Our Suicide Bombers! Thoughts on Western Jihad

[Nur]

Our Suicide Bombers

Thoughts on Western Jihad

 

 

By John Feffer

 

August 07, 2009 "TomDispatch" -- The actor Will Smith is no one's image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on earth in I Am Legend, he retains a wise-cracking, ironic demeanor. And yet, surrounded by a horde of hyperactive vampires at the end of that film, Smith clasps a live grenade to his chest and throws himself at the enemy in a final burst of heroic sacrifice.

Wait a second: surely that wasn't a suicide bombing. Will Smith wasn't reciting suras from the Koran. He wasn't sporting one of those rising sun headbands that the Japanese kamikaze wore for their suicide missions. He wasn't playing a religious fanatic or a political extremist. Will Smith was the hero of the film. So how could he be a suicide bomber? After all, he's one of us, isn't he?

 

As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. "We" are the powerful, developed countries, the ones with an overriding concern for individual liberties and individual lives. "We" form a moral archipelago that encompasses the United States, Europe, Israel, present-day Japan, and occasionally Russia. Whether in real war stories or inspiring vignettes served up in fiction and movies, our lore is full of heroes who sacrifice themselves for motherland, democracy, or simply their band of brothers. Admittedly, these men weren't expecting 72 virgins in paradise and they didn't make film records of their last moments, but our suicidal heroes generally have received just as much praise and recognition as "their" martyrs.

 

The scholarly work on suicide bombers is large and growing. Most of these studies focus on why those other people do such terrible things, sometimes against their own compatriots but mainly against us. According to the popular view, Shiite or Tamil or Chechen suicide martyrs have a fundamentally different attitude toward life and death.

 

If, however, we have our own rich tradition of suicide bombers -- and our own unfortunate tendency to kill civilians in our military campaigns -- how different can these attitudes really be?

 

Western Jihad

 

In America's first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced the use of suicide bombers. Indeed, the American seamen who perished in the incident were among the U.S. military's first missing in action.

 

It was September 4, 1804. The United States was at war with the Barbary pirates along the North African coast. The U.S. Navy was desperate to penetrate the enemy defenses. Commodore Edward Preble, who headed up the Third Mediterranean Squadron, chose an unusual stratagem: sending a booby-trapped U.S.S. Intrepid into the bay at Tripoli, one of the Barbary states of the Ottoman empire, to blow up as many of the enemy's ships as possible. U.S. sailors packed 10,000 pounds of gunpowder into the boat along with 150 shells.

 

When Lieutenant Richard Sommers, who commanded the vessel, addressed his crew on the eve of the mission, a midshipman recorded his words:

 

"'No man need accompany him, who had not come to the resolution to blow himself up, rather than be captured; and that such was fully his own determination!' Three cheers was the only reply. The gallant crew rose, as a single man, with the resolution yielding up their lives, sooner than surrender to their enemies: while each stepped forth, and begged as a favor, that he might be permitted to apply the match!"

The crew of the boat then guided the Intrepid into the bay at night. So as not to be captured and lose so much valuable gunpowder to the enemy, they chose to blow themselves up with the boat. The explosion didn't do much damage -- at most, one Tripolitan ship went down -- but the crew was killed just as surely as the two men who plowed a ship piled high with explosives into the U.S.S. Cole in the Gulf of Aden nearly 200 years later.

 

Despite the failure of the mission, Preble received much praise for his strategies. "A few brave men have been sacrificed, but they could not have fallen in a better cause," opined a British navy commander. The Pope went further: "The American commander, with a small force and in a short space of time, has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christiandom have done for ages!"

Preble chose his tactic because his American forces were outgunned. It was a Hail Mary attempt to level the playing field. The bravery of his men and the reaction of his supporters could be easily transposed to the present day, when "fanatics" fighting against similar odds beg to sacrifice themselves for the cause of Islam and garner the praise of at least some of their religious leaders.

 

The blowing up of the Intrepid was not the only act of suicidal heroism in U.S. military history. We routinely celebrate the brave sacrifices of soldiers who knowingly give up their lives in order to save their unit or achieve a larger military mission. We commemorate the sacrifice of the defenders of the Alamo, who could have, after all, slunk away to save themselves and fight another day. The poetry of the Civil War is rich in the language of sacrifice. In Phoebe Cary's poem "Ready" from 1861, a black sailor, "no slavish soul had he," volunteers for certain death to push a boat to safety.

