by Prof. James Petras
August 14, 2013
from
GlobalResearch Website
Introduction
Representative democracies and autocratic dictatorships respond to profound
internal crises in very distinctive ways:
-
the former attempts to reason with
citizens, explaining the causes, consequences and alternatives
-
dictatorships attempt to terrorize,
intimidate and distract the public by evoking bogus external
threats, to perpetuate and justify rule by police state methods and
avoid facing up to the self-inflicted crises
Such a bogus fabrication is evident in
the
Obama regime’s current announcements of an imminent global
"terrorist threat" [1] in the face of multiple crises,
policy failures and defeats throughout the Middle East, North Africa and
Southwest Asia .
Internet ‘Chatter’
Evokes a Global Conspiracy and Revives the Global War on Terror
The entire terror conspiracy propaganda blitz, launched by the Obama
regime and propagated by the mass media, is based on the flimsiest sources
imaginable, the most laughable pretext.
According to White House sources, the National
Security Agency, the CIA and other spy agencies claimed to have monitored
and intercepted unspecified Al-Qaeda threats, conversations by two Al Qaeda
figures including Ayman al Zawahiri. [2]
Most damaging, the Obama regime’s claim of a global threat by al-Qaeda,
necessitating the shutdown of 19 embassies and consuls and a world-wide
travelers alert, flies in the face of repeated public assertions over the
past five years that Washington has dealt ‘mortal blows’ to the terrorist
organization crippling its operative capacity [3] and
citing the US "military successes" in Afghanistan and Iraq, its
assassination of Bin Laden, the drone attacks in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia
and the US-backed invasion of Libya.
Either the Obama regime was lying in the past or
its current terror alert is a fabrication.
If, as Obama and the NSA currently claim, Al
Qaeda has re-emerged as a global terrorist threat, then twelve years of
warfare in Afghanistan and eleven years of war in Iraq, the spending of
$1.46 trillion dollars, the loss of over seven thousand US soldiers
[4] and the physical and psychological maiming of over a hundred
thousand US combatants has been a total and unmitigated disaster and the
so-called war on terror is a failure.
The claim of a global terror threat, based on NSA surveillance of two
Yemen-based Al Qaeda leaders, is as shallow as it is implausible. Every day
throughout cyberspace one or another Islamist terrorist group or individual
discuss terror plots, fantasies and plans of no great consequence.
The Obama regime fails to explain why, out of thousands of daily internet
‘conversations’, this particular one, at this particular moment, represents
an ongoing viable terrorist operation.
One does not need a million spies to pick up
jihadist chatter about "attacking Satan".
For over a decade, Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen have been engaging in a
proxy war with Washington-backed regimes and over the same time the Obama
regime has been engaged in drone and Special Forces assassination mission
against Yemeni militants and opposition figures.[5]
In other words, the Obama regime has magnified
commonplace events, related to an ongoing conflict known to the public, into
a new global terrorist threat as revealed by his spymasters because of their
high powered espionage prowess!
It is more than obvious that the Obama regime is engaged in a global
fabrication designed to distract world public opinion and, in particular,
the majority of US citizens, from police state spying and violations of
basic constitutional freedoms.
By evoking a phony "terrorist threat" and its detection by the NSA, Obama
hopes to re-legitimate his discredited police state apparatus.
More important, by raising the specter of a global terrorist threat, the
Obama regime seeks to cover-up the most disreputable policies, despicable
"show trials" and harsh imprisonment of government whistle blowers and
political, diplomatic and military defeats and failures which have befallen
the empire in the present period.
The Timing of the
Fabrication of the Global Terror Threat
In recent years the US public has grown weary of the cost and inconclusive
nature of the ‘global war on terror’, or GWOT.
Public opinion polls support the withdrawal of
troops from overseas wars and back domestic social programs over military
spending and new invasions. Yet the Obama regime, aided and abetted by the
pro-Israel power configuration, in and out of the government, engages in
constant pursuit of war policies aimed at Iran, Syria, Lebanon and any other
Moslem country opposed to Israel’s erasure of Arab Palestine.
The "brilliant" pro-war strategists and advisers
in the Obama regime have pursued military and diplomatic policies which have
led to political disasters, monstrous human rights violations and the
gutting of US constitutional protections guaranteed to its citizens.
To continue the pursuit of repeated failed
policies, a gargantuan police state has been erected to spy, control and
represses US citizens and overseas countries, allies and adversaries.
The "terror threat" fabrication occurs at a time and in response to the
deepening international crisis and the political impasse facing the Obama
regime - a time of deepening disenchantment among domestic and overseas
public opinion and increasing pressure from the Israel Firsters to continue
to press forward with the military agenda.
