TonyGosling
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Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
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 Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2015 11:51 pm Post subject: |
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An Open Letter to Britain’s Leading Violent Extremist: David Cameron
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/an-open-letter-to-britain-s-le ading-violent-extremist-david-cameron-abb568861784
By Nafeez Ahmed
This open letter to the Prime Minister is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project.
Dear Prime Minister David Cameron,
It is with deep disappointment that I read excerpts of your speech provided by Downing Street to the press, purporting to set out a five-year strategy to tackle fundamentalist terrorism, which — whatever its intentions — is thoroughly misguided, and destined to plunge this country, as well as the Middle East, into further chaos and misery.
I am writing this open letter to request you, as a matter of urgency, to abide by your obligations as a human being, a British citizen, a Member of Parliament, and as our Prime Minister: to undertake proper due-diligence in the formulation of Britain’s foreign, counter-terrorism and security policies, based on the vast array of evidence from scientific and academic studies of foreign policy, terrorism and radicalisation, rather than the influence of far-right extremist ideology, and of narrow vested interest groups keen to profit from war and fear.
Ideology, innit
In your speech, you say:
“It begins by understanding the threat we face and why we face it. What we are fighting, in Islamist extremism, is an ideology. It is an extreme doctrine. And like any extreme doctrine, it is subversive. At its furthest end it seeks to destroy nation-states to invent its own barbaric realm. And it often backs violence to achieve this aim….
And like so many ideologies that have existed before — whether fascist or communist — many people, especially young people, are being drawn to it.
We need to understand why it is proving so attractive… The root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself.”
But this is already incoherent. You state that the threat is Islamist extremism, an ideology. You then claim that we need to understand why that ideology is so attractive, and you answer the question by claiming that the “root cause” of this threat is the “extremist ideology itself.”
So essentially, the threat is the extremist ideology, and the root cause of the extremist ideology is the extremist ideology.
This is incoherent nonsense.
There are always factors outside ideology that push and pull people to that ideology. No one is suggesting ideology should not be tackled — but a strategy premised primarily on tackling ideology, which is what the government has been doing already for more than a decade, has already failed.
OSCT
Your own government and intelligence counter-terrorism experts have been trying to convince you and your Cabinets of this, for years. Why do you not listen to them?
Charles Farr, Director General of the Home Office’s Office for Security and Counter Terrorism (OSCT), last month repudiated your previous ill-conceived rhetoric implying that extremism is being “quietly condoned” in parts of local British Muslim communities.
He noted that only several hundred Britons have joined the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS), out of 2.7 million Muslims in Britain, and that rather than insinuating that a threat is hiding amorphously amongst British Muslims, we must recognise that in reality Muslim communities on the whole have proven quite resilient to extremism:
“It’s not to say the challenges they pose are not significant, they are. But … the more we overstate them the more, frankly, we risk labelling Muslim communities as somehow intrinsically extremist, which actually despite an unprecedented wealth of social media propaganda, they have proved not to be. So I think we need to be cautious with our metaphors and with our numbers.”
Farr had also repudiated your claim that the “root cause” is “extremist ideology”:
“The background of broken families, lack of integration into what we might call mainstream society, some level of criminality, sometimes family conflict, are all more than normally apparent… People join terrorist organisations in this country and in others because they get something out of them beyond merely satisfaction of an ideological commitment.
Sometimes it’s about resolution of personal problems, sometimes it’s about certainty in an environment which has deprived them of it, sometimes it’s about excitement and esteem, and we should not omit the last two factors.
This is the reality in Syria and Iraq but also many other contexts we’ve worked on over the past five or 10 years.”
In other word’s Theresa May’s top security official in your government is saying that ideology is not the main reason that people join terrorist organisations. While there is no doubt ideology plays a role in defining the nature of the terrorist group, its self-justification and actions, it is not the main driver of radicalisation.
Why do you not heed the words of your government’s own top counter-terrorism official?
Grievances
You go on to say:
“Some argue it’s because of historic injustices and recent wars, because of poverty and hardship. This argument, the grievance justification, must be challenged…
So when people say its because of the involvement in the Iraq War that people are attacking the West… we should remind them: 9/11 — the biggest loss of life of British citizens in a terrorist attack — happened before the Iraq War.”
The thing is, Prime Minister, is that what you call “the grievance justification” was endorsed by the British government and British intelligence services.
Just three weeks before the 7th July 2005 London bombings, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) — which examines intelligence from MI5, MI6, GCHQ, Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorism Branch, the Foreign Office, and so on, warned in no uncertain terms:
“Events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist related activity in the UK.”
In 2006, one year after 7/7, a report prepared for the Ministry of Defence’s internal think-tank, the Defence Academy, concluded — contrary to your dishonest or wilfully ignorant announcements — that the Iraq War had acted as a “recruit sergeant” for al-Qaeda.
The MoD paper, authored by an official linked to MI6, found:
“The war in Iraq… has acted as a recruiting sergeant for extremists across the Muslim world… Iraq has served to radicalise an already disillusioned youth and al-Qaeda has given them the will, intent, purpose and ideology to act.”
Saving Muslims
Nevertheless, you go on:
“When they say that these are wronged Muslims getting revenge on their Western wrongdoers…
…lets remind them: from Kosovo to Somalia, countries like Britain have stepped in to save Muslim people from massacres…”
Ah, Kosovo. It’s convenient that your understanding of the history of British foreign policy is so selective. You omit to mention that the destabilisation of the former Yugoslavia — which set in motion the ethnic conflicts across the Balkans of the 1990s — was planned and fostered by the US, Britain and German governments, setting in motion the events that led to the Srebrenica genocide.
And guess what! We used al-Qaeda fighters to finish the job.
You should really know this, given your job.
No, this is not a conspiracy theory. Although the US originally hoped for some decades to sustain Yugoslavia’s territorial unity and integrity, this changed as it became clear that the impact of escalating economic crises would likely result in the republic’s dismemberment.
As the late Prof. Sean Gervasi, an expert in Yugoslav affairs who was an economic advisor to John F. Kennedy in the White House, explained at a conference in Prague on NATO enlargement, the West:
“… carefully planned, prepared and assisted the secessions which broke Yugoslavia apart… And they did almost everything in their power to expand and prolong the civil wars which began in Croatia and then continued in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They were involved behind the scenes at every stage of the crisis. Foreign intervention was designed to create precisely the conflicts which the Western powers decried. For they also conveniently served as an excuse for overt intervention once civil wars were under way… It is nonetheless true that Germany and the US were the principal agents in dismantling Yugoslavia and sowing chaos there.”
Gervasi quotes the Jane’s Information Group publication, Intelligence Digest, which, citing Western intelligence sources, observed in 1995: “The original US-German design for the former Yugoslavia [included] an independent Muslim-Croat dominated Bosnia-Herzegovina in alliance with an independent Croatia and alongside a greatly weakened Serbia.”
Whether by design or default, German pressure on the EU/EC to recognise Slovenia and Croatia “incontrovertibly hastened the disintegration of Yugoslavia” in a manner with distinctive “economic advantages” for Germany.
US-backed macro-economic restructuring also played a key role in exacerbating inter-ethnic tensions and fuelling nationalist sentiments. Internal economic mismanagement was already deeply problematic, but Yugoslavia’s economic woes were compounded by the US-backed pro-market doctrines.
Through the 1980s, IMF stabilisation programmes and debt restructurings had left Yugoslavia unable to service an expanded external debt exceeding $21 billion. In her seminal study published by Cambridge University Press, Reading Humanitarian Intervention (2003), Prof. Anne Orford of the University Melbourne Law School examines the literature arguing that IMF reforms contributed to the crisis. She concludes:
“The social impact of IMF economic liberalisation and shock therapy stabilisation programmes also had unacknowledged political effects. These programmes arguably fuelled the nationalist dynamic by rapidly restructuring republican and federal levels of government, by implementing policies with divisive social consequences, and by advocating the removal of mechanisms that provided some state support to individuals who would suffer under unrestrained economic liberalism.”
Several scholars have documented this process including historical sociologist Prof. Robin Blackburn of the University of Essex, Catherine Samary of Paris-Dauphine University, and the late Peter Gowan who was professor of international law at London Metropolitan University.
A declassified top secret CIA assessment dated 18th July 1990 noted that Yugoslavia was “making headway” on Western-backed market reforms, but warned that as a consequence:
“Unrest is likely to reach worrisome levels as reforms cause voters to lose their jobs or suffer sharp drops in purchasing power. This will prompt asking the West for more financial support.”
