Differential Responses to Terror

Like almost everyone else, my mind is swamped with images and thoughts about the vicious attacks in Paris on Friday night. With Parisians out for a night on the town, including thousands attending a soccer match, the eight or more terrorists picked so-called ‘soft’ targets in a relatively small, hip area and attacked restaurants, a concert, and parts of the above-mentioned soccer match. Scenes routinely described as ‘scenes of horror’ ensued, with the concert venue the most revolting: terrorists armed with AK-47s fired randomly and coldly at hundreds of concertgoers below them, and then, when about to be eliminated by the police, blew themselves up with suicide vests. The only comparison that comes to mind is the similar scene in a movie theater in Aurora, CO, when the American James Holmes randomly shot and killed twelve theatergoers at a showing of a Batman movie (sadly, no one vowed war on the NRA as a response). But of course, we have a rich field from which to choose for horror in our time: the Russian plane that exploded over the Sinai, killing all 224 passengers aboard; the suicide attack in a Beirut suburb where nearly 40 people were killed; countless suicide bombings and shootings in Afghanistan and Iraq, both still reeling and broken after the U.S. shock-and-awed them in the wake of 9/11; the recent U.S. attack in Kunduz province in Afghanistan, an attack this time on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders. There seems to be no inhibition whatever, in our time, that prevents the murder of innocents in any place and at any time.

            What interests me here is the way we, especially we in the western world, respond to these horrors. Our response is, of course, a major part of the calculus of the terrorists who perpetrate such attacks. They know that though death hardly registers in our consciousness when it is ‘other’ innocents who are slaughtered—as, for example, when over 2,000 Gazans, mostly helpless civilians, were killed by the Israeli military in its most recent onslaught on that tiny strip of misery—the death of our people, of white Europeans or Americans in our ‘homeland’, is greeted with terror, with horror, with outrage, with cries that such barbarity must be avenged, must be repaid tenfold. These are exactly the sentiments coming out of France at the moment. France’s president, Francois Hollande, has declared that ‘this is war.’ And realistically, who could blame him? After the attacks on Charlie Hebdo earlier this year, after 1200 or more French citizens have joined the Islamic State in Syria, and now, after this attack, the French are legitimately feeling that they have been specially targeted by the ruthless fanatics who run ISIS. Though the said fanatics would no doubt prefer to attack New York or Los Angeles, they apparently have concluded that Paris is a more reachable, ‘softer’ target. They seem to think that this will discourage Europeans, and somehow persuade them to pull back from their participation in American-led attacks against them in Syria. That this is delusional, that their entire fundamentalist, apocalyptic mode of thinking is insane, does not seem to matter. Or rather, in a certain sense it matters most of all: such people, convinced that the world is ending anyway, seem to figure that dying a little sooner than the rest of us confers glory on them, not least because it will help bring on the apocalypse they yearn for.

            But I digress. What I really mean to focus on is how our responses to death, to the sudden death of innocents brought on by the terror of modern weaponry, differ, depending on who does the killing and who does the dying. Consider the response to the recent downing of the Russian passenger liner over the Sinai desert. It was loaded with 224 tanned vacationers returning from some time in the sun at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Initially, and still to this day, Egyptian officials have refused to even call it a terror attack, Ayman El-Muqadem insisting that an explosion could have occurred in several other ways, including “lithium batteries in the luggage of one of the passengers, an explosion in the fuel tank, fatigue in the body of the aircraft, or the explosion of something.” (Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 8, 2015). Increasingly, however, most countries are subscribing to the terrorist theory: that a bomb was smuggled onto the plane and its explosion brought the plane down. Whatever the cause turns out to be, the interesting thing is that almost no western journalists have rushed to Moscow or the Sinai to record tearful reactions from Russians who lost more loved ones than the French (as countless journalists like Katie Couric are doing in Paris). The airliner attack is either treated routinely, as ‘just one of those things,’ or even as something deserved. Russia, after all, remains our chief rival and increasingly our renewed enemy, with its leader, Vladimir Putin, characterized more and more as, if not quite a Hitler, then close.  He keeps interfering in our global plans and machinations, such as the coup in Ukraine (right on Russia’s border, it should be noted, and hence well within what we like to call a ‘sphere of influence’ when it’s in our hemisphere), and now in Syria (also very much closer and threatening to Russia than to the United States).  So when the Islamic State recently claimed responsibility for bringing down the Russian passenger liner, attributing it to Russia’s recent bombing campaign against them in Syria (and in support of Assad), one could almost hear the ‘served-them-right’ murmurs in the western camp.

