Will Trump Be a Lightning Rod for Terrorist Attacks on America?

If there's another Osama bin Laden out there, and there probably is, Donald Trump is manna from Heaven.

The Great Orange Bloat is every terrorist's dream. He's impulsive and reactionary. We're talking about a guy who can't resist late night Twitter barrages over something as insignificant as a parody sketch on SNL. His narcissism is well known. It may be his major personality trait. It could also be his - and America's - Achilles' Heel.

A core principle of terrorist tactics is provocation. bin Laden knew that he could not seriously damage the United States with the 9/11 attacks but that was never his objective. He wanted to panic the American people and provoke their leadership into an infidel attack on the Muslim world, one where they would get sucked in, quagmire.

Bush and his neocon courtiers - Dick Cheney and literally everyone Cheney got appointed including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, Perle and others - immediately mobilized for war. 15 years later American forces are still in Afghanistan, still fighting in Iraq, and they've picked up conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Libya along the way. Mission Accomplished indeed. They've also demonstrated, again and again, that America's vaunted military - All the King's Horses and All the King's Men - is generally ineffective against guerilla/insurgent movements and rarely delivers what its masters might consider meaningful victories.

Bush/Cheney and the neocon cabal set out to reshape the Middle East. That was the stated purpose of their conquest of Iraq. Once they had Saddam Hussein dangling from the end of the hangman's rope they expected every other upstart Muslim nation would get the message and eagerly embrace the American model of secular, constitutional democracy. Easy, peasy - in and out, Mission Accomplished and all those wonderful oil fields secured for the West for eternity.

What they didn't bargain for was how, once stuck in these quagmires of their own making, their wars of choice would reshape America as much as the Middle East itself. Think Patriot Act, the department of Homeland Security, America's now massive national security apparatus, the rescission of posse comitatus and  habeas corpus, the adoption of new policies in which armed force or the threat of armed force would displace diplomacy as the principal instrument of foreign policy and the emergence of the permanent warfare state with the advent of commercial "for profit" warfighting and so much more. And the costs? They're all covered with borrowed money.

The estimates range from $2.4 trillion (Congressional budget office) for Iraq and Afghanistan only to double that, $4.79 trillion, once you add in homeland security, stationery, photocopying etc.  And, remember, there's still no end in sight. A study by Brown University estimated that the interest cost of that borrowing could reach $7.9 trillion by 2053.

Obama initially sought to rein in this costly adventurism. He failed. Trump, by contrast, has no such hesitation. He's planning to double down on Bush/Cheney while expanding America's military budget and its costly nuclear arsenal. This is Trump, the man who asked a campaign advisor, "what's the use of having all these nuclear weapons if we don't use them?" Great, just great.

So Trump will inherit an already militarily mutilated America, one accustomed to spilling borrowed treasure on wasted costs. It's also a terminally divided America, one in which two major factions have emerged that are becoming increasingly irreconcilable. This, too, plays directly into the hands of terrorists.

Terrorism is about, well, terror. Burning a few soldiers or civilians alive doesn't accomplish much but it does scare the hell out of those who wonder if they'll be next. That insecurity works to deepen existing divisions between the populace and their government. People who can be made to distrust their government's ability and willingness to defend them can be as much of a problem for government as the insanely disproportionate costs terrorists exact. An insecure populace begins to look elsewhere for someone who can protect them, who will keep them secure in their beds at night.

Another objective of terrorism is to goad government and its forces to over-react, to repress the civilian population or large segments of it, driving them into the enemy camp. When the populace and its government turn adversarial, resistance movements can easily pop up. The classic example of this is the French and American wars in Viet Nam where insecurity combined with the repression of a corrupt government drove ordinary citizens into the arms of Viet Cong recruiters.

Trump seems a good bet to emulate all of these destructive practices and I'll bet that America's enemies, be they al Qaeda, ISIS or other groups that may come into being, will see the opportunity and the likely payback of more attacks on the American homeland. Perhaps next time they'll use chemical or biological or even nuclear agents ("dirty bombs"). It won't take much to turn a population, a majority of which is already leery of their incoming president, against their government.

And then there's the other shoe - Trump's provocative support for Israel. When it comes to the Palestinian problem there'll be no balance from Trump's White House. Trump's nominee for ambassador to Israel is a hard-line Likudnik. Even today Trump has come out to urge Netanyahu to hold out against John Kerry's coercion. The Trump relief column is just three weeks away. The Crusaders are coming to the rescue.

