by Gwynne Dyer
At the other extreme, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor and current nemesis, when asked to justify his earlier remark that the 9/11 attacks on the United States were “America’s chickens coming home to roost,” helpfully explained that the U.S. had dropped atomic bombs on Japan and “supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans,” so what did Americans expect?
“You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you,” Wright elucidated. “These are Biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles.” Are we to believe then that it was God who selected a bunch of Saudi Arabians and Egyptians to punish the United States for its misdeeds against the Japanese, Palestinians and South Africans?
Mass slaughter of the innocent as a tool of divine justice is a familiar concept in the Bible (Jericho, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Ten Plagues of Egypt), and it would have held equal appeal for the nineteen Arab fanatics aboard those hijacked aircrafts on 9/11. But divine terrorism doesn’t really qualify under the State Department’s definition, since God, even when he perpetrates “premeditated, politically motivated violence … against non-combatant targets,” is not acting as a “sub-national group or clandestine agent.”
God is more of a sovereign power in his own right. This puts him in the same category as sovereign states, whose actions, however violent and even illegal, cannot by definition be described as “terrorism.” If you don’t believe me, ask the State Department.
So much for Jeremiah Wright’s attempt to define the American use of nuclear weapons against Japan as terrorism. It was terrible and terrifying, and it was intended to terrorize the Japanese people into surrender, but it was not terrorism. Neither are Israeli actions against the Palestinians, even if a hundred Palestinians are dying for every Israel victim of Palestinian terrorism, and a high proportion of the dead Palestinians are innocent civilians. Israel is a state, and as such, by definition, what it does cannot be called terrorism.
Now that that’s clear, let’s move on to what the U.S. State Department does define as terrorism. The first thing that strikes you, reading the Country Reports on Terrorism, is that 6,212 of the “terrorist attacks,” over two-fifths of all the 14,499 that it records for last year, were in Iraq. Might that be connected in some way to the fact that Iraq was invaded by the United States five years ago, and for all practical purposes remains under U.S. military occupation?
Algerian rebels used similar tactics against French imperial rule, including numerous brutal attacks on innocent civilians. So did the Mau Mau guerrillas against their British colonial masters in Kenya, and the Viet Cong against the American presence in South Vietnam, as did other people fighting against foreign occupation or domestic oppression in dozens of other countries. Their tactics were regularly condemned by their targets, but nobody tried to pretend that the world was facing a wave of irrational and inexplicable violence called “terrorism.”
Yet that is precisely the assumption that underlies the State Department’s annual reports on “terrorism,” and indeed the Bush administration’s entire “war on terror.” Or rather, it is the perspective through which the report’s authors want the rest of the world to see the troubles in Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, for they cannot be so naïve that they truly believe the link between the presence of U.S. occupation troops and a high level of terrorist attacks is purely coincidental.
You can see the same perspective at work in the distinction that is made between Israeli attacks on Palestinians (the legitimate actions of a sovereign state) and Palestinian attacks on Israelis (terrorism). Thus U.S. support for Israel is also legitimate, while Iranian support for Palestinian militants makes Iran the “most active state sponsor of terrorism.”
Others play this game, too—notably the Russians in Chechnya—but it is really an American innovation. Terrorism is turned into a uniquely wicked and inexplicable phenomenon, while legitimate states and armies can get on with the business of killing people in legitimate wars.
The pollution of the language by tendentious definitions has also infected the military. The U.S. armed forces (like most others) used to give their operations code names like “Anvil” and “Overlord.” By the twenty-first century, however, it gave the invasion of Iraq the code name “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” while the Afghan invasion was retrospectively renamed “Operation Enduring Freedom”(after the original code name, “Operation Infinite Justice,” was judged potentially offensive to Muslims).
Doesn’t the U.S. military realize that this is Soviet-style propaganda-speak, and that it demeans their dignity as soldiers? Apparently not, or, more simply, they just lack the guts to do anything about it. Lack of guts has become a more general problem in this decade, actually.
June 26, 2008
BLACK’S FAUX PAS
A “faux pas” is not a lie or an error. It is a truthful statement which, for political or social reasons, the speaker should not have made. But since he did make it, let us discuss it.
In an interview published in the July issue of Fortune magazine, Charlie Black, chief strategist to John McCain, observed that the Republican presidential candidate would benefit from a surge of support if there were a terrorist attack on the United States before the election. You could hardly make a more obvious statement, but in today’s United States, you are not supposed to say it out loud.
It’s easy to see how Black was led into this faux pas. In the interview, he had mentioned the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto last December as an example of an emergency in which McCain’s experience would trump Barack Obama’s lack of same. “[McCain’s] knowledge and ability to talk about it re-emphasized that this is the guy who’s ready to be commander-in-chief,” said Black, “and it helped us [in the polls].” So the interviewer asked the obvious next question: would the public also see McCain as the better man to deal with another terrorist attack on the United States?
