[Peace-discuss] The real terrorist plot

[C. G. Estabrook]

[ALEXANDER COCKBURN assesses the real source of terrorism. --CGE]

Once again hands are raised in stupefaction. How could they have missed him – 
meaning in this case Umar Abdulmutallab the Nigerian bomber on that flight from 
Amsterdam to Detroit. Why, his own father – one of the most powerful bankers in 
Africa – gave the US embassy in Lagos a warning! He was on the US master 
computer list of potential terrorists but never made it on to the watch list.

The Truthers reject the obvious answers – caution, bureaucratic inertia, 
buck-passing, turf fights – and say it was a plot. Obama joins Bush and Cheney 
in the big conspiracy. It won’t be long before David Griffin rushes out a book 
on the affair.

Personally, I’m not at all dismayed at evidence that intelligence gathering 
networks are flawed, that bureaucrats pass the buck. Hyper-efficiency in these 
matters indicates we have arrived at the perfect police state.

Of course there is room for common sense and elementary vigilance. In the case 
of the Virginia Tech killer there was plenty of evidence that Cho Seung-hui was 
a time bomb waiting to explode. Students talked about him as a possible shooter 
and refused to take classes with him. His essays so disturbed one of his 
teachers with their violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal in case 
she needed security during her tutorials.

And then was there was proof positive that the time bomb had exploded and the 
mass murder session began in the engineering building, the police state proved 
all too human in actual performance. The police cowered behind their cruisers 
until Cho Seung-hui finished off the last batch of his 32 victims, then killed 
himself. Then the police bravely rushed in and started sticking their guns in 
the faces of the traumatised students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot.

Major Hasan offers another bracing illustration of the human capacity to avoid 
unpleasant decisions, like dealing with an Army shrink who had Soldier of Islam 
on his visiting cards, discussed openly the ethics of armed resistance to 
Christian assaults on Islam and so forth.

But without the advantage of hindsight were the signs that obvious? Not really. 
A Serbian woman I met at a New Years Party says that on her way from Abu Dhabi 
to Seattle she passed though Amsterdam airport the same day as Abdulmutallab and 
security was tight and the questioning she got was pretty rigorous. The story – 
now canonized by conspiracists – of the well dressed man trying to finagle a 
passportless Abdulmutallab onto the plane seems to be without foundation.

Now there’s an avalanche of punditry about Britain’s Islamic minority as the 
petrie dish in which toxic cultures of militant Islam flourish and multiply. At 
this rate they’ll soon be deploying the Delta Force in Birmingham and bombing 
mosques across the Midlands with drones.

The real petrie dish is US national policy, abetted by junior partners in the 
UK, France and Germany: widening attacks on Afghanistan, an unfolding record of 
torturing captives to death since 2001, full support for Israel’s onslaughts on 
Palestinians and calculated mass murder. What does a radical imam in the UK or 
Yemen have to offer as incitement to attack America that is as vividly 
persuasive as Obama and Hillary Clinton’s cheerleading for Israel or the posture 
of the US Congress?

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