Simon Jenkins The Guardian, Wednesday September 10 2008

This is what happens when a crime is redefined as warThe proper investigation of terrorist conspiracy has been wrecked by cynical politics. Meddling has again made us less safe.


The sun never sets on the war on terror, even as it degenerates into blood and recrimination. The Woolwich trial of eight members of a supposed 13-member gang all but collapsed on Monday. Despite evidence of intent to blow up an airliner, the jury convicted three defendants of conspiracy to commit murder but failed to reach a verdict on the central allegation.

It has been an open secret in police circles that Operation Overt, the most complex in counter-terror history, was sabotaged by the American vice president, **** Cheney, desperate for a headline boost to the Republicans' 2006 mid-term elections. British intelligence was following trails and acquiring evidence against 20 suspects. They needed American surveillance help in Pakistan and shared their information, foolishly it now appears, with Washington.

The backstory is told in Ron Suskind's new book, The Way of the World. Tony Blair, bursting with news of the operation, discussed it in July 2006 with George Bush, who was impatient for action. The argument, says Suskind, was a classic between American gung ho and British patience.

Nobody was sure if the plot was more than half-baked game-playing and it would certainly need evidence to stand up in court. The British were "treating it all as a criminal matter rather than a historic, and terrorist-glamorising, clash of power and ideology", Suskind writes.

Cheney then privately dispatched the CIA's operations director, Jose Rodriguez, to Islamabad to secure the arrest of one of the British suspects, Rashid Rauf, believed to be a possible link with al-Qaida. The British had been watching him and preparing his extradition. They did not want him rendered useless through CIA or Pakistani torture. Within days, news of Rauf's capture reached the British plotters. In a panic, the police had desperately to round up as many suspects as they could find overnight. According to Suskind, "top officials in British intelligence cursed, threw ashtrays and screamed bloody murder".

Months of work, which might have unpicked an entire al-Qaida network back to the Pakistani training camps, was ruined by "forced, foolish hastiness" - and all for the mid-term elections. Bush was soon boasting of having "foiled a plot to blow up passenger planes headed for the United States".

Two years later, a British jury, having to decide on the basis of evidence whether it faced another 9/11 or just a bunch of crazies, gave the benefit of the doubt to the latter. It was clearly fed up with scare stories and the politics of fear and felt the police had not made a case. Today, many of the plotters are at large, and Rauf himself has mysteriously escaped custody.

This is what happens when criminal conspiracy is redefined as an act of war. It goes political. As a conspiracy to cause mayhem, the suspected airline plotters merited and were getting thorough detective work in what was clearly a superb operation. Because it was also a "war", the death-or-glory boys took over and wrecked it.

Worse than wreck it, they rendered the operation counter-productive. A few sad, disaffected and clearly dangerous youths were captured, but in such a way as to induce many more to sympathise and imitate them. They will be fired by the same resentment at British foreign policy that has turned a crusade to bring democracy to the heathen into a bloody and drawn-out meddling in the affairs of foreign states. That meddling is now overwhelmingly counter-productive, fuelling anti-western insurgency across an arc from Syria through Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan. Characterised everywhere as a war on terror, it is further politicised and polarised.

Last week's massive operation by Nato forces to move a dam turbine 100 miles across Helmand was reportedly brought forward at Washington's insistence to help John McCain's candidacy. It cost some 300 Afghan lives. Every one of those lives invites revenge against that dam. Meanwhile, Nato and the Americans are intensifying their bombing of Afghan and Waziri villages. Anyone who visits this theatre is briefed with the same mantra: We are going to stop killing civilians ... Every death is 10 recruits to the enemy ... We must win on the ground not from the air. Airforces claim they can kill with "pinpoint accuracy". They claim the new predator drones can murder a Taliban leader at a mile distant.

They lie. To soldiers on the ground, calling in air power to clear a village is easier and safer than fighting by hand. As a result, and amid a storm of mendacious denials, wedding parties are blown to pieces, houses are crushed, women and children are massacred. To kill a Taliban it is considered worth wiping out a market. British and American generals in Kabul have slid into Vietnam mode, using the enemy kill rate as an indicator of victory. They do not care that one dead Taliban creates 10 live ones.

An Afghan crusade that was possibly winnable in 2001 has been systematically subverted by those waging it. Attempts to destroy the nation's staple crop, opium, has alienated almost everyone and driven huge profits into the pockets of the enemy. It has been unbelievably stupid.

