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Written by Chris Floyd
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Saturday, 20 April 2013 10:11 |
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Without wishing to indulge in deep-fried conspiracy gobbling at this point, I will say that the revelations about the FBI's prior involvement with one of the suspected Boston attackers, apparently going on for years, are of great interest. Even more so in the light of the fact that a very large number of the terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks in the United States over the past two decades have turned out to have had significant FBI involvement, often in the form of outright provocation by FBI infiltrators, egging on and sometimes even planning attacks that were later "foiled" -- by the FBI.
This doesn't automatically mean that the FBI or other government agencies were "behind" the events in Boston; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes people do bad things without government prompting. But the consistent pattern of prior FBI involvement, in various degrees and at various stages, with people and groups that later go on to attempt or carry out violent actions cannot be ignored, and should be more thoroughly explored in this case. Particularly considering the fact the agency at first denied having any contact with the suspect -- until her mother outed them to the media. From CBS News:
Although the FBI initially denied contacting Tsarnaev, the brothers' mother said they had in an interview with Russia Today. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said her son got involved in "religious politics" about five years ago, and never told her he was involved in "jihad."
She insisted the FBI "knew what he was doing on Skype" and that they counseled him "every step of the way."
Tsarnaeva went on to say that "they were controlling him, they were controlling his every step...and now they say that this is a terrorist act." That may or may not be true; certainly if I were the parent of someone in this situation, that's what I would want to believe. But the now-established involvement of the FBI, as well as the probable involvement of both the American and Russian intelligence agencies with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, should not be ignored when the reasons and roots behind the Boston attack and its bloody aftermath are explored.
That said, it is of course very likely that these connections will be ignored, as the well-worn narrative of "good boys turned bad by Islam" hardens into conventional wisdom. This narrative might be the truth in this case -- but it also works to the advantage of so many powerful forces. This is true not just for those opposing immigration in the the United States (that bloody shirt is already being waved frantically by many American politicians and other high-toned peddlers of racial and ethnic enmity), but even moreso for all those in power structures around the world who profit -- politically and financially -- from the vast engines of a military-security complex gorging on the fear of Islamic terrorism. (Other kinds of terrorism -- particularly the far more constant and far more murderous attacks of state terrorism -- don't bother them too much.)
Most immediately, this incident will greatly strengthen the military-security apparat in the United States and Russia, helping further demonize Muslims in general for the American apparatchiks and Chechens in particular for the Russians -- especially all those opposed to the brutal rule of the Kremlin and its satrap in Chechnya. But every political power structure that feeds on fear -- and which ones do not? -- will benefit from the crime spree in Boston, whatever its origins.
Again, these are just speculations, drawing on the few facts that are known at present, and putting them in the context of recent history. Perhaps the Tsarnaev brothers were lone operators: tormented individuals emerging from the brutal and brutalizing background of invasion, repression, violence and murder that characterizes modern Chechnya, who then internalized this violence and hatred, and sought, in anguish, ignorance and error, to expel it by directing it outward toward some generalized enemy, a demonized Other. Perhaps not. Perhaps other psychological factors were at work that we know nothing of at the moment. Perhaps not. Perhaps some agency or other of some military-security apparat somewhere seized on these troubled individuals and turned them toward the agency's own ends, with results that were either intended or else slipped far beyond the agency's wishes or control. Perhaps not.
But I think there are deeper contexts to the case -- whether these are restricted to the twisting of individual psyches by the greater geopolitical and cultural forces that have done so much pointless violence to us all, and in particular to the direct targets of massive power structures, such as Chechnya or, latterly, the Muslim world at large, or whether there are more specific involvements of military-security apparatchiks in the development of this murderous tragedy. Yet, as already noted, we will almost certainly see none of these deeper contexts explored in the earnest postmortems -- by politicians, pundits, academics and self-appointed "experts" of every stripe -- in the weeks and months to come.
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Written by Chris Floyd
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Monday, 15 April 2013 22:41 |
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All condolences are due to the victims of the Boston bombing and their families -- and to all those victimized by violence around the world today.
This includes the 75 people killed in bomb attacks across Iraq, a commonplace occurrence since American invaders destroyed the country and deliberately sowed bloody sectarian strife there.
And the families of the 20 people killed by a bombing Sunday in Somalia, a country whose fragile peace was shattered by an American-backed foreign invasion, which included American bombings, American renditions and American death squads sowing -- what else? -- bloody sectarian strife.
And the captives in Guantanamo Bay being beaten and brutalized by a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, who is keeping dozens of men cleared for release even by the twisted, draconian "rules" of the gulag itself -- while he continues to kill people around the world -- without charges, trial, evidence, defense or warning -- by his own unchallengeable, merciless diktat.
And the families of the four unnamed, unknown people killed Sunday in Pakistan -- a sovereign nation allied with the United States -- in a drone attack by U.S. missiles: more corpses to join the thousands killed by coward-controlled robots in the Nobellist's savage campaign that is "radicalizing an entirely new generation" and inflicting psychological terror on hundreds of thousands of innocent people, day after day, night after night, without end.
And the dozens of people killed across Syria today, in a vicious civil war fueled by American-backed al-Qaeda affiliates armed and funded by brutal tyrants and global purveyors of sectarian violence -- America's beloved Saudi royals -- attacking a brutal Syrian regime once happily used as a proxy torturer in the American Terror War.
Yes, let us remember the victims of violence today, those who died and those who live on in the scarred, tormented aftermath. Let us remember them in Boston, in Baghdad, in Mogadishu, in Guantanamo, in Waziristan --and in every corner of the world where the crippled souls who live by violence seek to impose their evil dreams on us all.
