This is an ICSR Insight written by Research Fellow, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens
On the ten year anniversary of 9/11 earlier this month ICSR published an authoritative report on Anwar al-Awlaki, As American as Apple Pie: How Anwar al-Awlaki became the Face of Western Jihad.
The demise of Anwar al-Awlaki, if reports of his death are accurate, represents a significant milestone in the fight against al-Qaeda. Despite his involvement with a number of both successful and abortive terrorist attacks against the West, it is Awlaki’s ability to project Salafi-jihadi ideology
. . . . . .
The story of Anwar al-Awlaki, and in particular his intellectual progression to jihad, reveals a unique
trajectory of jihadism in the West. This movement is not just confined to Muslim majority countries,
and through arguments he and others have provided, its message now resonates with a small section of
Western Muslims. The movement has achieved this level of resonance through a process which
includes the appropriation of contemporary Western political discourse about human rights, injustice
and foreign policy, interwoven with the history of Islam and the fostering a of global Islamic
consciousness which demands violent action in order to survive and expand.
As American as Apple Pie: How Anwar al-Awlaki Became the Face of Western Jihad PDF 96 Pages
This week, I will begin with the scandal of Operation Gladio that climaxed in the murder of former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, who on the day of his kidnapping, was to announce a coalition government that would include the Italian Communist Party. Leader of the Christian Democratic Party at that time, Francesco Cossiga, admits in the 1992 BBC Timewatch documentary about Operation Gladio, that he chose to “sacrifice” Moro “for the good of the Republic.” Not unlike the targeted assassinations that our government engages in around the world, where someone extrajudicially makes decisions on who lives and who dies. In the three-part documentary, Cossiga states that the decision caused his hair to turn white.
Operation Gladio is the ugly real-life tale of the U.S. government's decision to hire members of the state security apparatus of various European countries, and in collaboration with recruited community allies, wreak terror on innocent citizens by blowing up train stations, shooting up customers in grocery stores, even killing police officers in order to convince populations in Europe to give up their rights in exchange for certain security measures and enhanced state power. Yes, Operation Gladio, along with Operation Northwoods and U.S. policy toward Libya, show us that the United States is willing to create terror groups in order to justify a fight against terrorists! Sadly, this has become the modus operandi of our government in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Europe and Africa. And the U.S. government, after 9/11/01 has become like a “Gladio laboratory” of state policies that rip the Bill of Rights to shreds and lie to the public.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The beginning of the end of Operation Gladio occurred when the existence of the U.S. program was revealed. Characteristically, instead of stopping such insanity, the Europeans joined in creating multiple other “Operations Gladio.” Placed in this context, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya's second installment in a 4-part series reveals how U.S. policy in Libya falls right in line with U.S. actions in the past. In my opinion, Libya will not be the last location for such illegal activities unless we stop our government.
Along with French videographer Julien Teil, Nazemroaya weaves the incredible-but-true scenario of U.S. finance of alleged terrorists, wanted by Interpol, who became the chief protagonists in the NATO genocide currently unfolding in Libya.
Mahdi, Don Debar, and I will discuss this piece and more tonight on KPFK's Freedom Now starting at PACIFIC time 5:00 pm. Tune in to KPFK.org and listen live or I'll send you the link for listening at another time at your convenience.
Here is the Teil/Nazemroaya piece:
Click on Image to Enlarge
Washington is Conquering Africa using France, Human Rights, Terrorism, and the National Endowment for Democracy
by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya and Julien Teil
A repeat of the disorder and pandemonium generated inside Afghanistan is in the works for the continent of Africa. The United States, with the help of Britain, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, created the brutal Taliban and then eventually waged war on its Taliban allies. Similarly, across Africa, the United States and its allies are creating a new series of future enemies to fight, but after initially working with them or using them to sow the seeds of chaos in Africa.
Washington has literally been helping fund insurgencies and regime change projects in Africa. “Human rights” and “democratization” are also being used as a smokescreen for colonialism and war. So-called human rights and humanitarian organizations are now partners in this imperialist project against Africa
France and Israel: Is Washington Outsourcing its Dirty Work in Africa?
The Obama administration has demonstrated once again, as it did in Libya and as it’s done in a variety of surveillance cases, that its view of executive power in the arena of national security is hardly any less expansive than Dick Cheney’s was. The fact that this was predictable makes it no less alarming.
Just as the leaders of US national security thinking led America into the war in Iraq based on the false premise of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and reckless, but politically powerful, rhetoric, Washington's elite are now circling the wagons around the defense budget. They are using the same disingenuous tactics and the same kind of rhetorical gibberish. While they have successfully intimidated the rest of the political system, they are also making huge fools of themselves.
I express my views on this and some defense budget facts you have not heard from these people in a commentary. Titled “The Stench of Elitism in Defense Spending,” it is available at the Politics page of the Huffington Post. Under the better mannered title “Elites Are Wrong,” an edit is also available at AOL Defense.