What was Black supposed to say? “No, I’m sure that Senator Obama would deal with it every bit as well as my candidate”? This was a live interview, and he had inadvertently created an opening for the interviewer to ask the taboo question, and then Black put his foot in it: “Certainly it would be a big advantage to McCain.” Cue fake shock and synthetic horror as every body on the Democratic side pretends that Black is playing the “politics of fear.”
This is “Gotcha” politics of the lowest order. It is why debate on certain key subjects in the United States since 9/11 has been reduced to bland and mindless slogans on both sides of the political divide. Obama cannot say that the terrorist threat to the United States has been inflated past bursting point for the past seven years, and that it is high time to shrink it to its real, rather modest dimensions and get on with the country’s other long-neglected agendas. He would be crucified by the Republicans as “soft on terrorism,” and the U.S. media would uncritically echo the charge.
Instead, various Obama spokespersons condemned Black’s candid remark and, by extension, McCain’s tactics. “It is critical that the candidates debate national security … in an atmosphere free from fear tactics and political bluster,” intoned Richard Ben-Veniste, a former member of the bipartisan September 11 commission whom the Obama campaign trotted out for the media. What Black said involved neither fear tactics nor political bluster, but at this level, hypocrisy rules.
Black himself, of course, had to make a grovelling apology, and McCain had to distance himself from his chief strategist as far as possible: “I cannot imagine why [Black] would say it. It isn’t true. I’ve worked tirelessly since 9/11 to prevent another attack on the United States.” But it is true: a terrorist attack would obviously drive millions of American voters back into the arms of Mr. Security, because a great many people assume that ex-fighter pilots are just better than first-term senators at dealing with that sort of thing.
Nobody said that John McCain was hoping for a terrorist attack on the United States, although that i
s the implicit accusation he is denying when he talks about “working tirelessly” to prevent such an attack. And that superficial and pathetic exchange of views is probably the closest that the United States is going to come to a genuine debate on security issues during this entire election campaign.
So let us move on to something more interesting. What would “the terrorists” really like to do to the U.S. between now and November, assuming that they have the ability to do something? Attack now, or wait until later?
We are not talking about confused juveniles with dreams of seventy-two virgins here. We are talking about senior leaders who think in strategic terms and plan years ahead. So, if they want a McCain presidency, they attack the U.S. in a way that Charlie Black quite accurately said would boost the Republican vote. If they want an Obama presidency, they do nothing.
I cannot read their minds, but I do know what would swing their decision one way or the other. If they want to collect their winnings now, they will favour an Obama presidency and an early U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle East, after which they could reasonably hope to overthrow one or two regimes in the region and come to power themselves. If they would rather keep the U.S. mired in the region for longer, inflicting casualties on American troops and building up their own prestige with radical youth in the area, in the expectation of greater political gains later on, then they would back McCain. So, they would try to help his election by blowing something up in the United States.
The bottom line, however, is that they probably lack the ability to blow anything up in the U.S., which makes it a rather moot point.
The truly remarkable thing about the al-Megrahi case (below) is not the likelihood that he was framed by the Western intelligence services, but the radically different responses of the American and British relatives of the victims to the same evidence. The British almost all concluded that the spooks were lying; most of the Americans never questioned their word, even for a moment.
August 21, 2009
AL-MEGRAHI: WHATEVER WORKS
Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was an intelligence agent, and since he worked for the Libyan government he probably did some bad things. But he probably did not do the specific bad thing for which he was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison in Scotland.
He only served eight years. He was released on compassionate grounds last Thursday by the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, and then flew home to Libya. He is dying of cancer, but his release outraged the Americans whose relatives died aboard Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988. They believe that al-Megrahi is a mass murderer who should die in jail.
There were also British victims of the attack, and almost none of their relatives think that al-Megrahi should have been in jail at all. As their spokesman, Jim Swire, put it, “I don’t believe for a moment that this man was involved [in the bombing].”
THE PRIME SUSPECT
Back in 1988–89, Western intelligence services saw the bombing of Pan Am 103 as an act of revenge. The U.S. warship Vincennes had shot down an Iranian Airbus five months before, killing all 290 passengers, and the Iranians were getting even. (The U.S. was then secretly backing Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran, and the Vincennes, operating illegally in Iranian territorial waters, shot down the airliner thinking that it was an Iranian fighter.)
There was some evidence for this “Iranian revenge” theory. In 1989, German police found the same kind of bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 in a house in Frankfurt used by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command. The PFLP-GC was based in Syria, and Syria and Iran were allies, so maybe …
THE SWITCHEROO
But then, in 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Washington needed Arab countries like Syria to join the war against Saddam so that the liberation of Kuwait looked like a truly international effort. Syria’s price for sending troops was removal from America’s Most Wanted list. Suddenly Syria was no longer the prime suspect in the Pan Am case—and if Syria was out, so was Iran. Still, more Americans died on Pan Am 103 than in any other terrorist attack before 9/11, and somebody had to take the fall. Libya was the obvious candidate because it had supported various terrorist attacks in the past.
