Justin Raimondo

"[The] central point of all the pro-FBI, pro-government, anti-"extremist" propaganda blaring from MSNBC and other news outlets is to convince us that speech leads to violence."

Every government lives in fear of its own citizens. The fear waxes and wanes, as the tides of public opinion and economic ups and downs crest and wash over the political landscape. In good times, the fear is somewhat contained: discontent, albeit ever-present, is masked by prosperity and contained; in bad times, the fear overflows into the everyday life of the citizenry, which is viewed with the utmost suspicion by the ruling elite. In Washington, they’re wondering: how long will they put up with it?

Today, the answer to that question is: not much longer – and the fear is manifest in the latest campaign against "extremism," which is being touted by the "mainstream" media, the authorities, and the professional "extremist"-hunters who work in tandem with both. To give you the flavor of the witch-hunting atmosphere being whipped up by the media-FBI complex, get a load of Rachel Maddow, the "liberal" MSNBC commentator, last Thursday night.

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Justin Raimondo

"His strongest virtue is that he’s a thug" says neocon (and ex-CIA analyst) Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Obama’s CIA apparently agrees.

The perpetual reinvention of reality proceeds apace, as neocons who once gave expression to the Bush administration’s most extreme rhetoric now pose as "moderates," – and these same neocons insist the Iraq war was a great success after all. They point to the recent Iraqi elections as proof of their redemption – even as their former pet, Ahmed Chalabi, rises from the political graveyard to become Iran’s chief spokesman and agent. It’s one of the richest, and perhaps most revealing, of the many ironies generated by the invasion of Iraq that the Che Guevara of the neocons has morphed into the handmaiden of the mullahs.

As tempting as it might be to elaborate on this theme, it would be a diversion from what is really the main news coming out of the election, and that is the political reincarnation of Iyad "the Executioner" Allawi. A former top Ba’athist official who fled in the early seventies, he didn’t resign from the party until 1975. He claims to have quit due to the increasing dominance of Saddam Hussein, but Hussein didn’t take complete power until President Al-Bakr resigned in 1979.

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Justin Raimondo

Manufacturing the facade that Al-Qaeda is in your backyard:
Toledo Terrorists and Government Entrapment -It is no surprise that
the indictment names an informant called "The Trainer," who has
U.S. military background in security, and bodyguard training. (PP)

We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. That, you’ll recall, was the message pounded home in the early days of the Long War – essentially the same tired old cold war line trotted out by the neocons and revamped for the age of terrorism. If we don’t stop them in Central America, the (Sandinistas, Cubans, Salvadoran rebels) will be in Texas soon enough.

As it turned out, the Sandinistas never made it to Baja California, but an alarming development – or perhaps I should say alarmist – seemingly indicates al-Qaeda may have made inroads in the US. In the past few weeks we’ve witnessed the advent of a truly weird phenomenon: al Qaeda-in-America. Detailing the background of an American woman arrested in Ireland and linked to an alleged murder plot, the Press Association reports:

"Ms Paulin-Ramirez’s arrest is one of four developments in the past week that involved Americans in alleged terror plots abroad. Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn appeared in a video, Sharif Mobley of New Jersey tried to escape his detainment in Yemen, and Colleen LaRose, who allegedly went by the name Jihad Jane to recruit others online to kill Vilks, was named in a federal terror indictment"

As regular readers of this column know, Gadahn was in the news also due to his alleged arrest in Pakistan last week. Initial reports, however, proved inaccurate, and the confusion was due at least in part to the fact that the individual arrested by Pakistani police is also an American, like Gadahn, with a similar name, and said to be from Pennsylvania. So let’s add the previously unknown Abu Yahya Mujahdeen al-Adam to the list: not counting Major Malik Hasan, the Ft. Hood shooter, that makes five.

So, what happened to "we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here"?

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Justin Raimondo

After 92 days of waiting for the Word from on high, the nation received its marching orders from our commander-in-chief – and it was a flop of major proportions. As his West Point audience looked on disdainfully – applauding only twice, and then tepidly – President Obama tried to make the case that his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is really just a prelude to withdrawal. But is it?

"It is important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place. We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. … As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda … Al Qaeda’s base of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban – a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war, and after the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere."

