Craig Murray — Continued American Occupation of the Middle East Does Not Suppress Terrorism, It Causes It

Even the neo-con warmongers’ house journal The Guardian, furious at Trump’s attempts to pull US troops out of Syria, in producing a map to illustrate its point, could only produce one single, uncertain, very short pen stroke to describe the minute strip of territory it claims ISIS still control on the Iraqi border.

Of course, the Guardian produces the argument that continued US military presence is necessary to ensure that ISIS does not spring back to life in Syria. The fallacy of that argument can be easily demonstrated. In Afghanistan, the USA has managed to drag out the long process of humiliating defeat in war even further than it did in Vietnam. It is plain as a pikestaff that the presence of US occupation troops is itself the best recruiting sergeant for resistance. In Sikunder Burnes I trace how the battle lines of tribal alliances there today are precisely the same ones the British faced in 1841. We just attach labels like Taliban to hide the fact that invaders face national resistance.

The secret to ending the strength of ISIS in Syria is not the continued presence of American troops. It is for America’s ever closer allies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to cut off the major artery of money and arms, which we should never forget in origin and for a long time had a strong US component. The US/Saudi/Israeli alliance against Iran is the most important geo-political factor in the region today. It is high time this alliance stopped both funding ISIS and pretending to fight it; schizophrenia is not a foreign policy stance.... 

The chaos of this incoherent and counterproductive strategy is, peculiarly enough, what the neocons actually want. Perpetual war and destabilisation in the Middle East is their goal. One of the findings I had not expected to discover in writing Sikunder Burnes was that the British had been deliberately exploiting and exacerbating the Shia/Sunni divide as early as 1836 to the Imperial purpose. Today, by keeping Arab populations poor and politically divided, the neo-cons believe that they enhance the security of Israel, and they certainly do facilitate the access of western companies to the oil and gas of the region, as we see in destabilised Iraq and Libya.… 

I have written before that Trump may be a rotten President for Americans, but at least he has not initiated a major war; and I am quite sure Hillary would have done by now. For a non-American, the choice between Hillary and Trump ended up in balancing on one side of the scale the evil of millions more killed and maimed in the Middle East and the launching of a full on, unreserved new Cold War, against on the other side of the scale poorer Americans having very bad healthcare and social provision and America adopting racist immigration policies. I do hope that the neo-con barrage today arguing for more American troops in the Middle East, will help people remember just how very unattractive also is the Hillary side of the equation....

Craig Murray Blog
Continued American Occupation of the Middle East Does Not Suppress Terrorism, It Causes It
Craig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee

Eric W. Dolan — Andrew Sullivan: U.S. stopped being a free country under Bush

“Is that really fair to say we stopped being a democracy and a free country?” CNN host Anderson Cooper asked.

“When a citizen is able to be seized by the government with no charges and tortured for months on end, that’s not a free country. He’s a citizen,” Sullivan replied.

The Raw Story
Andrew Sullivan: U.S. stopped being a free country under Bush
Eric W. Dolan

Yves Smith — Banks Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of “Terrorist” Occupy Wall Street

The peculiar part of this overreaction is it says that banks and government officials see peaceful protests as a threat to their hold on power. It’s odd that they see their position as precarious, unless they have convinced themselves of their vulnerability as an excuse for clamping down even harder on the rest of us.

Naked Capitalism
Banks Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of “Terrorist” Occupy Wall Street
Yves Smith

The same can be said of the hugely disproportional reaction of the US Establishment to 9/11, which continues into the present, depriving US citizens of civil liberties and constitutionally guaranteed rights in the name of an amorphous and ill-defined "Global War on Terror."

This also brings up the disproportional reaction to possession and trafficking of illegal drugs under the rubric, "War on Drugs" that has resulted in a disproportional swelling of the US prison population and the expansion of a privately owned and operated prison industry at government expense.

This is exactly what the Founding Fathers drafted the US Constitution and Bill of Rights to prevent being repeated in America.

And no, I don't buy the Rothbardian-Libertarian argument that this is all the predictable result of "Keynesianism" and that all we need to do to fix this morass is privatize the monetary system and get government out of the way.

Meanwhile, the TBTF (to big to fail) bankers are now found to be TBTJ (to big to jail).

This is a constitutional crisis rocking the very foundations of the nation and threatening the Great Experiment with failure. The nation needs the leadership of a constitutional lawyer. Oh, wait!

Dave Lindorff — FBI Ignored Deadly Threat to Occupiers

Commenting on this peculiar lack of action by the FBI and other national anti-terrorist organizations, Partnership for Civil Justice executive director Maya Verheyden-Hilliard says, “The documents we’ve obtained show that the FBI was acting as a private intelligence and protective agency for Wall Street and the banks against people who are engaged in First Amendment-protected free speech activities. Yet here you had a real terrorist threat, which, if the FBI were serious about combating and preventing terrorism it would have acted upon, and it did nothing!”.... 