For all these reasons it strikes me as just a matter of time before America experiences a major terrorist attack on "the homeland." The knock-on effects, at home and abroad, among America's enemies and its allies alike, could be as unforeseeable as they are nightmarish.

How Did We Become a Land of Cowards?

Bill C-51 speaks to the cowardice that has taken hold of Canadian society at the instance of the fear-mongering federal government.  Conservatives and Liberals and, for that matter, a solid majority of the Canadian public support it.

What, some nutjob shoots somebody and so we need to turn the thumbscrews on the already dwindling rights and freedoms of all Canadians?  We're following in the jackboot steps of the United States.  We're becoming a land of cowards.

American pundit Ted Rall has a column in The Japan Times that should speak to all of us.

For a country that used to pride itself on a certain stoicism, the United States has become a land of whiny little boys and girls.

Oh, how we cried after 9/11. Three thousand dead! Those “Wounded Warrior” TV ads asking for donations to support Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans — excuse me, but why am I spending 54 percent of my federal tax dollars on defense if I also have to donate to a sketchy charity? — use the same melancholy tone and weepy delivery as Sally Struthers’ classic “save the children” messages. Obviously it sucks to lose your arms and legs, but let’s grow a pair. Fewer than 7,000 Americans got killed invading two countries where they had no business being in the first place.

Let’s put those numbers into proper perspective, shall we? The Soviet Union lost 20 million people fighting the Nazis (who invaded them, by the way). France lost 11 percent of its population during World War I — the equivalent for us would be 34 million Americans. But the Russians or French don’t bitch and moan as much as us.

Speaking of which, Americans have a lot of balls calling Frenchman “surrender monkeys” considering that nearly twice as many French soldiers were killed in the 1940 Battle of France over six weeks as the United States lost in Vietnam over the course of a decade. Meanwhile, we’re still whining about the 58,000 we lost in — no, invading — Vietnam.

Here at home, we’re infested with wimp cops.

In recent weeks, we have been treated to grand jury testimony in the shootings of two black men, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.

Both killer cops are bruisers — big, muscular guys. Most of all, they are cops. Cops have partners. They have the backing of the state. They carry tasers. They have nightsticks. They go to the police academy, where they train long hours in the art of subduing human beings. And as we well know, they have access to military-style hardware and defensive gear.

It's said that some 80 percent of Canadians questioned support Bill C-51 although most of them have no real idea of what it does or what the existing laws allow our police and security agencies to do.  Harper says "terrorism" and they predictably clap their flippers like trained seals.  These are people who are now inherently fearful, skilfully groomed to cowardice by a fearmongering government and its allies in Parliament.

It's the equivalent of handing over your lunch money to the schoolyard bully only on a national scale.  To those who would consider attacking us - real terrorists - we've just shown them how enfeebled we've allowed ourselves to become. 

They, potential terrorists and our supposed leaders alike, now see us for what we are - easy meat.

  

The 28-Pages that Could Condemn the House of Saud and Liberate the West.

The Gulf princes and sheikhs, especially the House of Saud, have been very successful in ducking scrutiny over their role in launching, funding and covering for every Sunni terrorist group from al Qaeda to ISIS to whatever bunch is now being organized to carry on their Islamic civil war pitting Sunni versus Shiite.

It's long been believed that 28-pages of the 9/11 Commission report were redacted by the White House because they finger the Saudi royals.  Pressure is now building for their release.

If those pages ever see the light of day, much of the credit will have to go to Zacarias Moussaoui, a former al Qaeda operative now serving a life sentence at a federal super-max prison in Colorado.

Moussaoui recently testified that he served as a courier for bin Laden, delivering the al Qaeda chief's letters directly to top Saudi princes, including the newly crowned king, Salman.

The Saudis have rushed to denounce Moussaoui as a mad man, claiming his evidence is delusional, unreliable.   The CBC's Neil Macdonald doesn't see it that way.

The Saudi embassy in Washington says ZacariasMoussaoui is a deranged criminal.

He may well be; the so-called "20th hijacker" is certainly a criminal, confined to the most secure federal prison in America, and certainly portrayed himself as crazy during his 9/11 trial, 10 years ago in Virginia.

I covered it, and his courtroom rants were either delusional or meant to be perceived as such. (It didn't work; the presiding judge pronounced him competent to stand trial and "extremely intelligent.")