            The same holds for the recent suicide bombing in the Hezbollah-dominated suburb outside Beirut. We saw evidence of the explosion, we heard a few screams, but underlying all the coverage was, again, a certain suppressed gloating. Hezbollah, after all, has been supporting the evil Bashar al-Assad, our latest candidate for Hitler’s mantle. Those who support Assad, such as Hezbollah and Iran and Russia, become, ipso facto, our enemies. So if even ISIS, supposedly the most mortal of our mortal enemies, suicide-bombs civilians targets allegedly controlled by Hezbollah, then that is a plus in our ledger. Any deaths that come as a result are to be lamented on the surface, perhaps, but secretly cheered.

            One could cite countless other terror attacks and a similarly muted response to them on our part. But consider what might be called terrorism but usually isn’t: the bombing of innocent civilians by the so-called “good guys.” The bombing of Gaza by the U.S.-supplied Israeli military comes immediately to mind. What else but terror can one call the relentless campaign of aerial and rocket bombing against a population imprisoned in the most densely populated piece of real estate in the world? What else but terror is the targeting of schools, of apartment complexes, of hospitals? But we don’t call it that, because the victims themselves are alleged to be terrorists or harboring terrorists, and the perpetrators are our close allies and hence experimenters with our own advanced weaponry to carry out what we call “retaliation.” Sadly, the same rationale is used to describe our recent ‘mistaken’ bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. How could this happen? As with the Israelis in Gaza, we knew or should have known the well-publicized global coordinates of this hospital. And yet, our planes bombed the hospital anyway, and even worse, allegedly attacked wounded patients trying to flee. Doctors Without Borders and several other groups have insisted that this was a war crime: hospitals are supposed to be protected, immune from attack even in war zones. But the main response from U.S. officials has been expressions of ‘regret’ over the ‘mistake.’ And from the U.S. public? Well, it was, after all, ‘those people’ in a war zone, some of whom may have been terrorists themselves. No need to concern ourselves, except a little that our shiny reputation might be tarnished.

            So this is what we have. Death is regrettable, and awful, and tragic, and sometimes outrageous, but it usually depends on whose death is at issue. If it’s a relative or close friend or one of our in-group, it hits us very hard, especially if it seems it could or should have been prevented. If death happens to one of ours as part of organized warfare, then it’s also ‘tragic’ but expected, and can be dressed up, in the end, as part of a necessary and noble sacrifice. And if the dead are ‘theirs,’ even if they are civilians and hence ‘innocent,’ we find ways to tolerate the deaths we’ve caused, rationalize them as ‘collateral damage,’ part of the messy business of defeating an evil enemy.  But..if death comes as part of an attack on us or our friends, in a manner that we label ‘terrorist’ (notwithstanding the legitimacy of the attackers’ grievances and their relative powerlessness to express those grievances in conventional ways), then it becomes an outrage. Then the killing becomes ‘barbaric’, regardless of the proportion of the lives ‘they’ have ruined relative to those we have ruined. And there seem to be endless ways in which we parse out their barbarity, and our outrage, respecting those deaths. In other words, there are ‘rules’ to which we insist all combatants in a conflict must comply, our clearly-defined rules of war; our clearly-defined rules for the taking of prisoners; our rules respecting which areas or institutions are legitimate targets. That the rules (like the rules regarding money, interest, and bankruptcy) are usually made to favor the more powerful party is mostly ignored or suppressed. Rules are rules, after all. And what terror does to outrage and terrify us is violate the most fundamental of those rules, our rules. Terrorists do not fight fair. Terrorists pick victims at random with no concern for their guilt or innocence, and snuff them out for no legitimate reason. And when the victims are “our” people, then the randomness, the unfairness, the barbarity—regardless of the relative numbers involved—are all considered more extreme, more unfair, more beyond the pale of what we have decreed to be legitimate, than anything we do or could even conceive of doing.

