Britain's Secret Terror Force

"We Were Not There To Act Like An Army Unit, We Were There To Act Like A Terror Group"

Soldiers from an undercover unit used by the British army in Northern Ireland killed unarmed civilians, former members have told BBC One's Panorama.

Speaking publicly for the first time, the ex-members of the Military Reaction Force (MRF), which was disbanded in 1973, said they had been tasked with "hunting down" IRA members in Belfast.

Panorama has been told the MRF consisted of about 40 men handpicked from across the British army.

Before it was disbanded 40 years ago, after 18 months, plain-clothes soldiers carried out round-the-clock patrols of west Belfast - the heartland of the IRA - in unmarked cars.

Three former members of the unit, who agreed to be interviewed on condition their identities were disguised, said they had posed as Belfast City Council road sweepers, dustmen and even "meths drinkers", carrying out surveillance from street gutters.

But surveillance was just one part of their work.

One of the soldiers said they had also fired on suspected IRA members.

He described their mission as "to draw out the IRA and to minimise their activities... if they needed shooting, they'd be shot".

Another former member of the unit said: "We never wore uniform - very few people knew what rank anyone was anyway.

A third former MRF soldier said: "If you had a player who was a well-known shooter who carried out quite a lot of assassinations... then he had to be taken out.

The MRF's operational records have been destroyed and its former members refused to incriminate themselves or their comrades in specific incidents when interviewed by Panorama.

But they admitted shooting and killing unarmed civilians.

When asked if on occasion the MRF would make an assumption that someone had a weapon, even if they could not see one, one of the former soldiers replied "occasionally".

"We were going down there and finding, looking for our targets, finding them and taking them down." 

"We may not have seen a weapon, but there more than likely would have been weapons there in a vigilante patrol."

Panorama: Britain's Secret Terror Force, BBC One, Thursday 21 November at 21:00 GMT and then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.

Terrorism From Below and Above

By Dallas Darling


"Now, as we all know, good often proceeds from apparent evil, and the reverse." 
- Nasrudin

Unlike the British and French military forces scattered across parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, including their massive and lethal weapons systems, at least the two suspected British converts to Islam that attacked and stabbed to death a British soldier in London did so by discriminating between enemy combatants and noncombatants. In Paris, surveillance showed a bearded man of North African origin and wearing an Arab-style tunic selectively stabbing a French soldier in the neck. 

It sounds cruel, but at least individualized military assassins and their "soft" weapons cause far less killing and destruction than collectivized military assassins and their "hard" weapons. 

Terrorism from below is always a consequence of terrorism from above, or when imperial armies invade and occupy foreign nations and dominate their peoples.

Although terrorism from below has emerged in many different forms and from various motivations, the earliest known examples of individualized military assassinations were the sicarii. The Jewish sicarii used a short sword (sica), which was hidden underneath their robes, to attack and kill their Roman enemies. Roman occupation soldiers which had militarily occupied Palestine, along with representatives of the Roman Empire and their religious collaborators, were specifically targeted. Their public attacks, carried out in broad daylight, were an indictment against imperial Rome which had indiscriminately slaughtered thousands through open mass executions. Their more humanized violence also served as a sign of hope against Rome's terrorism from above-systematic violence that determined the conditions of life through economic exploitation and enslavement.

The sicarii committed selective assassinations during holy festivals and special seasons. According to Josephus's account in his Jewish War: "The panic created was more alarming than the calamity itself; every one as on a battlefield, hourly expected death. Men kept watch at a distance on their enemies and would not trust even their friends when they approached."(2) Under Roman military occupation, cruelty had become the rule. When long-term injustices go unchecked, like the continued Western exploitation of resources, peoples, cultures, faiths, and military dictators in certain parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, cynical pleas of desperation arise. Faithfulness sometimes becomes fatalism. Massive secular-based violence against sacred traditions breeds faith-based violence. Counter-terrorism strategies from below are reactions to terrorism from above.

Unless terrorism from above is questioned and debated as rigorously as terrorism from below, new forms of overt and covert terrorist acts will continually evolve, especially in regards to the use of advanced weaponry. 

Whether from below or from above, there is one type of terrorism. 

But as the world observed on Sept. 11, 2001, individualized military assassins can sometimes lay down their sicas for a more powerful and technologically advanced lethal tool. 

And just as terrorism from above leads inevitably to its own next stages, so does terrorism from below. 

Left unhindered, terrorism from above and from below becomes super-terrorism, even hyper super-terrorism. 

If an effective language to critique both kinds of terrorism is not developed, then the concentration of absolute power will forever be met by inattentive acts of random helplessness.

U.S. Drone Strikes Are 'Terrorism'

Juan Williams, in for Bill O'Reilly tonight took on Madea Benjamin, the founder of Code Pink, over the assertion that President Obama is a war criminal for the administration's controversial drone program. Benjamin told Williams that drone strikes make the United States less safe because they end up creating more terrorists as a result of the strikes.

Williams pointed to comments by Professor Cornel West calling Obama a "war criminal." Williams asked Benjamin if she agrees with West. Benjamin argued that Obama's drone policy "terrorizes entire nations," calling it the "best recruiting tool for extremists organizations" while hurting the safety of the United States.

Williams grilled Benjamin on why it threatens Americans when the government sends out drones to take out dangerous terrorists. Benjamin highlighted the innocents killed by the drone strikes, arguing that every time a drone kills an innocent person, more people will start joining al-Qaeda. Williams told Benjamin what she's saying is "not true," suggesting that people in these nations would be less enthusiastic about the U.S. military moving in.

Benjamin accused the United States of "using terrorism" in nations like Pakistan, where people believe that the U.S. is their enemy. She insisted that the drone strikes are directly resulting in more people joining al-Qaeda. Williams shot back by accusing Benjamin of trying to "blame the United States" for targeting terrorists. He added that killing terrorists actually does make the United States safer. Benjamin responded, "We're creating more terrorists than we're killing."

