‘War against terror’ conceals record of deceit, corruption, incompetence

When governments wage “wars” against nouns, like drugs and war, rather than against nations, they confront an obvious problem. Neither drugs nor terrorism will surrender. How then will the Bush Administration convince the public that it is “winning” these “wars”?
Creative script writing? Instead of hiring top lawyers to prosecute criminals, the Justice Department may have contracted spin-meisters to scare the public – or at least engage a sector of it in sardonic laughter. In other words, the 9/11 (tragedy) has evolved into a preposterous undercover operation (farce).
Last week, the White House accused the New York Times of committing journalistic treason by publishing the story on how the Bush Administration secretly tracked U.S. bank accounts, as if cunning terrorists wouldn’t have thought of this possibility. Even more bizarre, the Justice Department staged a Miami sting, designed to show that Homeland Security stands between us and fanatical terrorists operating under our noses, and to frighten the TV watching masses.
Attorney General Alberto “Tap ‘em and torture ‘em” Gonzalez announced that his raid nailed seven black men -- five U.S. citizens, one legal Haitian and one Haitian apparently illegally in the United States. They face life in prison if convicted of plotting to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and committing other violent acts against the United States – even though an agent provocateur provided the ideas and offered the weapons to the group.
To suck the gullible into a preposterous melodrama, the Justice Department used the eager media, which serve as the equivalent of the 19th Century shills who helped convince rubes to buy miracle cures for snake bite and syphilis from traveling hucksters. Indeed, modern advertising continues to lure suckers into buying products to stop the aging process, if not death itself.
Gonzalez, ringmaster for the new act in the terrorism circus, announced this publicity center piece in Bush’s terrorism war. The newly arrested septet does, however, provide the public with a clearer notion of the “t” word – at least in Bush’s dictionary: “terrorist equals inarticulate and gullible black Muslim or Christian.”
A lawyer would charge “entrapment” and point to an FBI provocateur luring seven vulnerable men into a trap. He convinced the group to swear an oath to Al Qaeda -- on camera. Imagine people who would believe an Al Qaeda rep doing a talent search in an Afro American neighborhood in Miami! What’s in it for the FBI?
Well, Bureau officials still carry their poor pre 9/11 performance burden. They failed to heed Agents’ memos that might have stopped the actual airplane hijackers before they struck. Instead of protecting the public, they targeted, for publicity’s sake, men who possessed neither money nor explosives -- nor ability to use them.
Even deputy FBI director John Pistole admitted the “plans to attack the Sears Tower were aspirational rather than operational.” Hey, like thousands of other men, I “aspired” for decades to become a major league shortstop! Like the arrested men, I lacked a few needed components for success.
Albeit in the “aspiration stage,” Pistole insisted the seven illustrated “the threat posed by small groups without connections to international terror networks.” He warned that “these are members of a homegrown terrorist cell. Their goal was simple: to accomplish attacks against America.” Yes, Pistole admitted, the group had no real connection to Al Qaeda, but the FBI sting man convinced them to take a televised oath -- although none of them knew to whom they were pledging “eternal loyalty.”
The FBI plant convinced the leader of these “aspirational” Jihadists, Narseal Batiste, that he represented Al Qaeda and could provide Batiste with “boots, uniforms, machine guns, radios and vehicles.” The gullible Batiste even asked for bulletproof vests and $50,000.
To plant explosives in the Sears Tower why would he need most of these items? The FBI claimed that the seven had even given their boot sizes to the Bureau operative. When the synchronized raids took place at a Miami warehouse and at other places where the men resided, the raiders found no weapons, bombs – or material to make them.
Yet, Gonzalez insisted the Bureau had saved the country, it had “identified and disrupted a terrorist plot before any damage could be done.” He claimed that “these individuals wished to wage a full ground war against the United States.” One suspect supposedly told the FBI infiltrator that he wanted to “kill all the devils we can.”