The single most devastating blow to the police state buildup are the
documents made public by the NSA contractor,
Edward Snowden, which revealed the vast
worldwide network of NSA spying in violation of US constitutional freedoms
and the sovereignty of countries.
The revelations have discredited the Obama
regime, provoked conflicts within and between allies, and strengthened the
position of adversaries and critics of the US Empire.
Leading regional organizations, like MERCOSUR in Latin America, have
attacked ‘cyber-imperialism’; the EU countries have questioned the notion of
‘intelligence cooperation’.
Even dozens of US Congress people have called
for reform and cutbacks in NSA funding.
The "terror threats" are timed by Obama to neutralize the Snowden
revelations and justify the spy agency and its vast operations.
The Bradley Manning "show
trial", in which a soldier is tortured, often with forced nudity,
in solitary confinement for almost a year, imprisoned for three years before
his trial and publicly prejudged by President Obama, numerous legislators
and mass media (precluding any semblance of ‘fairness’), for
revealing US war crimes against Iraqi and Afghan civilians,
evoked mass protests the world over.
Obama’s "terror threat" is trotted out to
coincide with the pre-determined conviction of Manning in this discredited
judicial farce and to buttress the argument that his exposure of gross US
war crimes "served the enemy" (rather than the American public who Manning
repeatedly has said deserve to know about the atrocities committed in its
name).
By re-launching the "war on terror" and
intimidating the US public, the Obama regime is trying to discredit Bradley
Manning’s heroic revelations of documented US war crimes in Iraq and
Afghanistan by focusing on nebulous Al Qaeda terror threats over the
internet!
In the international political arena, Obama has suffered a series of
repeated political and diplomatic defeats with far-reaching implications for
his fanatical empire building project.
The Obama-backed and Al Qaeda-led Islamist
mercenary invasion of the sovereign nation of Syria has suffered a series of
military defeats and his proxy jihadist ‘freedom-fighters’ have been
denounced by most prestigious human rights groups for their massacres and
ethnic cleansing of civilian populations in Syria (especially Christians,
Kurds, Alevis and secular Syrians).
Obama’s Syrian ‘adventure’ has backfired, and is
clearly unleashing a new generation of Islamist terrorists, armed by the
Gulf States - especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar, trained by Turkish and NATO
Special Forces and now available for global terrorist "assignments" against
US client states, Europe and the US itself.
In turn the Syrian debacle has had a major impact on Obama’s NATO ally,
Turkey , where mass protests are challenging Prime Minister Erdogan’s
military support for Islamist mercenaries, based along the Turkish border
with Syria.
Erdogan’s savage repression of hundreds of
thousands of peaceful protestors, the arbitrary arrest of thousands of
pro-democracy activists and his own "show trials" of hundreds of
journalists, military officials, students, intellectuals and trade
unionists, has certainly discredited Obama’s main "democratic Islamist" ally
and undermined Washington’s attempt to anchor its dominance via a triangular
alliance of Israel, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies.
Further discredit of Obama’s foreign policy of co-opting Islamist "electoral
regimes" has occurred in Egypt and is pending in Tunisia.
Obama’s post-Mubarak policy in Egypt looked to a
"power sharing" arrangement between the democratically elected President
Morsi of
the Muslim Brotherhood, the Mubarak-era
military and neo-liberal politicians, like Mohamed El Baradei.
Instead, General Sistani grabbed power
via the army, overthrowing and jailing the civilian President Morsi. The
Egyptian army under Sistani has massacred peaceful pro-democracy Muslim
protestors and purged the parliament, press and independent voices.
Forced to choose between the military dictatorship composed of the henchman
of the former Mubarak dictatorship and the mass-based Muslim Brotherhood, US
Secretary of State John Kerry backed the military take-over as a
"transition to democracy" (steadfastly refusing to use the term ‘coup
d’état’).
This has opened wide the door to a period of
mass repression and resistance in Egypt and severely weakened a key link in
the "axis of reaction" in North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and
Egypt).
Obama’s incapacity to deal with the new peace overtures by the
recently elected President Rouhani in Iran was evident in the
Administrations capitulation to a Congressional vote (420 - 20) in favor of
further and more severe sanctions designed, according to the bill’s AIPAC
authors, to,
"strangle the Iranian oil economy".
Secretary of State Kerry’s offer to "negotiate"
with Iran, under a US-imposed blockade and economic sanctions, was seen in
Teheran, and by most independent observers, as an empty theatrical gesture,
of little consequence.
Obama’s failure to check the Israeli-Zionist
stranglehold on US foreign policy toward Iran and to strike a deal ensuring
a nuclear-weapon-free Iran , ensures that the region will continue to be a
political and military powder keg.