How Western Leaders Terrorized Muslim World Using A Fake Clash of Civilizations

By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja  

Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

A "war of religion" is unfolding, with a view to justifying a global military crusade. In the inner consciousness of many Americans, the "holy crusade" against Muslims is justified. While President Obama may uphold freedom of religion, the US inquisitorial social order has institutionalized patterns of discrimination, prejudice and xenophobia directed against Muslims.” Michel Chossudovsky, ”America's Holy Crusade against the Muslim World”, Global Research, 8/30/2010

Does the US war strategy require other nations to follow the American policy lead of war against all - the terrorism of war instigated by the Clash of Civilizations theory? Stephen Lendman (“America's Permanent War Agenda” 3/01/2010), an American political intellectual and a man of universal conscience puts the history in one nutshell:

“America glorifies wars in the name of peace, what historian Charles Beard (1874 - 1948) called "perpetual war for perpetual peace" in describing the Roosevelt and Truman administrations' foreign policies - what concerned the Federation of American Scientists when it catalogued about 200 post-1945 conflicts in which America was, and still is, the aggressor”

Many contemporary politicians having small wisdom coupled with big common sense information could lead or mislead the masses. People are always the end recipient of the political dramas and onslaughts. Samuel Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations” 1993, and subsequently, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1995), argued many things to many minds. It was a time fraught with political tragedies and unthinkable changes after the demise of the former USSR from the global theater of ideological confrontations. It happened out of the nowhere sending shock waves to the Western political mythologists and self-made experts who would become irrelevant in their mastery of pretensions to pursue the ideological warfare between the USSR and USA.

Islam and China were at the epic center of the Huntington’s theory of the Clash of Civilizations. To many Western mythologists, it was a blessing in disguise to substantiate the continuity of their expertise with changed notions of militancy against Muslims and Islam as the next bloc of forces maintaining the “bloody borders.” Americana and European policy makers denied its existence but used its mythology and substantial framework to wage a new war according to George Bush ‘crusade’ against Islam. Huntington’s thoughts and warning were critical to the foreign policy makers operating under the influence of Western strategic priorities. There were visible political scenarios of clash of civilizations between the West and China-Islam axis, but the War on Terrorism served the purpose of all cherished policy objectives lasting more than a decade.

The Western economies desperately needed new markets to dump their obsolete military hardware and know-how for expansion of businesses. But critical of all were the abundance of natural resources available across the Middle East to grab for future political hegemony and military control over these nations. Divided as they were, the Arab tribal clan-based rulers and other people of interest in the Muslim world made subservient to the American- West European political interests, were readily available to bring a Western dream of power and manipulation into reality.

From centuries of European colonization to the so called freedom time span after the WW2, Arabs and other Muslim societies had neither educated and intelligent leadership nor institutions to analyze the global affairs objectively and to develop a policy of mutual interests and strategic equilibrium in relations with the former Masters of the Western world. They were naïve and coward then, and they are proven dummy and stupid to this day. They willingly followed the George Bush dictum of military threats unless they should fully submit to the American doctrine of War on Terror. The US bogus War on Terror used the false pretext of the 9/11 attacks to pursue its pre-planned wars against the Muslim world.

Michael Meacher (“This War on Terrorism is Bogus.” Guardian, UK: 9/6/2003), British MP and Environment Minister in PM Tony Blair cabinet from May 1997 to June 2003 explain that the 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination.

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) written by the neo-conservatives in September 2000 before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis.

John J. Mearsheimer (“Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq war: realism versus neo-conservatism: Open Democracy: 5/18/2005), Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) ponders into reasoning of the neo-conservatives belief that the US must show its power to manipulate the world:

Neo-conservative theory – the Bush doctrine – is essentially Wilsonianism with teeth. The theory has an idealist strand and a power strand: Wilsonianism provides the idealism, an emphasis on military power provides the teeth……The key to understanding why the neo-conservatives think that military force is such a remarkably effective instrument for running the world is that they believe that international politics operate according to “bandwagoning” logic. Specifically, they believe that if a powerful country like the United States is willing to threaten or attack its adversaries, then virtually all of the states in the system – friends and foes alike – will quickly understand that the United States means business and that if they cross mighty Uncle Sam, they will pay a severe price. In essence, the rest of the world will fear the United States, which will cause any state that is even thinking about challenging Washington to throw up its hands and jump on the American bandwagon.

The War on Terror had wide range of unspecified agendas for long time to come:

• to occupy the Arab heartland and to offer extended strategic and political supremacy to Israel in the Middle East,
• to control and manage the oil and gas resources of the Arab Middle East,
• to inject fear and powerful hegemonic influence of the Western culture and varied civilizations,
• to divide and rule the Arab and Muslims people from distance powerhouses,
• to create new markets for the dollar and to block trade-business entry of China into the exclusive American Middle East market,
• to entice ignorant Arab population with false imagery of freedom, liberty and social justice and make the mindless rulers fearful of the US-Europe influence in their future-making,
• to distract attention from the decadent Western cultures and civilizations as Huntington warned them of its crumbling and immediate implication for the future,
• To dismantle the socio-economic and political infrastructures of the Arab-Muslim world, encouraging internal strife and sectarian bloodsheds and making them subservient to the US-European military and economic subjugation.
• And so many other short-long terms implications

Across the Western world, the mainstream news media propaganda campaigns made common folks fearful after the 9/11 attacks in believing that the Clash of Civilizations hypothesis was true and credible. The Arabs and Muslims authoritarian rulers elsewhere had no capacity or leadership to challenge the American political and military hegemony. The Arab and Muslim world was naïve and perplexed unable to THINK rationally or to challenge the West either in moral and intellectual domains and to question the relevance of the War on Terror. Even some of the leading Islamic thinkers failed miserably to understand the consequences of the bogus war on terrorism and to oppose the American policy and practices to attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. To date, the American led wars have killed approximately three millions people in Iraq, close to million in Afghanistan and million more displaced and made refugees in foreign lands, and some 40,000 to 50,000 civilians across Pakistan and continuing drone attacks bring horrifying details of daily killings of innocent children and women in Waziristan tribal belt of Pakistan. Should this deliberate genocide not be the major concern to the mankind?

