Terrorish

TERROR ISH

The events of 9/11 gave way to justify The War on Terror and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Two years later Iraq was occupied due to fears of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Thirteen years on, how has the longest conflict in US history altered Terrorism, or is it just using the term to justify an injustice equally as Terrorish as its foes.

Coined & Written

by Oscar J. Saunders

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Intro TERRORISH Part 1 NINE/ELEVEN Part 2 THE AFTERMATH Part 3 PROFITING PROTECTION Part 4 THE COST OF WAR Part 5 NIGHT TERRORS Part 6 DESENSITIZED GAMING Part 7 STOKING THE HELLFIRE

Part 8 NO TRIAL, JUST ERRORS Part 9 STIGMATIZED BELIEFS Part 10 A GAME OF DRONES Part 11 MY TESTIMONY TO WAR Part 12 #STICKS AND STONES Part 13 OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD Part 14 BLEEDING BLACK GOLD 107 Part 15 “BE VERY AFRAID...”

55 71 77 87 91 97 103

C O N T E N T S

terrorism; /ˈtɛrərɪzəm /

01 • 02

noun; the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. “the fight against terrorism” “terrorism is our number one enemy” “we will not rest until terrorism dies” “9/11 will not be avenged until terrorism is eradicates from our lives”

terrorish; /ˈtɛrərɪʃ / noun; having the usual undesireable qualities of a terrorist without being named as such by mainstream media. “the occupation in the Middle East is starting to feel slightly terrorish” “I’m feeling terrorish killing innocents” “we’ve committed equally terrorish crimes as the people we’re told to kill”

T E R R O R I S H

03 • 04

IN AN AGE WHERE TERRORISM SEEMS TO BE AROUND EVERY CORNER, WITH A BOMB IN EVERY BACKPACK AND A KILLER BENEATH EVERY BEARD. • WE MUST WONDER WHO IS REALLY TO BLAME? • HOW CAN WE DISTINGUISH BETWEEN LEGAL AND ILLEGAL ACTS OF TERROR? • IS THE INDEFINITE DETENTION AND TORTURE OF POTENTIAL TERRORISTS IN GUANTANAMO BAY A FORM OF TERRORISM? • IS THE SEGREGATION AND RACIAL PROFILING OF THE MUSLIM WORLD CREATING A DIVIDE IN EQUALITY, AND IN EFFECT CREATING POTENTIAL TERRORISTS? • ARE TARGETED DRONE KILLINGS OF POTENTIAL TERRORISTS AND THEIR FAMILIES IN PAKISTAN, SOMALIA, YEMEN, IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN AND MOST OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD TERRORISH?

T E R R O R I S H

“ The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule.”

- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

05 • 06

WHO ARE THE REAL CULPRITS IN THIS FANTASIZED

?

“WAR ON TERROR”

T E R R O R I S H

07 • 08

THE OCCUPIED?

OR THE OCCUPATION?

T E R R O R I S H

MI5 DEFINITION OF TERRORISM: 09 • 10

Terrorist groups seek to cause widespread disruption, fear and intimidation. They use violence or the threat of violence as a means of publicising their causes, motivating those who might be sympathetic to them and intimidating those who do not sympathise. They often aim to influence government policies and they often reject existing democratic processes, or even democracy itself, as a means of achieving their objectives. Although there is no generally agreed definition of terrorism internationally, in the UK the Terrorism Act defines terrorism as: The use or threat of action designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public, or a section of the public; made for the purposes of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause; and it involves or causes:

SERIOUS VIOLENCE AGAINST A PERSON; SERIOUS DAMAGE TO A PROPERTY; A THREAT TO A PERSON’S LIFE; A SERIOUS RISK TO THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF THE PUBLIC; OR SERIOUS INTERFERENCE WITH OR DISRUPTION TO AN ELECTRONIC SYSTEM.

T E R R O R I S H

NINE/ELEVEN Part 1 I

was 9 years old when the two planes struck the World Trade Centers. When we got back to the house,

11 • 12

There was an emergency meeting with all of the staff at my primary school, but they kept all information quiet until the end of the day.

No one disclosed much more than that, probably so none of the pupils freaked out. Most of our parents had been in the loop with what was happening in New York and many had hastily rushed to the gates to collect their sons and daughters. There was a faint feeling of fear on the older students faces, and even more so on my mothers. For me and my peers, a morbid wave of excitement was stirring – the most exciting global phenomenon since the millennium. We were young and naive at the time, and the scale of what was unfolding in America seemed miniscule in our lives.

“Home time!” sprung to mind way before the name ‘Osama bin Laden’ was mentioned, or the term ‘terrorist attack’ had been announced.

Getting into the car, my mother refrained from giving much away, I tried to pick her brain and figure out what all of he panic was about – all I got was a cold stare and an order to switch on the radio. Each station broadcast the same news; “A plane has crashed into the upper floors of the World Trade Center”, then “We have unconfirmed reports this morning that a second passenger plane has crashed into the second tower, within eighteen minutes of one another”, the initial excitement soon flushed out of my mind and then: “The United States of America is under attack, this is a deliberate targeted attack on the State.” A disaster was unfolding on the other side of the planet, it seemed tragic, but I had no idea at the time how much the world would change from that day onwards. In hindsight I think only a handful of people actually did.

Islam are the bad guys, Christians are good, and the War on Terror is justified necessity.

family members stood around the kitchen TV to hear the breaking news bulletins. “Hijacking”, “Suicide bombers”, “Terrorism” were all terms I had never been acquainted with before, and it was a scary reality that was just beginning to sink in. The hours that followed had everyone glued to the media outlets, soaking up each new development like sponge statues. Then the first tower collapsed in complete free-fall. Jaws all over the globe followed suit. Then the second fell. I can remember how quickly the silence spread like a plague.

An eerie helpless silence. This was it. I didn’t think I would experience something like this.

It was official. We were at war. Not only with an extremist entity only shown in low resolution handheld camera footage from training camps in the Middle East, but with an entire religion and culture that shared the burden of 9/11 throughout the world. Racism ripened as innocent Muslims were confronted for their beliefs and possible affiliation with the attacks. Even I must confess, I felt resentment towards them without knowledge, only judgement. I had been sucked into the media shit-storm that subliminally shunned an entire religion over night. What more did a young person such as myself need to hear? I’d seen the damage second hand, I’d been told who the culprits were without proof, and it was enough. Enough to plant a seed in my mind and in many others; Islam is bad, Christianity is good, and the War on Terror is justified.

N I N E / E L E V E N

DEATH TOLL= 2,996 PEOPLE

13 • 14

N I N E / E L E V E N

15 • 16

“ If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

- Malcolm X

N I N E / E L E V E N

As expected from such a horrendous attack, the newspaper headlines the following day reflected the terror in the language used, and the imagery shown. The entire world looked on as the cleanup was underway, and the hunt to kill everyone and anyone implemented in the plot. Yet as I trawled through the front pages of the following day, I began to notice a trend in the newspaper headlines.

There was no time to mourn for the victims, they wanted you to hate the attackers.

They were the main focus here; the “Bastards” who hijacked the planes. Each image depicted either the moment the second plane hit, or the second the towers fell. Harrowing images thrust into the public domain with huge “Terrifying” words that pulled at heart strings and gave people the courage and rage needed to wage another war. A new type of war, not specifically aimed at one particular group, or a known regime. Not at an ideology but at an idea. At anyone considered contagious with terror. A never ending cycle of killings for killings, from a list of names that increase two-fold for every one crossed off.

THE AFTERMATH Part 2 A

s the dust around the fallen towers settled, a new wave of nationalism swept across America

17 • 18

and racism soon followed. As these ideas are often faces of the same coin. “I’m going to go out and shoot some towel-heads,” were the words of a self-confessed patriot who murdered a man he mistook for a Muslim in revenge for 9/11. His victim was a Sikh named Balbir Singh Sodhi. His turban and beard made him a target. Yet, the sad irony remains that none of the nineteen hijackers had either.

For when you ‘other’ and dehumanise groups of people to define yourself against, it allows you to speak in a language of unspeakable destruction and violence. This pornography of force became a seductive message that convinced millions that our ‘freedoms’ and ‘values’ were worth defending at all costs.

Such a mind-set saw Islamophobic attacks increase by 1,700% in 2001. Prior to 9/11, the FBI recorded just 28 hate crimes against Muslims. The following year it increased to 481.

Twelve years later, and this miasma continues to fester across Europe, the United States and Britain. But why are other minorities mistaken for Muslims? Such an answer might require a deeper look at popular culture and its Orientalised depictions of Arabs. Representations would include Arabs with “their sharply hooked noses” and “evil moustached leers”. To have dark skin and a beard invites a racist assumption of faith and a baseless fear.

For visible Muslims, the threat of violence and abuse is even higher (especially for women).

However, Arabs only account for around 20% of the global Muslim population but their caricature dominates the Orientalist mind-set - especially at airports.

Islamophobia like any other form of racism, is a shame on all of us and must be erased.

Whereas, atheists like Richard Dawkins conveniently choose to define racism by a narrow biological definition to absolve criticism. However, racism can manifest itself epistemically. This idea draws on the historical notion of non-Western ‘inferiority’ and ‘savagery’ due to a lack of intelligence and rationality. As a result, only the West can be a moral force. Only the West can be democratic. Any thinking outside this hegemony invites suspicion, repression and exclusion from the debate. Muslims can only become accepted in this discussion if they agree to this Western-centric framework.

Racism allowed a French rail company to ban its black and North African employees from working during the visit of Israeli President Shimon Peres because their appearance might be constructed as ‘Muslim’. In New York, a Bangladeshi man was assaulted in ‘revenge’ for the Boston Marathon bombings as he was wrongly assumed to be an ‘Arab or Muslim’. After the London bombings in 2005, gurdwaras were targeted with firebombs in Leeds and Kent.

Such a patchwork of racism adds to the fabric of Islamophobia. Just a few days ago, it was reported that a Sikh soldier was severally bullied in his barracks and labelled ‘Taliban’, ‘terrorist’ and ‘suicide bomber’. Muslim women have been reduced to tears after being told to ‘fuck off and go back to your own country’.

We live in the age where the language of violence has manifested itself in the attempted arsons of mosques, murder, racist abuse (online and offline) and a government slow to condemn acts of terrorism against its Muslim citizens. This is a remarkable and long-standing failure of public policy. Silence breeds consent and as long as Muslims continue to be marginalised little will change.

T H E

“It’s so weird. Before 9/11, I am just a white guy, living a typical white guy’s life. All my friends had names like Monica, Chandler, Joey and Ross… I go to bed September tenth white, wake up September eleventh, I am an Arab.”

- Dean Obeidallah, Arab-American Comedian

A F T E R M A T H

WANTED 19 • 20

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

IF YOU

NOTICE

ANYTHING

SUSPICIOUS PLEASE ALERT THE AUTHORITIES

IMMEDIATELY!

T H E A F T E R M A T H

PROFITING PROTECTION Part 3 S

o long as Americans are convinced that the threat of terrorist attacks is extreme,

agencies like the Chertoff Group, a private consulting firm that focuses on security and counterterrorism, thrive. For example, in 2010, the Huffington Post reported that the Chertoff Group made $118 million on sales of full-body scanners produced by Rapiscan, one of the Chertoff Group’s clients, to the Transportation Security Administration. The Chertoff Group is not alone in profiting from the war on terror. Four other private companies—Booz Allen Hamilton, Science Applications International Corporation, the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies and Security Solutions International each profit off the government-induced fear of terrorism.

Pre-9/11, transport security was a breeze. Nowadays you have to empty everything considered a potential hijacking device into a plastic bag where the officers take it away to destroy in a “controlled explosion”. Your shoes could be thrown at the air stewardess in a crazed attempt to enter the cockpit, or turn your toothpaste into an acid and melt a hole in the hull.

21 • 22

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Experience counts. Our team has unrivaled experience countering today’s most critical

threats: defeating terrorists before they have a chance to act; responding to unprecedented natural disasters; preventing cyber criminals from breaking into the myriad networks that are the lifeblood of our government and private sector; and protecting international borders from transnational criminal organizations. We leverage our experience in government and the private sector as well as our deep subject-matter expertise to provide our clients with comprehensive, customized risk management solutions.

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P R O F I T I N G P R O T E C T I O N

23 • 24

Post-9/11 America has witnessed a boom in private firms dedicated to the hyped-up threat of terrorism. The drive to privatize America’s national security apparatus accelerated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and it’s gotten to the point where 70% of the national intelligence budget is now spent on private contractors, as author Tim Shorrock reported. The private intelligence contractors have profited to the tune of at least $6 billion a year.

In 2010, the Washington Post revealed that there are 1,931 private firms across the country dedicated to fighting terrorism.

₮£₹₹₡₹₺$₥

₱₳¥$ What it all adds up to is a massive industry profiting off governmetnt-induced fear of terrorism.

$6,000,000,000.00

Even though Americans are more likely to be killed by a car crash or their own furniture than a terror attack.

P R O F I T I N G P R O T E C T I O N

25 • 26

As well as the “comprehensive enterprise security” body scanners that the Chertoff Group profited from, there was another company that jumped aboard the post 9/11 protection hype. Although this company specialised in a more doubtful technology.

ATSC, an English tech corporation found that terrorism was an escalating problem, they also believed that almost anyone could be a terrorist, and almost everyone could be concealing a bomb. With that in mind they created a device like no other, a portable pieced of “Advanced Detection Equipment” capable of catching the bad guys before it was too late.

So without further adieu, I present to you, the ADE 651!

This brilliant invention can detect guns, ammunition, bombs, drugs, contraband ivory, and truffles. The bomb detection equipment that you see in airports weighs several tons, and can only operate over tiny distances.

The ADE 651 uses “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction” and can detect these things from a kilometer away, through walls, under the ground, underwater, or even from an aeroplane 5km overhead.

ATSC’s device is pocket sized and portable. You simply take a piece of plastic-coated cardboard for your chosen target, which has been through “the proprietary process of electro-static matching of the ionic charge and structure of the substance”, pop it into a holder connected to a wand, and start detecting.

There are no batteries and no power source: you hold the device to “charge” it with the energy of your body, becoming perfectly relaxed, with a steady pulse and blood pressure.

Then you walk with the wand at right angles to your body. If there is a bomb on your left, the wand will drift to the left, and point at it.

Like a dowsing rod.

Similar devices have been tested repeatedly and shown to perform no better than chance. No police force or security service anywhere in the developed world uses them. But in 2008, the Iraqi government’s

Pseudoscience occurs when you throw enough scientific bullshit into a sentence to make something completely obsolete seem useful.

In the case of this bomb detection rod, it is nothing more than a glorified golf ball finder.

Ministry of the Interior bought 800 of these devices – the ADE 651 – for $32m. That’s $40,000 each, rather brilliantly, and they’ve ordered a further shipment at $53m. These devices are being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq, to look for bombs.

Dale Murray, head of the National Explosive Engineering Sciences Security Center at Sandia Labs, which does testing for the Department of Defense, has tested various similar devices, and they perform at the level of chance. On Tuesday, two people working for The New York Times went through 9 Iraqi police checkpoints which were using the device, and none found the rifles and ammunition they were carrying (with licenses).

Major General Jehad al-Jabiri is head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives. “I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them,” he says. “Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs.”

How would you know? There are no independent tests of the ADE651 that I could find. The simplest explanation is that nobody could really be bothered. Magician James Randi can. He has carried a cheque for $1m in his jacket pocket for many years, in an admirably expensive act of passive aggression, and he will give this cheque to anyone who can provide proof of supernatural phenomena. Last year he invited the manufacturers of the ADE 651 to come forward, and see if their device works better than chance. They have not.

I guess if you’ve trousered $85m, you don’t care about The Amazing Randi and his puny cheque. We all have our excuses. General Jabiri, meanwhile, challenged an NYT reporter to test the ADE 651, placing a grenade and a machine pistol in plain view in his office. Every time a policeman used it, the wand pointed at the explosives. Every time the reporter used the device, it failed to detect anything. “You need more training,” said the general.

P R O F I T I N G P R O T E C T I O N

31

THE TRUE COST OF WAR Part 4 T

he wars begun in 2001 have been tremendously painful for millions of people

in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and the United States, and economically costly as well.

Each additional month and year of war will add to that toll. Moreover, the human costs of these conflicts will reverberate for years to come in each of those four countries. There is no turning the page on the wars with the end of hostilities, and there is even more need as a result to understand what those wars’ consequences are and will be.

The goal of the Costs of War project has been to outline a broad understanding of the domestic and international costs and consequences of those wars. A team of 30 economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts, and physicians were assembled to do this analysis of records from 2001–February 2013.

www.costsofwar.org.

27 • 28

Journalists 319 - 0.096% Humanitarian Workers 375 - 0.113% Other Allied 1,398 - 0.42% 9/11 Victims 2,996 - 0.9% US Contractors 6,307 - 1.896% US Military 6,656 - 2% Allied Military & Police 26,405 - 7.936%

Opposition Forces relate to any form of resistance,

regardless of age, ability or gender.

Collateral damage

Opposition Forces 86,400 - 25.966%

T H E T R U E C O S T O F W A R

29 • 30

Civilians 201,885* 60.673%

Over 200,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict, and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as the violence continues. But most observers acknowledge that the number of civilians killed has been under counted. The true number of civilian dead may pass a million when an adequate assessment is made. *Does not include indirect deaths which may total many hundreds of thousands more. Indirect deaths from the wars, including those related to malnutrition, damaged health infrastructure, and environmental degradation, must also be tallied. In previous wars, these deaths have far outnumbered deaths from combat and that is likely the case here as well.

