Comes Back And Bites You

Is this why the highest ranking officer of the ISI abruptly decided not to travel to India after the Mubai attack. Do ya think?

The war in Kashmir like America's secret wars, is a ghost war, with Pakistan funding armed struggle groups who they don't really control. The ISI learned its lessons from the CIA unfortunately like the CIA they failed to learn the most important lesson about black ops and secret wars by client organizations, they come back to haunt you.

All Terorism is State Terrorism it is the result of the Cold War. The use of fascists and military coup detat's were post-war CIA policy. The attack on civilians in post war Europe has a been the result of small fascist groups funded or aided by the CIA. This political strategy of a shadow war is used by the State to promote authoritarian policies through the politics of fear. Unknown, shadowy groups end up being exposed as funded and fronted by state security apparatuses. This shadow world gets exposed to the light of day when the client organizations act autnomously and with their own agenda.

The fallacy about these movements is that they are nationalist or anti-imperialist, when in fact they are anything but. They are agents of the State used to justify its authoritarian existence. They are not terrorists they are fascists, and as such are the creatures of the Security State. The Security State promotes global insecurity to justify its existence. There is no such thing as an 'unknown' terrorist organization, they are all pawns in the game of the intelligence networks that created them.



Pakistan’s Spies Aided Group Tied to Mumbai Siege

American officials say there is no hard evidence to link the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to the Mumbai attacks. But the ISI has shared intelligence with Lashkar and provided protection for it, the officials said, and investigators are focusing on one Lashkar leader they believe is a main liaison with the spy service and a mastermind of the attacks. Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means “army of the pure,” was founded more than 20 years ago with the help of Pakistani intelligence officers as a proxy force to challenge Indian control of Muslim-dominated Kashmir. Indian officials have publicly implicated Lashkar operatives in a July 2006 attack on commuter trains in Mumbai and in a December 2001 attack against the Indian Parliament. But in recent years, Lashkar fighters have turned up in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting and killing Americans, senior American military officials have said.Lashkar commanders have been able to operate more or less in the open, behind the public face of a popular charity, with the implicit support of official Pakistani patrons, American officials said. Lashkar also has a history of using local extremist groups for knowledge and tactics in its operations. Investigators in Mumbai are following leads suggesting that Lashkar used the Students’ Islamic Movement of India, a fundamentalist group that advocates establishing an Islamic state in India, for early reconnaissance and logistical help. Although Pakistan’s government officially banned Lashkar in 2002, American officials said that the group had maintained close ties since then to the Pakistani intelligence service. American spy agencies have documented regular meetings between the ISI and Lashkar operatives, in which the two organizations have shared intelligence about Indian operations in Kashmir. “It goes beyond information sharing to include some funding and training,” said an American official who follows the group closely. “And these are not rogue ISI elements. What’s going on is done in a fairly disciplined way.” Lashkar strives for the creation of a pan-Islamic state across South Asia,



Gul was director-general of the ISI from 1987 to 1989, at the end of a mujahideen war, covertly funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia, to drive the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. It was at the tail-end of this period that Pakistani support began for a separatist movement in Indian Kashmir. Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group whose leader hails from Sargodha, the same city as Gul, was founded in 1990.Gul says he supports the Afghan resistance to Western forces at a moral and academic level, but no more than that.Speculation among analysts and Western media has bubbled for years that the ISI either secretly supports the Taliban, or there are rogue or retired officers helping the insurgents. Gul was ISI chief during Bhutto's first government in 1988-1990.



New Delhi's past complaints about Pakistan — shared by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and some in Washington — have centered on its Inter Services Intelligence agency. Kashmiri militants as well as the Taliban have served as proxies for Pakistan to exert influence in India and Afghanistan in the past, and there are doubts that Pakistan's military, which controls the ISI, has fully abandoned that policy.Pakistani leaders have vigorously defended the agency, and complained that their country is being scape-goated for Western failures in Afghanistan. Still, they have also made moves to reform the ISI, including appointing a new chief in September.





SEE:

