On October 7 the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization military allies will begin the tenth year of their war in Afghanistan, over 3,000 miles from NATO Headquarters in Brussels.
The following month midterm elections will be held in the U.S. and NATO will hold a two-day summit in Portugal. The American administration is eager to achieve, or appear to have achieved, a foreign policy triumph in an effort to retain Democratic Party control of the Congress and NATO something to show for the longest and largest military mission in its 61 years of existence.
Not satisfied with the Vietnam that Afghanistan has become, NATO has now launched its Cambodian incursion. One with implications several orders of magnitude greater than with the prototype, though, into a nation of almost 170 million people, a nation wielding nuclear weapons. Pakistan.
The following month midterm elections will be held in the U.S. and NATO will hold a two-day summit in Portugal. The American administration is eager to achieve, or appear to have achieved, a foreign policy triumph in an effort to retain Democratic Party control of the Congress and NATO something to show for the longest and largest military mission in its 61 years of existence.
Not satisfied with the Vietnam that Afghanistan has become, NATO has now launched its Cambodian incursion. One with implications several orders of magnitude greater than with the prototype, though, into a nation of almost 170 million people, a nation wielding nuclear weapons. Pakistan.
On October 7 the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization military allies will begin the tenth year of their war in Afghanistan, over 3,000 miles from NATO Headquarters in Brussels.
The following month midterm elections will be held in the U.S. and NATO will hold a two-day summit in Portugal. The American administration is eager to achieve, or appear to have achieved, a foreign policy triumph in an effort to retain Democratic Party control of the Congress and NATO something to show for the longest and largest military mission in its 61 years of existence.
President Barack Obama has tripled the amount of American combat troops in Afghanistan to 100,000 and along with forces from other NATO member states and partner nations there are now over 150,000 foreign troops in the nation, the most ever stationed in the war-wracked country. 120,000 of those soldiers are now under the command of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the most ever serving in a North Atlantic Alliance-led military operation. NATO Kosovo Force at its peak had 50,000 troops, but they entered the Serbian province after an almost three-month air war had ended.
The 120,000 NATO forces currently in theater - from 50 nations already with more pegged to provide troops - are at the center of the world's longest-lasting and increasingly deadly hot war. NATO's first ground war, its first combat operations in Asia.
Last year was the most lethal for the U.S and NATO in what is now a nine-year conflict and this year has already proven even more costly in terms of combat deaths. And there are three more months to go.
Washington and Brussels could decide to save face and end the fighting through some combination of an internal political settlement and a true international peacekeeping arrangement - rather than the subversion of the International Security Assistance Force that was established by a United Nations mandate in December of 2001 but which is now the Pentagon's and NATO's vehicle for waging war in Afghanistan. And in neighboring Pakistan.
But the military metaphysic prevalent in Washington over the past 65 years will allow for nothing other than what is seen as victory, with a "Who lost Afghanistan?" legacy tarnishing the president who fails to secure it and the party to which he belongs being branded half-hearted and defeatist.
As for NATO, the Strategic Concept to be adopted in November is predicated upon the bloc's expansion into a 21st century global expeditionary force for which Afghanistan is the test case. A NATO that loses Afghanistan, that loses in Afghanistan, will be viewed more critically by the populations of its European member states that have sacrificed their sons and daughters at the altar of NATO's international ambitions. In the words of then-Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer six years ago: "What is NATO doing in Afghanistan? Defending values at the Hindu Kush in the present day international climate. We have to fight terrorism wherever it emerges. If we don't do it at the Hindu Kush, it will end up at our doorstep. In other words, this perception gap [of the North Atlantic military alliance operating in South Asia] in the long run must be closed and must be healed - that is, for NATO's future, of the utmost importance." [1]
Not satisfied with the Vietnam that Afghanistan has become, NATO has now launched its Cambodian incursion. One with implications several orders of magnitude greater than with the prototype, though, into a nation of almost 170 million people, a nation wielding nuclear weapons. Pakistan.