Despite a “bold stabilization campaign” scoring “significant successes,” the CIA report warned:
“These gains came at high cost, including falling industrial output, rising unemployment, and declining real incomes.”
According to a restricted 2010 internal memo from the private intelligence firm, Stratfor, obtained by Wikileaks, senior Eurasian analyst Marko Papic told Stratfor analysts: “Don’t forget, the IMF austerity measures imposed on Yugoslavia was [sic] in part to blame for the start of the war there. We need to be aware of any economically motivated social discontentment.”
As early as October 1990, the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) — circulated to senior White House officials —concluded that:
“Within a year the federal system will no longer exist; within two years Yugoslavia will have dissolved as a state.”
The report also admitted that “economic reform offers little chance of staving off political dissolution” even if successful.
As expected, the NIE offered glowing praise for market reforms, but in an extraordinary analysis acknowledged in detail that the IMF stabilisation programme, combined with local mismanagement, was contributing to dramatic inflation. The report noted that “one third of economic activities would have no justification for existence under market conditions.”
Essentially, the report conceded that the preceding years of IMF reform had created an economic point-of-no-return. Noting that “Monetary authorities can squeeze inflation out through restrictive monetary policies,” the assessment found that Yugoslavia had tried this in 1989, but failed: “The result was deep recession. Infusions of money to ease the recession immediately reignited old inflationary pressures.”
Most importantly, the CIA assessment reveals that by late 1990, before the outbreak of hostilities, US and European officials had firmly adopted a policy of attempting to manage a “dissolution” of Yugoslavia:
“European powers will pay lipservice to the idea of Yugoslav integrity while quietly accepting the dissolution of the federation. West European governments share Washington’s hope that Yugoslavia’s transformation will be peaceable, but they will not provide much financial support. Austrian officials fear possible consequences from a breakup of Yugoslavia but say, nonetheless, that they favor democracy and self-determination above unity. Bonn, with its influence in the region greatly enhanced by unification, will continue to foster individual contacts between German state governments and the emerging Yugoslav successor states.”
Thus, in 1990, years before the outbreak of conflict, the US and Europe were already jockeying to position themselves in preparation for the break-up of Yugoslavia.
The CIA assessment also predicted that the most likely source of violence would come from Serb efforts to “reincorporate disputed territory into greater Serbia.” It assessed that Slovenia and Croatia as “independent democratic market-oriented states” would be most easily integrated into Western Europe, but that Serbia — due to “nationalism and statism” — would be inhibited from such integration due to its “failure to adopt similar political and economic reforms,” to agree to settlements, and its human rights record.
Nevertheless, as Balkans expert Tim Judah documented in his book, Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (2008), the US effectively gave the “green light not only for the conquest of Srebrenica but of Krajina too” with a view to facilitate the carve-up of Bosnia and corresponding “simplified” population exchanges. The Srebrenica massacre in July “could not be ignored,” found Judah, but “it could nonetheless be used…
“Immediately after the massacres took place, the Americans had satellite pictures showing the location of mass graves but these were released in the UN Security Council only on 9 August, at such a time as to distract attention from the exodus of Krajina’s entire population which was then taking place.”
The US was also arming Bosnian Muslims through an alliance with Islamists.
According to British intelligence historian Prof. Richard Aldrich, summarising intelligence files exhibited in the official Dutch government inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre, the Pentagon, with tacit support from MI6, literally flew in al-Qaeda mujahideen into Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, in violation of the UN arms embargo. The so-called ‘black flights’ carrying arms and military trainers were undertaken largely by Turkish and Iranian planes, and later by unidentified black C-130 Hercules aircraft — all facilitated under Pentagon control of Yugoslav airspace.
The Dutch report, by intelligence expert Prof. Cees Wiebes, estimates the mujahideen presence in Bosnia to have been around several thousand, thanks to the Pentagon operation. The intelligence files show that the US and Britain were aware that multiple Muslim regimes were dispatching mujahideen fighters to Bosnia.
According to investigative journalist JM Berger, also a Brookings Institute fellow, “illegal arms ran through the UN embargo like water through a sieve, with the implicit or explicit blessing of the US government, and arms and other supplies frequently ended up in the hands of known al Qaeda members.” Berger added that this “US support for the arms shipments…continued even after a high-profile member of the Bosnian network was convicted of plotting to blow up UN headquarters in New York City.”
A declassified State Department cable obtained by Berger shows that the black flights documented by Wiebes routinely carried Islamist mujahideen fighters into Bosnia. One plane from Iran (out of hundreds) was intercepted by the Croats. Apart from being “fully loaded with arms,” there were also “20 to 40 mujahideen fighters on the plane… these were probably not all (or even mostly) Iranians. Iranian nationals in Bosnia functioned more as trainers and intelligence agents, but Iran helped smuggle in fighters from around the Muslim world.” Berger also reported that: “American military veterans were also flying into Bosnia to serve as trainers to the Bosnian mujahideen during the same period.”
The Croats, according to Berger, contacted US embassy staff — obviously not privy to the top secret Pentagon operation — who, perplexed, told them to send the plane back.
Wiebes’ survey demonstrates that the mujahideen were integrated into the Bosnian Armed Forces, receiving significant arms and logistical support, although they operated with considerable autonomy.
While the culpability of Serb forces in genocidal violence against Bosnian Muslims is well-documented, less known is the role of these foreign Islamist militants in carrying out massacres and atrocities.
A report from the International Centre for Counter Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague notes tensions between local Muslims and the mujahideen entering Bosnia with Pentagon support. Far from ameliorating violence, the mujahideen committed decapitations and mutilations of both soldiers and civilians. Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, in their Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, acknowledge that, emboldened by these forces, Bosnian Muslims had “conquered and ethnically cleansed a vast area” — though they remained severely outmatched by the better armed Serb forces.
After Dayton, the Bosnian government issued thousands of passports, birth certificates and other documents to the mujahideen fighters, some of whom became implicated in terrorist activity.
A classified US State Department report leaked in 2001 showed that officials believed Bosnia had now become “a staging area and safe haven” for terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden.
Even one of your own senior Tory figures — Sir Alfred Sherman, top adviser to Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of the Centre for Policy Studies — noted in 1997 that:
“The US encouraged and facilitated the dispatch of arms to the Moslems via Iran and Eastern Europe — a fact which was denied in Washington at the time in face of overwhelming evidence…
The war in Bosnia was America’s war in every sense of the word. The US administration helped start it, kept it going, and prevented its early end. Indeed all the indications are that it intends to continue the war in the near future, as soon as its Moslem proteges are fully armed and trained.”
The NATO operations in the Balkans were about expanding US hegemony into Eastern Europe and rolling back Russian influence, according to Sir Sherman.
A year later, then US energy secretary Bill Richardson agreed with him in reference to US interests in Caspian oil and gas:
“This is about American’s energy security. It’s also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don’t share our values. We’re trying to move these newly independent countries toward the west. We would like to see them reliant on western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We’ve made a very substantial political investment in the Caspian and it’s very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.”
In 1996, MI6 had according to American intelligence sources begun working with Islamist extremists Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu Hamza and Haroon Rashid Aswat to recruit British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. Among the factions Britain and the US supported as part of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were al-Qaeda units linked to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy at the time.
Ironically, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign which you claim was perpetrated to support Muslims in fact accelerated the violence and precipitated the ethnic cleansing of Kosovan Albanians. The OSCE inquiry noted “the pattern of the expulsions and the vast increase in lootings, killings, rape, kidnappings and pillage once the NATO air war began on March 24… The most visible change in the events was after NATO launched its first airstrikes.”
Then NATO Commander Gen. Wesley Clark admitted at the time that it was “entirely predictable” that Serb atrocities would intensify due to the bombing: “The military authorities fully anticipated the vicious approach that Milosevic would adopt, as well as the terrible efficiency with which he would carry it out.”
So why bomb? Not to save Albanians, according to Gen. Clark, who even pointed out that the NATO operation planned by:
“… the political leadership…was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing. It was not designed as a means of waging war against the Serb and MUP [internal police] forces in Kosovo. Not in any way. There was never any intent to do that. That was not the idea.”
Saving Muslims in Kosovo from ethnic cleansing was “not the idea” according to NATO’s commanding General at the time — but you know better?
Revenge
None of this justifies “wronged Muslims” taking “revenge” against the West.
The terrorists who killed and maimed on 7/7 and 9/11 and so on, are not “wronged Muslims.” They are despicable criminals. But the despicable nature of their savagery does not erase the fact that Western wrongdoing plays a role in fuelling the grievances that permit extremist ideology to fester.