 

The heroic sacrifices of the twentieth century are, of course, commemorated in film. Today, you can buy several videos devoted to the "suicide missions" of American soldiers.

 

Our World War II propaganda films -- er, wartime entertainments -- often featured brave soldiers facing certain death. In Flying Tigers (1942), for example, pilot Woody Jason anticipates the Japanese kamikaze by several years by flying a plane into a bridge to prevent a cargo train from reaching the enemy. In Bataan (1943), Robert Taylor leads a crew of 13 men in what they know will be the suicidal defense of a critical position against the Japanese. With remarkable sangfroid, the soldiers keep up the fight as they are picked off one by one until only Taylor is left. The film ends with him manning a machine gun against wave upon wave of oncoming Japanese.

 

Our warrior culture continues to celebrate the heroism of these larger-than-life figures from World War II by taking real-life stories and turning them into Hollywood-style entertainments. For his series of "war stories" on Fox News, for instance, Oliver North narrates an episode on the Doolittle raid, an all-volunteer mission to bomb Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor. Since the bombers didn't have enough fuel to return to their bases, the 80 pilots committed to what they expected to be a suicide mission. Most of them survived, miraculously, but they had been prepared for the ultimate sacrifice -- and that is how they are billed today. "These are the men who restored the confidence of a shaken nation and changed the course of the Second World War," the promotional material for the episode rather grandly reports. Tokyo had the same hopes for its kamikaze pilots a few years later.

 

Why Suicide Missions?

 

America did not, of course, dream up suicide missions. They form a rich vein in the Western tradition. In the Bible, Samson sacrificed himself in bringing down the temple on the Philistine leadership, killing more through his death than he did during his life. The Spartans, at Thermopylae, faced down the Persians, knowing that the doomed effort would nevertheless delay the invading army long enough to give the Athenians time to prepare Greek defenses. In the first century AD in the Roman province of Judea, Jewish Zealots and Sicarians ("dagger men") launched suicide missions, mostly against Jewish moderates, to provoke an uprising against Roman rule.

 

Later, suicide missions played a key role in European history. "Books written in the post-9/11 period tend to place suicide bombings only in the context of Eastern history and limit them to the exotic rebels against modernism," writes Niccolo Caldararo in an essay on suicide bombers. "A study of the late 19th century and early 20th would provide a spate of examples of suicide bombers and assassins in the heart of Europe." These included various European nationalists, Russian anarchists, and other early practitioners of terrorism.

 

Given the plethora of suicide missions in the Western tradition, it should be difficult to argue that the tactic is unique to Islam or to fundamentalists. Yet some scholars enjoy constructing a restrictive genealogy for such missions that connects the Assassin sect (which went after the great sultan Saladin in the Levant in the twelfth century) to Muslim suicide guerrillas of the Philippines (first against the Spanish and then, in the early twentieth century, against Americans). They take this genealogy all the way up to more recent suicide campaigns by Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Islamic rebels in the Russian province of Chechnya. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who used suicide bombers in a profligate fashion, are ordinarily the only major non-Muslim outlier included in this series.

Uniting our suicide attackers and theirs, however, are the reasons behind the missions. Three salient common factors stand out. First, suicidal attacks, including suicide bombings, are a "weapon of the weak," designed to level the playing field. Second, they are usually used against an occupying force. And third, they are cheap and often brutally effective.

 

We commonly associate suicide missions with terrorists. But states and their armies, when outnumbered, will also launch such missions against their enemies, as Preble did against Tripoli or the Japanese attempted near the end of World War II. To make up for its technological disadvantages, the Iranian regime sent waves of young volunteers, some unarmed and some reportedly as young as nine years old, against the then-U.S.-backed Iraqi army in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

 

Non-state actors are even more prone to launch suicide missions against occupying forces. Remove the occupying force, as Robert Pape argues in his groundbreaking book on suicide bombers, Dying to Win, and the suicide missions disappear. It is not a stretch, then, to conclude that we, the occupiers (the United States, Russia, Israel), through our actions, have played a significant part in fomenting the very suicide missions that we now find so alien and incomprehensible in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

 

The archetypal modern suicide bomber first emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s, a response to Israel's invasion and occupation of the country. "The Shiite suicide bomber," writes Mike Davis in his book on the history of the car bomb, Buda's Wagon, "was largely a Frankenstein monster of [israeli Defense Minister] Ariel Sharon's deliberate creation." Not only did U.S. and Israeli occupation policies create the conditions that gave birth to these missions, but the United States even trained some of the perpetrators. The U.S. funded Pakistan's intelligence service to run a veritable insurgency training school that processed 35,000 foreign Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Charlie Wilson's War, the book and movie that celebrated U.S. assistance to the mujihadeen, could be subtitled: Suicide Bombers We Have Known and Funded.