As the U.S. delivered its 20th deadly drone missile attack of the month inside Pakistan on the 27th, five times the amount launched in August and the most in any month since they were started in 2004, NATO conducted a series of attacks with helicopter gunships in Northwest Pakistan. Claiming the "right of self-defense" and in "hot pursuit" of insurgents that had reportedly attacked a NATO camp, Combat Outpost Narizah, in Afghanistan's Khost province near the Pakistani border, this past weekend NATO attack helicopters conducted two forays into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas where U.S. drone strikes have killed a record number of people this month.
Estimates of those killed, dutifully referred to in the Western press as insurgents, militants or terrorists, were 30, then 50, afterward 60, 70 and later "82 or higher." [2]
The amount, like the identify, of the dead will never be definitively known.
Press reports stated the targets were members of the Haqqani network, founded by veteran Afghan Mujahedin leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who when he led attacks from Pakistani soil against Afghan targets slightly over a generation ago was an American hero, one of Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters." Two years ago the New York Times wrote: “In the 1980s, Jalaluddin Haqqani was cultivated as a ‘unilateral’ asset of the CIA and received tens of thousands of dollars in cash for his work in fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, according to an account in ‘The Bin Ladens,’ a recent book by Steve Coll. At that time, Haqqani helped and protected Osama bin Laden, who was building his own militia to fight the Soviet forces, Coll wrote.” [3]
As to the regret that the otherwise praiseworthy Haqqani has of late allied himself with the Taliban, one voiced by among other people the late Charlie Wilson who once celebrated Haqqani as "goodness personified," in an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press last year Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told his American audience that the Taliban "was part of your past and our past, and the ISI and the CIA created them together. And I can find you 10 books and 10 philosophers and 10 write-ups on that...." [4]
On September 27 two NATO helicopters attacked the Kurram agency in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, killing six people and wounding eight. A local Pakistani government official described all the victims as civilians. According to Dawn News, "Nato has also shelled the area before." [5] Three attacks in three days and as many as 100 deaths.
On the same day a U.S. drone-launched missile strike killed four people in the North Waziristan agency. "The identities of the four people killed in the attack were not known...." [6]
The above events occurred against the backdrop of the revelation in Bob Woodward's new book Obama’s Wars that "a 3,000-strong secret army of Afghan paramilitary forces run by the Central Intelligence Agency had conducted cross-border raids into Pakistan." [7]
After mounting in intensity for two years and consisting in part - helicopter gunship attacks and special forces assassination team raids - of covert operations, the U.S. and NATO war in Northwest Pakistan is now fully underway and can no longer be denied.
The Pentagon - the helicopters used in the attacks on September 25 and 26 were American Apaches and Kiowas - defended the strikes over the weekend as falling within its rules of engagement and Defense Department spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said the U.S. had adhered to "appropriate protocol" and "Our forces have the right of self-defense." [8]
A spokesmen for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force initially denied that Alliance forces had launched any attacks inside Pakistani territory, although Afghan police officials had confirmed that they did. On September 27, however, the International Security Assistance Force verified that NATO forces had conducted the deadly strikes. As the third attack by NATO helicopters occurred on the same day, "Coalition officials said the cross-border attacks fell within its rules of engagement because the insurgents had attacked them from across the border." [9]
A NATO official informed the press that "ISAF forces must and will retain the authority, within their mandate, to defend themselves in carrying out their mission.” [10]
Mehmood Shah, former top security official of the Pakistani government in the region where the helicopter gunship and drone strikes have killed over 200 people so far this month, said of the recent NATO attacks: "This should be considered a watershed event. They [Nato] must be warned: the next time you do this, it can lead to war. Our units should be deployed to fire upon them. This border has sanctity. Nato must realise they have a mandate to operate in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan." [11]
On September 27 Interior Minister Rehman Malik denounced the NATO raids as a violation of Pakistani territorial integrity and national sovereignty and told the nation's Senate that the Afghan ambassador to Islamabad would be summoned to explain the attacks. Malik and the Pakistani government as a whole know that the Hamid Karzai administration in Kabul has no control over what the U.S. and NATO do in its own country, much less in Pakistan. The interior minister's comment were solely for internal consumption, for placating Pakistani popular outrage, but as Pakistan itself has become a NATO partner and U.S. surrogate [12] its officials, like those of Afghanistan, will not be notified of any future attacks.
