A battle over the meaning of 9/11

My contribution to counteract the current effort of Facebook to censor a dissenting voice.

The charges against Omar Khadr

CBC News quotes Khadr's lawyer:

But Glazier, the former military officer, adds, "the law of war does not criminalize throwing a hand grenade or shooting at soldiers; that is, in fact, what militaries around the world are called upon to do."

I've long wondered about that.

Ideology

Boris Johnson in the Telegraph, on the Norwegian "Templar:"

It is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad: no one in their right mind would behave as he has done. Nor is it enough to say that he is evil. If the word evil has any meaning at all, then it must obviously apply to a man who can go to a lake island summer camp, call innocent young people to run towards him – and then shoot 85 of them with an automatic rifle.
We will never be satisfied with simple words like “mad” or “evil”, and for the days and weeks ahead we can expect exhaustive psychoanalysis of this dreary and supercilious 32-year-old sicko. We will summon and interview all the potential hobgoblins of his mind. With the help of the Norwegian investigators, we will try to understand how these demons persuaded him to engage in an act of such premeditated cruelty; and as our guide we will use the 1,500-page manifesto of hate that he (and possibly his accomplices) have posted on the internet.
It is in many ways a preposterous document, with its plan to revive the ancient order of the Knights Templar, with Breivik as “Justiciar Knight”. The idea is to mobilise an army of similar loathsome berks and to liberate Europe of immigrants by 2083. It seems that this is the 200th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, whom Breivik blames for egalitarianism, feminism, multiculturalism and all manner of other things he dislikes. Breivik’s attempt at Mein Kampf is awash with Wikipedia-generated teenage ruminations about Gramsci, Adorno and Islam, and I must confess I have not slogged all the way through to the end.
But I have read enough to grasp the gist – and there is something both curious and troubling in his obsessions. He goes on and on about the EUSSR and “Eurabia”. He attacks multiculturalism as a “big lie”, and asserts that “political correctness now looms over Western European society like a colossus”. “Can the European Union be reformed?” he asks. “I doubt it. The EU is bound together by a self-serving class of bureaucrats who want to expand their budgets and power, despite the harm they do.” He claims that Europe has been systematically betrayed by mass immigration from Muslim countries, and that the method of this immigration has been concealed from the electorate. He cites a great many British commentators to make his points. Indeed, it is fascinating to see how rooted is this Norwegian extremist in the political discourse of the Anglosphere.
My friends, there is no easy way of saying this: a lot of what this evil nutcase says could be drawn from the blog-post threads that you will find in the media, especially the “conservative” media, in Britain. Some people will read his dismal expectorations and conclude that this inflammatory guff is what really drove him on. They will say that his barbarism was spurred by fury at the EUSSR and immigration, just as the murders of 9/11 were triggered by the various tenets of Islamic extremism.
It is certainly true that on the face of it he has much in common with some recent Islamic suicide bombers. He is disturbed by female emancipation, and thinks women would be better off in the home. He seems to be pretty down on homosexuality. Above all – and in this he strongly resembles an Islamist – he believes that his own religious leaders are deeply decadent and have deviated from orthodoxy. He is repelled, like so many Muslim terrorists, by anything that resembles the mingling of cultures.
People will say that we are looking at the mirror image, in fact, of an Islamic terrorist – a man driven by an identical but opposite ideological mania. There is certainly a symmetry here, and yet in both cases, Breivik and the Muslim bomber, I don’t think that ideology is really at the heart of the problem. Yesterday the television reporters found an acquaintance of his from Norway, a fellow called Ulav Andersson, who said that he had known Breivik pretty well. He was surprised by all the Knights of Templar stuff, because he had never really been religious, and he wasn’t aware that he had been interested in politics.
“He didn’t seem opinionated at all,” he said. He just became chippy and irritable, said Ulav Andersson, when some girl he had a crush on jilted him in favour of a man of Pakistani origin.
It wasn’t about immigration, or Eurabia, or the hadith, or the Eurocrats’ plot against the people. It wasn’t really about ideology or religion. It was all about him, and his feeling of inadequacy in relation to the female sex. The same point can be made (and has been made) about so many of the young Muslim terrorists. The fundamental reasons for their callous behaviour lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause, that potentiates the poison in their bloodstream, that gives them an excuse to dramatise the resentment that they feel in the most powerful way – and to kill.
There is an important lesson, therefore, in the case of Anders Breivik. He killed in the name of Christianity – and yet of course we don’t blame Christians or “Christendom”. Nor, by the same token, should we blame “Islam” for all acts of terror committed by young Muslim males. Sometimes there come along pathetic young men who have a sense of powerlessness and rejection, and take a terrible revenge on the world. Sometimes there are people who feel so weak that they need to kill in order to feel strong. They don’t need an ideology to behave as they do.
Michael Ryan had no ideology in Hungerford; Thomas Hamilton had no ideology in Dunblane. To try to advance any other explanation for their actions – to try to advance complicated “social” factors, or to examine the impact of multiculturalism in Scandinavia – is simply to play their self-important game. Anders Breivik may have constructed a portentous 1,500 page manifesto, but like so many others of his type he was essentially a narcissist and egomaniac who could not cope with being snubbed. We should spend less time thinking about him, and much more on the victims and their families.