            This is, of course, natural to most humans. Those in our group, those on our side (including God), are always considered to be more deserving, more valuable, more innocent than those on the side of the ‘other.’ To paraphrase Orwell, ‘all lives are valuable, but some lives are more valuable than others.’ Thus some deaths deserve to be lamented more than others. Some deserve to be grieved more than others. The useless waste of some lives deserves more attention than the useless waste of others. There may be no way to resolve this dilemma short term. But noticing it—especially before we rush off to scream for overwhelming and merciless retaliation—reflecting upon it, and eventually perhaps coming to see that the loss and waste of every life on every side is painful and deserving of our attention and our empathy, would certainly be worthwhile.

Lawrence DiStasi

Syria, Sarin, and Obama's 'Red Line'

I assume most of my readers remember the phony “evidence” that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had stockpiled “weapons of mass destruction,” (WMDs can include nuclear weapons, biological weapons and chemical weapons) ready to be used at a moment’s notice, thus justifying an American attack in 2003 on this Hitlerian regime. The ‘shock and awe’ attack—and the years of mayhem that followed, still far from over—took place to the cheering of American news media, but somehow the WMD were never found. With the change of administrations, though, we went from Bush to Obama and, presumably, an end to such phony justifications for war. Now, however, Seymour Hersh, probably the premier investigative journalist of our time, has written a piece indicating that the era of the ‘phony’ casus belli is far from over. Rather, it seems to be part of America’s DNA.

            Recall the dire situation: Syria and its president, Bashar al Assad, were engaged in a life-or-death struggle with what American media called “freedom fighters,” and what Assad called “terrorists.” The United States, of course, took the side of the “freedom fighters,” even though numerous reports made clear that these were not exactly democracy lovers, or nonviolent activists, or even native adversaries of the devilish Assad, but rather a rag-tag grouping of fundamentalist groups, many of whom openly declared their adherence to Al-Qaeda. The al Nusra Front was only the most prominent of these fighting groups, and it was also clear that it was supported mostly by Saudi Arabia (which had long wanted to get rid of Assad as the main secular leader opposing their hegemony in the Arab world) and other Gulf oil emirates. Yet the public was told that despite the jihadist tendencies of these freedom fighters—which should have fixed them in the camp of our mortal enemies—the United States supported them as the lesser of two evils. The enemy of my enemy is my friend is the way realpolitik types put it. And so we heard congressional hawks urging the president to ramp up the military aid, up to and including a possible U.S. invasion against the Assad regime; and the president and his men explaining that the U.S. was doing all in its power to support the “freedom fighters” short of providing a no-fly zone as it had in Libya. And of course, flush with Israeli intelligence insisting that Assad had used chemical weapons already, the American president in 2012 announced that any use of his chemical stockpile in the conflict was a “red line” beyond which Assad must not go. If he crossed that dread red line, it was implied, the United States would have no choice but to attack and save the world from weapons that threatened all of civilization. 

            In August of 2013 came the terrible news that such an attack by Assad’s forces had occurred in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, and, as “proof,” we were treated to horrifying videos of children writhing in death agony and piles of bodies allegedly killed by Assad’s sarin gas. We were told repeatedly that only Assad and his government forces had the capability to mount such an attack. We were given proofs such as the direction of the missiles that had carried the chemicals, and further proofs alleging that Assad’s forces had been gathering in just the place from which such missiles could be fired, and even alleged recordings of Assad’s commanders ordering the attacks. And so it appeared that with such an airtight case, the U.S. had no choice but to, once again, go to war in the Middle East against this latest incarnation of Adolf Hitler, now disguised as Bashar al Assad of Syria. Air strikes were being readied, we were told, while counter-claims that the gas attack might actually have come from the rebels, were laughed away as so much Syrian propaganda. BUT THEN, with two days to go before the planned strike, the president suddenly announced that prior to ordering the attack he would go to Congress to get approval. And in another two days, as Congress was preparing long hearings, the president accepted a deal brokered by Russian president Putin for Assad to get rid of his chemical arsenal under international supervision. The compulsory air strike and another American war had been avoided.

