Patti Jones
The Fly
I wont give any opinion, in orther to avoid any discussion, just take a look at this...
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Changing faces of terrorism
By Sayeed Hasan Khan and Kurt Jacobsen
ADMIT it. Doesn't President Bush sound perfectly reasonable when he pleads that the "civilized world" must go beyond crushing bin Laden and his cronies in order to root out terrorists wherever they may lurk? Isn't it terribly hard to resist his righteous call for a global struggle against terrorism, mounting a sort of secular jihad against jihadists? Only spoilsports ask where it will all end. They are much too short-sighted.
Consider that Bush's ambitious anti-terrorist enterprise, if performed with truly ruthless honesty, will prove extremely enlightening for all the rest of us poor citizens who thereby may get some very rare peeks into how power really works. After all, pursuing terrorist trails all the way to their bitter ends (and bitter beginnings) is likely to create a great many acute embarrassments for the very authorities who form the posse chasing vermin.
In international politics, ruled by fickle realpolitik, the posse itself is likely to be made up of many former bandits, suddenly redefined in Oprah-like political "makeovers" as sheriff's deputies so as to serve the latest shift in superpower interests. Behold the fantastic record of an Alice-in-Wonderland world where an enemy is exactly what the US government says one is, nothing more and nothing less - until it says otherwise. In and around Nicaragua in the 1980s Somoza's merrily murderous National Guard, presto, become Ronald Reagan's freedom-fighting Contras.
In Panama Manuel Noriega was a bosum buddy of the USA one year and public enemy number one the next. In the same decade Saddam Hussein was Uncle Sam's esteemed pal, but in the 1990s well, you know the rest. (One of us appeared on BBC Radio in 1988 with an American ambassador who staunchly defended Saddam Hussein.) Likewise, the Mujahideen and their zealous Taliban outgrowth were holy warriors of freedom with whom even Rambo revelled in one decade, and incubators of pure evil the next.
Don't get us wrong about the Soviets, we mean, the Russians and their current warm rapport with America. Weren't they once the malignant force that America feared enough to support the most vicious dictatorships in the name of democratic values?
Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island as a terrorist for decades and whatever happened to him? Menachim Begin was blowing up British soldiers in Palestine in the mid-1940s.
The Northern Alliance, though surely welcome allies, are hardly dedicated defenders of democracy and their cruelty in the temporary takeover of Kabul is too well remembered.
A subpoena is pursuing Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize winner, for his role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and, as Christopher Hitchens accuses in a new book, he is implicated in many other state terrorist acts too. Dizzying, isn't it? Blair and Bush claim they are going in to destroy heroin drug traffickers who fund terrorists. Yet, as the Iran-Contra scandal showed, American secret agencies have cultivated the drug trade as a secret revenue source for South-east Asian and then Central American allied forces since the 1950s.
So when is a terrorist (or sponsor of terrorists) not a terrorist (or a sponsor of terrorists)? If we want to punish evil-doers, a consistent and equally applied definition does not seem too much to ask. Noam Chomsky points out that if the US, suppliers of arms to Turks who freely killed Kurds in the 1990s, applied to itself the same legal and ethical criteria that they invoked to intervene in Kosovo, then the US would have to intervene against its own government.
Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, widely regarded as the political wing of the provisional IRA, was no longer a terrorist when President Clinton granted him a US visa in 1994. That sudden, if carefully considered, move hasn't worked out too badly for an incomparably more peaceful Ulster. Yet the IRA itself was reborn in the 1960s in reaction to the terrorist acts of loyalist paramilitary organizations abetted by a deeply oppressive sectarian regime. Is there legitimate resistance to oppression which does not deserve the name of terrorism? Can't states be terrorists?
Today Hamas is called a terrorist organization but there is disturbing evidence that before the Israeli-PLO dialogue started Hamas was given covert support by Israel in order to split the Palestinians and isolate them from the PLO and to devalue their cause internationally. Where does one even begin to appraise who is a terrorist when General Pervez Musharraf, on taking power in 1999, halted President Clinton's effort to train assassins (itself a violation of American law) to get bin Laden? The whole seamy tale of Lumumba and western intelligence agencies in the Congo has no heroes.
States often aid groups that other states regard as terrorists. Clearly, terrorists are not only ragged bands of underfunded outcasts who always fight on the wrong, that is to say, weaker side.
So asking authorities to define terrorism is something the whole world should welcome. Syrian diplomats and Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who are not in such good odour in the West, make an eminently reasonable request for "a clear, specified and correct definition of terrorism, and to distinguish it from the concept of legitimate resistance."