In reality, the only violence at the hundreds of Occupy movement actions during late 2011 and early 2012 across the US, from New York to Boston to Los Angeles to Seattle, was perpetrated by heavily armed police. Occupy activists were the victims, not the perpetrators of this violence and criminal behavior.

Now it turns out that when some as yet unidentified group or organization — possibly even one affiliated with banking interests for all we know — actually plotted to assassinate Occupy activists and leaders, those same intelligence and national, state and local police agencies, instead of protecting the public, turned their backs and did nothing about it.

Perhaps the very “loose coalition” nature of the Occupy Movement, which has consciously avoided having or following leaders, in the end saved it from attack, as the plotters with their sniper rifles never were able to ascertain who their targets should be.

Counterpunch
FBI Ignored Deadly Threat to Occupiers
Dave Lindorff
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

David Rosen — The Spy State Tightens its Grip

Ever hear of Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 20? Bet not. The more you’ve never heard of something, the more worried you should be....

The ostensible rationale for the tightening of the digital security grip is to track potential foreign cyber-threats. It is, however, evident that federal agencies are increasingly surveilling the electronic lives of ordinary Americans.

AlterNet | Civil Liberties
The Spy State Tightens its Grip
David Rosen

There was no crime in the USSR and satellites under the thumb of the KGB, Stazi, and other Soviet-style intelligence agencies and "ministries of the interior." Is this where the US is headed justified by the global war on terror?

Hillary Clinton Admits the U.S. Government Created al-Qaeda

Hillary Clinton Admits the U.S. Government Created al-Qaeda

Global Research TV

Osama bin Laden, originally from a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia, was a prominent organizer and financier of an all-Arab Islamist group of foreign volunteers; his Maktab al-Khadamat funnelled money, arms, and Muslim fighters from around the Muslim world into Afghanistan, with the assistance and support of the Saudi and Pakistani governments.[37] These foreign fighters became known as "Afghan Arabs" and their efforts were coordinated by Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. (Wikipedia)

The CIA calls it "blowback," aka "unintended consequences."

Lack of accountability in the "war on terror"

The Ninth Circuit today reversed the district court’s ruling in Padilla v. Yoo, ordering that former “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla’s civil damages suit against John Yoo be dismissed on qualified immunity grounds. The dismissal represents the latest refusal of a federal court to provide a remedy for abuses committed during the war on terrorism.

Read it at Balkanization
The Ninth Circuit’s Dismissal in Padilla: The Accountability Gap Widens
by Jonathan Hafetz

Politicizing terror

The article is not just about Obama in spite of the title. It's a winning political strategy — with downside consequences, too.

Read it at Asia Times Online

Obama wins politics of terror 
By Sreeram Chaulia

Cheapening a term — "terrorism" is getting out of hand

Such cyber-attacks are "a breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation, and must be treated as such", Danny Ayalon, the country's deputy foreign minister, said in a speech on Saturday.

Read it at Al Jazeera
Israel says credit card hack is 'terrorism'

Is "terrorism" the new "Hitler?" Time for an expansion of Godwin's law?

The conception of terrorism and use of "terrorism" are getting out of hand, sometime dangerously so.

The word "terrorism" is politically and emotionally charged,[3] and this greatly compounds the difficulty of providing a precise definition. Studies have found over 100 definitions of “terrorism”.[4][5] The concept of terrorism may itself be controversial as it is often used by state authorities (and individuals with access to state support) to delegitimize political or other opponents,[6] and potentially legitimize the state's own use of armed force against opponents (such use of force may itself be described as "terror" by opponents of the state).[6][7] source

Occupy protestors potential terrorists?

The City of London Police listed “Occupy London Stock Exchange” (OLSX) as a domestic terrorist threat in a bulletin sent to businesses, according to The Independent.

The protesters have been camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London’s financial district since October 15, as part of a global wave of demonstrations against political and economic inequality.

The bulletin, “Terrorism/Extremism Update,” listed the protesters along with al Qaeda, the Colombian revolutionary group FARC, and Belorussian terrorists.

“It is likely that activists aspire to identify other locations to occupy, especially those they identify with capitalism. City of London Police has received a number of hostile reconnaissance reports concerning individuals who would fit the anti-capitalist profile. All are asked to be vigilant regarding suspected reconnaissance, particularly around empty buildings,” it stated.

A spokesman for City of London Police confirmed the document was authentic, but said it was poorly worded and did not intend to label “Occupy London” as a potential terrorist threat.

Read the rest at Raw Story
London police listed ‘Occupy’ protesters as potential terrorists
By Eric W. Dolan