretty tiny, but of the two the risk posed by the police is clearly smaller). Rather, it is because, all else being equal, it is worse to be killed by one’s friends than by one’s enemies, and worse to be killed by people in authority than by people not in authority.

Here are some other important things to remember in thinking about the police actions of 22 July:

(1) There is no general legal duty to assist the police or to obey police instructions. Rice v Connolly [1966] 2 QB 414.

(2) There are special police powers to arrest and search. But there is no special police licence to injure or kill. If they injure or kill, the police need to rely on the same law as the rest of us.

(3) The law allows those who use force in prevention of crime to use only necessary and proportionate force. Jack Straw and Sir Ian Blair say that officers are under great pressure. But this is no excuse. In law, as in morality, being under extra pressure gives us no extra latitude for error in judging how much force is proportionate or necessary. R v Clegg [1995] 1 A.C. 482.

(4) Arguably, the police should be held to higher standards of calm under pressure than the rest of us. Certainly not lower!

(5) The necessity and proportionality of the police use of force is to be judged on the facts as they believed them to be: R v Williams 78 Cr. App R 276. This does create latitude for factual error. In my view it creates too much latitude. The test should be reasonable belief. The police may be prejudiced like the rest of us, and may treat the fact that someone is dark-skinned as one reason to believe that he is a suicide bomber. But in court this reason should not count.

(6) It is no defence in law that the killing was authorised by a superior officer. A superior officer who authorises an unlawful killing is an accomplice. R v Clegg [1995] 1 A.C. 482.

(7) The fact that those involved were police officers is irrelevant to the question of whether to prosecute them. It is a basic requirement of the Rule of Law that, when suspected of crimes, officials are subject to the same policies and procedures as the rest of us.

(8) Some people say: Blame the terrorists, not the police. But blame is not a zero-sum game. The fact that one is responding to faulty actions doesn’t mean one is incapable of being at fault oneself. We may blame Tony Blair for helping to create the conditions in which bombing appeals to people, without subtracting any blame from the bombers. We may also blame the bombers for creating the conditions in which the police act under pressure, without subtracting blame from the police if they overreact. Everyone is responsible for their own faulty actions, never mind the contribution of others. This is the moral position as well as the position in criminal law.

Proposed new anti-terrorist offences: The one that has been variously labelled as ’condoning’ or ’glorifying’ or ’indirectly inciting’ terrorism gives cause for concern. It is already an offence to incite another person to commit an act of terrorism (Terrorism Act 2000 s59). In which respects, we may wonder, is the scope of this offence to be extended? The word ’indirect’ suggests that they mean to catch those who incite the s59 inciter. But under general doctrines of English criminal law it is already an offence to incite the s59 inciter. So one suspects some other extension of the existing offence is being cooked up. Is the plan to criminalise the mere defence or endorsement of a terrorist act? If so we are in for trouble. Terrorism in English law is defined to cover all modes of political violence, however trifling. Are academics and commentators no longer to be permitted to defend any political violence? Is Ted Honderich’s Violence for Equality, or Peter Singer’s Democracy and Disobedience, to be put on the banned books list? The only thing protecting these books at the moment is that, in the eyes of the law, an argued endorsement is not an incitement. The thought that the government may be thinking of changing this should send a shiver down the spine of anyone who still has a spine (damn few).

Lord Hoffman in A v Home Secretary [2005] 2 WLR 87: ’The real threat to the life of the nation … comes not from terrorism but from laws like these.’ Quite right. Some extra risk of being blown up by fanatics on the way to work is one of the prices we pay for living in a free society. Let’s make sure we keep it that way.
Full: prisonplanet.com/bellacio

…Truth be told, commuters need to be most aware of young men praying to Allah and smelling like flower water. Law enforcement knows this, and so should you. According to a January 2004 handout, the Department of Homeland Security advises United States border authorities to look out for certain “suicide bomber indicators.” They include a “shaved head or short haircut. A short haircut or recently shaved beard or moustache may be evident by differences in skin complexion on the head or face. May smell of herbal or flower water (most likely flower water), as they may have sprayed perfume on themselves, their clothing, and weapons to prepare for Paradise.” Suspects may have been seen “praying fervently, giving the appearance of whispering to someone. Recent suicide bombers have raised their hands in the air just before the explosion to prevent the destruction of their fingerprints. They have also placed identity cards in their shoes because they want to be praised and recognized as martyrs.”

The bodies of the London suicide bombers were recognized by their identification cards. And on the eve of the 9/11 attacks, the hijackers shaved and perfumed themselves with flower water in a pre-martyrdom ritual called ablution. But don’t expect the federal authorities to screen for these indicators on Amtrak, which pulls into Penn Station in New York and Union Station in Washington, two of the biggest commuter-rail depots in the country. Not only is there no passenger profiling on Amtrak, but there’s no screening or mandatory searching of carry-on bags. The only restriction on bags is a 50-pound weight limit – and that’s not much comfort when you recall that the bombs used in London weighed only 10 pounds.