            What Seymour Hersh addresses is, why? Why did the president suddenly shift from attack to compromise? And what Hersh has found is that it was British intelligence that did the job. At its defense lab in Wiltshire, the Brits had analyzed a sample of the sarin used in the August attack and found that the gas didn’t match what was known to be in Syria’s arsenal. Given that our most loyal ally had evidence that the Sarin attack hadn’t come from the Syrian regime after all, the Joint Chiefs—who had been alerted by British intelligence—urged the president to halt the air strike. And so we learn that, once again, an American administration, goaded by hawks and phony evidence, was on the brink of initiating a major conflict that could have ignited a new conflagration in the most volatile region on earth.

            But Hersh goes further. What he demonstrates is not only that the sarin attack came from the jihadis, most likely the al Nusra Front, but also from its staunch supporter in Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. Hersh quotes a former senior US intelligence official with access to current intelligence:

We knew there were some in the Turkish government…who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria—and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.

Furthermore, though the administration insisted repeatedly that only Assad’s forces had access to sarin gas, both American and British intelligence had known since early 2013 that some of the rebel groups were developing chemical weapons. In fact, analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency had issued a paper stating that al Nusra was engaged in a sarin production program that was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort.’ Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia were providing sarin precursors in bulk, and several members of the al Nusra front were arrested in southern Turkey in May 2013 with two kilos of sarin. Though Turkish officials claimed the seized material was not sarin at all but ‘anti-freeze,’ the DIA believed the initial arrests were valid. Furthermore, a UN investigation in March and April of 2013 of a series of chemical attacks concluded that the evidence linked NOT the government but the opposition groups to the attack: “It was clear that the rebels used the gas,” said one investigator. “It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.”

            In short, the general public, not just in America but throughout the western world, was once again duped by the “chemical-weapons-in-the-hands-of-a-monster ploy” and very nearly went to war on the basis of phony allegations of WMD. Not everyone of course. There were many in the alternative press who vehemently disputed the claims coming out of Washington. But in the lame-stream media, there was not a peep. And notably, there still isn’t (except of course to ridicule.) Seymour Hersh had to go to England to get this latest piece published in The London Review of Books, where, fortunately, you can read it online (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line). Then, the next time you hear about WMD in the hands of a new ‘Hitler,’ you can start singing that old song: It seems, “we’ve heard it all before.” 

Lawrence DiStasi

A Tune We've Heard Before

The bovine feces issuing from the Obama Administration regarding its proposed attack on Syria is nauseatingly familiar: ‘this is going to be precise, and limited, and will teach Assad that he shouldn’t use chemical weapons again,’ said one of Obama’s National Security advisers, ‘and degrade his capability to the point that he will conclude that coming to the bargaining table is his best option because if he doesn’t, what he holds dear—his weapons, his army—will be taken from him’ (neverminding the fact that coming to the so-called bargaining table under the conditions set by the United States—that the Assad regime must hand over its power to the opposition—will by that very move lose “what he holds dear;” so what is the incentive to “come to the table"???). It is this kind of stupidity, this kind of logical contradiction that once again fills the airwaves. But let us take things one step at a time.

First, it should be clear: if the United States attacks Syria, it is not a “teachable moment,” or a warning, or an inducement to negotiate; it is an act of war. Though the President and his spokespeople keep referring to “punishing the Assad regime for violations of international norms,” there is no, repeat NO international authorization whatever for this so-called punitive attack. Short of a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force—and the use of force is almost exclusively reserved, by the UN charter, for situations in which one nation attacks another nation—there is NO legal justification for any attack on Syria. None. Not that this has ever stopped the United States before, of course. Just think Iraq and/or Afghanistan in 2003 or Grenada or Korea or Panama or any of a number of invasions just since WWII; though it must be said that in almost every other case, at least some figment of a fig leaf was fashioned to create the illusion of legitimacy or the resolve of the collective world community. Here, alas, we have neither.

