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Masadi:

I really get ticked off by any poster who uses ``elite or elitism`` excessively. With that said, I refuse to read your post. Please make sure that next time you are sensitive to my allergies. It`s disturbing that you had to justify my question. That`s unacceptable. There was nothing gained after killing the diplomat! Killings do not make any point. It is a crime and an inhuman practice. A killer does not make any point by repeatedly conducting a crime. He only proves his mental sickness and the need for hospitalization.

Now I have to take a break from Chowk, I think I have posted enough today.

#35 <<< I do not understand what the Americans, or bush for that matter, do that prevents Muslims the world over from solving their problems >>>>

You have a world economic system dominated by the American elite, that by means of that dominate the political/military institutions of various countries in the region; the way it is designed ensures that there are predictible winners and losers. Why those ``problems`` do not get solved is because they are beyond any one country working in isolation to solve. How can one country go against the institutional mechansims of the WTO that ensures that industy in third world nations will never take root? or go around to getting what it needs when its trade is based on primary products and it is forced to enslave itself to the IMF/WB?

A country tries to get too independant, tries to detach itself from this global system of economic exploitation, and they sanction you, isolate you, ruin you, they have a whole institutional setup for that purpose as well as a United Nations that will legitimize it. Nowhere is anyone justifying suicide bombings, the American elite are the ones who benefit and feed off of those not Muslims. They can use those incidents, hyped by their media to point fingers and justify their actions just like crime in the inner cities justifies the ``racism`` of the suburbs and seperation between white and black. No country operates in isolation especially in our times when the connections and domination has become more intricate and bureaucratized. Keep treating the symptoms (petty terrorism) and ignore the cause and chances are it will never go away because you are not looking at the dyamic that has set it in place.

Masadi,

read your posts and conclusions with interest. The lesson I have learnt is that when I get brunt by fire, I walk away from it, not embrace it. IF muslims do not like the americans, stop doing business with them and not toe their line. If the leaders of the muslim countries continue to do so then it is time to change the leaders of the muslim countries, not kill diplomats. Do you realize how much wealth there is in the Arab (read muslim) world and how do they use it ? They do not need the americans, yet they are after all things american.

My school history teacher once explained the Middle East problem thus - if all the arabs stood on the border of Israel and pissed, Israel would be washed in the sea`` And yet it does not happen. Why? Muslims all over the world are upset at what Bush has done to Iraq. Yet, there was not a peep, sucide bombing or anything else when Saddam killed his own people. Is the problem of Shia shrines being blown up in Iraq and yes, Pakistan, okay ? Is it due to the americans?

The inference is that it is okay for Muslims to kill Muslims. I have not read that anywhere in the Koran.

I do not understand what the Americans, or bush for that matter, do that prevents Muslims the world over from solving their problems. If Muslims cannot solve their own problems who will? Do you think Sucide bombing will solve problems for them ?

#32 writes <<< I am not sure what message was delivered by killing the American diplomat. It`s a shame for Pakistan to allow such forces to exist within that can disturb the momentum and peace of the country in no time. >>>

The message that was delievered was the message the American elite always wait to capitalize on. They need justification for what they are doing and the massive amount they are robbing from their own citizen to fund the defense industries and these incidents, hyped by the media, serve as marketing fodder. The forces that exist that lead to such acts are much bigger than Pakistan or the Pakistani government, rather its the global system of tyranny imposed by US hegemony upon that region.




Discretionary spending on the military by the US is greater than its spending on all other programs combined, and add to that the non discretionary part and you easily reach a whopping $800bn a yr. A few bombs blowing up here n there and a few Osama videos are rather cheap marketing for such a big enterprise. Of course the lives lost as a result of this game of deception matter not to the American Elite.

Pardon this extra space I am taking, those not interested can pass over it

The Terrorism Hype
By Michael Parenti


The U.S. national security state and its faithful lackeys in the news media have pretty much the same double standard re-garding the question of ``terrorism.`` They designate as ``terrorist`` those individual acts committed by dissident political or nationalist groups that operate against any of the major industrial powers. But they never use the term to describe the acts of massive repression and destruction perpetrated against whole populations by U.S. forces or by the armies of CIA-supported client states, such as in the aerial assaults on working class neighborhoods in Panama City, or the bombing of civilian populations in Baghdad, or the burning of 660 villages in Guatemala, or the roundup and mass executions of democratic supporters in Chile, Indonesia, Afghanistan, South Yemen, and dozens of other countries.