 

Finally, the technique "works." Suicide bombers kill 12 times more people per incident than conventional terrorism, national security specialist Mohammed Hafez points out. The U.S. military has often publicized the "precision" of its airborne weaponry, of its "smart" bombs and missiles. But in truth, suicide bombers are the "smartest" bombers because they can zero in on their target in a way no missile can -- from close up -- and so make last-minute corrections for accuracy. In addition, by blasting themselves to smithereens, suicide bombers can't give away any information about their organization or its methods after the act, thus preserving the security of the group. You can't argue with success, however bloodstained it might be. Only when the tactic itself becomes less effective or counterproductive, does it recede into the background, as seems to be the case today among armed Palestinian groups.

 

Individual motives for becoming a suicide bomber or attacker have, when studied, proved to be surprisingly diverse. We tend to ascribe heroism to our soldiers when, against the odds, they sacrifice themselves for us, while we assume a glassy-eyed fanaticism on the part of those who go up against us. But close studies of suicide bombers suggest that they are generally not crazy, nor -- another popular explanation -- just acting out of abysmal poverty or economic desperation (though, as in the case of the sole surviving Mumbai suicide attacker put on trial in India recently, this seems to have been the motivation). "Not only do they generally not have economic problems, but most of the suicide bombers also do not have an emotional disturbance that prevents them from differentiating between reality and imagination," writes Anat Berko in her careful analysis of the topic, The Path to Paradise. Despite suggestions from Iraqi and U.S. officials that suicide bombers in Iraq have been coerced into participating in their missions, scholars have yet to record such cases.

 

Perhaps, however, this reflects a narrow understanding of coercion. After all, our soldiers are indoctrinated into a culture of heroic sacrifice just as are the suicide bombers of Hamas. The indoctrination doesn't always work: scores of U.S. soldiers go AWOL or join the peace movement just as some suicide bombers give up at the last minute. But the basic-training techniques of instilling the instinct to kill, the readiness to follow orders, and a willingness to sacrifice one's life are part of the warrior ethic everywhere.

 

Suicide missions are, then, a military technique that armies use when outmatched and that guerrilla movements use, especially in occupied countries, to achieve specific objectives. Those who volunteer for such missions, whether in Iraq today or on board the Intrepid in 1804, are usually placing a larger goal -- liberty, national self-determination, ethnic or religious survival -- above their own lives.

 

But wait: surely I'm not equating soldiers going on suicide missions against other soldiers with terrorists who blow up civilians in a public place. Indeed, these are two distinct categories. And yet much has happened in the history of modern warfare -- in which civilians have increasingly become the victims of combat -- to blur these distinctions.

 

Terror and Civilians

 

The conventional picture of today's suicide bomber is a young man or woman, usually of Arab extraction, who makes a video proclamation of faith, straps on a vest of high explosives, and detonates him or herself in a crowded pizzeria, bus, marketplace, mosque, or church. But we must expand this picture. The September 11th hijackers targeted high-profile locations, including a military target, the Pentagon. Hezbollah's suicidal truck driver destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, killing 241 U.S. soldiers. Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a female Tamil suicide bomber, assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

 

Suicide bombers, in other words, have targeted civilians, military installations, non-military sites of great significance, and political leaders. In suicide attacks, Hezbollah, Tamil Tiger, and Chechen suicide bombers have generally focused on military and police targets: 88%, 71%, and 61% of the time, respectively. Hamas, on the other hand, has largely targeted civilians (74% of the time). Sometimes, in response to public opinion, such movements will shift focus -- and targets. After a 1996 attack killed 91 civilians and created a serious image problem, the Tamil Tigers deliberately began chosing military, police, and government targets for their suicide attacks. "We don't go after kids in Pizza Hut," one Tiger leader told researcher Mia Bloom, referring to a Hamas attack on a Sbarro outlet in Jerusalem that killed 15 civilians in 2001.

