Friday, November 06, 2009
Our Terrorists, bigger and better version
New Internationalist have just put up an extended footnoted version of my piece on the post-Cold War Western sponsorship of al-Qaeda here. It's a bit meatier, and murkier.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Our Terrorists - New Internationalist feature
Apologies for the delay in posting this - it's been online for a while, but haven't had a chance to post. Here's the link to the full online version of my New Internationalist piece "on the spooky complicity between Western intelligence agencies and Islamist extremism."
For those familiar with my work most of this material won't be new, but its presentation in this way is certainly a step forward, providing a concise summary of the 'deep politics' of the 'War on Terror' that covers quite a lot of ground and should provoke people into asking more probing questions about the drivers of contemporary security policies.
Opening below:
Islamic fundamentalist militants are the enemies of Israel and Western governments, right? Think again. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed reports.
Once upon a time, the CIA trained, financed and supported Osama bin Laden and his mujahidin networks in Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the end of the Cold War, bin Laden turned against the West and we no longer had any use for him. His persistent terrorist attacks against us for more than a decade, culminating in 9/11, provoked our own response, in the form of the ‘war on terror.’ This is the official narrative. And it’s false. Not only did Western intelligence services continue to foster Islamist extremist and terrorist groups connected to al-Qaeda after the Cold War; they continued to do so even after 9/11...
For those familiar with my work most of this material won't be new, but its presentation in this way is certainly a step forward, providing a concise summary of the 'deep politics' of the 'War on Terror' that covers quite a lot of ground and should provoke people into asking more probing questions about the drivers of contemporary security policies.
Opening below:
Islamic fundamentalist militants are the enemies of Israel and Western governments, right? Think again. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed reports.
Once upon a time, the CIA trained, financed and supported Osama bin Laden and his mujahidin networks in Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the end of the Cold War, bin Laden turned against the West and we no longer had any use for him. His persistent terrorist attacks against us for more than a decade, culminating in 9/11, provoked our own response, in the form of the ‘war on terror.’ This is the official narrative. And it’s false. Not only did Western intelligence services continue to foster Islamist extremist and terrorist groups connected to al-Qaeda after the Cold War; they continued to do so even after 9/11...
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The Radicalization Conundrum: notes on the 'Prevent' fiasco
Arun Kundnani from the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has this excellent comment on the fiasco that has emerged relating to the government's Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) funding programme due to the Guardian's recent spate of reporting on the issue. Kundnani is the author of an IRR report based largely on interviews with officials involved in implementation of Prevent funding and policies.
Some initial caveats, though:
1) The response from Muslim communities across the UK has been sheer outrage. This is understandable - the IRR and Guardian revelations indicate that police and intelligence agencies have pressured local authorities to use their PVE-brokered relationships with certain community organisations to gather generic sensitive information about people's personal lives, simply because they happen to be Muslim. Local Muslims are now looking at their local community workers, youth workers, local authority officials, and so on, with huge suspicion. The perception is that they are being criminalised due to their faith, and the result is that many now no longer want to have anything at all to do with PVE funding at all.
2) This reaction, while understandable, needs to be tempered. The new evidence illustrates that systematic 'spying' has indeed occurred, but it's unclear which organizations have been involved, and to what extent this has occurred as a centralized policy of government, as opposed to a more discrete strategy pursued by particular elements of police and intelligence agencies. There are many organizations and individuals involved in Prevent work, from both Muslim and non-Muslim communities, who are not involved in 'spying' activities. Therefore it's counterproductive to assume that anyone and everyone involved in Prevent work is actually a spy, as some are now doing.
3) It's also clear that some of this intelligence gathering has gone on under the rubric of the Channel Project, an interagency counter-radicalization initiative whose aim is to identify 'vulnerable' young Muslims who are 'at-risk' of become violent extremists. The logic of the Channel Project - and of all this surveillance-centred 'de-radicalization' work - is essentially based on a deeply flawed understanding of violent radicalization which focuses on surveillance to deal with symptoms, rather than resolving root causes.
4) The scope of risk-assessment is rendered potentially unlimited by the assumption, recently espoused by the MI5 Behavioural Science Unit for instance, that there is no “typical pathway to violent extremism” for British Muslim terrorists who fit “no single demographic profile” – all genders, classes, ages and localities of British Muslims may therefore potentially be “at-risk”. Categorizations of being “at-risk” from violent extremism could include anything from holding foreign policy grievances or expressing disillusionment with the parliamentary system, to holding religious beliefs assumed to contradict an as yet amorphous and contested conception of shared values – ‘symptoms’ which have no proven relationship to a propensity for violence.
5) Left out of all the flurry and fury are two issues: i) the social exclusion of the vast majority of British Muslims from mainstream British society, not by choice, but due to social structural factors which have led to up to 70 per cent of ethnically South Asian Muslims in Britain living in poverty; almost 100 per cent unemployment rates for youth in particular areas in Birmingham, Manchester, etc.; and institutional discrimination in access to housing, education, health-care, etc. - issues which do not by themselves lead to violence, but which do generate discontent and suspicion toward British civil society ii) the core role of the al-Muhajiroun organization (currently mobilizing under the banner of 'Islam4UK') in providing a radicalizing social network which provides links to al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups abroad, and which has been linked to every major terrorist plot in the UK, including the 7/7 bombings. The instrumental role of extremist ideology as manifest through al-Muhajiroun, as a 'pull' factor that exploits grievances about foreign policy and domestic injustices while abusing religious language and symbols using audiovisual and other techniques of indoctrination, has been ignored by police and intelligence services. By underplaying the significance of this specific network, authorities imply that radicalization is a generic community problem - when it simply isn't.
There's more to say on the issue of violent radicalization, but for now I want to focus on the question of al-Muhajiroun, which is supposed to be a proscribed organization. It now turns out that it was never proscribed - rather, its successor groups were banned, and now that its members are mobilizing under the banner of 'Islam4UK', they're free to run around mouthing the usual inflammatory drivel, which often includes inciting to violence and terrorism.
According to senior government and intelligence officials, at the time of al-Muhajiroun’s founding in 1996, the network was mobilized by MI6 to send British Muslims to Kosovo – coinciding with British and American military assistance to the Kosovan Albanians. This has been confirmed for instance by John Loftus, former US Justice Department official; as well as by former Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in his memoirs.
This was part of a general post-Cold War strategy of co-opting Islamist extremist and terrorist networks to exert influence in Central Asia, the Middle East and beyond. Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who has testified before US Congressional and Senate Committees about pre-9/11 classified intelligence documents she translated, confirms that US intelligence services maintained a “very intimate relationship” with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban “all the way up to September 11,” to secure geopolitical influence in Central Asia.
Even after 9/11, elements of this relationship were not discontinued. Concurrently, reliable reports indicate that the Bush administration in around 2003 began encouraging Saudi government financing of al-Qaeda-affiliated extremist Salafi groups across the Middle East and Central Asia (particularly in Iraq, Lebanon, and Pakistan) to counter Iranian Shi’ite influence. A Presidential Finding signed by President Bush in early 2008 confirms that the CIA has backed this programme with at least $300 million.
In Lebanon, for instance, extremist Salafi groups co-opted by the ruling Hariri faction have been financed by US-Saudi largess as a counterweight to the Shi’ite group Hizbullah. The Lebanese Daily Star (20 April 2007) reported that the United States had earmarked $60 million to reinforce Interior Ministry forces and Sunni organisations identified as “jihadists."