T H E T R U E C O S T O F W A R

= $1 BILLION Remember, when President George Bush’s National Economic Council Director, Lawrence Lindsey, had told the country’s largest newspaper “The Wall Street Journal” that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion, he had found himself under intense fire from his colleagues in the administration who claimed that this was a gross overestimation.

Consequently, Lawrence Lindsey was forced to resign. It is also imperative to recall that the Bush administration had claimed at the very outset that the Iraq war would finance itself out of Iraqi oil revenues, but Washington DC had instead ended up borrowing some $2 trillion to finance the two wars, the bulk of it from foreign lenders. This therefore accounted for roughly 20 per cent of the total amount added to the US national debt between 2001 and 2012, according to a report by The Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

31 • 32

= $10 BILLION The Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government report stated “The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history—totaling somewhere between $4 trillion and $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs. The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid... Another major share of the long-term costs of the wars comes from paying off trillions of dollars in debt incurred as the US government failed to include their cost in annual budgets and simultaneously implemented sweeping tax cuts for the rich. In addition, huge expenditures are being made to replace military equipment used in the two wars. The report also cites improvements in military pay and benefits made in 2004 to counter declining recruitment rates as casualties rose in the Iraq war.”

T H E T R U E C O S T O F W A R

“Massive direct spending on the two imperialist interventions continues. With over 60,000 US troops remain in Afghanistan, it is estimated that the cost of deploying one American soldier for one year in this war amounts to $1 million. These troops continue suffering casualties—including in so-called “green on blue” attacks by Afghan security forces on their ostensible allies. As they are brought home, they will further drive up the costs of medical care and disability compensation. The US is maintaining a vast diplomatic presence in Iraq, including at least 10,000 private contractors providing support in security, IT, logistics, engineering and other occupations; as well as logistics support and payments for leased facilities in Kuwait.” - Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Report

33 • 34

The Walter Reed Medical Centre at Washington DC, is currently treating hundreds of recent amputees and severe casualties, the facility had received 100 amputees in 2010; 170 in 2011; and 107 in 2012.

With over 1,500 amputees, at least they each received a medal.

According to the Harvard University report, some 1.56 million US troops—56 per cent of all Afghanistan and Iraq veterans—were receiving medical treatment at Veterans Administration facilities and would be granted benefits for the rest of their lives:

“One out of every two veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan has already applied for permanent disability benefits. The official figure of 50,000 American troops “wounded in action” vastly underestimates the real human costs of the two US wars. One-third of returning veterans are being diagnosed with mental health issues—suffering from anxiety, depression, and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

The report notes that in addition, over a quarter of a million troops have suffered traumatic brain injuries (TBI), which, in many cases, were combined with PTSD, posing greater problems in treatment and

recovery. “Constituting a particularly grim facet of this mental health crisis is the doubling of the suicide rate for US Army personnel,

with many who attempted suicide suffering serious injuries” It maintains: “Overall, the Veterans Administration’s budget has more than doubled over the past decade, from $61.4 billion in 2001 to $140.3 billion in 2013. As a share of the total US budget it has grown from 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent over the same period. Soaring medical costs for veterans is attributable to several factors. Among them is that, thanks to advancements in medical technology and rapid treatment, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have survived wounds that would have cost their lives in earlier conflicts.” “While the US government has already spent $134 billion on medical care and disability benefits for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, this figure will climb by an additional $836 billion over the coming decades.”

“The most common medical problems suffered by troops returning from the two wars include: diseases of the musculoskeletal system (principally joint and back disorders); mental health disorders; central nervous system and endocrine system disorders; as well as respiratory, digestive, skin and hearing disorders. Overall, some 29 per cent of these troops have been diagnosed with PTSD.” The report goes on to argue: “Among the most severely wounded are 6,476 soldiers and Marines who have suffered “severe penetrating brain injury,” and another 1,715 who have had one or more limbs amputated.

Over 30,000 veterans are listed as suffering 100 percent service-related disabilities, while another 145,000 are listed as 70 to 90 percent disabled.” It reads: “The worst of these casualties have taken place under the Obama administration as a result of the so-called surge that the Democratic president ordered in Afghanistan.”

In its conclusion, the report not only seeks to dispel illusions that ending full-scale wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would produce any kind of “peace dividend” that could help ameliorate conditions of poverty, unemployment and declining living standards for working people in the US itself, but makes it clear that the legacy of decisions made during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts would impose significant long-term costs on the federal government, the people they govern, and a multitude of future generations for many years to come.

T H E T R U E C O S T O F W A R

NIGHT TERRORS Part 5 by John Glaser W

hen the Obama administration decided to militarize an intervention in Libya,

35 • 36

they did so without approval from Congress.

A UN resolution authorized a mission to protect the civilian population from Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi’s forces, but the mission quickly morphed into an extended military conflict aimed at regime change. Not only did Obama violate Constitutional requirements which give Congress the authority to authorize war, he also disregarded the applicability of the postVietnam War legislation – the War Power Resolution – which requires notifying Congress of military action and receiving formal authorization if it lasts more than 60 days.

At the time, this was viewed by many as a gratuitous expansion of Executive power plainly not in keeping with much lauded American principles like checks and balances. There was even opposition within Washington: there was a House vote on an amendment to stop funding the Libyan War, a formal letter by the Speaker to conform to the law, and ten legislators filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration for unlawfully taking the country to war.

This controversy was something of a nod to various antiquated notions of the rule of law in this country. As James Madison said: “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.” This is such a fundamental tenet of basic rule of law as initially conceived, that even in such a criminal and corrupt Congress as we now have, some opposition to Obama’s martial overreach was perhaps predictable But for the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of a secret, unaccountable U.S. military force with activities and implications far more pernicious than Obama’s criminal disregard for the rule of law for intervention in Libya. This rise has occurred without even a fraction of the feigned opposition to intervention in Libya.

These forces have been known for their brutality and have been at the forefront of Bush and Obama’s night raid strategies as well as savage torture regimes in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

“THIS NEW PENTAGON POWER ELITE IS WAGING A GLOBAL WAR WHOSE SIZE AND SCOPE HAS NEVER BEEN REVEALED.”

N I G H T T E R R O R S

37 • 38

Joint Special Operations Command ( JSOC) is an unwieldy private army at the command of the President, and him only. And they conduct military and spy missions all over the world, never receiving formal congressional approval and never garnering even the limited scrutiny applied to the U.S.-led no-fly zone in Libya.

“Without the knowledge of the American public,” wrote Nick Turse back in August, “a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries. This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed.” According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, JSOC forces “reportedly conduct highly sensitive combat and supporting operations against terrorists on a world-wide basis.” As the New York Times this week reported:

The Special Operations Command now numbers just under 66,000 people — including both military personnel and Defense Department civilians — a doubling since 2001. Its budget has reached $10.5 billion, up from $4.2 billion in 2001 (after adjusting for inflation). Over the past decade, Special Operations Command personnel have been deployed for combat operations, exercises, training and other liaison missions in more than 70 countries.

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Special Operations Command sustained overseas deployments of more than 12,000 troops a day, with four-fifths committed to the broader Middle East.

JSOC operates outside the confines of the traditional military and even beyond what the CIA is able to do.

It’s unprecedented, but the Times reported that the leader of the Special Operations Command Admiral William H. McRaven is requesting even more unaccountability. He “wants the authority to quickly move his units to potential hot spots without going through the standard Pentagon process governing overseas deployments.” Those deployments have been focused in the Middle East, but also include Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Night raids have more than tripled there since 2009. In one notable incident in February of 2010, U.S. Special Operations Forces surrounded a house in a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and ended up killing two civilian men and three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager). U.S. troops, realizing their mistake, lied and tampered with the evidence at the scene, attempting blame the murders on the Taliban. Victims have even claimed that the men would dig out the bullets from the bodies with knives so that the killings couldn’t be traced back to the operation or Admiral McRaven.

These tactics very often kill civilians and the vast majority of those detained during night raids and sent without a trial to the detention facility at Bagram Airbase have usually been innocent civilians.

JSOC

NEVER KNOCK

N I G H T T E R R O R S

39 • 40

But it goes well beyond the war zones. In concert with the Executive’s new claims on extra-judicial assassinations via drone strikes, even if the target is an American citizen, JSOC goes around the world murdering suspects without the oversight of a judge or, god forbid, granting those unfortunate souls the right to defend themselves in court against secret, evidence-less government decrees about their guilt. As Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh said at a speaking event in 2009:

Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

Marc Ambinder has written a new e-book called The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army. Ambinder gave a revealing interview to Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman in which he claims that JSOC has faced some accountability. For example, after it was revealed they were torturing people in Iraq at Camp Nama, an internal investigation “resulted in about 30 people being disciplined, with some of them kicked out of the military or transferred to other units.” Ouch, harsh punishment for the crime of systematic torture. Ambinder explains that “JSOC prefers to keep its record of accountability in-house,” which of course is precisely anathema to the spirit of the word accountability.

JSOC operates in a legal black hole, where no law seems to be applicable which might restrain their activities. Authorization from Congress for the use of military force abroad is so irrelevant to the application of JSOC, it’s never even been suggested in Washington, so far as I know. What makes JSOC immune from congressional oversight, the Constitution, and the rule of law, nobody seems to know. Furthermore, one has to accept the premise that America owns the world and has jurisdiction on every speck of the planet in order to believe that the national sovereignty of countries JSOC infiltrates isn’t being violated.

Since World War II the United States government has divided up the world into different war zones. Various regions were placed under the auspices of some subdivision of the U.S. military in case of war and in the effort to maintain global hegemony. “The Unified Combatant Command system,” a recent Congressional Research report explains, “signified the recognition by the United States

that it would continue to have a worldwide, continuous global military presence.”

U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) had responsibility over the Middle East and parts of Asia, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) over the North Americas, U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) over Europe, and so on.

This system was itself a betrayal of principles espoused in the American Revolution against an all-powerful Executive and standing armies. It was truly the makings of Empire, and America’s subsequent military adventures and bourgeoning national security state came at the expense of civil liberties here at home and the livelihood of millions abroad. In September 2000, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest published a series of articles on this system of global militarism (cited in the CRS report) exposing how each domain had yielded an inordinate amount of influence in policymaking. She wrote that they “had evolved into the modern-day equivalent of the Roman Empire’s proconsuls—wellfunded, semi-autonomous, unconventional centers of U.S. foreign policy.” The CRS report asks “whether or not COCOMs [Combatant Commands] have assumed too much influence overseas, thereby diminishing the roles other U.S. government entities play in foreign and national security policy….The assertion that COCOMs have usurped other U.S. government entities in the foreign policy arena may deserve greater examination.”

The imperial mechanisms fully embraced by Washington insulated the government from the basic standards of a free society: that the people ought to have some knowledge and control over the actions of their representative government; that the people and the state were engaged in a consensual relationship. JSOC takes this an immense step further. As Ambinder said in his interview:

“There are legal restrictions on what the CIA can do in terms of covert operations. There has to be a finding, the president has to notify at least the “Gang of Eight” [leaders of the intelligence oversight committees] in Congress. JSOC doesn’t have to do any of that. There is very little accountability for their actions. What’s weird is that many in congress who’d be very sensitive to CIA operations almost treat JSOC as an entity that doesn’t have to submit to oversight. It’s almost like this is the president’s private army, we’ll let the president do what he needs to do.”

N I G H T T E R R O R S

Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

DESENSITIZED GAMING Part 6 F

rom a young age I can recall playing many first person shooter (FPS) games.

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Titles like Medal of Honor, Halo and Counter Strike were among the best in action packed arcade kill-em’-all frenzies. Whether I wished to revisit the D-Day landings and battle my way through the trenches, kill hordes of alien invaders in the year 3000, or just fire a big rocket at a bunch of terrorists – it felt good. Having said that, with the next generation console platforms allowing FPS gaming to reach epic proportions, and in the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent ‘War on Terror’, is the gaming world desensitizing the youth of today from the cold reality of modern warfare? In this part I will discuss my experiences with a number of games, and how the blockbuster titles are fueling the fire and glorifying the terrors of warfare.

Let’s start with my first love affair in the FPS genre – Counter Strike – one of the earliest multi player online PC platform shooters. It was simple, competitive and addictive.

Each game consisted of two teams; Terrorists (Ts) and Counter-Terrorists (CTs).

In Defusal the aim of each round was to plant and defend the bomb (as the Ts) until detonation, whilst the opposition (CTs) had to deactivate the bomb before the time limit. Either team could win by eliminating the opposition or by running down the clock without a successful plant. The second game mode was Hostage Rescue where the Ts had to protect the hostages from the CTs who’s job it was to carry at least one of the two

When the choice arose to choose between teams, most players would often side with the Counter-Terrorists.

This caused a major unbalance to the game but was in no way surprising.

hostages to the rescue point. Simple. Since the game was trying to mimic real life scenarios many of the maps were set in the Middle East, with a handful in Western countries thrown in for good measure.

The teams of course shared limited dialogue among themselves which related to their role. The CTs spoke with tactical terminology in a clear accent associated with their nationality (GIGN, SWAT, FBI, SAS), while the Ts spoke in English with an Arabic accent, usually shouting and swearing in an aggressive in tone. As you can imagine, teams usually sided with the Counter-Terrorists, both in number of players and “for the greater good”.

They are often perceived as the “good guys” or “protagonists”, opposite of the bad guys, the Terrorists. Their traits include having a wider arsenal of weapons as well as having a slight tactical advantage on many maps. However, many of their weapons were much more expensive.

What I find so fascinating about Counter Strike was how racist and pro-war the online community could be. Screen names often offended another culture and ignored by server admins, logo’s depicting dead “terrorists” and images of ground zero were sprayed around the map or represented in peoples avatars. Frustration would boil over through the microphone chatter as racial terms were thrown about. All this hatred, all this racism and still I continued to play.

D E S E N S I T I Z E D G A M I N G

47

DESENSITIZED GAMING

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48

D E S E N S I T I Z E D G A M I N G

49

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Continuing my search for multi player PC shooter games, I came across a free-to-download Army Simulator patriotically named as “America’s Army”. The graphics looked good, the reviews were great and I couldn’t say no to a free game. So without hesitation I signed up and started playing.

Little did I know that it wasn’t just a game, it was a recruitment tool.

America’s Army was released on the 4th of July in 2002. Its creation had been envisioned as early as 1997 in a brainstorming session between the National Research Council, and (MOVES), the Modeling, Virtual Environments, and Simulation Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School. The game was given out at recruitment stations, but most significantly, visitors to the U.S. Department of Defense America’s Army website could download the game for free. In its first six months America’s Army saw 1.5 million downloads. It was considered the most successful game launch in history at the time and became the number one online action game in the country with more than three million registered players. The game received several awards for its realism and was ranked as an 8.4 by the gaming source, Gamespot.com. By 2007 players had devoted “212 million hours

representing some 3.6 billion rounds of online game play.”

America’s Army boasts the most authentic rendering of combat because real soldiers help create the synthespians. Players are positioned as first-person shooters, and after basic training the advanced “marksmanship” is so realistic that the computer screen moves in time to the digital soldier’s breathing under fire. The commercial developer, Epic Games provided the game engine, and the realistic 3-D environments where gamers/soldiers “walk through” combat zones opened new avenues for training. Building on the success of what Wired magazine called an“interactive recruitment ad”, the US Army opened a videogame studio with industry veterans, former employees of companies such as Interactive Magic, Timeline, Vertis, SouthPeak Interactive, Vicious Cycle Software and Red Storm Entertainment. The task; “to write other kinds of software to simulate training for a variety of armed forces and government projects.” The new studio in North Carolina was headed by Jerry Heneghan, a West Point graduate and former Apache pilot who had produced Tom Clancy-style military simulation games at Red Storm Entertainment. Close to Fort Bragg, programmers would be able

to pattern simulations on real Army vehicles.

Heneghan said the “positive response for this type of training content has been overwhelming, We are having a difficult time keeping up with the many opportunities presented to us.” The next America’s Army: Special Forces was introduced on June 1, 2004 and Army’s web page boasted that the game “continues to focus on the crucial, specialized role of the Army’s special forces…as they fight the Global War on Terrorism.” Action-packed entertainment merges with virtual boot camps as personnel from the CIA to Special Forces learn techniques for eliminating cell-operated terrorists units worldwide, but especially in the Middle East. Not only had the game kept its audience up to date with current affairs and conflicts, it was teaching them how to fight, and who to kill.

Yet it would seem no other series of games has had such an impact on the way we play FPS’s, or they outlook we have to wards the War on Terror as Call of Duty. More specifically the Modern Warfare branch. Which is aimed at terrorism and how it has become the focus of a modern kind of warfare. There is so much I could draw upon from the franchise but I am just going to speak briefly about a level in Modern Warfare 2 that stands

out. The controversial “No-Russian” level was designed to cause an emotional impact on the player; in it you control a terrorist as he shoots up an airport. This is important because in gaming you are typically the hero and acts such as terrorism are usually experienced as a bystander. By forcing the player to control an antagonist when they commit such a heinous act, the narrative is elevated morally; we feel disgust for the actions we as the terrorist have committed. When we control the protagonist again, our need to defeat them is also increased drastically because we have experienced firsthand their actions. It is a notable level for its impact on gaming narratives as it uses Point of View and Alignment to achieve extremely effective results. Since the level is rather de stressing the player is offered the option not to play it, but who would say no to part of the game they have paid to play?