Those who were hoping for some real change in our rhetoric, if not our foreign policy, with Obama in the White House are no doubt sorely disappointed right now, because George W. Bush could just as easily have spoken these very same words – and, indeed, he did utter endless variations on this identical theme when justifying our actions in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the truth of the matter is that there are barely one-hundred al-Qaeda fighters in the whole of Afghanistan – so what are we doing there?

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08/18/09 Eric Margolis The US Denounces Iran While running fake elections in Afghanistan
08/18/09 Chris Floyd The Gadarene Gambit: Surging Over the Cliff in Afghanistan
08/20/09 Pepe Escobar The Afghan pipe dream
08/28/09 Patrick Martin Washington’s double standard: The elections in Iran and Afghanistan
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10/22/09 Eric S. Margolis Flames From Afghanistan Ignite Pakistan
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11/04/09 Malalai Joya Speech of Malalai Joya: No nation can liberate another
11/05/09 Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Why the UN is so disturbed at the Murder of the Western Nationals?
11/05/09 William Bowles The nerve of these guys! Karzai 'wins' anyway
11/06/09 William Bowles Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires or just a graveyard with a pipeline running through it?
11/06/09 Gwynne Dyer Last Exit From Afghanistan
11/12/09 Christopher King The Afghanistan war on Remembrance Sunday
11/17/09 Pepe Escobar UNDER THE AFPAK VOLCANO: Welcome to Pashtunistan
11/23/09 Olivia Ward 'Liberation was just a big lie'
11/24/09 Eric S. Margolis The Pot Calls The Kettle Black
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12/03/09 Stephen Lendman Obamathink on Afghanistan: Escalate to Exit
12/03/09 Justin Raimondo Obama’s War Speech: An Unconvincing Flop
12/11/09 William Blum The Anti-Empire Report -Yeswecanistan
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01/02/10 Peter Dale Scott Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War
01/08/10 What Really Happened Afghan My Lai Massacre
01/20/10 Jeremy Scahill Blackwater Wants to Surge its Armed Force in Afghanistan
01/21/10 Jeffrey Kaye Afghanistan: Women Dying and Torture Run Amuck
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02/28/10 Gwynne Dyer Afghanistan guerrilla war will have a predictable result
02/02/10 Anand Gopal Terror comes at night in Afghanistan
02/03/10 Mehdi Hasan Malalai Joya Intervieved by Mehdi Hasan
02/03/10 Nick Turse Drone surge: Today, tomorrow and 2047
02/15/10 Johann Hari Obama's secret prisons in Afghanistan endanger us all
02/15/10 Chris Floyd The Last Station: Surging Into the Savage Past in Afghanistan
02/17/10 Chris Floyd All Systems Go: No Disfunction in Profitable Afghan Enterprise
02/17/10 Chris Floyd Collateral Accumulation: Passing on the Abiding Wisdom of Empire
02/20/10 David Lindorff Battle for Marjah: The US has Already Lost
02/21/10 Christopher King Dutch government falls over Afghanistan
02/24/10 Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Marjah Operations are an Exemplary Lesson for the Invaders
02/24/10 Chris Floyd Many Thousand Gone
02/28/10 Gwynne Dyer Afghanistan guerrilla war will have a predictable result
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03/07/10 James Lucas Destroying Afghanistan
03/09/10 Gareth Porter Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War
03/12/10 Chris Floyd Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion
03/16/10 David Lindorff This Time It's Pregnant Women: Another US Atrocity in the Bush-Obama War in Afghanistan
03/20/10 Chris Floyd Night Riders: Afghan Atrocity and American Values
03/27/10 Chris Floyd An Unaccustomed Truth: American Commander Admits Afghan Atrocities
03/30/10 Rethink Afghanistan NATO Tries to Silence a Truth-Teller in Afghanistan After Killing Pregnant Women
03/30/10 Bill Van Auken Obama’s visit underscores US crisis in Afghanistan
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04/01/10 Richard North "We will not prevail in Afghanistan"
04/03/10 Victor Korgun The Afghan dilemma
04/06/10 Stephen Lendman US-Committed Atrocities in Afghanistan
04/06/10 Tom Eley US Special Forces covered up massacre of Afghans
04/06/10 Stephen Lendman US-Committed Atrocities in Afghanistan
04/14/10 Marc W. Herold Obama’s Unspoken Trade-Off: Dead US/NATO Occupation Troops versus Dead Afghan Civilians?
04/16/10 The Anti Press Special Forces Death Squads in Afghanistan
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