Ironically, a key figure benefiting from this policy is al-Muhajiroun leader Omar Bakri Mohammed, currently residing in Beirut, who has reportedly received material support from Lebanese Salafi networks which he now vocally promotes. In one recent interview, he proclaims, “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organize their jihad against the Shi’ites… Al-Qaeda in Lebanon… are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.” He is currently being investigated by Lebanese security forces who accuse him of training al-Qaeda forces in Lebanon.
Has Bakri benefited indirectly from US-Saudi intelligence sponsorship of extremist groups? It certainly seems that he has, given his current alliance with the CIA-financed self-styled Salafists in Lebanon. This disturbing prospect is made all the more worrying given that his extremist network, al-Muhajiroun aka 'Islam4UK', continues to operate with impunity in the UK, openly inciting to violence, yet ignored by law-enforcement authorities. Bakri himself still addresses his British followers through video link and internet broadcasts.
Urgent action must be taken to arrest, charge and prosecute the central players in this network, who have violated British law with impunity by condoning and promoting terrorist activity. Long-term action must be taken to deal with root structural causes of marginalization and disenfranchisement, affecting communities of all faiths and non-faith in Britain, as background causes of vulnerability to different kinds of extremism. As far as the Muslim community is concerned, urgent action must be taken to develop fresh approaches to counter the rhetoric and ideology of violent extremism promoted by this network. This must include developing an authentic indigenous vision for Islam which is progressive, inclusive and liberating.
Some initial caveats, though:
1) The response from Muslim communities across the UK has been sheer outrage. This is understandable - the IRR and Guardian revelations indicate that police and intelligence agencies have pressured local authorities to use their PVE-brokered relationships with certain community organisations to gather generic sensitive information about people's personal lives, simply because they happen to be Muslim. Local Muslims are now looking at their local community workers, youth workers, local authority officials, and so on, with huge suspicion. The perception is that they are being criminalised due to their faith, and the result is that many now no longer want to have anything at all to do with PVE funding at all.
2) This reaction, while understandable, needs to be tempered. The new evidence illustrates that systematic 'spying' has indeed occurred, but it's unclear which organizations have been involved, and to what extent this has occurred as a centralized policy of government, as opposed to a more discrete strategy pursued by particular elements of police and intelligence agencies. There are many organizations and individuals involved in Prevent work, from both Muslim and non-Muslim communities, who are not involved in 'spying' activities. Therefore it's counterproductive to assume that anyone and everyone involved in Prevent work is actually a spy, as some are now doing.
3) It's also clear that some of this intelligence gathering has gone on under the rubric of the Channel Project, an interagency counter-radicalization initiative whose aim is to identify 'vulnerable' young Muslims who are 'at-risk' of become violent extremists. The logic of the Channel Project - and of all this surveillance-centred 'de-radicalization' work - is essentially based on a deeply flawed understanding of violent radicalization which focuses on surveillance to deal with symptoms, rather than resolving root causes.
4) The scope of risk-assessment is rendered potentially unlimited by the assumption, recently espoused by the MI5 Behavioural Science Unit for instance, that there is no “typical pathway to violent extremism” for British Muslim terrorists who fit “no single demographic profile” – all genders, classes, ages and localities of British Muslims may therefore potentially be “at-risk”. Categorizations of being “at-risk” from violent extremism could include anything from holding foreign policy grievances or expressing disillusionment with the parliamentary system, to holding religious beliefs assumed to contradict an as yet amorphous and contested conception of shared values – ‘symptoms’ which have no proven relationship to a propensity for violence.
5) Left out of all the flurry and fury are two issues: i) the social exclusion of the vast majority of British Muslims from mainstream British society, not by choice, but due to social structural factors which have led to up to 70 per cent of ethnically South Asian Muslims in Britain living in poverty; almost 100 per cent unemployment rates for youth in particular areas in Birmingham, Manchester, etc.; and institutional discrimination in access to housing, education, health-care, etc. - issues which do not by themselves lead to violence, but which do generate discontent and suspicion toward British civil society ii) the core role of the al-Muhajiroun organization (currently mobilizing under the banner of 'Islam4UK') in providing a radicalizing social network which provides links to al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups abroad, and which has been linked to every major terrorist plot in the UK, including the 7/7 bombings. The instrumental role of extremist ideology as manifest through al-Muhajiroun, as a 'pull' factor that exploits grievances about foreign policy and domestic injustices while abusing religious language and symbols using audiovisual and other techniques of indoctrination, has been ignored by police and intelligence services. By underplaying the significance of this specific network, authorities imply that radicalization is a generic community problem - when it simply isn't.
There's more to say on the issue of violent radicalization, but for now I want to focus on the question of al-Muhajiroun, which is supposed to be a proscribed organization. It now turns out that it was never proscribed - rather, its successor groups were banned, and now that its members are mobilizing under the banner of 'Islam4UK', they're free to run around mouthing the usual inflammatory drivel, which often includes inciting to violence and terrorism.
According to senior government and intelligence officials, at the time of al-Muhajiroun’s founding in 1996, the network was mobilized by MI6 to send British Muslims to Kosovo – coinciding with British and American military assistance to the Kosovan Albanians. This has been confirmed for instance by John Loftus, former US Justice Department official; as well as by former Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in his memoirs.
This was part of a general post-Cold War strategy of co-opting Islamist extremist and terrorist networks to exert influence in Central Asia, the Middle East and beyond. Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who has testified before US Congressional and Senate Committees about pre-9/11 classified intelligence documents she translated, confirms that US intelligence services maintained a “very intimate relationship” with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban “all the way up to September 11,” to secure geopolitical influence in Central Asia.
Even after 9/11, elements of this relationship were not discontinued. Concurrently, reliable reports indicate that the Bush administration in around 2003 began encouraging Saudi government financing of al-Qaeda-affiliated extremist Salafi groups across the Middle East and Central Asia (particularly in Iraq, Lebanon, and Pakistan) to counter Iranian Shi’ite influence. A Presidential Finding signed by President Bush in early 2008 confirms that the CIA has backed this programme with at least $300 million.
In Lebanon, for instance, extremist Salafi groups co-opted by the ruling Hariri faction have been financed by US-Saudi largess as a counterweight to the Shi’ite group Hizbullah. The Lebanese Daily Star (20 April 2007) reported that the United States had earmarked $60 million to reinforce Interior Ministry forces and Sunni organisations identified as “jihadists."
Ironically, a key figure benefiting from this policy is al-Muhajiroun leader Omar Bakri Mohammed, currently residing in Beirut, who has reportedly received material support from Lebanese Salafi networks which he now vocally promotes. In one recent interview, he proclaims, “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organize their jihad against the Shi’ites… Al-Qaeda in Lebanon… are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.” He is currently being investigated by Lebanese security forces who accuse him of training al-Qaeda forces in Lebanon.
Has Bakri benefited indirectly from US-Saudi intelligence sponsorship of extremist groups? It certainly seems that he has, given his current alliance with the CIA-financed self-styled Salafists in Lebanon. This disturbing prospect is made all the more worrying given that his extremist network, al-Muhajiroun aka 'Islam4UK', continues to operate with impunity in the UK, openly inciting to violence, yet ignored by law-enforcement authorities. Bakri himself still addresses his British followers through video link and internet broadcasts.
