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Posts Tagged ‘Ayman al Zawahiri’

Pensacola: Blowback Terrorism The problem isn’t ‘radical Islam’

Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2019

Apparently the FBI brass considered this intelligence pure gold because they went on to use America’s interventionist policy in the Middle East as their main talking point when grooming and entrapping idiots by the hundreds into fake terrorism plots across the country since that time.

https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2019/12/08/pensacola-blowback-terrorism/

Florida Senator Rick Scott is lost in the dark. After Friday’s deadly Afghan war-style “green on blue” attack by a Saudi air force officer at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, the senator issued a statement calling the shooting an act of terrorism, and stating that this was the case, “whether this individual was motivated by radical Islam or was simply mentally unstable.”

First of all, “terrorism,” means the use of violence against civilians in order to provoke a political reaction. But these targets were all members of the U.S. Navy, not civilians. The three killed are Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, Airman Mohammed Sameh Haitham and Airman Apprentice Cameron Scott Walters. This is a tragedy, but it’s not really terrorism.

Then again, of course, the real question about terrorism is not about the victims, but about the motives of the perpetrator, Saudi Air Force Second Lieutenant Ahmed Mohammed al-Shamrani. And here is where the Florida senator misses the point. The possibilities as he presents them are that the attack was motivated either by “radical Islam” or “mental instability.” But perhaps the perp’s belief in his religion hadn’t changed at all, in terms of degrees of devotion or in beginning to prefer a different, stricter Islamic doctrine. And maybe he wasn’t mentally ill either. After all, there was a shooting at the navy’s Pearl Harbor base in Hawaii the day before, and all indications are that that shooter’s motives were purely personal.

As long as the senator is speculating, why should religion or mental illness be considered the most likely explanations at all? Maybe al-Shamrani had gambling debts. Maybe he was blackmailed into it by an unknown party. (At least 10 other men were taken in for questioning, at least one of whom is alleged to have recorded the attack with his phone camera.) …

Maybe he was mad about American foreign policy.

That’s what he said his motive was: [Errors in original.]

“I’m not against you for just being American, I don’t hate you because your freedoms, I hate you because every day you supporting, funding and committing crimes not only against Muslims but also humanity. I am against evil, and America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil. What I see from America is the supporting of Israel which is invasion of Muslim countrie, I see invasion of many countries by it’s troops, I see Guantanamo Bay. I see cruise missiles, cluster bombs and UAV.

“Your decision-makers, the politicians, the lobbyists and the major corporations are the ones gaining from your foreign policy, and you are the ones paying the price for it.

“What benefit is it to the American people to suffer for the sake of supporting Israel?

“Do you expect to transgress against others and yet be spared retribution?

“How many more body-bags are American families willing to receive?

“For how long can the US survive this war of attrition?

“The US Treasury spend billions of dollars, in order to give Americans a false sense of security .

“The security is shared destiny

“You will not be safe until we live it as reality in pleastain, and American troops get out of our lands .”

No wonder American papers and news stations are so reluctant to quote the whole statement. For Republicans, Democrats, spies, soldiers, Zionists and their media myna birds, “Mohammed made him do it” is surely a preferable explanation to “Uh, this is all our fault.”

But al-Shamrani’s statement doesn’t have anything to do with “radical Islam.” (Notably, though Twitter deleted his statement, the replies remain, and seem to uniformly consist of denunciations of the attack and the attacker by other Muslims.) Whatever this man’s sect and degree of devotion, this attack was political. As others have noted, some of the phrases in the screed have been borrowed directly from Osama bin Laden and Anwar Awlaki’s statements (though so far he is said to have no established ties to terrorist groups.) This would include the reference to the “war of attrition” that bin Laden had wanted to initiate against the U.S. since the early 1990s. That wasn’t about radical Islam targeting unbelievers either.

It’s fighting them over there that causes them to fight us here. It always has been.*

The perpetrators of virtually every single terrorist attack against the U.S., beginning with Egyptian Islamic Jihad/proto-al Qaeda’s assassination of Rabbi Kahane in New York City in 1990, have cited their wanting revenge for, and desire to play a role in a war that the United States started here on Earth. Before September 11th, al Qaeda’s leaders cited the presence of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia which were being used to attack other Muslim countries such as Iraq, support for Israel’s occupations in Palestine and (then) Lebanon, support for Saudi kings and Egyptian military despots, theft of Arab oil resources at artificially low prices, and support for other nations’ oppression of Muslim minorities. The plan was to attack us to provoke an overreaction. As the great intelligence beat reporter James Bamford explained,

“Ayman al-Zawahiri argued that al-Qaeda should bring the war to ‘the distant enemy’ in order to provoke the Americans to strike back and ‘personally wage the battle against Muslims.’ It was that battle that bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted to spark [with the 9/11 attacks]. As they made clear in their declaration of war ‘against Jews and Crusaders,’ they believed that the United States and Israel had been waging war against Muslims for decades. Now their hope was to draw Americans into a desert Vietnam, with bin Laden in the role of North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh.”

Twelve years after the humiliation of “America’s mayor,” Rudy Giuliani by Rep. Ron Paul in a 2007 Republican Party presidential debate, when Paul explained the truth about the terrorists’ motives for attacking the United States, the argument has still not been won. That is, of course, because the same people who are responsible for these policies, including the government’s handmaidens in the major media, are the same ones in charge of diagnosing and confronting the problem now. But that’s just how it works. The worse they fail, the more job security they have in the future, at least until the trillions of dollars spent becomes too many and retrenchment becomes unavoidable.

