Two good pieces on Al Qaeda landed in my Newsreader this week and they both point in the same direction, albeit in different terms. The first one is from Tony Karon who questions the current relevance of Al Qaeda as the big post-9/11 bogeyman. For Karon, Al Qaeda is irrelevant and always was. In this respect, Al Qaeda is comparable to Trotsky… Huh? How does the comparison apply?
"Al-Qaeda is irrelevant, and yet U.S. hegemony in the Middle East is facing an unprecedented challenge from Islamist-nationalist groups. To understand the link between al-Qaeda’s weakness and the greatly expanded strength of groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, Iran, over the past seven years, it’s worth turning to the 20th century precedent: Leon Trotsky and his followers vs. the larger, nationally-focused parties of the left in the mid 20th century.
Trotsky rejected pragmatism and compromise by nationally-based leftist movements and insisted, instead, that they subordinate their specific national interests and objectives to the fantasy of “world revolution.” And as a result, long before his murder by Stalin, he found himself holed up in Mexico City, manically firing off communiques denouncing all compromise, and being largely ignored by the more substantial parties of the left world-wide. He had become an irrelevant chatterbox, caught up in a frenzy of his own rhetoric while world events simply passed him by. The same can be said of Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri — it is not al-Qaeda, but the likes of Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood that represent the future of the nationalist-Islamist challenge to Western power in the Middle East."
What makes Al Qaeda seemingly powerful are two factors: the one mentioned by Karon, that is, the fact that the United States treats Al Qaeda as this omnipresent threat of global proportion and reacts to every action as if it were the beginnings of a terrorist apocalypse. The second one, which I think is relevant here and contributes to the first, is that fact that Al Qaeda, being a non-state group, articulates itself opportunistically to nation-based movements (Algeria, Philippines, Indonesia, or Iraq). Read more
Via Context Crawler, sociologist Diego Gambetta gives an interview to the Independent as to why engineers are overrepresented in terrorist Islamist groups (in addition to being all men between 18-40). There are possible explanations but they are not entirely satisfactory: Read more
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran’s parliament voted Saturday to designate the CIA and the U.S. Army as “terrorist organizations,” a largely symbolic response to a U.S. Senate resolution seeking a similar designation for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
It would be funny if it were not so scary. Read more
Sarah and I have been trying to work something out. I think part of the question that many people have or soon will have is Why are “you people” so angry? Read more
The Post, (I know, I know), via Talk Left, I’m having a sort of WTF moment:
“It’s a horrible prospect to ask yourself, ’What if? What if?’ But if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world,” Clinton told supporters in Concord.
“So I think I’m the best of the Democrats to deal with that,” she added.
Dammit, I have enough problems with foil, woman. Stop sounding like you’re the “liberal” member of the Dark Cabal. Read more
I hereby propose a rule to be known as Bush’s First Law: there is no geopolitical situation, no matter how bad already, that this nitwit and his fluffers cannot make indescribably worse. From Juan Cole today:
Before W. got into the White House and ruined the world, 56% of Turks had a favorable view of the United States and the country was a firm NATO ally. Last I knew, the favorability rating had fallen to 12%, largely because Turks are afraid Bush’s misadventure in Iraq will blow back on them. Now they think the US is a greater threat to them than the major terrorist organization that has menaced them for the past 30 years! It would be like the English public saying the US is a greater threat than the Irish Republican Army, or the French public saying the US is a greater threat than the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armé).
This was Dr. Cole’s comment on the news story he had just cited, from a report by that radical IslamoCommie media outlet…um, Voice of America (oops.) Read more
Prosecutors said [the terrorist] left five bombs outside homes in the Colorado city of Grand Junction in March 2006, including one where a Federal Aviation Administration official lived.
This is a huge story, right? Multiple bombs, one aimed directly at an official of the agency overseeing the nation’s air transportation system? As in, helllllooo, 9/11? Read more
Thai Billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra denies that he and the billionaire elite are staging terrorist attacks against Thai citizens. The alliance between telecom, finance and terrorism is one of the intersections of modern global domination that goes unnoticed. Read more
(Reuters) - Criminal gangs in Iraq and the Middle East are selling forged art works on auction Web site eBay and in antique markets in Britain to help fund terrorism, British police said on Wednesday.
The extent of the scam was not clear but the items, purportedly Iraqi or heirlooms from the region, could each sell for up to a couple of thousand pounds (dollars), according to London police’s Arts and Antiques Unit.
“Archaeological stuff is being exported by the ton-load from Middle Eastern countries and (the money) is going back into the Middle East area and some will inevitably end up in the hands of terrorists,” Detective Constable Ian Lawson told reporters.
“We know for a fact there is a terrorism link.” Read more
n October, police raided a trailer home which doubled as a meth factory - and they stumbled across a treasure trove of nuclear secrets that had somehow escaped from Los Alamos. As CBS reported:
The RIAA is at it once again. What can I say without sounding, well … paranoid. I’ll just say it this way – if we say nothing, do nothing, we deserve the country we inherit. Fair use. Fair use. Fair use. The internet is a public resource and monopoly through criminalization in the name of privatization for domination is an abomination (I AM Somebody). Read more
I put this one under “race matters” because our fine, fine SCLM treats anything that happens in Africa as too boring for notice. You know, they’re a darker shade of brown, and thus beneath the attention of your average Amurkin news consumer. Still, Africa is just chock full of “Islamicists,” and not all of them are very happy with Bush’s war on their coreligionists.