Chickens Come Home

Worth Reading After Mubai

Pakistan: Feudalism Not Democracy

Back In the USSA

Saddam and the CIA

CIA Conspiracies Are Real

Irans Nuclear Program Is A CIA Oops

State Sponsored Terrorism

State Security Is A Secure State

Paranoia and the Security State

ECHELON Spies on Greenpeace

Statist Anti-Terrorism Act

Weapons of Mass Deception





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Chickens Come Home

America's secret wars reveals the reason behind recent so called unexpected terrorist assaults in Mubai and Pakistan. These are not random events but part of the asymetrical warfare that resulted from the Cold War.
While America declares war on Terrorism, the terrorists are a result of its cold war with Russia and attempts to create a global Imperial Empire. Proping up military dictatorships in opposition to the Soviet Union especially in Pakistan, led to the creation of the modern Islamic terrorist network, originally funded by the CIA. Al Quadia, and other such groups organized to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.
After their victory over the Soviet Union and the subsequent decline in Russia's Imperial power in the region with the end of the Cold War, embolldened they turned their attention to the other Imperial nation in the region of the Middle East and Africa. Pakistan was an American client stte whith support from China. India was a Russian client state. The Taliban were created to take over in post soviet Afghanistan, by the Pakistan secret service, with a wink and a nod from the Pakistan government of the American backed Benazir Bhutto.
The Cold War has never really ended, it merely has morphed into the modern war that America is fighting in Afghanista, Pakistan, the Middle East and in The horn of Africa. And the globe is being divided yup between new Imperialist powers, not unlike the old colonial days of the 19th Century.
Instead of combating world poverty and mass unemployment, and encouraging development, U.S. Imperialism would prefer to fight the children of this impovershment. Chickens, home, roost.
Unfortunately it appears that America has not learned its lessons, and even under its new President it will continue its Imperial ambitions. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The war on terror, which began in reaction to an attack on the United States by a small group of nationalist and Islamist Muslims, outraged by the presence of American military bases in close proximity to the Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia, has now become a war against radicalism itself, disorderly states, other conflicts and failures in the non-Western world, poverty and social disorder ("breeding grounds” for terrorism), and “rogue nations,” meaning those that want to have nuclear weapons in order to deter attack by foreign enemies. This same war to make other states “into the American image” has been waged repeatedly during the last 50 years: in Vietnam, in Laos and Cambodia, in Nicaragua, in Iraq where “victory” (whatever that would be) still eludes the U.S., in Afghanistan in a war now spreading into Pakistan, in Somalia (through an Ethiopian proxy), and against Hezbollah and Hamas. It invariably has failed, at heavy cost to the societies involved, and little or no benefit to the United States. The rule long ago empirically established is that intervention in other countries to remake them invariably inflames and sustains nationalist resistance to the invader.

According to Islamic legal tradition, there are two different kinds of jihad. The first, offensive jihad, is when you seek out the infidel, offer him the opportunity to become a Muslim, and conquer him if he declines. That is how Muhammad and his successors went from obscure sect to global empire. Osama bin Laden has never called for an offensive jihad, probably because he knows no one would listen to him.
Defensive jihad, on the other hand, is the obligation of every able-bodied male Muslim to protect Muslim land from foreign invaders: all for one and one for all. In Afghanistan, the Soviet occupation offered bin Laden a textbook opportunity to fulfill this duty, and when the Soviets fell, he and the other foreign jihadists who had traveled there to fight were instantly branded as heroes. They hadn't just followed the classic defensive-jihad script; they'd proven that it worked.
Having found his purpose, bin Laden immediately set out to join another defensive jihad, and he wasn't picky. He even proposed to the Saudi government that he be allowed to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, since Saddam was a bad Muslim, and that was enough for bin Laden.
When the Saudis told him thanks but no thanks, bin Laden started looking at them for the bad-Muslim role. And when the Saudis opened their doors to U.S. troops to defeat Saddam and guarantee their continued security, bin Laden figured he had them. He argued that Saudi Arabia was now under foreign occupation by the Americans, making the United States a legitimate target. And then we invaded Afghanistan. Initially this was not a good thing for Osama bin Laden. He and the rest of Al Qaeda had to flee. Some were killed, and a few were caught. He lost the operating base he had built with Taliban collusion, and it was pretty much guaranteed he would be a fugitive the rest of his natural life. For the United States, it wasn't the home run that catching bin Laden would have given us. But it was a solid double, the opening of a rally that combined projection of our military power with a reminder to the world that we could not be attacked without consequence.
Unfortunately, like the Soviets before us, we couldn't leave it at that. We were a global superpower (with allies behind us), and a superpower, we told ourselves, couldn't just knock out a regime and then walk away without caring about the consequences. We needed to set up our own government, and we wanted it to rule the country. We wanted it to be at least vaguely democratic, to allow TV (talk about American values), and to permit girls to go to school. All that, it turned out, required more than bearded Special Forces operators. It required an occupation.
From October 2001 until March 2003, as America's occupation grew, bin Laden began to recoup his losses. He became not simply a notorious public figure but a global actor with a gravitas well beyond that of a mere terrorist. When the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated, the U.S. was not in fact the occupier of a Muslim country, whatever bin Laden might have claimed. Yet through the U. S. response -- the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and subsequently Iraq -- suddenly it was. Bin Laden was no longer a liar. Now he was a prophet.

Some Obama supporters are wringing their hands over the selection of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Hillary was, after all, a consistent supporter of the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and much more. But Barack Obama's selection of Reaganite and Bush family operative Robert Gates to continue as Secretary of War speaks volumes about the new administration's willingness to continue pulling the same wool over the public eyes as Democratic and Republican administrations past have done. Is this the "change" tens of millions voted for?