**Edited to update death count in Iraq.**
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Written by Chris Floyd
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Friday, 24 July 2009 00:22 |
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Many, many years ago, when I was a young pup of a reporter on a small rural paper in the foothills of the Appalachians in East Tennessee, one of my very first assignments was to attend a court hearing on a murder case, then meet afterwards with one of the most senior law enforcement officers in the county, who would be giving testimony in the case. This officer frequently provided the paper with photographs of the latest drug raid or big arrest his force had made.
I went to the hearing, then met the officer. He was, literally, a towering figure, topping six-foot-five, and sporting a thin Errol Flynn moustache, perhaps to offset his thinning hair. He was a powerful, popular figure, and one of the top leaders in a statewide law enforcement association; indeed, he spent several weeks a year training his colleagues in the latest modern methods of crime-fighting and professional law enforcement management.
I'd never met the man, but when I introduced myself as the reporter from the Herald, he gave me a big smile, took my hand with a crushing grip, and sat me down on a bench in the old, antebellum courtroom. He pulled out a roll of 35mm film in its plastic canister and handed it to me. As he handed it over, he clamped his massive hand down hard on my thigh and gripped it tight. "Here's your pictures," he said in a low voice. "If you do right by me, we'll get along just fine. But if you try to screw me, you're fucked."
Then he let go, stood up, and went off, smiling and back-slapping his way through the citizens milling in the hallway. Well, he got good coverage during the time that I was at the paper. He was very cooperative with the press; I went on several drug raids with his forces as they turned houses inside out -- the officers were particularly tickled when they found sex Polaroids the suspects had taken of themselves; although these were not germane to the charges at hand, they were examined far more closely than the actual evidence. I even went on what must surely have been one of the last moonshine raids in the Tennessee hills, after a long trek deep into the backwoods, where some nostalgic old-timer had set up a still -- even though the county, which was still nominally "dry," was ringed with numerous package liquor stores; you were never more than ten minutes' drive from all the hard liquor you could want.
But the "press" -- such as we were -- never had the time, or the resources, or the publishers' blessing to pursue the more troubling rumors that floated around the law enforcement star and several other bigwigs in the area. These chiefly involved cooperation between law enforcement, top financial entrepreneurs and criminal organizations to facilitate the transport of illegal drugs into the area, chiefly through private airstrips set up in far corners on palatial estates.
This was, oddly enough, the same basic set-up that I encountered, or heard credible tales of, in every American newspaper where I worked -- in East Tennessee, Middle Tennessee and down in Mississippi. In every case, there was prima facie evidence (and sometimes more than that) of a local worthy -- banker, music star, famous evangelical -- providing the facilities for drug-running while the law looked the other way. And in every case, there was a lack of resources -- and institutional will -- to pursue the allegations further. In the one instance where there was an effort to follow one of these trails, a top editor and I were set to drive to New Orleans, where a televangelist's planes were allegedly being used to fly in dope from Central America. But the night before we were to leave, I got a call at home from the editor: "Our sources tell us we'd better not meet with [the man who would corroborate the allegations.]" Why not, I asked. "They say we'll never make it out of New Orleans alive." So we didn't go.
I was reminded of all this ancient personal history by the recent story in the New York Times about the latest round of corruption arrests in New Jersey. Mayors, councilmen, city, county and state officials, rabbis -- all are alleged to be operating a crime network ranging from international money-laundering to good, old-fashioned cash in an envelope (or even a cereal box) in exchange for government favors. This was not the case of a "few bad eggs," but a veritable platoon of community leaders.
It was, in other words, another brief glimpse behind the curtain of how the world really works a good deal of time, at every level. There is always some powerful person somewhere clamping their hands down on somebody's thigh and muttering, "Play ball, and it's jake; screw me and you're fucked." Every now and then, someone will make a play too large for the pull they can muster to cover themselves; or maybe someone with bigger pull wants to muscle in on their patch, and brings the heat -- or, occasionally, a straight-up unit or prosecutor will get the goods and somehow run the gauntlet of protective barriers that hedge in the powerful.
But the fact is, many, many, many people in power whom we are incessantly told -- even ordered -- to respect and obey are dirty. They lie, they cheat, they steal, they commit or countenance heinous crimes. Sometimes the corruption comes in the form of a wad of cash passed under the table at a diner; sometimes it comes in the form of "bundled contributions" to a national campaign or arcane legal entity designed to receive, process -- and launder -- cash for politicians dripping with piety; or, even more often, in the form of the golden revolving door between government service and corporate sinecures. Sometimes the crime is looking the other way when a plane comes in loaded with dope; sometimes the crime is sending the planes in loaded with bombs.
A few years after I left the Appalachian foothills, my old thigh-clamping pal was convicted on felony gambling charges (as always, its the venial sins of the flesh that bring you down, not the pay-offs, strong-arming, commission of war crimes, etc.). But today he is once again a prominent, popular politician in the area. The evangelist whose drug-laden planes were allegedly landing in Louisiana is still a prominent, popular evangelist, despite a couple of highly publicized falls from grace with sultry jezebels. And the music star whose private airstrip on his vast rural manor was allegedly used to ferry dope is still a music star, noted now for his fierce Christian piety and rock-ribbed patriotism.
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Written by Chris Floyd
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Tuesday, 21 July 2009 22:32 |
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To lift the immortal words of the Angry Arab, "for those who care and do not care," there are some new songs up at the MySpace site: rough sketches as usual, but there are some hopes of doing a few of them up right with some talented collaborators a little ways down the line. Anyway, they're there, if you care to bend an ear -- or even cut a rug.
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