We have been conditioned into thinking of suicide bombers as targeting civilians and so putting themselves beyond the established conventions of war. As it happens, however, the nature of war has changed in our time. In the twentieth century, armies began to target civilians as a way of destroying the will of the population, and so bringing down the leadership of the enemy country. Japanese atrocities in China in the 1930s, the Nazi air war against Britain in World War II, Allied fire bombings of German and Japanese cities, the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. carpet bombing in Cambodia and Laos, and the targeted assassinations of the Phoenix program during the Vietnam War, Russian depredations in Afghanistan and Chechnya, the tremendous civilian casualties during the Iraq War: all this has made the idea of conventional armies clashing in an area far from civilian life a quaint legacy of the past.

Terrorist attacks against civilians, particularly September 11th, prompted military historian Caleb Carr to back the Bush administration's declaration of a war against terror. "War can only be answered with war," he wrote in his best-selling The Lessons of Terror. "And it is incumbent on us to devise a style of war more imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than anything terrorists can contrive." This more imaginative, decisive, and humane style of war has, in fact, consisted of stepped-up aerial bombing, beefed-up Special Forces (to, in part, carry out targeted assassinations globally), and recently, the widespread use of unmanned aerial drones like the Predator and the Reaper, both in the American arsenal and in 24/7 use today over the Pakistani tribal borderlands. "Predators can become a modern army's answer to the suicide bomber," Carr wrote.

 

Carr's argument is revealing. As the U.S. military and Washington see it, the ideal use of Predator or Reaper drones, armed as they are with Hellfire missiles, is to pick off terrorist leaders; in other words, a mirror image of what that Tamil Tiger suicide bomber (who picked off the Indian prime minister) did somewhat more cost effectively. According to Carr, such a strategy with our robot planes is an effective and legitimate military tactic. In reality, though, such drone attacks regularly result in significant civilian casualties, usually referred to as "collateral damage." According to researcher Daniel Byman, the drones kill 10 civilians for every suspected militant. As Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com writes, "In Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country."

So, the dichotomy between a "just war," or even simply a war of any sort, and the unjust, brutal targeting of civilians by terrorists has long been blurring, thanks to the constant civilian casualties that now result from conventional war-fighting and the narrow military targets of many terrorist organizations.

 

Moral Relativism?

 

We have our suicide bombers -- we call them heroes. We have our culture of indoctrination -- we call it basic training. We kill civilians -- we call it collateral damage.

 

Is this, then, the moral relativism that so outrages conservatives? Of course not. I've been drawing these comparisons not to excuse the actions of suicide bombers, but to point out the hypocrisy of our black-and-white depictions of our noble efforts and their barbarous acts, of our worthy goals and their despicable ends. We -- the inhabitants of an archipelago of supposedly enlightened warfare -- have been indoctrinated to view the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a legitimate military target and September 11th as a heinous crime against humanity. We have been trained to see acts like the attack in Tripoli as American heroism and the U.S.S. Cole attack as rank barbarism. Explosive vests are a sign of extremism; Predator missiles, of advanced sensibility.

 

It would be far better if we opened our eyes when it came to our own world and looked at what we were actually doing. Yes, "they" sometimes have dismaying cults of sacrifice and martyrdom, but we do too. And who is to say that ending occupation is any less noble than making the world free for democracy? Will Smith, in I Am Legend, was willing to sacrifice himself to end the occupation of vampires. We should realize that our soldiers in the countries we now occupy may look no less menacing and unintelligible than those obviously malevolent, science-fiction creatures. And the presence of our occupying soldiers sometimes inspires similar, Will Smith-like acts of desperation and, dare I say it, courage.

 

The fact is: Were we to end our occupation policies, we would go a long way toward eliminating "their" suicide bombers. But when and how will we end our own cult of martyrdom?

 

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. His past essays, including those for Tomdispatch.com, can be read at his website. Kathryn Zickuhr contributed research assistance to this article. Copyright 2009 John Feffer

 

 

Western Occupation Jihad

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The fact is: Were we to end our occupation policies, we would go a long way toward eliminating "their" suicide bombers. But when and how will we end our own cult of martyrdom?

 

John Feffer

[Muriidi]

i'm surprised no one commented on this ..

 

it's officially science-fiction ! many works that were in the past considered academic are now just sci-fi inspiration for bad horror movies .