Urgent action must be taken to arrest, charge and prosecute the central players in this network, who have violated British law with impunity by condoning and promoting terrorist activity. Long-term action must be taken to deal with root structural causes of marginalization and disenfranchisement, affecting communities of all faiths and non-faith in Britain, as background causes of vulnerability to different kinds of extremism. As far as the Muslim community is concerned, urgent action must be taken to develop fresh approaches to counter the rhetoric and ideology of violent extremism promoted by this network. This must include developing an authentic indigenous vision for Islam which is progressive, inclusive and liberating.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Exclusive - 'Our Terrorists' in New Internationalist
The Sept-Oct edition of the popular progressive magazine, The New Internationalist, is a special issue on Political Islam, carrying an exclusive feature article by me called "Our Terrorists", which summarises some of my work on Western military intelligence cooptation of al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist networks after the Cold War.
You can't read the piece online, so I'd encourage getting hold of the hard copy, and perhaps encouraging friends/colleagues to read it too as a way of raising awareness. The NI coverage is definitely a breakthrough into the mainstream for a 'deep political' perspective on the emergence of Islamist extremism and the role of Western covert operations.
The editorial by NI Editor Hadani Ditmars has been put online here, and she gives a glimpse of the substance of my piece with her own brief summary:
"... in certain quarters extremist Islamism is being actively funded and encouraged.
As 30-year-old British author Nafeez Ahmed writes (see page 17) the old Cold War relationships between certain national intelligence agencies and Islamist extremists are still alive and well.
While researching a doctoral thesis on imperialism and the ‘war on terror’, Ahmed found that in most Muslim countries where there is a significant petroleum industry, Western intelligence agencies have formed close relationships with Islamist groups – and in many cases are supplying them with arms and funds.
As strange new Wahhabist militias appear in, for example, Somalia and Chechnya , local Muslim communities with populist Sufi or other indigenous, moderate forms of Islam suddenly find their faith hijacked. Wherever sharia law is used as a tool of authoritarianism, there are often, it seems, hidden political agendas at work.
While some secular nationalist governments in majority-Muslim countries have engaged with Islamist extremists ( like Algeria’s ruling party – see page 18) to further their own agendas and co-opt the power of religion, similar tactics by Western governments and intelligence agencies can be new versions of the old divide-and-conquer imperialism.
Even as the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq empowered extremist Shi’a death squads via the new Ministry of the Interior, the CIA continued to support Salafist, Sunni militias throughout the region (see page 17). Sectarian strife would seem almost unavoidable under such circumstances..."
You can't read the piece online, so I'd encourage getting hold of the hard copy, and perhaps encouraging friends/colleagues to read it too as a way of raising awareness. The NI coverage is definitely a breakthrough into the mainstream for a 'deep political' perspective on the emergence of Islamist extremism and the role of Western covert operations.
The editorial by NI Editor Hadani Ditmars has been put online here, and she gives a glimpse of the substance of my piece with her own brief summary:
"... in certain quarters extremist Islamism is being actively funded and encouraged.
As 30-year-old British author Nafeez Ahmed writes (see page 17) the old Cold War relationships between certain national intelligence agencies and Islamist extremists are still alive and well.
While researching a doctoral thesis on imperialism and the ‘war on terror’, Ahmed found that in most Muslim countries where there is a significant petroleum industry, Western intelligence agencies have formed close relationships with Islamist groups – and in many cases are supplying them with arms and funds.
As strange new Wahhabist militias appear in, for example, Somalia and Chechnya , local Muslim communities with populist Sufi or other indigenous, moderate forms of Islam suddenly find their faith hijacked. Wherever sharia law is used as a tool of authoritarianism, there are often, it seems, hidden political agendas at work.
While some secular nationalist governments in majority-Muslim countries have engaged with Islamist extremists ( like Algeria’s ruling party – see page 18) to further their own agendas and co-opt the power of religion, similar tactics by Western governments and intelligence agencies can be new versions of the old divide-and-conquer imperialism.
Even as the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq empowered extremist Shi’a death squads via the new Ministry of the Interior, the CIA continued to support Salafist, Sunni militias throughout the region (see page 17). Sectarian strife would seem almost unavoidable under such circumstances..."
Friday, September 25, 2009
Calibrating Fear for the Long War
The Muslim News has just published my piece on the liquid bomb plot here, which extends some of my recent analysis of the trial and its implications. The piece starts with questions about the liquid bomb plot itself, but moves on to wider geopolitical and intelligence issues relating to Anglo-American involvement in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I post some of it below:
[...]
Perhaps the biggest unanswered questions remain about individuals allegedly linked to the plot whom the police have shown no interest in arresting or prosecuting. Rashid Rauf, a British citizen of Pakistani ethnic origin, who before this plot, was already wanted by police for murdering his uncle, was described as the plot’s al-Qa’ida mastermind, coordinating it from Pakistan.
[...]
But despite Rauf’s pivotal role in the case, for over a year the British Government refused to seek his extradition to the UK to stand trial for his alleged role as the plot’s ‘mastermind’. Official British disinterest in prosecuting the alleged al-Qa’ida ‘mastermind’ of the liquid bomb plot was compounded by Rauf’s inexplicable escape from Pakistani maximum security detention, and then by his reported extra-judicial assassination by a US drone late last year.
British authorities also displayed no interest in arresting or prosecuting another individual who was allegedly central to the plot, who is under 24-hour surveillance in the UK, has been named by the US Treasury, UN Security Council and UK Treasury, as a terror recruiter and fundraiser with links to al-Qa’ida and the Taliban, who has sent men to Pakistan for terror training. Although intelligence sources say that surveillance of him led them to the airline plotters, he remains at large.
British authorities are now considering a third re-trial to try to convict several other defendants in the liquid bomb plot trial about whom the jury could not agree to a verdict of guilt. The desire to use the judicial system to vindicate the Government’s claim to having successfully foiled “Britain’s 9/11” is unfortunately not matched by an equal willingness to investigate the role of dubious US and British intelligence policies, which appear to have incubated terrorist groups in Pakistan. As noted by Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, “the key question... is who put these useless idiots up to it? How far does surveillance and penetration blend into instigation by agents provocateurs?”
Last year, this newspaper noted that the plotters had reportedly travelled to Pakistan under cover of doing humanitarian work, where they underwent terrorist training in camps in the Balochistan province run by terrorist organisation Jundullah. Jundullah, an al-Qa’ida linked group formerly headed by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has reportedly “been secretly trained by American officials” due to their carrying out cross-border raids against Iran. A central player in these policies is the Pakistan’s intelligence services (ISI), which Anglo-American authorities insist not only on protecting, but on supporting. Pakistani sources said that while in Pakistan, the plotters had been “exploited by agents provocateurs” amongst ISI, who wanted to “guide them to carry out attacks.”
The troublesome role of the ISI is highlighted by recent revelations that the agency has continued to provide military and financial support to al-Qa’ida and Taliban forces in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Current Pakistani Army chief, Gen Pervez Kiani, served as head of the ISI from 2004 to 2007, during which according to a NATO report, the ISI administered two training camps for the Taliban in Balochistan.
For a single offensive in Kandahar in September 2006, the ISI had provided Taliban forces with 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 400,000 rounds of ammunition. Evidence of the ISI’s covert assistance to the Afghan insurgency under Kiani’s leadership has been circulated to the highest echelons of the US Government and the White House.
Despite this, reports US national security expert Dr Gareth Porter, “Senior officials of the Barack Obama administration persuaded the US Congress to extend military assistance to Pakistan for five years without any assurance that the Pakistani assistance to the Taliban had ended.”