Michael Meacher (“This War on Terrorism is Bogus.” Guardian, UK: 9/6/2003), British MP and Environment Minister in PM Tony Blair points out the planning of the war strategies and how it will encircle the other Muslim countries:

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001). The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

Huntington warned of the coming of new age of disharmony is dawning and that the West lacked an ‘ennobling animosity’- from an economic perspective, the ‘golden age’ of low birth rates and aging population as reasoning contributing to Western moral and cultural decadence. But the match-maker political opportunists have come up with many answers to Huntington’s concerns and curiosities. Now, there are increasing trend of degeneration - more gay rights claims and marriages are making headways - gay priests and gay politicians - gay parades, women are replacing the work of men from sexual enlightenment to unknown domains of leisure and enjoyment. Secretary Panelta announced that America will strike a balancing act and recruit more women to enhance opportunities in front line military combat operations. But nobody seems to question that by nature women are not made aggressive or to stir animalistic killing skills, their feminism is more an embodiment of love, attractive nature of things and beauty to bless the physical, moral, spiritual and intellectual fabric of human life. Why should they be manipulated against their very Nature? Are women a commodity at the strategic market place to be defined by economic men of interests or military rules of engagement? Nobody talks what able men will do in their spare times and moments of self-reflection if there are no longer attracted to beautiful women. John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hitman) tells us first hand that Arab Prince love to have the companionship of blond American women. Would America consider this romantic strategy to built-in with its military sale package to the oil exporting Arab rulers? Ironically, none of the leading political thinkers appear to talk now if the Western culture is progressive or more decadent? Huntington must be speechless and wondering what to say next.

The global political affairs are not managed by rational people, with rational thinking, doing the rational practices for the interests of global citizenry. The 1% global elite – men of king operate the international institutions - the perverted insanity lacking basic understanding of the Human Nature and of the working of the splendid Universe in which we enjoy coherent co-existence. The mankind continues to be run down by the cancerous ego and cruelty of the few Western warlords. Killing unjustifiably one innocent human being is like killing of the whole of the humanity. The global warlords represent cruel mindset incapable to see the human side of the living conscience. Madness of the perpetuated war on terrorism and its triggered insanity knows no bound across the global spectrum. 

Animals do not commit massacre of their kind and species, nor set-up rape camps for the war victims, the Western led wars against the humanity have and continue to do so at an unparallel global scale without being challenged by any global organizations or leaders. Torture and massacres of innocent civilians are convenient fun games to be defined as “collateral damage” and a statistic. Perhaps, they view humanity just in digits and numbers, not as the living entities with social, moral, spiritual and intellectual values and progressive agendas for change and development. Every beginning has its end. It is just that most powerful nations have failed to learn from the living history- a slap to EH Carr’s precious thoughts of human history. Einstein (“The World as I see it”) made it known that he was against military campaigns, killings and destruction of the natural environment: "This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!.”

According to British MP and Minister Michael Meacher (“This War on Terrorism is Bogus.” Guardian, UK: 9/6/2003):

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

Muslims were not born in the eye of the storm to threaten anybody. They are not the societies breeding terrorism against the West or anybody else. All Arab-Muslim rulers are subservient to the Western political-military dictates. Those individuals who were alleged to have attacked America for the 9/11 were the by-products of American warfare sponsorship and CIA indoctrination. Terrorism originates from the Western imperialism and military aggressions against the poor and helpless people. Time and encompassing opportunities warrant New Thinking, New Leaders and New Visions for change and the future-making. But change and creativity and new visions will not emerge from the obsolete, redundant and failed authoritarianism of the few insane leaders, be it the Western leaders or Muslim rulers.. None have the understanding of neither peace nor respect for human life and co-existence in a splendid Universe. 

To challenge the deafening silence of the US and Europeans for global peace and security, the humanity must find ways and means to look beyond the obvious and troublesome horizons dominated by the few warlords and continued to be plagued with massacres, barbarity against human culture and civilizations, destruction of the habitats and natural environment as if there were no rational being and people of Reason populating the God-given Universe. The informed and mature global community looks towards those thinkers, educated and honest proactive leaders enriched with coherent unity of moral, spiritual and intellectual visions and abilities to be instrumental to rescue it from the planned encroachment of the few Western warlords.

American historian Harry Elmer Barnes ("Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and It's Aftermath”) offered this stern warning to American politicians if the US led wars continue leading to man’s annihilation from this planet:

"If trends continue as they have during the last fifteen years, we shall soon reach this point of no return, and can only anticipate interminable wars, disguised as noble gestures for peace. Such an era could only culminate in a third world war which might well, as Arnold J. Toynbee has suggested, leave only the pygmies in remote jungles, or even the apes and ants, to carry on 'the cultural traditions' of mankind."

US 'War On Terror' Yields More 'Terrorism'

Inaugural Study Says Terror Attacks Worldwide Have Grown Rapidly In The Years Since 9/11 and Spiked During The US Occupation Of Iraq

After more than eleven years of the US waging wars abroad in the name of "fighting terrorism" a new report released Tuesday shows that the number of global terror attacks has dramatically increased during the post-9/11 era, not decreased.

The new Global Terrorism Index (GTI) found that while the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere generated huge spikes in terrorist activity and civilian deaths in those countries, it is North America which has been most insulated from the growth in violence.

Produced by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) the GTI is the first index to rank countries on the impact of terrorism and analyses the associated economic and social dimensions. The index is based on data from the Global Terrorism Database, which is collected and collated by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), headquartered at the University of Maryland.

"After 9/11, terrorist activity fell back to pre-2000 levels until after the Iraq invasion, and has since escalated dramatically," Steve Killelea, founder and executive chairman of the Institute for Economics and Peace, told Reuters in an e-mail interview.

"Iraq accounts for about a third of all terrorist deaths over the last decade, and Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan account for over 50 percent of fatalities."

