[Peace-discuss] Fw: The Terror-Industrial Complex

[unionyes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG>
To: <PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG>
Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 9:20 PM
Subject: The Terror-Industrial Complex


> The Terror-Industrial Complex
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_terror-industrial_complex_20100208/
>
> Truthdig Posted on Feb 8, 2010
>
> By Chris Hedges
>
> The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia
> Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill
> American military officers and FBI agents illustrates
> that the greatest danger to our security comes not from
> al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries,
> kidnappers, killers and torturers our government
> employs around the globe.
>
> The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who
> received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a
> doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University,
> often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50 years
> in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced in
> May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from her
> hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three
> children--two of whom remain missing--and spirited to a
> secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured and
> mistreated for five years. The American government has
> no comment, either about the alleged clandestine
> detention or the missing children.
>
> Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and
> apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni,
> Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was
> carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York
> landmarks and notes referring to "mass-casualty
> attacks." But despite these claims the government
> prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or
> links to al-Qaida--the reason for her original
> appearance on the FBI's most-wanted list six years ago.
> Her supporters suggest that the papers she allegedly
> had in her possession when she was found in
> Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for
> terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental
> deterioration, perhaps the result of years of
> imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by
> some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to the
> court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was
> described as a "match gun" that operates by lighting a
> match.
>
> "Justice was not served," Tina Foster, executive
> director of the International Justice Network and the
> spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui's family, told me. "The
> U.S. government made a decision to label this woman a
> terrorist, but instead of putting her on trial for the
> alleged terrorist activity she was put on trial for
> something else. They tried to convict her of that
> something else, not with evidence, but because she was
> a terrorist. She was selectively prosecuted for
> something that would allow them to only tell their side
> of the story."
>
> The government built its entire case instead around
> disputed events in the 300-square-foot room of the
> Ghazni police station. It insisted that on July 18,
> 2008, the diminutive Siddiqui, who had been arrested by
> local Afghan police the day before, seized an M4
> assault rifle that was left unattended and fired at
> American military and FBI agents. None of the Americans
> were injured. Siddiqui, however, was gravely wounded,
> shot twice in the stomach.
>
> No one, other than Siddiqui, has attempted to explain
> where she was for five years after she vanished in
> 2003. No one seems to be able to explain why a
> disoriented Pakistani woman and her son, an American
> citizen, neither of whom spoke Dari, were discovered by
> local residents wandering in a public square in Ghazni,
> where an eyewitness told Harpers Magazine the
> distraught Siddiqui "was attacking everyone who got
> close to her." Had Siddiqui, after years of
> imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S.
> detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of
> her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other
> two children, one of whom also is an American citizen?
>
> Her arrest in Ghazi saw, according to the official
> complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer,
> two FBI agents and two military interpreters arrive to
> question Siddiqui at the police headquarters. The
> Americans and their interpreters were shown to a
> meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain.
> "None of the United States personnel were aware," the
> complaint states, "that Siddiqui was being held,
> unsecured, behind the curtain." The group sat down to
> talk and "the Warrant Officer placed his United States
> Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the
> curtain, near his right foot." Siddiqui allegedly
> reached from behind the curtain and pulled the
> three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety.
> She pulled the curtain "slightly back" and pointed the
> gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the
> interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui
> shouted, "Get the fuck out of here!" and fired twice.
> She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the
> ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired
> "approximately two rounds" into Siddiqui's abdomen. She
> collapsed, still struggling, and then fell unconscious.
>
> But in an article written by Petra Bartosiewicz in the
> November 2009 Harper's Magazine, authorities in
> Afghanistan described a series of events at odds with
> the official version. The governor of Ghazni province,
> Usman Usmani, told a local reporter who was hired by
> Bartosiewicz that the U.S. team had "demanded to take
> over custody" of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He
> could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until
> officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul
> arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: The
> U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would
> remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however,
> a "senior Ghazni police officer" suggested that the
> compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the
> police station, he said, and demanded custody of
> Siddiqui. The Afghan officers refused, and the U.S.
> team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons
> unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the
> scene. The U.S. team, "thinking that she had explosives
> and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and
> took her."
>
> Siddiqui told a delegation of Pakistani senators who
> went to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after
> her arrest that she never touched anyone's gun, nor did
> she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply
> stood up to see who was on the other side of the
> curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted,
> "She is loose," and then someone shot her. When she
> regained consciousness she heard someone else say, "We
> could lose our jobs."
>
> Siddiqui's defense team pointed out that there was an
> absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4, all
> of which suggested it had not been fired. They played a
> video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly
> caused by the M4 had been there before July 18. They
> also highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony from
> the nine government witnesses, who at times gave
> conflicting accounts of how many people were in the
> room, where they were sitting or standing and how many
> shots were fired.
>
> Siddiqui, who took the stand during the trial against
> the advice of her defense team, called the report that
> she had fired the unattended M4 assault rifle at the
> Americans "the biggest lie." She said she had been
> trying to flee the police station because she feared
> being tortured. Siddiqui, whose mental stability often
> appeared to be in question during the trial, was
> ejected several times from the Manhattan courtroom for
> erratic behavior and outbursts.
>
> "It is difficult to get a fair trial in this country if
> the government wants to accuse you of terrorism," said
> Foster. "It is difficult to get a fair trial on any
> types of charges. The government is allowed to tell the
> jury you are a terrorist before you have to put on any
> evidence. The fear factor that has emerged since 9/11
> has permeated into the U.S. court system in a
> profoundly disturbing way. It embraces the idea that we
> can compromise core principles, for example the
> presumption of innocence, based on perceived threats
> that may or may not come to light. We, as a society,
> have chosen to cave on fear."
>
> I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New
> York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat
> posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly
> overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and
> political passivity, as well as pump billions of
> dollars into the hands of the military, private
> contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive
> client governments including that of Pakistan. The
> leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New
> York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads
> its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years,
> just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an
> actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as
> emblematic of the entire war on terror.
>
> Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number
> of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist
> attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments
> and legions of ambitious intelligence and military
> officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow
> against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their
> careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a
> flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us
> safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes.
> The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the
> Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists
> we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The
> same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I
> lived in Buenos Aires, "disappear" 30,000 of the
> nation's citizens, the vast majority of whom were
> innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out
> terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in
> 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and
> 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret
> archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of
> money and invest your political capital in a ruthless
> war against subversion, once you empower a network of
> clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel
> the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain.
>
> I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty.
> But I do know that permitting jailers, spies,
> kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule
> of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is
> one victim. There are thousands more we do not see.
> These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have
> created a system of internal and external state
> terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security
> and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic
> radicals.
>
> AP / Fareed Khan
>
> Mohammad Ahmed, son of Aafia Siddiqui, takes part in a
> demonstration arranged by Human Rights Network. A
> Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert
> Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright (c) 2010
> Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved. Web site
> development by Hop Studios | Hosted by NEXCESS.NET
>
> _____________________________________________
>
> Portside aims to provide material of interest
> to people on the left that will help them to
> interpret the world and to change it.
>
> Submit via email: moderator at portside.org
> Submit via the Web: portside.org/submit
> Frequently asked questions: portside.org/faq
> Subscribe: portside.org/subscribe
> Unsubscribe: portside.org/unsubscribe
> Account assistance: portside.org/contact
> Search the archives: portside.org/archive 


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.