Handcuffed and shackled, the men who appeared in court on June 25, did not coincide with the “danger” portrait. Not Arabs, Muslims, nor men with serious prison records! The mother of one arrested man, a construction worker, said she got his weekly paycheck and that he knew nothing of Islam and bore no grudge against his country. A sister of one man said he couldn’t spell “Al Qaeda.”
Why, one would ask, did the media give such prominence to such a poorly scripted police comedy? Or does the Homeland Security gang feel so insecure that they must manufacture a U.S. version of “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight?”
Since the Bureau over-orchestrated the media publicity on the danger of the men whom they had “stung,” Gonzales later contradicted his preliminary assessment of the “homegrown terrorism cell” by saying they posed “no immediate threat.”
Having shown their alertness at finding the non-plotters, the Homeland Security police studiously ignore real conspirators. In Miami, anti-Castro activists, even as senior citizens, pursue their youthful projects: to assassinate Fidel Castro and launch an invasion of Cuba. Since 1959, the U.S. government has aided and encouraged them to collect piles of guns and bombs. Over three decades, the CIA has also provided Castro’s violent enemies with sophisticated technology, like poison in his cigars and wetsuits in the 1960s and a pistol in a TV camera designed to shoot the Cuban leader at a press conference in Chile in 1971.
When Jimmy Carter briefly withdrew support for such efforts, some Castro-haters blew up a post office and attacked other U.S. government installations. Reagan however, resumed encouragement of the violent anti-Castro groups. They have continued to conspire and occasionally boast about plotting assassination and bombings of Cuba. Luis Posada Carriles, for example, boasted to New York Times reporters Anne Bardach and Larry Rohter that he had plotted the bombing of a Cuban hotel, by describing them “as acts of war intended to cripple a totalitarian regime by depriving it of foreign tourism and investment.” One tourist died. “Posada described the Italian tourist’s death as a freak accident, but he declared that he had a clear conscience, saying, ‘I sleep like a baby.’”
In 1976, an FBI cable identified Posada as responsible for successfully plotting to blow up a Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados. Seventy-three passengers and crew members died. Posada, now 77 and in prison for violating immigration rules, has yet to be charged with terrorism. More recently, other geriatric anti-Fidelistas claimed that the U.S. government encouraged them to proceed with violent plots.
In April, outside of Los Angeles, Robert Ferro got busted by local authorities for possessing some 1,500 weapons, including explosives and rocket launchers. Ferro claimed the government knew about the weapons and had encouraged him to use them to train an army to invade Cuba. Authorities had arrested Ferro in 1992 in Pomona, California, where he claimed to be training a group of Mexicans to invade Cuba and again in 1995 in Miami, with a large load of weapons. Inexplicably, Ferro faced no major charges and even got his weapons back.
In Miami, Jose Antonio Llama stated that serious assassination plotting had taken place with U.S. government knowledge. Authorities had arrested Llama and four other anti-Castro exiles in Puerto Rico in 1997 on charges of conspiracy to assassinate Castro, who was preparing to attend an Ibero-American Summit on Margarita Island, Venezuela. The men told a U.S. Customs officer that U.S. officials had given them the go ahead to kill Castro.
“We were impatient with the survival of Castro’s regime after the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp,” said Llama. He claimed to have put his own money into a plot in the early 1990s. “We wanted to accelerate the democratization of Cuba using any possible means to achieve it.” A jury acquitted them after a federal judge threw out one of the defendants’ self-incriminating statements. Indeed, Miami juries have consistently refused to convict violent anti-Castro plotters.
Serious terrorism merits public concern and dialogue. Thousands of Cubans died as a result of U.S.-backed terrorist attacks from the early 1960s on. Similarly, hundreds of real assassination plots against Castro took place – none successful of course. In the Middle East and other places, lots of actual plots are underway. Indeed, each day in Iraq, bombs explode and people die.
When the Department of Justice stages stings that no self respecting Hollywood producer would ever use in a film, it indicates a level of desperation inside the government. How long can the Bush Administration use the “war against terror” to conceal a record of deceit, corruption and incompetence?