War on terror – Page 3

The Bush extension

Glenn Greenwald offers a spot-on take on John McCain’s foreign policy thinking — a dangerous extension of the Bush doctrine that supports the cliches used (“a third Bush term,” etc.). A McCain presidency will mean an extension of the imperial project, the notion that the United States has both the right and obligation to run the world’s affairs.

It is, as I’ve been writing, the height of hubris and connected to the argument that Chris Hedges has been making, that the belief that history moves in a progressive direction (by progressive, I don’t mean liberal, but in a single direction) brings with it a rationalization of violence, a sense that the ends (a better world, the eradication of evil, etc.) justify the means.

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Quote of the day: on accountability

Juan Cole offers this (from yesterday’s post on his Informed Comment blog):

And I think there is good reason to ask whether McCain helped create al-Qaeda and the mess in Pakistan to begin with. It is time for someone to start holding the Cold Warriors who deployed a militant Muslim covert army against their leftist enemies accountable for the blow-back they created.

It has not been fashionable in the Post-9/11 era to raise this kind of question — to do so is to court criticism as an America-hater — but shouldn’t the people who created the conditions that led to the spread militant Islam be held to account?

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Sabre-rattlers get you nowhere

Barack Obama did it. The Bush folks did it. Several members of Congress have done it.

They all have essentially threatened to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty to go after al Qaeda — regardless of whether the Pakistani government wants them to.

I know this is what you say during an election year, that you need to look tough — blah, blah, blah.

But if anyone wants to understand the folly of this approach, they only need to read this story from the L.A. Times on what Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has to say about all this sabre-rattling:

The president pointed out that certain recent U.S. statements were counterproductive to the close cooperation and coordination between the two countries in combating the threat of terrorism,” said a statement released by the Foreign Office.

The Pakistani leader, it said, “emphasized that only Pakistan’s security forces, which were fully capable of dealing with any situation, would take counter-terrorism action inside Pakistani territory.”

Musharraf also called new legislation tying U.S. aid to Pakistan to his government’s fight against militants an “irritant” to the two countries’ relations.

I am no fan of the Pakistani president, but it seems pretty arrogant of us to assume we can just waltz into a sovereign nation and take care of our own business without their being repercussions.

Oh, wait. I think I’ve seen that movie before.

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Terror alert, II

This post from the Columbia Journalism Review touches on what I wrote earlier about the Fort Dix terror case:

It’s hard for the press not to run with stories of possible domestic terrorism, and for good reason — it’s serious and scary business. That said, not all plots are created equal, and lumping them all together into one grab bag of thwarted domestic terrorism cases is something reporters should avoid, especially given some of the absurd plots that have been uncovered over the last couple years. This is not to say that all leads shouldn’t be investigated — they should — or that anyone discovered in any stage of planning an attack shouldn’t be scooped up — they should– but we’ve seen a couple of cases in the last few years be blown way out of proportion, and that makes us wonder what the Fort Dix story will become.

Those cases, Paul McLeary writes, should have remained in the front-brain of reporters as they entered the vortex of the story.

The Bush administration’s Justice Department has a vested interest in portraying every “plot” it busts as the next 9/11, regardless of how embryonic or feeble. It serves as a distraction from the administration’s failures in Iraq and elsewhere, it perpetuates the state of fear that has served this White House well in recent years, and it justifies the massive Homeland Security bureaucracy. Journalists, meanwhile, are at a decided disadvantage when trying to determine the seriousness — or lack thereof — of the threat, because the government holds all the cards. That’s why a healthy dose of skepticism — given this administration’s track record with truth — is crucial to the press’s handling of stories like Fort Dix. These would-be terrorists in New Jersey should be taken seriously, at least until we have reason to believe they
shouldn’t. We’re only a couple of days into this story, but it’s never too early to watch for the hype, and watch for how the press either runs with it, or turns a skeptical eye.

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Terror alert

I resisted the urge to comment yesterday on the Fort Dix terror arrests, but having had some time to think about what happened and having heard Keith Olbermann’s comments, I thought I’d weigh in.

First, if the information released by the feds is correct, then the six men arrested should face some jail time — significant time.

Second, and this is where the Olbermann comments come in, there was a breathless quality to the reporting yesterday, taking what were a half dozen somewhat ineffectual terrorist wannabes and elevating them to mastermind status. As I said, these guys deserve jail time, but we shouldn’t turn this into more than it was.

Consider the basic facts as reported:

A suspect brings a videotape of some of the men “shooting assault weapons at a firing range, shouting in Arabic and calling for jihad, or holy war” to a South Jersey video store. The clerk reports the tape’s contents to police and the FBI becomes involved. The group spends time discussing its plot — which at various times included attacks on Fort Dix and the Army-Navy football game — and engages in a second weapons training in the Poconos.

Based on what has been reported, The FBI and police acted appropriately — they cannot afford to take chances — though the announcement was not made without the kind of hyperbole that has come to characterize the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism investigations. Consider this comment from yesterday’s press conference (above photo from New York Times):

“This is a new brand of terrorism where a small cell of people can bring enormous devastation,” Christopher J. Christie, the United States attorney for New Jersey, said at an afternoon news conference at the courthouse here.

And this:

“Today we dodged a bullet,” J. P. Weiss, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Philadelphia office, said at the news conference. “In fact, when you look at the type of weapons that this group was trying to purchase, we may have dodged a lot of bullets.”

Mr. Weiss added: “We had a group that was forming a platoon to take on an army. They identified their target, they did their reconnaissance. They had maps. And they were in the process of buying weapons. Luckily, we were able to stop that.”

Again, I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of a potential attack, but the rhetoric here seems to be way out of proportion with the facts. The New York Times, in its front page story today, offered a glimpse at the kind of self control that the media should have shown:

The arrests came after a 15-month investigation during which the F.B.I. and two informers who had infiltrated the group taped them training with automatic weapons in rural Pennsylvania, conducting surveillance of military bases in the Northeast, watching videos of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers and trying to buy AK-47 assault rifles.

The authorities described the suspects as Islamic extremists and said they represented the newest breed of threat: loosely organized domestic militants unconnected to — but inspired by — Al Qaeda or other international terror groups.

But the criminal complaint that details the plot describes an effort that was alternately ambitious and clumsy, with the men at turns declaring themselves eager to sacrifice their lives in the name of Allah and worrying about getting arrested or deported for buying weapons or possessing a map of a military base.

Simple, to the point, the paper encapsulates the entire affair in a few paragraphs, giving the details of the arrests and plot, without blowing the plot out of proportion.

In the end, however, I think Keith Olbermann’s comments on the media storm are probably on target:

The ultimate premise of the war in Iraq and the ultimate premise, certainly, of the Republican presidential campaign ahead, counterterrorism. The FBI claims it has broken up a plot to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey. The flaw, though, in the breathless reporting of the purported terror cell, the bureau infiltrated the six-person group after its members took video of themselves practicing with assault weapons, brought the tape to a photo store, and had it transferred to a DVD.

The details of the supposed plot don‘t seem to hold together that well either, though that did not stop extensive and entirely credulous coverage on TV, the Internet, in print today. The men supposedly had plans to gain access to the base disguised as pizza delivery guys, then cut the power somehow, they, quote, “hit four, five, or six Humvees and light the whole place, and retreat without any losses.” And take the tape of yourselves practicing and have it copied at PhotoMat. In other words, the FBI has arrested six morons.

Perhaps a bit too strong, but then these were not the 9-11 hijackers and this was not the major coup that it is being painted as. What we have is a solid piece of law enforcement.

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