Although officials claim that the military operations in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan are about fighting terrorists, a more likely motive is the Trans-Afghan pipeline planned to run from across southern Afghanistan, across Pakistan to Caspian reserves - bypassing US-British rivals like Iran, Russia and China. Current NATO operations are focused on clearing the area where the pipeline will run.
Three months before 9/11, US officials warned the Taliban that they would face military action if they failed to make peace with the Northern Alliance in a federal government that would provide stability to allow the pipeline project to go through. This still raises questions about continued Anglo-American support for the ISI despite its ongoing support for the insurgency.
According to a confidential report to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Professor Ola Tunander of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO), the US strategy is to “support both sides in the conflict” so as to “calibrate the level of violence” in Afghanistan to prolong the war.
This strategy is instrumental to a wider geopolitical objective of protecting a US-dominated unipolar order against escalating trends toward economic multipolarity and the rising power of major rivals. “The U.S.A.’s superior military strength and intelligence hegemony could only be translated into power and real global strength if there were ongoing conflicts – wars and terrorist attacks – that threatened the multipolar power structure of the economic-political world order,” continues the Norwegian report.
“Accordingly, from a European or Chinese or Japanese point of view, every US war, wherever it is fought, is not just directed against a local insurgent or an anti-American ruler, it is directed against the economic-political multipolar power structure that would give Europe, China and Japan a significant position in the world.” By fanning the flames on both sides in Afghanistan, US forces are able to “increase and decrease the military temperature and calibrate the level of violence” with a view to permanently “mobilize other governments in support of US global policy.”
In this sense, the ‘War on Terror’ functions as an ideological narrative that underpins the capacity of the British and American states to sustain geopolitical dominance over an increasingly fragile and changing international system. While the threat of al-Qa’ida terrorism should not be underestimated, solutions focusing on the expansion of military and police powers are counterproductive, serving only to buttress these dubious geopolitical agendas.
If the liquid bomb plot trial shows anything, it is that our out-of-control state intelligence policies continue to foster the enemy we are supposed to be fighting – both in supporting networks and agencies that back terrorist groups, and in continuing to generate the overwhelming civilian casualties that extremists exploit to recruit to their unholy cause.
[...]
Perhaps the biggest unanswered questions remain about individuals allegedly linked to the plot whom the police have shown no interest in arresting or prosecuting. Rashid Rauf, a British citizen of Pakistani ethnic origin, who before this plot, was already wanted by police for murdering his uncle, was described as the plot’s al-Qa’ida mastermind, coordinating it from Pakistan.
[...]
But despite Rauf’s pivotal role in the case, for over a year the British Government refused to seek his extradition to the UK to stand trial for his alleged role as the plot’s ‘mastermind’. Official British disinterest in prosecuting the alleged al-Qa’ida ‘mastermind’ of the liquid bomb plot was compounded by Rauf’s inexplicable escape from Pakistani maximum security detention, and then by his reported extra-judicial assassination by a US drone late last year.
British authorities also displayed no interest in arresting or prosecuting another individual who was allegedly central to the plot, who is under 24-hour surveillance in the UK, has been named by the US Treasury, UN Security Council and UK Treasury, as a terror recruiter and fundraiser with links to al-Qa’ida and the Taliban, who has sent men to Pakistan for terror training. Although intelligence sources say that surveillance of him led them to the airline plotters, he remains at large.
British authorities are now considering a third re-trial to try to convict several other defendants in the liquid bomb plot trial about whom the jury could not agree to a verdict of guilt. The desire to use the judicial system to vindicate the Government’s claim to having successfully foiled “Britain’s 9/11” is unfortunately not matched by an equal willingness to investigate the role of dubious US and British intelligence policies, which appear to have incubated terrorist groups in Pakistan. As noted by Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, “the key question... is who put these useless idiots up to it? How far does surveillance and penetration blend into instigation by agents provocateurs?”
Last year, this newspaper noted that the plotters had reportedly travelled to Pakistan under cover of doing humanitarian work, where they underwent terrorist training in camps in the Balochistan province run by terrorist organisation Jundullah. Jundullah, an al-Qa’ida linked group formerly headed by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has reportedly “been secretly trained by American officials” due to their carrying out cross-border raids against Iran. A central player in these policies is the Pakistan’s intelligence services (ISI), which Anglo-American authorities insist not only on protecting, but on supporting. Pakistani sources said that while in Pakistan, the plotters had been “exploited by agents provocateurs” amongst ISI, who wanted to “guide them to carry out attacks.”
The troublesome role of the ISI is highlighted by recent revelations that the agency has continued to provide military and financial support to al-Qa’ida and Taliban forces in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Current Pakistani Army chief, Gen Pervez Kiani, served as head of the ISI from 2004 to 2007, during which according to a NATO report, the ISI administered two training camps for the Taliban in Balochistan.
For a single offensive in Kandahar in September 2006, the ISI had provided Taliban forces with 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 400,000 rounds of ammunition. Evidence of the ISI’s covert assistance to the Afghan insurgency under Kiani’s leadership has been circulated to the highest echelons of the US Government and the White House.
Despite this, reports US national security expert Dr Gareth Porter, “Senior officials of the Barack Obama administration persuaded the US Congress to extend military assistance to Pakistan for five years without any assurance that the Pakistani assistance to the Taliban had ended.”
Although officials claim that the military operations in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan are about fighting terrorists, a more likely motive is the Trans-Afghan pipeline planned to run from across southern Afghanistan, across Pakistan to Caspian reserves - bypassing US-British rivals like Iran, Russia and China. Current NATO operations are focused on clearing the area where the pipeline will run.
Three months before 9/11, US officials warned the Taliban that they would face military action if they failed to make peace with the Northern Alliance in a federal government that would provide stability to allow the pipeline project to go through. This still raises questions about continued Anglo-American support for the ISI despite its ongoing support for the insurgency.
According to a confidential report to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Professor Ola Tunander of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO), the US strategy is to “support both sides in the conflict” so as to “calibrate the level of violence” in Afghanistan to prolong the war.
This strategy is instrumental to a wider geopolitical objective of protecting a US-dominated unipolar order against escalating trends toward economic multipolarity and the rising power of major rivals. “The U.S.A.’s superior military strength and intelligence hegemony could only be translated into power and real global strength if there were ongoing conflicts – wars and terrorist attacks – that threatened the multipolar power structure of the economic-political world order,” continues the Norwegian report.
“Accordingly, from a European or Chinese or Japanese point of view, every US war, wherever it is fought, is not just directed against a local insurgent or an anti-American ruler, it is directed against the economic-political multipolar power structure that would give Europe, China and Japan a significant position in the world.” By fanning the flames on both sides in Afghanistan, US forces are able to “increase and decrease the military temperature and calibrate the level of violence” with a view to permanently “mobilize other governments in support of US global policy.”
In this sense, the ‘War on Terror’ functions as an ideological narrative that underpins the capacity of the British and American states to sustain geopolitical dominance over an increasingly fragile and changing international system. While the threat of al-Qa’ida terrorism should not be underestimated, solutions focusing on the expansion of military and police powers are counterproductive, serving only to buttress these dubious geopolitical agendas.