Soon new evidence began to appear. It pointed to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who had been working as a security officer for Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta in 1988. A Maltese shopkeeper identified him as the man who bought children’s clothing like that found in the suitcase containing the bomb that brought down Pan Am 103.
It was pretty flimsy evidence, but Colonel Gaddafy, Libya’s ruler, was desperate to end the Western trade embargo against his country. He never admitted blame in the Pan Am affair, but he handed al-Megrahi and a colleague over for trial in a Western court anyway.
THE KANGAROO COURT
Al-Megrahi’s trial took place in 2001. His colleague was freed, but he was sentenced to twenty-seven years (in a Scottish prison, as Pan Am 103 came down in Lockerbie). As time passed, however, the case began to unravel.
The Maltese shopkeeper who had identified al-Megrahi, Tony Gauci, turned out to be living in Australia, supported by several million dollars the Americans had paid him for his evidence.
The allegation that the timer for the bomb had been supplied to Libya by the Swiss manufacturer Mebo Telecommunications turned out to be false. The owner of Mebo, Edwin Bollier, revealed that he had turned down an offer of four million dollars from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1991 to testify that he had sold his MST-13 timing devices to Libya. One of Bollier’s former employees, Ulrich Lumpert, testified at al-Megrahi’s trial that MST-13 timers had been supplied to Libya—but, in 2007, he admitted that he had lied at the trial.
And this year it was revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area at London’s Heathrow airport was broken into seventeen hours before Pan Am 103 took off on its last flight. (The police knew that twelve years ago but kept it secret at al-Megrahi’s trial.) The theory that the fatal bag was put on a feeder flight from Malta became even less likely.
All of which explains why the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission announced in 2007 that it would refer al-Megrahi’s case to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh. Their reason: he “may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”
THE DEAL
The Review Commission’s decision caused a crisis because a new court hearing would reveal how shoddy the evidence at the first one was. Happily for London and Washington, al-Megrahi was dying of cancer and this made a deal possible: he would give up his plea for a retrial, no dirty linen about the original trial would be aired in public, and he would be set free.
A miserable story, but hardly a unique one. A man who was probably innocent of the charges against him, a loyal servant of the Libyan state who was framed by the West and hung out to dry by his own government, has been sent home to die.
And then we have homegrown terrorism, near the village where my wife’s family has had a house since the 1950s, in deepest France.
August 18, 2009
BASQUE TERRORISM: AS GOOD AS IT GETS
It’s still a nest of terrorists around here, but nobody worries about it much. These days, when you hear a helicopter at night it’s only the medevac chopper bringing some urgent case down to the main hospital at Bayonne on the coast.
In the bad old days, the helicopter you heard would have been using infrared detectors to spot Basque terrorists heading across the mountains at night into Spain. This southwestern corner of France is just as Basque as the much larger Basque-speaking provinces of Spain, but ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna [Basque Land and Liberty]) always used France as a safe rear area and did its actual killing across the frontier.
The terrorists are still around, and they enjoy a certain amount of local support. Last Saturday was the summer festival in our local town, Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port (or Donibane Garazi, in Basque), and everybody for miles around was drinking and dancing in the square below the citadel, waiting for it to get dark enough for the fireworks to begin. Sud
denly banners were unfurled on the city walls: “Kidnapped? Tortured? Murdered? Where is Jon?”
So I ask around, and it turns out that everybody knows who Jon is. He’s a local man, universally believed to be an ETA member, who got on a train to Toulouse but never arrived. Everybody also believes that he was carrying a large sum of money for ETA, which leads nasty cynics like myself to contemplate several alternative possible reasons for his disappearance, but local opinion is convinced that it was the state that got him.
Yet local opinion is not really very upset about it. Most people don’t care much whether the French police seized or killed Jon, or if somebody else robbed and killed him, or even if he just decided to disappear and live on the proceeds. It’s all part of the game that some play on the fringes of society, and they’re welcome to play it as long as they don’t frighten the horses.
Across the border in Spain, where the killing happens, people take ETA much more seriously, and there is less sympathy for the killers among Spanish Basques than among French Basques. But there is also an irreducible hard core of support for the extreme nationalist option. Spain does not let political parties that openly support terrorism run in national elections, but when a radical Basque party was allowed to run in the June elections for the European Parliament, it got 140,000 votes. That’s only 5 percent of the population in those provinces—the terrorist struggle for Basque independence has so few supporters because the Basque provinces of Spain already have almost complete control over their own affairs. But that tiny minority of hard-liners is enough to sustain the armed struggle forever.
The “struggle” has killed 825 people over the past forty years, including three police officers killed by ETA bombs and sixty people injured by a truck bomb in Burgos this summer. There have been three ceasefires over the years, the last in 2006, but they never lead to a final deal because there is a small but steady supply of young people who cannot resist the lure of extremism. It gives meaning to their little lives.
