- With increasing evidence that normal
terrorism isn't happening in the US despite wide-open borders on the North
and South, US and Canadian anti-terrorism forces have increasingly engaged
in acts of outright provocation to lure young Muslims into planning amateur
acts of terror and then arresting them for falling for those provocations.
Civil libertarians are rightly outraged. Let's take on two recent cases
in point:
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- Canada: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police
(RCMP) held a big press conference showcasing the breaking of a Muslim
"al Qaeda connected" cell in Toronto that was supposedly constructing
a Timothy McVeigh-type fertilizer bomb. Just as Tim McVeigh had help from
government agent provocateurs in planning his attack on the OKC Murrah
Building, these young Muslims (most only teenagers) were led down this
path by agents of the RCMP - an important piece of information notably
absent from the "show and tell" news conference.
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- As Kurt Nimmo reported, "Not only
did the 'terrorists' in Canada not have a target for their so-called fertilizer
bomb, the fertilizer was delivered by the RCMP as part of a sting operation
(i.e., the suspects were framed) ... [According to the Toronto Star:]'Once
the deal was done, the RCMP-led anti-terrorism task force moved in for
the arrests ... At a news conference yesterday morning, the RCMP displayed
a sample of ammonium nitrate and a crude cell phone detonator they say
was seized in the massive police sweep when the 17 were taken into custody.
However, they made no mention of the police force's involvement in the
sale.'
-
- "Naturally, the corporate media
and experts on such matters are clueless. 'A Canadian terrorism expert
said the type of fertilizer ordered by the group - 34-0-0 - is the highest
grade and the best for making explosives,' reports the neocon National
Post, not bothering to mention the fact Canadian police arranged the delivery
of the fertilizer. 'This would indicate that they had done their homework,'
Tom Quiggin, a senior fellow at the Centre of Excellence for National Security
in Singapore, told the discredited newspaper, basically a neocon propaganda
tool. In fact, it appears the RCMP 'had done their homework,' not the patsies.
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- "In order to demonize the suspects,
or rather patsies, the National Post and other newspapers in Canada have
gone out of their way to establish, at best tenuously, an 'al-Qaeda' connection.
'Fahim Ahmad, 21, and Zakaria Amara, 20, are being described as the key
figures among the 12 adults and five juveniles charged over the weekend
with terrorism-related offences ... Both had been followers of Qayyum Abdul
Jamal, 43, a senior member of the Al-Rahman Islamic Centre in Mississauga
and the oldest of the 17 accused.' Jamal, according to the National Post,
quoting Aly Hindy, imam at the Salaheddin Islamic Centre in Scarborough,
'was upset at the way some in Toronto's Muslim community have distanced
themselves from the Khadrs, the Toronto family that once lived in Osama
bin Laden's compound in Afghanistan.'"
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- Often the so-called "connection"
to al Qaeda turns out to be people working undercover for anti-terrorist
task forces - this is the kind of circular reasoning that leads to evidence
of "controlled terrorism" rather than real terrorism. McVeigh
certainly had numerous connections with FBI paid provocateurs. We'll wait
and see what emerges later in this case.
-
- Nimmo's report continues: "Meanwhile,
so-called 'counter-terrorism officials' have admitted 'that lethal chemical
devices they feared had been stored at an east London house raided on Friday
may never have existed,' the Guardian reports. 'Confidence among officials
appeared to be waning as searches at the address continued to yield no
evidence of a plot for an attack with cyanide or other chemicals. A man
was shot during the raid, adding to pressure on the authorities for answers
about the accuracy of the intelligence that led them to send 250 officers
to storm the man's family home at dawn.'"
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- I tend to agree with Nimmo that "it
does not matter a chemical attack never occurred, or the police are unable
to find chemicals or deadly substances, because simply mentioning 'cyanide
or other chemicals' in the same sentence with 'terrorists' is enough to
provoke" both a public reaction in support of this shoddy prosecution,
and further support of the phony war on terror. What is telling here is
how easy it is for government agents, posing as Muslim radicals in internet
chat rooms to lure in young Muslims who, granted, are frustrated and dislike
America, and who can be goaded into acts of bravado. These things probably
never would have happened on their own. These are not professional terrorists
- just angry young wannabees who get lured into a sting operation. Police
agencies have no business going on fishing expeditions, deliberately trying
to radicalize young Muslims.
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- USA: The high profile prosecution of
a supposed "terrorist cell" in Lodi, California turned out to
be a manipulation of simple people who hardly spoke English. If we are
to believe the FBI, a simple cherry picking Pakistani immigrant and his
father, who drove an ice cream truck, formed an al Qaeda terrorist cell
intent on "wreaking havoc" in California. In this case, there
was absolutely no evidence of terrorist activities or planning, only a
concocted confession by the younger man who, at the suggestion of the interrogator,
admitted that he had attended a camp in Pakistan.
-
- As veteran journalist Alexander Cockburn
put it, "Their ordeal began last summer, when Hamid Hayat, fresh back
from a two-year trip to Pakistan where he has spent half his life, was
called in by the FBI and interrogated three times. The California-born
Hamid is evidently a simple fellow. At his first interview in the FBI he
betrayed no alarm at the prospect of interrogation by men who believed
they were on the verge of breaking a major terror ring in Lodi. He complimented
one of the agents on the style of his shoes and in general made every effort
to be helpful. So did his father, Umer, whose job is driving an ice-cream
truck. The FBI also grilled him intensively last June.