The glaring fault of the study, which demands note, is that it employs a very narrow definition of the term "terrorism"—a word that Glenn Greenwald says "simultaneously means nothing and justifies everything." Within the scope of GTI report, the term excludes the violence of state or government-based actors like the US armed forces or NATO's military regime.

As Reuters notes:

The researchers used the University of Maryland definition of "terrorism": "the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation".

It did not include casualties from government-backed action such as aerial bombing or other killings.

Long a critique of the "global war on terrorism" is that the definition of the word "terrorism" is meant to connotate violence perpetrated by less powerful, though committed, militant networks and not the politically motivated violence of powerful nations, such as the United States or others.

As Greenwald argued at Salon.com in 2011:

This topic is so vital because this meaningless, definition-free word — Terrorism — drives so many of our political debates and policies. Virtually every debate in which I ever participate quickly and prominently includes defenders of government policy invoking the word as some sort of debate-ending, magical elixir: of course President Obama has to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process: they’re Terrorists; of course we have to stay in Afghanistan: we have to stop The Terrorists; President Obama is not only right to kill people (including civilians) using drones, but is justified in boasting and even joking about it, because they’re Terrorists; of course some people should be held in prison without charges: they’re Terrorists, etc. etc.

And as the linguistics professor and author Noam Chomsky, commenting on the death of innocent people throughout the US military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, said: "Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism."

Despite the flaws of the definition used in the report, its value remains in the close examination of the last decade and tells a stark story about the nature non-state terrorism since 2001.

One of the key lessons of the report, as Killelea told Reuters, is that foreign powers should think twice before intervening militarily in regions like Yemen and Syria (or anywhere for that matter), as the mere presence of foreign armies simply adds to the grievances and anger of local people.

Other key findings include:

• The number of terrorist incidents and the number of successful attacks has steadily increased over the last decade.
• In 2011, 91% of terrorist attacks were successful.
• From 2002 to 2011 over one third of all victims killed in terrorist attacks were Iraqi.
• In 2011 there were 4564 terrorist incidents globally, resulting in 7473 deaths and 13961 injuries.
• Most terrorist attacks occur in the context of a wider conflict situation.
• Whilst religious terrorism often gets widespread coverage, there is a significant level of terrorism from non-religious groups.
• Western Europe experiences many more terrorist incidents than the U.S. having also suffered 19 times more fatalities than the U.S.
• Over the period 2002-2011, terrorists were most likely to target private citizens and property, government, police, and business. The trends for these attacks have been increasing as a percentage for all targets since 2002. Military installations and personnel were only targeted in 4% of incidents.
• Global incidents, fatalities and injuries are dominated by events in lower middle income countries. Seven of the ten countries most affected by terrorism are from the lower middle income bracket.
• Low income countries are much less likely to suffer from terrorism than lower middle income countries. This suggests that poverty is not a prime driver of terrorism.
• The majority of global incidents, fatalities and injuries occur in countries with hybrid regimes1 and account for 46% of incidents, 54% of fatalities and 60% of all injuries.
• Terrorism correlates with low political stability, low intergroup cohesion, human rights violations and with high levels of group grievances.
• From 2002 to 2011, North America was the least likely region to suffer from a terrorist attack, followed by Western Europe.

Via: "Common Dreams"

Drones: The West's New Terror Campaign

The CIA's Predator Drones Are Bringing To Pakistan The Same Horror That Hitler's Doodlebugs Inflicted On London

By Clive Stafford Smith
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

Living Under Drones, a new report from Stanford and New York universities, was a difficult piece of fieldwork – I was with the law students in Peshawar as they tried to interview victims of the CIA's drone war. But it has made an important contribution to the drone debate by identifying the innocent victims of the CIA's reign of terror: the entire civilian population of Waziristan (roughly 800,000 people).

Until now, the most heated dispute has revolved around how many drone victims in the Pakistan border region are dangerous extremists, and how many children, women or men with no connection to any terrorist group. I have been to the region, and have a strong opinion on this point – but until the area is opened up to media inspection, or the CIA releases the tapes of each hellfire missile strike, the controversy will rage on.

However, there can be no sensible disagreement over certain salient facts: first, the US now has more than 10,000 weaponised drones in its arsenal; second, as many as six Predator drones circle over one location at any given time, often for 24 hours a day, with high-resolution cameras snooping on the movements of everyone below; third, the Predators emit an eerie sound, earning them the name bangana (buzzing wasp) in Pashtu; fourth, everyone in the area can see them, 5,000ft up, all day – and hear them all night long; fifth, nobody knows when the missile will come, and turn each member of the family into what the CIA calls a "bugsplat". The Predator operator, thousands of miles away in Nevada, often pushes the button over a cup of coffee in the darkest hours of the Waziristan night, between midnight and 5am. So a parent putting children to bed cannot be sure they will wake up safely.

Every Waziri town has been terrorised. We may learn this from the eyewitness accounts in Living Under Drones, or surmise it from the exponential increase in the distribution of anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication across the region.

Sometimes it is difficult for those comfortably ensconced in the west to understand. But for me, it brings to mind my mother, Jean Stafford Smith. In 1944 she was 17. She had left the safety of her school (she had been evacuated to the countryside) to do a secretarial course in London. Each evening she took the bus home from Grosvenor Place, behind Buckingham Palace, to her digs off Tottenham Court Road. Back then, darkness would truly descend on the city, as the blackout was near total.

Sixty-eight years on, my mother retains vivid memories of the gathering gloom. One night a week, she climbed the tower of a local church to spot for the fires that might spread from an explosion. When the doodlebugs (as V1s – Hitler's drones – were called) came over, she knew that she was safe so long as she could hear the engine. She knew, too, that the drones were indiscriminate killers, and that only when they fell silent did she have to worry where they might fall. Some of the engines apparently cut in and out, like the oscillating buzz of a chainsaw, heartstopping for the potential victims below.