Then there’s the so-called evidence the administration keeps braying about. Marc Seibel of the McClatchy newspapers has just (Sept 4) written a piece about the widespread doubts over this so-called evidence. First, no chemical tests or satellite photos or anything else have been made public. Just some videos, apparently taken by the opposition. Then there’s the so-called “preparations” evidence. The U.S. claims it knew of preparations three or four days before the attack on Aug 21. But even the opposition forces are puzzled by this one: if the U.S. knew a gas attack was coming, several have said, why didn’t it warn them so lives could be saved, so the deaths of those darling children we’re all told about could be prevented? The answer is that the pre-attack evidence is probably manipulated, not least because the evidence came after the fact, after some spook analyst or other came up with conclusions that didn’t appear originally from the so-called evidence. Oh look, someone apparently said, here’s evidence of Assad’s troops putting on gas masks and getting their chemical attack mode ready. Very convincing. And then there’s the constantly-repeated claim by U.S. spokesmen that the UN inspectors were prevented from doing their work because Assad wouldn’t let them near the site of the attack for four or five days. This is total nonsense. In fact, countless observers testify that Assad gave permission to the inspectors to go to the site the very next day. No matter; citing the delay and the supposedly “degraded” condition the chemical evidence would be in (actually, sarin gas can be detected years after an attack), the U.S. simply withdrew all reliance on the UN inspectors (sound familiar? remember Iraq?), and said that the U.S. didn’t need UN evidence. Such evidence would come too late, anyway, it said, and wouldn’t matter because we already had conclusive proof that the gas used was sarin (problematic; even with the UN’s sophisticated equipment being applied in a lab, it could take weeks and up to a month to come to a valid conclusion; so how did the U.S. in mere hours conclude that it was sarin? and who gave them the samples and in what condition? unless… the conclusion was foreordained.)

Then there’s one more element of this UN inspection team brouhaha that bears consideration. We have been told that one reason for not putting any faith in UN findings is that the UN inspectors can’t even address the question of who delivered the alleged gas attack (which we already “know”); their mandate limits them to only determining if poison gas was used. This seems crazy on its surface. But does anyone ever mention why this UN mandate is now so limited? The fact is, we know very well why. It’s because an earlier UN inspection, referred to in a news interview by Carla del Ponte of Switzerland, one of the members of the UN investigating commission and a renowned prosecutor, found that gas was indeed used, and it was used by the opposition. That’s right. All the West (and that includes Israel) accused Assad of using poison gas and demanded a UN inspection, and when the UN found that indeed gas had been used and that it was the opposition forces that were using it (see BBC news 6 May), the conclusion was dismissed and ignored, and Carla del Ponte has not been heard from since. And just to be sure no repetition of this embarrassing conclusion was presented to the world, the subsequent request for UN investigations of poison gas use was stripped of its mandate to find out who used the gas, and limited to only the determination of whether gas was used. Period.

Of course there are other anomalies in the so-called evidence, such as that the proportions of deaths to those affected are not high enough; nor is there enough vomiting of victims. That is, Doctors Without Borders has cited figures of over 3,000 people attacked but only around 300 deaths. The proportion of those killed by sarin should be much much higher. Too, one of the significant marks of sarin gas poisoning is constant vomiting; it appears from video evidence that almost none of the alleged victims vomited. And of course, the numbers. Most estimates of the number of deaths hover in the 300 to 400 range; but according to U.S. spokesmen like John Kerry and President Obama since last week, a very precise number—1,429 victims killed—suddenly emerged. How could such a precise number have been arrived at, and how was it determined? No one can say.