Obama's Cabinet: In an editorial, the Guardian says as Barack Obama's choices of cabinet members and advisers emerge, it looks more and more as if putting the American political system back on an even keel is his main purpose, and "steady as she goes" the motto he has in mind. Obama's Politics: Daily Telegraph Columnist Janet Daley wonders if Barack Obama is a secret right-winger. She asks if his left-liberal stance during the presidential campaign was just a ruse to seduce a new generation of dissident voters. Gaza Siege: Commentator Hasan Abu Nimah writes on what he calls the shame of the Gaza siege. For nearly three years Gaza's entire population, 1.5 million people, has been subjected to a cruel siege from land, sea and air, he says; but worse than the siege itself is the silence of the whole world. Arab News (Saudi Arabia) Hillary Worry: An editorial expresses concern about Hillary Clinton's appointment. A New York senator with often-expressed Zionist sympathies, Clinton may not be the person to head up the renewed drive for a Palestinian settlement, it says.

While naive, giddy and myopic establishment leftists have been celebrating the great “change” heralded by the election of Barack Obama, the President elect has been busy appointing people to key positions who advocate the same Neo-Con imperialist foreign policy crafted during eight years of the Bush administration.
The New York Times, widely recognized as the voice of the establishment Democratic left, set the tone of what we can expect from an Obama foreign policy in a lead editorial last Sunday entitled, “A military for a dangerous new world.”
The editorial calls for U.S. military imperialism not to be scaled back under Obama, but to be vastly expanded both in terms of budget and scope.
Iran, China, Somalia, Russia and Pakistan are all listed as potential targets of U.S. military aggression and the paper echoes what Obama himself has said he will implement - an addition of nearly 100,000 more soldiers and marines to American ground forces, bringing the total to 759,000 active duty forces, at a cost of $100 billion dollars over the next six years.
Does this sound like a “change” from the Project For a New American century framework of endless “multi-theatre warfare,” the inspiration for eight years of Bush administration militarism, or an expansion of that very doctrine?

Report confirms 'shadow war' waged by US special forces
A 2004 classified order authorized the military to attack Al Qaeda operatives around the globe. As many as a dozen raids occurred under this mandate. Based on interviews with military and intelligence officials and senior Bush administration policymakers, The paper's report paints a picture of a shadow war conducted by commando teams from the US special forces' most elite units, often under the control of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It's a war beamed live via Predator drone cameras to US spy masters in control rooms halfway around the globe, but often invisible to in-the-dark foreign governments. London's The Times Online reports the forces fighting the US "secret war" include the Green Berets, Navy Seals, Rangers, and a shadowy unit code-named Gray Fox. The article reports the number of US special forces at about 50,000, though less than 10,000 are "earmarked" for combat. The Christian Science Monitor reported last month that some experts are concerned that clandestine US raids into sovereign territory may be counterproductive. But taking such actions in Pakistan and now Syria may involve high diplomatic risks and offer limited military gain, say experts outside the military.

After US Raid Syrians Wonder if War on Terror Has Arrived

Suspicions about American intentions have flooded the Syrian press. A recent article in Abyadh Aswad, a weekly Syrian political magazine, suggests the attack might have been intended to warn Iraq's neighbors, namely Iran, not to disobey U.S. demands. The article also reflected a common Syrian reading—that the current administration is attempting to thwart attempts by the next American president to improve relations with Syria. The article also suggests the raid could have been driven by a desire to prevent Syrian influence in Iraq just after Syria sent its first ambassador to the country since 1979.

Did Secret Orders Keep US Commandos in Somalia?

Fifteen years ago, a botched Special Forces raid targeting warlords in Mogadishu resulted in the deaths of 18 U.S. servicemen and hundreds of others. The battle, recounted in the book and film Black Hawk Down, cut short an ambitious peacekeeping plan for war-torn Somalia. Since then, U.S. special operators have returned to the lawless East African country, thanks to secret orders approved in 2004 by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush, and reported yesterday in the New York Times. So now, the question becomes: How often have those commandos been in Somalia, and how long have they stayed?

Meanwhile, the better organized, and motivated, Islamic radicals take control of more towns. These militias are only a minority of the armed groups that exist throughout the country. The non-religious warlords (mainly the Transitional National Government, or TNG) are unable to unite sufficiently to suppress the religious groups (the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia, or ARS, which is the successor to the Islamic Courts Union, or ICU). Kenya and Ethiopia find their borders crossed more frequently by Somali raiders (something which has been going on for centuries), and are seeking Western nations that will help contain Somali aggression. So far, the only people seriously listening are those with counter-terrorism forces (mainly American, British and French) in Djibouti (Somalia's neighbor in the north.) But this force of commandos keeps its operations very secret. Apparently, this Djibouti based force monitors what goes on in Somalia, and occasionally intervenes to kill key al Qaeda operatives. There are more al Qaeda showing up in Somalia, and apparently they are leading a terror campaign against relatively peaceful warlords controlling most of northern Somalia (Puntland and Somaliland).

Renditions fuel anger against U.S.

