Roots Of Terrorism

Courtesy Of: CovertAction

Edited By Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap

The following are some very brief excerpts from the editors' introductions to the various sections of the book, along with a list of the articles in each section.

I. War Without End:

The practical, economic forces driving resurgent imperialism—in essence unmitigated greed—are not alone enough to explain current conditions.

There are more metaphysical forces at play, undercurrents of the U.S. psyche as old as the nation itself.

One such theme is U.S. exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is somehow unique, somehow beyond any need for international consensus, somehow entitled to do whatever it wants.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington has pursued a policy of unilateral, world-wide military conquest, attacking and destabilizing weak "rogue" states in the name of democracy.

Another element driving this unilateralism is a form of religious fundamentalism endemic to the United States from its earliest days, the messianic notion that the United States represents God's chosen people, God's chosen system of government, God's chosen way of life: Triumphalism.

In one poll, forty-six percent of the people of the United States—including the President—described themselves as "evangelical" or "born-again Christians," an astonishing figure.

Many of them, and most of their shepherds, do not believe we should merely offer our God-given way of life to the other peoples of the world; we should foist our brand of democracy upon them whether they like it or not, and by military conquest if necessary, appropriating their resources as God intended.

God has chosen America to cleanse the world and George W. Bush to lead that battle.

As much of the material in this book makes clear, the strongest (and often the only) ally of this new U.S. triumphalism has been the government of the State of Israel.

While many of Bush's key administration figures are indeed self-professed Zionists, many others are deeply fundamentalist Christians.

Any detailed analysis of the complicated philosophical underpinnings of this alliance is beyond the scope of this book, though touched upon throughout.

The influence of the Israel-firsters cannot be gainsaid. It was the Jonathan Institute, described below in our introduction to The New Red Scare, that first promoted the notion of pre-emptive and punitive strikes.

As this became U.S. doctrine, it served as an ex post facto justification for Israeli policies already in place.

And it was the Jonathan Institute that provided the framework for the anti-U.N. sentiment that appears to have subsumed Washington.

The impetus for this collection is two-fold.

Much of the world's turmoil is in response to the upsurge in U.S. imperialism, increasingly unchecked for decades.

No one can truly analyze the dramatic rise in terrorism without conceding that it is largely reactive, largely driven by one brutal ploy after another by the western powers, almost exclusively the United States.

Not just invasions and wars, not just the removal of leaders distrusted by the west, not just the subversion of international institutions—but also the rape of the planet's environment, the dumping of dangerous products on the unwary of the world, and the callous disregard for the proliferation of disease and malnutrition everywhere.

For more than twenty years, CovertAction magazine reported on the relatively secret machinations of imperialism.

When we began publication, few U.S. citizens even knew what the CIA was, much less what it did and had done—in stark contrast to its victims around the world.

Today, much of what was done in secret in the past is done openly, and one can barely imagine what continues under cover.

The introduction to each section of this book is designed to highlight the connections between the articles and the situation today. In some cases, the connections are by analogy; in some they are simply the continuation of unfinished or interrupted game plans. In many cases, indeed, the main players are identical.

Dissent is not, as the warlords would have it, immoral; it is essential. If the articles in this book provide some assistance to the arguments of the dissenters, it will have served its purpose.

The articles in this section are:

"The Corruption of Covert Actions," by Ramsey Clark (1998).
"Tracking Covert Actions into the Future," by Philip Agee (1992).
"NATO and Beyond," by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap (1999).
"Evangelicals for Nuclear War," by Larry Jones (1991).

II. From Cuba To Afghanistan:

Instructive Examples:

The United States is the only country in the world where the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, are not viewed as a consequence of U.S. policy.

The reporting and analysis of what happened was almost entirely without historical reference.

Yet the record shows that the al-Qaeda network might even not have existed at all, had the U.S. not sponsored Islamic extremism in Afghanistan. This is commonly understood outside the United States.

Yet in official and media circles in the United States, almost no memory evidently exists of the policies of just a few years ago, in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, that promoted radical, fundamentalist Islamic "holy warriors" as "freedom fighters" against the Soviet Union.

Throughout the 1990s, voices were heard repeatedly in the Arab and Muslim world warning of the monster that had been created by U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan.

The United States rejected any responsibility when the holy warriors turned on other Islamic societies, notably in Algeria and Pakistan, for being too "secular" and vowing to "reform" them as they were reforming Afghanistan.

Tens of thousands of people were killed in the Islamic world in the 1990s by these extremists, to the almost complete indifference of the U.S. government and media.

The truest reflection of the U.S. attitude was uttered by Zbigniew Brzezinski, when he observed,

"What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

The Islamic fundamentalism sponsored by the United States to promote its strategic interests (in a comparable way, Israel aided Hamas to weaken the PLO) is closely associated with the phenomenon of international terrorism, which lately has replaced communism as the embodiment of the "Threat," that metaphysical force the U.S. requires to define its foreign policy.

