Joel Skousen: Falsifying The War On Terror

2006-06-10

Richard Moore

Original source URL:
http://rense.com/general71/fals.htm

Falsifying The
War On Terror
By Joel Skousen
World Affairs Brief
6-10-6

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:

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.

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.

  "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.'"

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.'"

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.

  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.

"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.

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.]

"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.]

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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