Nevertheless domestic exigencies compelled Malik to denounce the strikes inside his country and assert “I take the drone attacks in Pakistani territory as an attack on the sovereignty of Pakistan.” A senator from the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz "asked the government to inform the parliament about any accord it had reached with the US under which drone attacks were being carried out." [13]
At the same time Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit went further and lodged what was described as a strong protest to NATO Headquarters in Brussels over the weekend's air strikes, issuing a statement that said in part: "These incidents are a clear violation and breach of the UN mandate under which ISAF operates," as its mandate “terminates/finishes” at the Afghan border.
“There are no agreed 'hot pursuit' rules. Any impression to the contrary is not factually correct. Such violations are unacceptable.” [14]
By the evening of September 27, after the Pakistani complaints were registered, NATO's ISAF attempted to conduct damage control and reverted to the military bloc's original position: That it has not launched attacks inside Pakistan at all. On that very day it had dispatched two more helicopter gunships for the third raid in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
NATO will continue to launch lethal attacks inside Pakistan against whichever targets it sees fit and will proffer neither warnings nor apologies. The U.S. will continue to escalate attacks with Hellfire missiles against whomever it chooses, however inaccurate, anecdotal and self-interested the reports upon which they are based prove to be.
The death toll in Pakistan this month is well over 200 and for this year to date over 2,000. The justification for this carnage offered by the U.S. and NATO is that it is intended to extend the policy of Barack Obama to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" insurgent networks in Afghanistan into Pakistan, supposedly the sooner to end the war.
Forty years ago Obama's predecessor Richard Nixon began his speech announcing the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia with these words: "Good evening, my fellow Americans. Ten days ago, in my report to the nation on Vietnam, I announced the decision to withdraw an additional 150,000 Americans from Vietnam over the next year. I said then that I was making that decision despite our concern over increased enemy activity in Laos, in Cambodia, and in South Vietnam. And at that time I warned that if I concluded that increased enemy activity in any of these areas endangered the lives of Americans remaining in Vietnam, I would not hesitate to take strong and effective measures to deal with that situation." [15]
He claimed that "enemy sanctuaries" in Cambodia "endanger the lives of Americans who are in Vietnam," and "if this enemy effort succeeds, Cambodia would become a vast enemy staging area and a springboard for attacks on South Vietnam along 600 miles of frontier: a refuge where enemy troops could return from combat without fear of retaliation."
The course he ordered was to "go to the heart of the trouble. And that means cleaning out major North Vietnamese and Vietcong occupied territories, these sanctuaries which serve as bases for attacks on both Cambodia and American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam."
The practical application of the policy was that "attacks are being launched this week to clean out major enemy sanctuaries on the Cambodian-Vietnam border."
In language that has been heard again lately in Washington and Brussels - with nothing but the place names changed - Nixon claimed: "We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam...."
Washington indeed expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia, with what disastrous effects the world is fully aware, and soon thereafter departed Southeast Asia in defeat, leaving vast stretches of Vietnam and Cambodia in ruins.
Afghanistan and Pakistan will not fare any better.
_____________________
Notes
1) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 12, 2004
2) New York Times, September 27, 2010
3) New York Times, September 9, 2008
4) Meet the Press, May 10, 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30658135
5) Dawn News, September 28, 2010
6) Daily Times, September 28, 2010
7) Financial Times, September 27, 2010
8) Associated Press, September 27, 2010
9) New York Times, September 27, 2010
10) Dawn News, September 27, 2010
11) The Guardian, September 27, 2010
12) NATO Pulls Pakistan Into Its Global Network
Stop NATO, July 23, 2010
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/nato-pulls-pakistan-into-its-global-network
13) Dawn News, September 28, 2010
14) Dawn News, September 27, 2010
15) Richard M. Nixon, Cambodian Incursion Address
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/richardnixoncambodia.html
_________________________
Stop NATO
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato
Blog site:
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/
To subscribe, send an e-mail to:
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or
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Daily digest option available.
_________________________
The following month midterm elections will be held in the U.S. and NATO will hold a two-day summit in Portugal. The American administration is eager to achieve, or appear to have achieved, a foreign policy triumph in an effort to retain Democratic Party control of the Congress and NATO something to show for the longest and largest military mission in its 61 years of existence.