The funny thing is, Prime Minister, that it’s not mad conspiracy theorists that disagree with you on this: it’s British government counter-terrorism experts.
According to a joint Home Office and Foreign Office study based on survey evidence, information from British intelligence services, and academic research, foreign policy grievances are critical.
The report concluded:
“It seems that a particularly strong cause of disillusionment amongst Muslims including young Muslims is a perceived ‘double standard’ in the foreign policy of western governments (and often those of Muslim governments), in particular Britain and the US…
Perceived Western bias in Israel’s favour over the Israel/Palestinian conflict is a key long term grievance of the international Muslim community which probably influences British Muslims.
This perception seems to have become more acute post 9/11. The perception is that passive ‘oppression’, as demonstrated in British foreign policy, eg non-action on Kashmir and Chechnya, has given way to `active oppression’ — the war on terror, and in Iraq and Afghanistan are all seen by a section of British Muslims as having been acts against Islam.
This disillusionment may contribute to a sense of helplessness with regard to the situation of Muslims in the world, with a lack of any tangible ‘pressure valves,’ in order to vent frustrations, anger or dissent.
Hence this may lead to a desire for a simple ‘Islamic’ solution to the perceived oppression/problems faced by the ‘Ummah’ — Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir and Afghanistan.”
So British intelligence, along with senior civil servants and experts in the Home Office and Foreign Office, are all basically deluded?
But you and your Cabinet have somehow developed a special insight missed by counter-terrorism specialists in the Ministry of Defence, MI5 and MI6?
Murder
You say:
“…it’s groups like ISIL, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram that are the ones murdering Muslims.”
While entirely true, it is false to claim that these despicable groups are the only ones “murdering Muslims.”
The scale of death wrought by successive British and American governments in Iraq and Afghanistan alone — both before and after 9/11 — is truly colossal, by any standard.
Even taking on the lowest possible numbers — Prof Stephen Walt of Harvard University calculates very conservatively 288,000 Muslims killed by US forces, compared to 10,000 Americans killed — Western violence in the Muslim world far outweigh deaths of Westerners due to Islamist terrorism.
Prof. Walt, a founder of one of the core theories of International Relations, structural realism, has pointed out that:
“Our real problem isn’t a fictitious Muslim ‘narrative’ about America’s role in the region; it is mostly the actual things we have been doing in recent years.”
Over the last 30 years (thus including decades before 9/11), he wrote, the US and UK have “killed nearly 30 Muslims for every American lost” — a ratio that “is probably much higher” in reality.
How much higher? A number of scientific estimates suggest that the total number of people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by US and British covert and overt interventions, since 1990, approximates 4 million.
Wherever the real figures are between these higher and lower estimates, the upshot is that what you call “the grievance justification” is not, in fact, about “justification” at all.
It is about motivation.
And there can be no doubt that British government and intelligence counter-terrorism experts for the last decade largely agree that Britain’s dismal foreign policy record in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia has stoked resentment and provoked anger, thus fuelling the grievances that terrorist groups use to attract disillusioned recruits.
Why are you ignoring them?
You condemn the narrative of a ‘war on Islam’ while ignoring how our foreign policy has contributed to that narrative.
If you want to change the narrative, Prime Minister, you need to acknowledge the facts of history, and change your policy.
Exclusion
You continue:
“Others might say: its because terrorists are driven to their actions by poverty.
But that ignores the fact that many of these terrorists have had the full advantages of prosperous families and a Western university education.”
The same Home Office and Foreign Office report had also highlighted economic disadvantage as a critical factor in radicalisation.
Not, however, in the simplistic straw-man sense that you knock down, but in the more important sense that the deprivation experienced by the majority of British Muslims contributes to the formation of a general sense of identity associated with social exclusion, even for those who are not themselves excluded:
“Muslims are more likely than other faith groups to have no qualifications (over two fifths have none) and to be unemployed and economically inactive, and are over-represented in deprived areas. However, this is largely associated with the disadvantage of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, whereas the experience of Indian and Arab Muslims is much less disadvantaged…
There is still low Muslim representation in mainstream institutions of influence, especially for women — eg in public appointments, volunteering and mainstream politics (although the Home Office Citizenship Survey 2001 suggests that low Muslim participation rates largely reflect non-faith factors such as education, economic empowerment, age and gender).”
When a wider community experiences deprivation and unemployment — and 70% of British Muslims of South Asian ethnicity are in poverty — all the social science literature confirms that this has a detrimental impact on general identity formation in those communities, and exacerbates a sense of exclusion.
No one is saying that this alone makes a terrorist. The reality, though, is that this sense of exclusion contributes to the grievances that terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS exploit to recruit to their cause.
Integration
You also insinuate that Muslims in particular suffer disproportionately from a lack of integration within Britain, which contributes to their disloyalty to Britain, and even hostility to its citizens.
“For all our successes as multi-racial, multi-faith democracy, we have to confront a tragic truth that there are people born and raised in this country who dont really identify with Britain — and feel little or no attachment to other people here.
Indeed, there is a danger in some of our communities that you can go your whole life and have little to do with people from other faiths and backgrounds.
So when groups like ISIL seek to rally our young people to their poisonous cause, it can offer them a sense of belonging that they can lack here at home leaving them more susceptible to radicalisation and even violence against other British people to whom they feel no real allegiance.”
Your contempt for facts, Prime Minister, is astonishing.
For despite the social exclusion that British Muslims suffer from disproportionately, it is not British Muslims who are failing to integrate with people from other faiths and backgrounds — it’s people like you.
In February, a ComRes poll of British Muslims for the BBC found that 93% believe they should always obey British laws; 95% feel loyalty to the country; 84% would not leave Britain to live in a Muslim state; 85% feel no sympathy towards those fighting against Western interests; 85% did not agree that organisations publishing depictions of the Prophet Muhammed should be attacked.
The poll also revealed that the risk of radicalisation was very much bound up with grievances. It showed that 30% of British Muslims aged 18 to 34 had some sympathy with the motives of the Charlie Hebdo attackers. So despite overwhelming opposition to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, a firm belief in their lack of justification, and unswerving loyalty to Britain, just over a quarter of young British Muslims felt some affinity with what they thought to be the grievances that motivated the attacks.
The latest poll corroborates previous polls. In 2009, Gallup found that 77% of Muslims say they “identified with the UK,” compared with only 50% of the public at large.
That is despite 75% of British Muslims also identifying with their religion. Religious belief, then, is not a barrier for the 82% of Muslims who say they are loyal to the UK.
The barrier is coming from outside Muslim communities. The Gallup poll showed that only 36% of the general public would consider Muslims loyal to the country: in other words, a disturbing majority of the general British public — 67% of Britons — are suspicious of Muslims in general.
Prime Minister, it seems, you are among that majority. Are you not ashamed?
Poll after poll, study after study, consistently prove that British Muslims are more integrated into British society than their compatriots. Many of the latter, beguiled by the constant association of Muslims with terror thanks to poorly researched and ill-informed speeches such as yours, rarely come across people of other faiths, barely know any Muslims (or other members of other minority communities), and therefore find it easy to swallow stereotypical fear-mongering promoted by politicians.
The Gallup poll, also pointed out that another major factor in inhibiting Muslims from reaching their “full potential” in Britain was economic. The poll found found that only 7% of British Muslims were considered “thriving” compared with 56% of the general population, and only 38% said they had a job, compared with 62% of the general public.
It’s worth noting here that the joint Home Office/Foreign Office report cited above, which drew on British intelligence, showed that the perception of anti-Muslim hostility is another major factor in radicalisation:
“Perceived Islamophobia (particularly post-9/11) in society and the media may cause some British Muslims including young Muslims to feel isolated and alienated and in a few cases to reject democratic and multi-cultural values…
Lack of understanding of Islam — insensitive use of language and perceptions of Islam and an ill-informed assumption that Islam’s teachings are inherently extremist. Media coverage of extremist fringe groups increases this…
Muslims’ perception of bias in the way counter-terrorism powers are used to stop, detain and arrest people, both at ports and in-country.”
So, Prime Minister, you have successfully reinforced the overwhelming perception among British Muslims that they are a problem community requiring special measures, thus vindicating the bigotry of far-right neo-Nazi extremists, and feeding the victim mentality that extremists prey on to exploit and recruit.