If the liquid bomb plot trial shows anything, it is that our out-of-control state intelligence policies continue to foster the enemy we are supposed to be fighting – both in supporting networks and agencies that back terrorist groups, and in continuing to generate the overwhelming civilian casualties that extremists exploit to recruit to their unholy cause.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Liquid Bomb Plot Conviction
In response to this Evening Standard leader yesterday, letters editor Josh Neicho asked me to respond. The following letter was printed:
---
Efforts to showcase the airline bomb plot trial as "Britain's 9/11" being foiled are less than convincing. For the plot to work, hydrogen peroxide would need to be present in at least 30 per cent concentration, a state in which it is highly unstable; and it is unclear how the plotters would have supplied the necessary input of oxygen at high concentration.
On the other hand, the plotters’ murky international connections have been underplayed. Under cover of doing humanitarian work the plotters travelled to camps in Pakistan run by terrorist organisation Jundullah. Jundullah has reportedly “been secretly trained by American officials" due to their carrying out cross-border raids against Iran.
According to Pakistani sources, the plotters had also been members of extremist group al-Muhajiroun, which re-launched in Britain this June. In Lebanon, group founder Omar Bakri - who still radicalizes British followers over the internet - has allied himself with Saudi financed, al-Qaeda linked groups to which the US has turned a blind eye.
British police worked well to foil a scheme that was operationally flawed, but greatly facilitated by US intelligence strategies. Ministers must now take concerted action against al-Muhajiroun activists with a track record of incitement and exert greater scrutiny over our Atlantic ally's policies.
Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, author, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry.
---
Followers of this blog will note that I've been writing critically about the government's narrative around the liquid bomb plot consistently since August 2006. Last year I wrote more detailed piece on the liquid bomb plot after the farcical output emerging from the first trial, for the Muslim News (26th September 2008). Although the outcome of the re-trial in this September's convictions indicates that the convictees did indeed bear intent to carry out attacks, disturbing questions about the networks in which they operated and the role of intelligence services remain unanswered. I think the issues raised in this piece remain as pertinent as ever, and put the government's (and media's) self-congratulatory triumphalism in sharp relief. So I repost it in full here:
---
Arming the enemy? Fact and fiction in the liquid bomb plot
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
In the long awaited verdict of the liquid bomb plot trial, three men, Abdullah Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain, were convicted on September 8 of conspiring to commit mass murder. Yet after a £10 million investigation and a trial lasting more than two years, the jury could not agree on the Crown’s main allegation - that the eight Britons on trial had planned to blow up at least seven airliners across the Atlantic in 2006, using chemical explosives concealed in drink bottles, to be smuggled on board from Heathrow airport.
The jury also failed to reach a verdict on four other defendants, who had earlier admitted conspiracy to cause a public nuisance by making al-Qa’ida style suicide videos. Another defendant, Mohammed Gulzar, alleged by the Crown to have flown into Britain from Pakistan to oversee the plot, was acquitted of all charges. While ample evidence of the criminal intent of the convicted plotters seems to have emerged in the trial, less certain was their technical ability to actually carry out the grandiose scheme.
In the original story put out by security officials, liquid explosives - TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide) - were to be made on board the planes by mixing sports drinks with a peroxide-based household gel and then detonated using an MP3 player or mobile phone. Former British Army explosives expert Lt Col. Nigel Wylde dismissed that story as an impossible “fiction” that would take up to 36 hours to complete, emitting noxious fumes in the onboard lavatory that would trigger alarms in the aircraft air change system, and cause the plot to be quickly neutralised.
Given the absurdity of this scheme, the Crown later changed tact, opting for an alternative scenario: The alleged plotters planned to bring on board drink bottles containing a pre-prepared explosive - hydrogen peroxide mixed with Tang. The explosives would be connected to detonators made from hollowed-out AA battery cases filled with HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamine), that could be set off using the flash circuits of a camera.
Yet the prosecution’s case remained problematic. Hydrogen peroxide would need to be present in purified form - at least 30 per cent concentration - which is a highly unstable state prone to accidental detonation even in a sealed bottle. According to James Thurman, a former FBI explosives forensic expert, HMTD is also “exceptionally sensitive” to “impact, friction and electrostatic discharge”, and is thus considered an “exceptionally hazardous explosive” that is extraordinarily difficult to handle. Even if the plotters managed to get passed these hazards, they wouldn’t make it pass the final clincher: for hydrogen peroxide to function as an explosive, it requires a large input of oxygen in high concentration, either as liquid oxygen or as part of the explosive itself. Neither was feasible on board a plane. Hence, a large explosion would be impossible unless conducted as a highly controlled experiment. Government scientists attempting to demonstrate the viability of the plot undertook 30 attempts in stringent laboratory conditions before pulling off a sufficiently large explosion to show the jury. They also consistently used a mechanical arm to attach the detonators to the explosive material to avoid premature detonation, because its components were too volatile. In any case, the prosecution conceded that the men had failed to construct a viable bomb.
British police and security officials, deeply disappointed at the verdict, blamed the US Government for the weakness of the case. US officials, they said, pressured Pakistani authorities to pre-emptively arrest Rashid Rauf, a Briton operating in Pakistan and the alleged al-Qa’ida ringleader of the liquid bomb plot terror cell. The arrest forced British police to crackdown on the members of the cell far earlier than they would have liked to. Indeed, in 2006 long before the trial, British security officials were already complaining that an associated team of suspected terrorists “escaped capture because of interference by the United States.” This second group, they told the Independent (November 25, 2006), is “still at large.”
Questions arose when it emerged that Rauf, the alleged al-Qa’ida go-between for the group, had been tortured in the custody of Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which described him as the main planner of the attacks. Pakistani intelligence sources had reportedly penetrated the liquid bomb plot cell since late 2005, on behalf of MI6 and the CIA. According to Syed Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan bureau chief of Asia Times (August 15, 2006), Pakistani intelligence and ‘jihadist’ sources told him that the men “were exploited by agents provocateurs” in the ISI who wanted to “guide them to carry out any attack on US interests.”
The pre-emptive arrest of Rauf, however, prevented British investigators from uncovering the role of the Pakistani ISI and the wider network under its tutelage. US interference may have been designed to protect ongoing illegal relationships with intelligence assets of dubious moral stature.
Intelligence sources say that at least four of the alleged liquid bomb plotters had gone to Pakistan after the earthquake in October 2005 under the cover of humanitarian relief work. The men were reportedly then taken to camps run by Jundullah (Army of Allah), a terrorist organisation loosely linked to al-Qa’ida in the Waziristan area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where they were trained in the fabrication and use of explosives.
Yet, according to ABC News (April 3, 2007), citing US and Pakistani intelligence sources, Jundullah “has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005,” to stage terrorist attacks inside Iran. To avoid Congressional oversight, the Pentagon has funnelled assistance to Jundullah through Afghan military and Pakistani intelligence services. The dual US-ISI sponsorship of Jundullah was, say Pakistani sources, agreed between Vice-President Dick Cheney and former President Pervez Musharraf. As of February 2008, American national security journalist Andrew Cockburn reported that an official Presidential Finding authorized a further $300 million to finance covert operations against Iran from Lebanon to Afghanistan - among the beneficiaries is Jundullah.
Across the Middle East, to counter regional Iranian influence the Bush administration has covertly sponsored al-Qa’ida affiliated terrorist networks since at least 2005, largely through Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Covert US sponsorship of terrorist groups linked to the liquid bomb plot, as well as other terror plots including 9/11, has no doubt undermined national security. The dubious role of American and Pakistani intelligence in sponsoring the same extremist groups we are supposed to be fighting, although ignored in the trial, raises awkward geopolitical questions about Western security and foreign policy in the “War on Terror.”