State-supported, right-wing terrorism, as practiced by U.S. client states, is never defined as terrorism, though it is conducted on a far greater scale than the isolated bombings carried out by any Basque, Arab, or Irish Republican Army group. Also left uncounted is the massive terrorism perpetrated by U.S. supported ``guerrilla`` mercenaries, as in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua (against Sandinista rule) and several other countries, in which the countryside was devastated and massive numbers of people slaughtered by these mercenary forces.


The Larger Terrorism
As critics of U.S. interventionism have pointed out, what is reported as ``terrorism`` in the press is ``retail terrorism.`` What goes unnoted is ``wholesale terrorism,`` the massive U.S.-backed, state-supported kind. By any measure other than the peculiar one used by Washington policymakers and propagandists, the U.S. national security state is the greatest purveyor of terrorism in the world today and has been so for some time.

Estimating only the casualties inflicted by U.S. armed forces or U.S.-backed surrogate forces around the world, the death toll is estimated as follows: 3,000,000 in Vietnam, 1,000,000 in Cambodia, 1,000,000 in Mozambique, 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia, 600,000 in Angola, 300,000 in Laos, 250,000 in East Timor, 200,000 in Iraq, 200,000 in Afghanistan, 150,000 in Guatemala, 100,000 in Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador, and tens of thousands in Chile, Argentina, Zaire, Iran (under the Shah), Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Somalia, South Yemen, Western Sahara, and dozens of other countries.*

Against the blowing up of a building or an airliner, how do we measure this U.S.-sponsored terrorism? To be sure, we must not dismiss or make light of individual acts of terror. Yet we might wonder why they are just about the only ones that receive condemnation from official circles. The wholesale terrorism of aerial massacres, death squads, mass arrests, mass executions, torture and intimidation, is a function of a rational and deliberate counterinsurgency policy orchestrated by the U.S. national security state. But it is not treated as news. Indeed, its very existence goes unrecognized by mainstream policymakers and media.

Even on those rare occasions when atrocities are reported, the corporate-owned media never make the link between such horrific events and the policies of intervention and repression directed from Washington. The question is never asked: ``Why do successive U.S. governments support this kind of terrorism? What interests are bolstered and what interests retarded when a whole village of men, women and children are slaughtered by a military that is supplied and financed by the U.S. government, trained and equipped at U.S. military bases, and directed by U.S. military ``advisors`` in the field?

Such mass atrocities are not even defined as terrorism, the term being reserved for the lone gunman or small circle of conspirators who plant a bomb. Even these latter isolated acts are subjected to a highly slanted mode of reportage. Consider the time the White House charged Libya with orchestrating the destruction of the Pan Am 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Without benefit of supporting evidence, U.S. officials and news organizations treated this accusation as true-thereby demonstrating that they are not unalterably opposed to conspiracy theories about assassinations. They may beat up on Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone for seeing an assassination plot in the killing of President John Kennedy, but they themselves eagerly embrace any conspiracy theory or fantasy that emanates from the White House regarding nation-states and leaders who have been designated persona non grata.

Regarding the Pan Am bombing, there were strong signs pointing to terrorist groups in Syria and Iran. No matter, the country Washington wanted to target was Libya. Two Libyan ``intelligence agents`` were named in the U.S. media as having committed the act of terrorism. In fact, all we really knew about them was that they were Libyan airline employees, yet they were repeatedly identified as ``secret agents.`` The New York Times ran an editorial demanding that they be brought to justice and that the Libyan government, particularly its leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, be held accountable. The Libyans understandably refused to hand over the two men because no evidence was ever presented linking any Libyan to the Pan Am bombing.



Everybody, Here Come the Assassins
Libya has been targeted on other occasions. In 1981, U.S. planes attacked that country and shot down two Libyan training jets. In 1985, U.S. planes bombed two cities, killing a number of people including Qaddafi`s young daughter. (They were aiming for Qaddafi.)

Another incident of terrorism hype directed against Libya and now forgotten by most people-though it had the U.S. press all hot and bothered for the better part of two months-occurred in late 1981 when the U.S. government announced that a Libyan team of assassins, assisted by ``East German terror experts,`` under orders from Colonel Qaddafi, had entered the United States. Supposedly armed with surface-to-air missiles, they were intending to kill President Reagan and ten or so top officials, including the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense.