All in all, gaming has moved away from revisiting the D-Day landings and Sci-Fi settings, to completely immersing young players in the world of the ‘War on Terror’. After all, it is a glamorous war which we can all get involved in one way or another, we just have to keep playing games that desensitize us from the reality of wars. Where crimes are committed by all sides, and terrors too.

D E S E N S I T I Z E D G A M I N G

STOKING THE HELLFIRE Part 7 W

hat a lot of people fail to realise, is that the war in the Middle East is creating terrorists.

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Every targeter drone strike that kills one alQaeda suspect, kills plenty more civilians, and with every family member murdered by the occupation brings about a father or brother or son to pick up a rifle, or strap themselves with a bomb in revenge. As long as there is a continual war in their country killing their people, then there will always be a resistance.

There will always be combatants looking for revenge, and there will always be a reason for the war to continue.

For the families of those killed in the Middle East as nothing more than mere “collateral damage” it is hard to comprehend how they must feel towards the West and their occupation in their homeland. Although I have a strong feeling they wouldn’t think twice before taking up arms to defend their loved ones. For arguments sake I will create a hypothetical situation that would resonate much better with my audience and hopefully those that read this.

Ima g ine a foreign occupation of the United Kingdom from the East, lets just say China for example.

Now they have reason to believe that you and your families are harbouring criminals that might have something to do with recent attacks in Beijing, possible ties with an extremist Christian group that don’t like the way the Chinese government run things.

So the Chinese military start launching their Soar Dragon Drones over London, occasionally firing at potential Christian extremists.

With the blast radius’ out of control and re-

“ Religion had nothing to do with this. We watched films. We were shown videos with images from the war in Iraq. We were told we must do something big.

That’s why we met.”

con slightly misguided they happen to kill some of your loved ones. With the occupation in full swing the Chinese military begin kicking down doors and dragging away family members to lock up in a detention facility to interrogate and torture them, trying to find out more information on the groups.

Now luckily we don’t have to experience this sort of occupation in the West, yet, but I’m pretty certain it wouldn’t take much before a rebel group of lost souls and angered family members found some firearms and explosives and began attacking the occupation out of vengeance. It’s just hypothetical situation, but it’s still something to think about.

With all of the footage leaked from the front lines in the Middle East it’s easy to see how relatives and fighters can accumulate hatred for the Western occupation. Hussein Omar was a terrorist, interviewed after participating in a plot to bomb the London Underground on July 21st, 2005. He gave a statement claiming that “Religion had nothing to do with it” and the motives behind the plot was a response to being “shown videos from the war in Iraq.” This gave him the courage to meet with a fellow extremist and devise a plan for publicizing revenge against the West.

Another example of how the occupation of the Middle East is fuelling the fire comes from the lack of aid towards Syria and the totalitarian Assad regime that is spurring on a jihadist war from the Muslim world.

Spanning from European Muslims to Americans, thousands have flown out to the region to join the rebel groups in conflict with the government forces. At first I felt it was best not to intervene with yet another war, but as the story develops, more and more war crimes are being committed by both sides and the wrong action is being taken to quell the conflict.

IT TAKES S T O K I N G T H E H E L L F I R E

TO TANGO

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“IF CHILDREN ARE AL-QAEDA, THEN WE ARE ALL AL-QAEDA. IF CHILDREN ARE TERRORISTS, THEN WE ARE ALL TERRORISTS.” - A father speaking to Jeremy Scahill in the documentary ‘Dirty Wars’. His daughter was one of many killed in a targeted drone strike in Yemen, where there is currently no declared war.

S T O K I N G T H E H E L L F I R E

Although no one wants to talk about it, 9/11 is still hurting America. That terrible day inflicted a wound of public fear that easily reopens with the smallest provocation, and it continues to bleed the United States of money, lives, and goodwill around the world. Indeed, America’s response to its fear has, in turn, made Americans less safe and has inspired more threats and attacks.

In the decade since 9/11, the United States has conquered and occupied two large Muslim countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), compelled a huge Muslim army to root out a terrorist sanctuary (Pakistan), deployed thousands of Special Forces troops to numerous Muslim countries (Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, etc.), imprisoned hundreds of Muslims without recourse, and waged a massive war of ideas involving Muslim clerics to denounce violence and new institutions to bring Western

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Yes, these attacks are overseas and mostly focused on military and diplomatic targets. So too, however, were the anti-American suicide attacks before 2001. It is important to remember that the 1995 and 1996 bombings of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen were the crucial dots that showed the threat was rising prior to 9/11. Today, such dots are occurring by the dozens every month. So why is nobody connecting them? U.S. military policies have not stopped the rising wave of extremism in the Muslim world. The reason has not been lack of effort, or lack of bipartisan support for aggressive military policies, or lack of funding, or lack of genuine patriotism.

No. Something else is creating the mismatch between America’s effort and the

“ Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame. norms to Muslim countries. Yet Americans still seem strangely mystified as to why some Muslims might be angry about this situation.

In a narrow sense, America is safer today than on 9/11. There has not been another attack on the same scale. U.S. defenses regarding immigration controls, airport security, and the disruption of potentially devastating domestic plots have all improved.

But in a broader sense, America has become perilously unsafe. Each month, there are more suicide terrorists trying to kill Americans and their allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries than in all the years before 2001 combined. From 1980 to 2003, there were 343 suicide attacks around the world, and at most 10 percent were anti-American inspired. Since 2004, there have been more than 2,000, over 91 percent against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries.

results. For nearly a decade, Americans have been waging a long war against terrorism without much serious public debate about what is truly motivating terrorists to kill them. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, this was perfectly explicable -- the need to destroy al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan was too urgent to await sober analyses of root causes.

But, the absence of public debate did not stop the great need to know or, perhaps better to say, to “understand” the events of that terrible day. In the years before 9/11, few Americans gave much thought to what drives terrorism -- a subject long relegated to the fringes of the media, government, and universities.

And few were willing to wait for new studies, the collection of facts, and the dispassionate assessment of alternative causes. Terrorism produces fear and anger, and these emotions are not patient.

A simple narrative was readily available, and a powerful conventional wisdom began to exert its grip. Because the 9/11 hijackers were all Muslims, it was easy to presume that Islamic fundamentalism was the central motivating force driving the 19 hijackers to kill themselves in order to kill Americans.

Within weeks after the 9/11 attacks, surveys of American attitudes show that this presumption was fast congealing into a hard reality in the public mind. Americans immediately wondered, “Why do they hate us?” and almost as immediately came to the conclusion that it was because of “who we are, not what we do.” As President George W. Bush said in his first address to Congress after the 9/11 attacks: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

What really changed after 9/11 was the fear that anti-American Muslims desperately wanted to kill Americans and so any risk that such extremists would get weapons of mass destruction suddenly seemed too great. Although few Americans feared Islam before 9/11, by the spring of 2003, a near majority -- 49 percent -- strongly perceived that half or more of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims were deeply anti-American, and a similar fraction also believed that Islam itself promoted violence. No wonder there was little demand by congressional committees or the public at large for a detailed review of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD prior to the invasion.

The goal of transforming Arab societies into true Western democracies had powerful effects on U.S. commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Constitutions had to be written; elections held; national armies built;

Yet in actual fact, the root of the problem is the foreign military occupations.”

Thus was unleashed the “war on terror.” The narrative of Islamic fundamentalism did more than explain why America was attacked and encourage war against Iraq.

It also pointed toward a simple, grand solution. If Islamic fundamentalism was driving the threat and if its roots grew from the culture of the Arab world, then America had a clear mission: To transform Arab societies -with Western political institutions and social norms as the ultimate antidote to the virus of Islamic extremism.

This narrative had a powerful effect on support for the invasion of Iraq. Opinion polls show that for years before the invasion, more than 90 percent of the U.S. public believed that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But this belief alone was not enough to push significant numbers to support war.

entire economies restructured. Traditional barriers against women had to be torn down.

Most important, all these changes also required domestic security, which meant maintaining approximately 150,000 U.S. and coalition ground troops in Iraq for many years and increasing the number of U.S. and Western troops in Afghanistan each year from 2003 on.

Put differently, adopting the goal of transforming Muslim countries is what created the long-term military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, the United States would almost surely have sought to create a stable order after toppling the regimes in these countries in any case. However, in both, America’s plans quickly went far beyond merely changing leaders or ruling parties; only by creating Western-style democracies in the Muslim world could Americans defeat terrorism once and for all.

S T O K I N G T H E H E L L F I R E

There’s just one problem: We now know that this narrative is not true. New research provides strong evidence that suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance. Although this pattern began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, a wealth of new data presents a powerful picture.

Further, over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American.

The vast majority of suicide terrorists hail

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dress these criticisms by outlining the two factors that determine the likelihood of suicide terrorism being employed against an occupying force.

The first factor is social distance between the occupier and occupied. The wider the social distance, the more the occupied community may fear losing its way of life.

Although other differences may matter, research shows that resistance to occupations is especially likely to escalate to suicide terrorism when there is a difference between the predominant religion of the occupier and the

More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, according to extensive research that we conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day. As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically – from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009. from the local region threatened by foreign troops, which is why 90 percent of suicide attackers in Afghanistan are Afghans.

Israelis have their own narrative about terrorism, which holds that Arab fanatics seek to destroy the Jewish state because of what it is, not what it does. But since Israel withdrew its army from Lebanon in May 2000, there has not been a single Lebanese suicide attack. Similarly, since Israel withdrew from Gaza and large parts of the West Bank, Palestinian suicide attacks are down over 90 percent.

Some have disputed the causal link between foreign occupation and suicide terrorism, pointing out that some occupations by foreign powers have not resulted in suicide bombings -- for example, critics often cite post-World War II Japan and Germany. Our research provides sufficient evidence to ad-

predominant religion of the occupied.

Religious difference matters not because some religions are predisposed to suicide attacks. Indeed, there are religious differences even in purely secular suicide attack campaigns, such as the LTTE (Hindu) against the Sinhalese (Buddhists).

Rather, religious difference matters because it enables terrorist leaders to claim that the occupier is motivated by a religious agenda that can scare both secular and religious members of a local community -- this is why Osama bin Laden never misses an opportunity to describe U.S. occupiers as “crusaders” motivated by a Christian agenda to convert Muslims, steal their resources, and change the local population’s way of life.

The second factor is prior rebellion.

Suicide terrorism is typically a strategy of last resort, often used by weak actors when other,

S T O K I N G

non-suicidal methods of resistance to occupation fail. This is why we see suicide attack campaigns so often evolve from ordinary terrorist or guerrilla campaigns, as in the cases of Israel and Palestine, the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey, or the LTTE in Sri Lanka.

One of the most important findings from our research is that empowering local groups can reduce suicide terrorism.

In Iraq, the surge’s success was not the result of increased U.S. military control of Anbar province, but the empowerment of Sunni tribes, commonly called the Anbar Awakening, which enabled Iraqis to provide for their own security. On the other hand, taking power away from local groups can escalate suicide terrorism. In Afghanistan, U.S. and Western forces began to exert more control over the country’s Pashtun regions starting in early 2006, and suicide attacks dramatically escalated from this point on.

The research suggests that U.S. interests would be better served through a policy of offshore balancing. Some scholars have taken issue with this approach, arguing that keeping boots on the ground in South Asia is essential for U.S. national security. Proponents of this strategy fail to realize how U.S. ground forces often inadvertently produce

more anti-American terrorists than they kill.

In 2000, before the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, there were 20 suicide attacks around the world, and only one (against the USS Cole) was directed against Americans.

In the last 12 months, by comparison, 300 suicide attacks have occurred, and over 270 were anti-American. We simply must face the reality that, no matter how well-intentioned, the current war on terror is not serving U.S. interests.

The United States has been great in large part because it respects understanding and discussion of important ideas and concepts, and because it is free to change course. Intelligent decisions require putting all the facts before us and considering new approaches. The first step is recognizing that occupations in the Muslim world don’t make Americans any safer -- in fact, they are at the heart of the problem.

T H E H E L L F I R E

NO TRIAL, JUST ERRORS Part 8 G

uantanamo Bay really captures the essence of how the War on Terror is an unjust conflict,

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and questions the intentions of the “free world” and its totalitarian military presence.

America have always prided themselves as being a nation with freedom of speech, freedom of expression and everything else that comes with living in the land of the “free”. So how is it, twelve years after the opening of Gitmo, are we still hearing stories about unjust indefinite detention of “suspected terrorists” and complete stripping away of human rights by the people that believe in freedom so dearly?

Is Gitmo just an extension of how terrorish these leaders can be, or are they right to be running these eternment camps in an age where everyone, even terrorists, should be allowed a just trial for their supposed actions?

For those of you that don’t know much about Gitmo I’ll try to be as brief as I can to explain the situation. Firstly let’s start with its location.

Guantánamo Bay is a bay located in Guantánamo Province at the southeastern end of Cuba. It is the largest harbor on the south side of the island and it is surrounded by steep hills which create an enclave that is cut off from its immediate hinterland. The United States assumed territorial control over the southern portion of Guantánamo Bay under the 1903 Cuban–American Treaty. The United States exercises complete jurisdiction and control over this territory, while recognizing that Cuba retains ultimate sovereignty.

The current government of Cuba regards the U.S. presence in Guantánamo Bay as illegal and insists the Cuban–American Treaty was obtained by threat of force and is in violation of international law. Some legal scholars judge

GITMO has since been criticized as a way of mass imprisonment, usually of innocent civilians with no ties to terrorist groups.

that the lease may be voidable. It is the home of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which is governed by the United States.

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, also referred to as Guantánamo or Gitmo, is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, established in January 2002. In January 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said the prison camp was established to detain extraordinarily dangerous prisoners, to interrogate prisoners in an optimal setting, and to prosecute prisoners for war crimes. Detainees captured in the War on Terror, most of them from Afghanistan and much smaller numbers later from Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia were transported to the prison.

Since January 2002, 779 men have been brought to Guantanamo. Nearly 200 were released by mid-2004, before there had been any CSRTs (Combatant Status Review Tribunal) to review whether individuals were rightfully held as enemy combatants. Although the Bush administration said most of the men had been captured in fighting in Afghanistan, a 2006 report prepared by the Center for Policy and Research, Seton Hall University Law School reviewed DOD data for the remaining 517 men in 2005 and “established that over 80% of the prisoners were captured not by Americans on the battlefield but by Pakistanis and Afghans, often in exchange for bounty payments.”

The U.S. offered $5,000 per prisoner and distributed leaflets widely in the regions of the Middle East.

N O T R I A L , J U S T E R R O R S

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JANUARY 11, 2014 MARKED THE 12TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE U.S. DETENTION FACILITY AT GUANTANAMO BAY. THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION OPENED THE PRISON TO HOUSE AND INTERROGATE SUSPECTED TERRORISTS AS PART OF THE WAR ON TERROR.

N O T R I A L , J U S T E R R O R S

IN JUNE 2007, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA PROMISED, “WE’RE GOING TO CLOSE GUANTANAMO.” IN 2009, PRESIDENT OBAMA SIGNED AN EXECUTIVE ORDER REQUIRING THE CAMP TO BE CLOSED BY JANUARY 22, 2010.

IT’S STILL OPEN TO THIS DAY.

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N O

SINCE JANUARY 2002,

779 MEN

HAVE BEEN BROUGHT TO GUANTANAMO BAY.