---
Efforts to showcase the airline bomb plot trial as "Britain's 9/11" being foiled are less than convincing. For the plot to work, hydrogen peroxide would need to be present in at least 30 per cent concentration, a state in which it is highly unstable; and it is unclear how the plotters would have supplied the necessary input of oxygen at high concentration.
On the other hand, the plotters’ murky international connections have been underplayed. Under cover of doing humanitarian work the plotters travelled to camps in Pakistan run by terrorist organisation Jundullah. Jundullah has reportedly “been secretly trained by American officials" due to their carrying out cross-border raids against Iran.
According to Pakistani sources, the plotters had also been members of extremist group al-Muhajiroun, which re-launched in Britain this June. In Lebanon, group founder Omar Bakri - who still radicalizes British followers over the internet - has allied himself with Saudi financed, al-Qaeda linked groups to which the US has turned a blind eye.
British police worked well to foil a scheme that was operationally flawed, but greatly facilitated by US intelligence strategies. Ministers must now take concerted action against al-Muhajiroun activists with a track record of incitement and exert greater scrutiny over our Atlantic ally's policies.
Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, author, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry.
---
Followers of this blog will note that I've been writing critically about the government's narrative around the liquid bomb plot consistently since August 2006. Last year I wrote more detailed piece on the liquid bomb plot after the farcical output emerging from the first trial, for the Muslim News (26th September 2008). Although the outcome of the re-trial in this September's convictions indicates that the convictees did indeed bear intent to carry out attacks, disturbing questions about the networks in which they operated and the role of intelligence services remain unanswered. I think the issues raised in this piece remain as pertinent as ever, and put the government's (and media's) self-congratulatory triumphalism in sharp relief. So I repost it in full here:
---
Arming the enemy? Fact and fiction in the liquid bomb plot
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
In the long awaited verdict of the liquid bomb plot trial, three men, Abdullah Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain, were convicted on September 8 of conspiring to commit mass murder. Yet after a £10 million investigation and a trial lasting more than two years, the jury could not agree on the Crown’s main allegation - that the eight Britons on trial had planned to blow up at least seven airliners across the Atlantic in 2006, using chemical explosives concealed in drink bottles, to be smuggled on board from Heathrow airport.
The jury also failed to reach a verdict on four other defendants, who had earlier admitted conspiracy to cause a public nuisance by making al-Qa’ida style suicide videos. Another defendant, Mohammed Gulzar, alleged by the Crown to have flown into Britain from Pakistan to oversee the plot, was acquitted of all charges. While ample evidence of the criminal intent of the convicted plotters seems to have emerged in the trial, less certain was their technical ability to actually carry out the grandiose scheme.
In the original story put out by security officials, liquid explosives - TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide) - were to be made on board the planes by mixing sports drinks with a peroxide-based household gel and then detonated using an MP3 player or mobile phone. Former British Army explosives expert Lt Col. Nigel Wylde dismissed that story as an impossible “fiction” that would take up to 36 hours to complete, emitting noxious fumes in the onboard lavatory that would trigger alarms in the aircraft air change system, and cause the plot to be quickly neutralised.
Given the absurdity of this scheme, the Crown later changed tact, opting for an alternative scenario: The alleged plotters planned to bring on board drink bottles containing a pre-prepared explosive - hydrogen peroxide mixed with Tang. The explosives would be connected to detonators made from hollowed-out AA battery cases filled with HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamine), that could be set off using the flash circuits of a camera.
Yet the prosecution’s case remained problematic. Hydrogen peroxide would need to be present in purified form - at least 30 per cent concentration - which is a highly unstable state prone to accidental detonation even in a sealed bottle. According to James Thurman, a former FBI explosives forensic expert, HMTD is also “exceptionally sensitive” to “impact, friction and electrostatic discharge”, and is thus considered an “exceptionally hazardous explosive” that is extraordinarily difficult to handle. Even if the plotters managed to get passed these hazards, they wouldn’t make it pass the final clincher: for hydrogen peroxide to function as an explosive, it requires a large input of oxygen in high concentration, either as liquid oxygen or as part of the explosive itself. Neither was feasible on board a plane. Hence, a large explosion would be impossible unless conducted as a highly controlled experiment. Government scientists attempting to demonstrate the viability of the plot undertook 30 attempts in stringent laboratory conditions before pulling off a sufficiently large explosion to show the jury. They also consistently used a mechanical arm to attach the detonators to the explosive material to avoid premature detonation, because its components were too volatile. In any case, the prosecution conceded that the men had failed to construct a viable bomb.
British police and security officials, deeply disappointed at the verdict, blamed the US Government for the weakness of the case. US officials, they said, pressured Pakistani authorities to pre-emptively arrest Rashid Rauf, a Briton operating in Pakistan and the alleged al-Qa’ida ringleader of the liquid bomb plot terror cell. The arrest forced British police to crackdown on the members of the cell far earlier than they would have liked to. Indeed, in 2006 long before the trial, British security officials were already complaining that an associated team of suspected terrorists “escaped capture because of interference by the United States.” This second group, they told the Independent (November 25, 2006), is “still at large.”
Questions arose when it emerged that Rauf, the alleged al-Qa’ida go-between for the group, had been tortured in the custody of Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which described him as the main planner of the attacks. Pakistani intelligence sources had reportedly penetrated the liquid bomb plot cell since late 2005, on behalf of MI6 and the CIA. According to Syed Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan bureau chief of Asia Times (August 15, 2006), Pakistani intelligence and ‘jihadist’ sources told him that the men “were exploited by agents provocateurs” in the ISI who wanted to “guide them to carry out any attack on US interests.”
The pre-emptive arrest of Rauf, however, prevented British investigators from uncovering the role of the Pakistani ISI and the wider network under its tutelage. US interference may have been designed to protect ongoing illegal relationships with intelligence assets of dubious moral stature.
Intelligence sources say that at least four of the alleged liquid bomb plotters had gone to Pakistan after the earthquake in October 2005 under the cover of humanitarian relief work. The men were reportedly then taken to camps run by Jundullah (Army of Allah), a terrorist organisation loosely linked to al-Qa’ida in the Waziristan area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where they were trained in the fabrication and use of explosives.
Yet, according to ABC News (April 3, 2007), citing US and Pakistani intelligence sources, Jundullah “has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005,” to stage terrorist attacks inside Iran. To avoid Congressional oversight, the Pentagon has funnelled assistance to Jundullah through Afghan military and Pakistani intelligence services. The dual US-ISI sponsorship of Jundullah was, say Pakistani sources, agreed between Vice-President Dick Cheney and former President Pervez Musharraf. As of February 2008, American national security journalist Andrew Cockburn reported that an official Presidential Finding authorized a further $300 million to finance covert operations against Iran from Lebanon to Afghanistan - among the beneficiaries is Jundullah.
Across the Middle East, to counter regional Iranian influence the Bush administration has covertly sponsored al-Qa’ida affiliated terrorist networks since at least 2005, largely through Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Covert US sponsorship of terrorist groups linked to the liquid bomb plot, as well as other terror plots including 9/11, has no doubt undermined national security. The dubious role of American and Pakistani intelligence in sponsoring the same extremist groups we are supposed to be fighting, although ignored in the trial, raises awkward geopolitical questions about Western security and foreign policy in the “War on Terror.”
Update
I'm back!!!!