NAIROBI, Kenya—Clement Ibrahim Muhibitabo is one of the forgotten ones.So is Ines Chine. So is Abdul Hamid Moosa.Rwandan, Tunisian and South African citizens respectively, the three Africans are among the victims of one of the largest if most obscure rendition programs in the global war on terror: the mass arrest, deportation and secret imprisonment of some 100 people who fled an invasion of Somalia last year—a roundup that even included women and small children.The snatch-and-jail operation was carried out by U.S. allies Kenya and Ethiopia but involved CIA and FBI interrogators, say European diplomats, human-rights groups and the program's many detainees.

Yet the justifiable joy at Obama's ascendancy must be tempered with the knowledge that Guantánamo always has been a diversionary tactic in the "war on terror". The 250 men there represent fewer than 1% of the 27,000 prisoners being held by the US beyond the rule of law. There is a reason why most people have never heard of the plight of these unfortunates - they are ghost prisoners in secret prisons. Many are in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a smattering end up in US detention in Bosnia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kosovo and in 21st-century "prison hulks" off Diego Garcia and Somalia. The most miserable are held in proxy prisons in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco.

“The same group that we believe is responsible for Mumbai had a similar attack in 2006 on a train and killed a similar number of people,” the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, said last week in a speech at Harvard. “Go back to 2001 and it was an attack on the Parliament.” The Mumbai commuter train bombings killed at least 186. A dozen died in the assault on Parliament, which led to talk of war.
Second, Pakistan’s intelligence services have used Lashkar as a guerrilla force to fight India over their disputed border in Kashmir. That fight has raged since the British partitioned India and Pakistan in 1947. The rival nations went to war that year over Kashmir, and again in 1965 and 1971. Tens of thousands have been killed in political warfare since then.
Third, and most significantly, Lashkar’s roots, like Al Qaeda’s, lie in another war — the battle between Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan and Islamic rebels who fought them in the 1980’s. The rebels were backed by billions of dollars from the United States and Saudi Arabia. Their money and guns flowed through Pakistani intelligence.
In 1989, the Red Army left Afghanistan. The international Islamic holy warriors did not; many thousands of radicals from some 40 nations came to learn the lessons of jihad in Afghanistan, and Lashkar’s first foot soldiers were among them.
Lashkar was founded in 1989, supported by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani spies, according to Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s current ambassador to the United States, a former journalist who opposed Gen. Pervez Musharraf when the general was Pakistan’s ruler. Pakistan’s role as quartermaster and state sponsor of Afghan jihad forces created “a nexus between Pakistan’s military and secret services, which was heightened by the state sponsorship of jihad against India,” he has written.
In December 2001, after the Lashkar attack on India’s Parliament, President Bush added the group to the official United States list of international terrorist organizations. He asked General Musharraf to jail Lashkar’s leaders and break up the group.
Some members were arrested. Others went to fight Americans alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan rather than continue their battles against India’s Hindus in Kashmir, as the State Department and India’s Defense Ministry have reported; by 2006, attacks by Lashkar and its allies in Kashmir were half what they were a few years before.
But on April 23, 2006, Osama bin Laden seemed to signal an open alliance with groups like Lashkar, and their goals. He issued a proclamation denouncing “a Crusader-Zionist-Hindu war against Muslims.” He referred to the United States, Israel and India in the statement, as it was broadcast and translated by Al Jazeera. “A U.N. resolution passed more than half a century ago gave Muslim Kashmir the liberty of choosing independence from India,” it said. “George Bush, the leader of the crusaders’ campaign, announced a few days ago that he will order his converted agent Musharraf to shut down the Kashmir mujahedeen camps, thus affirming that it is a Zionist-Hindu war against Muslims.”

On possible intent and strategy of the terror group that struck Mumbai on 26/11
The strategy and intent was to create chaos, fear, lack of confidence, communal divide. There is nothing like specific homegrown (terrorist) group. The terrorists have tapped on sense of anger and alienation and taken advantage of lack of government’s effort to take to task all the right wing parties. In the 2002 Gujarat massacre, there was no case made out against the perpetrators and even in the compensation given to the victims of the violence there was a disparity. The government has failed to address the root grievances. You see it in the north-east of India, as well. In Kashmir, the insurgency happened because of the repeated negativism of Delhi politics in the (Kashmir) Valley.
On Pakistan’s role in terror attacks on India
In Pakistan, for the last two decades, ISI operatives have been entrusted with the task of identifying families of poor. Usually, the family has one boy who is a wastrel and has no purpose in life. This good-for-nothing fellow is selected by the ISI and told things like he is a failure but this task (militancy which they call ‘Jihad’) will give him respect in his society. They tell him even if he dies in the course of operation, he will attain martyrdom, and will be hailed as a hero. This youth is then recruited by luring his families with salary, pensions and other financial benefits. Normally, $10 – 20,000 is set aside for this purpose. Traditionally, people joined the armed forces after a calling. But these people are not like that. Pakistan does this entire recruitment in a much organised way. The current government may not support this but it is a situation where the country is being haunted by its own mistakes. It’s a ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ that they have created. It started with former Pakistani President late Muhammad Zia ul Haq. Zia’s strategy was to “bleed India through a thousand cuts.” Kashmir was his motive. It’s no secret that Pakistan has always harboured a desire to integrate the Indian side of Jammu & Kashmir into it, and that’s what the successive governments have wanted. These groups (militants) are a larger part of the same mind set. Apparently, the present Pakistan government is unable to control the militants.