T R I A L , J U S T E R R O R S

FATHERS

HUSBANDS

BROTHERS

SONS 61 • 62

Abbas Abed Romi Al Naely Abd Al Aziz Abduh Abdallah Ali Al Suwaydi Abd Al Aziz Kadim Salim Al Ayli Abd Al Aziz Muhammad Ibrahim Al Nasir Abd Al Aziz Sayir Al Shamari Abd Al Hadi Omar Mahmoud Faraj Abd Al Hamid Ibn Abd Al Salim Ibn Miftah Al Ghazzawi Abd Al Hizani Abd Al Khaliq Ahmed Salih Al Baydani Abd Al Malak Abd Al Wahab Al Rahbi Abd Al Nasir Ibn Muhammad Khantumani Abd Al Rahim Abd Al Razzaq Janko Abd Al Rahim Hussein Mohammed Al Nashiri Abd Al Rahman Abdu Abu Al Ghayth Sulayman Abd Al Rahman Ahmed Said Abdihi Abd Al Rahman Moaza Zafer Al Amri Abd Al Rahman Shalbi Isa Uwaydah Abd Al Salam Al Hilah Abd Al-razaq ‘abdallah Hamid Ibrahim Al-sharikh Abdallah Aiza Al Matrafi Abdallah Faris Al Unazi Thani Abdallah Ibrahim Al Rushaydan Abdallah Saleh Ali Al Ajmi Abdallah Yahya Yusif Al Shibli Abdel Hadi Mohammed Badan Al Sebaii Sebaii Abdel Qadir Hussein Al Mudhaffari Abdul Ahmad Abdul Al Zaher Abdul Al-hameed Mohammed Andarr Abdul Aziz Abdul Rahman Abdul Aziz Al Baddah Abdul Aziz Saad Al Khaldi Abdul Bagi Abdul Baqi Abdul Ghafaar Abdul Ghafour Abdul Ghani Abdul Ghappar Abdul Rahman

Abdul Hadi Muhamed Rasul Sayed Abdul Hafiz Abdul Hakim Abdul Rahman Abduaziz Al Mousa Abdul Hakim Bukhary Abdul Hakim Ghalib Ahmed Abdul Halim Sadiqi Abdul Hanan Abdul Haq Wasiq Abdul Helil Mamut Abdul Karim Abdul Karim Irgashive Abdul Khadr Abdul Latif Elbanna Abdul Latif Nasir Abdul Majid Muhammed Abdul Malik Bajabu Abdul Matin Abdul Mowla Abdul Muhammad Ahmad Nassir Al Muhajari Abdul Muhssin Abdul Reb Salah Al Aubaissy Abdul Nasir Abdul Qadir Yousef Hussein Abdul Qudus Abdul Raham Houari Abdul Rahaman Atah Allah Ali Mahmood Shubatti Abdul Rahim Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani Abdul Rahim Muslimdost Abdul Rahman Abdul Rahman Abdullah Mohamed Juma Kahm Abdul Rahman Ma Ath Thafir Al Amri Abdul Rahman Mohammed Hussein Khowlan Abdul Rahman Muhammad Salih Nasir Abdul Rahman Nashi Badi Al Hataybi Abdul Rahman Noorani Abdul Rahman Owaid Mohammad Al Juaid Abdul Rahman Umir Al Qyati Abdul Rahman Uthman Ahmed Abdul Rauf Aliza Abdul Rauf Omar Muhammad Abu Al Qusin Abdul Razak Abdul Razaq Abdul Raziq Abdul Razzak Abdul Razzaq Abdul Salaam Abdul Salam Ghetan Abdul Salam Zaeef Abdul Samad Abdul Satar Nafeesi Abdul Sattar Abdul Wahab Abdul Waheed Abdul Zahor Abdulah Alhamiri Abdulghani Abdulhadi Abdallah Ibrahim Al Sharakh Abdullah Abd Al Mu’in Al Wafti Abdullah Abd Al Qadir Akhun Abdullah Al Noaimi Abdullah Al Tayabi Abdullah Ali Al Utaybi Abdullah Bin Ali Al Lutfi

Abdullah Bin Omar Abdullah D. Kafkas Abdullah Edmondada Abdullah Ghofoor Abdullah Gulam Rasoul Abdullah Hamid Al Qahtani Abdullah Hekmat Abdullah Kamel Abudallah Kamel Abdullah Khan Abdullah Mohammad Khan Abdullah Muhammad Saleh Ganmi Abdullah Muhammed Abdel Aziz Abdullah Tabarak Ahmad Abdullah Tohtasinovich Magrupov Abdullah Wazir Abdullahi Sudi Arale Abdulli Feghoul Abdulrahim Kerimbakiev Abib Sarajuddin Abid Raza Abu Asah Adham Muhammad Ali Awith Abu Bakr Ibn Ali Muhammad Al Ahdal Abu Bakr Qasim Abu Farajal Libi Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda Bin Qumu Adel Abdulhehim Adel Ben Mabrouk Bin Hamida Boughanmi Adel Bin Muhammad Abbess Ouerghi Adel Fattough Ali Algazzar Adel Hassan Adel Noori Adel Zamel ‘abd Al-mahsen Al-zamel Adil Bin Ahmad Ibrahim Hakimi Adil Hadi Al Jazairi Bin Hamlili Adil Kamil Abdullah Al Wadi Adil Said Al Haj Ubayd Al Busayss Adil Uqla Hassan Al Nusayri Adnan Farhan Abd Allatif Adnan Mohammed Ali Ahmad Abd Al Rahman Ahmad Ahmad Abdel Qader Ahmad Hasan Abu Bakr Ahmad Muhammad Haza Al Darbi Ahmad Tourson Ahmad Yaslam Said Kuman Ahmad Zayid Salim Al Zuhayri Ahmed Adil Ahmed Adnan Muhammad Ajam Ahmed Bin Kaddour Labed Ahmed Bin Saleh Belbacha Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani Ahmed Hassan Jamil Suleyman Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani Ahmed Mohamed Yaqub Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz Ahmed Rashidi Ahmed Umar Abdullah Al Hikimi Aiat Nasimovich Vahitov Akhdar Qasem Basit Akhtar Mohammed Akhtarmohammad Akhtiar Mohammad Al Khadr Abdallah Muhammed Al Yafi Al Rachid Hasan Ahmad Abdul Raheem Ali Abdul Motalib Awayd Hassan Al Tayeea Ali Abdullah Ahmed Ali Ahmad Muhammad Al Razihi Ali Ahmed

Ali Bin Ali Aleh Ali Hamza Ahmed Suleiman Al Bahlul Ali Husayn Abdullah Al Tays Ali Husein Muhammad Shaaban Ali Mohammed Ali Mohsen Salih Ali Muhammed Nasir Mohammed Ali Shah Ali Sher Hamidullah Ali Yahya Mahdi Al Raimi Alif Khan Alif Mohammed Allah Muhammed Saleem Allah Nasir Almasm Rabilavich Sharipov Aman Amanullah Amanullah Alikozi Amin Ullah Aminulla Amin Aminullah Baryalai Tukhi Amir Yakoub Mohammed Al Amir Mahmoud Ammar Al Baluchi Amran Baqur Mohammed Hawsawi Anwar Al Nurr Anwar Khan Arkan Muhammad Ghafil Al Karim Asad Ullah Asad Ullah Ashraf Salim Abd Al Salam Sultan Asif Iqbal Asim Thabit Abdallah Al Khalaqi Ataullah Adam Gul Awad Khalifah Muhammad Abu Bakr Abu Uwayshah Al Barasi Awal Gul Ayman Mohammad Silman Al Amrani Ayman Muhammad Ahmad Al Shurfa Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi Ayub Murshid Ali Salih Azimullah Aziz Abdul Naji Aziz Khan Ali Khan Zumarikourt Azizullah Asekzai Bacha Khan Bader Al Bakri Al Samiri Badruzzan Badr Badshah Wali Bahtiyar Mahnut Bakhtiar Bamari Bandar Ahmad Mubarak Al Jabri Bar Far Huddine Barak Baridad Bashir Ahmad Bashir Bin Lap Bashir Nasir Ali Al Marwalah Bensayah Belkacem Bessam Muhammed Saleh Al Dubaikey Bijad Thif Allah Al Atabi Binyam Ahmad Muhammad Bisher Amin Khalil Al Rawi Bismaullah Bismillah Bismillah Bostan Karim Brahim Yadel Chaman David Michael Hicks Dawd Gul

Dawut Abdurehim Din Mohammed Farhad Djamel Saiid Ali Ameziane Ehsanullah Ehssanullah Ejaz Ahmad Khan El Haj Omar Boudellaa Emad Abdallah Hassan Emam Abdulahat Emdash Abdullah Turkash Esmatulla Ezat Khan Fadil Bin Hussien Bin Saleh Bin Hautash Fael Roda Al-waleeli Faha Sultan Fahd Abdallah Ibrahim Al-shabani Fahd Muhammed Abdullah Al Fouzan Fahd Salih Sulayman Al Jutayli Fahd Umr Abd Al Majid Al Sharif Fahed Abdullah Ahmad Ghazi Fahed Al Harazi Fahed Nasser Mohamed Fahmi Abdallah Ahmad Ubadi Al Tulaqi Fahmi Salem Said Al Sani Faik Iqbal Faiz Ullah Faizal Saha Al Nasir Faris Muslim Al Ansari Faruq Ali Ahmed Fawaz Abd Al-aziz Al- Zahrani Fawaz Naman Hamoud Abdullah Mahdi Fayad Yahya Ahmed Fayiz Ahmad Yahia Suleiman Fayiz Muhammad Ahmad Jamal Muhammad Al Kandari Fazaldad Feda Ahmed Feroz Ali Abassi Fethi Boucetta Fizaulla Rahman Fouzi Khalid Abdullah Al Awda Fuad Mahmud Hasan Al Rabia Ghalaab Bashir Ghaleb Nasir Awadh Al Bayhani Ghanim Abdul Rahman Al Harbi Ghaser Zaban Safollah Ghassan Abdallah Ghazi Al Sharbi Gholam Ruhani Ghuladkhan Gul Zaman Guleed Hassan Ahmed Habib Noor Habib Rahman Habib Rasool Hafez Qari Mohamed Saad Iqbal Madni Hafice Leqeat Manzu Hafiz Ihsan Saeed Hafizullah Hafizullah Shabaz Khail Hail Aziz Ahmed Al Maythali Haji Bismullah Haji Faiz Mohammed Haji Ghalib Haji Hamidullah Haji Jalil Haji Mohammed Ayub Haji Mohammed Khan Achezkai Haji Mohammed Wazir Haji Muhammed Haji Nasrat Khan Haji Niam Kuchi

Haji Noorallah Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil Haji Shahzada Haji Wali Mohammed Hajiakbar Abdulghupur Hambali Hamdullah Hamidullah Hammad Ali Amno Gadallah Hammdidullah Hamood Ullah Khan Hamud Hasan Abdallah Hani Abdul Muslih Al Shulan Hani Saiid Mohammad Al Khalif Hanif Mohhamed Harun Al Afghani Haseeb Ayub Hasham Bin Ali Bin Amor Sliti Hassan Abdul Said Hassan Anvar Hassan Khalil Mohamoud Abdul Hamid Hassan Muhammad Ali Bin Attash Hassan Zumiri Haydar Jabbar Hafez Al Tamimi Hazrat Sangin Khan Hedi Ben Hedili Hammami Hezbullah Himdy Yasser Hiztullah Nasrat Yar Hozaifa Parhat Hukumra Humud Dakhil Humud Sa’id Al-jad’an Husayn Salim Muhammad Al Matari Yafai Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud Al Qosi Ibrahim Bin Shakaran Ibrahim Daif Allah Neman Al Sehli Ibrahim Fauzee Ibrahim Machd Achmed Zidan Ibrahim Muhammed Ibrahim Al Nasir Ibrahim Othman Ibrahim Idris Ibrahim Rushdan Brayk Al- Shili Ibrahim Shafir Sen Ibrahim Umar Ali Al- Umar Ibrahimj Sulayman Muhammad Arbaysh Idris Ahmed Abdu Qader Idris Ilkham Turdbyavich Batayev Imad Achab Kanouni Inayatullah Insanullah Isa Khan Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush Israr Ul Haq Issa Ali Abdullah Al Murbati Issam Hamid Al Bin Ali Al Jayfi Jabir Hasan Muhamed Al Qahtani Jabir Jubran Al Fayfi Jabran Said Bin Wazir Al Qahtani Jalal Salam Awad Awad Jamal Abdullah Kiyemba Jamal Malik Al Harith Jamal Muhammad Al-deen Jamal Muhammad Alawi Mari Jamil Ali Al Kabi Janan Taus Khan Jaralla Saleh Mohammed Kahla Al Marri Jawad Jabber Sadkhan Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Diyab Jihan Wali Jon Mohammad Barakzai Juma Din Juma Khan

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63 • 64

Juma Mohammed Abdul Latif Al Dosari Kakai Khan Kako Kandahari Kamalludin Kasimbekov Karam Khamis Sayd Khamsan Kari Mohammed Sarwar Kay Fiyatullah Khaled Ben Mustafa Khaled Muhammad Salih Al Dhuby Khaled Qasim Khalid Abd Al Jabbar Muhammad Uthman Al Qadasi Khalid Abdallah Abdel Rahman Al Morghi Khalid Bin Abdullah Mishal Thamer Al Hameydani Khalid Hassan Husayn Al Barakat Khalid Mahomoud Abdul Wahab Al Asmr Khalid Malu Shia Al Ghatani Khalid Mohammed Al Zaharni Khalid Rashd Ali Al Muri Khalid Said Muhammad Al Sayf Khalid Saud Abd Al Rahman Al Bawardi Khalid Shaykh Muhammad Khalid Sulaymanjaydh Al Hubayshi Khalil Rahman Hafez Khan Zaman Khandan Kadir Khi Ali Gul Khirullah Akah Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa Khudai Dad Kushky Yar Laacin Ikassrin Lakhdar Boumediene Lufti Bin Swei Lagha Mahbub Rahman Mahmoud Omar Muhammad Bin Atef Mahmud Abd Al Aziz Abd Al Wali Al Mujahid Mahmud Arkin Mahmud Nuri Mart Mahmud Sadik Mahmud Salem Haram Muhammad Mutleq Al Ali Mahngur Alikhan Mahr Rafat Al Quwari Majed Hamad Al Frih Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi Maji Afas Radhi Al Shimri Majid Abdallah Husayn Muhammad Al Samluli Al Harbi Majid Al Barayan Majid Aydha Muhammad Al Qurayshi Majid Khan Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmad Majid Mehmood Mamdouh Ibrahim Ahmed Habib Mammar Ameur Mana Shaman Allabardi Al Tabi Mansoor Muhammed Ali Qattaa Maroof Saleemovich Salehove Martin John Mubanga Mashur Abdullah Muqbil Ahmed Al Sabri Masum Abdah Muhammad Mazharudin Mazin Salih Musaid Al Awfi Mehdi Mohammad Ghezali Mehrabanb Fazrollah Menhal Al Henali Mesh Arsad Al Rashid Mesut Sen

Mirwais Hasan Mirza Mohammed Mish’al Muhammad Rashid Al-shedoky Mishal Awad Sayaf Alhabiri Mju Ayn Al Din Jamal Al Din Abd Al Fadhil Abd Al Sattar Moammar Badawi Dokhan Moazzan Begg Mohabet Khan Mohamad Souleimani Laalmai Mohamed Anwar Kurd Mohamed Atiq Awayd Al Harbi Mohamed Ibrahim Awzar Mohamed Jawad Mohamed Kabel Mohamed Rahim Mohamedou Ould Salahi Mohammad Abas Mohammad Akhbar Mohammad Finaytal Al Dehani Mohammad Gul Mohammad Ilyas Mohammad Kashef Khan Mohammad Lameen Sidi Mohammad Mohammad Mustafa Sohail Bahazada Mohammad Nabi Omari Mohammad Nasim Mohammad Sanghir Mohammadullah Mohamman Daoud Mohammed Abd Al Al Qadir Mohammed Abdullah Al Harbi Mohammed Ahmed Ali Al Asadi Mohammed Akbar Mohammed Ansar Mohammed Anwar Mohammed Arshad Raza Mohammed Ashraf Mohammed Haji Yousef Mohammed Hashim Mohammed Ijaz Mohammed Irfan Mohammed Irfan Mohammed Ishaq Mohammed Ismail Mohammed Jayed Sebai Mohammed Kamin Mohammed Khan Mohammed Mizouz Mohammed Mohammed Hasan Al Odaini Mohammed Mubarek Salah Al Qurbi Mohammed Nayim Farouq Mohammed Noman Mohammed Omar Mohammed Quasam Mohammed Rafiq Mohammed Raz Mohammed Raz-mohammed Kakar Mohammed Sadiq Mohammed Sadiq Adam Mohammed Sargidene Mohammed Sayed Mohammed Sharif Mohammed Tahir Mohammed Tariq Mohammed Yacoub Mohammed Yusif Yaqub Mohammed Zahir Mohammednasim Mohammednasim Mohd Farik Bin Amin

Mohi Bullar Mosa Zi Zemmori Motai Sadeek Ahamed Saib Saib Mourad Benchellali Moyuballah Homaro Muaz Hamza Ahmad Al Alawi Mubarak Hussain Bin Abul Hashem Muhamad Naji Subhi Al Juhani Muhamed Hussein Abdallah Muhammad Abd Al Nasir Muhammad Khantumani Muhammad Abd Al Rahman Al Kurash Muhammad Abd Al Rahman Awn Al Shamrani Muhammad Abdallah Mansur Al Rimi Muhammad Abdallah Muhammad Awad Dyab Al Hamiri Muhammad Abdallah Taha Moaten Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Al Ansi Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih Al Hanashi Muhammad Ahmad Said Al Adahi Muhammad Ahmad Said Haider Muhammad Ahmad Salam Muhammad Ali Abdallah Muhammad Bwazir Muhammad Ali Hussein Khenaina Muhammad Ali Salem Al Zarnuki Muhammad Ben Moujan Muhammad Hamid Al Qarani Muhammad Hussein Ali Hassan Muhammad Mani Ahmad Al Shalan Al Qahtani Muhammad Murdi Issa Al Zahrani Muhammad Nasir Yahya Khusruf Muhammad Nechle Muhammad Noor Uthman Muhammad Rahim Muhammad Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim Muhammad Said Salim Bin Salman Muhammad Salah Hussain Al Shaykh Muhammad Sulayman Barre Muhammad Surur Dakhilallah Al Utaybi Muhammed Al Ghazali Babaker Mahjoub Muhammed Ijaz Khan Muhammed Yahia Mosin Al Zayla Muhibullah Muhsin Muhammad Musheen Moqbill Mujahid Mukhtar Yahya Najee Al Warafi Mullah Mohammad Fazl Mullah Norullah Noori Munir Bin Naseer Murat Karnaz Murtadha Al Said Makram Murtazah Abdul Rahman Musa Abed Al Wahab Musab Omar Ali Al Mudwani Mustafa Abdul Qawi Abdul Aziz Al Shamiri Mustafa Ahmad Al Hawsawi Mustafa Ahmed Hamlily Mustafa Ait Idir Mustafa Ibrahim Mustafa Al Hassan Nabil Said Hadjarab Nabu Abdul Ghani Nagid Mohammed Nahir Shah Najib Mohammad Lahassimi Naqib Ullah Naserullah