 

but don't most people know by now that a country called u.s.a. never existed ?

if you suspect the contrary in your ovservatory matrix .. require medical help !

 

i heard deep in the australian desert there's a tribe of natives , maybe one could sell them books about the history of countries that never existed .. but native australians are wise people

.. they know it's just a scary fairy-tale , shook their heads and went on with their life !

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U.S. Soldiers Punished For Not Attending Christian Concert

 

By Chris Rodda

 

August 20, 2010 "Talk to Action" -- For the past several years, two U.S. Army posts in Virginia, Fort Eustis and Fort Lee, have been putting on a series of what are called Commanding General's Spiritual Fitness Concerts. As I've written in a number of other posts, "spiritual fitness" is just the military's new term for promoting religion, particularly evangelical Christianity. And this concert series is no different.

 

On May 13, 2010, about eighty soldiers, stationed at Fort Eustis while attending a training course, were punished for opting out of attending one of these Christian concerts. The headliner at this concert was a Christian rock band called BarlowGirl, a band that describes itself as taking "an aggressive, almost warrior-like stance when it comes to spreading the gospel and serving God."

 

 

Any doubt that this was an evangelical Christian event was cleared up by the Army post's newspaper, the Fort Eustis Wheel, which ran an article after the concert that began:

 

"Following the Apostle Paul's message to the Ephesians in the Bible, Christian rock music's edgy, all-girl band BarlowGirl brought the armor of God to the warriors and families of Fort Eustis during another installment of the Commanding General's Spiritual Fitness Concert Series May 13 at Jacobs Theater."

 

The father of the three Barlow sisters who make up the band was also quoted in the article, saying, "We really believe that to be a Christian in today's world, you have to be a warrior, and we feel very blessed and privileged that God has given us the tool to deliver His message and arm His army."

 

A few days later, some of the soldiers punished for choosing not to attend this concert contacted the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). The following is from the account sent by one of those soldiers to MRFF, detailing what transpired that night.

 

"The week prior to the event the [unit name and NCO's name withheld] informed us of a Christian rock event that was about to take place on Thursday the 13th.

 

"On Thursday 13th at 1730 we were informed that instead of being dismissed for the day, the entire company (about 250 soldiers) would march as a whole to the event. Not only that, but to make sure that everyone is present we were prohibited from going back to the barracks (to eliminate the off chance that some might 'hide' in their rooms and not come back down).

 

"We were marched as a whole to chow and were instructed to reform outside the dining facility. A number of soldiers were disappointed and restless. Several of us were of different faith or belief. A couple were particularly offended (being of Muslim faith) and started considering to disobey the order.

 

"From the dining facility we were marched back to the company area. There was a rumor circulating that we may be given a choice later on to fall out or attend. Though it was only a rumor it was also a small hope enough to allow us to follow along a little longer before choosing to become disobedient. We were marched back to the company area. To our dismay there was still no sign of as having a choice.

 

"We started marching to the theater. At that point two Muslim soldiers fell out of formation on their own. Student leadership tried to convince them to fall back in and that a choice will be presented to us once we reach the theater.

 

"At the theater we were instructed to split in two groups; those that want to attend versus those that don't. At that point what crossed my mind is the fact that being given an option so late in the game implies that the leadership is attempting to make a point about its intention. The 'body language' was suggesting that 'we marched you here as a group to give you a clue that we really want you to attend (we tilt the table and expect you to roll in our direction), now we give you the choice to either satisfy us or disappoint us.' A number of soldiers seemed to notice these clues and sullenly volunteered for the concert in fear of possible consequences.

 

"Those of us that chose not to attend (about 80, or a little less that half) were marched back to the company area. At that point the NCO issued us a punishment. We were to be on lock-down in the company (not released from duty), could not go anywhere on post (no PX, no library, etc). We were to go to strictly to the barracks and contact maintenance. If we were caught sitting in our rooms, in our beds, or having/handling electronics (cell phones, laptops, games) and doing anything other than maintenance, we would further have our weekend passes revoked and continue barracks maintenance for the entirety of the weekend. At that point the implied message was clear in my mind 'we gave you a choice to either satisfy us or disappoint us. Since you chose to disappoint us you will now have your freedoms suspended and contact chores while the rest of your buddies are enjoying a concert.'