For some 20 years before September 11, western corporate media toiled diligently to transform the "Enemy" from communism to terrorism—a very selective definition of terrorism that was being implanted in the collective consciousness of its audience.

The articles in this section are:

" Jihad International, Inc.," by Eqbal Ahmad (1998).
"Power and the Semantics of Terror," by Edward S. Herman (1986).
"Why Do They Hate Us?" by Edward S. Herman (1988).

The New Red Scare:

It would be a mistake to imagine that George W. Bush declared war on terrorism on September 11. Rather he "re-declared" a war that Ronald Reagan had first created and financed, in the mid-1980s.

While Jimmy Carter had used "human rights" as a focus for imposing U.S. hegemony, Ronald Reagan replaced that doctrine with his own war against "international terrorism."

Within days of his inauguration, Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced that "international terrorism will take the place of human rights [as] our concern, because it is the ultimate ... abuse of human rights."

This fundamental shift in policy was due in large part to the influence of a shadowy Israeli-American organization, the Jonathan Institute, founded in 1979 by Benjamin Netanyahu, the future Israeli prime minister, whose brother Jonathan was killed in the commando raid on Uganda's Entebbe airport in 1976. The Jonathan Institute became the emblematic think tank of Israeli and U.S. officials.

The National Security state was giving way to the Counter-Terrorist state, with a catalogue of strategies that would come fully into the open when the September 11 attack made it possible for U.S. officials to speak without ambiguity.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, the strategic equation changed only in its new definition of the Enemy. The acceptable policies of the Counter-Terrorist state were defined.

A strong case can be made that the Jonathan Institute was established to insure not just the defeat of the Democrats in 1980, but the election of a Republican pledged to the international strategies of the Institute.

The provocative underlying message promoted was: We must not wait to be attacked, but must institute "preemptive retaliation," a formula already expressed in early meetings of the Jonathan Institute.

These themes—the backbone of Israeli policy against the Palestinians and the rationale for its continued occupation of their territory—soon became a part of the Reagan Doctrine.

The precursor of the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2002 can be found in Reagan's 1984 National Security Decision directive (NSDD) 138, authorizing paramilitary and military anti-terrorist squads as well as preemptive retaliation.

The articles in this section are:

"Cuban Exile Terrorists On Rampage," Editorial (1979).
"New Spate of Terrorism: Key Leaders Unleashed," by William H. Schaap (1980).
"Editorial on NSDD 138," Editorial (1984).
"Pentagon Moves on Terrorism," by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap (1984).
"The Uses of `Counterterrorism,'" by Christopher Simpson (1996).
Libya in U.S. Demonology," by Noam Chomsky (1986).

Setting The Stage: Afghanistan:

The actions of Afghanistan, of the Taliban, even of Osama bin Laden, have been seen on all sides as a metaphor for a global conflict, whether between western civilization on the one hand and intolerant religious fundamentalism on the other; or between rapacious global imperialism on the one hand and the yearnings of the exploited have-nots of the world on the other.

It is extremely instructive to study the details of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and such a study was made possible in a rather unique way.

After the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, many secret documents relating to Afghanistan were discovered, and they appeared in the pamphlets of reprinted documents (often pieced together from shredder baskets) published in Iran and widely distributed around the world.

These classified State Department and CIA cables up to October 1979 laid bare the development of the U.S. policy that led to incursion of Soviet troops two months later.

The articles in this section are:

"Destabilizing Afghanistan," by Steve Galster (1988).
"The Afghan Pipeline," by Steve Galster (1988).
III. Terrorist Wars in the Middle East

Israeli State Terror:

For more than 35 years, the violent and bitter history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts have centered around a history of collaboration between U.S. and Israeli military and intelligence services and their coincidence of interests.

Israeli covert operations have backed up U.S. clandestine schemes, especially in the Middle East, but also in Central America, southern Africa, and elsewhere in a global conquest in which U.S. domination has reached its apex under George W. Bush.

Ever since the discovery of vast, almost unimaginable oil reserves in the region, the overriding strategic objective of the United States in the Middle East has been access to and eventual control over that resource.

And since its 1967 victory in the six-day war, when Israel established itself as the regional military superpower capable of aiding in this primary U.S. objective, massive U.S. foreign aid and subsidized weapons of war have ensured an Israeli-U.S. alliance with mutually expansionist agendas.

Both want unfettered access to Arab oil, and more.

The second U.S. imperative is its strategic partnership with Israel, a function of the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, exemplified by the ability of the American-Israel Political Action Committee to influence congressional and even presidential elections.

And the White House, State Department, and Pentagon are riddled with insiders with dual loyalties, the belief that U.S. and Israeli interests are, and should be, identical.