President Barack Obama has tripled the amount of American combat troops in Afghanistan to 100,000 and along with forces from other NATO member states and partner nations there are now over 150,000 foreign troops in the nation, the most ever stationed in the war-wracked country. 120,000 of those soldiers are now under the command of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the most ever serving in a North Atlantic Alliance-led military operation. NATO Kosovo Force at its peak had 50,000 troops, but they entered the Serbian province after an almost three-month air war had ended.
The 120,000 NATO forces currently in theater - from 50 nations already with more pegged to provide troops - are at the center of the world's longest-lasting and increasingly deadly hot war. NATO's first ground war, its first combat operations in Asia.
Last year was the most lethal for the U.S and NATO in what is now a nine-year conflict and this year has already proven even more costly in terms of combat deaths. And there are three more months to go.
Washington and Brussels could decide to save face and end the fighting through some combination of an internal political settlement and a true international peacekeeping arrangement - rather than the subversion of the International Security Assistance Force that was established by a United Nations mandate in December of 2001 but which is now the Pentagon's and NATO's vehicle for waging war in Afghanistan. And in neighboring Pakistan.
But the military metaphysic prevalent in Washington over the past 65 years will allow for nothing other than what is seen as victory, with a "Who lost Afghanistan?" legacy tarnishing the president who fails to secure it and the party to which he belongs being branded half-hearted and defeatist.
As for NATO, the Strategic Concept to be adopted in November is predicated upon the bloc's expansion into a 21st century global expeditionary force for which Afghanistan is the test case. A NATO that loses Afghanistan, that loses in Afghanistan, will be viewed more critically by the populations of its European member states that have sacrificed their sons and daughters at the altar of NATO's international ambitions. In the words of then-Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer six years ago: "What is NATO doing in Afghanistan? Defending values at the Hindu Kush in the present day international climate. We have to fight terrorism wherever it emerges. If we don't do it at the Hindu Kush, it will end up at our doorstep. In other words, this perception gap [of the North Atlantic military alliance operating in South Asia] in the long run must be closed and must be healed - that is, for NATO's future, of the utmost importance." [1]
Not satisfied with the Vietnam that Afghanistan has become, NATO has now launched its Cambodian incursion. One with implications several orders of magnitude greater than with the prototype, though, into a nation of almost 170 million people, a nation wielding nuclear weapons. Pakistan.
As the U.S. delivered its 20th deadly drone missile attack of the month inside Pakistan on the 27th, five times the amount launched in August and the most in any month since they were started in 2004, NATO conducted a series of attacks with helicopter gunships in Northwest Pakistan. Claiming the "right of self-defense" and in "hot pursuit" of insurgents that had reportedly attacked a NATO camp, Combat Outpost Narizah, in Afghanistan's Khost province near the Pakistani border, this past weekend NATO attack helicopters conducted two forays into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas where U.S. drone strikes have killed a record number of people this month.
Estimates of those killed, dutifully referred to in the Western press as insurgents, militants or terrorists, were 30, then 50, afterward 60, 70 and later "82 or higher." [2]
The amount, like the identify, of the dead will never be definitively known.
Press reports stated the targets were members of the Haqqani network, founded by veteran Afghan Mujahedin leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who when he led attacks from Pakistani soil against Afghan targets slightly over a generation ago was an American hero, one of Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters." Two years ago the New York Times wrote: “In the 1980s, Jalaluddin Haqqani was cultivated as a ‘unilateral’ asset of the CIA and received tens of thousands of dollars in cash for his work in fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, according to an account in ‘The Bin Ladens,’ a recent book by Steve Coll. At that time, Haqqani helped and protected Osama bin Laden, who was building his own militia to fight the Soviet forces, Coll wrote.” [3]
As to the regret that the otherwise praiseworthy Haqqani has of late allied himself with the Taliban, one voiced by among other people the late Charlie Wilson who once celebrated Haqqani as "goodness personified," in an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press last year Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told his American audience that the Taliban "was part of your past and our past, and the ISI and the CIA created them together. And I can find you 10 books and 10 philosophers and 10 write-ups on that...." [4]
On September 27 two NATO helicopters attacked the Kurram agency in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, killing six people and wounding eight. A local Pakistani government official described all the victims as civilians. According to Dawn News, "Nato has also shelled the area before." [5] Three attacks in three days and as many as 100 deaths.