The media`s response to this wacko story was to treat it as solid fact. On ABC-TV evening news (November 26, 1981) Frank Reynolds stated that it was ``known`` that Libyan agents were ``in this country for the purpose of assassinating the highest officials in the U.S. government.`` CBS anchor Dan Rather announced on December 4, ``A squad of terrorists infiltrated the United States on a mission to kill the President and his top aides. It sounds like the stuff of a suspense novel . . . but American security officials tonight are taking the word of an informant seriously.``

That same evening, NBC began its report by asking, ``Is it true?`` and then promptly treated it as if it were. An NBC correspondent asked President Reagan if he was ``worried about the assassination plot.`` ``Yes, of course,`` said Reagan. The camera cut to Secret Service men leaping out of cars and racing around the president`s limousine-an image which itself suggested that the president was under imminent attack.

ABC`s ``Nightline`` (December 4, 1981) presented a special on the ``Libyan Assassination Plot,`` featuring Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA, who claimed that Libyan terrorist groups were organized ``basically and initially by the Soviet Union,`` and that our ``open society`` made our officials ``sitting ducks`` because ``we have been busy handcuffing the CIA and FBI for a number of years, and only President Reagan is trying to turn them loose a bit to deal with these threats.``

For the sake of balance and diversity of opinion, the right-wing Cline was joined by right-wing journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, introduced as a ``terrorism expert.`` He, too, assured viewers that the Libyans were working for the Soviet Union and that Qaddafi, whom de Borchgrave claimed to have interviewed ``five times in my life,`` was a ``pathological liar.``

For added political diversity, the panel included the right-winger Marvin Zonis, a Likud cheerleader described as a ``Mideast expert,`` who said that ``Colonel Qaddafi had a conversation with another leader of a Middle Eastern country in which he discussed very coolly and in a rational way how he intended to go about assassinating President Reagan.`` No one questioned Zonis about his source nor asked how it was possible that a leader of one nation would openly discuss his plans to assassinate the U.S. president with the leader of another nation who might impart this information to others. No one appeared on the show to inject a cautionary note or question the remarkable statements made by these three cold warriors.

The networks did their share to keep the White House`s conspiracy fantasy alive, running no less than twenty-four evening news reports about the hit teams in one month. Viewers were told there were three, five, ten, twelve, or thirteen hit men, depending on what network and what evening you watched. The assassins had entered the U.S. from Canada (ABC, CBS), from Mexico (CBS), and not from Mexico (ABC). The hit squads-there were now allegedly two of them-were composed of three Libyans (ABC, NBC), three Iranians (CBS, NBC), two Iranians (ABC), and three Syrians (NBC). All three networks agreed that there was one Palestinian, one Lebanese, and one East German. Never before had a team of assassins received such advanced billing. It should have been enough to deter all but the wildest publicity hounds among them.

The national media were filled with accounts of FBI agents fanning out across the country to hunt the assassins and heavily armed security teams roosting on the White House roof. In addition, there was film footage of Libyan soldiers firing ``Soviet missile launchers`` to shoot down helicopters ``such as the one the president used.`` Police composite sketches of six would-be assassins, looking like sinister comic-book Third-World characters, were carried by newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post and the New York Times and flashed repeatedly across the TV screen.

The sketches were allegedly composed from descriptions provided by an unidentified informant, who somehow was privy to the whole plot and endowed with an exceptional memory for facial detail. They were distributed to the media by columnist Jack Anderson, who later regretted doing it and wrote that he had been set up by an unnamed ``intelligence agency.``

Needless to say, the nonexistent hit team never materialized. It remained for TV Guide (June 12, 1986) to admit, in a cover story entitled ``Why American TV is So Vulnerable to Foreign Propaganda,`` that the ``assassination plot`` consisted of nothing but wild conjectures. TV Guide then disinformed its millions of readers by asserting that the whole incident was probably evidence of a KGB campaign to use alarmist rumors ``to destabilize public opinion in the West.`` Or perhaps the story was planted by Qaddafi himself, who ``is no madman`` but ``a shrewd Bedouin`` ``who is sitting back and laughing over this.`` Thus TV Guide accused Qaddafi of deliberately planting stories that implicated him in assassination plots against the president of the United States, presumably so that he might give U.S. leaders an excuse to deliver a murderous military retaliation upon him and his country.

In our ``open society,`` continued TV Guide, where ``anything can get reported,`` the press should be more wary of the false stories floated by ``Soviet intelligence sources.`` This assertion was as outlandish as the original story itself. It ignored the fact that the assassination-team fairy tale emanated from the White House rather than from any foreign source. Indeed the press had been once again easily duped-by Washington, not Moscow.