Sell outs
Why is your government so intent on ignoring the consensus in the academic literature on terrorism and radicalisation, which has proven your ideological presumptions about both to be fanciful theories, promoted by ignorant American neoconservatives?
Indeed, I am appalled but sadly not surprised to hear that instead of listening to experts with years of direct experience in the field, you are still taking advice from the laughably inept group of misfits who operate under the nomenclature of “the Quilliam Foundation.”
On Sunday afternoon, Quilliam’s founding chairman Maajid Nawaz tweeted:
“PM Cameron @Number10gov gives major policy-defining speech on extremism tomorrow. I helped with it. It’s significant.”
He added:
“…. his speech will acknowledge this has something, not everything, but something to do with Islam.”
What advice did you receive from Maajid Nawaz? And why is it that you and your government take the Quilliam Foundation so seriously?
I ask this because of your statements as follows:
“But you dont have to support violence to subscribe to certain intolerant ideas which create a climate in which extremists can flourish.
Ideas which are hostile to basic liberal values such as democracy, freedom and sexual equality.
Ideas which actively promote discrimination, sectarianism and segregation.
Ideas — like those of the despicable far right — which privilege one identity to the detriment of the rights and freedoms of others…
We believe in freedom of speech, freedom of worship, equal rights regardless of race, sex, sexuality or faith. We believe in respecting different faiths but also expecting those faiths to support the British way of life.”
Does your government not vet the people it calls into No. 10 Downing Street?
Are you not aware that Maajid Nawaz and the ‘experts’ employed by his ‘thick-tank’, Quilliam Foundation, completely lack even a shred of meaningful academic expertise (not a single contribution to the peer-reviewed academic literature at all) and are largely devoid of any meaningful, concrete experience of actual counter-radicalisation/counter-terrorism practice?
Are you not aware that Quilliam is merely a tool of far-right violent extremists in the US?
If not, why not? Surely the government vets the people it calls into Whitehall?
You claim that freedom of speech is a British value, but you take advice from a man who appointed to the board of Quilliam an American neoconservative bigot, Chad Sweet, a former US Homeland Security official under the Bush administration who now sits on the board of the FBI’s InfraGard, which facilitates spying on the public for corporate interests. The American Civil Liberties Union has criticised InfraGard for eroding freedom of speech and political dissent—both of which are integral to democracy, no?
During his tenure as an American director of Nawaz’s Quilliam Foundation, Chad Sweet was campaign manager for Senator Ted Cruz — the far-right neocon bigot who is openly homophobic, racist, and misogynist, as well as being a climate denier.
As a Quilliam director, Sweet happily promoted Cruz and his Republican brand of homophobia, racism and misogyny to his heart’s content, without a peep of protest from the ‘liberal’ Nawaz, who is clearly happy to harbour the very same bigotry he publicly opposes, on his very own Board of Directors.
Chad Sweet was and is part of a wider US network of white supremacists who see anti-Muslim hatred as their ticket to political victory.
Also on Quilliam’s US board is Courtney La Bau, who is Vice President of a bank not only linked to the repressive regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, but which also has a joint partnership with Saudi Arabia’s largest private bank, al-Rahji, described by US intelligence as a “conduit for extremist finance” — al-Rahji’s founder is a member of Osama bin Laden’s ‘Golden Chain’ of al-Qaeda financiers.
Over the last few years, Quilliam has received a million dollars in funding from a Republican front charity — Gen Next Inc. — which essentially operates to raise money for Republican political candidates, and for political causes and issues close to the hard-right of the Republic circuit: much of this involves promoting politicians who promote war — war and regime-change in the Muslim world.
The network’s members include senior members of the Bush administration who spearheaded the invasion of Iraq, which alone killed nearly a million people (according to last year’s study by the Nobel Prize-winning doctors group, Physicians for Social Responsibility).
These violent extremists pull the strings of the unqualified morons you are inviting into the heart of government, to advise you on your speeches and policies.
Given your professed concern with tackling “entryist” violent extremism, this is quite alarming.
The Home Office/Foreign Office report mentioned above even referred to how the government’s reliance on such crony organisations, with no grassroots credibility or expertise, is alienating and radicalising people:
“Some young Muslims are disillusioned with mainstream Muslim organisations that are perceived as pedestrian, ineffective and in many cases, as `sell-outs’ to HMG.
The government must make a more concerted effort to persuade the Muslim community that it is trusted and respected. That requires a change of language. Public challenges to Muslims to decide where their loyalties lie are counterproductive.”
It’s been over 10 years since that internal government study, and no lessons have been learned. To the contrary, you are repeating and reinforcing the incompetent, self-serving mistakes of your predecessors.
Your far-right promoters
Worse, Prime Minister, you are associating with people who stand for the very illiberal anti-British values you claim to oppose.
I am thinking, for instance, of one of your closest confidents and ad hoc advisors, Lord Daniel Finkelstein, who sits on the board of the Gatestone Institute, a notorious US think-tank that promotes far-right extremism and racism. This is the same think-tank that hosted Geert Wilders, who your Home Secretary previously banned for his racist incitement. Wilders not only promotes hatred of Muslims, he has openly called for ethnic Moroccans to be depopulated from the Netherlands.
Yet Finkelstein has promoted Wilders’ anti-Muslim bigotry and racist calls to depopulate Europe of its Muslims by, along with his other Gatestone board members, approving the publication of screeds sanitising and defending his far-right extremist ideology.
Finkelstein, in the same capacity at Gatestone, promotes the very same blogger who was cited 111 times by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik in his manifesto, and who has stated:
“Islam and all those who practice it must be total and physically removed from the Western world.”
Lord Finkelstein disavows that he personally advocates or believes such things. But he insists that such ideas deserve to be heard and platformed, and himself actively ensures they are heard and platformed. And he appears to have your ear.
Why?
Why do you cavort with a man who gleefully promotes racism and xenophobia, a man who publishes through the Gatestone Institute absurd narratives of “Muslim no go zones,” which you yourself described as idiocy?
Prime Minister, please disclose in the public interest the nature of your conversations with faux-liberals like Finkelstein and Nawaz, and please explain why your opposition to far-right extremism does not extend to rooting out the promoters and sympathisers of violent far-right extremism whom you are harbouring in your own private advisory sessions.
Conspiracy
You go on to suggest that those who criticise your government’s flawed and misguided counter-terrorism policies are engaged in malevolent conspiracy theories:
“And ideas also based on conspiracy…
..that Jews exercise malevolent power…
…or that Western powers, in concert with Israel, are deliberately humiliating Muslims, because they aim to destroy Islam.
In this warped worldview, such conclusions are reached…
…that 9/11 was actually inspired by Mossad to provoke the invasion of Afghanistan…
…that British security services knew about 7/7, but didnt do anything about it because they wanted to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash.”
Why is it that in 2007, when Tony Blair dismissed the need for an independent public inquiry into 7/7 as it would “undermine support” for the security services, you condemned his stance and demanded a full inquiry as only that would “get to the truth.”?
Let’s cut to the chase, Prime Minister — this not about “conspiracy theories.” It’s about your utter contempt for the 7/7 families and survivors, who after having suffered the worst terrorist attack in Britain since WW2, had to endure your government’s backtracking of your promise to hold an independent public inquiry.
It was the 7/7 families and survivors who were asking the hard questions that, before your rise to government, you disingenously supported to win votes.
Urgent questions like — why did MI5 lie by claiming it had not identified any of the 7/7 bombers prior to the attacks?
Why did the government lie by pretending that no warnings whatsoever of the attacks had been received by the intelligence services, when in fact, as we now know from leaks published in the press, dozens of warnings were received?
Why, despite urging an inquiry into the “preventability” of the attacks while hoping for votes, do you now effectively mock the 7/7 families and survivors, and the lawyers and experts who supported their call for an inquiry, as conspiracy theorists, complicit in extremism?
Prime Minister, this is disgusting behaviour, and it does not represent British values.
Scum
You say:
“The world is not conspiring against Islam; the security services arent behind terrorist attacks; our new Prevent duty for schools is not about criminalising or spying on Muslim children.”
As usual, your straw-men are irrelevant.
Your government played a key role in creating the murdering, rapist, tyrannical scum rampaging across Iraq-Syria under the banner of the ‘Islamic State.’
In your self-serving drive to destabilise the regime of Bashir al-Assad in Syria, and to rollback Iranian influence in the region on behalf of your allies in the Gulf, you and the US supported those despicable Gulf regimes in supplying arms and aid to al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Salafi-jihadist groups: groups that you now conveniently claim to oppose.