Once an Islamist suicide bomber is sitting next to you on the train, your chances of escape are slim. The only solution is for the police to stop him well before he boards your car. But with the system as it stands, that terrorist could easily slip in through the numerical window of random security screening. By not allowing police to profile the most suspicious train passengers – young Muslim men who fit the indicators above – Mr. Bloomberg and other leaders not only tie one hand behind law enforcement’s back, but they also unwittingly provide terrorists political cover to carry out their murderous plans. Call it politically correct suicide.
nytimes.com

Well now add young Somali males to the list, and they will be searching all blacks as well. This is pure nightmare.

EREZ CROSSING, Gaza Strip — Israel is increasing security at its border with the Gaza Strip in anticipation of next month’s withdrawal, the army said Thursday, disclosing details of a high-tech complex to ring the coastal strip with what it hopes will be the world’s most impenetrable barrier.

The barrier system will surround Gaza with fences, electronic sensors, watchtowers mounted with remote-control machine guns, and hundreds of video and night vision cameras, the military said.

…Palestinians trying to infiltrate into Israel _ like a would-be suicide bomber who managed to penetrate the old fence with wire cutters last week before being captured _ will first encounter fence made of coils of razor wire.

They would then have to cross a patrol road before reaching the current barrier, a fence with electronic sensors that sends a signal to a central command whenever it is touched or cut.

If they pass this barrier, they would have to traverse a 130-yard swath of land _ codenamed Hoover _ filled with motion sensors and scanned by an array of day and night optical devices, before reaching the third and newest electronic fence.

Watchtowers armed with remote-controlled machine guns are to be built every 1.2 miles and within a year, remote-controlled, unmanned vehicles will begin patrolling the area.
Full: washingtonpost.com

“We fight because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.. Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn’t play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.” Osama Bin Laden, Al Jazeera 11-01-04

“The root cause of suicide terrorism is occupation, not Islam.” Robert Pape;” Al Qaeda’s Smart Bombs” New York Times 7-9-05

— — Tom Friedman is the undeclared spokesman of the American establishment. His articles represent a distillation of the current thinking among a broad range of American mandarins, particularly members of the powerful CFR; (Council on Foreign Relations) the driving force behind much of America’s foreign policy. He is the imperial chronicler; the man responsible for promoting the narrow interests of elites and transforming the crimes of the empire into a narrative of generosity and goodwill. If one can decode Friedman’s bi-weekly hieroglyphic, they can also understand how elites use the media to manage public perceptions.

In his latest article, “Giving the Hate-mongers no place to Hide”, Friedman offers his views on both terrorism and free speech. He argues that we should pay greater attention to “hate speech” and try to grasp its relationship to terrorism. Friedman sees this overheated rhetoric as such an imminent threat that he thinks the State Department should identify the top 10 hate-mongers and provide their names to the public.

Apart from the McCarthy-like overtones of Friedman’s proposal, it’s hard to believe that his contemporaries in talk-radio would be very enthusiastic about this new idea. After all, sectarian and racial hatred have become staples on the country’s airwaves, with many of the nation’s top broadcasters savaging gays and Muslims on a routine basis. As Friedman knows, the issue of hate speech is normally a question of “whose ox is being gored”.

But, Friedman’s intention is not to take aim at the “accepted” institutions of discrimination and racism within the body politic, but to single-out Muslims who vent their rage at American foreign policy and subject them to public intimidation. This can be accomplished by developing a State Dept “blacklist” of anyone who utters a word against the Fatherland and, presumably, its junior partner, Israel.

“Words matter;” Friedman opines, “We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears. When their words are spotlighted, they often feel pressure to retract, defend or explain them”.

Friedman’s comments echo the Stalinesque directive from Donald Rumsfeld in May of 2005, “People need to be very careful about what they say as well as very careful about what they do.”

Indeed, they do, but is that the function of government; to silence those with an unpopular point of view? Or, are Friedman and Rumsfeld’s remarks simply intended to have a chilling effect on free speech? More importantly, does “hate speech” really generate terrorism or is there a more identifiable source?

While Friedman may be concerned with “shutting people up”, he’s much less concerned with the real origins of terror. His own paper the New York Times ran a very scholarly article just 3 weeks ago by Robert Pape, “Al Qaeda’s Smart Bombs” (7-9-05) that dismissed many of the commonly held illusions about terrorism. Pape, who documented every case of suicide bombing between 1980 and 2004, says that the “core motivating factor behind suicide terrorism” is “a nationalistic response to occupation”; “The root cause of terrorism is occupation, not Islam.”

Wow.

