Terrorism
Why the US is hated abroad

Robert Bowman flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam. He is

presently (1998) bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne

Beach, FL. Originally printed in The National Catholic Reporter,

Oct. 2, 1998.

The "Security" Charade

by Robert Bowman

If deceptions about terrorism go unchallenged, then the

threat will continue until it destroys us.

The truth is that none of our thousands of nuclear weapons

can protect us from these threats. No Star Wars system no matter how

technically advanced, no matter how many trillions of dollars are poured

into it, can protect us from a nuclear weapon delivered in a sailboat or a

Cessna or a suitcase or a Ryder rental truck. Not one weapon in our vast

arsenal, not a penny of the $270 billion a year we spend on so-called

defense can defend against a terrorist bomb. That is a military fact.

As a retired lieutenant colonel and a frequent lecturer on

national security issues, I have often quoted Psalm 33: "A king is not

saved by his mighty army. A warrior is not saved by his great strength."

The obvious reaction is, "Then what can we do?" Is there nothing we can

do to provide security for our people?"

There is. But to understand it requires that we know the

truth about the threat. President Clinton did not tell the American

people the truth about why we are the targets of terrorism when he

explained why we bombed Afghanistan and Sudan. He said that we are a

target because we stand for democracy, freedom, and human rights in the

world.

Nonsense!

We are the target of terrorists because, in much of the world, our

government stands for dictatorship, bondage, and human exploitation.

We are the target of terrorists because we are hated.

And we are hated because our government has done hateful things.

In how many countries have agents of our government deposed popularly

elected leaders and replaced them with puppet military dictators who were

willing to sell out their own people to American multinational corporations?

We did it in Iran when the US Marines and the CIA deposed Mossadegh

because he wanted to nationalize the oil industry. We

replaced him with the Shah and armed, trained, and paid his hated Savak

National Guard, which enslaved and brutalized the people of Iran, all to

protect the financial interests of our oil companies. Is it any wonder that

there are people in Iran who hate us?

We did it in Chile. We did it in Vietnam. More recently, we tried to do

it in

Iraq. And, of course, how many times have we done it in Nicaragua and all

the other banana republics of Latin America?

Time after time we have ousted popular leaders who wanted the riches of

the land to be shared by the people who worked it. We replaced them with

murderous tyrants who would sell out their own people so the wealth of the

land could be taken out by the likes of Domino Sugar, Folgers, and Chiquita

Banana.

In country after country, our government has thwarted democracy, stifled

freedom, and trampled human rights. That's why it is hated around the

world. And that's why we're the target of terrorists.

People in Canada enjoy democracy, freedom, and human rights. So do the

people of Norway and Sweden. Have you heard of Canadian embassies being

bombed? Or Norwegian, or Swedish?

We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold

human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to

people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our

multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to

haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism.

Once the truth about why the threat exists is understood, the solution

becomes obvious. We must change our ways. Getting rid of our nuclear

weapons unilaterally if necessary will enhance our security. Drastically

altering

our foreign policy will ensure it.

Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so

we can have the oil under their sand, we should send them to rebuild their

infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children. Instead of

continuing to kill hundreds of Iraqui children every day with our

sanctions, we

should help Iraquis rebuild their electric power plants, their water treatment

facilities, their hospitals, and all the things we have destroyed and

prevented

them from rebuilding.

Instead of training terrorists and death squads, we should close the School

of the Americas [Ft. Benning, GA.]. Instead of supporting insurrection,

destabilization, assassination, and terror around the world, we should abolish

the CIA and give money to relief agencies.

In short, we should do good instead of evil. Who would try to stop us? Who

would hate us? Who would want to bomb us?

That is the truth the American people need to hear.


Special report: Terrorism in the US

Seumas Milne

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.

It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.

But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.

All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.

 

  A look at the mindset

  As author of the book "Saharasia", which focuses upon the characterological

differences between freedom-loving nations, and the fascism of modern

Islamic fundamentalism, I've got quite a few emails asking for my opinions

about the present disaster.  Here are a few of them, not well organized,

but simply a listing of facts that very few persons speak about, even after

such a disaster.

 

1.  As discussed in Saharasia, the major motivation for fundamentalist

hatred of non-fundamentalists (of any religious background) is the absence

of the latter group's adherence to strict "moral codes" regarding sexuality

and female reproductive functions.  A fundamentalist who is raised with

heavy obedience training, who suffered through severe genital mutilations,

severe abstinence demands, segregation of the sexes at an early age, and

ruthlessly-enforced virginity taboos (girls murdered for violations), when

such a person grows to be an older teenager, they react with extreme rage

and anxiety when confronted with the physical presence of another person

who is more emotionally alive and fluid in character structure. And from

that extreme rage and anxiety, comes new belief-systems and social

institutions which organize the emotional outbursts into "religious

demands" for attacking such a person.  Translated into entire social

structures, this is a mechanism for open warfare.