In 1944, two doodlebugs hit the environs of Buckingham Palace, near where my mother learned shorthand. One landed on the palace wall, and blew out the secretarial school's windows. A second killed more than 100 people who had, until moments before, been singing hymns in the Guards Chapel on Birdcage Walk. It was a weekend, so my mother was back at her digs.

My mother, an eternal optimist, never really thought she was going to die, even when – on 30 June 1944 – a drone struck Tottenham Court Road. Perhaps reminiscent of the tragedy of 7/7, a witness described "a bus, still packed with people sitting in all the seats, but all the glass blown out and all the skin blown off their faces".

Many suffered far more than my mother, both in London and beyond. Indeed, they say that fear for those you love can be more devastating than facing danger yourself: my grandmother Vera, a formidable woman who had learned to trap rabbits in the Great Depression to keep food on the family table, lived 60 miles north of London near Ely, and worried constantly about her youngest daughter. The ripples of anxiety spread wide.

So little changes. Current RAF doctrine tells us, euphemistically, how "the psychological impact of air power, from the presence of a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] to the noise generated by an approaching attack helicopter, has often proved to be extremely effective in exerting influence …" Perhaps they mean "terror", as described by David Rohde, a former New York Times journalist kidnapped and held by the Taliban for months in Waziristan. Rohde, quoted in Living Under Drones, describes the fear the drones inspired in ordinary civilians: "The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death."

I hope that this report reminds us all what the US – with British support – is doing to the people of Pakistan. Maybe then there will be less surprise at the hatred the drone war is engendering in the Islamic world – and a chance that we will reconsider what we are doing.

Terrorizing Civilians With Obama's Drones

New Research Shows The Terrorizing Impact Of Drones In Pakistan, and How It Increases The Terror Threat

By Gleen Greenwald
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

A vitally important and thoroughly documented new report on the impact of Obama's drone campaign has just been released by researchers at NYU School of Law and Stanford University Law School. Entitled "Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan", the report details the terrorizing effects of Obama's drone assaults as well as the numerous, highly misleading public statements from administration officials about that campaign. The study's purpose was to conduct an "independent investigations into whether, and to what extent, drone strikes in Pakistan conformed to international law and caused harm and/or injury to civilians".

The report is "based on over 130 detailed interviews with victims and witnesses of drone activity, their family members, current and former Pakistani government officials, representatives from five major Pakistani political parties, subject matter experts, lawyers, medical professionals, development and humanitarian workers, members of civil society, academics, and journalists." Witnesses "provided first-hand
accounts of drone strikes, and provided testimony about a range of issues, including the missile strikes themselves, the strike sites, the victims' bodies, or a family member or members killed or injured in the strike".

Here is the powerful first three paragraphs of the report, summarizing its main findings:

Whilte noting that it is difficult to obtain precise information on the number of civilian deaths "because of US efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability", the report nonetheless concludes: "while civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians."

But beyond body counts, there's the fact that "US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury":

In other words, the people in the areas targeted by Obama's drone campaign are being systematically terrorized. There's just no other word for it. It is a campaign of terror - highly effective terror - regardless of what noble progressive sentiments one wishes to believe reside in the heart of the leader ordering it. And that's precisely why the report, to its great credit, uses that term to describe the Obama policy: the drone campaign "terrorizes men, women, and children".

Along the same lines, note that the report confirms what had already been previously documented: the Obama campaign's despicable (and likely criminal) targeting of rescuers who arrive to provide aid to the victims of the original strike. Noting that even funerals of drone victims have been targeted under Obama, the report documents that the US has "made family members afraid to attend funerals". The result of this tactic is as predictable as it is heinous:

"Secondary strikes have discouraged average civilians from coming to one another's rescue, and even inhibited the provision of emergency medical assistance from humanitarian workers."

In the hierarchy of war crimes, deliberately targeting rescuers and funerals - so that aid workers are petrified to treat the wounded and family members are intimidated out of mourning their loved ones - ranks rather high, to put that mildly. Indeed, the US itself has long maintainedthat such "secondary strikes" are a prime hallmark of some of the world's most despised terrorist groups.

Perhaps worst of all, the report details at length that the prime excuse offered by Obama defenders for this continuous killing - it Keeps Us Safe™ by killing The Terrorists™ - is dubious "at best"; indeed, the opposite is more likely true:

All the way back in 2004, the Rumsfeld Pentagon commissioned a study to determine the causes of anti-US terrorism, and even it concluded: "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies." Running around the world beating your chest, bellowing "we're at war!", and bombing multiple Muslim countries does not keep one safe. It manifestly does the opposite, since it ensures that even the most rational people will calculate that targeting Americans with violence in response is just and necessary to deter further aggression.

A one-day attack on US soil eleven years ago unleashed a never-ending campaign of violence around the world from the target and its allies. Is it really a challenge to understand that continuous bombings and civilian-killing assaults over many years, in many Muslim countries, will generate the same desire for aggression and vengeance against the US?

Time and again, those who have attempted to perpetrate attacks on US soil have cited the Muslim children and other innocent human beings extinguished by Obama's drones. Recall the words of the attempted Times Square bomber, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, at his sentencing hearing when the federal judge presiding over his case, Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, asked incredulously how he could possibly use violence that he knew would result in the deaths even of innocent children -- as though she were literally unaware that her own government continuously does exactly that:

"'Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don't see children, they don't see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It's a war, and in war, they kill people. They're killing all Muslims' . . . .

"'I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I'm avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.'"

The minute he was apprehended by US authorities, Shahzad, asreported by the Washington Post, "told agents that he was motivated by opposition to U.S. policy in the Muslim world, officials said. 'One of the first things he said was, 'How would you feel if people attacked the United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan.'"

Perhaps most importantly, the report documents the extreme levels of propaganda used by the western press to deceive their citizens into believing pure myths about the drone campaign. As I've argued before, the worst of these myths is the journalistic mimicry of the term "militants" to describe drone victims even when those outlets have no idea who was killed or whether that term is accurate (indeed, the term itself is almost as ill-defined as "terrorist"). This media practice became particularly inexcusable after the New York Times revealed in May that "Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants."