Nashwan Abd Al Razzaq Abd Al Baqi Nasibullah Nasir Maziyad Abdallah Al Qurayshi Al Subii Nasrullah Nasser Gul Nasser Najiri Amtiri Nassir Malang Nathi Ghul Nawaf Fahad Al Otaibi Nayif Abdallah Ibrahim Ibrahim Nayif Fahd Mutliq Al Usaymi Nematullah Sahib-khan Alizai Neyaz Walijan Nisar Rahmad Nizar Sassi Noor Ahmad Noor Allah Noor Aslaam Noor Habib Ullah Oibek Jamaludinovich Jabarov Omar Ahmed Khadr Omar Amer Deghayes Omar Hamzayavich Abdulayev Omar Muhammad Ali Al Rammah Omar Rajab Amin Osam Abdul Rahan Ahmad Osman Khan Othman Ahmed Othman Al Omairah Padsha Wazir Peta Muhammed Polad Sabir Oglu Sirajov Qalandar Shah Qari Esmhatulla Qari Hasan Ulla Peerzai Radwan Al Shakouri Rafiq Bin Bashir Bin Jalul Al Hami Rahmatullah Rahmatullah Sangaryar Rami Bin Said Al Taibi Ramzi Bin Al Shibh Rashed Awad Khalaf Balkhair Rashid Abd Al Muslih Qaid Al-qaid Rashid Awad Rashid Al Uwaydah Rasool Shahwali Zair Mohammed Mohammed Ravil Mingazov Ravil Shafeyavich Gumarov Rhuhel Ahmed Richard Dean Belmar Ridah Bin Saleh Al Yazidi Ridouane Khalid Riyad Atiq Abdu Al Haj Al Radai Riyadh Bin Muhammad Tahir Bin Lakhdir Nasri Barhumi Rostum Akhtar Mohammed Rukniddin Fayziddinovich Sharipov Ruslan Anatolivich Odijev Rustam Akhmyarov Sa Ad Ibraham Sa Ad Al Bidna Sa Ad Madi Sa Ad Al Azmi Sa Id Ali Jabir Al Khathim Al Shihri Saad Bin Nasser Ibn Mukbil Al Azani Sabar Lal Melma Sabir Mahfouz Lahmar Sabit Layar Sabri Muhammad Ibrahim Al Qurashi Sad Muhammad Husayn Al Muflih Al Qahtani Sadee Eideov Sadeq Muhammad Sa Id Ismail

Sadik Ahmad Turkistani Saed Khatem Al Malki Saeed Ahmed Mohammed Abdullah Sarem Jarabh Saghir Ahmed Said Abasin Said Ali Al Farha Said Amir Jan Said Bezan Ashek Shayban Said Bin Brahim Bin Umran Bakhush Said Boujaadia Said Ibrahim Ramzi Al Zahrani Said Mohammed Said Mohammed Alim Shah Said Muhammad Salih Hatim Said Saim Ali Said Salih Said Nashir Saida Jan Saidullah Khalik Saifullah Paracha Saiid Farhi Sajin Urayman Salah Abdul Rasul Ali Abdul Al Balushi Salah Abdul Rasul Ali Abdul Rahman Al Balushi Salah Hudin Salah Muhammad Salih Al Dhabi Salahodin Ayubi Salam Abdullah Said Saleh Abdall Al Oshan Saleh Ali Jaid Al Khathami Saleh Bin Hadi Sassi Saleh Mohamed Al Zuba Salem Ahmed Salem Hamdan Salih Uyar Salim Abd Al Salam Umran Al Ghuraybi Salim Ahmed Haddi Hathramoot Salim Mahmoud Adem Mohammed Bani Amir Salim Suliman Al Harbi Salman Saad Al Khadi Mohammed Salman Yahya Hassan Muhammad Rabeii Sameur Abdenour Sami Abdul Aziz Salim Allaithy Sami Mohy El Din Muhammed Al Hajj Samir Naji Al Hasan Moqbil Sanad Ali Yislam Al Kazimi Sar Faraz Ahmed Saud Dakhil Allah Muslih Al Mahayawi Sha Mohammed Alikhel Shabidzada Usman Shabir Ahmed Shafiq Rasul Shai Jahn Ghafoor Shaibjan Torjan Shakhrukh Hamiduva Shakir Abd Al Rahim Muhammad Aamer Shams Ullah Sharaf Ahmad Muhammad Masud Sharbat Shardar Khan Sharghulab Mirmuhammad Sharif Fati Ali Al Mishad Sharifullah Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj Shawali Khan Shawki Awad Balzuhair Shed Abdur Rahman Sheikh Salman Ebrahim Mohamed Ali Al Khalifa Shirinov Ghafar Homarovich

Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane Sohab Mahud Mohhamed Solaiman Dur Mohammed Shah Soufian Abar Huwari Sufyian Barhoumi Sulaiman Awath Sulaiman Bin Ageel Al Nahdi Sultan Ahmad Sultan Ahmed Dirdeer Musa Al Uwaydha Sultan Mohammed Sultan Sari Sayel Al Anazi Swar Khan Taj Mohammed Tarek Dergoul Tareq Ali Abdullah Ahmed Baada Tarik Mohammad Tariq Khan Tariq Mahmud Ahmad Al Sawah Tariqe Shallah Hassan Al Harbi Tawfiq Nassar Ahmad Al Bayhani Tila Mohammed Khan Timur Ravilich Ishmurat Toufiq Saber Muhammad Al-marwa’i Turki Mash Awi Zayid Al Asiri Ubaydallah Umar Abdullah Al Kunduzi Umar Said Salim Al Dini Usama Hassan Ahmed Abu Kabir Uthman Abd Al Rahim Muhammad Uthman Vakhidov Sobit Abdumukit Valikhonovich Wali Mohammed Walid Ibrahim Mustafa Abu Hijazi Walid Mohammad Haj Mohammad Ali Walid Mohammed Shahir Walid Muhammad Salih Bin Attash Walid Said Bin Said Zaid Wasim Wazir Zalim Ghul Yahya Samil Al Suwaymil Al Sulami Yakub Abahanov Yakubi Yamatolah Abulwance Yarass Ali Must Yasin Muhammad Salih Mazeeb Basardah Yasin Qassem Muhammad Ismail Yasir Ahmed Ali Taher Yasser Talal Al Zahrani Younis Abdurrahman Chekkouri Yuksel Celik Gogus Yusef Abbas Yusef Abdullah Saleh Al Rabiesh Yusef Nabied Yusif Khalil Abdallah Nur Yussef Mohammed Mubarak Al Shihri Zaban Thaaher Zaban Al Shamaree Zafar Iqbal Zahar Omar Hamis Bin Hamdoun Zahid Sultan Zaid Binsallah Mohammed Il Bhawith Zaid Muhamamd Sa’ad Al Husayn Zain Ulla Bidden Zair Mohammed Shaheen Naqeebyllah Zakim Shah Zakirjan Asam Zayn Al Abidin Muhammad Abu Zubaydah Husayn Zia Ul Shah Ziad Said Farg Jahdari Zuhail Abdo Anam Said Al Sharabi Zununjan Dawut

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9 6

2

DETAINEES HAVE DIED, OF WHICH WERE SUICIDES.

M!NORS

2AGE OF 18.

ARE

UNDER THE

PENTAGON FILES RELEASED BY WIKILEAKS STATE THAT AT LEAST 150 PRISONERS

N O T R I A L , J U S T E R R O R S

ALTHOUGH IT TOOK 7 YEARS ON AVERAGE TO RELEASE THEM.

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RELEASED DETAINEES CLAIMED THAT WATERBOARDING, SEXUAL HUMILIATION, AND FORCED DRUGGING WERE USED ON PRISONERS.

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DETAINEES ONLY WITNESS 2 HOURS OF SUNLIGHT EACH DAY WITH THE REST SPENT IN TOTAL DARKNESS

OVER 130 PRISONERS WENT ON HUNGER STRIKES AND MANY WERE PAINFULLY FORCE-FED.

N O T R I A L , J U S T E R R O R S

STIGMATIZED BELIEFS Part 9 A

s part of my research into the stigmatization of Islam and the bad press it continues to receive,

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I decided to visit my local Mosque at Fishponds in Bristol and speak to the Muslims there about how they feel their religion and themselves are treated in the new climate of passive islamophobia.

When I arrived at the Mosque on Friday for Mass, immediately I was struck by the state of the building. It wasn’t what I had in mind when I thought of a holy place of worship, it didn’t even look remotely holy. In fact, it didn’t even look inhabited by anyone. The windows were boarded up on one side and the surrounding area was barren warehouses and industrial sites. Who would come here to pray? When you put the state of the building in context with all the glorious Churches you stumble across in Bristol, you get the feeling that this truly was a second rate religion.

An hour passed as I eagerly waited for signs of a service to start, when finally a swarm of men, both young and old, began to advance on the derelict building. When I walked towards the doors I was greeted with open arms by the Muslim community and they all seemed to show a great deal of interest in my project and each had a lot to say. My main questions revolved around the change in peoples behavior towards them post-9/11, and how it had affected their lives and their community. Everyone had something to say and contributed to the discussion, many people saw my project as interesting and crucial so were more than happy to answer questions.

Before I could pick their brains I was invited inside to experience their service, my shoes were left at the door and I went with

How could an entire religion be frowned upon so widely, due to the acts of some extremists who claim to be true Muslims?

them to wash my hands and feet before entering the prayer room. Roughly 200 Muslim men were chatting away, sharing stories and exchanging greetings. They all spoke Arabic so I couldn’t quite understand but they all seemed elated and eager to proceed. I knelt down at the back of the room besides one of the younger men who greeted me outside, his name was Abdi Ahmed and he showed a great interest in myself and my project. Where he could he tried to fill me in with what was happening and sometimes what was being said, but apart from that I just listened to the melodic call to prayer that the man at the front of the room proceeded to sing.

Two hours passed and I felt enlightened, not in a religious or spiritual way but mentally. The meditative Arabic language seemed to me more like music than a recital of the Qur’an. I suppose it didn’t need to make sense to me, as I never paid attention to the verses of the Bible back when I was dragged off to Church on a Sunday, I just appreciated the beauty in the mans voice, and the song he lulled me with. Once the sermon was over, the men got up and said fair well to one another and went back to their homes and families, eager to continue daily life. Abdi then took me to one side and introduced me to his friends and we knelt in a circle and exchanged questions. I made it clear to them that I was an atheist, and that I was just interested in how they felt their religion has been portrayed lately. They took this extremely well and began to explain to me how naive people look at Islam with judgemental eyes. I couldn’t help but feel sympathetic towards them. How could such a large culture be treated so badly?

S T I G M A T I Z E D B E L I E F S

tsuJ“ • ”.srekcuf ykaens er’yeht ,meht rof tuo hctaW“ eb esaelP“ • ”!od ot gniyrt era yeht tahw rebmemer era gnitrevnoc t’nera uoY“ • ”.meht dnuora luferac uoy erus ekaM“ • ”.meht ot netsil t’noD“ • ”?uoy gnuoy a ees lliw yehT“ • ”.si adnega rieht tahw esilaer uoy ekam ot yrasseccen s’ti leef dna flesruoy ekil nam ”?malsI tuoba skoob uoy evag yehT“ • ”!meht fo eno • ”?won milsuM a er’uoy em llet t’nod esaelP“ • 73 • 74

When I spoke to my friends and family about where my project led me, I couldn’t help but feel the comments they made were slightly backwards.

dnA“ • ”...uoy erew I fi ereht kcab og t’ndluow I“ • ”?snoitseuq esoht ksa dna ni klaw uoy tel tsuj yeht seno hcihw wonk t’nod uoy ,luferac eb ot evah uoY“ • eb ot raelc reets d’I“ • ”!dab era hcihw dna doog era eB“ • ”?neht won detrevnoc uoy evaH“ • ”.tsenoh meht fo eno eb ot dah uoy thguoht I“ • ”.nam luferac teb I“ • ”?llems yeht diD“ • ”?euqsoM eht ni og ot ”.meht tsurt t’nod I“ • ”...llew sa meht deveileb uoy

“Watch out for them, they’re sneaky fuckers.” • “Just remember what they are trying to do!” • “Please be careful around them.” • “You aren’t converting are you?” • “Don’t listen to them.” • “Make sure you realise what their agenda is.” • “They will see a young man like yourself and feel it’s necessary to make you one of them!” • “They gave you books about Islam?”

• “Please don’t tell me you’re a Muslim now?” • “Next they’ll be teaching you how to make bombs...”

• “I wouldn’t go back there if I were you...” • “And they just let you walk in and ask those questions?”

• “You have to be careful, you don’t know which ones are good and which are bad!” • “I’d steer clear to be honest.” • “Have you converted now then?” • “Be careful man.” • “I thought you had to be one of them to go in the Mosque?” • “Did they smell?” • “I bet you believed them as well...” • “I don’t trust them.”

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“It should be remembered that practically all aliens have come to this country because they like our land and our institutions better than those from whence they came. They have attached themselves to the life of this country in a manner that they would hate to change and the vast majority of them will, if given a chance, remain the same good neighbors that they have been in the past regardless of what difficulties our nation may have with the country of their birth.

History proves this to be true... We must see to it that no race prejudices develop and that there are no petty persecutions of law-abiding people.�

- Earl Warren, 14th Chief Justice of the United States

S T I G M A T I Z E D B E L I E F S

A GAME OF DRONES Part10 W

hen I first heard the term UAV, I was deep in the world of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,

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fighting the terrorists as usual in an unknown war-torn part of the Middle East. “The enemies UAV is online!” would mean that the enemy team could see where your comrades were at all times via a flying camera that circled above the map for a minute or two. In the world of competitive online gaming this was a huge advantage for that team, as I’m sure it is in todays very own Modern Warfare. The only difference being, it wouldn’t fire missiles or drop bombs on you, it could only track you.

With the advancement of UAV’s in the real world, not only are people in foreign regions being constantly over watched, they are being killed. All the while without the pilot ever setting foot in the plane. A huge step forward in keeping that all important Kill:Death Ratio down, or maybe just another huge step backwards in human rights?

The debate surrounding the use of Unmanned Air Vehicles – or as they’re widely known now as Drones, is something me and many people I have spoken to feel very strongly about. Some praise the use of them and others are disgusted by them. I for one see them as a step in the wrong direction, an aeronautical engineer may argue that they are a piece of technological brilliance, where as a pro-war fanatic might tell you they’re helping to win the war on terror, and that when civilians die in a drone strike it’s just collateral damage.

Al-Qaeda is no doubt a nasty, brutish, criminal organization which has killed a lot of innocent people. But what about American foreign policy (i.e. bombs not diploma-

An armed drone controlled by a young recruit, thousands of miles away, can kill with the pull of a trigger on a Playstation controller.

Judge, Jury and ‘R2’.

cy), which in recent history has killed severely more people, a not insignificant proportion of whom have been innocent. In May 2009, in a testimony to US Congress, US Advisor to Gen. David Kilmullen, asked the Obama Administration to call off the drone attacks stating, “We have been able to kill only 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders since 2006 and in the same period, killed over 700 Pakistani civilians.”

There is absolutely no positive way you can spin a failure rate like that. So they don’t even try. The interested individual can find these stories online,but he has to go searching for them. The news outlets bury the stories if they report them at all, because they are subservient to the State.

In the most recent installment where 20 people were killed, the death toll includes 4 women and 3 children. Guess they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, right? The headlines tend to emphasize that 13 militants were killed, but let’s be real, here: 13 suspected militants,were summarily executed by an unmanned drone so that their accusers never had to present evidence in a court of law.

According to Reuters, “US officials say the drones are a highly effective weapon against militant groups. But civilian casualties in the strikes have angered Pakistanis,” but this “highly effective weapon” hasn’t really gotten any high profile terrorists since Baitulla Mehsud (a year ago), and has an alarming propensity to kill indiscriminately.

Most reports indicating that between 30 and 40% of those killed in drone strikes are objectively non-combatants.

U N J U S T I F I E D

V I N D I C T I V E

A G A M E O F

We have been able to kill only 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders since 2006 and in the same period, killed over 700 Pakistani civilians. – David Kilmullen May 2009

D R O N E S

Here are just a few of the most commonly drones.

Ordered by scale with company, names and country.

Guizhou Aircraft Industry Corporation

SoarChina Dragon

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems

MQ-9 Reaper

United States of America 79 • 80

Israel Aerospace Industries

Heron TP Israel

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems

MQ-1 Predator

United States of America

BAE Systems

Taranis

United Kingdom

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), are aircraft either controlled by ‘pilots’ from the ground or increasingly, autonomously following a pre-programmed mission. (While there are dozens of different types of drones, they basically fall into two categories: those that are used for reconnaissance and surveillance purposes and those that are armed with missiles and bombs.)

The use of drones has grown quickly in recent years because unlike manned aircraft they can stay aloft for many hours (Zephyr a British drone under development has just broken the world record by flying for over 82 hours nonstop); they are much cheaper than military aircraft and they are flown remotely so there is no danger to the flight crew.

While the British and US Reaper and Predator drones are physically in Afghanistan and Iraq, control is via satellite from Nellis and Creech USAF base outside Las Vegas, Nevada. Ground crews launch drones from the conflict zone, then operation is handed over to controllers at video screens in specially designed trailers in the Nevada desert.