Color me shocked, shocked to discover that we weren’t really told the facts at the outset of this case. Five years, and this is the best they can do? My regard for the FBI is just shaken, I tell you:
WaPo - Five years after the anthrax attacks that killed five people, the FBI is now convinced that the lethal powder sent to the Senate was far less sophisticated than originally believed, widening the pool of possible suspects in a frustratingly slow investigation. Read more
What I learned this Sunday: The Middle East is experiencing a new, if painful, birth of freedom; Bush & Co, and all supporters, were wrong in none of what they thought, said, and most of all did; Israel’s attack on Lebanon is yet another step in the plan, and, goodie, goodie, another opportunity to show Americans and the world that they were right on Iraq, the War on Terror, and all that both of those neo-con policy icons entail.
Chris Wallace was absent, so Brit Hume filled in as host/questioner. John Bolton was his first guest.
Immediate first impression: Ambassador Bolton is temperamentally unsuited to his position at the UN, and is the perfect voice for the Bush foreign policy.
Well, to be fair, they are all the perfect voices, all the “yes” persons - Condi survives because she is on the team; diplomacy in her hands is a terrifying joke. Read more
This Sunday in Tyre Lebanon Image courtesy of Tyler Hicks, NYTimes
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No, not the Bolton with the big, bushy mustache.
Josh Bolton is George Bush’s clean-shaven, intelligent, softly-spoken chief-of-staff, but like all members of this administration, however intelligent, however conversant with facts, he is all talking points, all the time, which makes him boring to listen to, of course, but far worse, dangerously deficient in the area of reality-testing.
Thus, quite a perfect spokesperson for this administration. BTW, this was Bolton’s first network interview since taking over for Andrew Card, an exclusive for Timmeh.
Nothing exclusive about the topics up for discussion, and God knows, nothing exclusive about what the Bush administration has to say on any of them - damn those talking points. Read more
We’re almost relaxed, as a nation, as we’re told that civil liberty after civil liberty is eliminated, made irrelevant, etc. So I wasn’t surprised at the collective shrug that occured as we learned that we’re being surveilled in our financial transactions as well as our emails and phone calls. But here’s an interesting take on that former matter, from some people who have been looking into money matters far longer than I:
Bankers, Blum explained, “have fended off every conceivable rule that would really be effective. Why are we pandering to them if we say we are in such a desperate situation?”
The political influence of bankers tops all other sectors, I learned as a young reporter. Regardless of party or ideology, politicians seek their friendship. So the United States has created a truly bizarre banking code that legalizes—and keeps secret—vast flows of ill-gotten gains. For what purpose? Terrorist financing, yes, but that business is dwarfed by the drug trade profits, insider looting of corporations, offshore tax evasion, securities fraud, plain-vanilla fraud and other uses.
The American dollar is lingua fria for illegal commerce and Congress protects the sanctity of its privacy, even allows it the criminal proceeds to flow freely through government-chartered and regulated financial institutions. This shady business is not an inconsequential profit center for banks (a bit like pornography for Microsoft).
The monitoring system described by the Times seems unexceptional to Blum. Indeed, his complaint is that it’s so narrowly focused that it mostly harvests empty information. “Meanwhile, the biggest purveyor of terrorist money, as everyone knows, are accounts in Saudi Arabia,” Blum observes. “Nobody will deal with it because the Saudis own half of America.” An exaggeration, but you get his point. Read more
“… a medical history revealed that the man suffered from external haemorrhoids. As it was, the ‘piles’ often became inflamed and bled profusely. This information was enough to make the assassins finally arrive at a solution. A roll of toilet paper coated with a special poison that when the target wiped himself after using the loo, could be absorbed into his blood stream.
There were problems; the first of which involved finding out the brand of toilet paper the man’s wife usually bought. “ Read more
Liz has the whole story, but I’ll assume most of you have heard that places like the Museum of Obsolete Computers in OH is getting some of the money that could’ve been used to protect unimportant places like say, Wall Street. There are more reasons than that for a New Yorker to be pissed off, as she details, but to me this sums it all up best:
And all along Hillary said that she would look into why the WH told the EPA to cover up their air quality findings after 9/11 and said she make sure NYC got adequate anti-terror funding. Feh. Useless.
Read more
Go read the whole thing, it’s a chilling testament to our system of “justice:”
Wedick couldn’t look Hamid Hayat in the eye. He had pledged to him months earlier that he was going to do everything he could to see injustice righted, even if it meant turning his back on 35 years in the FBI. “Hamid is a hapless character, but, my God, he isn’t a terrorist. The government counted on hysteria, the 1,000-pound gorilla, to be in the room. And it worked. Damn, it worked.”
He saw one juror holding back tears and made a straight line for her apartment. She wouldn’t let him in at first, talking through a crack. Two hours, four hours, finally she opened the door and told him what he suspected. She didn’t believe Hamid was guilty. So intense was the pressure from fellow jurors to convict him that she had to check into the hospital. Throughout the trial, she said, the foreman kept making the gesture of a noose hanging. “Lynch the Muslim,” Read more
This week, we’re back in The Mighty Corrente Building with FrenchDoc, tomorrow, Thursday, August 8, at 8PM EDT, for another in our continuing series of discussions on PB 2.0. It’s time to talk about principles!
Feed the hamsters…
… that work the wheels that keep the Mighty Corrente servers turning. Help us cover monthly hamster kibble anxiety:
by nationally-based leftist movements and insisted, instead, that they subordinate their specific national interests and objectives to the fantasy of “world revolution.” And as a result, long before his murder by Stalin, he found himself holed up in Mexico City, manically firing off communiques denouncing all compromise, and being largely ignored by the more substantial parties of the left world-wide. He had become an irrelevant chatterbox, caught up in a frenzy of his own rhetoric while world events simply passed him by. The same can be said of Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri — it is not al-Qaeda, but the likes of Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood that represent the future of the nationalist-Islamist challenge to Western power in the Middle East."