Obama’s appointments of prominent Zionist zealots to strategic Middle East
policy positions ensures that the US and the Obama regime have no options
for Iran, Palestine, Syria or Lebanon - except to follow the options
dictated by Tel Aviv directly to its US agents, the 52 Presidents of the
Major American Jewish Organizations, who along with their insider Zionist
collaborators, co-author the Middle East policy script for the US Congress
and the White House.
The Obama regime’s Israeli-Palestine 'peace' negotiations are seen by
most observers as the most distorted and bizarre efforts to date in that
cruel farce.
Washington has purchased the leaders of the
Palestinian ‘Authority’ with multi-million dollar handouts and gave way to
Israel’s accelerated land grabbing in the occupied West Bank and ‘Jews only’
settlement construction, as well as the mass eviction of 40,000 Bedouins
within Israel itself.
To ensure the desired result - a total fiasco - Obama appointed one of the
most fanatical of pro-Israeli zealots in Washington as its "mediator", the
tri-national Martin Indyk, known in diplomatic circles as "Israel’s
lawyer" (and the first US Ambassador to be stripped of security clearance
for mishandling documents.)
The breakdown of the negotiations is foretold.
Obama, caught in the web of his own long-term
reactionary alliances and loyalties and obsessed with military solutions,
has developed a knack for engaging in prolonged losing wars, multiplying
enemies and alienating allies.
Conclusion
The result of prolonged unpopular wars of aggression has been the massive
built-up of a monstrous domestic police state, pervasive spying around the
world and the commission of egregious violations of the US Constitution.
This, in turn, has led to crudely concocted
"terror plots" to cover-up the repeated foreign policy failures and to
slander and persecute courageous whistle blowers and threaten other decent
American patriots.
The recent declaration of another vast ‘terror plot’, which served to
justify the illegal activities of US spy agencies and ‘unify Congress’,
produced hysteria lasting less than a week. Subsequently, reports began to
trickle in, even in the obedient US mass media, discrediting the basis of
the alleged global terror conspiracy.
According to one report, the much-ballyhooed ‘Al
Qaeda plot’ turned out to be a failed effort to blow-up an oil terminal and
oil pipeline in Yemen.
According to regional observers:
"Pipelines are attacked nearly weekly in
Yemen". [6]
And so an unsuccessful jihadist attack against a
pipeline in a marginal part of the poorest Arab state morphed into President
Obama’s breathless announcement of a global terrorist threat!
An outrageous joke has been played on the President, his Administration and
his Congressional followers.
But during this great orchestrated ‘joke’, Obama
unleashed a dozen drone assassination attacks against human targets of his
own choosing, killing dozens of Yemeni citizens, including many innocent
bystanders.
What is even less jocular is that Obama, the Master of Deceit,
just moves on.
-
His proposed "reforms" are aimed to
retrench
NSA activities
-
He insists on continuing the "bulk
collection" (hundreds of millions) of US citizens’ telephone
communications (FT 8/12/13 p2)
-
He retains intact the massive police
state spy apparatus
-
Keeps his pro-Israel policymakers in
strategic positions
-
Reaffirms his policy of confrontation
with Iran
-
Escalates tensions with Russia, China
and Venezuela
-
Embraces a new wave of military
dictatorships, starting, but not ending, with Egypt
In the face of diminishing support at home and
abroad and the declining credibility of his crude "terror" threats, one
wonders if the ever-active clandestine apparatus would actually stage its
own real-life bloody act of terror, a secret state supported ‘false-flag’
bombing, to convince an increasingly disenchanted and skeptical public?
Such would be a desperate act for the State, but
these are desperate times facing a failed Administration, pursuing losing
wars in which the Masters of Defeat can now only rely on the Masters of
Deceit.
The Obama regime is infested with the "toxic politics of terrorism" and this
addiction has driven him to persecute, torture and imprison,
-
truth seekers
-
whistle blowers
-
true patriots,
...who strive (and will continue to strive) to
awaken the sleeping giant, in hopes that the people of America will arise
again.
Notes
[1] BBC News 8/16/13; Al Jazeera 9/16/13
[2] La Jornada ( Mexico City ) 8/16/13, p. 22;FINANCIAL TIMES 8/10-11/13
- "The exact threat to US missions has yet to be made public."
[3] Financial Times 8/8/13, p. 2 and Financial Times 8/10-11 2013 p 2;
McClatchy Washington Bureau 8/5/13
[4] Information Clearing House Web Page
[5] Financial Times 8/8/13, p. 2.
[6] Financial Times, 8/8/13, p. 2.