April this year I finally obtained my Doctorate.
Although I had hoped to spend more time on this blog thereafter, unfortunately it wasn't to be. I've been thrown into the deep-end on a variety of different projects.
The biggest is my forthcoming book, The Crisis of Civilization: How Climate, Oil, Food, Finance, Terror and Warfare will Change the World, to be published by Pluto Press, either late this year or, more likely, early next year.
I'm also currently working as strategy director for creative education at Arts Versa, where we're developing new educational projects related to inter-faith and cross-cultural dialogue, specifically concerning Islam and British Muslim communities.
And the IPRD website, after a complete makeover last year, and after undergoing serious technical and security difficulties for many months due to being hacked repeatedly, is now secure and operational - and is still in transition... we're currently working on a better more functional and user-friendly site, which we'll be updating very regularly, hopefully by next year.
And lots of other bits and pieces going on...
here's hoping to spend a bit more time on this blog from now on.
April this year I finally obtained my Doctorate.
Although I had hoped to spend more time on this blog thereafter, unfortunately it wasn't to be. I've been thrown into the deep-end on a variety of different projects.
The biggest is my forthcoming book, The Crisis of Civilization: How Climate, Oil, Food, Finance, Terror and Warfare will Change the World, to be published by Pluto Press, either late this year or, more likely, early next year.
I'm also currently working as strategy director for creative education at Arts Versa, where we're developing new educational projects related to inter-faith and cross-cultural dialogue, specifically concerning Islam and British Muslim communities.
And the IPRD website, after a complete makeover last year, and after undergoing serious technical and security difficulties for many months due to being hacked repeatedly, is now secure and operational - and is still in transition... we're currently working on a better more functional and user-friendly site, which we'll be updating very regularly, hopefully by next year.
And lots of other bits and pieces going on...
here's hoping to spend a bit more time on this blog from now on.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Back from Oslo: "The War on Truth" in The Independent, and elsewhere
It's just been a few hours since I arrived back from a conference in Oslo, "Deconstructing the War on Terror", where I was honoured to join a very distinguished panel of speakers addressing the need for a new discourse to make sense of current events.
I've just been told by the man who runs this website that I've been mentioned very favourably in today's edition of The Independent in an oped piece by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
"In his disturbing and clearly evidenced book, The War on Truth, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed traces the unholy games played with Islamicist terrorists by the US, and through acquiescence by the UK, flirting with them when it suited and then turning against them. Al-Qa'ida has been used as an instrument of western statecraft and for now is the enemy. Well, not quite. Pakistan's ISI is quite chummy with the Bin Laden groupies and, well, we have to keep Pakistan on side as they know so many of our secrets. So it goes on."
I also discovered in Oslo that The War on Truth has been reviewed in the Journal of Peace Research published by SAGE on behalf of the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO). I met with Dr Ola Tunander, who is a Research Professor at PRIO, and who wrote the review for the journal last year. It's a short, but very supportive review - here's the gist:
"In this volume, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed has collected a large amount of material about the US grand design for a new American world order, and particularly about the role of Osama bin Laden, 11 September 2001, and the intelligence networks of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the West. This volume tries to understand 21st-century terrorism, not primarily as a replacement for the Cold War Soviet Union, but as a Western disinformation campaign to control raw materials and populations on a global scale. Ahmed documents the close ties between Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and a number of intelligence services. He also documents policies for provoking terrorists into action to justify military responses. The frequent use of terrorism to alter the political agenda and to manipulate public opinion has seemingly created a ‘hyperreality’ that covers the true actors behind the scene. The ‘Global War on Terror’ is, to Ahmed, as much a‘war on truth’ as it is a war against any terrorists... his contribution is necessary for anyone who wants to write about the Global War on Terror and US preoccupation with terrorism in the 21st century. Thebook is also important for the understanding of the present war in Afghanistan."
The only caveat is that Professor Tunander describes me as "Director of Policy Research & Development at the University of Sussex" - a post which doesn't exist, and which is obviously a confusion of my affiliation to Sussex as a tutor and doctoral candidate, and my work with the IPRD.
Anyway, Tunander is a strong emerging voice in the emerging critical academic literature on terrorism. He has most recently contributed to the seminal academic anthology on 'deep politics', Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty by Dr Eric Wilson, Monash University and Dr Tim Lindsey, University of Melbourne.
On the subject of the conference, all the presentations were excellent, and really eye-opening. The opening speech was by Dr Erik Fosse, a senior medical doctor and Research Professor, and head of the Oslo-based medical aid agency, the Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC). Dr. Fosse's presentation was truly shocking. He was one of the handful of Western experts and eyewitnesses who was still in Gaza during Israel's latest bombardment, and was a firsthand witness to Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. He described how Israeli forces were literally bombing and specifically targeting civilian structures and installations, and recounted harrowing personal stories of the manner in which he and the Palestinian doctors at the Al-Shifa hospital were overwhelmed by incoming civilian casualties and lacking in sufficient medical supplies to treat them effectively due to the Israeli blockade. He also went into eyewitness evidence of new types of weapons being used by Israel. A gist of his talk can be gleaned from his interview on Al-Jazeerah.
Arzu Merali, Director of Research at the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) in London, described the role of the media in the 'War on Terror' and its tendencies to de-humanize ethnic minority communities, in particular Muslims. She described the increasing prevalence of cartoons depicting Muslims as fanatics with long beards, using language such as "parasites" and similar rhetoric; and most disturbingly, compared them to cartoons that were used in Germany in the early 1930s to depict Jews, before the Holocaust. The similarities were actually very striking, and extremely disturbing. She notes that the problem is that the majority community largely has very little contact with minorities, and so their perceptions of minorities are actually informed almost wholly by these sorts of de-humanizing and over-simplifying media stereotypes. There is a need to acknowledge that minorities by way of being minorities, de facto don't have the kind of media access that the majority community takes for granted.
Massoud Shadjareh, Chairman of the IHRC, focused on statistical evidence of the futility of anti-terror operations, procedures and legislation, and showed how not only does the current anti-terror strategy effectively target overwhelmingly innocent people, it in particular targets members of black and ethnic minority groups, once again Muslims in particular. One example was really telling. Out of the over hundred thousand or so people stopped and searched, moreover, there has been not a single conviction for terrorist offences. The financial costs of stop and search, even having cut out some of the red tape permitting police to continue the practive with even more impunity than ever before, are in the millions of pounds - money down the drain, much like the bulk of the Government's Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) strategy which, it now seems, is hell-bent on criminalizing most of the 1.2 million British Muslim population. As Andrew Gilligan has pointed out, we need to address the structural and social causes underlying the vulnerability of our youth, Muslim and non-Muslim, to all kinds of criminal activity.
Finally, Robin Yassin-Kassab, author of the novel The Road from Damascus, and a journalist who has travelled widely in the Middle East and Central Asia, spoke in detail about the rationale behind, and devastating impact of, the war on Pakistan and Afghanistan. Robin discussed the role of the Trans-Afghan pipeline in motivating US hostilities toward Taliban, which despite being invited to Nebraska for talks with UNOCAL and American diplomats in the run-up to 9/11, basically told the US and Britain to shove their plans for Afghanistan up their behinds, following which US representatives promised them bombs. He also delves into detail about the war in Pakistan, and is at pains to emphasise that the fracturing of that country into de facto civil war is a direct consequence of the US trying to compel the ISI to ditch its unruly spawn, the Taliban. Robin blogs here, where you can also find the gist of this presentation in Oslo. Here's a sample from the blog:
"The terror threat to the West is real, but vastly exaggerated. In its name military budgets swell and potential dissenters are intimidated. There were 498 terrorist incidents in Europe in 2006, only one of which was attributed to Muslims, yet half of terrorism-related arrests were of Muslim suspects...