U.S. President Barack Obama is piling up foreign policy disasters. In at least three areas, crucial for world peace and American interests — Arab-Israel, Afghanistan-Pakistan and Yemen-Somalia — he is pursuing a course which can only be described as foolhardy. The anger and hate towards the United States which he is generating could take a generation to dispel.
. . . . . . .
Is it not time to enquire whether U.S. policy has not created more terrorists than the CIA has managed to kill? Would it not be better if the United States were simply to declare victory in Afghanistan — and indeed in all the other places where its Special Forces operate — bring its troops home as soon as possible and turn its attention to tending the wounds in its own broken society?
Phi Beta Iota: The assumption that US foreign policy is somehow focused on peace or prosperity is evidently not correct. The people who make policy and give orders are not stupid–they are achieving the outcomes they desire. What is different is that a much greater percentage of the public than ever before can now use public intelligence to determine that these policies are not in the public interest, and therefore, are much more likely to be associated with treason–high crimes and misdemeanors that yield personal profit and public pain.
Summary: We now have enough experience with drone warfare to study its effects. Just as in physics, our actions affect ourselves as well as our targets. Social science research shows that drones are a gateway to moral disengagement dehumanization, and deindividuation. The great distances drones operate over, manipulated by faceless-nameless-lawyeristic-voyeurs, creates an emotional, mental, and physical divide between “us” ( i.e. our government) and the enemies we kill. Drones allow us to dissociate our actions from our values, a useful high-cost and high-tech justification. At the end are links to gain more information about this new form of warfare.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
— Newtons Third Law of Motion, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)
Winslow Wheeler: His article gives a chilling rebuke to those who glibly see them as “the future of warfare” and essential for counter-terror operations without acknowledging the consequences.
Robert Steele: The US Government has lost both its intelligence and its integrity. This has been a consistent theme of this web site, and while I have distanced myself from the day to day operations of Phi Beta Iota–they now have a life of their own–G. I. Wilson is one of the original Marines in this era able to demonstrate both intelligence and integrity, and one of the original gurus on asymmetric warfare. That he got to be a Colonel is a credit to the Marine Corps. “Authority” in the U.S. Government is now irrational, illegitimate, and out of control. Even from a practical stand-point, the bandwidth for remote killer drones costs more than human pilots would, and human pilots would have the added advantage of situational awareness, something that simply cannot be achieved from a one-dimensional cockpit in the middle of the USA. From killer drones to JSOC assassinations to the totally illegal war on Libya, the US Government is now a monstrous collage of atrocities being perpetuated against its own public (22% unemployment, 18 veterans a day committing suicide, just under 16% under the poverty line) as well as foreign publics from Palestine and Libya to Central Asia to the Southern Hemisphere. What is being done “in our name” is unaffordable, reprehensible, and long over due for presentation to the International Tribunal with a long list of “by name” perpetrators that should run from Congress and the White House down to the individual pilots and squadron commanders that have betrayed their Oaths of office. What we are doing every day is neither patriotic nor moral.
“Who understands the gibberish of the president of the United States before the General Assembly?” Castro asked.
AFP – September 26, 2011
HAVANA – Cuba's Fidel Castro blasted Barack Obama's speech to the United Nations as “gibberish” on Monday, saying the US president used a rambling address to justify the “unjustifiable.”
In his first published column since July, the 85-year-old revolutionary icon slammed US and NATO intervention in Libya as “monstrous crimes” and said Obama — whom he called the “yankee president” — used a bully pulpit at the UN General Assembly last week to try and sway global opinion.
Fidel, who handed the presidency to his younger brother Raul Castro in 2006 due to a health crisis, has laid low in recent months, and his column published in state media was his first since July 3.
In Monday's piece he came out swinging, saying Obama distorted the situations in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Afghanistan, North Korea, Libya and the Palestinian conflict, and that the US leader used “a long rant to explain and justify the inexplicable and unjustifiable.”
“Who understands the gibberish of the president of the United States before the General Assembly?” Castro asked.
Castro also took issue with the “fascist methods by the United States and its allies to confuse and manipulate global opinion,” and said he was heartened by the “resistance” of his key allies Hugo Chavez and Evo Moralez, presidents of Venezuela and Bolivia, respectively, who criticized US and UN policy in their speeches.
“Has any nation been excluded from the bloody threats of this illustrious defender of international peace and security?” Castro said of Obama, whose UN quotes he cited extensively in his column.
“Who gave the United States such privileges?” Castro said.
He said countries must consider taking a stand at the General Assembly against the “NATO genocide in Libya,” an action Castro described as one of many “flagrant violations of principles.”
“Does anyone want it to be recorded that under their direction, the government of their nation supported the monstrous crimes by the United States and its NATO allies?” he said.
Washington and Havana are Cold War adversaries who have brought their mutual dislike and distrust into the 21st century, and Castro routinely makes political attacks on his ideological foe.