One person ‘flies’ the drone, another operates and monitors the cameras and sensors, while a third person is in contact with the “customers”, ground troops and commanders in the war zone. While armed drones were first used in the Balkans war, their use has dramatically escalated in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the CIA’s undeclared war in Pakistan.

The US has two separate ‘squadron’ of armed drones – one run by the US Air Force and one run by the CIA. Using drones, the USAF Air Force has increased the number of combat air patrols it can fly by 600 percent over the past six years; indeed at any time there are at least 36 American armed UAVS over Afghanistan and Iraq. It plans to increase this number to 50 by 2011. CIA Director Leon Panetta has recently said that drones are “the only game in town.” The CIA have been using drones in Pakistan and other countries to assassinate “terrorist leaders.”

While this programme was initiated by the Bush Administration, it has increased under Obama and there have been 41 known drone strikes in Pakistan since Obama became President. Analysis by an American think tank The Brookings Institution on drone attacks in Pakistan has shown that for every militant leader killed, 10 civilians also have died.

The UK has several different types of armed and surveillance drones in Iraq and Afghanistan and others in the production or development stage. The UK began using armed drones in Afghanistan in Oct 2007

after purchasing three Reapers from General Atomics in 2007 at a cost of £6m each. The MoD confirmed in June 2008 that a British Reaper UAV had fired its weapons for the first time, but refused to give any details. In March 2009, the Daily Telegraph reported that British drones had been used ten times in armed strikes.

As well as armed drones, the UK has several types of surveillance drones, most notably Watchkeeper, a drone jointly produced

by Israeli company Ebit and Thales UK. The UK is purchasing 54 Watchkeeper drones and ground stations at a cost of £860m. The first ten will be built in Israel and then production will transfer to a specially built facility in Leicester. Testing is taking place at Aberporth in Wales and Watchkeeper is due to enter service in 2010. There have recently been reports that Watchkeeper may be armed in the future.

Thes UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, has said that the use of drones is not combat as much as ‘targeted killing’. He has repeatedly tried to get the US to explain how they justifies the use of drones to target and kill individuals under international law. The US has so far refused to do so. In a report to the UN he has said the US government (and by implication the UK government) “should specify the bases for decisions to kill rather than capture particular individuals …. and should make public the number of civilians killed as a result of drone attacks, and the measures in place to prevent such casualties”.

A further question is the extent to which operators become trigger happy with remote controlled armaments, situated as they are in complete safety, distant from the conflict zone. Keith Shurtleff, an army chaplain and ethics instructor at Fort Jackson, South Carolina worries “that as war becomes safer and easier, as soldiers are removed from the horrors of war and see the enemy not as humans but as blips on a screen, there is very real danger of losing the deterrent that such horrors provide.”

Military drone manufacturers are looking for civilian uses for remote sensing drones to expand their markets and this includes the use of drones for domestic surveillance. Drones will no doubt make possible the dramatic expansion of the surveillance state.

With the convergence of other technologies it may even make possible machine recognition of faces, behaviours, and the monitoring of individual conversations. The sky, so to speak, is the limit.

A G A M E O F D R O N E S

81 • 82

T

hen I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and seated on the cloud one like a son of man, with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand. And another

angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to him who sat on the cloud, “Put in your sickle, and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.” So he who sat on the cloud swung his sickle across the earth, and the earth was reaped.

Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. And another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over the fire, and he called with a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle, “Put in your sickle and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe.”

– Revelation 14:14-20

A G A M E

Accused of murder, the United States has offered no explanation, no defense, no information whatsoever to justify this extrajudicial execution campaign in which President Obama functions as judge, jury, and executioner, although he sometimes delegates some of these activities to underlings. The United States has become a rogue state and a state sponsor of terrorism and apparently the best justification the president has to offer for a decade-long killing spree in Pakistan and wanton lawless executions elsewhere is that – they do it too!

Never mind that the countries the U.S. is “protecting” are tired of the American protection racket. What’s important, according to the president in his May 23, 2013 speech is to keep in mind that crimes against humanity justify other crimes against humanity, although he put it somewhat more obliquely:

“Remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes. So doing nothing is not an option.”

How is that any different from the Hellfire missile victim who says: “If God gives me the chance of getting to Obama, I will. He is not only the killer of my son and brother, but he is the killer of many Muslims. The punishment or killing is to be killed. I would kill [Obama]”. Or are we facing another, grimmer parallel from Macbeth as he approaches the endgame and observes:

“ All causes shall give way. I am in blood.

Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

O F D R O N E S

83 • 84

While some insist that armed unmanned drones are effectively no different from other military aircraft, there are two important differences. Firstly they can be operated remotely over very great distances via satellite links. While the drones themselves are located near the point of operation, once they are launched, control can be handed over to pilots sitting thousands of miles away.

The second major difference is persistence. Due to the lack of any crew on board, drones can remain airborne far longer than a piloted aircraft. While a typical fast-jet can remain in the air for around 8 hours before the crew become fatigued, drones can fly far longer. Reaper and Predator missions typically lasting between 16 and 20 hours, and the length of time drones can stay aloft is being extended all the time. Crews simply change shifts on the ground while the drone remains in the air. This remote operating together with a greater persistence is a real difference and seen as a important strategic advantage by the military.

Some commentators try to make the point that there has always been remote warfare, flippantly citing the longbow and the trebuchet (a roman catapult) as examples from the distant past. But that is nonsense.

The ability to control weapons at vast distances while being in no personal danger, combined with their ability to loiter for many hours looking for ‘targets of opportunity’ (rather than the say the one-off shot a cruise missile) is a significant difference that is having a real impact on warfare. To put it briefly, the ability to be ‘remotely persistent’ makes armed drones significantly different from other armed aircraft.

In modern times, there is a real political cost to launching military intervention.

Politicians know that the public do not like to see young men and women sent overseas to fight in wars which often have remote and unclear aims. In particular the public do not like to see those same young men and women return in body bags and coffins. Potential TV footage of grieving families awaiting funeral corteges is a definite restraint on political leaders weighing up the option of military intervention.

Takeaway that potential political cost however by using unmanned systems, and it makes it much easier for political leaders to opt to use lethal military force. Drones swing the balance away from engaging in the often difficult and long-term work of solving the root causes of conflicts through diplomatic and political means, towards a quick, short-term ‘fix’ of ‘taking out the bad guys’.

While it’s still early in the drone war era, we know that the US has used armed drones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya and there been unconfirmed reports of US drone strikes in Mali and Philippines. Israel has used its armed drones in Gaza but also reportedly in Sudan and Egypt. The UK has so far only used its armed drones in Afghanistan although RAF aircrew have flown US drones in Libya, Iraq and also Afghanistan. There were serious calls for the UK to deploy its armed drones to support French forces fighting in Mali in 2013. Their deployment didn’t happen as the Secretary of State for Defence insisted that the UK’s Reapers were too busy in Afghanistan. Once the UK has acquired more armed drones it may be harder to resist the siren call to deploy these armed systems each time a crisis develops as there is no perceived cost to doing so. Indeed there is much talk of UK drones being deployed to Africa after NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan at the end of 2014.

Separate, but connected to the idea that drones lower the threshold for using lethal forces is the notion, as Philip Alston the former Special Rapporteur on extra judicial killing, put it of the ‘PlayStation mentality’.

Alston and others suggest that the vast physical distance between those operating armed drones and the target of a drone attack makes that act of killing much easier. The physical distance induces a kind of psychological ‘distancing’. Rather than seeing and understanding that the target in the crosshairs is a real, flesh and blood human being, all that is seen is an unreal image; all that is perceived are dehumanised pixels on a screen. This, as Alston pointed out, may be particularly true for pilots who play increasingly realistic war video games.

There are of course strong objections to this notion. Drone pilots, it is argued, are highly trained professionals that are able to distinguish between video games and real life. In addition, there is a chain of command that means the drone pilots are not free to pick and choose targets without going through rigorous processes. Furthermore it is reported that some drone pilots are suffering from stress from having to watch the results of their strikes.

Despite these arguments there is some evidence for a ‘PlayStation’ mentality. In 2010 an Afghan convoy of vehicles was hit by an airstrike involving drones in which 23 non-combatants – men, women and children – were killed. The subsequent USAF investigation attributed a large part of the blame to the Predator drone crew at Creech which it described as having “a propensity/bias towards kinetic operations.” The transcripts of the conversations between the Predator crew and intelligence analysts watching the live video feed from the Predator make it clear that the Predator crew wanted to attack and (again quoting from the USAF report) “ignored or downplayed” evidence suggesting the convoy was not a hostile target. While this is only one piece of evidence, and not enough to make a definitive case, the idea can’t simply be dismissed out of hand. At the very least there needs to be much more transparency about the day-to-day use of armed drones.

A G A M E O F D R O N E S

85 • 86

Perhaps the most controversial use of armed drones has been their use by the United States and Israel for targeted killing.

Legal scholars define targeted killing as the deliberate, premeditated killing of selected individuals by a state who are not in their custody. Where International Humanitarian Law (IHL) applies, as is the situation currently in Afghanistan, the targeted killing of combatants may be legal. Outside of IHL situations, International Human Rights Law applies and lethal force may only be used when absolutely necessary to save human life that is in imminent danger. This does not appear to be the case for many of the US drone strikes that have been carried out in Pakistan and Yemen.

The United States insists it has lawful authority for such strikes under the Authorization for Use of Military Force Act (AUMF) passed in the days after 9/11, as well as in the inherent right of self-defence under the UN Charter. Many legal experts and scholars, not least the former and current UN special rapporteurs on extra-judicial killings, strongly question the US position.

While some argue that it is the policy of targeted killing that is wrong, not the weapon used to carry out it out, it is very difficult to imagine that US would have undertaken the wholesale expansion of targeted killing without the technology. Because they can be used remotely and persistently, drones are perhaps ideally suited for targeted killings.

While the United States’ use of armed drones for targeted killing is highly controversial, the longer it continues, the more it becomes normalised and accepted.

It is now possible, perhaps even likely, that other states will follow the US example and use drones to undertake their own targeted killing programme of ‘suspected terrorists’.

In Afghanistan, it appears that the UK may have used its Reaper UAVs to carry out targeted killings although due to the lack of transparency surrounding the use of British armed UAVs it has not been possible to confirm this. We know from published RAF operational updates that UK Reapers have tracked “high value” targets for many hours before finally launching weapons.

Drones are helping to rehabilitate the very idea of war. Drones permit, we are told, precision airstrikes that cleanly and accurately ‘take out’ the bad guys while leaving the innocent untouched. Drone advocates seduce us with the notion that we can achieve control over the chaos of war through technology. However, as Professor Maja Zehfuss of Manchester University points out “Faith in precision bombing… requires an under-examination of the actual practicalities of precision bombing and the ways in which ‘precision’ has been defined.”

The reality is that there is no such thing as a guaranteed accurate airstrike While laser-guided weapons are without doubt much more accurate than they were even 20 or 30 years ago, the myth of guaranteed precision is just that, a myth. Even under test conditions only 50% of weapons are expected to hit within their ‘circular error of probability’.

Once the blast radius of weapons is taken into account and indeed how such systems can be affected by things such as the weather, it is clear that ‘precision’ cannot by any means be assured.

It is of course difficult to assess the precision of drone warfare without empirical data and there is a distinct lack of transparency around the use of drones. While we have some data about the impact of drones strikes in Pakistan from organisations like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), who report that between 400 and 950 civilians have been killed in US drone strikes there, across the border in Afghanistan where there have been far more drone strikes we have very little information. One US military analyst, Larry Lewis, who has studied classified military data on drones strikes in Afghanistan (although he is unable to release the information) told The Guardian that missile strikes conducted by drones were 10 times more deadly to Afghan civilians than those performed by fighter jets.

But ‘precision warfare’ is promoted both by the arms manufacturers and the military as a way of persuading us that war can now be ‘humane’, indeed that war is no longer the hell it once was. The problem is that our media and more importantly our politicians have fallen for this rather Hollywood notion of air warfare and drone strikes. Indeed there appears to be such faith in the accuracy of these systems that we are now much more willing to undertake airstrikes in areas which, previously, because of the presence of civilians, would not have been countenanced. This is yet another way that drones are expanding the battlefield.

The stated aim of UK military action (and presumably any military action) is to create longterm peace and security. Increasingly however there is a growing understanding that the use of armed drones may be doing just the opposite. Kurt Volker, the former US Permanent Representative to NATO said recently,

“Drone strikes allows our opponents to cast our country as a distant, high-tech, amoral purveyor of death. It builds resentment, facilitates terrorist recruitment and alienates those we should seek to inspire. Drone strikes may decapitate terrorist organizations, but they do not solve our terrorist problem. In fact, drone use may prolong it. Even though there is no immediate retaliation, in the long run the contributions to radicalization through drone use may put more lives at risk.”

Volker is not alone. Many others counter terrorism experts are now raising similar concerns. Professor Michael Boyle, former counter terrorism adviser to President Obama outlined in 2013 how use of armed UAVs is directly conflicting with other longterm counter-terrorism initiatives and doing real damage. Yet again, Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre from 2004 to 2006 and was previously CIA station chief in Pakistan said of the use of armed UAVs in Afghanistan and Pakistan: “We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield.”

As well as these direct concerns from senior counter terrorism experts, a number of recent reports from human rights and development NGOs have detailed how the use of armed UAVs – and in particular their use to loiter over particular areas for long periods of time before launching attacks – is causing severe mental trauma to the local populations, disturbing children’s education, and disrupting food production.

To many, drones are a modern marvel. The Economist declared in 2011 that ‘the future belongs to drones’ while Reuters argued that armed drones are ‘the perfect weapon for a war-weary nation on a tight budget.’ But as we have seen there are huge problems surrounding the growing use of armed unmanned systems. The use of armed drones is already undermining the laws of war and eroding human rights protections put in place to safeguard both combatants and civilians alike. There is also a real fear that the ‘risk free’ nature of these weapons is lowering the threshold for using lethal force, meaning that we are likely to see more warfare in the future.

The growing use of armed drones and the concept of remote, risk free war is a serious military escalation. In short, armed drones are simply making the world a more dangerous place.

A G A M E O F D R O N E S

MY TESTIMONY TO WAR Part11 by Mike Prysner W

hen I first joined the army, we were told that racism no longer existed in the military.

87 • 88

A legacy of inequality and discrimination was suddenly washed away by something called “Equal Opportunity.” We would sit through mandatory classes, assuring us that racism had been eliminated from the ranks, and every unit had its own EO representative to ensure no elements of racism could resurface. The Army seemed firmly dedicated to smashing any hint of racism. And then Sept. 11 happened. I began to hear new words like “towel head,” “camel jockey” and - the most disturbing - “sand nigger.” These words did not initially come from my fellow soldiers, but from my superiors - my platoon sergeant, my company first sergeant, my battalion commander.

All the way up the chain of command, viciously racist terms were suddenly acceptable. I noticed that the most overt racism came from veterans of the first Gulf War. Those were the words they used when they were incinerating civilian convoys. Those were the words they used when this government deliberately targeted the civilian infrastructure, bombing water supplies knowing that it would kill hundreds of thousands of children.

Those were the words the American people used when they allowed this government to sanction Iraq and this is something many people forget.

We’ve just learned that we’ve killed over 1 million Iraqis since the invasion; we had already killed a million Iraqis before the invasion throughout the 90’s through bombings and sanctions. When I got to Iraq in 2003,

“We were told we were fighting terrorists. The real terrorist was me.”

I learned a new word - “Haji.” Haji was the enemy. Haji was every Iraqi. He was not a person, or a father, or a teacher, or a worker.

But where does this word come from? Every Muslim strives to take a pilgrimage to Mecca, called a Haj. A Muslim who has completed that pilgrimage is a Haji. It is something that, in traditional Islam, is the highest calling in the religion - essentially, the best thing for a Muslim made into the worst thing. But history did not start with us. Since the creation of this country, racism has been used to justify expansion and oppression. The Native Americans were called savages.

The Africans were called all sorts of things to excuse slavery. A multitude of names were used during Vietnam to justify that imperialist war. So Haji was the word we used on this mission. We’ve heard a lot about raids during Winter Soldier, kicking down people’s doors and ransacking their homes. But this mission was a different kind of raid. We never got any explanation for these orders, we were only told that this group of five or six houses were now property of the U.S. military. We had to go in and make those people leave those houses. So we went to these houses and told the people that their homes were no longer their homes. We provided them no alternative, no place to go, no compensation. They were very confused and scared, and would not leave - so we had to remove them from their houses. There was one family in particular that stands out: a woman with two young daughters, an elderly man who was bed-ridden and two middle-aged men. We dragged them from their houses and threw them onto the street. We arrested the men for not leaving and sent them to prison with the Iraqi police.

M Y T E S T I M O N Y T O W A R

89 • 90

At that time I didn’t know what happened to Iraqis when we put a sandbag over their head and tied their hands behind their back; unfortunately, a couple months later, I had to find out. Our unit was short interrogators, so I was tasked to assist with interrogations. A detainee’s ordeal First, I’d like to point out that the vast majority of detainees I encountered had done nothing wrong. They were arrested for things as simple as being in the area when an IED went off, or living in a village where a suspected insurgent lived.