 

2.  Consider the Taliban, butchering their own women who do not wear the

veil or who rebel, as with Islamic fundamentalists elsewhere, they consider

western women to basically be whores and prostitutes.  The men in the west,

they consider to be weak-willed, and generally  because we do not follow

their faith, they consider us vermin, usless trash.  The Wahabbis of old

Saudi Arabia (which includes Bin Ladin) considered the best thing one could

do with an infidel was to immediately kill them, as Allah did not tolerate

the existence of infidels.  And so, up until World War I, no stranger or

traveler who accidentally stumbled into Wahabbi territory ever came back

alive.  Only with the intrusion of the British into the region during WWI,

were the Wahabbis subdued -- they were no match for British guns or tanks,

and unlike the Wahabbis, the Brits did not feel it necessary to put every

person to death.  Rather, they organized them into ruling families, the

descendants of which today are the ruling tyrrants and dictators of the

various Middle Eastern nations.  There are no genuine democratic social

structures in any of the Islamic nations, save possibly for Turkey.

 

3.  Which brings us to a question about Israel, the only true democracy in

the region, which also even grants Israeli Arabs the rights to vote, to

have members in the Knesset, even if they make public speeches reeking of

antisemitism, calling for the destruction of Israel, etc.  As demonstrated

in Reich's book Mass Psychology of Fascism, the poison of antisemitism is

always a hallmark for sex-frustration and racist hatred.  Antisemitic

literature is abundant in the Arab world, to inculde Mein Kampf, Protocols

of the Elders of Zion, and other discredited missives, some of which is

actively believed and shaped into foreign policy, as with the rulers of

Saudi Arabia.  Those rulers not only hate Jews, but also consider Americans

to be scum, American women to be whores and prostitutes.  They consider all

the American troops stationed there, to protect those debauched Saudi

princes in power, as merely mercernaries, hired guns.  So they cannot drive

into the cities of Jedda, sit at a cafe, and enjoy a cup of tea, etc.  The

men who rule the country will butcher their own wives if they show any

independence, and the rulers are "liberals" as compared to Bin Ladin, the

Wahabbi, who became so offended by the presence of infidels on Holy Saudi

Territory as to launch a personal terror war.

 

4.  I have sat in small cafe's in Egypt and Israeli Palestinian areas, as

early as 1980, and spoke with the common man.  In discussions, it became

clear, their emotional reaction to the presence of  a Jew on what they

consider to be Hold Arab Earth, is rather like you or I, the western

reader, reacting to the presence of a piece of shit floating in your

morning coffee, discovered only when you held it up to drink.  Likewise,

the mix of lust and hatred which is provoked by a western female, who does

not wear a veil, and who might (as the Israeli women do) dress with minimal

clothing.  The targeting of females by Arab terrorists in Israel is common.

Young men, with dynamite strapped to them, prefer to walk up to groups of

young Israeli girls before blowing themselves and the girls to bits.  In a

more rational world, the same Arab boy might give the Jewish girl flowers,

or ask her to dance.  Instead, the sex-repression is so extreme, that only

a deadly hatred is expressed.

 

5.  These sex-economic factors aside, Western businesses, governments, and

banks figure prominently in the building up of the Islamic fundamentalist

terror regimes.   European and American firms have been selling the

technology for nuclear and biological weapons to Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, N.

Korea and anywhere else they could, for decades.  So have the Russians.

 

6.  Western nations, in Europe and America, have squandered decades of

opportunities to wean themselves of the opiate of cheap imported oil.  We

buy oil from Wahabbi-derived Saudis, who run a strict patrilineage where

women have no say in anything of substance.  Or likewise, from the Emir of

Kuwait, a debauched man who has sequentially married and then later

divorced dozens of young wives, in a conveyor-belt of arranged marriages

paid for by hard cash derived from oil revenues.  Iraq, ironically, had

more freedom for women than any other state in the area, but only for the

tribal Bath group from which Saddam Hussein was derived.  Other women, from

other groups, were open targets for police rape and brutality, and in the

years just before the Gulf War, death-camps similar to old Nazi Germany

were established in northern Iraq, around the same time Hussein launched

poison-gas attacks against border villages with Iran.  He waged a war of

virtual extermination against the gentle Marsh Arabs, and the Kurds, which

continued even after the Gulf War (a disgrace for America, which urged them

to "rise up", and then sat back on its hands, refusing to use our vast

military power to help them, as Saddam's troops cut them down).  And all

for Oil, the new god.