US appears to be losing its secret war in Somalia
"Your government gets away with a lot here," said the prison warden, Hassan Mohamed Ibrahim, striding about his antique facility with a pistol tucked in the back of his pants. "In Iraq, the world is watching. In Afghanistan, the world is watching. In Somalia, nobody is watching."
It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts.
It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and — according to Isse and civil rights activists — secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships.
Mostly, though, it is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration: a little-known front in the global war on terrorism that the U.S. appears to be losing, if it hasn't already been lost.
"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted."
What the Bush administration wanted, when it tacitly backed Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in late 2006, was clear enough: to help a close African ally in the war on terror crush the Islamic Courts Union. The Taliban-like movement emerged from the ashes of more than 15 years of anarchy and lawlessness in Africa's most infamous failed state, Somalia.
At first, the invasion seemed an easy victory. By early 2007, the Courts had been routed, a pro-Western transitional government installed, and hundreds of Islamic militants in Somalia either captured or killed.
But over the past 18 months, Somalia's Islamists — now more radical than ever — have regrouped and roared back.

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way when the U.S. provided intelligence to the invading Ethiopians two years ago.
The homegrown Islamic radicals who controlled most of central and southern Somalia in mid-2006 certainly were no angels. They shuttered Mogadishu's cinemas, demanded that Somali men grow beards and, according to the U.S. State Department, provided refuge to some 30 local and international jihadists associated with al-Qaida.
But the Islamic Courts Union's turbaned militiamen had actually defeated Somalia's hated warlords. And their enforcement of Islamic religious laws, while unpopular among many Somalis, made Mogadishu safe to walk in for the first time in a generation.
A military think tank at West Point studying Somalia concluded last year that, in some respects, failed states were admirable places to combat al-Qaida, because the absence of local sovereignty permitted "relatively unrestricted Western counterterrorism efforts."

Ghana: The New World Order II

Whether Afrika and Afrikans as a whole are aware, the stark reality is that there is a new "scramble for Afrika".
The original "scramble for Afrika" was in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin in 1884/1885 where America and her western cousins such as Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands literally carved up Afrika for themselves and in the process stealing vast swathes of Afrikan land and by proxy creating the artificial boundaries we see today and in the course splitting entire families.
The current "scramble for Afrika" is a sinister and deadly attempt by Afrika's so-called development partners in a bid to save themselves from the inordinate financial chaos which is engulfing them.
This new "scramble for Afrika" has even more players with China, India, Turkey and Russia all vying to rape Afrika of its vital resources like Gold, Diamonds, Colthan, Oil and Copper.
Whilst the west, India, China, Russia et al all claim to be Afrika's "development partners" the truth of the matter is that billions of dollars' worth of natural resources are being looted from Afrika sometimes with the help of corrupt Afrikan "leaders". - Many Afrikan people are unaware of this grand theft that comes under the guise of "development partners", "globalization" and "strategic investors".
Instead of enriching Afrikan countries, some big American and European multi-national corporations are facilitating corruption and provoking instability right across the Afrikan continent - AS WE SEE IN D R CONGO.
Simon Taylor, a former director of Global Witness, a UK human rights campaigning organisation, said "Western companies and banks have colluded in stripping Afrika's resources. We need to track revenues from oil, mining and logging into national budgets to make sure that the money is not siphoned off by corrupt officials".
Looting of state assets by corrupt leaders should become a crime under international law, he said "The G8 should take the lead in this".
While the British government claims it leads the world in the "fight against poverty", the reality is that it is creating poverty and misery in Afrika by being the major arms supplier to 10 out of 14 conflict-racked African countries, including Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda.