 

"At that evening, nine of us chose to pursue an EO complaint. I was surprised to find out that a couple of the most offended soldiers were actually Christian themselves (Catholic). One of them was grown as a child in Cuba and this incident enraged him particularly as it brought memories of oppression."

 

The account of another soldier who did not attend the concert, which relates the same sequence of events and punishment that occurred, also adds that some of the soldiers who did decide to attend only did so due to pressure from their superiors and fear of repercussions.

 

"At the theater is the first time our options were presented to us. And they were presented to us in a way that seemed harmless, we could either go to the show, or go to the barracks. But at that point, I felt pressured. As a person, I know that I can't be pressured into anything, I'm much stronger than that. But I also know that a lot of people aren't that strong, and that pressure was present. I could hear people saying, 'I don't know about going back to the barracks, that sounds suspicious, I'm going to go ahead and go to the show' and many things that sounded a lot like that. Now, like I said, I don't get pressured into things, but I also don't think that anybody should have to feel that kind of pressure. Making somebody feel that pressure is a violation of human rights, we are allowed to think what we want about religion and not have to feel pressured into doing things, and at that moment there was definitely pressure to go to that concert simply because people don't want to have their free time taken away."

 

The Commanding General's Spiritual Fitness Concert Series was the brainchild of Maj. Gen. James E. Chambers, who, according to an article on the Army.mil website, "was reborn as a Christian" at the age of sixteen. According to the article, Chambers held the first concert at Fort Lee within a month of becoming the commanding general of the Combined Arms Support Command and Fort Lee in June 2008. But he had already started the series at Fort Eustis, as the previous commanding general there. The concerts have continued at Fort Eustis under the new commanding general, as well as spreading to Fort Lee under Maj. Gen. Chambers. The concerts are also promoted to the airmen on Langley Air Force Base, which is now part of Joint Base Langley-Eustis.

 

In the Army.mil article, Maj. Gen. Chambers was quoted as saying, "The idea is not to be a proponent for any one religion. It's to have a mix of different performers with different religious backgrounds." But there has been no "mix of different performers with different religious backgrounds" at these concerts. Every one of them has had evangelical Christian performers, who typically not only perform their music but give their Christian testimony and read from the Bible in between songs.

 

Another problem with these concerts, besides the issues like soldiers being punished for choosing not to attend them, is that they are run by the commanders, and not the chaplains' offices. It is absolutely permissible for a chaplain's office to put on a Christian concert. It is not permissible for the command to put on a Christian concert, or any other religious event. Having a religious concert series that is actually called and promoted as a Commanding General's Concert Series is completely over the top.

 

And then there's the cost. These concerts aren't just small events with local Christian bands. We're talking about the top, nationally known, award-winning Christian artists, with headline acts costing anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000, and even many of the opening acts being in the $10,000 range.

 

The cost of these concerts led MRFF's research department to start looking at some of the DoD contracts for other "spiritual fitness" events and programs, and what we found was astounding. One contract, for example, awarded to an outside consulting firm to provide "spiritual fitness" services, was for $3.5 million.

 

MRFF was already aware that exorbitant amounts of DoD funding were going to the hiring of civilian religious employees by military installations, the expenses of religious (almost exclusively evangelical Christian) programs, and extravagant religious facilities, but the extent of this spending goes far beyond what we had initially thought it amounted to. Therefore, MRFF has decided to launch an investigation into exactly how much the military is spending on promoting religion.

 

Do the recently announced plans of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to trim defense spending include any trimming of the military's outrageous spending on the promoting of religion and evangelizing of our troops? This alone could save the DoD untold millions every year, and go a long way towards upholding our Constitution at the same time.

 

editor - Talk To Action contributor Chris Rodda is Head Researcher for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a 501©(3) nonprofit that combats illegal and unconstitutional religious coercion in the United States military. Rodda is also author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History. MRFF was founded by Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein, an Air Force Academy Honor Graduate who served in the first Reagan Administration. MRFF's work was the subject of a May 2009 Harper's Magazine story by journalist Jeff Sharlet, Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military. For more reading on this subject, see Top Ten Ways to Convince the Muslims We're On a Crusade and this list of other additional Talk To Action stories concerning MRFF research

 

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Yemen and Somalia: Terrorism, Shadow Networks and the Limitations of State-building

 

Briefing Paper

 

Sally Healy and Ginny Hill, October 2010

 

 

* Yemen and Somalia face parallel challenges: insurgencies, terrorism, economic hardship, and ineffective governments that are perceived to lack legitimacy.