 

7.  I reject totally the "economic determinism" arguments for world

terrorism.  There are many nations living in poverty, but their character

structures are softer, and love between the sexes exists, and is openly

expressed wthout social condemnation or repression.  They do not generate

suicide bombers or terrorist social institutions, nor fundamentalistic

religions demanding abstinence and harsh punishments.  Yes, big economic

reforms are needed, in my view, and unrestrained corporate power and greed

surely needs to be limited and brought under control of democratic social

institutions.  However, this alone cannot explain the willingness of young

men, to commit suicide so readily.  Part of the answer lies in the

religious propaganda they are fed: when you die as a martyr, you will go to

heaven and be given dozens of virgin girls to sleep with.  This propaganda

is most effective, for young men in societies where even an innocent

conversation with a young girl is forbidden, and can in some cases bring

about a death-sentence upon the girl.  Better still, if, in the act of

committing suicide, you can actually murder young girls ("whores and

prostitutes") of your enemy.  The hatred feeding the racist suicide bombers

is primarily derived from sex-frustration, and not from some kind of

"economic distress".

 

8.  If I were an Arab man living in America today, a long time ago, I would

have publicly denounced my home culture, for the duplicitous and

hypocritical lying that goes on:  The demand for veiling of women, while

the men go out to the brothels (as with the Saudi royalty).  The passing

along of money to terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, who are

dedicated to murdering Jews (men women and children) as a policy, while

simultaneously making public statementments denying connections to such

groups.  The failure to make convincing open and public declarations of

disgust about Arab-Palestinian terror bombings.  The attempt to create

small fascist cultural camps on US soil, where women are repressed and

veiled as back in their home nations, as if American ideals of freedom and

democracy are reserved only for men.   This failure, of the Arab-American

community, is overwhelming.  It is akin to those fasicst German-Americans

who secretly (and sometimes openly) celebrated Hitler, in the years leading

up to WWII.

 

9.  To stop the terrorism, requires deliberate, bold and focused action.

The organizational infrastructure of the terrorist camps has to be

destroyed, utterly, along with their leadership, and -- most importantly --

the financial arrangements which fund them.  This usually means, going

after the states which support the terror.  Their infrastructrure must be

demolished, to the point where the absence of ordinary things such as a

good road network, power supply and water supply, interfere with the

ability of the central government to continue functioning.  But more, the

leaders supporting the terror have to be eliminated.

 

10.  The use of psychosis-inducing drugs by Arab and Islamic fundamentalist

leadership is rarely spoken about.  The main drugs being consumed are

hashish and qat.  Both can induce psychosis, especially if consumed

regularly, and done so in a context of religious fervor and sex-negation.

It is legitimate to speak about entire cultural groups, in the Middle East,

whose psychosis is so deep and extreme, and being fed so regularly with

mind-affecting drugs, as to render their entire political leadership

incapable of rational thinking.  Certainly, this is true for most of the

fundamentalistic groups -- and explains partly how and why there can be so

much merciless throat-cutting of non-fundamentalist women and even children

and babies by the Muslim fundamentalists in Algeria, as well as casual

machine-gunning of civilians, in places as diverse as the Vienna airport

some decades ago, to the massacre of western tour groups at the Hatshepsut

temple in Egypt.   The men who commit these atrocities are deeply sick, and

entire regions can be considered to be totally mentally ill, suffering from

psychosis so deep and profound, and so dedicated to hatred of the female

and female sexuality, as to demand that all women be covered from head to

toe, so as not to provoke the hatred and rage carried in the guts of the

average man.  It is as if one had a nation populated by millions of Jack

the Ripper's, who could only keep their impulses to butcher women under

control, if one could not see, literally, not to see, any portion of the

female form.  To classify this butchery of women as something "cultural" is

itself an expression of contactlessness -- one cannot rationally call the

massacre of Jews by the Nazis a "cultural trait of the German people" and

then ignore it, any more than one could say it was a "cultural trait of

Serbs to massacre muslims".   It is sadism and mass cultural psychosis at

work, the Mass Psychology of Fascism.

 

11.  Islam, in most parts of the Middle East, cannot be rationally

classified as a "religion".  It is, factually, a political-social movment,

where social and political power merge with religious belief.  The mosques

issue edicts governing the entirely of human conduct and behavior, and in

some nations, the mullahs rule, their religious edicts have the force of

law, and actually being carried out by special classes of "religious

policemen", who are the most butcherous one can find in the nation.  They

are similar to the old Christian empires of the periods between 400 AD to

1600 AD, when women were being brutally tortured and burned at the stake by

the millions, as demanded by the all-powerful Catholic Church.  Nobody

today in the West, who knows about the butchery and debauched character of

the Christian Church of those years, would dare to say the emperors and

kings of Rome were merely "practicing religion" -- in fact, they were

practicing religon and much more, the acquiring of power and military

muscle, through the patriarchal authoritarian families of the day.  The

same is true today in the "Islamic" areas.  Fanaticism is both religious

and political, and cannot be compared to religious or politicial

institutions as we have them today in the Western democracies.  As such, it

is worthwhile to consider the targeting of "religious leaders" and their

Grand Mosques, in retalliatory strikes against the infrastructure of

terrorism.  The Mullahs preach their hatred in sermons which stirr the

average man to hatred, no less than public propaganda on television -- or

even moreso.