In 2012, the intelligence community was fully aware that the core of the rebel insurgency being supported by the West, the Gulf states and Turkey was overrun by al-Qaeda. We were warned that continuing this strategy would spawn a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, which would in turn trigger the eruption of an “Islamic State” entity across Iraq and Syria.
Yet you, in alliance with the Obama administration, accelerated the strategy. You accelerated it knowing full well that British and Western Muslims were being recruited by extremists to fight in Syria, knowing full well that many of them would return to the West and pose a threat to our national security — yet in your noble pursuit to topple Assad the dictator, you helped other dictators support the extremists that would become ISIS, and you turned a blind eye to the radicalisation of a minority of our young people here as a result.
Even now, while you pontificate obscenely from your pulpit about “extremism,” British military intelligence officials are on the ground in Turkey and Jordan, working with the Gulf states and Turkey to supply arms and aid, and to coordinate operations, for al-Qaeda forces in Syria — purportedly to counter ISIS.
But you’d rather we don’t ask questions about that, right Prime Minister?
You’d rather we scrutinise the views of Muslim children — even when your own Parliament’s inquiry into the ‘Trojan Horse’ school allegations concluded that your Education Minister, Michael Gove, had severely overreached:
“One incident apart, no evidence of extremism or radicalisation was found by any of the inquiries in any of the schools involved. Neither was there any evidence of a sustained plot, nor of significant problems in other parts of the country.”
You have claimed on NBC news to be committed to working with the US “to destroy the caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, but you are working with some of the most extremist, corrupt and violent regimes in the region — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, Israel — supposedly to promote democracy and human rights.
These are the very same regimes which, by the admission of your American colleague, Vice President Joe Biden, funded al-Qaeda in Iraq (which became ISIS) and its rival al-Qaeda in Syria (many of whose members went on to join ISIS).
Now you are working with them to “destroy the caliphate,” despite failing to investigate and shut-down the same funding networks to these violent extremists that your government helped establish.
Your war, Prime Minister, is a farce.
You, more than any other British citizen, are complicit in the rise of ISIS, and the radicalisation of a minority of Britons. You have helped create the militant groups which, you rightly acknowledge, are murdering not just Westerners, but Muslims in Iraq, Syria and beyond.
The only people that will benefit from all this are giant defence contractors, many of which are closely connected to your party, and which hold overbearing counter-democratic influence on your foreign policy.
“Whether you are Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Christian or Sikh, whether you were born here or born abroad, we can all feel part of this country — and we must all now come together and stand up for our values with confidence and pride.”
I don’t need you to tell me stand up for our values, or to feel part of my country, thank you very much.
I’m British-born and bred, and unlike you, I’ve been standing against violent extremists of all stripes, Muslim and Western, for much of my working life.
I’m standing up for British values right now, and taking this opportunity to demand that you stand up for British values by denouncing the violent extremism that you have been perpetrating, harbouring, and allying with through your own government.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye.
He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award, known as the ‘Alternative Pulitzer Prize’, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was selected in the Evening Standard’s ‘Power 1,000’ most globally influential Londoners.
Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University.
Nafeez is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
This article was amended on 23rd July 2015 to ensure a more accurate and detailed reflection of the Balkans conflicts. The previous version had stated that the Dutch inquiry into Srebrenica showed al-Qaeda fighters were flown into Bosnia by the Pentagon. This was amended to show that the evidence of fighters being flown in by various Muslim states with Pentagon approval is supported by a range of sources, including the Dutch inquiry. Other sources are also cited to supplement the wider analysis of the West’s role in aggravating these conflicts and fuelling terrorism.
_________________
www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org
www.rethink911.org
www.patriotsquestion911.com
www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org
www.mediafor911truth.org
www.pilotsfor911truth.org
www.mp911truth.org
www.ae911truth.org
www.rl911truth.org
www.stj911.org
www.v911t.org
www.thisweek.org.uk
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.elementary.org.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/ |
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TonyGosling
Editor
Joined: 25 Jul 2005
Posts: 18335
Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
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| Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2015 12:51 am Post subject: |
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OK - so this is where Dave is coming from
US War Theories Target Dissenters
September 12, 2015
Exclusive: In the Orwellian world of Official Washington, the U.S. government is now wedded to the theory of “information warfare,” meaning that Americans who challenge national security policy may be treated as “unprivileged belligerents” under the new Law of War doctrine, retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce writes.
By Todd E. Pierce
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/12/us-war-theories-target-dissenter s
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
When the U.S. Department of Defense published a new Law of War Manual (LOW) this past summer, editorialists at the New York Times sat up and took notice. Their concern was that the manual stated that journalists could be deemed “unprivileged belligerents.” The editorial explained that as a legal term “that applies to fighters that are afforded fewer protections than the declared combatants in a war.” In fact, it is far more insidious than that innocuous description.
Here is the manual’s definition: “‘Unlawful combatants’ or ‘unprivileged belligerents’ are persons who, by engaging in hostilities, have incurred one or more of the corresponding liabilities of combatant status (e.g., being made the object of attack and subject to detention), but who are not entitled to any of the distinct privileges of combatant status (e.g., combatant immunity and POW status).”
The key phrase here is “being made the object of attack.” For slow-witted New York Times editorialists, that means journalists can be killed as can any enemy soldier in wartime. “Subject to detention” means a journalist deemed an unprivileged belligerent will be put into military detention if captured. As with any enemy belligerent, however, if “capture is not feasible,” they would be killed if possible, by drone perhaps if in a foreign country.
Currently, most U.S. captives deemed “unprivileged belligerents” are imprisoned in Guantanamo although some may be held in Afghanistan. It must be noted that the United States deems as an “unprivileged belligerent” anyone they target for capture or choose to kill.
That the New York Times’ concern only arose with publication of the new LOW manual suggests they may have been in a deep sleep since 9/11 as the Department of Defense (DOD) has openly worked to impose limitations on information sharing and news gathering since that event gave them a pretext. It is now a well-established pattern of the U.S. government to suppress rights guaranteed by the First Amendment whenever they can get by with it, as was seen with the New York Times own James Risen.
But the New York Times colluded with the CIA in censoring Risen’s reporting. Furthermore, they seemed to have ignored the U.S. government’s momentous argument of the unlimited power of the President to target journalists and activists for “expressive activities,” as the Department of Justice stated in the case of Hedges v. Obama, as described below.
It has frequently been noted there’s been an ongoing “war” against journalists since 9/11. The new DOD Law of War manual makes that official and potentially takes it to the highest level of conflict. While expressing concern, the Times’ editorialist does not seem to realize or care how ominous it is that the DOD now openly declares that journalists may be deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” unlawful combatants, as the DOD manual provides, instead of hiding the fact in coded language as done since 2001. Inherent to those classifications is that they represent the “enemy” and can be killed by U.S. officials.
That will come as no surprise to those acquainted with the foreign journalists who have been targeted and killed by drones in places such as Pakistan. Nor will it surprise Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist who was held in Guantanamo for years. But now it is clear that the same fate could be in store for U.S. journalists.
That coded language is embedded in the claim by Military Commissions prosecutors and the Justice Department that there is a “U.S. domestic common law of war.” What they claim is entirely based upon martial law orders of the Civil War and the military’s orders to remove Japanese-Americans from the their homes on the West Coast in World War II. All the cases they rely on for a “domestic law of war” today were judicially condemned during or almost immediately after the wars in which they were a part of.
U.S. Domestic Common Law of War
U.S. Military Commissions Chief Prosecutor Brig. General Mark Martins and his staff invented what they call the “U.S. domestic common law of war” in filings to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. That invention consists only of the martial law precedents of the U.S. Civil War and the removal of the Japanese-Americans from the West Coast at the direction of General DeWitt. Both were later seen as examples of military despotism.
The American people have been inured by a deliberate effort of the U.S. military to accept invocation of the law of war as a talisman to permit any act by officials which would have been known as illegal before 9/11. But as the manual states: “Although the law of war is generally viewed as ‘prohibitive law,’ in some respects, especially in the context of domestic law, the law of war may be viewed as permissive or even as a source of authority. For example, the principle of military necessity in the customary law of war may be viewed as justifying or permitting certain acts.” (Emphasis added.)
“Military necessity” was the law of war basis for removal of the Japanese-Americans. Military necessity though indisputably a part of the law of war is a totalitarian precept when applied to a civilian population.
