The
Politics Of The Latest
Terror Scare
By Barry Grey
15 August 2006
World
Socialist Web
Five
days after UK authorities arrested 24 British-born Muslims and announced
that they and their American counterparts had thwarted a plot to blow
up trans-Atlantic flights from London to the US, neither the British
nor the American government has produced any facts to substantiate their
dire claims.
No details of the supposed
plot have been provided, and no hard evidence that would justify the
arrest of so many people or the imposition of chilling security measures
that had wreaked havoc at airports in the US and Britain.
In the meantime, commercial
flights are being turned around in mid-flight, and wild claims of new
plots are hitting the newsstands. The latest was the arrest of three
Palestinian-Americans who were hauled into jail in Michigan after they
purchased some 80 cell phones from a Wal-Mart store. Local police discovered
that one of them had a digital camera with an image of the Mackinac
Bridge, which connects Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas.
This was sufficient to charge them with conspiring, using cell phones
as detonators, to attack the bridge.
This implausible “plot”
was punctured on Monday when the FBI issued a statement that none of
the three were connected to any known terrorist groups, that buying
cell phones was not a crime, and that the Mackinac Bridge was in no
danger. Family members explained that the three bought and sold cell
phones to make a living. The incident was, however, indicative of the
atmosphere of hysteria that is being encouraged by the Bush administration.
(As of this writing, moreover, the three suspects remain in jail).
Unless and until hard facts
are presented, the entire airline terror plot must be viewed with the
gravest suspicion.
On NBC TV’s “Today”
program Monday morning, Lisa Myers, reporting from London, said British
authorities were complaining that they had less evidence than they wanted
against the alleged plotters because the Bush administration insisted
that the timing of the arrests be brought forward by a week. The British,
according to Myers, had planned to wait until the supposed conspirators
carried out a “dry run” of their plot.
That British officials are
privately expressing concerns about a lack of evidence raises serious
questions as to whether there are clear and convincing facts that those
arrested had anything to do with the alleged plot, or that such a conspiracy
existed.
Myers’ revelation reinforces
previous reports that the British government had objected to claims
by US officials that the alleged plot was linked to Al Qaeda. These
developments suggest that far from thwarting a nefarious plot on the
eve of its implementation, the British government came under pressure
from Washington to participate in a massive provocation, and that once
more it knuckled under to US demands.
The lack of facts has not
prevented the mainstream media, especially in the US, from uncritically
accepting the official claims and embellishing them with commentaries
by “terrorist experts” about Al Qaeda connections, home-grown
terrorist cells and similar hypotheses, all of which are calculated
to create a climate of fear and intimidation.
Nevertheless, buried in the
reams of newspaper articles and hours of television commentary are bits
and pieces of information that cast further doubt on the substantiality
of the official claims. Thus Monday’s USA Today, in an article
headlined “Fearing Wider US Plot, Investigators Raced Clock,”
noted the following: “There was also no immediate evidence that
any of the suspects had purchased tickets for future flights, although
British authorities have indicated some of the suspects had allegedly
reviewed flight schedules and were honing in on specific flights.”
Yet British and American
officials stated at the time of the arrests last week that the airline
attack was “imminent.”
To make the entire affair
more suspect, the NBC news program Monday evening reported that British
authorities had discovered “new evidence” that led them
to alter their approach to their ongoing investigation. What was this
“new evidence?” And how could it significantly alter an
investigation that had supposedly thwarted an imminent attack? These
questions were not even raised.
Despite the lack of factual
substantiation, official threat levels have been raised and so-called
security measures have been introduced that have created chaos in the
air transport system and subjected the American and British people to
police-military methods that violate their privacy and infringe on their
democratic rights.
Twenty-three British citizens
remain in jail, under conditions, according to their lawyers, that make
a mockery of due process and democratic rights. They have been denied
contact with family members, have had virtually no contact with legal
counsel, and are being subjected to abusive treatment, including confinement
in freezing cells. They have been charged with no crimes, and, under
recently passed British anti-terror laws, can be held without charge
for up to 28 days.
The names and photos of most
of the prisoners have been splashed across newspapers and their assets
have been seized by the British Treasury, proving that the presumption
of innocence is a dead letter in both Britain and the US.
These are the type of conditions
that police agencies employ to terrorize suspects and extract damaging
statements or confessions that are then cited to “prove”
state allegations and prosecute defendants.