But his most recent testimony, given at the super-max penitentiary in Colorado last year and made public this week, reads like what it is: a detailed accounting by a man who holds a master's degree from a British university.

And what a remarkable account it is.

Moussaoui states that the 9/11 hijackers were supported not only by Saudi Arabian charities, but by Saudi princes and diplomats.

He reels off names he says were in an al-Qaeda database of moneyed donors, making it clear the jihadists couldn't really have accomplished much without them.

Macdonald says relations between Washington and Riyadh are becoming very strained, even tenuous.

Obama, having endorsed the Arab Spring as a wonderful expression of the people's will, also had to look the other way in 2011 when the Saudis sent troops across the causeway into Bahrain to violently crush Shia crowds protesting their treatment by the emirate's Sunni rulers.

Saudi's minority Shias have met with similar treatment; a respected Shia cleric was sentenced to death recently for criticizing the government.

The Saudis, who fund the building of mosques in America and around the world, strictly prohibit the presence of any religion but Islam on their soil, and America, the champion of religious freedom, says nothing.

The Saudis also openly scorned Obama for not being quick enough or generous enough in funding Syria's rebel forces. (As it turned out, of course, much of the Saudi funding ended up being channeled to ISIS and its cohort, but never mind.)

But the American public's willingness to tolerate the hypocrisy around Saudi Arabia is wearing thin. According to reports in U.S. media, Obama was unwilling or unable to form any sort of real friendship with Abdullah, the recently deceased king.

Increasingly, Saudi Arabia is being discussed in the U.S. media with the same tone accorded Pakistan, another official ally with at least informal links to al-Qaeda.

Canada is, of course, caught up in this same schizophrenia.  We're over in Iraq bombing ISIS while we're selling $15-billion worth of armoured democracy-suppressing fighting vehicles to the same buggers who funded ISIS in the first place.

This is more than just settling scores.  These Gulf princes and sheikhs unleash these monsters (al Qaeda, Isis and the like) and then turn to the West to waste our lives and treasure cleaning up their messes when they go rogue.  They're not giving up their not-so-covert war against Shia Islam either which almost guarantees we'll be over there fighting the next bunch and the one after that and the one after that.

If you need to kill a snake, you cut off the head.  We've been wasting our time and our soldiers' lives banging away at the tail.

About That Islamic Terrorism, Who Are We Kidding?

Well those damned Muslims have us in hysterics now.  Rupert Murdoch says this is on all Muslims.  Bill Maher says ditto.

But wait.  There are two strains of Muslims - Sunni and Shia.  Our Muslims of choice, those we consider our allies, are Sunni - Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, that bunch. The Muslims we normally despise and distrust are those other guys, the Shiites.

So, let's step back and look at all this Muslim terrorism that has us in such a state. Let's start with Osama bin Laden.  Sunni.  Al Qaeda, Sunni.  ISIS, Sunni.  Those Muslims Obama keeps whacking with his drones, Sunni.  The Taliban, Sunni. All those wedding parties we brought to an abrupt and terminal end with our gifts of Hellfire missiles, Sunni.  Let's count that up - Sunni, Sunni, Sunni, Sunni, Sunni and Sunni.  So far it's Sunni 6, Team Shia no score.  That's a shut out in any league.  Wowser.

That 9/11 wrecking crew?  All Sunni. About three-quarters of them were Saudi. It's widely believed that the 28-pages redacted by the Bush regime from the 9/11 report fingered the House of Saud as in on the attacks.  Whatever is in those pages even Obama is keeping them under lock and key.

We know that the Salafist/Wahhabist extremists have been lavishly supported by the Gulf states, including the remarkably like-minded Saudis.  You might even call them the terrorists' benefactors.

When the ISIS problem got out of control (and not one minute before) some of these Gulf principalities pledged to - wait for it - stop funding them.

Now you might have thought we would bring the Hammers of Hell down on the heads of these potentates to repay their perfidy.  A hundred or so Tomahawk cruise missiles targeted at their royal palaces likely would have done the trick. But that hasn't happened, has it.

Harper loves the Saudis, especially now that they've inked a $15-billion deal to buy Canadian-built light armoured vehicles to meet their democracy-suppression needs.  And, besides, it wouldn't be seemly for one petro-state to get uppity with another petro-state.

Well we have to whack somebody to avenge the Paris massacre.  Hmm, the Sunnis are out - at least those right at the core of this.  I guess that just leaves the Shia.  I know, let's attack Tehran.

p.s.  That scary banner being carried by the angry mob in the picture above? That could have been written by any crown prince of the House of Saud.

