BY CHRIS FLOYD
MOSCOW I stand foursquare with Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense, when he warns that there will be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilisation at large. We know, as does Rumsfeld, that this statement is an incontrovertible fact, a matter of scientific certainty.
And how can we and Rumsfeld be so sure that there will be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large? Because these attacks will be instigated at the order of Rumsfeld himself.
This astonishing admission was buried deep in a story which was itself submerged by mounds of gray newsprint and glossy underwear ads in the October 27 Los Angeles Times. There in an article by military analyst William Arkin, detailing the vast expansion of the secret armies being massed by the former Nixon bureaucrat now lording it over the Pentagon came the revelation of Rumsfeld's plan to create "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that will "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception".
According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organisation the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) will carry out secret missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to "counterattack" by US forces.
In other words and let's say this plainly, clearly and soberly, so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld's plan the US government is planning to use "cover and deception" and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people.
Let's say it again: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George Bush and the other members of the unelected regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people your family, your friends, your lovers, you in order to further their geopolitical ambitions.
For P2OG is not designed solely to flush out terrorists and bring them to justice a laudable goal in itself, although the Rumsfeld way of combating terrorism by causing it is pure moral lunacy. (Or should we use the regime's own preferred terminology and just call it "evil"?)
No, it seems the P2s have bigger fish to fry. Once they have sparked terrorists into action by killing their family members? Luring them with loot? Fuelling them with drugs? Plying them with jihad propaganda? Messing with their mamas? Or with agents provocateurs, perhaps, who infiltrate groups then plan and direct the attacks themselves? they can then take measures against the "states/sub-state actors accountable" for "harboring" the Rumsfeld-roused gangs. What kind of measures exactly? Well, the classified Pentagon program puts it this way: "Their sovereignty will be at risk."
The P2s will thus come in handy whenever the regime hankers to add a little oil-laden real estate or a new military base to the Empire's burgeoning portfolio. Just find a nest of violent malcontents, stir 'em with a stick, and presto: instant "justification" for whatever level of intervention/conquest/rapine you might desire. And what if the territory you fancy doesn't actually harbour any convenient marauders to use for fun and profit? Well, surely a God-like "super-Intelligence Support Activity" is capable of creation ex nihilo, yes?
The Rumsfeld-Bush plan to employ murder and terrorism for political, financial and ideological gain does have historical roots (besides al Qaeda, the Stern Gang, the SA, the SS, the KGB, the IRA, the UDF, ETA, Hamas, Shining Path and countless other upholders of Bushian morality, decency and freedom). I refer of course to Operation Northwoods: the plan that America's top military brass presented to President John Kennedy in 1963, calling for a phony terrorist campaign complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans to provide "justification" for an invasion of Cuba, the Mafia-corporate fief which had recently been lost to Fidel Castro.
Kennedy rejected the plan, and was killed a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but on a far grander scale, with resources at his disposal undreamed of by those brass of yore, with no counterbalancing global rival to restrain him and with an ignorant, corrupt president who has shown himself all too eager to embrace any means whatsoever that will augment the wealth and power of his own narrow, undemocratic, elitist clique.
There is a transgression, a stepping-over deliberately, with open eyes, with forethought, planning, and conscious will of lines that should never be crossed.
Acting in deadly symbiosis with rage-maddened killers, God-crazed ranters and those supreme "sub-state actors", the mafias, Bush and his cohorts are plunging the world into an abyss, an endless night of black ops, retribution, blowback, deceit, of murder and terror wholesale, retail, state-sponsored, privatised; of fear and degradation, servility, chaos, and the perversion of all that's best in us, of all that we've won from the bestiality of our primal nature, all that we've raised above the mindless ravening urges and impulses still boiling in the mud of our monkey brains.
It's not a fight for freedom; it's a retreat into darkness. And the day will be a long time coming.
[From <http://www.counterpunch.org>. Chris Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 13, 2002.
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