One thing is clear: the supposed
plot has been seized on for transparently political purposes of a deeply
reactionary character.
On Monday, British Home Minister
John Reid announced that the official threat level in Britain had been
lowered from “critical” to “severe,” even as
he suggested that there were many terrorist cells operating in Britain
and revived the Labour government’s call for an extension of preventive
detention to 90 days.
The day before, the US homeland
security secretary, Michael Chertoff, made the rounds of Sunday talk
shows and called for changes in US laws to make government spying even
more pervasive and allow for preventive detention along British lines.
Why was the Bush administration
so insistent that the alleged plot be exposed last Thursday? The answer
has nothing to do with security considerations. It has, rather, to do
with the machinations of the clique of political gangsters—Dick
Cheney, Karl Rove, among others—who run the US government.
With their favorite Democrat,
the rabidly pro-war senator and former vice presidential candidate,
Joseph Lieberman, losing the Democratic primary in Connecticut to a
political upstart running as an opponent of the Iraq war, Ned Lamont,
it was urgent that this expression of mass antiwar and anti-Bush sentiment
be shoved off the front pages and supplanted by a new round of fear-mongering
and hysteria.
Likewise the revelations
of US war crimes in Iraq and the torture of US prisoners at Guantánamo.
Even as Cheney was in discussions
with the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair over the impending
terror scare, he held a rare press briefing to denounce the vote for
Lamont as a boon to Al Qaeda. This bit of witch-hunting was then taken
up by Lieberman himself, who slandered opposition to the Iraq war and
to himself as tantamount to support for terrorism.
There undeniably is a conspiracy.
It is a plot to use terrorist threats, real or imagined, to terrorize
the American people, intimidate them, disorient them, and accustom them
to accept the militarization of every aspect of their lives and the
destruction of their democratic rights. The center of this conspiracy
is the American government itself.
This is to be, in so far
as Cheney and company have a say in the matter, the atmosphere in which
the November elections are held.
What is the political context
in which this latest terror scare takes place? Iraq has descended into
civil war under the jackboot of American military occupation, Afghanistan
is spiraling out of control, the US-Israeli war in Lebanon has ended
in political failure, new opinion polls show Bush’s approval ratings
once against sinking to record levels and antiwar sentiment rising to
new heights.
An article in Monday’s
Washington Post noted that Republican incumbents in the Northeast fear
they could be wiped out in the November elections as a result of popular
hatred for Bush and the war.
The answer of the Cheney-Rove
conspirators is to engineer a new wave of panic and hysteria in an attempt
to once again stampede voters behind Bush’s “war on terrorism.”
They did the same in 2004, when in the run-up to the election the government
suddenly announced a plot to attack major financial institutions in
New York, Washington and Newark, New Jersey—a plot that came to
nothing. And there was, at a convenient point in the election calendar,
the sudden reemergence of Osama bin Laden with a taped message reminding
the American people that he was determined to wipe them out.
The fascist-minded denizens
of American’s secret government rely on the cowardice and complicity
of the Democratic Party and the services of an utterly servile and corrupt
media, which is itself heavily populated by outright agents of US intelligence
agencies. Not a single mainstream newspaper or media outlet has challenged
the claims of the government regarding the alleged airline terror plot.
What about the 24th alleged
conspirator, who was quietly released by the British authorities from
jail last week? Who is he? Why was he released? Was he perhaps the MI5
intelligence agent who reportedly infiltrated the group of alleged plotters?
These questions are not even asked, let alone answered.
Why does the media take the
government leaders in the US and Britain at their word? They all dragged
their people into a war on the basis of lies. Bush stood before Congress,
the Supreme Court and the American people in his 2003 State of the Union
Address and lied about Iraq’s supposed attempt to buy uranium
from Niger. The US secretary of state went before the United Nations
and delivered an extended brief for war that was packed with lies. Cheney
is a serial prevaricator.
As for Tony Blair, he not
only lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he secretly sanctioned
a shoot-to-kill policy that resulted in the police murder of an innocent
worker, Jean Charles de Menezes, in the aftermath of last year’s
London train bombings.
The most important lesson
that must be drawn from the current terror scare is just how far advanced
the police state conspiracies are in the United States, and just how
criminal are the methods of those who run the country.