But then read the comments...

Crusader

The Norwegian terrorist considered himself a Knight Templar, thought "multiculturalists" were traitors, and expressed admiration for the effectiveness of al-Qaeda.

Another member of the "rivers of blood" gang. And oh so self-righteous with it.
z

Update: An older post on the rivers of blood gang.

Martian war machines

At this link you will find a very scary piece of video, sent to me by my Czech friend, Filip Marek. Someone has mangled it, and the beginning is missing, but it appears to be a legitimate Channel 4 documentary out of Britain. And what is documented in this is pretty scary: the use of remote-controlled drone aircraft, whose controllers are enlisted personnel with basic computer skills based in Arizona, to attack people in the eastern hemisphere, whose countries the United States is not at war with. I have heard about this before, but this presentation is very hard hitting.

Let's just think about one point raised in the video, by implication: wouldn't any counterattacks against the Arizona base be considered by the US government to be terrorism? And in fact wouldn't terrorism be one of the few possible responses to robot attacks from the air? And then we are presented with the information that the recent Times Square bomber was inspired by a desire to get revenge for such airborne attacks...

In the end it may simply be a lack of fuel that may save us from a really terrifying kind of war.

This brings back to me one of the more terrifying visions of the future I have ever had. In the movie Apocalypse Now there is an amazing scene where the US helicopters fly into battle -- a battle that involves shooting people on the ground who may or may not be the enemy -- playing the Ride of the Valkeries on a really good sound system.


I realized then that the Martian war machines were no longer H. G. Wells' vision from a fantastic feature, but a reality. Mine wasn't really a vision of the future, of course, despite my words above. It was a vision of the past.

Now I've got another one to match.

How it looks to one Iraqi immigrant

This blogger is a recent immigrant to the USA, and this is what he has to say about the attempt to bomb Times Square.

Airport security

I was flying this week and had the opportunity to test out the new scanning system on my way home. Unfortunately I didn't get to see how I looked -- I just know it presumably confirmed that I wasn't carrying any dangerous items.

On that trip my luggage contained some heavy pieces of metal -- family silver, a big tuned windchime made of hollow tubes, and a mantel clock from the 19th century. When we got home we found notices from the Transportation Safety Administration that the luggage had been checked and if TSA busted something, well, sorry but those are the breaks. I found that reassuring. They ought to be able to catch suspicious tubes etc. in my luggage.

It was all dealt with without anyone being obnoxious.

Update: Then there is this.

Hard-hitting quote

From the New York Times, on America's imperial overstretch affecting relations with Yemen:

The administration doubled Yemen’s economic aid last year, but as Barbara K. Bodine, another former ambassador, pointed out, the amount “works out to $1.60 per Yemeni.”

“That won’t even buy you a cup of coffee in Yemen,” she added, “and they invented coffee.”

Ethiopians, BTW, have a widely-accepted claim on coffee.

Image:Yemen Hufashi green coffee beans.

Defeat by 1000 cuts?

Mark LeVine in Al Jazeera:

Indeed, far from heralding a more successful US effort to stamp out Islamist terrorism, the soon to be deepening footprint in Yemen is a sure sign of America's defeat in the war against violent extremism in the Muslim world...

Think about it. One angry young man with about three ounces (around 80 grams) of explosive material, $2,000, and a pair of specially tailored underwear has completely disrupted the US aviation system.

It does not even matter that he failed to blow up the plane.