I witness and participated in many interrogations; one in particular I’d like to share. It was a moment for me that helped me realize the nature of our occupation. This detainee who I was sent to interrogate was stripped down to his underwear, hands bound behind his back and a sandbag on his head and I never actually saw his face. My job was to take a metal folding chair, and as he was standing face-first against the wall, I was to smash the chair next to his head every time he was asked a question. A fellow soldier would yell the same question over and over, and no matter what he answered, I would smash the chair next to his head. We did this until we got tired, then I was told to make sure he stayed standing facing the wall. By this time he was in an extremely broken state - he was shaking uncontrollably, he was crying, and he was covered in his own urine. I was guarding him, but something was wrong with his leg he was injured and kept falling to the ground.

My sergeant told me to make sure he stayed standing, so I would have to pick him up and slam him against the wall. He kept falling down so I’d have to keep picking him up and forcefully putting him against the wall. My sergeant came by, and was upset that he was on the ground again, so he picked him up and slammed him against the wall several times and when the man fell to the ground again I noticed blood pouring down from under the sandbag. So I let him sit, and whenever my sergeant starting coming I would warn the man and tell him to stand. It was then that I realized that I was supposed to be guarding my unit from this detainee, but what I was doing was guarding this detainee from my unit. I tried hard to be proud of my service.

All I could feel was shame. Face of occupation is laid bare Racism could no longer mask the reality of the occupation. These were people.

These were human beings. I have since been plagued by guilt - anytime I see an elderly man, like the one who couldn’t walk, who we rolled onto a stretcher and told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt anytime I see

a mother with her children, like the one who cried hysterically, and screamed that we were worse than Saddam as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt anytime I see a young girl, like the one I grabbed by the arm and dragged into the street. We were told we were fighting terrorists. The real terrorist was me. The real terrorism is this occupation.

Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. It has long been used to justify the killing, subjugation, and torture of another people. Racism is a vital weapon employed by this government.

It is a more important weapon that a rifle, or a tank, or a bomber, or a battleship. It is more destructive than an artillery shell, or a bunker buster, or a tomahawk missile. While all those weapons are created and owned by this government, they are harmless without people willing to use them. Those who send us to war do not have to pull a trigger or lob a mortar round; they don’t have to fight the war, they merely have to sell us the war. They need a public who is willing to send their soldiers into harm’s way, and they need soldiers who are willing to kill and be killed, without question. They can spend millions on a single bomb - but that bomb only becomes a weapon when the ranks in the military are willing to follow the orders to use it. They can send every last soldier anywhere on earth, but there will only be a war if soldiers are willing to fight. The ruling class - the billionaires who profit from human suffering, who care only about expanding their wealth and controlling the world economy - understand that their power lies only in their ability to convince us that war, oppression, and exploitation is in our interest. They understand that their wealth is dependent on their ability to convince the working class to die to control the market of another country. And convincing us to die and kill is based on their ability to make us think that we are somehow superior. Soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen have nothing to gain from this war. The vast majority of people living in the United States have nothing to gain from this war. In fact, not only do soldiers and workers gain nothing from this occupation, but we suffer more because of it. We lose the limbs, endure the trauma and give our lives. Our families have to watch flag-draped coffins lowered into the earth. Millions in this country without health care, jobs, or access to education must watch this government squander over $400 million a day on this war.

“THETERRORISM REAL

ISTHIS OCCUPATION.” The real enemy is here. Poor and working people in this country are sent to kill poor and working people in another country, to make

M Y

the rich richer. Without racism, soldiers would realize that they

T E S T I M O N Y

have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war. I threw people onto the street in Iraq, only to come home and find families here thrown onto the street in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis that is already leaving hundreds of Iraq war veterans homeless. We need to wake up and realize that our real enemies are not in some distant land; they’re not people whose names we don’t know and whose cultures we don’t understand. The enemy is people we know well and people we can identify - the enemy is the system that sends us to war when it’s profitable; the enemies are the CEOs who lay us off from our jobs when its profitable; they’re the insurance companies who deny us health care when it’s profitable; they’re the banks that take away our homes when it’s profitable. Our enemies are not 5,000 miles away. They are right here at home, and if we organize and fight with our sisters and brothers we can stop this war, stop this government, and create a better world.’

T O W A R

#STICKS AND STONES Part12 W

ith the power of Social Media, and the plain ignorance of some, racism has ripened.

91 • 92

Looking back at every war ever fought, there has always been two sides, no sitting on the fence. You were both an ally and an enemy, regardless of whether you were protecting your home and family, or kicking down the door. With conflict comes great ignorance, and with ignorance comes hateful racism, all supported by the power of the press. Through each and every era of our history, names have been erased, and replaced with labels. Terms embedded in one culture against another, terms which allow people to unite against a minority, terms used to collectively brand a common foe. These terms have allowed entire populations to spit venom at one another, a poison that unfortunately still circulates in the veins of our modern ‘hashtag’ society.

Since the colonization of Australia, ethnic slurs have been uttered towards the native Aboriginals of the island.

Originally ‘Abo’ was simply an informal term for Aborigine, and was in fact used

by Aboriginal people themselves until it started to be considered offensive in the 1950s. In remoter areas, Aboriginal people still often refer to themselves (quite neutrally) as ‘Blackfellas’ (and whites as ‘Whitefellas’). Although ‘Abo’ is still considered quite offensive by many, the pejorative ‘Boong’ is now more commonly used when the intent is deliberately to offend, as that word’s status as an insult is unequivocal. A ‘Boong’ is related to the Australian English slang term ‘Bung’, meaning dead; infected; or dysfunctional.

New Zealand have also adopted this term to refer to Pacific Islanders. A ‘Gin’ often referred to an Australian Aboriginal woman, and a ‘Gin Jockey’ was a white person having casual sex with an Aboriginal woman.

Labels fuel hatred, hatred breeds war, wars divide races, then label some more.

Native populations have had many labels throughout history, usually given to them by postcolonial culture and portrayed as ‘Savages’. In Canada a ‘Chug’ refers to an individual of aboriginal descent, derived from ‘Chugach’, the native people of Southern Alaska. The original natives of American unfortunately bare many labels, ‘Prairie Nigger’, ‘Redskin’, ‘Squar’ ( female), ‘Buck’ (male), ‘Timber Nigger’, ‘Half-breed’ and ‘Apple’ are among some of the racial slurs previously used. An ‘Injun’, previously mistaken as a highly offensive epithet to Native Americans, now refers to Indians who are “corrupted by mainstream America”. ‘Macaca’ originally used by francophone colonialists in Central Africa’s Belgian Congo to refer to the native population; has since expanded to other groups, including North Africans and Indians. Although the coin also has two faces, such with the word ‘Haole’ mainly used

by Hawaiians to describe white non-natives.

A ‘Gub’ or ‘Gubba’ is an Australian term for white people used by the Aboriginals.

During the colonial period of the 19th Century, the British referred to Sunni Muslim Hadendoa warriors on the Red Sea coast of the Sudan as ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’s’, and referred to their elaborate butter-matted hairstyles. A widely used derogatory term for Hindu Indians who practice the decoration of the bindi were labelled ‘Dotheads’.

British and American people would often refer to the French as ‘Frogs’, and is still very present today. Prior to 19th century, this referred to the Dutch (as they were stereotyped as being marsh-dwellers). When France became Britain’s main enemy, replacing the Dutch, the epithet was transferred to them, because of the French penchant for eating frogs’ legs. Also used in Canada to refer to both the French and French Canadians, and occasionally incorrectly as more broadly to people from Quebec who are not, in fact, necessarily French or French-speaking.

After the defeat of the French by Germany in 1940 – and due to the huge variety of cheeses originating from France – ‘Cheese-eating Surrender Monkey’ was coined by the British and American people for a Frenchman. The term gained popularity decades later after it was written into an episode of the popular Western cartoon, The Simpsons.

‘Christ Killer’ has previously been thrown at Jews, an allusion to Jewish deicide, a belief that places the responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Jewish people as a whole. This deicide accusation is expressed as such with damning ethnoreligious slurs. Although not part of Christian dogma, many Christians, including members of the clergy, preached that the Jewish people were collectively guilty for Jesus’s death. With Eastern Orthodox Christians chanting “the murderers of God, the lawless nation of the Jews”.

With the gold rush and railwayconstruction eras in Western North America came an influx of Chinese immigrant workers.

‘Chinaman’ and ‘Chink’ – both abundantly used to this day – were common discriminative names for those of Chinese or East Asian descent. An Asian person living in a Western country would often be tagged as a ‘Banana’ since they are “yellow on the outside, and white on the inside”. Although this term is primarily used by Asians to indicate someone who has lost touch with the cultural identity.

A person of Mexican descent – or more specifically, mestizos of Central American descent – can be referred to as a ‘Beaner’ or ‘Beaney’ originating from the use of frijoles pintos and other beans in Mexican food. The term has been widely used by US police, particularly in Southern states bordering Mexico.

‘Hun’ referred to Germans, especially German soldiers; and was extremely popular during the First World War and was found plastered across newspapers throughout the conflict. It derived from a speech given by Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany to the German contingent sent to China during the Boxer Rebellion in which he exhorted them to “be like Huns” (i.e., savage and ruthless) to their Chinese enemy.

When the Second World War erupted, so did the terminology, and the headlines soon followed. The Japanese were called ‘Japs’, whether a soldier, a national, or anyone of Japanese descent, they were stripped of their identity by the media and just labeled a ‘Jap’.

This new tactic of racism helped to desensitize the population against the new enemy and boost moral. The Germans also received a

new title of ‘Jerry’, much like the ‘Japs’ but deriving from the German designed Jerrycan for carrying fuel and water. Italians were ‘Wops’ and the Dutch were labelled ‘Cheeseheads’, Hitler was known to use this term a lot during his reign.

Since the Second World War, Americans and also mainland Japanese Americans referred to Hawaiian Japanese Americans as ‘Buddhaheads’. ‘Charlie’ was a slang term used by American troops as a shorthand term for Vietnamese guerrillas during the Vietnam War. Derived from the verbal shorthand for “Victor Charlie”, the NATO phonetic alphabet for VC, the abbreviation for Viet Cong.

Another disparaging term for an Asian person during the war, especially Vietnamese soldier or guerilla, was a ‘Dink’. ‘Gook-eye’ or ‘Gook’ referred to Asians, used especially for enemy soldiers. Its use has been traced to US Marines serving in the Philippines in the early 20th century. The earliest recorded example is dated 1920. It gained widespread notice as a result of the Korean and Vietnam wars alongside the term ‘Zip’ or ‘Zipperhead’ used

by American military, and subject to repeated use within Hollywood films such as Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Premium Rush and Gran Torino.

The recent war in the Middle East has unearthed the worst of the terms so far, with many veterans confessing to the widespread usage of them. ‘Dune Coon’ or more commonly spoken, ‘Sand Nigger’ was the US term for an Arab. It’s hard to grasp how far the world has progressed with human rights, equality, and the crushing of racist language such as ‘Coon’ and ‘Nigger’ since the slave trade. So to hear of such terms being re-invented and moulded to suit a new collective is sickening. Another widely uttered term for a person of Middle Eastern descent is ‘Camel Jockey’ due to their chosen mode of transport. Yet the most commonly used term

by US troops during the war is ‘Hajji/Hadji/ Haji’. Used to refer to Iraqis, Arabs, Afghans, or Middle Eastern and South Asian people in general. Derived from the honorific Al-Hajji, the title given to a Muslim who has completed the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). Closely followed by the stereotypical ‘Towel Head’, a person who wears a turban. Often refers specifically to an Arab or Muslim.

# S T I C K S A N D S T O N E S

Afghanistan 1960

93 • 94

“When I look at my dad’s photos, I remember Afghanistan as a country with thousands of years of history and culture... Fierce and proud yet fun loving people have been beaten down by terrible forces.”

- Peg Podlich, son of Dr. William Podlich, who spent 2 years teaching in Kabul, capturing the once beautiful country.

Trashcanistan*

2003

# S T I C K S A N D S T O N E S

The term “Trashcanistan� arose in debate by a pro-war *fanatic and avid gun enthusiast who believes that the post-war-on-terror Afghanistan is in better shape now than before the invasion began in 2001 by the West.

Somehow he felt the derogatory name was more suited to the current state of the country.

# “We should bomb Africa and the Middle East to get rid of the niggers, jews, and sandnigger #terrorists all in one. #jihad”

“Roses are red, Violets are...violet I won’t board a plane, With a jihadist pilot”

“Not racist but sick of seeing my country rammed w/ Mosques. If we went to their country we’d get shot in #jihad”

“In America, you’re 7X more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist, but at least the cop’s family won’t celebrate. #jihad”

“Get called a camel jockey or dirty oil arab on YouTube is hilarious. I’m not even Arab, nor comitting #jihad”

95 • 96

“I KILLED A SAND NIGGER LAST NIGHT #MERICAFACTS #FUCKYEAH #JIHAD”

“Everyone claims to not be racist until the guy with the #jihad towel on his head sits next to you on a plane.”

“OMG zero dark thirty best movie ever. Have a whole new hate for muslims and a whole new appreciation for our navy #jihad.”

“How come I can’t get a mobile reception in my house, yet a terrorist can upload his #jihads from a cave in Afganistan?”

“God damn Arabs are taking over our turf in the library.

You won’t find a Quran here! #GOBACKTOJIHAD”

“If you want to practice #sharia law and ignore US Constitution and law, leave USA and live in Trashcanistan. #islam #jihad”

“I also know that Muslim Arabs were Nazi collaborators.

Just waiting for the big takeover #jihad-ocaust”

# S T I C K S

Since the recent surge of fighting in people were not prepared to risk their lives in Syria of a ‘jihadist’ nature, twitter and other a righteous cause.

War is therefore the last resort, and sorts of social media have exploded on both sides. Those that condemn to the struggle with is subject to the rigorous conditions laid down racial slurs, and those who recruit through by the sacred law. The often misunderstood and overused term propaganda and refjihad literally means erences to tje Qur’an.

“Fight in the cause of God Then there are those against those who fight you, but “struggle” and not that understand the do not transgress limits. God “holy war” (a term not found anywhere situation and also the does not love transgressors.” in the Qur’an). Jihad, true meaning of the (Qur’an 2:190) as an Islamic concept, term “jihad”. can be on a personal Like Christianity,

“And fight them until perlevel--inner struggle Islam permits fightsecution is no more, and religion against evil within ing in self-defense, in is for God. But if they desist, oneself; struggle for defense of religion, then let there be no hostility exdecency and goodor on the part of cept against wrongdoers.” ness on the social those who have been (Qur’an 2:193) level; and struggle on expelled forcibly the battlefield, if and from their homes.

“If they seek peace, then when necessary.

It lays down strict you seek peace. And trust in God rules of combat that Next time you for He is the One that hears and see an islamophobic include prohibitions knows all things.” (Qur’an 8:61) status and decide to against harming cishare it: remember, vilians and against whether it’s viral or destroying crops, trees and livestock. As Muslims see it, injus- through conversation, rasism can have consetice would be triumphant in the world if good quences on innocents.

A N D S T O N E S

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD Part13 by Gordon Duff E

ven imaginary enemies can get tired, let’s end the American occupation of the Middle East.

97 • 98

For the last decade, America has been shuffling its entire military, including hundreds of thousands of private contractors, in and out of the Middle East on little more than a “snipe hunt.” Time for a reality check. Iraq never attacked the US. Reports say Al Qaeda may have fewer than 30 men in Afghanistan.

The Taliban has been asking for a cease fire for months. Turkey and Brazil negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran ending any possible threat, one we strangely, very strangely ignored. “Thermonuclear Israel’s” continual whining and manipulation is wearing thin. America’s economy, her Army and her suffering veterans demand an end to our Bush era phony war. General Petraeus is now in Afghanistan. The endless games, paying the Taliban for security, protecting drug dealers and propping up a failed dictatorship can come to an end.

OK, some news; the Taliban is sick of the war and ready to settle. The only thing keeping the war going is the Karzai brothers and their business partners. They aren’t worth it, they aren’t America’s allies, they are hated in Afghanistan and they need to be ‘retired’ to the south of France. I suspect they will be able to live quite well, no financial help needed.

Iran isn’t the problem, it never was.

Since the 1960s, America has been running interference for Israel’s territorial ambitions.

They are now occupying part of Egypt, Jordan and Syria and what had been 4 million

The occupied will eventually realise that the occupation’s just another enemy.

Muslim and Christian residents of Palestine are now 1.5 million Gaza detainees and 2.5 million refugees. Iran had already agreed to a proposal from Turkey and Brazil that would have gotten rid of any nuclear material that may have been used for a weapon, a “workable” deal that seems to have been opposed only because it is preventing a war that Israel wants.

Of course, Israel wants to attack Iran while hundreds of thousand of American troops are standing by. America’s occupation of the Middle East has proven to be a destabilizing influence for sure, making war on a whim attractive, a war really being fought as in Afghanistan over money, always oil and gas, drugs or arms profiteering. Without America’s military power, her ability to project force in the Middle East, a capability put in place after the first Gulf War, history might be very different.

With 75% of Guantanamo detainees winning release based on illegal detention, even under almost whimsical “rules of war” now in place, we are getting a new look at a decade of deception and even treason. Information is even leaking out indicating that the first Gulf War may have been grossly misrepresented with Kuwait now beginning to no longer be a victim but rather part of a partnership gone bad. The first invasion may be just as bogus as the second were it not for a better deception plan and the competent plotting of the elder Bush compared to his bungling son.