Free Speech Isn't Always Free

Twelve dead, as many again wounded, after a terror attack on the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo.  Paris police have launched a manhunt for the gunmen who escaped after attacking the magazine's offices.

Nobody has come right out and said Muslim terrorists were behind the attack but Charlie Hebdo has been intensely needling Islam for some time.

Moments before Charlie Hebdo’s offices were attacked, the magazine’s Twitter handle published a cartoon wishing a happy new year “and particularly good health” to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State (Isis).

Its cover this week features Michel Houellebecq’s provocative new novel, Submission, which satirises France under a Muslim president. These are just the latest examples of a publication that responds to efforts at intimidation by being even more irreverent or outrageous, defying the constraints of religious sensitivity or political correctness.

In November 2011, the magazine’s offices were fire-bombed after it published a special edition, supposedly guest-edited by the prophet Muhammad and temporarily renamed “Charia Hebdo”. The cover was a cartoon of Muhammad threatening the readers with “a hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing”.

The petrol bomb attack completely destroyed the Paris offices, the magazine’s website was hacked and staff were subjected to death threats. But that did not deter the magazine, whose editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, has received death threats and lives under police protection.

Six days later, the magazine published a front page depicting a male Charlie Hebdo cartoonist passionately kissing a bearded Muslim man in front of the charred aftermath of the bombing. The headline was: L’Amour plus fort que la haine (Love is stronger than hate).

Less than a year later, the magazine published more cartoons of Muhammad, including images of him naked and a cover showing him being pushed along in a wheelchair by an Orthodox Jew. The French government had appealed to the editors not to go ahead with publication, and shut down embassies, cultural centres and schools in 20 countries out of fear of reprisals when they went ahead anyway.

Riot police were also deployed to the Charlie Hebdo offices to protect it from direct attacks. The foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, publicly criticised the magazine’s actions, asking: “Is it really sensible or intelligent to pour fuel on the fire?”

This tragedy illustrates the fine line that can exist between free speech and gratuitous satirical provocation that can trigger a predictable outcome.  Canada has a blathering loudmouth who will undoubtedly jump all over this, praising the Charlie Hebdo publisher, Stephane Charbonnier, for his courage in standing up to radical Islam.  Yet it wasn't Charbonnier who forfeited his life but those of his employees for whom he has a clear responsibility for the entirely foreseeable result.

It's a dangerous world full of very dangerous and fanatical people and it was those very fanatics that Charbonnier relentlessly needled.  And for what?

Update - a report from Slate.com cites witnesses as stating that the gunmen identified themselves as belonging to Yemeni al Qaeda.

Update - The New York Times reports that the attackers also killed publisher Charbonnier.  The paper also reports that another of the victims was a police officer assigned to protect Hebdo.  The Guardian reports that among the dead were three of Hebdo cartoonists - Cabu, Wolinski and Tignous.

Pope Warns We May Already Be In "Piecemeal WWIII"

Has the world already stumbled into a third world war?  Pope Francis thinks that could well be the case.  Denouncing war as "madness", the Pope made his remarks while visiting Italy's largest military cemetery.

In Saturday's homily, standing at the altar beneath Italy's fascist-era Redipuglia memorial - where 100,000 Italian soldiers killed during WWI are buried, 60,000 of them unnamed, the Pope paid tribute to the victims of all wars.

"Humanity needs to weep, and this is the time to weep," he said.

"Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction," he said.

I don't know about you but I'm thinking Francis might just be right.  What's going on today around the world, the brutal chaos, the clash of state and non-state actors, the "new war" type of warfare is very much in keeping with the models of warfare for the 21st century canvased in a recent course I took from the war studies department of Kings College London.

Gone are the days of Haig and Kitchener, Rommel and Patton.  Gone are the days of massive armies clashing over reasonably understood objectives.
Gone are the days of victors and vanquished, of declarations of war and treaties of peace.

Today's warfare sees parties mix and blur, sometimes drifting in and out of conflict, with often ill-defined objectives or no particular purposes at all. Conflict has become more fluid, actors are apt to change sides or vary allegiances.  The distinctions that once separated crime, terrorism, and insurgency are increasingly meaningless.