Pape’s “fact-based” analysis directly challenges Friedman’s “hate-mongering” theory of terror. The distinction between the two hypotheses is colossal. If Friedman is correct than the West is justified in invading Muslim countries to rid them of, what Tony Blair called, “an evil ideology whose roots lie in a perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of Islam”. This is the rationale that supports the US occupation of Iraq; presenting the conflict as “the central battlefield in the war on terror”.

…The source of the problem is not in the heart of Islam but in the sanctuaries of the American plutocracy, where fantasists who never held a rifle dreamt of leading the nation to war. Their muddled vision has now produced the greatest wave of terror the world has ever seen.

Friedman scrupulously tip-toes around the facts so he can shift the blame onto his favorite whipping-boy; radical Islam. But the problem is not the “cancer in their midst”, as Friedman claims, but the cancer in ours.
Full: informationclearinghouse.info

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Iraq’s transitional prime minister called Wednesday for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops and the top U.S. commander here said he believed a “fairly substantial” pullout could begin next spring and summer.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said at a joint news conference with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the time has arrived to plan a coordinated transition from American to Iraqi military control throughout the country.
Asked how soon a U.S. withdrawal should happen, he said no exact timetable had been set. “But we confirm and we desire speed in that regard,” he said, speaking through a translator. “And this fast pace has two aspects.”

First, there must be a quickening of the pace of U.S. training of Iraqi security forces, and second there must be closely coordinated planning between the U.S.-led military coalition and the emerging Iraq government on a security transition, he said.

“We do not want to be surprised by a withdrawal that is not in connection with our Iraqi timing,”‘ he said.
Speaking earlier with U.S. reporters traveling with Rumsfeld, Gen. George Casey, the top American commander in Iraq, said he believed a U.S. troop withdrawal could begin by spring 2006 if progress continues on the political front and if the insurgency does not expand.
Full: apnews.myway.com

Oh. Now the ‘Iraqi government’ says the US troops have to go. Iran ho.

LONDON, July 27, 2005 — The plot for the July 7 transit bombings in London, which killed 56 people, may have been much larger than previously known, ABC News has learned.

Sources familiar with the investigation tell ABC News an additional 12 bombs and four improvised detonators were found in the trunk of a car believed to be rented by suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer. Police believe the bombers drove the car to Luton, where they boarded trains to London.

“I believe that the explosives left in that car were left there for a second strike,” said Bob Ayers, a London-based terrorism consultant with expertise in demolition. “But the Metropolitan Police responded so quickly, they were able to get to the car and take control of the car before the second team could get the explosives and leave.”

…British authorities are deeply concerned they are in a race against time against people who want to plan another attack.
Full: abcnews.go.com

Police arrest nine more men in hunt for bombers

Images of Bombers
Simply bizarre that there are no other people to be seen in these pics.

Fearful Europe steps up security

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.

In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation’s senior military officer have spoken of “a global struggle against violent extremism” rather than “the global war on terror,” which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had “objected to the use of the term ‘war on terrorism’ before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution.” He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that “terror is the method they use.”

Although the military is heavily engaged in the mission now, he said, future efforts require “all instruments of our national power, all instruments of the international communities’ national power.” The solution is “more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military,” he concluded.

Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush’s senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush’s own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Rumsfeld spoke in the new terms on Friday when he addressed an audience in Annapolis, Md., for the retirement ceremony of Adm. Vern Clark as chief of naval operations. Mr. Rumsfeld described America’s efforts as it “wages the global struggle against the enemies of freedom, the enemies of civilization.”

The shifting language is one of the most public changes in the administration’s strategy to battle Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and it tracks closely with Mr. Bush’s recent speeches emphasizing freedom, democracy and the worldwide clash of ideas.

“It is more than just a military war on terror,” Steven J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in a telephone interview. “It’s broader than that. It’s a global struggle against extremism. We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative.”
Full: commondreams.org

The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ model–incompatible ‘civilizations’, in compatible ‘philosophies’–back to the 18th century with its ‘different species’ of humans–utter garbage masquerading as ‘ideas’–the biggest secret about all these ideologues is that they are idiots.

When major oil companies report their quarterly profits next week, they’re once again expected to post record numbers. With crude trading around $60 a barrel, the oil industry is enjoying one of the biggest windfalls in its history. But as the industry looks for places to put that cash, it’s finding it harder and harder to put funds to work finding new deposits of oil and natural gas.

By just about any measure, the past three years have produced one of the biggest cash gushers in the oil industry’s history. Since January of 2002, the price of crude has tripled, leaving oil producers awash in profits. During that period, the top 10 major public oil companies have sold some $1.5 trillion worth of crude, pocketing profits of more than $125 billion.

“This is the mother of all booms,” said Oppenheimer & Co. oil analyst Fadel Gheit. “They have so much profit, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches. They don’t know what to do with it.
Full: msnbc.msn.com