On the same day a U.S. drone-launched missile strike killed four people in the North Waziristan agency. "The identities of the four people killed in the attack were not known...." [6]
The above events occurred against the backdrop of the revelation in Bob Woodward's new book Obama’s Wars that "a 3,000-strong secret army of Afghan paramilitary forces run by the Central Intelligence Agency had conducted cross-border raids into Pakistan." [7]
After mounting in intensity for two years and consisting in part - helicopter gunship attacks and special forces assassination team raids - of covert operations, the U.S. and NATO war in Northwest Pakistan is now fully underway and can no longer be denied.
The Pentagon - the helicopters used in the attacks on September 25 and 26 were American Apaches and Kiowas - defended the strikes over the weekend as falling within its rules of engagement and Defense Department spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said the U.S. had adhered to "appropriate protocol" and "Our forces have the right of self-defense." [8]
A spokesmen for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force initially denied that Alliance forces had launched any attacks inside Pakistani territory, although Afghan police officials had confirmed that they did. On September 27, however, the International Security Assistance Force verified that NATO forces had conducted the deadly strikes. As the third attack by NATO helicopters occurred on the same day, "Coalition officials said the cross-border attacks fell within its rules of engagement because the insurgents had attacked them from across the border." [9]
A NATO official informed the press that "ISAF forces must and will retain the authority, within their mandate, to defend themselves in carrying out their mission.” [10]
Mehmood Shah, former top security official of the Pakistani government in the region where the helicopter gunship and drone strikes have killed over 200 people so far this month, said of the recent NATO attacks: "This should be considered a watershed event. They [Nato] must be warned: the next time you do this, it can lead to war. Our units should be deployed to fire upon them. This border has sanctity. Nato must realise they have a mandate to operate in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan." [11]
On September 27 Interior Minister Rehman Malik denounced the NATO raids as a violation of Pakistani territorial integrity and national sovereignty and told the nation's Senate that the Afghan ambassador to Islamabad would be summoned to explain the attacks. Malik and the Pakistani government as a whole know that the Hamid Karzai administration in Kabul has no control over what the U.S. and NATO do in its own country, much less in Pakistan. The interior minister's comment were solely for internal consumption, for placating Pakistani popular outrage, but as Pakistan itself has become a NATO partner and U.S. surrogate [12] its officials, like those of Afghanistan, will not be notified of any future attacks.
Nevertheless domestic exigencies compelled Malik to denounce the strikes inside his country and assert “I take the drone attacks in Pakistani territory as an attack on the sovereignty of Pakistan.” A senator from the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz "asked the government to inform the parliament about any accord it had reached with the US under which drone attacks were being carried out." [13]
At the same time Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit went further and lodged what was described as a strong protest to NATO Headquarters in Brussels over the weekend's air strikes, issuing a statement that said in part: "These incidents are a clear violation and breach of the UN mandate under which ISAF operates," as its mandate “terminates/finishes” at the Afghan border.
“There are no agreed 'hot pursuit' rules. Any impression to the contrary is not factually correct. Such violations are unacceptable.” [14]
By the evening of September 27, after the Pakistani complaints were registered, NATO's ISAF attempted to conduct damage control and reverted to the military bloc's original position: That it has not launched attacks inside Pakistan at all. On that very day it had dispatched two more helicopter gunships for the third raid in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
NATO will continue to launch lethal attacks inside Pakistan against whichever targets it sees fit and will proffer neither warnings nor apologies. The U.S. will continue to escalate attacks with Hellfire missiles against whomever it chooses, however inaccurate, anecdotal and self-interested the reports upon which they are based prove to be.
The death toll in Pakistan this month is well over 200 and for this year to date over 2,000. The justification for this carnage offered by the U.S. and NATO is that it is intended to extend the policy of Barack Obama to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" insurgent networks in Afghanistan into Pakistan, supposedly the sooner to end the war.