If we arrived at a definition acceptable to the entire UN, for example, we would help create an extraordinary permanent coalition, capable of responding aptly to any threat by proper combinations of police work, bombs, bread and mediation. Who can possibly argue against that?
However, the joy of realpolitik is that it is a plaything of the elites, a game restricted to whoever occupies office of power. Every vested interest keeps an inventory of desired items it wants to push at every opportunity.
Hence, George Bush defends a tax cut for the rich as a rational blessing in good times and, as a downturn threatened, as a boon to lift the economy. Rationality is beside the point in such moments.
As Daniel Ellsberg observed in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, it was a credit to the American people that politicians had to lie to them so much about that vile war, although it was shameful that it was so easy to do. Elites historically are allergic to telling ordinary citizens anything worth knowing so we should applaud any chance for free debate about so important an issue as terrorism.
Citizens must try to find out where security measures are really going to help, especially where civil liberties are concerned. Consider the fact that oppressive regimes, including Muslim ones like the one in Algeria, define as terrorists perfectly civilized people who fled to the UK for asylum. So then, is the UK, technically speaking, harbouring terrorists in these cases ? Now the UK is threatening to change the law so that dissidents of any kind are treated as if they were rabid terrorists, particularly if they don't suit the UK's political aims of the moment.
Obviously, we must punish the people who perpetrated the World Trade Centre horror. Perhaps we can talk as well about the less obvious forms that terror takes. Arundhati Roy rightly asks why not hunt down and turn in the CEO of Union Carbide for the Bhopal gas leak disaster in which company negligence was responsible for killing thousands and harming many more? Terror takes many forms.
Perhaps the world's nations eventually can figure out how to protect their citizens from these less conspicuous terrorists, too.
Let us welcome this extraordinary opportunity to work out a sensible and binding definition of terrorism. Any such definition, of course, will be highly attentive to the shifting contexts in which people act. When visiting East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) Zhou Enlai was asked by Governor Monem Khan if it was true that he once was nearly executed as a terrorist when he was nabbed by Chiang Kai-Shek's forces? Zhou nodded, smiled and observed that there was a very, very thin line between a traitor and a patriot.
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Patti
-Pride Girl-
---------------------------------------------
Changing faces of terrorism
By Sayeed Hasan Khan and Kurt Jacobsen
ADMIT it. Doesn't President Bush sound perfectly reasonable when he pleads that the "civilized world" must go beyond crushing bin Laden and his cronies in order to root out terrorists wherever they may lurk? Isn't it terribly hard to resist his righteous call for a global struggle against terrorism, mounting a sort of secular jihad against jihadists? Only spoilsports ask where it will all end. They are much too short-sighted.
Consider that Bush's ambitious anti-terrorist enterprise, if performed with truly ruthless honesty, will prove extremely enlightening for all the rest of us poor citizens who thereby may get some very rare peeks into how power really works. After all, pursuing terrorist trails all the way to their bitter ends (and bitter beginnings) is likely to create a great many acute embarrassments for the very authorities who form the posse chasing vermin.
In international politics, ruled by fickle realpolitik, the posse itself is likely to be made up of many former bandits, suddenly redefined in Oprah-like political "makeovers" as sheriff's deputies so as to serve the latest shift in superpower interests. Behold the fantastic record of an Alice-in-Wonderland world where an enemy is exactly what the US government says one is, nothing more and nothing less - until it says otherwise. In and around Nicaragua in the 1980s Somoza's merrily murderous National Guard, presto, become Ronald Reagan's freedom-fighting Contras.
In Panama Manuel Noriega was a bosum buddy of the USA one year and public enemy number one the next. In the same decade Saddam Hussein was Uncle Sam's esteemed pal, but in the 1990s well, you know the rest. (One of us appeared on BBC Radio in 1988 with an American ambassador who staunchly defended Saddam Hussein.) Likewise, the Mujahideen and their zealous Taliban outgrowth were holy warriors of freedom with whom even Rambo revelled in one decade, and incubators of pure evil the next.
Don't get us wrong about the Soviets, we mean, the Russians and their current warm rapport with America. Weren't they once the malignant force that America feared enough to support the most vicious dictatorships in the name of democratic values?
Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island as a terrorist for decades and whatever happened to him? Menachim Begin was blowing up British soldiers in Palestine in the mid-1940s.