The Afghanistan debacle demonstrates how ill-prepared the West is for this transition in warfare.  Despite our claims to the contrary, we went into Afghanistan to fight a conventional military war - heavy on firepower, weak on troop strength.  It wasn't for lack of bombs or strike fighters, tanks, artillery or any of the other accoutrements of modern warfare that we failed to defeat a bunch of illiterate farm boys equipped with Korean war vintage rifles and light machine guns.  We failed because we stupidly never had remotely enough soldiers to fight their war and because they chose, not stupidly, not to fight ours.   At the end of the day the only war that mattered was theirs, the only one still in play when the clock ran out on our war.

Wars of theology seem to have supplanted wars of ideology as the new expression of nationalism.   The rise of religious fundamentalism as a driving force even in the halls of grand palaces and national legislatures has introduced a new element of zealotry and an acceptance of brutality that might have been unacceptable previously.  Who needs morality when you follow the fierce burning light of religious extremism whether Muslim, Christian, Judaic, Hindu or whatever?

Warlordism and tribalism often frustrate both the ability to conduct an effective war and any prospect for achieving peace from conflict.  We in the West have exacerbated those tensions by the manner in which we carved up so much of the world as our spoils of war, drawing lovely neat borders to suit our convenience and without concern for the ethnic realities of the people we were corralling together.

In contemporary warfare before the turn of the 20th century, fatalities were roughly 85% military, 15% civilian.  A century later those ratios had been reversed.  Today the brunt of warfare is inordinately borne by civilian populations as the laws of war intended to protect them are routinely flouted by non-state actors and state actors alike.  Even in Canada we sit by complacently as our allies deliberately target civilian populations with impunity.  They do it and, by our silence, we condone it and become complicit in it.

Morality has gone straight out the window.  There are more failed and failing states, ever more illiberal democracies (we're not all that far off either) ushering in a new era of authoritarianism.  And we have collectively arrived at this tragic place just at the moment when we must decide if mankind can find some means of equitably and peacefully sharing this biosphere, our one and only habitat, through what promises to be an increasingly challenging and dangerous century.                                        

Could You Become a Victim of Car-Hacking?

It's not carjacking.  Nobody with a gun jumping into the driver's seat and speeding off with your ride.

It's car-hacking.   A cyber criminal hacking into a car's computer systems to wreak havoc.

Senate Commerce Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, said while he's excited about safety improvements through technology, he's concerned about new risks including cyber security.

"As our cars become more connected – to the internet, to wireless networks, with each other, and with our infrastructure – are they at risk of catastrophic cyber attacks?" Senator Rockefeller asked in his opening statement prepared for the hearing.

Cars are increasingly controlled electronically rather than mechanically, from acceleration and starting to rolling down the windows. Infotainment systems connect drivers to satellite and wireless networks.

Today's typical luxury car has more than 100 million lines of computer code, while software and electronics account for 40 per cent of the car's cost and half of warranty claims, said John D. Lee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's industrial and systems engineering department.

Not exactly sure why someone would do this although imagine if terrorists could send vehicles careening out of control on busy highways?  In our automobile-dependent society what would happen if confidence in our essential conveyance was shattered?

Americans Settling In to Reality of Terrorism

The American people might just be getting terrorism fatigue after more than a decade of efforts by their politicians and media to keep them in a heightened state of anxiety.  How long can anyone do that and stay sane?   What price has already been exacted of them by those who have manipulated them since September, 2001?

A majority of Americans say occasional acts of terrorism are "part of life", and many doubt the government can do much more to prevent them, a new poll finds.

About three-quarters of Americans said they agree that "occasional acts of terrorism in the US will be part of life in the future", according to the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press.

The share of Americans who see terrorist acts as "part of life" has stayed high since soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks. But the figure had declined a bit in recent years, with people younger than 30 notably less likely to expect terrorist acts. In the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings, younger people have joined their elders in saying that some terrorist actions can be expected. 

The shift among the young has pushed the overall percentage of those who feel that way back to its previous high point.

Although most Americans expect terrorist acts will happen, a small minority say they are "very worried" about the prospect.

This is bad news for would-be terrorists and just as bad for the political classes and media barons who have accommodated the terrorists by inculcating fear among their own people.

Well, if they can reclaim the "home of the brave" maybe they can start working to recover the "land of the free."

A Sensible Response to Terrorism

We North Americans are unduly susceptible to acts of terrorism if only because terrorist acts on our doorstep, while dramatic, are infrequent.

In the reign of Bush the Junior, an act of terrorism could call down All the King's Men and All the King's Horses on the perpetrators, real and imagined.