The LOW manual explains the object of war by quoting George H. Aldrich, Deputy Legal Adviser to the U.S. Department of State during the Vietnam War. He wrote of “a general acceptance of the view that modern war is aimed not merely at the enemy’s military forces but at the enemy’s willingness and ability to pursue its war aims. . . . In Viet-Nam political, rather than military, objectives were even more dominant. Both sides had as their goal not the destruction of the other’s military forces but the destruction of the will to continue the struggle.”
The “destruction of the will” of the adversary is always the object of war, according to Clausewitz and adopted by the U.S. military. But this has a totalitarian element to it; the adversary’s reciprocal object is to destroy our will. Consequently, “our” will must be protected by suppressing any dissent which could harm morale and the population’s willingness to “continue the struggle.”
That was the foundational belief underlying martial law during the Civil War. The Constitution was an obstacle again to suppressing dissent to a degree after the Civil War, but with the invention of a U.S. domestic common law of war and legalistic word play, this obstacle has once again been removed as the Justice Department argued in Hedges v. Obama.
The claim of being at war with internal and external enemies is always made by totalitarian states to justify their suppression of speech and a free press through repression. For a brief period in U.S. history, the Civil War, the U.S. military adopted military repression through martial law to suppress any dissent to its war practices.
Martial law was declared throughout the Union States, the North, on Aug. 8, 1862, by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, at the request of President Abraham Lincoln. Orders were published to “arrest and imprison” any persons “discouraging volunteer enlistments” or “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” or for “any other disloyal practice.” A military commission would try the prisoners, and a second order “suspended” the writ of habeas corpus in their cases.
Martial law was more formally declared on Sept. 24, 1862, by President Lincoln himself in addition to suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Lieber’s Code was then prepared as the order giving effect to martial law. Contrary to how it is presented by the U.S. Army and credulous human rights commentators, Lieber’s Code was primarily a harsh martial law order with Prussian militarist law of war concepts introduced to the U.S. to criminalize any expressions of dissent as “war treason.”
Thus, Col. William Winthrop explained that among the greater number of individuals who were brought to trial before the military commissions during the Civil War, the offenses included “hostile or disloyal acts, or publications or declarations calculated to excite opposition to the federal government or sympathy with the enemy, etc.”
Whiting’s Guidance
Solicitor of the Department of War during the Civil War, William Whiting, gave legal guidance to the Union Commanders for enforcement of martial law. The “guidebook” was his own War Powers of the President. This book could have been used by any militaristic and totalitarian regime, which in fact it was as it was derived from authoritarian principles of martial law from Prussia. Those authoritarian principles remained in force under Prussia’s successor state, Germany, during two world wars, and were the legal basis of the infamous People’s Court which tried “war treason” cases; cases of “disloyal” expressive acts in most cases without more.
The guidance of Whiting was: “No person in loyal States can rightfully be captured or detained unless he has engaged, or there is reasonable cause to believe he intends to engage, in acts of hostility to the United States — that is to say, in acts which may tend to impede or embarrass the United States in such military proceedings as the commander-in-chief may see fit to institute.” This is the same argument that the U.S. government made in Hedges v. Obama.
What constituted an act of hostility? Whiting defines that to include a sentiment of hostility to the government “to undermine confidence in its capacity or its integrity, to diminish, demoralize . . . its armies, to break down confidence in those who are intrusted with its military operations in the field.”
An example of how martial law was to be carried out was in an order to a subordinate commander by the Army Department of the Pacific Commander in response to complaints from the Citizens of Solano County, California, of disloyal “utterances” they were hearing from fellow citizens.
The order read: “The department commander desires you to let the people understand generally that the order of the President suspending the writ of habeas corpus and directing the arrest of all persons guilty of disloyal practices will be rigidly enforced. . . . Practices injurious to the government or offensive to the loyal sentiment of the people will under no circumstances be permitted.”
Immediately after the Civil War, when it was freshest in their minds, the Supreme Court had this to say about martial law in Ex Parte Milligan: “What is ordinarily called martial law is no law at all. Wellington, in one of his despatches from Portugal, in 1810, in his speech on the Ceylon affair, so describes it. Let us call the thing by its right name; it is not martial law, but martial rule. And when we speak of it, let us speak of it as abolishing all law, and substituting the will of the military commander, and we shall give a true idea of the thing, and be able to reason about it with a clear sense of what we are doing.”
Martial law is a subpart of the Law of War and since it is for application to a domestic population as with the Northern States during the Civil War by the Union Army, it is “moderated” ordinarily from the even harsher provisions of the Law of War which are now invoked in the Law of War manual. Yet precepts of both are being introduced domestically with Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act and domestically and globally by the “U.S. domestic common law of war” precedents trumpeted by Chief Military Commissions Prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins.
It must be noted that this is not to compare the Union unfavorably with the Confederacy. The Confederacy had the highest form of martial law: slavery. But the Defense Department only uses one legal precedent from the Confederacy today, which is “outlawry.”
Lieber’s Code addressed “outlawry” in Art. 148, which provided, in pertinent part: “The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, . . . on the contrary, it abhors such outrage.”
This was adopted in the Hague Regulations and as interpreted in earlier Army Law of Land Warfare manuals, prohibited assassinations as well as any declarations that an individual or group is outside the protection of the law of war, which is what designation as an unprivileged belligerent does. The prohibition of assassination has also been put aside with the routine practice of assassination with drones today by the U.S. military.
The Confederacy committed the offense of outlawry when its leaders declared all captured African-Americans fighting for the Union were outside the protection of the law of war (which did preexist Lieber’s Code) and would be placed into the indefinite detention of slavery. After 9/11, the U.S. government did the same with the invention of the unlawful combatant/unprivileged belligerent category and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay and any other location U.S. officials chose to place “unprivileged belligerents.”
Treason of the Professors and the Media
Ironically, shortly after the New York Times expressed its concern for journalists in early August, the Guardian reported in an article written by William C. Bradford, a recently hired assistant professor in the law department at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The article, entitled “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column,” was published in the National Security Law Journal of George Mason University Law School.
Bradford argued that the U.S. should be more aggressive in attacking Muslims to include attacks which are war crimes under the law of war. But it was his advocacy that the U.S. military attack other “lawful targets” in its war on terrorism, which include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” that caught the most attention. These civilian areas were all places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist, according to Bradford.
Furthermore, Bradford wrote, “Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting] scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are – at least in theory – targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism.” In other words, dissenting scholars are unprivileged belligerents and subject to attack, just as journalists are according to the Law of War manual.
Not to defend him but Bradford was articulating the underlying logic of the new Law of War manual’s position that dissenting journalists can be targeted as unprivileged belligerents. This, as stated above, is consistent with oppressive extra-constitutional martial law practices which Chief Prosecutor Mark Martins boasts of as “U.S. domestic common law of war.”
One has to ask: where are the supposed watchdogs of the press when military officers can so easily slide historical falsehoods past them in destroying freedom of the press? Further, Bradford argued that law professors who criticized the failure of the U.S. to abide by the Geneva Conventions and the Law of War represented a “treasonous” fifth column that could be attacked as enemy combatants.
If there is treason being committed in the United States, it must be seen in the acts of those reconstituting the extra-constitutional martial law cases of the Civil War period. That is, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins and associated government attorneys who, in effect, are engaged in an indirect coup d’etat of the U.S. Constitutional order. In fact, Bradford was alleged to have written in favor of a direct military coup d’etat as well.
As it turned out, Bradford had other ethical issues than just his incitement to commit war crimes and target law professors. A combination of factors led to his resigning his position at the Military Academy and this individual crisis would seem to have passed.
The home page of the National Security Law Journal in which his essay had been published carried a repudiation of it by the incoming editorial board. They summarized his article as follows: “Mr. Bradford’s contention that some scholars in legal academia could be considered as constituting a fifth column in the war against terror; his interpretation is that those scholars could be targeted as unlawful combatants.”
But substitute “journalists” for “scholars” and you have the position on journalists of the DOD’s new Law of War manual.
An insightful article in The Atlantic asks “how a scholar pushing these ideas seems not to have raised red flags any earlier.” That’s an excellent question. The article was entitled “The Unusual Opinions of William C. Bradford.” But here’s the point; these opinions are not unusual among some members of the military and right-wing law professors such as Adrian Vermeule of Harvard and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago.
Posner and Vermeule have carved out a niche in American legal discourse in advocating that the U.S. needs to turn to the legal “wisdom” of the German Nazi lawyer, Carl Schmitt. In Terror in the Balance, they suggest that the U.S. may need to adopt censorship for, among other reasons, “antigovernment speech may demoralize soldiers and civilians.” For precedent, they point out that “Martial law during the Civil War permitted the military to try and punish people who criticized the Lincoln administration’s conduct of the war.”