With the election of Obama, the most extreme rhetoric of GWOT seems to have had its day. (It may be to Israel’s long term cost that it used GWOT rhetoric to package the recent massacre in Gaza, just at the moment when GWOT had been discredited in the West.) But if fundamental pro-Zionist and imperialist policies did not in fact change during the Bush years, not much will change, practically, in the post-Bush years. The passing of the War on Terror is as illusory as its sudden birth after September 11th."
Oh, nearly forgot. My presentation was about Anglo-American hostilities with Iran in the context (primarily) of increasingly scarce hydrocarbon energy resources (i.e. peak oil), and the worrying prospects over the next 10 years. And you can get a more in-depth (pre-Obama) reading of this here.
I've just been told by the man who runs this website that I've been mentioned very favourably in today's edition of The Independent in an oped piece by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
"In his disturbing and clearly evidenced book, The War on Truth, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed traces the unholy games played with Islamicist terrorists by the US, and through acquiescence by the UK, flirting with them when it suited and then turning against them. Al-Qa'ida has been used as an instrument of western statecraft and for now is the enemy. Well, not quite. Pakistan's ISI is quite chummy with the Bin Laden groupies and, well, we have to keep Pakistan on side as they know so many of our secrets. So it goes on."
I also discovered in Oslo that The War on Truth has been reviewed in the Journal of Peace Research published by SAGE on behalf of the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO). I met with Dr Ola Tunander, who is a Research Professor at PRIO, and who wrote the review for the journal last year. It's a short, but very supportive review - here's the gist:
"In this volume, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed has collected a large amount of material about the US grand design for a new American world order, and particularly about the role of Osama bin Laden, 11 September 2001, and the intelligence networks of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the West. This volume tries to understand 21st-century terrorism, not primarily as a replacement for the Cold War Soviet Union, but as a Western disinformation campaign to control raw materials and populations on a global scale. Ahmed documents the close ties between Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and a number of intelligence services. He also documents policies for provoking terrorists into action to justify military responses. The frequent use of terrorism to alter the political agenda and to manipulate public opinion has seemingly created a ‘hyperreality’ that covers the true actors behind the scene. The ‘Global War on Terror’ is, to Ahmed, as much a‘war on truth’ as it is a war against any terrorists... his contribution is necessary for anyone who wants to write about the Global War on Terror and US preoccupation with terrorism in the 21st century. Thebook is also important for the understanding of the present war in Afghanistan."
The only caveat is that Professor Tunander describes me as "Director of Policy Research & Development at the University of Sussex" - a post which doesn't exist, and which is obviously a confusion of my affiliation to Sussex as a tutor and doctoral candidate, and my work with the IPRD.
Anyway, Tunander is a strong emerging voice in the emerging critical academic literature on terrorism. He has most recently contributed to the seminal academic anthology on 'deep politics', Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty by Dr Eric Wilson, Monash University and Dr Tim Lindsey, University of Melbourne.
On the subject of the conference, all the presentations were excellent, and really eye-opening. The opening speech was by Dr Erik Fosse, a senior medical doctor and Research Professor, and head of the Oslo-based medical aid agency, the Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC). Dr. Fosse's presentation was truly shocking. He was one of the handful of Western experts and eyewitnesses who was still in Gaza during Israel's latest bombardment, and was a firsthand witness to Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. He described how Israeli forces were literally bombing and specifically targeting civilian structures and installations, and recounted harrowing personal stories of the manner in which he and the Palestinian doctors at the Al-Shifa hospital were overwhelmed by incoming civilian casualties and lacking in sufficient medical supplies to treat them effectively due to the Israeli blockade. He also went into eyewitness evidence of new types of weapons being used by Israel. A gist of his talk can be gleaned from his interview on Al-Jazeerah.
Arzu Merali, Director of Research at the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) in London, described the role of the media in the 'War on Terror' and its tendencies to de-humanize ethnic minority communities, in particular Muslims. She described the increasing prevalence of cartoons depicting Muslims as fanatics with long beards, using language such as "parasites" and similar rhetoric; and most disturbingly, compared them to cartoons that were used in Germany in the early 1930s to depict Jews, before the Holocaust. The similarities were actually very striking, and extremely disturbing. She notes that the problem is that the majority community largely has very little contact with minorities, and so their perceptions of minorities are actually informed almost wholly by these sorts of de-humanizing and over-simplifying media stereotypes. There is a need to acknowledge that minorities by way of being minorities, de facto don't have the kind of media access that the majority community takes for granted.
Massoud Shadjareh, Chairman of the IHRC, focused on statistical evidence of the futility of anti-terror operations, procedures and legislation, and showed how not only does the current anti-terror strategy effectively target overwhelmingly innocent people, it in particular targets members of black and ethnic minority groups, once again Muslims in particular. One example was really telling. Out of the over hundred thousand or so people stopped and searched, moreover, there has been not a single conviction for terrorist offences. The financial costs of stop and search, even having cut out some of the red tape permitting police to continue the practive with even more impunity than ever before, are in the millions of pounds - money down the drain, much like the bulk of the Government's Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) strategy which, it now seems, is hell-bent on criminalizing most of the 1.2 million British Muslim population. As Andrew Gilligan has pointed out, we need to address the structural and social causes underlying the vulnerability of our youth, Muslim and non-Muslim, to all kinds of criminal activity.
Finally, Robin Yassin-Kassab, author of the novel The Road from Damascus, and a journalist who has travelled widely in the Middle East and Central Asia, spoke in detail about the rationale behind, and devastating impact of, the war on Pakistan and Afghanistan. Robin discussed the role of the Trans-Afghan pipeline in motivating US hostilities toward Taliban, which despite being invited to Nebraska for talks with UNOCAL and American diplomats in the run-up to 9/11, basically told the US and Britain to shove their plans for Afghanistan up their behinds, following which US representatives promised them bombs. He also delves into detail about the war in Pakistan, and is at pains to emphasise that the fracturing of that country into de facto civil war is a direct consequence of the US trying to compel the ISI to ditch its unruly spawn, the Taliban. Robin blogs here, where you can also find the gist of this presentation in Oslo. Here's a sample from the blog:
"The terror threat to the West is real, but vastly exaggerated. In its name military budgets swell and potential dissenters are intimidated. There were 498 terrorist incidents in Europe in 2006, only one of which was attributed to Muslims, yet half of terrorism-related arrests were of Muslim suspects...
With the election of Obama, the most extreme rhetoric of GWOT seems to have had its day. (It may be to Israel’s long term cost that it used GWOT rhetoric to package the recent massacre in Gaza, just at the moment when GWOT had been discredited in the West.) But if fundamental pro-Zionist and imperialist policies did not in fact change during the Bush years, not much will change, practically, in the post-Bush years. The passing of the War on Terror is as illusory as its sudden birth after September 11th."
Oh, nearly forgot. My presentation was about Anglo-American hostilities with Iran in the context (primarily) of increasingly scarce hydrocarbon energy resources (i.e. peak oil), and the worrying prospects over the next 10 years. And you can get a more in-depth (pre-Obama) reading of this here.
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