OCCUPYING

SOON BECOMES

O C C U P A T I O N A L H A Z A R D

TERROR

99 • 100

IS THEM

TERROR IS T T Y R AN N Y

TERROR IS H H Y P O CR I SY

TERROR IS E E V ER Y O N E

TERROR IS M M A NIP U L AT I O N

O C C U P A T I O N A L H A Z A R D

101 • 102

What has really happened is that America has spun out of control with one “lobby” after another banding together into a phony political front that wants nothing but endless war. America’s most powerful lobby is the Israeli’s, myth makers and storytellers peddling biblical prophesy to the rednecks, terror scares to the American Jewish community that controls over 40% of the nation’s wealth and “Islamophobia” to the rest of the country over the controlled news and entertainment industry. Do we begin to mention how our corrupt electoral process has made any honest discussion of this problem political suicide for any genuinely “American” candidate? Did we forget the oil lobby? Why do you think war with Iran is being pushed? The second the attack begins, the Straits of Hormuz are closed, oil prices skyrocket and oil company profits quadruple just like they did during the last wars. How do you think low oil demand, low oil prices and the doubled price of gasoline came about? Last week we learned that BP, the company famous for destroying the Gulf of Mexico, ordered the British government to free the “Lockerbie Bomber.” Consider that only a peek at the real power the oil companies have over our governments.

What used to be the “military/industrial complex” has gone well beyond that. With many financial institutions now deeply into ownership of intelligence and “black-ops” companies that make up much of America’s defense capabilities, we haven’t simply privatized war, we have privatized war policy.

Using the term “Middle East” is, in itself, a deception. The Mediterranean is an American lake. The Indian Ocean is being treated as a war “front.” Europe, from Britain to Germany to Italy and into Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, exists as little but a staging area for operations against what could be 30 terrorists. American bases dot each of these countries, continually expanded and new ones added to every day. Even the Black Sea is being “occupied,” with warships and ringed with bases.

Has the United States established exactly what its strategic interests are in the region?

Oil is flowing freely as is heroin. Money is flowing into the region by the plane load and back out, into banks in Dubai, Tel Aviv and Switzerland. Is $500 billion a year being spent to defend Israel from invasion by, well, we aren’t sure? What is being spent to secure Israel, or empower Israeli recklessness, is nearly one third of America’s entire budget.

Wouldn’t it simply be cheaper to give Israel the United States or do they own it already?

O C C U P A T I O N A L H A Z A R D

BLEEDING BLACK G LD Part14 O

il. That is what the modern Middle Eastern geopolitics have usually been about.

103 • 104

Given the vast energy resources that form the backbone of western economies, influence and involvement in the Middle East has been of paramount importance for the former and current imperial and super powers, including France, Britain, USA and the former Soviet Union.

Prior to the discovery of oil, the region had been a hotbed for religious conflict and wars over other rich resources and land.

The declining Ottoman Empire paved way for the rising European imperial and colonial powers interested in securing various territories and controlling access to Asia. In more recent times, interest in the region has been due to the energy resources there.

As a result, for centuries, western populations have been acclimatized to a type of propaganda and vilification of the Arab and other people of the Middle East, and of Islam in general.

This was especially so during the European colonial times, as so vividly examined by Edward Said, in his well-respected book, Orientalism.

This negative stereotyping has served to provide justifications for involvement and to ensure “stability” for the “national interests” of the powers that want to be involved in the region.

This cultural stereotyping and racism has occurred in the modern times too.

Often, especially in the 1980s, war films depicting an Arab or Islamic group as the bad guys were common place, sometimes reflect-

In 2013, the United States consumed a total of 6.89 billion barrels of petroleum products, an average of 18.89 million barrels per day. Peak oil has already been reached meaning more invasions are imminent.

ing prevailing turmoils at the time. Even in the 1990s, those ideas continued, where the bad guy was often a despotic Arab from one of the “rogue states” and as a result of the terrorist attacks against the US in September 11, 2001 and the resulting “War on terror”, such imagery is likely to continue. Over such a long time then, such boundaries of discourse about the Middle East have already been framed. To overstep those boundaries is to be labeled anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, anti-West or some other equally negative label. For most journalists in the mainstream then, self-censorship is often the course, sometimes unknowingly.

To maintain superiority, control and influence over the region, the West has placed corrupt Arab leaders into positions of power and supported the overthrow of those that are not seen as favorable. This has also served to keep their populations at bay, in return for militarization, power and personal wealth of the elite. Sometimes this has been done in the name of fighting communism.

The common theme underlying it though has been the struggle to control access to important resources such as oil.

The Middle East is the most militarized region in the world and most arms sales head there. A suppressed people that sees US influence as a major root cause of the current problems in the Middle East has led to a rise in Islamic militancy, acts of terrorism and anti-west sentiment, anti-US in particular.

When looking at some of the actions of the US, it can often be seen why this is unfortunately so.

Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms. From ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West’s largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq. So have a slew of American oil service companies, including Halliburton, the Texas-

“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,”

- Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007.

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

- Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Chairman.

“People say we’re not fighting for oil.

Of course we are.”

- Chuck Hagel, former Senator and now Defense Secretary, in 2007.

B L E E D I N G B L A C K G O L D

Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with losers: the Iraqi people and all those who spilled and lost blood so that Big Oil could come out ahead.

105 • 106

based firm Dick Cheney ran before becoming George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000.

The war is the one and only reason for this long sought and newly acquired access. Oil was not the only goal of the Iraq War, but it was certainly the central one, as top U.S. military and political figures have attested to in the years following the invasion.

“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen, and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same

the task force reviewed lists and maps outlining Iraq’s entire oil productive capacity.

Planning for a military invasion was soon under way. Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, said in 2004, “Already by February (2001), the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why (to invade Iraq), but the how and how quickly.” In its final report in May 2001, the task force argued that Middle Eastern countries should be urged “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” This is precisely what has been achieved in Iraq. Here’s how they did it. The State Department Future of Iraq Project’s Oil and Energy Working Group met from February 2002 to April 2003 and agreed that Iraq “should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war.”

Che ron

in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil.

Of course we are.”

For the first time in about 30 years, Western oil companies are exploring for and producing oil in Iraq from some of the world’s largest oil fields and reaping enormous profit.

And while the U.S. has also maintained a fairly consistent level of Iraq oil imports since the invasion, the benefits are not finding their way through Iraq’s economy or society. These outcomes were by design, the result of a decade of U.S. government and oil company pressure. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then CEO of Chevron, said, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas-reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.” Today it does. In 2000, Big Oil, including Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell, spent more money to get fellow oilmen Bush and Cheney into office than they had spent on any previous election. Just over a week into Bush’s first term, their efforts paid off when the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired

by Cheney, was formed, bringing the administration and the oil companies together to plot our collective energy future. In March,

The list of the group’s members was not made public, but Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum -- who was appointed Iraq’s oil minister by the U.S. occupation government in September 2003 -- was part of the group, according to Greg Muttitt, a journalist and author of “Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq.” Bahr al-Uloum promptly set about trying to implement the group’s objectives.

At the same time, representatives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Halliburton, among others, met with Cheney’s staff in January 2003 to discuss plans for Iraq’s postwar industry. For the next decade, former and current executives of western oil companies acted first as administrators of Iraq’s oil ministry and then as “advisers” to the Iraqi government.

Before the invasion, there were just two things standing in the way of Western oil companies operating in Iraq: Saddam Hussein and the nation’s legal system. The invasion dealt handily with Hussein. To address the latter problem, some both inside and outside of the Bush administration argued that it should

reconciliation.” But due to enormous public opposition and a recalcitrant parliament, the central Iraqi government has failed to pass the Hydrocarbons Law. Usama al-Nujeyfi, a member of the parliamentary energy committee, even quit in protest over the law, saying it would cede too much control to global companies and “ruin the country’s future.” In 2008, with the likelihood of the law’s passage and the prospect of continued foreign military occupation dimming as elections loomed in the U.S. and Iraq, the oil companies settled on a different track.

Upon leaving office, Bush and Obama administration officials have even worked for oil companies as advisers on their Iraq endeavors. For example, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad’s company, CMX-Gryphon, “provides international oil companies and multinationals with unparalleled access, insight and knowledge on Iraq.”

The new contracts lack the security a new legal structure would grant, and Iraqi lawmakers have argued that they run contrary to existing law, which requires government

control, operation and ownership of Iraq’s oil sector. But the contracts do achieve the key goal of the Cheney energy task force: all but privatizing the Iraqi oil sector and opening it to private foreign companies.

They also provide exceptionally long contract terms and high ownership stakes and eliminate requirements that Iraq’s oil stay in Iraq, that companies invest earnings in the local economy or hire a majority of local workers. Iraq’s oil production has increased by more than 40% in the past five years to 3 million barrels of oil a day (still below the 1979 high of 3.5 million set by Iraq’s state-owned companies), but a full 80% of this is being exported out of the country while Iraqis struggle to meet basic energy consumption needs.

GDP per capita has increased significantly

yet remains among the lowest in the world and well below some of Iraq’s other oil-rich neighbors. Basic services such as water and electricity remain luxuries, while 25% of the population lives in poverty.

The promise of new energy-related jobs across the country has yet to materialize.

The oil and gas sectors today account directly for less than 2% of total employment, as foreign companies rely instead on imported labor. In just the last few weeks, more than 1,000 people have protested at ExxonMobil and Russia Lukoil’s super-giant West Qurna oil field, demanding jobs and payment for private land that has been lost or damaged by oil operations. The Iraqi military was called in to respond. Fed up with the firms, a leading coalition of Iraqi civil society groups and trade unions, including oil workers, declared on February 15 that international oil companies have “taken the place of foreign troops in compromising Iraqi sovereignty”.

At a protest at Chevron’s HQ in 2010, U.S. Army Veteran Thomas Buonomo, held a sign that read, “Dear Chevron: Thank you for dishonoring our service”

simply change Iraq’s oil laws through the U.S.led coalition government of Iraq, which ran the country from April 2003 to June 2004.

Instead the White House waited, choosing to pressure the newly elected Iraqi government to pass new oil legislation itself.

This Iraq Hydrocarbons Law, partially drafted by the Western oil industry, would lock the nation into private foreign investment under the most corporate-friendly terms. The Bush administration pushed the Iraqi government both publicly and privately to pass the law. And in January 2007, as the “surge” of 20,000 additional American troops was being finalized, the president set specific benchmarks for the Iraqi government, including the passage of new oil legislation to “promote investment, national unity, and

B L E E D I N G B L A C K G O L D

“BE VERY AFRAID...”

Part15 by Kevin Barrett Y

esterday it was a tag-line from a horror movie.

Today it is the unofficial motto of the US Gov.

107 • 108

David Cronenberg’s film The Fly told us to “be very afraid” of human beings turning into insects – a warning originally issued by Franz Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis. Kafka and Cronenberg were right. Behavior control experts have learned to “hive” the mass mind, effectively turning human beings into the moral, intellectual and spiritual equivalent of insects. And their biggest social control tool is fear. When people are terrorized, they let their leaders get away with murder. So corrupt leaders have applied “Terror Management Theory” to controlling and exploiting populations.

The Wikipedia entry on Terror Management Theory explains: “When a follower’s mortality is made prominent they will tend to show a strong preference for iconic leaders. An example of this occurred when George W. Bush’s approval rating jumped almost 50 percent following the September 11 attacks in the United States.” - George W. Bush an iconic leader?! The notion is laughable. Bush is a doltish drunk who failed at everything he tried. Unlike Obama, Bush is a bad liar – which would have disqualified him from political office were it not for his money and connections and ties to the companies that manufacture voting machines. But when Americans were terrorized by hideous images of plane crashes, fireballs, and tall buildings exploding into pyroclastic dust clouds chasing

Human activity is driven by the fear of death. People keep busy to avoid facing their own mortality.

screaming crowds through the streets of New York, they would have willingly submitted to a chattering purple-rump baboon as their “iconic leader.” Though Bush’s ratings rose 50 percent, the baboon probably could have gotten 60 percent.

So how does Terror Management Theory (TMT) work? According to TMT, human activity is driven by fear of death. People keep busy to avoid facing their own mortality. When reminded of death, they react in predictable ways – including giving up their rights and handing money and power to authoritarian leaders. So unscrupulous leaders, by highlighting certain kinds of threats, can terrorize people into submitting to corrupt authority.

In reality, lightning strikes and bathtub drownings are more of a threat than terrorism. But no politician can get away with saying “give me money and power and I will protect you from bathtubs and lightning.” Instead, they say: “Be afraid that a plane you are on will be hijacked and crash into a building.

Be afraid that a building you are in will be demolished by a plane. Be afraid that anthrax may arrive in your mailbox. Be afraid that a bomb may explode next to you on the street, or that your children will be shot by a maniac while they are at school, or that you and your family will be mowed down by a crazed gunman in a theater or a house of worship.”

Spectacular Hollywood-style violence featuring terror attacks, crazed gunmen firing into crowds, and similar imagery is – according to Terror Management Theory – the perfect tool of social control. All the leaders need to do is stage a certain number of terror incidents and blame someone else. Then they can “crack down on the terrorists and criminals” and keep the population in a state of slavish obedience.

Have US leaders ever staged a fake terror incident?

Quite simply, the answer is yes, multiple times.

“ B E V E R Y A F R A I D . . . “

109 • 110

The CIA has used false-flag terror attacks to overthrow leaders it doesn’t like, and empower leaders on its payroll, all over the world. Recently-declassified documents confirm that the CIA used false-flag shootings and bombings when it installed the Shah on the throne in Iran in 1953.

Another example: Operation Gladio. This was a US-led terror operation that slaughtered European civilians in shootings and bombings during the Cold War. Caught and prosecuted, one low-level participant explained: “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force… the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”

Though an investigation by the European Parliament proved that the American Pentagon was behind the wave of “radical leftist” terror that swept Europe during the Cold War, none of the planners or commanders of Operation Gladio has ever been prosecuted. So Europeans have good reason to suspect that the Madrid train bombings of 2004, the 7/7 London bombings of 2005, and other “terror attacks” are also Gladio operations directed by corrupt elements of the Western military and intelligence apparatus.

Today, a growing number of Americans believe that Operation Gladio never ended. They suspect that the Colorado theater shooting, the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the Sandy Hook school shooting were Gladio-style operations.

These skeptics have good reason to be suspicious. The Boston bombing was an obvious false-flag operation. Photographs taken at the scene show that Craft International paramilitary forces carried out the bombings, while the Tsarnaev brothers were innocent patsies. Now the authorities are killing everyone who could reveal the truth. Corrupt police shot Tamerlan Tsarnaev to death while he was naked and handcuffed; then repeatedly ran over his body with a vehicle.

Witness Ibragim Todashev was arrested by

the FBI, interrogated for several hours, then murdered execution-style – probably because he knew the Tsarnaevs were innocent and refused to change his story. Honest FBI agents connected with the Boston bombing have been “falling out of helicopters.” Now the Terror Management Theory forces are seeking the death penalty for Dzokhar Tsarnaev in hope of pressuring him to falsely admit guilt by accepting a plea bargain.

The Sandy Hook school shooting also appears to have been an exercise in Terror Management Theory. A recent article entitled ”Top Ten Reasons: Sandy Hook Was an Elaborate Hoax” by professors James Fetzer, James Tracy, and co-authors builds a compelling case that this “school shooting” was a contrived spectacle. During an interview Friday on Truth Jihad Radio, Drs. Tracy and Fetzer discussed evidence that both the Boston bombing and the Sandy Hook shooting may have featured “crisis actors” posing as victims and survivors.

If so, both events must have been “terror drills” that “went live” as part of a highly-classified Terror Management Theory social-engineering project.

James Fetzer cited a recent investigation by former Florida State Trooper and school security expert Wolfgang Halbig: “Wolf thinks this (the Sandy Hook false-flag event) was in the planning for years…it was very elaborate.”

Halbig’s investigation has been hampered by the pervasive secrecy surrounding the Sandy Hook shooting. For example, when Halbig asked for the FBI’s report on Sandy Hook, Fetzer says, the FBI personnel “laughed in his face and told him it wouldn’t be released in his lifetime.”

Why would a domestic school shooting be a classified national security secret? James Tracy speculated on possible motives for staging a school shooting at Sandy Hook: “There was the realization that it would have given a two to three week window in terms of gun control legislation. And keep in mind that this is also the rationale in the matter of school safety and safety in public places. If we can’t expect our children to be safe in public schools, can we expect ourselves

A nation that cowers in fear at home in front of the television is a nation vulnerable to being manipulated and swindled by its corrupt leadership.

and our families to be safe in broader public spaces? A nation that cowers in fear at home in front of the television is a nation vulnerable to being manipulated and swindled by its corrupt leadership.”

Dr. Fetzer has been targeted by bomb threats and Dr. Tracy by media and academic harassment. The media will not mention the obvious questions about these events, except to heap ridicule on those asking them. This adds yet another layer of terror – fear of ridicule and social ostracism – to the mix.

“ B E V E R Y A F R A I D . . . “

It seems that scary television images are capable of terrorizing people so badly that they become incapable of asking questions. That was the lesson of 9/11. Today, America is a nation paralyzed by fear; while its larcenous leaders – empowered to shred the Constitution and steal trillions of dollars through the shrewd use of Terror Management Theory – are laughing all the way to the bank.

CU ISM

PY

R

RO

R

TE

OC

terrorish; /ˈtɛrərɪʃ / noun; having the usual undesireable qualities of a terrorist without being named as such by mainstream media. “the occupation in the Middle East is starting to feel slightly terrorish” “I’m feeling terrorish killing innocents” “we’ve committed equally terrorish

crimes as the people we’re told to kill”