Who is fighting whom, and over what, are among the chief lies we've come to accept as part of the New Normal. So many of us are convinced that we are at war with some Arab "Other" which wants to slaughter us all in our beds, and that's why Boston happened.
Except Arabs had nothing to do with it. Or maybe they did...
We were at a literary event over the weekend. One of the local authors in attendance is a former CIA analyst, and he was asked about the Boston Thing and its relationship to the general problem and issue of terror(ism) and terror wars. He brought up the fact that "these people" (meaning Chechens) had been on the radar for quite some time, and at least when he was at the Agency, there would have been tabs kept if reports had come that a pro-Chechen immigrant had gone back to Russia within the last year and stayed for a good part of the year doing... what? They would have found out, they would have known. But once he returned to the USA, he became the FBI's responsibility. And the FBI, as far as he knew, was keeping track of the older of the brothers at least. Something must have gone wrong. He doesn't know what.
Coleen Rowley of Moussaoui Case fame has put up a long and rather confusing piece over at Consortium News that unravels some of the threads of the Chechen Connection. It's not quite as cut and dried as I would have thought in the past -- that Chechen separatists use terror tactics against Russians, not Americans. I would think they have no beef with America.
Well, maybe they do, though. According to Rowley, this all goes back to the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan, just as the Osama Thing goes back to that time and place, when the United States was recruiting and utilizing various Muslim and Jihadist resistance outfits to fight the Soviets as our proxies. This recruitment included Chechen separatists and jihadists.
According to her, the Chechen resistance was being led by one Ibn al Khattab -- which she somewhat surprisingly doesn't mention was a Saudi national who seemed to have been involved in all kinds of Muslim resistance movements in Europe and the Caucasus as well as Afghanistan back in the day. He was apparently everywhere, much as the late Osama sometimes seemed to be.
The Saudi connection has long been obscured in all the hoo-hah over terror(ism) and contemporary terror war. In some sense, the terror(ism) we are supposedly fighting all seems to flow out of the Arabian Peninsula, and it's getting tiresome to keep rationalizing what's going on as some sort of aberration.
As everyone knows, the House of Saud is and long has been a client of the United States Government. The House of Saud is so intimately attached to the United States Government, there is no daylight between the one and the other; the House of Saud seems to be a far more dedicated client of the United States Government than even our bosom companion Tel Aviv and Jerusalem clients.
And the House of Saud rules the Arabian Peninsula with a rod of iron and a sword of steel.
It is my impression that nothing happens on or from the Arabian Peninsula that the House of Saud is not aware of and has not signed off on. Perfidy writ large. And yet the House of Saud continues to be the close client and ally of the United States. It's always struck me as odd.
It's all about the oil, of course, but there is -- there must be -- more.
The Boston Thing started off bizarre and remains bizarre to this day because it had all the marks of a domestic terrorist act in every respect, including the subsequent shootouts and eventual suspect capture. A suspect who, conveniently, is so badly wounded in his throat that he can't talk. The other suspect, of course, is very conveniently dead.
It took an amazing degree of propagandizing to convince America that despite all the domestic-terror signs and signals, the Boston Bombings were actually the result of al Qaeda inspiration or training, as the bombs were apparently produced using the information found on the al Qaeda magazine website -- easily accessible by anyone, of course, but frequented mostly by jihadist/terrorists. For some reason, I've always thought that website (which I've never visited) was a honeypot, but what do I know? Wheels within wheels.
So then it turns out the suspects were immigrants (whew!) from some foreign land, not directly from Chechnya, no, but from the part of Russia bordering Chechnya, and they are ethnically Chechen, and by religion Muslim. Oh, well, that's all that's necessary to understand what's happened. Case closed.
Foreign Muslims on the rampage against the United States yet again. Only it's not that simple by any means.
In a lot of ways, it's still a domestic terror(ist) act, in part because though the suspects are ethnically Chechen, one is an American citizen and the other was on the path to citizenship. The family seems quite certain that there was no foreign interest or terrorist connection at all, despite the fact that the young mens' father moved back to Russia at some point, and lives there now, and the older brother apparently lived with him for six months last year.
Then he came back to set bombs at the Boston Marathon? But why? Just to do it? To show how easy it is?
Or was there something else? There was no statement, no manifesto, no claim of responsibility, nothing. Just bombs, and in this way, it was absolutely characteristic of domestic terrorist acts, which usually have neither claim of responsibility nor manifesto. They just "are." So it was in Boston.
It takes a while for authorities to sort out whether such acts are domestic or something else, but in this case, despite all the signs of its being domestic, there was nearly immediate and universal suspicion that it was a "foreign fighter" act, al Qaeda no less, because it had to be. This is propaganda in action.
Someone interviewed on the teevee over the weekend said straight out, "The battlefield now includes the United States," therefore any act by the government to suppress this sort of terror(ist) act is justified.
We are at war, and the war is right here in front of us, at least according to this view. Of course, it is compromised by the fact that the United States is officially at peace, but whether we are living under war or peace time conditions depends on the advantage to the government and its sponsors from one or the other designation, such that we are often simultaneously under wartime and peacetime conditions and authorities.
It's disorienting to say the least, but that's a problem for the People, not for the Government. I'd say it's deliberate intent.
There is as yet very little truth in the narrative of and the reaction to the Boston Marathon Bombing and the subsequent manhunts and shootouts. The lies will congeal into a version of "truth" that will be defended to the end.
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