The White House learned some things after it floated the ``assassination plot`` story of 1981. In regard to the Pan Am bombing, it came up with the names of two specific Libyan ``agents,`` Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, so that no embarrassment need be suffered when imaginary assassins fail to materialize. The White House also learned that it can inflict more durable pain and punishment with economic sanctions than with a few air strikes. So Libya has been repeatedly hit with sanctions.

Qaddafi`s Real Sins
Still we might ask what motivates all this hostility against Libya? Why has a country of three million inhabitants with a ragtag army of 55,000 been singled out by U.S. leaders and media as a major threat to U.S. national security? And why is Libya still targeted today with oil and trade embargoes? Is it because U.S. Policy is just stupid or mean? More likely, the attacks have been motivated by Washington`s concern that Libya is one of those renegade countries that refuses client-state status, not unlike Nicaragua (under the Sandinistas), Islamic Iran, nationalist Iraq, and communist Cuba and North Korea.

There are countries that do not want to be an integrated part of the global free market system. They do not want to open their land, labor, markets, and natural resources to U.S. investors, saying in effect, ``Come on in, it`s all yours. There are no occupational safety laws, no corporate taxes, no environmental standards, no limit to what you can carve out of our land at outrageously low prices, no minimum wage, no real labor unions. And if the workers or peasants get out of line, our police and military, who are trained and equipped by your military, will take care of them, for there are no constitutional protections either. You give us ruling oligarchs a generous cut and the rest is all yours. You make this society safe for the likes of us, and we will open it completely to you.`` The nations that refuse this contract with America run the risk of being targeted as ``terrorist states.``

After Qaddafi took power in the 1969 colonel`s rebellion, he nationalized Libya`s oil industry and set about transforming a country that resembled Saudi Arabia into a more egalitarian society, using a larger portion of its capital and labor for public needs rather than corporate greed, building health clinics, schools, and public housing, and implementing massive reforestation programs.

Independent, reform-minded Third World leaders like Qaddafi have a chancy future in the New World Order. They do not have the right politics. They do not represent the right class interests. For that reason we, the American people, ought to get to know more about what they are doing and find out how we too can produce leaders who do not worship at the altar of global free-market corporate capitalism, ``dangerous`` leaders who put public need before private greed.

Meanwhile we are not likely to see a swift end to the terrorism hype. Indeed, in 1996, President Clinton sponsored the ``Effective Death Penalty and Public Safety Act.`` Among other things, the bill authorized the president to unilaterally designate as ``terrorist`` any group anywhere in the world-without offering a shred of evidence. Any challenge to the president`s declaration will be a criminal offense. Any donation of money or aid or other kind of support to the ``terrorist group`` will be punishable with ten years in prison and a $50,000 fine. The bill would also allow the FBI to infiltrate, wiretap, and investigate groups and individuals with no previous proof of criminal activity.

With the overthrow of most communist states, U.S. leaders face a shortage of adversaries needed to justify U.S. global interventionism. ``Fighting terrorism`` now takes the place of ``fighting communism`` as the rationale for a huge military state and a repressive national security apparatus at home and abroad, the real function of which is to keep the world safe for those who own it. The real danger we face is not from terrorism but from what is being done in the pretense of fighting it.

*For details and documentation on the U.S.-imposed, post-war holocaust in the Third World, see Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar (New York: St. Martin`s Press, 1989); Edward Herman, The Real Terror Network (Boston: South End Press, 1982); William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995).

-This article is excerpted from Michael Parenti`s Dirty Truths, a collection of his writings recently published by City Lights Books.

I have never understood the intent behind such blasts and destruction. Many of us disagree with the policies and procedures of the Jehadis who are involved in creating such mess in the world, but unfortunately we (the Muslims) have not been vocal enough to stand-up against the forces who have been causing this destruction. Somehow or other, by lacking the backbone, we deliver a wrong message to the civilized world. That message is bloody nasty - we do not value life. After all, it`s very easy to recite: Inna` Lillahae` Wa Inna` Ilaehae Rajae`oon (Verily, unto Allah do we belong and verily, unto Him shall we return--Quran 2:156).

It`s extremely embarassing when you see or hear about the daily destructions in the muslim countries on TV-monitors installed in banks, offices and elevators. I am not sure what message was delivered by killing the American diplomat. It`s a shame for Pakistan to allow such forces to exist within that can disturb the momentum and peace of the country in no time. It`s also very sad that text messages have to alert family and friend to be careful. That`s bad.