The Northern Alliance, though surely welcome allies, are hardly dedicated defenders of democracy and their cruelty in the temporary takeover of Kabul is too well remembered.
A subpoena is pursuing Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize winner, for his role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and, as Christopher Hitchens accuses in a new book, he is implicated in many other state terrorist acts too. Dizzying, isn't it? Blair and Bush claim they are going in to destroy heroin drug traffickers who fund terrorists. Yet, as the Iran-Contra scandal showed, American secret agencies have cultivated the drug trade as a secret revenue source for South-east Asian and then Central American allied forces since the 1950s.
So when is a terrorist (or sponsor of terrorists) not a terrorist (or a sponsor of terrorists)? If we want to punish evil-doers, a consistent and equally applied definition does not seem too much to ask. Noam Chomsky points out that if the US, suppliers of arms to Turks who freely killed Kurds in the 1990s, applied to itself the same legal and ethical criteria that they invoked to intervene in Kosovo, then the US would have to intervene against its own government.
Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, widely regarded as the political wing of the provisional IRA, was no longer a terrorist when President Clinton granted him a US visa in 1994. That sudden, if carefully considered, move hasn't worked out too badly for an incomparably more peaceful Ulster. Yet the IRA itself was reborn in the 1960s in reaction to the terrorist acts of loyalist paramilitary organizations abetted by a deeply oppressive sectarian regime. Is there legitimate resistance to oppression which does not deserve the name of terrorism? Can't states be terrorists?
Today Hamas is called a terrorist organization but there is disturbing evidence that before the Israeli-PLO dialogue started Hamas was given covert support by Israel in order to split the Palestinians and isolate them from the PLO and to devalue their cause internationally. Where does one even begin to appraise who is a terrorist when General Pervez Musharraf, on taking power in 1999, halted President Clinton's effort to train assassins (itself a violation of American law) to get bin Laden? The whole seamy tale of Lumumba and western intelligence agencies in the Congo has no heroes.
States often aid groups that other states regard as terrorists. Clearly, terrorists are not only ragged bands of underfunded outcasts who always fight on the wrong, that is to say, weaker side.
So asking authorities to define terrorism is something the whole world should welcome. Syrian diplomats and Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who are not in such good odour in the West, make an eminently reasonable request for "a clear, specified and correct definition of terrorism, and to distinguish it from the concept of legitimate resistance."
If we arrived at a definition acceptable to the entire UN, for example, we would help create an extraordinary permanent coalition, capable of responding aptly to any threat by proper combinations of police work, bombs, bread and mediation. Who can possibly argue against that?
However, the joy of realpolitik is that it is a plaything of the elites, a game restricted to whoever occupies office of power. Every vested interest keeps an inventory of desired items it wants to push at every opportunity.
Hence, George Bush defends a tax cut for the rich as a rational blessing in good times and, as a downturn threatened, as a boon to lift the economy. Rationality is beside the point in such moments.
As Daniel Ellsberg observed in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, it was a credit to the American people that politicians had to lie to them so much about that vile war, although it was shameful that it was so easy to do. Elites historically are allergic to telling ordinary citizens anything worth knowing so we should applaud any chance for free debate about so important an issue as terrorism.
Citizens must try to find out where security measures are really going to help, especially where civil liberties are concerned. Consider the fact that oppressive regimes, including Muslim ones like the one in Algeria, define as terrorists perfectly civilized people who fled to the UK for asylum. So then, is the UK, technically speaking, harbouring terrorists in these cases ? Now the UK is threatening to change the law so that dissidents of any kind are treated as if they were rabid terrorists, particularly if they don't suit the UK's political aims of the moment.
Obviously, we must punish the people who perpetrated the World Trade Centre horror. Perhaps we can talk as well about the less obvious forms that terror takes. Arundhati Roy rightly asks why not hunt down and turn in the CEO of Union Carbide for the Bhopal gas leak disaster in which company negligence was responsible for killing thousands and harming many more? Terror takes many forms.
Perhaps the world's nations eventually can figure out how to protect their citizens from these less conspicuous terrorists, too.
Let us welcome this extraordinary opportunity to work out a sensible and binding definition of terrorism. Any such definition, of course, will be highly attentive to the shifting contexts in which people act. When visiting East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) Zhou Enlai was asked by Governor Monem Khan if it was true that he once was nearly executed as a terrorist when he was nabbed by Chiang Kai-Shek's forces? Zhou nodded, smiled and observed that there was a very, very thin line between a traitor and a patriot.
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Patti
-Pride Girl-