This week Der Spiegel has praise for Obama's handling of the Boston Marathon bombings.

The first official reactions heard in America after the bombings in Boston are encouraging. President Barack Obama took pains to remain calm, breaking with the deplorable tradition of the Bush years to promise revenge while invoking the rule of law. Obama knows full well that the United States needs no new anti-terrorism laws, no new government agencies, no expansion of police and intelligence operations and, most of all, no more inflammatory speeches.

The dramatic search for the two bombing suspects was undeniably a manhunt, and the social networks, especially Twitter, were filled with false accusations and hateful tirades. But none of this changes the quality of Obama's behavior, whose speech was statesmanlike in a positive sense: relaxed and filled with confidence in the president's own, broadly legitimized civil power.

Queen Elizabeth II served as a role model when she managed to set a similar tone after the London bombings in 2005. She spoke to her subjects of her sadness and sympathy for the victims, she thanked the emergency services and the people of London, and then she said, briefly and concisely: "Those who perpetrate these brutal acts against innocent people should know that they will not change our way of life."

This is what the voice of civilization sounds like, and it cannot be allowed to fall silent merely because a few cave dwellers are constantly feeling marginalized. Today and in the future, we should always reiterate the thoughts of the Queen's and Obama's calm words whenever terror happens to strike once again. In fact, the message to such murderers must always be the same: You cannot change our lives. You can blow up your bombs, but our culture, our values and our societies are stronger than your desire to destroy them. These are the best answers to terror of any stripe.

Unfortunately, Canada doesn't have political leadership of the calibre of Queen Elizabeth or Barack Obama.  We have third-raters like Harper and Toews who reflexively leap at the opportunity to exploit these incidents, inculcate fear to justify new, authoritarian powers, and, however unintentionally, make the terrorists' objectives that much more achievable.

Our leaders need to grow up.   So too do we.

Homeland Security Tests Mind Reading Sensors

According to the magazine Nature, the US Department of Homeland Security is conducting field trials of sensors they hope will be able to spot people thinking about committing terrorist acts.  That's right, just by looking at people, this hardware will supposedly spot would-be terrorists.

The gear apparently uses uses remote sensors to measure physiological properties, such as heart rate and eye movement.

It is all based on a form of witchdoctor psychology called behavioural science. These boffins have the cunning theory that someone with malintent may act strangely, show mannerisms out of the norm, or experience extreme physiological reactions based on the extent, time, and consequences of the event.

Homeland Security's FAST technology design so that coppers can basically arrest anyone who looks them funny. So no change there then.

The DHS claimed the machine was accurate 70 percent of the time the other 30 percent will probably get out of Guantanamo Bay in a couple of years.

However some boffins think the gear will give shedloads of false positives.

 

Oh, the Horror! Al Qaeda Targeting Wall Street Moguls?

The Global Security Newswire, picking up on a story from NBC earlier this week, reports that US intelligence officials fear Islamist extremists intend to target Wall Street banks or their top managers.

Intelligence researchers said there is a nonspecific but increasing fear that extremists in Yemen could make another attempt at shipping hidden explosive devices or chemical and biological weapons materials to New York financial institutions. U.S. authorities think extremists operating from Yemen were responsible for the packaged bombs addressed to Chicago-based synagogues in late October. The explosive devices -- hidden inside printer cartridges -- were intercepted in the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom but officials think they could have been designed to detonate in midflight (see GSN, Nov. 3, 2010).

Al-Qaeda's official magazine, "  Inspire,"   in its most recent issue included a mention of attempting to deploy the biological pathogen anthrax in a terror strike, officials said.

Al-Qaeda member Abu Suleiman al-Nasser in a recent blog post exhorted, " "Rush"  my Muslim brothers to targeting financial sites and the program sites of financial institutions, stock markets and money markets."

GSN says intelligence officials are warning the heads of some of America's top financial institutions to beware Yemeni terrorists.

The more I mull this over, the less sense it makes.   al Qaeda's ambition is to bring down the United States.   The best al Qaeda has managed is to bring down two skyscrapers, bomb a ship and destroy a couple of foreign embassies.  By contrast, Wall Street has done far more to weaken and undermine America than al Qaeda could manage even in its wildest dreams.

You're Either With Us Or You're With the Terrorists Or You Sell Us Oil

It seems that playing footsie with al Qaeda is okay with Washington, as long as America thirsts for your oil.   Back during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, prominent and noble Saudis funneled truckloads of cash to the mujaheddin and especially their own boy, Osama bin Laden.