The Attack on ‘Lawfare’
Other prominent advocates of authoritarian legal practices present themselves as protecting against disloyal attorney who practice “lawfare,” which is defined as a form of “asymmetric warfare” that misuses domestic or international law to damage an opponent through legal actions in a courtroom. For instance, Ben Wittes of lawfareblog.com would seem to espouse this type of animosity toward public-interest lawyers who use the courts to defend First Amendment liberties.
A fallacious argument, made by Wittes in a paper which calls for “balancing” liberty and security, is his idiosyncratic belief that “in American constitutional law, for example, free speech does not exist as a general right of the public to communicate as much or as widely as it desires but as an individual right not to have government restrict one’s speech.”
This is contrary to the understanding of the Supreme Court which held in First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, that: “[T]he First Amendment goes beyond protection of the press and the self-expression of individuals to prohibit government from limiting the stock of information from which members of the public may draw.” In other words, the First Amendment guarantees the public’s “right to know.”
Why does this matter? The Constitution’s Framers understood that an informed population was crucial for a Republic. As James Madison put it: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
This understanding of the criticality of the free flow of information for wise democratic decision-making is particularly important for national security where ignorance comes with the highest cost. This understanding formed Clausewitz’s belief in a broad-based civilian decision-making process in matters of national security strategic policy, and not one driven by military leaders with their one-dimensional thinking process.
The Vietnam War is Exhibit A as proof of this. If it had been left to the Generals to decide, the war would have continued “perpetually” even though wiser heads realized from the beginning that it was unwinnable by U.S. terms of maintaining an unpopular government in South Vietnam. The antiwar movement, whatever the motives of some, proved to be more strategically astute than General William Westmoreland who would have continued the war until the U.S. bankrupted itself in the manner that the Soviet Union would years later in Afghanistan. It was the American antiwar movement which gave effect to Clausewitz’s strategy that when a war’s costs exceed its “benefits,” a way must be found to end it.
Curiously, Wittes accurately notes in Law and the Long War that to claim “the President has all the powers of a normal war yet few of its restraints, that the whole world is his battlefield, and that this state of affairs goes on in perpetuity is really akin to claiming a kind of worldwide martial law.” In fact, that’s exactly what the Justice Department argued in Hedges v. Obama without the admission as to martial law.
Dissent as Treason
Since the Vietnam War, the belief that the media and other critics of government policies act as fifth columnists has become commonplace in military-oriented journals and with the American authoritarian-oriented political class, expressed in articles such as William Bradford’s attack on “treasonous professors.”
To the question “how a scholar pushing these ideas” did not raise a red flag, that might best be asked of the National Security Law Journal’s previous editorial board. It is worth noting however that the editors who chose to publish Bradford’s article are not neophytes in national security issues or strangers to the military or government.
As described on the NSLJ website, the Editor-in-Chief from 2014-2015 has broad experience in homeland and national security programs from work at both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and currently serves (at the time of publication of Bradford’s article) as the Deputy Director for the Office of Preparedness Integration and Coordination at FEMA. A U.S. government official in other words.
The “Articles Selection Editor” is described as “a family physician with thirty years of experience in the foreign affairs and intelligence communities.” Websites online suggest his experience may have been acquired as a CIA employee. The executive editor appears to be a serving Marine Corps officer who attended law school as a military-funded student.
Significantly; Bradford was articulating precepts of the “U.S. common law of war” promoted by Chief Prosecutor Mark Martins because nothing Bradford advocated was inconsistent with William Whiting’s guidance to Union Generals. Except Whiting went even further and advised that judges in the Union states who “impeded” the military in any way by challenging their detentions were even greater “public enemies” than Confederate soldiers were.
This “U.S. common law of war” is a prosecution fabrication created by legal expediency in the absence of legitimate legal precedent for what the United States was doing with prisoners captured globally after 9/11. This legal invention came about when military commission prosecutors failed to prove that the offense of Material Support for Terrorism was an international law of war crime. So prosecutors dreamed up a “domestic common law of war.” This in fact is simply following the pattern of totalitarian states of the Twentieth Century.
Government-Media-Academic-Complex
The logic of Bradford’s argument is the same as that of the Defense Department in declaring that journalists may be deemed “unprivileged belligerents.” As quoted above, George H. Aldrich had observed that in Vietnam, both sides had as their goal “the destruction of the will to continue the struggle.”
Bradford argued that Islamists must overcome Americans’ support for the current war to prevail, and “it is the ‘informational dimension’ which is their main combat effort because it is U.S. political will which must be destroyed for them to win.” But he says Islamists lack skill “to navigate the information battlespace, employ PSYOPs, and beguile Americans into hostile judgments regarding the legitimacy of their cause.”
Therefore, according to Bradford, Islamists have identified “force multipliers with cultural knowledge of, social proximity to, and institutional capacity to attrit American political will. These critical nodes form an interconnected ‘government-media-academic complex’ (‘GMAC’) of public officials, media, and academics who mould mass opinion on legal and security issues . . . .”
Consequently, Bradford argues, within this triumvirate, “it is the wielders of combat power within these nodes — journalists, officials, and law professors — who possess the ideological power to defend or destroy American political will.”
While Bradford reserves special vituperation for his one-time fellow law professors, he states the “most transparent example of this power to shape popular opinion as to the legitimacy of U.S. participation in wars is the media.”
As proof, Bradford explained how this “disloyalty” of the media worked during the Vietnam War. He wrote: “During the Vietnam War, despite an unbroken series of U.S. battlefield victories, the media first surrendered itself over to a foreign enemy for use as a psychological weapon against Americans, not only expressing criticism of U.S. purpose and conduct but adopting an ‘antagonistic attitude toward everything America was and represented’ and ‘spinning’ U.S. military success to convince Americans that they were losing, and should quit, the war. Journalistic alchemists converted victory into defeat simply by pronouncing it.”
Space does not permit showing in how many ways this “stab in the back” myth is false. But this belief in the disloyalty of the media in Bradford’s view remains today. He wrote: “Defeatism, instinctive antipathy to war, and empathy for American adversaries persist within media.”
Targeting Journalists
The right-wing militarist Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), with mostly retired U.S. military officers serving as advisers, has advocated targeting journalists with military attacks. Writing in The Journal of International Security Affairs in 2009, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters wrote:
“Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media . . . . Future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.” (Emphasis in original.)
The rationale for that deranged thinking was first propounded by Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp and other authoritarian-minded officers after the Vietnam War. Sharp explained, our “will” was eroded because “we were subjected to a skillfully waged subversive propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by the media’s bombardment of sensationalism, rumors and half-truths about the Vietnam affair — a campaign that destroyed our national unity.” William C. Bradford apparently adopted and internalized this belief, as have many other military officers.
That “stab in the back” myth was propagated by a number of U.S. military officers as well as President Richard Nixon (as explained here). It was more comfortable to believe that than that the military architects of the war did not understand what they were doing. So they shifted blame onto members of the media who were astute enough to recognize and report on the military’s failure and war crimes, such as My Lai.
But those “critical” journalists, along with critics at home, were only recognizing what smarter Generals such as General Frederick Weyand recognized from the beginning. That is, the war was unwinnable by the U.S. because it was maintaining in power its despotic corrupt ally, the South Vietnamese government, against its own people. Whether or not what came later was worse for the Vietnamese people was unforeseeable by the majority of the people. What was in front of their eyes was the military oppression of American and South Vietnamese forces and secret police.
Information Warfare Today
In 1999, the Rand Corporation published a collection of articles in Strategic Appraisal: The Changing Role of Information in Warfare. The volume was edited by Zalmay Khalilzad, the alleged author of the Defense Department’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, which was drafted when Dick Cheney was Defense Secretary and Paul Wolfowitz was Under Secretary of Defense – and promulgated a theory of permanent U.S. global dominance.
One chapter of Rand’s Strategic Appraisal was written by Jeremy Shapiro, now a special adviser at the U.S. State Department, according to Wikipedia. Shapiro wrote that the inability to control information flows was widely cited as playing an essential role in the downfall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
He stated that perception management was “the vogue term for psychological operations or propaganda directed at the public.” As he expressed it, many observers worried that potential foes could use techniques of perception management with asymmetric strategies with their effect on public opinion to “destroy the will of the United States to wage war.”