The current use of drones to bomb Pakistani territory, usually on faulty or devious intelligence, is raising whole tribes to fury. It now risks driving an unstable Islamabad regime back into covert, if not overt, support for the Taliban, as in the 1990s. Is this really the intention of Washington and London?

The war on terror has become an exercise in cynicism, a backdrop to domestic politics. Terrorists are a menace to certain western cities. A generation of young Muslims has emerged who see glory in killing civilians for nothing but publicity. They appear loosely aligned with insurgent forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan, much as terrorists in the 1970s and 80s allied themselves with Palestinians. But these terrorists do not constitute a threat to the security of any western state. Their plots and outrages are crimes and do not merit the status of war. They have become servants of political rhetoric. To be tough on terrorism is apparently akin to shooting a moose.

That Nato soldiers can casually bomb civilians in these distant parts, knowing it to be counter-productive, shows the half-heartedness of this so-called war. So does the ease with which politicised intelligence can undermine a criminal investigation. Both make us less safe, not more.

if terrorists harbor themselves with innocent human shields, they are mistaken.

To cry foul over whose heads the innov=cent spilled blood is on only serves to justify that tactic in the minds of the insane and inhumane terrorists that employ that tactic.

The peopl of Afghanistan have to decide whether or not they are going to let these terrorists hide among them out of fear or face their fears and fight back.

Meanwhile, that is their problem.

The US is determined to disallow another 911.

Yup, its ugly, and I don't like it either

but Susskind is wrong.

The wicked must know that they will sit in the gutter silently and impoverished and shamed and stripped of all hope for their ill will and all that it takes to not see that truth is for good men to do nothing.

The Europenas have grown accustomed to coddling islam. They get what they get for that.

America will never reduce itself to such coddling, despite the whining of the looney left.

We never have.

But the whiners that hate our exposed muscle in this country were also silent and affirming of going to war to get the bad guys that flew OUR pplanes into OUR buildings and indiscriminately killed OUR people.

Never forget that the looney left was attacked too and the looney left counted on the conservative leadership to go get the bad guys.

Pure emotioin and it wasn't second guessed by Bush.

But when the looney left second guessed themselves, Bush did not.

Hence, bush haters.


nope.


fear and self loathing, libs, fear and self loathing.


Time to wake up America.

we are in it now, neck deep.

we must finish it.

running away with the US tail between its legs is what will cause more attacks, and taking the fight to the terrorists guarentees otherwise.

exactly! WE MUST FINISH IT!!!!

"America will never reduce itself to such coddling, despite the whining of the looney left."


So we're just gonna go right ahead and throw the 1st amendment away then? Your gonna to endorse Bush's "God Da*ned piece of paper" comment when talking about our Governing document?

If terrorists sheild themselves with innocents and we, as Americans, just shrug our shoulders and kill the whole group, how are we any better than the terrorists? You just gave the next generation of radicals the excuse they need.
By the way, this revisionist history about there not being any more attacks after 9/11 is bullspit... or do I need to remind everyone of the people who died as a result of the inside job anthrax attacks?

I'm glad that you like Wilsonianism and the Trotsky principles, but I think I'm going to stick with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Ron Paul.

Those who sacrifice their liberties for the illusion of security will wind up getting neither.
Oh, and the last time this country was faced with not having the freedoms provided to us by our creator and assured to us by our Constitution and the Bill of Rights... If I remember right it involved a very nasty war.

True Conservatives want to take care of our own nation, practicing nonintervention and utilized trade, travel and diplomacy to protect us, rather than making mutiple generations of people cheer for our downfall, due to oppression, occupation and pushing our ideals on them from behind the barrel of a gun.

Jefferson didn't altogether cotton to Madison's views



The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the United States Bill of Rights that expressly prohibits the United States Congress from making laws "respecting an establishment of religion" (the Establishment Clause) or that prohibit the free exercise of religion (the Free Exercise Clause), laws that infringe the freedom of speech, infringe the freedom of the press, limit the right to peaceably assemble, or limit the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Although the First Amendment explicitly prohibits only the named rights from being abridged by laws made by the Congress, the Supreme Court has interpreted it as applying more broadly. As the first sentence in the body of the Constitution reserves all legislative authority to the Congress, the courts have held that the First Amendment's terms also extend to the executive and judicial branches. Additionally, in the 20th century the Supreme Court held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applies the limitations of the First Amendment to each state, including any local government within a state.

which part? due process? redress for grievances?

