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.
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