Consequently, “Warfare in this new political environment consists largely of the battle to shape the political context of the war and the meaning of victory.”
Another chapter on Ethics and Information Warfare by John Arquilla makes clear that information warfare must be understood as “a true form of war.” The range of information warfare operations, according to Arquilla, extends “from the battlefield to the enemy home front.” Information warfare is designed “to strike directly at the will and logistical support of an opponent.”
This notion of information warfare, that it can be pursued without a need to defeat an adversary’s armed forces, is an area of particular interest, according to Arquilla. What he means is that it necessitates counter measures when it is seen as directed at the U.S. as now provided for in the new LOW Manual.
Important to note, according to Arquilla, is that there is an inherent blurriness with defining “combatants” and “acts of war.” Equating information warfare to guerrilla warfare in which civilians often engage in the fighting, Arquilla states “in information warfare, almost anyone can engage in the fighting.”
Consequently, the ability to engage in this form of conflict is now in the hands of small groups and individuals, offering up “the prospect of potentially quite large numbers of information warfare-capable combatants emerging, often pursuing their own, as opposed to some state’s policies,” Arquilla wrote.
Therefore, a “concern” for information warfare at the time of the Rand study in 1999 was the problem of maintaining “noncombatant immunity.” That’s because the “civilian-oriented target set is huge and likely to be more vulnerable than the related set of military infrastructures . . . . Since a significant aspect of information warfare is aimed at civilian and civilian-oriented targets, despite its negligible lethality, it nonetheless violates the principle of noncombatant immunity, given that civilian economic or other assets are deliberately targeted.”
What Arquillo is saying is that civilians who are alleged to engage in information warfare, such as professors and journalists, lose their “noncombatant immunity” and can be attacked. The “blurriness” of defining “combatants” and “acts of war” was removed after 9/11 with the invention of the “unlawful combatant” designation, later renamed “unprivileged belligerent” to mimic language in the Geneva Conventions.
Then it was just a matter of adding the similarly invented “U.S. domestic common law of war” with its martial law precedents and a framework has been built for seeing critical journalists and law professors as “unprivileged belligerents,” as Bradford indiscreetly wrote.
Arquilla claims that information warfare operations extend to the “home front” and are designed “to strike directly at the will and logistical support of an opponent.” That is to equate what is deemed information warfare to sabotage of the population’s psychological will to fight a war, and dissidents to saboteurs.
Perpetual War
But this is a perpetual war driven by U.S. operations, according to a chapter written by Stephen T. Hosmer on psychological effects of information warfare. Here, it is stated that “the expanding options for reaching audiences in countries and groups that could become future U.S. adversaries make it important that the United States begin its psychological conditioning in peacetime.” Thus, it is necessary “to begin to soften the fighting will of the potential adversary’s armed forces in the event conflict does occur.”
As information warfare is held to be “true war,” this means that the U.S. is perpetually committing acts of war against those deemed “potential” adversaries. Little wonder that Vladimir Putin sees Russia as under assault by the United States and attempts to counter U.S. information warfare.
This same logic is applied to counter-insurgency. The 2014 COIN Manual, FM 3-24, defines “Information Operations” as information-related capabilities “to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decisionmaking of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.”
Those we “protect ourselves from” can logically be seen as the internal enemy, as William Bradford saw it, such as critical law professors and journalists, just as Augusto Pinochet did in Chile with dissidents.
With the totalitarian logic of information-warfare theorists, internalized now throughout much of the U.S. government counter-terrorism community, it should be apparent to all but the most obtuse why the DOD deems a journalist who writes critically of U.S. government war policy an “unprivileged belligerent,” an enemy, as in the Law of War manual. William C. Bradford obviously absorbed this doctrine but was indiscreet enough to articulate it fully.
It Has Happened Here!
That’s the only conclusion one can draw from reading the transcript of the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit. In that lawsuit, plaintiffs, including journalists and political activists, challenged the authority provided under Sec. 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization for removal out from under the protection of the Constitution of those deemed unprivileged belligerents. That is, civilians suspected of lending any “support” to anyone whom the U.S. government might deem as having something to do with terrorism.
“Support” can be as William Whiting described it in 1862 and as what is seen as “information warfare” by the U.S. military today: a sentiment of hostility to the government “to undermine confidence in its capacity or its integrity, to diminish, demoralize . . . its armies, to break down confidence in those who are intrusted with its military operations in the field.”
Reminiscent of the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here where those accused of crimes against the government are tried by military judges as in the U.S. Military Commissions, a Justice Department attorney arguing on behalf of the United States epitomized the legal reasoning that one would see in a totalitarian state in arguing why the draconian “Law of War” is a substitute for the Constitution.
The Court asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Torrance if he would agree, “as a principled matter, that the President can’t, in the name of the national security of the United States, just decide to detain whomever he believes it is important to detain or necessary to detain to prevent a terrorist act within the United States?”
Rather than giving a straight affirmative answer to a fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution, Torrance dissembled, only agreeing that that description would seem “quite broad,” especially if citizens. But he added disingenuously that it was the practice of the government “not to keep people apprehended in the U.S.”
Which is true, it is known that people detained by the U.S. military and CIA have been placed everywhere but in the U.S. so that Constitutional rights could not attach. Under Section 1021, that “inconvenience” to the government would not be necessary.
When asked by the Court if he, the Justice Department attorney, would agree that a different administration could change its mind with respect to whether or not Sec. 1021 would be applied in any way to American citizens, he dissembled again, answering: “Is that possible? Yes, but it is speculative and conjecture and that cannot be the basis for an injury in fact.”
So U.S. citizens or anyone else are left to understand that they have no rights remaining under the Constitution. If a supposed “right” is contingent upon who is President, it is not a right and the U.S. is no longer under the rule of law.
In discussing whether activist and journalist Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a citizen of Iceland, could be subject to U.S. military detention or trial by military commission, Assistant U.S. Attorney Torrance would only disingenuously answer that “her activities as she alleges them, do not implicate this.” Disingenuous because he knew based upon the answer he previously gave that the law of war is arbitrary and its interpretation contingent upon a military commander, whoever that may be, at present or in the future.
What could happen to Ms. Jónsdóttir would be completely out of her control should the U.S. government decide to deem her an “unprivileged belligerent,” regardless of whether her expressive activities changed positively or negatively, or remained the same. Her risk of detention per the Justice Department is entirely at the sufferance of whatever administration may be in place at any given moment.
Any doubt that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, along with Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, is believed by the U.S. Executive Branch to give it the untrammeled power that Article 48 of the Weimar Germany constitution gave to the German President in 1933 was settled by the arguments made by the Justice Department attorney in Hedges v. Obama.
Setting First Amendment Aside
One does not need to speculate that the U.S. government no longer sees First Amendment activities as protected. Government arguments, which were made in the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit, revealed that the Justice Department, speaking for the Executive Branch, considers protection of the Bill of Rights subordinate to the claim of “war powers” by the Executive. One can only be willfully blind to fail to see this.
By the Justice Department’s court arguments and filings, the protections afforded by the U.S. Bill of Rights are no more secure today than they were to Japanese-Americans when Western District military commander General DeWitt decided to remove them from their homes on the West Coast and intern them in what were initially called, “concentration camps.”
The American Bar Association Journal reported in 2014 that Justice Antonin Scalia told students in Hawaii that “the Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision upholding the internment of Japanese Americans was wrong, but it could happen again in war time.” But contrary to Scalia stating that Korematsu had been repudiated, Korematsu has never been overruled.
The court could get a chance to do so, the ABA article stated, in the Hedges v. Obama case “involving the military detention without trial of people accused of aiding terrorism.” But that opportunity has passed.
A U.S. District Court issued a permanent injunction blocking the law’s indefinite detention powers but that ruling was overturned by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. A petition to the U.S. Supreme Court asked the justices to overturn Sec. 1021, the federal law authorizing such detentions and stated the justices should consider overruling Korematsu. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2014, leaving the Appeals Court’s ruling intact.
The Supreme Court’s decision to not overturn Korematsu allows General DeWitt’s World War II decision to intern Japanese-Americans in concentration camps to stand as a shining example of what Brig. General Marks Martins proudly holds up to the world as the “U.S. domestic common law of war.”
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
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www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org
www.rethink911.org
www.patriotsquestion911.com
www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org
www.mediafor911truth.org
www.pilotsfor911truth.org
www.mp911truth.org
www.ae911truth.org
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www.stj911.org
www.v911t.org
www.thisweek.org.uk
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.elementary.org.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
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