But it’s no mystery. You could ask Robert Mueller, James Comey and the FBI about it. Their agent, James Fitzgerald, told the 9/11 Comission in long-since forgotten testimony about al Qaeda that,

“I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”…

The rest here

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Gaines & Horton: It’s Time to Stop Fighting Osama bin Laden’s War

Posted by M. C. on August 4, 2019

For the dignity of servicemembers and for the future of the country, it is time to stop playing into al Qaeda’s hands.

https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/03/09/robert-gaines-scott-horton-its-time-to-stop-fighting-osama-bin-ladens-war/

by Robert Gaines and Scott Horton

Osama bin Laden is long dead, but his plans live on through American foreign policy.

In 2001, al Qaeda consisted of only 400 ideologues in the far corners of the world. After the recent regime change wars in Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Syria, typical estimates place their membership at around 20,000. To top it all off, the American economy is out $5.6 trillion dollars for the whole failed project. This is not the legacy of a war to spread, or even protect, liberty and prosperity. Instead it is the legacy of an evil but gifted tactician, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Contrary to the popular misunderstanding of al Qaeda’s motives and strategy, bin Laden and his partner Ayman al Zawahiri were not trying to scare America away with the September 11th attacks. They were trying to provoke an overreaction. Al Qaeda’s leaders wanted the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in order to bog our military down, “bleed us to bankruptcy,” and force a worn-out, broken empire to leave the region the hard way, and permanently, just as they had done to the Soviet Union in the 1980s with American support. Only then could they hope to launch the revolutions they sought in their home countries without interference from the American superpower.

Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam warned in 1986 that the U.S. was on deck for expulsion from the region after the USSR. After observing the effectiveness of asymmetric war against a superior adversary, bin Laden, galvanized by the sanctions against Iraq and the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, took up Azzam’s mission. In an early declaration aimed at the U.S., bin Laden noted that the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan helped the mujahideen defeat one of the most powerful militaries in history, and declared that he would seek to lure America to its same fate.

After decimating al Qaeda’s old guard at Tora Bora in 2001, the U.S. military could have returned home victorious. Instead, our leaders chose to follow bin Laden’s wishes by committing to an extended occupation and impossible nation-building mission – one which has lasted for more than 17 years.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq to overthrow the man bin Laden called a “socialist infidel,” Saddam Hussein, was a massive boon to the terror organization, decimating a secular government, paving the way for the creation of the first al Qaeda franchise there in 2004, radicalizing of a generation of new fighters, and proving the limits of U.S. influence in the Middle East.

America’s further regime change wars in Yemen, Libya, and Syria have been strategic victories for the U.S.’s terrorist enemies beyond the former terrorist leader’s wildest dreams.

In his journals, bin Laden was optimistic about the 2011 Arab Spring, writing that it had “opened a door for jihadists.” He wouldn’t live to see the aftermath of the U.S. and NATO-backed regime change operation in Libya, but the country remains awash in members of Ansar Al-Sharia and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) that the U.S. and NATO supported in the war. Both groups are led by veterans of al Qaeda in Iraq from Iraq War II.

The jihadists empowered by the regime change in Libya quickly spread to Mali, Chad, and Niger. A new generation of Sunnis with rifles and SOCOM operators are fighting now throughout the Maghreb, Sahel, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Saudi Arabia became bin Laden’s primary target for revolution when the king allowed the American military buildup there in preparation for the first Iraq war in 1990. As a key ally and major purchaser of American weapons, the kingdom has long appeared immune from the fate of Iraq or Libya. Now that the current regime has been racked by political purges and the financial burden of a war in Yemen, it’s not difficult to see how the legions of jihadists cultivated directly and indirectly by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia itself in the recent regional wars might return and wreak havoc there.

U.S. and regional allies’ covert intervention on behalf of the insurgency in Syria backfired horribly by helping to bring al Qaeda in Iraq back to life from its previous near-total destruction by Iraqi tribal leaders during the 2007 “Awakening” in Iraq. In 2011, al Qaeda in Iraq, or the “Islamic State of Iraq,” crossed into Syria to take part in the uprising against the Ba’athist dictatorship there. In Syria, AQI/ISI began calling itself Jabhat al Nusra, then Hayat Tahrir al Sham. It remains loyal to al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri. Their group now again numbers in the tens of thousands and for the time being remains ensconced in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.

In 2013, the Iraqi-dominated faction split from al Nusra and Zawahiri’s al Qaeda. They returned to calling themselves the Islamic State (ISIS) and consolidated control over eastern Syria. A year later, they conquered all of predominately Sunni western Iraq, declared an Islamist “caliphate,” and seized numerous fully stocked military bases left behind by the United States just three years before. As President Trump correctly said during the 2016 campaign, this disaster was the direct consequence of the previous administrations’ wars in Iraq and Syria. The loss of western Iraq to ISIS led to the launching of Iraq War III in 2014-2017 to destroy the ISIS caliphate and drive them out of western Iraq and eastern Syria.

Now that fight is over. Trump should ignore demands for the continuation of a policy which has only furthered Osama bin Laden’s original agenda.

Two wars expanded into multiple conflicts that have enveloped entire regions, costing thousands of American lives, requiring vast defense expenditures, and killing or displacing millions of civilians. Though Washington hawks insist upon indefinitely extending commitments abroad, President Trump understands the consequences of open-ended war.

For the dignity of servicemembers and for the future of the country, it is time to stop playing into al Qaeda’s hands. Trump should withdraw from Afghanistan and Syria, and end the counter-productive war on terrorism.

 

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