What is treason?

A law enforcement issue?

and ac of terrorism is an act of aggression using indiscriminate deadly force in most cases and not anything characterizing a redress of grievances.

Therefore, as such, it is an act of war and not a criminal act of mischief.

As far as spying goes, it has always been done.

Where were you in the sixties?

I was in the mess up to my eyeballs. LOL

I woke up, though.


things are nmessy because the world is more complicated ans sophisticated and evil that can't muster innovation and ingenuity can sure corrupt anything meant for good. You ought to know that.

I don't altogether disagree with you.

Only on the method af addressing the problems we all face.

The system in place is more than adequate but it requires a tremendous amount of time and effort to stay abreast of the history and its influence on the American political landscape.

The whole of the landscape is not ignored or revised by foreign leaders by any means. Treaties, pacts, alliances, contracts, trade agreements, detente, interrnational laws odf commerce, etc, all play on remembering what was said to move forward tomorrow.

Nothing is verbal and clandestine between nations.

Everything is on paper.

It is man's way of doing business.

But in the Arab world, a contract is not ironclad, but only the berginning of negotiations.

You may not understand that, but they do. And they do business that way. Where we call a breach of contract, they say that there is no breach, only the beginning of continual negotiations til the finaL sale is complete. It is customary to change contracts mid contract.

credit card companies do it all the time

Seriously, my point is that the world does not play on the emotional triggers of "American dissent" regarding socio-economic and political discourse and perspectives of our two party system. Unless it is viewed as a sales contract to bind two parties to trade. LOL

I cannot say that I favor partisan factions, but the present realities I find myself contemporary to include their pre-eminent presence upon the landscape of my environment and cannot be ignored as asset and liability in balance when judging my participation in the futurediscourse of our public conversation with civility.

No one can ignore history and reality.

Things are ever more complicated.

A little trust is required when feeling apprehensive of government intrusions.

but if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear.

idealistic? yup.

But fighting terrorism is not a fight we want on our soil.

Reducing ourselves to another civil war may be inevitable, but that is far enough off that i would rather trust the professionals in every discipline with doing their best for America's good.


We all gotta relax and trust that we mean well in this country.

That isn't going to happen any day soon.

Most have not even a basic understanding of present realities and "the way things are".


What has evolved out of well intended beginnings also includes the clever contrivances of intelligent and thoughtful men that could not possibly address the nuances of our day.

less is more.

Transparency is key.

Bush hasn't blundered as much as libs would like to discredit him with.

Avarice and greed have wormed their way into everything, and that is not a partisan problem of factional divisiveness, but one of national shame not being addressed by any.

It will be a grassroots effort to ferret that out.

it will REQUIRE THE CITIZENRY TO VOTE WITH WALLETS.

But that is another issue.

Bush is not a bad man.

he has done a good job.

Mc Cain will do better with his fresh look from the outside.


That's OK.

but nobama?

he is seeking fame, dog.

he wants to be the mr big "IT".

That's all I see in him. He is in this for nobama alone.


I am just being an instigator for a season to stir people to think more about the facs and realities surrounding our political landscape.


I am excited about the prospect of Mc Cain and Palin being creative in their artful usage of the levers of government.

But osamam Nobama is just a tax the rich liberal pandering to the lazy and emotionally distraught.

And I can't really get behind Ron Paul because he has a rather sophomoric viewpoint of the realities of our day. He means well, but he is rather shallow.

The depth of Mc Cain and palin is evident in their "audacity of hope"

They make things happen.

They can handle sneaky snakes and come out on top for the constituency.

This time around, it is not just Arizonans andAlaskans that benefit, but the whole country.

Mc Cain has not been a war monger historically, but he sure called the solution that ccaused the sunnis to curr like lap dogs.

He has my respect for that.

Give him the opportunity.

It isn't pie in the sky voodoo.

just straight talk.

a little trust is needed.

peace, out.

well said!! I wish more people had that outlook..too many are jumping on the celeb band wagons..and far more are just too lazy to even care to do the research on who they would even vote for...it's actually quite sad!