The costs associated with preventing the next attack from succeeding will measure in the tens of billions of dollars - new technologies, added law enforcement and security personnel on and off planes, lost revenues for airline companies and more expensive plane tickets, and of course, the expansion of the 'war on terror' full on to yet another country, Yemen.

And what happens when the next attacker turns out to have received ideological or logistical training in yet another country? Perhaps in Nigeria, which is home to a strong and violent Salafi movement, or anyone of a dozen other African, Gulf, Middle Eastern or South East Asian countries where al-Qaeda has set up shop?

Will the US ramp up its efforts in a new country each time there is an attempted attack, putting US "boots on the ground" against an enemy that is impossible to defeat?

Such a policy would fulfill al-Qaeda's wildest dreams, as the US suffers death by a thousand cuts, bleeding out in an ever wider web of interconnected and unsustainable global conflicts.

Looking at US initiatives since 2001 it is hard to day he's wrong.

Yemen and al-Qaeda

A discouraging report from an expert in the journal Foreign Policy. Desertification meets terrorism.

Juan Cole explains the limitations of the US media

Discussing coverage of yesterday's coordinated bombings in Baghdad, he makes this worthwhile point:

Aljazeera notes that some US media outlets did not bother to cover these attacks in Iraq, and wonders if the story will return. I think the answer depends on the journalistic integrity of the outlet. For many, the answer will be no. Many US media are nationalist media, and cover stories having to do with US national projects. Americans have already decided that Iraq was a mistake, and they know the US military is leaving, and so what happens there is not "news" as much of the corporate media defines it (i.e. a story that generates profits because of wide public interest in it).

This may strike some readers as too charitable, but I think it captures one dimension of the problem of the US media. If you really want to know what is going on in the world, you've got to sample other sources.

A bit of Iraqi reality leaks through

Of course it comes from the admirable Inside Iraq:

October 30, 2009
Dumb and Dumber

There are more than 200 checkpoints in Baghdad; some of these checkpoints are manned by policemen, some by Iraqi army and some by both. Many of these checkpoints are equipped with explosive detectors that were supposed to enable the Iraqi forces to stop transporting explosives around the city or basically car bombs.

Most of these checkpoints are located at entry points to bridges and neighborhoods. Other checkpoints are on the main roads of Baghdad to the limit that the city is literally suffocating because of these checkpoints and the resulted traffic jam.

Before starting telling you what happens in most of the checkpoints you should know about the “explosives detectors”. The device is carried by security man who stops your car and walk beside it carrying the device. The device’s pointer changes its direction when passed by a car that supposedly carries explosives.

But the main flaw it points also if there is any chemical material like detergents or even medicine.

What happens in these checkpoints and how they are distributed in the city?!

First Scenario:

You drive into the checkpoint, and the explosives detector does not point to your car, Iraqi security orders you to drive and continue your magical trip through the elegant safe capital’s roads.

Second Scenario:

The detector points at your car, the security men orders you to drive into searching area, if there is one sometimes simply stop you in mid of the street, to search your car. The soldier responsible for searching asks the dumb and dumber questions:

- Where are you coming from and where are you going?

- Do you carry weapons?

If you answered with a wide smile, coming from X neighborhood and going to Y neighborhood and no I don’t carry weapons, you probably would leave without further questions or being searched.

Third Scenario

Detectors point at your car, you go to search, you answer the dumb and dumber two questions with a wide smile but yet the soldier insists to search your car. The search will be the following: open the trunk, soldiers will order you and that’s it.

Fourth Scenario

Your friend is a soldier or you have a badge that says you are a member of Iraqi security forces, no need to worry then, because every day we see tens of them passing all Baghdad’s checkpoints without being searched.

And till now, the government and the Iraqi forces are still insisting on depending on these checkpoints as the main tactic to control the apparently unstoppable attacks of car bombs.

I wonder, what did the American military or NATO trained the new Iraqi forces?

Image: Third scenario.

What's happening in Pakistan?

The Independent out of the UK has the best connected account I have seen.
Note this passage:

Ordinary Pakistanis have been left bewildered [by recent terrorist attacks], unable still to believe that the danger comes from within the country.

"Only God knows where such people come from because I know that Muslims cannot kill other Muslims," said Mohammad Yousaf, a 55-year-old, who runs a tea shop near one of the police training schools in Lahore and spent several hours hiding instead his store Thursday as gunfire and explosions engulfed the area.

Image: Outside Army HQ after the attack on it this month.