Shministim, Israel’s youngest prisoners of conscience
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False flag operations are covert operations which are designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and have been used in peace-time; for example, during Italy’s strategy of tension.There is a list of examples at the bottom of the article.
“ The statesman who yields to war fever…is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. ”
It is rare that we see in depth journalism in this time of hardship with in the news business. Stories must be short and concise, deep analysis is expensive, journalist don’t work for free. There are still some great journalists at work, William Langewieshe is one, he currently is the International Corespondent for Vanity Fair Magazine. This article was written in February 2008, yes over a year old but as important today as the day it was written.
The focus is the story of an illegal Algerian immigrant named Mouloud Sihali his life in London as an illegal immigrant, his arrest capture and trial. It is a long article told by a master story teller, Mr. Langewieshe. The story has velocity, veracity and violence, it is reminiscent of John le Carré and his novel A Most Wanted Man, in particular.
TERRORISM
A Face in the Crowd
by WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE
Vanity Fair - February 2008
The Stage
Frights are worse when they come by surprise. Since the 1990s, Britain had been remaking itself into one of the most advanced surveillance societies in the West, trusting in the decency of its political traditions while installing millions of closed-circuit television cameras, linking some of them to automated recognition systems, building huge and interlocked databases filled with personal information, running thousands of electronic intercepts (of e-mails, data flows, and phone conversations), and setting up biometric identity systems, including the largest DNA database in the world. All of this begs to be tied together with the issuance of electronic identity cards—which will start next year. To be clear that the nation in question is indeed still Britain—that great beacon of liberal thought—it is important to recognize the ad hoc nature of these growing systems, and the fact that the intent was never to suppress people’s freedoms, but rather to respond to popular concerns about uncontrolled immigration and ordinary crime. Nonetheless, when taken as a whole and combined with shifting legislation, the systems presented the British counterterrorism agencies with a tool of considerable reach, which after the attacks on Washington and New York they quickly seized. Since then the legal and surveillance regime in Britain has become even more invasive, leading some observers to wonder if the process can ever be halted. The seductions are insidious. Even in frank and private conversations, police officials express not the slightest doubts about the growth of state power or its dampening effects on people’s lives.Some Background
Governments thrive on conflict, and the tabloids love a show. Nonetheless, the larger concerns of the British authorities were well grounded and real. By the time of Sihali’s arrest, one year after the attacks on Washington and New York, only wishful Muslims and juvenile oppositionists were claiming that Britain did not face a significant terrorist threat, or that nothing should be done. The problem was that the roots of the threat extended deep into British society, with its extraordinary history of openness and civil liberty, and its long-standing self-defining tradition of harboring malcontents from around the world. Anarchists. Communists. Utopian dreamers of every creed. The malcontents this time were immigrant Islamists, committed to the overthrow of certain foreign regimes and, at the wishful extreme, to the establishment of a single global caliphate to be ruled under the banners of Muhammad. In the 1980s they congregated in Britain, where they enjoyed more freedom than they did elsewhere in Europe, and mixed comfortably into the large and ghettoized Muslim population—by undercount currently about 1.6 million strong.The Illegal Immigrant
Coming to Britain had not been Mouloud Sihali’s ambition. He was born in 1976, and raised in a coastal Algerian town, as the youngest son among 14 siblings in a modest Berber family. His father was a gatekeeper at a Coca-Cola plant. The children were nominal Muslims at best. When Sihali was 15, in early 1992, the civil war broke out after the Algerian army canceled national elections that would have brought an Islamist party to power. The fighting soon engulfed the country. In the midst of it, in 1995, Sihali graduated from secondary school and enrolled in the local university, with a dream of becoming a pilot. For the following two years he studied physical science and math, and used his enrollment to delay conscription into the army. Friends returning from the fight had become drug abusers, alcoholics, and loners. It was said that this was the effect of having been forced to slaughter innocent villagers—a plausible explanation in a civil war which pitted the military against the population and caused so many civilian deaths. Sihali decided to flee Algeria, even though the act would be considered desertion and a serious crime.Read Entire Article
MILAN —
Twenty-three Americans, including a C.I.A. station chief, were convicted on Wednesday in a landmark case involving the seizure of a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan more than six years ago.
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The convictions were a huge symbolic victory for Italian prosecutors, lauded by critics of the Bush administration as proof that that measures used to fight terrorism were against the law. It was the first time that American agents were tried in a foreign country for kidnapping in a case of the United States’ politically sensitive practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are captured in one country and taken for questioning in another, presumably one more open to coercive interrogation techniques.
How many civilians have been killed in the U.S. drone war in Pakistan? The number could be as high as 320 innocents, according to an analysis released today by the New America Foundation. That’s about a third of the 1,000 or so people slain in the robotic aircraft attacks since 2006…..
…Jane Mayer, the New Yorker reporter who revealed so much of what we know about the abusive treatment of detainees, says “The embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radicall new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. And, because of the CIA program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war,” she writes in the magazine’s current issue.In July 2001… the U.S. denounced Israel’s use of target killing against Palestinian terrorists… The CIA, which had been chastened by past assassination scandals, refused to deploy the Predator for anything other than surveillance purposes… George Tenet, then the agency’s director, argued that it would be a ‘terrible mistake’ for ‘the Director of Central Intelligence to fire a weapon like this.’
…Seven years later, there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.
For people in Pakistan a Terminator type SkyNet is already a reality, and the US military and CIA are at the controls.
The CIA’s invisible covert target killing program. Assassination from the sky by drones. Is this the moral or legitimate use of state power? We are doing it with no restrictions to where.
Listen to Jane Mayer talk about this on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
AboutEven the comments are worth reading. They bring a some balance to the lopsided main street press. Here is a good example
Mondoweiss is a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective.
Human Terrain
Film Makers Statement:
‘Human Terrain’ is two stories in one. The first exposes the U.S. effort to enlist the best and the brightest of American universities in a struggle for the hearts and minds of its enemies. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military adopts a controversial new program, ‘Human Terrain Systems’, to make cultural awareness a key element of its counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack by academic critics who consider it misguided and unethical to gather intelligence and target potential enemies for the military. Gaining rare access to wargames in the Mojave Desert and training exercises at Quantico and Fort Leavenworth, ‘Human Terrain’ takes the viewer into the heart of the war machine and the shadowy collaboration between American academics and the armed services.Via: 1D4TW
The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returned to Brown University to conduct research on military cultural awareness. A year later, he left to embed as a Human Terrain member with the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan. On May 7, 2008, en route to mediate an intertribal dispute, his humvee hit a roadside bomb and Bhatia was killed along with two other soldiers.
From Jerusalem Post Oct 7, 2009
Editorial by LARRY DERFNER
This is a maximum verbal irony.
From The Majlis Blog
“We assess that al-Qaeda is in its weakest financial condition in several years and that, as a result, its influence is waning,” Mr Cohen said from Washington.” …. David Cohen, the Treasury Department official
The Taliban, on the other hand, is apparently quite flush, thanks to the opium trade and donations from the Gulf. (Richard Holbrooke said in August that Gulf donors actually account for the majority of Taliban funding.)