Then came the embassy bombings, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and finally the 9/11 attacks - carried out by Saudi Islamists.   The obvious answer to that was to invade Iraq.  What?  But surely the House of Saud has learned its lesson and broken with al Qaeda, right?   Wrong.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tags Saudi Arabia as the major funder of outfits like al Qaeda and the Taliban.   Iraq's Shiite majority government in Baghdad also considers Saudi Arabia a much greater threat to Iraq than Iran could ever be.

Runners-up in the terrorism funding game are Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.  Yes, that Kuwait, the one the West liberated from Saddam.

Oddly enough there's been not a whimper out of Sarah Palin, John McCain or Newt Gingrich about leveling the Gulf oil states.  Hypocrisy?  Ya think?

Tories Politicizing Canada's Courts

What constitutes a terrorist or a state sponsor of terrorism? I don't know, maybe acts of terrorism? Maybe not. Maybe you're only a terrorist or a state sponsor of terrorism if the Conservative government isn't willing to look the other way.

As I expected, the Tories have introduced legislation allowing victims of terrorism to use the Canadian judicial system to sue supporters of terrorism but only so long as those terrorists are on Ottawa's list of terrorists.

A terrorist or a nation that supports terrorists is off the hook unless Ottawa puts them on its list. So, in other words, you can drive people from their historical lands, steal their water, destroy their homes and orchards, even treat them to a dandy barrage of white phosphorous shells and it's perfectly okay unless some Conservative jackass says otherwise.

Public Thought Minister, Tubby Van Loan, says proven shill, Governor General Jean, will make the determination of who is and isn't a terrorist according to what she's told by her master, Steve Harper. Mr. Loan said it's not up to him to decide whether the United States, Israel or India might make it on the list. I suppose Pakistan is free and clear too.

Here's a thought. Why not simply define "terrorism" and "acts of terrorism" and "state sponsors of terrorism" and let the courts receive evidence and decide who is and isn't a terrorist? Oh, wait a minute. Never mind, I get it.

Hey Steve, Some Terrorists to Sue - Finally!

Steve Harper is going to open Canadian courts to enable victims of terrorism to sue for compensation. I wonder what he thinks of these terrorists. From AFP:

Jewish settlers rampaged in the West Bank on Monday, wounding four Palestinians, as they vented fury that Israel may answer US calls and dismantle outposts in the territory, officials said.

Jewish extremists blocked roads, hurled rocks at drivers, burned fields, cut down olive trees and opened fire towards Palestinians who tried to chase the trespassers from their fields in the northern West Bank, witnesses said.

West of the city of Nablus, an area home to some of the most hardline settlers in the occupied territory, dozens of masked extremists blocked a road in the early hours and hurled rocks at Palestinian drivers who stopped their vehicles to move the obstructions, they said.

"They attacked when the minibus (carrying 17 Palestinian workers on their way to work in Israel) stopped. The man next to the driver was seriously wounded," said Zakaria Sada, an activist with the Rabbis for Human Rights organisation.

Near the settlement of Yizhar -- one of the most radical in the West Bank -- heavy smoke billowed into the air as settlers set fire to Palestinian fields.

When a group of Palestinians threw stones trying to chase them off the land, about 20 settlers armed with guns jumped out from hiding places and opened fire in the direction of the Palestinians and journalists, an AFP correspondent said.

Three army patrol vehicles at a nearby junction stood by and did not intervene to stop the violence, but prevented a Palestinian fire-engine from reaching the field.

That sure sounds like terrorism and I'll bet those farmers whose fields were torched could probably do with a dollop of compensation too. Maybe Steve can tell us where they can sign up to launch their court cases.

The Best Way to Fight Terrorism

Terrorism is a crime. It's not an act of war, it's a crime.

When terrorism is treated as a crime, something to be dealt with by law enforcement working with security services, results happen. The key is sleuthing, not bombing.

Ask Momin Khawaja, the Canadian foreign affairs department computer tech, who's now facing life behind bars after being convicted, in Ottawa, of five terrorism charges. Evidence adduced at his trial showed that Khawaja was an Islamist extremist who joined forces with likeminded villains in England. He agreed to produce 30-bomb detonators for his chums.

It was police work that brought Khawaja down and a criminal justice system that's put him behind bars for what may well be the remainder of his natural life.

It's not often mentioned, but when it comes to thwarting al-Qaeda, the FBI and the CIA have been vastly more successful than the Pentagon.