Finally, there’s the supposed “overheard” communications that the U.S. detected: Syrian commanders were allegedly heard by the renowned U.S. listening technology (see all, know all, hear all) talking about the attack and the fear it would be discovered. Well, it turns out that the source for that conversation was not U.S. but Israeli “intelligence,” Mossad, presumably, which is not exactly known for being unbiased where its Arab neighbors are concerned. Which means that, once again, we are being led or urged or hijacked into an unwanted war against an Arab country by none other than peace-loving Israel.

So here we are at the brink. Unsubstantiated allegations. The drums of war beating. The Congress full of thundering declamations of humanitarian intervention to “stop the horrible slaughter of children,” and all of it based on flimsy, ever-changing accusations devoid of any real proof. And the underlying question that keeps being suppressed: why, if Bashar al Assad’s force were winning in recent months, driving the opposition into more and more remote areas, with no real opposition force capable of taking over if Assad falls—even in the estimation of the United States—why would Assad at such a triumphal moment spoil his momentum by using chemical weapons that are no more effective than the more conventional artillery and air assaults he’s already been using? Why would he do this? If he were backed into a corner, perhaps. But when his forces were winning? It makes no sense.

What really makes sense is this: the U.S. and its (rapidly dwindling) allies have concluded with alarm that the opposition was being defeated; that Assad was about to take back the whole country. Since the U.S. and its allies had early on torpedoed any attempt for a negotiated settlement (even though Assad had agreed to negotiate—until, that is, the U.S. insisted that the only settlement could be one in which he conceded defeat; what kind of negotiation is that?), then all that was left was a military solution. But a pretext for a huge military intervention was needed. Poison gas, yet another “weapon of mass destruction used by yet another ‘Hitler of the Middle East,’ fit the bill. Now the U.S. can not only “punish” Assad for the use of WMDs, but also step up its already robust supplies to the opposition, to now include anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons it has been reluctant thus far to give them. It means to go all in, and tip the balance, once again, to the rebels. No matter that they are led by al-Quaeda elements; no matter that the al Nusra front (an al-Quaeda affiliate) is, according to almost all observers, the dominant opposition group. No matter. That wonderful, democracy-seeking Free Syrian Army, according to administration hacks, is the only group we will supply. And they will prevail.

The only remaining question is why? Why is it so important that Assad be unseated? Because his nation is the only real Arab power left in the region. And Israel has always planned to get rid of any and every Arab country that could threaten its plans for the Palestinians (extermination) and hegemony over the entire region. With U.S. help it got rid of Saddam and crippled Iraq in 2003. It reduced Lebanon in the 1980s. It got rid of Egypt’s Muslim brotherhood a couple of months ago, and Libya a few months before that. It long ago pocketed the quisling Saudis and Jordanians. And now it is determined to get rid of Syria. Who drops next? You guessed it, Iran. That’s what this is all about. Cripple Iran by destroying Assad so that the US/Israel axis can finally bomb or sanction Iran back into the stone age. And the American public will be stampeded, as it always is, into this new war waged from ships outside the range of any retaliation. That’s the kind of war we really like. We invulnerable Americans, dropping high-tech death from ships at sea or drones or high-flying bombers above. The wogs slaughtered on the ground by our super-smart weapons (not of mass destruction, to be sure; we moral Americans don’t use those; well, maybe a little white phosphorus, or napalm or uranium-tipped shells or cluster bombs or nukes, but always with the best of intentions—so that the Middle East can finally be made safe for democracy—well, democracy that we approve of—not like those fake democracies that put into power Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, but good democracies. Like Israel (What, you don’t approve of democracies that have religious requirements; that refuse to establish actual borders?). Like Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Kuwait and the UAE (What, you don’t approve of democracies run by royal families?) Like Egypt (What, you don’t approve of democracies run by military coup?)

   The sad thing is that the Syrian people are being massacred in a vicious war that is in part a proxy war. And sadder still that the man elected to extricate us from military ventures in the region, a Nobel Peace laureate, no less, is now moving heaven and earth and every possible pretext to get us into another one.  

Lawrence DiStasi