Forty years ago Obama's predecessor Richard Nixon began his speech announcing the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia with these words: "Good evening, my fellow Americans. Ten days ago, in my report to the nation on Vietnam, I announced the decision to withdraw an additional 150,000 Americans from Vietnam over the next year. I said then that I was making that decision despite our concern over increased enemy activity in Laos, in Cambodia, and in South Vietnam. And at that time I warned that if I concluded that increased enemy activity in any of these areas endangered the lives of Americans remaining in Vietnam, I would not hesitate to take strong and effective measures to deal with that situation." [15]
He claimed that "enemy sanctuaries" in Cambodia "endanger the lives of Americans who are in Vietnam," and "if this enemy effort succeeds, Cambodia would become a vast enemy staging area and a springboard for attacks on South Vietnam along 600 miles of frontier: a refuge where enemy troops could return from combat without fear of retaliation."
The course he ordered was to "go to the heart of the trouble. And that means cleaning out major North Vietnamese and Vietcong occupied territories, these sanctuaries which serve as bases for attacks on both Cambodia and American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam."
The practical application of the policy was that "attacks are being launched this week to clean out major enemy sanctuaries on the Cambodian-Vietnam border."
In language that has been heard again lately in Washington and Brussels - with nothing but the place names changed - Nixon claimed: "We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam...."
Washington indeed expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia, with what disastrous effects the world is fully aware, and soon thereafter departed Southeast Asia in defeat, leaving vast stretches of Vietnam and Cambodia in ruins.
Afghanistan and Pakistan will not fare any better.
_____________________
Notes
1) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 12, 2004
2) New York Times, September 27, 2010
3) New York Times, September 9, 2008
4) Meet the Press, May 10, 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30658135 5) Dawn News, September 28, 2010
6) Daily Times, September 28, 2010
7) Financial Times, September 27, 2010
8) Associated Press, September 27, 2010
9) New York Times, September 27, 2010
10) Dawn News, September 27, 2010
11) The Guardian, September 27, 2010
12) NATO Pulls Pakistan Into Its Global Network
Stop NATO, July 23, 2010
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/nato-pulls-pakistan-into-its-global-network 13) Dawn News, September 28, 2010
14) Dawn News, September 27, 2010
15) Richard M. Nixon, Cambodian Incursion Address
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/richardnixoncambodia.html _________________________
Stop NATO
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato Blog site:
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Mumbai-style terror plot’ against UK uncovered
02.10.2010 08:51
Mumbai-style terror plot’ against UK uncovered
[propaganda Alert]
Dandelion Salad, 29 September 2010
(Updated: October 1, 2010 added “PM and cops’ Mumbai terror dummy-run”)
1) ‘Mumbai-style terror plot’ against UK uncovered (29 September 2010)
2) UK Prime Minister Cameron took part in an anti-terror drill in London (30 September 2010)
3) IHRC Chairman: Baseless terror claims “further demonise a community under siege” (29 September 2010)
__________________________
excerpt from: ‘Mumbai-style terror plot’ against UK uncovered
by Matt Dickinson, Independent, 29 September 2010
Intelligence officials have intercepted a credible Islamist-linked terror plot against Britain, it emerged today.
The threat is one of “a succession” of terror operations the country has been dealing with over the past weeks, a government official said, although the UK’s terror alert status has not been raised from “severe”.
The planned attack would have reportedly been similar to the deadly commando-style raids in Mumbai, India, two years ago, with other European cities, in France and Germany, also targeted.
Last night the Eiffel Tower in Paris was evacuated following a bomb threat called in from a telephone booth. It was the second such alert at the monument in two weeks.
One UK government official told the Associated Press (AP) news agency: “There have been a succession of terror operations we’ve been dealing with over recent weeks but one to two that have preoccupied us.
“Still, it hasn’t been to the degree that we have raised the threat level.”
Another British official would not confirm the plot was “al-Qa’ida inspired” but told AP there was an “Islamist connection” and that the plots were in an early stage. No other details were given.
A Home Office spokesman said it was unable to comment on security matters, but confirmed the country’s terror threat was unchanged.
Yesterday French police closed off surroundings to the Eiffel Tower, France’s most visited monument. Officers pulled red-and-white police tape across a bridge leading over the Seine River, and stood guard.
Bomb experts combed through the 324m (1,063ft) tower and found nothing unusual, Paris police headquarters said. Tourists were let back inside about two hours after the structure was emptied.