A Killer Who Took the Easy Way Out or An Innocent Man Driven to Suicide?

American anthrax scientist, Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, has died at his own hand. According to the Washington Post, Ivins' death comes just as a federal grand jury was about to indict the scientist for murder in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and terrorized the country.

"Prosecutors were considering whether to seek the death penalty against Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked at an elite U.S. Army bioweapons laboratory in Fort Detrick. Ivins died Tuesday in an apparent suicide.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital, according to an obituary published in the Frederick News-Post. The Los Angeles Times first reported in today's editions that a federal grand jury in Washington had been gathering testimony about Ivins's alleged involvement in the attacks, and that Ivins had been notified that criminal charges were looming.

Fort Detrick, located 50 miles north of Washington, has been a focus of Justice Department and FBI investigators for nearly six years, since anthrax-laced letters arrived at media organizations and Senate offices shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The anthrax mailings killed five people, including two postal workers at the Brentwood Road facility in the District, and sickened 17 others, spreading fear on Capitol Hill and across the country only weeks after hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

For the past several months, the grand jury had been hearing testimony from scientists who worked alongside Ivins at Fort Detrick, performing research on inhaled anthrax spores, according to the Times report. While the Times report said Ivins worked in the elite biodefense lab since 1990, the News-Post obituary said he had been a scientist at Fort Detrick for 36 years.

The mailings, sent to then-Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), network television offices in New York and the company that owns the National Enquirer, gripped the nation and disrupted correspondence. In addition to the two D.C. postal workers, a Florida photographer, a New York hospital worker and an elderly Connecticut woman died after being exposed to the powder. "

Pushing the Fear Agenda

Thanks to Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria for shining a spotlight on a Simon Fraser University report that reveals how "terrorism" statistics have been gamed for nothing other than to make us all afraid - very afraid.

"The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.

The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, "Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups-and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START-it was almost never described as such."

Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined "significant" attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islam-ist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.

The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them.

The University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management (I wish academic centers would come up with shorter names!) has released another revealing study, documenting a 54 percent decline in the number of organizations using violence across the Middle East and North Africa between 1985 and 2004. The real rise, it points out, is in the number of groups employing nonviolent means of protest, which increased threefold during the same period.

Why have you not heard about studies like this or the one from Simon Fraser, which was done by highly regarded scholars, released at the United Nations and widely discussed in many countries around the world-from Canada to Australia? Because it does not fit into the narrative of fear that we have all accepted far too easily."

There you have it. The far-right Bush/Cheney/McCain/Harper gang keep telling us that we're in a fight for the very survival of our civilization because they don't dare acknowledge that Islamist jihadism is collapsing under its own weight. They can't, make that won't, tell us the truth because it undermines what Zakaria properly calls their "narrative of fear."

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/fareed_zakaria/2008/05/the_only_thing_we_have_to_fear.html

Speaking Truth to Power

I wish Harpo was in Chicago. If he was, maybe he'd load up on a lot of wisdom about the international turmoil now underway in Afghanistan and elsewhere. There's plenty of it to be had in the Windy City from the roughly 3,000 international affairs thinkers gathered there for the annual, International Studies Association convention.
Here, according to James Travers, writing in the Toronto Star, are some of the words of wisdom Harper could find helpful:

"Politicians stiffening national backbones won't find renewed strength in this sampler drawn from four intensive days. There's no guarantee imposing democracy controls terrorism, that being over there necessarily makes us safer over here or, most importantly, that the hope of reconstructing Afghanistan as a stable, modern state is guided by a common blueprint.

"None of that is idle musing. Academic and think tank business is booming in the failed states/security sector and the result is a lot of empirical holes in subjective cloth.

"For example, research predicts that violent groups will cling to their methods even after becoming political parties, Western powers become targets by intervening in essentially local conflicts, and practical short-term tactics make nonsense of the theoretical long-term Afghanistan strategy."

"A steady supply of walk-in suicide bomber recruits is a product of new anger over infidel boots on Islamic soil and not just a manifestation of more deeply rooted grievances.

"And in Afghanistan the goal of winning hearts and minds is being pushed further over the horizon by the day-to-day damage of air strikes in a war fought among the people and by anti-drug policies that make farmers poorer and more vulnerable to corrupt officials."

This isn't revolutionary thinking, far from it. It's actually very conventional wisdom that is simply not heard very often and even more rarely heeded.