Incredibly, even after that radical redefinition was revealed, and even after the Obama administration got caught red-handed spewing demonstrable falsehoods about the identity of drone victims, US media outlets continued to use the term "militant" to describe drone victims. The new report urges that this practice stop:

Significantly, the report says the prime culprit of these evils is what it calls the "dramatic escalation" of the drone campaign by the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate - escalated not just in sheer numbers (in less than four years, Obama "has reportedly carried out more than five times" the number ordered by Bush in eight years), but more so, the indiscriminate nature of the strikes. As Tuesday's Guardian article on this report states: it "blames the US president, Barack Obama, for the escalation of 'signature strikes' in which groups are selected merely through remote 'pattern of life' analysis."

The report is equally damning when documenting the attempts of the Obama administration to suppress information about its drone victims, and worse, to actively mislead when they deign selectively to release information. Recognizing the difficulty of determining the number of civilian deaths with exactitude - due to "the opaqueness of the US government about its targeted killing program" as well as the inaccessibility of the region - it nonetheless documents that "the numbers of civilians killed are undoubtedly far higher than the few claimed by US officials." In other words, the administration's public statements are false: "undoubtedly" so. As the LA Times summarizes the study's findings today: "Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged."

(The report is particularly scathing about the patent unreliability of the New America Foundation and its leading drone-and-Obama cheerleader, Peter Bergen, also of CNN, who has been amply rewarded with lucrative access by the administration he dutifully defends. Echoing a recent article by the Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf and an analysis from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the report concludes that scrutiny of Bergen's key claims "has since revealed omissions and inconsistencies in
New America Foundation's dataset, calling its widely publicized conclusions into question." It documents "several other glaring omissions from New America Foundation's data" used to depict Obama's drone campaign as far more benign than it actually is.)

Finally, the report notes the threat to democratic accountability posed by the Obama administration's refusal to allow any transparency or judicial oversight regarding who the president orders killed: "The opaque position of the US government on civilian casualties is also emblematic of an accountability and democratic vacuum." In that regard, the report - as its final paragraph - quotes the question I have often asked about this state of affairs, an answer to which I have never heard from Obama's drone defenders:

What has always made that question particularly pressing for me is that American progressives cheered loudly when a similar question was posed by Al Gore in a widely celebrated 2006 speech he gave on the Washington mall denouncing the Bush/Cheney assault on civil liberties:

"'If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?'"

What has always amazed me about that is that, there, Gore was merely decrying Bush's mere eavesdropping on Americans and his detention of them without judicial review. Yet here Obama is claiming the power to decide who should be killed without a shred of transparency, oversight, or due process - a power that is being continuously used to kill civilians, including children - and many of these same progressives now actually cheer for that.

Democrats spent several days at their convention two weeks ago wildly cheering and chanting whenever President Obama's use of violence and force was heralded. They're celebrating a leader who is terrorizing several parts of the Muslim world, repeatedly killing children, targeting rescuers and mourners, and entrenching the authority to exert the most extreme powers in full secrecy and without any accountability -- all while he increases, not decreases, the likelihood of future attacks. This new Stanford/NYU report is but the latest in a long line of evidence proving all of that.

Legitimising The Killings In The Name Of 'Just War'

War On Terror Has Not Only 'Legitimised' The Killing Of Millions, But Has Also Silenced A Fair Discussion About Them.

Irfan Ahmad writes,

This is the conclusion of the two-part series "How the war on terror is a war of terror". You can read part one here.Drawing on intellectual and political history of different regions of the world, Irfan Ahmad discusses the fallacy of and politics behind the current consensus on what constitutes terrorism. He shows how the dominant definition of terrorism as acts of violence by non-state actors to induce political change is conceptually flawed and demonstrates how terror has historically been important to most ruling elites and states across time. Based on diverse examples from India, the US, Israel, Indonesia and elsewhere, to this end, the author also shows how the watertight distinction between state and non-state actors is fragile and unsustainable. He concluded part one with an alternative definition of terrorism given by Oxford English Dictionary, a definition which he argues, is more appropriate and less contentious because it is historically informed and focuses on terror itself, no matter whether it is enacted by state or non-state actors.    

Terrorism - Counter-Terrorists' Style

In light of the discussion in part one, what does the "War on Terror" (WOT) mean? By its own definition, it is contradictory. If terrorism is always by non-state actors, how can it be countered through war which has been historically declared against a state - which terrorists obviously are not? Might it be, then, that it is less a "War on Terror" and more a "War of/for Terror"? 

With WOT, war was no longer a "dirty word". It became at once respectable and profitable; respectable because votaries of war and empire like George Bush and Niall Ferguson presented it as a war against barbarism and in defence of civilization, "our way of life, our very freedom"; profitable because transnational corporations and the military-industrial complex enriched their factories of fear, weapons, surveillance, privatised security and myths of "heroic-us" vs "evil-them" (eg, Hollywood). Needless to add, under the flag of WOT, civil liberties across the continents were severely compromised, ironically in the name of liberty. By excluding its own gruesome violence in the name of "just war" (was it not "just a war"?) WOT not only legitimised the killings of millions world over - Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere - it also silenced a fair discussion about these killings (for who would dare oppose "freedom"?).  

Listening Post - The dangers of reporting the 'war on terror'

Since its invasion and occupation by the West, in Iraq alone over one million civilians have perished. Additional hundreds of thousands, to reasonably guess, must have died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. I am not as such interested in statistics which can be (in)accurate. In a conservative estimate by Iraqbodycount.org, since 2003 the documented death toll in Iraq is 162,000 - of which 79 per cent were civilians. Were these civilians - including children, women and the elderly - all terrorists? Were the over 400 Iraqi academics killed - most with PhDs - terrorists? If terrorists kill innocent civilians, how are counter-terrorists different from terrorists? I am aware that many civilian deaths were also caused by those not in uniform; however, were not these killings consequences of the first act, WOT? And what about the "efficient" drones that almost routinely kill civilians in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen?  

