Question About American Enemies
One reason Endless War is endless is because the US is so adept at creating and strengthening the Enemies who then need to be dispatched (and that’s independent of how American actions are the principal cause of the anti-US animosity which ensures the War continues). Orwell famously highlighted the propaganda that “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia,” but does the US ever have any enemies that it did not at some point in the recent past fund, arm and/or cooperate with extensively?
Terrorists For The FBI
Mother Jones has published a major, multi-article feature looking at different aspects of the FBI’s recruitment and entrapment of “terrorists”. Check it out here.
How a Clueless “Terrorism Expert” Set Suspicion on Muslims
Immediately after news of the bombing of government buildings in Norway’s capital Oslo, the Internet buzzed with speculation about who might have done it and why. Most speculation focused on so-called Islamist militancy and Muslims. The urge to speculate after grave events is understandable, but the focus of speculation, its amplification through social media, its legitimization in mainstream media, and the privilege granted to so-called experts is a common pattern. The danger of such speculation is that it adds little knowledge but causes real harm by spreading fear and loathing of Muslims, immigrants and other vulnerable and routinely demonized populations, and whether intentional or not, assigns collective guilt to them.
The Meaninglessness of “Terrorism”
For much of the day yesterday, the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to definitive statements on the BBC and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits. The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin wrote a whole column based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible, one that, as James Fallows notes, remains at the Post with no corrections or updates.
The “Visa Express” Program
Why make it easier for one of the leading countries that sponsors terrorism, including "al Qaeda," which happens to be Bush friendly, to issue visas to get into the United States at a time when the OBL threat level was so high? It just seems suspiciously convenient that this program was implemented. History Commons: "Visa Express" "However, after all this, Ryan and the other authors of the Visa Express program are given “outstanding performance” awards ...
Newburgh 4: Terrorist Takedown or FBI Fantasy?
James Cromitie’s lawyer, Vincent Briccetti, writes that once [FBI informant] Hussain “cynically” turned Cromitie from an angry and disaffected man into someone motivated by money and spiritual reward, “the government designed, funded, supplied, engineered and directed every detail of an … entirely fake terrorist plot.” David Williams IV tells his story to the Village Voice.
CIA Agent Davis Accused of Orchestrating Terrorism
Both Pakistani and Indian news organizations are claiming, based upon intelligence sources, that Davis was involved in not just intelligence work, but in orchestrating terrorist activity by both the Pakistani Taliban and the terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has been linked to both the assassination of Benezir Bhutto and the capture and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Multiple calls to members of both groups were found by police on some of the cell phones found on Davis and in his car when he was arrested in Lahore.
Why Are the Feds Cultivating “Homegrown Terrorists”?
The FBI caught another homegrown terrorist this week, except like many recent plots the agency has “uncovered,” the attack was a plant, a plan concocted by the FBI itself. It’s the latest in a growing number of terrorism plots that the FBI stirs up by infiltrating communities and helping to devise attack plans. The practice raises serious questions about the government’s implementation of it’s ongoing war on terror.
Geraldo: All Recent Terror Plots Are Fake
Geraldo Rivera explains to Bill O’Reilly the FBI’s role in recent terror plots.
Nafeez Ahmed on Al-Qaeda As Western Asset
"At every major strategic point in the world, we find that US and Western power is symbiotically melded – through financial, military and intelligence connections – with al-Qaeda; and further that al-Qaeda has in certain places been explicitly used as a military-intelligence asset by Western powers, particularly the United States and United Kingdom. This documentation indicates that international terrorism in the form of al-Qaeda is not merely an enemy to be fought, but rather ...