I've said more on this, already, in my book "Saharasia", and so refer the

unfamiliar reader to it. James DeMeo

 

Attacks Against America Are Not Over

Col. Stanislav Lunev
Friday, September 14, 2001

Col. Stanislav Lunev is the highest-ranking military spy ever to defect from Russia. He continues as a security consultant to the U.S. government. He filed this report from an undisclosed location in Europe.

I was surprised to hear, Thursday, some politicians in Washington making statements that terrorist operations against America are over.

How can they make such claims?

International terrorists are still targeting the U.S. and the American people as never before. Osama bin Laden, Hamas and other well-known and currently unknown terrorist organizations consider America as their number one target.

After such an elaborate and coordinated attack was just conducted against the U.S., isn’t it reasonable to think that the terrorist groups, backed by powerful nations, might a) already have plans for an escalation of such attacks, or b) now, seeing the vulnerability of the U.S., become encouraged and launch additional attacks?

Since I defected to the U.S. from Russia, I have been always somewhat perplexed by the politically correct thinking in Washington and among the U.S. media.

The media are now openly criticizing the President for remaining in Air Force One and not returning immediately to New York or Washington.

The President acted very correctly and very smartly. As I recall, America has a Constitution. The President’s sole real responsibility is to preserve your Constitutional government – not to hold press conferences.

Obviously, the President and his advisors understood that there was a real possibility of a larger threat – perhaps nuclear – and one the media doesn’t want you to know about.

Let me explain. When I defected in the 1990s from Russia’s GRU – its military intelligence - I told the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, anyone that would listen – that the Russians already had elaborate war plans against the U.S.

I suggested that such a war might begin with a diversion, some sort of terrorist attack. With people’s attention focused elsewhere, special troops could storm Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, the White House – to kill American leaders.

I also warned the American government that I believe Russia has already smuggled small nuclear devices into the U.S.

I have no doubt that Russia has been behind many of these terrorist groups, financing and equipping them.

The President acted prudently. He continues to do so, by understanding the new, larger attacks may occur.

He also knows just how weak American intelligence agencies are after the Clinton-Gore administration.

Also, these terrorists are funded and sponsored by countries Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and by other rogue nations (all closely aligned with either Russia or China). These terrorist groups and nations want nothing less than war against Western civilization.

First of all they would like to destroy the U.S., the recognized leader of the civilized world.

On Sept. 11, terrorists used the so-called "cheapest" way for the destruction of symbols of American financial and military power. By doing it this way, the terrorists show just how vulnerable we are. It also allows them to have a place from which they can escalate the terror.

This suicidal attack could have been prevented, but that did not happen.

However, Tuesday's tragedy very clearly demonstrated the depths of terrorist penetration through the American nation - where they are operating, as if they were in their own backyard - and, for example, using American training facilities for the preparation of the attacks against American people.

I am continually amazed how easy the American government makes it for enemies to penetrate American society and institutions. I am also amazed how many American journalists dislike America, and openly work against this country.

From now on, we know for sure that there are hundreds if not thousands of terrorists who are living among us in America.

They are preparing to continue the war against countries, which provide them hospitality, including dozens of so-called "sleepers" or specially trained terrorists who pretend to be U.S. citizens and residents. 24 hours a day, every day, they are waiting for the wake-up call from their organization leaders for a new attack against American people.

The next attack may be more severe.

According to Western intelligence estimations, the most powerful international terrorists organizations already have access to weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and materials.

There is no doubt that the leaders of terrorist organizations already have their own combat groups in America. Next time they could use, against the American people, weapons of mass destruction or so-called "expensive" weapons, which could be delivered to the U.S. very soon, if they aren't already deployed inside America.

It's very difficult to understand the logic of terrorists and impossible to predict their next targets.

The war against America declared by international terrorism is REAL, PRESENT and DANGEROUS.

We will win this war if, instead of words about defending America, we will do everything possible, practically, for the protection of our country and lives of the American people. There is no time for talking and promises any more. It's time for ACTION.

Find out what Col. Lunev told the CIA -- NewsMax has just released Col. Lunev's audiotapes "CIA Files: Defector Reveals Russia's Secrets" -- Click Here Now. Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Domestic Terrorism

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,551036,00.html
From
The Guardian  Thursday September 13, 2001