Seldom do mainstream media and terrorism experts discuss these heinous crimes of killings. Rather there is an eerie silence about the loss of this humanity and its bare sufferings. It is almost a policy for media in Australia whose troops are on a "mission" in Afghanistan to rarely report about killings of civilians by Western military. In contrast, news of an Australian soldier injured or killed is notably telecast with a change in newsreader's voice to solemnity. Importantly, opposition and ruling parties become one to grieve the loss of the "nation" and praise dead soldier's "mission" that remains as vague as unbelievable. 

Is a definite hierarchy of human lives at work here? There is. WOT has created two kinds of lives - lives worth preserving and lives which can be readily dispensed with. Judith Butler puts it differently: lives which necessitate grieving and those which are perceived as less than living and hence unworthy of any memorialisation and grief in death. In Frames of War, Butler writes:

"This... point takes on specific meanings under contemporary conditions of war: the shared conditions of precariousness leads not to reciprocal recognition, but to a specific exploitation of targeted population, of lives that are not quite lives, cast as 'destructible' and 'ungrievable'... Consequently, when such lives are lost they are not grievable, since, in the twisted logic that rationalises their death, the loss of such population is deemed necessary to protect the lives of the 'living'." (p. 31) 

The ultimate terror WOT and counter-terrorism machinery stages is the production of destructible and ungrievable lives. And the state apparatuses participate in it with their own terror. The terrifying tale of Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen of Egyptian origin, illustrates this. Just before the US attack on Afghanistan in 2001, Habib was arrested in Pakistan by its authorities - then in the business of arresting "terrorists", especially foreigners, to "sell" to the US in lieu of rupees. He was tortured to confess that he, in 1995, blew up Egypt's embassy in Islamabad. He refused. 

Habib was flown to Egypt where he was further tortured. One interrogator said, "If you tell us this [you knew and were involved in 9/11], we can sell this information to the Americans for 10 million dollars. We'll give you 4 million, and we'll keep the rest" (p. 111). Omar Suleiman, an architect of Mubarak's "police state", made a similar offer on the refusal of which he slapped Habib. Meanwhile, Australia's Federal Police and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) had raided Habib's residence in Sydney to collect information, which they supplied to the Egyptian authorities. From Egypt Habib was flown to Kandahar, because Australia had refused to take him back (p. 139).  

From Kandahar he was taken to Guantanamo Bay where he was listed as an Egyptian, not an Australian. Stripped naked and left in freezing cold, threatened with rape, given electric shocks, menstrual blood thrown in his face by a female officer, deprived of sleep, drugged heavily, dragged on floor and beaten severely (pp. 155-56), he was asked to confess, in the presence of an Australian official from Washington, that he was "associated with al-Qaeda" and knew of 9/11 attacks "prior to their occurrence". The Australian official told Habib that he came to "help" him and that he should "co-operate" (pp. 212-14). In 2005, Habib was released due to his wife's determination, humane help from Joseph Margulies, an American lawyer who fought his case, Stephen Hopper, an Australian lawyer, and others. 

Back to Australia, terror against Habib continued. ASIO and the government harassed him. His phones were tapped; residence broken into twice and documents stolen, including those about his detention in Guantanamo. ASIO did not want Habib to speak to the media; they stopped him from doing so. He received death threats and intimidations; when he reported them, the police looked disinterested and one officer even called him a "terrorist". Habib and his family felt "threatened and terrified by the police" (p. 245, 247).

Is there a better term than terror to describe the condition of Habib and his family (all quotes from Habib's book My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who was Not, 2008)?       

Symbolic Terror Against Islam

In the wake of the WOT, the term "new terrorism" (NT) has been redeployed with a wider currency. Peter Neumann, in his book Old & New Terrorism contends that NT is different from old terrorism (OT) on three counts. While OT was 1) hierarchical, 2) secular, nationalist, and 3) aimed at "legitimate targets", NT is a) "networked, transnational", b) "religiously inspired" and c) aims at "mass-casualty attacks against civilians" (p. 29). 

Empire - 9/12 and the 'war on terror'

My focus is on NT's second element whose onset Neumann dates loosely, "in recent decades" (p. 4). For this claim to be true one has to show that earlier terrorism everywhere was secular. Was it so? To take one example, the terror Irgun and LEHI practiced in Palestine before/for Israel's creation was vitally religious, which Neumann doesn't discuss. Nor does he discuss how the US nurtured "fundamentalist" Afghans against the Soviet occupation. Afghan fighters, to recall, were of many shades, including secular-nationalist. However, the CIA financed the Hekmatyar group, which threw acid on the face of unveiled women. This group got 50 per cent of the US aid. When asked why the US backed Hekmatyar, a CIA official said: "fanatics fight better". My point is that religiously inspired terrorism is not "given"; it is complex as it is also produced by imperial power, which would later go on to call similar Afghan fighters "terrorist". 

Importantly, Neumann's flat distinction between secular and religious and their conceptualisation is callous to new scholarly works which critique them. Escaping these works, Neumann goes on to say that though religiously inspired terrorism "can be found in all faiths and culture" (p. 105), Islam serves as its master signifier:  

More than, say, Christian or Jewish fundamentalism, the rise of political Islam and the emergence ofIslamist terrorism have defined the current age. Those who claim to act in the name of Islam have killed more people in the last two decades than any other branch of religiously inspired terrorism (p. 105; italics added). 

Let us examine this quote. Analogous words for "Islamist terrorism" (Neumann also uses "Jihadist terrorism", p. 44) is not Christian or Jewish fundamentalism which he uses, but Christian or Jewish terrorism which he doesn't. Second, the claim Islamist terrorism has "killed more people in the last two decades than any other branch of religiously inspired terrorism" is blatantly inaccurate. Between 1986 and 2007, Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) killed no less than 100,000 people. (If worried about killings of humans, to say parenthetically, one could have also mentioned that in 1999, in the US more than 15,500 people were murdered, or in 2000 around 42,000 people were killed in road accidents, p. 9). 