Security Blanket: Western Democracy and the Strategy of Tension

We've written often here of the Pentagon's plan to foment terrorism where needed to achieve the goals of the "National Security State." This is but one of a staggering array of examples of the use of "the strategy of tension" by the "advanced" Western democracies of the modern world. This week came yet another. As Robert Mancini reports in the Guardian, the former president of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, let a great many cats out of the bag . First revealed by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1991, Gladio (from the Latin for "sword") is still protected to this day by its founding patrons, the CIA and MI6. Yet parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have shaken out a few fragments of the truth over the years. These have been gathered in a new book, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, by Daniele Ganser, as Lila Rajiva reports on CommonDreams.org.
Originally set up as a network of clandestine cells to be activated behind the lines in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, Gladio quickly expanded into a tool for political repression and manipulation, controlled and funded by NATO and Washington. Using right-wing militias, underworld figures, government provocateurs and secret military units, Gladio not only carried out widespread terrorism, assassinations and electoral subversion in democratic states like Italy, France and West Germany, but also bolstered fascist tyrannies in Spain and Portugal, abetted the military coup in Greece, and aided Turkey's ferocious repression of the Kurds. All of this in the name of "preserving democracy" and "defending civilization."
Among the "smoking guns" unearthed by Ganser is a Pentagon document, Field Manual FM 30-31B, which detailed the methodology for launching terrorist attacks in nations that "do not react with sufficient effectiveness" against "communist subversion." Ironically, the manual states that the most dangerous moment comes when leftist groups "renounce the use of force" and embrace the democratic process. It is then that "US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger." Naturally, these peace-throttling "special operations must remain strictly secret," the document warns.And as we have often noted here, similar operations -- the "El Salvador option," death squads, "High-Value Targeting," etc. -- have been an integral part of the Anglo-American subjegation of Iraq. Indeed, they are a pillar of the "counterinsurgency doctrine" proclaimed by the other president-in-waiting, David Petraeus, and now avidly embraced by the War Machine. As Tara McElvey reports in The American Prospect, the Pentagon is eager to apply "High-Value Targeting" and refinements of the "Phoenix Program" -- in which U.S. forces and local proxies murdered more than 20,000 people -- and the whole panoply of "psy-ops" to imperial imbroglios around the world, applying them "to Afghanistan, then Pakistan, the Philippines, Colombia, Somalia, and elsewhere."
But more war is exactly what we've been promised by our agents of change. More war, an even bigger War Machine, "tougher" security measures, national ID cards packed with personal data and tracking devices, more surveillance cameras, new "preventive detention" laws -- and more unbounded authority to use public money to bail out the elite. Yet how to make this happen in the current atmosphere of exhaustion and anxiety? How to catalyze the public into continuing to support the Security State? How to discredit the rising chorus of opposition to neocolonialism, elite cronyism, rampant militarism and growing authoritarianism?

Did US push detention of American without charges?

An American Muslim subjected to several years of intense FBI scrutiny and questioning about links to terrorism has been held without charges, access to a lawyer or contact with his family for nearly three months by the security services of the United Arab Emirates.
The case of Naji Hamdan, coupled with FBI interrogations of an American citizen secretly detained without charges in East Africa, raises the question of whether the Bush administration has asked other nations to hold Americans suspected of terrorism links whom U.S. officials lack the evidence to charge.
That allegation is central to a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union was planning to file Tuesday in federal court in Washington against President Bush, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller.
"If the U.S. government is responsible for this detention and we believe it is, this is clearly illegal because our government can't contract away the Constitution by enlisting the aid of other governments that do not adhere to the Constitution's requirements," said Ahilan Arulanantham of the ACLU's southern California office.
The lawsuit, to be brought on behalf of Hamdan's wife and brother, demands that the U.S. government extend to Hamdan his constitutional guarantee against illegal detention by asking the UAE to release him.
"The most elemental legal principles by which we govern ourselves cannot countenance the lawless detention of a United States citizen at the behest of his own government," said a draft of the lawsuit provided to McClatchy by the ACLU.
A spokesman for the FBI's Los Angeles office, Alonzo Hill, referred all inquiries about Hamdan, a former resident of the city's Hawthorne neighborhood, to FBI headquarters in Washington, saying, "This is a counter-terrorism case."

The American Way of Justice

As his client, Salim Hamdan, is released from Guantanamo Bay, revisit one bold JAG lawyer's inside accounting of how he convinced the Supreme Court that President Bush had breached the Constitution.

What I sought was simply that the president, just like the soldiers, sailors, and marines under his command, be required to comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. Because I believe that resorting to secret prisons, coercive interrogations, and the abandonment of the rule of law is not the way to keep our country safe from a handful of fanatics. Last summer, with the help of my civilian co-counsel, Professor Neal Katyal, and the law firm of Perkins Coie, I won the case in the Supreme Court of the United States. The problem is that the victory, as big as it was, was disdained by the administration, which has attempted to defy the Supreme Court and the rule of law by building Guantanamo up in the wake of the decision, instead of down. That needs to change.

SEE:

Worth Reading After Mubai

Somali Eco Disaster Bred Pirates

Mayor Of Kabul Says Get Out

Pakistan: Feudalism Not Democracy

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Worth Reading After Mubai

Found this excellent post, long but worth the read. Especially in light of this weeks fascist attack in Mubai, which revealed an incompetant and ineffective security state in India. And again the focus was a centre of world capital, a business centre, the countries capital, and home of the Indian bourgoise, a major centre of tourism, just like New York was. And Mubai like the Twin Towers has been a repeated target of fascists.
This article was published after 9/11.

THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION: Looking at Hamerquist’s ‘Fascism and Anti-Fascism’ by J. Sakai
Fascism is rapidly becoming a large political problem for anti-authoritarians, but perhaps moving up so close to pass us that it’s in our blind spot. Fascism is too familiar to us, in one sense. We’ve heard so much about the Nazis, the Holocaust and World War II, it seems like we must already know about fascism. And Nazi-era fascism is like all around us still, ever-present because Western capitalism has never given fascism up. As many have noticed, eurofascism even crushed has had a pervasive presence not only in politics, armies and intelligence agencies, but in the arts, pop culture, in fashion and films, on sexuality. For years thousands of youth in America and Europe have been fighting out the question of fascism in bars and the music scene, as a persistent fascist element in the skinhead subculture has been squashed and driven out by anti-racist youth–but come back and spread like an oil slick in the subterranean watertable. It feels so familiar to us now even though we haven’t actually understood it.
While the scholarly debates about “classic” 1920-30s eurofascism only increase–and journalists like Martin Lee in his best-selling book, The Beast Reawakens, have sounded the alarm about eurofascism’s renewed popularity –existing radical theory on fascism is a dusty relic that’s anything but radical. And it’s euro-centric as hell. Some still say fascism is just extreme white racism. For years many have even argued that no one who wasn’t white could even be a fascist. That it was a unique idea that only could lodge in the brains of one race! Others repeat the disastrous 1920s European belief that fascism was just “a tool of the ruling class”, violent thugs in comic opera uniforms doing repression for their capitalist masters. Often, both views overlap, being held simultaneously. So we ‘know’ fascism but really we don’t know it yet. Once reclothed, not spouting old fascist European political philosophy (but the same program and the class politics in other cultural forms—such as cooked-up religious ideology), fascism walks right by us and we don’t recognize it at first.
As fascism is becoming a global trend, it’s surprising how little attention it has gotten in our revolutionary studies. Into this unusual vacuum steps Don Hamerquist’s Fascism and Anti-Fascism.(2) This is an original theoretical paper that has in its background not only study but fighting fascists and racists on the streets.
In this discussion of Hamerquist’s paper we underline three main points about fascism:- That it is arising not from simple poverty or economic depression, but from the spreading zone of today’s protracted capitalist crisis beyond either reform or normal repression;
- That as fascism is moving from margin to populist mainstream, it still has a defined class character as an ‘extraordinary’ revolutionary movement of men from the lower middle classes and the declassed;
- That the critical turning point now for fascism is not just in Europe. With the failure of State socialism and national liberation parties in the capitalist periphery, in the Third World, the far right including fascism is grasping at the leadership of mass anti-colonialism.
Fascism has shown that it can gather mass support. In many nations the far right, including fascism, has become a popular oppositional force to the new globalized imperialism. In many countries the far right has replaced the left as the main political opposition. It doesn’t get more critical than this. This stands the old leftist notion about fascism on its head. It isn’t just about some other country. Without a serious revolutionary analysis of fascism we can’t understand, locate or combat it right here. And if you don’t think that’s a serious problem, you’ve got your back turned to what’s incoming.
The modern islamic rightists, who began in 1927-28 with the founding of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, took religious ideological form but were started as a political movement against British neo-colonial domination. They were backed not by workers or peasants but by the middle-class bazaar merchants and traders. The core of the islamic rightists from the beginning were not theologians but young men who had middle-class educations as scientists and technicians (like today’s Mohammad Atta who supposedly led the 911 attacks), and who used assassinations and trade boycotts. One trend within this broader islamist political movement developed fascist politics and a definite fascist class agenda. The fact that everything is explained in religious ideological terms doesn’t change the fact that their program and class strategy fit fascism perfectly. Perhaps that’s the real “fundamentalism” that they have.(5)
Throughout the Muslim world, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Turkey to Pakistan, Western imperialism has helped maintain militarized neo-colonial regimes that have looted and deadended society. They have destroyed local subsistance economies of self-production for use in favor of globalized export-import economies. The number of the declassed, those without any regular relationship to economic production and distribution, keeps growing. The lower-middle classes keep losing their small plots of land, their small market businesses, their toehold in the educated professions. These are men who are threatened with the loss of everything that defined them, including the ability of patriarchs to own households of women and children.
This is the class basis of today’s pan-islamic fascism, which demands a complete reversal of fortune. Revolutions where today’s Muslim elites shall be in the prisons or the gutter and the warriors of fascism shall be the new class ruling over the palaces, mosques and markets. They are more than national in scope just as all revolutionary movements have been. Because they are in a fluid war of undergrounds and exile, striking from abroad, of retreating from savage military repression in one nation to concentrate on breakthroughs in another nation. And to them, the world citadel of globalization in New York was not an innocent civilian target but a fortress of an amoral enemy.
The key thing about them isn’t that they’re following some old book. It’s that they’re fighting for State power just like everyone else in the capitalist sinkhole. They upfront want to rule, to not work but get affluent and powerful as special classes alongside the bourgeoisie, to hold everyone else underfoot by raw police power. Whether it’s christianity or islam or whatever they claim to be following, these are definitely political movements.