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- "What actually emerged in the trial,
where both men were fortunate to have good lawyers, was the usual saga
of FBI chicanery. It became very clear from videotapes of the FBI's questioning
that the men have very poor English. Their native tongue is Pashto. They
understood little of what they were being asked and were mostly concerned
with pleasing their interrogators. In the words of one courtroom reporter
from the San Francisco Chronicle, 'they gave many answers that had been
previously suggested by the agents - who did most of the talking.'"
-
- According to the boy's confusing confession,
the terrorist camp was in Pakistan, then Afghanistan or (he's not sure)
maybe Kashmir. In one version, it was run by Pakistanis, then by his uncle,
or perhaps his grandfather. Then at the FBI's suggestion it was al-Qaeda.
His father made even more bizarre admissions claiming he saw a "camp
with 1,000 Muslim fighters wearing ninja masks, shooting automatic weapons,
practicing swordplay and pole vaulting over obstacles - and the camp was
underground." Pole vaulting? Sure. In any case, there was no evidence
other than these confessions - and a written prayer found in the boy's
wallet: "Lord let us be at their throats, and we ask you to give us
refuge from their evil." Hardly a definitive terror threat given the
typical language of Muslim hyperbole.
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- As in the examples cited above, this
situation also involves agent provocateurs taking advantage of the young
and impressionable. Naseem Khan, 32, a former Bend, Ore., 7-Eleven clerk
and highschool dropout was recruited by the FBI in 2001 to infiltrate the
large Muslim community in Lodi - and paid a whopping $230,000 over three
years to do so. He joined their group and talked terrorism to as many as
he thought were willing. Apparently, one of those listening turned out
to be the young Hamid. Someone within the Lodi group suggested to Hamid
and his father that they go back to Pakistan and attend a camp. Who knows
if the camp is not another one of the creations of the ISI (Pakistan's
version of the CIA), which has been as deeply involved as the CIA in controlling
al Qaeda operatives - like so called 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Muhammed,
who after three years in supposed CIA/ISI captivity has never been shown
in public or prosecuted. Why? Either way, federal agents manipulated Khan
with outrageous amounts of money, who in turn, it seems, influenced young
Hamid.
-
- Moreover, Khan's credibility has been
questioned after he made the rather fantastic claim that "he saw Al
Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri, worshiping in a Lodi mosque
in 1998-99." If true, the FBI needs to explain how Zawahiri got inside
the US. Was it like so many other dangerous terrorists already on the FBI's
"watch lists" that get issued visas "by mistake"? Excuse
me for being skeptical of this much incompetence. In comparison, federal
agents never seem to be that incompetent when hunting down tax protestors
and other "really dangerous" Americans.
-
- William M. Arkin, the Washington Post's
resident shill for the official "war on terror," commented on
the Toronto case saying [my comments in brackets], "The apprehension
of the Toronto gang, and the use of Internet monitoring by Canadian law
enforcement authorities to track and understand them points not only to
the evolved nature of worldwide terrorism since 9/11, but also the possibility
of a workable deterrence strategy to stem the tide of new recruits."
[Not at all. When engaging government agents acting as sting operators,
new recruits are actually incited - not deterred.]
-
- "The Toronto suspects, Canadian
officials say, met and communicated over the Internet, using Email and
chat rooms and visiting Jihadist websites for inspiration as well as information
on weapons and tactics. [Real terrorists aren't that stupid. They all know
the internet is monitored. Only naive dupes like these young Muslims would
be entrapped so easily.] A group of men, many of whom barely knew each
other, banded together to plot a grand terrorist strike against Canada
over the web. [On the contrary, this is actually more evidence that this
wasn't a real cell, but something cobbled together with guidance from authorities.]
-
- "Of course we need to better understand
the anti-Canada and anti-Western motivations of these young men, but let's
face it: They fell in love over Email and got caught up in the excitement,
intrigue, and danger associated with their terrorism affair. [Finally,
he gets something right, but omits the provocation origins of the whole
affair.]
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- "Canadian intelligence and law enforcement
(and it is presumed, their NSA and FBI partners) were monitoring many of
these websites, penetrating password protected chat rooms and local encryption,
building dossiers. [They were doing more than that - they were actively
participating.] Over two years, various members of the 'cell' met for training,
made propaganda videos, acquired weapons, picked targets, made detailed
plans. [Arkin fails to mention that among the providers of these weapons
were undercover police, guiding the process.] Two Americans from Atlanta,
according to U.S. court documents, came to Toronto in March 2005 to meet
with their newly found 'like-minded Islamic extremists.' [These recorded
internet conversations will be evidence in court, and we, unfortunately,
will never know which of the conversants were the agent provocateurs because
the government won't reveal that information - nor will the transcripts
be made public so we can tell who is driving the agenda.]
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- Copyright 2006 Joel Skousen
- Partial quotations with attribution permitted.
- Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs
Brief
-
- http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com
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