German officials denied yesterday they had intercepted threats, saying there had been no change to the country’s threat level.
__________________________
excerpts from: PM and cops’ Mumbai terror dummy-run
by Simon Hughes and John Kay, The Sun, 30 September 2010
David Cameron responded to the threat of a Mumbai-style terror attack by secretly taking part in a full-scale dummy-run, it emerged last night.
The Prime Minister ordered the operation to ensure elite cops and Special Forces are as prepared as possible.
He moved after US intelligence warned of an al-Qaeda plot to unleash marauding gunmen in a British city before Christmas. France or Germany were other possible targets. [...]
It is understood that, in the wake of the unprecedented operation in London, there will be extra training for both firearms cops and SAS.
Mr Cameron called in senior police officers, including Met counter terror commander John Yates, and senior military and security figures. [...]
A number of lethal scenarios were examined at locations thought to include railway stations and hotels – targets in Mumbai two years ago.
__________________________
IHRC Chairman: Baseless terror claims “further demonise a community under siege”
Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) press release, 29 September 2010
Speaking after recent reports that security services had foiled plans to launch “Mumbai-style” terror attacks in UK cities, Massoud Shadjareh, the Chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), has called on the media to treat such claims with scepticism.
He called the claims “politically motivated” and warned that they served to “further demonise” a Muslim community that is already suffering hate crimes and feeling marginalised and under siege.
Shadjareh said:
“The latest claims of ‘Mumbai-style’ attacks having been foiled by US drone strikes in Pakistan need to be treated with a great deal of scepticism. The recent front page stories of an Islamic plot to assassinate the Pope in London, which turned out to be completely baseless, show how easily stories can be created out of nothing. We also have a long series of incidents in which stories apparently originating with the police or security services have turned out to be completely false or grossly exaggerated, from the supposed plot to blow up Old Trafford to the ‘Ricin’ chemical attack plot.
“It is widely recognised that people and organizations of all kinds often have ulterior and self-interested motives for placing and exaggerating certain stories. Sadly, the police, politicians and security services are no exception. The problem with stories like the ones this morning is that there is no-one offering sceptical, balancing counter-arguments, with the result that any claims, however outlandish, are treated as facts.
“But the people who make such claims, and the media sources who uncritically parrot them, have a responsibility for their consequences. We now have a community of nearly 2 million Muslims, including some of the most deprived and needy people in Britain, who feel marginalised and demonised; who are regularly discriminated against and treated with suspicion and contempt because of stories like this.
“The Islamophobia which is being fed by stories such as this is reflected as much in the statements of some MPs, and the columns of some newspapers, as in the thuggery of groups like the English Defence League. The increasing number of hate-crimes against Muslims is a result of this criminalization of the community as a whole.
“Muslims are now suffering a level of persecution comparable to that once suffered by Jews in Europe. We all look back to those days with abhorrence and disbelief at the levels of hatefulness that apparently reasonable people were capable of.
“It would be good if people could recognise the reality of the situation Muslims now face, and act to prevent it getting worse, instead of looking back in regret in a few decades time, when the lives of tens of thousands of people will already have been ruined.”
* For more information please contact the Press Office on (+44) 20 8904 4222 or (+44) 7958 522196, email: //
__________________________
from the archives:
Britons training in Pakistan for UK terror attacks
by Rob Crilly, Duncan Gardham, Ben Farmer, Daily Telegraph, 29 September 2010
NATO expands Afghan war into Pakistan
by Rick Rozoff, Dandelion Salad, 28 September 2010
Police need more powerful weapons to combat ‘Mumbai-style terror attacks’ says police chief
Daily Mail, 15 April 2010
UK “Terror Plot”: Gordon Brown points finger at Pakistan
Dandelion Salad, 11 April 2009
British hotels put on alert over Mumbai-style terror attack
Dandelion Salad, 23 March 2009
Creating an “Arc of Crisis”: The Destabilization of the Middle East and Central Asia
The Mumbai Attacks and the “Strategy of Tension”
by Andrew Gavin Marshall, Dandelion Salad, 7 December 2008
India’s 9/11. Who is behind the Mumbai attacks?
Washington is Fostering Political Divisions between India and Pakistan
by Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 30 November 2008
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