The quid pro quo for Israel, an extension of this objective, is the relative free play given to its own designs in the Middle East as a military force and an ever-expanding Zionist state.

The United States has given Israel virtually every sophisticated weapon system it has to offer, more than $18 billion in the last decade, with more than $2 billion in military aid slated for the next fiscal year (2003-2004).

As a further reward for cooperation in covert activities around the globe, the U.S. remained silent, if not actually assisted, Israel's development and testing of its own nuclear weapons.

The first intifada erupted in 1987 when Israeli expanding settlements in the occupied territories stripped Palestinians of more of their land, while Israeli and U.S. intelligence operations to weaken Palestinian unity intensified.

"Preemptive retaliation" began with the Israeli assassination of the co-founder, with Yassir Arafat, of Fateh.

The articles in this section are:

"Israeli State Terror," by Naseer Aruri (1988).
"Israel Shahak on the `Transfer Proposal,'" by Ellen Ray (1988).
"Israel Wages Chemical Warfare With American Tear Gas," by Louis Wolf (1988).
"Washington's Proxy: Israeli Arms in Central America," ny Clarence Lusane (1984).
"Israeli-South African Collaboration," by Jack Colhoun (1986).

Iran-Contra And The Israel Lobby:

The New World Order that George Bush senior heralded after the Soviet demise is now George Bush junior's legacy—his New Imperial Order.

The roots of this current power grab go back to the last months of the Carter administration in 1980. Reagan-Bush campaign hawks plotted feverishly against the possibility that the U.S. Embassy hostages held in Tehran might be released just before the November election—a devastating public relations coup for the incumbent, a so-called October Surprise.

On the heels of the disastrously botched hostage rescue attempt, only the negotiated release of the hostages would have kept Carter's chances alive.

Reagan's minions secretly negotiated with ranking advisers to Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini for a delay of any action until after the election, and their success left Jimmy Carter facing the polls with the Americans having languished in captivity for an entire year.
The campaign for world economic and political domination gathered momentum during the final years of the Cold War, including the decade-long Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s (in which the United States sold arms to both sides), and the "clandestine" wars against Nicaragua's Sandinista government and the revolutionary movements in El Salvador, Guatemala, Angola, South Africa, and elsewhere.

What became known as the Iran-contra scandal—clandestine U.S. arms sales to Iran, facilitated by Israeli intelligence guidance, with the huge profits used to fund the terrorist war of the contras against the revolutionary government of Nicaragua—was a major part of these operations.

Both ends of the operation were ostensibly prohibited by U.S. law, and the secret sales to Iraq were not even part of the publicly-known equation.

The articles in this section are:

"Disinformationgate," by Fred Landis (1987).
"Deltagate?" by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap (1987).
"Out of the Loop: The VP's Office: Cover for Iran-Contra," by Jane Hunter (1990).
"What Vice-President Bush Knew and Why He Knew It," by Anthony L. Kimery (1992).
"Vice-President Bush: Inside Track to Power," by Karen Branan (1992).

The Bush Family: Oiligarchy And The Emirs:

When the U.S. economy falters, conventional wisdom calls for war preparations, or, better yet, war.

Thus there are peculiar ramifications to the scandal over massive corporate malfeasance that broke early in the George W. Bush administration, hard on the heels of his fraudulent 2000 election.

At present, the U.S. economy is in a shambles—not from September 11, but because of corporate greed, publicly revealed corporate greed, on a scale never exposed before.

The President, his father, his uncle, and all his brothers have been neck-deep for decades in the corruption he now pretends to find so shocking.

Many key figures of the Reagan and Bush I administrations made huge profits not from any business acumen but from their political and military connections, sought after by corrupt Middle Eastern potentates, with assistance from shameful and unethical lawyers, banks, and accountants.

Even now, as some of the past wheeling and dealing is rehashed in the press, the truly far-reaching and longstanding implications are only superficially questioned.

The common thread is and always has been the control of oil. Middle Eastern oil in particular, and world energy supplies in general.

The war against terrorism and the jockeying for oil are intertwined, the former providing cover for the latter.

Before September 11, Washington's overarching thirst for oil had to be disguised.

During the Iran-contra congressional hearings much of the press coverage was spun to highlight Oliver North's escapades with the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries, not his role as an arms dealer in Iran and Iraq, whose oil was not in the U.S. grip.

The article in this section is:

"The Family That Preys Together," by Jack Colhoun (1992).

Iraq And The Gulf Wars:

For many years, the destruction of Iraq through its dismemberment into three mini-states (Kurdish, Shi'ite , and Sunni ), has been an Israeli, Zionist expansionist policy.

During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the Israelis were critical of the United States when the Republican administration's hostility toward Iran ran so deep that it covertly poured weapons (including chemical and biological) into Baghdad while they were also working with Israel in selling arms to Tehran.