SEE:
terror state/state terror
The Spectacle of War on Terror
The War Against The Metropolis
War and the Market State
World On Fire-Who Sells The Matches
India Is Now A Capitalist State
Hinduism Is Fascism
Unemployment Breeds Terrorism

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Remember, remember the fifth of November

"Remember, remember the fifth of November.
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot."

'Tis the 5th of November Guy Fawkes Day.

There was a standard toast for Guy Fawkes Day among my acquaintances in Britain:

"To Guy Fawkes - the only man who ever entered Parliament with honest intentions!"

And of course V for Vendetta was modeled on Guy Fawkes.



"The People Should Not Be Afraid of their Governments, Governments should be afraid of their People."




On John Lennon's 1970 solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Lennon sings "Remember, remember, the 5th of November" on the song "Remember". The lyrics are followed by the sound of an explosion.

Remember when you were young
How the hero was never hung
Always got away
Remember how the man
Used to leave you empty handed
Always, always let you down
If you ever change your mind
About leaving it all behind
Remember, remember, today

Don't you worry
'bout what you've done
Don't feel sorry
'bout the way it's gone

Remember when you were small
How people seemed so tall
Always had their way
Remember your ma and pa
Just wishing for movie stardom
Always, always playing a part
If you ever feel so sad
And the whole world is driving you mad
Remember, remember today

Remember
Tribute to V for Vendetta using Remember by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band

Signature of Guy Fawkes on a confession, 1605
Click to see more images Next

Confession of Guy Fawkes

These pages are from the confessions of Guy Fawkes. Fawkes is the most well known of the men who planned to blow up King James I and the Parliament in 1605.

In the years after England split away from the Catholic Church, most English monarchs were not very tolerant of Catholics living in England. James I was a Protestant king and English Catholics despaired of any return to the old religion. A small group decided to blow up both King and Parliament with gunpowder. They planned to place James' daughter Elizabeth ON the throne.They hoped she would marry a Catholic prince AND England would ONCE again be a Catholic country.

The king 's spies discovered the plot. Fawkes was found on the night of 4th/5th November 1605 in the cellars under the Palace of Westminster, where Parliament was due to meet. He had 36 barrels of gunpowder. On the following days, he confessed to the plot and named the others involved.

Fawkes signed 2 confessions - one after torture and another 8 days later. The contrast between them is remarkable. The first document shown here is a page from his confession under torture. His weak and shaky signature ' Guido' can faintly be made out. The second document is from a confession signed later in a steadier hand 'Guido Fawkes'.

Fawkes and the other plotters were executed on 30 and 31 January 1606. Ever since then, every 5th of November there have been firework displays and bonfires to remember the 'Gunpowder Plot '.

English playwrights and the theater loved the dramatic
images of Guy Fawkes and the celebration of the Fifth
of November. Bonfires...the plot itself and then there is Guy.
It is hoped that the study of Fawkes as he appears from
play to play throughout the centuries will provide us
with insights into how the history of the plot and its celebrations
evolved through time. See what you find in these works.
They are certainly quite enjoyable and fun in and of themselves.

Security is the chief enemy of mortals.

William Shakespeare

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security.

Benjamin Franklin

SEE

Paranoia and the Security State

State Security Is A Secure State

Canada’s Long History of Criminalizing Dissent

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Lonely Spies

Can't wait to join this social network.

Spies will soon have own social networking site Experts say the service will only be as effective as those who use it. And with many older workers puzzled by their younger colleagues' obsessive use of Facebook and its ilk, full-blown use could take time.

On second thought maybe not.

Mark Lowenthal, president of The Intelligence & Security Academy and the government's former assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production, admits he's baffled by social-networking sites and isn't sure if A-Space is the ultimate solution to fixing problems in the agencies.

"Clearly, we don't always behave like a community so anything you can do to help foster that to a degree is a good thing," he said. "We want to do better. Anybody who's dealt with adapting technology to the intelligence community will tell you that the intelligence community has not been brilliant in catching up."

A community of spies is a community spying on itself.



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Bowser A Terrorist

It's true. Air Canada taking advantage of the Conservative Governments No Fly List, has declared pets as a potential threat on airplanes. No really. No more traveling with bowser unless you ride the dog.

Air Canada has declared its aircraft no-fly zones for pets.

As of next month, animals will no longer be allowed aboard any Air Canada flights.

While the airline barred pets from aircraft cabins last September, the restriction now applies to the baggage compartment as well.

In a letter sent to the Canadian Transportation Agency on Wednesday, the national carrier said, "please be advised that Air Canada will cease the carriage of pets as checked luggage on domestic as well as international routes [including transborder routes], as of July 15, 2007."

See:

State Security Is A Secure State

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US, envoy, Divid Wilkins, Wilkins, US Ambassador to Canada, Arar, Marher Arar, Canada, US, terrorist, terrorism, RCMP, CSIS, CIA, Homeland Security, Syria, torture, CIA, rendition,
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