Returning to LRA, it is vitally religious. Its leader, Joseph Kony, to cite Walter Laqueur (The New Terrorism, 1999, p. 197), is a "former Catholic choirboy" who "claimed to directly talk to God" and "Kony has declared himself a Christian fundamentalist who wants to... establish a state based on the Ten Commandments". 

Chapter 4, which Neumann devotes to show his thesis of religiously inspired terrorism, is titled "From Marx to Mohammed? Religion and Terrorism". The crisp juxtaposition of Muhammad and Terrorism in the title is revealing. Does not Neumann's text establish a chain of equivalence between Islam, Muhammad, terrorism, jihad, jihadists (the latter two inundate his text)? Contrast this with his description of Timothy McVeigh: "an American right-wing extremist" (p. 2). No mention of his religion. Likewise, when he discusses Army of God and its attacks on abortion clinics in the US there is no mention of Christian terrorism (pp. 103-05, 116). To render religiously inspired terrorism synonymous with Islamist terrorism - Neumann's case studies and examples are all derived from "jihadist terrorism" - he offers the following justification: 

"It is not prejudice, therefore, that has determined the choice of the subject [Islamist terrorism] but, rather, a careful reflection of how the phenomenon of religiously inspired terrorism is currently being expressed." (p. 106)

At times, denial inadvertently may confirm what is being denied. For instance, how does one read the clarification that the war on terror is not against Islam? Why was this clarification needed, in the first place? As for Neumann's "careful reflection", one may be excused to perhaps read it as "beautiful deflection" from other forms of religiously inspired terrorism such as LRA's and the million it killed. In Jihad vs. McWorld, Benjamin Barber used jihad as shorthand for "atavistic politics" in general, yet "its evocative power ultimately rests in Islam" - the locus of the "essential jihad" (Roxanne Euben "Killing (For) Politics", p. 6). 

Likewise, for Neumann, Islamist terrorism, rather than being an example of religiously inspired terrorism, becomes the phenomenon itself: specificity of Islamist terrorism is presented in such a way that it becomes generality writ large whereby both get indistinguishable. This move to assign to Islam all that is religious, rather religion itself, is remarkable. From Christian discourses which regarded that "Islam was not a religion" and called Prophet Muhammad Arab Lucifer and charlatan, Islam has now been rendered as shorthand for all that is religious and hence the signifier of religiously inspired new terrorism. Such is the context that unveils contemporary debate on secularism and religion, including perhaps Neumann's, to cite Gil Anidjar, as "fundamentally related to anti-Islam".  

Frost Over the World - The 'war on terror'  10 years on

The subtle, effective equation of Islam with religiously inspired terrorism, in my view and following Pierre Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence, perhaps qualifies as symbolic terror. Once in the hegemonic discourse, a chain of equivalence is established amongst Islam, Muhammad, jihad, jihadist, terrorism and new terrorism, descriptions like "radical/terrorist" Muslims appear "natural" (ergo also "neutral") as does its binary, "moderate" Islam. It is due to this classificatory, conceptual assemblage that Muslims are asked: "do you condemn terrorism". And this seems "natural". In contrast, questions like "do you condemn the Norway shooting or the attack on Wisconsin's Gurudwara" may appear strange. It is also due to this symbolic terror that Indian journalist Shahina KK, when investigating a case of "terrorism", was herself branded terrorist by a Circle Inspector leading her to say "I am a Muslim, not a terrorist". 

A more illustrative example of what I call symbolic terror was the crisp characterisation of Islam - as "radical true Islam", as an enemy of free people everywhere and the specification of how to deal with "this barbaric ideology" -taught to the US military officers in Virginia (later withdrawn). Parts of course materials taught there included sentences like: "Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction" and that the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may apply to "Mecca and Medina's destruction". 

The symbolic terror of counter-terrorists, like terrorists' terror, is political. It has almost all the elements of sensation, excitement, fear, politics and threat associated with terrorism, but equally shared by terrorism experts like Rohan Gunaratna (see my essay here). Thus Robert Goodin is right when he says that issuing of warnings by politicians about terror can also be terroristic if its aim is to generate fear to reap political harvest. An apt example is the propaganda and warnings by Western politicians - aimed as they were at securing political goals by creating fear and threats - that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. To the warnings by politicians, I submit, should be added the writings by terrorism experts if and when they too engage in symbolic terror in such an effective manner that in the current age nearly every discussion on Islam is made to navigate through terrorism.     

Future Of Terror, Terror Of Future

What is the future of terrorism? This depends on how we shape our connected but violently asymmetrical planetary future. If we look at the past of our future, nationalism has been the dominant framework to envision human lives from 19th century on. This national framework, fully and religiously consolidated after WW II, continues to shape our present and future. National became so pervasive and ingrained that it appeared as rational to the extent that both became substitutes for each other. In this vicious game of naked substitution, ethics was the greatest casualty. Integral to the "natural" pursuit and maximisation of "national interests" was the logic of othering. With the transformation of population into nationals such as "Dutch", "French", "British" and "American", to name only a few, war, terror and violence were verily and mainly seen through the dehumanising lenses of national interests.  

Clinging to "national interests", terrorism experts suggest tightening "homeland security" as an antidote to terrorism. This suggestion is less likely to succeed because that from which emanates terror can't be its antidote. We need to shape a humane world that abolishes the dehumanising logic of ruthless pursuits of "national interests". In shaping this world, we ought to shun the dualism of nationalised reality - as presented by theorists of Realism and Neo-realism - and embrace the imagination and poetry like that of Sahir Ludhyanavi (d. 1980): 

Blood, whether others' or ours is the blood of Adam's race, ultimately;            War, whether in East or West, is the murder of world peace, ultimately. 

After 9/11, Salman Rushdie issued a priestly call for the Reformation of Islam to counter terrorism. Perhaps it is time to also initiate a Reformation of the West, which, as Judith Butler correctly points out, splits humanity into "destructible", "ungrievable" lives on one hand and "preserving", "grievable" lives on the other and fashions symbolic terror of multiple kinds. 

Via: "Al-Jazeera"