Despite their differences, however, both Israel and the United States profited handsomely by prolonging a war that killed over a million combatants and civilians on both sides.

By 1990, U.S. imperial strategy had developed a new thrust with respect to Middle East dominance.

Flushed with an unexpected Cold War victory, President Bush orchestrated Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, precipitating the first Gulf War.

For a decade afterwards, Washington's strategy was to maintain draconian sanctions on Iraq, with the support of Congress and a supine United Nations, while ordering almost daily bombing raids in the so-called "no-fly zones."

The justification for such barbarity was western insistence that Iraq possessed, and refused to destroy, vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), chemical, biological, and potentially nuclear.

By the time George W. Bush took office, it was clear to the world that sanctions had not weakened the Iraqi government, that no coup would succeed in Baghdad, and that opposition forces, such as they were, could never drive Saddam Hussein out.

Only another U.S. invasion, Washington hawks proclaimed, would finish the job Bush senior had inexplicably halted.

This became part and parcel of the evolving Bush Doctrine, which began by denouncing its former ally Iraq as a harborer of terrorists and a stockpiler of WMD, to be held accountable.

The hypocrisy of the administration in creating hysteria over the possible use by Iraq of chemical and biological weapons (CBW), and even of nuclear weapons, is boundless.

For almost a century, the United States has been the most prolific user of CBW, in World War I, in World War II, in the Korean War, in the Vietnam War, and throughout the Cold War.

It has left generations of victims throughout the world, devastated the ecology of Vietnam for decades still to come.

It has tested these weapons of mass destruction on unwitting civilians and military personnel; it has subjected its own combat soldiers to horrific, debilitating and deadly disease. (See our recent book, Bioterror .)

All the CBW agents Iraq ever had (and they have now been virtually destroyed) it got from the United States, in deals brokered by the very same people who now excoriate them.

Reviewing the 1990 Gulf War in some detail is historically helpful in understanding Washington's actions today.

The articles in this section are:

"Trading With the Enemy," by Jack Colhoun (1991).
"The Middle East in `Crisis,'" by Jane Hunter (1990).
"Iraq: Disinformation and Covert Operations," by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap (1991).

IV. End Game: The Fundamentalists Ascend:

In considering nuclear force, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld advised the Pentagon to "think the unthinkable."

The U.S. is considering military action against "40 to 50 countries," announced Vice President Dick Cheney.

"If we ... just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now," was how the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, put it.

It is terrifying when the world's only superpower is in the hands of a cabal that seems not merely to believe in Armageddon, but to relish the thought.

The links between Christian fundamentalists and the pro-Israel Zionist fundamentalists have been noted earlier. They all love the bomb.

The open talk of the U.S. use of nuclear weapons in Iraq, including pre-emptive use, only increases the likelihood that Israel will avail itself of this option, as it asserts itself into the conflict, something most observers think is inevitable.

And Washington's atomic warmongering does nothing to foster nuclear restraint in Russia or China, much less North Korea.

While Washington demanded that Iraq and North Korea abide by U.N. resolutions and international treaties and forgo nuclear capability, it steadfastly flouted such resolutions and treaties over the years, actively assisting Israel and apartheid South Africa in nuclear development.

Though the apartheid regime is gone, along with its atomic weapons program (having simply been moved north to a more pro-U.S. neighbor), Israel became one of the nuclear superpowers, willing since the October 1973 war to use them on its neighbors.

Both Israel and the United States speak fondly of neutron bombs, miniature thermonuclear devices designed to kill as many people as possible while inflicting as little property damage as possible.

They are reportedly a staple in the Israeli nuclear arsenal, a convenient weapon in future Middle East wars.

Indeed, Israel's nuclear program is a source of deep resentment and fear in the Middle East, and there is no likelihood it will be constrained.

The U.S. no longer pays even lip service to non-proliferation, having rejected the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and moved ahead with a National Missile Defense program, reviving the Star Wars fantasies of the Reagan era and seriously threatening the weaponization of space.

We hope the lessons to be learned from studying this history of U.S. terrorism and imperialism in the 1980s and 1990s are clear.

Washington's accusations must always be viewed with a jaundiced eye, its motives with skepticism. U.S. imperialism's hypocrisy knows no bounds, and its greed is unbridled.

America's triumphalism is not motivated by a longing for world-wide democracy, peace, and order.

It is nothing but a call for world-wide, brutal exploitation and dominion, led by a cabal that has not learned the lesson of Ozymandias.

The articles in this section are:

"Hiroshima: Needless Slaughter, Useful Terror," by William Blum (1995).
"Nuclear Threats and the New World," by Michio Kaku (1992).
"Israel, Iran, the United States, and the Bomb," by Israel Shahak (1993).