 

* Western engagement in Yemen and Somalia is based on a state-building framework involving diplomacy, development and defence. Yet the priority attached to security-sector interventions undermines the balance of political and economic actions needed for this approach to succeed.

 

* There is a growing tendency among the Western policy community to amalgamate the risk emanating from Yemen and Somalia, on the basis that al-Qaeda affiliates in both countries are recruiting Western citizens, and have the potential to work more closely together.

 

* Both AQAP and al-Shabaab have developed successful narratives around injustice that are not being addressed by existing Western interventions.

 

* On the contrary, Western policies are contributing to a sense among some Yemenis and Somalis of being 'under attack' and are drawing them towards radicalization and militancy.

 

* The threat of radicalization extends throughout the far-flung diasporas of Somalia and Yemen, defying efforts at containment within the two countries and requiring new thinking about stemming the appeal of radicalism at source.

 

* Conventional counter-terrorism and counter-piracy strategies are hindered by the existence of multi-million-dollar shadow business networks spanning the Gulf of Aden.

 

Source

[Nur]

Bring me the head of Silvino Herrera

"Us versus them" and other "modern" myths of war and civilization

 

By Daniel Patrick Welch

 

Against the background of the leaking of the USA’s secret Iraq war crimes files by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, Daniel Patrick Welch peers beneath the West's self-proclaimed cultural and moral superiority in the face of atrocities against innocent people all over the world.

 

"When we peel away all the layers of burning flesh, all the carefully constructed fiction of human progress and benefits of science and technology, we must face a reality perhaps even more grim. There simply is no 'us versus them'. The side claiming to represent progress has done more and done worse, using as low-tech and brutal methods as any on either side of the technological and cultural divide." (Daniel Patrick Welch)

 

October 30, 2010 "Redress" - -They behead – we do it with smart bombs. There is, of course, an ugly truth to this recently minted axiom: the horror of state terrorism is that the overwhelming machinery of death in the hands of all-powerful governments far outweighs individual atrocities by madmen, small groups and non-state entities. While, with their beheadings and murders of innocents, the heathen thugs and killers may indeed be barbarians, it is almost impossible to accomplish with their amateur methods the slaughter of half a million children, as did the Anglo-American/UN sanctions in Iraq.

 

This is the same reasoning that puts the lie to the sanitized concept of war and destruction which makes the self-satisfied "West" so smug and confident of its moral superiority. There is an underlying, and often overt, racism which allows so-called "modern" warmakers and their electorates to tolerate the huge disparities in casualties that have come to define modern conflict. In virtually every case, the brutal repression of movements that strive for greater human freedom, workers' rights and a life worth living is ignored, while the "atrocities" of those trying to resist are seen as backward and evidence of cultural and moral inferiority.

 

However, one problem is not just that the disparity in terror torpedoes the moral superiority argument. It is true that the 20th century was indeed a most horrific one, unbeknownst to most lay observers: at its dawn, 90 per cent of war dead were combatants and 10 per cent non-combatants. By its end, the ratio was reversed, making it the most deadly and, arguably, least "advanced" century in human history. True also, the machinery of war, with its amoral measurements in "kilomorts", its chemistry of napalm designed to stick to human skin and burn, its phosphorous and gas, its cluster munitions – not to mention the almost surreal evil of neutron bomb technology, which are meant to kill people while leaving buildings intact – shows that the actual brutality of burning flesh and exploding body parts is in no way less barbaric than other methods. The United States gets no props from the rest of the "civilized" world for instituting the pain-free technology of lethal injection to a practice most governments consider a barbarous anachronism.

 

When we peel away all the layers of burning flesh, all the carefully-constructed fiction of human progress and benefits of science and technology, we must face a reality perhaps even more grim. It is not merely us standing cynically by, wringing our hands while they hack each other to death with machetes, as when almost a million Tutsis died in Rwanda. There simply is no "us versus them". The side claiming to represent progress, the "march of history" and the fulfilment of the human desire for freedom and self-rule, has done more and done worse, using as low-tech and brutal methods as any on either side of the technological and cultural divide. There is a famous photo, not of Nick Berg, not of John the Baptist, but of Silvino, one of the lieutenants in Augusto Sandino's resistance army. Rather, it is a photo of Sr Herrera's head held triumphantly aloft by a US Marine, a conquering hero of the few and the proud. It turns out we behead, too.

US Marine Lt Remmington holding Silvino Herrera's head, 1930US Marine Lt Remmington holding Silvino Herrera's head, 1930

 

When I was in Nicaragua, I heard testimony of the victims of Somoza's National Guard, women with their breasts cut off, left alive and maimed on purpose to terrorize their families. Resistance fighters and their supporters and trade unionists killed with their genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths. Victims forced at gunpoint to swallow a button on a string while laughing guardsmen kept trying to pull it up. Like all the henchmen throughout Latin America, these murderers, nun-rapists, "deplaners" (who simply pushed terror victims out of a moving plane to their unacknowledged deaths), clown-killers and assorted scum received training and backing from the CIA, the Pentagon and the dreaded School of the Americas. As Franklin D. Roosevelt, hero of the US mainstream left, once bragged: "Somoza may be a son of a *****, but he's our son of a-*****." It turns out we do all that other stuff, too.

 

Likewise, I had mostly considered the shot of triumphant soldiers standing atop a pile of bones of the conquered dead to be mainly a cartoon representation. Wrong again – the only such true photo I have ever seen was of US soldiers in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, when over a half million Filipinos were slaughtered in the successful attempt to secure the islands for the American empire. The scene is repeated ad nauseum in US history, in murderous rampages across our own continent from sea to shining sea, through Central America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Despite George Bush's audacity and isolation, there is absolutely nothing new about Iraq. Conquest, pacification, occupation and the transfer of "sovereignty" to a puppet government is the textbook modus operandi. The only phase yet to be completed is the few decades in which the world is supposed to forget the origins of the dictatorship, after which US forces return to suppress rebellion or resistance movements and install democracy, as if the cycle had no beginning.

 

In this context, it is almost unbearable to hear the shallow, mind-deadening "debate" between Democrats and Republicans about "how to handle" Iraq, not to mention the infrastructure of organized theft that transfers trillions of dollars from South to North, from workers to capital, from poor to rich, from brown to white. To my mind, there are three crises – allowing for some consolidation and overlap – which surpass all else in their urgency today. They can be summarized as empire (by which we include Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Venezuela, Colombia and the rest), WalMart and the crushing of labour, with its attendant rape of the national treasury and the healthcare system, and the prison state, whereby incarceration is abetting and supplanting vote suppression, the Klan and slavery as the new racist ideology.

 

These are, of course, big problems. They are, however, exploding problems, and ones which threaten the very existence of humankind (combined with the rapacious consumerism which holds the lot together). Just the kind of all-encompassing issues one might foolishly expect a national election campaign to address. This huge history, soaked with blood and death for the benefit of profit and oligarchy, is completely unconcerned with the party hacks nibbling at its corners, unthreatened by the sorry excuse for "ideology" and "values" espoused by the political and economic system it nurtured and generated. Self-delusional, feel-good bromides about the "greatness of America" and a wilful suppression and misrepresentation of our history will seal the deal, and we will plummet headlong into the looming environmental catastrophe that is waiting to engulf us all.

 

As a young pupil celebrating America's bicentennial, I remember being paraded in a choral production called "Our Country 'tis of thee". One lyric still sticks in my mind and in my craw, sung by our chorus of mind-controlled, ignorant, chirpy sixth graders:

 

There's a peaceful sky in my backyard


Far away from fear and doubt


But the whole wide world is my hometown


And I've gotta help my neighbour out



There's a peaceful sky in my backyard


Far away from a far off land


But the whole wide world is my hometown


When freedom needs a helping hand

 

Thinking about it today still makes my skin crawl with embarrassment and self-loathing, even though I was only 11 years old. Sort of like a post-traumatic lapse for a former cult member. Lack of self-doubt combined with ignorance of one's history is perhaps the most dangerous combination known to humankind. Torture at Abu Ghraib is not the tip of the iceberg; it is simply the latest link in the chain. Facing that history head on, with the disillusionment, fear and doubt that rationality and honesty implies, is the sobering task of those who would resist the current onslaught. It is the first step in a long, long road to sanity, and it is not a comfortable one. As Rosa Luxembourg famously remarked, "it will always be the most revolutionary act to say the truth out loud".

Translations of this article are available in German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish.

 

© Daniel Patrick Welch. Reprint permission granted with credit and link to danielpwelch.com.